by Lia Romeo
I sit up in bed, lean over, and gently pull back the quilt and sheet from the other side of the bed. Lewis sleeps in only his socks and his black boxer briefs, and for a moment I’m distracted from my mission by the hard muscles of his thighs and butt, outlined in thin black cotton. He stirs, and I quickly lie back down and turn over, barely breathing, pretending to be asleep. After a few moments of lying perfectly still, I gingerly sit back up again.
Trying to move softly, I crawl down towards the edge of the bed. I’m on my hands and knees, my head facing Lewis’ feet, and I reach out to grab the toe of one of his scrunched-up black socks and tug gently. It doesn’t move. I pull a little harder, so that the toe hangs loose. Lewis’ leg twitches. Quickly, I pull my hand back. He sighs, then settles back into sleep.
I reach out again, and my hand brushes against his foot. It feels oddly solid, less like skin than like plastic. Plastic? I reach out and tap one finger gently against his foot, and my nail makes a hollow clicking sound. Does he have prosthetic feet? Do prosthetic feet even exist?
I tug on the toe of the sock again, and Lewis’ leg twitches in response. I pull my hand back. Maybe it would be better to do this all at once, like pulling off a Band-Aid. I grab the fistful of material that’s hanging off the toe of the sock and pull, hard, and the sock comes off . . . as does whatever solid, foot-like object is inside the toe of it. And then I clap my hands over my mouth to swallow a scream.
Because his leg isn’t . . . a leg, at least not from the ankle downward. It’s tapered and slender, covered with coarse, brown and white hairs, like a goat. And instead of a foot, he has a black, split hoof.
I close my eyes for a minute, open them again, and the hoof is still there, resting on the smooth cotton sheets.
I can’t—I can’t—I have to be dreaming. I have to have fallen back asleep and be dreaming.
And then Lewis rolls over and opens his eyes . . . and sees me sitting there, hands over my mouth, eyes wide with shock. He sits up, blinking sleepily, and his eyes fall on his exposed hoof, travel from his hoof to my face and back again. “Damn,” he says mildly.
– 8 –
“I KNEW THIS would happen eventually,” Lewis continues. “But I was hoping we might have a little more time first.”
“I—I—” I can’t even get any words out . . . not that I’d know what to say if I could. I just point at the hoof, my finger trembling.
“It’s a hoof,” he says. “The other one is too, in case you were wondering.”
“It’s a . . . cloven . . . hoof,” I manage to say in a faint voice.
Lewis looks at me hard for a moment in the darkness, then nods. “So you’ve figured the whole thing out,” he says ruefully.
“You’re—”
“Yeah,” he says.
“Say it,” I say in a trembling voice. “I want you to say it.”
He reaches over and switches his bedside lamp on, and suddenly the room is flooded with warm light. Then he looks back at me and shrugs. “I’m Satan,” he says.
He looks so boyishly vulnerable, sitting there shirtless amidst the rumpled sheets, one sock on and one off, blinking sleep out of his blue eyes, that I want to laugh. Of course, I also want to cry. I can feel the tears welling up in the corners of my eyes, but I manage to keep my voice steady. “And you’ve been—all this time, you’ve been—trying to steal my soul?”
“Not steal it, exactly,” he says. “Just . . . lead you into temptation. So that after you die, you’ll end up going . . . my direction.”
“To Hell.”
He shrugs again. “Yeah.”
“So if I’d taken Natalie’s money . . . I would have gone to Hell?”
“No,” he says. “That wouldn’t have been enough, just by itself. But once you get somebody started on the primrose path—”
“The what?”
“The primrose path to the everlasting bonfire. That’s what the Bible calls it. Anyway, once someone gets started they’ll usually go the rest of the way on their own. They start out doing small bad things, and end up doing bigger bad things, and soon . . .”
The tears are threatening to spill over. I blink rapidly. “So is this what you do all day?” I ask him. “When you’re not with me, you’re . . . going around trying to get people to do bad things?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Basically. Although most people end up damning themselves to Hell all on their own. I just work on some of the ones who haven’t.”
“What do you mean, work on them?” I ask him.
“Start spending time with them,” he says, “get close to them, get them to trust me.”
And now a couple of tears do spill over my eyelids and down my cheeks, and I can’t keep the quaver out of my voice. “Like you did with me.”
He reaches out to try to touch my shoulder. “Oh, Lucy, don’t cry—”
“Don’t touch me!” I exclaim, and I’m off the bed and running out of the bedroom, down the hallway and towards the door, barefoot and wearing nothing but one of his white undershirts which I’ve borrowed to sleep in. I make it out the doorway and into the hall, and I’m frantically pressing the button on the elevator when he catches up to me, hobbling awkwardly on one hoof and one sock-clad foot. He grabs my arm, and for the first time it occurs to me to wonder what he does to people who’ve figured out his secret. Am I going to end up chopped into little pieces and stuffed down the garbage chute?
“Lucy, please,” he says. “Can we talk about this?”
I struggle to pull away, but his fingers are digging into my skin. “I’m not going back in there,” I spit at him. “So if you want to, I don’t know, kill me or something, you’re going to have to do it out here in the hallway.”
He looks genuinely confused. “What?”
“Now that I know what you look like . . . doesn’t that make me a threat?”
“Oh.” He almost laughs. “No. It doesn’t matter.”
“I’ll tell people,” I tell him. “I’ll send your picture to the newspapers.”
“I’ll just shift shape.”
I’m so surprised I stop struggling. “You can do that?”
“I can look like whatever—whoever—I want. But even if I couldn’t . . . Lucy, I’d never want to hurt you.”
“It’s too late,” I tell him, and the tears start trickling out of my eyes again. “You already did.”
His face twists, and he releases his grip on my arm. And instead of pressing the elevator button again I open the door to the stairwell and start running down the stairs, still barefoot and in his t-shirt, leaving my clothes and my purse and my wallet and my phone behind, blinded by tears.
I get to the bottom of the stairs, push open the door, and run through the lobby, ignoring the doorman, who half-rises behind the desk and looks alarmed. “Miss?” he calls after me. “Miss, is everything all right?” I pull open the heavy glass door and run out into the street, waving frantically for a taxi.
To my surprise, a yellow cab pulls to the curb almost immediately. I wouldn’t have thought any cab would want to take a chance on picking up a crazy girl, since I’m sure that’s what I look like, with my bare feet and my tangled hair and my oversized white t-shirt. But business is probably slow in the financial district at five in the morning. I don’t have any money, but I’ll figure that out when I get back home.
I pull open the cab door and jump into the back seat quickly, hoping maybe the driver won’t notice that I have no visible means of paying him. “Thirty-Fourth and Third,” I tell him, and he pulls away from the curb and starts driving uptown. The streets are dark and almost empty, and the city lights outside the window blur through a film of tears. I cover my mouth with my hands to keep in the small, choking sobs.
The driver glances over his shoulder at me. He’s Middle Eastern, in his fifties, with dark hair and a dark mustache. “Is because of a boy, right?” he asks compassionately.
“Yeah,” I manage in a tear-choked voice, and then it occurs to me that Lewis isn’t
a boy, not really. “Well. Not exactly.”
“Is because of a girl?” he says, his eyebrows lifting with interest.
This makes me smile through my tears. “No.”
“Then because why?”
I’m not sure exactly how to tell him that it’s because of the human manifestation of ultimate evil, so I just say: “It’s nothing. Um, do you think I could use your phone?”
He takes a cell phone out of his pocket, and I open the glass partition so he can hand it back. I use the phone to call Natalie, who doesn’t answer, so I try Melissa. She answers on the second ring, sounding sleepy but professional: “Melissa Davies.” She probably figures it’s someone from work.
“Hi, Mel, it’s me. Could you meet me outside in five minutes with some money? I’ll pay you back. I’m really sorry.”
She tells me not to worry about it. “Is everything okay?”
“Yeah. No. Not really. I’ll tell you all about it when I get home.”
TEN MINUTES later, Mel has me wrapped in a blanket with a cup of hot cocoa on the living room couch, and I’ve started genuinely wondering if the past hour was just a nightmare. The living room is so normal, with its cream-colored carpet and dark wood coffee table and camel leather couch, and Mel, in her cashmere bathrobe, is such a calm, practical presence, that my discovery of the horrifying black hoof and the conversation that had followed seems completely impossible. It’s the same feeling I’ve had when I wake up in the morning and remember some particularly strange or embarrassing conversation I had while I was drunk the night before. Only I wasn’t drunk. And I know I wasn’t dreaming. So I tell Mel everything that happened.
And, not surprisingly, she doesn’t believe me. Well, she believes me, but she doesn’t believe Lewis. “He’s probably playing a joke,” she says. “He’s probably some sick Goth guy who gets off on this kind of thing.”
“I, uh—I don’t think so.” The possibility hadn’t occurred to me, but Lewis as a sick Goth actually seems less plausible than Lewis as Satan. “I mean, you met him. He’s not very . . . Gothic.”
“Not on the surface, but you never know about people. This guy that Brandon works with . . . blond and clean-cut as they come, but on weekends he likes to put on a teddy bear suit and go to Furries conventions. You know, where people dress up like stuffed animals and have sex.”
I burst out laughing. “People do that?”
Mel starts laughing too. “The costumes . . . they have . . . they have holes . . .”
This makes me laugh even harder, but then the laughter turns into sobs and I’m crying again. Mel comes over to the couch from the arm chair where she’s been sitting and puts her arms around me. “Sweetie, it’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”
Just then, Natalie comes through the door, hair tousled and button-up shirt buttoned askew. She takes one look at my tear-stained face and drops her purse to the ground dramatically. “I was right,” she says. “Wasn’t I? That’s an amazing necklace, by the way.”
I put my hand to my neck and feel the diamond hanging there. I hadn’t even realized I still had it on. “Oh, God. He gave it to me last night. I guess I’ll have to sell it or something.”
Nat opens the freezer, takes out a bottle of vanilla Stoli, and pours three shots into Columbia Business School shot glasses, part of a set Mel acquired while she was there.
“Come on, Nat, I can’t,” Mel protests. “I have to work in an hour.”
“Lucy needs moral support right now,” Nat declares, bringing the shots—and the bottle—over to the coffee table. Mel looks at my red eyes, shrugs, and takes her shot glass. We clink them together and toss them back. The vodka burns, then leaves a sickly sweet vanilla aftertaste. I slam my glass down on the coffee table.
“Another!” I demand, and Nat pours another shot for me and one for her—Mel puts her hand over the rim of her glass.
“I need to get dressed for work,” she says. She bends down to give me another hug. “I don’t know what’s really going on—”
“What’s really going on is that Lucy’s been sleeping with Satan!” Nat exclaims.
“Like I said,” Mel says patiently, “I don’t know what’s really going on . . . but it’s going to be okay. He’s just a boy.”
“He’s just a boy who was perfect!” I say, starting to sob again. Nat pours me a third shot, and I gulp it down quickly, spilling some vodka on the cream-colored blanket Mel’s draped around my shoulders.
“I guess it’s true what they say,” Nat says. “Nobody’s perfect.”
– 9 –
AFTER ANOTHER shot of vodka, I decide to call in sick. I’ve only missed work once before, when a suspicious-looking piece of sausage pizza from Penn Station gave me such a bad case of food poisoning that I vomited seventeen times in twenty minutes. (Or maybe it was twenty times in seventeen minutes. It was hard to keep track and vomit at the same time.) I called in sick the morning after that particular incident, and when I came back into the office the next day it looked as though a small tornado had touched down right on top of my usually orderly desk—piles of papers, receipts from vendors, full-color photos of vacuums spread everywhere.
Linda explained that she’d been looking for a press release and hadn’t known where I kept it—despite the drawer I’d helpfully labeled “Press Releases” on the office filing cabinet. After that I decided it wasn’t worth calling in sick, and through strep throat, the flu, countless hangovers, and wisdom tooth surgery, I came in. Sometimes I wore a surgical mask, but I came in.
But I figure that the fact that I’ve spent the last two weeks having (mind-blowingly incredible) sex with Satan is an excellent reason to give myself a mental health day. Plus, I’m drunk.
“We should go dancing!” I slur to Natalie, reaching for the vodka bottle (I’ve dispensed with the shot glass) and taking a swig from it.
“I don’t know, Luce. I don’t think there’s anywhere to go dancing at seven in the morning.”
If there were anywhere to go dancing at seven in the morning, I’m pretty sure Nat would know about it . . . so I’m inclined to believe her. “Well, okay, we should stay drunk until tonight . . . and then go dancing.”
“Okay!” Nat says, grabbing the vodka from me and drinking. Then she yawns. “I’m just gonna . . . rest my eyes for a minute.” She stretches out on the rug in front of the TV.
My eyelids suddenly weigh a thousand pounds, and resting them for a minute sounds like a great idea. I lean my head against the arm of the couch. “Yeah . . . me too. Just gonna sleep for a few . . . minutes . . . and then we’ll keep drinking.”
“Yeah,” Nat murmurs sleepily.
I don’t wake up until mid-afternoon. A shrill, repeated buzzing noise is drilling into my skull, and it takes me a minute to realize that it’s our intercom. I don’t really care who’s at the door, but I want the noise to stop, so I drag myself up off the couch, stumble over to the intercom, and press the “Listen” button.
“Miss O’Neill? Lucy O’Neill?” the doorman says.
“Yeah?”
“You have a delivery at the front desk.”
“Okay. I, uh—I’ll be right down.”
I catch a glimpse of myself in our hallway mirror as I stagger towards the elevator. My hair is matted into clumps and there are dark half-moons of eyeliner under my eyes. I have a disgusting taste in my mouth, and a headache that’s tightening into a vise grip at the base of my skull. I want to go back to sleep. For about a million years.
And then the elevator doors open, and standing in front of the doorman’s desk in the lobby is Lewis. He’s wearing a black pinstripe suit and a pale blue shirt that brings out the blue in his eyes. He’s breathtakingly handsome, and he’s holding an enormous bouquet of flowers—tiger lilies and irises and orchids—and, in the other hand, the black leather Coach bag—a Christmas present from my parents—which I’d left at his apartment last night. His eyes widen a little when he sees the pale mess supporting herself against the side of the eleva
tor.
And I panic. Instead of getting off, taking my purse, and telling Lewis to go away like an adult would, I instinctively reach forward to push the “Door Close” button. I jam my finger against the red button over and over until the doors, with agonizing slowness, start to shut.
“Lucy, wait. Please, I can—” Lewis manages when he realizes what I’m doing, and then the metal doors come together and cut off the rest of whatever he was going to say.
As soon as I get back upstairs I sit down on the couch, pull my knees up to my chest, and start to cry again. Grey late afternoon light is coming in through the windows, draining the room of color and turning the skyscrapers to muted shades of grey and blue. In the mornings, all of the buildings outside sparkle in the sunshine like limitless possibilities, but right now the view seems hopelessly lonely. Being with Lewis had brought the world down to a manageable size, because he and I had been all that had really mattered, but now it’s just me all alone in the middle of the big city again.
Of course, I know that I’m being completely ridiculous. I’ve just learned that the devil is real, and all I can think about is that Lewis isn’t going to be my boyfriend. For some reason I think of a story Melissa once told me; she’d been in high school, but she’d been visiting some older friends at Cornell, trying to decide whether she wanted to apply there. It was the first week, and classes hadn’t started yet, so there’d been parties every night, and on Tuesday Mel’s friends had been planning to host one. They’d bought Everclear and Kool-Aid the night before, woken up early that morning to move the furniture out of their common room and get everything ready . . . and then turned on the radio and heard the news that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. When she told me the story, Mel said that one of the first things she’d thought about when she’d heard the news report was whether her friends ought to cancel the party. She said she’d felt terrible for even thinking about the party at a time like that, but maybe it was just human nature.