Damned

Arching his thorny eyebrows, he says smugly, "If you have courage and intelligence it's because I willed for you to have them. Those qualities were my gift! I demanded that Baal surrender to you. Your so-called 'friends' work for me!"

Hitler, Caligula, Idi Amin, he claims that they each threw the battle to me. That's why my ascent to power happened so quickly. It's why Archer egged me to fight in the first place.

But I refuse. "Why should I believe you?" I stammer. I scream, "You're the Prince of Tides!"

Satan throws his head back, stretching his stained teeth at the orange sky and shouting, "I am the 'Prince of Lies'!"

Whatever, I say. I say that—if he's really and truly responsible for my every quote—then HE fucked up my last line of dialogue.

"I gave your mother movie fame! I gave your father a fortune!" he bellows. "If you want proof, just listen... ," and he flips the script open, reading aloud: "'Madison suddenly felt confused and terrified/"

And I did. I did feel confused and terrified.

He reads, "'Madison looked around anxiously for reassurance from her clique of friends.'"

And at that moment I had, indeed, been craning my neck, trying to catch sight of Babette and Patterson and Archer. But they'd already climbed into the waiting Town Car.

And yes, I know the words panic and racing pulse and anxiety attack, but I'm not certain whether I even exist to experience them. Instead of a fat, smart thirteen-year-old girl... I might be a figment of Satan's imagination. Just ink stains on paper. Whether reality actually shifted in that instant... or only my perception of it changed... I can't tell. But everything seems undermined. Everything good seems spoiled.

In his nerdy way, Leonard had tried to warn me. It's possible that reality was exactly the way he'd described: Demon = Daimon = Muse or Inspiration = My Creator.

Perusing the pages of his script, chuckling over his work, Satan says, "You are my best character." He beams. "I'm so proud of you, Madison. You have such a natural talent for luring souls to perdition!" With more than a smidgen of wistfulness, he says, "People hate me. No one trusts me." He looks at me almost lovingly, tears trembling in his goat eyes, and Satan says, "That's why I've created you......"

XXXVII.

Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison, and I'm not your Jane Eyre. I'm nobody's Catherine Earnshaw. And you? You're certainly no writer. You're not the boss of me; you're just messing with my head. If anybody wrote me it would be Judy Blume or Barbara Cartland. I have confidence and determination and free will—at least, I guess I do......

On a whim, I didn't take any of my storm troopers or Mongol hordes with me trick-or-treating. If I can trust them—if I won them fair and square—I don't know anymore. Besides, there are only so many people you can fit into a Lincoln Town Car, and despite what my mom says, an entourage can be too large. At the last minute, I couldn't even wear the Hitler mustache because Tiger Stripe ate it; and then I didn't want to take my kitty and risk his coughing up some big Nazi hairball on somebody's front stoop. In the end it was just us, Archer and Emily, Leonard, Babette, Patterson, and me, going door-to-door. The Dead Breakfast Club.

That said, I did wear the belt of King Ethelred II, the dagger of Vlad III, the hook with which Gilles de Rais murdered so many children. Emily, dressed as a fairy princess, wears the diamond ring of Elizabeth Bathory. Leonard trades everyone for their candy corn. First we went to the town where Archer had last lived, someplace with houses lined up along streets brimming with alive children. Maybe some are dead children, returned like us for a few hours of nostalgia. For one millisecond I could swear I saw JonBenet Ramsey wearing sequined tap shoes and waving hi to us.

Surrounded as we are by the marauding packs of costumed urchins, it's unsettling to know that some of these diminutive living goblins will die in drunk-driving accidents. Some little cheerleaders and angels will develop eating disorders and starve to death. Some geishas and butterflies will marry alcoholic husbands who beat them to death. Some little vampires and sailors will stick their necks through nooses or get shanked in prison riots or be poisoned by jellyfish while on dream vacations snorkeling the Great Barrier Reef. Of the lucky superheroes and werewolves and cowgirls, old age will bring them diabetes, heart disease, dementia.