The Devil's Man, a novel

TWENTY FIVE, YOU SAY?

Lydia Cross’s nose twitched as she rounded the staircase into the upstairs hall. She paused, hand on the railing, and sniffed like a dog, her eyebrows bouncing on her forehead.
“Rotten meat,” she muttered. “Someone’s been smuggling food.”
She struck forward, thrusting her nose at each door, left, right, left, right, starting at 2D and making her way down to the end of the hall. She stopped at 2B, Mr. Grimsby’s room, noticing, as if for the first time, the broken bottom half of the B, which made the room look like 2P—a ridiculous number, in her esteem, for though Epler’s Boarding House and Inn (or The Epler House, as the locals referred to it) was large enough to board twenty-four guests, two to a room, from 1A to 3D, it did not have rooms up to the letter P.
Mrs. Cross sniffed the jamb from the door plate up to the corner and back down again, frowning at the sour smell.
Thus offended, she rapped on the door.
“Mr. Grimsby?” she said. “Mr. Grimsby, are you cooking something in there?”
She turned her ear to the door. No answer came from the other side. She rapped again, harder now, bordering on pounding, with all the force befitting a woman such as herself, which was to say, a woman of intent, a woman who did not suffer insubordination or disrespect, her hardened knuckles suffering the brunt of the assault.
“Mr. Grimsby? Have you been drinking? I’ll remind you that there’s no tippling in my house.” 
Still nothing.
“Mr. Grimsby!” Pound, pound, pound! “I demand you open this door immediately!”
She pressed her ear to the wooden panes and listened, but for the third time, no sound came from within. She slapped her side pocket for her keys, a pocket she’d sewn into her skirts herself, and feeling nothing, suddenly remembered she’d given her ring to Jeannie, and Jeannie, that stupid girl, was in the basement with the wash. With a huff and a deeper frown than before (seemingly impossible, we know, but evinced by the deep ridges on either side of her mouth), she bustled toward the stairs.

“Jeannie!” Mrs. Cross bellowed as she descended. “Oh, where is that lazy girl? Jeannie!”
A groan from below, followed by footsteps clomping up the stairs. Both women arrived at the basement door at the same time: Mrs. Cross, full, substantial, broad of shoulder, her gray hair tied back in a bun, and Jeannie, slimmer, mousier, but stoutly built, a future Mrs. Cross in the making.
“What is it, ma’am?” Jeannie asked, wiping her forehead with the back of one calloused hand. “I’ve got washing to manage.”
Mrs. Cross wagged her considerable chins in disapproval.
“Where have you been? I called for you.”
“You told me to do the laundry.”
“Do you have the keys?”
“Of course I do, ma’am.” Jeannie patted her skirt, where the keys hung from a string she had tied around her waist.
“Give those to me,” she ordered.
Jeannie unclipped the ring from the string and held them out, and Mrs. Cross snatched them away.
“When’s the last time you stripped Mr. Grimsby’s bed? It smells like something died in there.”
“Mr. Grimsby? The writer?”
Mrs. Cross couldn’t help the sour expression that formed on her face
“Is he?” she sniffed, squinting at the ceiling.
“He writes the most fantastic stories, filled with haunted castles and ghosts and murderers.”
“Murderers? He doesn’t write for The End Times?”
“Maybe. He says he sells his work to a magazine in France.”
“He’s French?” Mrs. Cross said, her lip curling. “Did I know that?”
“He’s American, missus. Just speaks French. Or writes it.”
Mrs. Cross sniffed again.
“Don’t the Eplers have a rule about… writers?”
“No, ma’am. Irish and actors, but not writers.”
“Well, perhaps they should.”
“I’ll fetch the sheets,” Jeannie said, and started back for the basement.
“No, not now, girl. I suspect he’s storing meat from the tang. He’s not in, I’m afraid, so I need you find whatever’s making the stench and get rid of it.”
“Meat? Are you sure?”
“Of course, I’m sure!”
“If it’s so bad, why didn’t you do it when you were up there?”
“You have the keys! Now do as you’re told before I swat you.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jeannie grumbled.
Mrs. Cross stepped aside as the girl scooted by and hurried up the stairs to the second floor.
“Hurry up now,” she called after her. “That wash won’t wash itself.”
With a satisfied humph, Mrs. Cross started for her office. She wanted to check the books, make sure her fancy French writer had paid that week’s rent on time. Harboring food was bad enough, but it hardly warranted eviction. But if he was in arrears…
Jeannie’s high-pitched scream shattered her thoughts. 
“My heavens, what’s gotten into her now?” she asked the ceiling.
She followed Jeannie’s footsteps as they pounded down the hall overhead, then watched as the girl, still screaming, charged down the stairs like a horse crossing an open field, ran through the parlor to the door, ripped it open, and shot out of the house. 
   
Constable Thomas held a handkerchief over his nose as he leaned over to inspect the corpse. It was sprawled out in a leather wingback, waisted legs stiff as stakes, head resting against one of the wings. Its tongue, or what should have passed for one, poked out from between desiccated lips. It was dry and shrunken and twisted, as if all the moisture had been wrung free. One hand lay in its lap, clutching an interesting-looking pen. Constable Thomas leaned in for a better look.
“Is that bone?” he asked aloud.
“Bone?” Mrs. Cross repeated. “Heavens me!”
The constable noted the dark stains on the stylus, red and clotted. The grip wrapped in hair. On the rug beneath, a dark, dry stain. He leaned over the inkpot sitting on the side table to sniff it and drew back, frowning.
“What is it?” Mrs. Cross asked.
“I can tell you what it’s not,” Thomas said. “It’s not ink.”
He peered around the chair.
“Where’s the book?” he asked.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You said he was a writer. I see the pen. Where’s the writing?”
Mrs. Cross sent her own startled look around, hand clutching imaginary pearls. Thomas refocused on the scene at hand. Judging by the smell, poor Mr. Grimsby had been dead for at least two days. Maybe three.
Thomas took a pencil out of his breast pocket and pushed one of the withered lips up. The teeth were brown and rotten. He wiped the pencil off on his jacket.
“Sucked dry,” he whispered.
“Oh, that poor young man,” Mrs. Cross said.
“Young man?” Thomas stood erect and gave her a withering look. “Madam, I have seen many dead people. Dead from disease. The pox. Consumption. Cholera. Drink. Hollows ‘em out, it does. Like a leech. But even the young ones somewhat maintain their youth.” He nodded at the corpse, chuckling. “This one here, though, he was no young man.”
“Oh, certainly he was, sir,” Mrs. Cross said. “Why, I saw him with my own two eyes not a month ago when he first came here. Ripe as a peach, him.”
Thomas snorted.
“Bah.”
“It’s true.” Mrs. Cross's voice hardened. “Mr. Grimsby was twenty-five years old. No more than thirty.” 
The constable ignored her.
“I’ll not have you questioning my honesty,” Mrs. Cross said. “I might be a lot of things, but I am not a liar.”
Thomas considered the discrepancy between the woman’s conviction and the thing reposing before him, the shell that used to be Solomon Grimsby. A writer, whatever that meant. Fantastic French fiction. Now nothing more than a husk, empty orbs staring forever into the abyss, rictus grin belying the horror of the end. 
As he pondered, one of the arms slipped off the armrest, swung back, and struck the side table. The bones shattered upon impact, dusting the air and dropping splinters on the rug. Mrs. Cross gasped and held a hand to her mouth.
Thomas squatted and poked one of the shards with his pencil. It crumbled. 
“Twenty-five, you say?” he asked.










david lowe
2018/2024










PBIS

With only one entrance to Cain's End Senior High School’s combination staff parking lot, bus lane, and parent drop-off, the morning rush could get tricky. But if the busses ran on time, and if none of the parents tried to drop their kids off on the street in front of the school, and if security wasn’t too sidetracked by other duties to direct traffic, and if none of the teachers attempted to back into their spaces, and if all of the parents who did drop their kids off in the designated place followed post-drop-off protocols, and if it wasn’t raining, or sunny, or cold, or hot, some days it could be mostly somewhat manageable.
The fifteenth Monday morning of David Lowe’s two hundred and twentieth month of teaching at CEHS (not that he was counting) was not such a morning. He had been sitting in his white 2008 Toyota Corolla on the street in front of the school, fourth in line for the turn into the parking lot, for fifteen minutes. He’d texted Jim, his department head, to notify him of his unavoidable lateness, a message to which Jim immediately replied, “admin is aware of the situation,” and nothing else since.
Someone laid on the horn behind him. He cringed. He craned his neck to see if something, anything, had changed.
It hadn’t.
“Come on,” he muttered.
Rain spattered his windshield. He turned the wipers on. The blades smeared water across the glass. A tight knot formed in his belly. He was going to have to replace wipers, and the last time he looked, wipers cost close to forty dollars each. He stared at his phone. The arrival time on his maps app flipped from 7:00 (still twenty minutes early) to 7:05 (if he parked and ran in, he’d still be comfortably on time) to 7:07 (okay, seriously move people!).
When he was sure he was about to scream, the cars, as if by magic, drained from the road into the lot. He tried not to speed as he headed for his familiar space in the back.
It was 7:11 by the time he parked. The rain had transformed from spatters to an outright downpour. Fortunately, he had an umbrella. A fancy one with a button. He propped his door open a crack and stuck it out and pushed the button and it shot open with a THWAP!
Several other teachers in the same predicament were jogging ahead of him toward the faculty entrance. Some wore raincoats; some held umbrellas. A few covered their heads with their book bags.
Mrs. Commody, an algebra teacher who’d been in the classroom since the Reagan administration, struggled out of her car. The downpour escalated into a deluge, and Mrs. Commody glared at the sky. She floundered across the lot, her overstuffed teacher’s bag (she still took work home) slung over her shoulder. David slowed his roll and jogged over.
“Here, Mrs. Commody,” he called, reaching for her bag. “Let me take that.”
She pulled away.
“Oh, no, Mr. Lowe, I’m fine.”
“You sure?”
“I might be older than dirt, but I can still carry a satchel filled with paper. I’ll share that umbrella, though.”
They crossed the lot, David simultaneously holding the umbrella over her and stooping as much as he could to cover himself, too. The last round of parents lined up in the drop-off lane. Children popped out of cars and ran for the side door, more than a few of them looking down at their phones as they did so, clomping through puddles they might have easily avoided otherwise. 
“I read the email Central sent out last night about P796,” Mrs. Commody said. “Are you still teaching Of Mice and Men?”
“As long as they’ll let me.”
“I’m surprised they didn’t put it on the list. It has the ‘n’ word in it about a billion times.”
“More like half a dozen, and mostly in one spot. And saying the ‘n’ word isn’t sexually explicit, so no list.”
“I had to P796 a book this year.”
“In calculus?”
“Yep.”
“I didn’t know math was sexually explicit.”
The old woman waggled her eyebrows.
“Depends on how you teach it.”
“You’re serious, though? How on earth…?”
“They told us we had to teach literacy in math this year, so I assigned my AP kids a biography of Oppenheimer, and Oppenheimer had mistresses.”
The pair were about to cross the last lane to the curb when a minivan came roaring up from the right. David pulled Mrs. Commody back as it skidded to a halt, and the driver laid on the horn.

A few students were waiting for David in the hallway, all of them sitting against the wall, knees up, hunched over their phones. 
“Hey, everybody,” he said.
None of them bothered to unplug their eyes from their screens. David opened the door at the same time the warning bell rang (five minutes to go!) and aimed for his desk, where he deposited his backpack and lunch before turning back to the door to post-up against the frame. The zombies sitting on the floor turned into the walking dead as they shuffled into the room.
“Earbuds, earbuds,” David said. “Phones in the locker.”
A boy wearing a letter jacket strutted down the hallway.
“Señior Lowe! Good morning!”
David smiled. Chris Muñoz wasn’t the most outstanding student, but he was an anomaly in the post-pandemic world of phone-addicted teenagers. Garrulous, happy, and athletic, his parents wouldn’t let him have a device until he could pay for the line himself, and Chris wanted to play sports more than he wanted a device.
“Hey, Chris,” David said. You’re awfully chipper.”
“Notice anything new?” Chris asked.
He spun around to show off the back of his jacket, which bore his last name embroidered over an image of the school mascot: a glowering raven. He spun back around, a toothy smile plastered across his face, and popped the collar on his jacket.
“You finally got your teeth fixed?” David asked.
“Haha, very funny, Mr. Lowe.”
The boy patted him on the shoulder as he entered the classroom.
“Looks good, Chris,” David called after him.
A boy with bangs covering his eyes like blackout curtains hunched toward the door. David put himself in his way, and the boy drew up short.
“What?” he grumbled.
“Not today, Wilson.”
“Not today, what?”
“Earbuds.”
“Man, I don’t have ‘em in.”
David peered at each side of the boy’s head, but Wilson’s hair was a thick, black wall.
“This’d be the third strike, Wilson.”
“I told you I don’t have ‘em.”
“Give us a break, Will!” Chris called from inside. “Everybody know you have them things up in your head.”
“Shut up, Chris!”
“Law of the land now, boy. Take ‘em out or get out.”
“Whose side you on?”
“Side?”
“Enough, Chris,” David said. “You too, Wilson. Enough.”
Wilson glared at his classmate, but the interference seemed to break his resolve. He reached into his hair-curtain and pulled his earbuds out one by one.
“In your bag, Wilson,” David said as the boy pushed by.
The final bell rang, and when David turned to enter the classroom, a lanky boy with high, tight twists darted in and scooted to the back. It was not the quasi-tardiness that bothered David. Nor was it the questionably appropriate slogan on the boy’s t-shirt (I LOVE MILFs!). It wasn’t even the boy himself, though he was in dire need of the kind of discipline teachers were no longer allowed to exercise. It was the fact that he was on his cellphone, carrying on an intense conversation, apparently with his mother.
“Mom, I’m telling you I have a review session!” he said.
“Sam,” David said. “What are you doing?”
Sam tossed his backpack on a table in the back and threw himself into his seat.
“Because I have to do the review first,” he said. “Or I can’t retake the test.”
“Sam!” David snapped, approaching the boy. 
No less than a year before, most of the class would have been too engrossed in their devices to even notice what was going on, though some might have glanced up, half-aware, music blaring out of their earbuds. Now they were silent, staring wide-eyed as the confrontation unfolded before them, some on the edges of their seats.
David positioned himself in front of Sam, who was now ducking down, feebly trying to hide what he was doing. He held out his hand to the boy. “Let’s have it.”
“Mom,” Sam said. “No… MOM.”
“Sam! Give me your phone.”
Sam held up his index finger.
“Are you kidding me?” David said. “Sam, end the call.” Sam kept talking. “Sam, end the call now.”
Sam held up his finger higher and shook it.
“Yo, yo, man,” Chris said. “That’s disrespectful.”
He stood up and rolled his shoulders.
“Chris, I got this,” David said.
“Yeah, Chris,” Sam snapped. “He got this.”
Chris clenched his jaw and balled his fists. David inserted himself between the pair and turned his back to Chris.
“Sam, get off the phone,” he said.
“It’s my mom.”
“I don’t care who it is. You can’t even have that out of your backpack.”
“My mom don’t care.”
“Sam, if you don’t put it away, I’m going to have to call security.”
“You better snatch that phone out that boy’s mouth, Mr. Lowe,” Chris said. “He ain’t handing it over.”
David turned and pointed.
“Chris, stop.”
“Yeah, Chris,” Sam snapped. “Sit your black ass down.”.
Everybody froze. David felt his stomach clench. A girl sitting at David’s elbow dropped her mouth. And Chris exploded.
He grabbed his desk with both hands and threw it aside.
“Chris—” David ordered.
Chris marched forward, eyes zeroed in on Sam. David put himself up to the boy.
“Chris, calm down.”
“I’m gonna fuck that kid up.”
“Let me handle this.”
Sam ended the call to his mother and placed his phone down on the desk in front of him.
“Keep talking, son,” he said. “That’s all you got.”
David didn’t even have time to blink before Chris knocked him aside. He fell into the desks behind him, groaning as his back twinged. The two girls who had been sitting there helped by screaming and leaping to their feet. By the time he righted himself, Chris had already tackled Sam. The two went down in a tangle, and all he could see were Chris’s fists rising and falling. 
“Someone call security!” David cried.
“How?” one of the girls asked.
He got to his feet and limped over to the fight.
In his twenty-seven years of teaching high school, David had seen plenty of fights, but he’d never broken one up. Every instinct he had told him not to insert himself between the brawling boys. He should have cleared the room and moved anything out of the way that one of them could weaponize. But Chris’s fists were making sick, wet thudding sounds with each blow, and by the time David reached the pair, Sam’s arms had gone limp.
“Chris!” David yelled.
Chris reared back for another punch, and David lunged for his arm. He managed to pull the boy to his feet.
“Get the fuck offa me!” Chris yelled.
David pulled backwards with all the strength he could muster. He twisted to the side as they fell, his back twinged again, and then—











INFECTION

“You okay, doctor?”
David blinked. He was in the Grind. The Gory Grind. Mug in his hands. Warm. Half full. A framed poster featuring a grainy picture of what could have been either a flying saucer or a plate with the words I BELIEVE scrawled over it. In front of him stood a man with a towel slung over his shoulder, his arms folded over his chest. He leaned forward and waved a hand in David’s face.
“Yo! Doctor Lowe!” he said. “You okay, my man?”
“Y-yeah,” David said. “I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Give ‘im hell, Eli!” someone from the back yelled. “I don’t know why you let him in in the first place.”
“Shut your mouth, Boone.”
“Can’t be good for business, trucking with a guy like that.”
“I SAID SHUT YOUR MOUTH.”
Eli returned his attention to David, who was glaring toward the back of the cafe.
“Don’t pay him no mind, doctor. Ignorant people gonna be ignorant.”
“Yeah,” David said. He cleared his throat. Sniffed.
“You sure you okay?” Eli asked. “Been staring at your drink for ten minutes.”
“Haven’t been getting a lot of sleep lately.”
A roll of thunder arrested David’s attention, and he turned toward the window. Rain spattered the sidewalk. A struggling maple, held in place by spikes and bungee cords, swayed in a sudden gust of wind. Yellow-orange leaves blew down the sidewalk. A gray sedan rolled through the intersection.
Thunder rattled the mugs on the shelves. The lights died. A woman in the back shrieked. 
“Jesus, Betty,” Boone snapped. “That was right in my ear.”
One of the emergency lights glowed to life.
“Hey, Eli!” Boone called. “You pay the ‘lectric?”
“Mind your business, Boone,” Eli replied.
A siren wailed in the distance. Rain fell in dark sheets. When a second bolt struck, the entire block was lit up for a brief moment, spotlighting a hulking figure standing on the other side of the glass cafe front. Two red eyes beaming in the pitch black.
“Oh, my god what is that!” Betty cried.
“What’s what?” Eli asked, more irritated than concerned.
“There’s something out there!”
Eli scanned the window. The form had disappeared.
“Just the storm,” he said.
The lights flickered back on, and Betty screamed.
“Shut the fuck up with the screaming, would ya, Betty?” Boone said.
The front door flew open, and Betty, not one to break the rule of threes, performed accordingly. 
The entry was a black void and falling rain. Then, into the dim, brown light of the coffeehouse hobbled a frail old man in a trench coat and galoshes. He was one of the oldest things David had ever seen. He didn’t walk; he shuffled, moving as if every step pinched some secret nerve in the deepest crevices of his spine. He paused in front of a print of an old illustration featuring Andrew Jackson brandishing a sword at a polycephalous snake and raised his head, revealing a pale face with a long, ugly scar running from his left ear to the corner of his mouth. Water streamed off the fedora and down a crepey-skinned cheek.
“I just flew in from Cleveland,” he said in a reedy voice. He raised his arms in a feeble attempt to flap them. “And boy are my arms tired!”
Thunder rolled in the distance. Eli leaned on the bar.
“You wanna close the door?” he said. “This is a coffeehouse not a slip-and-slide.”
The old man stared at him for a moment, disappointed, before returning to the door and pulling it closed. He put his hands on his knees and coughed up something dark and terrible from the depths of his lungs. The messenger’s bag strapped to his back shifted and slipped off his shoulder. Another crash of thunder dinned the air. The old man shook his fist at the ceiling.
“There is no reason for that!” he cried. “No reason at all!”
Eli glared as the old man re-strapped the bag and shuffled toward the bar like a cartoon turtle. The wood floors didn’t even creak. David caught a whiff of something stale and putrid, like rotting meat masked by cheap cologne. When the old man was a few feet away, he shrugged his bag off his shoulder and caught it with one hand, his arm dipping precariously with the weight. Muscles shaking, he held it out to David.
“Please to help,” he said.
David took the bag and placed it on the bar as the old man attempted to mount one of the stools.
“Hup one! Hup two! Hup three!” the old man said. He plopped into the seat and removed his fedora, brushing a long strand of stringy gray hair out of his eyes. “Barkeep. One Bloody Mary, please. Extra bloody.”
“This is a coffeehouse,” Eli said.
“Then what is the alcohol I see back there?”
The old man aimed a limp finger at the bottles of Jameson’s and other liqueurs lining the shelf behind Eli: chocolate and coffees, some citrus bitters.
“Not the same thing,” Eli said.
“Hmm. What is the closest beverage you can make to a Bloody Mary extra bloody?”
“Extra bloody? What’s that mean?”
“More,” the old man said. “Blood.”
“You mean tomato juice?”
The old man’s laugh sounded like a wheezing cough.
“Yes. Yes. ‘Tomahto juice’.”
Eli rolled his eyes.
“Alright, okay,” he said. “I’m going to make something up for you on the spot, old man. Gonna call it the GTFO.”
The old man smiled a brown smile.
“Appreciations and gratitudes.”
Eli turned his back to the pair, and the weird man smiled sheepishly at David.
“It’s raining pitchforks out there,” he said. 
He picked up a copy of The End Times that had been soaking up coffee on the bar and read the headline aloud.
“Local Group Calls For More Book Bans,” he said. He tsked and shook his head. “These people. A great shame they bring upon us.”
“They’re idiots,” David said.
The old man cleared his throat as if about to make a great proclamation and said, “Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”
“H.L. Mencken,” David replied.
“His most famous quote. Usurped recently by some unsavories, I think, but meaningful in this context?”
The realization hit David so hard he nearly gasped.
“Mr. Grimsby,” he said. He stood up out of his stool. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize…”
“Not to worry, not to worry,” Grimsby said. “Please, call me Solomon.”
“If I’d known it was you… oh, my. I’m so embarrassed.”
He extended his hand for a shake, but rather than return the cordiality, Grimsby looked down at it, astonished, almost hungry.
“Are you sure?” Grimsby asked.
Flustered, David pulled his hand back, saying, “Oh, I’m sorry. I, uh—”
“No, no! Please, yes. Let us shake one another’s extremities in a display of friendliness and camaraderie.”
The hand that poked out of Grimsby’s coat sleeve was less a hand than it was a liver-spotted claw. David took it in his, intending to give it a delicate pump, but the old man clamped down.
“A pleasure! A pleasure!” Grimsby chimed.
David weathered the handshake as long as he could, and when he pulled away, one of the old man’s yellowing nails sliced into his wrist.
“Ow,” David said, frowning as he inspected the wound. A thin line of blood ran down his skin. He grabbed a napkin off the bar and pressed it onto his wrist.
Eli appeared and plonked a mug filled with red liquid down in front of Grimsby.
“Here you go,” he said. “GTFO.”
The old man grunted in lieu of a thank you. He wrapped his swollen knuckles around the mug and, placing his left hand under his right elbow, tipped it to his mouth. He slurped like a toddler, a line of red running out of the scarred side of his mouth.
“Ahh!” he gasped, smacking his lips. “Bloody delicious.”
“What is that?” David asked Eli.
Eli gave him an unreadable look.
“House secret.”
Grimsby watched him walk back to his perch next to the register, a sanguine smile on his face.
“Well,” David said. “Shall we get down to it?”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
Grimsby hooked a wrist through the handle on his messenger’s bag and dragged it toward him. With a quick motion, he flipped it open, the clasp clicking on the wood, withdrew a thick, ancient journal, and thumped it down on the bar.
The leather cover was ropey and raised, as if made from twisted skin, stitched at the seams with what looked like hair. A strange design was burned into the surface; though faded with time, David could still make out the sharp tips of horns, three rows deep, and the angular face of a beast.
“Beautiful, yes?” Grimsby asked.
“It’s hand written?” David asked.
“In my mother’s red blood! I joke, of course.”
“That’s not funny.”
“I would have to exhume her body to access her blood.”
David paused, uncertain.
“So! The down payment, yes?” Grimsby said. “As we agreed? One thousand to start?”
“Mr. Grimsby. Solomon. If the stories are hand written, I’m afraid I’m going to have to charge more.”
“Oh, my writing is pristine. Machine like, as my mother used to say.”
“Still…”
“See for yourself! Open her up!”
David folded the cover aside. Solomon indeed wrote like a typewriter typed, each letter evenly spaced and entirely legible, unlike David’s own messy handwriting, which he thought looked like that of a kindergartner with nerve damage. He leaned closer. The ink was indeed red. Blood red. He grimaced at a few disturbing phrases.
Clutched her throat… arterial spray…
“Something the matter?” Grimsby asked.
“No, no. It’s just… you were right. Your handwriting is perfect.”
Grimsby beamed. David folded the cover back over the journal. 
“Still. This is highly irregular. I do all of my edits on my laptop. Doing them by hand would add hours to the job.”
“Can you not use your lap doohickey to make the edits and print them off?”
“You contacted me about an editing job, Mr. Grimsby. If you want someone to transcribe—”
“Please, I—”
“It’s actually fairly insulting that you would even suggest—”
“I didn’t mean to insult you.”
“… not sure if this is the right fit for me.”
Grimsby banged his palm on the table.
“No!” he snarled.
David put his hands up. After a moment, he said, “Okay, I think you need to leave.”
Grimsby’s snarl quickly turned into a quiver.
“Wait,” he said. He reached out as if to clutch at David’s shirt but caught himself and clasped his hands to his chest. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Please don’t leave. Please.”
David looked around the coffeehouse. Eli had disappeared. Boone and Betty hunched over their drinks in the back.
“Please, please sit,” Grimsby said. His eyes were glassy.
David patted the air with his hands.
“Okay,” he said. “But one more outburst like that, and I’m gone.”
“Yes. Yes. Of course. I’m sorry.” The old man swiped at his eyes. “You must forgive me. I’m old. So old. My mother… I’ve been taking care of her since she fell ill, and as I said, she’s gone now, and so recently. This book, it’s the only thing I… the one thing that…”
David breathed out of his nose. 
“Listen, the way this works is that, normally, a client will share a Word file. Word is the application I use to do my edits.” Noting the old man’s confusion, he caught himself. “Never mind. I get the file, then I make a copy and make my changes to the copy. The point is, I can’t make those kinds of changes on a separate piece of paper and rewrite the whole thing or even type it up. It just… it just wouldn’t work.”
“Can’t anything else be done?”
David picked up the journal again. Pulled the cover aside. The dark red ink. The perfect print. He scanned the first few sentences without actually reading them.
“Fine,” he said. “But I’ll have to charge you more.”
“How much?”
David shook the journal. 
“I’m assuming you have more of these waiting for me?”
Solomon patted the messenger’s bag.
“At least a dozen. Filled to the brim!”
“How many words have you written?”
“I don’t know. How many words does a journal hold?”
“The way you write, ten thousand each, maybe? It’s a lot of work, Solomon. You’re adding at least forty hours to the project.”
“I will pay you anything.”
David calculated. He didn’t want to scare the guy off, but an extra week was an extra week. He decided to start high.
“Four thousand.”
“Four thousand it is.” 
“That’s on top of the original amount.”
“Done!”
The man pulled a worn envelope out of his inner jacket pocket. The paper was thick and yellow, with tiny hieroglyphs decorating the folds and a red wax seal bearing the imprint of the same demon embossed on the cover of the journal.
“And the extra two grand?” David asked.
That overbite smile again.
“It’s there.”
Grimsby cantilevered his mug up to his lips and gulped the rest of his drink down, Adam’s apple bobbing.
“Ahhh!” he said, smacking his lips. He smiled. David winced. “Refreshing.”
A fresh gale rattled the window as more rain fell. The water ran down the street in sheets. A distant rumble of thunder.

David stayed at the coffeehouse long after the old man left. He told himself he merely wanted to wait out the rain, but he really wanted the guy as far away from him as possible before he left. The storm harrowed the evening. The streetlights, dull and blurry in the rain, struggled against the dark. Eli banged around somewhere deep in the bones of the building. The journal seemed to vibrate at his elbow, begging for his touch. David glanced at it, and his throat constricted.
When he finally decided to leave, he palmed the cuff of his jacket and used his forearm to scoop both the journal and the envelope into his backpack, trying to ignore the queasy feeling their mere touch, even through the fabric of his clothes, inspired.