“He must commit a sin each day or else—”
“Or else,” said the demon, with a little more cheerfulness than he had heretofore displayed, “I show up at midnight and strangle him.” He coiled his tail into a garroting noose.
“Then you must be always near him to observe his actions and to carry out your duty if he fails. Very well. I lay this further behest upon you: Whenever he says your name, you must appear to him and answer his questions. Now begone!”
“Hey!” the demon protested. “I don’t have to do that. It’s not in my instructions. I— Yi!” He jumped again and rubbed his rump even more vigorously. “All right. You win.”
“Begone!” Ozymandias repeated.
The moon shone bright and clear on the beach and on the embers of a driftwood fire. “Well,” said the magician, “now you know.”
Gilbert Iles shook himself. Then he pinched himself. Then he said, “I guess I really saw that.”
“Of course. And now you know the nature of the curse. What do you think of it, colleague?”
lies laughed. “I can’t say it worries me. It’s a cinch. A sin a day—I’m no angel. It’ll take care of itself.”
Ozymandias frowned and stared at the embers. “I’m glad you think so,” he said slowly.
Gilbert Iles was always hard to wake up. He was especially so the next morning; but when he did finally open his eyes, he found the sight of Linda in a powder-blue housecoat a quite sufficient reward for the effort.
“My headache’s all gone,” she announced cheerfully. “And how is yours?”
He felt of his head and shook it experimentally. “Not a trace of a hangover. That’s funny—”
“Funny? You really did celebrate then? What did you do?”
“I went down to the beach and rode on things and then I went to a bar and got talking to a”—he paused and blinked incredulously in a rush of memory—“to an old vaudeville magician. He showed me some funny tricks,” he concluded lamely.
“I’m glad you had a good time. And when you next win such a nice fat fee, I promise I won’t have a headache. I hope. Now come on; even the man that won the Shalgreen case has to get to the office.”
A shower, then coffee and tomato juice made the world perfectly sane and plausible again. Tusked demons and tomato juice could simply not be part of the same world pattern. Neither could daily-sin curses and Linda. All Gilbert Iles’s legalistic rationalism reasserted itself.
Taurine wimps—never phrase an unintended wish; it may be granted—silverscaled tails that garrot at midnight—this was the damnedest drunken fantasy that the mind had ever framed.
Gilbert Iles shrugged blithely and whistled while he shaved. He broke off when he realized that he was whistling that tuneless chant to which the—imaginary, of course—demon had intoned the rhymed curse.
He went through a perfectly normal and unperturbed day, with enough hard work to banish all thought of demons and wimps. An unexpected complication had arisen in the Chasuble murder case. The sweet old lady—such ideal jury bait—who was to appear as a surprise witness to Rolfe’s alibi suddenly announced that she wanted two thousand dollars or she’d tell the truth.
This came as a shock both to lies and to his partner Tom Andrews. They’d taken the witness in good faith and built the whole defense around her. This sudden unmasking meant first a long conference on whether they could possibly get along without her— they couldn’t—then a guarded and difficult conversation with Rolfe in jail, and finally an afternoon of trying to raise the two thousand before her deadline at sunset.
Then Linda met him downtown for dinner and a movie, and they danced a bit afterward to make up for the celebration the headache had marred. They even played the game of remember-before-we-were-married, and parked on a hilltop near home for a half-hour.
It was almost twelve-thirty when they got home. It was one by the time lies had conclusively said good night to his wife and retired to the study for a final check-over of the testimony of the prosecution witnesses at the preliminary hearing.
There, alone in that quiet pine-paneled room, he thought of the wish and the curse for the first time since his morning shave. It was now over an hour past midnight. All day long he had been too busy to devote an instant to sin. And his neck was still eminently unstrangled. He smiled, trying to figure out what curious combination of subconscious memories could have produced such a drunken nightmare. Creative imagination, that’s what he had.
Then, just as a final touch of direct evidence, he said, “Sriberdegibit!”
The demon sat cross-legged on the desk, his height fluctuating and the plaintive twang of his tusk ringing through the room.
Gilbert Iles sat speechless. “Well?” the demon said at last.
“Well—” said Gilbert Iles.
“You summoned me. What goes?”
“I— You— I— You’re real?”
“Look,” Sriberdegibit expostulated. “Am I real? That’s a fine thing to call me up to ask. Am I a philosopher? Are you real? Is the universe real? How should I know these things?”
lies eyed the silver tail somewhat apprehensively. “But—it’s way past midnight now.”
“So what? Why should I bother materializing unless you summon me or unless I have to finish you off?”
“And you don’t have to?”
“Why should I? You did your daily sin all right.”
lies frowned. “When?”
“You arranged to suborn a witness, didn’t you?”
“But that . . . that’s all in the day’s work.”
“Is it? Didn’t something hurt a little inside when you decided to do it? Didn’t you use to say to yourself when you were young that you weren’t going to be that kind of a lawyer, oh no? Didn’t you sin against yourself when you did that?”
Gilbert Iles said nothing.
“Can I go now?” Sriberdegibit demanded.
“You can go.”
The demon vanished. lies sat in his study a long time that night, staring at the desk but not seeing the transcript.
“Tom, about Rolfe’s phony witness, I’m not sure we ought to use her.”
“Not use her? But the whole case’ll blow up without
