Maggie stopped at a rest stop fifty miles out of the city and pulled two hundred dollars out of her bank account, leaving only three hundred and thirty dollars remaining. She pocketed the wad of twenties and turned away from the ATM, and as she did she nearly collapsed with shock. Walking across the lobby, wearing blue jeans and Red Sox T-shirt was Shen. Maggie flung out a hand and caught the edge of the machine, and as she did she realized that the man who walked so confidently towards her was not Shen, but a stranger with similar features and a desire to withdraw money.
She nodded abruptly to him and walked away, stiffly, watching the pink and white tiles slip under her feet. She rubber her forehead and left the rest stop.
That night she stopped at a seedy hotel off the through-way, tucked into a bed that had held countless dirty strangers and watched a fuzzy TV that only had three channels. She lay there among the filthy, stained pillows and rubbed her fingers along the seven cassette tapes, each tape sending a fresh shiver down her spine. As the digital clock bled closer and closer to midnight, her heart pounded and she knew without a shadow of a doubt that the hotel phone would ring at exactly twelve o’clock, and it wouldn’t be room service.
At eleven fifty-nine she rolled off the bed and washed her face in the bathroom sink. She barely even felt the cold water slipping down her face. She was quaking and the wood-paneled walls seemed to be closing in on her very slowly, silently, stealthily. In the bedroom the little red numbers changed again and it was midnight. Maggie trembled, her ears searching for the high-pitched ring of the telephone, or the creak of a door opening. Something, anything.
Twelve-oh-one. Nothing. Maggie clutched the lip of the bathroom counter and told herself to calm down, think logically. She licked her lips, cast one last look to the frazzled, distracted woman in the mirror and walked slowly back into the bedroom. She sat on the bed as carefully as if she thought it might break beneath her and turned on the TV. The news, telling about a bomb in the Middle East, as usual. A commercial for an omelet flipper (Have you ever wanted to make the perfect omelet? Then you need our product!) And on the last of the channels that the television offered was a red screen and the soft buzz of white noise.
Into the gentle hum of the TV, a voice spoke. Maggie clutched a pillow to her stomach and she drew her legs up beside her. She tasted copper on the sides of her mouth and she swallowed. “Maggie, it’s me,” said the TV. “Maggie, listen to me. You betrayed me. You promised me you’d love me forever but you don’t, you don’t love me anymore, Magpie. I live in this eternal hell, every single second, pain and sweat and tears and Maggie you’re forgetting me.”
Maggie was crying. She lifted the remote to the TV and pressed the off button and the TV kept showing that red screen, Shen’s voice kept its harsh, low rant.
“I’ve called you. I told you I loved you and how do you repay me? You don’t even call me back! I called that therapist, Ellen something. She ignored me too. Do you know what it’s like to be ignored? No! I never ignored you! I made you dinner and bought you cigarettes and I cared for you because you were helpless. So do you know what I did, Magpie? Do you want to know? I sold my soul to the devil. Wasn’t cancer that got me, baby, it was the beast at 666. Horns and pitchforks, the whole enchilada.”
Maggie screamed and hurled her purse at the screen. Cassette tapes ricocheted off the walls and tissue packets flopped to the floor and Shen’s voice continued, hard and full of the pain of the dead. “I made a deal with the devil, Maggie. I told him he could have my soul, as long as you loved me forever. You have to love me forever, because I am in hell, I am burning again and again and I will never be stoked because I sold my soul. Come for me, Maggie. Pick up the phone and dial the number and I promise you it won’t be Kentucky. Pick up the phone. Pick up the phone. Maggie, pick up the damn phone!”
Maggie shook her head, tears running down her cheeks. “I can’t, I can’t. Shen I do love you, I do, I do. I can’t do it.”
The TV was silent and in a split second of clarity Maggie knew that the silence was worse than his voice grating over the whispers of countless lost souls.
She dug her nails into the pillow and remembered Shen, the real Shen before he had become the soulless thing of recent years. She remembered meeting him in Gym class, as she snuck behind the bleachers for a smoke and ran into the lurking shadow that had been trailing her for some months. But he wasn’t a stalker. He loved her, supported her, knew what she needed even before she herself knew. They had shared a cigarette and then a kiss, and within three months they were living together over the print shop, eating aloo palak as Frankincense flooded their senses.
All he wanted was her love. Was that so wrong?
She rubbed away the tears, sniffled and picked up the phone. She wrapped the cord around her wrist and dialed the number that had haunted her for seven long years.
It rang. Once, twice three times and then a receiver clicked on the other end.
“Hello, you’ve reached the devil, how may I help you?”
