Edgar Manning sat hunched over his writing desk, staring at a blank page in a study that had gone dark hours ago without his noticing. He’d been stuck for weeks. The pen that once moved on its own now sat dead in his hand, and every morning he woke up a little less sure he’d ever really had the gift at all.

   He’d tasted real success once. His name used to mean something in horror fiction. Now the well had run dry, and his reputation was going with it, day by day, review by review. When the despair finally got the better of him, he said the words before he’d decided to say them.

   “Help me,” he whispered. “I’ll do anything for inspiration.”

   The candle on his desk guttered, though no window stood open. A cold draft moved through the room like it had somewhere to be. Then he heard it: a low chuckle, coming from nowhere in particular.

   “Anything, you say?” The voice was pleasant in a way that made Edgar’s skin crawl. “Are you willing to make a deal, Edgar Manning?”

   “Who’s there?” Edgar’s eyes darted around the room. His heart was going hard enough that he could feel it in his throat.

   A figure took shape in the corner, wrapped in a cloak that seemed to eat the little light left in the room. Its eyes shifted as it stepped forward, dark one moment, gold and red the next, like a goat’s, like something that had never needed to blink.

   “I can give you what you’re after.” The voice was smooth, almost bored. “Does your ‘anything’ include a pact with me?”

   Edgar knew the stories. Everyone did. Deals with the Devil never ended well. But stories were stories, and desperation had a way of making even foolish bargains sound reasonable.

   “What’s the price?” he asked.

   “Nothing from your pocket. Not even a cut of your royalties. Just your soul.”

   Edgar almost laughed. “I don’t even believe that’s a real thing. I think you’re something I’m dreaming up. You’re probably the Scotch talking. Either that, or the five-alarm chili I had for dinner finally burned through to my brain.”

   “A figment of your imagination.” The thing grinned, teeth even, and far too many. “If that’s all I am, what’s the harm in agreeing?”

   “Fine. There’s no consequence to a deal with my own imagination. Inspire me, then get out. If I’m asleep, I’d rather have sweeter dreams.”

   The Devil raised a hand and passed it slowly over Edgar’s head. “You’ll write a series of stories about a serial killer. Each one worse than the last. And when anyone asks where the ideas come from, you’ll tell them, ‘It’s almost like they write themselves.’”

   Edgar’s eyes were already drifting shut by the time the hand dropped away. He nodded before he’d finished hearing the terms.      They shook on it, and something tore loose in his chest, quiet and final, like a page ripped clean out of a book.

   The first novel came fast. The second faster. Edgar wrote faster than he ever had in his life. Book after book, each one darker than the one before, and he told every interviewer, every fan at every signing, the same line the Devil had given him. It’s almost like they write themselves. He said it so often it stopped feeling like a lie.

   He also stopped remembering how the books got written. He’d sit down at the typewriter with nothing, and hours would vanish. More than once he came to on the dirt road outside town with no memory of leaving the house.

   A reporter cornered him outside a bookstore. “As a writer who covers this kind of thing, you must have thoughts on all these disappearances around the county?” Edgar opened his mouth but nothing came out. A few days later, she was one of the disappearances herself, and he told himself that was a coincidence, the way he’d tell himself a lot of things over the coming months.

   Each time he came home from a signing or a reading, a new manuscript would be waiting on his desk, finished, in his own style but sharper, meaner, like something had taken his voice and filed the edges into knives. His fame kept climbing right alongside the missing-persons count, and somewhere in that climb, the dreams started.

   At first they were just noise: shapes, voices, nothing he could hold onto in the morning. Then the faces sharpened. A schoolteacher with ink on her fingers, begging in a voice that cracked halfway through her own name. A traveling salesman who didn’t beg for his life so much as ask, quietly, if someone would write to his sister. A young mother with her arms locked around a child who wasn’t actually there, which was somehow worse than if she had been. Edgar didn’t know any of them. He knew every face.

    He told himself it was coincidence when the paper ran the first notice. MISSING LOCAL TEACHER. The name underneath matched the woman from his dream, letter for letter. He told himself the same thing three days later when the salesman’s photo ran, and again the week after that, until the telling had worn thin enough to see straight through.

   That was the night he decided to stop.

   He hauled the typewriter into the yard himself and left it in the dirt by the woodpile, then went back for the axe. The first swing cracked the carriage. The second sent keys skittering into the grass like teeth knocked loose. He didn’t stop until the machine was scrap, and then he went back inside for every manuscript he’d ever put his name to and fed them into the fireplace, page by page, until there was nothing left but ash curling up the flue. For the first time in months, he thought, there. Done. Whatever this was, it’s over now.

   He slept without dreaming, which should have told him something.

   When he woke, the sun was already high, and a typewriter sat on his desk. Not the one from the yard. This one was new, the ribbon worn just enough to look used, and next to it sat a stack of pages, squared off, finished, his name typed neatly on the title page. He hadn’t touched it. He sat down and read it anyway, because not knowing would have been worse.

   It was the most thorough thing he’d ever put out under his name. Every wound cataloged. Every last word from every victim written down like someone had actually been in the room, taking notes. He was three-quarters through when a name stopped him cold, one he didn’t recognize from any paper, any headline, or bulletin. The date next to it hadn’t happened yet.

   He was in town inside the hour, pages crushed under his arm, standing in front of the sheriff’s desk before he’d worked out what he meant to say.

   “You have to stop it,” he said. “There’s a woman. She’s going to die tomorrow, and I know her name.”

   The sheriff looked up slowly, already wondering if the next thing out of Edgar’s mouth was worth believing. “And how would you know a thing like that, Mr. Manning?”

   Edgar opened his mouth. There was no sentence that started with a manuscript wrote itself in my study and ended anywhere but a different kind of cell. He said nothing, and the silence did more damage than any answer could have. The sheriff’s face softened into something almost gentle. He suggested Edgar go home and rest. Fame took a lot out of a man. Maybe he’d been working too hard.

   They found her the next afternoon, right where the manuscript said she’d be, exactly how it said she’d be. There was nothing left for Edgar to add, and nothing left for him to deny.

   He drove home in a silence he didn’t remember choosing. The desk was waiting for him just as he’d left it that morning, except for a fresh stack of pages, centered on the blotter. He didn’t need to get past the first sheet this time. The dedication held four words, inked in a hand that wasn’t his.

   YOUR NEXT BESTSELLER.

                                    Signed, B.

   He stood before the altar in his study that night, unable to carry any more of it. He went down on his knees. “I can’t do this anymore,” he said. “Make it stop.”

   The Devil appeared across from him, eyes catching the candlelight. “You made a deal, Edgar. There’s no undoing it now.”

   But Edgar wasn’t interested in being a pawn anymore. He grabbed the lit candle off the altar and threw it. The flames caught the Devil’s cloak, and for a moment the thing laughed like it thought this was funny, before the fire and the smoke swallowed it whole.

   Edgar turned himself in the next morning. He led them out to the farm and showed them where the barrels were buried, every one of them, and told them everything he could remember, which by then was most of it.

                                                                                                ✦ ✦ ✦   

There was no trial. At his arraignment he confessed to every murder the manuscript had predicted, speaking plainly, almost gently, like a man describing a nightmare he’d taken too long to wake up from. He told the court he didn’t remember the killings themselves, that his hands had moved without him, that he’d lived for months inside something that wore his own skin like a coat. He didn’t ask for mercy. He said he didn’t think he’d earned it.

   The judge looked at him the way the sheriff had. Pity, mostly, with a little bit of that instinct people have to step back from something broken. Edgar didn’t contest anything. There was no jury, no appeal, no delay. He walked into prison already convinced it was where he belonged.

   He tried to be a good inmate. Laundry, kitchen, yard duty, head down. He prayed, though he was never sure who was listening.

Beelzebub visited anyway.

Sometimes he leaned against the concrete like it was a barstool. Sometimes he sat on the edge of Edgar’s bunk with his hands folded, patient as a man with nowhere else to be.

One night Edgar finally said what he’d been holding back.

   “You don’t control me. You don’t own me. I beat you.”

   The Devil laughed, quiet at first, then louder, until the sound seemed to come from inside the walls instead of off them.

   “You think a cell frees you? You think confession wipes the slate? Edgar. I have all the time in the world.”

   “Do your worst. The only thing you can take from me now is time. You can’t make me do your evil bidding. I may be in prison, but I’m finally free of you. I can do ten or twenty years behind bars, then worry about you later.”

   The Devil laughed until he clutched his sides.

   “We’ll see who has the last laugh,” Edgar said.

   “So we shall. I’ll wait. Enjoy the victory while it lasts.” The Devil looked straight into Edgar’s eyes. “Edgar, time belongs to me.”

   Then he was gone, and the cell was colder than it had been a second before.

                                                                                        ✦ ✦ ✦

   A hundred and ten years later, in orbit above a planet no one down there had bothered naming, the Andromeda Prison Systems station turned slowly against a field of stars. Inside, Warden Bruce Darden stood behind the glass wall of his office, running a routine scan of the newest transfers off Earth.

   Darden had been doing six-month rotations up there for longer than he liked to think about. Six months in recycled air watching men come apart at the seams, three months home for what the Directorate called family reunification, three months of conditioning to get ready to do it all again. He counted the days more than the inmates did.

   His slate flagged an entry and wouldn’t let him scroll past it.

   Prisoner 19384579. Manning, Edgar James.  The age field blinked, recalculated, and settled on a number that made no sense.

His assistant looked over from the exercise-yard feed she’d been half watching. “What is it?”

   “Look at this.”

   She squinted at the screen. “That’s an entry error. Incarceration date says 1979. That’s over a century. He’d have to be older than dirt.” She laughed, then stopped when he didn’t. “I’ll pull the transfer logs.”

   The data held up. No corruption, no missing packets, no glitch to point to.

   “Incident history,” Darden said, and turned the slate so she could read it herself. “Multiple suicide attempts. Stabbed in the showers, twice. Thrown from the third tier. Survived every one.”

   “That’s not possible.”

   He tapped the age field and let it expand. “A hundred and sixty-three. Next month.”

   She looked from the number to the man on the monitor, standing motionless in his cell, staring at nothing she could see.

   “Pull his file,” Darden said. “I want to know who he was before he was a number.”

   The file opened to a scanned page that had somehow survived a hundred years of transfers between facilities. At the top, typed and still legible, was a name.

   EDGAR MANNING.

   His cell floated in the dark, a clear cube anchored at each corner by magnetic braces. The walls held no shadows and no privacy. Light came from everywhere, filling the space that was no larger than a standard elevator used in the previous century.

   A column ran straight through the center, floor to ceiling. It was black and polished enough to throw Edgar’s reflection back at him from every angle. Faint blue veins pulsed beneath the polished surface.

   Restraint bands circled his wrists, ankles, and waist. They were tethered to that column by lines thinner than fishing wire and stronger than anything he’d ever tried to break. They gave him just enough room to move around the column, but the view remained the same at every angle. Nothing more. Push past the limit and the lines locked instantly, turning from thread to bar in less than a second. The current soon followed.

   He hadn’t been allowed to wear clothing in years. The state allowed no secrets or modesty. His body kept the record his file didn’t need to. Scars in pale ridges and knotted lines. A neck bent permanently off-center from all the times he’d tried to hang himself, with a bedsheet, a belt, drinking straws knotted together, and with a sock. A back that curved wrong. Legs that had healed just enough to hold him up after a fall from three floors he’d taken decades earlier.

   The air changed before he saw anything. Then B. was there, the first visit in twenty years, drifting through zero gravity in slow, lazy circles. His hooves never touched the floor. His cloak moved like it was underwater. His eyes shifted gold to red and back, the way they always had.

   “Still feel like a winner, Edgar?”

   “I’d hoped you’d forgotten me.”

   “I just saw you. Felt like yesterday.”

   “It’s been twenty years.”

“Tomato, tomahto. Time’s relative. Did you miss me?”

   Edgar didn’t look up. He’d hoped the taunting was behind him. “You’re not real. You don’t have power over me anymore. Get behind me, Satan.”

   Beelzebub laughed, and the sound didn’t behave the way sound was supposed to. It didn’t echo off the glass. It didn’t need to travel to reach him. It was just there, all at once, inside Edgar’s skull and every broken part of his body at the same time.

                                                                                           ✦ ✦ ✦

   Fifty stories up, in the monitoring tower, a guard glanced at a floating screen showing Edgar alone in his cell, chained, mouthing words at no one.

   “Nineteen-three-eight-four-five-seven-nine’s hallucinating,” he said, tapping the console. “Talking to himself.”

   The other guard shrugged without looking up. “Inherited ourselves a senile old man. Great.”

   They went back to their screens, neither one aware of the thing circling below them.

                                                                                          ✦ ✦ ✦

   “Quoting scripture now?” B. murmured, drifting close enough that Edgar caught the smell of ink and sulfur on his breath. “How quaint.”

   “You don’t own me.”

   “Oh, Edgar.” He pulled back, cloak trailing behind him like smoke through water. “I’ve owned you since the day a bestseller mattered more to you than your soul.” He leaned in again, and his voice seemed to come from somewhere inside Edgar’s own bones. “I’m very patient.”

   Edgar closed his eyes. It was the only way he’d found to get through these visits.

   Above them both, the guards watched a man talk to nothing. Below, the Devil laughed.

   “This has worked out better than anything I could’ve written myself,” B. said. “You’re a captive audience, Edgar. Pardon the pun.”

   “You mock me with your jokes, serpent.”

   “Don’t blame me for that one.” He smiled, and something that might have been tears drifted past Edgar’s face in the low gravity. “It’s almost like they write themselves.”