Up Jumps the Devil (45 page)

HIS HEART CRACKED
like a hot rock when he said it, but he meant it.

Leave his Earth behind?

Even if it was stupid and hopeless and doomed to rut in its own blood, it was ten times better than
this
.

Heaven was the only conceivable thing
worse
than doom and stupidity.

It was peaceful, but it was the kind of peace that came with nothing ever changing.

The Light pulsed. It looked sort of disgusted, and turned away with its nose in the air.

The tunnel came and sucked the Devil up like a vacuum cleaner, sent him burning like a meteor back to Earth, back to his hospital bed in Ohio.

Beep
, said the machine by his bed.
Beep. Beep
.

“Memory?” he rasped.

Silence.

Ohio, and then someplace deep in the woods, 2005

WHEN HE FELT STRONG ENOUGH
, they let him go.

They wanted him to ride out in a wheelchair. He refused.

Two insurance thugs materialized, and explained that he could either ride in the chair like a good dog or they could strap him in with duct tape.

He wasn't feeling
that
strong, so he rode.

When he got to the door, he sniffed the air.

Hunting.

What he was hunting was a long way away. It took a while to catch the scent. Longer than it should have. He felt supernaturally limited. He also drew stares.

The Devil didn't usually like quick fixes, but he was in a hurry, and frustrated, so he waved his hand and made his limo appear at the curb before him.

Except it didn't.

He tried again. It was like turning the ignition on a dead battery.

What had happened to the strange, dark powers that came with being the Devil? They weren't gone, exactly, but they were faded. Was this the price of God's healing touch? Of falling back to Earth again? Was it like the electricity going out, and would it come back on?

He caught a bus north, out of town. North and east, until the concrete gave way to grass and fields, and then woods on either side.

From time to time he sniffed the air, making sure he still had the trail.

Either the trail was growing fainter, as trails do, or his sniffer was dying.

Maybe both.

IN A SMALL TOWN
not far from the Massachusetts coast, he followed his nose off the bus. He sniffed the autumn air, which bit, the way New England autumn air does. The cold bothered him more than it should have, so he bought a toboggan cap at a thrift store before letting the trail take him out of town and into the woods.

It was Memory's trail, he realized. A smell like burning light and eternity. If he could find her, he would sleep in her arms until he was himself again, and they would live here together until the Earth itself was swallowed by the sun.

It was Zachary's trail, too.

Both trails made him tremble with anticipation. But why were they together?

Zachary's trail made sense. It went into hiding, into the woods.

Why did Memory have a trail at all? Why wasn't she with him now?

It felt better to concentrate on Zachary.

HE DID NOT
hurry.

At sundown, he made a fire amid the roots of an old dead hickory, and watched an open spot between the branches, watched stars pass by.

Let there be light.

Lying there with his shirt open, scratching at his chest, he encountered bullet scars. Smooth and bowl-shaped, like moon craters.

He would cook Zachary Cajun-style, the Devil decided.

IN THE MORNING
, he awoke to find an old woman standing over him. She had long gray hair and bright eyes, and leaned on a tall wooden cane.

“Morning, Devil,” said the old woman.

He knew her, he realized.

It was Zachary's mother.

“Mrs. Bull Horse?” he said, clearing his throat, removing his hat. Something in her bearing commanded respect. Something about her was new, since she'd lived in Arizona with her crippled husband, her son, and a garage full of frozen dead people.

“Don't you ‘Mrs. Bull Horse' me,” she snapped. “I know why you're here, and you and I are going to make a deal before you walk another step. Or I can crack your head with this big goddamn stick, if you prefer.”

The Devil might have been tired, and his Devil-batteries might have been dead, sometimes, but he still had his pride. He stood, and tried to tower.

“I've come for your son,” he said, “And Memory Jones, too.”

“All right,” said Mrs. Bull Horse. “So you've come for them. It didn't take a genius to know you'd come for them.”

“Are they with you? Take me to them.”

Mrs. Bull Horse raised the mighty cane.

“Manners,” she warned.

The Devil almost tore his hat in two.

“Please,” he said. “Please take me to them.”

“Maybe I will,” she said. “It's not like you don't have reason to see them; it's not my place to say. We mind our own business here. They've agreed to see you, but you have to do something for us, first.”

The hat came apart. “Who is ‘we'?” asked the Devil. “And what do you mean, ‘do something'?”

“‘We' is the people I live with. ‘Do something' is like singing for your supper. If you want something from us, you give something. It's an exchange. It's how things work.”

The Devil tried to mash his hat back together, to grow it back into a hat, but it refused.

“I'll do it,” he said. “What is it?”

“Dig a grave,” said Mrs. Bull Horse, and for the first time he observed that her walking stick was not a walking stick at all, as such, but a sturdy shovel of hand-turned wood and hammered steel.

She tossed it to him.

He caught it, and followed her through the woods a ways, into a village right out of a fairy tale.

A WIDE, GRASSY ROAD
passed between rows of stone houses. The village seemed to be built over the ruins of an older village, the Devil saw. Here and there, ruins broke through the earth like stone milk teeth.

The Devil, even at the worst of times, had a big mouth, and he talked about what he saw.

“Sure is quiet,” he said. “Everyone must be at work.”

“They are where they are,” said Mrs. Bull Horse. “About their business, I suppose.”

They passed the ancient remains of a church, with a cherry tree rooted amid the walls. They passed over a creek, where at last the Devil saw more people. Two men and two women with hand tools were rebuilding a fallen stone bridge.

“Devil,” they said, and nodded.

“You don't have electricity,” observed the Devil.

“We have it where it's needed.”

They passed through trees again, and when the woods thinned out, they stood atop a hill. Weathered gravestones surfaced here and there, overgrown with tall grass and clinging weeds. The Devil saw the sea itself, cold and gray beyond the edge of a rocky cliff. He smelled the rankness of dead things washed up on stone and sand, the familiar funk which the land-bound say is the smell of the sea, but which sailors know is the smell of the shore.

And Mrs. Bull Horse, pulling her shawl tight with one hand, pointed at the ground with the other, and said, “Here.”

The Devil let the shovel fall. The hand-forged blade bit weeds and dirt.

“Who is the grave for?” he asked.

“You don't need to know. You just need to dig.”

And off she went, back downhill, among the trees.

THE DEVIL DUG
.

Started to, anyhow.

It took exactly four times driving the shovel into the ground, driving it down with his boot heel, lifting it up and throwing the earth aside, for him to get awfully tired.

Four shovels of earth isn't much of a dent, he observed, taking a break.

A little later, he hit his first root. The root had to be chopped through, which took time and caused blisters.

Four shovels after that, he struck an old, submerged headstone, and had to start over, a few steps away.

That's how he spent the first hour.

This, he mused, feeling sorry for himself, was going to be a bitch. Digging holes wasn't easy to begin with, and graves were pretty big holes. Six feet down, three feet across, and they had to be nice and square, didn't they?

Devil paused, grabbing another dose of the ocean breeze, and scanning the land around him. On the inland side, beyond the village and the narrow wood, a pasture fell away toward the true forest. The grass was dotted, far away, with black-and-white cows.

The cows looked his way. They seemed glad to see him, and began to move uphill toward the cemetery.

It was good to know some things never changed, thought the Devil, and while he was thinking this, a large black cow interposed, causing the others to stop.

Not a cow. An enormous bull, shining like obsidian, hump like Mount Rushmore, neck like a tower, head like a Viking palace.

The bull snorted. The cows began grazing their way east again.

“That's Palestine,” someone said.

The Devil turned to find Mrs. Bull Horse behind him, carrying a pitcher of water and a glass. “You'll want to keep an eye on him; he'll gore you to death quick as look at you. If he gets close, you want to get up a tree or down a hole. Speaking of which, it doesn't look as if there's much digging been done.”

The Devil eyed the water pitcher, licking dry lips.

“Maybe it's too much for you,” suggested Mrs. Bull Horse. “Maybe you need help.”

Proud disdain flooded the Devil's features.

“Fair enough,” said Mrs. Bull Horse. She left the pitcher sitting in the grass, and walked off through the trees.

The bull, the Devil noticed, downing the whole pitcher at one swallow, had come the slightest bit closer in the meantime. Hadn't he?

The thought lent him new strength as he addressed himself again to the grave.

HE SHOVELED
for twenty minutes without stopping, just to see if he could.

New blood made the shovel handle sticky and brown. Blisters formed and burst—and didn't
that
hurt like a bastard—but he didn't stop until the grass had risen waist-deep around him, and he was about to lean on his shovel and see if maybe he couldn't raise enough magic to fill the water pitcher, and maybe some cheese and Oreos, when a rustling in the grass behind made him turn with a muffled cry—

Dread Palestine!

—but it wasn't Palestine, it was Memory, carrying water and some apples.

“Oh,” he said.

He tried to lean on the shovel in a handsome, workman kind of way.

She looked better, considering the last time he'd seen her, she had just come out of a long coma. Her long, flaxen hair looked healthy again. So did her mystical eyes. She wore the simplest of homespun dresses, with a shawl, and some kind of wooden pendant on a leather string around her neck.

“You haven't gotten very far,” she said, bending to hand him the water and apples. The Devil took a long swallow and ate half an apple with one bite. Then he turned and got back to work, saying, “Interesting place.”

“I suppose it is,” she answered, sitting down cross-legged at the edge of the grave.

“You like it?”

“I do.”

“How come?”

She was quiet for a long time. He threw out nine loads of earth, waiting, careful not to hit her.

“They're doing what you've been trying to get people to do for five thousand years, baby. They're building a place where people can live together.”

“I've done that. I've gotten people to do it.”

“That's fine, but these people are doing it on their own, so far. They're not trying to build Rome or anything. They're just trying to build this one small place. The place where they live. And that's all.”

The ocean breeze came on a little stronger. Maybe a little colder, a late-afternoon chill.

“I feel at home here,” she said, standing and turning to go.

But she stopped.

With her back to him, she asked: “What do you want with Zachary?”

He kept digging.

“Why?” he asked. “Are you protecting him?”

“I was. I brought him here. After he shot you, I was afraid for him.”

He stopped shoveling.

“And now?”

She still faced away from him.

She said, “You can't really protect another person. Not forever. You can help people, but in the end they have to take up for themselves.” Her voice shook. “You have to trust people to stand on their own, and hope for the best.”