arriving tomorrow. The woman was going to stay. Her companion would be allowed to leave and Abaddon was glad for that.
His house was warmer now, though chilly enough with the stone floors and stone walls. He kept a fire going just the same as before. Guests seemed to like it. And how they loved the look of the house with the turret and the gables and the dormers. Not all of them learned of the dungeon.
Outside were palm trees, mimosas, bougainvillea, the backs of tumbling mountainsides, and the wide Pacific ocean rolling softly onto white beaches. Sometimes Abaddon walked there at midnight, staring out to sea and imagining the sea's transformation to tidal waves and the earth to crevices and craters. It pleased him to see it beautiful and to imagine it demolished. When or if that happened in the future was not up to him, but if it was he would destroy it tomorrow.
As twilight came close, inching through the lead-glass windows with long fingers of darkness, and a frail wind whistled around the eaves, Abaddon reviewed in his mind the woman who was coming to him. She owned a company that would invent a chip that would control the thoughts of every citizen in every nation. She was buying another company, a pharmaceutical, that was on the verge of making a drug that could be put into water supplies--just drops of it--that would carry a virus never imagined and impossible to stop. Oh, she was a cunning monster, and determined, and rich enough to do everything she ever wanted to do to the human race. She threw the whole plan into chaos. She was a wild card and he had to shuffle her back into the deck.
Abaddon smiled and templed his fingers together to form a steeple. It was wonderful to have such purpose, to be such a utilitarian devil. He helped to correct the universe and got fresh souls in the balance. True scions of evil turned into his slaves. In a month his house would dissolve and reappear elsewhere in the world as if it had existed forever in another country, in another city. He had been promised Beirut--or was it Berlin? For the time being he had taken care of the natural born world killers in the United States--at least he would have after dealing with the woman coming to his bed and breakfast tonight.
He glanced about, feeling a little lonely, and drew the shadows to him. They came from out of the corners and off the ceiling, they crawled from beneath the settee and his chair, they burst from out of the flames of the fireplace. He watched them begin to move and sway and form into beings, into infernal, frightful creatures.
They knew how to dance for him. It was something they could do that lessened his misery. And if they did it well, sometimes they were unchained and sent away from the duty and drudgery of the house of Abaddon, the house of Hell.
They knew how to make their master happy...
...and how to sparkle like all the stars of heaven.
THE END
INTERVIEW WITH A PSYCHO
BY
Billie Sue Mosiman
Copyright 2011 Billie Sue Mosiman, All rights reserved
Published first in PSYCHOS by Robert Bloch, re-published in DARK MATTER by Billie Sue Mosiman (available in hardcover from John Betancourt)
***
The place was Alabama, a hundred miles north of Mobile, the village named after