Tim Pratt - Sympathy for the Devil

“Then-how could you feel guilty?”

“It was-” He broke off suddenly, and looked at her. She had a gentle face, and her eyes were filled with compassion. He shrugged. “I’ve said so much,” he said. “More would sound no more fantastic and do me no more damage.”

“There’ll be no damage from anything you tell me,” she said, with a sparkle of decisiveness.

He smiled his thanks this time, sobered, and said, “These horrors-the maimings, the deaths-they were funny, once, long ago. I must have been a child, a baby. Something taught me, then, that the agony and death of others was to be promoted and enjoyed. I remember, I-almost remember when that stopped. There was a-a toy, a-a-”

Jeremy blinked. He had been staring at the fine crack in the ceiling for so long that his eyes hurt.

“What are you doing?” asked the monster.

“Dreaming real,” said Jeremy. “I am grown up and sitting in the big empty lecture place, talking to the girl with the brown hair that shines. Her name’s Catherine.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, all the funny dreams. Only-”

“Well?”

“They’re not so funny.”

The monster scurried over to him and pounced on his chest. “Time to sleep now. And I want to-”

“No,” said Jeremy. He put his hands over his throat. “I have enough now. Wait until I see some more of this real-dream.”

“What do you want to see?”

“Oh, I don’t know. There’s something…”

“Let’s have some fun,” said the monster. “This is the girl you can change, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Go ahead. Give her an elephant’s trunk. Make her grow a beard. Stop her nostrils up. Go on. You can do anything.” Jeremy grinned briefly, then said, “I don’t want to.”

“Oh, go on. Just see how funny…”

“A toy,” said the professor. “But more than a toy. It could talk, I think. If I could only remember more clearly!”

“Don’t try so hard. Maybe it will come,” she said. She took his hand impulsively. “Go ahead.”

“It was-something-” the professor said haltingly, “-something soft and not too large, I don’t recall…”

“Was it smooth?”

“No. Hairy-fuzzy. Fuzzy! I’m beginning to get it. Wait, now… A thing like a teddy bear. It talked. It-why, of course! It was alive!”

“A pet, then. Not a toy.”

“Oh, no,” said the professor, and shuddered. “It was a toy, all right. My mother thought it was, anyway. It made me dream real.”

“You mean, like Peter Ibbetson?”

“No, no. Not like that.” He leaned back, rolled his eyes up. “I used to see myself as I would be later, when I was grown. And before. Oh. Oh-I think it was then-Yes! It must have been then that I began to see all those terrible accidents. It was! It was!”

“Steady,” said Catherine. “Tell me quietly.”

He relaxed. “Fuzzy. The demon-the monster. I know what it did, the devil. Somehow it made me see myself as I grew. It made me repeat what I had learned. It-it ate knowledge! It did; it ate knowledge. It had some strange affinity for me, for something about me. It could absorb knowledge that I gave out. And it-it changed the knowledge into blood, the way a plant changes sunlight and water into cellulose!”

“I don’t understand,” she said again.

“You don’t? How could you? How can I? I know that that’s what it did, though. It made me-why, I was spouting my lectures here to the beast when I was four years old! The words of them, the sense of them, came from now to me then. And I gave it to the monster, and it ate the knowledge and spiced it with the things it made me do in my real dreams. It made me trip a man up on a hat, of all absurd things, and fall into a subway excavation. And when I was in my teens, I was right by the excavation to see it happen. And that’s the way with all of them! All the horrible accidents I have witnessed, I have half-remembered before they happened. There’s no stopping, any of them. What am I going to do?”

There were tears in her eyes. “What about me?” she whispered-more, probably, to get his mind away from his despair than for any other reason.

“You. There’s something about you, if only I could remember. Something about what happened to that-that toy, that beast. You were in the same environment as I, as that devil. Somehow, you are vulnerable to it and-Catherine, Catherine, I think that something was done to you that-”

He broke off. His eyes widened in horror. The girl sat beside him, helping him, pitying him, and her expression did not change. But-everything else about her did.

Her face shrank, shrivelled. Her eyes lengthened. Her ears grew long, grew until they were like donkey’s ears, like rabbit’s ears, like horrible, long hairy spider’s legs. Her teeth lengthened into tusks. Her arms shrivelled into jointed straws, and her body thickened.

It smelled like rotten meat.

There were filthy claws scattering out of her polished open-toed shoes. There were bright sores. There were-other things. And all the while she-it-held his hand and looked at him with pity and friendliness.

The professor-

Jeremy sat up and flung the monster away. “It isn’t funny!” he screamed. “It isn’t funny, it isn’t, it isn’t, it isn’t!”

The monster sat up and looked at him with its soft, bland, teddy-bear expression. “Be quiet,” it said. “Let’s make her all squashy now, like soft-soap. And hornets in her stomach. And we can put her-”

Jeremy clapped his hands over his ears and screwed his eyes shut. The monster talked on. Jeremy burst into tears, leapt from the crib and, hurling the monster to the floor, kicked it. It grunted. “That’s funny!” screamed the child. “Ha, ha!” he cried, as he planted both feet in its yielding stomach. He picked up the twitching mass and hurled it across the room. It struck the nursery clock. Clock and monster struck the floor together in a flurry of glass, metal, and blood. Jeremy stamped it all into a jagged, pulpy mass, blood from his feet mixing with blood from the monster, the same strange blood which the monster had pumped into his neck…

Mummy all but fainted when she ran in and saw him. She screamed, but he laughed, screaming. The doctor gave him sedatives until he slept, and cured his feet. He was never very strong after that. They saved him, to live his life and to see his real-dreams; funny dreams, and to die finally in a lecture room, with his eyes distended in horror while horror froze his heart, and a terrified young woman ran crying, crying for help.

It began the day our new refrigerator was delivered. A big silver thing that looked like a miniature Airstream trailer turned on its side. But Rae loved it. We had bought it a few days before. In January I told her as soon as my raise comes in, you get your fridge. And I kept my promise, all six hundred and thirty-nine dollars of it.

Two puffing deliverymen came in the pouring rain to curse and shove it into place in our kitchen. Both guys were in big bad moods, that was plain. But no wonder-who wants to deliver appliances in a ripping thunderstorm? When they were finished and I’d signed the delivery papers, Rae offered coffee. That perked them up. After they’d done stirring and sipping and settling into the chairs one guy, “Dennis” it said on his shirt, told a strange story that got us thinking.

For the past few days while driving around making deliveries, they’d seen piles of furniture all over town stacked in the middle of sidewalks. That didn’t seem so strange to me. But Dennis said they saw it at least ten times overall: big piles of furniture heaped up, just sitting there unguarded usually.