This happened awhile back. Before Katrina. I was writing on a laptop on a balcony in New Orleans on a cool night. Dead quiet side street, no strolling tourists, few passing cars. As I worked, an IM window popped open and someone began pestering me.
I asked who they were and they said, “The Devil.”
Naturally I began baiting this person, and torturing them, mocking such ridiculous and grandiose claims, and they became increasingly angrier and less coherent. At one point I recall they typed, over and over, some Latinesque word, as if trying to block out what I was saying. “Exocit” or “equasit” or something like that. Maybe it’s Enochian, who knows.
They then wrote, “I know where you are,” and so I wrote something like, “Well, fair’s fair: Where are YOU?” Bantering tone, don’tcha know.
Just as I wrote this a convertible drove by, old tail-fin Cadillac, with four or five people in it, young folks, and one screamed something up at me. “Look out,” or maybe “Look here.”
I glanced down, flipped them off, and looked back at my screen, and the answer to the question Where are YOU hung there, glowing in the dark:
On the other side of the door.
I was sitting with my left shoulder to the balcony door, and it wasn’t a sliding glass door either but a regular hotel door, opaque wood with a locking doorknob and no peephole. That’s how that place had it set up. I’d left it shut to preserve the weak air-conditioning the room offered, for when I decided to try to sleep.
So I smirked and wrote, “What door?” and that’s when something thumped the door from the inside.
I’ll admit my pulse increased. However, I grabbed the doorknob, twisted it, and shoved the door open hard, yelling as I did so. Just a yell, a holler, no words.
Nothing there of course. I figured the thump could have come from another floor. Acoustics can fool you.
Still, I got up and poked my head into the room. No one there, nothing disturbed. Sat back down, and that’s when I got chills, because it was only then that it sunk in to me that I was working on a laptop, and that it wasn’t even plugged in for power, let alone linked to any line out. No Internet connection was possible.
The IM box was gone, of course, and I’ve no clue to this day what the hell happened or how. Dream? Doubt it.
If it was a funny little time-bomb program, then circumstances sure conspired to help bring off the joke in grand style.
And it was only in retrospect that I realized what I’d done: I’d shouted at the devil. Just like the old folk advice tells you to do. Just like that old heavy metal song insists, too. Did it quite naturally and unconsciously.
So what do I think now, after a good deal of time has passed? I think it was just another New Orleans shout echoing in the party-mad night.
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