A Devil Comes to Town by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

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8

After the devil’s departure, the pastor, the burgomaster, and I met several times to discuss the details of this … folly, which could not be described as anything else. I tried to get them to think about what they were about to do. Did anyone remember the name of the publishing house by any chance? Did we have an address we could confirm? A basis on which to verify the reliability of that individual more thoroughly? But there was no chance of making them use their heads. I don’t think they even remembered the man’s features. On the other hand, if I’d had to give a description of him, even I would have found it difficult, though I had observed him closely. In my memory, his figure fragmented into various garish details, like his lurid corpulence, or the affected sound of his consummate actor’s voice. On these we all agreed, but someone had also noticed his limp, which led one to think he had an artificial leg; and didn’t that inky-black hair look like a wig?

Every attempt on my part to induce them to be more cautious in completely trusting an individual whom they knew nothing about failed. I wonder how they would have reacted knowing that they had just made a contract with the devil himself.

Refusing to listen to me, the burgomaster immediately convened a council meeting, and within a few days the two rooms on the second floor of Town Hall were emptied out; the archive’s hundreds of folders found a new home in the basement. The walls were repainted, the marble floors polished to a mirror sheen, and the rooms furnished with drop-leaf chests of drawers and massive walnut desks. Not only that, but the burgomaster insisted on launching the literary award right away. There was no doubt as to what to name it, but there were several heated discussions regarding the limits to be imposed on the competition: indeed, no one wanted to open it to the entire national territory. In the end it was decided that only authors residing in our canton would be eligible for the Goethe award. The call for entries was printed as soon as possible, with a rather tight deadline, thus giving Dichtersruhe’s writers the chance to submit their manuscripts in the prescribed time, while at the same time trying to exclude all the others. Xenophobia still reigned, except toward the devil, of course.

Partly due to bad weather, I stayed indoors in the days that followed. The Föhn, the warm deadly wind, swept the valley for two days, depressing people’s spirits and prompting suicide.

During that solitary time I recalled the malevolent allusion that had been made to me by Dr. Sly Fox regarding an alleged diary that I kept at the bottom of a drawer, and which I had perhaps forgotten. Could the devil know something specific about me, or had he perhaps hit the bull’s eye accidentally? It was precisely because of a diary, in fact, that I found myself

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