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Chapter Text

A devil is returning to the sixth circle of Hell.

His fashionable black cloak swishes satisfyingly through layers of reality, dragging shining bits of stardust after him and making the few faded souls he passes cringe away from the light. Metaphysical boots on metaphysical solid ground, he walks swiftly across a borrowed landscape of barren, half-imagined trees. Not very far overhead crouches a dream moon, its craters remembered with questionable accuracy. On other days the devil might pause and correct the shoddy job - his own memory is impeccable - but he is in a dark and thoughtful mood today. He notices the flaws, but he does not care.

No shadows trail loyally after him, no darkness thrills around his feet as it might on Earth. This is Hell, made of the same stuff as he is, all spirit and mind, and it will only respond if he asks it to. But it waits for him to ask; it vibrates like strings under the bow of a virtuoso. He could sing this metaphysical landscape to life with an artistry he could never manage on Earth, reshaping it with images he'd seen and remembered. His mind is still sane though his spirit is ancient. A powerful combination. He's used it to climb the ranks.

A devil in its animalistic form - an enormous leathery bat, flaming eyes trailing sparks into its wings - screams over his head in salute. He raises his chin slightly, his only acknowledgement, and strides on. 

Where have you been? The reproach hangs, pungent, in the air as he approaches a pair of heavy black doors, set deep into rising cliffs of stone. Feeling no need to respond, he throws them open and strolls into the great hall - a borrowed Dark Ages aesthetic, much in vogue now that Earth has finally stopped using it. You reek of humanity.

The comment has come from his assistant, a blond-haired, currently humanoid devil in an ancient grey toga standing prickishly beside the hall's vacant throne. "Don't be rude, Scribius," he tells the menial vaguely, mimicking the vibrations of speech in a realm where no air stirs. 

Forgive me, master. 

"Not likely." He pointedly drops into the throne. His worldly cloak seeps to rich crimson; a thin crown wreathes like laurels around his long black hair. He closes eyes dark as the depths of the sea and tilts a nobly formed head back, weary and bored. He is, after all, nine thousand, three hundred and seventy six years old. He is the master of the sixth circle of Hell and his name is Mephistopheles.

There is a soul requesting audience, Scribius announces, ethereal hand on the mighty night-black doors. Shall I admit them?

Mephistopheles opens his eyes. A nagging thought in the back of his mind: He doesn't know how much time has passed. Clocks were reassuring things, marking seconds and minutes, finite and comprehensible reminders of the fleeting present. He makes a mental note to check out a clock next time he's on Earth, memorize the pattern of gears so he can recreate it here. Then again, a clock here in this matter-less kingdom probably wouldn't be very dependable. He frowns. Might look cool, though.

Master, shall I?

Mephistopheles sighs, uncrossing his legs. His blank black eyes are half-lidded and languid. "Admit them."

His thoughts are distant as the doors open.

Suddenly, however, his attention sears across the floor. Any remnants of emotion still surviving on his face would have slid off quietly.

"You're not supposed to be here," he tells the visitor.

"I seek audience with Satan," declares a thin voice, planting small bare feet half-way down the carpet.

Me too, thinks the devil. "Satan is a myth, child, even here. I am Mephistopheles, master of the sixth circle. Say to me what you would say to the Light-bringer."

The visitor draws himself up fiercely. A sword is clenched in his delicate fist, the force of his spirit flaming its edge with brilliant sparks. "Heed me, spawn of demons, and tremble before my sword, for I have come in the name of the Lord to free my father and return him to Heaven."

Mephistopheles considers in silence the small foreign body in his throne room. Then he rises and, walking to the child, crouches to his level. "How did you get here?"

"I swept into the fiery pit on the wings of righteousness."

A single long eyebrow arches upward.

The kid shifts from foot to foot, toes doing a bit of weaving in the rug. "Walked."

"From Heaven?"  Incredible, the power of the human will. It disgusts him, how casually it gets wasted.

The child looks hopefully into the middle distance. "Heed me, spawn of demons."

 "Demons is a rude word."

"Give me my father," says the kid, voice cracking a little.

The devil stands, crimson robe sweeping the floor. "It is not for me to judge your father. He'd be in Heaven if he could."

But he is not, Scribius observes helpfully from the sidelines.

"Not like it's a prison."

Not a prison, Scribius agrees.

"Thanks, Scribs."

Silent tears now marking grubby tracks, the child shakes his head and brandishes the sword very close to Mephistopheles' knees. The master of the sixth circle almost seems to smile. "You're not supposed to be here. No place for kids, come on, I'll take you back."

"No," says the child.

"Oh," says Mephistopheles. "Damn." He looks at the kid for a moment. Then he walks to the throne, sits back down, and closes his eyes.

"I'll smite you!"

"Guess I'll get smote, then."

"Bring me my father!"

Mephistopheles sighs. "Nothing I can do, child."

"Yes there is!"

Is there? wonders Scribius, broken gears turning.

"No," insists Mephistopheles, a bit late, and then throws his noble head back with a groan. 

We could eat him, says Scribius, excited to have gotten to the end of the train of thought.

"The kid or the father?" Mephistopheles shoves himself up again, a dramatic motion. He looks irritated, but just the fact that he looks anything definable at all is reassuring. "He's got a sword, Scribs, just don't get smote." You can take him, he mouths to the child as he passes, striding back down the great hall. 

"Halt, hellspawn! Where goest thou?"

"I'm going to go talk to your dad." Mephistopheles gives a mighty sniff, more for punctuation than anything, and orders the doors open with a casual sweep of intention. "What's his name?"

Mephistopheles found the soul in question at the base of the flagpoles.

The Official Flag of the Sixth Circle was black with a red pentagram. Mephistopheles was particularly proud of it. Of course, it wasn't as though flags were out of fashion on Earth nowadays - not by any stretch of the phrase - but if he fibbed and said they were, was it his fault if no one followed up on it? Someone, surely, must have been up top in the last century and seen all those flags flapping around and realized, well, it could hardly be called scavenging, what their master had been involved in - slavish imitation, more like - but evidently they had been too wise to voice disgust, because he hadn't heard a word about it. In fact, Mephistopheles wouldn't have cared even if he had. It had been too long since he'd cast a fellow devil into the Pits. That was because, about eight thousand years into the routine of it, it had stopped being fun and started being work. But he had made it clear to his subjects that at this point, the tradition was begging to be revived. No one liked being sent to the Pits.

People seemed to like the flagpoles, though. It was nice, Mephistopheles thought, for their kind to have a little national pride. The flags stood atop a bare hill, about fivescore of them, each a hundred meters tall, thick black folds skirting their trunks like vultures' wings. Mephistopheles remembered to send a current of wind their way every now and then. To hear that great grove unfurling - cracking and snapping into violently deafening life - it was art, and there wasn't another word for it. Who said non-creative beings couldn't make art?

That said, the pool of mortal energy squirming at the base of the poles was ruining the aesthetic. 

Mephistopheles walked over and poked it with his toe.  "Your kid's here."

The flayed essence of a human being took the faux-speech vibrations like bullets. 

Your child has come for you, he told it directly.

While he waited for a response, he made the flags fly. Infinite and dancing as the universe they seemed. Where they had no sound, he gave them sound; he made sure everybody in the sixth circle could hear it, tumbling off the crags and snapping up from the abysses;  ah, the physical presence of thunderous sound! It was difficult to replicate, but Mephistopheles had been studying.

He has pled for your freedom, he added. I have decided to grant it. Rise and leave this kingdom.

This, at least, got a response. The foreign consciousness turned the pale hue of terror. 

Mephistopheles nosed his boot across the featureless ground and pulled a few rocks into existence. Landscaping was not really his area. He looked off across the hazy dreamscape of his country and breathed, once in, once out, simply for the physical language of it. "It's always your own children who torture you in the end, isn't it?" He glanced dismissively down at the soul. "What do you think? Shall I bring him to see you?"

A word was working itself up from the heap. Mephistopheles waited patiently. "Communication's hard when you're willing your own non-existence, isn't it? Take your time."

No, said the child's father.

"No? No what?"

Don't -

"Go on."

Don't -

"I shouldn't bring him? What will I tell him, then? He was so insistent."
The soul shuddered and coughed on its own manifesting. Mephistopheles looked thoughtfully to the low-hanging sky. "Shall I tell him the real reason you're in Hell is that you can't stand the sight of yourself in the light of Heaven?"

Another word was coming, gurgling like bubbles through mud. Mephistopheles gracefully bent an ear. "Yes?"

Kill me, said the soul.

"Tough luck, ol' chap," said the devil, "I've got some bad news."

Please kill me!

Mephistopheles magnanimously decided to overlook the semantics. An eyebrow raised, he appraised the dead man. "Yes, I see you've been trying. And how has it been going?"

Dissolving slightly, the soul turned a despairing shade of cream.

"You look like stew," the devil concluded. He shook his crowned head, beautiful and severe. "Stew. You know something, ol' boy, that's a sorry shame."

The flags whipped and billowed against each other, wings of a nighted sky.

"I didn't ask for stew in my circle, friend. Terrible eyesore. I'm sure you understand."

The soul was silent, vibrating slightly against the ground.

"What shall we do about it? There's nowhere else to put you. Simple economics? How shall we make you pay, for cluttering up my flagpoles?"

Mephistopheles turned the soul over with his foot. He was beginning to feel like he was talking to himself. "Hardly seems worth the effort."

Sound rolled off the hill in waves like colors. Like a rising dawn. One hundred red pentagrams. Maybe he should have made two hundred. 

As he was descending the hill he called a many-beaked compatriot to his side. "There's a dead man up there," he said with a vague gesture. "Avenge all of Hell for me, will you?"

Screaming stew, he decided, was no more aesthetically pleasing than silent stew. But it was just a little bit more of a respectable landmark.

"Where's  Scribius?" Mephistopheles asked, striding up the carpet of his hall.

The child's sword was steaming suspiciously.  "He could not bear the name of the Lord Jesus."

"Bet you he could. Did he try to eat you?"

"He would not dare. For his crimes against the Almighty, my sword sentenced him to destruction."

"What, for being a devil?" Mephistopheles fell into the throne with a sigh. "You didn't destroy him. He'll just be stuck in the Pits for a while." He paused for a long while, then added thoughtfully, "Wish you had. I'd have you do it to me."

"You've come without my father," the child accused.

"I told you," said the devil. "I can't free him."

The child wavered, lowering his sword. "You did go to talk to him, did you not?"

"He was very brave. Neck-deep in flames, snakes and daggers coming in at him from all sides, and he still kept his head up. You should have seen it, kid."

"You tortured my father." White-hot blazed the sword.

"No, I relieved him from torture, child. I brought him out of the chamber, found him a secluded cell. He will serve out his sentence in comfort." He splayed an arm. "Come here."

Hesitating, the boy shook his head. "I don't trust you."

"Of course not. Come here anyway."

"I want to see him."

"Do you like stew?"

"I don't see what stew has to do with anything."

"Take my hand, child."

"No." The boy sniffed haughtily. "I will take your sleeve."

"Have it your way." Mephistopheles gritted his teeth in concentration. "This bit's tricky. Especially with passengers. You won't let go, will you?"
"Certainly not," said the child, and then blinked. Nothing had happened, but here he was standing at the edge of a great precipice - if that was the right word for it. A proper precipice would have had mist swirling down in its depths, or wind howling across forsaken trees. This looked more as though whatever second-rate artist had painted the ground and sky had simply run out of canvas. "What is this?"

"Heaven," said Mephistopheles, getting a crick out of his neck.

"No, it's not."

"Isn't it? We're quite close, at least." The devil waved a hand into empty space. "You're stretching my sleeve, kid."

"I don't want to go back to Heaven. I want to see my father."

"And I don't care. See? You and I, we can't always get what we want."

"You'll -" The child stopped. "You'll take care of him?"

"I'll do what I can to ease his suffering, child. I can't promise more than that. He's here because he can't be there."

"I understand," the boy whispered.

"Now," said Mephistopheles, "open the gates of Heaven."

"How?"

"How? You're making that sword flame, aren't you?"

The little disciple was indignant. "My sword flames with the righteousness of the Lord."

"And you're making your soul manifest? Talking and moving just the way you think you ought to?"

"Speak clearly, demon."

"Well, if you're going to be rude." He narrowed his eyes at the boy. "You're made of spirit, kid, just like me. This place will listen to you. It's already listening. Here." He bent and scooped a handful of dust. "See this?"

"I see it."

"It should be a rock. Make it a rock."

The child backed away, his brave hand finally unable to stave off the trembling. "I'm not playing your games."

"No games, swear!"

Dropping to his knees, the child pressed his palms together and closed his eyes. 

"Kid, wait a sec."

"Lord, receive me," prayed the kid, "and deliver me from the evil one."

"Fuck," said Mephistopheles.

There was a great flash of light and suddenly, existence bloomed. 

The canvas ended, and reality swam into being, smelling warm and green and sharp as a mountain stream. Stars, clear and pristine, bannered across a vast navy-blue sky. Like the coming of high tide it swam around the two figures in waves, salty and strong, enveloping them with wild, forceful sensation until great snowy mountains towered above them and around them on all sides lay the edge of the world.

There was grass beneath the child's dirty feet: yellow and sturdy, like wheat, like lonesome fields and dirt roads, worn by cattle and seasoned by the sweat wiped from beneath straw hats when the sky was gray and thick with insect song. Sagging wooding buildings, that's what the grass spoke of; loud, low-ceilinged taverns, lantern-lit at dusk, beaten bare around the entrance by dogs and horses' hooves. Cranes it told of too, long-legged cranes hunting patiently on the pale green banks of pebbled streams so cold they felt hot and so clean the water cleared the mind as well as the throat. Most of all it told of wind, whipping unforgiving from horizon to distant horizon, joined by coyotes and the song of flutes and lonely old men with smoke-roughened voices, whipping sparks from campfires and sending miles and miles into roaring, deafening flame.

Mephistopheles pursed his mouth together, irked. It was really good craftsmanship. 

"Well, nice meeting you, kid," he began, and stopped short. "Nope, he's gone." He gave a sigh. "Oh well. Never liked him anyway."

Luxuriously, he stretched his being out into the vast space, feeling quite at home in this mirror-world of the earth, this firmament that overlaid itself over humanity's material realm like a secret sixth dimension. This place was made of spirit too. Creative spirit, of course, not his own parasitic type, but spirit none the less. It moved and breathed harmoniously, as one being, the iron oceans storming in its belly and supernovas exploding in its eyes. It welcomed him. There was a place for him, it said, in this organism of spirit that wore the world as its body and the stars as its face.

"What's up," Mephistopheles told it. "I brought your kid back for you."

A wild rose pushed out of the grass at his feet. That meant gratitude.

"No trouble." The child was already out of sight, dancing down the hill, no doubt, with bees and katydids streaming behind him like a court of kings. Mephistopheles sat down on a log at the edge of the field and put his feet up. "Aren't you going to ask about his father?"

A small yellow chrysanthemum pressed its way into his hand. That meant grief.

Mephistopheles plucked it and twirled it thoughtfully between his long fingers. "Seems a shame, doesn't it. I'm sure he was a great man. I'm sure he had worlds in his mind. His worlds and yours, Lord." He held the flower up, eyes bestially blank. "Why'd you drive him away?"

The world was silent. A low wind began from the woods behind him.

"I mean, you created him pathetic. The man lives in delusion of his own worth, then dies, comes here, and sees that he's pathetic - who could bear it?"

The wind in the trees expressed distinct disagreement.

"Let the people have a little self-deception. Cloud their vision. Cover 'em up, Lord, there's no going back to innocence here. Not after having lived."

Humanity is not pathetic. The wind's message was as clear as words.

"Then how come half of it's in my circle?" He plucked petals absently, dropping them on his shoes. "You created humanity to kick itself out of Eden every time. I thought you loved the sinners - Jesus Christ, Lord, it's hard to exist with yourself after wasting your only life on hatred and cruelty. Forgiveness is forgetfulness, isn't that what they say?"

The wind said nothing, its last sentiment still thick in the air.

"It is! It is pathetic! I keep thinking they'll get wise, finally. That they'll stop crawling into my country like refugees from their own miserable selves. I watch them and I watch them, and you know, Father, you know… " There were no petals left on the chrysanthemum. Mephistopheles tossed the stem into the grass. "Fucking boring. That's all."

I have a proposal for you, said the trees, very distinctly. 

The devil was surprised. "I'll give you ten bucks if you can show me how to make a flower."

I'd like to propose a bet, said the trees.

"A bet?" Mephistopheles stared hard into the woods. "What are we betting on?"

A soul, said God, of my choice.

"Of course it's of your choice."

You, however, are free to rig the game however you wish.

The devil considered, eyebrows high. "This is a living soul, I presume? … He goes to Heaven, you win; he goes to Hell, I win?"

Correct.

"But you choose the soul."

Naturally, you will be able to inspect him before placing your bet.

"Can't say fairer than that," Mephistopheles agreed. "Alright. You're loquacious today."

There was amusement in the wind. It pulled a shower of thin green leaves into its current and rained them into the field.

"See, it's things like this that people forget about you. Here you are, goading me into doing my best to damn a man…"

He will prove his worth to you, said the trees with certainty.

"Yeah, he probably will at that." Mephistopheles sniffed and scratched his neck. "I sure love stories with morals. Still, it's something to do, isn't it?" He held out a courteous hand to the air. "Thanks for that, Father."

Marigolds bloomed at his feet. That was best wishes and good luck.

And a sunflower. Hospitality.

Mephistopheles grinned blankly. He got to his feet, shaking leaves from his scarlet cloak.

You are welcome to stay.

"And you created me to turn you down," the devil pointed out affably. "Does it bring you pleasure, asking?" He turned away and cast his being out, seeking the seam of his realm and Heaven's. 

Your creation was no mistake, Mephistopheles.

"It's hardly fair of you to taunt me when I've lost my capacity for anger." The devil found the seam and wedged his fingers into it. "When my sanity goes too, I'll send you a postcard. See you around, old man."

Slipping through reality, he left a silent wind and a strewn chrysanthemum. 

Chapter Text

"Have you been dabbling in the unholy arts?" asked the new professor of law.

Dr. Heinrich Faust - sixty-three, impeccable posture, the most intimidating pair of gray eyes ever fixed upon a man - turned slowly with a barely cocked eyebrow of pure distilled scorn. Had he been dabbling? Was that a trick question, Professor Hartholz?

"I couldn't help but notice -"

"I think you probably could," said Dr. Faust.

"You have a very fascinating collection of books in your office," Hartholz pressed bravely on. "I'm sure as academic novelties they're useful. But there have been rumors of something more, and I must say, Herr Professor -"

"Herr Doctor." Faust wondered how long he could drag this confrontation out. Through the doorway behind him, his students had stopped talking primly about natural poisons and started talking about sex, and arm-wrestling. Let them talk, thought Faust. Better use of time anyway.

Hartholz dropped his voice and his airs. "I'm worried about you, Herr Faust. I think you should go to the church. Right after your class, before the banquet. I'll come with you."

"Will you," said Faust, thinking shit, the banquet.  

"You need to confess yourself to God. No sin is so great that it cannot be forgiven. I mean -" he leaned forward and stage-whispered - "summoning spirits? I can't understand it!"
"I thought summoning spirits was your field," said Faust cleverly, who considered Hartholz an old drunk. 

"Is it true then? Do you hold your own soul in such low estimation? Can you be so flippant about your own damnation?"

"My soul," said Faust," is my business." He was thinking of the darkness behind the window of his childhood bedroom, and the things that moved out there. He was thinking of a story about the stars, bullshit but melancholy with yearning: the lonely lantern-bearing travelers stranded the other side of the sky.

"Herr Professor Faust, I fear you are unwell!"

"That is the only explanation," Faust agreed. 

"Allow me to pray for you, my friend."

"Why, could I stop you?" exclaimed Faust, finally provoked. "My relationship with the eternal does not require your intercession! If I have committed a sin, I will not shirk from the consequences! I cannot ask forgiveness for something I do not regret, and I will not be prayed for!"

Hartholz looked at him in true shock. "You are unwell," he repeated finally, in a whisper.

"Of course I'm unwell!" yelled Faust. "I'm sixty-three!"

"May God forgive you," whispered Hartholz. He bowed quickly and hurried off down the vaulted corridor, a wary glance over his shoulder. Faust watched him go, thinking suddenly, Of course I'm unwell, I have to see your face every day, but the opportunity was gone. 

He opened his watch. Only two minutes had passed. Oh well.

Wandering over to the door of the lecture hall, he wondered idly whether the rumors Hartholz heard would cost him his tenure. The thought was neutral in valence. Ten years ago, losing tenure could have been the best thing to happen to him. But it was a bit too late, these days, for starting over.

He cleared his throat in the doorway and watched his students frantically assume academic gravity - caps straightening, eyes swinging forward, hands rooting for paper and pen. That was fifty years of his life, right there, draining to silence in that grand stone lecture hall. He stalked forebodingly up the rows of pews and took his position at the pulpit.

"Today's lesson is that we know nothing," he said, deadpanning. "Everything we think we know will be disproven in a century's time. We are always making laughingstocks of ourselves to the future. Please raise your hand and tell me a fundamental rule of science."

"The heavens move around the Earth," said a boy in the front row.

"Disproven. Who else?"

"Health is determined by the humors."

"Disproven. Any more?"

"Thought is produced by lightning sparks in the head."

"That's - nonsense. You're an idiot. Now I will pose two questions. First question. How can we know what's true?"

"Utilizing our faculties of reason, it may be possible to -"

"Correct answer. We can't. Second question: What's the point of science?"

"Gradually, we may be able to improve the conditions of life -"

"Correct answer: There is no point of science. End of lecture."

Several hands remained waving in the air. Dr. Faust called on one of them. 

"What do we do for the rest of the class?"

"Go for a walk," said Faust. "Don't take notes."

When they were all, finally, out of the room, the doctor crossed slowly to the arches at the back of the hall, stopping before a glass cabinet sealed with lock and key. From this case he retrieved one small item, seizing it with an air of cold resolve, and placed it deep within the pocket of his fur-collar greatcoat.

Outside it was raining. Courtyard stones were glistening dark gray and smelled thick and sharp as a forest floor. The spindly fir trees in the corners had stopped merely existing and had unfurled dark festive needles in splendor, calling up to the sky - and the sky, wet and wind-torn as the river, was awake and passing the message to the crows: Leave home. Another old memory - was it that time of year already, that late-autumn evening time that set his childhood before him like it was something to be aiming for again? - a memory came to him of his mother, standing above him and whistling as she shook spices into a stew. He crouched, gremlin-like, on a wooden chair pushed into a warm yellow corner, between the stove and the wall and the window, and the darkness outside was so complete that they could have been anywhere at all. In his hands was a diagram of musculature. Ostensibly he was studying it for exams, but the routine of it meshed with the evening and the darkness and the definition of his existence in it, and the act of naming the body became mystical. The Latin terms were incantations, holy as church.

Knowing names was important, thought Faust now, agreeing tentatively with his younger self. It was just that scholars had the wrong ones. When it came to herself, Nature was a tight-lipped lover. 

The rain thickened to a dull roar. Faust thought vindictively of his twenty-five young students tramping around the city, getting splashed on by carts and ruining their books. His cloth academian's cap grew waterlogged and sent cold streams through his thin white hair and down the back of his neck as he schlepped through a smaller courtyard and through a mighty set of wooden doors. He'd trodden this path so many times it had anchored in his dreams. Down the hall, up the stairs, down the hall. Third door on the left: Dr. Heinrich Faust, Professor of Medicine.

The ceiling was high and vaulted and the walls were very narrow and made entirely of overflowing bookshelves. There was a mattress on the floor at the far end. A small black dog was curled on it, nose tucked under tail. 

"You're still here," Faust greeted it stiffly. 

Navigating stacks of papers and bottles of specimens without thought, he removed the little vial from his pocket and, after a moment of consideration, placed it gently in a silver bowl, beside several contorted lizard skeletons and a human skull. A smear of chalk - a curved line, perhaps the point of a star - stained the stone near his foot. Faust stood very still and looked down at the remnant as a gust of wind sent water spattering against the window frame and a painful chill rattling into his bones.

Oh, yes, Hartholz - he had been summoning spirits, alright. The circles had been drawn, the candles lit, the incantation pronounced, the mind flown high, high out of the mortal frame and into the realms of the eternal and the true. He had cried out with all of his being. Nothing had answered.

He'd felt so foolish, then, in the silence of an indifferent room, crepey blue-veined arms sore from holding the enormous tome.

A deep unspeakable anger brewing in the pit of his stomach, Faust tried to scuff the chalk smear out and tweaked his knee. He cursed, a high and pathetic interjection, and limped over to his wing-backed desk chair.

Here he was, empty-handed at the end of his life.

It was too late to start over.

Heinrich Faust did not move from the chair for almost an hour. But finally, at long last, the old doctor heaved himself up, grumbling, grabbed his coat, and limped with unnecessary drama out the door to get some dinner at the pub.

Mephistopheles morphed out of his secondary form, stretching and shaking dog hair off his casual jacket, and tip-toed across the room to have a look at the vial Faust put in the bowl. Extract of Nightshade, the label read.

"Shit," said the devil, "I'd better get a move on then."

The year was 1520. This meant that when the priests or academians wrote down a document and they wanted it to be important, they wrote the numbers 1,5,2, and 0 at the top. They did not wonder at being two decades into a new century. Centuries weren't old or new; they didn't have character. There were two eras: antiquity, when the saints had lived, and the present, when everything was going to shit. Since it was always the present, things were always going to shit, and they would continue to go to shit until Christ returned in glory. Most people hoped that this would be soon - at least, that's what the priests hoped, very vocally, and with a lot of Latin and chanting and ceremonial objects to drive the point home. 

The locus was the city of Heidelberg. This didn't mean Heidelberg, Germany, of course. Germany was a vast barbaric mountainous region that you only referred to if you didn't live there. What Heidelberg meant was the Neckar river. It was broad and blue and the wooded hills bowed deeply under its lazy current. The Neckar ran so thick with legends it was spoken of as a god. Not that the people of Heidelberg would phrase it that way; better to sleep with the neighbor’s wife than to speak of a god; better to take the neighbor into the alley and run him through the heart with a bread knife. Perhaps they’d say, rather, that the Neckar had a place at their table. They didn’t set one, but it took one anyways. 'Neckar's blessing,’ they said when the fog rose unearthly from its surface before dawn and stole quietly into the streets with its funkled smell of the resurrected drowned - and blessing, of course, was a flexible word. You didn’t have to be a god to give a blessing, or God, for that matter. Any priest could dab holy water onto the forehead of a sick child, and any river could anoint a city with its own moist self-transformation. 

Every child of Heidelberg knew that the Neckar had skin in the game, for they had been told the story of Herbert the Silent, who went into the hills to pray one evening. The townspeople he passed asked him why - isn’t the church the best place for a man of God to offer prayer? Herbert the Silent didn’t answer. The townspeople took this for a mark of great wisdom, seeing that his beard was long and white, but for this reason they also feared for the brave old man and thought to warn him. ‘There are Vitchen in these woods,’ they said. That was, of course, precisely why Herbert was going. 

Vitchen should never be translated as witches. The word is clearly the precursor to the modern witch , but the modern witch in German is a Hexe. Vitchen are something much more ancient, and much more difficult to burn at stakes. According to legend they have anywhere from ten legs to the normal two. Like the vampire, they cannot be found anywhere but in darkness. Unlike the vampire, this is because they are made of it. They don't steal into houses and take children away. They don't hide in the reflections of puddles and enchant the lovestruck into drowning. They simply exist, in the forests, in the nighttime, and are unknown and inhuman, and no one talks about them except in warning. Don't go into the woods. There's Vitchen.

And so Herbert the Silent went into the woods. And his body drifted down the river three days later and was deposited gently upon the shore, unbloated, peaceful, frigidly cold and uncannily beautiful, with waterlilies growing from his mouth and wreathing his hands. A miracle, the townspeople cried: The river, sensing the greatness of the man, had protected his body from dishonor. It had carried him back home in a procession of mallard ducks and riverweed. Waterlilies, the story concludes, grow at the bank of the Neckar to this day.

Heinrich Faust had written an epic poem about Herbert the Silent when he was eighteen. He dedicated it to God, and to Margarete Schilder, the woman he'd proposed to three times, and who had turned him down three times because she was in love with a particularly kind-eyed, soft-nosed Murnau-Werdenfels. Heinrich, who had always secretly been a romantic, was very understanding about it. He was the only person she ever told and he kept her secret his whole life.

"I feel like most people don't ever live," he told her once, at dusk, lying on the top of a nearby hill, which had a clearing as neat as a monk's tonsure. "I look around and I get so depressed. I don't want to live like everyone else does."

"Herr Thuringen wants to marry me," said Margarete.

Heinrich folded his arms under his head and added, "People go around with their eyes closed. They don't want to know anything outside their own front door. There's more to life than being a tailor. No disrespect to your father. Or a priest, even."

"I'm thinking of going into the woods and building a hut," said Margarete.

"I mean, we're made in the image of God. We're not meant to be just one thing. He gave us the world! This world is made for us, how come we don't know anything about it? I mean, we don't even care!"
"In a little meadow by a stream. Out where nobody could ever find it."

"But we could know, is my point. We have to be able to. Fine joke it would be if life wasn't knowable in a lifetime… you know?"

"I'll put in a root cellar and pickle things from the garden and keep jars of them down there."
"I just feel like, everyone's missing it. Whatever life is. I'm not fucking missing it, Gretchen. I'm all in. I'm going to do it right. I won't let myself end up with regrets."

"And flowers. Geraniums. I'll plant so many fucking geraniums."

Heinrich rolled over on the long yellow grass and took in her declaration. "Can I come?"
"Yeah. I'll probably be lonely."

"Ok, I'll come then."

She married Herr Thuringen.

It was a Christmas wedding, and the candlelit evergreen garlands along every pew were almost enough to stave off the seeping chill of the ice outside. There were more candles in that church than Heinrich had seen in his life and the multifarious flickering light fell on the wall primevally. The priest droned in Latin, the solemn couple kneeled at his feet and gave their replies, and Heinrich looked up at the image of the crucified Jesus and smiled as though the two of them shared a private joke. 

The priest read from the book of Matthew: "Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you." Okay, thought Heinrich, eyeing the crucifix, I will, and asked it, in Latin: Guide me to the heart of life. Show me the truth of the world. 

For surely the truth is reserved for all who think to ask, for all who notice that life as it appears is but illusion, and who are brave enough not to be discouraged, but to seek behind it, to pull aside the veil of the sky and look into the face of God.

Looking at the painted wooden Jesus, frozen for all time in the agonies of public execution, he suddenly became doubtful. So he kneeled, right there in the middle of the wedding ceremony, wreathed by candle smoke and incense and evergreens, and bowed his head and prayed, Lord, I am prepared to do what it takes. Where should I look? What should I become? I ask in complete earnestness; answer me, Lord.

And the priest had read, in answer to him, from the book of Genesis: "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth." So Heinrich went home and told his father, who had been gearing up to confront him about getting apprenticed to Herr Schilder, "God has spoken: I am Faust, the Scholar, and I will dedicate my life to uncovering the truth of life, God, and creation."    

He gave Margarete Thuringen the epic poem as a wedding present. Later she confessed to him, "I like your Vitchen."

"I'm going to go into the woods and find them," Heinrich told her.

He did go into the woods, but he didn't find them.

"Never had a wife," he was saying now, as he flung a rock off of Aindl's Shoulder, his favorite viewpoint overlooking the Neckar.

"Never went abroad." Another rock. He stopped and grabbed an armful so he wouldn't have to keep bending down. His back couldn't take it. "Never saw a spirit." Rock. "Never saw anything interesting or mysterious at all." He threw this one especially hard. It pattered gently down the hill and got stuck against a bush. "Never had a book printed. Never discovered anything interesting. Never spent any money. Never shagged a girl. Never took a day off." He stopped there because he had run out of rocks, but there were still a lot of things he had never done, so he kicked some dirt off the bluff with his bad leg. 

The small black dog beside him thumped its tail once, tongue lolling mirthfully. The evening sky was spitting rain in half-hearted bursts, and Faust, thoroughly wet, was getting quite cold. He glared at the dog. "What are you looking at?"

The dog grinned back at him. Faust snarled at it and then turned on the Neckar. "What are you looking at?" He spread his arms. He was drunk. He'd started monologuing in the Heavy Hagen and the bartender, who'd always had it out for him, had thrown him out.  "Never lived. So what? I did my best. What else was I supposed to do? It's an impossible task!"

He ripped some leaves off of the nearest tree and hurled them mightily over the edge. A few twirled down but most got stuck in the mud by his feet. "Some advice you give, Lord! Knock and the door will be opened! Of course, that wasn't really your advice, was it? And there aren't really Vitchen, are there? And the Neckar's just water, isn't it? Just plain fucking water! And I'm talking to my fucking self!"

The rain spattered a bit harder, but not to spite him. It was just rain.

Against the gray blanket of the sky, small black dots gathered. The crows were leaving Heidelberg. Migrational crows. Gone in fall, back in spring. Where did they go? Who cared. South, Faust guessed. Someone else could waste his time following them to find out. They were leaving, that's all that mattered.

God, he loved them.

Farewell, he wanted to say, but he couldn't quite get the words out. He felt like someone was watching him, even though he knew, for probably the first time in his life, that he was completely and utterly alone.

The dog sneezed and scratched its ear. Faust turned around and regarded it, somewhat sobered. "What, you want to come back with me again? Tough luck. I don't even know where you came from. Go back home, dog." He started walking away down the old, overgrown road, his soaked boots crunching through layers of red and yellow leaves.  It hadn't really sunk in that he was leaving Aindl's Shoulder and its view of Heidelberg for the last time. Later, many years later, he wished he had turned around, just one more time, for a last look. 

"Farewell," he said now, with bitter irony, his back to the Eckar. There were stale tears in his eyes. "Thought I was climbing a mountain. Turns out I was just dragging myself along the ground."

Light crunching drew his attention to the paws trotting beside him. "I said get lost, dog." 

The dog panted cheerfully, a sleek Patterdale terrier with cocked ears and an undocked tail. Stupid dog. Couldn't take a hint. 

The pair walked side by side in silence under the vivid boughs, and the rain finally began to let up.

"There's a professor's banquet at the university tonight," said Faust to the dog after a while. A gust of wind pulled leaves off the trees around them and Faust, with impressive reflexes, caught one out of the air.

 "Should I go? Just to remind myself that there's nothing worth staying for here?" He thought, dissolving the dead leaf between his fingers, then frankly confessed, "Honestly, I don't think I could bear it. You know how inane those things are."

The dog watched him drop the bits of leaf with an oddly appraising expression and cocked its head, as though listening to the wind. Faust, lost in his thoughts, took no note of it.

"Will you be around for long, dog?" he asked as they reached the bottom of the hill. "Shall I give you a name?"

The dog wagged its tail cheerfully.

"I think I'll call you Prestigiar," said Faust, "after the regard I have for you." He laughed dryly and it turned into a rattling cough. He was wet and freezing cold and his knee was hurting quite badly. "Come on, this way, dog. Almost home."

Another strong gust showered leaves. Heinrich Faust, who had learned not to personify the wind, knew it didn't mean anything, and indeed, in this realm it didn't. But unbeknownst to Faust, the spirit of Hell trotting at his feet had just made a declaration. And, a quick dimensional shift away, in Heaven too a mighty wind was blowing, and every tree and every field was dancing a reply:

Bet accepted.

Heinrich Faust did not kill himself immediately upon returning to his office. ("Yeah," said Faust, and tipped the vial of nightshade out of the window. "As if I was going to fucking kill myself. God fucking damn it.") Actually, he had paced around, soliloquized to the setting sun, and cried. The small black dog, slightly embarrassed for him, tucked its tail neatly around its paws, and had a long think. 

As things stood, the doctor, when he eventually did kick the bucket, would obviously do just fine in Heaven. Mephistopheles only had to take one look into those proud, stupidly idealistic grey eyes to know exactly where that man belonged. Heinrich Faust was aware of his entitlement as a human being, the universe's favored species, created in the image of the Godhead itself. That sort of pride went straight through the flesh and stuck in the soul. This man would not drive himself out of Heaven. This man would claim his birthright. Hell, he yearned for the infinite.

Mephistopheles didn't want to waste time trying to corrupt him. There was a much simpler way to get the job done, providing the Almighty played fair about it. He could simply ask the doctor to come to Hell instead of heaven. 

This wasn't as far-fetched as it seemed. He knew, mostly theoretically, that every man had his price; and he thought he had a thing or two to offer Faust for his cooperation. He was currently thinking wealth and youth. Those were nice, easy, one-time services. By this time tomorrow, the bet could be won. Mephistopheles figured he'd go home, draft a contract up, change into something nice and impressive and catch Faust before his morning classes. Maybe invite him for a rich breakfast in Venice while they talked business and hammered out the finer details.

Satisfied, the dog got to its feet, padded to the door, discreetly encouraged the handle to turn, and slipped out.

"Where're you going, dog?" the doctor called at it.

Oh, just, you know, thought the dog, leaving.

"Did you just open that door with your supernatural powers, dog?"

Yes, thought the dog, yes I did.

"Get back in here, Prestigiar."

Prestigiar hesitated an instant too long.

"You heard me! In!"

The doctor was standing in the center of the room with arms crossed and holding a small crucifix. The dog could hear Faust's heart beating wildly - could smell his perspiration.  "Am I crazy, huh, Prestigiar?"

Nope, thought Prestigiar, ready to skedaddle.

"Where'd you come from, dog?"

Oh, buddy, you're desperate, the dog thought. Just wait till morning. I gotta go.

Faust reached over it and closed the door in front of its nose. "I don't think so."
Dammit, thought the dog.

"All this time. You sat there right next to me. Were you waiting for me to notice you?"

I cannot make my introduction like this, thought the dog, this man has seen me sniff my own rear end.

"Don't you wag your tail at me, dog. What are you? A spirit? A demon?" His careful reserve fell away. "God damn it, answer me! You know how long I've been waiting for you!"

Knock knock. The door creaked open. "No! Close the door! Close the door!" yelled Faust.

"Sorry, doctor!" said a muffled voice. "Just bringing the - uh, the papers -"

"The papers. The papers." As the meaning of the word worked upon his brain, the old doctor seemed to shrink at least three inches. "Well - come in… close the door behind you."

An older student with a pathetic wispy beard slipped in. "They're organized by grade," he said, placing a stack down on Faust's desk. "Everyone did pretty well, I think, but you can check me on it. What were you reading?"

Faust stared at him blankly.

"Oh, I thought I heard you reading a play or something."

"I was talking to my dog," said Faust.

"Oh." The student scratched the terrier on the head. "Cute dog. Well, um, let me know if you need anything else from me-" 

"I won't -"

"Good night, doctor."

"Night, Wagner."

The assistant left. Faust stared at the dog dismally, then turned away and collapsed into his desk chair. Then, very slowly, he lowered his forehead onto the stack of papers.

The dog slunk off through the crack Wagner had left in the door.

Ten minutes passed. Faust sat up and peeled his top student's essay off his face. He could hear music drifting faintly across the courtyard - the faculty banquet was in swing. A breeze came through the window and, gusting suddenly, threw some of his papers to the floor. Faust bent down listlessly to pick them up, then holding his bad back he went to close the window. 

The window was already shut.

The wind blew several candles out and tossed the rest of the essays across the room. The floor quaked. Faust's hand went to his mouth. Something was gathering in the center of his office. All of the shadows and bits of candlefire were being drawn into one thing.

There was a burst of flame. Faust gasped like a woman and grabbed his crucifix from the desk. 

The wind stilled. The shadows drained onto the floor again. A figure stepped forward into the light.

The spirit of Hell spread its arms majestically, dressed in a coat of glittering red and gold, and the flames of all the candles bent toward it in fiery arcs. "Heinrich Faust," it said in a powerful baritone. "At last we meet face to face."

Faust looked at it and said, "We've already met face to face, haven't we, Prestigiar?"

The spirit of Hell lowered its arms. "Yeah, but my face was down there." It waved a hand vaguely to indicate the general location. "Now I'm, I don't know, taller than you. Anyway -"

"You're not taller than me."

What the fuck is this, thought Mephistopheles.

"And it seems to me you've intruded upon my work. So if you would kindly explain to me -"

"What work?"

"- what you are doing here and what business you have with me I would be much obliged."

"You don't do work," said Mephistopheles.

"You have no right to tell me what I do and do not do!" yelled Faust. "You've been spying on me since this morning, sitting in my office uninvited, shamelessly violating my privacy -"

"I wasn't uninvited."

"And I confided in you! I exposed my weaknesses -"

"Well, I won't tell anyone. Look, you can't call this an office, you've got a bed in here."

"Silence, demon!"

"Oh," said Mephistopheles, very darkly, "it's come to that, has it?"

"What are you doing here?"

"And you do want to know, don't you?" The devil circled him slowly. "You're desperate to know what it was. What did you do to make the eternal finally take note of you?"

"Don't mock me, spirit."

"Why shouldn't I? Why shouldn't I mock? My kind is a mocking race. And you, Doctor Faust, you are an infinitely mockable man."

Faust drew himself up proudly. "I will not be insulted by the likes of you. Tell me your name."

"You presume much, Doctor. Yes, I know you like names. But you don't get to have mine - not yet, at any rate."

Faust stared - too wondering, too ecstatic to glower. "Your business then."

The devil sent a pained glance at the heavens, and then brought it down to survey the doctor grimly. "I have an offer to make you."

"An offer. What could Hell offer me?"

"Who said I was from Hell?"

"Are you?"

"Yeah, sixth circle." 

"What are you offering me?"

The devil spread its arms wide. "I am in a position, Dr. Faust, to negotiate."

Faust considered this. "You don't have an offer."

"Well, I don't know what you want, Doctor. I have a few ideas. I have confidence we'll work something out."

"In exchange for my soul, I presume?"

"Ah, you know how these things work. It's nothing personal."

"It's not?" Faust crossed his arms. "You came to me."

"You called," lied Mephistopheles sweetly.

Faust breathed in and out rapidly and considered the strange and ancient being before him. It looked like a rich, middle-aged Italian uncle. "I didn't call for you."

"But you got me."

"Yes," said Faust, thoughtfully. "Yes, I did."

Then he outstretched a hand. "I'll take the deal."

The faculty of Heidelberg University was surprised to see old Dr. Faust arrive, looking immensely pleased with himself, late to the banquet with some disgruntled member of small-time nobility on his arm. "I've received some unexpected company tonight, gentlemen," the doctor had announced smugly, "don't mind him."

"Yes, don't mind me," agreed the visitor in a voice rich as molasses, winking and doffing his hat suavely to the nearest Professor of Rhetoric.

"Don't talk to people," Faust muttered.

"Ah yes, of course."

"Sit down. Where'd you get that hat?" It was red with a long feather.

"Magic."

"Wegener, may I introduce my guest -"

"Evgeny de Barathrum." The devil leaned across Faust to shake the other professor's hand. "Baron of Romberg."

"...Right. The Baron is my cousin twice removed. You idiot, " Faust hissed.

"Yes yes, a pleasure, just dropped in for a quick hello. What? " de Barathrum hissed back.

"I was going to introduce you."

"As what?"

"A - hellish spirit, I don't know. Where's Romberg?"

"Norway. You were going to tell your coworkers you're doing business with the devil?"

"Hardly doing business yet, did you bring the contract?"

"Right here. Look, no need to cause a scene, alright? You don't want to burn these bridges. Makes an awful mess."

"I'll do what I like. Why Norway?"

"Popped into my head."

"Barathrum, not very subtle, is it? What's your real name?"

"Nice try."

"Give me that contract."

The so-called Evgeny de Barathrum, Baron of Romberg, passed over a piece of paper completely blank except for Faust's signature.

"You can't 'take the deal,' " Mephistopheles had protested back at Faust's office, "we don't have a deal yet."

"Can't I?" 

"No!"

"What's this then?" said Faust, whipping out a pen and a piece of paper. 

"It's your signature, on a piece of paper."

"How do I make it valid? Oh,” he realized, “blood, isn't it?" Faust produced a knife from somewhere, slashed his hand, and redid the signature. 

"Doctor, we haven't - we don't have a -"  Mephistopheles stared at the blank contract which Faust handed to him. 

"We can work out the details later. I have to go out."

" You have to go out? "

"Yes, there's a professor's banquet in the main hall."

"I know. You told me earlier."

"I'm sorry," said Faust, grabbing his coat, "I didn't know you were listening. You seemed busy urinating on bushes. Come on, I want you to join me." And he walked out the door.

Mephistopheles had stared after him, speechless. Then he'd snatched the signed blank contract off the desk and followed him.

"So, you said you had ideas," said Dr. Faust. "Pass the potatoes," he added to his colleague across the table.

"You want to do this right here?"

"Why not?"

"Fine." The devil produced a pen. "Picture this: riches beyond your imagination."

"No. Are you done with the gravy?"

"All yours. What do you mean, no?"

"I mean, no."

"I could put anything on this contract, you know. It's a blank contract."

"But you won't, will you?"

"I might. What do you want , doctor?"

"What do I want." Faust dressed his potatoes. "What do I want?"

"Jesus Christ," muttered Mephistopheles. 

"I want to know all that you know," said Faust.

"Well, that's impossible."

"I want to see everything there is to see in the world," added Faust, counting on his fingers.

"That's ambitious of you."

"I want every human experience. Every type of joy, every mode of suffering."

"Now you're just making things up."

"That is the idea."

"I can't put these things in a contract, doctor. Tell you what. I could give you back your youth, how about that? Then you get a second chance, relive your life as you please."

Faust considered the benefits of youth. "No, I don't think so."

"What do you mean, you don't think so?"

Hartholz, a couple seats away, leaned over. "What's the talk about?"

"We're just working out some business," said Mephistopheles. 

"I'm selling my soul to the forces of Hell," said Faust. 

"Business, am I right?" said the Baron of Romberg. "Memos, records, contracts, you know. Soul-draining. What are you doing."

"I'm an honest man, demon," Faust hissed back.

"You are going to get me exorcized. Or intercized. Or just straight-up banished from Heidelberg."

"You can handle it, can't you?"

"And don't call me 'demon'."

"Alright, baron ." Faust scraped his plate clean with his spoon. "Finish your dinner and meet me in the hall."

"Where are you going? Alright, I'm done, I'm done. Wait."

In the vaulted stone corridor outside the dining hall, Faust turned on his guest and crossed his arms. "You mentioned youth."

"Yeah?" The devil raised an eyebrow.

"How long does it last?"

"Well, it's a reset, basically. If I make you look thirty you'll age like you're thirty."

"Can you do it now?"

The devil looked somewhat relieved. "Reconsidered, have you?"

"Reconsidered? No, no, no. This is just a taster. I want to see what you can do."

"You want a free sample?"

"That's right."

Mephistopheles considered. On the one hand, armed with the self-confidence and vanity of youth, the old doctor would be even more insufferable. On the other hand, the devil was actually kind of entertained by the evening overall. And Heinrich Faust had nice eyes. "Alright, fine. Stand up straight."

The devil leaned back on his heels and stared very intensely at the doctor without speaking for approximately thirty seconds.

"Well, what are you doing?" snapped Faust.

"Shush."

"I don't feel anything," he announced after another thirty seconds.

"Faust, I am literally rearranging your atoms by hand right now, shut up."

"How? With your psychic powers?"

"With my metaphysical being."

"You command the atoms to move and they move?"

"No, I reach my being out and make contact with you. Now be quiet. God, you have brittle bones."

"I don't like the idea of you touching my bones."

"Tough luck. Do a squat."

"What?"

"Just do it."

Faust complied. His eyebrows raised. "You've healed my leg."

"Still working on it. You can stand up straighter than that."

"My hands still appear old."

"I'll do skin last. How's your hearing?"

"Fine."

"The hair things are a bit worn down, I'll fluff them up a bit."

"What hair things?"

"I don't know, way back in the snail bit, there are these hair things."

"I've never dissected an ear."

"Well, now you know. How does your voice feel?"

"Stronger."

"Sounds stronger."

"My head itches."

"Run your fingers through your hair."

"My God. Let me see my reflection."

"Not yet." He turned the doctor's face to the side with his hand. "Did you ever have wisdom teeth?"

"They were pulled."

"Right. Turn around." 

"Is it done?" Faust pressed his hands to an unlined face. Every inch of his body felt like it coursed with electricity.

"Yeah, pretty much." Mephistopheles stepped back, hands on hips. "Hot damn."

They were run out of town.

Or, rather, they were slightly attacked at the banquet table and put the fear of God and/or Satan in everyone by rising into the air on a flying cloak and escaping through a large and priceless stained glass window.

"I've figured out what I want," said Faust, several hundred feet over Heidelberg.

"Oh really? I'm on the edge of my seat."

"Give me one good moment."

"...  Sorry?"

"One moment of perfect happiness."

"I mean - how am I even going to measure that? A moment of happiness?"

"Just give me a moment I don't want to end."

Mephistopheles raked his eyes up the young doctor Faust from foot to forehead. I'll give you a moment you don't want to end.

"If you can do that, I'm yours. You can take me right then and there."

I'd take you - The devil coughed and decided to collect himself. "You don't think I can show you a worthwhile moment?" he asked seriously.

"I don't know, can you?"

"You're betting your soul on life not having worth for you."

"Or maybe all I want is to find out how I could be happy in this life, and then I'd be perfectly content to die."

"Well that would be stupid, wouldn't it?" Mephistopheles considered. "Are you trying to prove something? I feel like you're trying to prove something."

"Take it or leave it."

"Heck." Mephistopheles rummaged in the flying cloak for the pen. "Alright, I'll put it down. This is going to take like three hours, mate." He spread his arms across the moonlit landscape. "You've got the world, Dr. Faust. What do you want to do with it?"

"I don't want to do anything. I don't think there's a single good thing you can give me, demon."

"Oh, I see how this works. Look, the sun will be coming up soon. You like sunrises, don't you?"

"They're melancholy. They mock me." Faust took the contract and read it over.

"They mock you! How rude of the sun to insult you, personally!"

"What do you know of beauty, demon?"

"I know that this world was meant for you," said Mephistopheles darkly. "You're not allowed to deride it."

"And you are?"

"Exactly. Doctor Faust, if you call me demon one more time I swear I will drop you out of the sky."

"Well, you won't tell me your name."

"Expensive things, names."

"We're business partners now." Faust rolled up the contract and handed it back. "I think I can handle it. Who are you, spirit?"

"My name is Mephistopheles. Master of the sixth circle of Hell."

"Oh."

"Oh?"

"I don't recognize it. I expected someone famous."

"Gee, sorry to disappoint."

"Why did you come to me, Mephistopheles?"

"Funny story, actually. I made a bet with God over you."

"A bet on what?"

"Whether you'd damn yourself, more or less. I won, of course."

Faust considered this. "You won easily. Why did God himself make a losing bet? The omniscient God Almighty?"

"I don't know yet. It's usually to teach me a lesson."

"And have you learned anything?"

There was a short pause. "No, not yet."

"Well, let me know. I have an uneasy feeling." He gazed dramatically out over the landscape as though he knew how good he looked brooding in the moonlight with his windblown chestnut hair and his stupid beautiful face. 

"Why'd you do it, doctor?" asked Mephistopheles, a note of wonder in his voice.

"Damn myself?" Faust somehow managed to make his expression even more tragically heroic. "Death doesn't matter, Mephistopheles. Life is all that counts."

"Death is forever. You do realize that."

"But that's why life is everything. There are no second chances." The grey eyes seemed full of the stars. "I can't die knowing there are things I've yet to do. Feelings I've never experienced. Places I've never seen."

"Even if none of it makes you happy?"

"I'm not looking for happiness."

"You sold your soul for it."

"I didn't sell my soul for you to grant me happiness," said Faust. "I sold my soul to see you try."

Chapter Text

Heinrich Faust tapped his pen against his lips and then wrote in careful script at the top of the page, 'Margarete Schilder.'

After a bit of thinking, he wrote a couple other names down. Then he cracked his knuckles, crossed his legs, lit a candle - the dusk was getting a bit too thick - and considered the list. The list was of all the single young women he knew in Heidelberg.

'Father,' he imagined announcing at the dinner table, 'I'm engaged.' The thought made him unconsciously correct his posture. 'Herr Schilder,' he imagined saying at the tailor's door, 'may I please speak to you regarding a private matter?' Yes, he thought, that seems right.

Then he took a deep breath, steeled himself, and went further. He imagined standing in the cathedral in the glow of a thousand candles. He imagined taking the face of Margarete Schilder in his hands and bending to kiss her. Yes, he thought, I could do that. He imagined going about life as a married man. 'Oh, thank you, Franz - my wife made it.' 'I'm afraid I must leave early tonight, gentlemen, to see to my wife.' He smiled.

It was, however, a very important decision, so he tested his will one last time, searching his breast for undisclosed feelings or reservations. There was excitement. A little nervousness - that was to be expected. He'd always been shy. The main emotion he discovered, however, was relief. Relief that the decision was so easy, so certain. Relief that a major problem of his future had been solved. Relief that he soon would be able to think of himself, no longer as a boy, but a man.

Good, he thought, then I shall ask her on Saturday.

'No, Heinrich!' said Margarete on Saturday.

Heinrich's next words stopped on his tongue, then very slowly slid back down his throat and slopped into his stomach.

'Oh, I'm sorry,' she said, taking his hand in a friendly way. 'But you don't want to marry me, Heinrich. Really.'

'I do,' said Heinrich, collecting himself. How sweet - she didn't believe him. 'I do, Margarete, more than anything.'

She raised her eyebrows. 'Heinrich, you don't like me.'

Heinrich was shocked. 'You're my closest confidant. My heart's dearest friend, Margarete, and - I hope - my life's companion. Please say yes, Margarete. There's no one else but you.'

Margarete sat down on the edge of the wet bench in the square, invited her friend to do the same, and took a moment, eyeing him intensely. She knew perfectly well that his sudden new passion for her was as chaste as a child's. For a moment it crossed her mind that this wasn't necessarily a terrible thing, all alternatives considered. No, she told herself sternly, no, no, bad idea. Maybe if you were into women. 'Heinrich,' she said with finality, 'I'm not going to marry you.'

'Is it someone else?' he asked, growing upset.

'No, it's you. You're just - irritating as fuck, I'm sorry.'

'Excuse me?'

'It's okay, I like you a lot, you know, we're good as friends. But I couldn't live with you, I'd end up hating you. I think you'd probably hate me, too.'

'I could never hate you,' said Heinrich, and added awkwardly, 'my love.'

'I pick my nose,' said Margarete.

'You don't,' said Heinrich.

'I have a really weird kink,' said Margarete.

Heinrich raised his eyebrows and looked away.

'See, you're not even interested in me.'

'I won't marry you, then,' said Heinrich, aggressively avoiding eye contact. 'If you really don't want me to. No one's forcing you. Sorry I asked.'

Margarete slipped her hand in his again. 'Don't worry about it.'

The church bell chimed ten across the square. Heinrich jumped and felt, settling in his gut, a sick certainty that he would never be able to hear the bell again without thinking of this horrible, horrible morning.

'Everyone's pushing marriage these days,' Margarete reassured him. 'It wasn't always like that. A lot of great men were bachelors. Look at all the saints.'

'I'm not a monk, Gretchen,' snapped Heinrich. His unheld hand was starting to shake.

'Do you want to change the subject?'

'Fine. I don't care.'

'Okay, want to know what Plato believed about reality? I just heard this today at the Hagen.'

'Everyone's always talking about the Greeks,' muttered Heinrich. 'Stupid homosexuals.'

The Brocken is the highest peak of the Harz mountains.

It is said that upon its summit the Saxons once offered sacrifices to the great god Odin. In 1520, however, on the night of the fall equinox* - that spirit-rich night known to legend as Walpurgisnacht - the strange shadows flickering across the mountain are not headed to the summit. They are headed to a small, innocuous circle of granite boulders on the edge of the tree line.

(*There is a rumor currently going around that Walpurgisnacht occurs on the spring equinox. This is a ruse to throw the Vatican off the scent.)

Walpurgisnacht takes its name from St. Walpurga, a sickly young woman who made it her life's mission to battle the forces of witchcraft. In her honor, villagers across Europe light pyres to ward off the very legions of darkness which St. Walpurga had so many years ago driven from their midsts.

Said forces of darkness, the legend goes, are well aware of this. On Walpurgisnacht, then, they steal from their homes and the shelter of the woods, escaping the light of the pious pyres, and hold a celebration of their own. And where better to congregate than the ancient site of pagan worship atop the tallest mountain in the Harz.

Strictly speaking, the festival on the Brocken is an anti-Walpurgisnacht, a celebration of witchcraft and, by popular conflation, the forces of Hell. This does not, however, mean Hell sanctions it. When Heinrich Faust expressed his interest in meeting others of Mephistopheles's kind on the Brocken, the devil laughed.

"I imagine they wouldn't want to infringe upon your domain," the doctor guessed.

"Let me tell you a secret, Faust, none of my compatriots would be caught dead at a shindig like this. They're far too principled."

"Really? What makes you different?"

"I'm special, Faust. I have no principles at all."

Devils, by and large, do not come to Walpurgisnacht. No miscellaneous spirits come, either, because - as Faust was dismayed to learn - miscellaneous spirits do not exist. ("Vitchen?" asked the doctor, pretending nonchalance. "Is that a skin condition?" asked Mephistopheles.) Angels exist, the doctor was told. But angels do not come to Walpurgisnacht.

To the Brocken on the equinox, then, flock five hundred or so representatives of the species man.* They come for diverse reasons - some, because it is fashionable. From the elite number invited to the first Walpurgisnacht on the Brocken several centuries ago**, a multiplication of plus-ones has naturally ensued. Others come to catch a glimpse of Mephistopheles, the only supernatural being anyone really has any chance of meeting in the physical world, and pay him tribute. In certain circles, he is King of the Brocken - Lord of Dances - Walpurgisnacht's guest of honor.

(*And about ten thousand migrational crows.)

(** Hosted in 1137 by Grand Witch Percy, who wanted a peaceful place to sell her pickled feet.)

Mephistopheles, for his part, comes for the music.

They filed up that night as always to the place where he stood, their cheeks flushed from the trek up the mountain, eyes glimmering with the light of a thousand lanterns, to kiss his hand. His cloak glittered black and blood-red. On his head: a crown of gilded rosebuds and thorns.

Everyone knows God has a plan for the world. A number of people, however, between the Rhine and the Elbe do not, for one reason or another, consider themselves aligned with it. These people may be outcasts. They may be heretics. They may be stark-raving mad, but if they know what goes down at the Brocken on the equinox, they will come.

Warlocks arrive in modest numbers, beating their massive drums, but it is the witches who dominate the Brocken. Heinrich Faust had always thought of witches as gorgeous naked women, the sort sent to tempt St. Anthony while he tended his pigs. He was somewhat relieved to discover that this was not true. If you would like to learn how to spot a witch, mark these qualifications: She is an unmarried woman over child-bearing age. She supports herself through multiple independent endeavors (selling vegetables, making jewelry, practicing medicine, etc) and does not go to church. She may put on masculine airs, sing at inopportune moments, and make off-color jokes. Many witches have been caught and killed through attention to these details.

Witches like to dance, and they are very good at it. The ground, then, between the circle of boulders had been meticulously prepared. Grand Witch Querty had been up there for almost two days, clearing out logs and rocks and trimming branches. Grand Witch Piebald had been there almost as long, stringing lanterns between trees and offering moral support to Grand Witch Querty. And Grand Witch Lisbeth had come up the day before to set up the open bar.

It was at the bar that a group of four students had congregated that night in 1520: Brander, Siebel, Altmayer, and Frosch. No one was sure if they had been invited. In fact, they had, but they were beginning to wish they hadn't, since Heinrich Faust was at that moment regaling them with tales of his adventures.

"As though a fiend of Hell knows what's of worth on this Earth," Faust was boasting, raising his voice to be heard over the clink of glasses and the turns of the fiddle.

"Well, where'd he take you?" asked Brander, not looking enormously interested.

"A bar," Faust scorned.

"No, I'm not taking you to ‘just a bar’," said Mephistopheles, feigning offense, "I'm taking you to my favorite bar."

"Ah yes, the eighth wonder of the world, your favorite bar."

"Don't be rude, doctor. I just bought your soul for unspecified personal services -"

"I specified -"

"- I figure I might as well get to know you."

"Anywhere else? Just a bar?"

"Then Hell. Well, the edges of it. The borderlands." Faust laughed disdainfully. "As if to show me my own grave."

The craggy orange rocks stretching into the mist of non-being. The great bottomless canyon between sleep and death. The low-hanging sky falling into nothingness at the end of consciousness, the end of time, the end of the world.

"I suppose," said Faust reluctantly, holding his dreaming mind there by sheer force of will, "there is a beauty in it."

"It's not much," said Mephistopheles, gazing blankly across the canyon. "But it's home."

"The fireworks in Beijing. A shocking display of wealth and glamor. The very key to a happy life, I'm sure."

"Naturally," said Frosch.

"The summit of the tallest mountain in the world."

"Oh yeah, that's real hellish temptation there."

"I wouldn't expect you to understand," said Faust primly. "But you see, its brilliance is in its subtlety." Slipping his hand into his long, fine coat, he ran his hand nervously across the pistol in his waistband. "Not that you'll need it," Mephistopheles had said, handing it to him about an hour before, "but this place can get a bit rowdy and I have some other duties to perform. Best to be prepared."

"Do you want a drink?" said Altmayer, refilling his own. "Or are you, you know, too pure and lofty?"

"Oh no, I have nothing against this," said Faust, gesturing at the festivities. "I gladly throw myself into the basest iniquities."

"Great," said Brander, with a sideways look. "Good for you."

"You might, in fact, say that I am not afraid to get down with the best of them. But I know," Faust continued proudly, "that there is no true satisfaction in it. No fulfillment."

"My God, how old are you?" said Frosch.

"It's not that deep, man," Altmayer said.

"Maybe it's difficult for you to understand," muttered Faust, and excused himself.

Instinctively looking around for his guide, Faust spotted him across the meadow, receiving homage from a group of witches. With his crown of roses he looked like an elven king. Strange, thought Faust, very strange that evil spirits were said to be ugly things. The horned red devil of legend seemed suddenly unlikely. Beauty was surely more suited to sow temptations in the hearts of men.

Turning away decisively, with an air as though he definitely belonged there and was enjoying himself, he decided step to the edge of the meadow and observe the proceedings.
"I beg your pardon," said a female voice behind and below him. Faust turned and found he was standing on a candle-lit quilt upon which several masked figures were picnicking.

"I apologize," said Faust.

"I should think so," said the voice from behind an owl mask. Disconcerted under the force of their stares, Faust strode into the trees as though that was where he had been going all along.

When the sound of the fiddle had almost faded behind him, the doctor found himself on a small outcrop looking down over the mountain. The night was overcast, but lights moved and disappeared in the trees below him. Bits of song, haunting strains, caught in the wind which suddenly swept the mountainside and cast an old chill into the doctor's bones. That was when it happened.

With the chill and the shrouded moon arose suddenly from the depths of his mind an old Christmastime memory - snatches of nutmeg, the dark stone arch of a church door in snow. The song came again, stronger, like a hymn, and Faust almost fell to his knees from the force of the image - a whole world, distant and unbelievably dear, lost forever if not for that scrap of song on that wind under that haunted sky.

There is more than this.

The yearning was as objectless as it was unbelievably acute.

Remember, said his own voice out of the memory, remember and never forget, there are many more worlds in this life than what you see.

The wind froze a tear off his burning, youthful cheek as, for the first time in years, he pressed unlined hands together in solemn prayer.

"What are you doing out here, then?"

"I was -" Faust lowered his arms and stole a glance at the spirit of Hell now leaning, unkinglike, against a tree. "I was admiring the view."

Mephistopheles looked hard down the mountainside, genuinely curious, trying to see the appeal. "Nice trees," he tried.

Faust turned his back, embarrassed and disgusted.

"Are you not enjoying yourself? I thought you'd love this, honestly."

"It's a triumph of debauchery. You should be proud."

"Do you want to leave? Because we can leave."

"Don't insult me, devil. I'm quite fine. I was actually just having a very enlightening conversation with some fellows from Leipzig -"

"Oh, you weren't! Oh, Faust, no wonder you're out here!" The devil seized his elbow and pulled him back towards the meadow. "You're much too good for those idiots, doctor, come on, let me introduce you to some folks."

The festivities, as illuminated by Mephistopheles, took on a different cast.

"That's Franscesco Melzi," said the devil, voice lowered. "He was the student of a great painter in Florence. A real nice guy."

Face etched in worry, the young man was going from guest to guest, seeming to ask the same question.

"What's wrong with him?"

"He's looking for his teacher. But he won't find him. He kicked the bucket last year." Mephistopheles scratched his ear, dog-like. "Massive loss. They say he died in King Francis's arms."

A man in clerical robes was pointed out next, sitting on a log at the edge of the woods with his head in his hands. "That fellow there - Faust, did you know the earth moves round the sun?"

Faust looked up sharply. "Is that so."

"Yeah, that guy - he's been coming here ever since the church kicked him out for proving it."

Staring, Faust wondered, "Why would they do such a thing?"

"Some people need astrological proof that humanity is the center of God's attention," said Mephistopheles, with barely a trace of irony. He pointed again. "And him there, that's the frogman."

"The frogman? What's his peculiarity?"

"I dunno, guess he has a frog. Oh, this is neat, Faustus, come look at this."

"What did you call me?" said Faust, but he followed, interested.*

(*Did you know that the official language of Hell is Latin? It's true.)

A small, oddly misshapen man bowed to them, glittering. After a moment Faust realized this was because he was covered from head to toe in clocks of diverse sizes. "Would your lordship be interested?" He reached to his ear and disconnected a silver pocket watch. "The finest quality."

Mephistopheles allowed the merchant to place the watch in his hand. Its delicate hands were crafted with incredible precision to look like two little silver fish. "The price?"

"No charge for you, my lord." The clockman had a vaguely Spanish accent. He looked about forty. He turned and smiled at Faust. "And for your handsome friend? Perhaps," he said - Faust could see every lantern reflected in his dark eyes - "you would be interested in a personal time-keeping device?" Slowly he put his hand to his own wrist, where several clocks were bound, and slipped off a slender golden watch.

"No," said Faust.

"Are you quite sure?" With a light, quick motion, the clockman slid the watch over Faust's own hand. "See? It was made for you."

"Why would I want," said Faust haltingly, staring at his hand, "a clock on my wrist?"

"Why, don't you know?" The doctor looked up to find the clockman's eyes looking directly into his. "Time can simply - slip away."

"We're already slaves to the time." Faust handed the clock back. "No need to count the seconds. Thank you, merchant, you're dismissed."

"My god, you're a prude," said Mephistopheles, after they had moved away.

"I don't know what you mean," said Faust, turning red.

"We've got to get you out of Germany."

"Right, I hear they do things differently in Greece," the doctor muttered.

"Not Greece," said Mephistopheles, very decisively.

Faust was surprised at his tone. "What - you don't like Greece?"

Staring in the general direction of the bar, the devil said, "I've got a weird thing with Greece."

"Really? Why?"

"It's -" Mephistopheles was quiet for a moment. "Huh."

"What?"

"Okay, you'll like this, doctor. See that woman at the bar?"

Faust saw a man in a dress with shoulder-length hair. "There's no way that's a woman," he said.

"You're right." Mephistopheles arrowed blank black eyes at her. "She's an angel."

Startled at the change of subject, Faust looked between the devil and the chinny blonde. "I didn't know your kind had those sorts of sentiments," he said. "But I suppose I shouldn't have assumed."

"What? No. That is a literal angel, Faust. Hark the herald, and all that."

The angel stared them down.

"What do we do?" whispered Faust, awed.

"We could go talk to her," said Mephistopheles.

"What is he doing here?"

"Why don't you ask her?"

"Okay," said Faust, stood up, and walked over under stringed lanterns and between drunken couples to one of God's own messengers. "Pardon me," he said, stiffly, "but do I have the honor of addressing an angel of the Lord?"

"Sorry," said the angel, embarrassed. And blushing, it got up very quickly and left the bar.

Astounded, Faust stared after it. "Excuse me," he asked the man on the next stool, "did you exchange words at all with the fellow sitting here?"

The man, an older gentleman with a long beard and an unfortunate nose, turned his words over with some confusion and finally said, "You can't mean the angel?"

"I - yes, the angel. How did you know?"

"I have seen eleven angels in my time," said the man. He followed Faust's gaze and added, swirling his mug (it appeared to be tea), "I wouldn't recommend you go after it. Angels are best left alone."

Faust mulled this new information over. "I suppose angels have a history of appearing to your race."

"Am I so easily marked?" said the man with a sad smile.

"Anyone can see you are a Jew," said Faust, a bit brusquely.

"That's remarkable, since I am a Muslim," said the man, returning to his tea.

Faust walked back over to Mephistopheles looking ruffled.

"Well?"

"I thought this was a pagan festival," said Faust.

The devil raised an eyebrow. "It's not really a religion thing, is it? Sure, this lot likes to throw the name of Hell around, but lots of people have their ideas about Hell."

"False ideas," said Faust. "I expected Christians, if anything, not Jews and Muslims."

"It's all kind of the same thing, isn't it?" said Mephistopheles, picking something out of his teeth. "What did the angel say?"

"The same -" The doctor whirled to face him. "You can't be serious."

"I mean yeah, you've made them different, but beliefs-wise it's like - basically the same thing."

Faust opened his mouth to retort, then suddenly got very still. Without saying a word he pulled the devil to one side. He looked carefully around to make sure no one was listening, then in a very low voice he said, "Is Christianity the true religion?"

Mephistopheles looked at him, expressionless. "You mean whatever you lot are doing over in Westfalen?"

"Don't twist my words, devil, I mean Christianity."

"You give a hundred men a book," said the devil, "you end up with a hundred different books."

"Is Christ the Son of God?" demanded Faust.

Only a German, thought Mephistopheles, could sell his soul to Hell and still care about theological intricacies. The devil held a fifteen-hundred-year-old memory in his mind for a second, looked appraisingly at the doctor, and decided to be honest. “You know, Faust, I don’t know. I've been around in Heaven and haven't caught wind of him, our Father Almighty certainly doesn’t mention him, but - who knows. A lot of stuff’s above my pay grade.” Noticing Faust's consternation, he offered consolingly, “I liked him.”

“You - the Christ? You knew him?”

“He was - an interesting guy, Faust. I have my opinions, but I'll keep them to myself.”

"You very well will not," said Faust.

"Yes, actually, I think I will."

"Of course," said the doctor, putting on wariness like a coat, "you would say such a thing. You're a spirit of Hell. You wish to sow doubt in the minds of the faithful -"

Mephistopheles tried and failed to be offended. "I've got no problem with religious people."

"You expect me to believe that? You, a devil?"

"Sure." Mephistopheles sniffed and scrunched his face idly. “Humanity's got it pretty good. You want to praise the Lord about it, go right on ahead. Better than being an ungrateful prick,” he said pleasantly, looking directly at Faust, “who thinks the world’s not good enough for him.”

"I think nothing of the sort," said Faust.

The devil shrugged. "I've got my own issues with God. But that's my problem."

Faust was still processing this information when the horn sounded, signalling the beginning of the dances. His expression was inward as the guests gathered in a rough circle, marking the circumference of the meadow; he was lost in his thoughts as Grand Witch Querty proceeded into the center, carrying a wooden goblet. But he looked up with sharp interest as the witch concluded her Latin incantation and tipped the goblet to expel a gush of dark brown blood.

“Every year they ask me to do it,” muttered Mephistopheles in the doctor's ear. “Desacrilize the ground. But I don’t know, Faust, it's just not really my thing.”

Faust watched the blood soak the ground with an avidity that suggested the ritual was, on the contrary, precisely his thing.

The drummers began first, pounding out a rhythm that Faust felt in his ribcage. The great timpani of the warlocks dropped notes so deep and round into the air, it was as though the meadow was plunged into water again and again. The fiddle came next, striking up a frantic jig. All around the circle, the guests twitched their feet and knees as the melody snuck up into their bones. Faust felt it, tugging on his muscles, begging him to move, but he did not dance until the bagpiper made his joyous entry and exploded in the doctor's chest like a star.

"I don't know the dance," he said, panicked.

"What?"

"I don't know the dance!" Faust yelled over the timpani.

"Who cares?" Mephistopheles yelled back.

It was like the turn of the universe around the earth.

For a moment, half an hour in - or was it an hour? - or was it five minutes? - it seemed to Faust that he was back in Heidelberg, that he was twenty years old, that it was the first day of May in the bright town square, that his old friend Richard Leder was on his right and on his left was Margarete Schilder, twining spring ribbons into his hair.

Then the scene shifted and it was Hell that he danced in, the orange rocks stretching into emptiness, the skyless, starless wasteland.

A nondenominational Hell, amoral, as unknown to his native Christianity as it was to the Roman pagans of antiquity. He felt himself suspended over a vast nothingness. His stomach turned, his throat closed up, and staggering, bent over, he pulled himself out of the circle. On his way to the edge of the meadow, he managed to relieve no less than four guests of their drinks and at least one merchant of a line of miscellaneous powder.

He must have been sitting down - on a log, maybe, or a plank the witches had set up as a bench - because after about ten minutes, someone sat next to him.

"Do pardon me, sir - may I inquire after your name?"

"Dr. Heinrich Faust," said Faust queasily to his knees.

"Were you by chance a professor at Heidelberg?"

"Yes," said Faust, looking up.

The inquirer proved to be a broad-shouldered, athletic man of about forty, with wavy dark hair and clever eyes. "I thought I recognized you. I heard you lecture many years ago. I'm at Wittenburg, myself."

"You teach?"

"Theology."

The word hit Faust like an electric shock. He may even have visibly flinched.

"You must be much older than you look," said the professor thoughtfully, "but then you came with him, didn't you?" He nodded his head towards the guest of honor, who seemed to be getting the fiddler to teach him to play the violin.

"I do not wish to speak of this," said Faust, a bit indistinctly, feeling like he might vomit. "You may leave now."

The professor of theology didn't budge. "It's not too late," he said, softly.

"Yes," said Faust, "it is."

"Dr. Faust, look at me. It's not too late."

Faust looked him straight in the eye, unfazed. "I signed a contract," he said coldly. "I am not one to go back on my word."

"Of course not," said the professor. "But - if I may be so bold as to put it crudely - you're not dead yet, Dr. Faust."

Having put a good hour of dancing in, Mephistopheles retired to the bar to catch up with an old friend.

"He's playing you," the friend was saying, hailing a fellow witch for a drink.

"You have no idea," said the devil. "The mind games this guy thinks he's winning, Margo."

"He's cute though," said Margo.

"Oh my god he's gorgeous."

The witch struck a match against her shoe and offered the devil a light.

"When I showed up," said Mephistopheles, "he was living in his office. No sunlight, books stacked to the ceiling, the place was a pit, and there he is, sitting in years of his own dust, crying about how he's going to kill himself."

"As my mother always told me. Life ain't nothing but a row o' pits."

"Your mother didn't know jack squat," said the devil. He took a long pull from Margo's pipe. "Happiness is easy. It will fall into his hands. He just has to open them."*

(*It is interesting to note that 'Faust', in German, means 'fist.')

"And if you're wrong?"

"I'm not wrong. He's already having a great time, I mean, just look at him -"

Dr. Heinrich Faust had acquired a small crowd and was lecturing at them from the edge of the meadow.

"From youth I had a suspicion that the true nature of the world was misjudged by the vast majority of humanity," Faust was saying. "That, living in a world of their own making, common man was happily blind to a higher reality. Dissatisfied with this complacency with illusions, I set out to uncover that higher reality, pursuing it down every alley of human inquiry."

"Perceptive, him," said Margo.

"Yeah, you say that now," said Mephistopheles.

"It was only with the best decades of my life sacrificed on the altar of knowledge that I arrived at the inevitable conclusion: The higher reality is hidden from us. It cannot and can never be known by human minds. Feeling my life's work wasted, facing nothing before me but old age and death, I succumbed to despair."

"How old is he?" Margo asked.

"Sixty… four?"

"He looks good."

"Thanks."

"In desperation I turned to magic, calling upon the spirits. None would answer me. At last I turned to face the most forbidden realm of knowledge, and in defiance of the most holy prohibitions, I called upon Hell."

"He did not," Mephistopheles protested to Margo.

"And it was Hell, at last, that answered me. A spirit of the infernal realm stood before me and, for the greatest of all prices, offered me in his palm the key to that knowledge hidden from man, that higher reality no mortal ought to know. Having nothing further to lose but my soul, I gave even that up as a sacrifice so that mankind might know the truth of the world."

"Bullshit," said Margo.

"No," said Mephistopheles, "I don't think it is."

"No one really believes that about himself."

"Faustus does."

The doctor cast a haughty gaze over his crowd. "Would you like to know the truth, then?"

The twenty-some witches and ne'er-do-wells did not exactly give him the rousing response he was looking for. Faust pressed on anyway. "He showed me angels, mortals, and devils. He showed me the vast reaches of the heavens and the fearsome bowels of the earth. He showed me the highest and the lowest men, their dreams and fears, their small lives and their vast hopes."

Margo elbowed the devil with a smirk. "I didn't think he liked it," said Mephistopheles, almost moved.

"And this is the truth he offered me. There is no higher reality. There is no hidden truth. There is no purpose in life, no meaning in anything. Nothing is significant and all will pass away. That is the truth he gave me!"

"You didn't," reproached Margo.

"He asked me what the meaning of life was! You don't ask someone that! There is no 'meaning of life', it's a stupid question!"

"Do you accept this, gentlemen? Ladies? Is this acceptable to you?"

"No!" said a young witch in the back, and then doubled over, hiding laughter. Faust pretended not to see.

"Raise your hand and tell me," said the doctor, "something of meaning in this world."

"Soup," said an ancient witch. There was a wide murmur of agreement.

"You hedonists," said Faust, "you're as bad as him. What else?"

"The people you love," said an old witch at the side, staring very deeply at him with oddly uncanny blue eyes.

"A hearth and home," added a warlock.

"Hearth and home," repeated Faust slowly. "Yes, indeed." And he made very deliberate eye contact across the meadow with Mephistopheles.

Playing the heckler, the devil called out, "You won't last five minutes!"

"I'm going to marry her," said Faust, and his low voice carried across the meadow like a scream.

Craning to look, the crowd tittered. "He cannot marry her," said Mephistopheles to Margo.

"Who's the girl?" said the witch indifferently.

"Her name's… Gretchen, I think. He's been courting her for like two weeks."

"So what?"

"So he doesn't even like her. He's just marrying because he thinks he should be married."

Margo shrugged. "Sounds good enough to me."

"Good enough? They'll both be miserable."

"Back in my day," said Margo, "that's what made it a marriage."

Mephistopheles suddenly realized Faust had crossed the meadow and was addressing him. At this distance, the devil could see the flush in his youthful cheeks and the drunken abstraction in his steel grey eyes. "I could spend a thousand years proving you know nothing before you manage to fulfill your side of the deal," said Faust, "or I could use the brief time I have left to me to find true happiness on this earth."

"The thing is," Mephistopheles said thoughtfully to Margo, "I think he'd be happier proving I'm wrong for a thousand years."

"Don't you dare mock me, demon."

Mephistopheles watched him passively. "You've had too much to drink, Faust."

"You've given me nothing. The best you have is worthless."

The devil did not answer.

The entire meadow had fallen silent and all heads were turned towards the guest of honor and his prideful plus-one. "Here we part ways," said Faust. "I will not waste the best years of my life on the likes of you."

Mephistopheles looked at him blankly.

"You know nothing of humanity," said Faust triumphantly, "you know nothing of our search for meaning, and I will die happy knowing I've beaten you at your own game."

"Every day," said Mephistopheles, quiet enough that only Faust could hear, "I scrape my shattered mind out of the sawmill of eternity."

"Enjoy your Walpurgisnacht," said Faust, pupils dilated. "Fucking awful party. "

And he walked away.

"Ah, tough luck," said Margo.

"It is what it is," said the ten-thousand-year-old Lord of Hell, distractedly.

The meadow slowly broke its silence as the guests lost interest and turned back to their own affairs. The fiddler struck up the music again. One of the Grand Witches decided it was a good time to light the bonfire. Mephistopheles strolled through the crowd. Humanity, pathetic? he said to his father in the dance of photons over the fire. I can't imagine where I got the idea.

Putting his hands in his pockets to watch the answerless flames, his fingers touched something cold. With mild surprise, he drew out the small silver clock. He contemplated it blankly for a minute, delicate and beautiful with its little engraven fish. Then he let it slip indifferently from his fingers to the dusty floor, where it was crushed under a hundred dancing heels.

Chapter Text

Faust had once asked Mephistopheles about his fall from Heaven. "It wasn't exactly a fall," the devil had said. "We just left, Faust."

"You left Heaven? Why?"

"We just didn't like it there very much. Nothing wrong with Heaven." He picked absently at a spot on his chin. "It's nice enough. Very - collective."

"You prefer Hell to Heaven?"

"We needed our own space." Mephistopheles lay back on the grass and put his hands behind his head. "So we settled down in any part of the spiritual realm that wasn't already - the divine. I mean, there's not much that's left, Faust, it's just around the edges, mostly, scraps of blank canvas. We're not super creative, not like you, we don't have the same capacity for it, but we do have our own talents and we did our best with the place. Your kind and mine aren't all that different. If God hadn't made the universe for you, you probably would have done the same."

"Not all of you left," said Faust, missing the whole point, the injustice, the bitterness.

"You mean angels?" Mephistopheles scoffed. "Angels weren't about to leave. Fucking hive mind."

"You were an angel."

Mephistopheles looked at him, assessing the depth of his ignorance and associated prejudice. "We're our own species, Faust," he said.

"Everyone knows devils are fallen angels."

"Oh, sorry, didn't realize you were the expert," said Mephistopheles.

"Why would God create a species like you?"

"God," said Mephistopheles, with more terrible honesty than the doctor knew, "has a twisted sense of humor."

Euphoric, Faust pushed through the throng of people at the bar. They fell silent and parted to let him pass, their stares like the spears of a gauntlet. An old hag caught his wrist with clammy yellow fingers. Faust tried to pull away and recognized the blue-eyed witch.

"What?" he said. "What do you want?"

"It's funny," said the witch.

"What's funny?"

"I mean it's really uncanny." Her eyes bored into his. "You look exactly like this guy I used to know."

Disturbed, disgusted by her touch, he freed himself and ploughed on.

Down the mountain he strode, his head buzzing, every step perfectly sure. He walked through seances of masked women holding fire in their bare hands. He walked through forest as thickly dark as the catacombs of France - he knew, for he'd seen them recently - and skirted granite cliffs as sheer as the canyons of the Himalayas.

He realized at some point that he was no longer alone. Other forms moved in the dark; voices and cries seared through the trees behind and beside him. He chanced a look back and saw the forest suddenly thrashing with life. He was part of a mass exodus.
A warlock ran by. "Get out of here! Go, go, go!"

"What is it?" Faust yelled after him.

"The fucking Protestants!"

Caught in a dark stream of frantic motion, Faust tried in vain to stop one of the fleeing guests. "What's going on up there?"

"They came for the hellspawn," a witch told him, passing.

"What do you mean?" said Faust, but she was already gone.

Scanning the stampede, he spotted the witch who had been talking with Mephistopheles and cut her off. "Where is he?"

"Who?"

"Your friend! Your guest of honor! Where is he?"

"His goose is cooked," yelled Margo. "We're getting out of here."

"You can't be serious!"

"Hey, I only got one life. He's immortal. Come on, hit the dirt, Faust, you don't want to be around for this."

Faust hesitated for two seconds. Then he turned on his heels and marched back up the mountain.

Professor Martin Luther - broad-shouldered and athletic, wavy-haired and clever-eyed, commander of a small legion of undercover Protestants - had driven out the revelers, skillfully incapacitated the devil with a few well-chosen Latin phrases, and was in the process of an intercism when Heinrich Faust stormed into the meadow.

"It's the anti-monk!" Mephistopheles had exclaimed, apparently amused, upon Luther's entrance. "Long time no see! How're the kids?"

"Fine," said Luther amiably, "and yourself?"

"Pretty pissed. Luther, how come you're crashing my party? I had a special guest tonight."

"I told you not to come within a hundred miles of Wittenberg, Mephisto," said Luther, matter-of-fact.

"The man of faith can move mountains," Mephistopheles had said, smiling, eyes like black holes. "Too bad I'm not a man."

Four Protestants got their hands on Faust and tried to hold him back. With surprising strength, the doctor twisted out of their grasp, reached into his waistband, and trained his pistol on Martin Luther's heart.

"Dr. Faust," said Luther. "Glad to see you again. I'm sorry it's under such circumstances."

Mephistopheles was suspended in the air like an animal strung up for slaughter. He seemed unconscious. His black hair hung limply down like a closed curtain.

"What did you do to him?" asked Faust, his voice very low.

"This isn't your fight, doctor."

"Where did they go?" yelled Faust, his hand shaking as he pointed the gun at Luther. "They were bowing to him ten minutes ago. Where did they all go?"

"One stands with God," said Luther, "or one stands alone."

"Not anymore!" yelled Faust.

"You weren't supposed to be here," said Luther calmingly. "Lower your weapon. No one needs to get hurt."

Calmed, Faust took a deep breath and said, "Get your filthy hands off what doesn't belong to you."

"Mephisto doesn't belong to anyone," said Luther, eyebrows raised, "he's a lord of Hell."

"Wrong. He belongs to me." Faust's grey eyes blazed. "He's mine until he fulfills the terms of the deal."

"Which are?"

"One good moment."

"He hasn't been able to give you one good moment?" said Luther thoughtfully.

"No," said Faust, "he's given me crap."

"That's surprising," said Luther.

"Why?" said Faust, suspicious.

"Look behind you and you'll see," said Luther, very seriously.

Faust, idiot that he was, looked behind him. Luther whipped out his own pistol and aimed it at Faust.

"You bastard," said Faust.

"Sorry," said Luther.

"I'm going to count to three," said Faust, "and then I am going to shoot you."

"Well, I can't finish this incantation in three seconds," said Luther, "so I'm afraid you'll have to shoot me."

"Three. Two. One," said Faust.

He fired. So did Luther.

Nothing happened, because they were both terrible shots.

Eight days later, Heinrich Faust stood at the altar.

He had asked for her hand in her father's candle-lit living room. He had waited in his best clothes, no longer nervous, outside the dark stone arch of the lakeside church door. He had taken her hands and told her, "I just wanted something good" - as if that could explain everything.

"If anyone has any reason why the marriage of Heinrich Faust and Margarete van Trocklenburg should not occur," said the priest, "speak now, or forever hold your peace."

There was a mighty bang and the heavy church door creaked open.

The entire population of Trocklenburg turned in their pews to stare at the vision silhouetted in the blinding noon-day light: an old hag astride a donkey - a witch in dirty gardening pants whose piercing blue stare pinned Faust against the altar.

"Yes," said the witch in a friendly, thoughtful voice, "I have a problem." The donkey nickered softly. "I've got several problems, actually."

"It cannot be," said Heinrich Faust, his stomach turning.

"Oh it be," said Margarete Schilder.

Two clergymen tried to encourage her to take the animal outside. The witch ignored them. "Hey, Margarete," she addressed the bride. "You look nice."

"You can't be here," said Faust, shell-shocked.

"Shut up, I'm not talking to you." Margarete turned to the bride, slid off the donkey, and led it by the reins. "Walk with me, hon."

The two women withdrew amid the crowd's confused chatter to the edge of the church. "Do you want to marry this guy?" Margarete asked.

"Yep," said Other Gretchen.

"Why."

"He says he's rich," said Other Gretchen. "Also, he's really hot."

"He doesn't like you."

"Sure he does."

"He's bad in bed." ("I am not," yelled Faust.)

"How do you know?"

"Just a hunch."

"Hm."

"Gretchen, you are a pawn in this fucking power game he thinks he's playing."

"That's a great way of putting it, actually. He's a pawn in my power game."

"He's sixty four."

"No way."

"Yes way. He sold his soul to Hell," said Margarete.

"Really? Good on him."

"You don't care?" Margarete almost yelled.

Other Gretchen shrugged. "Have you seen the guys in my town?"

"He'll ignore you," said Margarete, running out of ideas.

"Good," said Other Gretchen. "I don't like him anyway."

The witch was rather exasperated that she'd misjudged the thing so catastrophically. Not one to give up easily, however, she turned next to the groom. "You can't marry her, Heinrich."

"Why, because I'm too old?" Faust was having trouble looking at her and her wrinkled face. "Because I made a pact with a devil?"

"No," said Margarete, "because you're not into women."

"I am very much into women," said Faust, turning beet red. "I love women."

"Do you mean to imply, witch," said the priest, "that this man is a homosexual?"

"No she does not," said Faust emphatically. Margarete and the donkey made doubtful expressions behind his back.

"Because if that is the case," said the priest, "I'm afraid I can't allow this marriage to continue."

"He's not," said Other Gretchen quickly, "it's not, he's definitely not."

"Shut up, Other Gretchen," said Margarete, "you're dodging a bullet."

"What the fuck are you doing here, Gretchen?" said Faust despairingly. "What is this? And what are you - you're a witch! I thought you married Richard Thuringen!"

"Richard Thuringen was a fucking idiot," said Margarete.

"So what, you left him?"

"I told you," said Margarete. "I wanted to build a hut."

The priest declared the marriage impossible, despite the protests of the bride and her father. When Margarete van Trocklenburg went to pull her should-be husband aside, promising that his needs would be taken care of one way or the other, she found he had disappeared, along with the witch whose interventions would be spoken of in Trocklenburg for years to come.

"Did you say goodbye to her?" asked Margarete Schilder as they rode over the hills, she on her donkey, he on a handsome black stallion.

Faust did not answer.

"You're glad I did it," realized Margarete, astutely.

"How can I be glad?" declared Faust with high drama, the wind streaming the mane of his steed. "I can never be happy on this earth."

"Yeah you can," said Margarete.

"You sound just like him," said Faust, "coming at me to corrupt me with his - pretty little temptations -"

"Right," said the witch, pretending to untangle Sir Roger's mane so he couldn't see her smiling.

"You wouldn't know. You've never been plagued by forces of evil."

"That's true, I haven't," said Margarete. But she had followed him back to the meadow on the Brocken and had seen the way he'd looked once Luther had left - the intimacy with which he'd pulled the devil from his unholy suspension and laid him down gently on the moss.

Mephistopheles, who indeed had been stricken quite unconscious as a result of Luther's incantation, had been rather nonplussed to find himself in the bed of an inn with the covers pulled neatly over him.

He'd tried to cast his spirit out over the room, the most natural form of sensation for him, and met a wall running approximately the length of his own skin. Yep, he thought matter-of-factly, he got me. He'd been exorcised by Luther three times before and intercised twice. The man knew what he was doing.

He was wearing a shirt and long johns. His rose-themed Walpurgis get-up was folded neatly over a chair in the corner of the room. Switching over into manual gear (and ignoring the accompanying shiver of claustrophobia), he piloted himself out of the bed and navigated downstairs in the long johns, only stumbling once or twice. He was feeling oddly refreshed. Sleep was an elaborate ritual for someone like him and, as such, often quite difficult to arrange.

The boy sweeping the bar told him he'd been brought in by a handsome stranger on a black stallion who'd paid in gold. Inquiring after today's date, the devil discovered it was only the day after Walpurgisnacht. Luther, it would seem, had gone easy on him. The intercism was already on its way to wearing off.

Mephistopheles passed the boy a coin and learned the stranger had sat up all night in a chair by the bed with a gun across his lap. The boy had seen him there through the window as he'd tied up the black horse. By the morning, he had gone. He left the boy the pistol, a hefty tip, and instructions to refuse service to Protestants.

Mephistopheles had to admit he felt nothing but respect - the respect of someone who has, indeed, been beaten fairly at his own game.

Stepping out of eyesight, the devil went to rearrange the atoms of his long johns into something more suitable and hit the invisible wall again, so he went upstairs to grab his cloak instead.

Where had the stranger gone off to? The boy didn't know, but Mephistopheles guessed he would find him on the road to Trocklenburg.

He had, really, two options. Option one: wait a few days for Luther's intercism to wear off and then slip through realms to Trocklenburg - nice and easy. Option two: buy a horse. Well, there was always option three: cut his losses, go back home to the sixth, and wait for the old man to die.

He bought the horse. He made good time and only a week later, he was getting dirty looks en masse from the population of Trocklenburg. Where had the groom of Greek inclinations run off to? No one cared. But Margarete Schilder pulled him aside and told him he'd gone back to Heidelberg.

So here he was now, back at the stuffy old university, loitering like a ne'er-do-well in the hall. It had gotten colder these last months. The smell of the stone had grown biting, almost putrid.

Faustus's name was still on the door, but a smaller sign had been hung underneath it: Johann Wagner, Professor of Medicine. Mephistopheles knocked. "Come in," said Faustus.

The room - apart from having received a good dusting - was completely unchanged, like it had been kept as a shrine to the missing professor, now standing at the window, his back to the door. "Hi, Mephisto," the doctor said.

"Don't cheat me syllables," said Mephisto.

"Luther did," said the doctor without turning around.

The devil stepped into the room and closed the door. "Luther and I go way back," he said, taking a seat in the armchair.

"He tried to exorcise you."

"He successfully intercised me, actually."

"What's -" the difference, Faust started to ask, and then forced himself to stop.

"But it could have been a lot worse. I have a feeling I owe you my thanks, Faust."

The doctor shook his head. "No. You don't owe me anything."

"Owe you a moment, at least."

Faust didn't immediately respond. He watched the sun go down over Heidelberg. His heart was singing Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

The devil stood beside him and followed his gaze.

"I wish I knew why this is worth living for," said Faust. "But it is, isn't it?"

Mephistopheles looked at the tear tracks down his cheek and acquainted himself with the probability that the doctor was about to plead for his soul. "I wouldn't know," he said.

"I find that hard to believe." Faust turned and looked at the devil frankly, his posture oddly stiff and defiant. "You've offered me many things of great beauty."

"Have I?" Mephistopheles did not smile.

"This is bullshit," said Faust suddenly. He pressed his hand into a fist to stop its trembling. "I don't know any better than you what's of worth in this world. I've been happy. The terms are met."

Mephistopheles opened his mouth as though to protest and then closed it again, thoughtfully.

"If not for you I might be dead. I'd certainly be miserable. These months have been worth their price."

The devil moved his gaze very slowly to fix on Faust's eyes. Their proud fierceness made him think of Dion, that graceful tyrant, whose bed he'd shared in Athens two thousand years ago. Mephistopheles rarely thought of Dion - not because he didn't care or because it hurt, but because he believed it was unhealthy to wear out the memory further. "Now that's bullshit," he said.

"Like I said. Life's all that matters. And besides, I don't think I'd do very well in Heaven," he said. With evident difficulty, he smiled. "Fucking hive mind."

The devil contemplated this development in silence.

"So you can take me. I won't waste your time any longer." Dr. Heinrich Faust set his shoulders, braced every muscle in his body, and waited for Mephistopheles to shrug and say, Okay, your loss. Hold still.

Mephisto looked vaguely into the middle distance and said, "Have you ever been to America?"

Chapter Text

It was the last day of the month, which meant it was cafe day.

They had started off in Vienna for coffee. Now they were in Paris for croissants and a light breakfast, and they were heading to Rome next for some lunch and a bit of wine.

"I can tell Romantics made this quiche," said Mephistopheles. "It tastes like the fucking twelfth century."

Faust arranged his face into an expression of long-sufferance and sighed, "Don't talk nonsense."

"Excuse me," asked the server, refilling their water jug, "are you Heinrich Waldteufel, the singer?"

"As a matter of fact," said Faust, in strongly accented French, "I am."

"May I have your autograph?"

Hiding his pleasure, Faust agreed curtly and took her pen. In the previous decade, he had made a name for himself performing Schubert's lieder. He had, in fact, been developing his naturally strong tenor for some time, taking lessons under a variety of vocalists, with the ultimate goal of getting cast as himself in Gounod's opera.

Nothing about this plan required a pseudonym. As Mephisto had pointed out many times, it was easy to simply laugh and say, 'Oh yes, just like Doctor Faustus, I get that all the time.' The problem was, that answer required a speck of modesty, which Doctor Faustus did not have. Mephisto was beginning to regret ever cornering old Johann Goethe in the pub bathroom in Weimar.

"There is absolutely no reason," said Mephistopheles, putting the quiche to one side, "for you to sound like you're straight out of the Schwarzwald in literally every language."

"There is every reason," said Faust, carefully quartering his croissant with a knife and fork.

Mephisto reached into the croissant basket and was disappointed to find it empty. "You're not the only national treasure at this table, and you don't see me putting on accents, do you?"

"Would you like another basket?" asked Faust, vaguely mocking.

"Yeah, why not?"

"Okay," said Dr. Heinrich Faust, "I'll go get one."

But he didn't just say it. He leaned over the table, making fierce eye contact, and smouldered at Mephisto from a distance of about two inches before breathing the last words into his ear, and don't mistake it - there was a cruel twist of satisfaction in his mouth as he pulled away.

There was nothing new in this. Faust had been doing this for three hundred years. He was what Mephistopheles called, despairingly, a fucking tease. And, as Faust was well aware, the effectiveness of his little move had not lessened with the centuries.

The first time he'd done it must have been about a year after that initial visit to America. "And the contract?" Faust had asked, a week into guerilla fighting against the conquistadors (why, the doctor couldn't fathom) on the side of the Aztec empire. "Contract's still in effect," Mephisto had said. "I just wanted to go see America." Then it was Russia he wanted to go see, and then Egypt.

"Enough of this," Faust had declared, as they searched for the ruins of the Library of Alexandria. ('I was sure it was around here somewhere, Faustus, check over that hill.') "You cannot continue to dangle over me the prospect of my own damnation."

"Yes I can," said Mephistopheles, and he was almost convincing enough. Unfortunately, Scribius of the Sixth Circle chose that moment to make a rare appearance. Faust's Latin was good, but the two devils spoke a dialect, rapid and melodious, that probably would not have sounded out of sorts to the ancient Romans. He understood enough to know, however, that Scribius was not pleased, and that he spoke on behalf of the Sixth when he expressed the belief that Mephistopheles was neglecting his hellish duties.

"Yes, yes, fine, go away," said Mephistopheles in German, waving a dismissive hand. "Oh, Faustus, have you met Scribius? Say hi to Faustus, Scribs."

That night, in a buried vault of the destroyed library, surrounded by the priceless treasures of the Hellenes, Mephisto mentioned, nonchalantly, "I've been thinking about Indonesia."

He knew before he said it that the jig was up.

"You want me alive," said Faust.

"Don't get a big head," said Mephisto. "It's not what you think."

"Isn't it?" Faust moved closer until there were inches between them and looked Mephisto up and down, tracing the devil's body with his eyes. Mephisto looked back at him calmly. "Not at all?" Faust whispered, lips almost brushing skin.

If Mephisto had a volume knob attached to all six of his senses, his mild, amused expression betrayed no suggestion that Faust had just reached over and cranked it. Nevertheless, the doctor must have seen something, because he stepped back with a gleam of triumph in his eyes, and from that day on Mephisto knew Faust had his number.

But only once - once, in over three hundred years! - had the doctor allowed him anything more than a smoulder, and then it had been under most dubious circumstances. Having entangled themselves in a pub game in Cornwall, oh, sometime around 1630, in which people did stupid things for money (to the tune of, 'I'll give you five bob if you fill your boot with beer and chug it'), a very astute girl named Cravell, whom Mephisto considered a friend, challenged them, "I'll give you twenty bob if you two make out like dogs in heat."

The two in question withdrew for a private conference. "Let's do it," said Faust casually, before Mephisto had a chance to get a word out. "I'll take the lead."

Somewhat dazed, the devil let Faust lead him to the center of the bar and then stood shell-shocked as his companion of over a hundred years proceeded to kiss him without any preamble. It was a very light, brief event - almost tender, if not for the cruelty with which Faust's stare arrowed knowingly into his eyes.

Mephisto had a complicated relationship with his own humanoid form. It was a frustratingly irrational thing, a bizarre gift from the Almighty that could slide into reality and disappear into nothingness with absolutely no regard for the laws of physics. It functioned, for all extents and purposes, precisely like a human body, but the experience of being a conscious spirit inside it was a bit like climbing into a box too small for you and trying to push yourself around. It would randomly resist his manipulations, even when he needed to heal it, and would let him force it around for months without rest or nourishment before suddenly collapsing and forcing the devil, so to speak, to pull off to the side of the road and look under the hood.

All of which to say: As a being of spirit inhabiting a physical body, his experience of materiality was always mediated. He rarely felt immediate sensations - rather he received them, like information passed down the line in a game of telephone. And still, and still, he was astounded by the coil of tension that exploded in his stomach when Faustus kissed him.

He raised a hand curiously to the doctor's face and attempted to return the kiss - a gesture of sincere affection - but Faust pushed him back.

The small audience in the bar hooted. Faust wasn't done. Trailing fingers possessively down the devil's collarbone - Jesus, who taught him that little move - the doctor found the first button of his shirt and undid it. Wide-eyed, Mephisto gave the crowd a 'very impressed' look and mouthed, He's good!

"What are you thinking about?" asked Faust, staring at him unimpressed from across the cafe table.

"Cheers," said Mephisto, grabbing a croissant.

The year was 1876. It was a new era, and people marvelled at it. Soon we shall make this world into a utopia, cried the masses. And the artists, suffering from at least three diseases each, locked themselves in the basements of increasingly smog-laden metropolises and muttered to themselves, "Never liked utopias anyways."

A lot had been happening recently. It was as though time was moving faster, speeding towards some glorious or dismal goal. The eighteenth century had brought people's eyes down from Heaven and instead had them praying at the altar of human reason, its Trinity inscribed thereupon: the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Since all humanity was equally rational, a great effort was made to discredit the authority of the church, the past, and finally (in a frenzy that ended up a bit of a bloodbath) a number of monarchist governments in order to spread the honor around the common folk instead. Anyone could perfect himself. He just needed science; a touch of art; a dash of philosophy and a bit of help and brotherhood from his fellow man.

'Religion' became a thing and not a life, a subject and not a world, something good Christians could bring out on Sundays and the rest of the week store in the cupboard like a set of nice silver. Such a neat compromise, a thorough lowering of the stakes, had been the only way to stop the Protestants and the Catholics from drowning the entire Earth in their mutual bile. And the vast cosmos became a thing too, something knowable to a human mind.

Then a few people came along and said, How boring. And those people were the Romantics.

The Romantics, who wasted no time laying their claim to the nineteenth century, worshiped the Mysterious. They prayed to the god of Passion. They knew that the human soul, far from being an instrument of reason, was an irrational and unknown thing, prone to senseless joys and impenetrable despairs, and they gloried in it. They brought back the old myths. They resurrected the old gods, searching for their bones in the ruins of castles and the tangled wilderness of the psyche. They liked music that was strange and lonesome and they liked people who were always half on their way to madness.

Mephisto had taken one look at their swooning fancies and the way Faust was swooning along with them and declared himself an Enlightenment man.

In fact, that's exactly what he had told Johann Goethe at the bar in Weimar in 1780: 'They're all twats. I'm an Enlightenment man, myself."

The twats in question were, in addition, all dead. Johann had written a hugely popular novel about ten years before that concluded with the hopelessly lovesick hero standing on the edge of a very beautiful cliff and hurling himself off. The success of this novel correlated with a surprising spike in the number of lovesick people hurling themselves off very beautiful cliffs, and Johann had to have the book republished with an epigraph saying the hero had acted very foolishly, and the whole thing had left him with a poor impression of his admirers.

"Better not to be anything," he'd answered curtly, to which Mephisto had replied that he was probably right, but that it was fun, all the same. "I hear you have a new project," the devil added nonchalantly.

"I might," said the poet, "and then again, I might not." And excusing himself, he got up to use the bathroom.

Mephistopheles knew perfectly well what Johann Goethe's new project was. That's why he was in Weimar. Two hundred years ago, while they were living in England, he and Faust had taken it into their heads to write a comedy about their travels. They had composed it in less than a month at an inn in Liverpool - that is, Faust had composed it and Mephisto had leaned over his shoulder offering helpful suggestions - and they had not cared much about accuracy. In 'The Adventures of Doctor Faustus,' Faust's character was an alchemist who summons demonic powers and 'Mephistophilis' was an ambassador of the great Lord Satan. Their deal was twenty-five years of service, after which 'Faustus' would be dragged down to Hell on the stroke of midnight. Faustus requests to be a spirit like Mephistophilis and has a great deal of fun floating around invisibly and pulling his own limbs off to scare people. And since they'd had some difficulty with the Vatican the previous decade, they even put in a scene where Faustus steals the Pope's meat and boxes him round the ear. In the end they were really very pleased with it, and Faust was on the verge of signing the title page when Mephistopheles stopped him. "We can't put our real names on it, no one will take it seriously."

"Fine, I'll do Waldteufel and De Barathrum."

"No, do Christopher Marlowe." Marlowe was the go-to pseudonym anyone put when they wanted to be anonymous. It was a bit of a joke. So 'The Tragical Historie of Doctor Faustus,' as it was called in the end, was published under Marlowe's name, got a performance within a year, and quickly rose to popularity. Before long it was a staple of the Western canon and 'Doctor Faustus' was a household name across Europe.

Its authors had not actually been counting on this. They didn't mind, so much, entering into legend. That was rather flattering. But they wanted to do it as themselves, not as caricatures. So when the rumor started circulating in the 1770s that famous author and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was going to attempt a new adaptation of the Faustus legend, its two protagonists foresaw an opportunity to set one or two things straight.

Faust: The First Part of the Tragedy was a massive hit. Mephistopheles was very pleased with how the play had turned out. He thought his character came across very well, and he even got to play the zither and sing a few songs in it. He remembered old Goethe fondly, paid him visits until the end of his life, and even now, over forty years after his death, he made a point of visiting the poet's grave every now and then, to pay his respects and to see if he could get recognized by any fans.

They had read it aloud, when it came out - they sat by the fire in their cabin in the Teutoburgs and read each other's parts and Mephisto shook his head in nostalgic amazement at the blood pact scene and repeated, 'Schlag auf Schlag! Schlag auf motherfucking Schlag,' and Faust, as the play carried on, leapt out of his seat more and more frequently to pace around the floor and fume at the poet and threaten to sue him for slander.

But even he couldn't complain as the accolades rolled in, and thirty years later The Second Part of the Tragedy was released, saving him from the clutches of Hell because he had striven all his life with all his soul and deserved Heaven. And Lenau's version came out a couple years later, and Franz Liszt was writing a tone poem and Gounod started working on his opera Faust, and Boito wrote his odd little opera Mephistofele, and amidst the torrent of acclaim the doctor found himself less and less likely to protest and much more likely to start believing in everything that was said about him, the good and the bad and the positively godlike.

Mephisto just hoped he didn't start believing he deserved Heaven. He could only keep the doctor alive for so long.

Rome was oddly quiet for an August afternoon.

"Hey, wait here for a moment," Mephisto said. They were standing on a shady little cobblestone street outside the third cafe of the day. Not a soul was in sight. Even the birds were silent. "Catch me if I fall."

The devil's expression went slack as he abandoned his form. Even though Faust knew there was nothing to see, he still scanned the block for evidence that his metaphysical companion was ransacking the place. The devil's empty form started to unbalance, so Faust stepped behind it and propped it up with his own body.

He had, suddenly, the unwelcome thought that the devil could have secretly returned to occupy his form; that he was pretending, lying there limply just for the pleasure of feeling Faust's body against his. The thought was nonsense, but nevertheless the doctor pushed his companion's form a good inch or two away and held it up with his shoulder instead, just in case.

Mephisto was back within thirty seconds, straightening and shaking feeling back into his hands. "Thanks."

"What'd you see?"

"Nothing. All clear."

"What'd you expect to see?" The devil had seemed uncharacteristically cautious all day.

"Let's get a table and I'll tell you."

At a booth by the window, the devil leaned on his elbows over the table. "Right." He lowered his voice. "I ran into some old friends in the Sixth this morning."

"What did they have to say?"

"Well, Faustus, to tell you the truth, they're not too pleased with me."

"I shouldn't think so," said Faust, examining the wine list. "You haven't really been home in years."

"Decades. I haven't actually went back to stay since you and I had our fight - you know which one -"

"Oh yes," said Faust dryly, "the infamous 1730s. And 40s."

"It was an infamous century."

This time, he had just popped in as a shortcut from Rome to Vienna while scouting out lunch places and had been stopped on the way by a compatriot of his named Limino. Limino used to be a bright and inventive devil of even humor and good cheer - they had worked together to put mountains in on the Sixth's southern border way back in 5500 BC - but of late he had been growing narrow minded, and the first signs of weakening reason were invading his patterns of speech.

You've been seen, said Limino, acting as the servant of a human man.

Mephistopheles did not care enough to correct him. "Yeah," he said, "for about three hundred years now. You're late to the party, mate."

I cannot understand it. Why would you degrade yourself in such a way?

"I like it," said the Master of the Sixth. "It's novel. Stimulates the mind. You could use some stimulation yourself, Limino, have you ever considered visiting?"

You have always put them above us.

"Not always," said Mephisto darkly. "Only since our Father forced me to choose between my sanity and my principles."

Then we cannot allow you to rule.

Mephistopheles looked at his compatriot and allowed the shadows to flare out behind him like a cloak filled with stars. He wasn't angry. It had been a very long time since anything had made him angry. He simply felt it necessary, as Limino's sovereign, to put the devil back in his place. So the ground cracked and pulled apart under his feet. The sky fell down and coiled around him. His eyes became consumed with white fire. Challenge me, he said directly, and I will bury you deeper than Lucifer herself.

On hearing this, Faust suppressed a smile. "Would anyone dare?"

"Yeah, probably. I doubt they'd come up here to do it, but it doesn’t hurt to keep an eye out.”

“How touching,” said Faust, half smoulder and half sneer, “you’re worried about me.”

“You’re just so useful to me, Faustus,” Mephistopheles replied sweetly.

Through the tone of sarcasm was discernable a cold little nugget of truth. “I know,” said Faust. He stood, straightened his fashionable black jacket and scarf, and said, “Excuse me a minute.” Then he stalked off in the direction of the loo.

Mephistopheles followed him out the door with his eyes, admiring how the fine tailoring snatched his figure. It was always hard to know, when it came to their relationship, which Faust would take more poorly - sarcasm or sincerity. It didn’t matter, in the end. He’d be back. He always came back.

If he didn’t, he’d die.

He’d tried it, in the 1730s (and 40s.) By the time Mephisto was desperate enough to break his fucking door down, the man had withered of old age. The devil took one look at that decrepit form and saw visions of heart attacks and strokes and softenings of the brain and a great wave of panic had seized him like it hadn’t in hundreds, thousands of years and he’d thrust the frail doctor back in his velvet old man chair and ravished his atoms without laying a finger on him until his bones strengthened and his myelins slicked and his skin smoothed and hair glossed and grey eyes cleared and regained the indomitable sharpness that Mephisto, for the last century or so, had worn imprinted on his memory like a possession.

The doctor had not protested. He’d lain there, silent, and received the devil’s ministrations with a cold twist to his mouth that might have been fury at Mephisto and might have been fury at himself.

Mephisto enjoyed the last bites of his sandwich and then looked idly around the cafe, drumming his fingers on the table. He’d bought a ring last month in St. Petersburg, a little silver pentagram that he wore on the middle finger of his left hand. He was very pleased with it. It caught the cafe light and sent a delightful splash of silver onto the white plastered wall.

Faust had not returned from the loo.

The devil let ten minutes pass, then an uneasy feeling invaded his form and he walked over to the back rooms of the cafe. Shadows began to collect in his wake as he emerged into the alley.

Faustus was not there.

He cast his spirit out over the immediate area. Faustus was not anywhere.

The devil abandoned his form in the middle of the street and went searing through Rome, crossing the city in a matter of seconds, reaching out to the very limits of his ability, enveloping every street, filling every building with himself.

He looked everywhere, except the blip on the map that was Vatican City.

Returning to his form, shaking off a couple concerned passerby, he ran two blocks from the cafe to the edge of the Vatican border and, leaning up against the invisible barrier like a window, scoured the courtyard with his eyes. There was nothing to see, of course.

Mephistopheles, oddly calmed, thought for a minute. Then, on a hunch, he walked back to the cafe. At the booth where he and Faustus had been sitting, there was a small envelope.

Mr. Mephistopheles,

A bad start. Lord Mephistopheles of the Sixth would have been more appropriate. The Vatican never had been interested in diplomacy.

Mr. Mephistopheles,

In recent decades we have become aware that you value the companionship of a certain Dr. Heinrich Faust. Since you have been unwilling to comply with us, we have taken Dr. Faust into our custody. You are advised to consider this a ransom situation. Police interference will not be tolerated.

The ransom is to be paid as follows: That you will submit yourself to the Holy See at the Church of Saint Mary of the Rosary at midnight tonight. If your conduct is considered in order, we will release Dr. Faust, and no harm will befall him. If it is not, Dr. Faust will be placed on trial for his crimes against the Church, not least the murder of the Reverend Wayland, the punishment for which, as you know, is death.

We do not find it necessary to expect your reply.

Cordially,

It was signed by two cardinals and a high-ranking priest.

No frills, no flatteries, no apostrophes to God. Mephistopheles had to admire an honest ransom note. He set the letter down on the table. "Shit," he said aloud to himself. "They're onto me."

He sat down in the booth, and - even though he didn't need to - he read the letter again.

No harm will befall him.

Mephistopheles had not felt anger in approximately seven hundred years. Numbed by the sheer length of his own existence, he simply had not been able to rouse the emotion in himself. But as he looked at the note, deep in the trembling spaces between his atoms he felt the beginnings of a quiet, searing fury. It was the most exquisite thing he'd ever felt.

Oh, Faustus, he thought, closing his eyes almost prayerfully. You never do disappoint.

Chapter Text

Faust and Mephisto had been in London when Hamlet was premiered. They had looked at the flyers on the pub door and saw there was a comedy uptown and a tragedy downtown. They had gone to the comedy.

After Shakespeare blew up, they had decided to make a game of attending every event that would later be considered of historical importance around the world. They also set a goal to meet every man they thought would probably be famous in a hundred years. Eventually they got a bit bored with this and decided to narrow their search to musicians - a most specious group of people indeed.

Take Beethoven, for example, who'd lately become something of a national legend. Mephisto had liked him well enough. Ludwig, twenty-eight at the time and still in decent health, was an Enlightenment man like him - a country boy who'd grown up on the river banks of the French Revolution and who now was stuck awkwardly, defensive and unkempt, in the middle of conservative old Vienna - but he had a streak of naive idealism and idiot stubbornness that the devil found very appealing.

Faust didn't like him at all. When Mephisto tried to point out their similarities, he'd scoffed, "We are not the same."

"That's true," agreed Mephisto. "You're way meaner. You're a mean old man."

Faust did not deign to respond.

"He's kinda cute, too," said Mephisto thoughtfully.

"He is famously not cute."

"I think he's cute."

"If you come on to him," said Faust, "he will never trust you again and will cut you off forever."

Mephisto looked long and blank at Faust. Then he nodded, half to himself. "Understood."*

(*Later on Mephisto had been amazed at the hero the Romantics made of him. It hadn't helped his opinion of them, seeing bright-eyed ol' Ludwig stretched out all bloody and grimacing, deaf as a door post, on their altar of genius.)

It had been the same with Wolfgang Mozart. When Faust offered to help the kid fake his death - Wolfie had a disastrously famous life and a ridiculously controlling father - Mephisto thought he might be coming around. "You gotta cut him some slack," the devil had said, "the guy was a child celebrity. That's gonna mess you up." But while they helped Wolfie giddily feign some story about writing his own funeral mass and got him settled up in Trocklenburg with a pseudonym, Faust maintained he was only doing it for the human interest of it. He had nothing but scorn for the man himself.

Most likely he was just jealous, thought Mephisto, as he drilled Wolfie Mozart's piano sonatas and tried to figure out how 'spirited' was a musical term.

Schumann, with his split personalities, had given Mephisto a bad feeling, though Faust had gotten a bit obsessed with his song cycles. "I like Floristan well enough," Mephisto conceded, "but I just can't stand Eusebius." And then there was Brahms, pining after Schumann's girl and stealing his schizo little alter ego from the author Hoffmann. My God, thought Mephisto, it's almost as though you're trying to make yourself miserable. It's almost as though you're milking your own sorrow for songs. Johannes, my man, it's not worth it!

All in all, there had been only one they'd both liked, a future legend who'd entered into their small rotating cast of friends. His name was Franz Liszt. Faust and Mephisto had known Franz in the 1840s, when the virtuoso was in his thirties and women were still clawing each other half to death over his cigar stubs, back when he could cast his gleaming eyes over the front row from the piano and make a man swoon with a single smile. He was now sixty five years old and had gotten ordained as a cleric.

For once, this suited Mephisto's purposes just fine.

The devil had thought to look for Franz at his home in Weimar, that polished, patriotic little town famous for having been Goethe's residence, but when he knocked on the door of the nicely gardened house, the late August sun beating down on the cobblestones, he found the pianist was not at home. The housekeeper said, "He's off visiting his daughter."

Franz Liszt's daughter Cosima (illegitimate, as all his children were) had made a nice sensible marriage to a kindly conductor and then had incurred her father's wrath by running off with debt-ridden anti-Semitic small-time composer Richard Wagner. Talk on the street was that Franz disapproved of Richard and had refused to see the couple for years after their marriage (his dislike had grown at about the same rate as Richard's cult following) but recently he had decided to put his feelings behind him and reenter his daughter's life. He'd even, the housekeeper said, gone down to Bayreuth to help with the grand opening of the Wagners' opera house, and that's where he was now.

Bayreuth was a riot of sound. Thousands of well-dressed people were streaming towards the new theater, set north of the town in a sea of gardens. Mephisto followed the flow of traffic and learned that the final opera of the Ring Cycle would be performed on the hour. “The premier?” asked Mephisto, curious. He’d seen the first one a few years ago when it came out - a heroic, soul-transporting dramatization of a very old Germanic myth.* No, said the woman, a countess of some sort, no, this was the festival’s third time through the Cycle. They’d been playing non-stop, an opera a day, since the thirteenth of the month.

(*He’d thought the music very fun, the stage design very stylish. He would’ve liked it even more if not for the audience constantly falling into paroxysms of despair and exultation all around him. It had gotten exasperating.)

“That’s a lot of operas,” said Mephisto.

“Too many,” the countess agreed. "Such a strain on one's constitution." She’d been present for every performance.

Skipping forward into the lush and crowded grounds of the theater, Mephisto was amazed at the quality of the throng. There were heads of state - he recognized handsome King Ludwig II of Bavaria*, hiding behind a bushy false beard - and authors, and musicians of all sorts. The devil spotted Bruckner, come all the way from England, having a chat with the Russian composer Tchaikovsky under a vast oak tree. He heard American accents and snatches of Italian over the sound of a brass band, elevated in a gazebo and playing patriotic tunes. The flag of Germany, as brand new as the empire, snapping sharply in the wind over the opera house, proudly declared the recent unification of Prussia with the smaller kingdoms to the south. The talk, among the Germans, was of the new nation: its great strength, its glorious future. The talk was of Wagner: its brightest star.

(*The one who built the famous castle, Schloss Neuschwanstein, which you have probably seen at some point, with its slender blue fairy-tale turrets, towering gracefully over its Alpine lake. The castle's name makes reference to swans, King Ludwig's favorite animal. King Ludwig was obsessed with them. This was mainly because he was obsessed with Lohengrin, the legendary Swan Knight, whom he had painted in gorgeous murals in the dining room and drawing room and above the bathtub and all around his bed. He had a great cape of swan feathers made for him and he would pretend to be Lohengrin while running around the Alps with a sword.

After seeing the opera Richard Wagner had written about Lohengrin, King Ludwig became obsessed with Wagner too. What he saw in that pale melon of a forehead, I have no idea. Richard certainly never cared much for him. All I know is that when the composer went through his Marxist phase and had to flee the country, King Ludwig's first impulse was to abdicate his throne and follow him, and he would have done it too, if Richard hadn't taken him aside and talked some sense into him.)

Mephisto thought he might go over and say hello to Tchaikovsky when a young man sitting apart from the crowd drew his eye. Slumped on a log by some fragrant flowering bushes, he was staring into the empty space before him like he was beholding the horrors of Hell. The dark circles under his eyes, deep-set and hooded behind a small pair of oval glasses, heightened the impression that he'd just been punched in the face. With the moustache he was evidently attempting to grow and his otherwise erect bearing he was the spitting image of a shell-shocked soldier. Mephisto went over to him. "Hey, I'm looking for Franz Liszt, have you seen him?"

The man raised his head slowly and looked at the devil as though from across centuries. "No," he said finally. "I didn't know he was here. I would ask Frau Wagner."

"Sure, where might I find her?"

"Wahnfried," said the soldier, as though it were obvious.

“Thanks," said Mephisto, who had no idea where or what Wahnfried was. "You look like shit, what happened to you?”

“I have a migraine,” said the soldier, looking like his family had just been murdered in front of his eyes.

“Oh, well, if that’s all.” Mephisto hovered curiously.

“Have you ever,” said the soldier, “been blind to something you didn’t want to see?”

“Sure, loads of times.”

The soldier gestured out over the grounds in the direction of the gazebo, where a lively sing-along to the Deutschlandlied had broken out. “Tell me what you see, then, stranger. What do you think of all this?”

“What, all the rah-rah? Not really my thing, but it’s nothing new, is it?”

The soldier looked up, a brightness livening his gaze, and turned to the devil frankly. “You have the eye of a historian. What's your name?”

"Evgeny de Barathrum."

"Friedrich Nietzsche." The soldier had a firm handshake.

"Nice to meetcha, Nietzsche." Mephisto sat down beside him and contemplated the proceedings. "Honestly, I’m no optimist when it comes to, you know, human nature and all that. But I like this place. It’s taken me in, it’s like my adopted country. And since the Romantics, I’ve been finding it harder to be a part of things.”

Unexpectedly, Friedrich laughed. "Fucking Romantics."

“They got my friend too. Now all he does is talk about castles and shit. Hey, I have a time crunch, want to take me over to Wahnfried?"

Friedrich glanced over at the theater. "I really was going to go in there. I wanted to see Siegfried get stabbed again by Hagen at the well." He shook his head and laughed again, then stood up resolutely. "To your feet, stranger. I'll take you to Wahnfried."

Wahnfried turned out to be a grand yellow house decorated with engravings of Muses and other artistic things. There was an epitaph over the door explaining why Wagner had chosen the name ('peace from madness') and all in all Mephisto could very much believe that a cult leader lived there. Friedrich - ‘call me Fritz,’ he’d told Mephisto - walked up to the door and knocked.

They were taken through a small square foyer tiled in black-and-white checks and past the parlour to a small sitting room. A tall, thin man put down his cheese and crackers and stood to receive them. It was Franz Liszt. 

His heart-stopping beauty had left him. Instead, he now possessed a handsome, silver-haired dignity. He wore a long black robe with fifty buttons up the front, identifying himself as a man of the cloth, and his combed-back hair hung almost to his chin as it always had. The gleam in his eyes was clever and the lines on his face were kind.

“My God,” the pianist said. He almost called the devil by his real name, but since they weren't alone, he caught himself. “Ev de Barathrum. I don’t think I ever expected to see you again, you look the same as ever.” He shook Mephisto’s hand warmly. “And - Herr Nietzsche, is it? We’ve met once before, haven’t we?” He shook Friedrich’s hand too, pressing his fingers with both hands. "Sit down, please."

"So the rumors are true," Mephisto grinned at him, lounging on the couch and crossing his legs. "Franz Liszt, man of God."

"I know," said Liszt, whose dry tone and serious expression were belied by a certain impish quickness in his eyes. "I've let you down. Herr Nietzsche, I thought you would be at the opera."

"No," said Friedrich. "Respectfully, Herr Liszt, I'm not sure I can allow myself to stay any longer."

"Oh, I don't blame you," said Liszt, bringing his tea to the low table between them and taking a seat in an armchair across from the couch. "I stopped going after the first cycle."

"No one admires Wagner more than I," said Friedrich, "but it's turning into something I can't condone."

"What," said Liszt, taking a sip of tea, "nationalism? It was always that. Well, part ways with him, if you must. Cosima will get over it.”

"You know Cosima?" interrupted Mephisto.

"She's been like a mother to me," said Friedrich quietly.

"Huh. Small world."

Liszt looked between his two unlikely guests and said finally, with some exasperation, "Herr de Barathrum, do you have something to impart to me in private?"

Mephisto turned and looked hard at Friedrich. “Yeah, I think so.”

A bit baffled by the eye contact, Friedrich said, “That’s fine. I should be going anyhow.”

“Wait, wait, Fritz.” Mephisto pulled a pen and paper from apparently nowhere and scribbled something down. “My address. Write to me.”

Friedrich took the paper, bowed slightly, and left.

"Well, now that he's gone," said Liszt, raising an eyebrow at his remaining guest.

"I got your waltzes," Mephisto said.

"What did you think?"

"I loved them, Franz, I was really flattered."

"Were you? Oh dear."

"And you'll be pleased to know I learned them all."

"Oh, that's even worse."

Mephisto had played in front of Liszt once before, a composition of Liszt's own. Every note had landed exactly where it was supposed to and he didn't even metaphysically encourage any of the keys at all. "Well," Franz had judged, "your showmanship is nice - probably got that from me -' (Mephisto had conceded this.) "- it sounds like you heard me playing it, memorized it, and just did exactly what I did?"

"Yeah, that's about right."

"You're a good man, Mephisto," Liszt had said, clapping him on the shoulder. "Too bad you're a shit pianist."

"Shall we make some more small talk?" said the composer now, raising an eyebrow.

"That seems like a civilized thing to do," the devil agreed.

Liszt offered him the cheese and cracker plate. "Herr Nietzsche seemed to interest you. You decided to wait until a later date to scar him for life with knowledge not meant for human minds?"

Mephisto heaved a sigh and selected a piece of English Wensleydale. "Nah. He wouldn't take it well. You're not that scarred, are you, Franz?"

"Not scarred at all," said Franz, adjusting one of his fifty clerical buttons. "He's a great admirer of Goethe, you know."

"All the more reason. Wait, how do you know that?"

"I make it my business."

"Oh dear, Franz, don't tell me you're untrusting of your own daughter?"

Franz raised the infamous eyebrow. "If your daughter eloped with Richard Wagner, would you trust her?"

Mephisto said nicely that as he had not yet had the pleasure of the happy couple's acquaintance he would have to suspend judgement.

Liszt sighed. Apparently wanting to get off the subject, he said, "I expected to see any number of famous faces these past weeks, but never would I have thought to find Mephistopheles of the Sixth Circle among them."

"You don't peg me as an opera-goer? I'm disappointed."

"You know perfectly well, Mephisto, that in addition to being the most incongruous and irrational feature of my biography, you are also the most incongruous and irrational feature anywhere you go. There is no good reason that you should exist, and yet you do. No, I did not expect to find you here, since I do not expect to find you anywhere, for the simple reason that I try very hard to forget about you when I can."

"You hurt me, Franz," said Mephisto, not sounding particularly hurt.

"And now you will tell me why you have come," said Liszt, calmly finishing his tea.

"I will? Yeah, okay, I will. Look, Franz, I need your help."

"Do you really? The surprises never end. What could I possibly help you with?"

"The Vatican's got Faustus," said Mephisto.

Liszt stared at him for a long second, a cracker and a bit of cheese half way to his mouth. Very carefully, he replaced the cracker on the plate. "What's the situation?"

"We've got till midnight to get him out of there or they say they'll kill him."

"That seems unlikely," said Franz, looking uncertain. "I can't imagine they'd kill an innocent man just to bring you grief."

"Faust's not innocent. He has the blood of a priest on his hands, Franz, it's not our first run-in."

Franz Liszt studied his own hands. Those thin, wrinkled, once-beautiful fingers had made him the greatest pianist in the world. He hadn't told anyone, but he'd been having trouble playing for years now. His joints were getting stiff and it hurt to stretch over an octave. "Well? What's your plan?"

"For you to sneak in and grab him."

"Oh, if that's all."

"You can say you're on a pilgrimage. No one will question you."

"Except the number of priests who delight in celebrity gossip and know that I ought to be in Bayreuth."

"How many priests delight in celebrity gossip?"

"The majority," said Liszt. "It's a dull life, being a priest."

"Okay, then you have a celebrity's immunity. They wouldn't dare hold you, they're all politicians really. There's no risk to you. Franz, I don't have a Plan B."

Liszt sat back silently and waited to be offered something. He wouldn't mind his youth back, himself. A bit of extra money. A few strings pulled at the publishers'.

"Name it, Franz," said Mephisto tiredly.

"Take care of Cosima when I'm gone," said Franz.

"How do you mean?"

"Let her health never leave her. Let her live long. Let all her endeavors succeed. Let her investments return ten-fold."

"I can heal her if she gets sick," Mephisto said, "and I can send her money."

"And she must never know you have a hand in it. You must promise she will never know."

"She won't see me," said the devil. "Jesus, Franz, I thought we were friends."

"We were friends. I'm not so sure we are, any more. Not that I blame him, or you. I'm sure nothing spoils the taste of youth more than watching a friend grow old. Shall we shake on it? Or do you desire a contract?"

"If it's sufficient for you," said Mephisto, a little formally, "a handshake will be fine."

And thus the agreement was ratified.

"It's already getting dark," said Liszt. "We should go right away. You have some means of transportation, I assume? Ah yes, the infamous cloak."

"Don't sound so skeptical." Mephisto shook the garment out and offered the pianist one end.

"Is it magical?" Liszt was trying not to look as curious as he felt.

"No, it's just a normal cloak. Looks cool, though."

"Then how do we -"

"I have power over matter," said Mephisto, "so I can just -" He and Liszt rose a foot into the air.

"Any matter at all?"

"I mean, theoretically, but I can only concentrate on so much, can't I? It's not easy moving -"

The door slammed open and and a woman came storming right past them and into the next room.

"- twenty octillion atoms around at once - um - "

"You massive, pea-brained, bone-headed idiot," whispered Liszt.

"One hundred and fifty thousand marks!" yelled the woman from the next room. "One hundred fifty thousand flipping marks!"

"Put us down," hissed Liszt. Mephisto put them down.

"I told you, didn't I, Father?" Cosima called back at them. "I said it would be a disaster and that's exactly what it is, a massive flipping disaster -"

"I don't think she saw," whispered Mephisto.

"You absolute imbecile, of course she saw." Liszt raised his voice. "Cosima, why aren't you at the opera?"

"As though I could sit through another godawful performance - not a single tempo remotely correct, Richter's a damn fool - almost as bad as that awful Jew, whats-his-name - what was his name?"

"I'm sure I can't remember," said Liszt.

"It'll come to me." Cosima Wagner was in a rioting bad mood. It was partly because she had just received financial projections regarding the Festival's dismal failure and mostly because she'd just caught Richard backstage in the theater snogging King Ludwig II of Bavaria. "Oh, let's go out, shall we? I need a distraction. You're not doing anything, are you?" She poked her head back into the sitting room. "Ah, I'm sorry, you have a guest."

She looked between the red cloak and her father and the strange noble-looking man and processed what she had seen subconsciously about thirty seconds ago. "Don't tell me I'm crazy, Father, you were floating in the air."

Liszt didn't answer. "You were," Cosima cried, wide-eyed. "So it's true!"

"So what's true?"

"That you sold yourself to the Devil, all those years ago."

The pianist had never in his life regretted his concert career more.

Cosima spun to the guest. "So, you've come to collect, have you?"

"Not at all," said Mephisto with a grin. "Your dad's doing me a favor."

"Oho! But you don't deny who you are!"

"No," said Mephistopheles, "I've never denied that."

Liszt was leveling him a glare comparable in intensity to the furnaces of the Fourth Circle. "Cosima," he said, "this man is a fool who thinks it fun to play with a woman's fancies. Leave us immediately and think no more on this."

Cosima Wagner raised a Lisztian eyebrow. She was thirty-nine and looked a bit like a fish, with a long face, a wide mouth - and strikingly proud grey eyes. "Are you playing with my fancies, devil?" she asked.

Mephisto looked at Liszt. "Am I?"

Liszt nodded severely.

The devil looked back at Cosima. "Yes, I am."

"No, you're not," said Cosima. Mephisto winked at her. "And I'm not leaving until I get an explanation."

"Well, we're a bit pressed for time," said Mephisto.

"Well, that's unfortunate. I'm not."

"Well, I think you'd better come with us then," said Mephisto.

"I absolutely forbid it," said Liszt.

Mephisto shook out his cloak again. "Here, put this end around your shoulders. Franz?"

"You cannot. I won't help you if you do."

"Oh, come on, Franz, yes you will. You'll get him to help, won't you, Cosima?"

"If I see fit to," said Cosima.

"Can't say fairer than that." Mephisto lifted them all into the air. "You've got awesome windows in here. I love a big window. Perfect for dramatic exits, are you ready?"

And, the window flying open at the devil's bequest, the three soared out into the night, over Bayreuth, over the Alps, over Italy, as the first of the stars began to poke pinpricks through the velvet sky.

Chapter Text

Funny thing about Vitchen. A forest full of them, even and especially if you can never find them, is much more interesting than a forest where they never existed at all.

Faust was led, hands tied, through St. Peter's Basilica by a priest and two cardinals. He had been here before, to watch Michaelangelo touch up the ceiling a bit, and again he was impressed by the massiveness of the place. Everything in Vatican City was to a larger scale. 

Perhaps that was one reason for the deja vu clutching Faust's heart like a forgotten childhood memory. And perhaps there was something less tangible, something promised by the carved pillars and the great golden vaultings. That thing, Faust decided, was mystery. When you're a child, everything feels vast. It's not just because you're small - it's because everything else is still unknown. The edges of things has not yet been determined. Your hometown stretches out just about forever, and somewhere out beyond its borders yawns a limitless expanse of undiscovered strangeness. Every house is a new world, every park a new wilderness. Your own life is a frontier, intimate with infinity. Any story could be true.

Around six decades ago, Faust had made the disturbing and liberating discovery that empirical fact no longer interested him at all. He had grown up in a world that drew maps with dragons around the edge to mark the end of what was known and the beginning of what wasn’t. Yes, he had sought to cross the uncrossable, to step where no man dared step. He had done so. But he’d reached the end of the map. 

To see the world through Mephisto's eyes was to disenchant it. To the devil, everything was rational. He had an explanation for everything: the swell of the sea. The birth of the stars. Faust was tired of hearing it. The dark stone Christmas arch of the church door no longer haunted his dreams; instead he had begun to dream of a hollow in a wood somewhere, the ground dusted with spring snow and yet the boughs heavy with flowers. He had no idea where this hollow might be, but he was often made to think of it by a few chords in a Schumann song cycle. He thought it might be in a third realm, neither Heaven nor Hell but something as yet unknown and unchronicled. Somewhere, perhaps, deep in the mind’s darkest shadows, or in the half-real mirages of the past. The only thing certain was that it was wreathed in legend, and Faust often speculated upon its history: perhaps here Siegfried was felled as he drank from the well. 

He was pulled from his speculations as hands on his shoulders forced him to his knees before the grand altar.

"Heinrich Faust," said the cardinal, reading dully from a large old tomb, "you are accused of conspiracy against the Church, blasphemy against God, and the murder of a priest. Do you repent of your crimes against Heaven and submit yourself to the mercy of Christ and the Holy Virgin?"

"No," said Faust.

"I didn’t think so."

The second cardinal spoke. "You are aware that the punishment for these crimes is death?"

"It hardly surprises me," said Faust. "Despite all the posturing I've never found the Church particularly merciful."

"You're wrong," said the priest, gently. "Repent, Faust. Give yourself to God and no harm will come to you."

"You can take your dick," said Heinrich Faust evenly, "and shove it up my fucking asshole."

"I hear you like that sort of thing," said the first cardinal, not looking up from his book. ("Luigi," reprimanded the young priest darkly.)

"You do know," droned the second cardinal, "that your life is in our hands. The only reason we haven’t killed you yet is because you can still be useful to us."

"Don’t worry," said Faust. "It's a dynamic I'm used to."

"Dr. Faust," said the young priest, "leave him and you can still be saved."

It was something he’d been told over and over again. It was something he heard in his dreams. “I made a deal,” he said, as always, “and I will abide by it.”

"Tell me, Dr. Faust, you were born in -" the priest checked a notebook - "1463?"

Faust eyed the notebook suspiciously. "Yes."

"Four hundred years ago," said the priest, sounding impressed. "That's a very long time. Say what you will about the patriarchs, I'm not sure any other human being has ever lived as long as you."

"I assume you have a point."

"I'm just curious. You'll have to remind me, Dr. Faust - was it part of the deal?"

"It's an added bonus," said Faust. He couldn't keep the irony out of his voice, so he added scathingly, "And it's none of your damn business."

"Some might say you've more than fulfilled your obligation to him. Why not give it up, doctor? You must be tired. After all these years. You deserve to come home."

Faust sighed, relieved. So not everything was in that notebook. "Give it up?" he declared proudly. "Give this up? My name is known throughout the world. Anything on Earth is mine for the asking. I live as a god - why should I give that up?"

"For the eternal good life after death," scorned the cardinal.

"No," said the priest, and an edge crept through his gentle demeanor. "Dr. Faust gives no thought to the afterlife. He holds this life in much higher esteem than you or I. No, I'm merely surprised, doctor. It seems to me that you are not living the good life. Not at all. You're holding out for the good life, perhaps. But you don't know where to find it, do you?"

Faust opened his mouth to retort, but he couldn't think of anything clever to say, so he closed it again.

"You're just too scared to die before you've figured it out. What if next year you're happy? What if next month you're satisfied and fulfilled? And until then you live as the pet of a demon, allowing him to drag you through the centuries until you hardly recognize yourself, until everyone you've ever loved is dead and everything you ever knew is gone, mocking your ideals until you deprecate yourself while you pretend at friendship so he won't lose interest and let you die. No, Dr. Faust. You're not living the good life at all."

"What do you have to say to that?" laughed the second cardinal.

"'Demon'," said Faust, "is a rude word."

"This interview is over," said Luigi.

The cardinals lifted him to his feet and led him through the carved dark rows of facing pews. They took a corner and then ducked into a narrow door in the panelling near the organ. The steep wooden steps became stone as the light faded. The second cardinal lit a lantern and together, in the flickering yellow light, the four descended past the great wheezing lungs of the organ, past the silent tombs of the saints, into darkness.

"And in short," Mephisto was saying as they touched down near the cafe, "I do hold power over him. I understand how it might grate on him, but I just don't know how to convince him that he, too, holds power over me…"

"In my opinion," said Cosima, handing him her portion of the cloak and smoothing her dress, "if you care to hear it, I think he's perfectly aware. I think he's using you to his own advantage. Look what he's gotten from the arrangement - indefinite life! Fame and a supernatural servant to do his bidding -"

"I'm not his servant," said Mephisto, miffed.

"He has harnessed your power for his own gain," said Cosima, "as I would expect of any German hero."

"And you know many German heroes, do you, Cosima?" asked Franz.*

(* Incidentally - and this may not be relevant at all - King Ludwig II had paid for the construction of the opera house, Wahnfried, and the Wagners' house in Tribschen.)

"I merely think," said Cosima, "that Dr. Heinrich Faust ought to be the Devil's equal. I am sure that he thinks of himself as such."

"He certainly professes to," said Liszt, "although he is so adamant about it I can see why you suppose him insecure, Mephisto."

"As for the desires you believe him to have repressed, I propose he has feigned his interest in order to control you."

"Mephisto's point, though," said Liszt, "and I believe this to be true, is that Faust is by no means certain what would profit him. To what end does he seek control? His extended life satisfies him no more than fame."

"Hey, guys," interrupted Mephisto.

"Then it is control itself that satisfies him," said Cosima.

"I agree that when such great power is in play," said Liszt, "we cannot speak of the ordinary dependencies of friends. But surely you don't think a three hundred year partnership could be empty of all affection?"

"Guys, guys, guys, shush," said Mephisto.

"Faust is a German hero," repeated Wagner positively, "and will not be tempted into homosexuality by the forces of Hell. And by the way, Mephisto, if you truly do feel that mankind's ire against your people is prejudiced and unjust, I suggest you find a better way to occupy yourself."

Mephisto held up a finger and looked patronizingly at his two friends until they shut up.

"Sorry," said Franz.

"It's - um - what, nine o'clock? We've only got three hours. You remember the way -"

"Yes, I've written it down. Mephisto, you should think of something else as well, in case we fail."

"You won't fail," said Mephistopheles. "I'd better disguise myself, but I'll see you to the border."

Liszt, Wagner, and a small black dog approached Vatican City at 9:15 PM. The dog watched them enter at a distance, then turned and trotted away.

There was nothing Mephisto could do for the next three hours but wait.

He let himself into the cafe, which had closed, settled down into the booth where he'd sat with Faustus, and thought about the day Scribius had died.

Devils, of course, are immortal. True death is beyond them. They are, however, able to induce in themselves a kind of hibernation. This state is senseless and indefinite, and because it is a vast taboo to rouse a devil from his hibernation, it may last thousands of years or longer.

In Hell, a nation that holds the self-sufficient weathering of eternity to be the highest of virtues, it is considered cowardice to hibernate in such a way, a shameful vulnerability, a hair's breath from suicide. Regular hibernation was treated like a substance addiction, ending inevitably in the sleep of total surrender. Why, after all, keep dragging yourself through the centuries when you could sink into oblivion?

Scribius had lain down on the floor of the vast stone hall of the Sixth Circle while Mephistopheles sprawled in his throne and mused vaguely at the ceiling.

"Dion was beautiful too, remember? But I didn't respect him. I managed to want him, that was all."

Long before Scribius had lost his mind, he had been Mephisto's foremost confidant. They had played chess under the red mountains and debated whether God had created Hell as a place of punishment for humanity*. That had been many centuries ago, but Mephistopheles was still in the habit of talking aloud to him.

(*And, if so, whether it would be counter God's will to treat the refugee souls with respect; whether a system of justice on Earth was necessary for the divine plan; whether angels slept, and if not, whether the mythical Lucifer could actually be hibernating in the depths of Hell at all; and other such questions of philosophical importance for the infernal nation.)

"I thought that was enough," he said, draping a hand languidly over the armrest. "I wrung that scrap of desire for all it was worth. Long after he died, I thought of him. Even when there was nothing left in it. It was a compulsion, I had to force myself to stop, cold turkey, do you remember, Scribs?"

Then he looked over and saw Scribius on the floor.

Oh, shit, he thought, I bored him to death.

And then a cold numbness settled in over his spirit like a shroud.

It had been the year 1603. Faust was staying in a hotel in the Swiss Alps, writing his life story. By the time the door opened, he had already blown out the candle and was sitting dully on the edge of the bed, trying to find the desire to sleep somewhere in the weariness that, even then, was already pressing against his heart.

Then it was as though all of the darkness in the room stirred like a flock of crows taking flight and swarmed towards the doorway, where it consolidated into the shape of a man. For a moment, Faust's weariness vanished, and the euphoria of the first meeting in Heidelberg traced its old course through his veins like a radioactive echo.

Mephistopheles did not say anything. He closed the door softly behind him, removed his cloak, coat, and boots, folded them, and placed them on the floor. Then he came around the other side of the bed. In the dim grey light of the window, Faust could see his face. There was nothing on it, no emotion at all.

Mephistopheles looked down at him from the side of the bed. Then he lay down carefully beside him in his shirt and trousers.

Faust couldn't decide whether to say What do you think you're doing? or My God, what happened to you?

"I'm going to tell you a secret, Heinrich," said the devil quietly, lying on his back.

It was the first time he'd said Faust's first name. It was one of the only times he ever would.

"My species is capable of something like sleep," Mephistopheles continued. "We are not, however, capable of waking from it ourselves. We must be woken." He stared at the ceiling. "I would like to sleep tonight. Would you wake me, Faustus, in the morning?"

"Yes," said Faust, profoundly moved.

"Thank you."

Mephistopheles said nothing more. Faust leaned over and made out his face in the darkness. His eyes were closed. It was impossible to tell if he was breathing. In sleep, he looked like a young man.

Faust watched him for several minutes. Then he lay down beside him.

They failed, of course. It was a ridiculous and desperate plan.

But it was amazing how far they got. They made it into the basilica without a problem, riding on the fame of Liszt's name and his clerical buttons. They found the passageway under the organ and they followed it down to a small chamber past the bones of St. Peter, where a single bishop was dozing beside a heavy locked door. He had thick grey hair and his face was ruddy.

The first thing they'd tried was to draw him away. The bishop politely demurred. So instead, Cosima distracted him while Franz conked him over the head with a small marble likeness of the Virgin.

"I'm sure she'll forgive me," said Franz, staring dolefully at the shattered statue. He crossed himself.

"This is incredible," said Cosima, drawing a set of keys from the unconscious bishop's pocket. "It's like we're in an opera."

They were feeling pleased with themselves until they opened the door onto an empty room.

It was very unfortunate that they had so quickly resorted to violence. If he'd been conscious the bishop would have gladly told them, in his muted, musical Rhenish accent like Ludwig Beethoven's, that Dr. Faust was a national legend and deserving of Germany's highest honors. He would have shown them the book, a copy of Goethe's Part One, that he'd gotten the doctor to sign. And he would have shown them the hidden passageway behind the statue of Mary down which he'd directed Dr. Faust not thirty minutes before.

As it was, however, the clergyman who'd let them into the basilica grew suspicious. Not finding them in the church, he'd gathered some of his comrades and, plunging into the basilica's heart, discovered Liszt and Wagner despairingly ransacking Dr. Faust's empty cell. They locked the intruders in and they were still there when the great bells, high above them, tolled midnight.

The Church of St. Mary of the Rosary was a small chapel just outside the border of the Vatican, frequented by a population of Turkish immigrants. Mephisto, in disguise, watched it from across the street. The church bells of Rome, echoing and interrupting each other like a flock of geese passing overhead, had just chimed quarter to midnight.

They wouldn't kill him, he was thinking. There's no way they'd kill him. He's their only card in this game.

Then he thought that if he didn't show up, they might conclude Dr. Faust really wasn't a very useful card at all.

If the Holy See forced him into his animal form and imprisoned him within Vatican City - which he imagined they would like to do - he wondered how long it would take Faustus to rescue him. Mephisto supposed he would do it eventually. The doctor hated being in his debt and would be eager to regain something of an upper hand; and besides, his longevity would depend on it. But then again, Faustus was unpredictable. It was one of the reasons Mephisto still found his company engaging after three hundred years.

Say he didn't. Say he considered himself freed from the devil's abrasive company and decided to pursue a quiet retirement in the countryside and died of old age in the Scottish highlands. Provided his compatriots in the Sixth didn't negotiate for their master's release, and it was safe to assume they would not, Mephisto could be stuck in Vatican City for as long as there were priests to keep him there. Depending on the political situation of Europe in the next century - and the devil had some reason to think it would be precarious - the Church could retain its power for centuries or more. Mephisto turned his contemplation upon his own mental state. Could he last centuries? Trapped in a small room in a dog's body with not even hands to hold a harmonica? With no need to produce thoughts and no one to share them with anyhow? Probably not.

Definitely not.

Well, shit, thought Mephisto, how suicidal am I feeling?

Not very, he decided.

He glanced around for a clock tower, but there was none in view.

I could sleep through it, he supposed. But he could not find a reason to believe that anyone would ever wake him.

Why did he want to be woken? Why did he drag himself through one day and then another, one year and then another? Why did he, of all his compatriots, fight so hard and sacrifice so much to remain lucid and coherent and alive? And what good would it ever do him?

It didn't matter, he thought - he had no choice. It was live, and live again, and live again, or submit to the nihilism he had been fated for from the moment he'd been breathed into consciousness, the nihilism that every day was at work with little picks and hammers, deepening and widening the black hole within his heart.

Alright, he conceded, but that was still a choice. Nothing wrong with nihilism. It was its own justification. So what was stopping him from sinking into it like a warm bath like so many of his people, like everyone else he knew? Could it be that despite everything he still cared enough to care? Still loved enough to love?

It was nice to have little crises like this, he reflected as an aside. Aired out the mind. Dilemmas like this one came around once an eon.

Thanks for that, Faustus, he thought, and then, God fucking damn it.

He morphed into his humanoid form and changed into his most elegant attire. He gave himself a sash and epaulets and he wreathed a black crown around his hair. He cloaked all of his eternity around his shoulders and called the shadows of Rome to come writhe at the feet of their master. And solemn and distinguished as any earthly king, dignity in the set of his chin and infinity in the cast of his eyes, Lord Mephistopheles, Master of the Sixth, strode across the street and into the chapel.

"Step within the circle, Mephistopheles," said the cardinal.

Before the altar stood a circle of candles. The cardinal and his partner flanked it, the first holding a heavy book. A priest kneeled in the back of the church, head bowed in prayer, concealed in shadow.

Silently, black eyes flashing, a faint smile on his lips, Mephistopheles walked down the aisle and stepped into the circle. The first cardinal began to declaim in Latin. Nothing visibly happened, but the devil felt the effect of the restraints immediately.

"I'm glad you've come," said the second cardinal. "We will keep our word."

"I'm amazed you've come," said the first. "I thought for sure you wouldn't. You really care that much about him?"

Mephistopheles slowly turned his gaze on the first cardinal. His expression didn't change. He said nothing.

"It's an impressive show of humanity. But we're not releasing you just for that."

"We know your kind," said the second. "Children of the deceitful one. You have persuaded many people to admire you, Mephistopheles. Neither poets nor artists have been immune to your charm. It is good that your influence will no longer be felt -"

He stopped talked suddenly, because at that moment a bullet had passed through his heart.

Within the next second, four things happened. Let us take a moment to consider them in turn.

Firstly: The priest, the remaining cardinal, and Mephistopheles turned to look at Dr. Faust, standing with a pistol in the doorway of the church. Faust, turned loose in the Vatican, had armed himself with various ceremonial objects, cornered the right people, and discovered, over the course of a couple hours, the ransom situation of which he was a key piece. After borrowing a firearm from the Pope's security detail he had headed to the Church of St. Mary immediately, but had been obliged to hide for half an hour while two priests stood in the courtyard and gossiped about the King of Bavaria.

Secondly: Dr. Faust fired again. He was no longer the terrible shot he'd been when facing off with Martin Luther. He'd been practicing for several hundred years and was now probably one of the best marksmen in the world. (He was also accomplished with a sword and in hand-to-hand combat.) He struck and felled the other cardinal.

Thirdly: The metaphysical constraints holding Mephistopheles weakened with the death of their caster. The devil began to throw his spirit against them.

Fourthly: The priest, still concealed in shadow, pulled out his gun and shot Dr. Faust.

If the bullet had pierced the doctor's heart or liver, Mephistopheles would have been able to knit his tissues back together and restore him to life. Unfortunately, the priest knew this too, and he cleverly struck Faust right between his eyes. The bullet ripped through his frontal lobe (center of higher reasoning) and exploded out the back of his skull, taking a good chunk of the occipital lobe (perception in space) along with it. The doctor was dead before he hit the ground.

The cardinal's restraints shattered a couple seconds later.

It's not that Mephistopheles was at a loss when it came to the human brain. He had memorized every atom of Faust's own - it was, after all, the most difficult organ to keep healthy for three and a half centuries - and he knew exactly what neuron led to what.*

(*As of the last time he looked, which was approximately six months earlier.)

Not bothering with his own form, which collapsed at roughly the same time Faust's did, Mephisto set himself immediately to the reconstruction of the doctor's ruined lobes. From the loose bits of brain he took carbon and who knows what other elements and built the spidery web of cells back up again, 'carbon' copies if you'll pardon the pun, and he worked so fast that within three minutes everything was back exactly where it should be and he'd sealed up the bone and skin around it.

During this time the remaining priest emptied his barrel first into Mephistopheles's abandoned form and then in the late Heinrich Faust's general direction, but the latter bullets bounced and skittered around the church and the priest threw himself to the floor on instinct.

The future was mapping itself out in front of Mephistopheles. He saw Europe and Asia and America and the skies and oceans pool together like spilled ink and disappear into blackness save for the facade of Church of Saint Mary of the Rosary, standing out pallid and sick against the nothingness like a blank face. Faust was not breathing. Mephisto sent a thousand volts coursing through his heart and cold air rushing into his lungs. He settled his own spirit into the spaces between Faust's atoms and commanded him to breathe like he commanded the shadows and the skies and the seas. But the doctor's brain, however perfect, was dead weight, and he couldn't breathe, any more than he could perceive the command.

The devil left Faust's side briefly to blast the priest half way up the church wall. Then, keeping him suspended there against the stone with a thin arm of metaphysical consciousness, he wrapped himself around the doctor's dead body. He gave himself hands to cradle the doctor's face. He gave himself lips to kiss the doctor's mouth.

All of this looked like a whirl of dust and fire to the priest hung up on the wall, and though he knew full well he could not be harmed, he felt afraid. The fear was moral. There was emotion in the movement below him. The priest was afraid he had done wrong.

Mephistopheles, being of spirit and dust and fire, fell still against the body of Heinrich Faust and then reached out for the crack between dimensions. Father, he said in the reek of the gunpowder in the chapel air, save him.

Amazingly enough, his father answered. We shall make a deal.

The terms.

That you relieve him of his promise.

Yes, Mephisto said, and the ends of Faust's neurons recognized each other again and, wrapping their long arms around each other, gave unanimous instruction to the doctor's lungs, and he took a shuddering breath.

Away from the city they'd raced with hardly a word, flying through the clouds as though all the Holy See were at their heels. 

"You should not have done that," said Faust angrily. "Mephisto, stop here, listen to me."

The devil brought them to a halt, a thousand feet above Lake Trasimeno under a clear sky. He took a very deep breath, ran his spirit over Faust one more time to ensure he was entirely unharmed, and then looking at the doctor he let out a jubilant laugh.

"Oh, Faustus," he said. "I don't believe it!"

"You shouldn't have gone into that church," Faust accused. "You could have been very badly hurt. If I had come but five minutes later -"

"Nah, I knew you'd come, Faustus."

"That is not the point. And now this deal!"

Mephisto hardly heard what he was saying. Not ten minutes ago, he had experienced desperation. The feeling had been extreme; he was still experiencing its after-effects. He marveled at it; luxuriated in it. Laughter buoying his chest, he beheld Dr. Faust like a sportsman recognizing a new rival. "But you're alright, aren't you? How did you know?"

The doctor met his gaze with wariness and a little defiance, starlight settling around his hair. "While I was dead," said Dr. Faust, "I had a dream."

Maybe Mephisto's physical form was at a loss when it came to interpreting the recent panic of his spirit, and maybe it was just protesting the bullet wounds he hadn't taken the time to mend. His head felt very light and his skin felt searing hot, and when he looked at Dr. Faust and thought about what he was willing to do for that man it was like a hand thrust itself into his abdomen and grabbed a handful of his guts and carefully, leisurely, teased them around. There was something exquisite in the sensation. 

Okay, he thought to himself. Okay.

"I dreamt of a wood," the doctor said. "I was standing in a hollow in the gold of late afternoon. There were branches laden with blue flowers, and there was snow, too, around the trees where the light hadn't yet penetrated. And I could see - even though it was day, I could see stars through the leaves above me. I felt a remarkable kind of relief, a great lightness all about me."

"What kind of flowers were they?" Mephisto asked. 

"I'm not sure. Perhaps geraniums. What would that mean?"

"Happiness," said the devil quietly. "And friendship. Please do continue."

"I've dreamt of this hollow before, Mephisto, but this time there was someone there. A man with blonde hair. Long, not so long as yours - perhaps to his shoulders. He wore a white dress. I had the strangest impression I'd seen him before."

Mephisto nodded slowly, as though he'd been expecting something like this for a long time. "What did she say?"

The angel had said nothing. It had stared at Faust from the center of the hollow until the doctor said, "What is your name?"

The angel appeared to find it a strange question. "That is not important," it said.

"Where am I?"

"Your true home," said the angel. "The subject of your life's yearning. The happiness you've searched for and never found. The forgotten memory you looked for in every mountain, in every star; the true reality."

"Heaven," concluded Faust.

"Yes."

"I am not supposed to be in Heaven. Tell me -"

The angel had interrupted him. "You are invited to be in Heaven," it said. "The Lord God himself requests your presence here."

"The Lord God is too late," said Faust. "I have already made another arrangement."

"You have made a deal," said the angel, "and you must hold up your end."

"I'm glad you understand," said Faust.

"However, the Lord God has paid your debt," said the angel. "You are released from your arrangement."

Faust stared, then shook his head. "How? The deal was between me and Mephistopheles." His tone hardening, he added, "The Lord does not get to interfere in our private business just so He can win His bet!"

"You owed your soul to Mephistopheles. On your behalf, the Lord God has paid him what was due."

"How?" repeated Faust. And then a supposition began to grow in his mind. 

"Yes." 

"I am not dead," said Faust.

"You are dead," said the angel. "But with these words I raise you to life again."

"The woods began to recede," Dr. Faust narrated to Mephisto, "until it was as though they were painted on a vast map full of uncharted regions, and I awoke."

Mephistopheles looked blankly out over the trees. "He didn't waste time, did He. You'll stick around for a few years before you go, won't you?"

"Don't be ridiculous. I certainly won't be taking Him up on His offer," said Faust.

The devil looked at him sharply.

"It's laughable," said Faust, "the lengths everyone goes to. The Church wants me to repent of my time with you. God himself wants to buy me off you, but I do not belong to God. My soul is not a good to be bargained for. I gave it to you, and it will remain with you for eternity."

Mephisto's eyes widened. His hand twitched in a strange way. He still didn't say anything.

"God thinks He knows what I want. God knows nothing. My determination is unchanged, Mephisto. I will go to Hell."

When the devil spoke, his voice was very soft. "You wouldn't like it there, Faustus," he said.

"Well, I didn't imagine it would be butterflies and roses," said Faust.

"I'm not kidding. I won't have you in my Circle."

Faust looked away, blinking rapidly. "He damned your kind to madness. Just once, He should lose a bet."

"Then don't go dying again," said Mephisto definitely.

Faust shook his head and didn't answer.

"Besides, I bet on the patheticness of mankind," said Mephisto. "I never really wanted to win."

"You bet on me."

"Yeah, I did," said Mephisto. He grinned. "And I was right about you, too. You are pathetic. You're a complete idiot. You're self-centered, self-destructing -"

"Yes, yes, that's enough," said Faust.

"-  and I couldn't be happier that people think of me when they think of you," said Mephisto. "Once an eon I've had a friend like you. I'm getting old, Faustus. When I lose you, I'm not gonna have enough left in me to make it to the next one. You keep me sane. You keep me living. You're the heads to my tails and I wish I could tell you - Faustus, it's absolutely remarkable, I've been drained of feeling for so long, but you -"

"Stop talking," said Faust. Mephisto stopped talking.

They looked at each other in silence for a moment. Mephisto thought that Faust was about to do something, but the doctor only averted his eyes. His hands were fists. "We should go back," he said. "Your friends will be needing a ride back to Bayreuth."

Ah, thought Mephisto, so that is rejection. 

Chapter Text

When Pope Pius XI was coronated in 1922, a small group of cardinals took him to a small room under the basilica, sat him down at a small table, and told him what they had told his predecessor: that there was a demon walking the face of the Earth.

"I should think so," said the Pope.

No, the cardinals said, His Holiness did not understand. While many demons may roam the Earth as spirits, tempting and manipulating mankind, this demon took physical form and posed as a human being.

"It's hardly unheard of," said the Pope.

Perhaps, the cardinals said, they weren't making themselves clear. This demon had plays written about him. He had operas and symphonies. He was a cultural icon and, they added with distaste, in many areas he was quite beloved! He went about with his human companion making trouble, performing small miracles and telling influential Christian people who he really was. He was nothing less than a sort of anti-christ, and the cardinals were only the latest in a long line of conspirators with the primary aim of casting him back into Hell where he belonged. 

"Well," said the Pope, "I'm not sure what trouble one demon could possibly do, but if you're so concerned about it, we'd better take care of him." He asked the cardinals where the demon was now. In America, scoffed the cardinals. He played with a travelling band. "What does he play?" The cardinals weren't exactly sure, but they believed it might have been the keys.

The Pope arranged to be brought to Boston the following weekend, and with a small security detail he sat discreetly in the back of a club called Harwood's - it was a snooty, white-only club - to listen to the set. "He is playing the piano, correct?" he asked one of the cardinals. "He is very good. He seems to be enjoying himself."

"He revels in his own skill, Your Holiness."

"He looks like no demon I've ever seen. Now I know you think jazz is the Devil's music, Graham, but I've always liked it, myself. Are you quite sure -"

"Quite." The cardinal's hand moved to the briefcase, where he had a file full of evidence. "If you would like to review -"

"No, no, that won't be necessary. Shall I do it here?"

"No!" Graham hadn't meant to speak so loudly, and he looked around to see if anyone had noticed. He continued in a softer tone, "His companion is here. We must wait to catch him alone."

"Oh, really? Which one is he?"

Graham pointed out the trumpetist, who was taking a mournful solo. "He would not think twice about attacking us among civilians. He is many centuries old and all morals have fled him."

"Well, alright then." The Pope and his contingent stayed to the end of the set, then filed around the back of the club, where they concealed themselves behind a mud-splattered Model T. Fifteen minutes later, the trumpetist emerged, wearing a fedora, with a black dog at his heels. The trumpetist was complaining to the dog and looking up at the overcast sky.

"Now!" hissed the cardinal.

"But where is he?"

"The dog! He's the dog!"

The Pope shrugged and intercised the dog. The animal froze, bristling, and looked around wildly. The trumpetist bent over it in concern. "Well, that's that done," Pope Pius said to Graham. "Shall we head home?"

Eight years later, Heinrich Faust was doing the dishes. 

A record was on in the living room: Tommy Dorsey's Stardust. It was a comfortable room, with a couch, an armchair, a fireplace, and a coffee table stacked with a very reasonable and restrained quantity of books. There was a rotary phone on the table as well, but it had hardly been used, because nobody ever called Faust, and Faust never called anybody. The little black dog was stretched out in front of the unlit fireplace in a good approximation of sleep.

Faust hummed along and dried the last plate. "The rain's stopped," he said over the counter to the dog. "Shall we go on our walk?"

The dog didn't stir. "Don't ignore me," said Faust, hanging up the dishtowel neatly. He removed the needle from the record and placed Tommy Dorsey back in his sheath. "I'll go without you."

The dog made a noise of displeasure and got up, performing an exaggerated series of stretches. Faust retrieved his coat from its hook and held the door open for the dog to trot out. He had repainted the door (red) earlier that week because one of the neighborhood kids had scrawled GO HOME KRAUT on it while Faust was at the grocery store. 

It was the first warm night of the year. The April air was lush and earthy from the rain and the uneven bricks of the sidewalk shone like glass in the lamplight. Faust looked up at the stars to see if they'd reacquired any mystery since their last trip around the globe and found they had not. Folding his coat over his arm, he set off with the dog down the hill.

He had been fortunate, that night in Boston eight years earlier. Or maybe his pride and insecurity had finally paid off: Around the turn of the century he'd opened accounts with several banks in several countries, in which he kept several hundred thousand dollars for emergencies. And this had been enough to buy outright a pretty little green house on Hope Street in the small and picturesque city of Providence, which was where he lived now.

On Wednesdays and Thursdays he played trumpet with a band downtown - Harwood had gotten him the gig - and on weekends he rode his bike down to the Italian District, where he sang at a club. He mostly did romantic crooner ballades with names like 'The Moonlight, the Danube, and You', and he had such a restrained, subtle way of playing to the audience that several circles of Providence girls considered him a bit of a heartthrob. So did a small group of boys from the Buenos Aires Club a block and a half down the road. 

The city of Providence - Faust was inclined to find the name ironic, though he wasn't sure in which direction - was divided by a canal. Downtown lay on one side, with its single park, its single street of high bank buildings and its clean little labyrinth of hotels, restaurants and theaters. On the other side of the water, across a flower-pot stone bridge, the ground rose steeply. Brown University, one of the lesser known Ivies and known for its abysmal sports performance, lay atop the hill. Forming the campus's border on the far side, Hope Street ran - in one direction it led down to the East Bay and in the other it curved around the far side of the hill into shady, trick-or-treat New England suburbs, neighborhood after neighborhood of broad oak trees and many-gabled, variously-colored houses that all seemed to have been built by different architects.

Faust and the dog crossed Thayer, the campus street with shops where students tended to loiter - still lively despite the hour. They passed a darkened coffee shop on the corner which Faust had once frequented until he had been piqued by a woman's comment on the book he'd been reading about ancient Greek religion. Religion, the woman had claimed, was a modern phenomenon and thus the study of ancient religions was a false discipline. Faust had been drawn into a very animated conversation which soon encompassed the question of history as a whole. What are we really studying - the stranger, who turned out to be a professor at the adjoining women's college, wanted to know - when we make a subject of the past? Is it a single thing that we seek to reconstruct? Is it an infinite overlaying of individual experiences that we attempt to connect and organize in new and unforeseen ways? Or does the historical discipline simply arise from a duty to prove our ideas and concepts have origins, just like any other created thing? Faust felt as engaged and interested as he had in a very long time - he found himself raising his voice and almost leaping to his feet in his eagerness to put forward a relevant point - and he was very pleased when the professor wanted to meet again later in the week to discuss things further. Then she had paused the conversation to laugh at her own impoliteness and ask him what she called 'the usual questions.' These were his name, his age, his profession, and his general backstory. Faust was caught off-guard. He couldn't think of any reasonable answer, and besides he felt such a strong unwillingness to lie to her that, paralyzed between the lie which he couldn't invent and the truth which he couldn't impart, he said nothing at all. 

Unfortunately the professor was known to frequent that particular coffee shop, so from that day forth Faust stopped going there.

At the edge of the college's Main Green, on a road ceilinged with branches and wafted with smells from the nearby dining hall, Faust passed the venerable stone church where once he'd pulled the priest from his station at the door after a service and asked him if he knew anything of intercisms and exorcisms. The priest had not. Faust had continued coming for services anyhow, because the smell of dampness and incense, and the ceiling over the altar painted deep navy and spangled with stars, reminded him of Heidelberg.

Half-way down the hill by the iron campus gates stood the grand old university library. Faust had taken to reading there often. It had been over four hundred years since he'd sworn off the books, and he'd thought he might as well give it another go. After all, scholarship had changed with the centuries just as he had - if not more. He caught himself up on literature and philosophy, and then he plunged into the piles of essays, articles, and research papers that the institution and its sisters had been churning out. The university housed scholarship from around the world, including one article about the philosophy of language that Faust could not read because it was in Sanskrit. Faust had acquired over ten languages in the last four centuries, but Sanskrit was not one of them. He decided that, in order to read the article, he would spend the next six months learning Sanskrit.

This endeavor, of course, really had nothing to do with Faust's interest in the philosophy of language. Alone in a strange city, Faust had made a satisfying life for himself the only way he knew how: acquiring skills. The more skills he possessed, the more formidable and powerful a person he felt he became. Sanskrit was only one of many - he had recently been practicing a variety of dances and learning to cook. He would have dared anyone to think of a better advantage to near-immortality.

A ratty poster clung to a lamppost behind the dining hall. MISSING DOG, it said. A skillful ink drawing below. ANSWERS TO PRESTO. HIGHLY INTELLIGENT. LIKES JAZZ. Faust had forgotten this flyer. He'd taken the others down when the dog had shown up on the porch a month later, a bit skinnier but unharmed, smelling strongly of the woods. The Blackstone Woods were on the far side of town, through the suburbs to the river. An abandoned train bridge stood there, a drawbridge frozen with its arm perpetually raised above the water as though in a mad excess of generosity. The ghost bridge was spoken of fondly by the poor folk who lived along the river and the neighborhood baseball team had it drawn on their hats. Faust never found out where Presto had been, but he had an odd image of the dog sitting on the arm of the ghost bridge, staring into the water.

Faust and the dog turned onto the Main Green. The quad was criss-crossed by paths through venerable old trees and periodic gold circles of lantern light. "There's an organ concert tomorrow night," Faust said to the dog, looking up at the tall stone hall, "shall we go? Although it might just be for students," he mused. Then he realized the dog had stopped and was shaking something awful. "What is it?"

The dog clawed at himself with his back legs and shook his head vigorously.

Faust had the horrible, sick feeling that right then and there, with absolutely no warning, a period of his life had ended and could never be returned to. 

He kneeled beside the dog in the middle of the quadrangle, who lay down, still shaking, and at last fell limp onto the grass. 

That's it, he thought. It's over. 

The quadrangle was suddenly the epicenter of a small hurricane. The air pushed this way and that and spun in joyous circles. The leaves turned yellow on all the trees. It started to snow.

Then all these phenomena ceased, as suddenly as they'd begun, and Faust felt the minute, almost imperceptible pressure on his chest that meant a devil in his true form was enveloping him, overlaying him, like the most intimate of embraces.

The pressure lifted; the lifeless dog twitched - then disappeared altogether, pulled between dimensions. With a shudder, nothing like his usual easy manifestations, a human man appeared in the dog's place, stark naked and trembling, curled in the fetal position.

Faust bent over him, and hardly aware of himself, he combed fingers through the devil's hair. "Hey," he murmured. "Hey. It's alright."

The devil's stare was empty. He looked blankly at Faust, then past him, as if language was beyond him.

"It's been eight years," Faust told him. "You can take your time."

Mephisto rolled over onto his back and stared at the sky.

"Are you okay?"

Long pause. Then the devil weakly formed his hand into a thumbs-up and raised it into the air.

A student on a midnight walk back from the library hesitated at a distance, trying to discern whether the two men on the ground needed help or privacy. "Fuck off," Faust yelled at them.

Mephisto patted his arm fondly.

About five minutes passed. Then the devil blinked hard, scrunched up his face, took a deep breath, and said, "That sucked."

Faust couldn't think of anything to say, so he just said, "Mephisto."

"That really sucked." He tried to sit up and lost the strength half-way. Faust put his arm around his bare back and helped him up, shocked at the warmth of his skin. It was a conductive heat; it traveled up the doctor's arm, fanned through his chest, and lodged hotly in his gut. "Eight years?"

Faust nodded.

Mephisto turned to him with a lopsided grin. "We have a house."

"Can you walk?" 

"I think so." He got shakily to his feet, Faust supporting him. They walked slowly the four blocks home.

He lay the weakened devil down on the bed and took the chair at the side of the room, where he rested his chin on tightly folded hands, foot tapping rapidly, and contemplated the situation.

In his other form, the devil had lain beside him every night for eight years, curled tail-over-nose at the foot of the bed. But now he had hands, and him being there meant something different. Now he had smooth skin and bare shoulders and a human mouth that Faust still remembered the touch of after three hundred years.

"What do you see, Faustus?" said Mephisto, watching him knowingly. Too knowingly.

"God, I hate you," Faust said. 

And without even taking his clothes off, he fucked him there on the bed.

When it was all over he buttoned his pants up, went back to the chair, and buried his face in his hands.

The Buenos Aires Club was having a grand ball.

Heinrich Faust arrived late, after some deliberation, in a grey three-piece with a small white carnation in his button-hole. He left his coat in the cigarette-hazy cloakroom, gave a wary nod to the bouncer, and slipped into the room in starched shirt-sleeves. From the edge of the room he surveyed the proceedings - a rambunctious crowd of forty-some men and a few pairs of women, doubled by the gold mirrored ceiling. Although, complicating that count, Faust noticed with distaste, was the fact that many of the men were dressed as women and a number of the women were dressed as men. 

Faust had been inside a few of these establishments in his time. He never felt at ease in them. He was anxious today too, but overriding the tenseness he felt the potential for a very good mood. He crossed his arms and tapped his fingers and was wondering whether he should order himself a drink from the speakeasy downstairs when a voice from behind him said, "Look at that. You really did come."

"Of course I came." Faust turned. The devil was wearing a black pinstriped suit. He also had a carnation, though his was red. "That coat suits you very well."

"Gee, thanks. You look -" Mephisto's eyes fell on the white flower and he stopped.

"I was just going to get something to drink, would you like anything?"

"Yeah, sure," said Mephisto, still staring. "Are we still doing the -"

"What, breaking the law? Yes." The walked down dingy stairs. "You seem quite recovered, do you feel you are?"

"You’re being nice. Why are you being nice, Faustus?"

"I don't know what you mean," lied Faust primly. "Are we or are we not friends?"

"You tell me," the devil said.

Mephisto's suspicion was warranted. For the last week, Faust had to admit, he'd been a bit hard on him. After he had - well - alright, let's not beat around the bush, after he had railed him that night, a strange shame had overtaken him. He'd lost control, yes, he regretted it, yes, but there was also a disproportionate sensation of dirtiness - of feeling sullied, somehow, degraded. "I'm sorry about what happened," he'd been mature enough to say (well, one would hope, at four hundred sixty-seven) the next morning. But then the devil had said, a needling exasperation in his voice, "Sorry? You're sorry?"

"I took advantage," said Faust. "I wouldn't have done it to anyone else." The devil raised his eyebrows at this, so Faust clarified bluntly, "You're the only person whose feelings I'm not careful of."*

(*You wanted this, didn't you? he had breathed raggedly into the devil's ear, pressing him into the mattress. You wanted this.)

"Oh, if that's all," said the devil, with just enough incredulity that Faust lost control once more. "Don't play the fool with me," he'd snapped. "You're an immortal being who no longer reacts to pain because you tortured yourself too much in the twelfth century. Stop pretending to be human."*

(*Mephisto, human. Now that was a thought. Mephisto powerless, bewildered, afraid. Faust would have him in every room. He would take him over every piece of furniture.)

His nerves had been raw the whole day. At a nearby diner, waiting to order lunch, Mephisto made a comment about wanting to be introduced to people and Faust had to tell him there was no one to be introduced to. "You mean," Mephisto had exclaimed, "you've been here eight years and you haven't made a single friend?"

"I don't want to hear it," said Faust, a bit too sharply. "You know."

"People will surprise you," said the devil. "And you need surprises."

"Well people don't need my surprises. You think a real friendship is honesty? A real friendship is having the integrity to keep others out of your own shit."

"Some people can handle it," said Mephisto mildly.

"Well, you know what, I don't care!" yelled Faust. Several diners turned to look, and that only aggravated him more. "I'm not interested! There's not a human being alive that doesn't bore me. Who can I relate to? You?"

And Mephisto had taken his hand suddenly across the diner table. He had literally reached past the ketchup and salt shaker and taken his hand. Faust could feel the touch of it still.  "You have to pretend," he'd said. "Trust that you need it, even if you don't want it."

Faust had snatched his hand away - the presumption of it! "You pretend," he said, viciously. "You're very good at it. As for me, I cannot lie to myself and others in order to make them useful to me."

"Faustus," said Mephisto, uncharacteristically earnest, "we're the same."

"You made us the same," spat Faust with disgust. "You made me like you. You were alone in your own kind of loneliness, so you created me."

Mephistopheles dropped the act. "Very good, doctor," he said, black eyes glittering, a lord of Hell once more. "You've told me something about myself. And now I will tell you something about you." He leaned across the table, voice very low, a small smile on his lips. "You're afraid of changing as the world changes. You have to stay the same or you betray yourself in a thousand small deaths. You have to cling to the promises you made yourself and make sure you never need me. And fulfilling those promises gives you a sense of control. Denying yourself gives you a sense of power. That is what I know about you.”

Faust was quiet for a long time. Then he said, softly, "Need you? Of course I need you. I bought this house with your money. I am living this life by your hand. You declined to have my soul - what, now you want my heart? Damn you. I mean that. Search your damned, empty little soul and see if you can find it within yourself to let me remain in possession of the only thing I have left."

And thus the week had begun.

Today, however, Faust had made a decision. He'd thought things over and the sick weight on his chest had slid off gradually, and when Mephisto had said, "I'm going to a party tonight," Faust had said, "I'll come with you." And here he was now.

Mephisto was catching up with some friends he'd made that week - if nothing else, the devil certainly was sociable - and Faust was loitering by the bar. "Your boyfriend's gorgeous," said the barkeep, sounding jealous.

"Oh, he's not my boyfriend," said Faust, dismissive. "He's a lord of Hell that I seduced."

"Right, of course," said the man. "How long have you guys been - seducing?"

"About four hundred years," said Faust.

Across the floor, a guy named Jan was introducing Mephisto as a 'ten thousand year old little fucker' to a couple named Lila and Francisca. 

"Oh yeah? You're old as dirt, huh? Give us some wisdom."

"Ok - everything is made up."

"Like what?"

"I don't know, name a thing."

"Family."

"Made up. Name another thing."

"Women," said Lila.

"Made up. Oh my god, I sound like Faustus." 

Mephisto looked up to see where the doctor had gotten off to, anyway, and saw Faust snogging the bartender. His jaw dropped.

The doctor glanced over and saw him looking. After a minute he took leave of his partner and walked over. "Are you quite alright," he asked, scathing.

"Me? Yeah. Totally alright," said the devil, staring wide-eyed over Faust's shoulder. "Absolutely - fine, yeah, doing great."

"Get a fucking comedy show, Mephisto," said Faust. "I'm not your fucking audience." And he turned around and stalked off, smiling to himself.

"What did I do?" Mephisto watched him go with exaggerated injury. "Did you see that?" he asked Lila. "You see how he hurts me?"

Faust, meanwhile, had spotted a couple doing the Carolina shag incorrectly and was attempting to demonstrate. "No, no," he exclaimed, gesticulating at the woman's feet, "step back first, then twist."

"Like this."

"No. Like this. Mephisto!" he called. "Come here. Do the shag with me."

"The - Oh! You mean the -" The devil shuffled his feet. Faust joined him. A few seconds later they were performing a very elaborate routine and a small crowd gathered to watch them. “We had a double act in Chicago,” said Faust, pleased, as the audience applauded.

The guests demanded a demonstration. So Faust and Mephisto sang Fisher's 'Chicago,' trading the parts and doing a bit of softshoe, while Francisca accompanied them on the jangly old upright.

After the acclaim died down, Mephisto discovered Faust had stolen away from the floor. He found him out back, smoking a cigarette underneath a sputtering streetlight. Leaning against the brick beside him, the devil looked out across the parking lot.

"I assume I don't need to tell you," Mephisto said after a long silence, "what this is doing to me."

"And I thought I made it perfectly clear," said Faust, "that I don't want to hear it."

Another long pause. The splatter of a car driving through a puddle around the corner. The distant bark of a dog.

Mephisto turned to look at him. "I'm baffled, Faust," he said frankly. "I'm at a loss. What do you want from me?"

"Nothing," said Faust.

"You want to deny yourself," the devil translated, "and you want it to hurt me."

"Hurt you?" said Faust, casually. "I want to destroy you."

Quiet. A gust of wind through the oak tree on the corner.

"Alright," said the devil at last. "I'll play your game. I'll play anything; God knows I can't afford to pick and choose. But I want you to know, Faustus, that I -"

"I'm moving back to Germany," said Faust.

"What?"

"You've been gone for eight years," said the doctor seriously, "so I imagine you don't know -"

"I know. Oh, Faustus - no -"

"No? What do you mean, no?"

"It's - a mess over there, Faustus, trust me, you don't want to get involved -"

"Don't I? Germany is in trouble - Germany is dying - and I shouldn't get involved? Goddamn it, Mephisto, this is my country!"

Mephisto looked at him bleakly, a bad feeling descending on him like a fog. He thought briefly of the little green house on Hope Street, and then he let it fall away, another bit of debris in the rubble heap that was his past. "Alright," he said. "We'll go."

The year was 1939.

He wore a five-pointed red star on his chest. She bent over him and carefully, with short, fine strokes, painted beside it a six-pointed yellow star. Then, on a whim, he asked for the paintbrush and next to the yellow star on her shirt he painted a red one.

When it was done they both sat back and admired their handiwork. "I feel like that meant something. Did that mean something?" he said.

She shrugged and put away the paint. "A star's a star, maybe."

"I don't think I can wear this," said Mephisto. "I mean, I don't think I've earned it. You know who my people are, right? Very much not the chosen people of God."

Hannah, apparently not listening, perused the newspaper.

"The unchosen people of God, maybe. The rejected, exiled, cursed people of God."

Hannah put a hand on his shoulder as though about to break bad news. "That's a very Jewish thing to say. Shall we walk to the cafe?"

"Yeah, yeah, fine."

As they strolled through Parisian alleys Hannah said, "Martin's in town this week, he wants to meet up."

"You don't sound too happy about it."

"You know him, right? Heidegger?"

"I think he was there when you and I first met, yeah."

"So you know he's a god-damned Nazi."

Mephisto sighed, a bit longingly.

"Go on, Ev, talk me out of it."

"What is it about pure, absolute evil," said the devil, "that's so -"

" - incredibly hot?"

"So hot. It's like, sure, in that uniform you can evaporate me any day."

"Any day."

"Let's, um - not tell Walter about this."
"No, no, we won't tell Walter."

Walter was waiting for them at the cafe, a strong cup of coffee in hand. He ordered them each a drink and a piece of cake and settled back in his armchair. "'Our relationship to Germany,'" said Walter, "'is one of unrequited love. Let us be manly enough at last to tear the beloved out of our hearts.'"

"Speak for yourself," said Hannah. 

"Yeah, that's reductive, isn't it, Walter?" said Mephisto.

"Very reductive," agreed Hannah, lighting a cigarette.

"I never said it wasn't," said Walter, eyebrows raised. "That was Moritz Goldstein, 'The German-Jewish Parnassus.'"

Hannah turned to Mephisto: "Do you know about Walter's - plan with the quotes?"

"I collect quotes," said Walter.

"Yes, I know you collect quotes," said Mephisto.

"Pearls among the barnacled wreckage of history."

"An essay entirely made out of quotes," said Hannah. "That's his plan."

"Like some kind of fucked-up mosaic," said Walter.

"Where does Goldstein want us to go, anyhow," Hannah said, "Palestine?"

"Well. Let us see how he continues. 'I have stated what we must want to do; I have also stated why we cannot want it. My intention was to point up the problem. It is not my fault that I know of no solution.'"

The server came. "Cake for the philosophers," he said.

"We're not philosophers," said Hannah in French. "I'm a political theorist, he's the devil, and he's - what are you, Walter?"

"A book collector," said Walter. Hannah blew smoke at him.

"Cake for the book collector," said the server without batting an eyelid, placing a slice of walnut torte on the table.

"Cake for the exiles," said Walter in German when he'd gone.

"Speaking of, have you reconsidered about America?"

"You're always talking about America. What would I do in America? Stroll around Hollywood with Adorno? He doesn't even like me," said Walter. Carefully sown into the inside of his jacket was a little bottle of pills. In less than a year France would fall to the Third Reich and Walter Benjamin, a day late to the Spanish border, his visa declined, would break the bottle open and down them all.

Mephisto stood up suddenly. "Shit, it's later than I thought."

"You're going? So soon?"

"Sorry. I'm expected at this Nazi party."

Walter smiled drily. "Dark times call for dark jokes."

"Yeah, that wasn't a joke. I'll see you Wednesday, yeah?"

The Teutoburger Wald is beautiful in spring.

Great shelves of stone rise out of the mulch under the oaks. Smooth and bulbous, they look like sleeping gods, and indeed every outcropping has a name and a myth: the Witches' Kitchen; Blücher's Cliffs; Heathens' Temple. Dirt roads are lined with ancient, lichen-covered walls, winding through mountain meadows and copses of pines where once Johannes Brahms had liked to wander. Above them all along the ridge runs Hermann's Path. Two thousand years ago, when the Romans invaded Germany, they only got as far as the Teutoburgs - there among the hills they were beaten back by Hermann and his valiant crew. The Wald never did come under Roman rule. It remained free: free, the rolling meadows down into the valley; free, the massive smooth trunks of the oaks; free, the damp caves and their ancient buried bones.

But now - the deer look up from the briar, ears swiveling. The foxes' wet noses twitch as they paw through the leaves. Something is in the air. A flock of ravens takes wing. From above, they see it - a whip of smoke at the base of the hill.

Today, the Teutoburg Forest only means one thing. It means shelter for a legion of British troops. And that means it has to go.

A single man is walking along Hermann's Path. His step is purposeful, steady; his advance is like fate. In his wake, holly bushes and pine saplings wither into fire.

Soldiers shoot at him from down the hill. He throws a hand carelessly in their direction and death meets them, swiftly. He strides on.

From afar, the officers see him coming and prepare their defenses. They recognize the crisp lines of his black uniform; the recognize the gleaming red of his armband. They don't know why they feel cold, all at once, deep within their hearts. He is only one man. 

"Stop there," yells an officer. He doesn't stop. "Fire!" He shakes the bullets off and keeps coming.

Into the camp he strides; pausing only to look about him, he walks over to the man in charge. "Lieutenant," he says, "on behalf of the Third Reich I request your surrender."

"On behalf of the free world," says the Lieutenant, "I request that you stick your Reich up your arse."

"I'd be careful, if I were you," says the Nazi, a faint smile touching his lips. "You don't know who you're talking to."

"Oh yeah? Who am I talking to?"

In response, the man flicks his wrist. Every tent in the camp bursts into flames. 

"I am Doctor Heinrich Faust," he declaims, as the soldiers scream, as the forest burns. "And I command the forces of Hell for the salvation of Germany."

The fire closes around him until there is nothing but a dull roar, the sound of oblivion.

He snaps his fingers. "Appear to me."

The devil slips through dimensions into physical form, head slightly bowed, eyes empty, silent and waiting. Faust steps close to him and grabs his arm roughly. "Take us up."

They rise through thrashing tails of flame until, through the smoke, Faust can see the velvet carpet of the sky.

"Very good," he says, his tone mocking. "Now for your reward."

He rips the stars off the devil's chest and lets them fall. Then he seizes him by the collar and kisses him violently, with all the intimacy of utter loathing. As the forest burns below them, Faust kisses Mephistopheles like he hates him.

The red and yellow stars flutter into the fire and dissolve into ash. The dying forest exhales them into the star-filled night.

"We need to talk," said Mephisto.

"Oh," said Faust, saccharine and smug, "you think we need to talk? That's odd, Mephistopheles, because I'm pretty sure we don't, in fact, need to talk at all."

"Wow, that's my name," said Mephisto. "That's - yep, that's all the syllables."

"So now that we've resolved that little problem, can I pour you a cup of tea?"

"I'm withdrawing my support," said Mephisto.

Faust stared. Then, very slowly, he put down the kettle. "You're what?" he said quietly.

"I'm getting out, Faustus. I'm sorry."

"You cannot," said Faust, shock giving way to fury. "What? You cannot. You'd abandon this country -"

"I never did it for Germany," said Mephisto. "I did it for you. I sold myself to your party because I -"

"Don't say it," said Faust "Do not say those words. You don't know what those words mean."

"There's something you need to see," said the devil. "I want to take you somewhere and show you something."

"There's nothing I need to see." Faust turned away, angry beyond words.

"I challenge you, Faustus. I challenge you to see it."

The doctor was quiet for a very long time. Then, at last, after what seemed like several minutes, he said, "Show me."

Mephisto took him somewhere. Then somewhere else. Then somewhere else.

Gradually, Faust's expression changed. The defensive defiance melted off his face and he grew very pale. 

"This is a betrayal," he whispered.

"Do you understand?" the devil asked.

"How could they do this? What have they done?" He stared dully into the sick grey smoke. "This is the end of us."

"I know," said Mephistopheles.

"How long has this been happening?"

"Years."

"How many people?"

"Millions."

"This is suicide," Faust breathed. 

"I know."

"How could you not tell me?"

"Oh, Faustus, I thought you knew. I thought you all knew."

He hadn't wanted to know. He let anger again kindle in his chest. He hoped the heat of it would burn away the shame. "Take me to Berlin," he said.

Later that night Heinrich Faust walked like a specter through the door of his house in Bayreuth, a black and empty silhouette. His uniform was splattered with blood. "Get my bags," he said. "We're leaving."

They left Germany that night. They left it behind, that ravaged, decomposing, self-cannibalizing landscape. They left it to eat out its own heart.

Some day in the future sanity would return to the country's ruins. But Dr. Heinrich Faust never did.

Chapter Text

I am an American teaching at a German high school. 'What's the best thing about America?' the kids will sometimes ask. 'It's the National Parks,' I say. Of course it's the National Parks. 

Turn on the song 'Live and Die' by the Avett Brothers. And imagine a car. 

It's an El Dorado, 1959. Black. Kind of like the Supernatural impala, but cooler. A gleaming silver grill as bright as the backsplash of a diner. Slim 'V' on the hood. Streamlined smooth sides tapering back to fins like the body of a rocket. She's fucking fast. You can see your reflection in her. When the engine idles, all of her hums, waiting, vibrating. What glam rock band did not, at least once in their corpus, sexualize a car? And it might as well have been this car - the machine of a dream - reach down and ease the seat back - we're our way to the promised land. 

This car doesn't have a single dent. Its engine is meticulously cared for. There's a stack of cassettes in the center console - some albums (Highway to Hell, Best of Aerosmith), some compilations (Utah 1976, Colorado 1983). There's dust from all 50 states on its undercarriage. It's left streaks of rubber on the long desert roads of Nevada, on the covered bridges of the Appalachians, on the mountain switchbacks of Idaho's silver country. It's idled in the dirt of ghost towns; it's melted soft snow with the warmth of its hood; it's grown searing hot under a Death Valley sun.

Life was a flash of new images between stretches of open road. A succession of dark, over-air-conditioned motel rooms looking out onto brightly lit parking lots; pastel diners playing country music and log-walled restaurants with taxidermy mounted on the walls; the world's widest tree or America's oldest lighthouse; herds of buffalo; herds of caribou; a solitary moose at the edge of a marshy lake. And then there was the road. Eighty, ninety - a hundred miles an hour, on a good day, the music turned as loud as it will go. Drums, electric guitars, falsetto vocals screaming from the speakers like a whoop of freedom, like pure, wild, simple joy. 

As a man who cannot hear may speak louder than he intends to, so would Mephistopheles crank the volume; so would he roll down the windows; so would he drum on the steering wheel and throw out his arms wide and sing along.

There were quiet nights pulled off to the side of the road, the dashboard fogging up. There was leaping off boulders into frigid mountain rivers. There was the growing collection of polaroids in the glovebox. There were campfires and oceans of stars that the devil would follow Faustus's gaze to. There were two guitars and a six pack of beer in the trunk. There was the never stopping, the pressing forward to new images that began to feel, after a while, like a running away.

"And then he left," said Mephistopheles.

"Why'd he go?" asked Bennet. They were on the floor of her dorm room in the Sun and Moon. Bennet was painting her nails. 

"I don't know," said Mephisto, staring forlornly at the ceiling. "We had a bit of a fight. Not the first time."

"When was this?"

"'89, I think."

Evgeny had this bit where he pretended to be immortal. Bennet had this bit where she pretended to believe him. "Honey," she said, "you need to let him go."

"No I don't," said Mephisto, in his whiney little gay boy era.

"What did he say? What exactly?"

"It was along the lines of, 'If you stay out of my life, I promise not to kill myself.'"

"Oh, hon. You need to let him go."

"No, no, you don't understand how it is with us." He rolled over onto his stomach, propped his chin in his hands, and looked at Bennet pleadingly. "We're fucking masochists, Ben, we're always doing this to each other."

"Is that what Faustus would say if I asked him?"

"Oh, don't listen to Faustus. Everything Faustus does has like fifteen layers of reverse psychology. And denial."

"Who owns who, at this point? Where are you at with your contract?"

Mephisto pulled out his phone and dialed a number. "Hey, Faustus, we were just wondering, do I own your soul or do you own my soul? I forget."

Faustus hung up.

"He doesn't know," said Mephisto.

The Sun and Moon was a society in Providence. Technically, it was affiliated with the university and it was housed in a university building - an old brick house on the north end of campus under an oak tree. Only students lived there. They were self-governing, however, and they had their secrets.

Mephisto had wandered in for karaoke night in the spring of 2011, about two years earlier. He had sung 'Obsessed With You' and 'The Cult of Dionysus' by the Orion Experience, taking the low part while a blue-haired kid with a shoulder tattoo like a kraken tentacle took the high part. Their name had been Lydia. They'd shown pizzazz. And an embarrassing amount of self-confidence.  Mephisto liked them. He'd kept an ear open for the society's events, and eventually he started visiting without any reason at all. By the time the Sun and Moon realized that Evgeny de Baratrum was not, as they had assumed, a graduate student - nor did he actually live in Providence - nor was he gainfully employed at all - they liked him too much to let him go. 

Since Evgeny looked, if we're being honest, at least thirty and probably more like forty, this was, to be sure, an uncomfortable situation. And there's exactly one word that can explain it. The word is AIDS. The word is the vast majority of queer people having been killed off in an epidemic the government turned a blind eye to. The word is older queer people being in very high demand from younger queer people in a world that wanted them to believe they were a fad, a novel phenomenon. Evgeny de Baratrum was easy-going and unjudgmental, sure. But he also wore a crop top and tight jeans. He wore a leather jacket with glitter on it and a quantity of colorful sown-on patches. He wore rings. He wore his long hair with the front part clipped back untidily. He held his wrist loosely and gestured broadly. He lounged on the couch like a caricature of a Romantic poet and complained incessantly about his tragic gay love affair. And the Sun and Moon latched on to him like orphans to a father figure. 

A word about the Sun and Moon. Rarely do you find a physical space strung so tightly with volatile energy. Every member felt themselves to be unusual - ranging from 'weirdo' to 'god' - and every member knew the shame of dampening one's weirdness to seem more palatable and comprehensible to others. Every member was so fucking grateful to be there in that brick house, where oddness so often meant genius, meant pushing at the boundaries of the thinkable, meant carving out new ways of existing from the world's streamlined categories of thought. That was why the Sun and Moon never hazed its members. They were already trauma-bonded; from the moment they unfolded the longings of their soul in that warmly lit bean-bag lounge they were complicit in something transgressive and euphoric; they held each others secrets in their mouths. People who didn't understand took one look at the naked strangeness and walked the other way. People who did understand asked quietly for entry, afraid to beg but willing to do it. Rarely was someone turned away.

It was a place of dangerous angst, of every emotion felt to the fullest, of an almost embarrassing earnestness; of an ironic distance from having both too much and too little self-knowledge, and knowing it. Mephisto, who hardly ever felt anything at all, hung around in the hopes that he'd pick up a vicarious emotion or two. He was never a member - his secrets were not the sort to be shared with undergraduates. He never knew the meetings they had about him, arguing vehemently in the candlelight.

"What do you guys believe in?" asked Martin one evening, sitting with some folks around the big table by the kitchen.

Evgeny ate a dining hall fry. "That's kind of a new thing, isn't it, 'believing in' something?"

Martin frowned, disapproving. "How do you mean?"

"You'd never have heard that kind of question a couple hundred years ago. There was the world you lived in. That was it."

"Believing in something," said Lydia over their computer, "implies not believing as a valid option. Like saying you're religious implies that other people aren't, and that at least on some level it's a choice you make. And that's only possible in this climate where - metaphysical, where universalizing claims about the world just aren't being made. Or at least they don't carry any real authority. Any more."

"I dunno," said Bennet, sliding into the conversation, "there's always been debate about stuff, hasn't there, there's always been people taking a stand -"

"It's the 'in', though, believing 'in' something, it's like, people used to all share the same values and take them for granted. And we can't do that any more." Lydia was gaining steam. "There's a level of shame around belief, now, because belief is a universalizing thing, and we don't live in a universalized world any more. At least, there's a sort of moral obligation to realize that there are many different worlds, different discourses -"

"But -"

"- and so on some level it will always seem naive to choose one."

"But we're not unbiased beings, we live in our own discourses, we have to, it's no use pretending we can be objective about things -"

"No," said Lydia, "hence the new question. What do you believe in? What things do you consciously choose to value, knowing other people value them differently?"

"Well, what things do you value. Period. It's not a choice, necessarily, it's just, you know - self-awareness."

"But also like, cultural literacy."

"Guys," exclaimed Martin, "it's a simple question! Jesus Christ! You're not two hundred years old, are you, Ev? So what do you believe in?"

"Rock 'n' roll," said Ev seriously, putting his feet up. "Get your fucking shoes off the table," said Lydia.

"Do you guys believe in love?" asked Martin.

"Yes," said Bennet and Evgeny.

"What kind?" asked Lydia shrewdly.

"Doesn't matter," said Ev.

"Yes it -"

The devil headed off the monologue. "I didn't say I believed it existed. I said it's something I irrationally choose to value, right? There's a landmark on, like, the map of my life, and it's labelled 'love', and who the hell knows why or who named it or what's actually there."

"Hear, hear," said Martin.

"Oh, was that good? I've been trying out metaphors."

"For love, or like -"

"Oh, no, in general. Never used to use 'em."

"It's like, language is a compromise, right?" said Bennet. "The more abstract a word gets, the more everyone's own usage differs. We can deconstruct them, find more precise terms, but meanwhile the first word develops like its own personality and runs around like a mythic character and, I dunno, gets stories told about it."

"That's not where I thought that was going," said Lydia.

"I dunno, I'm just bullshitting. Anyone want kahlua in their cider?"

"Yes please. Oh my god. New project. An urban mythology. Of abstract concepts."

"Alright, I get it!" interrupted Martin, pissed. "It wasn't an intellectual question!"

"No, but we're very intellectual people, Martin, so you should have known this would happen," said Lydia.

"No, Martin, you were just asking if we'd had any encounters with the mythic character known as love," said Bennet. 

"You guys need to stop enabling me," said Lydia. "I am literally becoming so insufferable."

"I think love is an action," said Martin, thoughtfully. 

"I think it's an umbrella term for an enormous number of actions, feelings, physical-slash-psychological symptoms, social practices, and ideals," said Bennet.

"I think it's a fat cherub with a bow and arrow," said Lydia. "Prove me wrong. Fucking prove me wrong."

"Love is a knife," said Heinrich Faust.

He leaned over the table and put his fist over his heart like he was grasping a hilt. "Love is a knife thrust into your chest. Tell me, what must one never, never do with a knife in one's chest?"

"Pull it out, I suppose," said the woman across from him.

Heinrich sat back with grim satisfaction. "So what is left to do?"

"I don't know."

"Return the blow. And you both go down together. Oh, Lorelei. You do not want to play the game of love with me."

Lorelei Becker was looking mortified. "I'm so sorry."

He took a sip of his coffee. Here he was, in the same Providence coffee shop he had forsworn almost a hundred years ago. It was unrecognizable, of course. It was a Starbucks now. But he would take what continuity he could get. 

A car passed with bright headlights through the rain, and in the following darkness he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the foggy window. He looked away. 

"I am not someone you should get close to," he said. "You'd do better to leave."

She shook her head, smiling slightly despite her embarrassment. "Why, because you're a misogynistic, bigoted old man? I'll have you know that I'm a misogynistic, bigoted old woman. Maybe you ought to stay away from me."

"And if I were the devil himself?"

"I'd be delighted. I've been thinking of selling my soul."

Heinrich looked at her steadily, a sadness and an irony touching his smile. Oh, the things he could tell her. But in the way he sipped his coffee, there were the beginnings of indifference."Hell doesn't want your soul. Hell has an immigration problem."

"God, I wish that were true. Right," she said, reopening her notebook to the page they had been lesson-planning on, "sorry for hitting on you, shall we carry on?"

That evening, Mephisto was sitting in his car. The car was in a garage in Washington. The bay door was open and the cold evergreen air mixed with the workbench smell of wood and oil. "One out of three could handle it," he was saying into his phone, reclining in the passenger seat. "But we're a friend group, so it's all or nothing. Martin said to me the other day, 'I know you, but I know nothing about you. I just want you to know that you can trust us.' Which is funny, because I think -" the phone beeped, which meant he had five seconds left on the voice message - "Martin would convert to Catholicism just to hunt me down. Ok love you call me bye."

Three thousand miles away, Heinrich was sitting alone on the porch of the green house on Hope Street, wearing a sweater against the September cold. He watched his loathsome little flip phone until it stopped ringing, and then for a long time after. At last he said to it, without dialing a number, "She's like me. She would have made the deal. She'd give anything to know. To see the world in a mythic way. To see herself in a mythic way. But how can I ever tell her? How do I have that right?" Pause. "Time vanishes these days. It floats around. There's nothing to anchor it. You have to learn to lie to yourself. You have to learn to see spirits in the shadows. I don't know how you've always done it. I don't know how anyone does, anymore." Then, as if answering: "One day at a time."

Evgeny de Baratrum stepped onto the porch of the Sun and Moon, yelling something back through the door with a laugh, the last cicadas of the season singing their last songs in the arms of the oak tree, the first cold breeze of fall stirring the damp and yellowing leaves.

He didn't walk down the steps to the street. He leaned against the railing until the automatic light clicked off and then he said to the mulchiness of the air, to the promise of thundershowers, to the arc of the streetlights off the asphalt, Make yourself manifest.

A rustle of shadow in the few fallen leaves at the base of the tree. And then there was someone standing there, leaning up against the bark.  He was tall and thin and graceful, all acute angels - sharp chin, sharp nose, long pianist's fingers. Hair like black lamb's wool. Eyes like golden nebulae. He was wearing long white socks and pantaloons.

Mephisto scrutinized this apparition, then poked it with a metaphysical finger. His jaw dropped. "Limino?"

The devil blinked, slowly.

"Holy shit! I've never seen you up here before! You look gorgeous!" He ran down the steps and outstretched a hand to clasp Limino's, comrade to comrade, but Limino did not offer his hand. "Aw, don't leave me hanging. What brings you up here? How's materiality agreeing with you?"

In answer to that last one, Limino's head twitched like his whole body was an itch to be dispersed. "I have come," he said, "with a summons."

"You don't say! Things finally happening in the old motherland, huh, what's going down?"

"You," said Limino.

"Was that a pun? Was that a literal pun?"

"The council will try you for neglect and for treason."

Mephisto rubbed his shoulder thoughtfully, tracing his fingers over the red pentagram sown into his jacket. "Well, I'm no traitor, but they could definitely get me on neglect."

"They will get you on neglect. Report within the week. I take my leave of you."

"Hey, Limino -" But no, he was gone.

Mephistopheles, Master of the Sixth, stood in the front lawn for a bit contemplating the oak tree.

"What have you neglected?" asked Bennet, behind him.

Mephisto turned slowly. 

The silence inflated like a balloon.

Drumming his fingers against his leg, he avoided eye contact comically. Finally: "How's the Latin course going, Ben?"

"Yeah, pretty good, thanks."

"And, uh - how much did you…?"

"Oh, all of it."

"Right." 

"You need a character witness, call me up, yeah?" said Bennet, passing him to climb the porch stairs.

Mephisto looked hard at her. Then he scrunched his face, scratched his neck, and said, "You could try, if you like. It's not super easy to get there. You have to, like, lucid dream it."

"I've always had lucid dreams," said Bennet over the railing.

"Then yeah, you probably could. You wouldn't be any help, but it'd be a great bit."

"Cool, let me know when you report, or whatever. What's the trial?"

"Oh, I hold some - office in my home country. Haven't been there for a while. Haven't been doing my job. It's a fair cop."

"Are you worried about it?"

Mephisto looked past her at some point in the distance. "Hey, I hate to ask you to keep something like this quiet, but - Lydia and Martin -"

"They'd go insane."

"Right."

"They won't know."

"Right. Okay. Then, uh - I'll be in touch, yeah?"

"Yep," said Bennet, unlocking the front door. "Night."