Part 1 (1/2)
TALES FROM THE.
DARKSIDE.
Tom Allen and Mitch.e.l.l Galen.
THE DEVIL'S ADVOCATE.
by Michael McDowell.
It's not quite a smile. ”Still here, Richard,” her mouth said to him.
”And don't you forget it.”
He typed: MY WIFE'S PICTURE HANGS ON THE WEST WALL OF MY STUDY.
He looked at the words and liked them no more than he liked the picture itself. He punched the DELETE b.u.t.ton. The words vanished. Now there was nothing at all on the screen but the steadily pulsing cursor.
He looked up at the wall and saw that his wife's picture had also vanished.
He sat there for a very long timea”it felt that way, at leasta”looking at the wall where the picture had been. What finally brought him out of his daze of utter unbelieving shock was the smell from the CPUa”a smell he remembered from his childhood as clearly as he remembered the Magic Eight Ball that Roger had broken because it wasn't his. The smell was essence of electric-train transformer. When you smelled that, you were supposed to turn the thing off so it could cool down.
And so he would.
In a minute.
He got up and walked over to the wall on legs that felt numb. He ran his fingers over the Armstrong paneling. The picture had been here, yes, right here. But it was gone now, and the hook it had hung on was gone and there was no hole where he had screwed the hook into the paneling.
Gone.
The world abruptly went gray, and he staggered backward, thinking dimly that he was going to faint, like an actress in a bad melodrama. He reached down into his crotch and squeezed himself, suddenly and brutally. The pain was terrible, but the world came back into sharp focus.
He looked from the blank place on the wall where Lina's picture had been to the word processor his dead nephew had cobbled together.
”You might be surprised,” he heard Nordhoff saying in his mind, ”You might be surprised, you might be surprised.” Oh, yes; if some kid in the fifties could discover particles that travel backward through time, you might be surprised what your genius of a nephew could do with a bunch of discarded word processor elements and some wires and electrical components.
You might be so surprised that you'd feel as if you were going insane.
The transformer smell was richer, stronger now, and he could see wisps of smoke rising from the vents in the CRT housing. The noise from the CPU was louder, too. It was time to turn it offa”smart as Jon had been, he apparently hadn't had time to work out all the bugs in this crazy thing.
But had he known it would do this?
Feeling like a figment of his own imagination, Richard sat down in front of the screen again and typed: MY WIFE'S PICTURE IS ON THE WALL, WHERE IT WAS BEFORE.
He looked at this for a moment, looked back at the key board and then hit the EXECUTE key.
He looked at the wall.
Lina's picture was back, right where it had always been.
”Jesus,” he whispered. ”Jesus Christ.”
He rubbed a hand up his cheek, looked at the screen (blank again except for the cursor) and then typed: MY FLOOR IS BARE He then touched the INSERT b.u.t.ton and typed: EXCEPT FOR 12 SPANISH DOUBLOONS IN A SMALL COTTON SACK.
He pressed EXECUTE.
He looked at the floor, where there was now a small white-cotton sack with a drawstring top.
”Dear Jesus,” he heard himself saying in a voice that wasn't his. ”Dear Jesus, dear good Jesusa””
He might have gone on invoking the Savior's name for minutes or hours if the word processor had not started steadily beeping at him. Flas.h.i.+ng across the top of the screen was the word OVERLOAD.
Richard turned off everything and left his study as if all the devils of h.e.l.l were after him.
But before he went, he scooped up the small drawstring sack and put it in his pants pocket.
When he called Nordhoff that evening, a cold November wind was playing tuneless bagpipes in the trees outside. Seth's group was downstairs, murdering a Bob Seger tune. Lina was at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows, playing bingo.
”Does the machine work?” Nordhoff asked.
”It works, all right,” Richard said. He reached into his pocket and brought out a coin. It was heavy and crudely uneven, wavering from an eighth of an inch on one side to almost a quarter of an inch on the other. A conquistador's head was embossed on one side, along with the date 1587. ”It works in ways you wouldn't believe.” He giggled. He put a hand to his mouth, but the giggle came through anyway.
”I might,” Nordhoff said evenly. ”He was a very bright boy, and he loved you very much, Mr.
Hagstrom. But be careful.
A boy is only a boy, bright or otherwise, and love can be misdirected.
Do you take my meaning?”
Richard didn't take his meaning at all. He felt hot and feverish. That day's paper had listed the current market price of gold at $514 an ounce. The coins had weighed out at an average 4.5 ounces each on his postal scale. At the current market rate, that added up to $27,756. And he guessed that was perhaps only a quarter of what he could realize for those coins if he sold them as coins.
”Mr. Nordhoff, could you come over here? Now? Tonight?”
”No,” Nordhoff said. ”I don't think I want to do that, Mr. Hagstrom. I think this ought to stay between you and Jon.”
”Buta””
”Just remember what I said. For Christ's sake, be careful.” There was a small click, and Nordhoff was gone.
He found himself in his study again half an hour later, looking at the word processor. He touched the ON/OFF key but didn't turn it on. The second time Nordhoff had said it, Richard had heard him. ”For Christ's sake, be careful.” Yes. He would have to be careful. A machine that could do such a thing- How could a machine do such a thing?
He had no idea, but in a way, that was no bar at all to acceptance. It was, in fact, par for the course. He was an English teacher and a sometime writer, not a technician, and he had a long history of not understanding how things worked: phonographs, gasoline engines, telephones, televisions, the flus.h.i.+ng mechanism in his toilet. His life was a history of understanding operations rather than principles. Was there any difference here, except in degree?
He turned the machine on. As before, it said: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, UNCLE RICHARD!.
JON.