by Jim Hodgson
Soon he had read all the news items there were to read. This was the point at which he'd normally tell himself to buckle down and get some actual work done. But there was no work to do. He searched through some employment sites to see if there were any jobs posted. A few. He clicked on one, but the link took him to a HTML form where he was expected to rewrite his resume as a response to a series of questions. But I already have a resume, he thought.
One of the questions: "What has been the most significant interview of your career to date, and how did you get it?"
Well, he thought, I chatted with Barry for about five seconds once. And I kind of lied about being able to get an interview with Satan in order to make myself seem more important.
He gave up applying for today. He'd try it again later. He made himself a bowl of cereal in a bowl he'd previously only used for two-person salads and plopped down in his living room for some action movies, resolving to get pitifully drunk alone later that night.
Later, pumped up by the action movies, he strode through his apartment in his underwear, arms wide apart from his body to demonstrate power. He flexed in the mirror. Maybe he'd start smoking.
When it came right down to it, though, he didn't have the knack for complete self-destructive pity. He had a bottle of whiskey and drank some of it, but he felt self-conscious. This drunken pity thing was dangerously close to becoming an affectation, and he tried to avoid too many of those. Being a writer was bad enough. He could call up Geoff, get him to meet for drinks, but Geoff was probably having a nice evening. What would be the point?
Instead, he decided to just move on. A voice inside his head whined petulantly. Already? It hasn't even been twenty-four hours? But how much time did he have? He'd already gotten dumped, humiliated, and fired. Surely he'd be killed next; torn to shreds by ravenous lemurs or something.
He flipped the computer on again and looked at the job boards more earnestly this time. He could get paid to work at home as an "SEO writer fast pay." Scam. He could submit a screenplay to a studio for a small reading fee. Scam. He could become a team player on the ground level of a growing company which would offer him a salary six months from now. Boring scam.
He found a few decent opportunities out of his league but submitted to them anyway. So this was job searching: humiliation and self-doubt. He needed something to concentrate on while this job search thing happened.
His thoughts turned to his empty threat in the elevator. Sooner or later his former coworkers would gossip about why he'd been let go, what he was up to now. If he looked like he really was following through with his threat to be the first person to locate and interview Satan, he'd look a lot better than if he was just, well, doing what he'd been doing all day: eating bad food and farting into his couch.
He started researching, just for fun, how he might meet the Lord of Lies.
Chapter Ten
Geoff was wearing an odd, appraising expression when Phineas met him for lunch a week later. He smiled, though. "How's it going?"
"I'm keeping myself busy." He'd been posting all week about his search for Satan. Rumors, speculation, any links he could find. He wanted everyone to think he was not only unfazed by his firing, but charged up by it.
"So it would seem." Geoff held the door to the deli open and they stepped inside. Phineas ordered a sandwich. Jeez, it was an eight dollar sandwich. Eight bucks! He'd never really noticed before how expensive it was to eat here.
After placing orders, then waited by a drinks case for their numbers to be called.
Geoff eyed him again. "You're really going through with it huh? Everyone's been talking about it."
Phineas was delighted to hear his campaign to appear busy in his unemployment was working. He'd been posting a lot about his findings on social media. Mostly they amounted to crackpot satanic web sites and forum postings, but someone must be fooled. Obviously his former coworkers had been checking up on him. "Like I said, I have to do something with my time. Might as well try a little investigative journalism."
"Yeah, but Satan?"
"You said yourself I needed to focus on things more people would want to read."
Geoff gave a shrugging nod. "Shame you didn't listen to me more when you were on staff," he said.
"Yeah, maybe."
Their numbers came up and they paid for the sandwiches. Phineas thought his was particularly delicious, and thought it might have something to do with his having subsisted on hastily-made PB&J and canned spaghetti for a week. He thought: I used to eat this sandwich almost every day and this might be the first time I've tasted it.
"Listen," Geoff said. "Dave's asked me about what you're up to. If you could show a little progress, you might be able to get your job back."
Phineas surged hopefully. But he wanted more than just his job back. He wanted Karlyn back, and Dr. Losscraft wasn't likely to let that happen. Phineas figured if he made enough of a fuss about this Satan stuff, maybe he could get hired again. But if he was going to get Karlyn back, he'd have to go around Dr. Losscraft, straight to her. He'd resisted the urge to contact her this week so he didn't look too desperate. Started texts, deleted them. Stared at her contact information in the light of his phone.
It was happening. He was clawing his way back from the depths of hell by trying to get into it.
He thought about his text to Karlyn on the way home. He wanted to let her know what he was up to. Had anyone told her about his apparent progress? When he had a draft composed in his mind, he withdrew his phone from his pants pocket, a maneuver which required him to lift his butt from the seat while being careful not to drive off the road or smash into anything. He had the phone in his left hand when he drove over a massive pothole, jarring the car. The arm rest on the driver's door bumped his elbow, and the phone went pirouetting out the window onto the street, clattering on the asphalt.
He yelled punchy obscenities and searched frantically for a place to pull over. It took him almost a block to slow the car and whip into a hardware store's parking lot. He jerked up the emergency brake and dashed from the car, ran along the sidewalk. Cars were heading the opposite direction he'd been going. Was one of them running his phone over? Damn it completely. He danced foot to foot on the sidewalk as a garbage truck drove by.
When he found the phone, gleaming in the yellowish streetlamp light, it looked like a sad robotic taco. The screen was destroyed. It did not respond to commands. His hands dropped to his sides and he turned his face to the sky where the street lights washed out everything but clouds and moon.
#
The man at the cell phone store eyed Phineas with outright suspicion when he saw the sagging wreck of the device. "Mmm hm," he said. He turned the phone over and over in his hands, using his fingertips to examine it delicately as though to use his entire hand would be too coarse. "And what did you do to this?"
"Well, it wasn't me. It slipped out of my hand."
The man put the phone on the counter. His name tag said "Chad" on a white strip of plastic. "Are you aware it is illegal to text and drive, sir?"
"I wasn't texting."
"But you were driving," Chad said, clearly sensing that he had his man. His eyes were half lidded. He'd seen this kind of thing a million times before.
Phineas looked around the displays of new cell phones for an appropriate answer.
"...with intent to text," Chad added.
"Listen, uh... Chad is it?" Chad made no move to acknowledge he was Chad. Phineas went on. "I don't like this any more than you do. Trust me. I have calls to make. Texts and emails to send. Can you help me?"
Chad moved slowly to examine the phone once more. "Do you have phone insurance?"
"Ah! Yes. Yes I do."
"Well, it won't help. You see, the insurance covers loss due to unforeseen circumstances. You were attempting to use your phone while operating a motor vehicle, were you not?"
"I..."
"Would you say you found yourself accidentally at the wheel of your car, sir?" The w
ord "accidentally" dripped with sarcasm and disdain. Chad arched an eyebrow.
Phineas felt adrift. "I didn't mean to hit the pothole that jarred me, did I?"
"Oh, I see," Chad said, shifting to cross his arms. "Now we're answering questions with questions, are we?"
Phineas ran a hand over his face. Stubble on his chin. He must have looked exactly like someone who aroused all manner of suspicion.
"Best I can do for you is offer you one of our..." Chad paused to telegraph his distaste for the rest of what he was about to propose. "Lesser models."
The lesser model in question turned out to be somewhat big and bulky but otherwise okay to Phineas's eye. It wasn't sleek like his older one had been, but all his contacts transferred into it. It got texts and emails. It made calls. It even had a camera.
It didn't have all the whiz-bang features, but did he really need those? No. What he needed right now in his life was to focus on his work. Specifically, finding some work.
So far, his posts to social media about his satanic findings were mostly fluff and bits from here and there on the Internet. If he really wanted to sell it, what he needed was to take things up a notch.
He'd read about a few methods of summoning Satan. He'd already tried praying, but that hadn't seemed to work. People prayed to gods all the time, didn't they? But how were they routed? Did one have to address a prayer -- like a letter? -- or were your prayers automatically delivered to whichever deity you were known to be aligned with?
He'd posted these questions to a satanic message board, but the users had called him "a troll" and kicked him out. He'd had to re-register with another name to keep reading their posts.
Without the benefit of any kind of mentor, Phineas had begun his prayers with "Dear Satan," because that seemed clear and formal. Nothing happened.
He found a post on one of the message boards describing an elaborate ritual for speaking directly to Satan. It involved a pentagram of blood, preferably from a cloven-hoofed beast like a goat, some candles, and more praying. While Phineas had no idea where he could get his hands on the goat's blood, if he got a blood pentagram and some candles it would definitely play well on social media, thus fueling the illusion that he was well on his way to finding and interviewing Beelzebub. Maybe he could use some red paint, just to make it look good? They mixed Karo syrup and red food coloring to make fake blood when he was in high school drama club.
This was too important to fake it, though. He needed to go all the way. Get the real stuff. He took a few test photos with his new phone's camera. The colors were okay, but the focus was too sharp to be evil. He smudged a finger across the camera lens and took another one. Better.
Inspired, he looked up recipes that used goat blood, figuring he might need an excuse. He found an Indian -- specifically Dravidian -- dish called Goat Blood Poriyal, which seemed to be vegetables and meat fried along with spices and the blood. He made up a backstory in which Karlyn was of south Indian descent and he was still in a relationship with her. "Oh yes," he would tell the butcher. "She is so beautiful. When I make this dish for her, she will be so pleased." In his fantasy, a gorgeous brown-skinned version of Karlyn took a bite of his goat blood poriyal and her face lit up. Then she dropped her fork and threw her arms around him. She smelled amazing. Like some exotic spicy perfume. Her hair tickled his face.
Jesus, what was he doing?
He called the closest butcher shop, but when the man answered, Phineas hung up. What an idiot he was. Not the closest butcher shop. What if he went in there at some later date with fair-skinned Karlyn and the butcher realized he'd lied about why he needed the goat blood? He dialed one a few neighborhoods away instead.
"Hi, do you have goat blood please?" Phineas asked.
"Hell yeah," said the butcher. "Gallons of it. How much you want? Take it all."
"I'm making this dish call—" Phineas said, but the man cut him off.
"Listen, I got a long line here. Just come get it, okay? Thank you!" He hung up.
Huh, Phineas thought.
He drove to the butcher shop where there was indeed a line. He waited his turn, and a college aged kid behind the counter asked what he needed by saying, "Next!" loudly.
"I called about the goat blood," Phineas said, trying to keep his voice low.
"Oh!" said the kid. "The goat blood guy." He yelled into the back of the shop, "Dad! Goat blood guy's here!" He motioned toward the back. "Just go on back there and say you're the goat blood guy."
"I'm not really a goat blood guy, I just—"
"Next!" the kid called.
Phineas walked around a display case full of various meats into the rear of the shop where a thick man with graying hair was slicing meat with a shiny machine. He turned to look at Phineas. "Goat blood guy?" he asked.
Bah. What's the point? Phineas nodded. "Goat blood guy."
The man straightened then looked quizzical. "What are you gonna put it in?" He showed Phineas the blood, which was in a beat up plastic bucket.
"Can I just take the bucket?" Phineas asked.
The butcher shook his head. "No way. I love that bucket. There's a hardware store a block over, though. Maybe you can find something there." He showed Phineas the back door, which led out into an alleyway between buildings. "Just come to the back door when you have something. Don't bother waiting in line again."
Phineas thanked him and headed down the alley. At the hardware store, he found a couple of buckets, but nothing that had a lid on it. They were galvanized steel pails much smaller than the bucket at the butcher shop. How much blood did he need? Enough to draw a pentagram, surely. What if he used a paintbrush to make the pentagram? Would that work? Could you paint blood? Or did it need to be splashed?
He thought about it. Splashed seemed more satanic. He wasn't on an episode of This Old House, after all.
In the end he bought two of the smaller buckets, intending to fill each only part way, thus giving himself some slosh room. The butcher eyed his two buckets oddly, but when Phineas explained his sloshing philosophy and proposed two-bucket solution, the man nodded.
"Good thinking," he said. "It will slosh around something fierce."
The butcher helped pour a few inches of the blood into each pail. It wasn't like the red melted candle wax blood or spilled Bordeaux wine blood you saw in horror films. It swirled and frothed with various flecks and chunks of things floating in it. Phineas fought the urge to gag with the aid of the thought that it was going to look really good in a photo, even on his lesser model phone.
On the way home, he took care to drive without sloshing the pails too much. A little bit spilled out anyway, he discovered, but not a lot. He left the windows cracked so the smell wouldn't build up too much, but it built up anyway. It was like meaty pennies, and whiffs of it made his heart rate quicken. His body knew the smell and wanted to be as far away from it as possible.
Phineas walked carefully with a pail in either hand, trying to use his legs like a suspension system to keep his body as still as possible. He flicked his gaze from pail to pail to monitor the splash potential.
"Hey, whatcha got there?" someone asked brightly. Rob stood at the apartment building door, holding it open.
Phineas stopped in his tracks. The blood sloshed in the pails as he steadied them. His thoughts were sloshing around and threatening to make a mess as well. "Well, uh," he said. He raced for an explanation, but none came to mind. "It's blood, actually. Goat blood. For a recipe." Shit! A recipe? Who was he fooling? Rob was going to ask a lot of questions for which he had absolutely no answers. What to do? He'd just have to actually make the goat blood porridge or whatever it was. Was it porridge? He could let Rob taste it maybe, just to prove he'd really been making a recipe and not trying to contact the Father of All Lies.
But Rob didn't seem to care. "Oh yeah? Cool. Well, see ya later!" he said, once Phineas was inside. Rob headed down the street, seemingly without another thought about the neighbor with two buckets of blood.
Phineas reflected that he could probably walk around this town juggling bloody hatchets with a dead body slung over one shoulder and never have a single person ask if anything was amiss. People. So self-absorbed.
He made room in the refrigerator for the goat blood, not a terribly challenging task given that he was eating breakfast cereal almost exclusively. He also consolidated into a single pail, washing the blood from the other in the sink. It was reluctant to be washed out, clinging to the sides and bottom in organic clumps.
After gathering a few more items and printing some notes he'd made about how to contact Satan from the Internet message boards, Phineas poked his head out his apartment door. All was quiet. He couldn't hear any music or smell any marijuana, so the couple across the hall must have been out. The sun was setting, which seemed to tend a bit more toward the demonic than a sunny afternoon.
The basement of the apartment building was walled off into several compartments. The front half was a dirt crawlspace with wires and pipes running here and there. The rest had a concrete floor and ten foot ceilings. On one side there was a washer and dryer for tenant use, plus a couple of big tanks that must have been holdovers from the radiant heating days. Another section of the basement was finished into a horrible apartment.
Building lore went that the original owner of the building had rented out the upstairs apartments and finished the basement for his mistress. It smelled of mold, and anything left in it for long would not only gain the smell of mold, but actual mold as well. The basement apartment now served as tenant storage and a place Phineas could easily imagine a grisly murder taking place. Pieces of computers, ice chests, snowboards, and a number of vacuums clumped in the gloom, gathering mold.
The last walled off section also had a dirt floor and a furnace with pipes sprouting from its top. Even though the moldy apartment was terrifying, Phineas figured the dirt floor of the furnace room promised easy cleanup. He could just kick some around to cover up any mess. And he did, after all, plan to make a mess.