Interview with the Devil

Chapter 5 of Our Lady of Brattle Street, copyright (c) 2026 by Richard Smoley

5

Interview with the Devil

The episode with Shoshanna Birnbaum was humiliating, and the more Artemus thought about it, the angrier he grew. Her intuition was incomplete and incorrect. He had not gone there intending to tell her anything, and he had not asked her for any confidences, certainly none that graphic. And imparting confidences creates no obligation for repayment in kind.

Nonetheless, the incident depressed him, reinforcing his sense that he was radically alone. He could turn to no one—certainly to no such creature as Shoshanna Birnbaum. He regarded it an insult to himself even to consider consulting with that idiot Dr. Ormond, and the wife was the worst confidant of all, given the state of the marriage. Artemus could easily imagine what a divorce lawyer would do with these details.

Behind it all was Harvard. He could only think of John Mack. The late John Mack had been a professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, and he had taken on the investigation of UFO abductees. He published his findings and was immediately surrounded by a wall of denunciations. There was even an attempt to strip him of tenure—a deed otherwise unthinkable except, perhaps, for someone revealed as a former concentration-camp guard. Yet all Mack had done was to treat the matter phenomenologically—that is, as the abductions were experienced by the subjects themselves. The fact that this was the most scientifically rigorous approach did not occur to anyone. But then rigor is usually the first casualty in academic squabbles.

Mack somehow managed to weather these blasts, only to die in a rather embarrassing way: being hit by a car on his way to dinner in London. The drunk driver was no doubt the chief culprit, but the unfortunate American habit of looking the wrong way when stepping off a London curb may have played its own sinister role.

And John Mack had not reported any experience of his own: his findings and discussions were purely clinical. Artemus’s close encounter of the third kind (to continue the UFO metaphor) would have subjected him to much worse. Many of the Harvard faculty were crazy and certifiably so; indeed Artemus reflected that if somebody asked him whether the crazy faculty members outnumbered the sane ones or vice versa, he would have to flip a coin for an answer. But their craziness generally belonged to types that are more or less expected of career academics. Artemus’s situation was beyond the pale.

One afternoon not long after these events, Artemus had some business in Back Bay, and when it was done decided to treat himself to a martini or two at the Ritz bar.

He was given a small corner booth, which could not accommodate more than two people. Shortly after he sat down, a man came and sat next to him.

“Very glad you’re here. I wasn’t afraid you could come.”

Artemus had no recollection of arranging such a meeting.

He was one of those odd gentlemen of the Continental type. His black hair was heavily oiled, as in the old days of brilliantine and Macassar, and he had a small moustache that was less than neatly trimmed. His black suit was neither clean nor of the highest quality and was frayed at the cuffs. He wore a wide, loud tie that only went as far down as his navel, as men sometimes wore in the 1940s. He made Artemus think of an alcoholic Walt Disney.

He spoke in a clear but indefinably foreign accent: “I wanted to see how you are doing.”

Artemus did not say anything.

“Horreur!” said the gentleman. “Le diable! Yes, you have guessed right—or you were about to. To answer the next question you were about to ask: yes, I am definitely a figment of your imagination. You certainly don’t believe all of that theological nonsense. Shall we live a little?” he added as the waiter approached, and ordered a bottle of vintage Roederer Cristal.

The waiter nodded and went off with the order.

To Artemus, he said, “What do you think of my outfit? I was thinking of Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant. But if you prefer, I can leave and come back, say, as an old Franciscan friar.”

“Your outfit? It looks seedy. Your suit is worn and not very clean, and your tie does not go with the rest of your outfit.”

“Parfait! Quel triomphe! Wondering how you were, I attempted to imitate your state. Worn, frayed, seen better days, badly put together. Would you agree?”

“I would not disagree,” said Artemus as the waiter brought the champagne.

“I understand that you had a couple of visits from the other party.”

Artemus spat up his sip of champagne.

“Why be surprised?” the gentleman went on. “We have already agreed that I am a figment of your imagination. Consequently, I am a part of you, and can see what is in you, my young friend.”

The gentleman paused. “I apologize. I misspoke in calling you that. Strictly speaking, you are older than I am.”

“If you know so much, can you tell me one thing? Were you the thing that was trying to get into me that night?”

The champagne bottle was emptying fast.

“What? That! No! As you can see, it is logically impossible. If I am a part of you, I am already in you and therefore cannot try to get into you. No, that was one of the innumerable denizens of worlds unseen to human eyes—or at least to ordinary human eyes.

“It’s an ecosystem very like the one you see in nature. Except immeasurably bigger, of far vaster dimensions and far more diversely populated. But to expand the biological analogy, practically all of these creatures care nothing for man and wish to do him neither evil nor good. Some of them, it is true, are appallingly ugly, but have you ever looked at photos of creatures from the deepest oceans? Many of them are monstrous. In fact, if you viewed many ordinary insects from your garden close up, they too look like monsters. But they will do no harm—although for your roses, it may be another matter.

“On the other hand, as in the natural world, there is a small number of creatures who like to prey on man. These are nothing more than the mosquitos and tapeworms of the astral realm. They are not to be feared. Your particular specimen was like a bacterium. It tried to get in, but your, shall we say, immune system was strong enough to repel it. If you look at accounts of demonic possession, you will see that they inevitably occur to people, often children, who are psychically weak; those who have been abused are particularly vulnerable. Some religionists take advantage of this, pretending that their chants and their sprinklings are the only remedy, but they are no better and in fact worse than most other remedies of the occult variety.”

Artemus was half irritated, half amused by this discourse. “And what about those who try to invoke them?”

“It’s all quite obvious. Some girls get hold of a book called Teen Wicca or something of the sort. Of course, it isn’t like the movies, with large pieces of furniture flinging themselves across the room, but the results are often startling enough. The young people realize, ‘My God! It works!’ The smart ones are frightened and stop; the stupid ones see if they can use these powers to make trouble—and they can, but almost entirely for themselves. There is a tiny minority—the really smart ones—who realize from their experience that the world is not in the slightest way as it is imagined to be, and some of those go on to try to find out what is really going on.

“As for those magicians who call up spirits from the vasty deep, they usually get the results they should expect even if they are not intelligent enough to do so.”

The waiter reappeared and emptied the bottle.

“Shall we have another?” said the gentleman. “Yes, let’s!” he answered himself. To the waiter: “Another, please.” The waiter went off.

“Let us suppose,” continued the gentleman, “that you are stupid enough to try to be a magus of this typical variety. You pull up some grimoire from 500 years ago, and you try to evoke some unwholesome spirit according to the directions in the book.

“These grimoires were written with fail-safe devices. As you will see if you have ever looked at one of them, you will see that they are immensely complicated. You are supposed to swing censers of incense, gesture in any number of directions, and draw circles with a sword while reciting unpronounceable names, even though you only have two hands and one mouth. You inevitably botch the ritual, and having done that, you have to start all over. But by now, you are so discouraged that you usually give up. That was the point: to make sure that fools would botch the ritual and keep from burning their own fingers.

“Sometimes, however, through persistence or sheer bad luck, one of these cardboard magi manages to evoke a spirit. The grimoires, of course, call them devils, because the Christians decided that every spirit that didn’t look like an angel on a stained-glass window was an agent of the Evil One. The magus then compounds the mistake by bullying the spirit and ordering it around. No wonder it would retaliate if given the slightest chance.
“Look at the matter objectively. The life of the typical demon is even more wretched than that of the human being. It lives in a dismal milieu, and it has no holidays in the Caribbean to look forward to. Then some complete stranger knocks on its door, barges in, and demands services that the demon may or may not even be able to provide. Rather than assuming that these are minions of evil, you should realize that you are behaving in the rudest and most barbaric fashion, and from their point of view and even from ours, they have every reason to be hateful, retaliate, and escape as soon as possible.”

“I didn’t call up any spirits, that night or any other,” said Artemus.

“No, and I’ve already explained why. You are in a crowded restaurant, someone sneezes, and a virus enters your nostrils. Perhaps this is evil of a metaphysical sort, perhaps not—that is a long discussion—but it is neither more nor less cosmically evil than your demon intrusion.”

“And what protected me that night?”

“I’ve already told you. Your own astral immune system.”

“It was not the Lady.”

“Not in the way you imagine.”

“Who is the Lady?”

“That is not my prerogative to discuss. I have already gone over the ledge in telling you as much as I have, but I can see the situation as it is, and one must do something. Anyway, I have a few tricks left.”

“Do you intend evil toward me?”

“Sir, I intend nothing but evil toward you.”

“And what is my protection from you?”

“The antidote to what led you to create me.”

“And that is?”

“Do you really want me to give up the whole game?”

The second champagne bottle was now practically empty. Artemus was suddenly felt an urgent need to go to the men’s room and hastily excused himself.

When he came back, he saw a single glass, with a splash of champagne, left on the table. There was only glass; there had always been only one glass. There was no need to make any inquiries of the waiter. Artemus had sat at that table in complete silence, drinking two bottles of vintage champagne all on his own while barely tasting it, as he was reminded by a bill for $684.k