Demons

by John Shirley

“The forbearance is at an end,” Mendel said.

  “Is it?” Paymenz said, going pale beneath his beard. “It was always surprising—”—

  “What are you talking about?” Melissa asked, her voice rising, breaking, the knuckles white on her clenched hands.

  I reached out instinctively and took her hand; she let me do it. Her hand opened in mine like a blossom.

  She looked at Nyerza, then at me. “Could we go somewhere and—and talk, Ira?”

  Then the screams from above began. The room shook; a subterranean thunder rattled the pipes; plaster sprinkled, then rained down like flour from a sifter.

  Nyerza ran to the police guards, shouting.

  Drawing their weapons, the men hurried into the hallway, a ramp slanting gradually to stairs leading to the next floor.

  Mendel had slipped away, off to the room he slept in—to hide?

  Then a reptilian stench rolled into the room, a wind laden with a palpable reek that seemed to coat the inside of my nose and mouth with viscosity—like the putrid discharge you get on your fingers from handling a garter snake.

  Nyerza was trying to herd us back from the hallway entrance when something rolled down toward us, down the ramp to our feet: a furry ball; the severed head of one of the guards. Then another came rolling down seconds later to bump with a wood-block clunk into the first. Someone screamed—I think it was me, not Melissa—and the demons we’d encountered in the conference room upstairs were there: the Gnasher and behind him the great sinuous bulk of the Tailpipe.

  I remember thinking: Just as things are beginning to make sense, chaos comes for me.

  I pulled Melissa back—she sagged on rubbery knees, making it hard to move her—and I wanted Mendel to be there, to explain, to make things rational again.

  As if I’d summoned him, Mendel entered the room. At first he seemed the emblem of absurdity: He’d changed into a costume. Mendel carried a silvery broadsword. He’d taken off his coat; over his shirt he’d draped a tunic that was also a sort of banner, called a tabard, front and back: a red Christian cross on a white background.

  “A crusader!”

  the Gnasher hooted gleefully, gnashing its teeth loudly. The Tailpipe was too big for the hall but somehow oozed into the room like lava behind the Gnasher, who struck an elegant pose and swung his genitals like a zoot-suit chain.

  “What a delight! And with a sword! I’m almost disappointed you can’t slay me like Saint—who was it?—Saint Someone.”

  This last was addressed to Paymenz, who was murmuring something that might have been an incantation and might have been a prayer in what sounded like Hebrew.

  “It was Saint George,” Mendel said, and ran toward the Gnasher, shouting, “For Saint George! For Jesus, the King! For the King!”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,”

  I heard the Gnasher mutter.

  Then the sword whistled down, cleaving the demon to its groin, like some mighty blow in an Arthurian saga—but the wound sealed up behind the slash. The demon smiled sadly as it healed itself, almost disappointed. It gripped Mendel’s wrist, crushing, making him fall to his knees with pain.

  “Run, you imbeciles!” Mendel shouted, as the Gnasher with its free hand wrenched the sword’s grip from Mendel and drew the sword casually from its own gut as from a scabbard.

  Paymenz stalked toward the demons, incanting louder, raising his hand. The Gnasher laughed in Paymenz’s face and ignored him, turned the sword on Mendel, gutting him like a chicken. Paymenz raised his voice and was almost in the Gnasher’s reach as Melissa screamed, “No, Daddy!” and I strained to hold her back as she tried to run to him.

  Nyerza strode up and struck Paymenz on the back of the neck, so that Paymenz buckled.

  “You must take care of the girl and the Gold in the Urn, Israel!” Nyerza shouted to Paymenz as he dragged him back a few steps. Then Nyerza lifted Paymenz, threw him clear—even as the leviathan tail of the steaming, oozing black Tailpipe lifted and slammed at him. Nyerza dodged aside, was hit glancingly so that he was spun back away from the demons to fetch up against the wall, dazed but uninjured.

  The Gnasher had slashed Mendel open, so that blood spread in a widening pool. Mendel was quivering, but his eyes were empty; he was dead or in shock. The Gnasher seemed to be probing for something in Mendel’s insides . . . with his hands, with his sword, with his mouth, searching more and more frantically through Mendel’s wet wreckage.

  “Where is it? Where!”

  Its fury made its voice resonate through my head.

  “The spark! Where!”

  After that it raged in the language we called Tartaran: the language of demons. But a baseline meaning was conveyed: rage, pent-up seeking, frustrated hunger. The Gnasher stepped back from the body and roared.

  As if expressing the Gnasher’s frustration by proxy, the Tailpipe raised its tail and smacked it down on Mendel’s body, so that bone ends ripped into pink-white view and teeth rattled from a shattered jaw.

  Melissa swayed; her mouth dropped open. She whimpered. I only felt like doing those things.

  The Gnasher took a step toward us. Paymenz stepped in front of me and Melissa. Nyerza got to his feet.

  Suddenly Mendel was there, intact, apparently alive, as we’d last seen him. But somehow I knew that it wasn’t his body I was seeing. “Here is the spark you seek,” he said, though his mouth didn’t open.

  The Gnasher turned to him and slashed with curving talons that went through Mendel, as if through a hologram. Mendel smiled distantly.

  “You cannot harm me thus,” said Mendel. “What you call my spark is a flame, and it burns in the realm of All Suns, where you cannot reach it.”

  Mendel turned to Nyerza and said, “Use the Gold as a shield.”

  Then Mendel was gone. It wasn’t as if he blinked out, it was more like the passing of a memory.

  The Gnasher bellowed,

  “One spark gone, these remain, calling to their inheritor! Purchase ye my insurance, one payment only! Live forever within me and immediately cash in your premiums! We are a full-service organization!”

  And it strode toward us.

  “There has to be a way out!” I said, backpedaling, dragging Melissa with me.

  Nyerza shook his head. “They will pursue: The only way out is through.”

  So saying, he took Melissa by the wrist and swung her in front of him.

  And pushed her toward the demons.

  I shouted something—I don’t know what it was—and ran after her to pull her back as the Gnasher opened its great jaws to snap at her head, and then felt Paymenz and Nyerza gripping me, each taking an arm. Melissa put her hands in front of her face—

  The Gnasher stepped toward her—

  Then there was an effulgence. No, a scintillation, a sparkle from just in front of Melissa issuing from the area of her sternum. I saw, now, a sparkling, a slowly turning ball of sparkle, each spark big as my hand, the whole growing as it emerged, stabilizing at the size of a bushel; a grand, turning sparkle of gold and violet and electric-blue, the gold predominating, the whole giving off a keening sound so high-pitched you couldn’t quite hear it and yet you felt it in your joints. Slowly turning, the orb of unfading sparks hung in the air between Melissa, who seemed in a trance, and the Gnasher . . .

  Who reached for it . . .

  And then recoiled, the demon whimpering so pathetically I wanted to say, There, there . . .

  The wheeling ball of sparks moved toward the demons, seeming to draw Melissa like a sleepwalker behind it, and the Gnasher wailed in his own language and clawed its way up onto the steaming black bulk of the Tailpipe, as if taking comfort there, and then scrambled back away from Melissa. The great quivering, steaming, many-mouthed eelskin flank of the Tailpipe still barred our way, as we stumbled after her, but then the Tailpipe oozed itself into two parts, a kind of macroscopic mitosis, one part splitting off to the right, the other to the left, like the Red Sea in the Moses story. There was a clear path between t
he quivering ends, and we hurried between, through the oily stink of it, and up the ramp, past headless bodies, and to the stairs. I turned to see the Tailpipe flow seamlessly together behind us, and it commenced to follow, until the Gnasher shouted something in Tartaran, and it held back.

  “This way,” Nyerza said. “We go to the helicopter.”

  I looked at Melissa; the globe of incandescence had vanished, receded into her. She stared into space, listening, with tears in her eyes, as Paymenz whispered something to her.

  “Okay,” I said. “A helicopter. That’s fine. I’ll go for that. Sure. Let’s do that.”

  Paymenz held Melissa in his arms, at the back of the chopper; I sat near the front, behind the pilot’s seat. The pilot was a dour, stooped, gray-haired black man in a paramilitary uniform without markings: Mimbala, whom Nyerza said had once been an army chief of staff for some African country. Mimbala had started the chopper and left it running in some kind of idle, having gone to consult with a spindly white man from the FAA who was trying to provide a strategy for flying safely past the drifting Spiders, the darting Sharkadians. We could see them, instead of airplanes, speckling the sky here and there in the distance. Our chopper’s blades were chuffing so slowly I could have hung on to them and swung around, like a child at play; and I had an impulse to do just that—to do something meaningless, mischievous, anything to deny the darkness pulling at our hearts like G-force tugging an astronaut who realizes his shuttle won’t make it into orbit. Like the astronaut, I wanted to take to the sky.

  Mostly to keep my mind busy, I began to question Nyerza. “The thing that came from her, that drove them back, that saved us—was it the Gold in the Urn that Mendel mentioned?”

  “Yes. It needs a human being to be the Urn, the repository, for a time. We planted it in Melissa.”

  “Is that . . . is that what you were doing with her last night?” I asked, leaning toward him so Melissa wouldn’t hear, my voice as soft as possible over the humming of the idling engine, the chuffing of the rotors.

  He looked at me in frowning puzzlement. “No. That was . . . just a man and a woman. Spontaneous, as you say.”

  “Not a ritual?”

  “No. It was quite natural.” He looked out the window, signaled to the pilot. Mimbala raised a hand, palm outward, to say wait a moment. Nyerza turned back to me, sighing. “I will miss having Mendel physically near. The Urn . . . the Gold . . . this is what the demons call sparks, the being force of many lives, who’re consolidated, in this case, to one purpose. They meditate together, and this keeps them together. They are like— In some cultures they are called bodhisattvas, the awakened, who return to help us. When we realized that the catastrophe was coming—though we did not know what form it would take—we consulted with these beings, these Ascended Masters, and asked for their help in its most powerful form: the Gold in the Urn. But our connection to it needed to be kept in one place and protected. A few years ago, Melissa was selected as the bearer, the Urn.”

  “She knew this?”

  “She did not. I’m embarrassed to say it was done without her knowledge, as she slept. But this was done with the cooperation of her father. Harmlessly and painlessly.”

  “A few years ago . . .”

  I remembered. Melissa had been depressed, gloomy, much more into the goth thing. Writing bleak songs like the one the demon had mocked her with. Then she’d changed—almost overnight. Becoming more centered, more confident, optimistic.

  “The Gold . . . it possessed her?”

  “Not at all. It only rode there, in her. But there has been some influence on her, I have no doubt. Its radiance would have been felt, though they try to keep themselves secreted deep within. The demon was trying to drive the Gold from her, perhaps, when it recited her song—a song from a time when she was ruled by, as you might say, quiet despair: that thing that, in some people, opens the door for the diabolic.”

  I thought I should be angry that Melissa had been used this way. But then, the Gold seemed to have helped her; and it saved us all today.

  “The demons can’t hurt her, at all, while the Gold is with her?”

  “In time, they will make their own dark orb and hunt her down—destroy the Urn to destroy the Gold—using their own merged darkness to get to her, surely. Or they may use humans to attack her. But this, you see, will take time. How much, we only speculate. A month or six weeks perhaps, Mendel told me. . . . Ah, here comes Mimbala.”

  Mimbala returned to the chopper and threw switches, pulled levers; and it thrummed, and the rotors swished faster and faster, the world tilted, and we angled into the sky.

  We are alone, Melissa and I, in the professor’s chilly, dark apartment, alone with restive cats and dead lava lamps. Except Melissa is never alone, even when I’ve left her in another room. The Gold is with her, though unseen. It is silent, transparent; it is singing and scintillating: all of these.

  I finished writing all the foregoing yesterday. Yes, it’s amazing what people can get used to. We’ve been here for weeks, since the chopper pilot landed on the roof of the building.

  “There’s canned food and water stacked floor to ceiling in that back storeroom,” Paymenz had shouted, over the throb of the chopper. “My divinations, you see, led me to stock up: I, at least, took them seriously! Now you may sing hosannas of praise to my foresight!” He grinned; he was trying to make light of his departure.

  “Dad—stay with us!” Melissa shouted. “Or take us with you!”

  The engine got louder. “Arrangements . . . They won’t come here. . . . Must go with Nyerza . . . Events are shaped by . . . various convergences . . . luminous . . .” Luminous something. Repercussions, maybe? “We’re going to try to locate the—” I couldn’t make out the rest. They took off as he shouted, “Back in touch when possible. You are safe if you stay with her, Ira.”

  That’s not good for my masculine vanity, but it’s true: Melissa keeps me safe.

  I don’t go out, because I could be killed; Melissa doesn’t go out because she doesn’t want to see anyone killed. And the looters, the gangs, could take her; use her and kill her, as they have with too many others.

  The Spiders departed the balcony some time ago. But streamers of black smoke twist up randomly across the glassy vista of the city.

  Depression comes sometimes, like a wolf prowling at the edge of a campfire’s light. I throw what fuel I have on the fire.

  The first few days we slept most of the time, she in her room, me on the living room couch, where I could keep an eye on the front door, pretend I was useful as her guardian. We slumbered away a weighty emotional exhaustion, absorbing, in riotous dreams and dozing depression, all that we’d seen. The demons, the flight through the city, the Gnasher, the flare of sex, the reshaping of paradigms, the brutal killing of Mendel and his triumph, the revelation of the Gold in the Urn . . . the Gold, the living wheel of burning spirit that possessed Melissa and yet didn’t possess her; that seemed to hum in the background, unheard but felt by those feeling parts of us that are usually dormant.

  What people can get used to . . . People managed a routine even at Dachau; they found ways to survive psychologically—harder than surviving physically.

  In Cambodia, in the days of the Khmer Rouge, peopleadapted to being forced into an insane plan for an anti-intellectual agrarian utopia, a utopia based on mass murderand the destruction of ideas and common sense; masses ofpeople, after seeing their loved ones butchered, forced fromthe cities onto farms, forced to work fourteen-hour days,seven days a week, 365 days a year; to give up all theirold culture, their music, their traditions, every single one of their beliefs; to wear black pajamas and nothing else ever;to be slaves to a demented scheme of social engineering. They adapted; they survived.

  Demons invade the world; people find ways to adapt, to get used to the horror.

  Is it, really, any worse than the Killing Fields?

  But often I felt a craving for the ordinariness that had reigned before the demons, for
the very banality I had sometimes railed against. The mindless, childish ubiquity of mass media and consumerism; the welcome distraction of dealing with traffic and laundry and phone bills. What a relief real banality would be . . .

  We passed the time as we might, making a pact, for the sake of sanity, to leave the TV and its battery in a closet, and listen to a radio news show only once a day. After two weeks Melissa asked me to listen alone, away from her. She spent the time meditating, every so often muttering in some language she shouldn’t know; in reading, writing feverishly in a journal.

  She encouraged me to paint, to draw, with whatever was handy. I felt tense, my art balled up inside; I was reluctant to let it out, to express it. But she gently insisted and came to muse over my drawings, my pen and inks made with all the wrong sorts of pens and inks.