The Devil Eats Here (Multi-Author Short Story Collection) (2 page)

Mahmood smiled. “The man in the nice suit?”

“I guess.” Effie took out her notebook. “Paul liked to look nice, even though he couldn’t remember the time of day. Maybe you have a motel name or some woman’s phone number, that’s all I need.”

“He disappeared.” Mahmood said, simple as saying Paul went for a walk.

Effie waved her notebook. “Paul has a way of doing that when there’s work to be done, but he comes up for air.”

Mahmood shook his head. “He disappeared.”

“Good enough for me.” Effie shoved her notebook into her pocket. “As long as I get the story. What about the wish? You said anything?” She made a mental list - a new boss, a good man -

“Anything!”Mahmood’s white teeth sparkled.

He seemed very confident.

“Look, I need a good story, a juicy tale, witchcraft, magic, something to grab the readers.” She winked. “Hey, this wish thing? What do I give up, my firstborn, my soul? And the kid, some kind of boy bride?”

Mahmood’s eyes opened large as black and white marbles. “It’s all part of the ceremony.”

Effie mopped sweat from her face and neck with her sleeve. “Hey, no offense, but I want a solid piece to report. Interviews and photographs, gossip. So, sign me up for whatever ceremony. I'll do anything, work, kick or punch, I want my story.”

“Ahhh—” Mahmood’s head bobbed like a happy-faced nodding toy.

“Good, we’re on the same page. What about you? Did you make a wish?”

“This!” He spread out his arms. “Doing this!”

Effie shooed another mosquito away without success. “What’s with their…some kind of infectious disease?”

“No-no—it’s a tribal…”

“Tribal tattoo, that's right! I could do a lot with that. Let’s get this over with.”

Yet, as she stood and waited, it was not the baking sun that sapped her energy. She found herself relaxing again…she jerked awake.

The serpentine dancing of the natives and their mumbo-jumbo song might tease the budget traveler to snap a been-there-done-that memory, but not her. Later, she would interview everyone, especially the tall man, the one called the Sender. He was standing stiff as a bronzed statue next to the boy. Mahmood had told her the curved blade in his hand was a parang, a local knife, the standard accompaniment to local ceremonies. Sure. Another cheap gimmick.

In the distance, Mahmood was talking and laughing with the villagers. Children tugged at his shirt, dug into his pockets, and he let them. One big happy family. Boring news, but that could be fixed easily.

Effie stared at the blank piece of paper in her hand. Right now, she wanted a cold shower. Oh well, why not? She wrote, “new life”, and folded the paper.

The boy walked over and took the paper from her. What a face. Large eyes, white smile. That face and the big man with the knife on the front page -
“Boy sacrifices to save village!”
The boy tucked her wish into a gap between the stones.

Light sparked. The tall man was approaching the boy. In his hand, the moving blade caught the sun like a flying shard of glass. So the freak show was about to begin. Maybe she could stop at a waterfall on the way out. The man swung the blade. Effie opened her mouth, but all she could do was move her lips. The boy’s tiny head detached, dropped, wobbled… Effie passed out.

*

Chuck grabbed the last bit of his triple chocolate doughnut. He screamed into the telephone.

“What do you mean disappeared?”

“She’s gone, poof!” The other man said.

“Mahman, oh, what...Mahmood, right? Mahmood, people don’t just disappear. Are you guys having a good time on my dime? I should have known, that girl’s a troublemaker. Hallo? Hey-hallo?” Chuck bit into his doughnut. “Ge-me-get me Malaysia again! No, no, forget it, get me another dozen of doughnuts!”

Digging into those messy cabinets for a backup story required backup food. He shoved the doughnut into his mouth.

*

The first time the parang swung over Mahmood's best friend's neck, he almost passed out too. But it was all over now. He slipped the telephone into his pocket. The villagers laughed and chatted as they departed from the clearing. Now they could live in peace, forever, in the rainforest, the only place they knew. If not for the devil, where would the villagers go? A foreigner for a villager...Hantu granted all wishes...maybe not in this lifetime, maybe later...

Mahmood stood in the middle of the clearing.

Rain was falling again, like endless strings of crystals. Wind shuffled canopies into a slow dance.

Right here, as the sun set, women used to gather in circles, their tongues wagging the latest gossip, their hands braiding leaves into wraps. Men squatted under the trees, chewing tobacco, sharpening tools. Children played tagged and chased the chickens. As the sun smiled one last time over the tree, the youngest one always called out to him.Mahmood, Mahmood.That last dinner. It was his turn, when the others returned to their shacks, to check the embers.

“Mahmood, Mahmood!”

“Huh?” Mahmood opened his eyes.

“Mahmood, Mahmood!” From the bushes, children were calling for him. Women were waving. The Sender was cleaning his parang on a banana leaf, back and forth, front and back.

Mahmood bolted.

How many times did he pray for forgiveness? Tuhan, Hantu, God, devil. Only Hantu offered a solution. What did foreigners say? Win-all?

“Mahmood, Mahmood!”

Hands clapped over his ears, Mahmood ran past Hantu. He stopped. Silly. Nothing moved. The rain made fools of men with heavy hearts. He reached out with his hand, but he could not bear to touch the yellowed tipped rock. No one forced her, or the others.

“Win-win.” He said, and left. His lonely rented room in the city waited for him.

Lightning streaked. Trees and branches lit into a scarred painting. Winds whipped leaves into Mahmood’s face. Something was burning. Impossible. Nothing could stay lit in this rain. Branches whipped his arms. Vines slapped around his body. The charred smell followed him. He tugged and tore to get away. At a large rock slimy with lichen, he stopped to catch his breath.

Rain streamed cool over his head, his face, his legs...

Thunder boomed.

Mahmood opened his eyes. How long had he been standing there? He continued through the forest.

“Wh-what?” He stared at the clearing. “I-I—”

He took another step. His shoes sunk into wet soil. He laughed. How did he lose his way? He lived here his whole life.

“I need a good curry.” He laughed, and made his way across the clearing again.

Something golden moved. Hantu? Mahmood squinted.

“Ahhh!” Mahmood reeled backward.

A rock, flashing golden, flew at him, barely touching his nose, then dropped into the ground.

Mahmood fell on his knees.“No, no, this is not good,takbagus!”

Where was the rock?

Wind whipped around him, as if admonishing him for his incompetence.

The girl, she wouldn’t stop talking, it was her fault, Chuck was right, she was a troublemaker. Where was the rock?

Children and women screamed. Men’s voices grew loud.

The villagers were shouting. “What is happening? Our new home in the forest, you promised us…”

Women and men jostled around Mahmood.

“It’s the rock!” Mahmood fell to his knees. He scattered rocks. “We must find the rock!”

Hands dug like spades into the ground. A small hand pulled away.

“Yes, yes!” Mahmood smiled. “Good boy, Ali, good!”

Men and women parted. Ali sprang away. A woman began to chant.

Mahmood sat on the ground. Why was the Sender staring at him? He wanted to close his eyes and rest. Why was everyone smiling at him?

The chanting rose.

Leaves fell on him, layering him, cool and wet, soothing as hands washing away the aches in his body, the pain in his -

Something flew above his head.

Whoop!

THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS

by Tara Maya

Personal Paradise Inc. did not buy ads in the Chicago Tribune or post notices on the Internet. They relied strictly on word-of-mouth. Their clientele were ubiquitously as discrete as they were rich.

The office of Personal Paradise Inc. reflected the nature of the company: quietly opulent. The halls carried the whiff of affluent men, of cologne, leather and mahogany, but it was the art on the walls that drew his eye. Exquisite and unidentifiable masterpieces of famous artists graced the walls, boasting silently: We were made in another history. Glass shelves framed Declarations of Independence to start nations that had never existed, and Treaties of Perpetual Peace to end wars that had never been fought. Photographs showed cities where all the cars had three wheels and the pedestrians wore fashions subtly wrong. Despite himself, Dean was impressed.

Klaas Smit was a white-haired man with a florid face and immaculate suit. His office was dominated by a large photographic mural of Manhattan: a Manhattan with a skyline not quite right, a nude Statue of Liberty, Dutch flags.

"So," Dean said without preamble, as he seated himself across from Smit. "Have you found me a world where I am richer and more powerful than I am in this dump?"

"We have found the best of all possible worlds for you." Smit leaned forward over steepled hands. "You’ll be the happiest man on Earth."

Dean reflected on his life: his company, once his baby, now his slave driver; his parents, to whom he had not spoken in years; Colette, grown more and more distant. None of it made him happy.

Smit displayed a map of the alternate Earth that the company had identified as Dean Vanch’s personal paradise. The map of the other Earth looked like a three-day binge of Risk. Outlandish politics resulted in familiar landmasses with unfamiliar borders.

"France won the French-Indian wars," Klaas Smit said affably. "Among others. But don't worry -- by the early Twenty-first Century, Napoleon's empire has long since collapsed in on itself. It will be nothing but history for you. Here is where your alternate self lives."

Smit pointed to a nation gathered around the Great Lakes, between New England and Louisiana, labeled "Acadia." The capital city read: DIESKAU, although it was located where Detroit should have been.

Smit cheerily outlined the history of Acadia. Like most of the nations in North America, it had achieved independence in the 1830s, trading an imperial dictatorship from abroad for a homegrown "presidential" dictatorship. Because of ethnic tensions, Acadia's fitful bouts of democracy had been pockmarked ever since with military coups and civil wars. Acadia had, in some ways, fared better than other North American nations. Take French Mexico, with 159 coups in 170 years since independence, or California, which, after thirty years of fascist rule followed by forty years of Communism, had no economy or industrial infrastructure worth mentioning.

In recent years, Acadia, like many of its neighbors, had been engaged in bouts of vicious ethnic cleansing, as the Anglophones and Francophones took advantage of their turns in power to exterminate one another. The country funded its forty-years-and-going civil war with a brisk cocaine trade.

To Dean, it sounded like Eastern Europe's 20th Century piled on top of South America's 19th. "This is the best of all possible worlds? Weren't there any with nuclear winters available?"

Smit smiled slyly. "Remember! What matters isn't if the world makes most people happy, only if it makes you happy!"

With a subtle gesture, Smit indicated the papers on the desk between them. Crisp black on white, legal documents, with yellow sticky arrows indicating everywhere Dean needed to sign.

The docs describing the proposed journey through the Multiverse were more than twenty pages long; when lawyers met physicists, they birthed a many-headed hydra of nearly incomprehensible techno-babble and legalese. During a previous meeting, which had involved Smit, Dean, the company lawyer and Dean’s lawyer, Smit had explained the contract clause by clause. Clause 21, for instance, said that Dean would not be able to travel to the alternate dimension in his own body. His quantum consciousness, as the scientists had defined it, would inhabit the body of the Dean who already existed in the alternate reality. Since that world would be the best of worlds for any existing Dean in the Multiverse, Dean would find himself stronger, healthier and maybe even better looking than he was now. But that was just the beginning, Smit had assured him. Every aspect of his life would be the best it could be.

Dean had a sudden vision of himself as supreme dictator of one of the states on that alternate earth, with palaces, cars, women, and the power of life and death over his subjects. He signed the papers. The only sounds in the office were the ripple of the pages as he turned them, and the scratch of his pen on every line marked with a sticky yellow arrow labeled SIGN HERE.

When he finished, the enormity of what he had done washed over him. He felt almost giddy.

“You’re going to love your new life,” Smit said.

"Damn straight. As long as I’m happy, screw the rest. Let’s do it."

*

Dean felt nothing during the transfer itself, but a hollow roar echoed his ears. Cold, gritty wind blasted him. He found himself next to naked and the temperature next to freezing. He gawked at his surroundings. Barbed wire. Thin, half dressed men. Sky blown with ash and smoke. For some reason he was holding a heavy rock. What the hell...?

Dean stepped out of line with the shuffling men. They, too, carried large rocks. The stink of their unwashed bodies affronted him, even more so when he realized he stank as badly as the rest. He dropped his to the ground, fighting nausea, forcing himself to stand tall.

Pain snapped across his back. He cried out and crumbled to the ground, full of surprise and then indignation.

"Work, you lazy dog!" a voice growled.

Dean almost laughed. The absurdity overwhelmed him. A thug in an unrecognized uniform had hit him with a whip. Then anger replaced irony. He recognized a damn labor camp when he saw one. And it was clear he wasn't running it. Personal Paradise Inc. had betrayed him.