Me and the Devil: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

and printed into a beautiful book.”
    I fell for the line about her intention to produce a beautiful book, and offered to let her license the Spanish rights for a five-year period at an extremely modest price. I regretted my generosity immediately, but my word was my bond. But my price, she claimed, was all of two hundred dollars beyond her means.
    “Unfortunately,” she wrote, “Spain is a small country, with not that many readers.”
    The indignation I felt turned to laughter, and I dismissed the matter without another word to her. Maybe the name of the house—Errata Naturae translates from the Latin as “errors of nature”—should have served as warning from the start.
    No wonder I didn’t write anymore. To quote Tennessee Williams, from his final stage play: “Fuck it!” Nobody remembers Shakespeare’s creditors.
    So in my newfound sobriety I continued not to write. At leastnot consciously. Then early one morning something gave me start. I was sitting on the couch with my coffee when, from the corner of my eye, I noticed there was a pen on my desk, and beneath the pen was a scrap of paper. I was sure that these had not been there the night before. I went to the desk, looked at the paper, saw hurried-seeming words. My pulse quickened. The light and sounds of morning through my windows seemed to vanish.
    I’m lying here dirty waiting for the undertaker to give me a shave. I shouldn’t have put it off for so long.
    The movement of my life was as the movement of my left hand. It stirred, reached out for the touch of another, raised the glass to my lips, and, when paralysis came, trembled occasionally, senselessly, vaguely, with no meaning at all.
    Before that stirring I was a woman who spoke another tongue.
    I was a leopard awaiting glance in bowering shade.
    Remembered now: forbidden gods to whom I did pray.
    Remembered now: the coming forth that awaits me into the light beyond day.
    It is an electric razor. It is not what I would have wanted. There was no slow, measured scrape of the blade. Of course I should have known. Strange, the things we do not foresee.
    I am risen now from what was me.
    Eternal Savior, bear me unto thee.
    Eternal Savior, rise.
    Remembered now: the long dark passage without breath, the dark passage longer than life.
    Eternal Savior, bear me.
    Eternal Savior, rise.
    Remembered now: what the lady and the leopard, the daemon-seeker and miller did know before me.
    Eternal Savior, bear me.
    Eternal Savior, rise.
    Remembered now: it is not meant to be.
     
    It was my written-in-the-dark scrawl, but I did not remember writing it. In fact, I felt certain that I had not, and that these words were not mine. But the handwriting attested otherwise. Had I written this while sleepwalking, or in a semiconscious state? What did it mean? I did not believe in reincarnation. But had I felt a sense of reincarnation when I wrote the lines I now beheld? Did my unconscious know what my conscious mind denied? Had something from within, or a voice from somewhere, spoken through me? What was I to make of this eerie incantation of everlasting life?
    I read the words again, whispering them aloud to myself this time. I placed the pen in the center drawer of the desk with my other pens, and I folded and placed the scrap of paper in the drawer to the right. Something in me wanted it out of sight. I wanted to put it out of mind as well, but I could not.
    These words were strange to me, yet at times uncannily familiar, as if they might be speaking to, or from, atavistic memories that were hidden, vague and veiled, unknown and unarticulated, in me. The phrase “bowering shade” meant nothing to me. But I have always loved and felt a deep affinity for leopards.

T HE COLDEST MONTH OF THAT WINTER PASSED SLOWLY. Even the wolf moon when it arrived seemed frozen in the sky as I gazed at it through my kitchen window. It was there, to the west, looming high and big over the river, at four o’clock in the morning, and it was