Devil's Toll

By Malachi Stone

Do we die with our flesh? Or do we live on? DEVIL'S TOLL asks: what happens to our consciousness when we die? Despite the current appetite for supernatural suspense fiction, no other novel to date has dared to explore the concept of the Aerial Toll Houses, a time-honored religious belief that at the moment of death, our souls must encounter supernatural toll houses guarded by demons seeking their last chance to snatch us away to eternal damnation. The existence of the Aerial Toll Houses is an ancient doctrine in the Eastern Orthodox Church-a doctrine that persists to this day. DEVIL'S TOLL, written in a deceptively light-hearted tone, leads the reader on a death walk with a modern woman through her mysterious premature demise and the harrowing of her soul by malevolent unearthly beings masquerading as humans. Over three hundred years ago poet John Milton wrote: "Millions of spiritual Creatures walk the Earth Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep." Do YOU believe?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Malachi Stone
• Release date: Jan 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215852316

Malachi Stone

Marlon Brando on Larry King Live quoted an unknown Louisiana woman who said, "Anybody who shows his face in public is an ass." (1) Mindful of those wise words, I created the pseudonym Malachi Stone to author my novels and short stories because, as a practicing attorney in a conservative community, my natural inclination was and still is to avoid notoriety and controversy wherever and whenever possible. That being said, my secret identity affords me a perverse Zorro-like gratification. I've been writing for more than twenty years. For a three-year period I was represented by a fine literary agent (2) in Manhattan, who tried valiantly but without success to place my novels in traditional publishing. Allegedly, objections were raised to negative protagonists and explicit sex. While I am convinced those objections are groundless, I am weary of arguing the point. I'll simply let you, the readers, decide for yourselves. I have garnered many good reviews over the years. See, for example, Elizabeth White (3). Interviews of me may be found on the web, for instance, Steve Weddle, Fiona "McDroll" Johnson, Paul D. Brazill and Ian Ayres (4-7). Please feel free to post reviews of my work, good, bad, or indifferent. Only be sure to remember that most of my books, especially the later ones, are self-published without the dubious benefit of copyediting, content editing or censorship of any kind. So if you post reviews carping about bad language or finding flaws in punctuation, paragraphing or font, I frankly don't care. I'm putting these books out there for the sole reason I wrote them in the first place - to be enjoyed by readers. As my law practice has become more active recently, I have taken a sabbatical from writing but hope to resume soon. My personal and private email is: [e-mail]. I'd be delighted to hear from you!1. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0308/02/lklw.00.html2. http://variety.com/exec/stacia-decker/3. http://www.elizabethawhite.com/tag/malachi-stone/4. http://www.spinetinglermag.com/2011/04/20/conversations-with-the-bookless-malachi-stone/5. http://imeanttoreadthat.blogspot.com/2012/01/american-banshee-by-malachi-stone.html#!/2012/01/american-banshee-by-malachi-stone.html6. https://pauldbrazill.com/2012/01/19/short-sharp-interview-malachi-stone/7. http://nigelpbird.blogspot.com/2010/09/dancing-with-myself-malachi-stone.html

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DEVIL’S TOLL

A Novel by Malachi Stone

Eleventh Edition

©2023 by Malachi Stone

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the permission of the author. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 as amended, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the author constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the author at

[e-mail]

Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental. All characters depicted in this book are over eighteen years of age.

For Maria, who has heard often enough that the devil you know is never as bad as the devil you don't know.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CONNECT WITH ME ONLINE

The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.

(Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray)

PROLOGUE

The venerable house dominated the shaded, tree-lined block as she had for more than a century and a score; her dormer windows cast down an imperious glare from where she loomed high above the quiet campus street, out of place as a dowager great-aunt or a stern chaperoning crone. She had garbed herself in Victorian mourning—black with white trim—since before living memory. Hunkered down over her massive fundament of cut stone, prudently discreet behind the delicate lace of fanlight fretwork and ornamental railing, from her balconies and porches she kept somber, disapproving watch over every compass point. Modeled after an original by British architect Richard Norman Shaw, the house had withstood every treasonous effort to end her rule—generations of modernist renewers had tried and failed to effect her demolition, and had ultimately broken themselves against her indomitable will. She had regally stood her ground: out of place, perhaps, but not yet out of time.

Rough-hewn oaken timbers were her bones, hauled by mule team along mud roads treacherous and winding as any blacksnake whip. The braying of the team and the curses of the drovers heralded her impending birth. German master carpenters had finished her fine interior woodwork, her carved doorposts and ornamental arches with a fealty to perfection now lost to time but for the proof of the work itself; no barn carpenters these—her noble beauty endured unmarred by discernible tool marks. Candlelit chandeliers of brass and crystal had filled her great octagonal rooms with flickering and dancing merriment a generation before gaslights. Her history tracked family fortunes, both good and bad. Eventually the years found her empty and abandoned. Some say this was the start of her madness. Others, naysayers, contend that hers was not madness but an intractable and perverse wickedness. These claimed the cancerous evil in her had begun much earlier, that one fateful night after the great chandeliers had burned low, and nocturnal shadows lengthened into goblins’ shades, an unspeakable sin had been committed in her rooms—a blasphemous sin borne out of idleness and high spirits—blackening the heart of her forever. It was said she harbored a smoldering remnant of hellfire within her like the core of a glowing ember.

CHAPTER ONE

There is but one perfect day in every spring. On one such day my wife died. On another, in bittersweet irony, I met Hope.

Hope found me beneath the century-old oak that shaded the Annex on the outskirts of campus. Her conversation was unerringly polite, albeit otherworldly—a Henry James novel read by flickering candlelight.

I beg your indulgence, kind sir, she began, hands folded in a demure posture, but I was advised I might find Professor Steven Toddmann here. Her elocution was soft-spoken as a fleeting thought, yet precise and self-assured. Her ankle-length dress seemed more appropriate to a sesquicentennial celebration than to a modern University campus. She wore her luxuriant chestnut hair upswept as though meant to be secreted under an antique broad-brimmed picture hat pinned with a veil to save her moonbeam complexion. She held my gaze for a count of three before turning aside to focus on the house behind me in a contemplative attitude that flattered her profile.

Having grieved for my lost Zoë the full cycle of seasons, in all that span of time I had never looked upon another woman. Zoë and I had offered no rash promises of survivor’s celibacy to one another—our marriage had been too full, too intense for any of that. Steeped in the headiness of our passions, we each had blithely assumed that we might live forever.

But after a year of mourning Zoë, I allowed myself to take in Hope that perfect spring day. She was no more than twenty-three, barely five feet tall in high-button shoes, and chastely corseted in a wasp-waisted dark dress that might have adorned one’s great-great-grandmother with its regimented rows of pearl buttons and long skirt that rustled like leaves when it swept the ground she walked upon.

The suffragette demo on the quadrangle must have broken up early, I said, trying for that famously wry disarming humor for which I’m so justifiably beloved by students and faculty alike. Mine had become a humor tempered by sadness this passing year.

She returned her glance to me, as though momentarily taken aback by my impertinence. Her eyes shone like a doe’s caught in deep forest starlight. I stared into them with wordless abandon, until I felt it, truly felt it for the first time.

The Permeance, LeGrand had called it, long after he had suffered pariahtization for having become an embarrassment to the other university faculty. The Permeance—that intimation of fourth-dimension mobility, that mystical magic carpet ride of the djinn, forever just beyond our grasp like a half-recollected dream.

LeGrand like all other alchemists before him had broken himself on the wheel of time travel. Nominally a social psychologist but in spirit and truth a latter-day Ponce de Leon, he had, initially out of boredom perhaps, dabbled in remote viewing, telepathic and clairvoyant experiments, even published, with my unacknowledged assistance, an article or two about his research in mind-control of crowds and photographic reading. Whether it was his freelance studies that eventually drove him to commit the ultimate academic sin, I cannot say. But sin he did. He publicly proclaimed himself a mystic, renouncing daily ablutions and modern conveniences alike. He foreswore bathing, shaving, underarm deodorant and laundry detergent. In consequence, he suffered the only pillorying a state university can inflict upon a tenured full professor without a full legal pitch battle costing more than an endowment: banishment to an annex. In his case the fairy-tale Banfield mansion that came to be known as the Annex.

Rather than appealing to Caesar, LeGrand settled into his investiture with all the pride of a Pasteur or a Curie having been awarded the Legion d’Honneur. As LeGrand’s son-in-law, protégé, first-called disciple and accomplice in most if not all of his darkest secret research, I followed him to his annex on the outskirts of campus and suffered voluntary exile in order to be with my mentor, enduring his humors and catching manic flight with his ineffable flashes of crazy brilliance until the night he died. But before the day I met Hope, I would have thought The Permeance no more than a chimera, an undiscovered and apocryphal Gospel of Q to be accepted on academic faith alone.

I’ve so much to learn here, she said with such breathless sense of purpose that whatever vestigial traces still remained of my professorial dedication to teaching began to stir once more. And Professor Toddmann has so much wisdom to impart.

Borne down by the weight of all that I know, I bowed extravagantly, constricted by the invisible cloak of mourning I still wore. She astonished me by acknowledging my bow with a practiced curtsy of her own, followed by something even more rarely encountered on campus, at least during my tenure: the softest evanescence of a blush. Did she sense my betrayal of Zoë’s memory?

Publishing anything of an academic nature had become a more and more remote and unattainable aspiration of mine over the course of the passing year; Zoë’s death had imprisoned me in an amber of indolence. Oh, I showed up promptly and dutifully for every class I had been assigned to teach: Abnormal Psych, Intro to Psych and Graduate Psych Research and did a yeomanlike job. I technically remained available for consultation with the grad students who had drawn the short straw of my name as faculty advisor, though I rarely if ever heard from any of them. None wanted the stigma of being linked with the memory of LeGrand or anything he had come to represent in the collective campus mind, and all considered me LeGrand’s Boswell. Everyone knew I had married LeGrand‘s daughter Zoë, who had died suddenly and mysteriously along with him last Walpurgisnacht at the stroke of midnight.

No research assistants. No questions at the end of any lecture. Virtually cast out from the university proper, I lived a solitary existence. Like a cloistered monk, I welcomed any unexpected visitors to my hermit’s cottage of a mansion with a hunger borne out of loneliness.

Steve Toddmann, I said, offering her my hand. She extended hers limp-wristed, as though expecting it to be kissed. I shook it gently. And you are...?

Hope, she said at last, with what seemed a painfully shy reticence, then added, Pleased to make your acquaintance, Professor Toddmann.

Why don’t you come on in, then? I gestured towards the Annex door, still taking her for a graduate student who’d rolled snake eyes in the advisory crapshoot. I’ve got some Coke, if you like.

Isn’t it terribly warm to be building a fire?

My ankles felt the soft brush of her hemline as she swept by me and entered. Her eyes of wonderment met every corner of the annex. She rushed on ahead of me and into my office, one hand on my desk as though to support herself, bending forward, fingers exploring the texture of my computer monitor, smudging her fingertips across the screensaver like a child. After no more than a moment’s hesitation she darted out of the office and into one of the research rooms in back. LeGrand had divided it into a series of paired cubicles separated by sliding panels of one-way glass.

What’s become of the pantry? she whispered to herself, caught like a comely experimental rat in a maze. And the back kitchen?

Before I could gently demand that she explain herself, Hope discovered the rest room. She touched the commode with an enchanted air of discovery, then stared at herself in the mirror for a count of thirty; I felt like a peeping Tom standing framed behind her. She adjusted her severe coiffure, pinched her cheeks and pouted her lips. There! she said at last. She picked up a room deodorizer, held it to her nose and sniffed it.

"The bouquet of this bouteille de parfum is positively divine, she said, adding, I adore Parisian scents."

I nodded, perplexed.

Very well, then, she stated. When shall we commence?

Commence?

Our experiments, she said with a hint of impatience. You are the same Professor Steven Toddmann who apprenticed under Doctor Bruno LeGrand, are you not? Or am I mistaken?

Perhaps it was the beauty of the day, or the commemoration of my most melancholy anniversary. It may have been nothing more than idle curiosity. In any event, I decided as an adventure to play along with what I suspected to be an elaborate charade by an overly dramatic and perhaps even unstable young woman.

Actually more a colleague than an apprentice, I replied.

Indeed, she sniffed.

Hope’s supercilious attitude chafed at me a bit. Am I the one interviewing for a position here, or what? I demanded. You came to me, remember? If it’s a research assistantship you’re tilting at—

This lovely mansion was to have been our home, Hope murmured. It beckons me still, through all the gloomy mists of time.

Let’s ring down the curtain on the little theater performance, shall we? I interrupted. The University annexed the land we stand on before I was born. This mansion is on the historical register. That’s why we can’t even put up a sign or change the exterior structure, cosmetically or otherwise. Hell, we can’t even paint it another color, even though the black is depressing as hell. So no one could have planned to set up housekeeping here, at least for the past hundred years.

For the past one hundred thirty years, to be precise, Hope said. And I dispatch to remind you that am a lady. Therefore, I will not countenance any gentleman’s willful uttering of swearwords in my presence. Even a distinguished Professor...much less his impertinent colleague.

I performed a mental rewind and replay of my last remarks. You mean because I said ‘hell’? That’s why you’re mad? I asked her, amazed.

Hope stamped her foot. All I saw of it was the swaying undulation of the skirt, but I heard it against the hardwood floor. There she stood, arms crossed, firm and insistent as time itself. It is you, Professor, whom I suspect to be mad, she finally said, breaking her own angry silence.

All right, I said, shaking my head. I apologize if any thoughtless or insensitive remark of mine might have offended you. As a nontenured associate professor, one can’t be too careful. Especially with your nut cases.

Her countenance softened. Your apology is most graciously accepted, Professor, she said. However, you must understand that in one such as I, who has dared what I have dared, words intimating eternal damnation inflict a most peculiar and exquisite sting.

I gotta confess I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about, Hope, I said.

The fact that I am present here at all should render obvious the personal sacrifices I have endured to undertake the journey, she said. I’ll wager the pangs of death would savor sweet by comparison.

So you’re on a journey? I ventured. And would that happen to be a spiritual journey you’re referring to, by any slim chance?

One that I fear has rendered me no better than a heathen Indian, truth be told, she said, wiping away a remarkably genuine-looking teardrop with a delicate lace handkerchief. I had to admire her stage-business, her deft use of props. It was like watching a movie-of-the-week period piece. But who had put her up to playing out this costume drama for an audience of one? And to what twisted purpose?

Why a heathen Indian, Hope?

Soothsaying was never countenanced by those of my generation or of my race. At first, LeGrand’s practices evoked my savage and willful nature. In the end, I proved more a stranger to my time than I am to yours—my place supplanted by another.

How did you know LeGrand?

How does one come to know a phantom? she inquired. Through automatic writings, mesmeric sketches, conversations conducted by means of a Ouija board palette.

Sounds awkward.

No more awkward than the Morse Code, she retorted. I had to concede her point.

So you’re here intending to assist in carrying out his research?

Precisely, she said. A service for which I shall prove myself eminently well-qualified. Shall we begin?

Oh, please do.

Might I suggest we darken the ballroom, then? I assume it remains situated beyond these pocket doors? Hope slid aside one cherrywood door, swept into the octagonal ballroom, closed the pocket door behind us and looked upward, mildly perturbed.

How does one extinguish the chandelier? she asked, I thought disingenuously.

Methinks milady doth dissemble, I said.

In what regard, Professor? Not a hint of stealth.

Yon switchplate holds the key.

Hope shrugged, then busied herself closing the shutters and drawing the blackout curtains on the tall windows. Then she sat down on the divan facing the huge antique mirror and beckoned me to join her. The chandelier, Professor?

I tensed with alarm. Was I being set up by resentful colleagues for a bogus sexual-harassment frame-up? My instinct told me to leave the annex as though on an impromptu fire drill of my own making, take a walk and leave her there posing on the divan. Instead, I pressed the antique pushbutton switch, extinguishing the pale yellow light. The combination of window shutters and blackout shades utterly blotted out the last remnants of late-afternoon sun. Stalking the sounds of her breathing through the profound darkness, I crossed the hardwood dance floor until I stood over her.

I had forgotten how LeGrand had once equipped this very ballroom to serve a dual purpose as his photographic darkroom and meditation chamber. For a few tense moments, enveloped in the pitch-blackness of a cave, we listened to the rhythmic sounds of one another’s breathing and the soft rustling of Hope’s archaic couture, interrupted only by my nervous staccato throat-clearings. Then an ineffable firefly glow began to emanate from the edges of the gilt mirror frame, encircling an oval pool of deepest gloom—an oracle‘s looking glass. I could make out neither Hope’s reflection nor my own. I turned to where my non-visual senses told me she would still be seated. The pitch blackness preserved her modesty, for by this time we both were naked, as though instinctively each of us knew The Permeance would not visit us were we to remain hidden beneath the dull hypocrisy of clothing.

Desperate for any illumination, I turned once more toward the mirror, holding my gaze there. Somehow I sensed Hope was doing the same, peering intently into its dark void. The ornate 19th century framed mirror—a bequest to the University from some nameless and forgotten estate—seemed to draw all the room’s scarce light and energy into itself, shimmering with evanescent ripples like a sliver of moonlight caught in a breeze-swept reflecting pool.

Do you see what I see? I whispered.

Hush, you’ll spoil it.

As I continued to stare, my vision seemed to tunnel; the closeness of darkness replaced the immense dimensions of the room. I lost all perception of the gilt-edged frame, of light or shadow, what a scientist might call spatial orientation, the feel of my body out my clothes, the burden of gravity, even the passage of time. The mirror’s black void made itself my universe; with every sighing breath of Hope it seemed to transform almost imperceptibly nearer and nearer to purest white. Like a savage in a jungle clearing about to attend his first picture show, I widened my eyes, faced the blank screen and waited, anticipating everything and nothing.

CHAPTER TWO

And then it happened.

What happened, Steve?

The Permeance.

You’ll have to define your terms there, Professor. It was winding down into early evening; the streetlights were winking on, my secretarial staff of one long departed for home and family. The most exasperating aspect of late afternoon appointments is the loquacious client. Such a client was my good friend Professor Steve—undisputed king of the interminable stream-of-consciousness monologue. And, as my yellow pages ad says, the first office visit is always absolutely free.

The Permeance is an uncharted domain of consciousness, he began, entirely theoretical and anecdotal until LeGrand’s seminal work in this area established its existence beyond dispute. Although I had extensively analyzed the EEG and PET scan data I personally had never experienced the phenomenon as a subjective reality. Until Hope came along, that is.

Hope—this woman you believe time-traveled a hundred years so she could meet with you in your office?

It was really LeGrand she wanted to study under, not me—curious term, isn’t it? Study under? But it does take into account the fact that the structure of the academic world is inherently autocratic, not collegial. Properly labeled, it should have been the Autocracy of Psychology, not the College of Psychology.

Maybe your star pupil Hope can travel back in time and remedy that mislabeling.

Steve didn’t even look at me. On any other topic except his late wife Zoë, and now more recently this Hope, his conversation could be counted on to be pellucid, incisive, witty and erudite. Zoë and Hope were to the flow of ideas in his mind akin to two rough, strangely-shaped rocks diverting and narrowing the bed of a swift stream, churning the water in crazy, unpredictable patterns of impenetrable roil and mud. His body stiffened, neck taut, he spoke rapid-fire, with what those in the know call pressure of speech.

The Permeance is like discovering another sense, more powerful than sight or sound, more delicate than taste, headier than the softest touch and more evocative than smell. You know how a smell—burning leaves, hot apple cider, school paste, witch hazel—can take your mind back thirty years and more to an experience you thought you’d totally forgotten? Well, the Permeance can really take you there, if you’ll let it, body and soul. Forward in time, too. That’s what happened with Hope. He nodded rapidly to himself, over and over. I could see why his assigned graduate students shunned him and demanded transfers to other faculty advisers. It must be particularly demeaning and challenging for a graduate student in the psychology department to have a lunatic for a mentor.

So it’s like a sixth sense, this Permeance? Second sight?

It’s something ineffable. Beyond words.

I know what ineffable means, Steve.

I know you do. But until with Hope’s assistance I actually experienced the Permeance firsthand, I must admit to harboring some of the same thoughts you’re thinking now.

What exactly am I thinking now, Steve? Practicing psychotherapy without a license has always been a necessary adjunct to my law career in counseling and interviewing clients.

You think nice thoughts, same as the Board of Governors. You think maybe I need to take a nice long sabbatical at a nice quiet mental institution until I’m all better. You think the nice doctors ought to fry the rarest and most fragile cockles of my brain with nice new experimental antipsychotic drugs. You think I totally lost it after Zoë and LeGrand died, and that maybe, just maybe, I killed them both.

No, but what I do think is that I’d like to meet this Hope, if you can set it up. Do you think she might stop by my office if you asked her to, maybe answer a few questions?

Steve stared at the statue of blindfolded Lady Justice holding a downturned sword in her right hand and in her left a perfectly balanced scale: a clock on one weight pan and a dollar sign on the other, in equipoise. Janet had bought it for me at a weekend vacation seminar in San Francisco.

What kind of questions? Steve asked..

The guy at the booth told Janet the figurine had been cast using the ‘lost wax process.’ Intrigued by his candle magick mumbo-jumbo, she had been hooked, and bought it for me on a whim. The clock still worked perfectly—it now read four minutes until eight PM.

Seriously Steve, do you think I could meet Hope? I doubted very much by this time that Hope actually existed. Any reticence on Steve’s part to produce her would serve to reinforce my suspicions. But Steve readily agreed.

Next time I see her, I’ll ask her, Fred. She’s coming by tomorrow for some more intensive research. He glanced around the office, as though looking for something. You think I could have a cup of coffee?

Sure. Relax, I’ll get two coffees, and call Janet.

Oh, am I holding you up?

Let me just make a quick call.

Janet sounded tired; her voice told me the kids had been bugging her about vacation again. We hadn’t had a family vacation in years; in fact, the last time Janet and I had gotten away was the tax-deductible professional seminar junket to San Francisco in 2004. Her profession, not mine.

Are you still with a client?

It’s Professor Steve.

Not The Thing That Never Leaves? You certainly don’t owe him any more of your time, Fred. Remember that last time we had him to dinner? I thought we’d have to make up the spare bedroom. What was it, four AM before he went home? And Sunday morning Mass only a few hours away.

They have those things every couple hours at St. Patrick’s; it’s like a multiplex, I said, remembering Professor Steve’s coffee, which if Nancy hadn’t turned it off would be the general consistency of liquid asphalt by now.

Please don’t remind me I’m married to a Protestant heathen, Fred. All I’m saying is that you were his shoulder to cry on when Zoë and her father died so horribly; it’s been a year now, and he needs to get on with his life, not monopolize ours.

I pulled the door to the secretary’s office shut and lowered my voice: I think it’s more than that now, Janet. I think Professor Steve’s finally lost his mind.

Well then he needs a doctor, not a lawyer. Think of the children, Fred. Think of me for once, will you, rather than your bloody professional duties and your high and mighty loyalty to your clients. Now I’ll have to worry about Professor Steve and his psychotic break sneaking into our home wild-eyed and chasing all of us ‘round and ‘round the dinner table brandishing a butcher knife.

Janet, you’ve been watching too much Lifetime Television for Women. He’s harmless. The University is trying to let him go. All those years working toward his tenure about to go up in smoke, and he’s sitting here rambling on and on about time travel and a sixth sense. Oh, and I think he’s come up with an imaginary girlfriend, too. Her name’s Hope. We’re setting up a meeting.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Fred, get out of there now.

Thank you for including me in such august company.

Be serious for once in your life, Fred, instead of blaspheming.

As I recall, it was you taking those three names in vain.

Pay attention to your wife for a change, will you? I’m worried. You’re no psychiatrist, even though you may think you are.

Neither are you, my love. Only a damned cunning forensic psychologist.

Don’t you forget it.

I won’t be long. Love you. Bye. I hung up before she could utter further protest, knowing I would most certainly hear it at home.

The coffee dregs were the consistency of crankcase oil after fifty thousand miles of hard off-road desert driving. I poured two cups, hoping the nastiness of the bill of fare might drive Steve Toddmann home to face his private demons alone. No such luck.

You made espresso.

Nah, it’s only what’s left in the pot. Do you want me to review that letter now?

It’s pretty self-explanatory. He produced a correspondence folded into quarters, then into triangles. It was a proposed letter of resignation, respectfully requesting the CIU Department of Psychology to relieve Professor Steve of his duties and waiving and releasing any and all claims, causes of action whether sounding in tort, breach of contract or otherwise, bla bla bla. Recited consideration was lump-sum severance pay of $2500.00 and the University’s mutual waiver of any and all claims it might make against Professor Steve.

And obviously if you don’t sign?

"The cover letter says they will pursue any and all avenues against me, up to and including lawsuit and termination of my employment. I can’t handle this right now, Fred. Not when I’m on the verge of something that’ll make modern-day psychology as irrelevant as, say, astrology. Interesting aside: did you know