A Roadie’s Tale Ch. 03: Devil

She crosses her arms at the hem and then a long upward peeling of snug black fabric as she unveils herself to me. Nothing beneath her top but blushing, freckled skin.

Her hand returns to my cock and it's a sexier, friendlier squeeze than the assessing grip before. She seems happy but I can't boast. Go a month or so without anything but your imagination and then snog the Devil herself, you'll be a girl's ever-ready best friend too. No batteries required.

If this is her wish I can't wait for my turn...

She lets me taste her tongue, an edge of spice in her mouth, her gentle sounds asking for more. Her fingers curl in my hair and hold me still as she kisses my lips, my jaw, my neck.

She licks heat into my skin and then kisses it, nips playfully with her teeth. I groan, more than getting into it as my own hands push downward into the back pockets of her jeans to pull her hips hard against mine. She groans into my shoulder, growls around the nape of my neck as I hug her tight and...

A long kiss tempting me for more. I let her drive and I feel her breath pulling at mine, let her draw it out of me. Strange thing for her to do in a way, intimate.

I kiss her and then felt her breathing back into my mouth, and I accept it. I want all of her.

Fire, the only description. My lungs are the bellows breathing in the furnace and as I try to pull away I realise she has me by the throat.

The heat doesn't fade as it seeps into me, it sets every cell alight or at least it feels like it. I can't move and her fire is pulsing through my veins.

Pressure in my head, my vision fades from the outside like an old movie, down to those two bright points of green, staring into me.

I can feel her, somewhere in my head. Somewhere just in range of my attention there's the tug of a familiar smile, but not my smile.

I feel like we suddenly fall into one another, nothing meets me but a warm inky darkness.

I need to borrow you for a bit. Her voice is in my head, but I hear my own lips move with her words.

***

It's dark. My eyes are open but I'm not getting the feed, void black and grey snow like the end of a VHS.

"The hell is this?" I can't speak, only think it.

I can hear footsteps, my footsteps. Alone.

"You there?" I can still think at least.

Nothing.

"Did you just... breathe fire?" I realise it's a little late to be concerned, but I am anyway. Feel the thump of my soles on the floor. My body is working but I'm not driving it. I'm locked somewhere behind my own eyes, pulled out of my senses.

"Where are we?" I ask the inside of my head.

Nothing.

I wait.

...

"Are we nearly there yet?" I put on my most annoying kids voice.

I hear myself chuckle, my body at least. Sounds weird when someone else does it.

It felt like long minutes, just listening to the sounds of my own footsteps and my breath. I had no form from within myself like this, no limbs or senses, I knew only what she told me.

"You could at least put the radio on or something." I tell her, for the moment suspending my disbelief of psychic body-snatching devils.

Somewhere beyond my control my eyes blink and I can see again. It's not familiar, a part of the festival field I hadn't been to before. Already almost pitch dark except for the plethora of glowing sticks, hoops, ropes, vials, and the ubiquitous night-glow bodypaint smudged into everything people touched. Now it was getting darker I noted some telling combinations of handprints, a smaller set between a larger one, long drags of distracted passion. Everyone's having fun but me...

"Why am I walking funny?" She's stumbling on top of my legs like she's drunk.

"You have stupid feet." She tells me. "And your knees aren't much smarter."

"Try stomping a bit more." I give her a pointer, after a few steps we seem to be making steadier progress.

"Thanks." She's short with me, I wonder if I'm even supposed to be aware of this part, if she was just going to...

"What was that about anyway?" The question forces itself into the dark mind-space between us. "You burned me, or something."

She doesn't respond. With a commendable stomp she makes better progress, wherever we're going it's a long way.

We move among rows of tents and on to the larger trailers and caravans, behind where some of the vendors are set up. I feel her flexing my hands, my knuckles click and I feel an odd satisfaction, I realise she's driving more than just my body somehow.

I realise where we are as we step out into a lit path laid with plastic matting to stop the mud becoming a swamp. Clomping down at an easy pace, not attracting attention though I can feel her worry that everyone is staring.

Odd thing for a demon to be concerned about, makes me ponder.

"Why me?" I ask from within.

I don't hear her words this time, just feel a flex of my muscles, an oddly convincing view of myself from the outside; half a pint in my hand, watching the people, CREW written on my chest in bright white, an impression of helpfulness I wouldn't have ascribed to myself.

We go through a door combination locked against unruly fans. The numbers roll across my mind before I'm really aware of who is currently controlling the brain, my thumb seems to work by itself to punch in the numbers and then open the door.

"Feel like my head's gonna turn inside out..." I want to pull over and stop, suddenly feel the toll of thinking two different sets of thoughts at once. Somewhere behind my eyes I can feel things clanking and squeaking, an old engine being pushed too hard.

"Almost there." She whispers with my lips.

We're in the VIP section, where a guy like me is only supposed to tread when we're unpacking or taking down. We're about twelve hours too early to have much of an excuse.

"Should've brought beer." I tell her. "No-one thinks twice about a roadie carrying alcohol."

I get a brief shared memory, not anything specific so much as an incredible expanse of time and space. She's telling me she was sneaking into places while my ancestors were making things out of flint.

I suppose I could have just waited but I was still trying to reach out for phantom limbs. I'm not a man who likes being controlled and I was trying to work from my eyesight out.

We're climbing stairs, stone steps in a spiral. For a second I can feel the muscles in my legs flexing, I try to exert influence but I don't even break our stride.

This must be back inside, but not the caves below. This is the old house, some national trust museum thing, owned by everyone but off limits to the likes of us.

I wonder if that's why she needs me, as a disguise, a vehicle she's borrowing to get past what passes for security here.

It's too dark for me to see anything, my eyes are open but all I get is a sense of different sized spaces. We go through corridors, through bigger rooms weaving around pillars or furniture or something.

It's cold too, something I only began to notice as I felt our feet on stone again after a long stint of floorboards. My t-shirt feels a little damp with sweat, from her fire or from those long stairs or both. I can feel it chill quickly, see a smudge of vapour on my breath.

This isn't right. There is a vibration in the air, seems to be seeping into me feet first.

"Where are we going?" I've lost my chatty personable tone, I'm sliding the levels closer and closer toward my humourless bastard tone instead.

"Silence." Her soft whisper shuts me down instantly, with effortless, immovable force I am rendered thoughtless and speechless. For a while I just... am?

Are?

I witness my body move to a heavy oak door behind a dusty velvet rope with a sign saying No Admittance, she makes my unresisting arms move the rope aside and then squares up to the door.

We both feel the cold pouring off it, as if it were a huge chunk of dry ice.

Fire versus Ice. I wasn't stupid enough not to be worried at this point. I've played enough Final Fantasy to know about elemental stuff like that, but I'd never stopped to consider that I might only be one or the other.

I'd always thought of myself as complicated I suppose. We only have the worlds inside our own heads in the end, I thought I might be deep enough to have undercurrents; hoped I might be dark enough to cast an interesting shadow now and again.

I felt her... disdain feels to negative a word and I won't trouble you for a thesaurus. She saw through me completely. The mental impression I got through her view of me was... different. Like hearing your own recorded voice except with everything about you; do I really come off that way? Do I always seem that tall or that weird or that...

What do you even call that? I realise I have huge gaps in the way I see people, see myself. Was I always so obvious?

Couldn't ask her at the time, but I made a note of it.

It's odd having a girl at the wheel. She strokes a single finger of my right hand down the rough old oak. It feels like frozen metal, trying to stick my skin to its surface even as it was dragged around, feeling for something beneath or... beyond somehow.

I feel that heat in my blood again, feel it shift and concentrate in my palm, thumping into my fingers. Now she presses both palms flat to the door, and I feel the cold sucking the heat from my blood.

I, She, We lean in and push at the door. Not physically although that was part of it. I could feel her trying to push us straight through the whole thing and there was something heavier than a door resisting us.

She pulls more fire around herself as she wears my skin, a spinning molten core somewhere in my chest begins pumping magma through my bones.

I feel sweat springing from me, see steam rising from my arms as heat and cold battled where my skin met the door.

She hunches us over and shoves harder, until our arms buckle and we have one shoulder hard against the studs.

Now it starts to hurt, the iron studs meant to stop axe blows jab and grind against my bones and muscles. But it's the cold that now spills into my chest that gets to me.

I'm not sure who, but one of us makes my lungs gasp, the sudden cold makes us want to cringe and hug our freezing chest.

I don't know what she's even doing, just that it's important. I remember the odd feeling of... kinship with the heat as it first swirled around my veins. Remembered there was a heat of my own.

Was that what she needed me for?

She seems to encourage me as I pull up the greatest hits of things that make me want to stand immovable before the storm, to scream into the tornado just for spite's sake.

Sometimes that can be useful, though it's not a pet you'd want to take home with you. Sometimes you need to override muscles that wanted to give up an hour ago, occasionally you need to not yell and curse when someone drops a flight case on your toes.

There are times when the universe you're standing in just doesn't measure up, and it would be that familiar old ember smouldering at the back of my throat as I ranted at the void. Strange to find such a direct use for it.

She doesn't judge it, though I suppose my reasons seem pretty simple to her. She just accepts the extra fuel, throws the rest of me on the coals. The ice is past my wrists now, my hands two stiff gloves of numb flesh around sharply aching bones. I can see the vapour of my heated breath turning to frost on the iron fixtures of the door.

The door, I slowly realise, has the same problem I do. There's a little extra something hidden within. Not a person, not a being like the one using me as a convenient meat-puppet, but a thing all the same.

It's pushing back, my heart aches and stutters. I realise it's trying to get into my head when I feel a strange sense of perspective, see how vulnerable I am, a brief thing burning in the dark. I feel a laconic sigh and then the vastness of nothingness, the infinite entropy of destruction. It's all ending and no-one cares...

I see a rolling bead of sweat stop and freeze solid on my arm, watch it crack and then tumble to the stone floor. Half of me is getting close to frostbite by now.

She fights back from my corner, reminds me of the first kiss I ever had, the last time I saw a woman naked, teases me with the thought of tasting her sly mouth. She needs more from me and since she's asking so sweetly I ignore the cosmic horror of it all, press on.

I feed my Devil more fuel, give her my teenage angst and my wronged sense of fair play. I let her see the odd mixture of caring about someone and then pretending not to, the honest hurt of missing someone along with the honest anger at them for leaving in the first place.

I hear wood creak, the cold that had been arrogant, almost amused that anyone should offer it resistance, was now ever so slightly pissed-off. My fear is a cold thing too, but the fire inside keeps it's chill at a distance.

The cold begins to retreat from my skin, the faint fog of my breath becomes a plume of greyish steam that melts the frost. I hear old wood creak and gristle as the ice begins to weaken within.

"How much longer?" I realise I can ask things again just as we feel something other than the physical door give and unlock.

My thumb, more under her supervision than her direct command, lifts the latch and the door swings open.

Total darkness inside.

We fall to a single knee, shaky but strong. Feels like I just went ten rounds with Tyson, like my kids are going to be born with ringing in their ears.

I put out a hand for balance and realise the unearthly cold has gone from the stones beneath us. They're cool to the touch but no more, the yawning pit of existential horror seems to have given up.

I want to get up and am surprised that my muscles obey. I reach out to the doorframe, expecting another encounter with... whatever the fuck kind of malign sentience can make a door feel like the gates of Hades.

It's just an old door now, mundane timber nailed together and fixed with iron studs to keep out the Vikings. It even creaks a little as I push it open fully.

"What now?" I ask even as I feel an invisible pull on my centre of mass, I fall into a stumble down a suddenly inclined level stone floor.

I blink and half my vision flickers out with it, just leaving a smudging of colours that didn't make much sense to me. Something held its own crackle though, something small and at about chest height relative to me. It pulsed with a purplish dark blue light, and without really knowing what it was, I knew it was... evil.

It was just a slowly sharpening blur of colours, but I felt before I even reached out that it was a spiky thing. It was only pretending to be whatever mundane object hadn't caught my eye before. Something inside was razor sharp, and angry.

I feel the fiery Demon within pushing my hand atop her own. As much as I wanted to pull my hand back, she kept me reaching for the thing.

Pain now, it had some kind of defence against me trying to reach it. I was slowly coming around to the idea that this Devil of mine had tried subterfuge already and failed, that she needed a sturdy enough hammer for the job and had found me.

"It's only a book." She whispers in my head. "Just grab the damned thing."

I lurch the last foot or so and before I can stop myself my fingers clamp around...

Agony, like I'd just picked up an angry ball of Bullet Ants, like my skin had turned into stinging nettles. I remember a grunt of pain and a huff of effort as I bring my other hand around to grab it.

Now I can't let go...

The door was just a barrier, I realise, now I'm close enough for the thing to actually fight back. It's moving in my grip, invisible force tries to pry my fingers away, but the heat within pushes back harder and I find myself opening the thing to a random page.

I try to close my eyes but She has them wide open. I'm not seeing the physical right now, words and runes scanned across my brain. I'm overloaded, shattered with data, smashed by the sheer enormity of the sentiment contained within that vicious grimoire.

A kind of hate I've never hated before, a kind of spite that spans millennia. All of it seems to be seeping in just like the cold, instead of freezing me out it's inviting me in, inviting me to become just another swung blade in the brutality of human history.

"Destroy it." Her words are so loud and so close that, had I not been paralysed by a cursed book, my head would have whipped round to try and find her.

The thing is open, horrible words and disgusting incantations are rolling through my mind. I think of the Barmaid, my Ex-Friend, the sudden look of insolence as her mask dropped for the final time, the little hint of sadness in her eyes that made me want to...

"Don't be so sentimental." My Devil tells me, put another of her thoughts in my head.

I had a borrowed memory of someone scribbling the words printed here, someone old and in pain, in hatred and in fear, scratching down all the worst things they wished to see visited on their enemies before their time ran out.

And somewhere, someone had said "No." and the ravings of an embittered old codger might have gone no further. But some part of him refused even that, had wanted his anger to outlive him. And so it had, right here, in this room on this shelf it had waited like a landmine, like nuclear waste in a leaky barrel, waiting while we went from quill pens to laptops, angry all the while.

But nothing should last forever, she thinks for me, we're not all supposed to be the last of our kind. We're built to have a time and a place and sometimes ideas happen, sometimes love happens, sometimes the universe gets on our bad side, and somehow the evil of it all seeps into us, bled right from some shaky old fingers to this cracked and bone-dry paper.

I feel lost love, unrequited and painful, sinful even. I feel the eyes on the man's back as he wrote, even the ones in his head. I can't relate to someone making their last act a random curse, but I've felt that feeling myself.

Whatever is left of the old man's curse in these pages has taken on its own sentience, I feel it lashing out at other hands, making people run from the room without ever knowing why, making people feel that endless despair. It was a deodand as well as a book, this object had murdered a few people, it was too dangerous to be left alone, too dangerous for anything but destruction.

Wretched thing, better to end it.

I feel Her gasp inside my head as I tear the book in half along the spine, let the suddenly dull pieces fall to the floor. However evil it might have been, it was still only paper.

There's a passing chill in the air as whatever magic or soul or whatever that thing

was, left. Fled might have been a better word.

"You really needed me for that?" It seemed a simple thing, hard going certainly, and more than a little painful. But still something she could have done herself, right?

She doesn't answer with words, but I get the sensation of being frozen almost to death just by the door, being sliced and sent screaming back by the corner of a single page of that cursed tome.

What was easy for me seemed almost impossible for her. I wondered if it was just because I'm physical in a way that maybe she isn't, or if she needed to use me like a shield to get close enough... Academic now maybe.

I look down and find the two rough halves of book are blank now, whatever spirit that was locked in there had taken the words with it. No explanations, no resolution. Just a torn book, sad in a way, but I'm glad it's over.

I feel the fire stirring again deep in my chest. I don't have time to wonder, just fall back to my knees, balance on my hands.

It was like... sneezing all over, like throwing up, like I'm a dog shaking water off my coat or a hermit crab being pulled from its shell.

I pull in a deep breath to steady myself but when I exhale it's an impossible cloud of venting steam. I can feel it whistling through my teeth as it gouts out of me, suddenly the vapour catches light and I'm a dragon, I'm a Demon too, I'm...