The Devil in Detail, page 1
Contents
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
DEDICATION
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 2016 by Brian Stableford.
Published by Wildside Press LLC.
www.wildsidebooks.com
This text is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, events and incidents are entirely the product of the author’s imagination, or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The Devil does not exist, and nor do I.
DEDICATION
For the Devil,
to whom, although he does not exist, I owe more than
I can possibly repay, given the mediocre quality of my soul.
CHAPTER I
It was in 1997—which now seems a long time ago, although it wasn’t, in terms of the Great Cosmic Clock—that I made my formal pact with the Devil. I stress the word formal because, as Oswald Spengler pointed out in The Decline of the West, we now life in a Faustian Age in which the entire culture in which we exist has made a tacit pact with the Devil, within whose terms we all live. I was aware of that prior to 1997 but until then I had not actually had the opportunity to make the Devil’s acquaintance, and had assumed, given his non-existence, at least in the sense in which “existence” is commonly understood, that I never would. I was, however, wrong about that, and the purpose of writing this down now, nearly twenty years after the event, is to explain the peculiar circumstances in which it came about, and the consequences that the advantages of hindsight now allow me to see.
I did not write or give anyone an account of what happened at the time—at least not an accurate one—because I suspected that they might consider me insane if I did so. I was not entirely certain myself that I was not, in spite of the Devil’s assurances to the contrary, and his seemingly-reasonable explanations for his true nature and my ability to encounter him and make a pact with him in spite of his “non-existence.” I still cared about my image in those days, but I am now an old age pensioner, and the government does not stop paying you a pension merely because you are generally deemed to be insane, or, indeed, if you actually are.
There are still reasons that perhaps ought to inhibit me slightly. I was for a brief while a part-time teacher of creative writing on an M.A. course in “Writing for Children” at what was then King Alfred’s College, Winchester, and I was always careful to tell my students that, although there were absolutely no rules of writing, despite what Elmore Leonard might think, I felt obliged to give them two excellent pieces of advice, the first of which was never write to anything autobiographical (the second, in case anyone is interested, was never write a story about bullying).
Neither item of advice was received kindly by my students, but my explanation for the first one was that fiction ought to consist of honest lies, and autobiography, whether fictionalized or not, inevitably consists of dishonest lies. “As Winston Churchill said,” I used to misquote, “there are lies, damn, lies, statistics, history and autobiography.” If anyone objected, as someone occasionally did, that dictionaries of quotations tend to suspend the list with “statistics,” I explained that that was because historians had censored the fourth term, and that the fifth had been dropped because nobody likes to think that all possible accounts of their own lives—especially the one that consciousness and memory unscrupulously render to them by way of supplying them with a notion of identity—are actually mere tissues of distortions, inventions and self-serving hypocrisies.
So, if I were still prepared to practice now what I preached then, I ought not to be writing this story at all, but at least I can be upfront now in admitting, right from the outset, that whereas most of my works of fiction are absolutely honest lies, this one will probably a little bit suspect. The reasons for that will probably be fairly obvious already, but they will doubtless become clearer in the progress of the narrative, in the course of which I not only make my pact with the supposedly-non-existent Devil but also make fleeting contact with the thesis to which he is the logical antithesis, the Creator, alias the Cosmic Mind, whose non-existence is generally considered to be more debatable.
Anyway, I believed at the time, and still believe, that I made the relevant pact and the contact in question, although, as a dyed-in-the-wool skeptic, I naturally mistrust everything that I believe. If that seems paradoxical, and hence unacceptable to the commonsensical reader, it merely serves to demonstrate the awful extent to which Aristotelian logic has taken root in our culture, in spite of the fact that we all know perfectly well, thanks to Werner Heisenberg, that the physical world really is paradoxical. Nowadays, no one with a nodding acquaintance with the enigma of Schrödinger’s Cat can reasonable refuse to believe that things can both exist and not exist at the same time—or, at the very least, ought to be prepared to both believe it and not believe it, in a scrupulously undiscriminatory fashion.
So, at least for the sake of the narrative, the reader ought to be prepared to believe that the Devil, like Schrödinger’s famous feline while still in the sealed box, both exists and does not exist. Ditto the Creator, and the narrative voice, alias me. It really ought not to be difficult, given that such stubborn paradoxicality really is the way of the physical world as well as the world of fiction.
In any case, a person who has made a formal pact with the Devil surely owes it to posterity to make a record of the terms of the pact in question, even if he did not actually sign it in blood, for the sake of the moral annals of humankind, and even if those annals only have a few years to run before civilization collapses and books become extinct, along with animals and people.
In addition, the Devil told me himself to publish and be damned, and I really wouldn’t like to disappoint him, as he was such a likeable fellow. The Cosmic Mind won’t care either way, of course, having too many other things to worry about.
So here goes.
I was putting the final touches to the introduction to a new edition of C. D. Pamely’s Tales of Mystery and Terror for a small press publisher when the phone rang. I picked it up with my left hand while my right forefinger finished pecking out the last few words of the sentence.
“Hello.”
“Brian? Lionel, Cardiff.”
Lionel Fanthorpe rarely uses his surname when identifying himself to his friends in outward calls, preferring his place of residence.
“Hi, Lionel,” I said, attempting—unavailingly, of course—to match the cheerfulness and ebullience of his tone. “How’s fame treating you?”
In 1997 Lionel had recently achieved a measure of celebrity by virtue of being appointed the presenter of Fortean TV, a magazine program devoted to the not-entirely earnest investigation of weird events and individuals. This had caused a certain amount of controversy in the broadsheet press, some of whose columnists had thought it unbecoming of a minister of the Church of Wales to lend his clerical collar to such irreverence.
“It’s marvelous,” he assured me. “Actually, that’s why I’m ringing you.”
“You want me to appear on Fortean TV?” If I sounded skeptical, it’s because I am—and it’s because I was universally renowned for my skepticism in those days that I had every right to be skeptical about the possibility of ever being invited to appear on Fortean TV.
“Oh, no—sorry, but we’re already nearly full up for the next series. Ever since the first series aired I’ve been deluged with calls from all kinds of people clamoring to get on. You wouldn’t believe some of the stories they tell.”
“Actually, Lionel,” I said, “I wouldn’t believe any of the stories they tell—but I do believe that you’ve been deluged with calls. What do you expect if you set yourself up as the front man for rent-a-crank?”
“That’s exactly why I thought you might be useful in the present circumstance, if not as a contributor to Fortean TV,” he told me, refusing to take the slightest offence. Lionel’s geniality knows no bounds; he is the most admirable man I know.
“What present circumstance is that?” I enquired.
“The publicity generated by the show has led to my receiving other requests and proposals,” he explained, beating around the bush somewhat. “It’s because Martin saw an episode of the show that he got in touch, but he wanted to consult me in my official capacity. He wants me to exorcise a supernatural presence in his bookshop.”
“Do you perform exorcisms?” I asked, having previously assumed that that was a prerogative of the Catholic clergy and African witch-doctors.
“It’s not something I do lightly,” he assured me, “but if I’m convinced that it will do some good, I’m prepared to employ any of the Church’s rituals. I believe that exorcism is a legitimate weapon in the war against evil.”
Lionel is what the Victorians would have described as a muscular Christian—not so much because he has a black belt in judo as because he believes that the power of active evil has to be countered by an equal and opposite rea
“Why do you need me?” I said. “The presence of a strident atheist is hardly likely to help the party go with a bang. Assuming, of course, that departing demons do go with a bang, as well as the obligatory whiff of brimstone.”
“I wouldn’t need you for the exorcism, even if there is one,” said Lionel, cheerily, “but I feel obliged to mount a preliminary investigation first, in order to try to determine whether there really is some kind of supernatural presence in the shop, and whether, if so, it’s demonic. A skeptic might be useful, to add balance to the committee of investigation.”
“Committee?” I queried.
“Oh, just three of us. I’ve invited another of my acquaintances along to provide her expertise.”
“And what expertise is that?” I asked, skeptically.
“She’s a leading member of the local branch of the Society for Psychical Research Society.”
My relentlessly antiquarian mind inevitably associates the SPR with its Victorian heyday, and the investigations of Katie King and D. D. Home mounted by the likes of William Crookes and Oliver Lodge. I was aware, however, that it was still going strong in 1997—and, indeed, still is, proudly proclaiming on its website the admirable fundamental aim of examining “without prejudice or prepossession and in a scientific spirit those faculties of man, real or supposed, which appear to be inexplicable on any generally recognized hypothesis.”
“It’s not something of which I have any experience,” I confessed, dutifully, although the prospect of joining an investigative committee to evaluate a possible haunting was an intriguing possibility.
“I know,” he said, “but I thought you might be qualified, and interested enough to sit in on a preliminary investigation—an all-night sitting—so that we can try to figure out exactly what we’re dealing with. I read your thing in Steve’s anthology.”
“Ah,” I said, as a measure of enlightenment dawned. Steve Jones had edited an anthology for Gollancz which consisted of famous horror writers’ true encounters with the supernatural. Not wishing to miss out on the opportunity for a sale, in spite of never having had any such encounter, in the commonly understood sense, I had supplied a piece wittily entitled “Chacun sa goule” which had offered a scrupulously accurate account of a real event: the coincidental discovery of a rare book by Maurice Maeterlinck at an antiquarian book fair, which I had stumbled across by chance. Typically, I had supplemented my record of the bare facts with a philosophical rhapsody about the existential significance of the continued permeation of the world by the carbonaceous matter that once made up the bodies of the dead. I had observed that the carbon dioxide in every breath we take contains atoms that might once have been part of the people of the past, whose minds also echo in the pages of their writings, so that the dead do indeed retain a “ghostly” presence in the present. Although graveyards are doubtless replete with such ghosts, I had said in the article, the most significant of my own “ghostly encounters” invariably took place in bookshops, involving contact with the ghosts of authors via the presence of their works.
It was perhaps not unnatural, therefore, that on being told about a haunted bookshop—a bookshop whose resident supernatural presence was so discomfiting as perhaps to require exorcism—Lionel might think of me.
“Well?” said Lionel. “Are you interested?”
“What bookshop?” I parried. “Where?”
“It’s a second-hand place—just down the coast, in Barry.”
“There isn’t a second-hand bookshop in Barry,” I said, confidently. I had previously lived in Swansea for several years and had continued to visit my children there for several more years when the Ex moved back there after deserting me. If there had been a second-hand bookshop in Barry, I would have found mention of it in drif’s guide and made every effort to visit it.
“It hasn’t been there long,” Lionel told me.
“And it’s haunted already? By whom?”
“Martin’s not sure that it’s the premises that are haunted. He thinks it might be the books.”
I nearly came out with some facetious crack about Martin presumably having picked up a copy of Abdul Alhazred’s Necronomicon at a jumble sale in Tiger Bay, but I hesitated. The idea of haunted books was not without a certain appeal—in fact, the mere mention of books was inevitably appealing to a person of the kind that I was then, who lived in a five-bedroomed house in which every brick wall was covered with books and who had commissioned a friend who was a builder to construct two garages in the back garden in order to contain the thousands of books that wouldn’t fit in the house.
It’s all gone now, of course; I had to get rid of the books and the house when **** deserted me in her turn, and I now live in one room with hardly any books at all—both circumstances that help to make the pension go a lot further—but in those days, a chance to visit a second-hand bookshop that I hadn’t visited before was like Camembert on the spike of a mousetrap to me.
Even the newest second-hand bookshop, I knew, needed old books to dress its shelves. Some people anxious to move into the trade back in the twentieth century, when there still was a trade, used their own collections as bases, but hardened collectors were usually so reluctant to put out their old favorites that they would shop around instead for anything that could be bought in bulk at a reasonable price.
I knew that there had been a time in the nineteenth century when the coal industry was booming and Cardiff had been a busy port. The burgeoning middle class had had aspirations in those days—C. D. Pamely’s father had been a mining engineer in Pontypridd but he’d harbored greater ambitions for his sons—and it was possible that there were some nice caches of good antiquarian stock lurking in a place like Barry, which had been a haven for the south Wales gentry before slipping way down-market to become a third-rate holiday resort. Haunted or not, therefore, there was a slim possibility that the mysterious Martin’s shop might have some interesting contents—and if it had opened too recently to obtain an entry in the latest issue of drif, the professional vultures might not have had the chance to strip the shelves clean of tasty meat.
There is nothing that gladdens the heart of an obsessive book-accumulator like the thought of virgin stock, and although my obsessive tendencies had not yet reached their present magnificent orderliness back in 1997, they were pretty forceful.
“It sounds very interesting,” I said to Lionel, effortlessly switching into earnest mode. “When do you propose to hold this investigative vigil?”
“Monday,” said Lionel.
It was short notice, but I assumed that it would have been even shorter if Lionel hadn’t been otherwise occupied on Sundays.
“Suits me,” I said, firmly hooked and avid to be reeled in. “Name your time and place, and I’ll be there. I’m looking forward to it already.”
CHAPTER II
Lionel picked me up from Cardiff station in an old Cortina whose funereal paint job seemed appropriate to the occasion. He already had two passengers in place so I had no choice but to take a back seat. There wasn’t a lot of space for me, let alone my overnight bag, but I squeezed myself in.
“This is Martin,” Lionel said, indicating the middle-aged man whose claim to the front seat had obviously been secured by reason of dimension as well as opportunity, “and this is Penny, from the local Society for Psychical Research.”
“Presumably not a full-time employee?” I quipped, nodding politely to a thin, thirty-ish woman with spectacles whose lenses were almost as powerful as mine.
The bespectacled woman did not seem to appreciate the flippancy of my tone, and might even have failed momentarily in her duty to regard me without prejudice or prepossession. “No,” she said, in a severe manner which suggested that she’d been warned about my skeptical tendencies.
It was left to Lionel to supplement the blunt denial. “Penny works for the Welsh Development Agency,” he said.
“Awdurdod Datblygu Cymru,” she corrected. Having been married to the Ex, I knew that she was merely translating the term into Welsh, presumably being a member of the Welsh Language Society—or Cymdeithas yr laith Gymraeg, as she would presumably put it. The lilt of her accent inevitably came out fully in the way that she pronounced the phrase.
