Demon Theory

by Stephen Graham Jones

  “Guess I was never ten,” Hale mumbles, then changes direction: “If she was right—Noan, Nona—then we shouldn’t have to try to make it like what we remember. Last time. It’ll all just fall in place whether we want it to or not.”

  “But we don’t want it to,” Con says. “Not exactly, do we?”

  Hale’s POV looks back to the original, desiccated Jenny reaching up for him, for him to pick her up.

  HE shakes his head no.

  “Which ending, then?” Con asks, no answer. He continues: “Our proportions are off anyway, girl-boy-wise. Even with Noan’s ex-hostage and the Incredibly Big Hulk.”337

  “Total body count, though,” Hale says. “Potential, I mean.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  As punctuation, Skopek and Seri slip past the doorway, Seri looking in, doing no explaining whatsoever.

  “Good thing we’re not splitting up,” Con calls behind them.

  “Plan C,” Hale offers, grim in the mouth, then squeezes a drop of blood from the small puncture in the web of his hand, lets it fall. “This is where you shot me,” he tells Con.

  Con shakes his head. “Hair or two over it would have actually broke the skin,” he says back. “Feeling woozy yet? Here, follow my finger … ”

  Hale looks up and it’s Con’s middle finger.

  Hale smiles, tries to clean the little cut with his shirt. Then looks at the stained shirt.

  “Hydrogen peroxide’ll get it out,” Con says. “What we used in ER. By the gallon.”

  Somehow Hale manages to look out the door, down the hall, to the close-up of the hydrogen peroxide bottle in the soap tray and then back again. He doesn’t move though.

  Con continues: “I think the peroxide reacts with the oxygen in the blood or some chemical thing.”

  “Sounds pretty scientific,” Hale says, doubtful.

  Con smiles. “Really we’d just stain the rest of it with iodine. How you think those nurses always look so tan …?” When Hale doesn’t react, Con shrugs, tosses him some sort of antibiotic cream from the medicine drawer. “Rub this on your ego,” he says. “Doctor’s orders.”

  Hale looks to Con in question, still questioning.

  “Okay,” Con says. “Physician’s assistant’s orders.”

  But Hale’s still questioning.

  “Former intern’s orders, then, okay? Speaking of medicine … ” He resumes sorting the drawer, a futile process. But then he looks up. “Shit,” he says. “Noan brought a PDR, didn’t she?”

  Hale doesn’t get it.

  “Physician’s Desk Reference,” Con explains. “If you were a real doctor—”

  “Thought you shot that too,” Hale interrupts.

  “Got any better ideas?” Con asks, then stands with the drawer. “You coming, or should we, y’know, split up? Wouldn’t want to do anything unoriginal … ”

  Hale looks to the window, moves to follow but moves slow. Collects the ampoule of the insulin off the nightstand in passing, pockets it, something for us to note, file away for later.

  The shot moves with them into the hall, over Hale’s shoulder.

  “This is the part I hate,” Con says, taking the first creaking step down the stairs. But suddenly Hale isn’t keeping up: on the opposite end of the hall from him is the glint we know has to be Jenny’s old wheelchair. Just to the right of it is the bathroom, and his POV again manages to snake around, look in the mirror: no reflection, just an aching nostalgia.

  Soon enough Con’s gone and Hale’s all alone up there, crosscut with an artist’s re-creation of Jenny the night of her disappearance, walking from her wheelchair out the door. In hasty pencil. In the backseat of the Chevelle now, Jakey Boy is holding the close-up of the Strange Stories–type book open, reading, his lips moving over the words, following his finger. After a long and involved sentence he looks up, to the house, confused. “She … she killed them all?” he whispers, JENNIFER SWEREN writ large in the caption, but before he can get any further the storm rocks the Chevelle, turns his pages, slams the book shut just when it was revealing too much. We do get the title, anyway: F.A.M.E.!: FAMOUS AMERICAN MURDERS ENCYCLOPEDIA.338

  “Enough of this shit,” Jakey Boy says to himself, and crawls over the front seat, out into the snow. Stands just in time to have to dive out of the frame as Skopek opens the front door, Seri right behind him.

  Jakey Boy still has the book with him.

  AT the bottom of the stairs Con says it: “Noan?”

  The living room is empty, though.

  Con looks back up the stairs. “Haley?” he asks, no answer again. He shakes his head in disbelief, approaches the couch Nona was on just to be sure. Touches it. Cues in that the front door is no longer locked. Places his hand on the knob as if to look out then doesn’t, locks it instead. Notices that someone’s dragged their finger through the close-up of Nona’s chalk line, disrupting time.

  He turns back to the stairs, grins some sincere displeasure.

  “Plan D,” he says, “as in die, dying, death, dead, done for … ” but is interrupted by the downstairs toilet flushing.

  “Virginia …?” he says after a few longish moments, everything set up like the original, when Virginia was about to return from the bathroom. Con shakes his head no, as if clinging to reason, refusing to allow himself to hope. But his eyes are saying maybe.

  He gloms339 onto the fireplace poker in anticipation.

  “Just in case,” he says, holding it baseball bat–style, creeping into the dark kitchen, through it, the shot moving with him to the utility room, the ext. door open. He steers wide.

  Soon enough there’s the bathroom.

  Con hums the Halloween theme, leans forward with his lighter, the toilet tank refilling, the valve sound rising higher and higher, with the water.

  In his own lighter light then he says it again—“Gin?”—and as if in answer Nona’s reflection lurches into the mirror and then she’s framed in the doorway, chin bloody, the orchestra screaming about her. Con falls back swinging, the poker microns from connecting with her face, and she doesn’t even flinch, just sways too far forward, passes out onto Con, becomes a muted crash through the floor Hale’s standing on. In the bathroom, in front of the mirror again, the silver backing rotted away so his reflection is vague at best, and, with no real light source, extra dim.

  He turns the faucet on again, no response. But something’s building in the plumbing; something’s always building in the plumbing.340 Hale watches, waits, and it finally spurts out—rusty brown water, uneven flow.

  His POV draws tight on it swirling down the drain, the shot getting crosscut momentarily with the same shot from the original, the way Hale must be remembering it.

  To complete things, he squeezes some more blood down with the water, very Psycho. Looks in the mirror again, waits. To see what he’s conjured is the idea. Or who.

  No one steps into the reflection, though.

  He finally twists the water off, wraps his finger with crumbly toilet paper, backs out of the bathroom. Doesn’t seem to notice what we have to: that the wheelchair’s missing. He walks down the hall as if being led, then, the shot moving alongside him, the opposite wall sliding past. The wall with the door that opens onto his and Jenny’s old bedroom.

  Hale doesn’t look in when he passes, and what he doesn’t see is a childlike shape at the outer edge of the frame, already gone.

  And now someone’s coming up the stairs. Deliberate steps, the POV black and white without being threatening. More like aged. And there are so many more stair steps than there used to be, enough that Hale has time to back into his old room.

  It’s still dark in there too. A wrong kind of dark.

  Hale senses this, senses motion in the room with him, then looks down to his feet: from his angle there’s black footsteps, a child’s feet. In blood is the idea. All this blood.

  Hale breathes out in catches, exhales frost. Gets wet in the eyes.

  “You can walk,” he says, smiling, j
ust as the black and white POV tops the stairs, leans into Hale’s mother’s bedroom, locking onto the memory of Stan’s corpse rotting into the mattress, the crucifix standing up out of his back.

  The shot holds long enough for us to recognize it as old footage—Cat standing in the doorway. Or the memory of Cat.

  BUT back to Hale: in his old bedroom, the child-sized footprints lead into the darkness he’s still staring into.

  He starts to make a word, a name, something, then can’t. Has to back out instead, never looking away, feeling along the wall, the shot crossing the threshold with him, catching the glint of the suddenly-there wheelchair Hale doesn’t see.

  Instead he’s looking the other way down the hall, to his mother’s room, Cat’s old footage flashing for him somehow, leading him that direction.

  He walks toward it, dragging his bloody finger along the wall, the central image of the trailer. He rounds the corner into his mother’s room with no forethought, and it’s wholly empty.

  And then the phone on the nightstand rings, the inserted phone downstairs lifeless, est. that the one Hale’s seeing is the only one ringing.

  HALE gets weak in the knees and the eyelids and everywhere else it can show, walks forward. Answers: “This is Hale.”

  Silence, silence, and then his mother’s voice: “… come inside, dear … ”

  Hale’s expression goes blank, serene.

  He answers reluctantly—“I am inside”—idly ferrets a syringe out from under the bed. He holds it at eye level, ponders it, the window in the immediate b.g. of his hand, framing the needle, already blurring into the f.g.

  Hale returns to the window, resumes his vigil, his fingertips on the frosted glass: in his elevated POV are two things: 1) a young girl reflected in the glass, standing in the doorway behind him, her dress tattered; and 2) Seri and Skopek picking their way between his fingers, toward the ambulance, Seri holding herself against the cold, the storm suddenly bearing down, whiting everything out, screaming too much for dialogue.

  The shot tightens down to Skopek’s newly gloved hand holding Seri’s naked one. Soon enough a gust of snow blocks their hands out for moment, and when we can see again, all Seri’s holding on to is a limp glove.

  She shakes it away as if it’s an insect.

  We go close enough on her mouth that her voice comes through the wind: “Oh God.”

  She has to make herself not run. But every direction is just white, more white, the house there for an instant then wiped away just as fast. Never the ambulance, the Chevelle, the cattle guard.

  She holds herself against the cold, but then, by degrees, the storm starts avoiding her, the wind whipping around her instead of at her. She smiles in wonder. Her hair floats up.

  She starts laughing, a little girl.

  ON the couch again, Nona is shivering and sweating both, Con dabbing the nosebleed off her chin, the medicine drawer beside him, PDR open.

  “She went outside, didn’t she?” Nona asks, taking her chin back. “Seri?”

  “I don’t know whose idea it was,” Con says, and Nona looks at him for more. He supplies: “Hers or his, I mean.”

  Nona grins through her fever.

  “I guess she didn’t believe me,” she says, “about him.”

  Con pauses, looks to Nona in question, then follows her deadpan gaze outside, Seri in the calm spot but no longer calm: through the snow there’s a large figure coalescing.

  “No,” she says, “this isn’t possible,” but then the figure dissolves. Seri spins, panics, and is facing the wrong way when a leathery black hand settles on her shoulder. Skopek, frost on his eyebrows.

  Seri exhales, wraps her arms around his neck, Skopek unsure where to place his hands. Unsure enough that his POV just studies the ground, the powdered snow suspended some six inches off the ground.

  The hug lasts long enough for the floating snow Skopek’s watching to shift in subtle anticipation, get pressed down in the middle, curl back up at the edges. In the reaction shot, Skopek flares his animal eyes, turns his head just in time for a DEMON to enter the frame, diving hard and loud out of the storm, not anticipated by an aerial POV as it usually has been before.

  It grabs him, carries him up at an angle, the massive wings cratering the snow around them, Skopek’s jacket already tearing away, saving him.

  In the wake of all this Seri’s back down to her original black bra, the first thing we ever saw her in. Breathless too. And still in the eye of the blizzard, or whatever it is. She tries to step out but gets buffeted back.

  “This isn’t happening,” she says, voice rising, “Goddammit, Daddy!” but then notices what’s in her hand, left over from impact with Skopek: the neon key string.

  For a flickering moment, the ambulance resolves in her POV.

  She leans into the wind and stumbles toward it, swaying her back, swaying her back, falling, getting up, glancing off the Chevelle.

  She slams up against the passenger-side door, forcing the close-up of the key through the ice.

  X distance behind her, Skopek is lying facedown in the snow, his back bloody. Just when it seems he’s dead for sure he resumes consciousness all at once, his massive frame shivering awake. He doesn’t panic though, like a sane person, but keeps his head still, watching the snow for irregularities.

  When there are none he stands, finds Stan’s blade in one of his hands.

  Smiles.

  Watches the sky.

  This time the demon isn’t airborne, but standing a few yards out. Big enough that even Skopek has to look up. It steps awkwardly forward, everything about it unnatural,341 unholy,342 unnamable,343 etc.

  Skopek hides the blade down the back of his leg. Plays hurt. The demon approaches, stands over him. Looks down to him. Raises a clawed hand for the killing blow but when the hand falls Skopek severs it cleanly, right at the delicately thick wrist.

  At first the demon doesn’t respond at all, and then it shrieks, stands farther up on its toes, head thrown back, and Skopek takes advantage, opens up its midsection, wrong-wrong stuff spilling out, melting the snow, scorching the blade.

  The demon tries to hold the close-up of its insides in.

  When the shot backs off, Skopek’s disappeared.

  BACK to Seri, in the driver’s seat now, the ambulance not even bothering to turn over for her ignition key. She dials too fast through the static of the radio—still working somehow. “Please please oh God please,” she screams as quietly as she can. Which is to say her panic is killing her. Her mouth is pressed hard to the mouthpiece when Skopek’s backside crashes into the windshield, showering her with glass.

  She screams, screams some more. Keeps screaming. Tries the doors but they’re buckled shut. Finally she kicks and crawls away from Skopek, into the back, where a tray of pill bottles spills over her, dialing her panic up a few notches. We stay with the bottles as they scatter, zero in on the label of one—NONA PEARSON, rolled out from its hiding place evidently—stay with it as a voice replies through the static: “Skopek, Skopek, is that you? If you could just tell us where she’s taken you, just let us know that no one’s going to get hurt this time—” but then the voice goes dead, demon feet coming through the glass on either side of Skopek, answering the question.

  ON the hood of the ambulance the wounded demon leans down to Skopek, smelling him, studying him, and Skopek takes it, even takes the blood dripping onto his skin, burning craters. The close-up of his hand is still wrapped around the blade handle, waiting patiently. Soon enough Seri makes some noise in the ambulance and the demon backs off like an animal, trying to look in, and Skopek takes advantage, runs the blade up through the demon’s chin, out the top of its head, then rips it to the side, opening the demon’s face bone-deep, if bones are what that whiteness is. For a moment, from the side, the demon arches back in pain, its massive wings unfolding three-quarters of the way across the screen, sharp, bat-like and beautiful,344 the ambulance rocking with pain.

  In the poster version, the h
eadlights are on, for the anthropomorphic touch, and Skopek’s brushed out, so that the demon’s attacking the ambulance. Meaning this scene completes the image for us.

  The demon falls back, into the storm.

  Skopek extracts himself calmly and deliberately from the windshield, leans back into the wind. To finish it is the idea.

  IN spite of his second-story POV, something going on through the storm, Hale’s looking at the little-girl reflection in the window. Maybe’s been looking at it the whole time.

  “Jenny?” he says, turning away from the glass just as a huge wing floats across it, no sound.

  The doorway the reflection was framed in is empty now.

  Hale shakes his head as if he’s losing it, sits on the edge of the bed. Holds his face in his hands and falls back, closes his eyes. Is starting to lean up when there’s a girl’s voice behind him: “No.”

  Hale rolls over, looking in the doorway, and in that moment the modified garden-shear blade comes slicing up, through the close-up of a single pane of the window, shaving the air just above Hale’s face, where he would have been. Which is to say that single word, that No, saved his life.

  The blade buries itself in the opposite wall of the hall, smoking hot, trembling with history.

  Hale turns to it, focuses hard on it.

  “Father?” he says, the formal ring of it somehow unsettling.

  ON the couch Con is inexplicably oblivious to the crashing glass, etc., upstairs. Occupied instead comparing pill bottles to the PDR, a half-eaten can of corn within reach.

  “Wherever his mother is,” he says, adding another bottle to the pile, “she can’t possibly be as happy as she was here. Jim Morrison wasn’t even this happy.”345

  Nona stands unsteadily, gropes her way to the window. Parts the curtain.

  “They’re gone,” Con tells her.

  “One way or another,” Nona creaks, her POV stopping at the frosted glass.

  “You can’t remember what they had you on?” Con asks. “Haldol, clozapine … even a family would help … ”

  “Or a diagnosis, right?” Nona asks, mentally on her feet, at least.

  Con nods.

  Nona shakes her head. “You won’t find it in there,” she says, about the drawer, her POV singling out the corroded candy on the coffee table.