Tales From Gavagan's Bar (43 page)

             
But I assembled all the properties, and at midnight, as the grimoire advised, started my incantation. It's quite impressive, even when you translate it into English. I used the medieval Latin of the original, of course; I didn't want to vary the formula any more than I had to; and I kept in mind all the time that this was a perfectly genuine offer. And I succeeded.

             
[Gross emitted a prodigious belch: Mr. Cohan almost dropped the bottle he was holding, and Witherwax's mouth fell open. "You mean you saw the Devil?" he asked incredulously. "Mr. Cohan, another round."]

             
No, I don't mean anything of the kind. I told you in the beginning I didn't actually see any devil. But I know I raised one. The lights in my pentacle took on a bluish cast that I simply haven't any means of accounting for; I found myself suddenly shivering all over, though the room was quite warm, and I had the most horrible sensation of depression and utter despair, as though everything in the world had failed and I had lost my last friend. The strangest part was—well, you know the feeling when you're reading, concentrating on the page, and someone looks over your shoulder? It was like that, only intensified a dozen times. I looked all round the room and even turned around two or three times. There was no one there, but I definitely felt someone in the room with me.

             
I thought that as long as I had gone this far, I might as well carry on. So I said: "I offer you the soul of Calvin Haugen in exchange for money—lots of money."

             
I don't know what I expected to happen, but nothing did except that the lights gave a slight flicker. Not a sound;
nothing to see. If it hadn't been for that feeling of
presence
and the awful depression, I would have said this was quite as much a failure as Cal's own experiments. But I remembered the bargain had to be sealed, so I wrote out another contract and put a drop of blood on it, then pronounced the formula of dismissal.

             
As soon as I did that, both the despair and the conscience of someone being in the room with me vanished, and I found myself wondering what I had been so excited about. One of my lights had burned out, and the contract lay on the floor where I had placed it. The whole thing was a disappointment; I could see how the medieval demon-raisers must have thought themselves bilked if this was all they got after the emotional tension and build-up and the danger of trouble with the Church.

             
But I wasn't through with it yet by any means. I don't usually dream much, and when I do, the dreams are the confused and disorderly kind most people have. But that night I had a perfectly clear, logical dream, just like watching myself on the screen of an extraordinarily clear color television. I was going to the bank and drawing out everything I owned—there was a close-up of my hand writing the figures—and then going to the office of a broker named Wolff and telling him to buy stock in a firm called the Cal-Tex Oil Company. Then I saw a date pad and myself telephoning Wolff to sell out just four days later.

             
The whole thing was so vivid and precise that I looked up the Cal-Tex Oil Company in the morning. There was such a firm all right, and its stock was selling around $1.75—a notorious dog. There was a broker named Wolff, too, with an address in the Benson Building. But I didn't follow the advice of the dream. After all, it seemed to me a pretty slender basis for investing everything I owned in a stock that might be good for wallpaper if it were carefully kept.

             
However, that night I had the dream again, just as clearly pictured as before, only this time with a couple of small differences. The picture of me drawing out the money was accompanied by a series of red flashes, as though the dream
were being insistent on what I should do. At least I took it for that. And the next sequence was changed; instead of going to Wolff's office, I was putting the money in an envelope and sending it to him with a letter by special messenger.

             
I don't know what caused the variation in procedure, but this time I decided to follow directions—that is, except about taking a chance on everything I owned. I couldn't quite do that, but I did sink most of the wad.

             
[He paused; Mr. Witherwax said expectantly: "And did you lose the money?"]

             
No, I didn't, though I might as well. You see—wait, I'm getting ahead of myself. The first thing that happened was that on the morning after I sent Wolff the money, I nearly fell over when I looked at the paper. Cal-Tex had hit a gusher of simply mammoth proportions in an entirely new oilfield; its stock had already scored one of the most sensational rises in the history of the market and was still climbing. It was real then; I hadn't imagined the visitation, and I had actually succeeded in bilking the devil.

             
Or so I thought until Cal called me up. I hadn't called him because—well, because I felt I had played him a rather shabby trick, in spite of his professed agnosticism and his willingness to sell a soul he didn't think he had. But now he called me up, very excited, and wanted me to come over at once.

             
As soon as I got inside the door, he almost shouted. "You were right! It worked; I know it worked; but it's nothing I want to monkey with any more. The damndest thing."

             
He went on to tell me how, the night after I had tried my invocations, he had tried it himself, keeping steadily in mind his perfect sincerity of purpose, just as I had. The thing happened pretty much the same way; he had the shaking chill and the feeling of someone in the room without being able to see anyone, and the terrible melancholy that would have made suicide a positive pleasure, only it seemed to him that his lights had taken on a reddish tinge instead of the blue mine had. It frightened him; he hadn't imagined that Hell was a depressing place. He pronounced the formula of dismissal
almost at once.

             
But as with me, that wasn't the end of it. That night he had had a dream, just as vivid and precise as my own, only of a far different kind. What he saw was the option contract for the sale of his soul that we had worked out the other night, and then his own hand writing "Cancelled" across it, and both of us signing our names.

             
I said: "As a matter of fact, I'll even take up the option. I've just had some luck with money and if you want the five thousand—"

             
He said: "As a matter of fact, it's something I wouldn't really dare to go on with, even though I don't quite believe in it. Those few moments were pretty horrible and vile. I want to get out of the whole thing, and as it happens, I can—even pay you off your hundred. The strangest part of all is that I've had an amazing piece of luck. A broker named Wolff called me up this afternoon about my account. I'd never heard of him and didn't know I had any account, but it seems that someone sent him two thousand dollars by special messenger yesterday, with instructions to invest it in Cal-Tex Oil, and the stuff's gone up like a rocket. I can't imagine who did it; probably that nutsy uncle of mine out in Arizona, with all the dough. He wouldn't give you the time of day if you asked him, but he likes to surprise people. Have you got that crazy document with you?" .

             
I began to see it then. I saw it all, almost in a flash, and it turned out I was right. I don't know how the bookkeeping system of the infernal regions operates, but when Cal summoned up a devil the night after I did, it must have become clear to them that I wasn't Cal Haugen, and the soul I was selling didn't really belong to me; I only had an option on it. That was why the dream changed the second night. I was directed to send the money in, instead of going in person, so Wolff couldn't identify me. I wasn't a person to him, just a name on a sheet of paper. And of course, the devil had arranged it that I would make one of those stupid mistakes people sometimes make. I was thinking of Cal Haugen, so I'd put his signature on the letter to Wolff instead
             
of writing my own name. But there wasn't anything I could do about it at this point. Even if I told Cal the whole story, he would have said I deserved it for trying to sell his soul instead of my own, and he would have been right. I saw a Bible on the table as I went out; the grimoires were gone.

#
★
#

             
Mr. Witherwax finished his Martini. "Did you try the formula again?" he asked, munching the olive.

             
"Yes. I wanted to find out whose soul I
had
sold. But the formula didn't work this time. Maybe I've sold my own and they aren't going to give me a chance to call it off."

             
Mr. Cohan crossed himself again.

-

             
Mr. Gross laid a package on the bar and said: "My Boilermaker, and double on the whiskey, Mr. Cohan." He turned a head like a basketball toward the door. "Is that rain? That's all I needed. That
mamzer
of a nephew—"

             
Young Mr. Keating from the library glanced at Mr. Gross and raised his voice firmly to forestall the oncoming anecdote. "I'll check the closed stacks, Doc, but I don't think we have a really good one. However, I can ask interlibrary service."

             
The snub-nosed Dr. Tobolka appeared to hesitate between the difficulty of dealing with a Gross anecdote and that of following Keating's lead and inventing a reason for not listening. At this moment, Gross sipped his Boilermaker, emitted a ponderous belch and then a groan of positively subterranean depth.

             
Tobolka said: "Are you all right, Adolphus?"

             
Gross said: "If I was any worse, the undertakers are taking me off without even waiting till I fall down. It's my soul." He patted the protuberance just below his sternum to indicate that this was the seat of his soul.

             
"What's the matter with your soul?" asked Tobolka.

             
"It's hurt. On account of this." He indicated the package, about three by four feet and flat. "It was all because of that television. Myself, I'd rather be at Gavagan's than looking at it, but you know how it is with kids. While they're supposed to be doing their homework from school, there they are lying in front
of it and watching a cowboy shoot off his gun fifty times without having to put no bullets into it, and this Miss Marks comes around—-"

             
"I beg your pardon," said a man who was sitting on a stool a couple of places down from Gross, "but is that the Miss Marks who teaches at Pestalozzi School?"

             
Gross regarded him with gravity. "She is that one, and why she would be spending her time teaching I cannot tell you, because what she ought to be doing is in the movies, but I guess maybe there is some reason why she does not, because I heard she got a tryout at the Striped Cat night club and they did not want her after the first show."

             
"Sorry to interrupt," said the man. He was young, well-dressed, and good-looking, with a smile that flashed on and off as though controlled by a switch. "I was just about to meet her, and-"

             
"Make it no matter," said Gross heavily, downing the last of his Boilermaker and shoving the glasses toward Mr. Cohan for a refill. "Like I was saying, this Miss Marks comes around and says that if the kids don't do their homework from school no better, they wouldn't get passed, and I better do something about this television they're watching all the time. And my business has been keeping me late, and my wife, how can you expect a woman to keep the kids from doing what they want?"