Tim Pratt - Sympathy for the Devil

The next time I went, the maudlin drunk was there again wailing obscenities at her through the door. She shouted at me to come back later, that she didn’t need her food right now. She sounded resigned and irritated, and she went back to scolding her visitor before I had backed out of earshot.

He was screaming at her that she’d gone too far, that she’d pissed about too long, that things were coming to a head, that there was going to be hell to pay, that she couldn’t avoid it forever, that it was her own fault.

When I came back he was asleep, snoring loudly, curled up a few feet into the mildewing passage. Mrs. Miller took her food and ate it quickly, returned it without speaking.

When I returned the following week, she began to whisper to me as soon as I knocked on the door, hissing urgently as she opened it briefly and grabbed the bowl.

“It was an accident, you know,” she said, as if responding to something I’d said. “I mean of course you know in theory that anything might happen, you get warned, don’t you? But oh my… oh my God it took the breath out of me and made me cold to realize what had happened.”

I waited. I could not leave, because she had not returned the bowl. She had not said I could go. She spoke again, very slowly.

“It was a new day.” Her voice was distant and breathy. “Can you even imagine? Can you see what I was ready to do? I was poised… to change… to see everything that’s hidden. The best place to hide a book is in a library. The best place to hide secret things is there, in the visible angles, in our view, in plain sight.

“I had studied and sought, and learnt, finally, to see. It was time to learn truths.

“I opened my eyes fully, for the first time.

“I had chosen an old wall. I was looking for the answer to some question that I told you I can’t even remember now, but the question wasn’t the main thing. That was the opening of my eyes.

“I stared at the whole mass of the bricks. I took another glance, relaxed my sight. At first I couldn’t stop seeing the bricks as bricks, the divisions as layers of cement, but after a time they became pure vision. And as the whole broke down into lines and shapes and shades, I held my breath as I began to see.

“Alternatives appeared to me. Messages written in the pockmarks. Insinuations in the forms. Secrets unraveling. It was bliss.

“And then without warning my heart went tight, as I saw something. I made sense of the pattern.

“It was a mess of cracks and lines and crumbling cement, and as I looked at it, I saw a pattern in the wall.

“I saw a clutch of lines that looked just like something… terrible… something old and predatory and utterly terrible… staring right back at me.

“And then I saw it move.”

“You have to understand me,” she said. “Nothing changed. See? All the time I was looking I saw the wall. But that first moment, it was like when you see a face in the cloud. I just noticed in the pattern in the brick, I just noticed something, looking at me. Something angry.

“And then in the very next moment, I just… I just noticed another load of lines-cracks that had always been there, you understand? Patterns in broken brick that I’d seen only a second before-that looked exactly like that same thing, a little closer to me. And in the next moment a third picture in the brick, a picture of the thing closer still.

“Reaching for me.”

“I broke free then,” she whispered. “I ran away from there in terror, with my hands in front of my eyes and I was screaming. I ran and ran.

“And when I stopped and opened my eyes again, I had to run to the edges of a park, and I took my hands slowly down and dared to look behind me, and saw that there was nothing coming from the alley where I’d been. So I turned to the little snatch of scrub grass and trees.

“And I saw the thing again.”

Mrs. Miller’s voice was stretched out as if she was dreaming. My mouth was open and I huddled closer to the door.

“I saw it in the leaves,” she said forlornly. “As I turned I saw the leaves in such a way… just a chance conjuncture, you understand? I noticed a pattern. I couldn’t not. You don’t choose whether to see faces in the clouds. I saw the monstrous thing again and it still reached for me, and I shrieked and all the mothers and children and fathers and children in the park turned and gazed at me, and I turned my eyes from that tree and whirled on my feet to face a little family in my way.

“And the thing was there in the same pose,” she whispered in misery. “I saw it in the outlines of the father’s coat and the spokes of the baby’s pushchair, and the tangles of the mother’s hair. It was just another mess of lines, you see? But you don’t choose what you notice. And I couldn’t help but notice just the right lines out of the whole, just the lines out of all the lines there, just the ones to see the thing again, a little closer, looking at me.

“And I turned and saw it closer still in the clouds, and I turned again and it was clutching for me in the rippling weeds in the pond, and as I closed my eyes I swear I felt something touch my dress.

“You understand me? You understand?”

I didn’t know if I understood or not. Of course now I know that I did not.

“It lives in the details,” she said bleakly. “It travels in that… in that perception. It moves through those chance meetings of lines. Maybe you glimpse it sometimes when you stare at clouds, and then maybe it might catch a glimpse of you, too.

“But it saw me full on. It’s jealous of… of its place, and there I was peering through without permission, like a nosy neighbor through a hole in the fence. I know what it is. I know what happened.

“It lurks before us, in the everyday. It’s the boss of all the things hidden in plain sight. Terrible things, they are. Appalling things. Just almost in reach. Brazen and invisible.

“It caught my glances. It can move through whatever I see.

“For most people it’s just chance, isn’t it? What shapes they see in a tangle of wire. There’s a thousand pictures there, and when you look, some of them just appear. But now… the thing in the lines chooses the pictures for me. It can thrust itself forward. It makes me see it. It’s found its way through. To me. Through what I see. I opened a door into my perception.”

She sounded frozen with terror. I was not equipped for that kind of adult fear, and my mouth worked silently for something to say.

“That was a long, long journey home. Every time I peeked through the cracks in my fingers, I saw that thing crawling for me.

“It waited ready to pounce, and when I opened my eyes even a crack I opened the door again. I saw the back of a woman’s jumper and in the detail of the fabric the thing leapt for me. I glimpsed a yard of broken paving and I noticed just the lines that showed me the thing… baying.

“I had to shut my eyes quick.

“I groped my way home.

“And then I taped my eyes shut and I tried to think about things.”

There was silence for a time.

“See, there was always the easy way, that scared me rotten, because I was never one for blood and pain,” she said suddenly, and her voice was harder. “I held the scissors in front of my eyes a couple of times, but even bandaged blind as I was I couldn’t bear it. I suppose I could’ve gone to a doctor. I can pull strings, I could pull in a few favors, have them do the job without pain.

“But you know I never… really… reckoned… that’s what I’d do,” she said thoughtfully. “What if you found a way to close the door? Eh? And you’d already put out your eyes? You’d feel such a fool, wouldn’t you?

“And as you know it wouldn’t be good enough to wear pads and eyepatches and all. I tried. You catch glimpses. You see the glimmers of light and maybe a few of your own hairs, and that’s the doorway right there, when the hairs cross in the corner of your eye so that if you notice just a few of them in just the right way… they look like something coming for you. That’s a doorway.