The Devil's Lease

Chapter ten: The First entry

The air outside the apartment complex was as sharp and merciless as a new bill. Caleb was on the stoop, holding the black notebook like a very tiny, very damned book. Everything else seemed to be just… ordinary. A man in a business suit rushed by, speaking on his phone. A little kid, six at most, was trying to ride a training-wheel bike that squealed around each bend. A woman was watering some plants. The sun was shining bright, the birds were singing sweet melodies, and all the air was filled with the scent of fresh pavement and coffee. It was an incredibly beautiful, typical morning, and Caleb felt like a fraud to walk through it.

He was a new soul hunter. The thought was so ridiculous, so utterly insane, that he almost laughed. Almost. But then he remembered the mooing milk and the starving trash can, and the chuckle stuck in his throat. This wasn't funny. This was reality. He was a man who spent his afternoons trying to write a brilliant chorus, and now he was doing this. He was a field operative for the damnation division.

He wasn't an i***t. He had to "observe" people and find out what their "vulnerabilities" were. That was something a kook guy in a trench coat would be doing, not a hoodie-wearing, dirty old sneaker-munching moron. He felt so vulnerable, so out of place. He yearned to turn around and return indoors, climb into bed, and wish this was some terrible fever dream. But the thought of the humming walls and the emitting soy sauce gave him a strong motive. He could not turn back. He had to do it.

He decided his first victim to be something familiar, a safer risk. He could not handle a stranger at the moment. He thought of his neighbor, Mark. Mark lived directly across the hall and was a human stereotype of a cranky hermit. He wore the same plaid shirt every day, and his scowl seemed permanently implanted on his face. Caleb walked over to a small bed of wild bushes near Mark's window and crouched down, peering through the leaves like a bad spy. His knees were aching and he could feel a drop of sweat trickling down the back of his neck. This was so humiliating. He was a total p*****t.

He pulled out the notebook and a pen. Okay. Mark. What was he vulnerable about? What was his sorrow about? Caleb sat there for a long time thinking.

"Mark is displeased probably because his plaid shirt is never ironed," he wrote in the book. He glared at it. It was stupid. He crossed it out. "Maybe he wishes he had invested in more shares of a company? No, he is a guy who has never heard of stock." He crossed that one out, too.

He saw Mark sitting on his sofa watching television through the window. He was snacking on a pack of chips with a look of deep dissatisfaction. He was glowering at television as if it had insulted his family personally.

He was embarrassed to have consumed a whole bag of chips at 10 a.m.? Caleb typed. He paused. No, that was not it. Mark was not so embarrassed and so much. enraged. What could be so maddening about a television program?

Abruptly, there was a shiny, silver shoe next to Caleb's head. Caleb raised his eyes. It was Dev, of course, with a look of sheer disappointment on his face. He was carrying a tiny, silver tray with one, perfectly placed croissant on it.

"Hiding behind a bush, are you?" Dev asked, dripping with condescension. "We've done this. Productivity, sunlight. Not. foliage. Your performance review is going to be affected if you keep up with these. plant-type things."

Caleb leapt to his feet, twig embedded in his hair. "I was observing! I'm in the observation phase! I was watching Mark! This is hard, okay? I don't know what I'm looking for!"

Dev took a bite of the croissant. "Mark. A classic. All hard case on the outside, but he's really a sad sack of a man who blew his one chance at true happiness."

Caleb stared at him in shock. "You know his story?

"Oh, absolutely," Dev replied, chewing. "I know where to find the information. But you need to learn to find it for yourself. You're not doing the legwork. You're looking at the surface-level garbage. The chips. The scowl. You're ignoring the gold."

He drew out a tablet that gave off a gentle red glow. He swiped at it, and a holographic image of a smiling, youthful Mark appeared in front of him. Mark was holding a trophy. The vision switched to a modern-day Mark, crunched up on the couch, watching TV and looking sour-faced as he watched a game.

"Look for the telltale signs," Dev told him, inclining his head toward the screen. "The flicker of regret in his eyes when the quarterback throws the perfect spiral. The way he rubs his back when he sees a cheerleader. It's not what he's doing right now; it's what he didn't do then."

Caleb stared at the hologram. "What is it?"

"He was so good a punter in college. Had a pro career potential. But on the last day of tryouts, he got hurt and had to retire. He's bitter about it ever since. He's resentful of anyone who succeeded where he did not. His vulnerability is not the chips; it's his regret."

Dev's words were so casual, so corporate, that they were even more chilling than a demonic roar. He was a corporate instructor for the damned.

"It's all about the data, sunshine," Dev said. "Stop guessing. Start seeing."

And with that, he vanished, Caleb alone, Dev's words echoing in his mind.

Caleb glared at Mark. The scowl, the chips, the bored look on his face—all at once suddenly made terrible, pitiful sense.

Caleb spent the next three hours at a local café, nervously sitting at a tiny table, sipping a weak coffee he didn't even like. He was a perv. He was meant to be spying on other people, learning their darkest secrets. It was bad, immoral, and really awkward.

He tried to apply Dev's advice. He looked for the microexpressions. He waited for the flash of shame or envy to appear. He saw a woman in the distance. She was texted, laughing. Caleb wrote in his notebook: "Vulnerability: Probably addicted to her phone. Envy for social media." He felt like a fool. It was too general.

He looked around again, his eyes finding a man in a corner table. The man had on a bright, fitted suit. He was wealthy, prosperous-looking. He poked at his laptop, a frown on his face. Dev's words echoed through Caleb's mind: "Don't look at what he's doing now. Look at what he didn't do then."

Caleb observed him, his focus unbroken. The man groaned, rubbing his temples. He touched a photo on his laptop screen. It was a picture of him when he was younger, with a beautiful, smiling woman. She had her arm placed around him, and he really, blissfully looked happy. The man groaned again, a low, tired one, and closed his laptop.

Caleb knew. It was instinct, a chill certainty. The man was rich but had lost the one who mattered. His vulnerability wasn't his wealth; it was the loneliness. The loss of something he could never regain. Caleb put it down, a twist churning in his stomach. The act of writing it down was a small betrayal, a black little secret stolen and written on paper.

Caleb spent the rest of his day in a haze of fever. He went to the library and sat by himself in the corner, notebook spread out, simply watching. He walked through a local park, pretending to be listening to music with his eyes scanning for the tiny cracks in the emotional helmets of bystanders. He didn't even notice the flow of time. He was merely an eye and a pencil, documenting the small, secret sorrows of the world.

He saw a teenager, among his peers, whose smile never reached his eyes. His vulnerability: a profound feeling of being an outsider even among his own group. He saw a mother, wiping her child's face meticulously, her face wearing an insistent, enduring weariness. Her vulnerability was the relentless need to be perfect, never to relax and let her guard down.

The longer he stared, the more he perceived. As if Dev had bestowed upon him a kind of new vision, a devil's eye that stripped away the painted-on smile of ordinary existence and revealed to him the gnawing sadness beneath. The world, which had previously been so quaintly mundane, was now a canvas of suffering, individual heartaches. And to add to the insult, Dev was right. It was a scavenger hunt, in a manner of speaking. A grisly, despairing, but not relentlessly fascinating one.

He felt shame and excitement simultaneously. It was a terrifying kind of power, to see the things people hid from the world. And yet it was a way of ending the mooing milk and the rumbling garbage can. He was holding up his part of the deal. He was doing something for once.

When he came back to his apartment, the sun was setting and cast long, bruised shadows down the street. He was utterly exhausted, mentally and emotionally. He had spent the whole day in a state of over-awareness, and his mind was filled with other people's pain. He stepped into the calm, blissfully still apartment, and relief was so overwhelming it nearly left him dizzy at the knees. The air was tranquil, the silence normal, and the fridge was not humming with malevolent intent. He had won.

He sat the notebook on his kitchen table, a tired, contented sigh escaping his lips. He was in it now. He was getting the work done.

He flipped the book to the page where he had penned his note concerning the businessman. The isolation of the man. The loss. It was all there, a row of script in his own writing.

But as he looked at it, the ink began to shine. The words curled and twisted, not in a nasty or horrifying way, but in a way. more evocative. More personal.

The single sentence he had written was now an entire paragraph. It was describing the loneliness of the man as a precise thing, rather than a general condition. It spoke of how he could still detect the scent of his ex-wife's perfume on his pajamas. It spoke of how he came home every evening and watched himself silently consume a TV dinner. It spoke of how he had a recurring dream of her turning away from him forever, a smile creeping onto her face. The new news felt so private, so shatteringly particular, that Caleb's stomach rolled over. It was not only a record. It was a snapshot of a pain.

He flipped back through the pages he had written, the ones about the mother and the adolescent. The same had happened. His crude, fly-by-night notions had been elaborated out into complex, hurting actualities. The notebook was not just a place to write. It was a tool. It was not just recording his notes; it was amplifying them. It was an X-ray of the souls of the people he watched. It took his passing thought and turned it into something formidable.

The stark fact was horrific. He was only a witness, an innocent bystander. The notebook took over the rest. And it craved more.

He looked at the page, a new kind of fear seeping into his heart. He wasn't just a soul hunter. He was worse. He was the beginning. He was the one who cracks open the door.

He looked at the next page, which was blank. He knew what to do. He needed to fill it. He needed to nourish the notebook. But the problem was no longer what he would be writing. It was who.

He felt a soft knock at the door. It was Lena. He had forgotten to let her know he came back. He opened the door. She had a worried face, her eyes big and asking silently. He did not have to speak. She knew. She had seen him clutching the accursed book the previous day. She had cautioned him against it. But he went ahead and did it anyway.

He looked at the notebook, still in his hand, then back at her face. The look of concern there was a new kind of fear. This wasn't like a sour carton of milk. This was personal. This was real. And none of it had anything to do with him, and everything to do with her. What was he going to do next?