Halloween Haunts: Have You Ever Shaken the Devil’s Hand on Halloween Night?

Halloween Haunts: Have You Ever Shaken the Devil’s Hand on Halloween Night?

By David Sandner

Was it a Halloween night when Robert Johnson walked out to the crossroads to make a deal with the devil?

I don’t know, I’ll ask him next time I see him.

There’s lot of versions of this story (because there’s lots of ways to go to hell, but only one way home). Here’s one account of things: Robert Johnson wanted to be a Blues guitar player, but when he stepped on stage as a young man, he got hooted off. He just wasn’t good enough. But after he walked a lonely road one night and sold his soul to the devil, he came back and played the haunting riffs that back recordings like “Cross Road Blues” (1936) and “Hellhound on My Trail” (1937), singing in a high, eerie voice that arrests the attention. Dying mysteriously at 27, he is still considered one of the greatest and most influential Blues guitarists to ever live and his works have become standards of the form.

Well, the last part is true.

If one goes to talk to the devil, you walk alone, so no one was there to confirm the story told about his rise as a musician. And very little is known about Johnson’s life. He was a peripatetic Blues guitarist of the early twentieth-century, a shadowy and elusive figure. The recordings that pass down to us all come from a seven-month period in 1936-7. There just isn’t much to go on.

I’ll say this, though: as an artist, getting hooted off the stage for your first efforts is no big deal. As I get older, I keep wishing my first drafts will be better than they are…but I’ve gotten used to the fact that first drafts are terrible, and hard work can and will make them better. So, as a fellow artist, I want to make sure to give Johnson his due: he probably went away and worked hard to mature as an artist. He deserves the mythic stature that goes with a “deal with the devil at the crossroads” story, but not the implication he didn’t put in the work. He deserves all the credit for his scorching talent and terrifying songs,

Yet, I want to beckon you back down the crossroads still (don’t worry, I’ll try to get you home in time for trick-or-treating, and the devil won’t be here tonight, he has too many other appointments…we’re safe…probably), to talk about what we really find there at the crossroads, and why we go. For the Johnson story is far from the first iteration, of course, of the handshake with the devil story. There are a million versions. Like the Faust legend, with famous works by Christopher Marlowe and Johann Wolfgang van Goethe—but the story pre-dates those works by forever, too. We like to make that deal, and so we might pause to wonder why when it seems like a particularly bad deal on the face of it. A moment of fame—or wealth, or attractiveness, or some other of the “worldly riches”—is traded for an eternity of torment.

Who would take a deal like that?

Apparently, oh, so, so many people.

Halloween’s coming, which makes this a good moment to think about what we get when we dabble with the darkside, so follow me into the shadows. Because the thing is, I don’t think it’s really about what we actually get in such a deal—it’s not for the worldly wealth or gain. That’s fleeting. I think, the thing is, what I think it is about is…you want to make the devil deign to shake your hand. Yours.

Stay with me a moment. (I’ve taken your arm to lead you off, and my grip is icy and strong…I’m going to keep you here. Probably for only a little while.) This is going to be a dark thought (and now don’t you have to know? See how you don’t turn away—you press on, excited rather than repulsed by any warning?). We want to matter. There’s two problems with that: maybe we don’t matter, maybe nothing does; and, cutting deeper, maybe if we are to matter, we have to matter as who and what we are—I mean, what we really are…and maybe what we are is that ridiculous desire to have attention, the spotlight, the money, the magic powers, the beloved object—to have everything. Which is the same as having nothing. The things don’t matter, only the desire itself. That’s the essence.

The devil shakes your hand, and you have proof you matter enough to have the devil shake it. You are given your worldly desire, for a moment in time only, and then a demon is assigned to you for eternity to torment you. And I think that comes as a relief—because now you know you matter enough for a demon to torture you for eternity. When all those you’ve ever known have died and disintegrated into dust, you will still be there, in torment, your demon, your boon companion, there for eternity to assure your endless suffering. You will matter to it…forever! It will have no other task but you…forever!

That’s why you find yourself walking the loneliest road, to where the gallows stand at the crossroads, and you will call out to the wind as if someone might appear there. And you will feel foolish. (Don’t worry, I did lead you here, but there are two of us…so nothing to fear, you only meet the devil alone, unless I’m not what I seem and you are alone…look around now, do you see anyone else? Oh no!) And though you know you shouldn’t have done it, that it has no meaning even were you hold all the money in the world in your hands, for it will be but a moment—or a year—or ten—who cares when measured  against eternity?—still you will feel a secret lift in your heart when the devil shapes out of shadows to hear your pitiful excuse for what you most desire.

The secret lift is because you know: it’s not the thing you desire; it’s the promise of the handshake. Laugh when it happens because, no matter how bad the deal, no matter how you have been tricked, you win. When you lose, you win. For you—ah, at last!—you will never be alone again!

Happy Halloween!

David Sandner has a new novel coming out, and in it, two characters make their way to the crossroads, and find a speakeasy—perhaps the strangest place you could ever know. Preorder now! Egyptian Motherlode (co-written with Jacob Weisman) appears November 2024, from Fairwood Press. Sandner is a member of the SFWA and the HWA. Novella His Unburned Heart (about Mary Shelley and her husband’s heart) came out from Raw Dog Screaming, May 2024, and The Afterlife of Frankenstein: Mad Science, Automata, and Monsters Inspired by Mary Shelley, 1818-1918 from Lanternfish, November 2023. He is working on a novel in progress building on the Shelley novella. His short stories and poems appear in leading magazines, including Asimov’s, Weird Tales, PodCastle, and Abyss & Apex, and in anthologies, like the HWA Poetry Showcase, The Mammoth Book of Dark Magic, and Monstroddities. He has published scholarship on Mary Shelley, Philip K. Dick, horror, the critical history of the fantastic, science fiction, and the sublime. He is a Professor of English at California State University, Fullerton. See davidsandner.com.