(Dedicated to 'oneforfall'- a generous,kindly soul without whom this story would not have seen the light of day on this site at least.)
a/n This story invites the reader to guess the identity of the contractee Sebastian's remembering. Adequate clues are included within the text if you'd like to google it, so even if you did not live in the 60's and 70s you should still be able to play along.
...
Just like Robert Johnson and many other musicians both before and after, he'd met her first at a rural crossroads-in her case, in Texas. If there were any justice in the human world, neither she nor Robert would've ever needed his help to make their dreams come true.
He'd seen to it, however, the world would never forget either of them.
Funny, self-deprecating, profane and adventurous, the demon found her captivating. Her soul overwhelmed him with its heady bouquet of despair, self-loathing and the pain of a permanently shattered heart. Her wanton innocence, at once shy, girlish yet utterly uninhibited, her willingness to try anything to get free of the small-minded little Texas town of her birth was both laudable and completely understandable.
She hungered just as he hungered, in her case, with a voracious appetite for everything life offered. Consequently, the demon liked her instantly. They were going to be good together, he could tell, good for however long it lasted.
Of course, with heroin in the picture even he couldn't make it last long.
But yes, she was very much to his taste. He had always favoured the smart, the devious and the talented. He wanted a playmate. He wanted her. He wanted her bare, writhing and moaning, wrapped around him possessively somewhere dark and private. Plus, of course, no aphrodisiac on earth works as well as having someone want you as much as you want them and having one who truly understands you.
Like him she swung both ways; nothing really put her off. And just like him, no amount of affection applied to the outside would ever reach the icy lump they both carried in place of a heart, the heart that had been torn out years—or in his case, millennia—ago.
He'd been in her audience one night shortly before the so-called 'Summer of Love,' the one that ironically killed the Haight-Ashbury community. It had been a good place to be a demon for many seasons and many reasons. Most of all because the police despised the happily trippy young people living there, hating the success of their socialistic ideals and their conviction that 'love' really was all the world needed—that, and the complete destruction of the advances of the industrial revolution and a return to medieval-era simplicity. He could've told them it wasn't that simple but when had he ever been the sort to discourage people torturing themselves? The establishment,'the Man' as they referred to it, considered them a nuisance and a danger to public peace, so very few deaths were rigorously investigated. Plenty of people died there thanks in part to the easy access to potentially lethal drugs. Many a tender youth went in and was never heard of again. Some of them the demon himself was responsible for.
In short, it was a predator's paradise.
He'd gone into a little coffee house on Oak street that night to enjoy the second-hand smoke and listen to the entertainment. He'd been instantly captivated by her wild appearance and powerful, utterly raw, uninhibited performance. In an era where women still slept in curlers and used aerosol hairspray to lacquer their beehives and spit curls into crackling rigidity, her medium red-brown hair exploded off her head and down her back making her resemble a human tumbleweed. He couldn't imagine her with a curler in her hair though in truth, she'd once hnestly tried her best to fit in, to be accepted, to be one of them. But 'they' had already decided; they weren't having it.
What immeasurable loss the world would've suffered had she succeeded!
That first night, she'd had on more jewellery than a Bengali bride and reeked of sex, black tar heroin and musk oil. The last song in her set, an a'capella chant begging God for such modern-day necessities as colour television, a luxury car, and a drunken night out, was so funny he'd blown whisky out his nose laughing at it.
Yes indeed, she was quite a package.
Her uniquely raspy, wailing voice, so much like a cat in heat that he'd once asked her whether she were ever troubled by tom cats getting into fights over her. He'd never heard a human voice that could command both melody and harmonics to produce such an amazingly complex, earthy sound. It was especially noticeable when she sang the ballad "Summertime." It made his fingers itch for an oscilloscope to test her voice on.
Such a lush, emotional rendition, it was as though she were somehow having sex with every ear in the audience. At once lewd carnal, yet spiritual and intimate, it was rare and altogether precious, just like her. Easily enough to make an angel cry. Or a devil, or...well. He could only prove one of those statements, but still.
''Call me 'Pearl','' she'd told him, not too long before the overdose they'd agreed on to cover up the real cause of her death—him, collecting her soul.
All she'd ever really wanted in the end was to show that shabby little town that hated her so that she had worth to someone, somewhere, even if not to them.
Well. That, and to be beloved of someone. Anyone. Even if only for a little while.
He still laughs as he travels through that town. It has to suffer the indignity of being remembered by the rest of the world as her birthplace and for absolutely nothing else. Hardly a day goes by that someone there isn't forced to think of her, say her name or point out where she'd once lived, attended school or gone to church. They have surprisingly little to say when asked to point out those who had made her life a living hell on a daily basis. But he knew who they were and that's all that mattered. Occasionally he'd scare one of them to death just for the hell of it. In her honour.
And there, smack in the centre of town, a memorial: her bronze likeness smirking down in triumph at them all.
Vengeance indeed.
The fact of that memorial always pleased him ridiculously. He always liked to take an extra swing through town with the windows rolled down, blasting a recording of her most popular songs, just to rub it in. But that bronze memorial also gave him uncomfortable, unexpected twinges of guilt sometimes.
She'd been worth—oh hell, so much more than that.