Demons

by John Shirley

  “Stop whining and answer! How may we waken these sleepers? How may we end the demonic attack?”

  Shephard clutched himself and tittered sourly. “You have just said it: You end the demonic attack by waking the sleepers! They are the extrapolation of all mankind. Men sleep even when they think they are awake—the true self sleeps—and because it sleeps we are ruled by the egoic, by vanity . . . by the demonic. Unchecked, unchanneled, it rages where it will! Sometimes in quiet cunning, friends, dear friends—sometimes in overt brutality! Even those—those of us who managed some higher consciousness—it’s in all the wrong parts of us! We’re all . . . we’re like—like the Elephant Man—all overgrown in the wrong places, inside. . . .”

  “How can they be awakened, Professor?” Melissa asked more gently.

  “I don’t know! If I knew, I’d have done it! I came here with drugs, various drugs, to awaken them, and I administered them. Nothing worked. I used those drugs to keep myself awake, for weeks at a time, for fear I might become like them. You see before you the result—I am a wreckage. But these—these sleepers cannot be awakened by any ordinary medical means—not by ice water—not by blasting symphonies in their ears!”

  “And if you kill them—you render the demons permanent, or so I suspect,” Paymenz murmured.

  “Yes. They are what they are. As the sleepers sleep, each has a corresponding demon who rages in the outer world. And how the demons look, what they do, is partly sustained by what path the sleepers chose, by their acts—but also by the sleep of the rest of humanity! If the human race—even some great portion—saw itself as it was, there would be a—a ripple effect that would be some help.” As he went on he slowly slumped into a fetal position, lying on his side, muttering, the words more and more difficult to hear. “But the shock required to wake those who sleep this sleep . . . well, it’s too late to be self-generated by the sleeper. Such a shock comes only from—from a kind of grace coming from something greater than all of us, from the solar level, the next higher plane. But how, how to—to focus that, to— I don’t know . . . I thought perhaps . . . I don’t know.” He shook his body, as he might have once shaken only his head, and fell silent. And then he went limp.

  We looked at him, at one another, back at Shephard. I asked, “Is he dead? Asleep?”

  Melissa touched his neck. After a moment she shook her head. “Neither. Unconscious.” She stood and looked at the sleeping multitude. “Or in a trance of some kind. Perhaps he has become like one of these others.”

  “No,” Nyerza said. “Not yet.”

  “Mendel was here,” I said. “He must intend something. You who are . . . you in the circle. Didn’t you know about all this?”

  Nyerza gazed at the sleepers and mused, “We knew almost nothing of all this . . . because they had suffused the world in distractions and darkened the world with media, with wave after wave of their dark suggestions. We knew they were hiding something—but we guessed at nothing so vast.” He added, “Then again, some guessed. And they were not listened to.”

  “Yes,” Paymenz said. “Mendel suggested something of the sort. So I’ve heard. We knew the Brotherhood of That Certain One were using some aspects of industrial civilization for evil, but the obvious evil blinded us to the subtle, the Great Plan. We thought it was all for the sake of chaos, to keep humanity off balance, easy to prey on. But that was only half of it . . . and even now the waves of darkness hide the truth—even from the ascended masters.”

  “No longer,”

  said Mendel. His voice resonated with that unnatural, psychic vibrancy the Gnashers sometimes had. But where the Gnashers’ tones had radiated impulses to self-doubt, to raw fear, Mendel’s voice gave hope and subtle energy.

  We saw him again, standing amid the sleeping multitude.

  “We now see what needs be done. Only one more was needed—myself—to add to the noospheric energy, to dispel the darkness. Follow the woman, one sleeper to the next. Be guided by her.”

  With that he was gone. And Melissa drew her breath in sharply. She touched her solar plexus, and shivered.

  We followed her. From one sleeping figure to the next.

  They were all adults, of every possible age, of every type,of every race—though there were perhaps more middle-aged white males than any other type.

  As Melissa came to the first sleeper, the Gold in the Urn emerged from her, resplendent.

  She quivered, her knees buckling, as it came fulminating, sparkling, and shining; a birth pang that left her shaking, gazing with parted lips, with eyes reflecting the shimmer.

  “This—this golden thing,” I murmured to Paymenz, “could it awaken me? Could she use it to—to make me . . . enlightened?”

  “No, enlightenment, and the states of consciousness beyond enlightenment—the recognition of true essence in oneself, the creation of real being—these things must be earned. They must be paid for by personal effort, by conscious suffering. What will happen here is only a return to ordinary consciousness—and I suspect the Gold will show them one thing more.”

  She turned to Mimbala, and in a voice that wasn’t quite hers, said, “Go there—to the box on the wall. Shut off the false light.”

  He looked at Nyerza, who nodded. Mimbala trotted to the power box and threw the switch. We were dropped into a vast well of darkness that was immediately abated in a hemisphere of light around us—the light of the Gold.

  Then she put out her right hand, palm upward, and the shimmering orb floated to suspend the core of itself six inches over her palm, so that its energies all but hid her hand from view and lit up her body . . . and lit her face and eyes from beneath, blue and gold.

  She moved her arm to the nearest of the sleepers, a young man, and lowered her hand so that the energies swept over the sleeper’s head, and almost instantly, he awoke.

  He awoke with a wrenching cry of authentic agony.

  We heard that sound repeated hundreds of times, as we passed from one recumbent figure to the next.

  The awakened seemed inconsolable, though some drifted into groups, here and there, and clutched one another for comfort, weeping. Others crept under their gurneys and hugged themselves, crying, quivering with horror, eyes wide, staring around yet looking somehow inward.

  Seeing themselves, through the power of the Gold in the Urn, as they really were.

  There were many cries of agony.

  We found out later . . .

  . . . that a seven-year-old Hispanic boy and his young mother were making their way on foot to a government emergency food distribution center, when a flying Sharkadian, carrying a Bugsy, spotted them crossing a street.

  I don’t know if the Bugsy was “my” Bugsy, but it came to them the way it had left us. The Sharkadian lowered the Bugsy on one side of the terrified mother and son, then flapped to obstruct their escape down the rubble-filled street.

  The young mother whispered to her son: “Run, when I give the signal.”

  The Bugsy told her that she should tell him, instead, to run right to the Sharkadian. It’d be over faster that way. Unless the Bugsy itself decided to take the boy as his “li’l pal.” The Bugsy said it hadn’t had a “li’l pal” quite that little before. But perhaps the lady would like to dance first. “The two of us,” said the Bugsy—“a polka, perhaps.”

  “If I dance, if I do whatever you want, you let my son go?”

  “Depends,” said the Bugsy, “what you mean by let him go.”

  Then the Sharkadian, impatient, leapt forward, clapped its talons on the mother’s shoulders, opened its jaws to snap her head away, as the child screamed.

  “That’s when the one who had me was pulled away,” the mother said later. “Like something had him by the tail and was pulling him. I don’t know why he couldn’t pull me with him—it was like he had no strength in him then.”

  The Bugsy gave a whimpering cry and tried to crawl under a car, but it did no good. The same thing that was happening to the Sharkadian happened to the Bugsy. The
demons began to fall away into themselves.

  We heard the description again and again, and always more or less the same: The demon was like something receding into the distance at great speed—as if you’d dropped the demon off the roof of the Empire State Building and watched it fall, shrinking as it went. Only, it was falling into itself somehow, into the center point of where it had been. It vanished into the distance—without moving an inch.

  The boy and his mother clutched each other and watched as the two demons shrank into nothingness and were gone. Mother and child fell to their knees and thanked God and went safely home.

  The story was told again and again in thousands of places across the world.

  And each vanished demon corresponded to a human being, a conspirator of the Brotherhood of That Certain One, awakened by my own darling Melissa and the Gold in the Urn. When the demon’s corresponding human woke, the demon was hurled back into its own plane, back to where it was and wasn’t; and that which made it possible for them to inhabit our world returned to its originator, and woke the invoker to an agony of self-knowledge.

  As Melissa finished waking the sleepers at the first ISZ, Nyerza switched the overhead lights back on, and she turned to see Mimbala pointing a gun at Shephard’s head.

  Shephard was on his hands and knees, weeping, crawling toward her, across the room.

  “Dr. Nyerza!” Melissa shouted.

  Mimbala cocked the gun.

  “Mimbala will not pull that trigger!” Melissa bellowed.

  Nyerza looked at her. She’d raised her voice to a volume I’d never have thought possible. “You will let that man be!”

  She strode toward them, and as if in retreat from her anger, the Gold in the Urn vanished within her, for a time.

  Mimbala fired the gun.

  Most of Shephard’s left ear disappeared. There was a red smear down his neck, and he clutched his head and rocked in pain.

  Mimbala’s old hands were shaking. He steadied his right hand with his left—

  Melissa came to stand a few yards away. Mimbala hesitated, looking at her and then at Nyerza, but kept the gun extended, aimed at the cowering Shephard.

  Melissa spoke in a gentler tone. “Nyerza? Please. Leave him be.”

  “Let them kill me,” Shephard said hoarsely.

  “No,” Melissa said. “Nyerza?”

  “He’s one of them—and soon,” Nyerza added, “he will be a sleeper, like those you’ve awakened. He is lying to us about his intentions—perhaps misleading us completely about everything.”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

  She looked at me, and I sighed and walked over to stand beside her.

  “So you can be conscious, Nyerza—and without compassion?” I asked.

  “I can kill if necessary,” said Nyerza. “I believe that if we let this man live, he will become like these others—when we cannot reach him. And another demon will walk the Earth. How many will it kill? To save those people—kill him now.”

  I turned to Melissa. “Unless—can you wake him now?”

  “No . . . it doesn’t—doesn’t feel like it.” She looked sharply at Nyerza. “Here’s the irony: Some part of you, Nyerza, has gone to sleep. Maybe it’s the burden you’ve carried the last few weeks. No one could bear it. Don’t feel bad, but see this impulse to kill Shephard for what it is.”

  Nyerza opened his mouth, as if to speak—then seemed to gaze into space for a moment, or into himself.

  Paymenz was watching the others, who muttered and groaned and cursed in the room. “I think we’d better make up our minds and leave. Nyerza, she is guided. Trust her.”

  Mimbala looked at Nyerza questioningly. Nyerza closed his long fingers over Mimbala’s wrist and shook his head.

  “Let him be,” Nyerza said reluctantly. “She is right.”

  Melissa strode up to them.

  “Shephard will come with us,” she said.

  “This?” Paymenz said, pointing at Shephard. “He is one of them! How many have died because—”—

  “Daddy—be silent!”

  Paymenz fell silent out of sheer astonishment.

  She went on, more quietly and even more authoritatively, “He comes with us. He will lead us to the others.”

  Shephard required a wheelchair. Nyerza’s government contacts provided military helicopters and transport jets normally used only for the brass, and an Army nurse for Shephard.

  We traveled, with snowballing exhaustion, from one primary ISZ to another, Shephard guiding us. Six more—there were three more Industrial Sacrifice Zones in the United States—one in Chicago, one in Louisiana, one in New Jersey; then we skipped to three overseas, flying across the Atlantic. We hopped the globe, traveling to primary ISZs in Africa, India, and Malaysia.

  Behind us, those forcibly awakened slowly emerged from the vast underground rooms: some retreated into madness; some went into a long depression and then a sort of amnesia;a fair number committed suicide; some found their way to synagogues, Buddhist temples, churches, mosques, cathedrals, even sweat lodges, to ask intercession and forgiveness. One man crawled forty-three miles on his hands and knees till he was grinding bone ends on concrete, as some sort of inarticulate act of expiation; many simply let their health tumble apart, in alcohol and drugs. And died. They all had this in common: a fear of sleep; a determined sleeplessness.

  We crossed the Pacific to the last ISZ—in the Los Angeles area.

  They were waiting for us . . .

  . . . in California. We saw them twenty minutes after we trudged wearily down the ramp. Melissa coming down the ramp out the back of the squat plane first, and then the men hiding behind the woman: Nyerza, Paymenz, Mimbala, myself, Shephard and his nurse, four buddhist Monks, a Sikh teacher, two Catholic priests, and an Islamic Sufi we’d picked up in India. We emerged, blinking in the sunlight, from the military transport plane we’d appropriated, with the blessing of the Air Force, in Hawaii. The plane had landed on a broad road that led to the chemicals factory twenty minutes north of the San Fernando Valley. The site of an “accident.”

  We looked up at the ISZ: The factory stood against the yellowish late afternoon sky in a shape that was largely vertical but with pipes and catwalks crossing horizontally, diagonally: the now-obvious silhouette of a giant rune.

  But our small group wasn’t alone: three trucks of National Guardsmen arrived almost at the same moment, looking pale and frightened, sent to help us by a Presidential administration encouraged by Melissa’s successes. They climbed dutifully from their trucks, checked the clips on their rifles, gazed pensively around them.

  As we approached the side road that led to the underground chamber of sleepers, I felt a constriction, a chill, seeing long lines of dark figures issuing from the grove of dead oak trees to either side of the road; the leafless, twisted, blackened trees themselves looking like freehand runes in some fanciful, forgotten script signifying only decay and death.

  But those who paraded from the woods to block our way were human—most of them. There were, however, three Bugsys, looking almost identical, in the forefront. Milling around the Bugsys were some four hundred men and women, many of them naked but for sandals and garish body paint: painted in ribald imagery, geometric designs, or pentagrams; crude pictoglyphs of Spiders and Tailpipes. Others wore papier-mâché heads resembling Gnashers, Grindums, and Sharkadians; hand-sewn costumes mimicking the demons’ shapes.

  These were people, I thought, who had been terrified into making their own desperate accommodation with the new demonic reality.

  Some carried hunting rifles, pistols, axes, baseball bats, and steel pipes.

  The National Guardsmen looked almost glad to see them. These people, at least, could be shot dead, and they would stay dead.

  A Bugsy stepped forward, with his hand on one man’s shoulder, guiding the man toward us like a parent gently urging a child to step forward and recite a poem.

  The lanky potbellied man, with a ragged gray-streaked red
beard, was almost naked, painted mostly blue, with bands of bright red around his limbs; his genitals Day-Glo orange; on his head was a hand-sewn cloth hood that was a sort of pathetic muppet of a Sharkadian. In one hand the man held a staff made from an old television antenna, with bits of mummified human parts dangling from its remaining crossbars: mummified fingers, a string of ears, a whole hand, a head—the head mostly just skull, now.

  There was a teasing familiarity about the face of the man in the Sharkadian hood, despite the paint and the beard and the gauntness. Hadn’t he been an important candidate for governor before the invasion?

  I put an arm instinctively around Melissa’s shoulders; we heard a snorting, a flapping, and glanced up to see Sharkadians wheeling a few hundred feet overhead, to see Spiders drifting in from three directions.