Good Intentions

From the upcoming book of short stories 'On The Road To Hell I Met A Man'

With all that happened after, I really can’t say whether or not losing my way in the rain that evening was a good or a bad thing. For what it’s worth, I wasn’t really sure where I was going anyway, except that I needed to find some shelter before the sun went down.

The Yorkshire moors are quite vast, and lovely for walking on a sunny day, but as darkness falls and the rain sets in, they become something quite the opposite. It wasn’t too chilly at lunchtime, and I honestly wasn’t expecting to be gone for more than an hour, but the winding trails that I followed without paying enough attention had led me somewhere that seemed decidedly unfamiliar.

A book of matches in my pocket might have been my only source of light were they not already damp from the rain. The moon was off brightening some other part of the sky, and so currently disinclined to illuminate my path. Either way, the brooding, leaky clouds above would have seen to that even if it were in a favourable spot.

The trail that I’d eagerly followed became but a dim grey line twisting into the short distance as the last of the light faded. I continued along it as far as I could, but soon it had turned as black as the rest of the landscape and sky, and I was reduced to blundering along in the dark, arms outstretched like a three-penny opera monster in pursuit of some hysterical damsel.

It was most fortunate that there were few trees in the area – I surely would have given myself concussion had I encountered one. After a time, soaked through, I could see no option but to stop and crouch until the clouds broke or the moon appeared or the sun came up. I was lost enough, and had no desire to be any further removed from society than I had already wandered.

The thought made me laugh. At lunchtime, I had walked into the hills with the sole intention of locating a convenient precipice from which to plummet. My melancholy at that hour was pronounced and so very fresh – to wake up alone in a strange hotel room was disorienting in itself, though when combined with the humiliation of rejection by each and every debutante at the ball the night before, a darkness of demeanour had descended upon my soul which rather called for a good plummet to put right.

Perhaps the hard liquor that I had imbibed to the bottom of several bottles during the course of the evening was also a contributing factor, though the resulting malaise had eased a trifle as I fully immersed myself in the crisp atmosphere of the hills. I had found, to my dismay, that there were very few precipices to plummet from on this part of the moors, and rolling down a gentle slope instead wasn’t quite what I had in mind.

It was there, crouching in the damp darkness that I began to despair once more. No amount of gin or whiskey would mask my oversized ears or nose to the opposite sex, nor would it strengthen my weak chin – more an indentation than a protrusion – or make my bucked and buckled teeth any more attractive.

In a fit of abhorrent self-pity, I had come to surround myself with the cruel beauty of nature one last time before I did the world a service and put an end to my miserable, amusingly odious countenance. Amusing to others, at least.

While it seemed like a good idea at the time, the hours and the atmosphere had changed my perspective. The rain and chill had helped greatly with that, and now I wished for nothing more than a warm fire and a stiff glass before falling into a soft bed. Instead, I began to shiver, and before too much longer had passed, I let out a violent sneeze.

Spots danced before my eyes in the blackness as I recovered, then disappeared as my nerves settled. All but one. Instead of fading and disappearing into the darkness as all the others had done, this one burned brighter and larger by the second.

As my vision adjusted, I saw that it was a light, coming toward me. It illuminated very little around itself, merely a hint of  deeper shadow below suggested a figure carrying a flaming torch. The misty rain seemed no impediment to its relentless flickering.

“Salutations.” Whoever it was that owned the voice was still a shadow, but above his greeting I could hear the crackle of the flames. As he moved closer, my nose wrinkled against the sulphurous stench of the brand that he carried as it continued to defy the gusty weather.

I cleared my dry throat before replying. “A good evening to you, sir. You happen along at a most fortunate instant.”

“Indeed. I’m rather adept at that. What brings such an inadequately equipped fellow to this region of the moors so late at night? Looking for someone, perhaps?” The man stood a few paces away as I gained my feet to look him up and down.

He was neither tall nor short, neither thin nor portly, and as the brand flickered above, the shadows made his face appear young, and then old and back again as I watched. His nose and eyes were as average as I had ever seen, and his mouth could not be said to be either wide or narrow.

He smiled, baring teeth which were as unremarkable as the rest of him. “What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?”

I frowned. “I don’t like cats. They make me sneeze. Please don’t mention cats again.”

“I could promise not to… but I’d be lion.” He chuckled, and a spark popped from the end of the flaming torch as if it had also found the joke hilarious. I took several deep breaths in an effort to control the skin of my sepsis, but as always when cats entered the room or the conversation, it irritated itself into a jolting sneeze.

More spots danced before my eyes. “Please. What are you doing here?”

The stranger looked this way and that before turning his eyes back to me. “Oh, you know, this and that. Just pussyfooting around, you might say.”

I groaned. “Have you come to torture me?” I shook my head as a fresh wave of self-pity washed over me. “Lost and alone in the rain at night on these godforsaken hills, and I find a court-jester for a companion.”

“Godforsaken you say? Interesting you should mention him. But I tigress.” The figure chuckled once more, then waved in the direction from which he had come. “Follow. I can provide shelter and warmth while the storm passes.”

I had little choice but to take up his offer. It was that or crouch in the miserable, damp dark until I caught my death of cold.

I sneezed several times along the way. The path he bade me follow was long and at times aberrantly twisted. More than once it felt as if we were walking in tight circles around each other. It seemed a most peculiar sensation.

After some time which I could not put a figure on, we came to a door in the darkness. The stranger fished around in his clothes until he came up with a large ring of keys, then shuffled through them until he found one of thick brass with a clover-leaf handle. The click of the lock seemed to echo across the hills.

As we walked through the open door, I felt a further odd sensation – the door was not attached to anything externally. I could have sworn from the outside there were no walls either side of it, no roof above. But once inside, I found myself in a cosy drawing room, with a roaring open fireplace and two armchairs facing in toward it. A small table was placed between them. There was a decanter of dark gold liquid and two glasses on its surface, as well as a deck of playing cards.

A pair of windows in the far wall were shuttered against the weather, and between them hung a medium sized oil painting in a gilt frame, portraying some dark and foreboding mansion from behind the elaborate locked gates of its perimeter walls. A high, full moon illuminated its peaks and gables.

The stranger gestured for me to sit as he set his brand into an iron ring that had been fixed to the wall, then shrugged off his overcoat. “Ah, it’s good to be out of that wind and rain. Will you take a drink and pass the time with me?”

I shrugged. “That’s a very kind offer, and certainly a better option than crouching on a wet hill in a storm. It would be a pleasure, Mister…” I scratched my head, trying to remember whether he’d mentioned his name. “Do you know I’m not sure we introduced ourselves.”

The stranger smiled. “Names. What are they, really, but some hatstand or other to hang one’s identity on. Names are not important – they can change and adapt and be lied about, they can be sullied and held in disrepute. I don’t like them, much, so I don’t use one.”

I nodded. There seemed little point in giving him my name, so I changed the subject and gestured to the table. “A deck of cards? Do you enjoy gambling?”

The stranger slipped me a sly grin. “Oh yes. It occurs to me that we have several hours until dawn. Perhaps I could entice you to a game?”

I raised an eyebrow. The cards were rarely kind to me, and I tended to avoid them even when I had spare coins to stake, which to be truthful, wasn’t often. Tonight, though, there were still some coppers in my pocket, and there was surely at least some chance that I could win, as long as the deck were not marked. “Which game would you like to play?”

He tapped the deck with his forefinger. “I’m afraid we’re two short for Bridge, and I’ve always found Poker rather a common drudge. Between two players, I would suggest Blackjack, or if you’d prefer a more gentlemanly game, Cribbage.” He poured a drink for each of us and clinked glasses as he handed mine to me. “Salut!” He drained his at a gulp, and I followed suit.

I tried not to gasp for breath. The cognac was excellent. It burned in a most pleasant manner on the way down. When I had regained my ability to speak, I gestured to the table once more. “We’ll need a score board for Cribbage. Do you have one?”

“Of course.” The stranger produced a small, painted wooden board with rows of holes drilled into it, as if from thin air. “Cribbage, then. You are a man of culture, it seems.”

“I am a man of experience, and I rather prefer the odds to Blackjack, though I will concede the fact that it’s a more civilised game.”

“Indeed. The odds. They’re the thing, now, aren’t they just? The higher they climb, the faster our hearts beat with excitement as the possibility of a more comfortable struggle through life is waved, briefly, within our reach. But the higher the odds, the larger the stake… The question is, how much are you willing to wager?”

“I have a few coppers to offer, if it’s a friendly game.” I pulled back the lapel of my jacket to reveal the expensive Swiss timepiece that I’d stolen from a second-hand store years ago. “This has a casing of solid gold, if we’re playing for higher stakes.”

The stranger shifted his eyebrows as the shiny metal gleamed in the firelight. “Solid gold is it? I was correct in my assumption that you were cultured, then. Entertain me. Tell me now, here by the fireside, as one old friend might to another… What is your deepest desire? The very thing in all the world that you want most?”

I steepled my forefingers and thought on his question as I pressed them to my lips. My deepest desire... I found, after a time, that choosing amongst my many many desires was leading me into a deep spiral of confusion. Just what did I desire?

Money? All men desired money. Without it, life was reduced to a cycle of toil and disappointment, hunger and pain. But was money all that I wanted? No.

Women? While it’s true that not all men desired women, I was amongst the number that did, and greatly. To be loved unconditionally was a rare and treasured thing. But my desires were much more complex.

Fame? Well, yes. But I could hardly find any sort of fame that didn’t involve being seen in public very often. My appearance would still be the butt of cruel jokes, even if I were brilliant enough in some other way to be known for my work.

I spread my hands, realising that the stranger had been watching intently while my mind had wandered along on its merry way. “I have no idea. I know what I think I want, but it seems to me that I’d only want those things to impress others, to fit into some comfortable slot in society, as it were – which is quite honestly something I couldn’t care less about.”

The stranger spread his own hands, and then reached for the decanter to pour us another glass each. “It’s a harder question than most people realise. There are many answers, but the real one may lie buried beneath piles of other, more fleeting desires. Digging it up sometimes means we have to face our deepest fears.”

“I’m not sure what you mean. I do understand the dilemma, but I can’t imagine why I’d be subject to such unpleasantness on the way. For the stake in a game of cards, I would think the desire must be limited to something of a physical nature – an object or at least a representation of one. Desires can quite transcend the physical world, and even stray into the realms of the impossible.” I took my drink at a gulp, as did he.

“Indeed they can, and most often do… and as for the limitations on the wager, it greatly depends upon whom you should choose as an opponent. Were it to be, say, a local ruffian in a bar-room game of poker, then you might well be limited to whatever they could physically stake. But consider for a moment what difference there might be in choosing someone who could indeed achieve the impossible. A witch, perhaps, or a wizard. A genie, a demon, or even the Devil himself.” The stranger put down his glass and began to shuffle the cards.

“What about God?” I placed my glass next to his on the table and cut the cards when he offered them to me.

“What about Him? If you really think about it, you’ll realise what a sorry choice of opponent He’d be. As an omnipotent being, the supreme omnipotent being, if you like, he’d be privy to your strategy every time, and always know just which cards you were holding. You would have no chance of winning. None at all. For God, every deck is marked.”

“If the stories are true, that would almost certainly be the case. Alright then, let’s say I was playing against the Devil. I assume my own stake would be my ‘soul’… whatever that is.” I scratched my head. “But would he be any better an opponent? Is the Devil not also omnipotent?”

“I could not speak for him, but I would say not. I would think the Devil possesses a great knowledge of the world and the workings of people, but if he knew everything, he wouldn’t have gotten himself thrown out of heaven in the first place.”

“Fair point. But men have been said to conjure up the Devil many times in the past to make some sort of bargain. It never seems to go well.”

“Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume that he’ll uphold his end of the wager if he loses the game.”

“If you want to play Devil’s advocate, so be it…” I chuckled. “Alright then. Back to my deepest desire – even if it’s impossible. I’m still not certain. Happiness, and a comfortable, indulgent life? I could have that in theory without magic or voodoo or whatever it happens to be. So, no.” I went on when he raised an eyebrow.

“Immortality. Now there’s a grand desire. To live and live and live some more while all of your fellow human beings squander their brief lives, grow old and die too soon. Yes, it’s a desire worth contemplating, but I wonder if one wouldn’t eventually become tired of everything. Forever is a very long time to regret a rash decision.”

“A wise analysis. Immortality is indeed a double-edged sword.” He chose a card and bid me do the same. I turned up a seven of spades to his five of diamonds, and so he took the deal and laid out six cards each.

“Or perhaps to be granted some fantastic power. To will one’s self to invisibility, or a new visage on command, or to fly like a bird above the treetops, or to breathe under the water and explore all the places that men cannot go. These desires seem more conventional… I am already invisible. My unpleasant appearance makes that a fact of life. Curiously enough, I came to the moors today to find somewhere that I could fly like a bird, at least, for a short time.”

“It seems you were unsuccessful, or I would not have found you crouching and shivering in the dark. What happened? Did you lose your nerve?”

“Eventually, yes. At first, I just couldn’t find anywhere high enough. These are gentle, rolling moors. I needed a mountain.” I put two high cards in the crib and cut the remaining deck.

The stranger turned the lower top card to reveal a five of clubs as the starter. “There’s never one nearby when you need one, just like a policeman, so I’m told.”

“Indeed. My greatest desire? To not be ineffectual. To be a normal, healthy, average looking human being. Not one with a face that looks as if it fell off the back of a lorry, and the general demeanour of an outcast.”

“Ah. Outcast is it? I suggest you know nothing of being an outcast. You’re free to go and do as you please, at least within the boundaries of the law, and good taste, if you have any manners at all. This feeling of isolation comes from inside you, and you have the power to change it without the aid of any supernatural being.”

“My face? That I cannot change. There’s no doctor in the world with the skills to alter someone’s features to make them more attractive and confident. That would be no more than fantasy with our current surgical procedures. It’s true, there have been many advancements in the past decades – penicillin and other such things to make the healing process more reliable, but to change one’s face? Perhaps in some far distant future, beyond my lifetime.”

“A face is just a mask. Who we truly are is not always reflected in our face. I was referring to attitude – if you really wanted to be accepted, an unfortunately shaped face shouldn’t be much of a barrier. If you could find some way to gain a brighter perspective, a shift in attitude would surely follow, and others might begin to look deeper than the surface when they note your confidence.” As we played through the deck and advanced our pegs in their leap-frog sequence, I found several combinations that scored highly, which put me in the lead. We still hadn’t decided on stakes, but the stranger’s rhetorical question had been too interesting not to explore.

He was right, of course. If I wasn’t such a self-pitying, nervous wreck all the time, I might actually get something done. “I’m afraid I will have to concede the question. I have no idea what my deepest desire is. Like I said before… I only know what I think I want.”

“A thinking man’s answer. Many others might have settled for power or fortune. How about we add some more immediacy to the stakes then. Something you have to decide on right now – and do remember that you currently lead the board.”

I spread my hands. “What do you suggest.?”

He rested his chin on his fist and smirked. “Your immortal soul. Let’s just say for the sake of argument that I am actually the Devil. I deal in damned souls – they’re all I have to keep me going. There doesn’t seem to be much of a point to my existence, really, aside from to keep you lot in check with the existential threat of hellfire and eternal damnation. So I do get rather bored if I can’t win a soul every now and then.”

I nodded. “High stakes indeed. If you really were the Devil, I might agree if only to see what you would offer in return.” I scratched my chin, wondering what he could possibly come up with that I hadn’t already thought of and rejected.

“I did speak of immediacy. I offer your immortal soul. I already have it, you see. The moment you walked into these moors with the intention of never walking out again, I had you by the short hairs. You were easily led astray. Consider for a moment that this,” he gestured to our cosy surroundings, “is only in your mind. For all you know, you could have been struck by lightning as you crouched there in the darkness. Perhaps this illusion is only a short pause during the transition between your life and death…”

I thought back to our unlikely meeting, and the strange walk we took through the hills to this place, wherever this place was. “I suppose that could be the case. But if this were the transition between life and death, theoretically, you could be anybody. An angel, if we’re heading down that track. For all I know you could be Gabriel.”

“Well, I do have horns, but not the type you’re thinking of there.”

“Very funny. Really now. Do you expect me to believe that you are the Devil? The one who resides in Hades and usually carries a pitchfork? Red skin, tail and, as you say, horns? That sort of Devil?” I barked a theatrical cough, attempting disdain.

“The same. Look, it’s not as bad as all that. Yes, I am those things… sometimes. But I’m also a very fair chap who likes to give honest souls the chance to redeem themselves before I revert to my usual brimstone and hellfire personae. There’s plenty of time to be getting on with that. Now, shall we conclude this little game?” The Devil rubbed his chin and reached for the decanter to pour the both of us a final glass.

“I suppose there’s nothing else for it. If this is really limbo, and you really are the Devil, well, I must say you aren’t quite what I was expecting. I’m not sure I’ve ever done anything evil enough to consider myself a candidate for eternal damnation, but then, I’m not exactly sure what the rules are. I’m hardly what you’d consider pious, either.” I accepted the glass and clinked it against his. “To your good health. If you are the Devil, I’d despair to think of any ailment that could make you suffer even more than you already must be.”

The Devil nodded his head and drained his glass. “It’s not often that people acknowledge my own suffering. You’re quite a rare one, Dick.”

“So you do know my name, then?”

“Your name, your address, your telephone number, the number of men you shot dead in the war, the number of spermatozoa that nearly beat you to the mark, and what all of their names would have been. I am not omnipotent, not like Him, but I know people a lot better than He does. What makes you think I suffer so much?”

“Pride. That’s how the story goes, isn’t it? You were His favourite, and you became arrogant with pride, and He cast you out of heaven. I don’t think you could simply turn that off. I think something like the humiliation of banishment would play on your mind, and hurt rather a lot, behind all the rage and anger and injustice of the punishment. According to you, even I have the chance to redeem myself, wretched soul that I am, or was. Do you not have the same chance to redeem yourself in His eyes? To restore yourself to your former position?”

“I… don’t know. He’s a hard bugger to please once you’ve annoyed him, I can tell you that. I’ll make you an offer. If you happen to lose the game, and don’t get your chance to sit on a cloud playing a golden harp – which by the way leaves you with a wet arse every time – then I’ll find some place for you in Hell that isn’t too uncomfortable. You’re good company after all, and you do play an entertaining game of cards.” The Devil checked his hand and found that he had no low card to make the count of thirty-one, and so had to pass.

I had the necessary five. My peg advanced to a position that was in sight of the winning score. The next hand, if I could find the right combinations, would be the last. But the Devil was breathing down my neck, and if his luck was in, it would be touch and go.

“Do they really do that? Sit on clouds and play harps, I mean.”

“And get wet arses. Yes, they do. Heaven is a bit of a let down, really, once you get over your awe. It’s pretty, but it’s exceedingly dull, and exceptionally nice, and well, it all gets laid on a bit thick there. I had some ideas to make the place a bit more practical, but I never managed to put them into effect.”

“I’ll make you an offer, then. If I happen to win, you tell me what your ideas were and I’ll relay them to Him if I get to meet him, and put in a good word for your redemption. You really are a decent fellow, so I can do that much.” The cognac had quite gone to my head. I almost offered to concede the game. Heaven sounded a rather gruelling place, even if it was pretty.

“You haven’t won yet, but thank you. I’d appreciate that.” The Devil’s turn yielded a winning hand for him. He moved his pegs up the board until the leader was a single point ahead of mine. The next hand would reveal my fate, once and for all.

        *

Later, in the hospital…

I read through the newspaper with some intense interest. It was a local rag, and contained an article about me. Apparently I’d been found unconscious in the hills, about a hundred feet from a pub which I couldn’t recall ever seeing in the area, though I knew its byways reasonably well.

According to the paper, I had been struck by lightning, and was comatose for nearly a week before I woke up here, bandages shrouding my head and upper body.

The newspaper, and everything else I’d seen since I had woken was a source of great mystery. It was dated the twelfth of November, which was curious. I had gone for a walk in early March. Stranger still, I had gone for a walk in the early March of 1923. This newspaper was printed in 1984. I could still smell the fresh ink. The date was also printed on every open page, top left and right, so a misprint was unlikely.

The hospital room was built with a very modern design, the like of which I’d never seen. On a shelf opposite, a portable device with a glass screen about the size of a small suitcase was plugged into the wall. I had been to the pictures more than once, but never had I imagined that something like this would someday be a household item. With a small black box, from across the room, I could operate the thing just by pushing buttons. It was marvellous, like something from another world.

The pictures it played had sound, and there were all sorts of things to watch. Melodramas and news and weather and sports games, as well as game shows and interesting documentaries about anything and everything. It was overwhelming, and I was not sure that I wasn’t in Heaven. It certainly didn’t seem very much like where I’d come from.

The nurses avoided talking too much, beyond asking if I was comfortable and if the food was alright, both of which were always answered in the affirmative. The newspaper had suggested the reason for their aloof manners. All of the identification that I had carried on my person was from my time. My clothes, also, were modern in 1923, but now they looked somehow antiquated next to the garments that these people wore. And their hairstyles…

I was as mysterious to them as they were to me.

It was only when the doctor came in to remove my bandages that I began to understand. He was neither old nor young, neither slight, nor portly. He smelled vaguely of sulphur and antiseptic.

“Well now, Mr Brown. You were inordinately lucky – luckier than most who have occasion to experience a direct lightning strike. Unfortunately, your face suffered a good deal of damage from the resulting burns, but with reconstructive surgery having advanced in leaps and bounds over recent decades, we’ve been able to do a bang-up job of putting you back together.” The doctor handed me a mirror as he unravelled the last of the bandages and revealed the results of his surgery.

The face I saw in the mirror was not the one I had endured for so many wretched years. This one, while not exactly handsome, was similar, but the oversized nose and ears had been corrected, and the chin now protruded as a normal, average human’s should. There were scars, still angry and red, but the doctor assured me they would fade over time. He was a very friendly chap, and we got to chatting as he explained the procedures that had been undertaken.

The subject soon turned to my enigmatic arrival, and the curious, outdated identification that was found in my clothes. The doctor had done some digging in the local records and found evidence of a Richard Brown that had gone missing on the moors in the spring of 1923, and never turned up. It was assumed he’d fallen into some hidden crevice and died, but even after sixty-odd years, no sign of the body had ever been found.

I chuckled to myself. I knew where it was.

This doctor who was neither short nor tall, neither surly nor bland, grinned in return and gave a slight shrug. “I suppose the press will come up with some logical explanation or other. They always do.”

“I’m not sure that I ever will. But it’s certainly good to be alive. I have you to thank for that.”

“You have fate to thank, first and foremost. But even that would be hasty. Lots of convalescing to go before you’re ready to face the world, yet.”

Fate. I wanted to feel relieved that fate had finally dealt me a winning hand.

But fate, like justice, is blind. It can go either way. I desperately tried to think back to the last hand of the game, but it wouldn’t come.

For the life of me, I couldn’t remember whether I’d won or lost.

I had assumed the only paths that lay before me were the high and the low, and my success or failure in the game would determine which I was to take, but I had not expected more life. The Devil had convinced me beyond question that I was already dead.

Then it occurred to me that this could still be some other limbo on the way to Heaven or Hell. I had no way of knowing, at least until I was able to get up and about and do some exploring. I asked the doctor when I could hope to be released from the hospital.

He produced a deck of cards from his coat pocket with a wry smile, and appeared to manifest a cribbage scoreboard from thin air as he sat on the stool next to my bed.

The doctor cut the deck and began shuffling. “Oh, now don’t be in such a hurry, Dick. There’ll be plenty of time for that.”