terror

green plastic chair beneath the swag-lamp at the window. Lester thought absently that only a demonic fiend could have been comfortable in that torture-device disguised as a chair.
He was flushing red with acute shame, and terribly aware of his own physical inadequacies. Mr. Lightman cocked his head to one side, and frowned.
“Shame?” he said. “I think not. We’ll have none of that here.”
He gestured—not with his index finger, but with the second. Suddenly Lester’s shame vanished, as if the emotion had been surgically removed. And as he looked down bemusedly at himself, he realized that his physical endowments had grown to remarkable adequacy.
“A taste of things to come,” Lightman said easily. “You must be a perfect specimen, you know. People trust those who are handsome; those who are sexy. Think how many criminals are convicted who are plain, or even ugly—and how few who are handsome. People want to believe in the beautiful. They want to believe in the powerful. Above all, they want to believe.”
Lester nodded, and lowered himself down onto the scratchy bedspread. “As you can see, I’m ready to deal,” he told the fiend calmly.
“So I do see.” Lightman snapped his fingers, and the neatly-typed pages of Lester’s contract appeared in his hand. He leafed through them, his mouth pursed. “Yes,” he murmured, and, “Interesting.” Then he looked up. “You seem to have thought this through very carefully. Brother Lee was not quite so—thorough. The late Brother Lee.”
Lester nodded; then took in the rest of the sentence. “The—late?”
Lightman nodded. “His contract ran out,” the fiend said, simply. “Perhaps he had been planning to gain some extra years by bringing you into the flock, but he had not written any such provision into his contract—and a bargain is a bargain, after all. The usual limit for a contract is seven years. I rarely make exceptions to that rule.”
Lester thought back frantically, and could recall no such provision in his own contract.
But then he calmed himself with the remembrance of his loophole. The very worst that would happen would be that he would live a fabulous life and then die. That prospect no longer held such terror for him with the hard evidence of an afterlife before him. With