Oliver Doyle by Kvitan Shevchuk

I met Oliver when I was eighteen.

That summer I had just started university on the other side of the country and didn’t know a single oul. Oliver appeared at one of those endless student parties, slipped effortlessly into my orbit, and somehow remained there for years.

He was the kind of person whose laughter filled a room and somehow pulled everyone toward him. Oliver always knew when to deliver a perfectly timed joke and when silence would serve him better. He was sharp too—like some ancient wizard from a DnD campaign. One moment he would launch into a discussion about philosophy or politics; the next he would casually quote a line from a classic novel or mention some obscure historical detail. A walking encyclopedia. No, more like a walking-almighty-Bible. Or some other sacred text. And on top of it all, he was handsome. Even I noticed that, and the girls definitely did. They followed him everywhere.

Still, there was something odd about him. For a man with a Hollywood smile and the soul of every party, Oliver almost never appeared in photographs and never stayed in relationships for long—just brief affairs here and there. He never spoke about his family, or a childhood summer camp. At the time, none of us questioned it. In a way, it gave him an air of mystery, as if he didn’t quite belong to this world, which only made people want him around more.

Yesterday I turned thirty-five. I remember standing in my apartment, holding Oliver's driver's license in hand. He forgot it at my place after celebrating. Oliver was grinning at me from the photo on the plastic card. Oliver, who, year after year, looked exactly the same. Yesterday I joked that he must have sold his soul to the devil. Oliver looked at me then. I knew he disliked my religious jokes, yet there was something in his gaze that felt… unsettling.

It took me twelve years to begin assembling the pieces. The man around whom things always seemed to spiral into chaos. People fell in love, argued, made terrible decisions, changed their lives, ruined their careers, reconciled, and then argued again. Oliver never interfered directly. He would simply smile, drop a remark, pour someone another glass of wine, or ask the one strange question that changed everything.

“People always think the French Revolution was romantic,” Oliver once said. “In reality, it smelled terribly of blood.” Everyone laughed. But my neighbor’s dog always growled when Oliver came over.

Yesterday, for the first time, a thought crossed my mind that once would have sounded completely absurd.

And over the next few days I’ll probably sit in libraries and internet cafés, trying to find some logical thread connecting these suspicions. Yet one conclusion already feels unavoidable.

Oliver Doyle didn’t make a deal with the devil. He is the devil in human form.