Me and the Devil: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

still there, seeming not to have moved, more than three hours later, after seven, when I went back to bed. The winds howled to gusts of fifty-five miles an hour in the wake of that moon.
    More snow and frigid sleet came down upon the city. I took a taxi to the Lower East Side, telling the driver to let me off at the corner of Tenth Street and Avenue B. Leslie would be tending bar at the Lakeside Lounge that night, and I knew that she would accept, perhaps even be happy to see, that I was not drinking.
    I liked Leslie a lot, and it was good to see her. She had a smile that always worked on me like mellow medicine, even when I encountered it through barely seeing narrowed eyes. But I was there for another reason. Whatever strays were out on a desolate night such as this, I figured, belonged to nights such as this.
    “What brings you out?”
    Leslie was one of the few people who ask this and elicit a thoughtful answer. It was the way she asked it.
    “I feel like sucking a damsel’s blood,” I told her. She smiled that smile of hers, and I saw that she thought I was being merely glib and playful. “I’m serious,” I said.
    It was no use. I did better when I lied than when I told the truth, it seemed. She asked me what I was having, and I told her that all I wanted was a club soda with a piece of lemon. She brought it and pushed my money back to me. I looked around. It was dark, and it took a while to make out the animated or torpid forms at the bar. It felt good to be sober, to see and think clearly amid the slurred mutterings and the wailed descants of misery, complaint, and lunacy.
    Leslie was talking across the bar to a girl several seats down to my left. When the girl laughed, I saw that she was quite pretty. She was alone and had a full drink in front of her.
    I felt slightly demonic. It was a not unpleasant feeling. Old Nick or Nicholas the Ancient. Wasn’t that it? No, no, no. Old Scratch or Nicholas the Ancient. And
ancient
was spelled in a peculiar, antiquated way. What was it?
Antient.
Yes, that was it. Old Scratch or Nicholas the Antient. Where had I found that? Something British, no? Seventeenth century, eighteenth century?
    Maybe that explained the words on that scrap of paper. Maybe I had read them somewhere, and somehow they had come back to me when I was half asleep, and I had set them down and not recalled doing so. Or maybe I had written them long ago, completely forgotten them, and, yes, somehow they had come back to me when I was half asleep, and I had set them down and not recalled doing so. Memory and the subconscious could be very tricky.
    But as I told myself these things, I did not believe them. I wanted only to solve that piece of paper and the words on it, to be rid of the uneasy strangeness they had left me with.
    “Who’s she?” I asked Leslie. “The girl you were talking to.” Without turning I gave a toss of my head in the direction of the girl down the bar. Leslie followed my gesture with her glance.
    “Oh. Melissa. I don’t really know her. She seems like a nice kid.”
    “Give her a drink on me.”
    “She just got one.”
    “Back her up.”
    She went over, said something to her. They both looked my way. Leslie lightly rapped the bar in front of her.
    Old Scratch or Nicholas the Antient. A leopard in the bowering shade.
    I shook loose these words from my mind.
    The girl finished her drink. Leslie set another before her and took money from me. The girl raised the drink to me, then drank.
    I wasn’t about to approach her. That was something that foolish young men did. I too may have once done such a thing. But I was a foolish old man now, and my folly was not without dignity. At the same time, I knew that she was not likely to approach me. I found myself walking toward her. After a few steps I decided to keep walking, to walk past her, as if I were barely aware of her, and to go outside and have a smoke. An inspired move. I made as if to be preoccupied and not to notice the