The Weirdness(15)

“I guess,” Billy admits. “At the electronic music dude convention.”

“He probably had some buddy who was coming into the city and needed a place to crash. He probably got in touch—Hey, buddy, can I stay with you?—and Jørgen was like Perfect, I’m not even there, you can crash in my bed. I’ll send you the key. I got this roommate though … One thing led to another and they got into their heads that it’d be a good idea to freak you out. I mean, did he know anything about you that Jørgen doesn’t know?”

Billy considers this. “No.”

“This whole devil thing sounds like something one of his friends would come up with. You remember he spent like all of last year palling around with those death metal dudes? Guys with a kinda Jotunheim look about them? Dudes in druid robes who maybe had a White Power background?”

“Yeah, but this guy didn’t look like that,” Billy says. “He just looked kind of normal.”

“I don’t know,” Anil says. “Maybe somebody who grew out of that stage?”

Billy considers Lucifer’s shaved head and stubble. “Could be,” he concludes. “But what about the part where, you know, where he reached in and like touched my brain?”

“Tricky,” Anil says. “But someone who has maybe some stage magic experience? Somebody who had done some hypnotism?”

“Yes! He sounded like an R-rated hypnotist!”

“Coupled perhaps with an unusually receptive, naïve subject … it’s not ironclad, but it makes loads more sense than the alternative. I’ll bet they got the whole thing on video. It’s probably up on YouTube right now. You’d better hope you comported yourself with your usual dignity throughout the experience.”

Billy remembers cowering in the corner, and he winces. “Is that legal?” he asks. “To put me on YouTube without my permission? With an … intention to humiliate?”

“Dude,” Anil says. “You’re not going to sue your roommate just because he punk’d you.”

“Don’t say punk’d,” Billy says. “That is not a word.”

“Don’t worry, buddy. If they did something like that, it’s cool, they’ll take it down as soon as they know you figured it out. Look, we’re going to go see the Ghoul, right? We should have left ten minutes ago, I’m just saying. If you’re online somewhere, looking like an idiot, the Ghoul will be able to find it. Fuck, he’s probably already seen it. So you call Jørgen, you admit that he punk’d you, you guys’ll have a laugh, he’ll take it down. That’ll be it. You’ll go home tonight, the quote-unquote Devil will be there, you’ll get to meet him a second time and you’ll see that everything’s cool, tomorrow you’ll be all like He actually turned out to be a really funny guy.”

Put that way it doesn’t sound so bad. Billy’s been meaning to call Jørgen anyway. And as they head out, he can almost make Anil’s version of events seem plausible. There is only one problem with it. The switch in Billy’s head, the one that tells him that this guy was actually the Devil? It’s still stuck, determinedly, in the ON position.


“Gentlemen,” says the Ghoul, his heavy-lidded eyes rising from his phone to regard them as they tramp in and shake off the chilly November as best they can.

“Hey, G.,” says Anil. “How’s the poetry biz?”

“Predictable,” says the Ghoul. He’s already gotten started on his meal, having worked halfway through his usual, an enormous platter of vegetarian chili nachos. The waitress proffers menus before Anil and Billy are fully settled in; they wave them off, putting in orders for their own respective usuals.

“So,” Anil begins. “It’s been an interesting day.”

“Uncovering new horizons in sandwich-making?” says the Ghoul.

“As ever. But no. The interesting part involves our buddy Billy here.” He claps Billy on the shoulder. “Billy had, I don’t know, you might call it an unusual epistemological occurrence? Maybe a brush with the divine?”

The Ghoul slowly arches an eyebrow.

Anil turns to Billy. “Do you want to tell it?” he asks.

“Why don’t you tell it,” says Billy. He wants to hear whether it sounds crazy coming out of someone else’s mouth.

“Let me lead with a question,” Anil says to the Ghoul. “Did you see anything online today that might have embarrassed Billy?”

The Ghoul’s face contorts into a grimace of sympathy, revealing an answer. Billy crumples a little, mortified, but there’s some relief in it: he understands that he can maybe begin to relax into knowing that the whole thing was just a joke.