Ron Goulart - Black Magic for Dummies.pdf

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BLACK MAGIC FOR
DUMMIES
RON GOULART
THE FIELD REPRESENTATIVE of the demon showed up exactly thirty days before Pete Whitlock’s
fifty-fifth birthday. He assumed human form for the visit, appearing as a handsome, tanned young man in
his late twenties.
“How you doing, Pete?” he inquired just after materializing in the doorway of Pete’s den at a few minutes
after two on an overcast afternoon in late October.
Pete had been hunched at his computer keyboard, trying to beef up his resume.
“I’ve decided not to sell,” he told the young man, looking up. “So if you’re
with one of the Realtors who still has the house listed, you can just—“
“Name’s Chip Willis.” The demon’s rep held out a completely believable hand.
“I’m not in real estate.”
Getting up, Pete shook hands. “From the bank? They mentioned they were going to send somebody
over about the equity loan,” he said. “See, I’ve decided to keep the house for a while, borrow on it and
hold on until I get the new advertising job I’m waiting for.”
“Good plan, Pete.” Willis settled into the big brown armchair. “Won’t make much difference in the long
haul, but you may as well go out hopefully.”
Frowning, Pete asked, “You aren’t from the bank?”
“Nope, but it’s a natural mistake.” Willis smiled broadly. “I’ve got myself rigged to suggest something like
that—sincerity, financial stability. Could be a lawyer, maybe an accountant. You know, someone people
will trust, respect and believe in.”
“Who in the hell are you then? Why did you walk right into my house?”
“Didn’t walk in, sport,” corrected the smiling Willis. “I materialized. You
must’ve heard the faint popping sound. It’s caused by the displacement of—“
“Great, wonderful. I don’t have enough problems. Now I have a lunatic prowling
my—“
“Keep cool, there’s no problem. I’m not a loon, a serial killer or any other common suburban bugaboo.”
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“Go away,” suggested Pete. “If you’re a burglar, I have to tell you right off
that—“
“Not a burglar either, no.” His smile broadened. “Well, what say we get down to business?”
“What business? I don’t, far as I know, have any impending business at all with a lunatic.”
“Hey, Pete, you’re not paying close enough attention here. Didn’t I just assure you I wasn’t a nutcake?
Relax, listen to me now.” A briefcase appeared suddenly on his lap, a brand new one made of real black
leather. “Sorry, I forgot this.”
Pete dropped down into his desk chair, turning to face Willis. “How’d you do that?”
“Impressive, huh? It’s black magic.” He unfastened the black case, reached inside. “But you ought to
know all about that.”
“All about black magic? Listen, Mr. Willis, I think maybe you—“
“Call me Chip.”
“Chip, I’m commencing to think that you’ve got the wrong Peter Whitlock,” he told him. “Maybe, you
know, you want some other Peter Whitlock. Peter J.
Whitlock, say, or Peter F. Whitlock or maybe—“
“No, you’re my boy, Pete.” He extracted a rolled sheet of parchment. It was tied with a faded twist of
red ribbon. “You remember this, don’t you?”
“No, I can’t say I do. What is it?”
Willis tapped his knee with the rolled parchment. “Let me refresh your memory,” he offered. “Frisco.
Thirty years ago. Well, thirty years less thirty days ago actually.”
“Thirty years ago I was living out inSan Francisco , yeah,” he admitted,
becoming aware of some twisting pains beginning deep in his stomach. “That was
my first advertising job, with Arnold & Maxwell. I started there as a copywriter
just before my twenty-fifth birthday. But I don’t see what that has to do with
--“
“It was there you began your impressive meteoric rise to success in your chosen profession.”
“Meteoric?” Pete laughed ruefully. “I’ve been out of work for nearly five months. I never rose above
copywriter with any of the five agencies I’ve worked with over the years. I’m living here in New
Beckford,Connecticut , in a house that’s dropped in value from $450,000 to maybe $375,000. I’m
paying two vicious and vindictive former wives alimony and the last award I won was for some
HoundDog Puppy Treat trade ads back in 1988.” He shook his head slowly. “Success? You’ve
definitely got the wrong Peter Whitlock, Chip.”
“Let me clarify something,” offered Willis, a trace of impatience sounding in his voice. “Because, see, lots
of people I come to collect from try similar dodges. But, the point is, success is relative and everybody
can’t become a flapping billionaire. Even the most powerful demon in the netherworld can’t go around
turning everybody into a millionaire. Hell, that’d futz up the economy worse than it is already.”
“Collect? What did you come to collect?”
“We’ll get to that in a minute.”
“And what was that reference to demons?”
“Oh, c’mon—are you pretending you never heard of Shug Nrgyzb?”
Pete scowled at his visitor. “What is it?”
“Shug Nrgyzb is who I work for.”
“Not a very catchy name for a company.”
“Shug Nrgyzb isn’t a company or a product, Pete. He’s a demon,” explained Willis, waving the
parchment. “A truly powerful one.”
“You’re claiming you work for a demon?”
“I do work for a demon.”
“You really are a loon. You’d just better leave my—“
“Whoa, whoa. Pete, I don’t have all that much time to waste.” Untying the
ribbon, he unfurled the parchment. “The bottom line here is that you made a deal
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with Shug Nrgyzb thirty years back and now the time has come to settle the—“
“I never heard of him until just this minute,” insisted Pete as he stood up again. “It’s not the sort of name
you’d forget. And, trust me, if I’d made any deal with a demon, granting that I’d ever believe in such a
half-wit notion, I would sure as hell remember it.”
Willis shook his head. “Been tried, pal.”
“What’s been tried?”
“Stupidity defense. ‘I was too dense to know what I was doing.’ Never works, not ever,” the rep
assured him. “Possibly in a court of law you could pull something like that and have a chance. But, hey,
none of that cuts any ice with a demon.”
Pete sat. “You’re claiming that thirty years ago out inSan Francisco I made some kind of deal with this
Shug Nrgyzb?”
“You aren’t pronouncing Nrgyzb right, Pete. It’s Nrgyzb.”
“Be that as it may, Chip—What was this deal I allegedly made?”
“In exchange for thirty years of uninterrupted success, you agree to—“
“You call what I’ve lived through for the past thirty years uninterrupted success? Do you have anything in
your files on Mary Jo?”
“Your first wife, sure.”
“How can any man who was married to Mary Jo for ten long, bleak years be considered a success?”
“You continue to miss the point, Pete. If you hadn’t, see, made the deal things
would’ve been even worse,” the rep told him. “Success for a schlep like you
doesn’t involve sitting on top of the world for three decades. Nope, it means
rather that you—“
“And then there was Mary Jane, my second wife.”
“Were you aware that you have a tendency to marry women with similar names?”
“Yeah. But tell me what could have been worse than seven years with Mary Jane?”
“Seven more with Mary Jo. It’s all, I keep trying to convince you, relative.
Believe me—you’ve had a much better life than you deserved.”
“Do you know what my current bank balance is?”
“Checking or savings?”
“Savings.”
“You have $11,49.6.”
“Chip, we’re inFairfieldCounty . People hereabouts give $11,426 to their cleaning ladies as a Christmas
bonus, they often drop $11,426 into a homeless beggar’s Styrofoam cup, they toss $11,49.6 to their
kids for pocket money. $11,426, believe me, is not a fortune. It sure as hell is not an impressive amount
to have to show for thirty damn years of wild success.”
“For a born loser like you, Pete, it’s about $10,000 more than you deserve.” He rattled the parchment,
at the same time making an impatient noise. “Back to the business at hand. It’s our policy, as you know,
to call on our clients thirty days in advance of the collection date. That way, Pete, you have time to put
your affairs in order, maybe arrange a farewell party, do those things you’ve always been meaning to do
and, being such a schlep, never got around to doing.”
“Wait now.” He was on his feet again. “This isn’t the old hokey business where you come to collect my
soul?”
“No, it is not, nope.” Willis grinned. “All Shug Nrgyzb wants is your life.”
“Life?”
“On your fifty-fifth birthday he’ll appear and devour you.”
Pete sank, slowly, back into his desk chair. “What exactly does being devoured by Shug Nrgyzb
involve?”
“Painless really. Being as how he’s on the large side, he can devour the average person in two bites.
Three tops,” promised Willis. “Some folks get panicky when they witness the flames and smoke that
accompany a manifestation of Shug Nrgyzb, but that’s all for show. You might, possibly, experience a
few first degree burns, but you’ll only be alive for a few seconds after that anyway.”
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“Listen, Chip, I never made any deal with this guy,” insisted Pete. “So it
really doesn’t seem fair, particularly since I never actually got the thirty
years of dazzling success, for him to come and devour me. I’m sure that if you
point out the mistake to him, he’ll be only too glad to—“
“Actually, Shug Nrgyzb has a reputation for being a real shit, Pete,” Willis pointed out. “He could drop
by and devour you merely for the fun of it. Yet that’s a moot point, since you did actually sign this
document.” He paused, scanning the parchment. “Oops.”
“Ha! It isn’t me you want at all, is it?”
“Oh, it’s you sure enough. No doubt about that, Pete.” He held out the
parchment. “You see, the way this works is that the party who enjoys the success
is the one who has to pay the piper. In this particular instance, however, you
didn’t personally sign yourself up for the thirty year success package. That was
--“
“Jennifer Windmiller.” He’d grabbed the illuminated agreement and was frowning at the signature at the
bottom.
“Old girlfriend of yours, as I understand it.”
“Jennifer Windmiller,” Pete repeated softly as he let the parchment drop to the carpet. “I haven’t thought
of her for years.”
Willis rose up, smoothing his trousers. “Well, you owe all the great things that have happened to you
during your adult life to that little lady,” he said, smiling. “We won’t see each other again, but it’s been
nice meeting you. Oh, and don’t try to run when Shug Nrgyzb shows up to collect. That would only
make him madder and he’d probably devour you in smaller bites.”
There was a faint popping noise as Willis, his briefcase and the parchment all vanished.
ZORINA TASHLIN reached across the desk to brush at his left coat sleeve. “Lint,”
the thin dark woman mentioned. “Perhaps your long stretch of unemployment,
Peter, is due as much to your slovenly appearance as it—“
“One speck of fuzz doesn’t qualify me as a slob,” he countered. “But let’s get back to my latest
problem.”
She picked up her pencil, set it down an inch to the right of where it had been.
“I’m a career consultant, not a therapist.”
“No, no, I’m not cracking up,” he assured her. “It’s simply that I seem to be mixed up, through no fault
of my own, with a vindictive demon.”
“Perhaps if you accepted responsibility for your problems, you’d—“
“The reason I came by this afternoon, Zorina, is that I need some advice about
how to—“
“If you honestly believe that this old sweetheart of yours has put a curse on you, then she’s the one you
must talk to.”
“It’s not exactly a curse, it was supposed to be a boon. Thirty years of ongoing achievement, except it
didn’t turn out quite that way. But then what can you expect from a nitwit like Jennifer Windmiller?”
“Why don’t you simply contact her, Peter?”
“I tried that, soon as the demon’s advance man vanished,” he answered. “Trouble is, she’s not listed
anywhere in the San Francisco Bay Area, not according to phone information. And I used the Net every
way I could think of and didn’t find one damn trace of her.”
“Probably she’s married.”
“Maybe, more than once. I don’t have any idea, however, what her name is these days.”
“Finding lost loves is not part of my service. But a good private investigator
might be able to—“
“That will take too long,” he cut in. “But you advise a lot of people on career changes, help them find
new jobs. Do you know anybody who specializes in occult stuff? I want to approach the problem from
the demon angle, but unfortunately there’s nothing like an occult investigator listed in the yellow pages.”
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Turning, Zorina gazed out the office window at the gray late afternoon parking lot. “Well, I suppose there
is Batsford.”
“What does he do?”
“Mostly Batsford fouls up the job interviews I send him out on,” she said, picking up the pencil again.
“He maintains that, in addition to being a second rate accountant, he’s an investigator of the supernatural.
Mind you, Peter, I can’t vouch for the validity of such a claim.”
“Basically I need someone who’s knowledgeable about warding off demons. Or at least stalling them for
a while.”
“Check with Batsford.” She wrote an address on a memo slip. “His phone’s not in service at the
moment. And don’t, by the way, give him any cash in advance. He has a tendency to go off on sprees.”
Taking the slip, Pete studied the address before folding it and inserting it in his shirt pocket. “Long as I’m
here—have you got anything new for me in the way of a job?”
“I hesitate to send you out on any more interviews, Peter, if you plan to be eaten by a demon in a
month’s time.”
“If Batsford is any good at all, I’ll have longer than that.”
“You’ll have to guarantee me you’re going to be alive for at least a year.”
“C’mon, that’s not fair, Zorina. Nobody can guarantee you that they’ll live another year.”
“That’s true, yes, but none of my other clients has a fiend from the netherworld breathing down his or her
neck.”
“What about that copywriting job for Help-A-Tot? You mentioned there might be an opening there
about now.”
“It’s beneath you, Peter.”
“Five months I’ve been out of work.”
“I wasn’t aware of the exact nature of the position when I brought it up the other day.” She tapped the
eraser end of the pencil on the desk. “Help-A-Tot collects money for underprivileged children around the
world. Each child is supposed to write a letter to his or her individual sponsor every three months. Alas,
Help-A-Tot isn’t as aboveboard about those letters as I was originally led to believe. It turns out they’re
faked, all written by the same person and then mailed by stringers across the globe. The Help-A-Tot
copywriter is the person who has to crank out those fraudulent missives. It’s disgusting.”
“Disgusting,” he agreed. “But what does it pay?”
She rose up, carefully, frowning. “Clean up this demon mess first,” she advised.
“Then we can talk jobs again, Peter.”
“That’s not a crystal ball,” observed Pete.
“Yes, it is.”
“Looks like a fishbowl to me.”
“If it were a fishbowl, my skeptical chum, there’d be a myriad of colorful little fish flitting around inside it,”
said Batsford.
“You’ve got it upside down, so all the fish would’ve dribbled out long since.”
“Who’s the occult expert, my boy—you or I?”
“Well, Zorina claims that you are, though I’m starting to have—“
“And how much am I charging you for this entire lengthy session?”
“Fifty dollars.”
“That’s an incredibly low fee, my boy, considering that you’re getting my exclusive and undivided
services.” He was a small, rumpled man in his middle forties, wearing a double-breasted blue suit and a
white sweatshirt.
The questionable crystal ball rested on a card table in the center of the small, cluttered living room of his
second-floor apartment.
“I’m skeptical that any of this,” admitted Pete, who was sitting opposite the mystic, “is going to work.”
“I must have silence while I’m trying to tune in on the supernatural real ms.”
“Is that what you’re supposed to be doing? What exactly will that have to do with warding off a demon?”
Batsford scratched at his left armpit. “I may go off into a trance any time now,” he warned. “Should I say
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