Demon Theory

by Stephen Graham Jones

  In them Hale trips over every possible thing there is, trying to see everywhere at once, but then, when the snapping branches never get too close, he calms down. Stands up straight.

  “What?” he says three-sixty—demands—and then turns his back on it all, takes one step forward, and falls cleanly into the earth, the same tunnel/hole he crawled out of in the original, only now he’s going back in, Alice all over.364

  IN some darkness—presumably the cellar—a demonic face is partially illuminated for the briefest second, in outline, as if with breath somehow, and then it’s pitch-black for long moments, until it happens again—the demon face being illuminated—but this time the guilty cigarette is evident. Stan speaks from the darkness, breathing smoke:

  “You remembered the back door.”

  “More like it remembered me,” Hale says, and we follow the cigarette smoke up, through the vent pipe, to the mound the cellar makes, the outline of a real demon perched there, as if listening.

  Back in the cellar the cigarette glow is still about the only light there is. Hale leans forward, into it.

  Stan laughs a guttural, hurt laugh.

  “The flesh,” he says, holding his decomposed cigarette hand up, “it’s … ”

  “Weak,” Hale completes.

  “Pliable,” Stan corrects, and touches Hale’s face affectionately, runs his rotted fingers up near Hale’s temples, Hale flinching away, but not quite far enough to break contact.

  “You came here for an answer,” Stan tells him, in anticipation, “why they don’t want me,” and then casually Nixes365 three of his fingers through the flesh of Hale’s skull, into his mind, and the flashback he’s sharing is first the close-up of an extra long and sturdy hypodermic in black and white, next a male doctor’s feminine hands delicately screwing it into an aluminum frame. An aiming apparatus, like a drill press. In the unfocused b.g. are two neat rows of VOLUNTEERS, dressed seventies like the same flashback from Firestarter.366 All with the obvious mate to the aluminum brace attached to their heads. All pretty mellow too. For now.

  TWENTY-ODD years later a dim photo of them is on the hardwood floor of the house’s living room, part of Nona’s half-burned files.

  Seri crouches to pick it and some of the others up, keeping her eye on Skopek the whole time, who’s watching the three of them in turn. And swaying unsteadily.

  The demon hand is smoldering into the coffee table, palm up.

  It twitches once and Nona catches her breath.

  Seri turns the close-up of the volunteer photo right side up, studies it.

  Con nods down to the hand, to Skopek. “Your backup plan, right?” he says to Nona. “Just outmuscle them, get medieval on their asses …?”367

  “Shhh,” Nona warns him, then to Skopek: “You saw them, didn’t you?” and in answer Skopek just cracks his frozen face into a wide grin, blood spilling from the sharp corner of his mouth.

  Nona starts backing away; the kitchen is closest.

  She looks once to Seri and once to Con, informing them of what she’s up to, and then—with zero sudden motion—she takes a blithe step into the kitchen, keeps her back to the wall all the way to the pantry, then eases quietly into it, is shutting the door when the close-up of a set of fingers slides between door and jamb. Con. With Seri.

  Once inside, they close the door together.

  Con lights his lighter, looks around at all the storage stuff, the absence of windows.

  “What the hell was that about?” he asks Nona.

  “Why he helped me escape,” Nona says back. “I promised he would get to see them … it. Death.”

  Con reappraises her. “Guess you really were in the loony bin,” he says, patting himself down for a cigarette. “Judging by your friends. Current company excluded.”

  “I don’t need this right now, Con.”

  “Yeah. Well I don’t need to be locked in a room with no windows and a jumbo-sized psycho waiting out there for me. So we’re even. Hell is other people,368 you know?”

  “This is probably the best place to hide from him, okay?” Nona says. “He doesn’t like to be enclosed.” She waves her hands around at the tightness of the pantry. “Claustrophobic,” she explains. “Common malady of the seven-foot-tall crowd.”

  “Well shit,” Con says. “Give me a cabinet then. Better yet a suitcase … ”

  But Nona shakes her head. “That’s where he’ll put you,” she says. “He deals with his fear of enclosed spaces vicariously, if you know what I mean.”

  Con thinks about it, tries to stare Nona down. Laughs. “He fills all the small places in the world with bodies, so he won’t have to be in them …?”

  Nona shrugs, directs her POV to Seri, huddled alone with the salvaged files, little light to read them by.

  Con continues: “And I guess if we don’t fit, he’ll make us fit—” but Nona interrupts, gets lost in thought for a moment.

  “That’s what Hale’s father did to the sister,” she says, more just out loud than to Con. “Made her fit. Of course. And now Skopek’s killed one of them, killed death, so he’s also past that … ”

  “Well give the man a mask.” Con nods down to Seri for Nona. “She was right, y’know. You brought your own demons. [looking down at himself] Your own lambs too. All you needed was the house.”

  Nona’s no longer listening to him though, but studying Seri. In Seri’s POV is the close-up of the volunteer photo from twenty years ago.

  “Remembering old times, Sare?” Nona asks her. “Family photo?”

  “Where’d you get these?” Seri asks.

  “Liberated,” Nona explains.

  “He never told me,” she says. “Is that really him?”

  “Well then here’s a big word for you,” Nona says, ignoring Seri’s question, “since you like them so much. Telomerase. Your father injected it directly into their pituitary glands. Telomerase is what does cellular repair. The compound your father engineered was like telomerase on speed, times forty-two. Like that Chuck Norris film with the guy in the well.”

  “Silent Rage,”369 Con fills in.

  “But cellular repair doesn’t—” Seri starts, Nona already ready: “The compound—the jacked-up telomerase he made—doesn’t just do cellular repair on happy cells, though. Meaning if you have cancer already, it accelerates that as well. Or just if you have the genetic proclivity for cancer, even, or psoriasis, or whatever.”

  “And Hale’s father was the only one in the group with a spic-and-span bill of health?” Con says, Nona nodding, staring hard at Seri, as if indicting her for her father’s sins, Seri in turn studying the photo.

  “Ever seen a tumor go full cycle in five minutes?” Nona asks, narrating the picture almost, and like that we cut to Stan’s flashback in Hale’s head, a tumor going full cycle in five minutes: on one of the beds, a male volunteer’s distended stomach splits, the male doctor stepping in front of the shot at the last moment.

  The rest of the room is just as bad, where the special effects department earns its keep: one woman aging so fast her bones break; another’s nail growing into the palms of her hands; a man vomiting blood, his neck bubbling up like a frog; the psoriasis Nona mentioned turning one woman into an alligator, more or less; Stan sitting up in bed, watching all this, looking at his own hands, then up to the doctor.

  A quick flash inserts his name tag—DR. PARKER—and right as we’re panning up to his face he turns, leaves the room, locking the door behind him, one of the volunteers shattering the reinforced glass of the door moments later, a security cam high in the corner monitoring all this, taking the photo Seri’s still holding.

  She’s looking at Nona. Stands to face her, challenge her back.

  “They weren’t supposed to breed,” Nona says, “these test subjects. Because they didn’t know … the children—”

  “If they’d be X-Men370 or honor students,” Con interrupts.

  “Something like that,” Nona says.

  “Meaning we still don’t know
about him,” Seri says. “Hale, I mean.”

  “Or the sister,” Nona adds.

  “Or your bodyguard,” Con adds, mister hopeless, “or the gargoyles, or … [looking at Nona] you.”

  “Or where you got that arm … ” Nona adds right back, then turns on Seri: “What do you remember from the other time?” she asks, and Seri’s eyes water up.

  “I remember … ” she starts, hand rising defensively to her throat as she looks up, to the second floor, understandably trying to repress the old footage of her crashing out the bedroom window, the phone cord around her neck.

  NONA turns to Con, now: “And you?”

  Con smiles. Crushes his cigarette out on the wall, smudges his fingertip in it. “I remember this,” he says, and, moving slow, traces black X’s over Seri’s eyes.

  And Seri lets him.

  And they all hold their breath when the front door opens once, distantly, then closes.

  IN front of the house though, there’s no one. Just snow drifted over the blood and Hale’s tracks cutting through it all, trailing between the cellar door and the front porch, not stopping halfway as everyone’s in the original did, but getting time-lapsed over—rounder and rounder, finally not even there at all.

  UPSTAIRS, Skopek is at Jenny’s wall again, in worship mode or something. He’s been there a while too, judging by the bleeding he’s done on Hale’s bed, and looks as if he’s going to be there a while longer. Until some motion in the hall gets his attention.

  He rises soundlessly, pads out there, looks both ways. There at the deep end is the guilty motion.

  He cocks his head.

  The idea is it’s the same Jenny Hale saw. And maybe she could stop Skopek.

  Skopek steps forward into the darkness, hesitantly. Blinks once and his eyes come back yellow, slit pupil, like the coma patient from the sequel; infected. His slightly enhanced POV distinguishes a body shape. The body shape is holding something, too, low down, at thigh-level. Something square like a book, the F.A.M.E. letters barely there.

  It falls, slapping the wooden floor, resounding, and doesn’t distract Skopek in the least.

  He does smile a bloody smile, though.

  IN the utility there’s no book-slapping-wood sound, meaning some amount of time’s passed since the discussion in the pantry. Enough for a lot of even breathing to be going on, Con and Seri and Nona more or less asleep in one corner, or horizontal at least: Seri’s lying there wide-eyed, scared.

  There’s a creak somewhere past the utility door and she fumbles around on Con’s arm, looking for his lighter. But then his whole arm comes off. She breathes in to do some serious screaming but Con smoothly covers her mouth with his good hand until she’s quieted down.

  She starts crying into his sleeve then, and Con lets her, lights the lighter behind her, takes a look around.

  “How long we been in here now?” he asks.

  Seri shrugs. Looks to Nona, fast asleep.

  “Could be morning?” she offers.

  Con stands, shakes Nona, no response. “Hey sleepyhead,” he says, shaking her a bit more, and the close-up of her head lolls over, face-up, and a thin line of blood spills from her nose.

  “Fuck,” Con says. “I told her—” but is already trying to administer aid. “I’ve got to get her out … where I can have some room.”

  “Why don’t we just let her—” Seri starts, but Con stops her with a look. “You’re not a hero,” she tells him.

  “There are no heroes,” Con says back. “Just stupid people who get lucky.”

  Seri stands, evidently torn, trying to make a decision. Finally she shrugs, reaches into her pocket. Comes out with the close-up of the pill bottle from the ambulance, Nona’s medicine.

  She tosses it down to Con.

  “You’ve had this all along?” he asks.

  “Will it …?” Seri asks back, looking to Nona.

  “Do you care?”

  Seri turns away.

  Con shakes a couple of pills out, uses all his medic prowess to get them down Nona’s throat. Talks to her as he does it: “I know you probably don’t want these, Noan, but goddamn, I don’t know what else to do here … ”

  After giving her the pills he holds her, massages them down her throat.

  “How long till we know?” Seri asks, only half-interested.

  Con shrugs, and, midshrug, Nona spasms, starts convulsing violently.

  “What the fu—” Con says, trying to contain her. He grabs Seri, pulls her down: “Did you switch the meds?”

  Seri shakes her head no, does her fingers for some hybrid of Scout’s honor and peace. Con does his best scowl in her general direction, fumbles the pills open, trying to compare brand name to bottle label. But he just has one hand, and keeps dropping them.

  Meanwhile, Nona’s bouncing into everything, biting deep into her tongue, banging her head, eyes fluttering open.

  “Shit shit shit!” Con says, trying to contain her, finally throwing the pill bottle against the wall, where it explodes. Seri flinches from his anger and he turns on her, calmly: “She was our last best hope, you know,” he says. “And you may have just—”

  “I didn’t,” Seri says. “Maybe she’s just supposed to take them with food or something.”

  Con squats, trying to keep Nona from hurting herself. “This isn’t an upset stomach,” he says.

  “Maybe she didn’t want them,” Seri says. “You think of that? Maybe she likes being craz—her delusions.”

  Con shakes his head, nothing left to say about this. He lifts Nona’s head with his good arm and his hand comes back bloody: the close-up of the back of Nona’s head is cracked open the littlest bit. “Shit,” Con says. “I’m putting her back on the couch. Where it’s soft. She at least deserves that.”

  “But what about him?” Seri says, motioning past the utility, at the threat of Skopek.

  “You want to live forever?” Con says back, vintage Valeria,371 and neatly picks Nona up, pushes the door open with his foot. Looks back. “You coming or not, Miss Wonderbra?”372 and Seri nods, follows.

  IN the living room is the distinct sound of eating, a little bit of sun on the backside of the curtains. Con enters, stands in the doorway holding still-twitching Nona, another thin line of blood escaping her nose, falling out of the shot.

  “Well well well,” he says, and we pan slowly around to Hale, sitting on the couch, methodically spooning creamed corn down. His clothes are dirty from the cellar, his temple bloody and bruised from Stan’s fingers.

  He looks at Con blankly, as if he doesn’t recognize him.

  “You alone?” Con asks him, and when Hale just continues eating, Con sets Nona down on the couch opposite him, takes her pulse, peels her eyelid back. Shakes his head despondently. Bumps the coffee table so that an old can of corn falls over, rolls into the hole the demon hand burned.

  “You’re really here,” Hale says finally, taking the can as evidence.

  Con nods. Hale smiles.

  “I thought I’d imagined you or something,” he says. “That I’d been here alone for … ”

  “Twelve years,” Seri says, nodding down to Nona. “We already did the math, remember?”

  “So’d you see the wizard?” Con asks, blanketing Nona.

  “The wizard,” Hale repeats, our shot zeroing down to Nona’s spilled blood again, the floor slurping it up the same as last time. “My father,” Hale says, o.s. “He wanted me to … to kill him.”

  “Nothing like a little patricide to get the old morning juices flowing,”373 Con says. “Did you do it?”

  “He’s my father.”

  “He’s a whacked-out old mask-wearing fr—” Con starts to object, but Seri stops him: “We all have fathers,”374 she reminds.

  “You’re protecting him, now?” Con asks her, incredulous, “after he pulled an Egan and disappeared for who knows—” but Seri turns on him before he can finish: “What did you say?”

  Con shrugs.

  “The name,” Se
ri clarifies. “You said a name.”

  “Egan,” Hale supplies. “He was here the first time.”

  “He couldn’t have been,” Seri says, pleads, then quieter: “He’s been … twelve years … ”

  “Who?” Con asks.

  “But if he was … ” Seri says, desperate, searching, “why don’t I remember …?”

  “He was easy to forget,” Con says. “But I wonder why he didn’t get invited back, when the rest of us did?”

  Hale looks away, doesn’t try to answer.

  Seri’s somewhere past words for the moment too, just staring.

  Hale finally looks to Nona. “What about her?” he asks.

  Con shrugs. “She’s not really unconscious,” he says. “Psychosomatic conditions have psychosomatic symptoms, according to her. Which include us. So we’re imagining this.”

  “Is she—?”

  “I don’t even have any idea what she thinks she has,” Con says, “and she wouldn’t tell me, either. Meaning I don’t have any idea how to pretend to treat it, y’know? Not that I even could … ” As illustration, he dips into the medicine drawer, gets instantly fed up with it, slings a handful of pharmacy-brown bottles against the wall.

  Nobody saying anything.

  Seri tiptoes to Hale, settles in beside him, inspects his temple.

  Con shakes his head at the two of them then looks at Hale. “You do know Nona’s Jolly Green Giant375 killed one of them?”

  “Not possible,” Hale says flatly.

  “Tell him that,” Con says.

  “But they’re … ” Hale starts.

  “Not real?” Con asks, baiting him.

  “You can’t kill death,” Hale says. “It’s already … dead, right?”

  Seri says something weakly, and they turn to her. So she repeats: “The dead can kill the dead,” she says. “I mean it makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  “She’s right,” Con says. “Or as right as anything is here.”

  “But—” Hale starts.

  “But your father wants you to kill him,” Con supplies.

  Hale nods.

  “Your father who supposedly can’t die,” Con tags on.