Fenwick’s behaviour was based on an increasing feeling that he was the only permanent object in a transient world. “Their days are as grass,” he mused, watching his fellow Satanists as they crowded around an altar with something unpleasant on it. This was early in his career, when he was exploring pure sensation along traditional lines, later discarded as juvenilia.
Meanwhile, perfectly free, and filled with that enduring, delightful sense of well-being, Fenwick experimented with many aspects of living. He left a trail of hung juries and baffled attorneys behind him. “A modern Caligula!” said the New York News, explaining to its readers who Caligula had been, with examples. “Are the shocking charges against James Fenwick true?”
But somehow, he could never quite be convicted. Every charge fell through. He was, as the devil had assured him, a closed system within his environment, and his independence of the outer world was demonstrated in many a courtroom. Exactly how the devil managed things so efficiently Fenwick could never understand. Very seldom did an actual miracle have to happen.
Once an investment banker, correctly blaming Fenwick for the collapse of his entire fortune, fired five bullets at Fenwick’s heart. The bullets ricocheted. The only witnesses were the banker and Fenwick. Theorising that his unharmed target was wearing a bulletproof vest, the banker aimed the last bullet at Fenwick’s head, with identical results. Later the man tried again, with a knife. Fenwick, who was curious, decided to wait and see what would happen. What happened was that eventually the banker went mad.
Fenwick, who had appropriated his fortune by very direct means, proceeded to increase it. Somehow, he was never convicted of any of the capital charges he incurred. It took a certain technique to make sure that the crimes he committed would always endanger his life if he were arrested for them, but he mastered the method without much difficulty and his wealth and power increased tremendously.
He was certainly notorious. Presently he decided that something was lacking, and began to crave admiration. It was not so easy to achieve. He did not yet possess enough wealth to transcend the moral judgements of society. That was easily remedied. Ten years after his bargain with the devil, Fenwick was not perhaps the most powerful man in the world, but certainly the most powerful man in the United States. He attained the admiration and the fame he thought he wanted.
And it was not enough. The devil had suggested that in a few million years Fenwick might wish to die, out of sheer boredom. It took only ten years for Fenwick to realise, one summer day, with a little shock of unpleasant surprise, that he did not know what he wanted to do next.
He examined his state of mind with close attention. “Is this boredom?” he asked himself. If so, not even boredom was unpleasant. There was a delightful, sensuous relaxation about it, like floating in a warm summer ocean. In a sense, he was too relaxed.
“If this is all there is to immortality,” he told himself, “I might as well not have bothered. Pleasant, certainly, but not worth bartering my soul for. There must be things that will rouse me out of this somnolence.”
He experimented. The next five years witnessed his meteoric fall from public favour as he tried more and more frantically to break through that placid calm. He couldn’t do it. He got no reaction from even the most horrific situations. What others saw with shock and often with horror had no meaning to Fenwick.
With a sense of smothered desperation under the calm he saw that he was beginning to lose contact with the race of man. Humans were mortal, and more and more they seemed to recede into a distance less real than the solid earth underfoot. In time, he thought, the earth itself would become less solid, as he watched the slow shiftings of the geologic tides.
He turned at last to the realm of the intellect. He took up painting and he dabbled in literature and in some of the sciences. Interesting - up to a point. But always he came before long to a closed door in the mind, beyond which lay only that floating calm which dissolved all interest out of his mind. Something was lacking in him…
The suspicion was slow in forming. It floated almost to the surface and then sank again under the pressure of new experiments. But eventually it broke free into the realm of the conscious.
Early one summer morning Fenwick roused out of a sound sleep and sat straight up in bed as if an invisible hand had pulled him out of slumber.
“Something is missing!” he told himself with great conviction. “But what?” He meditated. “How long has it been gone?” He could not say - at first. The deep, ineradicable calm kept lulling him and it was hard to follow the thought. That calm in itself was part of the trouble. How long had he had it? Obviously, since the day of his pact. What caused it? Well, he had been assuming all these many years that it was simply the physical well-being of perfectly and eternally functioning bodily mechanisms. But what if this were really something more? What if it were an artificially induced dulling of the mind so that he would not suspect a theft had been committed?
A theft? Sitting up in bed among heavy silk sheets, with the June dawn pale outside the windows, James Fenwick suddenly saw the outrageous truth. He struck his knee a resounding blow under the bedclothes.
“My soul!” he cried to the unheeding dawn. “He swindled me! He stole my soul!”
The moment the idea took shape it seemed so obvious Fenwick could not understand why it had not been clear from the first. The devil had cunningly and most unfairly anticipated the pay-off by seizing his soul too soon. And if not all of it, then the most important part. Fenwick had actually stood before the mirror and watched him do it. The proof seemed obvious. For something was very definitely missing. He seemed to stand always just inside a closed door in the mind that would not open for him because he lacked the essential something, the lost, the stolen soul…
What good was immortality, without this mysterious something that gave immortality its savour? He was helpless to enjoy the full potentialities of eternal life because he had been robbed of the very key to living.
“‘Certain memories of the past,’ is it?” he sneered, remembering the devil’s casual description of the thing he wanted for surety. “Never miss them, eh? And all the time it was something out of the very middle of my soul!”
Now he remembered episodes out of folklore and mythology, people in legend who had lacked souls. The Little Mermaid, the Seal Maiden, someone or other in A Midsummer Night’s Dream - a standard situation in myth, once you considered the question. And those who lacked the souls always yearned to get one at any cost. Nor was it, Fenwick realised, simply ethnocentric thinking on the part of the author. He was in the unique position of knowing this yearning for a soul to be quite valid.
Now that he was aware of his loss, the queer, crippling inward lack tormented him. It had presumably tormented the Little Mermaid and others. Like him, they had had immortality. Being extrahuman they had probably possessed this curious, light-headed, light-hearted freedom which even now interposed a cushion of partial indifference between Fenwick and his loss. Were not the gods supposed to spend their days in just this simple-minded joy, laughing and singing, dancing and drinking endlessly, never weary, never bored?
Up to a point it was wonderful. But once you began to suspect that something had been removed, you lost your taste for the Olympian life and began at all costs to crave a soul. Why? Fenwick couldn’t say. He only knew.
At this moment the cool summer dawn shimmered between him and the window, and the devil stood before James Fenwick.
Fenwick shuddered slightly.