An Offer You Can’t Refuse by Samuel Gregory
Each Friday night, the demon came to Joe with a question. The first of these questions had been simple, would he be willing to part with his life to save the life of the boy who lived two doors down? Joe, thinking the question part of an unsettling dream, bemusedly refused, only to watch the boy die in a hit and run only two days later. The next week, the demon asked for Joe’s life in exchange for the lives of the couple he had met only last Wednesday at a nearby coffee shop. Joe, thinking the car accident a tragic coincidence, again refused. That Saturday morning, he saw the couple’s faces on the television, complete with a phone number to call in case he knew anything about the botched robbery that they had claimed their lives. The “stakes”, if you will, had gotten higher and higher with each week. Last week’s offer was Joe’s life for that of a school bus full of children. And, like every week before, Joe had turned down the devil’s bargain.
Rain or shine, between the hours of 6 pm and midnight every Friday, the demon would appear. It seemed to prefer materializing in his dreams but if Joe was still awake, it would force its way into the microseconds of blackness created by his blinks. It appeared always as a smokey black hole roughly two feet in diameter, circumscribed by the pained faces of those whom Joe refused to save, its voice as flat as a moonlit desert. No master or grand purpose could be inferred from its visits and voice, and no mythology contained any creature that matched it even slightly. Even calling it malevolent seemed to be misguided as the demon was perfectly impartial in its interactions and gave off a strangely bureaucratic air, seeming more like a bored messenger than a scheming shade. Joe had been the one to classify it as demon, as the strange being talked about nothing other than its weekly offer and the three rules which governed it, sparing no extra syllables. The first rule was that Joe’s death would be instant and painless if he did indeed choose to sacrifice himself. The second was that he had only five minutes each week to ruminate upon and accept the offer. The final rule was that any attempt to prevent the deaths of those who lives hung in the balance would fail. Joe had tried to break this rule on the third week by trying to warn the family of four who had been put on the other end of the scale. His tires had all blown simultaneously upon pulling out of his driveway and the bus he had managed to flag down had taken several wrong turns. By the time he arrived at their house, firefighters had unsuccessfully been trying to revive the family’s patriarch in the middle of the front lawn. Next to the oxygen tank were two small and one large sheet-covered mounds.
Any rational person would have asked why Joe had not given himself up, both to save the lives of future victims and to end this strange and underserved torment. The answer was simple cowardice. The hypochondria of his parents and an inherent state of malaise had conspired to make him unfathomably scared of death. Even thinking about sleep, the banal, universal experience every man knows, was enough to cause him to break into a cold sweat due to how well it simulated the stopping of consciousness. Joe’s fear did not lead him to refuse the demon lightly, however, and his extreme guilt caused ulcers to fester in his stomach and sores to breed in his mouth. Nothing stopped the guilt, not even the best of rationalizations. Each week, he swore that he would accept the bargain and each week his determination faltered when the demon cloud appeared. At these moments, he could feel his conscience slipping down further and further in his chest. The guilt had largely plateaued after he let a ferry sink in a nearby lake.
On the 52nd week, a full year after the demon had first appeared, Joe went to sleep early Friday afternoon and awoke Saturday morning, having experienced a dreamless and silent night. He sat in his bed for an hour, fearing that the sunlight streaming through his window was some fiendish trick. The devil had never failed to come before and had shown no sign of stopping or pausing its visits, delivering last week’s message as it had done 51 times before. Joe didn’t fully exhale until the next Friday when the demon again failed to make an appearance, confirming what he hoped for against hope for all week long.
Joe was never the same, however. As his memories of the demon began to grow less and less distinct, he only began to worry more and more about his spectral visitor. The ambiguity regarding the purpose of the torture drove him insane. What foul master or masters did the demon serve? Was the whole ordeal some sort of test and did he pass or fail? Had he condemned himself to hell? And worst of all, would it be waiting for him when he did finally die? No religion or philosophy could even hope to answer these questions and so it was almost kind that Joe’s answer to this question came sooner than expected in the form of a speeding driver who sped through a crosswalk. Unfortunately, the comfort of the end to his ignorance was not enough to dispel the fear in Jo’s dying mind as familiar smokey tendrils creeped into his fading vision.
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Samuel Gregory is a mechanical engineering student who enjoys history and anything paranormal. His favorite animals are frogs.
