by Harvey Click
“You disappoint me,” Azzy said while Snive unlocked the door to his apartment. “You don’t seem to understand that you’re my servant, my butler if you prefer. Now, what should I do when I find my butler sneaking away with a suitcase? How should I reprimand such a disloyal servant? Should I make an example or show mercy?”
Snive sputtered.
“Since it’s a first offense, I guess I’ll show mercy,” Azzy said. “As the bard said, ‘Sweet mercy is nobility’s true badge.’ ”
He grabbed Snive’s left hand and broke the little finger.
“There,” he said. “A wee hint of pain always strengthens a servant’s devotion. But next time I’m not likely to show such mercy.”
On the coffee table was a cardboard container of Mongolian Triple Delight left over from last night’s carry out. The demon grabbed a wooden chopstick sticking out of the mess and broke it in two.
“Here, this should make a nice splint for your little booboo. Fix it up and then go fetch my stuff. And don’t forget the strawberries—I’m very fond of strawberries.”
Snive was screeching so loudly he scarcely heard. He ran to the bathroom, found some tape, and screeched even louder while he splinted the broken finger. He collapsed to the bathroom floor and vomited a few times in the toilet.
It’s not fair, he thought. Joe Boy wins the jackpot, and I get the fucking crap pot.
When he returned to the living room, he found the demon eating the stale leftover Mongolian Triple Delight with his fingers and washing it down with bourbon.
“Are you still here?” the thing said. “Go get my stuff, and be snappy about it. And if you have any ideas about trying to run away, just let me break the rest of your fingers right now to save me the trouble later on.”
Snive fled before the thing could try. There was a small crowd out front along with three police cars and an ambulance collecting the two teenagers, who were moaning and cursing.
“Hey, did you see this happen?” a cop asked him.
“Nope. Didn’t see nothing.”
By the time Snive returned, his left hand was the size of a grapefruit, and he had to carry all the groceries and new clothes with his other hand. He found the demon sprawled out naked on his bed, snoring loudly with the empty bourbon bottle beside him.
This seemed like an opportune time to make his escape, though the thought of ten broken fingers made him hesitate. The briefcase full of money was sitting on the coffee table in the living room, enough money to take him far away and keep him comfortable for a while. A quick cab to the airport, a ticket for whatever plane was leaving soon, and all this trouble would be behind him.
He was halfway out the door when a deep hard voice from the bedroom said, “Which finger do you want me to break this time?”
“I brought you your stuff,” Snive said meekly.
“Bring it in here. And bring my briefcase too.”
Snive brought them to the bedroom, and the naked demon placed the briefcase between the bed and the wall, where Snive wouldn’t be able to get his hands on it easily. With his head propped up on a pillow, the thing devoured the big porterhouse steak raw, using Snive’s bedsheet as a napkin to wipe blood from his fingers and the corners of his mouth. Then he ate six or seven eggs in a particularly disgusting manner. He’d bite off the small end, suck out the gooey contents, and slurp them down his throat, smacking his thin dark lips noisily while a yellow drool of yolk oozed from the corners of his mouth. He tossed the empty eggshells on the carpet, and when he got tired of eating eggs he hurled the rest of them one by one at the wall, laughing like a mentally ill teenager as they burst open and oozed down the paint.
For dessert he shoved handfuls of strawberries into his mouth, not bothering to remove the little green crown at the top. When they were all devoured, he wiped the red mess off his face with Snive’s sheet, opened a bottle of brandy, and drank a surprising amount in one swill. He burped and lay back to gnaw contentedly on his steak bone.
“Well, that was good,” he said, tossing the bone onto the floor. “I’m very fond of earth food. You wouldn’t believe the kind of rubbish I have to eat at home, snakes and bugs and grubs and lizards and the like. Now I believe I’ll have a nap. I always find transmigration exhausting. Just sit quietly in the other room while I sleep, and don’t try to pull any tricks or slip out. Wait, am I forgetting something? Oh yes, I need to punish you, don’t I? You were trying to sneak out with my money earlier. Come here.”
This time he broke the index finger on the same hand, saying he wanted to keep one hand usable so Snive could earn his keep. When Snive was done screeching and splinting, he lay on the sofa in the living room and sulked. A bit of reefer would help the pain, but how was he supposed to roll a joint with one hand? Whiskey would help too, but the demon had polished off his bourbon. It seemed all the unfairness in the world had been dumped on him all at once.
He still had enough money in his pocket for a bus to Cleveland or Chicago, but then what would he live on? Besides, Azzy would be sure to find him if he tried to blow town. He wondered how the demon knew every damn thing he did or even thought about doing. It must be some sort of telepathy, and he wondered if it worked while Azzy was sleeping. Of course he’d been sleeping earlier, when Snive tried to nick the briefcase, but maybe that had been a light catnap, not a heavy steak-and-egg snooze like this.
Snive heard the demon cough and sputter in its sleep, and his throbbing hand told him to sit still and behave. There was only one solution: he was going to have to hire another sorcerer to get rid of the damn thing. But how was he going to find another sorcerer, and even if he found one how he was he going to pay him?
After much musing and sulking, he managed to fall asleep on the sofa. It was close to midnight when he heard Azzy emerge from the bedroom. He was wearing the extra-tall dark-blue suit Snive had bought him, and aside from being a bit short in the sleeves it didn’t look half bad, considering it was cheap polyester off the closeout rack at a bargain store. Unfortunately the thing had the briefcase in hand.
“I’m going out for a while,” Azzy said. “I’m in the mood for a floozy or two, and I don’t want to bring them back to a mess like this, so change the sheets while I’m gone and clean that wall in there. It has eggs all over it. Oh, and don’t get any clever thoughts about running away. Remember, I can find you even if you’re hiding on the moon.”
He strode out, briefcase in hand, and Snive ran to the street-view window in the bedroom to make sure he was really leaving the building. He was, so Snive called Joe Boy and asked if he knew of any other sorcerer in town.
“Snive, my man, sorcerers don’t grow on trees, and I hooked you up with probably the only legit one in the whole damn country. So why are you wasting my time with these dumb-shit questions?”
Snive told him the old man was dead and now a badass demon was busting his chops, and Joe Boy said, “Look here, pal, I hope you ain’t trying to pull a Nancy on me with all this bogeyman talk. I mean, you ain’t dumb enough to try pissing down my back, are you?”
“Don’t worry, you’ll get your money.”
“I damn well better. You got two weeks to pay up, my good friend, and don’t even think about trying to skip town, or my boys will hunt you down and feed you your balls for breakfast.”
Snive hung up and stared at his throbbing hand. The situation seemed hopeless, but then an idea came to him: the old man’s magic books. If he could get his hands on them, maybe he could send the demon back to hell himself. It couldn’t be all that difficult, because the drooling old fuck hadn’t exactly impressed him as a rocket scientist. Probably somewhere in his study there was a book that explained it all very clearly, with neat tidy headings like “How to Summon a Demon,” “How to Bind a Demon,” and “How to Dismiss a Demon.”
It was a desperate plan, but Snive was a desperate man. After calling a cab, he slipped a small flashlight into his pocket and got his .38-caliber snub-nose revolver from his dresser drawer. He didn’t thi
nk the gun would be any good against the demon, but if the damn thing happened to come charging at him he’d unload four cartridges into its chest and save the last bullet for his own brain.
He had the cab drop him a block from the old man’s house so he could case the place before attempting B&E. There were no lights on, and after looking carefully to make sure no one was watching, he hurried around to the back. He tried the windows and found them locked, but the back door was easy to jimmy with a credit card.
He slipped into the kitchen and shut the door. The house stank even worse than usual, probably because there was a corpse rotting in the hot attic. He pulled the revolver from his pocket and groped his way to the stairs in the dark, not wanting to use the flashlight till he was safely ensconced in the study. The stairs creaked loudly and often, and he desperately hoped nobody was there to hear them.
The stink was worse on the second floor. He tiptoed to the study, shut the door quietly behind him, switched on his flashlight and aimed it at the shelf of books behind the desk. He glanced at the titles, magic this and sorcery that, and finally pulled out a fat volume titled Demonology and Diabolic Rites.
But there was something odd about the book: a strip of paper printed to look like old leather had been glued onto the spine, but the cover itself wasn’t leather and didn’t look old. He opened the book and was startled to see it was a cookbook; in fact, he was staring at a recipe for corned beef hash.
He pulled out another book and found it too had a glued-on spine. Though the fake spine promised magic, the book turned out to be a battered copy of The Wizard of Oz.
The door suddenly opened, and Snive shined his light at the old man, who was dressed in pajamas and house slippers. Except he didn’t look so old anymore; without makeup on his face and white powder in his hair, he looked more like 65 than 85.
The not-so-old man sat down on a chair facing the desk and yawned. “I wasn’t really expecting to get much sleep tonight anyway,” he said.
Snive aimed his revolver at him and said, “Ha ha, you old fuck. You didn’t fool me for a minute. I had this pegged for a scam all along.”
“Did you now?”
“Sure I did. Bernie Snive wasn’t born yesterday. That’s why I come back here, to ask you a few questions. Maybe I wanna pull this same gag myself and make me some easy money. For starters, tell me who’s that big ugly asshole pretending to be a demon.”
“That’s Pinky. He’s one of Joe Boy’s goons. Pinky’s a true psychopath in my opinion, very dangerous, but with some makeup he looks like something from hell. He hides behind that old dresser up there in the attic and slips out when I fall off my chair and pretend to be dead. My name’s Honest Abe, by the way.”
“What kinda name is Pinky? Sounds like some kinda girly name to me.”
“Don’t tell him that, or he’s liable to break some of your bones.” Honest Abe glanced at Snive’s splinted left hand and grinned. “Did you hurt yourself?” he asked.
“There’s just one thing I don’t understand,” Snive said. “Your trick with selling me luck really worked. So how’d you do that? I don’t think you got the magic out of one of them cookbooks.”
“It’s not magic. You see, to be a successful confidence man, you must first and foremost have confidence in yourself. If you do, the rubes will buy whatever hokum you’re selling, but if you don’t, you fail miserably and blame it on bad luck. So I made you believe you had the luck of the devil behind you, and the rubes started buying your hustle. Joe Boy brings down-on-their-luck grifters to me, and nine times out of ten I can turn them into star performers. I’ve got twenty fools out there on the streets right now raking in good dough and giving half of it to me. Then Joe Boy picks out the really special cases, the ones who are particularly stupid, and he suckers them into this demon malarkey.”
“Just in case you’re calling me stupid, lemme tell you I had all this figured from the get-go. I was just playing along to see how you worked it. The only thing that tripped me up was Joe Boy winning the lottery. So I guess he done that with just plain ol’ good luck, huh?”
“Joe Boy didn’t win any lottery. He just put the word out on the street to rope in suckers who were wanting to buy good luck.”
“But he’s living in a great big mansion.”
Honest Abe grinned. “It’s not his. He’s house-sitting for a gangster friend who’s doing some time. Apparently the swimming pool lures some hot dames—and idiots like you.”
“Tell me who’s the idiot in this room,” Snive said. “One of us is got a gun and one of us don’t.”
Honest Abe yawned again.
“So I’m guessing that briefcase Pinky’s carrying ’round don’t have no money in it,” Snive said.
“No, of course not, it’s stuffed with newspaper just to keep you baited. Pinky’s job is to hang out with you for a while, see if you have any money tucked away to steal, and try to scare you into pulling some risky jobs, liquor stores and the like. He scared one of my rubes so bad the poor guy tried to hold up an armored van in broad daylight.” Honest Abe chuckled and coughed. “Unfortunately that didn’t work out too well.”
“So my money’s probably right here in this safe.”
“It is, and since you have a gun I suppose I’ll be obliged to open it for you. But I don’t think you’ll be spending it anytime soon.”
“Why’s that?”
“There’s an old saying: If you invite evil into your house often enough, sooner or later it will show up. You see, it really doesn’t matter what words you use—they can be fine Latin phrases out of some dusty old book of the occult, or they can be mumbo jumbo you make up off the top of your head—but if you summon a demon often enough, sooner or later one is likely to show up. Mine showed up this morning, right after you and Pinky left my house.”
Snive heard shuffling footsteps in the upstairs hallway, slowly approaching the study, and he knew another scam was coming. In a moment the door would burst open, and Pinky or some other brute would be standing there with a gun aimed at him.
But it wasn’t going to work. With his injured hand Snive aimed his flashlight at the door, and with his good hand he aimed his revolver the same direction. He took a good deep breath and prepared himself to start shooting the moment the door opened.
Whoever it was, he was taking his time, and nothing happened for a while even after the slow footsteps stopped outside the door. Snive could hear somebody breathing out there, a wet nasty gurgling sort of breath, and the study began to stink horribly. It smelled like a lot of wet mangy cats crammed together in a small room, and maybe some of the cats were skunks.
Honest Abe cleared his throat and grinned in the dark.
At last the knob turned and the door squeaked slowly open. It wasn’t Pinky, and it wasn’t anything human. Though it wasn’t armed, Snive emptied all five chambers of his revolver into the center of the thing’s chest, and in the dim beam of the flashlight he saw all five flattened bullets slide harmlessly off the pulsating gray skin and fall to the floor.
“They’re surprisingly easy to summon,” Honest Abe said. “The difficult part is getting rid of them. Unfortunately, it requires a human sacrifice.”
A Box of Silence: A Prose Poem
He'd been thinking about someone so softly that he sensed her more than loneliness. He took the small teak box from the mantle and opened it. It contained the gleaming silence of endless empty space. He put on a crisply pressed dress and a carefully preserved personality, that of his dead sister.
She emerged from the apartment and headed toward the sadness it had left her with. The box went with her, its silence patient. The sun was a dark purple sonata, sinking to deep lavender.
She believed in her childhood faith, a sign that she was part of the impossible. She found it in the whisper of a footstep, a fading fragment of dream, a bubble of blood on parted lips. Wind was brisking stronger, and specters stalked the street like dark sticks.
She entered a house and waited. The pa
intings here were clumsily spilled on her thoughts, glistening pigments of dread mixed with forgotten faces smeared onto rectangles of canvas sinking into abstract gloom on the walls.
Long past fully dark when the man returned. The knife loved escaping from the box and slipping past bone. It was an expensive piece of God, and the man received it as a revelation. Peepshow holes gaped at death; blood bubbled and sighed and silence ran cold.
Icy quiet stilled her sadness. But it would return, along with forgotten faces. They were always there, mumbling and mocking, even in the sacred hush.
Thanks!
Thank you for reading my collection of stories. I hope you enjoyed it and would love to hear your feedback. Please let me know your thoughts about it by posting an online review.
Also by Harvey Click
Demon Frenzy
Sometimes going home again is a lot like going to hell.
Searching for her lost brother, Amy Jackson returns to her isolated hometown in the Appalachian Mountains. But Blackwood has changed. Now it’s run by a mysterious drug lord who has something more lethal than guns to protect him. He has demons—more vicious, venomous demons than even Hieronymus Bosch ever dreamed of—and after Amy witnesses an unspeakable atrocity he unleashes all the frenzied furies of hell against her. Soon she is stalked by snakewalkers, herky-jerkies, toadfaces, listeners, harpies, centicreepers, and the sinister crying man, who weeps while he torments his victims.
Click here to view
Demon Mania
The exciting sequel to Demon Frenzy
Amy Malone thinks she and Shane are safe living in a desolate area of New Mexico, but after she encounters a mysterious sorcerer she’s plunged into a demon-ridden nightmare even worse than what she faced in Blackwood. Pursued through moonlit wilderness by grotesque grimsnuffers and hunted by hideous jabber-suckers that suck out their victims’ flesh through pulsating tentacles, Amy must survive a deadly maze to confront the most fearsome monster of hell: a demon so deadly it can kill with just a look.