TALES FROM THE.
DARKSIDE.
Tom Allen and Mitch.e.l.l Galen.
THE DEVIL"S ADVOCATE.
by Michael McDowell.
It"s not quite a smile. "Still here, Richard," her mouth said to him.
"And don"t you forget it."
He typed: MY WIFE"S PICTURE HANGS ON THE WEST WALL OF MY STUDY.
He looked at the words and liked them no more than he liked the picture itself. He punched the DELETE b.u.t.ton. The words vanished. Now there was nothing at all on the screen but the steadily pulsing cursor.
He looked up at the wall and saw that his wife"s picture had also vanished.
He sat there for a very long timea"it felt that way, at leasta"looking at the wall where the picture had been. What finally brought him out of his daze of utter unbelieving shock was the smell from the CPUa"a smell he remembered from his childhood as clearly as he remembered the Magic Eight Ball that Roger had broken because it wasn"t his. The smell was essence of electric-train transformer. When you smelled that, you were supposed to turn the thing off so it could cool down.
And so he would.
In a minute.
He got up and walked over to the wall on legs that felt numb. He ran his fingers over the Armstrong paneling. The picture had been here, yes, right here. But it was gone now, and the hook it had hung on was gone and there was no hole where he had screwed the hook into the paneling.
Gone.
The world abruptly went gray, and he staggered backward, thinking dimly that he was going to faint, like an actress in a bad melodrama. He reached down into his crotch and squeezed himself, suddenly and brutally. The pain was terrible, but the world came back into sharp focus.
He looked from the blank place on the wall where Lina"s picture had been to the word processor his dead nephew had cobbled together.
"You might be surprised," he heard Nordhoff saying in his mind, "You might be surprised, you might be surprised." Oh, yes; if some kid in the fifties could discover particles that travel backward through time, you might be surprised what your genius of a nephew could do with a bunch of discarded word processor elements and some wires and electrical components.
You might be so surprised that you"d feel as if you were going insane.
The transformer smell was richer, stronger now, and he could see wisps of smoke rising from the vents in the CRT housing. The noise from the CPU was louder, too. It was time to turn it offa"smart as Jon had been, he apparently hadn"t had time to work out all the bugs in this crazy thing.
But had he known it would do this?
Feeling like a figment of his own imagination, Richard sat down in front of the screen again and typed: MY WIFE"S PICTURE IS ON THE WALL, WHERE IT WAS BEFORE.
He looked at this for a moment, looked back at the key board and then hit the EXECUTE key.
He looked at the wall.
Lina"s picture was back, right where it had always been.
"Jesus," he whispered. "Jesus Christ."
He rubbed a hand up his cheek, looked at the screen (blank again except for the cursor) and then typed: MY FLOOR IS BARE He then touched the INSERT b.u.t.ton and typed: EXCEPT FOR 12 SPANISH DOUBLOONS IN A SMALL COTTON SACK.
He pressed EXECUTE.
He looked at the floor, where there was now a small white-cotton sack with a drawstring top.
"Dear Jesus," he heard himself saying in a voice that wasn"t his. "Dear Jesus, dear good Jesusa""
He might have gone on invoking the Savior"s name for minutes or hours if the word processor had not started steadily beeping at him. Flashing across the top of the screen was the word OVERLOAD.
Richard turned off everything and left his study as if all the devils of h.e.l.l were after him.
But before he went, he scooped up the small drawstring sack and put it in his pants pocket.
When he called Nordhoff that evening, a cold November wind was playing tuneless bagpipes in the trees outside. Seth"s group was downstairs, murdering a Bob Seger tune. Lina was at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows, playing bingo.
"Does the machine work?" Nordhoff asked.
"It works, all right," Richard said. He reached into his pocket and brought out a coin. It was heavy and crudely uneven, wavering from an eighth of an inch on one side to almost a quarter of an inch on the other. A conquistador"s head was embossed on one side, along with the date 1587. "It works in ways you wouldn"t believe." He giggled. He put a hand to his mouth, but the giggle came through anyway.
"I might," Nordhoff said evenly. "He was a very bright boy, and he loved you very much, Mr.
Hagstrom. But be careful.
A boy is only a boy, bright or otherwise, and love can be misdirected.
Do you take my meaning?"
Richard didn"t take his meaning at all. He felt hot and feverish. That day"s paper had listed the current market price of gold at $514 an ounce. The coins had weighed out at an average 4.5 ounces each on his postal scale. At the current market rate, that added up to $27,756. And he guessed that was perhaps only a quarter of what he could realize for those coins if he sold them as coins.
"Mr. Nordhoff, could you come over here? Now? Tonight?"
"No," Nordhoff said. "I don"t think I want to do that, Mr. Hagstrom. I think this ought to stay between you and Jon."
"Buta""
"Just remember what I said. For Christ"s sake, be careful." There was a small click, and Nordhoff was gone.
He found himself in his study again half an hour later, looking at the word processor. He touched the ON/OFF key but didn"t turn it on. The second time Nordhoff had said it, Richard had heard him. "For Christ"s sake, be careful." Yes. He would have to be careful. A machine that could do such a thing- How could a machine do such a thing?
He had no idea, but in a way, that was no bar at all to acceptance. It was, in fact, par for the course. He was an English teacher and a sometime writer, not a technician, and he had a long history of not understanding how things worked: phonographs, gasoline engines, telephones, televisions, the flushing mechanism in his toilet. His life was a history of understanding operations rather than principles. Was there any difference here, except in degree?
He turned the machine on. As before, it said: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, UNCLE RICHARD!.
JON.
He pushed EXECUTE, and the message from his nephew disappeared.
This machine is not going to work for long, he thought suddenly. He felt sure that Jon must have been working on it when he died, confident that there was time; Uncle Richard"s birthday wasn"t for three weeks, after all- But time had run out for Jon, and so this totally amazing word processor, which could apparently insert new things or delete old things from the real world, smelled like a frying train transformer and started to smoke after a few minutes.
Jon hadn"t had a chance to perfect it. He- Confident that there was time?
But that was wrong, and Richard knew it. Jon"s still, watchful face, the sober eyes behind the thick spectacles . .
there was no confidence there, no belief in the fullness of time. What was the word that had occurred to him earlier that day? Doomed. It wasn"t just a good word for Jon; it was the right word. That sense of doom had hung about the boy so palpably that there had been times when Richard had wanted to hug him, to tell him to lighten up a little bit, that sometimes there were happy endings and the good didn"t always die young.
Then he thought of Roger"s throwing his Magic Eight Ball at the sidewalk, throwing it just as hard as he could; he heard the plastic splinter and saw the Eight Ball"s magic fluida"just water, after alla"running down the sidewalk. And this picture merged with a picture of Roger"s dusty mongrel van, HAGSTROM"S WHOLESALE DELIVERIES written on the side, plunging over the edge of some dusty, crumbling cliff out in the country, hitting dead squat on its nose. He sawa"though he didn"t want toa"the face of his brother"s wife disintegrate into blood and bone.
He saw Jon burning in the wreck, screaming, turning black.
No confidence. Always exuding that sense of time running out. And in the end, it had been Jon who turned out to be right.
"What does that mean?" Richard muttered, looking at the blank screen.
ASK AGAIN LATER.
The noise coming from the CPU was getting louder again, and more quickly than this afternoon. Already he could smell the train transformer Jon had lodged in the machinery behind the word processor"s getting hot.
Magic dream machine.
Word processor of the G.o.ds.
Was that what it was? Was that what Jon had intended to give his uncle for his birthday. The s.p.a.ce-age equivalent of a magic lamp or a wishing well?
He heard the back door of the house bang open and then the voices of Seth and the other members of Seth"s band. The voices were too loud, too raucous. They had been either drinking or smoking dope.
"Where"s your old man, Seth?" he heard one of them ask.
"Goofing off in his study, like usual, I guess," Seth said. "I think hea""
The wind rose again then, blurring the rest, but not blurring their vicious tribal laughter.
Richard sat listening to them, his head c.o.c.ked a little to one side, and suddenly he typed: MY SON IS SETH ROBERT HAGSTROM.
His finger hovered over the DELETE b.u.t.ton.
What are you doing? his mind screamed at him. Can you be serious? Do you intend to murder your own son?
"He must do somethin" in there," on of the others said.
"He"s a G.o.dd.a.m.ned dimwit," Seth answered. "You ask my mother sometime.
She"ll tell you. Hea""
I"m not going to murder him. I"m going to . . . delete him.
His finger stabbed down on the b.u.t.ton.
"Ain"t never done nothing buta""
The words MY SON IS SETH ROBERT HAGSTROM vanished from the screen.
Outside, Seth"s words vanished with them.
There was no sound out there now but the cold November wind, blowing grim advertis.e.m.e.nts for winter.
Richard turned off the word processor and went outside.
The driveway was empty. The group"s lead guitarist, Norm Somebody, drove a monstrous old LTD station wagon in which the group carried their equipment to their infrequent gigs. It was not parked in the driveway now. Perhaps it was somewhere n the world, tooling down some highway or parked in the parking lot of some greasy hamburger hangout, and Norm was also somewhere in the world; as was Davey, the ba.s.sist, whose eyes were frighteningly blank and who wore a safety pin dangling from one earlobe; as was the drummer, who had no front teeth. They were somewhere in the world, somewhere, but not here.
Seth had been deleted.
"I have no son," Richard muttered. How many times had he read that melodramatic phrase in bad novels? A hundred? Two hundred? It had never rung true to him. But here it was true.
Now it was true. Oh, yes.
The wind gusted, and Richard was suddenly seized by a vicious stomach cramp that doubled him over, gasping.
When it pa.s.sed, he walked into the house.
The first thing he noticed was that Seth"s ratty tennis shoesa"he had four pairs of them and refused to throw any of them outa"were gone from the front hall. He went to the stairway banister and ran his thumb over a section of it. At the age of ten (old enough to know better, but Lina had still refused to allow Richard to lay a hand on the boy), Seth had carved his initials deeply into the wood of that banistera"wood that Richard had labored over for almost an entire summer. He had sanded and filled and revarnished, but the ghost of those initials had remained.
They were gone now.
Upstairs. Seth"s room. It was neat and clean and unlived in, dry and devoid of personality. It might as well have had a sign on the doork.n.o.b reading GUEST ROOM.
Downstairs. And it was there that Richard lingered the longest. The snarls of wire were gone; the amplifiers and microphones were gone; the litter of tape-recorder parts that Seth was always going to fix up was gone (he did not have Jon"s hands or concentration). The room bore Lina"s personality like a stampa"heavy, florid furniture and saccharine velvet tapes tries (one showing The Last Supper, and another showing deer against a sunset Alaskan skyline)--but Seth was gone from it.
Richard was still standing at the foot of the stairs and looking around when he heard a car pull into the driveway.
Lina, he thought, and felt a surge of almost frantic guilt. It"s Lina, back from bingo, and what"s she going to say when she sees that Seth is gone? What . . . what . . .
"Murderer!" he heard her screaming. "You murdered my boy!"
But he hadn"t murdered Seth.
"I deleted him," he muttered and went upstairs.
Lina was fatter.
He had sent her off to bingo weighing a hundred and eighty or so pounds. She had come back weighing at least three hundred, perhaps more; she had to twist slightly sideways to get in through the back door.