Lucifers Folly

**SYNOPSIS: BORN INTO DESTINY: LUCIFER'S FOLLY**

Rabbitt works as an errand runner for Jimmy Ray, a small-time Dallas operator who humiliates him for sport. When Jimmy Ray smashes Rabbitt's Gibson underfoot and mocks him for it, three years of degradation reach a breaking point. The next day, sent out with Jimmy Ray's Cadillac and a sealed package he's told not to open, Rabbitt keeps driving north instead of coming back.

Outside Tulsa he picks up a hitchhiker, Jessie, headed to see family in Lincoln, Nebraska. He has nowhere else to be, so Lincoln becomes the destination. Jessie brings him to a house party, where a guy named Greg — magnetic, vain, impossible to read — needles him in front of a crowd, then abruptly claims he can get Rabbitt a record deal. Ten minutes later Greg returns with a burned CD and plays "Happy Together" — the first song Rabbitt ever learned on guitar, a fact Greg has no way of knowing. It's the first of three signs that convince Rabbitt he isn't dealing with an ordinary person.

Rabbitt moves in with Dave and Sarah, the couple hosting the party, and spends weeks orbiting Greg's world. Greg asks him for a ride and, in the car, produces the exact knife Rabbitt carries — same make, same warning Rabbitt uses to describe it — before returning it to his pocket without menace, just proof he already knows everything. The ride ends at a brownstone reached by fire escape, where a woman in lingerie greets Greg at the door and a room of more than twenty beautiful women lie in a trance across six canopy beds, reaching for him and going still the instant he's out of range. He retrieves something from the last bed and leaves without explanation.

Back at the house, the second sign arrives: Greg brings home a leather-bound book with a blank final page bearing Genesis 28:15 in Rabbitt's mother's handwriting — the same verse from a letter Rabbitt tore up and buried in the trash an hour earlier. Separately, Greg's two oldest friends, questioned alone and days apart, give Rabbitt the identical unprompted answer about why they stay near him despite hating him, word for word. Rabbitt decides to run to his aunt's in Bettendorf, Iowa. Before he can leave, Greg shows up asking for a ride and unfolds a map with a pentagram already inked over Bettendorf — the third sign, and confirmation that nowhere he picks is his own idea.

Snowed into Lincoln for two weeks with no way out on the highway, Rabbitt finally starts the Cadillac and drives anyway. The snow that should have buried the car parts in front of him. He makes the six-hundred-mile run to his mother's house in Tulsa on half a tank of gas, and somewhere along the way the stolen package disappears from the seat beside him without explanation. He tells his mother he's met the devil, that God is real. She isn't surprised; she already knew.

Days later, driving back through Oklahoma, he's pulled over and arrested. A three-month jail stretch follows — a legal non-event, except for one night in the group shower, where another inmate slashes both arms open at the elbow in a suicide attempt. Rabbitt takes charge in the emergency with no authority to do so, directing strangers to press towels, twist tourniquets, and hold the man's head off the concrete until paramedics arrive. The man survives. Rabbitt sleeps that night without dreaming of the amber-eyed visions that had followed him since Lincoln — not because they're gone, but because, for the first time, he answered them.

The book closes without resolving whether what happened was destiny or coincidence, divine or demonic — Rabbitt leaves that verdict to the reader, the same way he was left to reach it himself.

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