“The Shoes” (Unknown Worlds, February 1942)

Bloch, Robert. “The Shoes.” Unknown Worlds, February 1942, pp. 78-82.
archive.org/details/unknown-v-05-n-06-1942-04/Unknown%20v05%20n05%20%281942-02%29/page/78/mode/2up

The story opens abruptly in the middle of a two-sided conversation. One of the speakers is called “the voice” and is quickly revealed to be the Devil who is negotiating with a “little man” for an exchange of valuables. For his soul, the little man demands that he never be killed. The Devil is taken aback, and they struggle a bit to define the terms of the deal. Not wanting to be maimed, the little man demands that if his body were to be killed, he’d be instantly given a new body, fully healthy and even dressed appropriately. The devil points out that he could not make a body immortal under such circumstances; instead, he will enchant something else: the cheap shoes the little man is wearing. Good enough, the little man says, thinking that he has swindled eternal life from the devil. When the Devil leaves, the little man tests the arrangement by going home to his quiet apartment and slashing his own throat. 

After a moment of pain, he awakes to find himself reborn, uninjured, and wearing the shoes once again. Disposing of his dead body, unfortunately, is a new problem. He checks into a motel intending to stage a suicide. Staring at his own corpse unnerves him a bit, but he carries out the plan. He then visits his cruel and jealous boss, Mr. Connors. The little man antagonizes Connors, telling him that he has slept with Connors’s wife. The hotheaded Connors pulls out a gun and shoots the little man. Connors instantly regrets his actions and then needs to dispose of the body. he drags it to the cellar to the furnace intending to burn it. Meanwhile, the little man has been reborn and takes the opportunity to open the safe and steal a huge pile of money. He hatches a plan to continue his thievery knowing he has a foolproof plan. And why not continue to amass power? Maybe become the most powerful man in the world? He is at the train station heading out of town when he stops for a shoeshine. On the train, he fantasizes himself a superhero, immune to danger. He overhears a man speaking to another. It is the hotel detective who discovered the “suicide.” The little man attempts to flee, but they are two hours from the next station. He goes into the men’s room intending to leave behind another body so he can slip away undetected. His nearly headless corpse is discovered by the porter who was looking for him to apologize for giving him back the wrong pair of shoes after the shine.
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This is a quick story, as you might be able to tell from the page count. It features a character and situation that will be turned to comic effect in a month or two when Lefty Feep sinks his mitts into a situation like this. For now, the “little man” has more than he bargained for when it comes to the deal he struck with the Devil. Not being able to be killed is not the same thing as being invulnerable. He is still susceptible to death, and to cover his tracks, he often needs to clean up a mess. It ends so quickly for him, probably exactly as one might expect. This is not Bloch’s only foray into the Faustian bargain. I am looking forward especially to “The Devil’s Ticket” in September of 1944. It shoed up again in Bogey men (1963), a collection that also contains “The Ghost-Writer” (1940). That looks like such a fun collection; I know most of the stories well already. Very slowly, I have been spending more and more time on used book sites and buying stuff. I have a first hardcover edition of Lori scheduled for delivery Monday, for example. I can see the Bloch-book-collecting slope beneath my feet. And, yes, it appears to be quite slippery…