Demon Theory

by Stephen Graham Jones

  “Vangelesti … ” Con says in greeting.

  “This his first night?” Vangelesti asks back, chin-pointing to the intern.

  Con nods. “Fishboy,” he says, patting the intern on the back, “still got his gills, even.”

  Vangelesti shakes his head in apology and flings the door open, Con’s face inserted, eyes narrowing.

  “Trick or treat,” he says, in sick admiration.

  The intern is bent over, dry-heaving.

  Behind them the stray lid the doors were drawing in is drawn in now, gone.

  MOMENTS later, the twin aluminum doors of OR3 slam open, Vangelesti and Con and the intern pushing their way through, the patient on a gurney, already name-tagged: SWEREN—just like the Bible, except in magic marker, not goldletter—morphine dripping top-speed down the IV. The shot expands, moving with them still, and the patient is a full-term pregnant woman, skin badly badly burned, sloughing off like wet ash. She’s seriously frail with age, too, but breathing somehow, lidless eyes staring to the side in defeat.

  “Tell the burn unit Christmas is coming early this year,” Con says, handing her off just as she starts seizing, and then the DOCTORS and NURSES converge, machine-gunning all the ER ad-lib back and forth.151

  “Clear the OR,” a DR. WATKINS152 growls, “now. We’re losing her!”

  “You,” a SECOND DOCTOR barks to Virginia, hiding in the b.g., “stay. Turn the lights down for the understandably photosensitive now … there. Like that, yes. Good girl.”

  At the light switch, Virginia stares this second doctor and his good girl down, but the doctor’s already forgotten about her. When she’s done with him the door beside her opens and MARKUM drags in, all sneer, no rattail.

  “Triage,” he says to himself, taking stock, tying his mask at the base of his skull: “Happy Hallofuckingween.”

  As he leans into the crowd, a grinning Con pins Vangelesti with a question, asked in confidence: “She call just so you could watch, man, or what? A little rural autoerotic nonspontaneous geriatric combustion to cap off an otherwise eventless weekend?”

  Vangelesti doesn’t seem to follow, though. Over Con’s shoulder, the patient flatlines, indicting Vangelesti with her dead stare, and then Vangelesti’s POV is backing away from her, from Con’s question, out into the hall, studying the entrance doors, their swishing too distant now to hear.

  PAST them, past the dead ambulance, Cat is shuffling away, still in shock. Toward the road, a monstrous vodka billboard (tall glass, lemon wedge, so refreshing). She’s not looking both ways. There’s even a candy sack dragging from her ankle.

  In her distant b.g. Vangelesti rushes out to the cab of the ambulance, sees her, calls to her, but his voice is delayed by what she’s flashing back to: the grainy, black and white int. of the house in the country, no electricity, ambulance light strobing through the windows. Her POV is downstairs, in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, Vangelesti pushing past her, as if he’s going to get something. On the kitchen table are eight glasses, each with a lemon wedge. An open canister of kerosene is on the table as well. The last two glasses are still full. Not with water is the practically spoken idea.

  Hale’s mother’s cane is hanging off the edge of the table, and directly below it there she is, smoldering into the distorted linoleum. Writhing, legs pedaling.

  “It can’t … ” she just manages to say to Cat, alone with her. “… please, don’t let him … me, no … ” and then Cat is backing away, to the front door, then running from it too when Vangelesti bursts through, extinguisher in hand. The door pushes her into the stairs and she falls up them, away from all this, is soon in the darkness of the hall, the master bedroom door open for her, inviting.

  She approaches, looks in, and there, half on the bed, facedown, is Stan’s corpse, rotting into the linen, pants around his ankles. The cross standing up out of his back, evidently the killing blow, its shadow long, red-edged, severe.

  “Ca-ther-ine,” Vangelesti yells at her, both up the stairs and from the emergency lane.

  Cat’s POV turns to him, then, yes, but immediately snaps back to the road, the approaching headlights, the screaming radials of a slant-nosed sports car, her reflection serene and whole in the windshield. And then it spiders away, from impact.

  THE crash reverberates through an int. darkness, and then that darkness is bisected by the flat green line that should be a heartbeat, spanning the width of the screen. The grey-haired finger of Dr. Watkins points to the lower frame of the screen-within-a-screen, the rhythm beating there once, twice, erratically. Strange dactylic spikes, shallow valleys.

  “Fetal,” he says. “It’s alive.”153

  “But how?” the second doctor asks. From an angle over the surgery table the two of them are crowded around with three others—a WOMAN DOCTOR, Markum, and Virginia. Smoke’s still rising from Hale’s mother. There’s a long, heavy silence, broken finally by Markum, behind his mask: “Talk about one in the oven, gentlemen … ”

  His joke only meets with reproach, though—especially from the woman doctor—and he mewls out of the spotlight, out of OR3 altogether.

  Dr. Watkins looks away, back, locks eyes across Hale’s mother’s corpse.

  “We have to,” he says, grudgingly, “goddammit if we don’t … liability. It’s not our decision.”

  The woman doctor he was locking eyes with concurs.

  As they make the cesarean cut—the taut, burnt skin more pushed aside than really ever incised—Virginia begins intoning behind them, to herself:

  “Our Father who art in heaven

  Hallowed be thy name

  Thy kingdom come … ”

  But then she trails off as the water officially breaks, steaming over their feet, leaving a bloody residue, kernels of undigested corn there.

  The second doctor lowers his mask, tests the air with his nose. “Is that lighter fluid?” he asks.

  The woman doctor shakes her head no. “Lamp fluid,” she corrects. “Kerosene. Weeks of it by my guess.”

  “Shit.”

  “She didn’t want to go full term,” the woman doctor adds.

  The amniotic kerosene feels around the tangle of wires.

  Dr. Watkins looks across the table at the second doctor, then nods, and together they reach deep into the womb, and instead of Alien154 we get an Omen155 shot, from the floodlight angle: the two doctors lifting an infant-sized oblong shape, bloody black and limbless, holding it up, presenting, straightening their arms under it for some reason, as if they locked their elbows under every birth, held it blinking up to the gods with its Rosemary’s Baby156 eyes.

  As evidence. For explanation.

  The expressions on their faces give it all away too: disbelief, shock, revulsion.

  The second doctor sums it up for them: “Holy hell, gentle—” [demurring for the woman doctor] “people.” He talks to Virginia without looking at her. “What about that prayer, Nurse?”

  Virginia’s just mouthing it reflexively now, no voice.

  Slowly then, the umbilical cord separates at a preformed node and begins dripping black fluid, which, inserted, eats into the aluminum frame of the gurney, trails acidic steam up.

  Dr. Watkins removes his hands, and the second doctor recovers, catches the noninfant, cocks his head to Dr. Watkins, who’s grubbing desperately in his pocket for something.

  “Are we … ” the second doctor begins, “… are we liable for this, Dr. Watkins?”

  Dr. Watkins shakes his head no, slowly, and then raises his hand, the beeper now in it. He presses the test button surreptitiously and then holds it out like a shield, a shrill badge. “I’ve got to … go,” he says, all distant, “I’m needed … in … ” and with that he makes his weak escape, leaves the door swinging.

  The second doctor is at a loss for words.

  “This isn’t procedure—” he begins, but is cut short by Virginia, breathing increasingly faster, staring hard at the gurney: “What’s the … what’s that name?” Wh
en no one answers she repeats, with feeling: “What’s that name?”

  Inserted again, it’s still SWEREN.

  Virginia chokes up, too scared to scream, and, trying to run, slips on the amniotic fluid, into the fluid. All over her face, in her mouth; corn in her hair. She makes it crying out the door.

  Now it’s just the woman doctor and the second doctor.

  The woman doctor eyes the second doctor.

  “This isn’t science, is it?” she asks flatly, and he shakes his head no, it isn’t.

  “Can’t I just put it back?” he whines. “And I wasn’t the attending here, either. No matter what the good doctor says.”

  The black umbilical fluid, burned through the aluminum of the gurney now, is being pulled to the floor, the inevitable kerosene. The woman doctor sees this, reacts.

  “He won’t say anything,” she says, stepping carefully to a silver oxygen tank, backing the handle off like the second Halloween157. It hisses. “He won’t say anything,” she continues, “because this never happened.”

  She makes her way to the door, eyeing the dripping fluid. Nods gravely.

  “Doctor,” she says in farewell, and the second doctor looks around, eyebrows pressed together, eyes watering.

  The fetal monitor is still blipping.

  “Doctor,” he says back finally, nodding in reluctant acceptance, and the single drop of umbilical fluid is pulled silently down.

  FROM halfway down the hall the twin aluminum doors of OR3 unhinge, are blown against the opposite wall like tissue paper, the oxygen-driven kerosene explosion following it, the woman doctor walking away, not running. She doesn’t look back either, nor to the side, where Virginia is, holding her crucifix with both hands, close to her mouth.

  Moments later, the bad-luck overhead sprinklers come on.

  IN OR3 too. Like rain. The only other sound the fetal monitor, unevenly blipping, and then too—its delicate lead wires inserted, burning slowly through, the ends falling away from each other—it’s gone as well. Leaving silence.

  Hale’s mother’s corpse is blown against one wall, sitting grotesquely up, never wholly in the shot, but coming slow and in pieces, as if either respecting her privacy or saving the special effects budget for later.

  Dragged a few feet from her—still connected by placental tendrils—is the oblong black sac, collapsing, empty. Abandoned.

  Just past the sac is the oversized floor drain, and the metal grating there is eaten away, replaced by a virgin floor drain, on some dimly lit floor. Really faint music in the b.g., barely recognizable as old Sheena Easton. Directly above the drain is the underside of a bed. Topside is a comatose PATIENT—male, wan.

  The shot rises, est. a whole bank of comatose-patients against one wall, the opposite wall just the same. Some decorated, some neglected. One dilapidated. A nurse’s station at one end of the long, high-ceilinged room, the nurse behind the glass filing her nails away. LIN. In the open part of the floor is a custodian monotonously mopping, head lowered, the music coming from her headphones. When she turns we rush in close and it’s NONA, still with the red hair tucked behind her ear, but augmented now, metallic: Gillian Anderson158 in her punk years. It’s a light moment, the inverse of the OR3 scene: she’s mopping with the music, lip-synching (“now take it slow like your daddy told ya”159), moving enough like Sheena E160 that she eventually tangles her headphone leads up, ripping the cassette player from her belt.

  It crashes to the ground, the batteries rolling away. One heads for the patient/bed just over the drain.

  “Fuck,” Nona says, then, to the patients, still comatose: “Sorry. Didn’t mean to disturb anyone.”

  She looks to Lin but Lin is filing away.

  Exasperated with herself, Nona plunges her mop into the bucket, becomes legs approaching the bed. Goes to her knees, leaning under, reaching, reaching—the battery there in the drain-grating, her fingers dancing all around it. Just when she’s got a tenuous grip on it though we cut above, to an inserted sprinkler head, splashing on.

  Nona stands in the artificial rain, looking around. Her mop bucket is quickly filling, the dirty water overflowing. The comatose patients’ monitoring equipment flashing on and off, emergency lights flickering on, coloring everything amber.

  “Just when I thought it was safe to be indoors,”161 she says, looking around at the patients, their mouths filling with water.

  She takes off her shoes, wrings her white shirt out some—holding it away from her chest, at first, then remembering where she is, letting it cling back to her—and walks to the door, the hat rack with an old umbrella hooked over it.

  “Guess I should just break a mirror too, while I’m at it,” she mumbles, splashing the umbrella open indoors, looking at the twenty-odd patients in real danger of drowning.

  It doesn’t take her long to decide which one to save: she walks to the dilapidated bed on the opposite wall from the drain-side. Holds the umbrella over the patient’s face, saying “I won’t let anything happen to you, JD,” the patient resolving first as male, then young, then as the same actor used to play both twelve-and fourteen-year-old HALE in the original. He’s maybe two years older now, but playing fifteenish, his neck scarred all the way around, the rope almost visible there in his skin.

  Nona looks again to Lin, still filing away behind a sheet of water, oblivious somehow, and then jerks suddenly to the patient over the drain. His chest rises for a moment, back bowing as if with electricity, so he’s held up by heels and head, and, from the opposite side—Nona in the b.g. now—his eyes flutter open in fear, pain, etc., then something better washes over and they close again.

  Beneath the bed the water is pouring into the now-grateless drain.

  Beneath the umbrella Hale’s eyes are twitching with flashback: the o.s. whine of his three-wheeler winding up and up, a demon rushing down out of the sky at his OBE POV.

  BACK to the coma room. Under the drain-patient’s bed. Attached to the bottom is a pulsing black Alien-type parasite, what might be wing buds blistering up near what might be the head. We go close and closer, until the screen is wholly black.

  Beat, beat.

  SLOWLY, then, a modest subtitle fades in near the bottom of the blackened screen: DECEMBER 22. Meaning seven weeks have passed, Halloween’s long over. As the subtitle dissolves out, a room comes into focus, becomes walnut, panned three-sixty, est. all the degrees, diplomas, and awards you’d expect in a psychiatrist’s office, shelves and shelves of books, etc. A calm place. Virginia balled up on the maroon leather couch, small against it all.

  “I don’t need therapy,” she’s saying. “I need someone to believe me.”

  “Okay, then,” CURTIS says, leaning forward, into his therapist role, “let’s say I choose to believe you. That these dreams of yours are real. What then?”

  “You’re not getting it,” Virginia says. “It’s not that my dreams are so much real. They’re not even dreams, really. More like … like repressed memories—”

  “That unrepress when you’re sleeping, though, correct? When the rules of the waking world don’t necessarily apply?”162

  Virginia chews her inner cheek in disgust, not nodding yes to his loaded question, turning her head in a way that reveals her hair isn’t just bunned up, but cut short.

  “Are you still in the Christmas pageant?” Curtis asks, his fingers nimble with a pen. “Taking Cat’s place?”

  Virginia laughs to herself. “This where you tell me about the therapeutic power of those sexy little elf costumes, Dr. Curtis?”

  “Just Curtis.”

  “‘Curtis.’”

  “I do think it will … occupy you, yes,” he says.

  Virginia closes her eyes, exasperated.

  “To circle back,” Curtis says, “let’s pretend that, though you exhibit all the symptoms, false memory syndrome is nevertheless a misdiagnosis. Meaning your memories are real, sleeping or awake.”

  Virginia opens her eyes, nods okay.

  Curtis sits bac
k, laces his fingers into a church, with Virginia in the b.g. “What then?” he asks.

  “We all die,”163 Virginia says, matter-of-fact.

  “Like … you did.”

  “I can’t explain it, okay? That’s what you’re for. It’s like … I don’t know. Like everything’s jumbled up just to make my story unbelievable … like Reese in Terminator,164 right?” Curtis looks at her, waiting. She replies: “Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not real.”

  “‘They.’”

  Virginia nods again, obviously aware of how all this is sounding.

  Curtis tries to continue, reading from his notes in a patronizing voice—“Let’s see, they have wings … not human … not affected by the cold, either, so scratch the reptilian angle”—but Virginia interrupts: “I thought it wasn’t real too,” she says, “that I was losing it. Until this.”

  This is a crumpled, mostly burned piece of paper she sets carefully on Curtis’s desk. He unfolds it, nods without smiling.

  “Oh, I see,” he says, then tries to read: “Swa … n … ”

  “Sweren.”

  Curtis pretends to be recalling the name. “Ah, yes. Sweren. The, um, combustible … birth situa—”

  “The barbecue case. You can say it.”

  “Your hair,” he says, pointing politely, as if in explanation.

  Virginia nods. “She was from what I remembered. Her name, I mean.”

  “Hmmm,” Curtis allows, studying the ceiling. “But do you have any, say, ante-partum-type evidence? Proof that you’re not just coopting her into your … your memories? Did you write her name down in a diary or something? Tell a friend, perhaps?” Virginia just stares at him. He continues: “These are valid questions, Miss Cane.165 You’re a rational person.”

  “Con knows,” Virginia says, getting surly.

  Curtis shrugs helplessly, flips through his inserted notes to the page labeled CONAN SIMMS, reads without inflection: “‘… she probably is just in love with me. In her own little fantasy world. Girls will say anything to get me alone, you know how they are … There was this one time … ’ Well, he goes on from there. In many directions.”

  “Yes, he’s quite entertaining.”