Demon Theory

by Stephen Graham Jones

  “Trust me,” the tape player repeats again. “Take the highway to junction 139 and then every right after that. A two-story house. Cattle guard. She’s going to need some medical attention.”

  “Trust me,” Nona repeats, mocking the tape, “we’re all going to need some of that kind of attention,” and then directs her POV to the JCT 139 road sign approaching. She moves her head with it as they pass, so that it’s the still thing, everything else moving, including a POV approaching the ambulance from behind, a fast, car-level rush, swerving left just before impact. On the side of the ambulance is PSYCHIATRIC TRANSPORT.

  The siren wails, wails, is drowned out gradually by some cranked Black Sabbath,297 the DJ ad-libbing an intro—call letters “KBAT,” punctuated by flapping wings. We go close on the guilty radio and half-gloved fingers roll the volume knob even farther over, to the handwritten 11, a Spinal Tap298 nod.

  From above and behind once more, we finally get the whole scene: the ambulance is being paced by a primered Chevelle, vanity plate STACE. In the Chevelle are STACE and TINE and VERONNIE and three other punks—GEORGIE (name sewn into his mechanic coveralls), DIM,299 and JAKEY BOY,300 the youngest and quietest of the crew, which translates to newest, least doomed.

  Dim leans out the window, sits on top of the door and swings a beer bottle over his head in imitation of the ambulance’s siren. Wails with it, the wind tearing his voice away.

  Skopek looks over from behind the wheel, not impressed.

  Stace, the driver, leans forward, looks back. Smiles. Slides his hands over as if to ram Skopek but isn’t really holding the wheel.

  Tine screams, trailing off into laughter.

  Skopek doesn’t flinch.

  “Fuck them,” Veronnie says, looking away from Skopek, draping herself over Stace, and Stace nods, buries his foot, the inset traction bars slapping his leaf springs, the Chevelle surging ahead, Dim losing his beer bottle under the ambulance, almost going down with it, Georgie and Jakey Boy hauling him in at the last instant, Stace keeping track of all this in the rearview.

  “Take this right,” Tine instructs Stace, and Stace starts to turn the wheel, which takes us into the old house, the int. wall of Jenny’s childhood room. The idea being that at the end of all those rights the caller was talking about is this, the house in the country, the weathered drawings. Waiting to be reactivated. Nested among them is an oval mirror. Reflected in the oval mirror301 is Egan’s worn mask, motionless for long beats and then looking slightly over, into the camera.

  The shot reverses slowly and on Hale’s bed is STAN, masked, chin in hand, elbow on knee, feet on bed frame—the aging gargoyle Rodin302 never had. Alive again.

  He’s studying the wall.

  Breathing.

  Flashing back to twelve-year-old Hale, carrying a mangled Jenny toward the house. Evidently this is moments after the three-wheeler accident, grass and dust still thick in the air. Hale stops about fifteen feet out from the porch, maybe unsure whether to come all the way home, and in the bedroom Stan’s eyes behind the mask shut, as if looking away.

  A tear wells up and spills, its path hidden by grey-rubber skin.

  He stands. Raises the gloved hand that his leg’s been hiding. Between two of the fingers is a cigarette.

  “No more,” he says, voice rough, and then holds the cigarette to the corner of one of the brittle drawings. The paper smolders at first, then takes flame, the fire reflected in the close-up of his still-wet eyes.

  By his leg again, forgotten, the cigarette burns into the rubber finger of Egan’s glove, but Stan either isn’t sensible or doesn’t care anymore. Either of which is bad news.

  The wall in front of him burns gloriously, and backlit against it he raises his arms from both sides, reaching for the crucifixion stance, waiting to burn with it. But it’s early yet for anything as final as that: as the flames lick up into the dry ceiling, the ceiling creaks, the stained paper curling back with heat, and then it gives all at once, spilling days of accumulated snow down on the fire, smothering it.

  Stan just stands there, over it, his arms still out, the index finger of his glove melting away, the flesh beneath boiling, his gargoyle face caught again in the scorched mirror, the rest of him framed through the window, a long shot this time, est. the house as snowbound, lightless, everything it needs to be. The low angle even stands it tall against the sky like the Bates place, the silhouetted parent an added touch.

  It all carries over.

  NEXT is a right hand, leather-gloved, leaving a smudge-line down a row of glass doors. Bottled drinks behind all the doors.

  At the end of the row is the beer. The hand stops reverently, opens the door, but before it can close we’ve cut moments ahead: it’s already on the check-out counter.

  The same CLERK from the original looks from it to the WE CARD mat and then up not to the Chevelle punks as the glove’s been suggesting but to CON, in his motocross boots and jeans, two shirts and two jackets. The ugliest duck-hunting cap ever, hair shaggy under it, again indicating how much time’s passed since the second installment.

  “You serious?” Con asks, slapping his ID down. “Whatever, man. Gotta say I’m flattered.”

  The clerk doesn’t care about age, though: “Twenty-two fifty,” he says. “And no funny stuff this time.”

  Con cocks his head, looks down to the beer, then his wallet. A grand total of fifteen dollars.

  We cut ahead again, to a cheaper beer getting slammed onto the counter in the good beer’s place.

  Con throws the fifteen dollars down beside it.

  The clerk shakes his head no, though. Selects two of the six-packs out, pushes them to the side. Nods.

  But now Con shakes his head no, re-includes the beer.

  Adds a carton of cigarettes, even.

  Looks the clerk in the eye. “Maybe we can work something out,” he says, and we cut ahead one more time, to an ext. shot: Con, beer all tied together somehow and slung over his right shoulder, left sleeve empty. He walks past the pumps, out of the neon light, stops in the lee of the air tank to cup a cigarette with one hand. Looks back at the phone booth and the pile of rags that could be a person.

  He starts to say something to the pile but stops himself, steps neatly out of the frame instead, the 139 sign across the road becoming important—yellow letters, blue b.g.

  IN the convenience store the clerk is staring down at the counter. On one side of the WE CARD mat is the fifteen dollars; on the other side is a prosthetic forearm–hand combo, with a leather glove.

  The clerk sneers.

  “Not again,” he says, his trailer cameo, the big line, but before he can test the arm with a pencil, he’s blinded momentarily by headlights screeching up, the Chevelle’s engine making the plate glass tremble. It guns and then trails off, the glasspacks popping, the car parked at a severe angle.

  Stace and Tine and Veronnie and the three punks unfold themselves from the int., spill into the parking lot. Turn as one to the clerk, who now has his hand close to a riot gun bracketed behind the counter.

  The crew slams through the doors. Georgie’s coveralls are folded down now, and the back of his shirt reads, I DO OWN THIS PLACE, YES.

  “Dirty Harry,”303 Stace says to the clerk. “Nice to see you again.” Dim salutes the clerk in passing, and then it’s a series of shots from the clerk’s POV, all escalating: Stace ducking into the bathroom; Dim drinking a not very well-hidden beer, the cooler doors open, spilling frosted-white air; Veronnie reading the Bazooka Joe jokes to herself, tossing the gum behind her; Jakey Boy lounging over the magazine rack, Georgie hungrily tearing the plastic off a porn mag. All the small-fry stuff we expect. But then Tine goes seasonal, stands wearing a Marilyn Monroe mask, strikes a pose, trying to hold down the skirt she would never wear.

  The crew congregates on her, Georgie going for a Gene Simmons face, tongue and all,304 Dim a Richard Nixon,305 Veronnie opting for costume makeup, pasting her face white then drawing vertical black Crow-lines over her eye
s, slipping on white gloves as well, mime-style. Just like the inserted container shows it. Dim tries drinking his beer through the Nixon mask but the lips are sealed. The beer froths down his chest, onto the floor.

  “Here, Dick, like this,” Georgie falsettoes, taking the bottle and tilting Dim’s head back, pouring the beer into the mask’s nose, which has the necessary breathing holes cut out.

  Dim coughs, dry heaves, and while he’s trying to get his bearings Georgie removes his KISS mask, tosses it to Jakey Boy.

  Jakey Boy catches it on reflex, looks up in time to see Dim/Nixon barreling down the aisle at him.

  The shot cuts to a side view of the counter, Dim and Jakey Boy sliding out of the aisle into the magazine rack, and that’s when the clerk pumps his riot gun one-handed, stands over them both.

  The convenience store hushes.

  Tine steps hesitantly forward and the clerk swings the gun onto her, motions them all into a tight pack over Dim and Jakey Boy.

  The clerk laughs.

  “This time you will pay for the merchandise,” he says.306

  “What merchan—?” Georgie asks, then has to stop when the barrel lines up on him.

  “How much?” Tine asks.

  This gets a laugh from the clerk. “All of it,” he says, and, one by one, the crew surrenders their wallets and purses and dime bags and paraphernalia into a disgusted pile on the counter.

  “You can’t do this,” Dim says to the clerk, “I’m—” but Veronnie nudges him quiet, directs him up to the convex mirror, Stace approaching down the beer aisle, buckling his belt with one hand.

  The clerk looks at them individually, rifles through the wallets, keeping the money, spilling the rest.

  “This is how it feels—” he starts to say, but never gets to finish: from behind the hot dog glass, Stace’s arm extends. At the end is a 9mm pistol.307 At the end of the pistol is the base of the clerk’s skull.

  The clerk closes his eyes in defeat.

  Tine laughs. “No,” she says to him, “this is how it feels,” and while Stace holds the gun, they vent on the store, doing all the typical damage. In the midst of it Dim helps Jakey Boy up.

  “We don’t get out much, Jakey Boy,” he says, winking, then takes the Nixon mask off. The backside is slathered in beer and nose blood and maybe vomit. He throws it at the clerk, retrieves another mask. Gargoyle.

  “Better?” he asks Jakey Boy, but Jakey Boy’s busy eyeing Tine/Marilyn, her suddenly bare chest pressed up against the inside of the cooler doors, leaving delicate twin prints in the frost—already more skin in one scene than we’ve seen in two whole movies.

  Soon enough the destruction is complete, the store trashed, still settling.

  Georgie, in a werewolf mask now, approaches the clerk on all fours. Stands so that the riot gun is pressing into his belly, the clerk’s inserted finger wanting to so so bad.

  But then Stace cocks the pistol.

  Georgie’s eyes smile through the mask for a moment before he slaps the barrel to the side, spins the stubby shotgun back around so it’s under the clerk’s chin.

  “Trick or treat,” he spits, the clerk flinching.

  Georgie laughs, turns, leads the way out, everyone falling in until it’s down to Stace and Veronnie.

  Veronnie looks to Stace, uses her mime hands to say no about the clerk.

  Stace pulls the pistol away, backs out of the store.

  Leaving just Veronnie and the clerk.

  She walks up to him, smiles a big smile, biting a blood capsule so the dye runs down her chin. Slowly then, she bodies up to the clerk, reaches around behind him, takes Con’s prosthetic off the counter. Holds it and her other hand up to her cheeks, miming shock, and then laughs, leaves, spinning the sunglass rack in passing, the shades shooting out long after she’s gone.

  Now it’s just the clerk and the store.

  “Fucking Halloween,” he says.

  IN the parking lot the close-up of Stace’s eyes through the windshield are the ones blinded now: the ambulance, coasting slow low and heavy through the parking lot.

  As they pass, things slow down, both cars hardly seeming to roll at all, Skopek looking out the window, down at Stace & Co., Stace looking back.

  IN the int. of the Chevelle, Georgie, using Con’s prosthetic, reaches over the seat for Stace’s gun, turns to the back glass, pretend-shoots the receding ambulance full of holes, making the sounds himself.

  Stace isn’t liking this, though.

  Veronnie either: she palms the gun away from Georgie, leaving the hand of Con’s prosthetic empty.

  “These aren’t toys?” she says, vintage Nona.

  BEHIND them, the ambulance has backed up to the front of the convenience store.

  The rear doors swing open. Dark inside.

  The pile of rags underneath the phone booth stands, becomes a Swamp Thing308–looking bum, his beard matted over. Like Egan said Seri said in the original, he does have Hale’s eyes.

  He steps off the curb, up into the ambulance.

  Before the doors close Nona leans forward, into the meager light, says it: “We’re going back.”

  NOT far down the road, Con, peeing in the snow, looks over his shoulder at the Chevelle tearing past, someone yelling out the window, dopplering away.

  Soon enough he’s peed a circle around himself.

  The car is taillights for about six seconds, then they kiss each other bye, disappear.

  “Fools,” Con says, the steam from his pee rising around him in a hollow column.

  “LIKE we’re going to find it this time,” Tine says to the row of backseat punks. The ditches outside the windows are much closer now, the Chevelle inching along.

  “We’ll find it,” Georgie says.

  “Dim?” she asks, and Dim the gargoyle holds up a finger, turns the page of a different Strange Stories–type book than in the original. But similar enough that we get the idea.

  “Can you even read?” Veronnie asks.

  “Fuck you, Ronni,” Dim tells her. “I went to the same school as her.”

  “That doesn’t mean you know how to get to her house,” Veronnie says.

  “Who?” Jakey Boy asks.

  Tine smiles. “Jennifer Sweren,” she says reverently, getting drowned out for a moment by the Chevelle, trying to pull through a low spot in the dirt road, its inserted rear tires spinning, spinning, the chains that weren’t there before finally inching them forward, then shooting them bouncing and sparking over a cattle guard—the cattle guard, Stace’s cigarette falling out the window as cigarettes have to, here.

  There in the headlights is the house.

  IN the Chevelle, Tine doesn’t look away from it, narrates for Jakey Boy: “They say she comes back every Halloween. You can hear her … ” she trails off, looking simply up.

  “Oh,” Jakey Boy says, playing tough. “That one.”

  Veronnie smiles around her beer. “Really we just came out here to scare you three, get us some. Drop your pants, now. You know the routine.”

  “You wish,” Dim says after a long beat, which est. both that Veronnie’s playing and that Dim hoped she wasn’t.

  THEY spill out of the car for the second time, the backseat punks pushing each other into the snow, Veronnie inhaling to fit Stace’s gun into her waistband.

  “So this is it,” Tine says, hardly impressed. “Unspoiled Americana. The stuff of legends, movies, all that shit. Good thing I’m not a virgin anymore309 … I do need a long hard beer, though, if any of you’ve got one for me … ”

  Georgie really really does. She opens it and it foams over, getting a smile from her as she mouths it deeper than she really has to.

  To her left Jakey Boy’s looking up at the attic window.

  “Nobody lives here anymore, then?” he asks.

  Veronnie looks up with him. “Guess that depends on how you’re using the word,” she says, joking. Behind her Stace is inspecting the chains, tightening them. Looking past the tree line, at the gathering clo
uds, soaking up the stars.

  “OF course there’ll be a storm coming,” the close-up of Nona’s mouth says around a disposable razor, as if in answer to Stace. Her face is flecked with shaving cream. The ambulance is motionless; she’s shaving the bum. Nona continues: “But it’ll wait for us to get there.”

  “How polite,” a muffled female voice says from the other int. wall of the ambulance, and—artfully avoiding the bum—we pan over to SERI, dressed in pajamas, mouth poorly gagged with pantyhose, hands and feet duct-taped together.

  “Exactly,” Nona says back to Seri, “polite, proper. There’s an order to follow, an etiquette. Just like last time.” Seri rolls her eyes, but before she can get anything else out, Nona’s razor-hand trembles, almost spasming. She grabs it but not before a line of thin blood can leak down the extreme close-up of the bum’s neck.

  He flinches away. His hand rises into the frame, grabs her wrist, and then he sits up: HALE. Nona smiles.

  “Trust me,” she says, both to him and to Seri.

  In her b.g. is the rearview, no Skopek behind the wheel. In his absence we pull down to the radio, a female voice coming through: “… unauthorized use of an emergency vehicle on state highways is nothing to laugh at, Skopek. I know you’re listening. Do this. Listen to me, not to her. She’s just using you to escape … three years ago she brutally murdered the director of the hospital she was working at … she’s not what you think she is … ”

  Reflected in the rearview by a new angle, Nona is looking at the radio, smiling an evil smile for Seri. “They don’t really care about me,” she explains, nodding up front, outside—to Skopek. “I only killed one.”

  Seri pauses long enough for us to register what Nona’s saying. “But … he’s—” she starts, Nona already interrupting: “All dressed up for Halloween? Another escaped mental patient?”310 Nona smiles, continues: “They haven’t even found everybody he killed, yet. And that was eleven years ago.”