Devilish

by Maureen Johnson

  “So you need to take possession of … someone? Is that it?”

  “That’s generally the way it works.”

  “So take me.”

  She looked at me, then at the heart-shaped bottle, as if sizing up whether or not I could fit in there.

  “And what do you want in return?”

  “Nothing. Just switch us.”

  She examined her remaining cupcake for a moment.

  “The thing that keeps this job challenging,” she said, “is the fact that we can’t just grab you and wring your soul out of you. If we kill anyone, we forfeit. No force, no threats. As little direct contact as possible. We can only try to coax you to do what you clearly want to do anyway. We can only take a willing soul.”

  “I’m willing.”

  “But you don’t believe,” she said.

  “In devils? In you? No, Lanalee.”

  “That’s no fun,” she said. “But you do believe that something’s happened to Allison. Something that’s hard to explain. Something I did.”

  “I think you made her think something was going on. There. Are you satisfied?”

  “It’ll do. Your opinion will change. Now, I always give something. That’s what I’m good at! But in your case, we could do something better. How about a bet? I’ll let Allison go right now. I’ll set her free. The rest is just us. You win the bet—you walk away.”

  “Fine,” I said. “What’s the bet? Where’s your twenty-sided die? Let’s get this going.”

  “The kiss,” she said, “is a very powerful gesture. So here’s what I want. You get yourself to the Poodle Prom. I’ll make sure Elton gets there. Once you’re there, you have until midnight for him to kiss you. You can’t tie him up and make out with him against his will. He has to give you a kiss.”

  “And then?”

  “And then you’re free. You’ll both be free. Can’t get more fair than that.”

  “And if I fail?”

  “Then you go into the bottle.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Done.”

  She almost clapped.

  “I’ll have to mark you,” she said. “I have to make some sign of the agreement. I’ll send you a more formal contract later on, but I need to leave something on the body.”

  “Mark me how?” I asked.

  “Just with a pen.”

  Good. This was just what I needed. Something to show Allison that it was all over, that I had taken it on.

  “Fine,” I said. “Mark me.”

  She grinned and picked up the remaining cupcake and more or less shoved it all in her mouth at once by taking these large, gulping bites, like a baby bird eating. Then she went across the room to a rolltop desk. She removed a key from a nearby pot, unlocked the desk, reached in, and produced what looked to be a very fine antique pen-and-ink set.

  “If you could just take off your sweater,” she said, “I’ll do your arm.”

  “No problem.” I yanked off my sweater. “Have a preference?”

  “Oh, the left one, please.”

  I turned my left side toward her and pushed up the short sleeve of my T-shirt so that nothing would get in her way.

  “That’s perfect,” she said. “Thanks.”

  She dipped the pen carefully into the ink pot and let one or two drops leak out before coming near my skin.

  “You’re always supposed to use virgin parchment for contracts,” she said. “I think this counts.”

  “Just do your doodle.”

  Lanalee’s scary demonic mark was a small, very rough cartoon of a poodle, with curlicues for fur and a smiley face. She took the pen set back to the desk and carefully locked it up, then came and sat back down crossed-legged. She had a loose, happy expression—almost a kind of ecstasy. I folded my arms, leaned back, and met her gaze with my own.

  “Congratulations,” she said. “We’re all set.”

  “Call her and tell her,” I said. “Tell her it’s over.”

  “There’s no need.” She smiled. “She’ll figure it out on her own.”

  twenty-one

  When I got home, I tried Allison’s number a few times, but she didn’t answer. Joan was out, my father left a message that he had to go into school for some kind of reception for a visiting mathematician, and my mother was at the restaurant. It was dark, and wind was causing one long, low branch of our big oak tree to bump and scratch against the window.

  I slumped in front of the TV but couldn’t concentrate on anything. Of course, I wasn’t worried about any pact I’d made, nor did I have any intention of showing up at Lanalee’s stupid event and chasing my ex-boyfriend—now my best friend’s boyfriend—around in circles all night. I had gone along with the whole thing as much as I felt I needed to, and now it was done. But I wasn’t feeling well. I was achy and tired and my skin was warm. It had been a long day.

  Crick was relentlessly pacing in front of the door, looking at me anxiously.

  “Okay,” I said, pulling myself with great effort from the sofa. “Walk. But then Jane is going to bed, okay?”

  He hopped from foot to foot, like a tiny Irish step dancer.

  Crick was too dignified for a leash. We called it a walk, but really we just opened the door and let him trot out. But when I opened the door, he didn’t trot. He sat and stared in mortal terror at the fifteen or so cats that were on our porch. Then he hid behind my ankles.

  The cats themselves were calm and still, some draped on the railing, others sitting primly. I recognized quite a few of them. Gray Betty from two doors down. Angelface from across the street. Hamlet, the kitten from the house that the Brown drama students were renting. The cats all looked up at me, their curious eyes glowing gold and green in the dark.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  They didn’t answer. Because they were cats.

  This was deeply odd. I wasn’t sure why the Cat Club had decided that our porch should be the rendezvous point for the night, but it did give me the uneasy feeling that something small, furry, and dead might be involved.

  There was no way that Crick was going out there. Cats terrified him. A cat had jumped on his back once and ridden him like a camel, digging its claws in for support. I quietly shut the door, and Crick retreated to his special safety zone behind the television. This was fine by me. I was growing more exhausted with every second. I could barely drag myself upstairs, put on my pajamas, and get into bed.

  My head began to spin the moment it hit the pillows. I had never been so relaxed in all my life. My bed had never felt so soft, my sheets so cool. I started to fall asleep so deeply, it actually felt like my head was falling through the pillow and into the mattress….

  I barely jumped when I noticed the man on my bed. I opened my mouth to scream—but something in my head was saying, Don’t. It’s no use.

  It was Mr. Fields, the man I kept bumping into. I looked at him, and he looked at me, an ecstatic smile on his face. He wore a black suit, a kind of Edwardian-looking cut, a bowler, and a pair of very round, green glasses. He had a long purple scarf wrapped several times around his neck.

  “Jane!” he said. “I’m so pleased! I had hoped all along it would be you. Here. Take this. This will help.”

  He passed me a coat. I pulled it on and hugged it tight around me, as if it could protect me. Then he made sure I was securely propped up, with pillows behind and alongside me.

  “Hang on,” he said. “We’re going for a ride.”

  He pulled an object from inside his coat, which at first I thought was a flashlight made of a deep black plastic. He shook it hard, and a long silver tentacle of whip shot out of it. He snapped this at the foot of my bed.

  I actually felt myself falling deeper into sleep, as if I was dropping through floors of a building, down, down, down—yet I seemed to be totally awake and lucid. And then we rose. Both of us and the bed too. The legs of the bed were extending themselves. Once they were about two feet from the ground, they began walking. The bed pinched itself up to get through
my bedroom door and traipsed carefully down the stairs. Crick, who hadn’t quite recovered from the cat incident, sat at the foot of the stairs and looked at me accusingly, as if asking me why I was doing this to his little doggie head.

  “I don’t think I’m well,” I finally managed to say.

  “You’re doing very well!” he said happily. “One of the best reactions I’ve ever come across. But it doesn’t surprise me one iota. Not one iota!”

  “Thanks?”

  “You’re very welcome!”

  “Okay,” I said. “I know this isn’t happening, so I’m not going to get upset.”

  “Jane, dear, this is very much happening. But there is no need to get upset. You’ve made the very best decision of your life. And I’m here to show you what awaits you.”

  Crick dodged out of our way as we reached the bottom of the stairs. He trailed us halfway to the door but then backed off. The cats scrambled out of the way as we crossed the porch. Now we were out on my street. I could feel the cold a bit, but it was distant. And though I saw the trees bending hard, I felt no wind. The bedposts grew very long, and with every step, they grew a bit longer. By two blocks down, we were as high as the housetops. As the bed clip-clopped its way down the hills, the legs grew longer still.

  “Here,” he said, shoving the whip into my hands. “Would you like to steer?”

  “No.”

  “That’s all right. It knows the way.”

  We went down, deeper into town, to the rivers that separate East Providence from downtown. The bed stepped easily over the rivers—one, two—and then we were downtown, level with the tops of the very highest buildings.

  “Sit tight for a moment,” he said. “This next bit can be disorienting.”

  There was a cracking sound, and I felt my head jolt forward with extreme force. The moon winked out for a fraction of a second and was replaced by a gold chandelier the size of a motorcycle dangling above us. My bed had returned to its normal height and sat in the center of a long room. The walls of this room were entirely mirrored with slightly rose-tinted glass, so we saw ourselves over and over again. The floor was black-and-white check, and that too was reflected, making the room seem endless. I felt like I had seen this room before somewhere, possibly in a textbook or a documentary. It was palatial, with furniture decorated with embroidered scenes and gold leaf running along its edge. People rested on some of the furniture and turned to look at us with great interest.

  “Sorry about that, my dear,” Mr. Fields said. “Claris? Give me a hand, will you?”

  Claris was standing by the foot of the bed. She was dressed in a severe black suit, cut so sleekly to her frame that you could almost see her elbow joints. The front of the jacket was extremely low cut, revealing a delicate black silk shirt bound together by a series of massive silver safety pins. She walked over and stiffly extended her hand.

  “Stand up,” she said.

  “Be polite,” he said to her sternly. “Jane is an honored guest now.”

  Claris looked reluctantly contrite.

  “May I help you?” she said.

  “I think I’m fine here,” I said.

  She looked to Mr. Fields.

  “Let her sit,” he said. “Jane doesn’t have to get up if she doesn’t want to.”

  “Who are these people?” I asked.

  “These,” he said sweeping his arms around, “these are heroes, Jane! These are your peers now. Let me make a few introductions. Over there …”

  He pointed to a haughty-looking threesome, all dressed in scarlet velvet.

  “The Borgia family of Rome. One of history’s greatest political dynasties. Wonderful people. Next to them, with the rather large hat, that’s King Ashurnasirpal II of Assyria. He set new standards on how to deal with your enemies. He covered an entire column with their skins. Some of the enemy soldiers he walled up while they were still alive—he put others into pillars, also while they were alive. Very, very effective. Had one of the greatest libraries in all of history. We owe him a great debt. It’s because of him that we know much about the ancient world.”

  The man next to the Borgias mumbled something in what I guess was Assyrian.

  “Maybe I’m having an allergic reaction to something,” I said.

  “This is reality,” the man said. “You’ve always known, haven’t you, Jane? You’ve always known what you’re capable of. It was never hard for you, any of it, was it?”

  I said nothing. I just sat there on my bed, with my lunatic buddy with the green glasses. But I did feel something inside me—a sense of knowing. It always had been easy. School. Grades. If I wanted to understand something, I did.

  “Exactly,” he said. “You know. It was only a matter of alerting you to what was already inside you. We cannot go much further now, Jane. This is only a glimpse. The full view is coming. For now, goodbye.”

  The cracking noise seemed to come from the inside of my head this time. Blackness for a moment. Then we were reversing our path past unlit windows and signs, jumping backward over the rivers. We got lower and lower as we hit my street, lower still as we re-scattered the cats. Then, when we reached the front door, I felt the ground give out. It was more than just a hole—it felt like matter itself was being erased from that very spot, taking my consciousness with it. I had just enough time to remember that they say that if you fall in a dream, you almost never experience the moment where you hit the ground unless you die. But how anyone would know that is hard to say because they’d have to be dead to have that information….

  I smacked into something and the falling stopped.

  I sat bolt upright.

  I was sprawled on the living room floor with a old issue of American Scientist wound tight in my grip, and I was wearing one of my mother’s old winter coats. It was morning. Joan stood over me, eating a muffin and poking me with her slippered foot.

  “Are you drunk?” she asked.

  I released the magazine and reached up and felt my face. I seemed to be alive and sober.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Why are you sleeping on the living room floor, then? In Mom’s coat? That seems kind of drunk.”

  “I’m not drunk,” I said, groggily pulling myself upright. “I’m just … thinking.”

  “Oh.” My sister accepted that my thought processes were different from hers. “You better get dressed. Oh, and I used all the hot water. Something’s wrong with it. Sorry.”

  She stepped over me and left. Crick came over and stuck his little Scottie snout in my face, licked my cheek, and then trotted off. With great effort, I managed to get to my feet and up the stairs into a shockingly cold shower. I rubbed my temples briskly, trying to wipe the dream away. My clothes had been slightly damp, and now I was cool. I’d most likely burned through a high fever during the night and now felt refreshed, alive.

  As I scrubbed, I carefully preserved the poodle on my arm.

  “At least that,” I told myself, “takes care of that.”

  twenty-two

  It was one of those crisp and perfect New England mornings, one of the few times that it’s actually nice to live here. All the leaves had turned a bright gold, which stood in stark contrast to the sky, which was almost electrically blue. It provided a brilliant frame for the brightly colored Victorian houses that lined my street. Tons of rotting leaves covered up rotting, lost newspapers. People ambled along with their dogs. It seemed much sunnier than it should have been at seven thirty in the morning, and the chill in the air didn’t even bother me as much as it normally would.

  In short, everything was normal. Better than normal. No walking beds or Assyrian kings in sight. I had a quick shower and a bowl full of cold tuna steak with grilled limes and headed to school.

  I decided to walk along Benefit Street, which is one of Providence’s jewel box streets—an incredibly tight row of old houses, each one so painfully important and historical that it’s plaqued and tagged up to the roof. Benefit sits at the midpoint of an in
credibly steep hill, walling off the drop. So, the owners of these million-dollar monuments get amazing panoramic views of the city and the river below them.

  Walking down Benefit and looking over the city gave me a strange sense of … well, power. I can’t explain it any better than that. I felt juiced up, alive, like I owned the whole city, everything in sight. It was all an echo of my dream, which still felt so real.

  I remembered what Mr. Fields had told me that day, about the houses being bought with slave money, that there was a darkness underneath everything … and for a moment that clouded my thoughts. But then I didn’t feel it anymore. It was just too nice a morning.

  I realized that at this time next year, I’d be walking down a street in Boston, maybe on my way to class at Harvard, and that I wouldn’t be wearing a brown polyester skirt, a worn and yellowing white oxford-cloth shirt, or saddle shoes. I would be dressed like a human. The future was close. I could taste it. I even opened my mouth a bit so I could get an extra gulp of that fresh morning.

  Allison was early too. She was lurking around the front gate. She seemed to be waiting for me, just like the good old days. She also seemed remarkably round-shouldered.

  “Did you get my messages?” I asked.

  “No. I can’t work my phone.”

  “Come on,” I said. “We’re early. Time for a coffee. On me.”

  We walked down to the little coffee place a few blocks away, and I bought us some cappuccinos and heated chocolate chip cookies. Allison lumped herself down at one of the tables. I noticed, as the sunlight streamed in through the window, that her face was losing some of the glow from the facial. It looked a bit sallow. She barely stirred when I presented her with her breakfast. Lanalee’s game was clearly taking its toll on her.

  “Look,” I said.

  I rolled up my sleeve and showed her the poodle. Her eyes lit up in instant recognition.

  “Jane,” she said, “what did you do?”

  “I took over for you,” I said. “I swapped places.”