Tarot Creativity Challenge, Day #4

(I feel like the character in this is the Hermit in another context).

The Devil

Hands red with dove’s blood, I waited. The aftertaste of the words was dirty in my mouth. My elbow was aching.

It took several tries for me to hear the ringing of the doorbell over the echo of the bell in my skull. I got up; the slight movement made the weightless dove down scatter over the floor. My heart was crashing in my chest.

The front door? Really? No smoke and stink of sulfur? No solidification of shadows at the unlit corners of the room? No reverberating voice or sinuous whispers?

I went to the front door and opened it. Dove’s blood got all on the doorknob.

The man standing at the door was of medium height, slightly paunched. I had the impression—I don’t know from where—that his height and weight and age were at the exact numerical average for the country. There was something about his face, though…but I couldn’t tell what. I couldn’t say that his hair or eyes; his skin was the color of skin. Even looking right at him, I was forgetting what he looked like. It was like the image of his face would enter my mind and slide right out again. It made you dizzy. He wore grey—a grey suit of no particular distinction, no particular make. I would have latched onto it and said that it was professional dress, but even then I couldn’t quite be sure if the coat and shirt were business or casual. The fact of the presence or absence of a tie refused to stay in my mind.

Shaking my head, the reverberating of the bell growing louder instead of softer, I said “You’re here.”

He said something—mumbled more than said. The words were a low blur of sound. I pieced out words and bits of words. Day you tract you legal vice you ay I in. Oh. May I come in?

“Yes, come in,” I said, sweeping my hand toward the interior of the apartment and spattering dove’s blood on the wood of the floor.

He walked in. He walked past the ritual circle on the floor of the living room, stepping around the smoldering black candles that cluttered the floor like fungus in a forest and stepping over the lines drawn in blood already drying to flakes of rust. He sat on one of the cheap wicker-bottom chairs that I had shoved to the side of the room. He breathed in the air thickened by wax smoke and the smell of the insides of doves. He took out a briefcase I hadn’t seen him carry in, placed it on his knees, and open it. He took a sheaf of papers from the opened case and straightened them by racking them against his thigh.

My heart had died for a few moments there when I had opened the door and saw nothing but the man standing there. But now it had resuscitated, and had a desperate life of its own. It was drowning inside of me and trying to claw its way out. I walked to him.

“I tried so hard to bring you here,” I said. “Real dove’s blood. White doves, not pigeons. I had all the candles. I rang the bell a full six-hundred and sixty-six times, not eighteen times like those pissant cowards do in their rituals. I guess I could have gone with child’s blood, but I’m sure even you think that’s a bit over the top.” At that moment I tripped over one of candles, catching myself before I went down onto the floor but sending several of the candles crashing in a chain reaction of flame and black wax. I recovered, stood over him with blooded hands.

“And now you’re here,” I said.

He buzzed something incomprehensible. Listening to him was like listening to radio static. He held the sheaf of paper in his hands—largish-smallish hands, wrinkled-smooth hands.

“And you know what that means,” I said.

He droned. His voice was sometimes rough and harsh, clicking or hitting against a consonant, but there was something in that blur of words that made you want to lie down and go to sleep. I shook my head and slapped myself on the cheek to keep myself awake. I bit the inside of my cheek to shock myself with pain.

“You’re here,” I said. “And that means it’s true. All of it is true. Heaven, Hell. God and you. I prayed for years—decades without any verification. But I knew you would listen to my prayers. You don’t require an act of faith. You’re pragmatic. Aren’t you?”

If he said something, I didn’t know what it was. Maybe the mumbling was nothing but sound.

“You’re here,” I said, “and that means that I have a soul. A soul for the selling and the buying.”

He held out the papers to me. They were thick with print.

“No,” I repeated. “Now that you’re here, now that I see you—fuck you.”

He took the papers back. I had the impression that his eye-colored eyes were looking at me, although I couldn’t be certain. It made my skin want to slough off of my bones.

“Don’t you get it?” I said. I gave out a laugh, a brutal thing. “You fucking fool. That you’re here at all means I should never bargain with you. You’re proof of the scope of it, of the drama. You’re proof of it all. Eternity, all of it. “

He sat back. He listened.
“Don’t you get it?” I repeated. “Years of doubt, of gnawing doubt, of anxiety fit to split me open resolved.” I laughed again, and there was the high treble of hysteria in my voice. “Oh, you goddamned idiot. ”

“You don’t know what it’s like, do you? Doubt. You play on men’s doubts, prey on men’s doubts, but you’ve never doubted yourself. You always knew. You always knew that the impossible things that you can’t touch or see or hear or sense in any way were everything, in spite of all the reality all around you. You knew this was all trash, a dream, and that the truth was something you’d never experienced but only been told about and had no reason to believe in but that that nothingness meant so much more than all the everything you knew; you knew you were accountable to inscrutable rules that defied all logic and experience but that your living in accordance with these rules was the most important thing you could possibly do with your brief, brief time. You knew that everything that seemed good and pleasurable and sensible was a lie, and that attrition and self-punishment and the mutilation of your reason were what was required of you. You knew that everything that was false was true and true was false. You knew. Fuck you. Now you’re here, and now I know. Fuck you and fuck faith and now I will spend every second of my life ensuring that I live forever rather than wondering if I’m wasting every second of my life chasing figments and vapors.”

I knew I wasn’t making sense. I didn’t care. Nonsense was sense and sense was nonsense. That was what it meant.

He rose. His voice raised up until it was deafening, until I was drowning in sound. The buzzing hum of it filled my ears, the room, reality. It was the sound of every bee ever born droning its wings into a microphone. It was overpowering and awful—it made my bones hurt—and it put me straight to sleep.

And I forgot all about it.

That I remember now means what, exactly? I don’t know. It’s been years since that happened. Or has it? I’m not obsessed with black magic anymore, not obsessed with verifying the existence or non-existence of a soul within me. I’ve given up on all that. If I was ever into it at all. I remember eating bitter entheogens that made the shadows crawl and the walls waver but told me of nothing aside from the mind’s capacity for self-rape. I remember reading about the rituals, prepping them, going all out for the most elaborate and powerful one of all. But I don’t remember actually performing it. I don’t remember anything about it. You’d think I’d remember the hard, empirical fact of having to scrape black wax from six hundred and sixty-six candles off of the hardwood floor of my apartment, but there’s no memory of that. It’s just a blur, just a haze of words and long nights and doubt so acute it came as a physical pain in my guts that made me curl up and howl my lungs out until my howl became a breathy, spittled whisper.

And then there’s this. This memory that came back to me. Or was it a memory? A fever dream? A flashback? Wishful thinking?

I don’t know. I don’t know, I don’t know, and I never will.

God fucking damn it.