The Book of Magic

by George R. R. Martin

  It was a turquoise 1933 Essex-Terraplane Eight, the kind the bank robbers had favored, and its running board and headlamps gleamed so, you’d think detail work was the only job left to the damned. Pearleen couldn’t quite make out the driver, so bright was the finish in her eyes. The car went into the circle widdershins and went around, and went around, and went around, thirteen times all told, until it pulled to a stop, still in the road, and sat there, rumbling. The back door nearest Pearleen opened by itself, to reveal nothing but a wall of shadow, an utter absence of light. It was like the mouth of a cave, or a sewer pipe, or a rifle barrel. But Pearleen took a deep breath, muttered, “The things I do for you, Petey Wheatstraw,” cinched her pack tighter, walked across the grass, and got in.

  The plush back seat was right comfortable, except for the door that slammed shut behind her without agency, and the dead man at the wheel whose head lolled sideways. His glassy eyes in the rearview mirror seemed to stare just past her at something awful. Someone had shot him in the temple, and the blood was caked and dry. Riding shotgun was an enormous bloodhound that filled the front seat; his buttocks crowded the driver, and his muzzle fogged the side window. The hound’s focus was outside the car. He emitted a low growl.

  “You leave that squirrel alone,” Pearleen said, and at that moment, the small critter came unstuck and bounded away into the grass.

  “ARF!” said the bloodhound—not the sound of a dog’s bark, but the sound of a deep-voiced man yelling, “ARF!” As if that were a command, the driver’s flopping dead hand shoved the gearshift into place, and the car rolled forward, picked up speed around the circle, around the circle, around the circle, thirteen times until Pearleen was nauseated and the Terraplane slingshotted down US 378 toward the lake, the scenery a blur. Pearleen sat forward at an inopportune time, just as the dog emitted a long, eye-watering fart, to see for herself the speedometer needle that spasmed at the unmarked right end of the gauge. “SIDDOWN!” yelled the dog, and Pearleen fairly jumped back in the seat. Something went thump thump beneath the car, and Pearleen thought sure a tire had blown and she was done for—but no, on the straightaway ahead, as far as the eye could see, small animals dashed into the road from left and right just in time to be run over. Their broken furry bodies continuously smacked the undercarriage, thump thump thump thump thump. The car made a screeching turn to the left that tossed Pearleen against the passenger door, which was hot like a stovelid. She shoved herself back into the middle of the seat just in time for a second screeching turn to the right. Pearleen managed to brace herself and sit up straight that time, but the lifeless driver slumped forward, his face wedged into the corner between dashboard and door, and never moved again. The bloodhound peered back at her. Drool from his jowls beribboned the back of the seat as he said: “Ain’t it a smooth-riding car?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Pearleen murmured, barely audible over the quickening thump thumpthumpthump.

  “You know what they say,” added the dog, his voice trending louder and more manic. “On the sea, it’s aquaplaning! In the air, it’s aeroplaning! And ON THE ROAD, IT’S TERRAPLANING! Haw haw haw!” He rolled off the seat with laughter, fell onto the brake pedal, and the car stopped dead with a screech that was mostly Pearleen screaming, her hands over her face, certain that in the next instant the car would flip over, and she’d be dead. But nothing happened except her scream, and she eventually slacked off, spread her fingers, and looked around to find the car’s interior unchanged, and the scenery no longer moving. The door through which she had entered now popped open with a hiss of rushing air, as if a pressurized seal had broken. From just out of sight in the front seat came the abrupt sounds of ripping and gulping: the dog had begun to eat the driver. Pearleen scrambled out of the car and ran blindly, her only thought to get far from the befouled Terraplane, and in the process ran twenty feet across a freshly raked dirt yard. She stopped herself just a couple of inches away from the bottommost of a set of plank steps.

  “Young lady, I do not recommend you set foot on those steps,” said a harsh nasal voice like claws on slate, “less’n you intend to be my houseguest till half past eternity.”

  Pearleen looked up. Sitting on the wide front porch of a two-story white house with clapboard siding, baked beneath a purple sun in a red sky, were Asmodeus, the Unclean, and the Stranger to All; Baphomet the Tempter, the First Beast, and the Father of Lies; the Senior Senator from the Great State of Bigotry and Hatred and Status Quo; the Son of the Shadows; the Prince of Air and Darkness; the Lord of the Flies, and of Misrule, and of This World; Plague-Bearer, Light-Bringer, Accuser and Adversary, Lodestar and Belial; Old Massa, Old Nick, Old Scratch—all those and a thousand more compressed into a single unshaven, plug-chewing, undershirt-wearing, wattle-necked, pussel-gutted little peckerwood, just enough yellow-white hair left on his bald head to stick out in all directions like a Van de Graaff halo. He sat in a rocking chair and fanned himself with a derby hat, his many titles and responsibilities buzzing around him like a swarm of blowflies. His tiny, close-set eyes, embedded in wrinkles like a pair of snake-eye dice in a dead man’s palm, gazed at Pearleen with distant disinterest, as they might have gazed at a dried-out cow patty in the road. He was just plumb awful, but Pearleen immediately felt a little better, just to see him; she had known his type long since, and was no longer afraid. She did, however, make a little curtsy, being ever mannerly, and nobody’s fool.

  “I appreciate the warning, sir,” she said, “but I’m a little surprised you gave it.”

  “My magnanimity surprises me, too,” the Devil said, “but I reckon we’re all a mass of contradictions. Take you, for example, Miss Sunday. You look like the Sabbath for which you are named—or like its popular conception, at least—all cream and strawberries in an unchipped bowl. And yet you must be at least half-full of live bait, to survive the trip to my lake house in the first place.” His jumbled, dark-stained teeth gleamed in the wrongness of the sun. “I don’t believe I caught your name.”

  “You just said it,” Pearleen replied.

  “Did I, now? That was so long ago, I can’t remember. I don’t think you’ve given it to me, though. Not handed out freely, pink and squirming in your hand. You’ve yet to give me anything like that.”

  “Just your freedom,” Pearleen retorted. “You remember me, Old Scratch. My name is Pearleen Sunday, and you saw me last when you were just a tiny thing, and were trapped by a wizard from Yandro Mountain. His hex-magic laced you inside a boot from the Civil War. I said the words that sprung you, and I swung that old boot over my head three times and let it fly, and you were freed and loose in the world again. I did that not for your sake, but for the sake of he who trapped you. I did it for the soul of Wendell Farethewell, the Wizard of the Blue Ridge, and I am not sorry for it. Do you remember me now, Old Many-Shaped?”

  The Devil’s chair was placed, for maximum annoyance, on the sweetest spot of a creaking floorboard, which voiced its torment each time the Devil rocked forward. “How about that,” the Devil said. Creak. “Ain’t that something.” Creak. “Well, my, my, my.” Creak.

  This went on for a while, until Pearleen got impatient. “How long you gone rock there,” she asked, “and not answer my question?”

  “Sometimes it’s more diplomatic,” the Devil said, “just to make noises with your mouth, and say nothing at all. And be careful what you ask me, little girl. You might not like the answer. But the fact is, that I don’t seem to recollect even one little tee-ninchy bit of this fairy-story you’re a-telling me.” He shook his head and scratched his balls. “Gals are so big for their britches these days. I blame literacy. They start looking at the pretty dresses in the Woman’s Home Companion, and next thing you know, they’re sounding out the words too.”

  Pearleen ignored this provocation, and the Devil’s rubbing himself, and his fixed stare aimed not at her face. “You don’t remember, do you? Well, then, tell me this, Old Deceiver. If you w
eren’t beholden to me big time, if you didn’t owe me a favor of favors, why’d you come a-running when I called you, just like a good little poodle dog?”

  This snapped him into focus. The Devil sat forward in the chair, eyes flashing. “I didn’t come to you, Little Britches. I brought you to me.”

  “It works out the same,” Pearleen said. “There’s a tie that hauls us together. What braided that rope, Old Thing Without Breath, if not the good turn I did you?”

  He sat back with a frown, and flapped his hand in an oh-do-get-on gesture. In the process, he noticed his jagged fingernails. “Let’s not say good,” the Devil said, fingers in his mouth, gnawing himself a manicure. “I did just eat my dinner. Let’s say only that I wanted a better look at you than I got last time—you being older and more interesting to a man of the world, and me being more presentable than I was.” He hooked both thumbs beneath the straps of his undershirt and snapped them against his scrawny shoulders. “So, Miss Sunday, what’s this wholly unearned favor-of-favors you got in your eyeteeth? What you want from me, other than the right to live to see your next time of the month?”

  “I want you to release Petey Wheatstraw.”

  The Devil went very still, and every window in the front of his fine house shattered.

  “I don’t believe I know the name,” the Devil said, as glass shards fell and smashed all around.

  “You do, too. He married your daughter.”

  “I got lots of daughters,” the Devil said. “They all whores and harelips. They got lots of husbands, and wives too—if you define the terms broadly, in a common-law way.”

  “You got only one as powerful as Petey Wheatstraw,” Pearleen said, enjoying the way the Devil winced at the repetition. “That’s why you put him on the Old Crooked Track. Because you’re scared of him.”

  “You are so full of shit,” the Devil said, “and believe me, I should know. Where’d you say he is, your friend what’s-his-name, this Peter Dickstraw?”

  “He’s everywhere named for the Devil, a thousand thousand places but nowhere else. He’s confined to those places over and over, in all time periods, all over the world.”

  The Devil shook his head. “Not the world, honey. Only the United States. Don’t you know nothing? That’s the extent of my jurisdiction. I got no authority outside the United States at all.”

  This stopped Pearleen short. Her jaw dropped.

  “Whyever not?” asked Pearleen.

  The Devil shrugged. “Don’t ask me. For whatever reason, y’all are the last Satan-fearing nation on Earth.”

  “But,” Pearleen said. “But.”

  The Devil shook his head, made a clawlike gesture of dismissal. “Honey, I do not make the rules, remember? That’s why I quit Heaven in the first place. But as for your friend Pecker Woodsman, why shouldn’t I keep him just where he is?”

  “It ain’t fair,” Pearleen said. “Not as handsome as he is, and as smart, and as kind. Not when he’s so well-placed to do so much good in the world, with all his powers, and all he’s learned from you, through the years.” She went on in this vein for some time, and enjoyed the Devil’s growing discomfiture, the angry flush on his cheeks. “Oh, now, mind you, he’s done a lot of good already, right there on the Old Crooked Track. Why, at Devil’s Den, on the Gettysburg battlefield, he consoles the wounded, and brings them water, and is ever so helpful. At the Devil’s Punchbowl in Oregon, he dips out drinks for everyone, like the thing is bottomless, and I don’t know what he spiked it with, but old enemies who ain’t spoken to one another in decades, why, they hug and make up and show each other photos of the grandbabies. At the Devil’s Courthouse in North Carolina, he hands out pardon after pardon, forgives every sinner in the place, the defendants and bailiffs and judges and even some of the lawyers, and just wipes the slate clean.” By now the Devil was sky-purple with rage, hunched over like a whistle-pig as he gnawed splinters out of the arm of the rocking chair, his eyes like twin eight-balls spinning into pockets. “I mean, Petey Wheatstraw plumb does everything he can, and if he keeps at it another century or so, why, your name will stand for nothing but goodness and mercy, all across the map. But just think how much more he could do if—”

  “Silence!” roared the Devil, in a voice that cracked the posts that held up the porch, rearranged into obscene designs the dirt of the yard, and busted the radiator in the Terraplane. Over the hiss of the leak and the bloodhound’s panicked barks, the Devil said, “So that’s what he’s up to, is he? I’ll cut out his goozlum, I will.” He stomped to the front door, hitching up his britches, and yelled through the screen: “Hey! Middle management! Get your useless business-school asses out here!”

  In moments, a dozen cubicle dwellers, all in ill-fitted gray suits—too large for some, too small for others—tumbled through the doorway and cowered before the Devil, wringing their hands, each face a rictus of abject subservience and eagerness to please. They were men and women both, black and white and brown, and though they were not literally kissing the Devil’s hind knickers, Pearleen had no doubt they would, and more besides, if he but said the word. The Devil turned to face Pearleen, happy again, and waved his hand at the whole miserable lot.

  “Multicultural as the day is long,” the Devil said. “I used to run a segregated shop, but you got to change with the times.” He spat a long plume of tobacco juice onto the nearest cubicle dweller’s shoes. “Besides,” he said, “I like to think of myself as a progressive. Now how fast can you all bring ’round my two finest horses, all saddled up and ready to go, you yes-men and yes-women and how-highers and focus-group fuckfaces?”

  The answer was, about two minutes thirty seconds, during which time the Devil stomped and cursed, the bloodhound chased its stinking tail and barked, and Pearleen held her breath and marveled that so far, the Devil’s gullibility had lived up to all Petey’s expectations. The middle managers finally led around the house two magnificent liver-red chestnut stallions that neighed and reared, flaxen manes tossing and nostrils flaring. With the inexpert help of half the crew, the Devil, who wriggled and squealed like a piglet, eventually managed to mount the larger of the two horses. Pearleen conceded that he looked fairly at home on horseback, once he finally got situated.

  “This one here,” said the Devil, “is Hallowed-Be-Thy-Name, or Low for short. Yours is Thy-Kingdom-Come, but he answers to King.”

  “Mine?” asked Pearleen. But the middle managers already had scrambled to help her into the saddle. This turned out to be a far easier job than the Devil had been.

  “I named ’em,” said the Devil, wheeling about, “after the one who gave ’em to me in the first place.”

  “You mean?” asked Pearleen.

  “The very same,” said the Devil. “It was the only time He ever give me anything, really, since the late unpleasantness. And He wouldn’t have done that, if I hadn’t a jumped out from behind a bush on December twenty-four and yelled ‘Christmas gift!’ You can sneak up on Him, sometimes. But you can’t sneak up on me!”

  Settled in, she stroked King’s neck and murmured into his ear, “Easy, big fellow.” He nickered companionably. She was glad he couldn’t talk, at least.

  “You’re my one-woman posse, Pearleen Sunday. You and I are gone ride down that sanctimonious, bad-name-ruining, not-blood-kin-in-any-way-whatsoever son of a bitch Petey Wheatstraw, and you will both see that once a place on the map is named for the Devil, by God it stays named! Yaaaaah!”

  Waving his derby overhead like a cowboy as the middle managers cheered him on, he spurred Hallowed-Be-Thy-Name out of the dirt yard and down the gravel lane. Without her doing a thing, Thy-Kingdom-Come bolted forward after them. It was all Pearleen could do to hold on. For a few yards the bloodhound loped alongside, barking, but King quickly picked up speed and left him far behind. Just before he was out of earshot, the bloodhound yelled after them: “SHOWOFF!”

  * * *r />
  —

  They caught up to Petey in Indiana, at the Devil’s Mill.

  Petey had stood just behind the miller all morning, as the farmers of the neighborhood brought in sackfuls of corn to be ground. Though he was invisible to them, Petey wore a many-pocketed apron identical to the miller’s, a soft gray cap identical to the miller’s, even a bristly red mustache identical to the miller’s. And as each customer approached, Petey provided advice likely identical to what the miller would have come up with on his own.

  When a rich farmer approached, Petey said, “This fellow can afford to pay a higher rate. He won’t even miss it. Toll him heavy, Mr. Miller, toll him heavy.”

  When a farmer of only middling success approached, Petey said, “Here’s a man of ambition. He wants to be where the rich farmer is, so why deny him? Toll him heavy, Mr. Miller, toll him heavy.”

  When a half-starved sharecropping widow woman stumbled in, three wailing waifs clutching her spindly shanks, Petey said, “Their little bit of corn ain’t gone keep them alive another winter. It’d just go to waste. Toll her heavy, Mr. Miller, toll her heavy.”

  “You don’t owe me nothing, Mrs. Prentiss,” said the miller. “And here’s five dollars. Buy you a sack of groceries while you’re in town, and God bless you.”

  “Well, how do you like that?” Petey snorted, as the little family hobbled out of the mill rejoicing, and as the miller’s chest swelled with unearned pride and satisfaction. “That is a sign of a first-rate liar. Pearleen said she would make me out to be some kind of good-deed-doer, and damned if it ain’t coming true.”