The Demonists

by Thomas E. Sniegoski

  Most of the demons ranted and raged, but some admired the trickery used.

  The magick had trapped them, bound them, and now the body that they had possessed had been returned to life, and even more powerful magick was being used upon her— Upon them.

  Even though their numbers were legion, they could not escape. They were bound to their host, grafted into the fabric of her being.

  Where they had expected to be free when the cage of flesh of expired, now they were as one. If she were to die, they would die as well.

  The demon swarm roiled in a last-ditch attempt to take control of their host, but something prevented them.

  Something held them back.

  Marks, symbols, black tattoos inscribed upon her soft and supple flesh.

  The demons saw these marks and knew terror and despair, for they were powerful sigils designed by their most reviled enemies.

  Designs that gave those adorned with them power over the forces of shadow.

  That gave those adorned with these figures power . . .

  Over.

  Them.

  Theodora stood naked before the mirror in awe of what had been put upon her skin.

  At first she had been horrified, shaken to the core that these strange sigils had been inked upon her body. The marks flowed up her arms, around her neck, and down her back to circle her waist like a belt. From there they continued, seeming to slither down her hips, to explode outward on either side of her vagina, before winding around her thighs and legs and onto the tops of her feet.

  Look at me, she thought, turning in the mirror, admiring her shoulders, lower back, and buttocks.

  All covered with the ancient marks.

  But the shock had been short-lived, for she could feel the strength that they gave her, the power over the forces that had infected her.

  She could still feel them there, inside her—waiting.

  There was no doubt that the demons were still strong, powerful beyond words, and she was certain that if it wasn’t for the strangers who had come into her home to work their magick, and put these marks upon her, she would have fallen by now. Would have died, allowing the malignant forces out into the universe to infect many other poor souls and eventually bring about their demise and the doom of any who loved them.

  They had saved her. Somehow they had done what her husband, with all his arcane knowledge, could not.

  For a moment she remembered a needle in the hands of her husband, and how he had injected her with its contents, and how she was pretty sure that she had died.

  But only temporarily. She remembered a sense of peace—an inner calm as her spirit was released from its corrupted flesh to flow upward from the earthly realm to a place of warmth and light.

  She thought she would have been content to stay there, to join with the stuff of creation, but Nana Fogg had told her that it was not yet her time, that she still had much to accomplish.

  She and the love of her life.

  It was that love that had brought her back, that had given her soul the weight and strength to return to a body still infected with a multitude of evils.

  But the vessel—her body—had been fortified, made stronger by the magickally infused sigils that had been inscribed upon her flesh, their power flowing under the skin to the muscle, sinew, blood, and bone beneath.

  Yes,the evil—the demons—were still there.

  Theodora held out her hand, feeling influence of one of the demonic entities as it attempted to assert itself. She could feel it slithering beneath the flesh, entwining around her fingers. She watched as the flesh grew leathery and spotted, the nails at the tips of her fingers growing longer, hooking as they grew thicker, becoming more like a bird’s talons now.

  She knew what the demon wanted. It wanted her to reach up with those nasty claws to her delicate throat and rip the flesh away. The hand rose, and the long, spindly fingers trembled in anticipation of the violent act it was going to commit.

  And she said, No.

  With that simple command, the flesh softened, the talons receding, changing, until they were nothing more than fingernails again. Theodora flexed the hand, opening and closing her fingers, and she smiled Yes, the evil—the demons—was still inside.

  But it was now she who possessed them.

  John Fogg held the tooth in his fingers, trying with all his might not to think of where it had come from.

  “There are repeated patterns,” he said as he brought the tooth under the focus of the magnifier lens that he had attached to his glasses. “Which convinces me that these scratches are most definitely part of an alphabet, but not one I’ve encountered before.”

  Elijah grunted in response.

  John looked away from the tooth, to the image of the Coalition leader on his computer screen. From his office in Romania, the scarred old man hovered over the multiple photographs taken of the teeth from the files Agent Isabel had given them.

  “We’ve run the patterns through our database with no luck,” he said. “Perhaps what we’re looking at here is older than the data we’ve collected. So old it has been lost to time.”

  John removed his glasses, rubbing at his tired, burning eyes. “Or our perpetrator is more ambitious than we thought and has created his own alphabet and written language.”

  “There is a man in Sicily who has helped us on occasion,” Elijah said as John watched him slowly lower himself down into a chair. “Ever since an accident on a construction site that caused a steel bolt to be lodged in his skull, he has been capable of deciphering Enochian script. Perhaps he might be able to do something with—”

  “Hello,” said a voice.

  John nearly jumped out of his skin, spinning around in his desk chair to see his wife standing there.

  “You scared the shit out of me,” he said, and watched an apologetic smile creep across her pale features.

  “Sorry,” she said with a shrug. She hugged herself nervously. “I heard voices and thought that maybe . . .”

  Theo focused on his computer screen, seeing Elijah there.

  “I thought so,” she said, recognizing the old man and moving toward her husband’s desk and the small video camera built into his screen. “Hello.”

  “Theodora,” Elijah said. “I must say, you’re looking well. How are you feeling?”

  “Good, Elijah,” she said, leaning against the desk. “More myself every day.”

  John watched her communicating with the Coalition leader, paying attention to her every word. She appeared to be telling the truth, seeming to be getting better each day, but he was still cautious, watching for signs that the sigils they had placed on her body weren’t performing as intended.

  So far, so good, but he didn’t want to let his guard down.

  “And the itching?” Elijah asked. “Has that diminished?”

  “Lots of body lotion,” she answered, running her hands up and down her arms, across the exotic markings on her flesh that kept the demons trapped inside her at bay.

  John could see them move, changing their configuration in order to counter whatever new threat the evil inside his wife might be attempting.

  “That will pass with time,” Elijah said.

  “I’m sure,” Theo agreed. “I want to thank you again—you and your people—for what you did for me.”

  “You are so welcome, my dear,” the old man said. “Now you must get well again so that you and your husband can assist the Coalition in our future endeavors.”

  John cringed at this reminder but remained silent. He no longer wanted his wife involved in any form of investigation, especially the cases that the Coalition would bring, but that was a discussion for another time.

  There was a pause in the Skype conversation and John decided that it was time to wrap things up for the evening.

  “So you’re going to take the pictures of the teeth to your man in Sicily?” he asked.

  “Yes, that might be the best approach right now,” the old man said.

  “
Pictures of teeth?” Theo questioned.

  John nodded. “I’m consulting with the FBI on a case and there is some evidence—a child’s teeth—that appear to have been inscribed with—”

  “May I see?” she asked.

  “I actually have one of the teeth,” he admitted ashamedly. He had put it away in an envelope on his desktop. He poured it into his hand to show her.

  “May I?” she asked, tentatively reaching down to take it from his palm.

  “We were saying that neither of us has ever seen symbols or writings such as this before,” Elijah said through the computer speakers. “And that maybe the language is something far older than—”

  “It is,” Theo gasped, closing her eyes as she wrapped her fingers around the tooth and began to swoon.

  John reacted, jumping from his seat, ready to catch her if necessary.

  Theodora swayed where she stood, her entire body trembling.

  “Theo, what is it?” John asked.

  “I . . . ,” she began haltingly. “I . . . he . . . he knows what this is,” she finished, fist still wrapped around the tooth.

  “Theo? Are you all right?” Elijah asked. “John, what’s going on?”

  “It appears that she’s having some sort of reaction—to the tooth.”

  She had brought her closed fist to her chest and was holding it tightly as she seemed to struggle. John saw that the exposed tattoos on her arms and neck were moving, slithering across her skin as they attempted to reconfigure.

  “Who knows about the writing on the tooth, Theo?” John asked.

  “One of them,” she answered. “One of them inside . . .”

  She dropped to her knees, in the midst of some great inner struggle. “He knows what it is . . . what the writing is. . . . He can read it. . . .”

  John squatted down beside her as she started to laugh—but it wasn’t her laughing; it was something inhuman . . . monstrous . . . demonic. “Theo! Theo, are you all right? Are you there?”

  He saw that her eyes had changed. They looked reptilian now— crocodile-like— to be more specific.

  “If you only knew,” the voice of the demon said, Theo holding out the tooth to him.

  “Elijah, what should I do?” John asked, unsure if there was something he should be doing, something he should know.

  “She should be able to fight them off,” the Coalition leader said. “Give her a moment before—”

  The demon screamed, Theo’s neck swelling up like a bullfrog’s. She began to thrash, bending forward until her head touched the floor.

  “Theo?” John asked. He reached out cautiously, wanting to touch her but . . .

  “I’m all right,” she said breathlessly. “I’m all right now. . . . He said that . . . he said that he wasn’t going to tell us what is written on the tooth.”

  John squeezed her shoulder. “That’s perfectly fine,” he said. “Let me help you up and—”

  “But I told him that’s not how it works anymore,” she then said, a touch of maliciousness in her tone.

  “And?” John questioned.

  She smiled, and the hair on the back of his neck stood on end.

  “You might want to grab a pen and a piece of paper.”

  She had gone back inside again.

  Sitting on the floor of her husband’s office, she’d closed her eyes and dove into the darkness, where the monsters lived inside her. They were all there, waiting in the shadows. She couldn’t quite believe the number that had found their twisted way into her body, affixing themselves to the stuff of her soul.

  The demons sensed her at once, coming at her in a tidal wave of jabbering obscenity, and for a moment she was afraid.

  But then she remembered who held the true power now. “Stop,” she commanded them, and as much as they did not want to, and as much as they struggled and fought against the words, her magick was strong.

  Theo noticed her flesh, the markings that had been put upon her naked body. In the material world these sigils were as black as a murderer’s soul, but here, they glowed as if white hot.

  They glowed like the stars in the sky.

  They screamed at her, this demonic army, threatened her with bodily harm and worse, but they did not move.

  They could not move.

  She looked out over the sea of them, at all their twisted and horrible faces, searching. She was looking for one of them in particular. One of them who had information that she wanted.

  “Where are you?” she asked them as they continued to screech and wail, still held in place by the markings on her body. “Where is the one that knows about the tooth, and the writings scratched upon it?”

  The demons writhed as one, an undulating ocean of wickedness. “Give him to me,” she commanded, her words making them shriek and wail as if they were being hacked to bits.

  They did not want to obey her, but the sigils burned all the brighter, their magickal radiance touching their horrible flesh, making the demons act on her command. They singled out one of their own, grabbing him up and lifting him above their heads, moving him across the ocean of their evil toward her.

  The demon protested, cursing his brethren’s existence as he was handed over, one demon to the next.

  He was a foul, awful thing, piglike in appearance, with a tail that was a hissing serpent, and tiny, baby’s hands instead of hooves. As he drew closer, he attempted to escape, to crawl across the surface of his awful kind, but they propelled him forward.

  Toward the woman who commanded them.

  Theo watched as the demon was ejected toward her, his corpulent pink form landing upon a solidified platform of darkness with a wet sounding slap. The demon lay there, head bowed, trembling before her. Slowly it lifted its porcine face to glare.

  “The things I will do to you when the opportunity arises,” the monstrous thing spat, the inside of his mouth filled with writhing, plump maggots.

  She moved closer to the demon, the light emanating from the markings on her naked flesh making him squeal as it touched him.

  The demon tried to get away, to turn tail and run back into the mass of inhumanity, but his fellow demons blocked his way.

  “When the opportunity arises,” Theodora repeated, squatting down in front of the piggish demon. “If the opportunity arises. Guess we’ll have to cross that bridge when we come to it.” She reached out, grabbing the hideous thing and pulling it into her arms in a hug. “But until then, you’re nothing but my bitch.”

  Theo seemed to have gone into a kind of fugue state, sitting on the floor of John’s office.

  He watched her as she sat there, both fascinated and terrified by how quickly the symbols on her flesh were moving—writhing, expanding, and contracting.

  “What’s happening, John?” Elijah asked from the Skype connection.

  “I’m not really sure,” he answered. “She appears to be in some deep, meditative state. The sigils, though . . .”

  “She communicating with them,” Elijah said. “The demon spawn that possess her are likely attempting to regain control, but the sigils give her the power now. The power over them.”

  “I just wish that she’d come out of it,” John said. He couldn’t help himself, gingerly reaching out to stroke the softness of her ruby flushed cheek.

  Theo opened her eyes and gasped.

  For a minute he saw the eyes not as his wife’s, but as someone else’s—something else’s—but they quickly changed, and once again, he was looking into his wife’s loving gaze.

  “Hey,” he said to her. “You all right?”

  “Yeah,” she said, nodding. “You ready to talk to him?”

  He looked at her. “Him?”

  “The demon,” she explained. “I’d tell you his name, but it sounds more like a cat hawking up a hairball than a proper handle.”

  “Is she all right?” Elijah asked from Romania.

  “She appears fine,” John said.

  “I’m good,” Theodora answered for herself. “Are we ready for th
is?”

  “Elijah, she says that she’s going to allow us to communicate with the demon that knows about the writing on the tooth.”

  “Fantastic.”

  “Can she do this?”

  “Of course I can do this,” she answered, a touch of petulance to her tone.

  “That is what the sigils are for,” Elijah explained. “They give her the power to have control of the demons inside her instead of the other way around.”

  John could see that the sigils on her body were still moving across her flesh like a swarm of army ants.

  “All right,” John said. “How do we do this?”

  “Are you ready to ask the questions?” she asked. “I’m not too sure how long I’ll be able to keep this up, or how compliant the demon will be.”

  “I’m ready,” John said, grabbing the pen and notepad that he’d brought out earlier.

  He watched her take a deep breath, and her eyes slowly closed.

  “Be careful,” he suddenly said.

  Her eyes opened and she looked at him.

  “Careful as mice,” she said, and smiled in such a way that his heart began to swell with the love he had for her.

  She went back to it, closing her eyes.

  “Get over here,” she said in a powerful voice, and for a moment, John considered moving closer to his wife until he realized it wasn’t him that she was talking to.

  Theo’s face suddenly changed, the bone structure altering, the flesh growing thicker—grayer—and her eyes opened, but they weren’t her eyes that now looked at him.

  The demon gazed around the room and smiled, a thick stream of foul-smelling bile trailing from the corner of its twisted mouth.

  “I could get used to this,” it said, and then chuckled with a horrible gurgling sound. “Just imagine how much nicer it could look covered in a healthy, arterial spray.”

  It laughed again, and John had to suppress the urge to attempt to drive this filth from his wife’s body.

  But as Theo had said, that wasn’t how this worked.

  “We’re not here to talk about my office,” John said to the thing.

  It’s eyes . . . its dark horrible eyes . . . focused on him.

  “Hello, John,” it said. “That is your name right? John.”