Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence. Michael Marshall Smith

My meeting with the imps and demons of North Dakota confirmed my suspicions. They have prayed and made sacrifice, every day and hour. Countless lives have been blighted by their actions – yet none of that power has found its way home to me. I suspect this may even be at the root of how I lost awareness of myself. The dark charge faded to the point where I slipped into some kind of infernal standby mode.’

      The Engineer looked serious now. ‘That’s … very strange.’

      ‘When did you last check the machine?’

      ‘Yesterday. It’s working perfectly.’

      The old man in the suit suddenly frowned, and turned his head towards the sliding doors.

      Hannah had woken first a little before midnight, according to the clock on her bedside table. She was cold. She huddled deeper into her bed sheets and managed to drift back off to sleep.

      She woke again an hour later. She was still cold, but something told her this was not what had interrupted her sleep. She lifted her head from the pillow and listened.

      After a moment she heard a voice. It sounded like Granddad. Perhaps he was on the phone.

      She fell asleep once more, but it was a shallow sleep, and her mind kept working, eventually popping up the observation that Granddad couldn’t be on the phone, because there was no signal here, duh. This observation didn’t know what to do with itself and so it wandered Hannah’s dozing mind, bumping into other ideas and thoughts and fragments of dreams, until eventually it made enough noise to wake her up.

      She listened blearily. There was silence, and then she heard a voice again. This time it sounded like an old man, yet not Granddad.

      That was strange.

      She raised herself up on one elbow, still half-asleep. She’d just about be able to believe that someone had happened to wander by the cabin and decided to stop and have a chat with Granddad, were it not for the fact that (a) he’d said he didn’t know anyone here, and was glad of it, and (b) it was now after one o’clock in the morning.

      Also, she thought she could hear the sound of running water, too. And a low, tuneless humming.

      She got out of bed.

      There was silence on the deck as the two old men watched Hannah approach the sliding doors.

      ‘Who is this?’

      ‘My granddaughter,’ the Engineer said. ‘She’s the other person who felt the pressure of your thoughts today. It made the afternoon difficult for her.’

      ‘She’ll forget. But what’s she doing here?’

      ‘Staying with me.’

      ‘Yes, I assumed something of the sort,’ the old man said tetchily. ‘I meant why?’

      ‘Problems at home.’

      Hannah reached the doors and slid one of them open. She flinched as the cold air crept quickly inside. ‘What are you doing out here, Granddad? It’s freezing. And who is this man?’

      The man in the black suit stood slowly, towering over her, all the world’s shadows ready at his command. ‘I … am the Devil,’ he said, his voice hollow with the echoes of countless millennia of howling darkness.

      There was silence for a moment.

      ‘I don’t believe you,’ Hannah said. She blinked at him, and yawned massively. ‘Also, Granddad, there’s an extremely large mushroom in our bath.’

       Chapter 11

      ‘But … but … but … how?’ Hannah asked.

      It wasn’t the first time she’d asked. ‘And also … why?’

      It wasn’t the first time she’d asked that either. She and Granddad were in the living room. The man in the crumpled suit had told the giant mushroom to get out of the bath and go wait outside. The mushroom, whose name seemed to be Vaneclaw, had done what it was told. A little later there had been a faint yelping sound, caused by it wandering too close to the edge of the bluff and falling over it. The man in the suit – or ‘the Devil’ as he kept insisting he should be called – said he’d be able to do less harm down there, and to ignore him for now.

      After a while, however, the mushroom had started calling out, rather plaintively. The noise eventually got loud enough that Granddad became concerned it might get into the dreams of people in nearby cabins, and so the old man in the suit irritably went out to make the mushroom be quiet. He’d been gone for some time.

      Meanwhile Granddad had listened to Hannah ask the same questions, again and again. How, and why, could he possibly know the Devil, the most evil and awful being in the universe, that a lot of people said didn’t even exist?

      Each time she asked, Granddad seemed to try to make a start at answering, but faltered. So she asked yet again.

      ‘Let me tell you a story,’ he said, finally.

      Once, he said, there was a boy.

      His name was Erik Gruen. Erik was thirteen years old and lived on a farm, a small farm, in the vast flatness of central Germany. It was not a very good farm. Every day Erik and his brothers and sisters helped their parents, tilling the land and planting seeds and looking after their straggly collection of livestock. Each year, the family barely scraped by. There was never much food, and Erik – the youngest of six children – went to work in the field every day wearing a selection of cast-offs not just from his elder brothers, but sisters, too. You might think that would have been embarrassing, but it was not, because everyone wore the same – torn rags and bits of sacking, held together with string. The point was not looking smart but being protected from the elements, because often it rained. It was cold a lot of the time, too, and windy.

      It was a tough life, though they didn’t know it. This hard, endless struggle was all they knew, all their parents had known, and all their parents’ parents had known, back into the mists of murky time. The Gruens had been working this scabby patch of land for centuries. That was what they did, all they had ever done, and all they would ever do.

      Except that one morning, when it was raining so hard there was nothing they could do outside and the entire family was crammed into the tiny farmhouse, sniping at each other, Erik decided to take a walk. He headed down the long, winding lane and got as far as the road (itself only a track slightly wider than the lane). He kept on walking until he’d gone further than ever before, and then he walked some more.