‘Then you take their souls.’
‘I told you, they don’t want their souls,’ he returned. ‘It’s a free and fair exchange.’
‘What do you do with all those souls anyway?’
‘Put them to work in my dry cleaners,’ he answered, switching the sound on the TV back on.
‘What’s it like not having a soul?’ I persisted.
He sighed, brought his hand in a slow melancholy circle about the room. ‘It’s like this, kid. It’s exactly like this.’ When I got home, I couldn’t stop thinking about this contract that prevented him from enjoying anything. It explained a lot, such as why every time he bought an ice cream, half of it always immediately melted off onto the street. But I couldn’t help wondering if ‘purgatorial’ applied to his relationships too, and if that was the only reason he was friends with a ten-year-old boy.
I saw him most days, to play marbles or watch TV, but I didn’t know how the Devil spent his evenings, until one night I was woken from my sleep by a sudden peal of light. I opened the curtains to see the sky pulsating with unearthly colours; when I lifted the sash it seemed I could hear laughter too, amid minor explosions and other, vaguely animalistic sounds. I put on my shoes and lowered myself out the window.
There was some kind of party going on inside the Devil’s cottage. In the brief bursts of scarlet, cinnamon, silver light, I could make out horned heads, baroque silhouettes with enormous, arching wings. I wanted to get closer, but something held me back: so I stayed at the edge of the trees, watching, until I got cold and returned to my bed.
The Devil was alone again the next morning when I called over, throwing beer cans and emptying ashtrays into a black plastic sack, singing along with the stereo: ‘Sinatra,’ he told me. ‘We did some business at one point. Soul the size of a raisin.’
‘So you had a little party last night,’ I said.
He looked at me and harrumphed. ‘I thought I heard someone nosing around outside. Shouldn’t you have been in bed, with your dollies?’
‘I was in bed, until the noise woke me up,’ I said pointedly. ‘Can’t have been too good for your ulcer, all that beer and smoking.’
‘What are you, my mother?’ he retorted.
I knew he didn’t have a mother and was about to remind him, when the sadness of it struck me: that he’d never had anyone to make him free lunch, or give him his ulcer medicine, or wrap presents for his birthday, although I didn’t know if he had one of those either. Instead I said, ‘Who were all those people?’
‘Oh, just friends of mine. Come here, I’ll show you.’ He brought me over to the fridge and named the people in the photos. ‘That’s Astragal . . . Azazel . . . Baal, he’s a riot . . . Choronzon . . . and that is Baphomet.’ His finger dallied on a winged figure slouched at the edge of the picture. ‘Beautiful, isn’t she?’
I shrugged. ‘If you go for green skin and yellow eyes, I suppose.’
‘She and I have been hitting it off quite well lately,’ he said airily; then, registering my indifference, he nudged me. ‘Come on, let’s go and have some fun.’
He was in high spirits. After a particularly impressive bout of cheating at marbles, during which he repeatedly sent himself back in time so he could jump out from behind himself, he turned his attention to the cows. ‘Look at these poor chumps,’ he said. ‘Standing in their stupid field day after day. They have no idea how wonderful life can be.’
‘They look happy enough,’ I said.
‘We need to teach these cows how to enjoy themselves,’ he said thoughtfully.
I was about to ask him what he meant when, at the far end of the field, I noticed one of the cows was hovering ten feet off the ground.
‘What are you doing?’ I said warily.
‘I’m not doing anything,’ the Devil insisted, as the first cow’s comrades slowly joined it in mid-air. They were uncertain at first, but then they really took to it, swooping about, buzzing the hedgerows, filling the sky with their joyful mooing. One more ambitious cow attempted to loop the loop; until you’ve seen a cow loop the loop, in my opinion, you haven’t really lived. After that he turned us both invisible, and brought us up the hill where my parents were studying the rock formations. ‘Watch this,’ he whispered. Suddenly my dad stood bolt upright; then he hunched down again; then he jumped up, as if he’d been stung, and called my mother’s name. ‘Gold!’ he cried. ‘Gold!’
‘Where? Where?’ my mother gasped, hurrying over.
My father hunkered down, frowning at the ground. ‘That’s weird,’ he said. Then my mother clutched his arm. ‘What’s that glinting over there?’
We bit our lips to stop ourselves from exploding with laughter.
I was still laughing about it the next morning when I called to his cottage. The Devil answered the door in his dressing gown, though it wasn’t early; he agreed to come and play marbles, but his cheating was curiously lacklustre and he seemed more interested in his phone.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ I demanded when his apathetic play and constant sighing got annoying.
‘Nothing,’ he said, checking his phone.
‘Are you expecting a call?’
‘No,’ he said, but then added: ‘What kind of signal are you getting here? I don’t think my phone’s getting a signal.’
‘Do you want me to try calling you?’
I dialled his number, and he gazed with mounting joy at the phone as it lay inert in his hand – then his face fell, as it began to buzz.
‘Who’s supposed to be calling?’ I asked. ‘Is it that girl with the green skin?’
‘Baphomet,’ he said morosely.
‘Maybe she’s busy,’ I said.
‘Oh, she’s busy all right,’ he said. ‘She’s a succubus.’ Noting my blank expression, he gave me a comprehensive explanation of what this entailed.
‘Oh,’ I said faintly, lowering myself onto a tree-stump.
‘So you see,’ he concluded gloomily, ‘at any given time I’m sharing her with like ten other guys.’
After that day, not a marble was thrown, not a single cow levitated. Whatever this Baphomet had done to him, all the Devil wanted to do now was moon about his cottage – either staring hopelessly out the window, or throwing the sofa cushions around in a rage, shouting lines of Paradise Lost, which he knew by heart.
As for me, I was totally out of my depth. With no experience in matters of the heart, I could do little more than make him cups of hot chocolate and listen to his lengthy enumerations of Baphomet’s virtues, which in most people would have been considered pretty serious vices.
‘Why don’t you call her?’ I ventured at one point.
‘Me? Call her?’
‘Well, why not?’
‘What is wrong with you?’
‘It’s just a suggestion.’
‘Me call her,’ he repeated, disgustedly.
‘There must be something you can do.’
‘There isn’t! There just isn’t!’ He got up and went to the stereo and put on Tracks of My Tears for the millionth time.
His heartache was exhausting to be around, and my inability to help made it even worse. When the time came for my family to pack up and return home, I found myself experiencing a strange mixture of guilt and relief.
‘So you’re just going to abandon me, is that it? Like everybody else.’
‘I have to go back to school.’
‘What if I kill myself?’
‘You can’t kill yourself,’ I said. ‘You’re the Devil.’
This observation didn’t seem to cheer him up at all. On the contrary, I left him with his head in his arms, beating his fists on the table. The next year we took our holidays in France, and it was a long time before I heard from him again.
Ten years passed. I grew up and went to college; my parents retired and moved to an island in the South Pacific to study the volcanoes. Although I’d vowed to myself, that last day in West Cork, to avoid it at all costs, by now I’d had a few more persona
l run-ins with love. My last girlfriend, Jennifer, was beautiful but intensely religious and wanted us to ‘wait’. Sometimes I’d try and change her mind with one of the Devil’s speeches about living for the moment; she would listen patiently and then peck me on the cheek and tell me she’d be late for her seminar. If I wanted to live for the moment, she implied, I would have to do so by myself.
One rainy April evening, just after seven, the buzzer of my apartment sounded. I went out to the step and there he was. He hadn’t aged a day; if anything, he looked younger than ever, except for his eyes, which described a decade spent toiling through continents, paying court to the greedy and desperate, hustling the same base fantasies that were the best a never-learning humanity could come up with – that jaded look that comes from trading in dreams.
‘What the f—k is this s—t?’ he said, looking around my dingy apartment.
‘I’m a student,’ I told him.
‘Rocks?’
‘Literature.’
‘That’s useful,’ he said.
Now that we had caught up to his satisfaction, he came promptly to his point. Did I remember Baphomet? ‘Of course,’ I said. He told me that after years of silent yearning he had at last confessed his feelings to her. It had not been a success. First she laughed. Now she was avoiding him. She wouldn’t even return his calls. ‘She kept telling me she wasn’t ready for a long-term relationship,’ he said, honking his nose into a handkerchief. ‘I mean she’s ten billion years old. How long do I have to wait?’
I was surprised to hear he was still obsessed with her after all this time, but I supposed time for him was not at a premium; he had all eternity to indulge his fascinations. In some ways I could see her point. ‘You’re both career people. You travel a lot. It’s hard to maintain a serious relationship if you’re spending all that time apart. Not to mention the nature of your work. Love doesn’t always sit well with, you know, the all-consuming pursuit of Evil.’
He folded his hands on the crown of his head and exhaled slowly. ‘Well that’s just it,’ he said. He explained that since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the corresponding ascent of free-market capitalism, increasing numbers of people had been selling their souls to each other, bypassing him altogether. ‘Effectively, the whole thing’s been privatised,’ he said. Given that the greater part of his work was being done for him, he wondered whether the time hadn’t come for him to get out of the game.
‘Out of the game? And do what?’
‘This is what I’m saying. I could settle down. Live a normal life.’
‘I thought you hated normal life,’ I said, remembering his harsh words to the cows.
‘Not your kind of normal life,’ he said irritably, waving at the grungy apartment. ‘I’d be with Baphomet.’
Warning bells went off in my head, but all I said was, ‘Baphomet doesn’t feel the same way?’
‘Oh, she’s obsessed with her work. But her situation’s exactly the same! Look out your window! You think to tempt men from the path of rightness and drain them of their sexual energy you need a designated full-time staff anymore? Modern life does all that for you! The Western world is basically one big succubus. She could quit tomorrow and no one would even notice. But she just won’t accept that times have changed.’
‘So what does that have to do with me?’ I said at last.
Immediately he was all business. ‘She won’t listen to me, but what about a disinterested third party?’ he said. ‘She’s so concerned about work – what if it’s her actual work that turns around and says, thanks but no thanks? Believe me, that would really make a succubus stop and think.’
He told me that Baphomet was currently ‘working the area’. She tended to concentrate on clerics, saints, people whose minds should be on other things, but if I agreed, he would slip me onto her client roster. (‘We share a secretary,’ he explained.) When she visited me, I would astonish her by rejecting her advances. Then I would subtly lead her around to thinking about alternatives to her current way of life. ‘Tell her she’s too good for that damn business! Tell her there are people out there who’re ready to make a serious commitment to her! Who could make her happy. That sort of thing.’
It didn’t sound like much of a plan. Nobody – man, woman or demon – likes to be told they are obsolete. Even if she accepted that she’d been supplanted by technology, from what he’d told me about her, Baphomet didn’t sound, to put it as politely as possible, like the ‘settling down’ type. And what about him? Could he really spend the rest of eternity with her – in a corner of the field, so to speak, chewing the cud? The whole enterprise seemed a vainglorious folly that would collapse the moment you set foot in it. Yet surely he knew this. He was the Devil! Vainglorious follies were his stock-in-trade. He must have some angle, I thought; he must be counting the cards, he must have spotted some flaw in the system, by which he could make this work.
A few nights later, I stayed up late studying the Romantics, those troubled souls who had struggled so heroically, so hopelessly against their own narcissism. When I went to bed, I quickly found myself lost in a dream, in which I was pinned to my bed by a demon. She had green skin and yellow eyes and was sublimely beautiful: at the same time, her talons, her wings, the capacity of her body for terrible cruelty, gave this beauty an extra intoxicating dimension. She went about her work, stripping back the sheets first and then my clothing, whispering to me wordlessly that if none of this was real, it didn’t matter, there was no need to resist . . .
It was with some difficulty that I fended her off me, and sat up in the bed.
‘What?’ she said, blinking. ‘This never happens.’
Anyone who’s woken up with a demon straddling them will know that it’s not the easiest thing in the world just to strike up a conversation. But I tried, nevertheless. ‘So you must be a succubus,’ I said, adjusting my pyjamas.
‘Obviously,’ she snapped, clearly vexed at having her work interrupted.
‘I’ve always wanted to meet a succubus,’ I said.
‘Well, this is your lucky night.’
‘Can I get you a drink, or—?’
‘Silence,’ she commanded. She pushed me down onto the bed, stroked my eyelids shut and whispered to me, ‘Abandon yourself to pleasure.’
I cleared my throat, wriggled out from under her, clambered off the bed. ‘It’s just that I’m actually a little bit thirsty,’ I said.
‘I will sate your thirst and your every other desire.’
‘Mmm,’ I said apathetically.
‘I will bring you release so extraordinary you will forget who you are.’
‘Well, why don’t we have a drink first,’ I said, ‘and then we can decide what we’re doing.’
I went to the cupboard, while she glowered back at me from the roiled sheets. Her yellow eyes were quite intimidating, and her long tail bobbed incessantly behind her, more like a familiar than a part of her body. ‘So!’ I said, presenting her with a tumbler of wine and then retreating to a safe distance. ‘You’re a succubus! That must be an interesting job?’
She threw back her wine, and then crunched the glass for good measure, staring at me with her yellow eyes. ‘I take the filthiest fantasies from the darkest corner of the heart and paint them in sweat on your bedsheets,’ she said.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘And you’ve been doing that for long?’
‘A hundred million nights,’ she replied, ‘of almost unbearable pleasure.’ She drew herself up on her knees, and her magnificent torso jutted out like the gates of Paradise. I hurried down another slug of wine and averted my eyes. I was finding it difficult to concentrate on my task. She really was a very attractive woman. Her forceful tone, her faint redolence of brimstone, that magnificent pistachio-ice-cream-coloured skin, when you took it all together it really cast a spell on you—
‘A hundred million nights,’ I squeaked, catching hold of myself. ‘That’s a long time.’
She made no reply to this. I noticed a long rent in t
he bedsheet where she was clasping it and unclasping it between her talons.
‘And you don’t get bored?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I’d have to say I never get bored.’
‘Because from one perspective,’ I said, ‘I mean, you know, here’s you, this beautiful, intelligent, immortal creature, just . . . bouncing around with all these different men . . . ’
‘What are you getting at?’ She drew back, eyeing me suspiciously.
‘Some people might find it a little . . . empty,’ I said, as delicately as I could.
‘Empty?’ she repeated. ‘Empty?’ Tendrils of her hair rose snake-like to hiss around her head. ‘After the raptures I purvey, worldly pleasures are as scraps from the table! To enter my body is to stare into beauty’s own sun!’
‘I’m just wondering if you ever feel like it’s time to settle down,’ I said.
The hissing tresses and whipping tail froze: she stared at me for a long moment, her eyes turning from yellow to black. Then she half-jumped, half-flew off the bed. I covered my face, but she went right past me, over to a handbag I hadn’t noticed before. From this she took a printout, read it, then turned back on me. ‘You’re not the Archbishop of Fontenoy!’
I babbled out excuses, but she’d already worked it out. ‘Satan put you up to this, didn’t he?’ she exclaimed, with a kind of mock triumph. ‘I should have known! Nobody wants a drink first!’
I hung my head, while Baphomet swore and stormed around the room, her great wings beating furiously, sending gusts of charred air to pummel the curtains and rustle behind the posters on the wall. Finally she hoved up at my desk, plunking herself in the chair and lighting a cigarette.
‘He gave you this too, I suppose,’ she said, picking up a book on the Romantics. ‘His little gang.’
I told her I was studying their poetry; I had my finals in a couple of weeks, I said.
‘Poetry,’ she repeated derisively. But, sucking hard on the cigarette, she began to flick through the book. ‘Byron. I could tell you some things about him. And his flaky sister. Always trying to get me into her room. Those two just did not stop.’ Pages turned; the coal of her cigarette glowed in the murky dreamlight. ‘Keats, though. He was like you, he only ever wanted to talk. Used to call me his Muse. Asked me to wear togas, and talk Greek to him.’ She sighed, closed the book, held it away from her in order to gaze melancholically at the cover, like a mother with a picture of a child who has since gone astray. ‘In retrospect, this is when it all went wrong,’ she said. ‘When he went native.’