The Devil's Workshop

by Donnally Miller

  “Why are these baubles the Devil’s to dispense?” asked Gervaise. The night was fragrant with the scent of lilac, and he was in a mood to challenge the most abstruse philosophies. “And what, if anything, does that imply about God?”

  “I think it isn’t the knowledge and the power themselves that are sinful,“ replied Apollinaire. “After all, these are things men strive every day to attain; how can such striving be sinful? I think it is asking the Devil to supply them that is blasphemous.”

  “So if I were to request a pedagogue to provide me the knowledge I wanted there would be no sin in that – after all, God helps those who help themselves – but if I were to ask the Devil to provide the same knowledge that would be sinful? Seems a bit of a niggle to me.”

  “Perhaps it’s the type of knowledge, knowing how to bring beauties from ages past back to life to make love to them, forbidden fruit you know.”

  “Personally, I would be satisfied if I could make love to the many beauties of the current age. I’m just having trouble seeing how the Devil comes into it.”

  “Speaking of which, what’s that disturbance there at the corner?”

  “And why would God care anyway? Amazing the things God seems to care about. What disturbance? – Oh, I see.”

  “That wolf has just ripped that old woman to pieces,” said Apollinaire.

  “I must take issue with the premise on which you found your observation. That is no wolf. That’s a loup-garou.”

  “How droll you are, Gervaise, of course it’s a wolf. The loup-garou is a figment of legend.”

  “Perhaps when the sun is shining it is a figment, but tonight, when the moon is full, it is a living, breathing reality.”

  “Whatever it is, don’t you think we should remove ourselves from its presence? That is now, I think, the third person it has disemboweled.”

  “There is no need for haste. It has not yet looked in our direction. But its presence here gives me cause to believe that the rumors we’ve been hearing are true. The Son of Light is dead, and there is nothing shielding us from the wrath of Satan.”

  “Surely the wrath of Satan is a boogy to scare naughty children, like the demons in that most entertaining play we were just discussing. Also it is now looking in our direction.”

  “Fortunately, Apollinaire, it has been my fixed habit for several years now to carry a pistol and silver bullets on nights when the moon is full. I foresaw, you understand, that something of this nature was bound to occur eventually. Here is the pistol of which I speak.”

  “Gervaise, your sang-froid amazes me. Do you realize while you have been idly talking to me you have allowed that creature to kill four – no, five – of your fellow citizens when you could have saved them by simply loading your pistol and shooting the beast?”

  “The discharge of firearms in a crowded public setting is fraught with hazards.”

  “This setting is rapidly becoming less crowded.”

  “It would be rash to undertake such a step when other methods of quelling the threat are still viable. The use of deadly ballistics must always be regarded as a final recourse. Now, where did I put those bullets?”

  “Gervaise, would you think it terribly impolite if I were to take to my heels at once? Aighee!”

  “Alors! You have dropped your cane. Allow me to retrieve it for you.”

  “Please, there are other matters requiring your attention. For the love of God, could you just load your pistol and shoot this hellish beast?! His teeth are planted firmly in my calf.”

  “I am attempting to do so, but I am not so adroit as some, particularly with this monster snapping at my wrists – oh, confound it, look at that, he’s scattered the bullets all across the pavement. What an infernal nuisance.”

  “Gervaise, you fuck – Bluaghzzarbaab!”

  “There’s no call for that language. I think I will have to beat this bloody brute to death with your cane. Where did you find such a fascinating finial? Is it a foliated fleur-de-lis?”

  “Foliated?! How could you think such a thing of me. It is solid silver – Ahgiee khrazzurh!! – Or else I have been swindled.”

  “In that case, this will do nicely.” And with that, Gervaise brought the heavy cane down onto the cranium of his elemental adversary. This had more of an effect than one might have anticipated due to the fact that the finial was, as Apollinaire had been assured, composed of solid silver. The slavering brute whimpered in pain and backed off to lick its wounds. Apollinaire looked up hopefully, but he winced when he tried moving his ruined leg. Gervaise asked, “Do you think you could hand me those two bullets lying next your ankle?”

  Apollinaire handed them over.

  Holding the cane in his left hand and the pistol in his right, Gervaise attempted to load the two bullets into his gun. He hoped two bullets would suffice. The rest had rolled into the gutter. The werewolf was watching him the whole time with uncanny attentiveness and at one point lunged towards him, but he delivered a devastating back hand with the cane. However, in order to hold the gun steady, he was going to have to drop the cane so he could put both hands on the revolver. He deftly flung the cane into the monster’s face and then using both hands fired a bullet that ripped through its right ear. The bullet discharged with so much force the recoil threw Gervaise to the pavement, and the creature leaped backward in pain. Then, falling to all fours it paced back and forth, keeping a wary distance, eyes on the pistol. Gervaise kept the beast in the revolver’s sights, preparing to shoot it through the heart. At the very moment he was ready to pull the trigger, the brute turned tail and ran, disappearing round the corner.

  Once Tom had struggled up the strand past tidal pools and the untidy line on the beach that marked the high point of the tide, he’d thrown himself down. Sleep overcame him and he lay prostrate, shuddering gasps shaking his frame, as the last light leaked from the sky. The moon rose in the east, round and luminous, and traversed the heavens.

  Now descending, it lay just above a bank of clouds, casting a glimmering pathway across the tireless waves, to the yellow sands where he lay. Had he looked up at that moment he would have seen its mottled surface shift as a figure stepped from it onto the stairway of clouds, down to the pathway painted on the ocean’s surface. The distant figure walked along the path of moonlight towards where he lay, gradually taking on the appearance of Melinda, Mistress of the Shuddering Moon. As she drew near she shook her head, loosing her lustrous silver locks. Her gown of pure white samite moved and shimmered beneath a lace of amethysts, pearls and moonstones. She stepped onto the sand and approached, placing a hand on his shoulder. He looked up only to be mesmerized, haunted and spellbound by the unexpected glory in her eyes; the pupils were pure white, hardly to be distinguished from the iris. All thoughts were swept away. She spoke to him and afterwards he never knew if her words were sounded in the air, or in his mind alone, and the words she spoke were these: “Despair not. True love’s journey ends in gladness. Chaos, fear and death are illusions to the heart that truly sees and never wavers. The world was created and is redeemed by love. Love is everything. All else is the mind’s phantasm. Love is everything.” She held his gaze a moment longer and for that moment he felt his heart pumped joy, not blood. Then, just as she had come she passed back along the watery pathway, gradually losing distinction as the distance grew greater, up the stairway of clouds and back into the moon. Then the moon resumed its descent, and as it did, the first rosy gleams of dawn appeared in the east above a dirty smudge of cloud.

  Fergus felt as if the discomfort of the knots had almost become part of him. Long ago his left leg had gone to sleep, the rope holding that limb being particularly efficacious in cutting off the flow of blood. His mind had wandered from one thing to another. He’d tried to sing, but his reedy voice sounded naked in such a big, empty house, so he stopped. He’d gotten tired of looking at the chairs with their old-fashioned richness, the wall clock with its gilded case, the broad, cumbersome mirror. Everything had the gloomy appearan
ce of long forgotten splendor, shrouded in ancient spiderwebs. He’d counted the nails in the wall, and the cracks in the ceiling. He wished he could sleep, but couldn’t quite get there. When he closed his eyes he heard the house settling slowly in its long concession to decay, making the resonant little creaks and knockings of an ancestral abode at night. He’d been left completely alone, his only visitor the occasional draft that whimpered through the wainscoting. After a time when his thoughts had seemed to drift lazily back and forth to no purpose, he suddenly came fully awake to the realization that he was being watched. There was nothing he could hear, there was nothing he could smell, he didn’t know which sense it was that told him, but he knew he was being watched. He was being watched by someone or something behind him. He couldn’t turn around, he could only move his head so far. “Hello?” He waited for an answer. None came, but the space around him felt tighter somehow, more uneasy, as if whatever it was had just moved a little closer. The air suddenly became colder. He imagined eyes opening, and looking at him. He imagined their unfriendly glare. He imagined hungry lips. He imagined teeth. “Stranger, is that you?” In an instant he was panicking, struggling against the ropes, trying to break free. He wrenched and wrenched his arms, he twisted, but he was caught, he couldn’t get away and it was now only inches from his back. He felt its touch and he screamed. The stranger had a grip on him and was trying to settle him down.

  “Stop that!” the stranger said. “Stop! Lord knows who you’ll wake up here.”

  Fergus was panting and blubbering. “You didn’t have to tie me up!”

  “You’d have run away if I hadn’t. It was for your own good.”

  “The only person I want doing things for my good is me.”

  “Calm down. Stop all that thrashing . . . I’m going to untie you. Don’t waggle, you’re just making the knots tighter.”

  Fergus watched the stranger patiently untying the knots. He saw he was bruised and limping, and there was an ugly oozing wound on the right side of his head where he’d lost his ear. Something really mean had gotten to him. “What are we doing?” he asked. “All this riding around the country, stirring people up. What’s the point? And who are we fighting? If we’re fighting someone I want to know who it is so I can keep a lookout.”

  The old man just laughed.

  “It looks like you should’ve kept a lookout tonight. Something bit your ear off.”

  “Oh, Fergus –“

  “And turning into a wolf, that’s not natural. And this house gives me the creeps. Lights always coming on just before I walk into a room, what’s that about? And how come you don’t have a name? I want to know what I’ve gotten into and why I have to be tied up to keep me from getting out of it.”

  The stranger just looked at him a moment, an amused smile on his face. “I tied you up to protect you. There were some malicious characters on the prowl. I had to keep you someplace safe.”

  “You call this someplace safe?”

  “And I do have a name. I just don’t give it out.” He leaned back, removed his snuffbox from his waistcoat pocket and took a good snort. “It’s long. I have thirty-seven middle names. And you know something . . . ? I once met someone with the exact same name as me. All thirty-seven middle names, in the same order, spelt just the same. Course he wasn’t related, just sort of a coincidence.” Fergus was flexing his legs, now the ropes were off him. “Come here,” the stranger went on, “I want to show you something.” He led Fergus outside. Dawn’s first light was leaking into the sky from the east. It rested on the lines around the stranger’s eyes and mouth. To Fergus he looked old, very old, an old man probing past mistakes and revelations. The full moon was in the west, just on the point of disappearing below the horizon. Afterwards when Fergus thought about what came next he wasn’t sure if it’d really happened, or maybe he’d dreamed it. The old man reached for the moon in the west and took it out of the sky and held it in the palm of his hand. “See this? It’s just a small thing really.” Fergus looked at it where it sat in the man’s hand. The stranger turned it over, showing both sides, the dark and the light. It looked like one of those silver dollars he always had about him. “The whole universe is just a cockeyed toy.” He tossed the moon and it twirled in the air before falling back into his palm. “We just pretend it’s big enough to matter, but I could sweep up all the stars in the sky and they’d barely fill my pockets.” He put the moon in his back pocket. “Think I’ll go spend it.”

  “Wait. You can’t –“

  “You’re right. I better put it back.” He put it back just above the horizon where he’d taken it from. “Don’t think anyone noticed, do you? . . . Anyway it won’t matter much longer. Everything’s falling apart. Soon we won’t even recognize the words that come out of our mouths. It’ll be Paradise again, like when all were animals. What man is now isn’t right. Man’s not an animal. He’s more savage, more cruel. He’s got this veneer of civilization, but what’s inside him? What’s waiting inside, that he can’t understand? ”

  “I don’t know.”

  “No, you don’t, because there’s nothing. You can’t see what’s inside you . . . Now get your rest. You’re going to need it. Today we sleep, but when the sun goes down we’ll head out. We’re on our way to the Forgotten Forest. And then we’ll light up that munitions depot on Lost Bastard Island.”

  Captain Jasper Squeak, the quartermaster, was seated in front of his tent, polishing the ornamental saber he always wore on his right hip. His thoughts were far away, on the distant downs of his beloved home in the old country. Soon he would throw off the mantle of this stale old military life and actually become the person he’d always been. Where shall a man find happiness to surpass his own old home? He’d not live in a house of gold in this God forsaken land.

  He’d kept his distance from the disturbances of the night. There’d been wild talk of a wolf, or a wolfman, or something of that sort. He heard a sound and looked up apprehensively at the dense, shaggy pines surrounding the camp. They cast a dark curtain of impenetrable shadow. God knows, there could be anything in that forest. The sooner we’re out of it, the better.

  He was suddenly brought to his feet by the appearance of a bedraggled, tattered negro who shambled cautiously out of the woods. His face was bloody and his clothes were torn. Squeak held the saber in front of himself while attempting to retreat into his tent. “Hold it,” he shouted. “Stay right there.”

  The negro put his hands up. “I surrender,” he said.

  They stood there for a moment. Squeak didn’t know what to do. “Throw down your arms,” he said.

  The negro lowered his hands.

  “No! Keep your hands up, but lay down your arms!”

  “I don’ see how tha’s possible, but if you mean my weapons, I don’ got any. They wouldn’ trust me with a hatpin ovah theah.”

  Squeak was seriously perplexed.

  Nero could see this white man, like most, was a dummy and would have to be taught. “I’m your prisoner,” he explained. “You’ve captured me.”

  “I have?”

  “Yes. These are the fortunes of war.” He smiled.

  “I see. Well, in that case –“

  “An’ this is your lucky day. There’s a big reward offered for my capture by Massah Andrew Merriwether of Trento . . . You’re suppose’ to ask me to identify myself.”

  “Identify yourself.”

  “My name is Nero.”

  “You’re Nero the negro.” Squeak smiled.

  “No one calls me that.”

  “Oh.”

  “Tha’s alright. I was a slave on the Merriwether Plantation. You’re gonna get a big reward. You betcha.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yes. Just take me to your commanding officer and throw me in chains. It’s all I deserve.”

  Squeak was having a hard time taking this in. He’d avoided all the fighting, but somehow he’d captured a prisoner. He hoped there wouldn’t be a medal involved, or anything that would compl
icate his retirement.

  “And you know what else? I can lead you right to the head man of these no good slaves. Tha’s what I’ll do. Where is your commanding officer?”

  “That’s Colonel Snivel. I’ll take you to him. Am I supposed to put you in handcuffs or something?”

  “You probably are, but I don’ think that will be necessary. I am not a troublesome prisoner.” And he actually gave Squeak a wink. Nero told himself, Oh, what a clever man I am.

  When Katie looked about herself she was disheartened to see that in the first light of dawn the sacred god-haunted glen was nothing more than a clear patch of sandy soil in the midst of some scrubby oaks and twisted, thrawny pines. The godhead whose overpowering call had summoned her was diminished to the twittering of birds waking to greet the sunrise, and she was standing naked in front of a large mossy rock somewhere near the inn where they’d lodged for the night. She turned around. She retraced the rarely trodden path she’d used in the night. It led her to the apple tree outside the inn and she climbed the tree and crept out onto the branch that touched the window of her room. As she climbed back into her room she saw Tavish just rolling over and opening his eyes.

  “Hello,” he said. “You’re up early.”

  “Turn your eyes away. I’ll not have a man regard me so.” She quickly grabbed a blanket to cover her nakedness.

  “Oh, Katie, you’d think I’d never seen a woman before. Your shyness is silly.” He stood and scratched himself before the mirror. He made no effort to be modest, and she felt she had to turn her head away. She was very self-conscious. Mornings had been proving especially difficult, as the cramped conditions on the road often compelled them to sleep close together, but always when they slept she kept her stick between herself and Tavish.