Up Jumps the Devil (41 page)

That wasn't being a proud rebel. That was just being a sick-ass motherfucker.

The Devil came smashing out of prison like a comic-book demon.

HE WAS BONES
and flames on a flying motorcycle, screaming east like a meteor, to New York, where he burned to a stop beside Memory's bed. He locked the door and switched the Coma Channel to play reruns.

“Wake up,” he commanded. His voice cracked.

She lay still.

He burned himself naked. He froze himself hard.

He missed her,
wanted her
, so badly. He was sick with the crazy tide that comes with panic and not knowing what to think or do.

He gathered her in his arms, his anguish and frustration and rage boiling though him. But he wasn't soothed—his tongue uncoiled like a dragon's. He fought himself, but the engine of want began to churn out the hope that love and need and desire this strong might bring her back, the way it had Arden—and that loneliness fed the engine, too, until it was all he could do to be tender. It almost made him scream, but he curled his fists until his knuckles burst and went slowly—and waited until he felt her loosen around him somewhat, before thrusting, once, twice—and erupted with a roar.

He pulled free, shivering over her like a rag doll propped on its haunches. Head hanging, hair hanging, horns gleaming.

Memory lay still.

The Devil crouched there breathing, simply breathing, for some time, before he admitted to himself that she was not going to wake up. He gently smoothed her hair back into place, tidied her bed, and kissed her goodbye.

He fled the dawn across the sky and shrank at last back into his cell.

He didn't know what to think. Of what he had done. Of himself. Of people. Of anything.

So he didn't think at all. He just sat there, smelling like smoke.

TIME PASSED
like a long, dry fart.

When fourteen months had gone by, they came and got him and let him out.

Just like any other prisoner, he looked older, and was smaller in some ways, and haunted.

When they gave him back his cell phone, there were nine thousand calls stacked up, mostly from the TV studio.

He dialed.

“Hello?” said the phone.

“John Scratch,” he said.

And the phone got all excited and told him they had decided to pick up
Think It Over
right where they'd left off, minus the felony programming.

He should say “No,” he knew.

And just like that, right there at the prison bus stop, the Devil understood the thing he'd been trying not to understand.

People were nothing special, after all. They were just animals. Humanity was just a fiction he had created to help himself believe he had a chance to get Arden back. Evolution hadn't produced humans yet, just a Frankenstein monster that kind of
looked
human.

Maybe he had known this, even before prison. He had always wanted to think that one day they'd shake off the spell, stand up, and say, “Enough is enough! We've become addicted to stupidity! Leapin' lizards, we're better than this!”

That's what humans would do. They would break the addiction.

Except it wasn't an addiction. Stupidity was their natural state. Their shiny civilizations were nothing more than a cheap coat of paint, the work of a few bright people, stolen and perverted by a world of village idiots.

Egypt. Rome. Smoke.

Camelot. America. Mirrors.

The realization became bright and clear, as if his brain were a sun made of glass.

The Devil threw up down the front of his cheap, complimentary getting-out-of-prison suit, and people at the prison bus stop moved away and pretended nothing was wrong.

“
JOHNNY?” SAID HIS CELL PHONE
. “We want to restart the show as soon as possible. John?”

Think It Over
wasn't going to jar people awake, the Devil knew. It was animal cruelty, pure and simple, like playing mean tricks on puppies.

So what? Who was he, Mother Teresa? No, he was the fucking Devil, so watch out.

“Soon as possible,” he told the phone, snarling. “Great. I'll be there.”

The phone gave a cheer and asked if he needed any money or drugs or pussy or anything.

THE DEVIL PUT HIS PHONE
in his pocket, rode a bus to L.A., got the death limo out of mothballs, and drove east, straight to Memory's bedside.

He curled up on the windowsill, thinking, Wake up, wake up.

Even though she was one of them, he still felt alone without her.

The Devil. Really, what was that? The people-animals ran laps around him when it came to darkness, to being able to live in sickness and thrive on death. For the first time in his life, he realized that what he was maybe wasn't so much. Just built to last, was all.

He tried to shake it off, but it was like a fly that kept buzzing back.

The New World, 1608

THE DEVIL FELT TIRED
in a way he'd never felt before.

Kneeling beside Memory's bed, both hands wrapped around her fists, he fell asleep and dreamed of the one thing he always tried so hard not to remember. He had lost the strength to protect himself from pain.

The memory took him back four hundred years, into the woods, when the woods were deep and dark. He had come across the sea, to the new world behind the sunset, where he hunted with his hands and slept on raw earth.

THE PEOPLE WHO LIVED THERE
called themselves the Falling Water People and they were afraid of him. They drew lots to see who would try to kill him.

A young hunter named Wahsinatawah—“Great Big Head”—chanced to be elected, and he approached the Devil without fear.

Great Big Head was well named. His enormous head nearly creaked atop his shoulders, which had grown muscular in order to support it. Unfortunately for Wahsinatawah, girls found his great head repulsive. He had given up all hope of ever getting one of them to become his wife, and turned all his strength and all his heart to the hunt. He made himself a peerless hunter. Now he hunted the strange, terrible creature.

Three days into the woods, Wahsinatawah spied a great buck deer leaping through the trees. Instinctively, he nocked an arrow and took aim, muttering a prayer—

Thud!
Something slammed into his left leg.

An arrow! He'd been
shot
!

Something zipped through the brush over his head, and the buck was shot, too. It tumbled across a thicket, pierced through the heart.

The Devil appeared up the trail. He held a bow in one hand, and a bone knife in his teeth. He approached Wahsinatawah, smoking a bluebird in a long clay pipe.

“You shot me,” Watsinatawah said to the Devil.

“You were about to shoot my deer. I chased him all the way from the river.”

The Devil gave Wahsinatawah a narrow-eyed look, marveling at the size of his head.

“Tell you what,” he said, pointing with the stem of his pipe at Wahsinatawah's bleeding leg. “Either I can pull that loose and heal it for you, or you can draw an arrow of your own and shoot me through the heart. Only be warned: Choose to shoot me and miss, and it will be my turn.”

Wahsinatawah chewed his lip. The hunter in him was hypnotized by the thought of shooting the Devil and carrying him back to his village. It was the only thing that might get him a wife.

“I'll shoot,” he decided.

“It is a good day to die,” said the Devil, backing off a little distance and closing his eyes.

Watsinatawah nocked an arrow, took aim, and let fly.

There came a hard
thunk
as if the arrow had gone astray and lodged in a tree, but it hadn't. It quivered right on target, stuck in the Devil's chest as if he were made of wood.

“Oh, fuck,” said Wahsinatawah as the Devil nocked an arrow of his own. He tried to think of something wise and clever, something lifesaving, to say.

The Devil loosed his arrow—

—and missed. The arrow slashed off into the woods.

Something had distracted the Devil. Watsinatawah turned to see a girl in a buckskin dress, with wild, burning eyes, kneeling beside the dying buck. She waved her hands over the deer, then fell forward as if embracing it.

The Devil walked toward her. The girl whipped upright, staring.

Her eyes were uncertain, but not fearful. The Devil opened his mouth to say something to her, but she whirled and shot away through the woods before he could manage a sound.

The Devil was a streak, right behind her.

Wahsinatawah drew his knife, and was torn between whether to cut the arrow from his leg or dress out the deer.

He did the deer first. Then his leg. Then he passed out.

“
STOP, GIRL!”
the Devil commanded.

“Why?” she called out. “So you can drag me home to eat?”

“I'm not a monster,” he said.

“You're the Devil, aren't you?”

The Devil leaped forward, scooped her up, and came to a stop with her in his arms.

“Being the Devil and being a monster are not the same thing,” he explained.

She wrapped her arms around his neck, lifted her head, and looked into his eyes. She must have liked what she saw.

“Take me swimming,” she said.

WAHSINATAWAH WOKE UP
in the weeds, with the dead buck hanging nearby, and felt a touch of fever behind his eyes. He knew he would have to get home and let the healer rub snake piss on the wound, or it would kill him. Cutting down the deer, he packed up the best meat and limped off through the forest.

If he hadn't been distracted with fever, things might have gone better for him.

Certainly he would have heard voices, or maybe even smelled something out of place. As it happened, though, he came stumbling into a clearing where five men sat around a smoky campfire. They wore shining helmets, and had great, horrible beards and bad eyes and pale skin, like dead men.

They stared at him, astonished by his sudden appearance and his enormous head, but they got over it quickly, and clubbed him unconscious.

AT THE RIVER
, the Devil was surprised when the girl stepped out of her dress without hesitation, and plunged into the water.

He followed.

They didn't play games with each other. There were no coy words, no hard to get. Just a certain looking and knowing and wanting. In minutes, they had fallen in love. It happens that way sometimes.

They came together in the water like one fish. She rubbed against him, gasping, and although the Devil's desire was quickly obvious, she stopped short of taking him inside her. The Devil ground his teeth, but didn't press her.

They curled up together amid cypress roots, and she told him she was called Pocahontas, that her father was a chief and her brothers were hunters, and that they were likely to come looking for her if she didn't return home in a day or two.

He would take her back to her father and brothers, and they would be married. He didn't say so, but he didn't have to. And she didn't agree, not in so many words, but she didn't have to either.

THE DEVIL
couldn't sleep.

He was troubled with love.

Not for the first time. He had taken wives, from time to time. Always, though, he reserved the very core of his heart for Arden. Until now.

Was it ridiculous to compare a thousand hundred years with the sport of a single afternoon?

But it wasn't a trial of arithmetic. He was in love, that was all, and for the first time he thought perhaps it was time to settle for what he could have and grasp here on Earth. Pocahontas was who she was, and he wanted to dive into it like a river, run in it like a forest, and hunt there, and sleep under its stars.

He said her name, once, quietly, and finally fell asleep.

IN THE MORNING
, he awoke to find that she had captured fish with her bare hands, and cooked them, wrapped in leaves. They ate, and they swam again, and after a while they dressed and turned toward her village.

They were holding hands, lost in separate thoughts, when they made exactly the same mistake poor Wahsinatawah had made. They walked into a broad, open field, and there on the other side were white men in silver helmets keeping watch outside a crude fort.

The Devil dropped out of sight in the tall weeds, pulling Pocahontas down with him, cursing.

“Who—?” she whispered, curious about the white men just as she seemed curious about everything.

He had to pull her down again, shushing her.

He had come a long way to get away from white men. No good could come of them crossing the ocean. He would have to convince her of this. Just as he was about to explain it to her, something happened to silence him.