Armageddon In Retrospect - Kurt Vonnegut [61]
“Supposed to bring the Devil like a fire alarm box brings the hook-and-ladder,” said Dr. Tarbell.
“Surely you don’t think it’d really work?”
He shrugged. “I haven’t tried.” The lights suddenly went out. “That’s that,” he sighed, and laid down the soldering iron. “Well, there’s nothing more we can do here. Let’s go out and find an unbaptized infant.”
“Won’t you tell me what the drum is for?”
“Perfectly self-evident. It’s a Devil-trap, of course.”
“Naturally.” I smiled uncertainly, and backed away from it. “And you’re going to bait it with Devil’s-food cake.”
“One of the major theories to come out of the Pine Institute, my boy, is that the Devil is completely indifferent to Devil’s-food cake. However, we’re sure he’s anything but indifferent to electricity, and, if we could pay the light bill, we could make electricity flow through the walls and lid of this drum. So, all we have to do, once the Devil is inside, is to throw the switch and we’ve got him. Maybe. Who knows? Who was ever crazy enough to try it? But first, as the recipe for rabbit stew goes, catch your rabbit.”
I’d hoped I’d seen the end of demonology for a while, and was looking forward to moving on to other things. But Dr. Tarbell’s tenacity inspired me to stay with him, to see where his “intelligent playfulness” would lead next.
And, six weeks later, Dr. Tarbell and I, pulling the copper drum along on a cart, and laying wire from a spool on my back, were picking our way down a hillside at night, down to the floor of the Mohawk Valley, in sight of the lights of Schenectady.
Between us and the river, catching the full moon’s image and casting it into our eyes, was an abandoned segment of the old Erie Ship Canal, now useless, replaced by channels dredged in the river, filled with still, brackish water. Beside it lay the foundations of an old hotel, that had once served the bargemen and travelers on the now forgotten ditch.
And beside the foundations was a roofless frame church.
The old steeple was silhouetted against the night sky, resolute, indomitable, in a parish of rot and ghosts. As we entered the church, a tugboat pulling barges somewhere up the river sounded its horn, and the voice came to us, echoing through the architecture of the valley, funereal, grave.
An owl hooted, and a bat whirred over our heads. Dr. Tarbell rolled the drum to a spot before the altar. I connected the wires I’d been stringing to a switch, and connected the switch, through twenty feet more of wire, to the drum. The other end of the line was hooked into the circuits of a farmhouse on the hillside.
“What time is it?” whispered Dr. Tarbell.
“Five of eleven.”
“Good,” he said weakly. We were both scared stiff. “Now listen, I don’t think anything at all’s going to happen, but, if it does—I mean to us—I’ve left a letter at the farmhouse.”
“That makes two of us,” I said. I seized his arm. “Look—what say we call it off,” I pleaded. “If there really is a Devil, and we keep trying to corner him, he’s sure to turn on us—and there’s no telling what he’d do!”
“You don’t have to stay,” said Tarbell. “I could work the switch, I guess.”
“You’re determined to go through with it?”
“Terrified as I am,” he said.
I sighed heavily. “All right. God help you. I’ll man the switch.”
“O.K.,” he said, smiling wanly, “put on your protective headset, and let’s go.”
The bells in a steeple clock in Schenectady started striking eleven.
Dr. Tarbell swallowed, stepped to the altar, brushed aside a squatting toad, and began the grisly ceremony.
He