Haunted by the Devil Teaser

An excerpt from the first book in the Soul Salvager Series

“for even Satan disguises
himself as an angel of light.”

(II Corinthians 11:14)

“the devil hath the power
T’ assume a pleasing shape.”

(Hamlet 2:2:628-629)

Chris Murphy and his “business associate” (Shutterstock AI, which compensates artists for use of their work)

I blinked a few times. I’d been on the computer for too long. Maybe my eyes were so tired I was hallucinating.

No matter how much I blinked, though, the big red button on the screen still said, “Sell Your Soul.”

I wasn’t at all superstitious, so I didn’t think clicking on the button was going to do anything—except maybe plant malware on my computer. No, I wasn’t worried about the button one way or the other.

What worried me was that I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten to this page in the first place.

“Guess this is what I get for following Satan’s Twitter account,” I muttered to myself.

The screen name wasn’t actually Satan. Come to think of it, I couldn’t remember what the exact name was, but the profile clearly indicated it was someone pretending to be the prince of darkness. I’d followed that account for laughs.

Yet here I was, less than twenty-four hours later, staring at an internet offer to sell my soul.

Then I noticed a smaller button just below the sell-your-soul one that was labeled “Thirty-Day Free, No-Obligation Trial.” Clickbait if ever I’d seen it—but I went ahead and clicked anyway, figuring whatever I found would be good for another laugh, if nothing else.

The web page I found myself staring at now had all kinds of alluring graphics: exotic vacation destinations, piles of money, sports trophies, and scantily clad, beautiful girls. Floating in this sea of tempting images was the instruction, “Select the benefit you wish to test during your free trial.” Underneath that was a long list of potential benefits, all clickable.

I raised an eyebrow as I read through the choices. Some of them, like, “Make your enemy suffer,” seemed tasteless and not even a bit funny. Others, like, “Become a millionaire,” might have been tempting if I had really believed such a thing were possible.

My eyes finally came to rest on, “Have a smokin’ hot girlfriend.” That option was at least funny. I wondered how many poor nerds clicked on it and actually expected to have their wish fulfilled.

Well, this poor nerd clicked without a second thought—just for laughs, you understand.

Much to my surprise, up popped a terms-of-service agreement. Someone was really going to great lengths to make it appear that “customers” were actually agreeing to something. I clicked right through it without reading it. (Don’t judge—you know you’ve done the same!)

A final message appeared on the screen: “Your thirty-day trial period begins tomorrow, so be prepared to meet your new girlfriend.”

“As if,” I muttered to myself. I couldn’t say I’d had much luck with the ladies up to this point. Though guys always got ridiculed for being superficial, in my experience, girls could be exactly the same way. I would have liked to think I was at least a little cute, but my fairly bright red hair, pale skin, freckles, and lack of conspicuous muscles set me apart from the image of the ideal guy in the minds of most girls. My elementary school nickname, Leprechaun, kind of summarized my public image. I supposed such a nickname was inevitable, given my looks and my very Irish name, Christopher Patrick Murphy—why use just one saint’s name when you can squeeze in two? Anyway, the nickname stuck like Krazy Glue, even though I was now in high school—in a different state! I didn’t know how that could have happened, though I suspected my parents had let the nickname slip to somebody else’s parents. In a small town, that was all it would take.

Leprechauns in folklore were clever, sometimes mischievous, often amusing—but they never got the girl, at least not in any story I could find. Even modern paranormal romance writers neglected the poor leprechaun. Vampires and werewolves could get lucky. Hey, even zombies got some love, gross as the idea was if you thought about it. But for the poor leprechaun, there was none to be had. Even worse, for the leprechaun I saw in the mirror every morning, there was no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, so I couldn’t even get girls to love me for my money.

I sighed and made a conscious effort to forget about the whole thing. The website experience had been worth a chuckle or two, but now that it was over, I felt kind of let down. I guessed someone would have to be pretty bored to find fake deals with the devil funny for very long.

Yawning, I realized it was later than I thought. I got ready for bed and crawled between the covers, fully prepared to dream about my new, smokin’ hot girlfriend. Dreaming was as far as that was ever going to go.

I woke next morning realizing I hadn’t even gotten a dream out of the deal, at least not that I could remember. I did feel nervous, though, as if I were actually going to meet a potential girlfriend today. I even went through the motions of combing my hair more attentively than usual, and I went out of my way to pick out a clean shirt.

I had to snicker at myself a little. It was going to take a lot more than that to get me some sex-goddess girlfriend. On a good day, I was Joe Average, and girls who were genuine tens didn’t usually end up with guys who were fives, at least not in my experience.

My parents could see there was something subtly different about me, but they didn’t ask. They were pretty cool about not trying to probe every single detail of my unexceptional teenage life, and I repaid the favor by telling them anything I felt comfortable sharing.

By the time I arrived at school, I had mostly shoved the whole smokin’-hot-girlfriend thing out of my mind. I might not have been great with the ladies, but at least I was a good student, and I didn’t want to get distracted from my academic goals by some prank website.

Despite my motivation, I had the feeling the day might not be very productive. We’d moved to Madisonville four years ago, but I still wasn’t really used to the place, particularly its heat. When my friends back in Wisconsin thought of California, they visualized beaches and great weather. For someone living near the coast, that wasn’t a bad description, but Merced, much further inland, averaged about ten degrees warmer than the coastal cities, and Madisonville, east of Merced, tended to be even hotter than that. If there was a breeze, it was no cool ocean breeze. It felt more like the hot air that came out when you opened an oven. October here was sometimes like July in beach cities, and today was no exception.

Yeah, it had snowed in Wisconsin in winter, sometimes a lot, but I’d trade a Wisconsin winter for a Madisonville summer in a heartbeat.

I wasn’t a big fan of James Madison High School either. It was clean, new and appropriately air-conditioned, but it had the feel of a place with no past, as if it had dropped out of the sky yesterday.

I’d been a student at Regis Middle School in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and if my family hadn’t moved, I would have attended Regis High School on the same campus. It was surprising in some ways that I missed Regis. I was no one’s idea of a good Catholic—even my parents would have admitted that—, and Regis was very emphatically a Catholic school. There was something, though, about being in a place with roots, with tradition—hell, with a past of any kind. Regis descended from the old Saint Patrick’s High School, founded in 1914, renamed in 1954. Madison High School, by contrast, had just opened when my family moved to town, and the place felt artificial, like one of those model homes no one actually lives in, despite all the students that shuffled through it every day.

A house has to be lived in for a while to become a home. Though I’d been at Madison my whole high school career, it still had that new-house feel to me. No, even worse—the feel of a house a real estate agent was showing you, one you somehow knew wasn’t a good fit.

I tried to get my mind back on the right track. Who cared if the school had a long history or not? What was important was that it had a decent academic program, and that was what I needed to focus on. I could leave all the oddly poignant nostalgia for when I was writing my memoirs.

My resolve to focus with laser-like intensity on my studies lasted for all of about five minutes, at which point I saw her moving in my direction. She made eye contact as if she knew me, but that was impossible—there was no way I could have forgotten a girl like her.

It was as if someone had taken my specs for an ideal woman and created one who matched those specs down to the most minute detail. She was exactly the right height for me, and her curvaceous body was possibly the most mind-overwhelming thing I had ever seen.

Remember those academic goals? Well, at that moment I didn’t. They had burned away in a hormonal fire storm.

She had wavy, shoulder-length blonde hair and sky-blue eyes I could have stared into all day. Her features were so perfect that if I had seen a photo of her, I would have assumed it had been Photoshopped. Since she was standing right in front of me, though, I knew she really was that beautiful.

“Trying to catch flies?” she asked, giving me a little laugh and a hard-to-look-away-from hair toss. I closed my mouth quickly.

She smiled, and it was like the first sunlight after a six-month-long blizzard.

“Why do you look so surprised to see me?” she asked, giving me a hug that almost made me lose my mind right then. I struggled to say something but couldn’t make words come out.

“Is there anything that unusual about seeing your girlfriend?” she continued.

I could have said something like, “Considering you weren’t my girlfriend yesterday, yeah, it’s pretty unusual,” but I still couldn’t quite get myself to speak.

She wrapped her arm around mine. “Don’t feel like talking? OK, but can I at least walk you to class?” She leaned on me, and I made myself start walking. I was too stunned to do much else.

When I recovered myself enough to look around, everyone was staring at us. Were they staring just because she was beautiful—or was it because she was so far out of my league that she might as well have been from another planet?

Hell, maybe she was from another planet.

She dropped me off at my next class, for all the good that did anybody—I was completely useless during the whole period…and the next…and the next. My entire mind was focused on lunch, when I knew I would see her again.

Just when I thought pent-up frustration would make my head explode, lunch finally arrived, and sure enough, my girlfriend was waiting for me right outside the classroom.

We went to the cafeteria and ate lunch. Well, she ate. I pretended to eat but really spent the whole time contemplating her beauty—as, I might add, did a fair number of the other students as well, particularly the male ones.

The one awkward part was that I had no idea what her name was.

As soon as that realization hit me, though, she said gently, “Amanda,” which just happened to be my favorite girl’s name in the world. However, at this point, she could have had a much clunkier-sounding name, and it would have made no difference.

The fact that she seemed to be able to read my mind didn’t occur to me until later. I was just happy to finally know who she was.

I was a big believer in the old expression, “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” so, despite the strangeness of her sudden appearance, I found myself surprisingly accepting of this total change in my life.

As the days passed, I almost forgot that there had ever been a time without Amanda. She was as much a part of me as my own shadow. Gradually, the people around me got used to her. The stares at school diminished over time, and my parents, who had looked startled when I introduced her—they also knew she was out of my league, though they’d never say that—accepted her very quickly.

Hormonal reactions aside, it would have been hard for anyone not to like her. She always knew exactly the right thing to say to me, and she seemed to be able to do the same thing with everyone. I couldn’t think of a single person who wasn’t at ease around her.

There was, however, one exception, though I didn’t realize it until he spoke to me.

I’d told Amanda I needed to get a little work done. It was hard for me to do that, but she understood and disappeared for a while. I was sitting at one of the tables on the patio next to the library, my mind still half on Amanda even though I had Marlowe’s Faustus open in front of me.

I almost didn’t notice Gavin Johnson walking over to the bench where I was sitting. After all, there was no reason to think he wanted to talk to me. He and I moved in different circles. I was a Science Olympiad kind of guy. He was also strong academically, but being the quarterback of the football team put him on a completely different rung of the social ladder. Since I wasn’t the most confident guy around, I stayed as far away from leadership roles as I could get. He, on the other hand, was president of the senior class, the Black Students’ Union, and pretty much any other organization of which he was a member. Before Amanda, I had never had much luck with the ladies; Gavin, with the massive physique that earned him the nickname Goliath, had always had his pick.

“Chris, can I talk to you?” Gavin asked in his deep, resonant voice. He got instant bonus points for not using my nickname.

“Sure,” I said, gesturing at the empty chair next to me. Since Amanda wasn’t around at that moment, I didn’t have a good reason to refuse, but something about his manner made me uneasy. Though I didn’t know Gavin well, when I had seen him, he was always smiling—but not today. Something was clearly up.

Chapter 2: Intervention

Gavin plopped down in the chair and looked at me, but he didn’t seem to know how to start the conversation. From what I’d seen, Gavin wasn’t usually tongue-tied, so his reticence unnerved me a little. I could feel my stomach begin to tie itself in knots.

“So, how’s football season going?” I asked finally. I really couldn’t have cared less, but it seemed polite to ask, and it was a way of breaking the ice.

“Fine,” said Gavin without enthusiasm. Since even I, the ultimate non-sports-fan, knew that the team was undefeated, his anemic response made me worry even more.

“Look, Chris,” he continued finally, “I don’t really know how to ask this, so I’m just going to be blunt, OK?”

“Fire away,” I replied, managing to sound almost natural. I bet he had no idea I was shaking inside.

“Have you…been messing around with the supernatural?”

I laughed nervously. “What do you mean?” I made a big show of looking around. “This a team Halloween prank? Where’s the cameraman?”

“I’m serious,” he said in a tone that underscored his words.

I knew he meant what he said, but how’s a guy supposed to respond to that kind of question?

“No, I’m not ‘messing with the supernatural,’ dude. I’m not even sure what that means.”

Gavin looked down at the ground. “I know that sounds a little crazy, but…I’ve seen things. I know some crazy stuff is actually real.”

Well, this conversation was about as awkward as any I had ever had.

“Gavin, I don’t mean to be rude, but I really—”

“How long have you known Amanda?” he said suddenly, looking up from the ground, staring me straight in the eye.

I wanted to tell him it was none of his business, but some part of my beta male psyche was screaming at me to answer the alpha male’s question.

One thing I knew about Gavin, despite his Goliath nickname, was that he was no bully. Still, he was so intense, and he was two hundred and fifty pounds of pure muscle to my hundred and twenty of pure scrawniness. I was David to his Goliath—if David hadn’t been handy with a sling.

“Just a couple of weeks,” I said finally.

“She’s not a student here,” said Gavin, telling me rather than asking me. How he knew that, since she was on campus all the time, I wasn’t sure.

“So?” I didn’t know what else to say. If the guy had been any more cryptic, I’d have needed the Spark Notes for the conversation.

“How did you meet her?” he asked, never taking his eyes off me, as if he thought I was going to attack him or something.

“A mutual friend introduced us.”

“What friend?”

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. I suppose I should have developed a better cover story, but I wasn’t expecting to be cross-examined.

‘What are you getting at?” I countered. “For that matter, how is that your business?” I couldn’t say why, but my instincts were telling me I needed to end this conversation, and end it fast, alpha male or no alpha male.

“What’s her last name?” asked Gavin as if I hadn’t just spoken.

It was at that moment I realized I had no clue what her last name was. Gavin would never believe that, so I had to keep covering.

“Where does she live?” he continued without waiting for an answer.

I closed my book and stood up quickly. “I’ve got to go, man. Sorry.” I didn’t have to go, and I wasn’t one bit sorry, but screw it. I was going to make tracks as fast as I could.

In one quick motion, Gavin was out of the chair and holding my right arm in a steely grip. “I’m just trying to help, dude—and I think you need it!”

Counting heavily on Gavin’s non-bully reputation, I ripped my arm away from him and snapped, “Leave me alone!” I turned as fast as I could and headed into the library, heart pounding and adrenaline levels rising.

To my infinite relief, he didn’t follow me.

Once safely away, I did my best to forget the whole thing. I thought about mentioning it to Amanda when we got together for a snack at the diner, but I didn’t. Why worry her about weirdness like that? Gavin had some strange ideas about her, but I was pretty sure he wouldn’t confront her with them.

However, I couldn’t get Gavin out of my mind. I had nightmares featuring his determined face, his hand on my arm, and vague supernatural menaces.

The next day, again at one of those rare moments in which Amanda was not around—as if Gavin was watching me, waiting for just such an opportunity—he appeared again, looming over me so suddenly that I jumped a little despite myself.

“Hey!” I protested as he sat down without being invited. His face was set in a man-on-a-mission expression.

Then I noticed the girl with him. Though not as good-looking as Amanda, the newcomer was striking: tall, with long dark hair, bright, inquisitive eyes, and ample curves. She too sat down. I knew she wasn’t Gavin’s girlfriend, so why was she here?

“Look, man, I’m not trying to hassle you,” he said quickly. “I think you might be in trouble. I’m just trying to help. Can we just talk a little?”

“Are you going to grill me again? Because if so—”

“No,” Gavin cut in as fast as he could. “Can I just tell you what I think is happening?”

“OK,” I said grudgingly. Short of trying to run away from him, I couldn’t really see any way out of this conversation.

I noticed the girl with Gavin was staring at me with the same intensity he had shown yesterday.

“Do I know you?” I said as politely as my jangled nerves would allow.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Gavin. “Where are my manners? Chris, this is Carla Rinaldi. She’s a friend of mine from Santa Brígida.”

Carla offered her hand, and I took it. Her skin was as soft as Amanda’s, but her handshake was firmer than I expected.

“I didn’t realize you knew any folks down there,” I said, still wishing I was anywhere except here.

“You had some classes last year with Lucas, right? Lucas Santos?” asked Gavin. I nodded.

“Santa Brígida is the place Lucas moved to. I’ve visited him a few times. That’s how I met Carla. Actually, I met quite a few people that way.”

“And you wanted to talk to me because…” I prompted.

“I know this is going to sound crazy, Chris, but…but I think you sold your soul to the devil.”

Somehow, I had managed to forget all about that weird website—and my thirty-day free trial. That had been just for laughs, though. I hadn’t really sold my soul.

Amanda did appear the next day, but that had to have been a coincidence.

Even as I thought that, I realized it couldn’t be true. Amanda had known me from the moment we first met, just as if we had already been boyfriend and girlfriend. Whatever our relationship was, there was something…unnatural about it.

Pushing that idea as deep into the inner recesses of my mind as it would go, I asked, “What makes you think something like that?”

“Suddenly you have a beautiful girlfriend out of nowhere,” said Gavin. “She always seems to be here, even though she’s not a student here. We have no one named Amanda this semester; I checked.”

“She’s…she’s in college,” I said, wishing I sounded more convincing.

“With a class schedule that lets her hang out at the high school her boyfriend attends all day every single weekday? You expect us to believe that?”

“I don’t really care what you believe. It’s the truth!” I snapped.

“I don’t think it is,” said Carla. She sounded if she was trying to be gentle, but there was no mistaking her determination.

“Something about this conversation is making you very uncomfortable,” she continued.

“Gavin here just accused me of making a deal with the devil,” I replied. “Who wouldn’t be uncomfortable about that?”

“Someone who hadn’t made a deal with the devil,” she replied without even having to think about it.

I started to get up. I could see the muscles in Gavin’s arms tense. He was not going to make this easy.

“I’m not a big fan of the horror genre, so if you’ll excuse me—”

To my surprise, it was not Gavin but Carla who grabbed me by the arm this time.

“Gavin is right, and you know it. I can feel traces of infernal magic on you. It’s unmistakable.

“If I had to guess,” she continued, sounding almost clinical for a moment, “it looks like the kind of magic a demon would use to make you overly accepting of situations you’d normally question, maybe forget details that would usually have been red flags to you.”

“What makes you such an expert?” I asked, wanting to pull away but afraid of hurting her if I yanked too hard. Who was I kidding? I was hardly muscular enough to do her much damage, even if I wanted to.

“I’m an ‘expert’ because I sold my own soul,” she said quietly.

I had imagined several possible responses. That wasn’t one of them.

“You…you what?” was the most articulate response I could manage.

“Sit down, and I’ll explain.” I had the feeling Gavin was going to make me sit down anyway, so I dropped back into the chair.

“I was in love with someone who didn’t love me,” Carla began, looking down at the table. She might be crazy, but she really thought she had sold her soul, and she was embarrassed by it. Every move she made told me that much.

“I know,” she said, fidgeting self-consciously with her hands, “that sounds so like a 1950s I-need-a-man-to-complete-me attitude.”

I hadn’t actually been thinking that. I had been wondering how someone as good-looking as Carla could possibly have had a problem getting a guy. OK, so she wasn’t quite Amanda, but then who was?

After a little hesitation, Carla continued. “The person I was interested in loved someone else and always had…yet there was some chemistry between us. I was confident I could change his mind. Too confident, as it turned out.” Her voice cracked a little near the end, and I thought she might be about to cry.

“Carla, you don’t need to go through all this, do you?” asked Gavin, putting a hand on her shoulder.

“No…no, I think I do,” said Carla. “Chris needs to hear this.”

“I’m not even sure why—” I started.

“Because the touch of a demon is upon you,” said Carla with startling intensity. “You need to know what that means.”

A few weeks ago, I would have figured she was crazy and found some way to get away from her as fast as possible. Now, though, I hesitated. I kept remembering that silly website, with its sell-your-soul button and its thirty-day free trial.

Carla leaned in my direction, getting so close that, if I hadn’t known better, I would have thought she was moving in for a kiss. Beautiful as she was, though, her manner was stone-cold serious rather than flirtatious.

“This isn’t the same as what happens in a book like Faustus, where you get what you want, and then Satan comes along and collects your soul right before you die,” she said. “That would be kind compared to what actually happens.

“Satan doesn’t just want your soul. He finds ways of getting you to agree to even more, giving him some control over your present life, so he can use you as an agent to increase the power of evil. You may not even realize what’s happening to you—until it’s too late.”

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What happens to Chris? Quite a bit, as it turns out. One way or another, the Devil haunts him for years. To find out more, check out Haunted by the Devil and the other two books in the series, The Inner Worlds Trap and Schooled by the Devil. You can find the series page here.

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A little book trivia (and a special offer):

Like some of my other works, this series grew out of a much shorter work, in this case, a novella, The Devil Hath the Power, which eventually became the prologue for Haunted by the Devil. The excerpt above is drawn from that prologue.

My first three series are all set in the same universe, and as time went by, connections emerged among the different story lines. Though they never meet in any book written so far, Chris Murphy is the cousin of Max Murphy of the Different Dragons series. If you aren’t familiar with it, you can read a series-related short story starring Max right here:

Carla Rinaldi and Gavin Johnson are both originally from the Spell Weaver series. (Carla is introduced in Living with Your Past Selves, the first book in the series. Gavin first appears in We Walk in Darkness, the fifth book.) I don’t have any short stories featuring either of them, but I do have one involving Khalid, a half djinn first introduced in the second book of the Spell Weaver series. You can read that one right here:

Special Offer

One of the other major characters in the Soul Salvager series, Reverend Falco, began as character in a Spell Weaver-related short story, “Angel Feather.” Because it’s enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, I can’t post it on Substack, but I will gift a free copy to any subscriber (paid or free). To take advantage of this offer, just visit this page.