Demons

by John Shirley

  Sometimes, as I drew, I seemed to see, in my mind’s eye, a pentagram superimposed over a city I didn’t recognize. I reproduced the city as a simplified map, street lines intertwined with hermetic symbols, and figures of myth.

  One night, in the light of battery-operated lanterns, we sat around the living room, trying not to hear the distant soundsof shouting, combat, sirens, and, from far off, the crump of what might be a plane crashing. Some nights were worse than others; this was one of the bad nights.

  She’d asked me to read to her, anything I wanted. I chose the Sufi poet Rumi—consciously or unconsciously. I glanced up at her from time to time as I read. She was curled sideways in an easy chair, with two cats nestled in her hollows; she wore a dark purple sari, no shoes. Her feet were drawn up onto the cushion, one hand toying with a silver ring on a toe, her eyes hidden by the drape of her hair. She made me ache.

  “A lover gambles everything, the self,

  the circle around the zero! He or she

  cuts and throws it all away.

  This is beyond any religion.

  Lovers do not require from God any proof,

  or any text, nor do they knock on a door

  to make sure this is the right street.

  They run and they run . . .”

  I felt her looking at me then and glanced up at her, and our eyes met. Her gaze seemed open, as never before. I found myself putting the book aside and crossing the room to her, bending to kiss her. She lifted her head to return the kiss, and moved aside on the big chair so I could slide in beside her, the cats irritably jumping to the floor and slinking away. Then Melissa eased herself onto my lap, and I drew her into the circle of my arms. We kissed more deeply. My hands found their way to her thighs, and she let them explore upward from there. . . .

  Suddenly I stopped, and looked down at my hand. It was as if there was a cold, bony grip on my wrist, holding it back, though nothing could be seen. Nothing except a blue-gold sparkling, a throbbing shimmer, that never quite declared itself. Did I see it? It was as if, instead, I felt it and made some accommodation in the visual part of my brain.

  She felt it, too, and went pale, looking up at me. “They . . .”

  “They don’t want me to. I’m not . . . while they’re there, it has to be . . . someone like . . .” It hurt to say it: “Someone like Nyerza . . .” I took my hand away from her thigh; the invisible grip went from my wrist. It all seemed so . . . lawful. So inevitable. We didn’t question it.

  She laid her head against my shoulder. “But the time will come.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll ever be . . .”

  “You might, but that’s not what I meant. They won’t always be with me. Not in the way they are now.”

  “If we live.”

  “Yes. If we live.”

  “But you’ll belong to Nyerza.”

  After a moment, she said, “No, I don’t think so. He’s . . . a great man. But though he knows better, it’s difficult for him to think of a woman as his equal. And even when I’m close to him I’m not close to him. And . . . there was a sense, when he was—was in me . . . that he was talking to them . . . like I was the phone booth. I didn’t care for it. I should be honored, but . . .”

  “Do they—do they speak to you? Inside?”

  “No. Well, yes and no. They hide their light so I am not blinded. Sometimes I think I feel . . . sort of feel them saying something . . . but I hear no words.”

  “Saying?”

  “I don’t know how to put it into words.”

  We said no more that night, and soon she went to bed. I haven’t tried, since. But sometimes she takes my hand, or I take hers, and we hold hands; sometimes she comes into the circle of my arms, and we stand quietly in the middle of the room.

  In our area, the police are still operating, in a furtive kind of way. Mostly curtailing the gangs of looters, trying to suppress the parades, because there are always deaths at the parades or in their wake.

  The parades wind through the streets, the paraders clashing garbage can lids, clanking bottles together, chanting, many of them naked and bright with fanciful body paints. How it began, no one seems quite sure. The parades skirt the areas where the demons are roaming, seem to flirt with them, to invite them. They seem to believe, according to a radio report I heard, that if they thus offer themselves up en masse, the participating individuals have a better chance of survival: Choose from us but choose not me.

  I watched with binoculars, one dusk, as one of these spontaneous parades of the half mad wended, clashing and banging and chanting with an elliptical rhythm, into the square below the apartment building. I watched as a Dishrag fluttered down from the sky like a wet autumn leaf just broken from the tree, coming down, soon, to tumble across the ground, now like a tumbleweed but not tumbling at random. It was seeking and finding, as it closed on one of the paraders. The demon colloquially called a Dishrag is like fuzzy, blotchy gray-and-blue terry cloth crumpled up into a ball, about ten feet in diameter, capable of partially unfolding to entrap its victims.

  The Rag bounced in pursuit of a short, fat man—perhaps picking the easy kill from the herd—as the parade parted for the hunt, the crowd gawping in awe as the demon’s bounce became a pounce, knocking the man down, closing over him like a sea creature enfolding a fish. The victim’s arms and feet protruded from opposite sides of the crumpled, furry ball. As it crushed him, squeezing the juice from him, something else was expressed from him, pressed out by unimaginable psychic pressures, a visible emission of his mental battery, a kind of electric-blue discharge of images, key psychological moments sketched on the air. It was something like the smoky shapes I’d seen coming from the victim of the Spiders—but this was like the movement of a light pen caught in slow time exposure: the brief, streaky-blue glow outline of the victim with his parents, his mother beating him with a coat hanger, a priest making him kneel before an altar and then before him, a girl surrendering to him, a college degree handed to him, a car accident where the girl dies. Then the light cartoons faded, as the man’s screams became muted. The crowd was parading around the feasting demon, clashing and clanking and chanting rhythmically, some chant I couldn’t make out, and now a Sharkadian was darting down from above.

  I turned away, sickened and feeling suddenly claustrophobic. But something else had caught my attention from the corner of my eye.

  I went back to the balcony railing and looked down to see a nondescript bus pull up, men with guns get out below, far below. Men with guns going into our building.

  “Oh no,” I said.

  I think that’s what I said. And I went back inside the building.

  Shephard’s people, maybe. The black magicians had sent mortals, unaffected by the power of the Gold, to take Melissa away.

  I had no way to stop them, but maybe I could misdirect them.

  I ran downstairs, got as far as the second-floor stairwell landing, before the soldiers burst into the stairwell and surrounded me. There was a gun shoved against the side of my head, one arm twisted behind me. “Let’s see your pass,” someone growled in my ear.

  “I don’t have one.” I told them I was from Paymenz’s apartment and then wished I’d bitten my tongue, thinking I shouldn’t have told them that.

  But it turned out to be the right thing to do. They let me go.

  I went into the lobby and saw the front door was ringed by a semicircle of soldiers. None of the other buildings in the area was guarded. Our guardians seemed almost relaxed as they checked a nervous old woman’s building pass. Maybe the soldiers were glad to be here, because the demons were afraid of this building—because the Gold was here. Word had gotten around that the demons wouldn’t attack the building because they were afraid of Melissa.

  Laboring back upstairs—the elevator was broken, of course—I realized the soldiers had been sent here, through Nyerza’s government contacts, specifically to guard the building against Shephard’s mortal associates. The bus I’d seen had brought relief s
oldiers for the next watch; they were protecting Melissa, not threatening her.

  Then perhaps it was safe to go to the roof . . . to get out, after all these weeks, really outside . . .

  Enjoying the exercise, I climbed to the roof. I wasn’t alone up there.

  I didn’t see them at first, though I heard a tinkling piano from somewhere. There was a little building containing the elevator engine housing and the top landing for the stairs, and when I came out of it, they were on the other side, behind me. I strolled across the transplas-coated roof to the railing, reveling in the open air but scanning the sky for nearby Sharkadians or Spiders. I wasn’t protected up here. I was too far from Melissa, from those who were called the Gold.

  Then they raised the volume, and I turned at the sound of someone playing an electric piano. It sounded like a perverse take on honky-tonk ragtime.

  I walked around to the other side of the building, following the sound, and found two figures standing at an electric piano, the tall skinny one fingering a bass part, the stocky one in the hat tinkling away at the upper register. The electric piano was portable, on folding steel-tube legs, battery powered, and sounded fairly close to an acoustic piano. Up here, it sounded lost, plaintive. I took half a dozen steps toward them, before I realized that the guy playing the upper register, the guy wearing patchy jeans and work boots, and a shabby vest unbuttoned over a dirty white T-shirt . . . that his clothes had grown on him, were not real clothes, were part of his skin.

  His? Its skin. The demon seemed to sense me, as I realized this, and though I very much did not want to see its face, the Bugsy snapped its whole body around and showed its face to me, and we both knew I couldn’t look away.

  A thing projected from its mouth that looked like a smoldering cigarette and gave off a greasy steam, only the projection wasn’t a cigarette but an excrescence, part of its lip, a growth projecting three or four inches, camouflage complete with a yellow cigarette filter. I had no doubt there would be a brand name on it, too—and the “cigarette” never burned down. The Bugsy’s face was ostensibly human, with a stub of a nose and flat blue eyes that were a tad too wide; a slack, froggish mouth; and jagged, uneven yellow teeth. Its proportions were not dwarfish—but its hands were, except for the curving talons on them. Its clothes grew from its skin like the shell of a turtle; and there were blotchy red and yellow running sores on the “cloth” of its vest, pants, and on one side of its neck. Bugsys grew different sorts of “clothes,” but they all had those sores.

  On its head was a hat, a real hat, taken from some human victim probably; a bashed-up gray fedora that had mostly lost its shape.

  A Bugsy, I thought. There is a fucking Bugsy on the roof.

  It had a human companion—as they often did for a time. They kept human pets for a while—sometimes for a week or more, I’d heard—and then killed them. The human sidekicks were inexplicably oblivious of their fate until close to the end.

  The Bugsy’s voice was slurred like a drunk’s, by turns guttural and squeaky. “There’sh my man, there’sh my man,” the demon said. “Here he ish. Robert, you see this guy? Is he a bleshing or what?”

  The skinny, ragged human sidekick, a man who might have been thirty, with hollow eyes so red I couldn’t make out his natural eye color, tittered and rubbed his pointed noise with a grime-caked hand. His nails had grown long and begun to curl, as if in grotesque imitation of the Bugsy’s talons. “You think he got any dope on him?”

  “No, no I don’t schmell any, Robert. I mean he’s a bleshing for you, because I was jush gonna killya, for somepina do, and here he chiz. He’s like a bleshing from uh-BUUUUUUUUUV! Gorblesh ‘im!”

  Robert laughed hysterically, glancing sidelong at the demon. What had it said about just going to kill?

  Hoping to get them to turn their backs again, I said, “I was enjoying the music. Like to hear some more, if you’ve got any more in you.”

  “You wantsa shee what Robert’s got in him huh ya?” the demon said, “cigarette” wagging with each syllable. The Bugsy hooked a talon under Robert’s chin, so that blood spiraled down the skinny, grimy neck. There were lots of little scars, half-healed cuts on Robert where the Bugsy had toyed with him.

  Robert giggled, still pinned by the talon the Bugsy was absentmindedly digging in like a man vigorously picking his nose. Robert looked at me desperately, as if he wanted to say something.

  It was useless, I knew, to tell the demon, No, I don’t want to see you hurt him. I wondered how fast the Bugsys ran, how far they could jump.

  Could I make it to the door of the building?

  I tried to stay calm, forcing myself to breathe evenly. A little rain began to skirl down . . . to fall, to ease up, to fall again . . . A scrap of paper blew spiraling by . . .

  I said, “I was hoping for music. I’d just about do anything for live music about now.”

  “Really! You do anyshing? Thasha what I wanta hear from more ya pepple—mansy, alla mansies don’ wanna do this, don’ wanna do that, boring tuh kill, boring to keep company widshem. You do someshin for me firsh”—the cigarette-shaped growth waggling—“. . . and I’ma playin’ you a bigshing . . . There’sh a girl downstairs, I’m a let you live, be the king, the king, the king of the shecrets, if you let my friend here in to talka her jusha little minute . . .”

  “Just lemme talk to her,” Robert said. “Just a little minute.”

  “Certainly . . . I’ll bring her up here,” I said. “Just a moment.”

  I backed toward the little building . . . the door to the stairs.

  “No, thatsh not cool, mothuhfuckuh mansie—you lie to me, yuh fuckin’ guy, yuh lyin”—now we goin’ down the hall, you and Robert, ya goin first. Robert . . . he . . .”

  And Robert kills her, I thought.

  “Oh fuck it,” I said, aloud. Just run.

  I half turned to run for the door. The Bugsy let Robert go and crouched, preparing to spring. I’d never make it to the door. Then I remembered something I’d heard.

  I turned back, dug in my pocket, and came up with a quarter with lint and crumbs stuck to it. I polished it with my thumb, saying, “Hey—I’ll bet you anything you want I get heads, you get tails.”

  The Bugsy froze, then straightened, eyes glazing. They’re said to have difficulty resisting an opportunity to gamble. They prefer cards, especially stud poker, but the coin toss seemed to be working. “Shrow it,” the demon said.

  I tossed the coin, caught it, flipped it, slapped it on my wrist. “Heads!” I announced.

  “But ya didn’t make a bet!” Robert blurted, blinking.

  I realized that Robert reminded me of someone: my mom’s boyfriend, Curtis. Long time ago.

  I said, “I bet—I bet our lives, Robert’s and mine—”—

  “Shrow it, fuckin’ shrow it. I takeuh headsish time,” the Bugsy hissed, staring at the quarter in my hand, drooling.

  “Sure.” I tossed the quarter up—toward a farther corner of the roof. The Bugsy ran for it.

  I mouthed Run! at Robert. He only gaped at me, blinking stupidly, tears starting from his eyes.

  I sprinted for the door to the stairs.

  “No, don’t, man!” Robert yelled hoarsely. “He . . .”

  The Bugsy made a sound like a furious boar, and, as I ran, it shouted, “I won thatsh tosh!”

  “Wait!” Robert yelled. He said nothing else after that—there was only the scream. It was such a piteous cry, I paused at the outbuilding, just around the corner from the door, to look back. Always a mistake, to look back at a demon.

  “You don’t wanna see whush I gotferya here?” the Bugsy said, “cigarette” bobbing as with one set of talons it held Robert facedown, the other claws digging deeply into Robert’s back, demonic grip closing firmly over the writhing human’s spine. One hand pushing, the other pulling—with a practiced motion, pulling Robert’s spine from his body, the whole spine, as from an overcooked fish, though it was still attached to his skull. Until, there, the spine was yan
ked free, and the Bugsy waved the vertebrae spatteringly at me. “We cud be friendsh, give ya immortality, shecrets—all tha’ shit, teach you do shit like thish, whatcha shay . . .” And as it spoke it strode toward me, waving the segmented dripping red wand of Robert’s spine, holding my trapped attention.

  I broke free and ran for the door, for the stairs, and vaulted over the railing, fell twelve feet—maybe more—to the next landing, a painful landing, hearing the unnaturally soft boot steps on the stairs above me as the demon came after me, seeing the red bony splintery thing flung past my head and down the stairwell.

  I was down just ahead of the Bugsy, through a doorway, down the hall, running to Paymenz’s apartment door. With terror-focused concentration putting the key very exactly right into the lock, no wasted motions as I inserted, turned the key, got the door open, removed the key, and ran in, slammed the door, shouting for Melissa, feeling like such a goddamn little boy, calling for the protection of his mother.