Page 43 of What Happens at Nightfall

“It’s not—” Ingrid caught herself. “So, I’m an early modernist, right? I was working on the position of women in Renaissance Florence, and one of the texts I was using was Machiavelli’s Belfagor Arcidiavolo. You know Belfagor Arcidiavolo?”

“Um, no. I don’t know.” Adam had read The Prince, of course, not just once, but for multiple classes. He’d done a double major in forestry and poli-sci. The poli-sci was a sop to his parents, who were still hoping he’d get over the whole forestry thing and go to law school. He looked at Jess, who was still trying to make her phone turn back on. “You?”

Jess shook her head.

“It’s incredibly misogynistic,” said Ingrid earnestly. “The idea is that the devil takes human form as a Spaniard—that’s a little dig there, because, you know, Florence and Spain in the Renaissance, not friends. Anyway, he takes a human wife, who beggars him with her crazy extravagance, and stuff happens, and the bottom line is, he grants a peasant the power to cast devils out of women, and then goes back to hell, bad-mouthing women and marriage. Thanks.”

The waitress had put a platter of pancakes down in front of her.

Adam passed the all-day omelet over to Jess, making room for his own enormous burger platter. “Eat,” he said. Jess’s omelet was fringed with wilted greens and a few sad tomatoes. It didn’t look particularly sustaining. “You’re welcome to some of my fries too.”

“Thanks,” said Ingrid, taking one.

“I don’t understand.” Jess’s voice sounded rusty. She took a long swig of the lemonade Adam had ordered for her. “What does this have to do with the Vanderwilts?”

“Okay,” said Ingrid, around a mouthful of Adam’s fries. “So I was doing a literature review and this demon keeps popping up. And the more I looked into it, the more I became convinced that this wasn’t just a story. It was real. It happened. This demon—he was on the loose in the world. Once you know what you’re looking for—and if you have the access to the archives and the right language skills—there it is. The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in France? Totally down to this guy. The Great Fire of London? Also his.”

The sound system crackled slightly, blurring Crosby, Stills & Nash’s musings on seeing the Southern Cross for the first time.

Jess stirred in her seat. “I thought the Great Fire was caused by a cow.”

“That’s the Chicago fire,” said Adam apologetically. “Mrs. O’Leary’s cow.”

Ingrid slurped her Diet Coke. “Also caused by Belfagor.”

“Who?” asked Adam.

Static crackled from the speakers set into the ceiling. Music blasted out, loud and insistent. “What’s my name? What’s my name? Say it louder!”

The woman behind the counter made an annoyed noise and stuck the coffeepot back on the burner. “Some joker must have turned the volume up.”

“What’s my name? What’s my name? Say it louder!”

On the TV screen, the college football players disappeared behind a series of wavy lines, eliciting an angry groan from the men at the counter. The screen blinked and crackled and a new image came on: Cookie Monster. But not Cookie Monster as Adam knew him, selfish and lovable. This was evil Cookie Monster, with glowing red eyes, growling, “Me eat souls!”

“What on earth—”

“Belfagor,” whispered Ingrid. “It’s Belfagor.”

Chapter Thirteen

It was such joy making the mortals squirm.

Belfagor drank in the delicious milkshake of fear and confusion. Milkshakes, that was something he had discovered over the past two days, since that milksop boy had freed him from his miserable glass cage.

Late nineteenth-century stained glass, how tacky. It was a tragedy that he, Belfagor, who had enjoyed the craftsmanship of Leonardo; who had whispered in Cellini’s ear, tempting him to brawl and murder; who had goaded Velázquez and muddled the paints of Monet, should be trapped inside that travesty of poor taste. It was even worse than the time that smug Italian, Machiavelli, had printed Belfagor’s private marital troubles for the common oaf to gawp at.

Baphomet hadn’t let him hear the end of it. Belfagor, he’d call, whenever they happened to pass by the adamantine rock on their way to a restorative day in the sulfur pits. How’s your wife?

But even that paled next to a century of confinement. That twit Hamlet might have said he could be bounded in a nutshell and count himself king of infinite space, but he’d obviously never actually tried it.

At first it had been enough simply to be free of that musty crypt. Since the boy had released him, Belfagor had been reacquainting himself with the city. There were no more horses to spook, it was impossible to make a milk wagon run amok, but Belfagor quickly discovered that it was equally satisfying to foment altercations between the class of men who called themselves “uber drivers,” presumably as a claim that they were better than the common run of drivers of these new horseless conveyances. It was, he learned, a very easy and satisfying thing to bend the light at just the right moment, blinding the driver and causing one of these strange vehicles to swerve and collide with a hydrant, or possibly a bicycle, or both.

Ah, mayhem and destruction. The means might have changed, but humans were still delightfully frail in all sorts of ways.

Belfagor had given himself a day to see the sights. He had gone to a show on Broadway and made the curtain fall on the principal actress, breaking her leg in two places. He had visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which appeared to have moved from the Fifty-Fourth Street location he remembered. There he had whispered into the ear of one curator that his latest acquisition was a fake, planted notions of adultery in the mind of another, and capped his visit by moving the walking stick of an elderly visitor just a fraction so that it wound up under the foot of an impetuous third grader, causing the whole school class to tumble down the stairs. Oh, how he laughed.

One of the angels in the medieval wing had blown a raspberry at him, but Belfagor took that as a compliment. Let them know that Belfagor was back and badder than ever.