I have a fiction request, Sir. The greatest negotiator has come to town after hearing about strange things in the area. Satan is looking to make a deal for Jack’s soul or his service, and she won’t take no for an answer. I’m curious to see you write the dialogue and whether certain lesser demons would get involved.
(Note: I’ve oftened referenced “Splathouse Lore” works, which involve OCs I created while this blog was still on Tumblr. I’m unsure how many of you have read those, but that’s what this request is referencing. In the spirit of catering to a growing and new audience, I’ve decided to take the opportunity to re-boot those works for new people. The Devil and Jack will be a multi-part series, starting with this entry. This will be something new I’m attempting, and I would greatly enjoy feedback. I am going to try my best to crank out a chapter every week, week and a half. It’s my sincere hope you all enjoy meeting Asmo, Jenazebelle and my “lore” half.-j)
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“Asmo, get my knife. The big one,”
My boss, he’s standing with his back against the door. He’s just flipped the deadbolt, the lock, and the latch. Sweat beads at his brow, and his chest rises in such a small fashion I just know he’s holding it in. I watch his throat bob as he swallows, his eyes wide as they meet mine. His robe-an old, ratty thing fading from black to gray-hangs loose about him. It’s open to reveal the ponch of his belly, the steel hair at his chest.
The ink on his skin, it rolls, roils and coils about every tendon. His tattoos, they do that sometimes. I’d asked him once why, and he just told me he forgets what they’re supposed to be. That the ink decides its shape. Right now, it surfaces in dark, firm lines at his chest. His shoulders. It grays along his stomach and pecs. Geometric shapes, shaded and hardened.
Steel plates. They were supposed to be steel plates.
Watching him, my stomach tightened. I rolled my tongue over my lips, and finally found the courage to speak.
“Uh, Jack? You’re going to have to be a bit more specific than-”
“The big one, with the leather sheath. It’s in my sock drawer-just go, okay?” he says. He almost spat the words out. His tone softened, but I could still hear it in every syllable. If it was worry or fear, I couldn’t say. He hadn’t spoken like that in a long while.
I turn to my sister, and look up to study her face. Jenazebelle stands, her tail rigid and angled towards the ground. Her black lips are pulled into a thin line, and she watches our boss for a long moment. She crosses her arms, and turns towards me. That gaze, I’ve seen it over the years too. People made statues, paintings of it before. No mortal ever captured it-but none had been with her as long as I. Or the boss.
My stomach tightens just a little more.
“Asmo? Go. Go get his knife, and then I want you to go into your office. You’ll lock the door after, understand?” she says, her voice monotone as her eyes bore into me.
“B-but why would I-” I start, but my sister holds up a hand.
“Get the knife, go to your office, lock the door. Now,”
So I did. I took the stairs that lead to his office turned study, a disaster of a hole. I sheafed through paper products, under the mattress worn with age. By the time I’d pushed ten or so odd books aside, I finally uncovered a battered, scarred dresser. The drawer groaned as I pulled it out.
As it drew towards my hip, there came another loud rap at the door downstairs. Firm and sure, like a salesman that knows he can stick his foot in the frame.
“ASMO?” cried my boss, the fervor in his voice melting into a pot of anxiety.
As I dug under faded black socks and boxers, under half-used bottles of lube, I heard the clatter of hoofs on the stairwell. That’s when I found it.
The sheath, like the table, was ragged and battered. Worn at the edges and fuzzy. It was tanned the color of tired skin, and from the top stuck a handle just as ragged. If it was wood or some ancient bone, I couldn’t tell you. I lifted the knife into my hands, afraid the leather would crack on contact.
It was as long as my forearm. Even encased, I let it lay flat across my palms. Not because I’d never seen it-I had, just once. Not because it frightened me. Though my scalp tingle just looking at it, that wasn’t it. The reason it laid across my hands was far more simple.
It was warm, and getting warmer. I pushed the drawer back in with my knee, and laid it atop the dresser.
The hooves clattered more manic, and grew closer with every step. The door to Jack’s office had been cracked open, just a sliver. My sister swung it open so hard it rattled against the wall. Her eyes cut across the room, then towards me. She drew close, her hooves deftly stepping over papers and boxes, trash and clothes. When her eyes fell upon the knife, she grasped my shoulder and squeezed.
“Good, you did good. Now go down, and into your office. Lock the door. Don’t open it for anyone-Jack or I will get it, okay?”
She took the hem of her shirt, and lifted it. She wrapped it around the sheath, and held the blade as far from her stomach as she could. She stepped over the piles of crap again, and made it to the door before I spoke.
“Jen? W-who is that? Down there, beyond the door?”
She paused, a hoof raised to step out towards the hall. She took a breath, and shook her head.
“Someone old. Someone I hoped we’d never meet again. C’mon, let’s get you locked in, okay?”
So I followed her. Not of my own volition, but my legs move all the same. Every step we took down the stairs agitated the vipers of my guts. We hit the landing, and Jen tossed the knife to Jack. He had just gripped the handle as my sister guided me towards my office.
“Remember-keep it locked. Jack or I will get you. And don’t open just because we say it’s us, okay?”
I nodded, and met her eyes. Over her shoulder, I watched as Jack slipped from his robe. It slid over his shoulders to his hips. He took the sleeves, and tied it there. He stuck the knife, case and all, beneath it. The ink underneath his skin-in this light, it looked like dulled steel. The designs held firm, and didn’t waver.
As he turned, I watched his face. His lips moved ever so slightly, his eyes narrowed.
He was concentrating.
That’s why the designs held.
“Jen?” I say, “Are we in trouble?”
@@@
Hell? People think it’s all fire, all brimstone. Preachers across the country talk about the screams, the smell of charred flesh. Dante layered it like a cake. People use it as an adjective, a noun. They tell everyone to go to Hell. They say they’re going there themselves, even. This is hell, that is hellish.
That’s all thanks to our misinformation department.
Don’t get me wrong, we’re still Hell. But just as the world changed, so did we. It’s a streamlined process, the kind of automation CEOs have wet dreams about. Fully automated, with little need for stop processes or employee involvement. The Hell we have now?
It’s focused on customer service. A call center that works every second. I hadn’t seen blood-or semen, or shit-until I came topside. The most violent thing I’d come across at my old job?
Tabulating genocides.
Numbers on a screen that meant nothing after the first year.
But then came the summons.
At one point, a summoning happened one in every six hundred and sixty-six cases. Then six thousand, six hundred and sixty six. Before I came up, it was six hundred and sixty six million. It wasn’t that humanity had lost faith, or didn’t believe in us. They always had that. If they projected on a horned god or a celebrity, faith was always around.
They just didn’t need us anymore.
Getting a summons now, it was like winning the lottery. My brothers and sisters were so excited for me. They kept clapping me on the back, telling me how lucky I was.
“You’re finally getting out,” they would say. And “You’re so lucky”.
The only one that didn’t was my boss. My step father.
I never asked how old he was. Downside, we don’t really measure time. Everything is one long moment. All your triumphs and screw ups, they stick with you. Everything piles and piles upon you. Layer and layer, the totality of your existence crushed beneath it. So you do your job, and answer to your boss. You don’t think, you do. Baphomet-father and leader, boss and tyrant-he was the only one that didn’t smile when he heard the news.
He called me in to his office.
Without the fire and brimstone? Without the heat at a melting point? We’d ascended to chairs. To desks. Some were nicer than others. My father, he had the nicest I’d seen. Everything was neon and bright, a rainbow of color the moment you opened the door. The slab rocks that made the walls, they had been smoothed. Murals of fish, lush vegetation and more had been painted over them. If you stood there long enough, you would swear they could move. But they never did. I’d touched the walls plenty of times to be sure.
He told me once it reminded him of the earth Before. He said it just like that, too. When he did, he’d give a crooked smile from his goat mouth, and just stare at the walls.
My father, he didn’t smile often.
He was one of the only people that smiled in hell.
I think that’s why despite everything, I loved him so much.
Sitting there in his office, he turned to me. He said “Asmodeus? It’s a fix. The summoning, I mean. You remember Jen, right?”
It took me a moment to remember Jenazebelle. Buried beneath everything else, I saw a face. Blue, like mine. Rounder, softer. Kinder. A succubus. My sister was a succubus, and she’d been summoned, too. I calculated the odds of that. The two of us, summoned so close. Two demons in the same traitline at all being called.
It was well beyond six hundred sixty-six million.
Baphomet brings a hand to his beard. He strokes his goatee, and twirls the ends in his black nails. He leans back, his office chair squeaking. His hooves meet the top of the desk, his yellowed eyes firm upon me.
I nod, but don’t say anything. He returns it, and lets go of his beard.
“Well, she’s past due. Her paperwork. We’re still waiting on a signing from her-and we’re hundreds of days over. Can you talk to her? Go topside, maybe figure out what’s what for me?”
“Yes father,” I say, “It’s no problem, Father.”
Baphomet gives a bleat, and smiles. He takes his hooves from the desk, and stands.
Sitting in this chair like this, gazing up at him?
It reminds me of the brood nest. When I was born.
He passes the desk, and comes towards me. His hand meets my shoulder, and gives it a squeeze.
“That’s a good boy,” he says, “That’s a good, good boy. Let’s get you ready, then. You know about topside, I take it?”
“As much as any of us Father,” I say. He squeezes my shoulder again, and pulls his hand from my suit jacket.
“Well, I’ll try to get you up to speed before then. Come along, boy. We’ve much to do, much to do indeed,”
His hooves clacked to the door. I followed, the sound of my own hoofs so much fainter. He loomed massive in the door, his hand straying a moment. He stood there, and tilted his horned head back at me.
“And boy? Don’t fuck this up,”
@@@
With the cigarette at his lips, It could be almost any other day. But then he wipes his brow, and smears red over his eyes. He glances at the back of his hand, and lets out a sigh. Standing there in the doorway, he’s dripping blood. Gore. The folds of his skin are a deep burgundy as gray matter sops from his head to the floor.
His tattoos, they’re a mash of scenes. The steel plates are gone. In their place, I see the execution of french royalty. The bombs dropping on Nagasaki, Hiroshima. They melt and give way to imperialists being shot to death. Firing squads and tomahawks. Flesh flayed and people being burned at the stake. I stare, and I keep staring until his words pelt from his lips.
“Hey, you mind getting a mop?” he says.
When he walks away, his boots stick to the floorboards. For a long moment, I don’t say anything. I just stand there and stare out the door. Then my eyes flick towards the frame, towards the handprint smeared against the wood.
I wasn’t a stranger to violence, but it had always been on the other side of a screen. Seeing it in person? It was like getting a call in the middle of the night. You scramble to the phone, already angry, already cursing. Then you pick up the phone, and the voice on the other end isn’t friend or foe. It’s an assertion of who you once were. You might have tried to ignore it or forget it. Most of the time you can fool even yourself. But the moment you hear that voice, it all comes back.
I took a step towards the door, and paused. I gazed into the hall, the crimson trail of boots that went towards the living room.
I tried to remember the last time I saw real, actual blood.
If I ever had seen it.
@@@
Finding my sister, it was supposed to be hard.
Downside, you grow numb fairly quick. You mature from the brood nest in a blink, then they stick you in a suit. They seat you behind a desk, and give you an assignment. Drive by shootings, stillbirths. Wars without end, stick-ups at convenience stores. White lies told by parents to placate children. Rapists dumping bodies. At first it’s all stimuli, an avalanche of things too horrid to process.
The first hundred thousand, you keep feeling like you’re going to vomit. Lots do. Then you keep feeling like you should, but nothing comes up. You get the dry heaves. Past that, nothing.
It’s just numbers.
It’s just a job.
Going Topside, all those murders, rapes, mass graves and unpleasant jokes. They’re right there, overwhelming your senses. They’re not just figures in a report. They’re in front of your eyes, under your nails. The charnel house smell of death and shit and cum is all around you.
Only this time you can’t get away. There’s no amount of vomiting that can make you feel better.
Finding Jenazebelle was supposed to be difficult. Not because she’s a demon, but because of the rest. Most demons that go topside, they get retired when they come back. They keep associating pictures to the numbers. Like they’re fresh out of the nest. That morality they had spent so long trying to forget and bury?
It’s back. They’ve yanked it kicking and screaming to the forefront of their brain, and it won’t shut up.
When my sister yanked me from the broom closet I appeared in, it was a lot like that.
I wasn’t sure where I was at first. It was a cramped space. Black as pitch. I tried to turn, and stuck a hoof in a bucket. My tail hit a shelf, which knocked a broom against me. I flayed an arm out, and tried to set it back-which just made the entire shelf topple.
Not on to me, but with such a clatter I wished it had. Then I heard the turn of a door knob, the grip at my shoulder. I was dragged out into the hall, my hooves kicking away at the bucket. When I turned, I had to look up just to see her.
She looked like the others-tall and round and full. Her lips and hips plump by design. She still wore the same suit we all had. A jacket black as ebony over a snow white button up. A black skirt that ended just above the knee. The horn rimmed glasses were new-at least, I thought they were. Her skin shimmered like cobalt, the color iridescent in the newfound light of the hall.
But it was her eyes that made me grow still. The sureness of her grip on my shoulder as she spoke, it was all so real. So here and now, a bleeding part of reality.
Only my father had touched me in Hell. Only ever a grip at my shoulder, nothing more.
“Asmodaeus? That’s you, right? Listen to me-I’m only going to say this once. I need you to do something for me, something big. You’re listening, right?”
I’d been Topside an entire minute. I blinked, the light of the hall so much brighter than anything I’d known. I turned my head, and took in the details by degrees.
Wood floors. Old walls. A staircase, a landing. Doors as big and old as time to the east, west and north. My sister, towering over me. Her eyes were wide, her grip tighter as she spoke.
“No matter what this guy upstairs says, I need you to trust him,” she said, “I need you to trust me-and not report back. It’ll all make sense later, but for right now, I need you to do this. I need you-do you understand?”
I was too overwhelmed to do anything but nod. Jenazebelle smiled-and that’s when I knew. The roiling in my guts, it started to calm. She patted my shoulder, and reached for my hand. Her fingers laced between mine, and she turned.
“Good-just trust me. No matter what you think, we’re going to need this to work, okay? So just play along. No matter what,”
“Why?”
She paused, and turned towards me. Her grip grew slack for all of a picosecond. She bent at the hip, her face inches from my own. Her eyes searched mine, my cheeks, my lips. Then she lifted a hand, and cupped my face. The roiling in my gut, it wasn’t gone. But in its place came a warmth I’d only known when Baphomet smiled.
“Asmo? You’re more than your job, you know that right?”
I stood there for a long moment, jaw wavering. Words coming to the edge of my tongue only to fail. My sister stroked my cheek, and kept talking.
“You’re more than that cubicle, those reports. I know it doesn’t seem like it, I know this is all scary. But just stick around. Don’t file that report just yet. Don’t write home right away, okay? Can you do that for me?”
When I don’t respond, my sister rises. She squeezes my hand again, and tugs at my hand.
“Come on then-it’s time you met him,”
“H-Hi-Him who?” I say, the words a jilted mess of noise.
Jenazebelle just laughs, and says “Oh, you’ll see.”
She drags me along, and eventually my hooves start to move on their own again. We went up the stairs, her pace steady, her grip unwavering. When we made it to the top we turned left and walked down the hall. The floorboards beneath us creaked so much it made me nervous.
The ground never creaked in hell.
My sister, she didn’t seem to mind. So I pretended not to as well. I failed, but I tried the whole way down the hall. I almost bumped into her as she came to a halt. Her hand dropped, and my own strayed in the air another moment before it met my side. Jenazebelle took a deep breath, and turned towards me.
“Okay, so that bit about your job? It’s true-but it’s also your cover. Being a worker. So no matter what he asks you, just say yes. Just believe in it. This whole thing, it’s powered by that. Got it?”
“Jenazebelle? W-who is i-it t-that called us?”
The question lingers in the air, and I watch her eyes stray for just a moment. She blinks, and I watch as her lips curl into a smile. She gives my hand a final squeeze, then pulls hers up to wrap upon the door.
“Eh, I guess that depends on how he’s feeling today. Here’s hoping he’s in a good mood,” she says.
Her knuckles tap against the door, and beyond the wood I hear a loud, wet cough. My sister knocks again, and a bass voice calls out from beyond the door.
“What the hell is it? I’m working, damn it!”
“Jack? Remember last night?” calls my sister. There’s a pause, and the voice that replies is softer if only by degrees.
“Which part?” it says.
“The latter one. After the warm up,” she says.
Another pause, one that makes the pregnant silence all the more heavy.
“Yeah?” says the voice-Jack.
That’s was his name, Jack. At least it was for now.
“Well, someone’s here to see you. Do you have a moment?” she says. Jenazebelle, she stands there with her hands poised, her blue ears pinned against her head. Her yellow eyes flick towards me, and she closes one of her eyes quickly. It’s a gesture I don’t get, but it gets her smiling again.
The silence stretches, and it’s then it dawns on me. The smell, the house, the touch of my sister. It’s all so real, so here. My legs grow tense, and I want to run. To get away, to claw the earth until I’m home again. Back in my cubicle, with numbers and charts. Tabulating deaths, tabulating horror too distant to care about.
Then the door knob turns, and the black wood swings inward.
My sister turns her hand, her palm presenting the darkened doorway.
“Well, there you go,” she says. She takes a step back, the clack of her massive hooves echoing in the house. She raises a hand, and prods me forward.
“Just remember, say ‘yes’. Just believe. It’s not anything hard, nothing deep. You made it this far-the worst is already over, okay? No matter what, the worst won’t happen. Promise,”
I’d stepped over the doorway, into a darkness I’d not even seen within the deepest pits. I had just turned to ask her so many things. Questions that buzzed and throbbed in my skull like a hive.
Then the door closed, and I was left with that wet, hacking cough.
I’d been topside ten minutes, if that. If they even used time here. I’d already broken one of the rules Baphomet-my father-had instilled in me.
I trusted her.
@@@
The face smiles despite being severed at the neck.
There’s an arm in the umbrella stand, slender fingers angled and clutching.
By the end table, there’s the rest. Ribcage spread wide, small intestines splayed over a ragged couch. It had been brown, but with the blood had darkened to a gushing black. Jack sat on it, cigarette burning away.
In his hand was the knife, it’s clipped point singing against a whetstone. Three strokes, and then he would flip it to the other side. He paused only to pull the cigarette from his lips, and tap the ashes away in the visceral beside him.
I saw all of this in swaths of colors. The pale skin of the body, the crimson of the blood. Jack’s tanned and inked skin, the gleam of the knife. Every image made my stomach roll. The need to up-chuck my breakfast crept to the back of my throat. I’d turned left before I let it all go, eyes cinched as tight as I could.
A murder, just one. Unextrodinary in how old a sin it was. Mudane by the body count despite it’s brutality. I’d filed millions of these away every single part of the long, on-going moment of my life without so much as a blink. But here, with the blood and the smell and the swaths, I couldn’t run away. I couldn’t send it back with a simple keystroke, send it off to join countless others in our department.
I only opened my eyes when I heard my sister speak.
“Asmo? Asmo, look. It’s okay. It’s going to be fine,”
Her hand was at my shoulder, the slurry of my breakfast at my hooves. She squeezed and tried to pull me up. I shuddered and seized against her touch, and my hooves kicked manically at the air as I was lifted.
“Just breathe,” she said, “It’s just a trick, okay? Look-”
“N-n-no!” I spat, knitting my lids closed again. “I d-do-don’t want to, I can’t, I-”
“Don’t tell me this is the finest that old goat had. Why, top of collections-and this bothers you?”
The voice, it made both of us pause. I didn’t-couldn’t-open my eyes just yet. Through those syllables came a realization, though. I’d heard this voice before, this cadence. But there was a schism between them. The voice was supposed to soothe-but the cadence, it was all wrong. A mockery of genteel nature, like a lamb with a wolf’s maw.
As my sister lowered me, I took a breath. I opened my eyes.
The blood, the gore. The arms and the intestines, it was all gone. The couch was brown, and Jack sat atop it still. Shirtless but clean, the ink beneath his skin swirling into a Cross. Christ suffering at the hands of the Romans. Angels descending with spears on winged horses. Thunder striking against clouds. The flood, the destruction of Babel, the-
“Boy? I was talking to you,” came the voice again.
Inch by inch, I turned my face away from my boss. Across from him, to the other side of the room. Atop an old parlor couch, not so unlike the one Jack sat upon, sat a thin, pretty woman. She wore delicate heels on her slender, pale feet. A form-cut cocktail dress the color of night wrapped around her. It rose to reveal her shoulders, pale as milk and without a single blemish. Her arms were clad in black gloves, one which held a long, skinny cigarette holder. The face, it was the one I’d seen a moment ago. Atop the shoulders again, without so much as a bruise. Clad in thick shades, it smirked as the woman raised a hand. She tipped her glasses down, and eyed my sister and I.
She said “Well now, look at the both of you. Are our little delinquents going native? Hrm?”
“Shut the fuck up Audrey,”
The three of us looked to Jack, with his terrible knife across his lap. His tattoos formed into solid black caricatures. Depictions from the turn of the century vaudeville. A man in a red cape, with horns and a goatee. A smirking red imp, prodding at a child.
The goatish head of my father, his arms extended.
The woman-Audrey-she just laughed and laughed and laughed.
“Or what? You’ll butcher me again? You didn’t find it the first time because it doesn’t exist,” she said.
She took a drag from her cigarette holder, and looked towards my sister and I. When she exhaled, the smoke came out black as pitch. “Besides,” she said with a roll of her shoulders, “There’s no reason we can’t be civil, is there? I chose a form you’d find appealing. The least you can do is humor me warlock,”
She turned, the couch squeaking beneath her. She gazed at Jack, who held her eyes with his own fervor. For a few long minutes, neither of them said a word.
Then Jack looked away, and picked up his knife again. The blade sang, and caught the light with every note.
“Human form,” he said, his voice monotone, “Means you’ve a heart somewhere. One time, ten times. I’ll find it. So you go right on talking your shit. I ain’t nearly tired enough yet,”
The woman snorted, and pushed her sunglasses back up. She took another drag, and watched him as she sighed. “You know, I had a choice. Thousands. But I chose Breakfast at Tiffany’s just for you-and this is the thanks I get? Steel through the brain in some vain attempt to beat me?”
When she laughed, it sounded like nails grating against the world’s biggest chalkboard. She leaned forward, her sunglasses tilting down once more. Only the eyes that laid upon my boss, they weren’t the almond shaped ones from before.
I tried to look-tried to guess their age, their color. But it was like staring into a black hole. The more you tried, the closer and colder the event horizon became until there was nothing at all.
“You’d have better luck with a fiddle you god-forsaken bumpkin,” she spat.
@@@
The first day of my new job, I didn’t do a single calculation.
I didn’t even look at a screen.
On the very first day of my new job-a lie, a cover my sister had called it-I got in a beat-up truck. I rode with my boss, and ordered something called a Thick Burger at a drive through. The lady at the window, when she opened it, she stared at me. At my horns and hair, at the slit of my eyes. Her brow arched as she handed Jack a grease stained bag.
“Y’all going to a comic convention?” She said. Jack just smirked, and gave her a nod.
“Eh, something like that. You take care, okay?”
Then we drove off like nothing happened. We hit the highway and twisted through curves and back roads. Pavement gave way to gravel, dirt. By the time Jack hit the breaks, the cabin smelled of cooked meat and grease. He set the car in park, and unbuckled his seatbelt.
He gripped the bag with his other hand at the door. “Well, this looks as nice a spot as any, don’t it?”
I turned towards the window, and gazed out over the hood. Beyond it lay a field, big and green and empty. Grass rose past our ankles, and wildflowers bloomed in every direction. Then it Jack jumped on the hood of the car. He sat the bag beside him, and unfurled the top.
I finally opened the door and got out. The sun met my skin, and I felt warm. Not hot, not broiling. Just warm. I stood there a solid minute, just soaking it in. Then I clambered on top of the hood with my boss. Jack pushed the bag towards me, and eyed it. In his grip, meat and bread dripped grease right onto his shirt.
“Eat up now-and tell me about yourself,”
I stared at the bag, and rolled my shoulders. “I-I-I d-don’t know w-what you w-want me t-to-”
“Whatever you want,” he said, mouth full. He lifts a hand, and dabs at his mouth. “This ain’t no interrogation. You get to choose who you wanna be-alright?”
I sat there, and thought on that as I looked out towards the field. Wind blew, and every stalk of grass, every flower swayed along with it.
It was how I thought the ocean might look.
I rolled my tongue over my lips, and said “W-what if I d-don’t know who I-I wanna be? J-just who I’m supposed to be?”
Jack swallowed audibly, then bust into a laugh. “Well, it’s a trick question. Ain’t none of us really got the former figured out, though we’re guided with the latter. Best guess any of us got is just who we are in the moment. So, I’ll start. I’m Jack. I’m a writer,”
He smirked, and turned towards me. He extended his hand, and as I go to grip it that’s when I see it. The first smudge, a swirl of black that scurries away beneath his sleeve. I stared at the hand, and raise my eyes to his face. Jack smiles, and brings the hand closer.
“I didn’t say that’s all I am. But we’re gonna start off small. Okay?”
I nod and take the hand. His palm is callused and rough, but the fingertips feel smooth. His grip comes firm, but it’s gone a moment later. He reaches into the bag, and pulls out a lump wrapped in foil. He places it next to me, close enough to warm my thigh.
I watch as he pats at his jacket, a black and ragged thing that would have looked at home back home. He pulls his lapel away, and reaches within. I lift the lump, and unwrap it.
Tobacco and charred beef both meet my nose at the same time. As I’m chewing, Jack takes a drag.
“So. You uh, like your sister?”
I almost choke on the burger. I manage to swallow it down, but only after I nearly gag. Jack, he hadn’t once brought up what I was. He hadn’t bat an eye at my horns, my skin, my hooves. But sitting here now, hearing those words peel from his lips, it made me aware of two things.
I didn’t know this man.
I was alone with this man.
As my spine went rigid, I tried to think. Tried to tabulate all the ways I could bolt from this spot. How far I could run in the woods. He was a smoker and overweight by twenty pounds, so surely I had enough time to-
“Into the uh-sex side of things,”
“I-I ca-can’t say that I have ever v-viewed her in an i-intimate context,”
Jack turns his head by degrees, his mouth slack. Then he bursts into a laugh, one so hard it turns into a hacking cough. He smacks his chest, and shakes his head. “Uh, not quite what I meant there chief. I mean are you like, a sex demon? Like her?”
“O-Oh, I uh. Y-yes. Well, n-no. I’m n-not an i-incubus by t-trade. I w-worked accounting. B-by trait and broodnest, t-though-”
“So you get sexy with numbers. Good. We can work with that. What else?’
I sat there, maw full of food. I forced a swallow, and tried to think. The wind blew, and all the flowers before us swayed. A verdant carpet that seemed to breathe. I took a breath, and shrugged as I took another bite. Jack didn’t say anything for a while.
Then he lifted his boot, and put his cigarette out on his heel. Tobacco and paper shredded away, and he tucked the butt away in his pocket.
“S’okay,” he said, “S’alright. I already told ya’, it’s a trick question. So. It’s like this. I need a gopher, you need a place to stay. I ask you to go fetch something, you do it. I ask you to come with me out, you do it. Can you handle that?”
I swallowed, and gave a nod. I turned my head, and saw Jack smiling. He lifted his knees to the hood of the car, and wrapped his arms around them as he looked back over the field.
“Good, good. You and me, we ain’t gotta be friends. I’d like to be though. And I hope you do too,”
“I-I t-thi-think I can ma-manage that,” I sputtered.
Jack laughed, and reached over. His hand met my shoulder, and gave a squeeze. “Yeah, kid. You’re going to do just fine. Promise,”
We didn’t talk after that. I got done eating, and tossed the wrapper in the bag. Jack smoked another cigarette, and we sat there. Warm in the embrace of the sun, watching the flowers. Later we got in the truck, and we started back over the dirt and gravel.
It was about that time I realized I’d broken another rule, one my father had given me.
Don’t Trust The Mark.
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