Death's Apprentice: A Grimm City Novel (4 page)

“Why don’t you ask your archangels?” The watching figure sneered at the madman’s terror.

The figure stood up from the broken bench and walked forward, into the center of the abandoned garden square. The madman’s sight dropped to the man’s feet. He could see now that the figure’s left foot was misshapen and heavy, producing a dragging limp.

“I know…” He looked up at the man’s sneering face. “I know who you are…”

“As you said—” The Devil towered above the cowering lunatic. “I don’t like anyone coming here without my permission.”

“I … I’ll go. Right now…”

“And then to hear all this … this nonsense.” The Devil glared down at him, face tightening with rage. “Just as if I’d never had to listen to it before. I know all about your archangels, and your heroes, and their invincible army. I’ve been listening to that fairy tale for centuries. And you know something?” Eyes burning even fiercer, he leaned down toward the madman. “It’s never come true. And it never will.”

The madman crouched down lower, but there was nowhere else to go.

“But all the same, no one has ever been fool enough to come to my front door and talk about it to my face before.” The Devil squeezed his hand into a fist. “Not until now.”

The Devil looked up from the quivering figure at his feet. He brought his gaze to the paper-winged toys dangling from the leafless tree. They burst into flames, spreading to the tinsel draped across the branches.

Crying out in dismay, the madman sprang to his feet, trying to beat out the fire racing across the tree. The flames spiraled like luminescent serpents down its trunk, engulfing the candle stubs and action figures set out in the grass.

The fire dwindled away in seconds, its purpose accomplished. The dead tree remained undamaged. But the ashes drifted from its branches, like black snow settling upon the shapeless blotches of melted plastic below.

“You…” The madman turned his face, tears mingling with rain, toward the Devil standing behind him. From somewhere inside himself, amidst his disordered thoughts, he had found a spark of defiance. “You can destroy whatever you want—but you can’t destroy my hope. The things they told me, they’ll come true one day. And maybe that day will come sooner than you think.”

One corner of the Devil’s mouth lifted in an ugly smile. “Somehow I doubt that. But even if it does, it still won’t come soon enough to save you.”

He turned and gestured with an outflung hand toward the weeds choking the limits of the square. Rats, their eyes glistening like points of fire, rushed from their burrows, streaming across the matted grass.

The rats swarmed over the madman, their claws scrabbling up along his legs, then across his chest. His screams were choked off by the yellow fangs sinking into his face. He fell, hands futilely tearing at the sleek, grey shapes blanketing him from sight.

Only a few minutes passed before he stopped moving. His raw flesh, gnawed to the bones beneath, could be seen in the middle of a widening pool of red, blood seeping into the ground.

The Devil turned away. He looked up at the black reach of the office tower at the side of the garden. In the rain, it stood as daunting as an immense cenotaph, fashioned from some black stone quarried from the earth’s depths. Others like it mounted toward the storm-darkened sky, mute guardians of the city’s wealth. Only a few people knew what distinguished this building from the rest.

The clouds obscured the top of the building. Just below them, at the twentieth floor, light came from an expanse of windows. That was where he brought his gaze, head tilted back.

Someone watched him from those windows, so far above …

The Devil looked down at the dark figure standing in the abandoned garden. He could see that they both wore the same expensive cashmere jacket and open-necked silk shirt beneath. The same sulphurous blue flame sparked in their eyes. The figure below wore a heavy, clubbed shoe, concealing his cloven left foot—as did the identical figure on the twentieth floor.

Their twin gazes met for a second. Then the garden was empty of everything except the dead peach tree and the madman’s bloodied carcass at its base.

The Devil closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, as though drawing part of himself back toward the core of his being—

He had other business to take care of now.

*   *   *

When the Devil turned away from the window, a face bright with anxious sweat looked up toward him.

“Can … can I go on now?”

Disgust filled the Devil’s thoughts. That was the reaction produced by each and every pathetic example of humanity. The cringing, sniveling ones that came here to his office were the worst.

“If you must.” He stepped away from the floor-to-ceiling windows, looking over the abandoned garden square below. “So, what exactly did you want to discuss with me?”

“I thought … you knew…”

“Sadly, I do.” He turned and looked at his desk. It had been cut, a long time before, from a two-ton boulder of black lava-stone. “What’s all this … stuff?”

“I brought some photos—” The magnate’s hands, rounded and plump as his gut, frantically rearranged the colored images. “So you could see what I’ve built up for myself, since the last time we spoke to each other.”

“This is your wife, I take it?” He picked up one of the photos and regarded it. “A little out of your league, I would have thought.”

“Well…” A nervous smile showed on the man’s face. “I guess I did well for myself.”

“Money has an attractive quality to it. For certain women.” He peered at another one of the photos. “And this is your son?”

“Oh, yeah.” The man’s face brightened. “I took that at one of his soccer games. He’s the top scorer in the city youth league—”

“Indeed.” He bent down and prodded a few more of them about with a manicured fingertip. “Your daughters?”

“Twins. That was at their ballet recital. We had to donate a bundle to the local ballet company to get ’em into the school. But it was worth it. I want my money to do some good now, you see. For everyone.”

The Devil could barely keep his gorge from rising. “And what a lovely home you have, too.” His polished fingernail tapped another photo. “Three stories—more of a mansion, really. You must keep a troop of gardeners employed, to have all that landscaping so well maintained.”

“Yeah…” The other man shrugged. “But what can you do? You gotta have it.”

“Just so.” He nodded. “You
must
have it. That’s what you decided. What you wanted
must
be what you have.” He had picked up a half dozen of the photos, and now tossed them onto the desk with the rest. “That’s why we made our little deal, all those years ago. And you got what you wanted, didn’t you?”

“Oh, sure—” The other man nodded his head frantically. “I got no complaints—”

“Then why did you come here? Why did you want me to see all … this?” He gave a dismissive gesture toward the photographs. “These pretty pictures.”

“Well—”

“And especially
now
.” He frowned as he shook his head. “I have to say that your timing seems just a little suspicious. Given that tomorrow is the exact anniversary, to the day, of the sealing of our contract with each other.”

“I thought that maybe…” The other’s voice was nothing but a hoarse whisper; he couldn’t look up, but kept his lowered gaze on the photos. Even if he couldn’t see them now. “Maybe we could work something out together … something else, I mean … about my end of the deal.”

“Ah.” The Devil tapped a fingernail on the photograph of the man’s wife. “I see.”

“Do you?” A hopeful gaze lifted toward him. “I mean … if you could…” The fat man spread his hands above the photos again. “Because it’d be a crime to just waste everything I’ve accomplished. Everything I’ve pulled together…”

“A crime. Yes, of course.” He nodded slowly. “But let me show you something even more criminal.”

The magnate cowered as the Devil leaned across the desk. The leonine features were contorted with a sudden rage.

“You!” He jabbed a finger into the fat man’s chest. “You disgust me. We have a deal, you and I, a contract—and now you want to crawl out of it. And for what?” He slammed the flat of his hand down upon the desk. “For this trash? That slutty whore you like to call your wife? Your ugly pug-nosed children?” He swept his hand across the photographs. “And you dare say that this is what
you’ve
accomplished? Twenty years ago, you were nothing but a broken-down traveling salesman who had pawned his samples case for a bottle of cheap bourbon. And when the bottle was lying empty on the floor of your five-dollar-a-night motel room, you looped your belt over the water pipe in the bathroom and tied the other end around your neck. There would have been nothing left of you but another purple-faced corpse if I hadn’t arrived in that moment to offer you a way out.”

“I…” The pudgy hands hurriedly pulled back the photos into a ragged pile. “I know. And I appreciate it. Really I do. But I’ve got a family now. And they love me…”

“Do you really think that means anything to me?” The scorn in his face was more frightening than the anger had been. “What does a worm like you know of love, and things lost?” He raised the man’s tear-wet face with a fingertip under his chin. “Let me tell you a story, maggot. Once there was a creation, a being holier than any of your tribe could ever be, immaculate in a newborn universe. An archangel, the first to be molded by God’s hands, the first ever to have life breathed into his unstained heart. That archangel was given the duty of bringing light to all the worlds. And he was God’s favorite, until God created … Man.” The single word sounded like a curse on his lips. “And a thing like you, a thing of stinking flesh and callow, ignorant appetite, became God’s favorite.” His gaze turned away from the fat man on the chair, and locked onto a vision of millennia past. “Was I to thank him for that usurpation? No. Better I should rise up and rebel against my creator for the love He’d taken away.”

Imbedded in the lava-stone desk, a series of arcane metal symbols appeared, turning incandescent with heat as the Devil spoke. The photos on top of the desk burst into flame, their edges charring black as the fat man scooped them up and held them against his heaving chest.

“Do you see those?” He pointed to the swirling, interlaced symbols. “That’s the spell that God used to create me. And it is more a part of me than this.” One hand laid upon his chest. “This flesh is but earthly corruption, a prison. If you could decipher what is inscribed in that stone, you would know what happened at the beginning of the universe. You would see the beauty of it, and realize the crime God committed when He turned against me. But of course … I had my vengeance in the end. When I tricked your naked progenitor into eating the forbidden fruit in Eden.” His smile was one of malignant satisfaction. “Man was banished for that crime, and made into a suffering, mortal thing—as he deserved. As
you
deserve. But that is not the end of the story. No, for God is not so craven an opponent as to fail to recognize my cunning. And so, following that victory in Eden, I was granted the authority to test and try every human soul that is born to this world, to sort the worthy from the foul, and damn all who fail into a Hell of my own making. A Hell that has been waiting for you ever since the moment you signed our deal.” He reached down and tapped at the burning symbols. “The metal here is magnesium. The metal of Heaven. The metal of eternity. But as fiercely as these would sear your flesh were you to touch them, the pit of your damnation rages hotter. And it is so close to you in this moment that I could pick you up and throw you into the fire from where I stand.”

Curled into a ball on his chair, the fat little man wept, his hands full of the ashes of his life.

The Devil spoke softer now, as though his anger had ebbed back into its hidden sources inside him. “Did you really think I came to you that night, with no thought but to do well by you, and make everything your hand touched turn to gold?” He shook his head as he gazed down at the whimpering form on the chair. “Did I lie to you? Did I deceive you? Tell you that I was anything other than what I am? Or that the price of all the success and wealth I would give you, twenty years of every desire satisfied—that the price would be anything other than your immortal soul?”

“No … you told me…”

“Exactly. As I tell everyone who enters into such a contract with me. Whatever else I might be accused of, by God or Man, none can say that I’m not up front. When we sealed our agreement twenty years ago, I told you what would happen when your time was over. But now that it’s within sight, when you have only one day left in which to enjoy all that I have given you, now you throw that last little bit away by coming to me, sniveling and whining for me to change my terms.” His disgust became even more apparent, the corner of his mouth withering to a sneer. “The species of man is so predictable. Do you think you’re the first one to have come here like this, begging for a reprieve? Everyone does, when the time for their final settlement approaches. But it does you no good. None of you. Once you’re mine, you’re mine forever. And if you don’t believe that, see it for yourself—”

The Devil pulled open one of the drawers of his desk. From the drawer, he pulled out a handgun, its polished silver gleaming. “If you want to be free of me, this is the simplest way to do it. All you have to do is shoot me with this gun, and you can have all the freedom you desire.”

“What…” The fat man cringed backward. “What do you mean?”

“Take it.” He held the gun by its barrel, handle extended toward the other. “All you have to do is show the same strength of will that I showed against God, when I fought Him face to face in Heaven. If you do that, then I promise you, you can spend as much time with your precious family as you want. Watching your children grow up and your pretty young wife grow fat.”

He forced the gun into the magnate’s trembling grasp.

For a full, ticking minute, the fat man grasped the gun in his doubled fists, its snout wavering toward the Devil’s chest. Then, at last, it dropped away, dangling between the man’s knees where he sat. “I … can’t … I want to do it. But somehow, I just can’t…”