Bedbugs (20 page)

But I’m not the kind of guy who takes this kind of stuff—from anyone! And, in an ironic sort of way, I guess I’m getting paid back for that, too. Bottom line? If someone sics a lawyer on me, I’m gonna bite back!

Now here’s where it starts getting a little weird.

If I told the police shrink all of this, he’d bounce me up to P-6 for sure. I mentioned that we’d been reading Faustus in class, and that’s when I decided to do a bit of . . . let’s call it
research
. I dug through the library and found what was supposedly a magician’s handbook. Not sleight of hand kind of stuff. I mean what’s called a
grimoire
. And I decided to try my hand at necromancy.

Look, I’m not crazy. I went into it more than half-skeptical. And I want to state for the record here that I . . .

-2-

D
iary entry two
: two hours later. Time’s running out, for sure!

Sorry for the interruption. I’m back now after wasting two hours with the police shrink again. He ran me over the story again, but I held up pretty well, I think. At least I didn’t tell him what I’m going to write about now. But like I said earlier, I want to have this all recorded so if I’m right . . . Oh, Jesus. . . . If I’m right. . . .

Where was I? Oh, yeah—necromancy . . . a deal with the Devil. Yes—yes—yes! A deal that was signed in blood! The library on the Gorham campus had an ancient
grimoire
. Well, actually it was a facsimile of one, published a few years ago by the University of Nebraska Press. It’s amazing what gets published these days. I wonder if the person who edited the text got tenure. I can’t recall his name just now. Anyway, I looked up the spell for summoning the Devil and . . . now I know you’re going to think I’m crazy, but you have to believe me on this; I did it!

I actually summoned the Devil!

Go ahead. Laugh. What does it matter? I’ll be dead—and in Hell—soon enough!

I have a key to Bailey Hall, so I came back to my office late one night—sometime after eleven o’clock, so I could be ready by midnight. After making sure my office door was locked, I set to work. Pushing back the cheap rug I had by my desk (to keep the rollers of my chair from squeaking), I drew a pentagram on the floor using a black Magic Marker. I placed a black candle—boy, were
they
hard to find!—at each of the five points of the star and lit them. Then, taking the black leather-bound book, I began to recite the Latin incantations backwards.

Actually, I was surprised that it worked. My Latin was so rusty, I was afraid I’d mispronounce something and end up summoning a talking toadstool or something.

But it worked—it
actually
worked! In a puff of sulfurous fumes, “Old Scratch” himself appeared.

Looking around, he said dryly, “Well, at least you’re not another damned politician!” Then, getting right down to business, he said, “Okay, what do you want in exchange for your soul?”

With his golden, cat-slit eyes burning into me, I had the feeling that he already knew—more clearly than I did at the moment. Anyway, I told him. I said that I wanted an absolutely foolproof way of killing my wife and not getting caught. I told him I was willing to sign over my soul to him—
yes! Dear God! In blood!
—if I could just get rid of Sally and be absolutely certain that I wouldn’t get caught.

I’m writing this, you must have realized by now, in a jail cell. I’m the prime suspect for my wife’s murder, but I haven’t been charged with anything—not yet, anyway. I have a perfect alibi, you see, and there are these other problems, too. If you read the
Portland Press Herald
tomorrow, you’ll find out whether or not I got away with it.

What the Devil did was hand me a revolver. He called it a Colt .24—a “specially modified” Colt .45—and a box of nice, shiny, brass-jacketed bullets. He told me all I had to do, after I signed the agreement, of course, was load the gun and aim it at Sally—he suggested I sneak home sometime before lunch someday—pull the trigger, throw the gun away, and make sure I went to work as usual the next day. If I did exactly what he said, he guaranteed that I’d go free.

Sounded okay to me. At this point, I was well past analyzing the situation rationally. I’d been under a lot of pressure, you understand. My wife’s lawyer had stuck the end nozzle of his vacuum cleaner into my wallet and was sucking up the bucks. I’d been without sleep for nearly two days and nights running—I was getting so worked up about Sally.

And the capper was Rosie. As soon as she found out that Sally knew about us, she cooled off. Cooled off Hell—she froze! Maybe—I hate to think it!—but maybe it was just the chance of getting caught that had added to her excitement, her sense of adventure, her passion. Once we got caught, the thrill was gone for her. Could she really have been that shallow? I can’t help but think so.

I wasn’t completely convinced this whole business with the Devil had really worked, because . . . well, I must’ve fallen asleep after he pricked my finger so I could sign the contract in blood, gave me the gun, and disappeared. I woke up, stiff-necked and hurting all over, flat on my back on my office floor, mere minutes before my eight o’clock class. The candles had burned down and extinguished themselves, but in the pale wash of morning light, I could see the pentagram on the floor, so I knew I hadn’t dreamed everything. Also, I had the gun . . . a Colt .24!

I’d been asleep—I don’t know how long. Not more than four hours, I guessed. I remembered that I had started the summoning right at midnight, like I was supposed to, but I had no idea how long it took. At least for me, old Satan didn’t waste any time with dizzying visions of power and glory, or processions of spirits. Nothing, really—just a straightforward business transaction. Thinking about it later, it could just as easily have been Old Man Olsen, the night janitor in Bailey Hall.

But like I said, I did have the gun, and—damned if I didn’t decide then and there that I’d use it. I had my two morning classes first, but right after them, I planned to go straight home, point the gun at Sally, and pull the trigger—even if, then and there, it blew her through the picture window. I’d reached my limit, which, I’d like to think, is considerably beyond what most men can stand.

So I did it.

After my second class—between classes I had time to drag the rug back and gulp down some coffee and an Egg McMuffin—I took off for home. As luck would have it, Sally was—Damn! Here they come again!

-3-

D
iary entry three
: more than an hour wasted—not much time left!

This time the police came in again, not the doctor. Talk about being confused! I know they want to charge me with the shooting, but my alibi is rock solid, and the funniest thing about it all is, they can’t get my gun to fire. So they asked me some more about my relationship with Sally, using the excuse that maybe it’ll give them a lead on who else might have wanted to kill her. They said I might be released soon.

Hah!

As if that’s going to make a difference!

Where was I . . . Oh, yeah—Sally was home, and her lawyer, old Walter-baby, was there with her. I sort of wondered why he was there at my house. Maybe nosing around gave him better ideas how to skin me alive. Or maybe getting into Sally’s pants was part of his fee. You know what they say about lawyers. . . . But I couldn’t afford to leave a witness, so whatever he was doing there, that was just his tough luck. One more lawyer in Hell wasn’t going to make a difference, anyway.

I walked in from the kitchen and nodded a greeting to the two of them, sitting there on the couch. I mumbled something about having forgotten some test papers as I put my briefcase down on the telephone table, opened it, and took out the gun. Shielding it from their sight with the opened top of the briefcase, I brought the gun up, took careful aim at Walter, and squeezed the trigger. Not once—not twice—three times! Good number, three. A literature professor knows all about the significance of the number three.

But nothing happened!

Although I’d been careful to slip a bullet into each chamber before I left the office, there was no sound, no kick in my hand. There wasn’t even much of a
click
. The only thing I could think was that maybe the Colt .24 wouldn’t work for someone who wasn’t part of the deal, so I pointed it at Sally and fired off three more shots . . . with the same result.

Nothing.

I do remember—or thinking I remember—smelling a faint aroma of spent gunpowder, but I chalked that up to wishful thinking.

Sally and Walter never even noticed what I was doing. They just kept right on talking, ignoring me as I gawked at them; so I slipped the gun back into my briefcase, shut it, and went up to the bedroom, shuffling around a bit up there while I tried to figure out what to do. I’d been packing my things to move out, but Sally—against old Walter-baby’s advice, I might add—had said it was all right for me to stay in the house until the apartment I’d rented in Gorham opened up the first of the month. Thanks, Sal. As it turned out, that was the last favor she ever did for me—except a day later, when she dropped dead!

So anyway, I came back downstairs, got my briefcase, and headed back to campus with Sally and Walter still sitting on the couch just as alive as they could be. I was feeling like I’d been ripped off, set up or something by the Devil. As far as I was concerned, his Colt .24 was a dud.

Back at my office, about two o’clock, I checked the Colt. I was surprised as all hell to see six spent shells in the chamber—no bullets, just empty shells. I wondered if I could have been so dumb as to load the gun with empty bullets. I didn’t think so—I’d used the ones the Devil had given me. I shook the empties out into my hand and then tossed them into the trash. Then I slipped six fresh ones from the Devil’s box into the chamber. I was getting a bit scared that maybe I had hallucinated the whole thing, but that still didn’t explain where I had gotten the Colt.

I’m sure by then I wasn’t thinking too clearly, lack of sleep and tension and all, so I decided to test the gun right there in my office. I sighted along the barrel at one of the pictures on my wall—one of my favorites, actually: a silk-screened advertisement for the Dartmouth Christmas Revels—and gently squeezed the trigger.

Nothing happened.

Turning quickly, I aimed at my doctoral dissertation on the top shelf of my bookcase. Now there was something else to hate! I pulled the trigger a second time.

Nothing.

Again, aiming at the pencil sharpener beside the door, I squeezed the trigger.

Nada!

Pointing at the wall, I snapped off three more shots, and still nothing happened. I caught the same faint, tingling aroma of gun smoke I’d smelled back at the house, but I guessed it had to be my imagination. But you should never guess when you’re dealing with the Devil . . . not once you’ve signed your soul over to him.

Again, though—and this time it struck me as
really
weird—when I opened the chamber, all six bullets were spent. Maybe they were dummies or something, I thought—not really made of lead . . . or maybe
I
was the dummy being led!

I picked up the box of shells, now missing twelve bullets, and after inspecting them very carefully—they sure as hell seemed real enough to me—I reloaded, placed the gun on my desk, and tipped my chair back to think about all of this.

I’d been had, I knew that much!

Rage and stark fear tossed around inside me. I had signed my soul over to the Devil for
what?
For a revolver that didn’t even work!

Anyway, like I hinted at, the next day, by noon, Sally was dead.

A neighbor of ours, Mrs. Benton, said she heard three gunshots from our house. Afraid there was a robbery or something going on, she stayed in her house and, clutching her living room curtains to hide herself, peeked out at our house while she called the Gorham police. They came right away and found Sally dead of three gunshot wounds to the head. I’ve heard it wasn’t a very pretty sight.

I, of course, didn’t know this at the time. I was just returning to my office on the Gorham campus after conducting my graduate seminar on Elizabethan Drama in Portland. I hadn’t gone home the night before and had slept—again—on my office floor, so I wasn’t in the best of moods.

I spent the next hour or so at my desk, working through a stack of papers and pondering everything that had happened lately when there came a hard knocking at my door.

Almost without thinking, I scooped the Colt into my desk drawer but—foolishly--didn’t slide the drawer completely shut before I answered the door. Two uniformed police officers entered, politely shook my hand, and then informed me that my wife had been murdered . . . shot to death with a Colt .45.

I fell apart, wondering which I felt more intensely—shock or relief. I hadn’t been able to do it, but
someone
had! The policemen waited patiently for me to gain control of myself, then explained that they wanted to know where I had been in the past three hours. Apparently Mrs. Benton had seen fit to fill them in on our domestic problems. They also asked if I owned a Colt .45.

If this whole story has a tragic mistake—for me, at least—it was not following the Devil’s advice precisely to the letter. That’s how he gets you, you know. I should have realized that. I’d read enough plays and stories about him. He had told me that if I aimed the gun at Sally, pulled the trigger, and then threw the gun away, I’d never get caught.