of trouble.”
“Screw you. You’re not getting any of it. I was serious about the screaming part.”
But then it didn’t matter, because Secrest came in right behind the Devil. He spun the Devil around by the shoulder and kneed him in the crotch. It was the first time she’d ever seen him do anything remotely resembling violence. The Devil crumpled to the concrete floor.
“Screw you both,” the Devil gasped. “I’ll take the Greyhound bus anywhere I want to ride.”
They checked in at the Economy Lodge in Asheville. Secrest checked the film in his camera and folded up an AAA map of downtown into his pocket and set out to see the sights.
“The historic district is a perfect square,” he declared, as if he’d made a scientific discovery. “So I’d like to walk every street in the grid. I figure I’ll get started today with the up and down and finish up tomorrow on the back and forth while you’re at the university. Want to come with?”
She told him she was tired and crashed out on top of the musty comforter with all of her clothes on while the overworked air-conditioner chugged away.
She met Rusty at the Maple Leaf Bar. It had been less than two years since she’d seen him, but he had to have lost close to fifty pounds, and his hair, once a luxurious mass, was now thinning and stringy. He still got that same giddy smile when he caught sight of her, though, and he rocked back and forth with inaudible laughter. They walked back to his place on McDowell Street, where he gave her the $900 he owed her plus $600 for the drugs in her underwear. They celebrated the deal by getting high in his second floor bedroom, sitting on the end of the bed and staring out the gable window over the rooftops of old downtown as the fan whirred rhythmically overhead. After a few minutes, he collapsed onto his back, let out a long sigh, and then was silent.
She was daydreaming again. In her daydream, Secrest is out walking the maze, crisscrossing through the streets until he sees the Devil walking toward him from the opposite direction. The Devil’s shoes look even filthier, and his goatee has vanished into the rest of the stubble on his face. His shirt is stained with sweat under the arms and around the collar, turning the pink to black.
“Not you again,” Secrest says, kicking the nearest lamppost with the toe of his wingtip. “I was almost finished with walking every street in the historic district.” He looks away, back toward the green hills of the Pisgah Forest to the south, then turns back, as if the Devil will have vanished in the interim.
“Yes, you’re very good at staying on the path,” the Devil says. “But now it’s time for a little detour. Your girlfriend is sitting in an apartment on McDowell Street.”
“Oh, really?” says Secrest.
“Yes, and the police are closing in, because an old friend of hers has ratted her out to the cops. They’re probably climbing the stairs right now.”
Or maybe he says, “An old friend of hers is dying on the bed next to her right now.”
Anyway, the Devil reaches out and grabs Secrest’s hand, shaking it energetically.
“Thanks for the ride, buddy,” he says.
Then Secrest comes running up the street to save her.
Ten for the Devil
Charles de Lint
“Are you sure you want off here?”
“Here” was in the middle of nowhere, on a dirt county road somewhere between Tyson and Highway 14. Driving along this twisty backroad, Butch Crickman’s pickup hadn’t passed a single house for the last mile and a half. If he kept on going, he wouldn’t pass another one for at least a mile or so, except for the ruin of the old Lindy farm and that didn’t count, seeing as how no one had lived there since the place burned down ten years ago.
Staley smiled. “Don’t you worry yourself, Butch.”
“Yeah, but—”
Opening the passenger door, she jumped down onto the dirt, then leaned back inside to grab her fiddle case.
“This is perfect,” she told him. “Really.”
“I don’t know. Kate’s not going to be happy when she finds out I didn’t take you all the way home.”
Staley took a deep breath of the clean night air. On her side of the road it was all Kickaha land. She could smell the raspberry bushes choking the ditches close at hand, the weeds and scrub trees out in the field, the dark, rich scent of the forest