Before I tell you this story, it isn't about religion or "Satan", but it is about evil and how it can be contagious.

For a couple of years when we moved into our building in Paris, things were pretty normal there, other than the fact there there were literally no children in the 12 or so apartments. We had a spinster just below us, a nice couple our age above, two older people both of whom died while we lived there. Life went on, and as the months past, we started hearing noises in the middle of the night. Not exorcist or ghost noise, pounding, from the next door neighbor (with a common wall between us). It soon became apparent that he was either hitting the ceiling with a broom or stamping his feet on the floor, depending upon who was bothering him. Although we heard nothing, it became obvious that he was bothered by the normal sounds of life people make in a big city. He once remarked that my sneeze was really loud.

I knocked on his door once and in a very calm and reasonable manner asked him what the problem was and explaining that the noise he was creating was disturbing us more than the people he was trying to bother. He had no answer, just grumbling through the closed door. Things got worse, we spoke to his other neighbors, who seemed reasonable. Our neurotic started acting like one of those people who climbs up a tower and starts shooting. He lived with an equally sick Vampira woman, the two of them making the most sinister couple I've seen since the Millenium TV series. 

This horrible neighbor, let's call him Beelzebub, started acting up more and more, yelling up the stairs and playing little "tricks" on people. When the young couple had a baby, they left their stroller downstairs in a corner where is wasn't in the way or even noticeable. Beelzebub wrote on the walls "it is forbidden to place objects in the common area" . Then he got worse, he began dumping raw garbage in the stroller. He spat on women in the stairwell. He had to go out one day at 4AM and when he left, he rang the downstairs intercom buzzer to wake us up and then ran away. He consinued to move furniture around in the middle of the night to make the downstairs neighbors miserable. And since that apartment, a small rental, had changed occupants often, he was able to inflict his odious behavior on several groups of people beside those of us that lived there for years. Sometimes the occupants stayed only a few months!

One day, he crossed paths with one of the neighbors below and the guy punched him in the stomach, which stopped the noise for awhile. When he took the stairs, the "boxer" would yell out to him "pussy" or "wimp". 

And so it came to pass that I was right behind him on the stairs, and he slowed down in front of me to provoke me. I jabbed him in the back a few times, which put him off balance and he stopped screwing around. Then I had a feeling that I've never had in my life. I'm the guy who shakes spiders off paper out the window rather then stomping them with my boot. The guy who can always try to understand the other guy, empathize, put myself in his shoes. I had this giddy feeling realizing how dead simple it would be to give this horrible person a good shove down the flights of stairs. That would teach him a lesson, right?

Fortunately, that didn't happen. I so wanted to just lift my thigh up and kick with all my might on this skinny-assed coward's back that day. Had I done so nothing would have been served beside the Devil, the devil in me. Evil is a disease, a very contagious disease, a disease with no cure, only prevention and event that doesn't always work.