Sympathy for the Devil - By Tim Pratt Page 0,24

time that happened, the one was as bad as the other. Get into that kind of a state of mind and after awhile you start to forget things like kindness, decency… the fact that other people aren’t put here in this world for you to feed on.”

Staley’s heart sank lower.

“We’ve got to do something about this,” she said. “I’ve got to do something. I’m responsible for whatever hurt they cause, feeding on people and all.”

“Who says it’s your fault?” Robert wanted to know.

“Well, I called them over, didn’t I? Though I don’t understand how I did it. I’ve been playing my music for going on four years now in that meadow and nothing like this has ever happened before.”

Robert nodded. “Maybe this time the devil was listening and you know what he’s like. He purely hates anybody who can play better than him—’specially if they aren’t obliged to him in some way.”

“Only person I owe anything to,” Staley said, “is my Grandma and she was no devil.”

“But you’ve been at the crossroads.”

Staley was starting to understand what he meant. There was always something waiting to take advantage of you, ghosts and devils sitting there at the edge of nowhere where the road to what is and what could be cross each other, spiteful creatures just waiting for the chance to step into your life and turn it all hurtful. That was the trouble with having something like her spirit fiddle. It called things to you, but unless you paid constant attention, you forgot that it can call the bad as well as the good.

“I’ve been at a lot of places,” she said.

“You ever played that fiddle of yours in one?”

“Not so’s I knew.”

“Well, you’ve been someplace, done something to get his attention.”

“That doesn’t solve the problem I’ve got right now.”

Robert nodded. “No, we’re just defining it.”

“So what can I do?”

“I don’t know exactly. Thing I’ve learned is, if you call up something bad, you’ve got to take up the music and play it back out again or it’ll never go away. I’d start there.”

“I already tried that and it only made things worse.”

“Yeah, but this time you’ve got to jump the groove.”

Staley gave him a blank look.

“You remember phonograph records?” Robert asked.

“Well, sure, though back home we mostly played tapes.”

Robert started to finger his guitar again, another spidery twelve-bar blues.

“Those old phonograph records,” he said. “They had a one-track groove that the needle followed from beginning to end—it’s like the habits we develop, the way we look at the world, what we expect to find in it, that kind of thing. You get into a bad situation like we got here and it’s time to jump the groove, get someplace new, see things different.” He cut the tune short before it could resolve and abruptly switched into another key. “Change the music. What you hear, what you play. Maybe even who you are. Lets you fix things and the added bonus is it confuses the devil. Makes it hard for him to focus on you for a time.”

“Jump the groove,” Staley repeated slowly.

Robert nodded. “Why don’t we take a turn out to where you’ve been living and see what we can do?”

I call in a favour from my friend Moth who owns a junkyard up in the Tombs and borrow a car to take us back up to Staley’s trailer. “Take the Chevette,” he tells me, pointing out an old two-door that’s got more primer on it than it does original paint. “The plates are legit.” Staley comes with me, fusses over Moth’s junkyard dogs like they’re old pals, wins Moth over with a smile and that good nature of hers, but mostly because she can run through instrumental versions of a couple of Boxcar Willie songs. After that, so far as Moth’s concerned, she can do no wrong.

“This guy Robert,” she says when we’re driving back to the bar to pick him up. “How come he’s so fixed on the devil?”

“Well,” I tell her. “The way I heard it, a long time ago he met the devil at a crossroads, made a deal with him. Wanted to be the best player the world’d ever seen. ‘No problem,’ the devil tells him. ‘Just sign here.’

“So Robert signs up. Trouble is, he already had it in him. If he hadn’t been in such a hurry, with a little time and effort on his part, he would’ve got what he wanted and wouldn’t have owed the devil a damn thing.”

Staley’s looking at