by Matt Cardin
Here’s how it happened: I crawled out of bed all fuzzy-eyed and disappointed that the daylight had come so quickly, since I had spent the night sitting up late by myself and imbibing vast quantities of wine in the very same chair where you-know-who would greet me a few hours later. My television had sat silent and my bookcases unmolested. And the damned computer had stayed locked in the closet. No entertainment for me. The plan had been to devote the entire evening to indulging deliberately in my private misery, exploring each shading of its symptoms and every cranny of its causes. It had ended up a magnificent success, all things considered.
And of course I paid for it the morning after, as I had known full well I would. Catharsis wasn’t something I sought; I had given up on that long ago. The emotional hangover from the night’s excess of self-pity was actually worse than the alcohol-induced one, a truth that glared at me in the wretched light of a despicable sun as it squeezed its violating rays through loathsomely disloyal window blinds. (See what I mean?) So as soon as my feet hit the berber, I raced straightway for the kitchen—or rather stumbled on legs made of some miraculous hybrid substance, part gelatin, part rubber—to get the coffee started. The holy liquid blast of caffeine was set to be my savior that day, and I was eager to begin the worship service.
As I stood filling the carafe with tap water and earnestly striving to achieve total cognitive annihilation through sheer force of will, I heard somebody clear his throat. If ever I heard a dignified realignment of mucus, it was in the cultured sound of that musical ahem. Later, after the incident was over, I thought back and realized that everything that came afterward had already been previewed in that single, phlegm-filled sound.
Not that I knew this consciously at the time, what with the outer world coming to me through a perceptual filter of extreme ugliness while my craving for coffee ramped upward toward junkie level. At the time, I was simply startled to hear that I was not alone. So I whirled around to see who was there, and when my head stopped spinning a few seconds after my body, what should I see but a man in a dark business suit, exquisitely tailored, sitting in the sun room off the kitchen. That room faces east, so at 7 a.m. it was flooded with golden light from the overeager sun. This meant the guy was silhouetted against a row of window panes awash in liquid gold. Naturally, I blinked, and the afterimage of the fiery silhouette that was seared onto my retinas showed somebody bigger and bulkier than this normal-sized person, somebody with what appeared to be wing joints jutting up above his shoulders and goat’s horns protruding from his temples.
So I blinked again, several times, rapidly. All this did was to strobe both images, the regular guy and the mountainous devil, against each other in rapid alternation. When I stopped blinking and stared, he was just a regular guy, albeit a very scrubbed and handsome-looking one. And he was sitting in my vintage La-Z-Boy recliner with his legs crossed and his hands templed. He said to me, “Having fun with the blinking thing? I can’t say I blame you. It’s an interesting effect, isn’t it? Sometimes I wish my eyes worked like yours.” He spoke in a rich baritone, melodious and smooth.
To say I was dazed is an understatement. To say I was pissed off at the man’s desecration of my sacred sulking chair is entirely accurate. A cold splash of liquid on my hand made me jump, and I realized I was letting the water overflow the carafe. I quickly shut off the tap and set down the carafe. My coffee rhythm was broken. My mental and physical misery morphed into outrage. Okay, so pissed off was going to trump freaked out, at least for now.
The guy just looked at me as I hobbled into the sun room and tried to muster a poisonous glare. Before I could summon an appropriate verbal challenge to his presence, he said, “Please, Evan, have a seat,” and indicated I should join him by settling on the nearby sofa. His voice and mannerism were pure silk. How could you hate a guy with a set of vocal cords like that and a personal style to match? I was amazed at the way I instantly began to melt. I obeyed him and sat on the sofa—but on the end farthest from him.
“I know,” he continued, “this is all very sudden. You didn’t wake up expecting to see me here. That’s all right. I’ve grown very accustomed to poor receptions. So please don’t trouble yourself with feelings of remorse about your poor reaction to me, even though as your guest I do deserve better treatment, at least under a set of older cultural codes whose loss I lament.”
It sounds insane, but the casualness of his manner and soothingness of his voice, combined with his oddly complex and formal speech pattern, set me back on my regular schedule. I stared at him open-mouthed for a moment, then rose and returned to the kitchen to finish with the coffee. The comforting nature of the ritual began to pacify me: fill the carafe, then fill the reservoir. Set the paper filter, then scoop in some Folgers. Press the “brew” button, then wait for the miracle. As the trickle of hot dark liquid began tinkling into the carafe, I realized I really needed to visit the toilet.
“Evan?” That wondrous baritone again, like a pipe organ speaking through a human vocal apparatus. “This will take only a moment. I’d appreciate your full attention. We really need to talk.”
“Why would I talk with someone who’s not even there?” These words, tossed over my shoulder with arch impertinence, were a blatantly manufactured attempt to appear nonchalant. “I’m reminded of the sage words of Ebenezer Scrooge concerning the sometimes dramatic hallucinatory effects of digestion upon perception. You’re probably just a bit of undigested beef, or a blot of mustard, or a crumb of cheese. Or, as the case may be, a gallon or two of cheap wine. So go away. I’m about to drink the elixir of life, so I have precious little time to chat.”
“Evan.” His voicing of my name this time landed like a boulder. The very walls shook, and his tone cracked slightly but ominously, not on the high end the low one, his baritone betraying a hint of impossibly deep bass like the foghorn roar of a primeval monster. The thick vibrations actually rumbled in my chest, momentarily seizing my lungs and squeezing the breath out of them. In the ensuing silence, I listened to the delicate tinkling of the coffee while silently willing my visitor to be nothing more than Scrooge’s digestive hallucination. But when I turned to look, he was not only still there but still seated in my La-Z Boy.
He said, “Are we on the same page now?” and his voice was back to normal. I suppose we must indeed have been reading the same text by then, for I meekly returned to the sun room and resettled on the sofa, this time on the end nearest him. From this closer angle I verified that he really was ruggedly handsome, in a corporate-man sort of way: hair slicked back, perfect teeth, square jaw, nice tan, flawless complexion. He wore expensive cologne, too, and I savored the spicy tang of it even as I noticed that it failed to completely mask another, less pleasant smell that hung about him like an invisible cloud: the stink of smoke and sulfur, like rotten eggs in a burnt-out house.
He gave me a pointed look. “I’m here about your books.” Then he waited for my response.
In my brilliance, I came up with, “What?”
“Let’s not mince words, Evan.” He assumed a shrewd expression. “Horror novels are one thing, but religious horror novels—or horrific religious novels, if you prefer—are quite another. The books you write have produced the unfortunate result of crossing certain wires, as it were, and thereby producing certain, shall we say, problematic effects amongst a wide swath of readers. The purpose of my visit this morning is to set you on a different course.”
“You . . . I . . .” My eloquence continued to astound.
“The problem,” he said, “is that you have taken the entire Christian cosmology and, more importantly, the characteristic emotional tenor of those who consider themselves Christians, and you have turned these on their head. You have created protagonists whose very search for salvation produces a backfire effect that damns them to a worse hell than they had ever imagined. You have speculated that the Bible contains a hidden subtext that runs between the actual printed lines and undermines the surface message at every turn. You have wri
tten of a narcissistic demiurge who is so enraptured by the beauty of his own creation that he represses the memory of his birth from a monstrous prior reality, so that when he is forcibly reawakened to this memory, he suffers a psychological breakdown that generates cataclysmic consequences both for himself and for the cosmos he created. In these ways and many others, you’ve launched a subversive assault on the deepest philosophical and theological foundations of the enemy camp.”
He actually said “the enemy camp.” Was he referring to God? To Christians? Did this fact, and also the smell and the voice and the Dante-esque shape that still sizzled on my retinas, indicate the man’s true identity? Was this truly the type of story that I had stepped into? A “Devil in the morning” rehash?
As I wondered these things with my jaw hanging down, he concluded: “You might reasonably think that I would approve of your efforts. But you would be mistaken. God, to put it bluntly, does not need depth therapy. He can’t handle it—precisely as you have intuited in your books. And I’m here to make sure that your future creative efforts are focused in a different and, shall we say, more fruitful direction.”
Despite or because of my astonishment, my blood began to boil again. The guy was talking about my books. My books, those hated relics from the former life I had lost. And he was speaking as if I were somehow still responsible for them. The heat of my rising fury began to clear away some of the remaining fog in my brain, and I let this irate clarity shape my words.
“Even though this is all a dream, I’m still not going to sit here and listen to such accusations. Let’s get this straight right now: I do not write those goddamned books, I wrote those goddamned books. And now it’s hands off, once and for all. So don’t you dare come here to my house and interrupt my coffee and sit in my chair and accuse me of . . . of whatever it is you’re accusing me of. Because you’re talking to an ex-author who doesn’t give a damn about those books.”
“Of all the delicious sins in this sinfully delicious universe,” he said, “there’s none more delicious or endearing than self-deception. Especially of the willful kind, which you’re demonstrating with aplomb at the moment. Bravo, Evan!” He sized me up, smiled with that handsome mouth, and nodded. “Go ahead. Tell me what you want to tell me. Share the whole sad story of your private woe, which, as I strangely regret to inform you, really hasn’t been all that private.”
I felt as if I were coming unglued. Literally. My brain reeled and my heart wanted to hammer a hole in my sternum. “The . . . the books . . .” He nodded again with obvious approval, encouraging me to share and tell.
And just like that, the logjam in my mouth and heart and brain broke wide. “My books almost killed me! Do you think I wanted to become the king of mid-list horror? Hell, no! All I ever wanted was to spend my life writing about religion and beauty and truth and spirit and mystical awakening. That’s what I loved since I was a kid! When those novels about God’s psychosis and all that crap came flooding out instead, I was more horrified than any of my readers. I was absolutely mortified at the metaphysical sewage spewing from my pen.”
“But,” he pointed out helpfully, “not so mortified that you refused to cash the checks.”
“What else could I do?” My fury was erupting to volcanic heights. “My whole life imploded! My wife said she couldn’t live with somebody who put ‘hell on paper.’ She called me a monster to my face and then left me, after which her family cleaned me out in a lawsuit over ‘emotional damages.’”
“And oh, irony of ironies, what happened next?”
Next? “There was no next. That was the end of it. Just as soon as my life had completely imploded, the curse went away. I couldn’t write those things anymore. I couldn’t write anything anymore. I went from being a working writer to being a blocked writer overnight. And the well wasn’t just empty, it was concreted over and laced with trip wires. I got pounding headaches every time I tried to think about writing. My thoughts scrambled when I even sat down in front of the typewriter, let alone tried to put words together. It got so bad I wondered if I might have a brain tumor. I returned all the publishers’ advances, broke my contracts, and live now on a few royalty checks that get smaller every time.”
“And so,” he said with an air of finality, “here we sit, I in your chair and you on that sofa, which I’m noticing could stand to be reupholstered.”
I was drained. My eyes felt feverish and my gut cold. “Here we sit,” I repeated.
“Evan,” he said, “somebody—I forget who—once said, ‘You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.’ I come to you now bearing that truth and offering that freedom.”
I was too numb even to summon another “What?”
He continued: “Would you like to write again? Would you like to return to your first love? Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it these past several years while you’ve been drinking alone.”
“You can help me write again.” It was a question that plopped out as a lifeless statement, like I had somehow spat a dead cat out on the floor.
“Yes, I can help you write again.” He gave a special emphasis to the final word and smiled faintly. “After all, I did it once before.”
He cut off my look of blank confusion with more words. “It’s time to come clean, I suppose. You noticed, naturally, that your authorial aspirations took a decidedly different turn than what you had originally intended. Please don’t pretend to be shocked when I inform you of what you long suspected: that the unexpected change was of course my doing. I gave you a little, shall we say, push in a new direction, and then nature—your nature, to be exact—simply took its course.”
“A push?”
“Yes, Evan. More fully, I assigned you a muse, and she whispered things into your inner mind, certain dark and hidden truths which most people never manage to intuit, and you then processed these promptings through that magnificent literary sensibility of yours to produce some of the finest horrific writings this side of the Abyss. As I said, there’s no use pretending that you didn’t speculate a few times in your darkest moments that you were the victim of a demonic curse. The fact is, you were. And the fact is, it’s not fair. There’s no justice in it. So don’t bother searching for any. Just ask a man I once knew by the name of Job.”
“You . . . cursed me?” That dreamy feeling again, really rippling and powerful this time. Not real. None of it. Not happening.
“All part of a master plan that I was and still am working,” he said. “And oh, how it did work! Watching you run with those ineffable evil truths was so very refreshing. You were truly a fine vehicle, and don’t think I didn’t appreciate it.
“But then the backfire effect I alluded to earlier began to set in. You went too deep and started breaking out of the proper boundaries that my opponent and I had set. I guess I didn’t take proper account of your keen philosophical bent, because your exposés and deconstructions of the Almighty—as he obtusely insists on referring to himself—started exposing and undermining the very foundations of the game that he and I have set for ourselves. In a nutshell, it doesn’t benefit me at all when people start thinking ‘off the grid’ in matters of good and evil. I’m in this war to win it, not to see myself rendered irrelevant by people who see through it. And so I find myself in the unenviable position of paying you a visit today in order to shore up my opponent’s ego.” His smile now was rueful and none too pleasant. “Who would have thought?”
Despite my rising astonishment, incredulity, and horror, it was all quite fascinating, really, this revelation from the Devil, and in a deep and thrilling way that I hadn’t experienced for years. Damn, but those were ideas that I sure could have run with, back in the days when I could write.
But the greater part of my attention at the moment was occupied by memories of all those years when I had been writing horror fiction and feeling as if I were either possessed by a demon or suffering from a progressive form of nightmarish schizophrenia. The shadows in my closet and under the
bed had begun to inspire a profound sense of dread. I had been plagued by nightmares of suffocating darkness and demonic presences, from which I would awaken with keening shrieks that terrified my wife. The only outlet I had found for my growing horror had been my typewriter and the blank pages I rolled into it, which I had blackened with fictional visions more awful than anything I had ever heard of, let alone wanted to midwife into the world.
And now I was hearing the reason for my life’s ruin explained in plain language, spoken by the Devil in a Gucci suit.
“You did this to me,” I said in a quiet voice. And then, “You did this to me!”
“Evan,” he said, and that volcanic rumbling tremored again through the floor and up through the sofa and into my soft, fleshy body. “Shut up. Just shut up and listen. ‘Here’s the deal,’ as people in your increasingly illiterate and verbally barbaric culture and historical period are wont to say. I can’t have you exposing God’s and my cosmic game of Spy Versus Spy, and you can’t stand living with yourself in your current state any longer. So this is what’s going to happen.”
Why was the room beginning to heat up and the air shimmer with a hellish red glare even as my consciousness of the crystalline chirping of the birds in the backyard beyond the windows grew more delicate and precise? Why did I catch a whiff of rotting flesh and acrid, ashy waste even as the morning sunlight appeared more golden and pure than I had known it for many years?
“I am assigning you another muse.” This was the Devil speaking to me, I reminded myself, and he nodded, reading my thought and never wavering in his declaration. “She has been instructed to fill your soul with the inspiration you have always desired. You will find that everything you ever wanted will now come to you. And from your pen—sorry, typewriter—from the very same channel that brought into the world those subversive revelations which have so imperiled my operations, there shall flow revelations that will once again shore up the dam, patch the damaged parts, make the straight places crooked again, and shove those damned exalted valleys back down to their proper place.”
