10 May To Love the Devil’s Wife

The Devil is known for his patience. He will see a budding sin ripening in your youth and wait the long years of your life before harvest. The little girl who lies about a stolen treat—how long will it be before she breaks her vows? The boy who stomps on creatures in the woods—the Devil will not take him yet. He will watch and wait for him to kill a man. Why shouldn’t the master be patient? What is one more soul to the untold billions in his dominion? What is one more year in his endless reign? Perhaps by waiting, he is even giving us a chance to spend our lives repenting for what he knows must come.

I wouldn’t know. Sins such as mine are too terrible, so that no absolution is possible. I suppose that is why he waited no longer and visited me that night. The Devil came for me in the forest while the murdered woman was still in my arms, warming my body with her blood. It was warmer than my own. Her long gray hair was damp and matted, clinging to her face.

The old woman was bleeding from so many places. I must have done it with a knife. How could there be so much blood? How many times must I have driven the blade into her? Did she scream and fight back? Had anyone seen? Had I stopped when she was dead, or kept going—a mad machine driven beyond reason or purpose? But there could be no purpose to such depraved violence. No reason, except my own diseased and evil nature.

I was numb from the adrenaline. Everything was blurry, and I couldn’t hear my own thoughts over the sound of my racing heart. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t remember why I killed her—or even who she was. But even before I saw the Devil, this feeling of guilt so permeated my being that I would have walked to Hell myself if I had but known the way.

I knelt with her in the snow, feeling the Devil hovering nearby. It felt as though I was standing alone on a stage, my back turned to an audience that stretched forever, all looking at me. An invisible sea of people: lapping whispers, mocking laughter, all imagined in my head. Yet I could not shake the terrible weight of all those eyes upon me. My father and mother were in that nightmare crowd. Everyone I’d ever known, perhaps everyone who had ever lived. A million faces: bored, disgusted, or filled with ugly hatred, all seething in my direction. That sneering wave washing over me—that feeling I called the Devil in my mind at once—for nothing else could so reveal my own demons in me.

“I didn’t kill…” I began, but choked. Shoulders slumped in defeat, I felt crushed beneath the weight of his presence. A slivered moon peered through the dead branches above, but it revealed little.

I took a deep breath and tried again.

“It’s not a sin to lie to the Devil, right?” I attempted to laugh, but choked on the sound.

The quiet rage I felt around me was too much to bear. There was no Devil. This terrible feeling was nothing but a trick of my imagination, I told myself. Just my own guilt weighing on me. I couldn’t stay here, freezing in the red snow. I prayed that I didn’t know the old woman—that I could walk home, take a shower, have a long sleep, and wake up to find none of this had happened. I touched the cold skin of her cheek, damp and smeared red.

I froze when I heard footsteps crunching through the crystal snow. My nightmare was alive and real. My head sank lower, wretched and hunched.

“Of course it’s my fault,” I confessed. “Is that what you want to hear from me? I’m not going to grovel. Maybe she deserved it. Ever think of that? Maybe she was trying to blackmail me. I don’t care what you think of me. I’m going home.”

Crunching snow—the black boots stalking around me. The weight on my shoulders and mind grew heavier, like a migraine pounding with every step. I could not lift my head properly, feeling as though the edge of a knife nestled at the top of my spine, leaning into my skull. All in my imagination, of course, just like the evil audience leering at me. But the thought was so persistent that I couldn’t force myself to look up.

It is difficult to see the Devil, though he stands before you. I cowered before a dark shape roughly like a tall man, but his outline drank in the meager moonlight around him, forming swirling eddies and concealing himself in bottomless shadow. Like a solar eclipse—but not only the light concealed: all that was good and beautiful in the world smothered in his darkness.

It was a cold and evil place I knelt, more so because I was in it. Though I stared at him, I cannot say I truly saw him any more than a blind worm stretching up toward the stars. It is sufficient to say that the Devil could not be perceived with any one sense, but the pressure of his presence so commanded my awareness that I was enveloped by him. I was a thought in his mind—a lost raft swept by his tempest at sea, tossed upon an alien consciousness too vast to comprehend. I belonged to him. I deserved him. I could not, would not, fight him.

Escape was impossible. Pleading worthless. Words meaningless.

I let the dead woman slip from my arms to rest upon the stained snow. Her long gray hair still covered her where she lay. My trembling, bloody fingers reached to brush it aside, but froze. I was afraid to see who I had killed. Instead, I stood to face the Devil directly, with all the dignity remaining to a man so far removed from God. If I could only stare at him for a moment, maybe my eyes would adjust to his darkness enough to make out his features. At least the Devil would see me being brave. I had a powerful desire to impress him, perhaps knowing it was too late to impress God. I wanted to look the Devil in the eye and earn his admiration, to spare myself a little from the disgust I felt for myself.

The Beast never gave me the chance. Without speaking, he turned and began to walk through the fading light of this dying world. Where he went, the light went with him, dragged behind to drown within his cloak of shadow. I kept pace with him as surely as if he led me by a noose around my neck. It was starting to snow again, lightly dusting the bare trees. There was still blood in my footsteps, traces left behind no matter how far I walked from her discarded body. At least the prints would soon be covered with fresh snow. There was healing in new snow.

No, I thought—not healing. Only hiding. Her body would still be underneath. No matter how many snows came, no matter how pure it looked from far away, her body would still be there.

There was no healing for me either. No matter how many new deeds and good intentions settled over my sins, they would still be buried underneath. I stopped and watched the new snow settle into my footprints, waiting for the blood to disappear. It didn’t even occur to me that I would need them to find my way back.

There was no going back from where I was going.

Why should I not go with the Devil to where I belonged?

I even hurried to catch up with him.

* * * * * *

Where we went, how long we walked, I do not know. It seemed as though I could have relived my entire life in the time it took for us to stop. I wondered about the woman, but every time I began to remember who she was—or why I killed her—the waves of the Devil’s mind crashed into my little raft. My mind was flooded with demented thoughts, angry or lustful, which could not have belonged to me. Intrusive images of my bloody hands dragged me beneath the dark waters.

The weight of his companionship suffocated me. The cold air was a blade of ice plunging into my lungs. I labored over each breath, but finally managed to ask:

“Who was she?”

The Devil paused. His dark eclipse burned into my vision, branding an afterimage when I blinked and rubbed my eyes.

“You will suffer more if you do not know,” he said in a voice far too like my own. “Go only where you deserve to be.”

Then he was gone. And with him, the curtain lifted to reveal the horror of his empire, into which I had blindly followed him.

I was no longer in the forest at all. Perhaps it would be more accurate to call Hell a person rather than a place, for it was a living thing. The snow was gone, and I stood upon a tanned hide that rippled uneasily beneath me. I jumped back, thinking I had stepped on a creature by mistake, but its rough skin stretched in all directions to form the ground of this world. Hairy moles, tumors, and boils sprouted from the earth like plants or rocks. A low rumbling sound vibrated through the landscape, rising into a mournful wail.

It was the land itself that was in pain. Everything here was alive, and everything wished not to be.

Withering shadows flitted around me, endlessly prodding and grasping with half-formed hands. I lurched away, but they followed incessantly, brushing against me without quite touching. The sky—if it could be called that—was unobstructed by moon or stars, stretching endlessly into a timeless abyss.

Somewhere in the distance, a great ball of fire swung between two towers like the pendulum of a clock, cascading shadows as it moved. The towers themselves looked like bent and broken fingers, and in the shifting light, I glimpsed other tortured buildings: open wounds and blisters upon the rotting corpse of this cursed world.

Had I followed the Devil underground without noticing? I had to climb out. I looked up to where the sky should be. But it felt like looking down into an endless pit. I had the ghastly sensation of balancing on an eroding precipice, poised to tumble upward into the void. It seemed the monstrous land clung to my feet, waiting for the moment to let go.

Be calm. Breathe. I was still alive, wasn’t I? Yet even the charnel winds slithered their way into my nose and mouth with tangible substance, forcing oily coils down my lungs with each breath.

A muffled roar echoed in the distance. Beyond the towers and the swinging fire, vast mountain-like beings raged against the unseen sky—ancient, crumbling gods screaming in endless decay. I could see forever, and yet I could not even see clearly an inch before my face.

I could not climb out of the endless pit. Neither could I stay. So began my long walk to nowhere.

Through this blasphemous temple to the end of the Universe I wandered. Always following me were nightmares—winged, half-conceived terrors beating the air with the wet, ceaseless sound of fists against flesh.

There are two kinds of pain I had known in my old life: physical and emotional. Nothing prepared me for the excruciating ordeal awaiting me here. No mental burden ever weighed so heavily as the taunting echoes that now jeered at me. Whispering, laughing shadows and living tissue mocked my every step.

Every good memory I had smuggled with me through the years was poisoned. Every joy became an elaborate fantasy of how I had hurt those I loved through selfishness. Every shame was magnified a thousandfold, the leering specters narrating my sins with intimate cruelty.

Worse still was the gnawing hopelessness that robbed even my sense of self. I was not a person in Hell; I was Hell. I did not feel pain; I was pain—inseparable, indistinguishable, forevermore.

How many cursed days passed where the sun never rose? The air was thick and cloying, sustaining me just enough to prolong my suffering. My body turned against itself. I would do anything to eat, but the thick hide of the ground yielded nothing.

I looked longingly at the outer buildings of the city: grotesque human parts trying to escape their fleshy prison. Houses shaped like heads, feet, and hands, living and twisting in agony. Great halls with domes like carved ribs, shallowly breathing in and out.

I considered approaching, desperate enough to beg from them. But terror held me back.

Let me starve and die as a man, I thought. Let that be the end of me. Come what may, I would not enter the city. If the Devil watched me still, then let him see a soul who refused to accept damnation. Even knowing my own guilt, I believed that my pride was worth defending.

I passed each woeful house from a distance, convincing myself that a little strength would seed a little hope—and that hope would nourish me more than any food.

I was a man, I told myself. They could never take that from me.

Starvation has a way of convincing one otherwise. The long hunger, once only gnawing at my stomach, radiated through my entire body. It ate my fat, then my muscle, and when there was nothing left to take, it fed on hope and will. Hour by hour, my pride was devoured, and I felt myself reduced to a crawling animal.

It was then, at the nadir of my humanity, that I saw a curious and irresistible spark of beauty where none should exist.

A little green. A few blades of grass poking up through the rough hide.

I pressed myself to the ground and ripped up the grass, stuffing it into my mouth. It tasted sweet and sticky, with a little moisture—if nothing else. Then came little flowers. I ripped these up as well. I didn’t stop to consider that I was destroying the only beautiful thing in this world. I didn’t think of anything at all—only the wild excitement as the garden ahead grew more lush and green.

Weak and pitiful, I crawled into the thickening grass until it was tall enough to conceal me. Then I dropped to the ground, rolling and laughing at the touch.

Beyond the grass were trees—tall, laden with red apples and giant, luscious peaches. A small pool of water shimmered nearby, and nestled beside it, a log cabin with white smoke curling from its chimney.

It was too good to be true. So it must be a lie.

I told myself I must not be lulled into complacency. The voices and nightmares had mocked me already. Perhaps this was another trick. But my body crawled onward of its own accord. Maybe I wouldn’t go farther, I reasoned. Maybe I would only hide here, where the taunting was quiet. Or maybe I would just wash in the pool—no harm in that. And perhaps it would be foolish not to take one fruit, if only to sustain myself.

Hope pleaded more desperately than reason could resist.

Trembling, I reached for a giant peach dangling from a low branch. I held it in both hands, closed my eyes, and sank my teeth into it.

The outside was unexpectedly hard, and it immediately squirmed in my mouth.

I spat it out and hurled the thing to the ground. The “peach” spread wings like a giant beetle, buzzing angrily as it flailed away.

It was a trick—of course it was.

I recalled the Devil’s parting words: Go only where you deserve to be.

Stupid, desperate fool. How could I believe I deserved such a beautiful place?

I rose to my feet to flee, but all the fruit in the garden spread wings and took flight around me. The air swarmed with giant insects, buzzing and whirling overhead. I hurled myself to the ground in a fetal position, covering my face with my arms.

The buzzing was so loud it seemed to come from inside me.

The Devil was watching. He must have been. Where was the pride I claimed a moment ago? Where was the stubbornness I clung to so tightly?

Man feels too much. Hope hurts too much.

In my despair, I decided I would show courage at every opportunity, even if it were meaningless. Even if it cost me everything. I needed something—anything—to feed hope again.

I rose unsteadily to my feet and removed my hands from my face. I spread my arms wide and let the things swarm over me. Hairy legs crawled across my skin. I opened my mouth and spat them aside to shout:

“Do you see me unafraid?”

“Be at peace,” a soft voice replied.

The words cut through the maddening buzz like a blade through smoke. The insects lifted away at once, folding their wings and returning to the branches where they again resembled shining fruits.

Standing in the doorway of the cabin was a black-haired woman. She looked strangely familiar—but surely I would remember someone so beautiful.

Ivory skin, unblemished by mortal hurt. A white dress, unstained by this foul place. If you understood me when I told you I was pain, you will understand now when I tell you she was beauty.

She was too beautiful to be real. That realization filled me with fresh fear, but I told myself I would not show it. I would rob the Devil of at least that satisfaction.

I stood frozen while the dark-haired woman approached, her steps silent across the grass. The shifting light from the swinging fire in the distance played over her body, sometimes rendering her angelic, sometimes sinister. In one hand, she loosely held a long blade of white bone.

She raised it slowly toward my heart.

My arms were still spread as when I had embraced the swarming insects. I left them open even as she pressed the bone blade against my chest. I waited. Waiting for the pain, or the betrayal.

At the last possible moment, I lunged.

I seized her wrist with both hands, twisting the knife away. She fell back in shock, and I leapt atop her, pinning her to the ground. I raised the blade.

She was only another trick, I told myself. Another Devil’s illusion. I could kill her and claim this garden as my refuge. I could be safe here.

I almost brought the knife down.

“Kill me! You are weak!” she hissed, her voice half specter, half laughter. There was even a glint of amusement in her dark eyes.

My arm trembled. The blade hovered above her.

I could not do it.

I could not kill my hope.

I released her and stood, turning the blade to present the handle back to her.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was startled. This is yours.”

She smiled, smoothing down her white dress with infuriating calm. She took the bone knife from my outstretched hands and immediately raised it again, pressing the point back against my chest.

“Thank you,” she said. “Would you have given it back if you knew I was still going to cut you?”

I nodded.

“I will only get what I deserve,” I said.

“Then you shall have everything.”

The bone knife slid into my heart, and she kissed me in the same instant.

The blade was hard. Her lips were soft. I don’t know which hurt worse—or which offered the greater mercy.

If that moment could have lasted forever, I don’t think I would have been in Hell anymore.

Gently, surely, she slid the blade through my body. Massaging hands shed my skin, not as torment, but as release. With her flashing knife, she cut away my starving, tortured limbs. Each slice brought a pain so pure and clean that I welcomed it without question. Layer by layer, she flayed me—until there was nothing left to cut but my soul.

“My husband was wrong about you,” she said. “You couldn’t kill me. You didn’t kill anyone. You don’t deserve to be here at all. I’m going to help you escape.”

I couldn’t comprehend how anything could exist outside this suffering. What universe would accept me, torn and broken as I was? What universe could I accept, knowing it would so punish an innocent soul?

“I don’t deserve it,” I whispered. “I know I killed her—but guilt never leaves. It’s something you can never cut away.”

“She killed herself by loving you, and for that you are not to blame. Do you see these hands?”

She cupped my hands in hers, and I realized she was creating new ones even as she spoke—clean, strong hands untouched by blemish.

“These hands could never be used for hurt. These eyes could never look upon evil as their own creation.”

My old face had been shed completely. A new one blossomed with her words. My new body grew piece by piece: bones lanced outward and thickened, muscles blossomed like bark over them, organs ripened like fruit in the sun, and a network of veins threaded through me, pulsing with fresh life.

“Now these feet must fly,” she said, “for my husband is always watching.”

“You’re the Devil’s Wife?” I asked.

She took my new hand in hers, and we began to run.

Through the macabre landscape we sped, dancing across the festering world as softly as light passing through a drop of water. I could see her more clearly the farther we traversed, although she never stayed still long enough for me to get a proper look. Bare feet skipped across the rotten land, twirling her through looming specters that besought us from all sides. It was a wonder the oppression of this unending night had failed to extinguish her spark. Invigorated by her purity, I was whole again.

She was leading me into the city of demons, toward the crooked fingers and the swinging ball of fire. But I was pure and new, and I wasn’t afraid of being corrupted anymore—not as long as I was with her.

“You are his wife,” I repeated in shock. Even these new lungs struggled to speak as we raced.

“We are bound to each other, yes. Quick now!” the woman insisted.

“Of all the madness in this cursed place,” I said between panting breaths, “that must be king.”

She smiled tightly and released my hand, scampering ahead on all fours to climb a bulbous mound of hairy skin leading up toward the crooked fingers. A flock of peering shadows gathered from the houses to watch us curiously, but none dared approach her.

We climbed higher, scaling the living flesh and broken bones that formed the city’s grotesque foundations. Every so often, the pendulum of fire would swing close, bathing the world in burning light and momentarily revealing the horrors clustered in the shadows.

“My husband is not mad,” she called back, pausing on the ridge, “and neither am I for being with him.”

“And if I were to love you instead?” I shouted up after her. “Would that be mad as well?”

She smiled again—one of sadness and wonder—and stretched her hand down to help me scramble up beside her. We sat together atop the monstrous knuckle of the crooked finger and stared upward into the endless void.

The slightest brush of her leg against mine intoxicated me with rapture.

“All love is paradoxically mad,” she said. “It is an assault on reason, but in doing so, it creates its own reason. But it won’t do you any good, because you will leave Hell—and I will stay.”

“Come with me,” I said—not a question, not a demand. Just a hope burning too hot to hold inside.

She laughed. The sound was as light and bright as wind chimes amid a storm. But her smile was sad, and she shook her head.

“You can’t prefer to stay here!” I insisted.

“Stop this foolishness. Listen, and I will tell you how to leave. All you must do is climb a little higher and jump from the tower when the ball of fire swings our way. The body I have given you will be repelled by the fire. You’ll fall up instead of down—you’ll fall all the way back home.”

“I’m not afraid anymore. But I’m not going alone,” I said, with reckless conviction. “I’ve already left Hell—the moment I entered your garden. Since the moment you found me. And if I leave you behind, then wherever I go will be Hell again.”

“You’re being silly and wasting time. The Devil is always watching. If my husband catches us—”

“He won’t,” I said, pressing my finger gently against her lips. “What could he do to me that he hasn’t already? What could be worse than losing my only hope?”

To prove my point, I slipped down from the stony joints of the finger and began climbing back toward the closed fist below.

“Stop! If he finds you, he’ll—” she cried, voice full of panic.

“He’ll what?” I shouted back, spreading my arms wide to encompass the hellish immensity around me. “Let him try!”

I saw something shift inside her then—something she could no longer suppress. Perhaps she saw in me something she could not let die.

I hadn’t even made it back to the ground before her hands clasped me again. She heaved me upward with surprising strength, pulling me back toward the reaching fingers.

We climbed together, hand in hand, scrambling up the warped architecture of Hell.

The flaming ball of fire swung closer now, cascading waves of scorching heat across the monstrous landscape.

“My husband is always watching,” she whispered.

“I don’t care,” I whispered back. “As long as you’re with me.”

We clambered higher, standing at last atop the tallest joint of the crooked fingers. The void above us stretched into infinite blackness. Beneath us, the city heaved and writhed.

Hand in hand, we prepared ourselves.

The wet, bludgeoning drums of the winged creatures began again, a dreadful thunder closing in.

I watched her tense beside me, watched the fear and the longing war inside her. I did not look away.

When the flaming ball swung close enough, she coiled like a spring.

We jumped together, as one.

The fire roared toward us—but instead of burning, it flung us away, and we fell upward, away from Hell.

The gut-clenching free fall distracted my attention, but I never let go of her hand as we whirled through the timeless void.

“We did it! We’re leaving Hell!” I screamed in exhilaration. The air was already lighter, easier to breathe. I laughed and gulped it in, breathing properly for the first time after endless suffocation.

Relief and joy flooded me.

It wasn’t until the rush faded that I realized something was wrong.

I didn’t have to look at her to feel it. Her hand withered in my grasp, her skin wrinkling and drying as though years of heat beat into her with every second we spent together. Soon, her flesh cracked and bled, washing my hands in her warmth.

While I grew healthy and strong, I was forced to watch helplessly as she withered away.

Her smooth black hair turned gray and matted in greasy clumps. Her face, once radiant, eroded as though sandblasted by relentless storms. Her fingers clutched at me more desperately, but their strength fled moment by moment.

No torment in Hell could match the guilt of knowing she was enduring this for me.

The spinning abyss around us began to slow. I cradled her against my chest, shielding her fragile body with my own as best I could.

At last, the black sky relinquished us, and we tumbled back into the woods where I had begun.

I landed on my knees in the snow, clutching her broken body. Blood now freely flowed from a thousand invisible wounds, soaking us both.

My head clouded, as if waking from a dream I could not fully remember. I fought to hold onto the truth, but it slipped inexorably away, stolen by despair.

I could not even remember who I was holding, or how she had gotten there.

All I knew—all I could feel—was that it was my fault.

I had killed her. Somehow, I had destroyed the only beautiful thing I had ever touched.

When the Devil came for me, I knew I would follow him willingly.

No matter what horror lay in store, I knew I deserved it for what I had done.