by Harvey Click
“The old man don’t care ’bout fine things for himself,” Joe Boy said as they climbed the steps to the front door. “He’s more the inna-lect-yule type, spends all his flow on dusty old books and such.”
The old man was so old he looked like a walking corpse, if you could call his slow geriatric shuffle walking. He was the color of cigarette ashes, skinny as a stick, and hunched over nearly as crooked as the walking cane he clutched with a bony claw. He stepped up close to Snive and stared at him with rheumy vulture eyes without saying a word, and when Snive said hello he exhaled a wheezy breath that smelled like a dead rat.
The house was so dark that Snive thought he could use a cane himself to navigate through the smelly clutter as he followed the old man’s slow shuffle up the stairs to a dingy little study with a couple chairs, a cluttered desk, and some old books on a shelf behind it. Beside the bookshelf hung a big painting of a grim-looking gent wearing an old-fashioned suit and holding a rod or scepter, maybe some sort of magic wand.
The old man slowly eased himself into the chair behind the desk and stared at Snive with those awful vulture eyes, wheezing softly and slobbering a little from one corner of his gray mouth.
“Here’s the deal,” he said in a wet whisper. “I’ll give you one free day of good luck just for a taste. If you want another lucky day after that, bring me half of everything you make the first day. If you don’t want to buy another lucky day, you can keep it all. But if you come back here wanting more, don’t try to cheat me on your earnings. I’ll know exactly what you made down to the last penny.”
“So what am I supposed to do to earn all this good money?”
The old man shrugged his skinny shoulders. “Whatever you do best.”
He wanted some information before they left, Snive’s time and place of birth, his favorite food (a Double Whopper with bacon and cheese), his favorite film or television show (Dating Naked), and so forth.
The next day Snive went door to door collecting for a homeless foundation, and the first door he knocked on was opened by a crazy old woman in a pink nightgown who gave him a hundred dollars in cash and a quick blowjob. His luck continued, and by the end of the day he had earned nearly one grand. Now he could afford a cab to the old man’s house, and in the dark living room he counted the money into two equal piles and handed one of them to the old man.
“Chickenfeed,” the old man said. “You’re a nickel and dime chiseler. You need to do better than this if you want to work with me.”
“I got me an idea, but it’s gonna take a few days to pull it off,” Snive said. “Gimme at least five days of sweet luck, and I’ll rake in a nice pile.”
“Five days, and I take half,” the old man said. “And don’t bring me any more chump change, or we won’t be working together again.”
The next day Snive used a fake ID and phony references to rent an apartment. It wasn’t as swanky as he would have liked, but the deposit and first month’s rent were all he could afford, even after emptying his bank account and pawning his mother’s jewelry and her nice new flat-screen TV. He ran an online ad offering the place for $500 less per month than it was worth, and four days later he’d rented it to twenty different parties, all of whom had given him one month’s rent in advance plus another month’s rent as a security deposit. There’d be twenty confused and angry marks one week from now, when the apartment supposedly would become available, but confusion and anger were just an everyday part of life that everybody should expect, unless they were really stupid. By now all the checks had been cashed, and there’d be no way to trace them because they’d been made out to a fake name and then laundered through a checking account set up under that name.
Fifty grand for five days’ work—not too shabby—but he had to give half of it to the old man to purchase more good luck. He soon moved on to new schemes bigger and bolder than he’d ever had the nerve to try before. The money kept getting better and better, but no matter how much Snive raked in, the old man always demanded half of it, so the good luck kept costing more all the time.
Snive began to chafe at the yoke. The old man sat on his geriatric ass in his filthy house doing nothing, while Snive labored and toiled day and night. The work was difficult, and despite his luck he always feared the big bust. He tried his hand at easier and slightly more legal work, such as joining the poker games that were always in progress in a room above his favorite bar, but his luck apparently didn’t extend to poker.
A rumor went around that Joe Boy had won mega-millions in the lottery and had gone legit, meaning he now sat around in a mansion doing nothing except railing at his servants, like other respectable and honest millionaires. Snive started spending a good portion of his earnings on lottery tickets, but they all turned out to be worthless paper. It wasn’t fair: Joe Boy had won millions, and Snive couldn’t even win a few lousy poker hands.
Then one day he saw Joe Boy cruising through the old hood in the backseat of a shiny new black Mercedes. Snive jumped in front of the car and waved his arms, and the chauffeur, maybe fearing a lawsuit, stopped the big car just as the front bumper bruised his shins. The back window slid down and Joe Boy said, “Hey, what goes, bro?”
Snive pulled a one-hundred dollar bill from his pocket, waved it in front of Joe Boy’s face and said, “I need some info, pal.”
Joe Boy stared with disdain at the insignificant bill as if it were a used condom, but eventually condescended to take it and invited Snive into the backseat. They slowly cruised the streets, Joe Boy chuckling and sneering whenever he spotted one of his former cronies still dressed in cheap threads and plying the same old nickel and dime gags.
“That luck you buy don’t apply to poker or Las Vegas or the lottery,” he said in answer to Snive’s question. “It only makes you lucky in your work, and gambling ain’t considered work.”
“Well, I’m sick and tired of working. I bust my ass all day long, and that old fuck takes half my honest proceeds. Plus, I keep feeling the heat breathing down my back.”
“Yeah, they’ll probably bust your ass sooner or later, my friend. I’m sure the old man never claimed your luck would apply to the long arm of the law. After all, he ain’t no attorney.”
Snive pictured a jail cell and shivered. “Aw, come on, Joe Boy, tell me your secret,” he said. “We always been best buds, ain’t we? Remember how I took that beating for you when you lifted Knuckle Neddy’s stash? So tell me how you won that lottery, and don’t tell me it was just ordinary plain ol’ regular luck.”
“Hell no, it wasn’t. Wise men make their own luck, or else they buy it.” Joe Boy looked out the window and laughed. “Look, there’s old Tony the Turd trying to peddle those same sad-ass worn-out hoes. I’m surprised they ain’t all dropped dead from AIDS by now.”
“So how’d you do it? You got some help from the old man, didn’t you?”
“It’s a very special kind of help, amigo, and the old man don’t do it ’cept for his very special kind of friends. He don’t want nobody talkin’ about it neither, so don’t you dare say a single word to him.”
“Please, Joe Boy, you gotta help me out. Remember how Knuckle Neddy busted my nose like a blood sausage ’cause I wouldn’t snitch you out? That’s the kinda good friend I always been. This hard work is killing me, and I can smell cops everywhere I turn. I want to go legit like you.”
“Yep, legit’s definitely the way to go okay,” Joe Boy said with a smug smile. “You got the cops off your ass and nothing to worry ’bout ’cept the Hong Kong dong. Well, Snive, since you’re my main man and all that, I guess I can plead your case to the old man. It probably won’t do no good, but I can try. But if I’m gonna stick out my neck for you like this, then you gotta show me some love yourself.”
“You know I love you, Joe Boy. We been like brothers since grade school.”
“Tell you what, my friend, my gutters need cleaned and so does my swimming pool. There’s a whole lotta yard work too, and I’m getting damn sick of these sticky-finger
Mexicans poking through my stuff. You come by and work for me for a couple weeks, and I’ll give you room and board, and if you do me a real good job I’ll talk to the old man ’bout helping you win the lottery.”
So Snive moved into a hot little room with no air conditioning above Joe Boy’s garage and worked on his yard and gutters and every other ugly task Joe Boy could think of for him to do. Joe Boy sat around the pool most days with a bevy of hot babes in tiny bikinis and sometimes no bikinis. They ate lobster and crab legs and big porterhouse steaks, and in the evening Snive was given the half-chewed leftovers to eat in his hot little room.
At the end of two weeks Snive said, “Okay, I cleaned up your toilets real good, so tell me how to win the lottery.”
They were sitting alone beside the pool in the early evening. Joe Boy smiled and poured himself a double shot of single-malt Scotch without offering any to Snive. “It’s the genie in the lamp,” he said in a reverent voice.
“Huh?”
“You know them old stories, rub a lamp and a genie pops out and grants you three wishes. Except in this case it’s not three wishes, it’s just one. I wished to win the lottery. You can wish for a truckload of dog shit if you prefer.”
“Them are just stories,” Snive said. “There ain’t no real genies.”
“You’re right, it ain’t really a genie, it’s some sort of demon. The old man magics it up and makes it grant you a wish, and then he kicks its ass back to hell. He says he’ll charge you fifty bills, and even then I had to ask him real nice.”
Fifty bills meant fifty thousand dollars, and the size of the sum made Snive dizzy. “Man, I don’t have that kind of jack,” he said.
“How much you got?”
Snive had never been good at saving, and his expenses had risen with his earnings—whiskey, cocaine, whores, and other such necessities. “I don’t know, maybe I can scrape together twenty thou,” he said.
“Scrape together as much as you can and I’ll front you the rest,” Joe Boy said. “Then when you win the lottery or your truckload of dog shit, you pay me back twice what I give you. And don’t try to skip without paying, or you’ll find yourself feeding the fish at the bottom of the lake.”
Two days later Snive took a cab to the old man’s house with a briefcase containing fifty thousand dollars. The old man counted it carefully, drooling and slobbering the while, and deposited it in a wall safe hidden in his study behind that painting of the grim-looking gent. The old man was looking especially old and unhealthy today, and Snive had to help him up the steep steps to his attic.
It was a hot morning in August, and the attic was stifling. Two windows, both of them shut, let in enough light to show a dusty room with a few pieces of junk furniture piled against the walls. Most of the floor was bare, and there was a large circle painted on the wood slats with a pentagram and some weird squiggles painted inside it.
The old man gasped and wheezed noisily for a while before he could speak. “We stay inside the circle,” he said. “It gives us protection. The demon can’t come inside the circle.”
Snive stood in the center of the circle while the old man sat beside him on a chair. “Now listen carefully,” he said. “First I summon it, and then I bind it so it’s forced to grant your wish. It’s very hard work to keep a powerful demon bound for any length of time, and I won’t be able to do it for more than half a minute, so you need to have your wish clearly in mind and you need to shout it out quickly. As soon as you state your wish, I’ll dismiss the demon. It must be dismissed properly or it will go around the world wreaking great havoc. Understand?”
“Gotcha.”
“Do you have your wish ready? You need to state it loud and clear, with no ambiguity or loopholes.”
Snive had already decided he was going to ask to win the Super Lotto, but now he wondered what was the best way to ask for that without any loopholes. He wanted to win it soon, not when he was seventy years old, but on the other hand he wanted to wait until the pot was at least forty million, so there had to be some leeway on when he bought the ticket. He decided he’d say, “I want the first Super Lotto ticket I buy to win the jackpot.” That way, if he needed to, he could wait a few weeks for the pot to be good.
“Okay, I’m ready,” he said.
The old man started waving his cane around in the air like a wand and chanting gibberish in a high, wheezy voice. He did this for a long time and nothing happened, and Snive began to suspect the whole thing was a scam. His fifty thousand was locked up in the old man’s safe, and there was no genie popping out of a lamp. He decided he’d give this gag a few more minutes, and if nothing happened he’d bitch-slap the old fuck till he gave up the combination to his safe.
But the few minutes stretched out, and the stifling attic air and the screechy chanting began to make Snive feel dizzy and nauseated. He shut his eyes for a moment, trying to keep from being sick, but snapped them open when he heard the chair beside him fall over.
The old bastard had fallen out of his chair and was slumped face down on the floor. Snive rolled him over and saw he wasn’t breathing. His first panicked thought was that now he’d never learn the combination to the safe, and Joe Boy would kneecap him or worse when his loan wasn’t repaid.
His second panicked thought was that he wasn’t alone in the room. He looked up and saw a tall figure standing in the shadows of a corner. It was a naked man with long black hair, but as he stepped out of the shadows Snive wondered if it really was a man. He had manly attributes—his body was rippling with muscles, and he was hung like a porn star—but the strange narrow face with its deep black eyes looked just barely human.
Snive was so frightened he could scarcely breathe, but he collected his wits and said, in a weak voice, “Hey you, I wanna win the Super Lotto.”
The man—or thing—grinned, showing long yellow teeth. “Fuck what you want,” it said in a deep hard voice that sounded hollow, as if it was coming from a cave. “Your friend’s dead, and I’m free as a bird, so let’s go downstairs and discuss what I want.”
Snive stayed where he was, kneeling on the floor and shivering in the heat beside the old man’s body. “You leave me alone!” he said. “You can’t come inside this circle! It’s magic.”
The thing strode swiftly into the circle, picked up Snive by the ass-end of his belt, and dragged him to the stairs. He was lugging him down the steep steps like a suitcase when the belt snapped, and Snive slid the rest of the way down on his hands and knees. The thing yanked him up by his collar, hauled him into the old man’s study, and shoved him into a chair.
It sat behind the old man’s desk and stared at him with those horrible black eyes until Snive thought his heart was going to seize up. If you saw the thing on the street, wearing clothes of course, at first glance you might think it was human, even though it was tall and ugly—at least six and a half feet tall by Snive’s estimate—but on second glance you’d notice those nasty little eyes, deep set with black circles all around them like skull holes, and you’d feel a stab of dread as if you were gazing at a homicidal maniac who’d just murdered your mother and was about to do the same for you.
“My name is Asmodeus,” the thing said. “But of course you’ll address me as sir.”
It rummaged around in a drawer of the old man’s desk, found a tablet of paper and a pen, and began to scribble. In his panic, Snive had already forgotten the demon’s name. He was thinking if he knew its name maybe he could dismiss it, like the old man had intended to do, but the name was too weird and hellish to remember. Azzy-something, but Azzy what? Azzy Azbourne, Azzy Asshole. Azzy Asshole, get thy stinking ass back to hell!
“I need a few things,” Azzy said. “First, a nice suit, dark blue I think. I haven’t roamed around this planet for a while, so I don’t know the current fashions, but something tasteful and conservative. Shoes and some shirts of course, I’m writing down the sizes. Don’t bother with a necktie or underwear, I never wear them. Next a dozen eggs, a nice big porterhouse st
eak, and a couple bottles of good V.S.O.P Napoleon brandy. And some fresh strawberries. I’m very fond of strawberries.”
“All my money’s locked up in that safe behind that pitcher,” Snive said. “You’re gonna have to bust it open somehow.”
Azzy slid his list across the desktop and grinned, showing those disgusting yellow fang-looking teeth. “I see some money in your pocket, and you have some more tucked away at your apartment.”
It was true; Snive had kept enough in his wallet for cab fare and a few drinks, and he’d stashed a few hundred beneath his mattress to make ends meet until he picked up his lottery winnings.
“Don’t be long,” Azzy said. “Transmigration always makes me hungry.”
Snive grabbed the list, hurried out of the house on shaky legs, and kept hurrying until he spotted a cab. When it dropped him at his apartment, he told it to wait. He ran inside, threw a few things in a suitcase, stuffed the money from under his mattress into his pocket, replaced his ruined belt, swallowed a couple good guzzles from his bottle of bourbon, and rushed back out.
A green cab was now parked behind Snive’s yellow cab. Azzy stepped out of the green one and grinned at him. He was wearing a threadbare bathrobe, probably something that had belonged to the old man, and apparently wasn’t wearing anything else, judging by his bare hairy legs and bare knobby feet.
A couple teenage thugs approached him with some choice words about his garb, and Azzy did something very quick with his feet and one hand that sent them both flying to the sidewalk. The other hand was clutching the briefcase that contained Snive’s fifty thou.
“Oh, thank God,” Snive said. “Thank you for bringing my money.”
The thing sneered and pointed with one long finger at the entrance to the apartment building. Snive backed his way up the steps into the building, staring first at the demon and then at the two thugs groaning on the sidewalk. They seemed in no hurry to get up, and in fact looked like they might never get up again.