Authors: Subterranean Press
“Ah could pay for the bairns tae go east. They’re young
enough.” He glanced at the doorway. “It’s no right, throwin’ snowba’s in May.”
“That’s global warmin’.” Tam shrugged with elaborate
irony, then changed the subject. “Where d’ye think they’d go? The Ukraine? New
‘Beria?”
“Somewhaur there’s grass and nae glaciers.” Pause. “An’
real beaches wi’ sand an’ a’.” He frowned and hastily added: “Dinnae get me
wrong, Ah ken how likely that is.” The collapse of the West Antarctic ice shelf
two decades ago had inundated every established coastline; it had also stuck
the last nail in the coffin of the Gulf stream, plunging the British Isles into
a sub-Arctic deep freeze. Then the Americans had made it worse–at least
for Scotland–by putting a giant parasol into orbit to stop the rest of
the planet roasting like a chicken on a spit. Davy had learned all about global
warming in Geography classes at school–back when it hadn’t
happened–in the rare intervals when he wasn’t dozing in the back row or
staring at Yasmin MacConnell’s hair. It wasn’t until he was already paying a
mortgage and the second kid was on his way that what it meant really sank in.
Cold. Eternal cold, deep in your bones.
“Ah’d like tae see a real beach again, some day before
Ah die.”
“Ye could save for a train ticket.”
“Away wi’ ye! Where’d Ah go tae?” Davy snorted, darkly
amused. Flying was for the hyper-rich these days, and anyway, the nearest
beaches with sand and sun were in the Caliphate, a long day’s TGV ride south
through the Channel Tunnel and across the Gibraltar Bridge, in what had once
been the Northern Sahara Desert. As a tourist destination, the Caliphate had
certain drawbacks, a lack of topless sunbathing beauties being only the first
on the list. “It’s a’ just as bad whauriver ye go. At least here ye can still
get pork scratchings.”
“Aye, weel.” Tam raised his glass, just as a stranger
appeared in the doorway.
“An’ then there’s some that dinnae feel the cauld.” Davy
glanced round to follow the direction of his gaze. The stranger was oddly
attired in a lightweight suit and tie, as if he’d stepped out of the middle of
the previous century, although his neat goatee beard and the two small brass
horns implanted on his forehead were a more contemporary touch. He noticed Davy
staring and nodded, politely enough, then broke eye contact and ambled over to
the bar. Davy turned back to Tam, who responded to at his wink. “Take care noo,
Davy. Ye’ve got ma number.” With that, he stood up, put his glass down, and
shambled unsteadily towards the toilets.
This put Davy on his lonesome next to the stranger, who
leaned on the bar and glanced at him sideways with an expression of amusement.
Davy’s forehead wrinkled as he stared in the direction of Katie the barwoman,
who was just now coming back up the cellar steps with an empty coal powder
cartridge in one hand. “My round?” asked the stranger, raising an eyebrow.
“Aye. Mine’s a Deuchars if yer buyin’…” Davy, while not
always quick on the uptake, was never slow on the barrel: if this underdressed
southerner could afford a heated taxi, he could certainly afford to buy Davy
some beer. Katie nodded and rinsed her hands under the sink–however well
sealed they left the factory, coal cartridges always leaked like printer toner
had once done–and picked up two glasses.
“New roond aboot here?” Davy asked after a moment.
The stranger smiled: “Just passing through–I visit
Edinburgh every few years.”
“Aye.” Davy could relate to that.
“And yourself?”
“Ah’m frae Pilton.” Which was true enough; that was
where he’d bought the house with Morag all those years ago, back when folks
actually wanted to buy houses in Edinburgh. Back before the pack ice closed the
Firth fro six months in every year, back before the rising sea level drowned
Leith and Ingliston, and turned Arthur’s Seat into a frigid coastal headland
looming grey and stark above the the permafrost. “Whereaboots d’ye come frae?”
The stranger’s smile widened as Katie parked a
half-litre on the bar top before him and bent down to pull the next: “I think
you know where I’m from, my friend.”
Davy snorted. “Aye, so ye’re a man of wealth an’ taste,
is that right?”
“Just so.” A moment later, Katie planted the second
glass in front of Davy, gave him a brittle smile, and retreated to the opposite
end of the bar without pausing to extract credit from the stranger, who nodded
and raised his jar: “To your good fortune.”
“Heh.” Davy chugged back a third of his glass. It was
unusually bitter, with a slight sulphurous edge to it: “That’s a new barrel.”
“Only the best for my friends.”
Davy sneaked an irritated glance at the stranger. “Right.
Ah ken ye want tae talk, ye dinnae need tae take the pish.”
“I’m sorry.” The stranger held his gaze, looking
slightly perplexed. “It’s just that I’ve spent too long in America recently.
Most of them believe in me. A bit of good old-fashioned scepticism is
refreshing once in a while.”
Davy snorted. “Dae Ah look like a god-botherer tae ye?
Yer amang civilized folk here, nae free-kirk numpties’d show their noses in a
pub.”
“So I see.” The stranger relaxed slightly. “Seen Morag
and the boys lately, have you?”
Now a strange thing happened, because as the cold fury
took him, and a monstrous roaring filled his ears, and he reached for the
stranger’s throat, he seemed to hear Morag’s voice shouting,
Davy, don’t!
And to his surprise, a moment of timely sanity came crashing down on him, a
sense that Devil or no, if he laid hands on this fucker he really would be
damned, somehow. It might just have been the hypothalamic implant that the
sheriff had added to the list of his parole requirements working its arcane magic
on his brain chemistry, but it certainly felt like a drenching, cold-sweat
sense of immanence, and not in a good way. So as the raging impulse to glass
the cunt died away, Davy found himself contemplating his own raised fists in
perplexity, the crude blue tattoos of LOVE and HATE standing out on his
knuckles like doorposts framing the prison gateway of his life.
“Who telt ye aboot them,” he demanded hoarsely.
“Cigarette?” The stranger, who had sat perfectly still
while Davy wound up to punch his ticket, raised the chiselled eyebrow again.
“Ya bas.” But Davy’s hand went to his pocket
automatically, and he found himself passing a filter-tip to the stranger rather
than ramming a red-hot ember in his eye.
“Thank you.” The stranger took the unlit cigarette, put
it straight between his lips, and inhaled deeply. “Nobody needed to tell me
about them,” he continued, slowly dribbling smoke from both nostrils.
Davy slumped defensively on his bar stool. “When ye wis
askin’ aboot Morag and the bairns, Ah figured ye wis fuckin’ wi’ ma heid.” But
knowing that there was a perfectly reasonable supernatural explanation somehow
made it all right.
Ye cannae blame Auld Nick for pushin’ yer buttons.
Davy reached out for his glass again: “’Scuse me. Ah didnae think ye existed.”
“Feel free to take your time.” The stranger smiled
faintly. “I find atheists refreshing, but it does take a little longer than
usual to get down to business.”
“Aye, weel, concedin’ for the moment that ye
are
the deil, Ah dinnae ken whit ye want wi’ the likes o’ me.” Davy cradled his
beer protectively.
“Ah’m naebody.” He shivered in the sudden draught as one
of the students–leaving–pushed through the curtain, admitting a
flurry of late-May snowflakes.
“So? You may be nobody, but your lucky number just came up.”
The stranger smiled devilishly. “Did you never think you’d win the Lottery?”
“Aye, weel, if hauf the stories they tell about ye are
true, Ah’d rather it wis the ticket, ye ken? Or are ye gonnae say ye’ve been
stitched up by the kirk?”
“Something like that.” The Devil nodded sagely. “Look,
you’re not stupid, so I’m not going to bullshit you. What it is, is I’m not the
only one of me working this circuit. I’ve got a quota to meet, but there aren’t
enough politicians and captains of industry to go around, and anyway, they’re
boring. All they ever want is money, power, or good, hot, kinky sex without any
comebacks from their constituents. Poor folks are so much more creative in
their desperation, don’t you think? And so much more likely to believe in the Rules,
too.”
“The Rules?” Davy found himself staring at his companion
in perplexity. “Nae the Law, right?”
“Do as thou wilt shall be all of the Law,” quoth the
Devil, then he paused as if he’d tasted something unpleasant.
“Ye wis sayin’?”
“Love is the Law, Love under Will,” the Devil added
dyspeptically.
“That’s a’?” Davy stared at him.
“My employer requires me to quote chapter and verse when
challenged.” As he said “employer”, the expression on the Devil’s face made
Davy shudder. “And she monitors these conversations for compliance.”
“But whit aboot the rest o’ it, aye? If ye’re the deil,
whit aboot the Ten Commandments?”
“Oh, those are just Rules,” said the Devil, smiling.
“I’m really proud of them.”
“Ye made them a’ up?” Davy said accusingly. “Just tae
fuck wi’ us?”
“Well, yes, of course I did! And all the other Rules.
They work really well, don’t you think?”
Davy made a fist and stared at the back of it. LOVE. “Ye
cunt. Ah still dinnae believe in ye.”
The Devil shrugged. “Nobody’s asking you to believe in
me. You don’t, and I’m still here, aren’t I? If it makes things easier, think
of me as the garbage collection subroutine of the strong anthropic principle.
And they”–he stabbed a finger in the direction of the overhead LEDs–”work
by magic, for all you know.”
Davy picked up his glass and drained it philosophically.
The hell of it was, the Devil was right: now he thought about it, he had no
idea how the lights worked, except that electricity had something to do with
it. “Ah’ll have anither. Ye’re buyin’.”“No I’m not.” The Devil snapped his
fingers and two full glasses appeared on the bar, steaming slightly. Davy
picked up the nearest one. It was hot to the touch, even though the beer inside
it was at cellar temperature, and it smelled slightly sulphurous. “Anyway, I
owe you.”
“Whit for?” Davy sniffed the beer suspiciously: “This
smells pish.” He pushed it away. “Whit is it ye owe me for?”
“For taking that mortgage and the job on the
street-cleaning team and for pissing it all down the drain and fucking off a
thousand citizens in little ways. For giving me Jaimie and wee Davy, and for
wrecking your life and cutting Morag off from her parents and raising a pair of
neds instead of two fine upstanding citizens. You’re not a scholar and you’re
not a gentleman, but you’re a truly professional hater. And as for what you did
to Morag–”
Davy made another fist: HATE. “Say wan mair word aboot
Morag…” he warned.
The Devil chuckled quietly. “No, you managed to do all
that by yourself.” He shrugged. “I’d have offered help if you needed it, but
you seemed to be doing okay without me. Like I said, you’re a professional.” He
cleared his throat. “Which brings me to the little matter of why I’m talking to
you tonight.”
“Ah’m no for sale.” Davy crossed his arms defensively.
“Who d’ye think Ah am?”
The Devil shook his head, still smiling. “I’m not here
to make you an offer for your soul, that’s not how things work. Anyway, you
gave it to me of your own free will years ago.” Davy looked into his eyes. The
smile didn’t reach them. “Trouble is, there are consequences when that happens.
My employer’s an optimist: she’s not an Augustinian entity, you’ll be pleased
to learn, she doesn’t believe in original sin. So things between you and the
Ultimate are…let’s say they’re out of balance. It’s like a credit card bill.
The longer you ignore it, the worse it gets. You cut me a karmic loan from the
First Bank of Davy MacDonald, and the Law requires me to repay it with
interest.”
“Huh?” Davy stared at the Devil. “Ye whit?”
The Devil wasn’t smiling now. “You’re one of the Elect,
Davy. One of the Unconditionally Elect. So’s fucking everybody these days, but
your name came up in the quality assurance lottery. I’m not allowed to mess
with you. If you die and I’m in your debt, seven shades of shit hit the fan. So
I owe you a fucking wish.”
The Devil tapped his fingers impatiently on the bar top.
He was no longer smiling. “You get one wish. I am required to read you the
small print:
“The party of the first part in
cognizance of the gift benefice or loan bestowed by the party of the second
part is hereby required to tender the fulfillment of 1 (one) verbally or
somatically expressed indication of desire by the party of the second part in
pursuance of the discharge of the said gift benefice or loan, said fulfillment
hereinafter to be termed ‘the wish’. The party of the first part undertakes to
bring the totality of existence into accordance with the terms of the wish
exclusive of paradox deicide temporal inversion or other wilful suspension
contrary to the laws of nature. The party of the second part recognizes
understands and accepts that this wish represents full and final discharge of
debt incurred by the gift benefice or loan to the party of the first part.
Notwithstanding additional grants of rights incurred under the terms of this
contract the rights responsibilities duties of the party of the first part to
the party of the second part are subject to the Consumer Credit Regulations of
2026…”