Devilish

by Maureen Johnson

  “She says you can come in,” I said.

  “No thanks. I’ll stay out here. We’re not really supposed to mingle—it confuses things. Find out what happened and leave. No dealing.”

  “I know.”

  “Seriously, Jane. No dealing.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

  I went back up to the door, where Lanalee was drooping sleepily.

  “He doesn’t want to come in,” I said.

  “Yeah, Owen kind of likes the cold,” she said. “He hasn’t had much luck with hot places. Well, then, princess, you’d better follow me.”

  Even though no one was in the room, the downstairs fireplace was going strong, and all of the lights were on.

  “David!” Lanalee screamed.

  A thing—a person—came down the stairs, wrapped in a plush red bath wrap. I barely recognized him. He was obviously cold, shivering visibly, and pruned to the point where he looked like he was about a hundred. Only his shoe-polish black hair and doe-like eyes were the same.

  “Have you been in the bath all this time?” I asked.

  “I forgot about him,” Lanalee said, twisting her face into a smile. “I never told him he could come out.”

  David gripped the rail and sneezed with such force I thought he’d broken a rib.

  “David, refreshments for us, please. Maybe some cocoa with those little homemade pink marshmallows. I got the best marshmallows at Trader Joe’s!”

  She said this last thing to me, excitedly, as if I’d just stopped over in my robe and slippers in the middle of the night to see if she had any good snacks. David came down the stairs, gripping the rail fiercely. I could see his pale legs now, bloated and purplish from being in bathwater for days. He seemed barely able to walk. He went through the archways to the kitchen.

  “Seriously,” she said “They’re square and pink, and they’re handmade by these farmers or something. They are too good.”

  “We need to talk,” I said.

  “Oh, I know why you’re here,” she said with a smile. “You’re here because you’re not stupid.”

  She got up and went over to a long shelf mostly full of anatomy textbooks and art books. The bottom shelf had a few leather-bound albums. She pulled out one of these, a cracked red one.

  “This is the Codex,” she said. “This is the record of all disagreements I make.”

  “Disagreements?”

  “I don’t like to call them agreements. It’s too positive.”

  “Disagreements? You seem like more of a poser than any poser I’ve ever met.”

  She smiled faintly and opened it. After flipping through a few pages, which I could clearly see were class notes and homework assignments, she found what she was looking for.

  “Here,” she said, passing me the book. “Read it yourself.” I did. It read:

  You, Allison Francis Concord, have entered into an official contract with a representative of the Satanic High Command, Hearth of the Cold and All-Consuming Fire, Destroyer of Worlds, Consumer of Souls, Taker of the Life Breath, Guardian of the Bottomless Ocean of Sorrow, Bearer of the Lance of Endless Pain, Lanalee Tremone, 10B. Whereby, you agree that you will receive the bounty and comfort you desire and the worldly leadership of the Poodle Club, in exchange for the soul of one Jane Elizabeth Jarvis, which you will secure by ensuring that the quarry (JEJ)

  “I’m quarry?” I asked.

  Lanalee grinned.

  … will be thwarted in her attempt to receive a kiss from one Andrew Elton on All Hallows’ Eve. Should you fail in this, you will surrender your soul in her stead.

  David returned in the interim, with a massive mug of cocoa that Lanalee greedily grabbed. She shoved the Codex into his chest, and he dutifully staggered over to the bookshelf to replace it.

  All I could think to say was, “Why?”

  She laughed so hard that she had to squeeze her nose to keep cocoa from coming out. David laughed as well, out of obligation.

  “Ow,” she said. “Hotness on the nasal membrane. Why? Okay. Let me give you a for instance. You know how you watch television sometimes and you see some new somebody or other? Usually blond, usually skinny, usually very talentless, often in synthetic fibers? These people can’t really sing, are too stupid to know their own names—they just have a catchy song and some really good eyeliner? And you ask yourself, not unreasonably, how? How did this happen? How could some no-talent idiot get a big record contract, make big dance music videos, rise up overnight?”

  She got up and went over to finger-dust her perfume bottles. David sat on the floor near our feet and watched her admiringly.

  “It happens because we do it, Jane. I can do a celebrity conversion in less time than it takes me to get a pedicure.”

  “Mistress is so good at this stuff,” David said, hugging his robe tight around his purple legs.

  “All it takes is a few phone calls to some friends,” Lanalee said. “And it’s very, very hard to go back when you’ve had a taste.”

  “It’s true,” David said, nodding sagely. “So true.”

  “David, shut up and get Jane some cocoa. She hasn’t tried my pink marshmallows.”

  David unwillingly left his spot by the fire. Lanalee came and sat next to me, adjusting Joan’s ski jacket so that it sat more easily over my fluffy robe.

  “Allison didn’t want to lose what I had given her,” she went on. “So she came back and asked me to give her everything, and in return, she would simply make sure that you lost. I get you. She gets stuff. Simple. Beautiful. And just plain wrong. And really, more than I expected from her. I like that girl now! I’d still rather have you, though. I’m glad we’re taking care of that.”

  David returned with another cup, which Lanalee took as he was passing it to me.

  “So, is that what you wanted to know?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said, feeling a churning pain in my stomach. I had put myself on the line to save Allison, and she had turned on me. My best friend.

  “Great.” Lanalee downed the cocoa in one gulp and stood. “Well, I’m awake now. Want to make some pancakes or something?”

  “No. I just want to go.”

  “Whatever you want. You know where the door is. See you in hell!”

  Owen Secret-Serviced himself out from behind the tree as I came down the steps. I sank down on the last one and put my head in my hands.

  “What happened?,” he asked, coming and standing over me.

  “You were right,” I said. “Ally went back. She did another deal. And she’s going to make sure I lose.”

  I wrapped my arms completely around my head and tried to see if I could squeeze myself out of consciousness. It didn’t work. Owen didn’t sit down. He just continued to stand there, looking down at me.

  “There’s only one thing you can do,” he said.

  I squeezed my head some more.

  “Are you listening?”

  “No.”

  “In sixteen hours, you have to win this bet.”

  “And send my best friend to wherever it is that Lanalee comes from? Hell?”

  “That’s right.”

  When I peered up from the folds of my own arms, I noticed what seemed like a thousand tiny gold dabs of light all around us. They were under parked cars. On porches. Across the street. In the bushes.

  “What,” I asked slowly, “are those?”

  He turned and looked.

  “Cats,” he said.

  “Cats?”

  Now that he said it, I could make out tiny shadowy forms, crouching low, pacing slowly.

  “What are they doing?”

  “Watching the house.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they know something is wrong. Cats are good guards. They can feel the time is coming.”

  “There were cats on my porch the other night.”

  “They were probably trying to protect your house. They can’t do much, but it’s in their nature to try. So get up, Jane.”

  “A
nd go where?”

  “Come with me. There’s no time for you to go home. You can’t go back. Not right now. You know that.”

  So that, in short, is how I ended up running away from home on the night of my high school expulsion.

  thirty-two

  Owen led me up a narrow, very steep staircase, past three bedrooms, to an even tinier staircase. The floorboards creaked so loudly that it sounded like the house was about to implode into a shower of match-stick-sized pieces, but no one stirred.

  It’s always interesting to have a look in people’s bedrooms. It can tell you a lot. Owen’s room took up the entire third floor, but it was hardly spacious; the ceiling came to just an inch or two above his head. There was an old dresser with the knobs hanging a bit loose. There was a switched-off electrical heater, so it was absolutely frigid.

  “You can sleep in my bed,” Owen said.

  “Your bed?”

  “I’m not sleeping tonight,” he said quickly. “I’m not saying we’re going to share.”

  I walked over to a desk with a neat stack of notebooks and textbooks on top. On the shelf above, there was a perfectly organized row of books. I walked over and read the spines—they were all old books, in some cases held together with carefully placed pieces of yellowed tape. Most of them were adventure novels—20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Treasure Island, The Time Machine, Around the World in 80 Days. There were others as well, larger books with titles like The Modern World and The Future of Flight. I reached for one of these but stopped when I noticed that Owen had frozen with an armload of folded blankets that he had just removed from his closet.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “It’s okay. Just … be careful. They’re kind of fragile.”

  I took down The Modern World and opened it gingerly. The pages were strong and shiny despite their age. I looked over the drawings of “modern” cities, with strange lemon-shaped flying machines attaching themselves to the tops of skyscrapers.

  “You like classics,” I said. “These are all pretty old books. Are you some kind of collector?”

  “They were all mine,” he said, resuming movement but still watching me out of the corner of his eye.

  This stopped me cold. I closed the book with excessive caution and slid it back into place on the shelf. Owen visibly relaxed a bit, but then turned a wary glance to the heater.

  “I guess if you’re sleeping here, I should turn that on,” he said.

  “Don’t you usually?”

  “These things are fire risks,” he said, bending over and examining the cord.

  “So how do you sleep? It’s freezing in here.”

  “I dress warm. Anyway, I’ll be awake tonight.”

  He switched on the heater and squared himself off in a chair just opposite it.

  I pulled off the coat and got into Owen’s bed. It may have looked like a military cot, but it felt like the warmest, most welcoming refuge on earth. I looked up to see Owen’s gaze fixed on me, his fine eyebrows set in a straight line. Then I went to sleep.

  I woke up with a snort and a start. Owen was wide awake, standing at the window. I automatically reached up and gave my spikes a tufting and rubbed my face. He didn’t seem to notice how I looked.

  “Morning,” he said gruffly. “You should go down and get some breakfast.”

  “Don’t you want any?”

  “I think better on an empty stomach,” he said. “Go downstairs and eat. Brother Frank is waiting for you.”

  “Did you have any good ideas overnight?”

  “I’m working on it. Go eat. You need to have lots of energy today, so don’t be all girly and say you aren’t hungry.”

  I ignored the girly remark.

  Brother Frank was sitting at the kitchen table, nursing a cup of coffee. The oak outside the window was completely naked except for a few straggling dead leaves that had survived the last few weeks, clinging to the branches like those kittens in the Hang in There! posters. The sky was an unpromising steel gray.

  “Jane,” he said, perking up at my appearance. “Good morning. Let’s have some breakfast.”

  He proceeded to make me a breakfast that could easily have fed eight—pancakes, toast, a leftover cinnamon roll, bacon, fruit salad. When it was all on the table, I picked at a pancake and he pushed around a piece of bacon, but really, neither of us ate much.

  “Okay,” I said, “just tell me. What does it mean?”

  He knew what I was asking. I was asking, What does it mean to sell your soul?

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “I think I should,” I said. “Knowledge is power, right?”

  “That point is debatable.”

  “Come on,” I said. “There has to be a perk to this. Do I get any cool abilities? Will I be able to breathe fire or anything? I mean, Lanalee seems to like being a demon.”

  “I suppose demons have a place in our world,” he said thoughtfully. “In a sense, they actually help get things done because good things often come from bad. In this world, we have to have both. They balance each other out.”

  “So it’s not all bad.”

  He rubbed his forehead and pushed the plate toward me.

  “Here,” he said, “have another pancake.”

  We ate in silence until I worked up enough courage to speak again.

  “How do you know Owen?” I asked.

  “He’s lived with our order since the early 1900s,” he said. “Not just here—in various locations. Every few years or so, one of the brothers or sisters who works in a hospital arranges to get him a new birth certificate. Otherwise, it’s hard to explain someone who’s been fourteen years old for as long as anyone can remember.”

  “You’d think they’d send someone … older,” I said.

  “Don’t underestimate Owen.”

  Outside, some little kids were off to school in their costumes. Among them, there were tiny devils in red pajamas carrying plastic pitchforks.

  “Maybe it won’t be too bad,” I said. “Maybe it will be like that.”

  He put his hand over mine.

  “You’ll never find out,” he said. “I believe that. They’ve taken a lot of people, but they can’t have you.”

  thirty-three

  I knew my parents had to be beside themselves with worry. I’d been kicked out of school and then disappeared from my bed in the middle of the night. I had to call them. But my parents were smart people—they could trace the number that came up on the caller ID. So I shuffled out of Brother Frank’s house into the cold morning to find a pay phone. I knew there was one on Thayer Street, but that was too common a thoroughfare and was a direct line to Brown, so I could have easily bumped into my dad. That wouldn’t work.

  I opted instead to walk toward the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence’s other big school. This had several advantages. There was likely to be a phone around somewhere, I didn’t know anyone who would be going that way, and art students were a lot less likely to notice a very small girl dressed up in hand-me-down guys’ clothes, several sizes too large.

  This worked well. I found a fairly secluded phone behind the student center, and with my scruffy spikes and hobo wear, I fit right in with the stream of art students making their bleary way to class, dragging massive portfolios and art boxes. When I reached for the phone, my arm disappeared up the long sleeve. I looked like I was trying to do a magic trick where I was trying to slip my way out of a massive sack while handcuffed. It was not graceful.

  Joan picked up the phone on the first ring.

  “Joan,” I said quickly. “I’m fine. Don’t say anything about the Biltmore.”

  “Oh my God, Jane! Where are you?”

  My mother was on the line in the next instant, demanding everything a panicked parent demands in situations like this. Where was I? Was I okay? Was I coming home? Was I upset about the school in Boston? Was I with Allison?

  I almost laughed at that last one.

  “I just need a day,” I said.
>
  “Jane …”

  There was so much worry and love in her voice that I felt a physical pang—a kind of broken-guitar-string plunk. This was likely to be one of the last times I ever spoke to my mother. Then I would be gone. How I would go, I had no idea. Maybe tomorrow they would find a body—maybe I would just vanish…. There would be questions forever, and they would never know that the reality was worse than even their very worst nightmares.

  And I would never see them again. Joan would never ask me if Canada was in South America; Crick would never try to wake me up by chewing at the fringe of my bedspread. I would never see my mother, tousle-haired at noon, coming downstairs and telling us about the nightly adventures she had with the head chef of the restaurant. My dad would never push over his Sudoku and ask for my help, which he never needed. He just always liked to show me how much he thought of my abilities. My family loved me. And I loved them. And now I was hurting them, and the pay phone clamped to my ear was cold. My world was over. Jane Jarvis was coming to an end. A very bad end.

  I set my teeth hard and steadied myself. I could not give in to those thoughts.

  “You have to trust me,” I said quickly. “I need this day, more than I’ve ever needed any day in my life.”

  I pushed on when she tried to speak.

  “Please,” I said. “Trust me. I am fine. I love you. Okay? I have to go now.”

  I clapped the phone back onto the hook with too much force. It must have sounded like an angry, crazy hang-up. I stood there, my hand still on it, as if trying to soften the blow after the fact. Then I let go, pulling one finger loose at a time, and made my way slowly back to Brother Frank’s.

  Owen was sitting in the living room, cross-legged in the middle of the floor, poking at a gap between the floor-boards with his fingernail.

  “Where have you been?” he greeted me, jumping to his feet and coming over to me. He grabbed me by the shoulders, as if checking that I was actually there and wasn’t just a walking pile of laundry.

  “Calling my parents.”

  “What?” He stepped back, and his face contorted in panic. “You didn’t tell them where you are, did you? They’ll come for you. They’ll try to take you….”