Esta resposta foi escrita antes que o querente acrescentasse que eles se lembram do diabo como sendo uma cobra. Eles indicaram que a seguinte história é não o que eles estavam procurando.
Poderia ser essa a pequena história "Pessoa deslocada" por Eric Frank Russell ?
O narrador encontra uma pessoa estranha enquanto está sentado em um banco ao pôr-do-sol.
He glided out of the gathering dusk and seated himself at the other end of my bench and gazed absently across the lakes towards the Sherry Netherland.
(...)My mind speculated about him the way minds do when momentarily they've nothing else to bother them. A European refugee, it decided. A great surgeon or sculptor or something like that. Perhaps a writer, or painter. More likely the latter.
O estrangeiro confidencia que ele é um refugiado.
"You're not a native of this New York?" I prompted.
"No." Resting long, slender hands upon his stick, he gazed meditatively forward. "I have no country. I am a displaced person."(...)
"In these days it is an all too familiar story," he said. "A leader became so blinded by his own glory that no longer could he perceive his own blunders. He developed delusions of grandeur, posed as the final arbiter on everything from birth to death, and thereby brought into being a movement for his overthrow. He created the seeds of his own destruction. It was inevitable in the circumstances."
(...)
"I organized that opposition. I still think it was justified. But I dare not go back."
Então ele se levanta para sair.
"My name," he murmured softly, "is Lucifer."
De acordo com o ISFDb , foi publicado primeiro no edição de setembro de 1948 de Weird Tales e foi coletada em várias antologias que podem ser encontradas através da sua entrada no ISFDb.
