MARKED

CHAPTER ONE

“Do you believe in the Devil?”

The question caught me off guard.  I had not ever expected to be hearing that from a coworker.  I nodded slowly as I sat down on a piano bench, still clutching the broom I’d just been using in my hands.  My voice seemed to have fled in shock.

“In what forms?”  Asked my co-worker.  He seemed too young to be pestering anyone about religious things... This was rather odd.

I hesitated.  Talking about religion was never something I did on a regular basis; and when (and if,) it came up; I usually found an excuse to leave the room to escape the uncomfortable feeling that came over me.  I didn’t belong to any specific religion; but I couldn’t deny the fact that there was an existent God or Devil.  

I shrugged.

“You don’t talk much.  You know that, right?”  He pushed.

“Yeah,” I muttered.  Being quiet was one of my attributes, but even though I prefered to keep my lips sealed, I could be extremely observant.

He stared at me for a moment, and when he opened my mouth to speak I could tell that this was very important to him.  Why he was talking to me about it; rather than our only female co-worker (and only other worker; at that;) was beyond me.  

“Do you believe in the Devil?”  He asked again.

I shrugged again.  “Do you believe in the Devil?”

“I asked first,” his face grew dark.

“Absoruddylutely!”

He leaned forward in the bench, a satisfied smile spread across his face as he hovered over the piano keys.  “Good,” he said.  “I do too.”

He glanced at his watch, leaning backwards for a second before leaning forward again to place.  I was taken aback by the serious expression on his face.  “You do realize you need to stop, right?  You’ll get yourself into serious trouble if you don’t.”

“Sorry?”  I asked.

“I know what you’ve got in your pocket.”  He murmured.  His eyes remained glued to his hands as he slowly began to play a chromatic A scale up the keys.

I immediately shifted in my chair, shoving my right hand into the pocket of my sweatshirt to make sure it was still there.  Sure enough, my hand closed around a thin, cylindrical object.  My forehead began to glisten with sweat.  “Who are you?”  I muttered darkly, staring at his hands as they flew up the piano keys rather than his eyes.  His face.  I couldn’t bring myself to meet his gaze.

“No one special.”  He said.  “I’m just Blake... Your co-worker.”

His fingers moved down the keys.

*****

“You had better get an umbrella, Max,” the middle-aged man, Mr. Alan Charles had said to me as he passed me on my way outside the piano store.  “It’s raining pretty hard out there.”

I smiled weakly at him, nodding.  “Thanks, Mr. Charles,” I pushed the glass door open and made my way outside.  

Immediately I pulled my hood over my head for some protection against the onslaught of water.  ‘Raining pretty hard,’ as Mr. Charles, the man who’d been stopping by our piano store every day for the past two weeks, had said, was a disgusting understatement.  Through the rain I could barely hear the roar of car engines or the honk of horns in the city as the traffic slowly crawled through the streets.

I jogged towards a taxi, which was sitting idly on the side of the road.  Stopping at the passenger side; I knocked on the window.  The driver, a heavyset man with a round belly and a balding head, glanced over at me, a rather annoyed expression on his face, and motioned sharply for me to enter the car.