Mercedes Lackey - Fiddler Fair (anthology)

He drove straight to the bank, and deposited it all in his savings account. Then he drove straight home, took out the papers Brother Lee had given him and began to read.

Before he was finished, his mind was made up.

The ritual called for some nasty things—not impossible to obtain or perform, but unpleasant for a squeamish man to handle and do. Dancing around in the nude was embarrassing, even if there was no one there to see him. And although he was certain that this motel room had seen worse perversions than the ones he was performing, he felt indescribably filthy when he was through.

Still; if this really worked, it would be worth it all.

If. . . .

“Now how could you possibly doubt me?” asked a genteel voice from behind him.

Lester jumped a foot, and whirled. Mr. Lightman sat comfortably at his ease in the uncomfortable green plastic chair beneath the swag-lamp at the window. Lester thought absently that only a demonic fiend could have been comfortable in that torture-device disguised as a chair.

He was flushing red with acute shame, and terribly aware of his own physical inadequacies. Mr. Lightman cocked his head to one side, and frowned.

“Shame?” he said. “I think not. We’ll have none of that here.”

He gestured—not with his index finger, but with the second. Suddenly Lester’s shame vanished, as if the emotion had been surgically removed. And as he looked down bemusedly at himself, he realized that his physical endowments had grown to remarkable adequacy.

“A taste of things to come,” Lightman said easily. “You must be a perfect specimen, you know. People trust those who are handsome; those who are sexy. Think how many criminals are convicted who are plain, or even ugly—and how few who are handsome. People want to believe in the beautiful. They want to believe in the powerful. Above all, they want to believe.”

Lester nodded, and lowered himself down onto the scratchy bedspread. “As you can see, I’m ready to deal,” he told the fiend calmly.

“So I do see.” Lightman snapped his fingers, and the neatly-typed pages of Lester’s contract appeared in his hand. He leafed through them, his mouth pursed. “Yes,” he murmured, and, “Interesting.” Then he looked up. “You seem to have thought this through very carefully. Brother Lee was not quite so—thorough. The late Brother Lee.”

Lester nodded; then took in the rest of the sentence. “The—late?”

Lightman nodded. “His contract ran out,” the fiend said, simply. “Perhaps he had been planning to gain some extra years by bringing you into the flock, but he had not written any such provision into his contract—and a bargain is a bargain, after all. The usual limit for a contract is seven years. I rarely make exceptions to that rule.”

Lester thought back frantically, and could recall no such provision in his own contract.

But then he calmed himself with the remembrance of his loophole. The very worst that would happen would be that he would live a fabulous life and then die. That prospect no longer held such terror for him with the hard evidence of an afterlife before him. With the Devil so real, God was just as real, right?

That beautiful loophole; so long as he repented, merciful God would forgive his sins. The Adversary would not have him. And he would repent, most truly and sincerely, every sin he committed as soon as he committed them. It was all there in the Bible, in unambiguous terms. If you repented, you were forgiven. That was the mistake everyone else who made these bargains seemed to make; they waited until the last minute, and before they could repent, wham. He wouldn’t be so stupid.

But Mr. Lightman seemed blithely unconcerned by any of this. “I’d like to make a slight change in this contract, if I might,” he said instead. “Since Brother Lee’s empire is going begging, I would like to install you in his place. Conservation of effort, don’t you know, and it will make his flock so much more comfortable.”

Lester nodded cautiously; the fiend waved his hand and the change appeared in fiery letters that glowed for a moment.

“And now, for my articles.” Lightman handed the contract back, and there was an additional page among the rest. He scanned them carefully, including all the fine print. He had expected trouble there, but to his surprise, it seemed to be mostly verses from the Bible itself, including the Lord’s Prayer, with commentaries. It looked, in fact, like a page from a Bible-studies course. He looked up from his perusal to see Lightman gazing at him sardonically.

“What, have you never heard that the Devil can quote Scripture?” The fiend chuckled. “It’s simply the usual stuff. So that you know that I know all the things people usually count on for loopholes.”

That gave him pause for a moment, but he dismissed his doubts. “I’m ready to sign,” he said firmly.

Lightman nodded, and handed him a pen filled with thick, red fluid. He doubted it was ink.

He was the most popular televangelist ever to grace the home screen; surpassing Brother Lee’s popularity and eclipsing it. His message was a simple one, although he never phrased it bluntly: buy your way into heaven, and into heaven on earth. Send Lester Parker money, and Lester will not only see that God puts a “reserved” placard on your seat in the heavenly choir, he’ll see to it that God makes your life on earth a comfortable and happy one. He told people what they wanted to hear, no uncomfortable truths. And there were always plenty of letters he could show, which told stories of how the loyal sheep of his flock had found Jesus, peace of mind, and material prosperity as soon as they sent Lester their check.

Of course, some of those same people would have been happy to ascribe a miraculous reversal of fortune to their “personal psychic” if they’d called the Psychic Hotline number instead of Lester’s. Above all else, people wanted to believe—wasn’t that what both sides said?

He had a computerized answering service for all his mail; no dumping letters into the trash at the bank for him, no sir! He had a fanatically loyal bunch of part-time housewives read the things, enter the letter’s key words into the computer, and have an answer full of homey, sensible advice and religious homilies tailored to the individual run up by the machine in about the time it took to enter the address. Every letter came out a little different; every letter sounded like one of his sermons. ­Every letter looked like a personal answer from Lester. The computer was a wonderful thing.

They could have gotten the same advice from Dear Abby—in fact, a good part of the advice tendered was gleaned from the back issues of Dear Abby’s compiled columns. But Abby didn’t claim to speak for God, and Lester did.

He also preached another sort of comfort—that hatred was no sin. It was no accident that his viewers were nearly one hundred percent white; white people had money, and black, yellow, and red ones didn’t, or if they did, they generally weren’t going to part with it. That’s what his Daddy had taught him. He sprinkled his sermons with Bible quotations proving that it was no sin to hate unbelievers—or to act on that hatred. After all, those people had placed themselves beyond the pale of God’s forgiveness. They had not and would not repent. They should be purged from the body of mankind. “If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out!” he stormed, and his legions of followers went out looking for offending eyes, their own blind to mirrors.

Most of his prosperity he owed to his own cleverness, but there were times when he needed that little helping hand—just as he had thought he might. Like the time when his network of informers let him know that Newsweek had found his ex-wife, and she was going to spill some embarrassing things about him. Or that one of his many ex-mistresses was going to write a tell-all biography. Or that the IRS was planning an audit.