Deal with the Devil (Withrow Chronicles Book 3)

by Michael G. Williams

  “Wouldn’t that kind of be the ultimate ironic pain in the ass, though? To find out demons had been all in their head the whole time?” I clucked my tongue at the idea.

  “Not in their heads, Cousin,” Roderick corrected me with a waggle of one snow-white finger. “Distinctly outside their heads. That is the point. The tulpa becomes its own being. If this ‘Ross’ is a tulpa, the one who summoned him up may have long since seen the sun. It would not matter. They may be something we manifest but, invested with enough intent, given enough attention, believed in with sufficient fervor, they are their own entity.” Roderick shrugged again. “I find it fascinating to consider them in light of other phenomena with significant overlap: the fair folk, alien abduction, Sasquatch and so on. There are cases of each, some more than others, in which the experience is essentially transactional in nature and the experiencers or witnesses left to believe themselves lucky to have escaped to tell the tale. The fair folk may lay a geas on those who wander into their circles; it is claimed extraterrestrial entities require their victims to carry implanted devices in return for their freedom; large hominids intimidate witnesses with loud roars and other harassment climaxing in chasing them from the woods altogether. Each of these has in common the condition of a more powerful entity essentially choosing to allow their victims to go free. Why? I believe it is so the witness-victim will report their experience to others and thus spread the notion of their existence. If these are all creatures sustained by belief perhaps they need us to further that belief for them. What if ‘tulpa’ and ‘fairy’ and ‘alien’ and ‘bigfoot’ and ‘demon’ are all merely arbitrary terms for a purely memetic entity reliant on us for reproduction and migration? What if the so-called ‘ultraterrestrials’ of John Keel are simply a form of life, conjured perhaps from the collective unconscious, gaining sustenance from ongoing belief in their objective truth?”

  I blinked at him for a few moments. “Where in the hell do you hear about stuff like this?” I held out my hands and then clapped them against my legs in frustration. “I mean, what does ‘memetic’ even mean? What’s an ultraterrestrial? What in the hell made you bone up on Tibetan thoughtforms in the first place?”

  “Podcasts, mostly.” Roderick shrugged. “And e-books. We live in the information age.”

  I snorted and shook my head. “Whatever. So maybe demons aren’t from an actual h-e-double-hockey-sticks with a devil and everything. So what?”

  “But they do appear to those who want something so badly their desire and desperation attract the attention of the being.” Roderick scooted just a little closer. “Two examples come to mind, of course.”

  “El Diablo,” I said. “So desperate to get back at the school that drove him out of his work, so seething with rage, that a demon showed up and started offering ideas.”

  “And then used the resources it found laying about – such as El Diablo’s addicted research subjects – to keep the interest and engagement of Dmitri. If the demon-tulpa is a being of psychic energy summoned into existence by the attention and intention of those who create it and requiring more of those energies over time to sustain it, perhaps it is driven to strike bargains and impress ‘normal’ material beings with its abilities so that they will thank it, ask for its assistance or otherwise go on needing something it can offer.”

  I nodded. “Okay,” I said. I liked the way it tied things together just enough for me to forget. I didn’t want to sit around and stew about cosmology. I had too much on the stove already.

  “The other example which comes to mind,” Roderick continued, “Is you.”

  I blinked and stared at him like a horseshoe had just fallen out of his mouth. “What? I didn’t summon up any goddamn thoughtforms.”

  “No, Cousin, you did not.” Roderick nodded serenely, calm as the surface of the Dead Sea. “But the tulpa took an interest in you. You have desires to offer it. You have a need it thinks it could fulfill. It flattered you. It tried to distract you while its other clients caused havoc under your nose. It would have harmed you if doing so would make its other patrons stronger; it would have aided you had it supposed that to be been better for it in the end. The demon or devil or tulpa is an inherently untrustworthy being. It makes bargains to maintain relationships but will flit from one to another as its opinion changes regarding which is best. Remember this, Cousin, no matter what it makes you feel.”

  If I’d been alive, I would have blushed. I would have turned pink and then red and then downright purple with embarrassment. I’d been entirely if only temporarily consumed by a desire for Ross, inexplicably drawn to him in a way I’d assumed was lost to me forever. He’d awakened something deep-seated for which I had not been prepared and that lack of readiness was what had opened me up to him in the first place. Now, reflecting on it, I was almost as angry as I was embarrassed.

  In the long run, though, it all paled in comparison to my sense of loss and frustration and unease. What were my bruised little feelings when there was a war going on and a new kind of critter with which to contend? Zombies and vampires and mortals had been more than enough, but now there were pseudo-devils, too? “Well,” I said, “That’s just great.”

  “Aloneness is very attractive to them,” Roderick said with something proximate to kindness. “Remember that.”

  I cleared my throat. “Anyway, none of that is nearly so important to me as seeing Seth among the elders back in the day.”

  “Worrisome, yes,” Roderick agreed. “You should ask him about it.”

  “What, just walk up and say, ‘Hey, big guy, kind of saw a glimpse of you in the past. Looked like you’d joined the all-singing, all-dancing Satanic revue’?” I fluttered my lips. “Sure.”

  “Seth strikes me as trustworthy,” Roderick shrugged. “If his aim were to eliminate you, he would have done so long ago. Asking him will either settle your mind or catch him off-guard. I see no disadvantage to either.”

  I harrumphed. We both turned to stare at what stars we could see in the sky over suburbia.

  We were silent for a few minutes before Roderick spoke again. “In truth,” he said, “What concerns me most is how Dmitri found out this would be a good place to go. A young champion of the rebels? That must surely be you. This suggests Agatha was on the side of the rebels, which is what I would assume: she likes control of her things but she is willing to grant freedom to those who serve her best, as she did you.”

  “I asserted my own freedom in my own way,” I said. “I was not granted anything. She respected me.”

  “I do not doubt that is a part of it, Cousin,” he said with a sly smile, “But your maker also enjoys scheming. I recommend you ask yourself who might have sent Dmitri here and why. Perhaps Dmitri was not ready for the showdown. I would consider the possibility someone who is aware of the war has fed Dmitri to you, both to eliminate him and to whet your appetite for war.”

  I blinked at him, surprised. “Why would they do that? Why make everything so complicated? Why not just ask me to join up?”

  “Because they know the war was never truly over,” Roderick said. “Our makers schemed together to destroy those who made them. They have already demonstrated a preference – and a talent – for conspiracy. There are many reasons someone might not approach you with an open offer of recruitment to some jingoistic cause. You have no special love for authority other than your own.” I opened my mouth but he put up one hand to stop whatever sass was about to bubble up. “You do not welcome being told what to do.”

  I shook my head at that. The things my cousin could say, like it was all a big game and he was the guy giving color commentary during halftime. Unfortunately, he had a point.

  I walked into the downtown bar managed by Seth less than ninety minutes after sunset the following night. Roderick had been right: if Seth was on the wrong side of a war I’d suddenly found myself in, I wanted to find out sooner rather than later and I wanted him to have no chance to prepare.

  It’s a little joint with a polished
wooden bar, a long mirrored wall opposite it and a couple of bathrooms at the back of a forest of tall cocktail tables. There are chairs with long legs and high backs but they, like everything else in there, had seen better days. It was all painted black and blue and gray and there were lights under the bar, out of sight, so that Seth and the butch lesbian who helped him out sometimes were lighted from below like co-hosts of some UHF station’s late night horror show.

  Seth looked up and started to say something but stopped. I had never been to this bar before. I’d never once intruded on what Seth and I both considered to be his sacred space. We all have our own little patches of turf, after all, and even if I claim dominion over most of the state I recognize the wisdom – the humane necessity – of giving other people their space and demonstrating respect for it.

  There were only a couple of other people in the bar, early patrons who show up for happy hour and tie one on in hopes they can forget something. They didn’t even register my entrance. Seth nodded at me eventually as my boots clacked up to the bar. “You here to see that thing?” The way he asked it suggested I’d come to buy a car or maybe a brick of heroin. It was in no way subtle, nor was it especially meant to be: he was telling me he knew I was here to have some sort of serious talk and he really didn’t want to have it in front of tonight’s custom.

  I nodded. “Sure thing. Let’s go take a look.”

  Seth nodded at the big metal door in the back with EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY scrawled on it in magic marker. “Right this way.” He put down the glass he was polishing for lack of anything better to do and walked around to go out. I could see and smell an alleyway beyond. It was almost entirely pitch black. That suited me just fine.

  As soon as the door slammed shut behind us and the sounds of early night in a small city settled in, I spoke. “I know about Dmitri,” I said. My voice was low and I tried to keep it even and devoid of any judgment. I needed to let Seth’s response tell me something about Seth, not about how I’d approached him. “I know you are one of the elder vampires or were at least associated with them at one point in the past. I know about the rebellion.”

  Seth stood like the taciturn little ‘80s punk he’d always appeared to be: slumped against the wall, one booted foot lifted to rest a heel against the cement blocks, slouching just so with one hand in a pocket and the other shoving a cigarillo with a plastic filter on the end into his mouth. He hesitated for a second, lit the cigarillo and puffed it three times before blowing a long stream of smoke at the ground. “Just because I’m old doesn’t mean I’m one of them.” His voice was very quiet and he wouldn’t meet my eyes but it sounded like the truth. The very first reaction he’d had to the subject was to try to put some distance between him and his peers.

  “I didn’t say you were, but I saw you there.”

  Seth looked up with confusion on his brow. “Saw me where?”

  “One of their rituals, a long time ago. One of the big rituals involving the demon they summoned up to try and win the war.” I shrugged. “My Last Gasp tells me things from a victim’s life. I see visions of truth about them.”

  Seth pondered for a moment, returning his gaze to the ground and to the glow of the cigarillo tip. The smoke was cloyingly sweet, like he was toking on a joint stuffed with marshmallows. “Hindsight,” he said.

  “That’s what my cousin called it.” I nodded. “It’s useful.”

  “But not so useful you use it all the time,” Seth replied. He looked up and met my eye. “You don’t go out and murder random people to get some voyeuristic thrill as you rewind through their life.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “I do not.”

  Seth nodded. “That’s the difference between you and them,” he said. “Or maybe I mean ‘us’. I dunno.” He gave me a jerky little shrug with his shoulders, eyes on the ground. Seth has always been serene and wise in the face of problems: slow to act or to assume. He was treating me with the same kid gloves he used on any other problem. “Those assholes pulled out the Necronomicons and the ritual knives as soon as they knew they were in trouble. Just like that, they started spilling blood left and right: mortals, other vampires, anybody who was handy. They sliced apart one life after another in hopes the devil would eventually give them what they wanted. It was wrong. It was a nightmare.” Seth looked up at me again. “I left after they started that stuff. I had never sympathized with them in the first place, but that didn’t much matter to the rebels. Anyone old enough to be anything other than the lowest rung on the organizational ladder was to be considered their enemy.” He drew a slow breath. “Even those of us who agreed with them in principle.”

  “No offense,” I said, remembering seeing Seth robed up with the others at one of their ritual events, “But it seemed like maybe it took you some time to reach that conclusion.”

  He chuckled a couple of times: low panting breaths. “I needed something from the demon, too,” he said through smoke. “I needed the ability to escape my… allies, I guess. I needed to be forgotten by them.”

  “So you stuck around long enough to cut a deal on the side?” I cleared my throat and eased my weight against an old crate.

  “Pretty much.” Seth didn’t sound proud of himself. To him, this was an act of confession. “I wanted out and I wanted them not to remember I’d ever been there. The demon faked something up to make them think I was dead and I ran for it. I changed my name, started adopting the contemporary styles and aimed to be under the radar in Raleigh after that.”

  “Being second in command isn’t exactly keeping a low profile.” I rested one elbow on its corresponding knee.

  “It beats being in charge,” Seth finally said. He’d gone back to staring at the ground but spoke again through one great long gust of smoke, “And it keeps the boss off your back.”

  I nodded. “So,” I finally said, “If the old guys were to show back up tomorrow, if the war were all of a sudden hot again, on whose side would you be?”

  “My own.” Seth looked up and his eyes met mine. “No one’s but my own.”

  I nodded at him. He was telling the truth. “Fair enough,” I said.

  We sat in silence for a long time. I stared at his aquiline nose and narrow face in half-dark silhouette as he finished the Swisher Sweet. Finally, he spoke. “So, what now?”

  “Did Dmitri know you were here? Is that why he came here?”

  Seth shook his head. “If he knew I was here he would have just tried to kill me. He wouldn’t have been doing anything else with his time. You didn’t answer the question.”

  I sighed. “I don’t know the answer.”

  “There are only two answers,” Seth said. He ground the plastic filter of the cigarillo against the heel of the boot he’d had propped against the wall. “Either you’re going to try to put an end to me right now or you’re going to say my age doesn’t matter as long as I’m on your side. If you choose the former, I’m just going to run away. I have no interest in a fight. If you choose the latter, everything stays the way it has been.”

  “And if they show up again, you’re just going to run off?”

  Seth paused at that. “Probably.”

  “That’s a hell of a way to spend eternity,” I said. My voice was soft and I hoped I sounded sympathetic. I didn’t blame him, but neither did I think I could just go off and spend forever with my tail between my legs.

  “I’ve got plenty of time,” Seth said. “I’ve got more time than I’ll ever use.”

  “That sounds like it’s more meaningful than it seems at first listen.” I cleared my throat.

  Seth shrugged that off without looking at me.

  “OK, I’m choosing the latter of your two options, but I ask one thing of you as a demonstration of…” I licked my lips. “Not loyalty, not fealty, but of, I don’t know, of the absence of ill intent.”

  Seth looked at me again. His gaze was steady, revealing nothing.

  “What’s your Last Gasp?” I asked it point-blank, rude as possible in vampire circles. �
�We don’t normally talk a lot about that. Tell me yours. Show me one of the cards up your sleeve. Give me a reason to feel like you’re speaking honestly with me.”

  Seth smiled and looked back down. “I call it ‘borrowed time’,” he said. I made a noise of incomprehension and he went on. “When I drain the last of someone, I take all the time that would have been left to them if they’d lived out the rest of their normal life.” He cleared his throat. “Let’s say I drain someone at age 16. If they otherwise would have lived to 80, for instance, that gives me 64 years of time to burn off.”

  “So, that’s 64 years of being you? Or something?” I didn’t understand. “You’re not immortal like the rest of us?”

  Seth chuckled. “No one is. That isn’t what I mean, though. I mean I can freeze time. I can step between seconds. You have hindsight: usually that means you experience what you experience between two instants of perceived time. You spend a long time learning stuff but when you snap out of it no time has passed, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Imagine you could instead press pause on the flow of time like that and walk off into the world as it stands, perfectly frozen, practically uninhabited, for as long as you wish. When you press play, time starts moving again. The time I perceive as passing for me when I do that – when I freeze time – is that surplus of borrowed time being burned off as I move about.”

  “And the paused time available to you is finite.” I humphed with surprise.

  “In purely mathematical terms, yes.” Seth nodded at me. “But I collected so much time when I was young, before I knew the deal, I don’t know if I’ll ever run out.” He shrugged. “I have millennia of borrowed time to draw on.”

  I blinked. “How old are you, Seth?”

  He smiled at me. “Sorry, man,” Seth said. “You asked for one thing, and I gave it to you. Some secrets I keep for myself.”

  I furrowed my brow. “Prove it.”

  “The watch,” Seth said. “You needed a watch to impress that guy at Power Company, so I stepped out of time, went and got a watch and brought it back to you.”