Chapter Text
He does try to play the thing once or twice.
But a fiddle of gold is heavy as shit, and the sound’s all wrong—loveless, and cold as Hell, with vicious strings that split Johnny’s fingers when he plays. (There’s never any blood when he looks, and Johnny wonders if it’s drinking him up, dry; leaving scars at his fingertips and an ache in his hand that won’t quite ease. Then again, it’s the Devil’s instrument; it can probably do any evil thing it likes.)
In the end, he loosens the bow-hair and puts the thing away in a battered, borrowed case, goes back to playing his box maple. Wood is living, it breathes and breaks; swells like your best girl’s clit under your tongue, shivers like a warm wind through leaves. Wood remembers the sun, wants to sing about it.
There’s nothing gold wants to sing about, except being dead.
Johnny’s playing the maple that night at the Bellows Club—well, used to be ‘Club’ until the owner’s second wife decided they were destined for better things, had it rechristened ‘Café’. The Tuesday-night regulars are the same, though, and they whistle or lazily applaud when he finishes his set, greet him by name after he’s put the fiddle away and come down off that high-as-Heaven stage. Johnny wades out among them to make a little small talk, then wanders his way to the bar.
The Devil is waiting for him there.
“Do you not like my gift, Johnny?” the Devil asks, smiling. He’s handsomer than Johnny remembers, but then Johnny supposes every man is better-looking on his own turf. (His gramms had said that since Babel, the Devil claimed every spit of land taller than two stories. And here, among the old cigarette butts and sin, it’s likely to be true.)
The Devil smells of mint gum, something rotten underneath.
“Your gift?” Johnny laughs. “The way I remember, you lost it to me.”
“Fair and square,” the Devil says, still smiling.
They each get their own drinks separately, the Devil asking for his private reserve—“From a high shelf, you know which I mean.” The bartender stops cold for a minute before nodding with a jerk of his head, and disappearing into the back.
Johnny knocks his drink back quick, letting the bite of cheapshit whiskey choke him out of saying anything particularly stupid. He’s not sure how the Devil would take ‘your fiddle’s a piece of shit, want it back?’ but he’s not eager to find out.
The bartender comes back with a black bottle, so old that Johnny can’t make out the lettering on the label. Just foreign, faded squiggles and a date that might be ‘95 or ‘05 or maybe initials, a snake biting its tail and a bolt of lightning. God knows.
(God does, probably.)
The bartender leaves the bottle and a glass, nodding the way bartenders do for good tippers. The Devil pours himself a generous double, and drinks.
Johnny stares.
“You want a taste?” the Devil asks, holding the glass out to Johnny. The whiskey sloshes a little, catching impossibly gold even in the half-light of the bar. It’s not even whiskey, really—it’s the dream of whiskey, the kind of thing that makes a distiller wake up in the night sweating cold and haunted forever by a vision he’ll never hold on his tongue.
Johnny can feel the well shit curdling in his stomach, shamed.
“What’s it cost?” Johnny asks.
“No charge, for an old friend.”
‘Friend’ sounds a lot like ‘gift’ did, coming from him. “That’s not what I asked.”
The Devil looks at Johnny with those yellow eyes, careful and considering. “How’s the song go? First taste is always free.”
Johnny studies the Devil for a moment, the particular careful arch of his eyebrows, his thin mouth. Yellow eyes, though they’re shadowed by the dim light to almost the same gold as the whiskey. (Johnny wonders what he did with his horns; he remembers the Devil having horns.)
Finally, Johnny nods, reaches out to take the glass from his hand—
The Devil pulls it away. “No,” he says, and there’s something about his smile Johnny doesn’t like. Not that he liked it before, but now it’s unsettling, too—human. And hungry. “That’s not how you drink whiskey like this. Open your mouth.”
Johnny hesitates, but only just. He opens his mouth.
The Devil brings the glass up, and Johnny thinks bizarrely of communion. He’s not really religious and never has been—wasn’t it the Catholics who believed that the cracker and cheap cornerstore wine was really the body and blood? God-eaters and cannibals, and this is what Johnny thinks about, when the Devil cups his jaw in one hand to hold him him still. (His fingers dig into Johnny’s jaw, hard enough to bruise.)
“Only a sip,” the Devil says, and presses the cool glass to Johnny’s lower lip. The whiskey is gold as the Devil’s eyes, and smells sharp and warm and perfectly aged. He drinks.
It burns.
It burns, liquid hell; it burns all the way down his throat to his gullet, and Johnny wheezes. He jerks out of the Devil’s grip, coughing wildly. He feel it, sloshing uneasily in his stomach. It makes him sick in a way that wraps around his bones. “Holy—” Johnny breathes, wishing he had a chaser. His voice is hoarse, he sounds like a man dying. “How do you drink that?”
The Devil is studying him, eyes narrowed. “You don’t like it.”
“I generally want my whiskey to go down a little smoother.”
The Devil is still looking at him. His pupils have gone slitted as a snake’s. “No offense meant,” Johnny adds quickly.
The Devil turns, just slightly, never taking his eyes off Johnny. He lifts the glass to his own mouth, breathing in the smell of it like a connoisseur before swallowing the rest himself. He doesn’t choke like Johnny did; instead, his eyes go heavy-lidded and his cheeks hollow, as though he’s licking it from his teeth, savoring. Johnny thinks he can see gold shining on the inside of the Devil’s mouth, just before the Devil closes his lips.
Very delicately, the Devil sets his glass back on the bar. He’s looking at Johnny like he’s considering something, and Johnny wishes he could grin like he did at the crossroads, half-drunk on weak beer and daring enough to announce he was the best that’d ever been. But he’s not under the hot sunshine now, fiddle in his hand. Now it’s just him and the Devil, standing at the dark corner of the Bellows with their liquor communion.
“Why don’t you play my fiddle, Johnny?” the Devil asks, and Johnny almost chokes again, his breath stuttering. He stares back at the Devil, trying to—plead, without saying—
“I see,” the Devil says, finally, when the silence stretches on too long. Johnny swallows. He can still taste the remains of that bitter whiskey.
“Do you...do you want it back?”
The Devil flinches—or rather, his skin does, rippling over him and then settling back in the shape it’s meant to. It’s like watching a stone thrown into a pond, or a tracking line on a VHS tapes—that sudden slide and jump of the picture, except this is real, and the Devil is still standing there, with snake-eyes and the suggestion of scales, almost hidden by the shadow of his throat.
Johnny doesn’t realize he’s got a white-knuckled grip on the bar until the Devil turns away, and those yellow eyes aren’t fixed on Johnny anymore. The ache in his arm makes itself known viciously, and Johnny hisses, immediately trying to massage some feeling back into the muscles. The Devil twitches at the noise, doesn’t turn back; pours himself another double and knocks it back, all at once.
There’s a split in his tongue when he licks the wetness from his lower lip.
“Keep it,” the Devil says finally, and his voice is awful, full of augmented fourths and tenderness. He won’t meet Johnny’s eyes. “You won. Fair and square.”
The Devil goes without another word.
In the mirror that night, Johnny has five finger-shaped bruises, pressed into his jaw.
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Johnny sees him again, not long after: a pale shape turning away into a field of corn. The stalks are only just up to his shoulders and Johnny slows, watching in his rearview as the Devil walks away into the field, and is swallowed up by the dusk.
There’s a truck not far, idling there at the intersection of Hickory and Brower, with no one in the driver’s seat; Johnny doesn’t stop for it. A few days later, he hears that Louis—you know Louis, we played that gig out in Canton, has a voice like Jimmy Martin—got a record deal, blew them off for the bright lights of Nashville. Even left his truck behind, stalled out at Hickory and Brower.
(Johnny wonders if a soul looks anything like the wriggling greyish thing he’d seen the Devil cradling in his arms.)
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“You sure you’re allowed to be here?” Johnny asks the Devil. It’s been a good few weeks since the bruises faded but he can feel them suddenly, flaring into a string of sharp pains along his jaw.
In the hard August sunlight, there’s no hint of scales under the Devil’s skin. He looks like a man—a weak chin, and pale as something grown in the dark. He’s leaned up against the side of Johnny’s truck like he’s sunning himself. (Maybe he is. They say that in the Garden, the Devil was a snake; Johnny wonders if he has fangs too.)
Johnny can feel him staring, even through the mirrored sunglasses. “Why wouldn’t I be allowed?” the Devil asks, as Johnny stops dead in front of him. Johnny’s palm is sweating, where he clutches the handle of his fiddle case.
“Well, it’s holy ground, isn’t it?”
The Devil scoffs. “Does the church parking lot really count as holy ground?”
“As much as any graveyard.”
The Devil is watching him, behind those mirrored shades of his. Johnny would stake his life on it. “Then what business could you have here, Johnny?”
The sun is hot, and Johnny’s shoulders ache—it’s been a while since he played so long, and the band had barely taken any break between sets. It had been even hotter under the white tent, every breath an inhale of warm coleslaw and human bodies sweating through their Sunday finest. Johnny had only agreed to play the church social as a favor to Nina, and he’d hated her more with every note of ‘I Am The Man, Thomas’ and ‘Big Mama Brown’, wishing he’d thought up some excuse instead, or maybe just told Nina to fuck herself with a bow frog.
But the Devil is leaning up against Johnny’s truck, and Johnny has the awful suspicion that if he mentions all that, he might be offered another gift.
(The bruises along Johnny’s jaw sing.)
“Why does any man get religion?” Johnny says, and the Devil cocks his head curiously. Johnny grins. “Protection against the wickedness and snares of the Devil.”
He has the pleasure of watching the Devil throw back his head and laugh under the bright sky. The Devil’s got hair the same white as ash, and a forked tongue; it’s strange to see him duck his head back down, and wet his lower lip with it.
“You needn’t venture into His country, Johnny,” the Devil says, and Johnny can hear the capitol letter there, the specific Him. “If you wanted something, you know I would have obliged.”
Johnny shrugs, and goes to unlock the passenger door, even though it brings him into the Devil’s reach. The Devil still smells of something rotten—or maybe water left to stand too long, stale and flat. Johnny finds himself shivering, all of a sudden; the sun is still there on back of his neck, but the heat of it is gone.
“You cold?” Johnny asks idly, forcing himself to keep his attention on the lock, the key, tucking his fiddle case into the passenger seat.
“Hell follows me wherever I go,” the Devil says absently.
Johnny makes a show of straightening up and staring, but the Devil is looking off in the distance, not at Johnny at all. He’s watching the kids playing on the hill behind the church, screaming and getting grass stains that they’ll catch hell for later. Johnny hadn’t been paying them any attention, but the Devil is, in a way that makes Johnny uneasy.
“Thought Hell was supposed to be a fiery pit,” Johnny says.
“Not in my part of town,” the Devil says absently. “Dante got that much right. It’s all ice, thick as...”
He’s still watching the kids as one of them grabs another, and they fall down; the two boys flailing, fighting one another in the dirt. Around them, the others form a knot, clapping or screaming, like a flock of crows waiting to swoop down on whoever’s left in the dust.
“Huh,” Johnny says, when it doesn’t seem likely the Devil will finish the sentence. “Well, I’m fixing to carry out. You want a ride?”
The Devil turns and looks at him then, and even with mirrored shades Johnny can tell the he’s staring, ash-pale eyebrows arched. “What?” the Devil says, and Johnny’s almost tempted to laugh.
“It’s a good forty minute drive back to town. You have other places to be?”
The Devil is studying Johnny the way he’d studied him at the Bellows, after Johnny choked on the whiskey. Under the sun and with the snake-eyes hidden away behind shades, it feels less like a cottonmouth judging the best time to strike, and more the way Johnny’s seen his cousin Lulu crouch down and study mushrooms growing up out of the ground, trying to decide if they’re poison.
Johnny’s not sure where that leaves him.
He swallows, and pats the truck, just beside the Devil’s shoulder. Even that’s cold, colder than any ice Johnny has ever touched; Johnny jerks his hand back, wondering if he’ll have blisters on his palm to match the bruises on his jaw. His hand is already aching.
The Devil is still studying him. His face has smoothed out, gone impassive as a marble statue’s. He could certainly pass for one, all paleness and hair like ash.
“Well,” Johnny says, clears his throat. “Shut the door, whichever side of it you’re on.”
He ignores the part of him that screams when he turns his back on the Devil. Johnny walks over to the driver’s side on weak knees. He deliberately doesn’t look, not even just to see, fishing his keys out of his pocket, and then climbing up into the truck. He turns the ignition, and the familiar roar comes up through Johnny’s feet and makes his cold-burned hand ache around the wheel.
His eyes look without his permission, in the end.
The Devil is there, sitting in the passenger seat, Johnny’s case balanced across his knees. The fraying nylon looks a little pathetic next to the Devil’s perfect linen suit, but it’s reassuring, to see that something of Johnny’s is stubbornly unchanged in the Devil’s hands.
“Still not playing my fiddle, Johnny?” the Devil says, and Johnny grins, throwing the truck into reverse.
They don’t talk much, though they’re close enough that Johnny can feel the cold gathering every time the Devil breathes, like his shit A/C has decided to work for once. There’s a stiffness to the way the Devil’s sitting and it’s catching too, like the cold. It makes Johnny feel wrong-footed, even not having said anything, or done anything, really, except forget a turn at the pike because he couldn’t stop stealing sidelong glances. Johnny can’t tell if the stiffness is a trick, or just disdain for the worn-out seat and the secondhand smoke smell Johnny has never quite managed to scrub out.
Johnny keeps catching sight of his own face in the mirrored shades.
He slows down where Hickory meets Brower. Not on purpose, but Louis’ truck is still there—one of the windows spider-webbed with cracks and what looks like ‘salvage’ spray-painted along the side of the truck bed. He can feel the Devil looking, but not at the truck.
“You have any brothers?” the Devil asks suddenly, and Johnny blinks. Louis’ truck slides past, and then it’s gone, disappearing into the rearview.
“No, only child. Couple cousins, really just neighbor kids I was raised with, but…no blood between us.”
The Devil hums, noncommittally. About a mile and a half passes in silence, and Johnny’s thinking about turning on the radio—
“I had a brother,” the Devil says, and Johnny damn near jerks them off the road.
Johnny fixes his eyes on the asphalt, the faded center line. His cold-burned hand aches every time he readjusts his grip on the wheel, and that and the surrounding fields all he’s got to distract himself from this, the Devil saying I had a brother.
For some reason, Johnny thinks of the boys on the hill behind the church, fighting in the dust.
“Yeah?” he asks, tracking the rows of sorghum grass as they wick by.
“Yeah,” the Devil says.
“Something happen to him?”
“Why?”
The Devil’s voice is gentle, almost curious, and it chills Johnny quicker than the Devil’s cold. “You—you said ‘had,’” Johnny says. His mouth is dry. “I assumed…”
Johnny dares a glance but the Devil is turned away, looking out the passenger-side window. Those pale hands are curled into fists against Johnny’s fiddle case, knuckles made even whiter by how tightly the Devil’s holding them.
“He took the old man’s side,” the Devil says, finally. “And then he died.”
Johnny swallows, still dry-mouthed. “Sorry for your loss.”
“Oh, it didn’t last.”
“What?”
“The dying, it didn’t last. One of the old man’s cons—he’s really only good for cheap magic tricks. Resurrection is one of his favorites.”
Johnny’s mouth is so dry he’s afraid to open it, like salt or sand might come pouring out if he tries. “Why ‘had’, then?” he croaks. His throat hurts and the road is starting waver where he’s staring straight ahead, the center line blurring into a pale-white wave.
“Taking the old man’s side, that lasted. We fought about it all the time. Used to, anyhow. He hasn’t spoken to me in…oh, it’d be centuries now.”
“Do you miss him?”
There’s a horrified silence.
“You—don’t have to answer that,” Johnny says weakly. He’s sweating through the cold, which doesn’t feel possible with his mouth dry as it is. “Sorry, shouldn’t have...”
“We used to play together,” the Devil says, sparing Johnny whatever shit he’d been about to say. The Devil’s voice is full of that horrible gentleness again. “He was better than me on the fiddle too.”
Johnny blinks.
“‘Too’?” he repeats before he can think about it, the beginnings of a grin pulling at his mouth.
“Pride goeth before destruction,” the Devil says, and Johnny does laugh at that—the hypocrisy of it, or maybe just how prim the Devil can sound quoting scripture. He could give some of those old women at the church picnic a run for their money.
The Devil shifts a little, and Johnny catches a sliver of bright glasses before the Devil turns away to the window again. “You would have liked him,” the Devil says, after a minute.
“Yeah?” Johnny asks.
“Yeah,” the Devil says. There’s satisfaction winding through his voice when he adds, “I was the voice of the thing. Only a handful can sing the blues like I can, and most of them are His anyway—He switched from saints to singers sometime in the twentieth century. Martyrdom with a record deal, better than any sermon.”
“Sounds pretty good to me.”
“Cheap magic tricks, Johnny.”
They sit in silence for another mile, maybe two. “So,” Johnny says. “Blues.”
“The Devil’s music.”
Johnny huffs a laugh. Even with the cold gathering in the air, he feels languorous, lazy as the August heat was. The road ahead melts away under his truck, to be replaced by more grey-white asphalt and faded lines, on and on to the horizon. The sun is golden on the sorghum and he’s a better fiddle player than the Devil.
He wonders what it sounded like, the Devil and his brother playing the blues. He wonders what sort of songs—
“You can let me out here, Johnny,” the Devil says, and Johnny startles back to himself. His hands spasm around the wheel and it sends a fresh ache through his cold-burned hand.
“You sure? There’s nothing around for miles.”
The Devil just smiles. “I’m sure.”
Johnny pulls over and the Devil gets out, careful to tuck Johnny’s fiddle in his place before he shuts the passenger door. For a moment, he just stands there on the shoulder, staring at Johnny through the window. Johnny’s about to take off when the Devil raps his knuckles on the glass, looking expectant.
Johnny leans over and rolls down the window. He’s still straightening up when the Devil pushes his mirrored shades up to his head, rests his forearms on the truck.
He still has those yellow snake-eyes.
“If I was offering…” the Devil says, the question of it curving his voice into a bright and baited hook. Johnny smiles a little, and resists the urge to swallow.
“I’d thank you, but there’s nothing in particular I want. Not that much.”
The Devil nods, and pats the side of the truck the way Johnny did earlier. It’s nice to know that the Devil looks awkward doing it too; even with eyes like a snake’s and the mirrored sunglasses on top of his head reflecting the whole of the sky.
Johnny pulls away and drives, waiting to exhale until he can’t see the white shock of the Devil’s hair in the rearview anymore. He spends the rest of the drive drumming his fingers on the wheel, or scanning through radio stations, looking for—something. A song he can’t hear, or get out of his head.
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.
It hurts to play. The cold-burned hand aches all the way down to his wrist whenever Johnny cradles the neck of his fiddle—his eyes are wet halfway through ‘Real Old Mountain Dew’, the room wavering so dangerously that he has to set his jaw, only the tune to carry him through because his mind is driving itself crazy with the pain.
By the time he finishes, he almost wants the golden fiddle back.
“I mean, I get it,” Hernandez says, handing Johnny a fistful of ice wrapped in a rag that’s polished too many glasses. Hernandez is the only bartender Johnny really likes at the Bellows—sometimes he comps Johnny drinks, because he feels bad. All that white trash music, he’d said once, pouring a double that looked more like a triple. It’s gotta drive you crazy.
(The next time, Johnny brought a stack of library books, just to prove that bluegrass was his before it was theirs, but Hernandez had barely glanced at the grainy pictures of string bands, the sons of ex-slaves staring, unsmiling into a camera. Holding so still.)
“You get what?” Johnny asks, gritting his teeth. The freezer-tray ice is somehow warmer than the cold lingering in his hand. The Devil’s cold has spread down his whole arm, twined with the muscles of his fist. He wonders if lighting himself on fire would help, and then remembers his fiddle would go up in smoke with him. No use to anyone that way.
“I get why you play that shit.”
Johnny looks at him, and Hernandez shrugs. “I don’t know, man. It was...it made sense. Very existential.”
Hernandez went to college briefly, before the money dried up because of state budget cuts. Worse, Johnny likes Hernandez; which is why he doesn’t laugh at how serious his expression is.
“No,” Johnny says. “No, it’s not like that. It’s about…”
“What?” Hernandez asks, and Johnny thinks about the Devil saying resurrection. How heavy he’d been, saying that.
Only heavy isn’t the word Johnny’s looking for. It’s blues that’s heavy—blues wants you to sink to your knees in the ground and feel every inch of black dirt; it wants you to cry from it, though all the saltwater in the world could never wash it away. Blues sings because there are chains, and dirt, and sin. It makes sense that the Devil would be heavy as blues.
Bluegrass, though...bluegrass isn’t heavy at all. It’s light, and loud, it fills every corner of the room just for the obnoxious noise of it. Bluegrass might sing about chains and dirt and sin, but it’s not because, it’s despite. To spite them. Making a sweet and joyful racket that swallows all the air in the room and shoves into your head, until there isn’t space for anything else. (Johnny had taken up space that day, sort-of drunk in a field, grinning and cocksure and almost gleeful when the Devil finally showed up. A fucked-up proof of soul, because the Devil couldn’t have it if it wasn’t there.)
“It’s just music,” Johnny says finally.
Hernandez lets him sit there anyway, ice melting down his wrist.
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The golden fiddle sits silently in the corner on his room, its case leaned up against the chair Johnny uses to lay out the one good suit he owns. (He’d let Nina have the room with the closet, figuring that she could make better use of it than he could. She’d punched him in the shoulder for referring to her ‘womanly needs,’ but taken the room anyway.)
Once, when it’s late and Johnny’s on his way to drunk but not quite there yet, he takes it out—the golden fiddle, that infernal prize. He plucks the strings, and it sings in perfect pitch even without being tuned, all thirds and sevenths. Johnny’s never played an instrument that doesn’t slip, but here it is. Infernal thing.
He plucks out a half-time count of ‘Soldier’s Joy’. It rings strangely in his bedroom, like the sound is echoing in a different space—Johnny had a gig once in a room that was all high ceilings and big glass windows. Everything they’d played that day had sounded hollow and out of joint; it’d put the whole band in a mood, and they’d blown most of the money they earned that same night. (The beer had helped. So had their knock-down screaming match in the parking lot of the bar.)
Impulsively, Johnny lifts the fiddle to his shoulder. It’s still too heavy, cold against his throat and under his chin. He thinks of the Devil suddenly, ice thick as—
He puts the fiddle down, shoving it into the case so quickly that his index catches at the E string. The reverb of it buzzes high and sharp enough to make his teeth ache.
Johnny wonders a little what the acoustics of ice are.
The next morning he’s half-hungover, and his tongue tastes soured and tacky. He doesn’t notice the spots of blood, spread in the shape of his fingers across the pillow.
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Johnny dreams of ice melting beneath his hands. Water, all around.
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Johnny shivers when he steps down from the truck. It’s not that cold of a morning—just too early for the sun to have burned off the damp, the wind tugging at his collar. Johnny can feel the rain of the night before like this, standing where the gravel shoulder of the road gives way to farmland. He exhales, burying his hands in his pockets.
It’s late enough in the year that there’s nothing to see but the wire fence, greying stumps of cornstalks twisting in the wind. A lone barn that’s seen better days, its painted quilt square peeling.
And the Devil, walking across the field like he’s headed somewhere past the hills.
It had been hard to miss him from the road; a shape white as wet bone against the fading gold of the field. Johnny had pulled off to the shoulder without thinking about it, half out the door before he remembered the keys in the ignition. He’d had to force himself to be still, to flatten his hands against the wheel and breathe and think for a minute, not to stumble over himself and break both ankles trying.
(He hadn’t seen the Devil in months, and if it weren’t for the golden fiddle in Johnny’s room, he’d think he hallucinated the whole thing—the deal and the whiskey and the Devil in the passenger seat, talking about the blues.)
Now Johnny’s standing here, and he’s not sure what to do next.
His hands are shaking when he cups them around his mouth. “Hey cocksucker!” he shouts, his voice breaking on it. He swallows, lifts his hands—
Then the Devil is standing there on the other side of the wire fence, and Johnny startles, stumbling back so quickly that his shoulders hit the truck with a thud. The cold follows at the Devil’s heels and it slams into Johnny like a stormfront; he’s shaking suddenly, freezing as though he were standing in a pit of ice, the wind blowing. The kind of cold that sinks into your bones and never leaves, and Johnny is cold, he’s so fucking cold. It’s how he imagines dying, if his heart weren’t thundering in his ears.
The Devil leans on the fence, and his white knuckles go even whiter when he tightens his hands around the metal wire.
“I have been known by many names, Johnny,” the Devil says smoothly. His voice is six discordant notes at once, enough that Johnny can feel the beginnings of a headache starting at his temples. “But that is not one of them. Is there something about me that suggests I would welcome such disrespect?”
Johnny swallows, shakes his head.
“Then I believe you owe me an apology.”
The Devil has horns again; twisting-sharp things that might actually be bone, now that Johnny thinks about it. They come up through his forehead like they’re part of his skull, and the skin around them is cracked and ugly, flaked with black blood. There’s blood staining his suit too, little spots on the white linen.
Johnny exhales. His breath clouds in the air. “Sorry.”
The cold eases a little, but the tightness of the Devil’s hands doesn’t. “Was there something you wanted from me, Johnny?”
Johnny could lie. He could. “Haven’t seen you in awhile. Thought I’d say hey.” He shrugs, though he’s shaking so badly it probably looks more like a convulsion. “Hey.”
The Devil blinks. “That’s...”
“I’m just saying, man lets you ride with him, and then you don’t speak to him for three months? Maybe you owe me that apology.”
It’s meant to be funny, at least a little, but if anything the Devil looks more startled. He’s frowning like he’s trying to figure out some complex equation written on Johnny’s forehead, or bore straight through Johnny’s skull by sheer force of stare. One of the two. Johnny wonders if—
After a moment, the Devil’s eyes narrow. “Why are you twitching like that?”
“Just cold,” Johnny grits out. His fingers are starting to ache, and he shoves them in his pockets. “I didn’t dress for your part of Hell.”
The Devil cocks his head, and Johnny’s suddenly plunged into warmth, hot enough that he hisses between his teeth. In comparison to the Devil’s cold, the chilly morning is like a fever burning next to his skin. “Thanks.”
“Of course.”
They watch one another from over the wire fence.
Finally, Johnny exhales, leans back against the truck. He’s trying for unaffected but he suspects he’s too tense to really pull it off. “So, uh. What’ve you been up to?”
The Devil looks at him for a minute. Then he’s unbuttoning his suit and fishing something out of the inside. He tosses it to Johnny.
“What the hell is it?” Johnny asks, turning the thing over in his hands. It’s light as a stick of driftwood, but it’s definitely not any wood Johnny knows—the skin of it gives under his fingers, and he leaves purple whorls like bruises whenever he pushes too hard. He scrapes a nail over a knot in the wood and the whole thing shivers, making a soft chiming noise.
“Mariah McKinnon.”
Johnny frowns, looking up from the driftwood. “What?”
The Devil has his face turned up to the sky, impassive as a marble statue. “No, you’re right,” he says slowly. “It’s hardly all of Mariah McKinnon. Just her soul.”
Johnny does not drop the soul of Mariah McKinnon out of sheer panicked shock, but it’s a close thing. “Jesus,” he breathes, staring down at the stick of driftwood. The purple bruises from his fingers suddenly make him feel vaguely sick, though they’re fading to green now. “I thought—I saw you before, it was grey and as big as your arms. It was moving.”
“No two souls are alike. Divine gift, you know.”
Johnny cradles the driftwood to his chest as gently he can, wondering what Mariah McKinnon sold her soul for. If it had been worth it. “Am I hurting her?”
When he looks up, the Devil is staring at him again. In the grey morning, his eyes are a pale yellow, like old glass. Something in his expression flickers, passing across his face, and then it’s gone.
“Souls are more resilient than you might think,” the Devil finally says. The discordant notes are gone from his voice, and he sounds very human this way. “And there’s nothing you could do that would be worse than what’s coming.”
Johnny looks down at the driftwood in his arms. “You’re taking her to Hell.”
“Those are generally the terms of the agreement, yes.”
The soul of Mariah McKinnon is brittle-looking and dry, but it gives under Johnny’s fingers. It chimes, like bells. “What did she sell it for?”
“She wanted to be young again.”
Johnny doesn’t know what it is about that that makes him so sad, but it does. He looks away, staring at the ridge of trees until they blur. In his arms, the stick of driftwood trembles like a living thing—and it is, more than a living thing. A soul.
“Don’t do it.”
Johnny expects anger, a swell of cold, but it doesn’t come. Instead, the Devil just looks tired. “This is what I do, Johnny. I might as well ask you to break your fingers.”
“It isn’t fair—”
“That’s a lie,” the Devil says, so sharply and suddenly that Johnny jerks back again, almost biting his tongue in the process. “This is fair. I am fair. It is exactingly, absolutely fair in the way such things must be. And they must be, Johnny.”
The Devil falters suddenly, looks away. “The word you’re thinking of,” he adds, his voice soft, “is ‘cruel’. And it is that.”
Johnny swallows. “Then maybe I could—we could make a deal.”
“No,” the Devil says. “This game’s only allowed three players, Johnny. You, me, and Him all locked in a room with a pack of cards, wagering for your soul and no one else’s. You can’t save Mariah McKinnon and she can’t save you. But,” the Devil’s throat bobs as he swallows, “the desire does you credit.”
Johnny laughs, a sound without any humor in it. “So we’re all fucked, then?”
The Devil smiles bitterly. “Not as often as you would think. He’s the dealer, too, and he likes throwing the game in your favor.”
The Devil holds out a hand.
“I’m sorry,” Johnny says as he returns the soul of Mariah McKinnon to the Devil’s keeping. The Devil arches a pale eyebrow.
“What for?”
Johnny shrugs, turning away and squinting at where the sun is just coming up over the trees. “I wasn’t talking to you.”
When he looks back, the Devil has gone.
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Johnny dreams of a field, tall grass up to his shoulders and moving like the sea. The Devil is there too, and has his hand flat against Johnny’s stomach, just where Johnny’s ribs give way to softness. This is where you keep your soul, Johnny, the Devil says.
You would know, Johnny says, and the Devil grins. His eyeteeth are bone-white, and sharper than they have any right to be.
Don’t you want to see what you are? A divine gift, one of a kind—I want to see.
The Devil’s eyes are yellow, and Johnny murmurs, Snake in the grass, without meaning to say it aloud. But the Devil just laughs, low and amused. Johnny decides he likes it.
This is a dream, Johnny says. He’s not sure he meant to say that aloud either, but it’s true.
The Devil cocks his head. How do you know?
Johnny brings his hands up around the Devil’s, hovering just over his wrist, his fingers; not quite touching. You’re warm, Johnny says. That’s how I know.
The sea of grass swallows them up.
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.
“Hey,” Johnny says, and the Devil startles, skittering sideways like a spooked horse. Johnny can do nothing but stare, and try desperately not to laugh. There’s no way in hell he’s going to laugh at the Devil, at least not sober, not watching him smooth down his linen waistcoat and fuss with his cufflinks like he’s trying to make a point.
Finally, the Devil clears his throat, and turns to face Johnny.
“Johnny,” the Devil says. There’s no music in his voice at all, and his eyes aren’t anything like a snake’s—they’re pale yellow in the sunlight, and ordinary. Almost human. It’s somehow more unsettling after the forked tongue and the smell of stale water.
“Perhaps it slipped your notice, but I am working.”
Johnny leans on the rail of the fence. It’s clear, and unseasonably warm for November. He’s got his shirtsleeves pushed up to his elbows and on the field the Colonels’ second string have all stripped down to their padding. Brown boys under the sky of an Indian summer, with the hazy golden air doing nothing to obscure the blue above all of them. Johnny wonders lazily he could tip his head back and stare right through to Heaven.
“What, is Ryan Delacorte going to sell his soul to be first string on the Bulldogs?” Johnny asks. He can feel the cold uncoiling in his direction as the Devil gingerly settles himself beside Johnny. It feels good, cool where it curls up beside his skin.
Out of the corner of his eye, Johnny watches the Devil fold his abnormal-pale hands together, like those long white fingers need something to occupy themselves with.
“Maybe,” the Devil admits finally, and his eyes flick to Johnny. “What’s it to you?”
Johnny shrugs lightly. “Seems like cheating, that’s all.”
The Devil is quiet for such a long time that Johnny can’t help looking. His pupils have gone slitted again, ringed by a snake’s poison yellow iris. “Bless your heart, Johnny,” the Devil drawls, and Johnny swallows. The Devil’s smile is faint, almost amused, and somehow that’s worse. “You say that like you understand the rules.”
It is suddenly very cold.
“There are rules?”
The Devil looks away, and Johnny can breathe again. “Of course there are rules.”
“Like what?” Johnny asks, because apparently he can’t keep his mouth shut, even for a minute. The Devil shoots him a look, and he shrugs. “In case I ever find myself wagering for another golden fiddle.”
The Devil’s eyes go to the fiddle case slung over Johnny’s shoulder. The shoulder strap is fraying and has been for a while; Johnny had to jury-rig the thing a while back with some duct tape and Nina’s stitching. Johnny suddenly feels self-conscious of it; as though it really is the stupid golden fiddle he’s carrying around and not his old box maple, as beat up as the shoulder strap.
“Is...?”
“Hell no,” Johnny says, and doesn’t know what to make of the way the Devil’s expression goes shuttered. The Devil looks away too quick, and then the setting sun is on his face; there’s nothing to see but blankness and light.
Johnny looks back to the field. The first string is running plays now, and there’s a kind of music to it—all those boys moving through the air, their helmets hard and bright in the sunshine. “I teach some lessons, after school,” Johnny offers, though he’s not really sure why he’s offering. “I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to get a fifteen-year-old to practice chromatic scales, but they definitely don’t get done if you show up with a golden fiddle.”
The Devil is quiet. On the field, they’re setting up a play; the coach’s whistle pierces the air and Ryan Delacorte breaks from the line, running. He’s something from a breakdown, beautiful and barely touching the earth; everything that tries to stop him finds only his shadow, which trails behind him in the setting sun. When he makes it to the end zone he doesn’t slow, just loops around the goalposts in a wide lazy circle like a bird in flight.
Johnny wonders what it looks like, the soul of a boy like that. Something bright, probably; with feathers.
“That’s one of the rules,” the Devil says suddenly. When Johnny looks, he nods to the field. “You can only sell your soul once you know what it is you’re selling. Which means I have to wait until the age of reason.”
“The age of—?” Johnny laughs. “I was sixteen once, you know; there’s definitely no reason involved.”
The Devil snorts, which is such a human thing that Johnny grins despite himself. He wonders if the Devil can laugh outright—it’s the beginning of an old song, the Devil laughing at some poor doomed asshole with a fiddle, but Johnny’s standing next to him and nothing’s happened yet. (He wishes he could remember of those songs ended.)
Something about it is wrong, though, because the Devil freezes like a startled animal. Before Johnny can say anything, the Devil looks away again, staring down at his folded hands.
Johnny swallows.
“The age of reason,” the Devil says, and his voice is strange. Not inhuman strange, but some other kind of strangeness that Johnny can’t quite put his fingers on.
The Devil’s eyes narrow, though he’s still staring down at his hands. “After all, if I had to wait until men were reasonable, Hell would be empty.”
Johnny blinks, and then he chokes on a laugh. “Jesus,” he says in absence of anything else to say. The Devil’s clearly trying to keep himself from smirking, and somehow that’s funnier—like the Devil having cufflinks, being startled. (I had a brother, said with that awful tenderness, and all the nights Johnny had spent awake trying to imagine how the Devil sings the blues. A stick of driftwood in Johnny’s hands...)
The coach’s whistle cuts through the air, high and bright.
“I’ll make you a deal,” Johnny says, and the Devil looks at him then. His eyes are poison yellow, when Johnny grins. “Let Delacorte keep his soul another day.”
The Devil cocks his head. “And in return?”
“You can come and distract my students from their chromatic scales.”
He’s already walking away when the Devil calls after him, “That’s not much of a deal, Johnny!”
Johnny is drunk on the golden afternoon light and the blue of Heaven above it, the Devil’s pleased smirk—he doesn’t break stride, just throws up his hands as though it’s all the same to him. He doesn’t think he’s imagining the Devil’s bark of something that isn’t quite laughter, but isn’t anything else, either.
(“Your friend is weird,” Latisha says after her lesson, with all the point-blank certainty of the very fifteen. Johnny glances over at the Devil; he’s standing at the window like a marble sculpture, like a snake sunning itself. Somehow, his ash-white hair stands on every end.)
“So?” the Devil asks, once Johnny packs away his fiddle and shuts off the lights in the band room. The janitor nods in a friendly sort of way as they pass him in the hall; Johnny’s mother taught him enough manners to offer a smile and mumble over a ‘good night’. It’s always strange to be back here, with the same old rooms and faces; like suddenly being that stupid teenager again, too big for his skin and a restlessness in his hands. Johnny’s pretty sure Mama started him on the violin because there weren’t any good alternatives for a nervous, skinny kid with itchy fingers. A musician was destined to be poor and unhappy, but probably wouldn’t spend any time with the Department of Corrections. And you could always ask whether he’d practiced yet, whenever he started looking for trouble.
She had been pragmatic, Johnny’s mother. Now she was a starry-eyed romantic because she’d gotten remarried to a man who cooked Dominican food and did his own laundry—but back then, she’d been pragmatic.
Johnny almost forgets the Devil is there until they hit the parking lot, when the Devil reaches out and touches his shoulder. Johnny startles—the Devil’s touch is cold, even through his shirt. The burns have only just faded from Johnny’s hand, and he wonders if this will hurt too, leaving bruises at his shoulder or under his clavicle.
The Devil is looking at Johnny like he’s waiting for something. Johnny blinks.
“Sorry,” Johnny says lamely. He sounds breathless somehow; he doesn’t mean to. “Sorry, I wasn’t…”
“Offer me a ride,” the Devil says, and Johnny swallows.
“Yeah,” Johnny says. In the security light, the Devil is very pale—white as ash, blueish shadows in the curve of his cheek, his nose. All his shadows are blue, and Johnny wonders whether that’s somehow on purpose. He’s only ever known men whose shadows were dark, black and brown; he doesn’t know what to do with blue shadows. “If you want a ride, I’ll—sure.”
It’s different, having the Devil in his truck when they’re hemmed in by the dark and the soft sound of the radio. It all seems smaller, closer than before. Johnny can’t help breathing in the smell of stagnant water and the Devil’s cold and he wonders if he burns hot, by comparison. Maybe that’s the allure there: all that human warmth. For a delirious moment, Johnny wonders what it would be like in Hell—to reach out and watch all that ice melt beneath his hands. Everything would steam under his palms and around his fingers, and it would melt. Until it was water all around them, a cold sea, and he could imagine how the Devil would stare as they treaded water, with his yellow eyes wide and startled, like when Johnny had—
The Devil has him pull over in the middle of a nowhere field again. “You sure?” Johnny asks.
“I’m sure,” the Devil says. The moon is faint, and Johnny can’t see his eyes, which feels like cheating. “Thank you for the ride, Johnny.”
“It’s no trouble,” Johnny says. “Sorry for Ryan Delacorte.”
The Devil climbs down from the cab of Johnny’s truck, and the door shuts softly behind him. It’s a strange sort of déjà vu when he leans against the window, fixes Johnny with a look. “No,” he finally says, decidedly, and Johnny feels heat prickle up his neck. “I don’t think you’re sorry about Ryan Delacorte.”
“Not really,” Johnny agrees, though he hadn’t meant to.
The Devil makes a soft noise that Johnny suspects is a laugh. “You’re bad for business, Johnny,” the Devil says, stepping away from the truck, and that’s somehow worse, enough to make Johnny’s skin prickle all over. He swallows.
“Good night, Johnny,” the Devil says. Johnny drives off and doesn’t look back until he’s miles away, when the only thing in the rearview is the dark line of trees and the weak moonlight off grass.
His shoulder aches.
He’s only half a mile from home when he realizes that the radio hasn’t been playing music at all, just static and the occasional jagged noise of another station cutting in and out. He’s been humming along to nothing, just the tune in his head.
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.
“There you are. What the hell did you do to my search history?” Nina asks the second he gets in the door. She’s squinting at her laptop screen like it’s in a foreign language. “All the ads are for weird religious shit now, and like. Satanism.”
“Just doing some research,” Johnny says, waltzing right on past Nina like his hand isn’t suddenly too-tight around the handle of his fiddle case.
He’s already to his bedroom when he hears her mutter, “No, I do not need an exorcism, Christ.” Johnny collapses onto his bed, staring at the ceiling and willing away the shivery, strange feeling just under his skin.
He’s not really sure why it’s there to begin with.
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The Bellows is hot that night, it’s hot, and they’ve never played better—one of those nights that everything single thing is gold and Hubby never misses a pick, and Johnny can’t finger anything but the exact right notes. Ava’s voice is doing that husky thing where she sounds like Etta James after a pack of cigarettes and a dose of bitter irony, the mandolin singing counterpoint under her hands. They’re so good, they can’t fucking miss—
Even the regulars applaud afterward, banging their glasses on the tables and whistling around their fingers. Johnny is hot, flush with it, so much that he doesn’t mind when he’s shoved toward the bar to grab the band’s first round.
“Hey!” Johnny shouts when he finds the Devil there instead. It’s by accident that he’s so loud, and he only feels a little guilt as the Devil leans in to say something to the woman he’s talking to. When he turns back to face Johnny, the Devil’s eyes are slitted as a snake’s and gold in light of the bar, the same color as whiskey.
“What did you think?” Johnny shouts over the follow-up act. Some girl with a guitar singing country-pop, white as plain rice—it seems important, that the Devil know they’re nothing like this bullshit Elvis-cut country.
The Devil levels Johnny with a cool, considering look. “Would have been better with a golden fiddle,” he says finally, turning back to his drink. Johnny’s so startled that the laughter comes a beat too late, punched out of him.
The Devil drinks, but his glass doesn’t quite hide the curve of his smirk.
“Come meet my band,” Johnny says, leaning in so he doesn’t have to shout. (The Devil is still cold, and smells of something curdling; Johnny feels drunk without having touched anything but water. They’d been hot, they had been so goddamn hot. He hadn’t missed a single note, even during his run on ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown’, though he’d felt feverish and light-headed playing it. His fingers ache, stiff and jittery at once, and it was so good—they’d been so good, he couldn’t imagine anyone not knowing it, not even the Devil.)
The Devil turns his mouth toward Johnny’s ear, and there’s a brush of cold against his cheek, a brief, strange pressure like a storm front moving in. “I don’t think you mean that, Johnny.”
Johnny grabs at the sleeve of the Devil’s suit before he can turn away. “But I do.”
“Johnny…”
The Devil’s got ugly purple veins running down the side of his neck where there were once scales. Johnny stares, still delirious with the applause and the heat of the stage and wondering if the Devil bruises easy. “That’s me. Come meet my band.”
“I’m working,” the Devil says, nodding to the woman. She’s politely pretending not to listen to their conversation, running a finger idly around the rim of her glass—a whiskey sour, Johnny guesses, or maybe an amaretto sour. Something called ‘sour’ to hide the sickly sweetness of it. Johnny’d like to see her try the Devil’s whiskey instead, just to see if she’d choke on it too. (He’d be lying if he said he hadn’t thought about that since, awful tasting as it was. Mostly he’d thought about how surprised the Devil had been, the way he looked at Johnny, after.)
The music is still thrumming under Johnny’s skin, in his hands. His fingers ache where he’s clutching the sleeve of the Devil’s suit. “I’ll make you a deal,” Johnny says, and the whiskey-gold eyes focus on him again. “Come meet my band.”
The Devil leans in close enough that Johnny can almost feel his mouth shape the words. “And in exchange?”
Johnny grins. The Devil doesn’t look startled by it this time, he just looks—intent. “You get to meet my band.”
The Devil smiles so sharply Johnny sees the dangerous length of his eyeteeth. They curve like a snake’s fangs, as bone-white as the rest of him. “Well, if you’re offering.”
(“How the hell do you know that guy?” Carl asks Johnny afterwards. They’re smoking in the alley behind the Bellows—the jittery high of playing has faded somewhat, and now Johnny’s mostly just tired, riding the wrong edge of a buzz. He wants to crawl directly from the alley into his bed, sleep forever on clean sheets.
“He’s a musician,” Johnny says with a shrug. And then: “We played together once.”
“Fiddle?”
Johnny takes a drag, letting his head fall back against the brick. It’s a cool night even for January, and the cigarettes they’re smoking are cheap; when Johnny inhales, the air tastes the way the Devil smells. “The blues,” Johnny finally says. “He sings the blues.”)
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Johnny dreams he’s in his own bedroom, the golden fiddle cradled in his lap. The glow from the street lamp is worming through his blinds, a sickly, artificial yellow. Still, it catches like dawn on all that polished gold, and Johnny’s room is full of light.
His hand is shaking when lays his palm flat against the fingerboard. He thinks of the Devil and wraps his fingers around the violin’s neck, tightens his grip until he can feel the strings biting into his palm. He’s expecting blood and pain, but there is none—just a somehow alien ache, like touching his cheek after novocaine, or trying to walk with his foot asleep. It’s heavy and graceless, but it doesn’t hurt.
This is a dream too, Johnny says to the empty room. It should hurt.
Suddenly the violin isn’t gold it’s ice, and it’s melting beneath his hand. Johnny watches it turn to water and smoke, and then it’s gone and he’s alone.
The next morning, his hand is smooth and unmarked. He stares at it for at least a minute in the morning light, turning it back and forth, trying to find some trace of scarring, bruises. But there’s nothing.