Demons

by John Shirley

  Don’t think about climbing those concrete steps to the little room. Following the sleepy-eyed old woman, climbing up from what should have been the top floor of the narrow, pyramid-shaped skyscraper. Spiraling like a nautilus, those steps, up and up.

  Don’t think about the old spinster’s face . . . though it wasn’t at all a sinister face. But when she turned to him—rosy-cheeked, bright eyes of some dark color you couldn’t quite identify; bluish hair in a bell shape, like that of any number of old ladies; her teeth so perfect and white, much too perfect for a woman her age—it affected him like touching Inimicalene.

  “Almost there,” the spinster had said brightly, eyes dancing with delight. “Never quite but almost! Goes on forever. Who was that old Greek gent, said you couldn’t go anywhere because any distance could be divided again and again, smaller and smaller, so it went on forever? Yet here we are, here we are!”

  In the dream . . .

  In the dream they had stood on the topmost landing of the entire building; and she had opened a shabby plastic-amalgam door to the topmost room, a room no bigger than a broom closet, itself shaped like a pyramid. Then she stood aside and gestured for him to enter. Her manner was that of a kindly nurse in a maternity ward, ushering him into the presence of one of life’s sacred joys.

  He had stepped through and seen that the only furniture in the room was an old, flaking wooden kitchen table—a table he almost recognized, perhaps from his father’s tiny kitchen—and on it, a wooden tray filled with dirt. In the dirt were human faces—unfamiliar yet almost known to him—seven of them, staring straight up as if the faces were the caps of big mushrooms. Each one—though only a face, its temples and jawline flush with the black soil—was alive, was squirming, fidgeting within itself. The eyes rolling; the mouths opening, gasping, murmuring without words, a little drool escaping the corners of their open, mumbling lips: five men and two women.

  As he had stepped closer, seven pairs of eyes had swiveled to fix on him, and the babyish fear in their expressions turned to idiotic joy.

  “Now if you’ll just feed them,” came the old woman’s chirpy voice in the dream, “everyone’s future will be happy . . . happily . . . joyfully . . . to”—her words fragmenting as the dream broke up—“completionate . . . fantastible, joynicating . . . razzle suckle . . . Steve . . . Stevie.”

  “Mr. Isquerat?”

  He nearly leapt from his seat. “Yes?”

  “Mr. Winderson will see you now.”

  “Coffee, Stephen?”

  Here was Mr. Dale Winderson, the billionaire, offering to pour him, a junior executive, a cup of coffee. But it wouldn’t do to be obsequious, to insist on pouring his own coffee.

  “Sure. Thank you, sir.”

  “You can call me Dale, Stephen. Your father called me Bratboy.” He chuckled. Winderson was a tall, good-looking man with thick black hair, wearing a silk San Francisco Giants jacket, jeans, and cowboy boots. He had permanent smile lines etched around his eyes and mouth.

  “Bratboy, sir? Not really.”

  “Oh yes, really! I didn’t mind.”

  The office was enormous—it was a good eighty feet to the ceiling with the square footage of about a two-story house. The sparseness of its furnishings reflected an elegant minimalism that only emphasized the volume. There were a sofa, Winderson’s broad, Chinese-lacquer desk, two chairs—leather, not Inimicalene—and a few paintings. The window wall revealed the stalagmite caviness of downtown San Francisco: a few copters darting like mutated dragonflies, the new monorail slithering over the Bay Bridge.

  Winderson stood in front of the tinted window, pouring coffee at a mahogany serving table on casters. Despite the tinting and the gray sky there was a certain glare, and only when Winderson brought Stephen his coffee—in a black mug with the WW logo emblazoned in gold on the side—did he realize that Winderson had hair plugs of some kind and that the expression on his face, with its cheerful lines, was more or less printed there. His expressions were garments, like his casual clothing.

  Trying not to stare, Stephen sipped a little coffee and pretended to admire the view.

  “Your father was a great guy,” Winderson was saying, as he sat on the edge of his desk, stretching his legs out.

  Stephen sat in the black leather chair across from the desk; the big office seemed to whisper of opportunity, of privilege.

  “Old Barry . . .” Winderson shook his head as if at some cherished memory. “Your dad took me under his wing when I came to Stanford. He was my roommate, a year older—but it was more than an obligation. He liked helping people find their way. And he’d go the distance for a pal.”

  Stephen felt grief pierce his giddiness for a moment. His father, a grade school teacher, had indeed been a good man. He’d had his problems—a tendency toward moody withdrawal, and he’d almost destroyed his marriage with an affair—but he’d loved his son, and made sure Stephen felt it. He had died two years before of cancer, after a cruelly protracted battle. The insurance companies crapped out on me, son. The HMO dropped me, of course, long ago. So I spent everything on treatments. I shouldn’t have. I should’ve known it was too late. What that means is I’ve got nothing to leave you—except a tired old favor. A man owes me a favor. You’ve heard of Dale Winderson . . . what I did for him—well, he owes me. We were roommates, and he can get you in at the top of his company. I don’t really know what they do there, exactly—chemicals or refining or something. But if you don’t like it, you can always move on. You’ll be one of the people you wanted to be. . . . I mean, you know—you can use your MBA.

  What had he meant, “one of the people you wanted to be”? Why had he put it like that?

  Stephen had dabbled in online day trading, stocks of all kinds, since he’d turned eighteen. He’d lost as much as he’d made at it, but it had always been small investments, and hence small losses—and the excitement had whetted his appetite.

  He didn’t want to be like his father, teaching kids who didn’t care. He wanted to be one of the people who mattered in the world.

  “Your dad,” Dale was saying, “well, he was really there for me. I owe him. I mean it was more than just shepherding me through school. Did he, um, tell you what it was that he, ah . . . ?”

  “No, sir. Dale.”

  “Well. All that matters is, what he did for me got you the job. I won’t pretend that your grades did it, though they were respectable. And now it’s going to get you another opportunity. . . .”

  He paused, sipped coffee, looking at Stephen over the top of his mug. Waiting.

  Waiting for what? Stephen wasn’t sure. He cleared his throat and took a stab at it.

  “Dale—I’m here at WW because I want to be. I mean—I want to be part of the—”—

  “Team, right? You want to grow with the company. Son, you’ve already been hired. You don’t have to give me that tired old speech. I just wonder . . . do you know what the world is really like? And what our place in it really is? Of course you don’t. Almost no one does. You’re an alert kid—and you caught our interest with that Dirvane 17 business you brought up.”

  So that’s it. Stephen maintained what he hoped was an interested, impartial expression. But inside he writhed. He was going to be fired after all. Maybe Winderson thought he had to fire him personally, for his father’s sake.

  Researching new products, Stephen had learned that Dirvane 17, a pesticide soon to be marketed by West Wind, had been called seriously carcinogenic and neurologically toxic by independent researchers. Remarkably small amounts of it would cause convulsions in children and liver damage in adults. There were also indications of neurological complications. And it persisted in the environment. But it killed the Glassy-Winged Sharpshooter, the bug that threatened California’s wine industry, more rapidly and definitely than any other pesticide.

  “You pointed out the downside of Dirvane 17.”

  “Yes, sir—I was only concerned that—” He broke off as Winderson raised his hand.

&nbs
p; “I know, son—you were concerned about the company. That we’d face lawsuits. That it’d generate a big backlash—bad publicity—that in the long run it’d cost us more in settlements than we’d make in profits.”

  Stephen exhaled through his nose, in relief. “Exactly . . . Dale.”

  “Very sharp. I’ve asked that the stuff be reviewed. Maybe we can cover our asses with some sort of warning label and special handling instructions—more of that kind of thing than usual, I mean—before we market the stuff.”

  Winderson went to stand in front of the window, his back to Stephen, striking a pose with one hand in his Giants jacket, the other holding the mug in front of him. “Look at that big ol’ world out there. Steve, you ever ask yourself which way is up or down?”

  “Um—well success is up, and to get there . . .”

  “Don’t need that speech either, Steve. No, I mean—morally. Is there a moral up and down?”

  “Well—sure.”

  “Sure there is—yet it’s all relative. Personally, I think of the moral good as being the greatest good for the most people. Now this world of ours—did you ever consider that up—the literal up, toward the sky—isn’t up? You’d know if you were an astronaut. Those guys know. See, it’s all relative to where you stand. It’s up if you’re on the ground. But in space there is no up. I mean—why don’t you fall off the Earth? Looking toward the South Pole, why, that’s down, right? So why don’t you fall toward the South Pole and then out into space? Gravity. But that’s all that prevents you going one way or another. Get out into the Solar System, the galaxy, there’s no up or down. We orient ourselves according to what works, son.”

  What’s the point of all this? Stephen wondered. But he said, “Um—sure, I can see that.”

  “So . . . gravity . . . where’s our center of gravity, so to speak? Yours and mine? Where’s our moral center of gravity? Like I said, it’s whatever’s the most good for the most people. I have my own notions of what that is. Have to operate by my own notions—they’re all I’ve got.”

  He turned to face Stephen but didn’t look at him; he put his coffee mug down very carefully on his glass-topped desk beside the computer terminal and the speaker phone, frowning with concentration, as if putting the mug down was a matter of life or death. “Stephen, you remember the so-called Demon Hallucinations about nine years ago?”

  “The Demon Hallucinations?”

  “Yes. What’s your notion of what happened?”

  Stephen hesitated. “Um—I really don’t have one. I was doing graduate work, helping create a business in Thailand—a computer-manufacturing base.” He chuckled, trying to sound like an experienced fellow businessman. “We did all of the work and got none of the profits. I wasn’t much more than an intern then, and it wasn’t much more than a sweatshop, as it turned out. I couldn’t wait to leave. It was an island just off the Thai mainland, very isolated. They could avoid the international labor laws there. But I was stuck there for a while. I wasn’t in the States when any of the—the demon hysteria went down. I saw some of it on TV, but it all looked like a hoax to me, special effects, that, uh—”—

  “Yes, no doubt,” Winderson interrupted with a dismissive wave. “So you thought it was a hoax, and later—hallucinations, you said?”

  “Right—they said there was a terrorist attack, with hallucinogens—all these people went nuts and wrecked the—”—

  “Yes, all right,” Winderson broke in again, briskly this time. He gazed blankly down at Stephen. His eternal smile had seamlessly melted into a grimace of strain.

  I said the wrong thing, Stephen thought. But how?

  Winderson gave a soft grunt that sounded like cynical amusement. “Well, some of our people were accused of being involved in spreading the poison gas, or whatever, that caused the hallucinations. I wanted to know where you stood on it. There are lawsuits pending. Groundless, I assure you. It was pulled off by terrorists, who put rye-mold-based hallucinogens in the water around the world. Of course, a great many people still believe . . .” He shrugged as if waiting for Stephen to finish the thought for him.

  “Uh, yeah, a lot of people seem to think it really happened, in some literal way—but there’s no TV footage of actual demons. At the time I saw some clips—but they were all sort of blurry. . . . After a while, they stopped showing them. I’ve always wondered what happened to that footage.”

  “Do you know how much footage there was out there? Too much to find and erase. Yet all the people who claimed to have home video footage of the demons, or to have taped news reports about them, came up with erased tapes. Digital stuff was blotted out, too. So—they were lying.”

  “But how could there be footage of hallucinations in the first place?”

  “There wasn’t—there was some footage of people hallucinating, rioting, killing one another, some of them in bizarre costumes. Many of them with extraordinary strength—a side effect of the drug.”

  “Costumes. I saw some of that—people parading around in homemade demon costumes, their bodies all painted up. . . .”

  “Right. It was mass hysteria, fueled by the attack. Some people succumbed, and some didn’t. The footage was confiscated, taken for the government investigation. Anyway, the terrorist cell was wiped out so that’s that.”

  “Well . . .” Stephen stood, assuming the interview had come to an end.

  “Not so fast, son! That’s not the only reason you’re here! I was just wondering what you thought about all that. No, there’s something more we have to discuss. You have a special opportunity ahead of you.”

  Stephen sat down again, a little too heavily, his mouth dry.

  At last, here it was.

  “They’ve asked for you, Stephen.”

  “Who has?”

  “That’s not what you need to know. You should ask why they’ve asked for you—that’s far more important.”

  Is it? Stephen wondered. Some survival instinct stirred in him.

  “Yes,” Winderson went on, perhaps reading the doubtful expression on Stephen’s face. “Yes . . . Why you? is the question. It’s because you’re a kind of tabula rasa, it seems. You have special qualities. . . .” He seemed to be thinking aloud. “And I can only envy you . . . but—” He shrugged, then turned to the speaker phone, and hit a button. “Latilla?”

  As he straightened up, an older woman in a gray-blue suit bustled into the room through a side door.

  The woman from Stephen’s dream.

  “I’ve got to make some phone calls. Take Stephen to see his opportunity, Latilla,” Winderson said. “I’ll be along.”

  At the back of the penthouse office, a door opened onto a stairwell: a dusty stairwell that spiraled upward.

  Heart hammering, Stephen found himself following Latilla exactly as he’d followed her in his dream, though she had been dressed differently then. She didn’t say anything as they ascended, just hummed tunelessly to herself as they came to a narrow landing, a door.

  Stephen felt himself close to hyperventilating as she put her hand on the knob. The faces in the tray.

  She looked at him quizzically. “Are you all right, Mr. Isquerat?”

  She pronounced his name almost like Issk-rat. Making him think of muskrat. He wanted to correct her, tell her it should be closer to Iss-carrot.

  No. There was something else it was more important to say: Don’t take me into that room!

  “Yes—yes, I . . . but perhaps, really, I’m . . .” He wanted to say he wasn’t right for this. But he wasn’t supposed to know what was there.

  She gave her head a little shake of puzzled impatience, then turned the knob and stepped into the room, holding the door open for him.

  Inside was another short hallway to a small office just big enough to hold its five workstations.

  Stephen looked around. Just an office. He shivered.

  He was dizzy with relief. The dream had been just a dream. He blew out his breath, relaxing a little.

  The cubicles weren’t
cubicles, really—though partitioned with the usual white soundboard, they were oddly shaped, each one a triangle, with the point outward, the computer operator sitting at a desk with his back to the center of the room, where Stephen and Latilla stood. It was a windowless room; vaguely New Age Muzak oozed from hidden speakers. A sixth man joined them, his smile somehow the same quality as the music. He was a pale man with a high forehead and fishy lips, wearing a white lab coat. He carried a digital clipboard.

  “This is H. D.—Harrison Deane,” Latilla said, squeezing Deane’s shoulder hard enough to make the man wince.

  H. D. blinked at Stephen. “This is . . . ?”

  “Yes, this is him,” Latilla said.

  “Really! And he’ll be starting here with me soon?”