Demons

by John Shirley

  “And just now?” I asked.

  “Now? Now the appropriate response is to search for the appropriate response. That means research. Scholarship is our sword.”

  I didn’t believe a word of it, but it was good to hear him say it.

  “But there’s a more pressing concern,” Melissa said.

  “Yes?” her father said, looking at her.

  “Should we try to help those who are being murdered out there?”

  We all three turned and stared at the door.

  We went to the kitchen. I climbed up on the sink and peered out a lower corner of the kitchen window, expecting a feathery spider leg to ram through the glass the moment I lifted my head into sight, picturing it plunging a hook into my eye, digging for my brain. But the creatures on the balcony were immobile, maybe dormant.

  The city below was reeling from the invasion. It made me think of footage I’d seen of the bombing of Kabul in 2007: dim, smoke-shrouded canyons of streets lit only by random bonfires and burning cars and now and then a burning storefront.

  Below, figures darted for cover. A car careened, something clinging to the roof, flailing at it; the car piling into a hydrant, water geysering, the door torn aside, a man scooped out like a sausage from a can.

  Above . . . was that a passenger jet, just under the lowering cloud cover? Was it veering in the sky? Was there something that ravaged, aboard it?

  I climbed down, my mouth gone paper dry again. Melissa looked the question at me. She was hugging herself to keep from wringing her hands.

  “It’s not good,” I said. Meaning, it was still going on, out there—so it was going on in the building, in the hall.

  She nodded, biting her lip.

  The professor and I armed ourselves with a baseball bat and a long piece of old pipe left by some plumber behind the water heater. We went to the door to the corridor and bent near it to listen. There was a thrashing noise and then a steady thumping that sounded to me like it was from the apartment across the hall. Someone shouting for Allah. Pleading for Allah. Then—just the thumping, the sound having developed a wet quality.

  The professor said, “No. Come.” He turned on his heel and, breathing hard, went back to Melissa’s bedroom and switched on the TV. He changed channels until he found another report. We followed him in.

  “We need to know—” he began. But someone on TV finished the remark for him:

  “Can they be killed? We are about to find out.”

  You know from the reality programming shows how real-life action looks on television. It hasn’t got the good camera angles or the impressive splashing of the squibs or the special-effects explosions or even great visual crispness—the image is washed out, badly lit. It looks herky-jerky and uncertain. Half the time a cop tackling a criminal looks like a guy playing football with one of his friends. It’s a lot of off-balance fumbling, and it’s over so quickly you can’t make out what happened.

  But there were at least a dozen in the SWAT team. The demons—five Sharkadians, that I could count, and a Grindum—were all over one of those small school buses they use for mentally handicapped kids; and the kids were in there, slow kids and Down’s syndrome kids and deeply pathological kids, a yellow box of them on wheels. The SWAT advanced toward them, firing with something like gleeful esprit, perhaps because the demons had no guns and because they were feeling the impact of the rounds, the bullets knocking them back, skidding them off the bus. The commentator, sounding a bit drunk, was saying something about a game a lot of us had played in childhood, Doom, and how Doom might’ve been designed like some kind of premonition to prepare us for this—

  And then a Grindum that had been knocked down by a swarm of bullets simply stood up and advanced against a stream of gunfire, jerked a gun from a wilting cop’s hand, melting the gun in its own claws, and, as the man turned, took him by the throat and forced the molten metal of his gun—bullets exploding—down his throat. The others were running or were being pulled apart, like flies in the hands of sadistic children. I could see no wounds on the demons though bullets hailed into them.

  The Grindum bounded on its giant grasshopper’s legs back to the bus, lunged inside, and began to snap little heads off in its jaws.

  We switched the television off and put our pipe and our baseball bat aside.

  No. They cannot be killed. They can be inconvenienced by weapons. They can be slowed down and forced to reconstitute themselves if you shatter them sufficiently, but they cannot be killed by any conventional means: more proof that they are supernatural creatures, if any more were needed.

  One night in 1986: I’m ten years old and something has awakened me and I can’t get back to sleep. I thrash in the bed. It’s June, and neither warm nor cold, but the sheets seem to abrade my skin and the air seems heavy over my bed. I can feel it pressing on my eyelids. The noise from the living room woke me, I suppose. But it’s not the noise that’s keeping me awake, it’s a kind of shiver that pulses through the house from down there. It’s my mother. I can feel her down there, shaking with anguish, although—I know this from past experience—she’s probably curled up in a chair staring at the TV, not visibly shaking at all. Now and then she’ll uncoil, with a whiplash movement like an eel on a hook; I’d seen it many times already this year. But once more I get out of bed, and wearing only my briefs, I go to the second-floor landing in our half of the divided Victorian and look down the worn wooden stairs at Mom in the living room.

  It’s the amphetamines, I know, confirming it to myself as I see her sit very still, then thrash herself to another position in the chair, then sit very still again. She’s staring at the television. She’s flicking it with the remote. Channel. Another, another. Channel for five, ten seconds. Another.

  Suddenly she stiffens and jerks her head around—I pull back but she’s seen me. “Git on down here,” she says. She grew up in a trailer park in Fresno; though she’s a relatively educated woman she slides back into trailer park diction easily. “Come on, come on, come on, git down here.”

  I go down, trailing my hand on the banister. “I woke up. I couldn’t get back to—”—

  “You think I’m weird, don’t ya, baby?” she says as I come to the bottom of the stairs. I sit down there and hope she’ll let me stay there. She doesn’t usually get violent, but she scares me when she’s drugged. I wonder where Boyfriend Thing is.

  The high-ceilinged room is lit only by the TV; the shifting images make the shadows of the room jump like dancing gray-white flames. Picture flames, I think to myself.

  I notice that except for the van Gogh posters—my Mom had a van Gogh fetish—the room is more barren than it was. Something’s missing. The easy chair is there, the vinyl at the end of its arms partly peeled away; the TV and a thin metal TV tray with its handful of rattling pot seeds, all that is left of Boyfriend Thing’s pot stash—there’s no other furniture: The sofa is missing. A nice brown-leather sofa. She’d begun to sell things off about then.

  “You didn’t answer me. You think I’m weird. You do.”

  “No.”

  “You do. Because of . . . because I stay in the house so much now; you told your sister that. When she called.” My sister had moved out; she was fourteen and she lived with my aunt. Sometimes I wanted to leave, too. “Well. Well, well, well. The world is an evil place, Ira. The world is sick and dangerous. You know what they just had on the news? I just saw it. Little girl chained to her bed for five years. She was six years old. That’s what kind of world it is.”

  The irony isn’t lost on me even at the time. My mom a speed freak flipping out about someone else’s child abuse. But I know now it was Jung’s shadow, the shadow projection.

  “In Southeast Asia, this one country, people are, like, just chopping each other, just hundreds and hundreds, and hiding the bodies. . . . Oh and in Cambodia not that long ago, okay . . .” She tells me in too much detail about the Killing Fields. “You know what it is?” she says, coming to the question without a pause. “Ther
e’s demons loose on Earth pretending to be people. And I’ll tell you what—I saw this thing just now, the astronauts can see. They can see from orbit whenever they’re over the night side of Earth, they can see lightning somewhere every few seconds. Always lightning bashing around somewhere on Earth, every few seconds. You know what that is?”

  I nod, but she’s already gone on. I had gotten very skilled, the past few months, at not seeing her face when she was high. It was so puppetlike. Her eyes looked like those glass disks, like the flattened marbles they use for stuffed-animal eyes; her skin looked taut as polished wood; her mouth seemed to clack like a puppet’s.

  “Those flashes they see from orbit, it’s lightning, is what it is, is all,” she is saying. “I’m not crazy. I don’t think it’s anything else. But I’ll tell you what it’s like. It’s like the astronauts are seeing the flash of someone doing something cruel, some big cruelty. An atrocity, like; there should be, if there was any fucking justice, some kinda ol’ flash or something you could see from space. Maybe it is, maybe there’s one lightning flash for every atrocity somewhere on Earth. Ought to be. You think I’m weird? You do. Go back to bed. Go on. I’ve gotta . . . go on, go on, get your ass up there, go, go. . . .”

  I was thinking of that night, listening to my mother’s speed rambling, when the professor turned the televangelist on. The tube preacher was gassing on and on. He was using all his skills. His face was puppetlike; his eyes like glass disks. And he was babbling, but he didn’t have his usual confidence. This was Reverend Spencer. I’d seen him before, and he usually strutted with confidence.

  Tonight Reverend Spencer looked scared.

  “It’s occurred to him,” the professor said.

  “What?” I asked. I sat on the end of the bed, sipping Tokay. It had grown quiet outside . . . some sort of lull. . . .

  “All the crust he’s built up to hide what he knows in his heart has been clawed away by what’s happening around the world,” the professor said.

  “I’m hungry,” Melissa said, her voice muffled under the pillow she was holding over her head. She was lying in an S shape on the bed behind us. “But if I eat I’ll throw up.”

  Without looking at her, Paymenz reached out and patted her shoulder.

  I said, speaking slowly, “You mean, Israel . . . that it occurred to him . . . that if this is Judgment Day then he’s going to be among the first cast into his favorite lake of fire.”

  A news flash had said there was a flurry of televangelists giving away their money.

  The professor nodded. He was half listening to the televangelist, but his mind was mostly somewhere else.

  The professor shut off the television, stood up abruptly, and went into his bedroom-office next door. I could hear him pull a book off the shelf, and turning pages.

  We slept only fitfully that long, static night.

  I had a dream of a laughing man in a hooded cloak with a face like shifting, running sand—sand that sometimes shifted into the well-sculpted shape of a fairly ordinary human face and sometimes crumbled to re-form into the face of a chimpanzee.

  He was laughing but laughing sadly, his voice echoing in the high school gymnasium where we sat in the bleachers, he and I. My echoes mingled with his, when I suddenly spoke up: “You’re laughing, but really you’re quite sad like one of those songs about being a clown when you really want to cry.”

  “Yes,” he said, sobering suddenly. “I am the one who brings sleep and dreams. And what has happened to the world? Who has vomited their colors all over my canvas? Where is my art now? Where is my art now, I ask you?”

  His tears eroded his head so that it sagged off his neck and crumbled into a stream of sand that slithered down over the wooden bleachers.

  4

  Not long before dawn, as Melissa sank into a doze, I found a sketchbook and pastels I’d given her; she’d never used it, so I did. It kept my mind occupied in the taut, weary hours of the night. I tried drawing everything but the demons, but could find no rest in denial. So I tried drawing what would later be called a Sharkadian, and found myself sketching a sort of bas-relief pattern, or something like Morris wallpaper, around it, locking it in.

  “That’s not a bad thing to experiment with,” the professor said, looking over my shoulder, his words slurring a little. He’d been at the vodka. “You’re unconsciously, if it is unconscious, fitting them into some kind of pattern, making some kind of artistic sense of them. And who knows what such a process might divulge. . . .”

  But I soon put the sketchbook aside, exhausted and irritated by his occasional critiques and perhaps troubled by the fear that he was clutching at straws in suggesting the drawing was something useful. Nothing seemed useful anymore, except a deep hole to hide in.

  The first of the Lulls came about nine A.M. During Lulls the demons seemed to vanish, or to go into some kind of dormancy. They were not sleeping—those who could be seen seemed to be listening.

  It was a global Lull. The riots and panicky surges of refugees stopped in their tracks, when the demonic attacks ceased for a time, the refugees wondering which way to jump. Wondering if angels were next, Michael wielding a fiery sword. The world sank onto its haunches and let its shoulders sag as it panted for breath and wiped its brow.

  During the first Lull there was time for pundits to argue on television. Back then they were still babbling the tediously familiar polemic of denial, with their “not demons but anarchists in rubber suits, bulletproof vests, cyborg enhancement,” their “hallucinations, and the hallucinating attacking people, some of them in costume and makeup . . . water poisoned by terrorists,” their “mind-control projections combined with bombings.”

  Then there was the inevitable countersuggestion: The demons are indicators that the moment has come for complete resignation and submission to Jesus (or Allah or angry ancestral spirits or Yahweh or . . . Lord Satan). Long lines formed outside churches, synagogues, Buddhist temples, and outside both the Church of Satan and the First Church of Interstellar Contact—this latter an extraterrestrial contactee outfit run by channelers. It was a riot of metaphysical confusion.

  Only Paymenz and a few others kept their heads.

  “We will go to the Council for Global Interdependence,” Paymenz said to me. “We need an objective. That will be our first one.”

  “What,” I asked, eating bread and jam in the bedroom, “is the council for . . . ?” Most of my attention was bent on sounds from the drainpipes on the outer walls that might have been the clicking of large claws.

  “CFGI. The Council for Global Interdependence. It’s not much of anything yet—it’s just a gleam in Mendel’s eye, compared with his plans for it. But there are real contacts there, and I was preparing to go over there yesterday morning. It happens that the very day of the demonic coming, about seventy representatives from twenty countries came to town for a conference funded by the Council. Shephard’s conference, actually. One that’s not going to go on, but— Most of the conferees are here and may be in the convention center yet . . . and Shephard . . .” His voice trailed off. He looked at me but said nothing. I was thinking the same thing: Hadn’t Shephard suggested perhaps that the conference wouldn’t happen?

  Paymenz seemed to shake himself and went on. “The council is sheer talk so far, but it represents those who’ve made other initiatives.”

  He sipped his tea. I saw his eyes wander to a vodka bottle leaning precariously on one of Melissa’s stacks of magazines, but he looked resolutely away from it. Melissa was sleeping—twitching in her sleep. She would sleep for five minutes, till something unspeakable drove her out of the dream, and she would sit up and then sink slowly back.

  “What sort of initiatives?” I asked.

  “Hm?”

  “You said ‘those who’ve made other initiatives.’ ”

  “The initiatives . . . well, it actually began in the middle of the last century. Or perhaps much earlier . . . but most notably, the formation of the League of Nations and then th
e United Nations. Then came the U.N. Peacekeeping force—the NATO actions in Kosovo, the global peacekeeping forces in East Timor. A slow movement toward a real global society with real global policemen, with uniform human rights rules . . . and it was not all as spontaneous as it seemed. It was planned, as much as it could be. They didn’t know that the Indonesians would do what they did in Timor—but they knew what to do if a situation like that arose. And they did. The Council is another project of those same planners. I was one of many consultants. It’s something still in its infancy, still unformed and tentative. It could go very wrong—or it could be something wonderful. At any rate, my boy, that’s what I’d have said a few days ago. Now, all considerations of the future are subject to redefinition. The future itself is problematic. All our paradigms are in ruins. Let us go, however. Wake my poor daughter, and let us go to the Council.”