Demons

by John Shirley

  “First there’s a plan for, ah, some kind of fieldwork. Just the way Dale likes to do things.”

  “Fieldwork?” H. D. looked at her in confusion. Then something seemed to dawn on him. “Oh, yes, of course . . .”

  “I’m a little at sea, here,” Stephen said, trying to laugh it off. It was as if they were two people who knew about a surprise party and were trying to talk about it without clueing him in.

  “H. D. is George Deane’s son,” Latilla said, as if that explained things. “George started psychonomics.”

  “Psychonomics . . .” Stephen couldn’t quite bring himself to admit he didn’t know what it was.

  Latilla smiled. “The use of psychic power in business, which in turn increases your psychic influence over the world. If you’ve developed your ability with psychonomics.”

  Stephen wasn’t sure he’d heard her rightly. Had she said “psychic”?

  “So this room is for . . . psychonomics training?” Stephen asked.

  More urgently, he wanted to ask Where’s the men’s room? He needed to pee badly. But somehow it didn’t feel like the right moment.

  “Ye-es,” said H. D., noncommitally. “Have a look at Al in station number three. I think he’s got some kind of groove going here today.”

  They went to stand behind a gangly, round-shouldered man with thinning brown hair, stooped before a flat-screen monitor. He was staring intently at the screen. There was no keyboard.

  The screen itself was divided into two columns of numbers, scrolling jerkily down. “On the left,” H. D. said, “you see numbers generated, as you might suppose, by a random-number generator. On the right side, Al is trying to induce in the stream of random numbers consistent patterns—increases, especially. When he succeeds, the computer chimes.”

  As if eager to demonstrate, the computer chimed, and numbers flickered in bright green on the right side of the screen.

  “It rewards me,” Al said. His voice seemed distant, as if he spoke in his sleep. “The computer rewards me. I can feel it.”

  “How does that happen?” Stephen asked, shifting from one foot to the other. He tried not to squirm, though he increasingly had to pee. “The reward part?”

  But H. D. went briskly on, “So you see, he’s changing the pattern by the power of his mind alone. Something like this might be used to influence the stock market, for example, one way or another.” He droned on, and Stephen glanced around for a men’s room door.

  “Are you quite all right?” Latilla asked.

  “Yes, well, actually I was sort of wondering if I could just pop into the men’s room.”

  “Right out that door and to the right. You can’t miss it,” H. D. said, pointing. He turned his attention back to his clipboard.

  Stephen hurried through the door, found himself in an unfamiliar hallway. He followed it around two bends, then located the men’s room. The New Age Muzak sang in soothing redundancies as he relieved himself in the urinal. He set off again to find the computer room, opened the door he thought led back into it, and realized he was lost.

  Instead of the psychonomics computer room, he found himself in an antechamber, facing a glass door. On the other side were two women in nurse’s uniforms, bustling around a dim figure on a bed.

  Some other aspect of psychonomics, he supposed. He could ask them the way back to the room with the five computers.

  He went diffidently through the glass door into a room that smelled of hospital disinfectant overlaid by the perfumes of an enormous bouquet of flowers on the broad windowsill. A bone-thin older man in a hospital gown, his back to the door, lay on his side in a wide, comfortable-looking hospital bed. Top of the line, Stephen supposed. The room was all white, pastel, and chrome: a hospital suite transplanted whole into the upper floors of an office building. There was a television, switched off, on the wall over the sink; a bathroom, a metal table with bedpans, catheters, coils of tubing. Stephen went a little closer to the old man on the bed.

  “I don’t think you were given a pass to this suite,” came Latilla’s voice, low and brittle, as she came in the door behind him, making him jump.

  “I was looking for the, uh . . .”

  He found he was staring at the man on the bed. He recognized him from his research into the company: George Deane, the cofounder of West Wind. The onetime company president was staring into nothingness with a look of frightened despair, his lips moving soundlessly. His stick-thin arms were drawn up mantislike in front of him, his fingers tapping, quivering in front of his mouth like questing antennae.

  “That’s Mr. Deane—H. D.’s father—isn’t it?” Stephen asked.

  Winderson came in then, behind Latilla, and stopped, eyebrows raised, looking at Stephen.

  Latilla turned to look at Winderson. It was remarkable how unafraid of him she seemed.

  Winderson pursed his lips. “You find your own way in here, Stephen?”

  “Took a wrong turn coming back from the bathroom.”

  “Did you? You recognize him, I see. Well—you’re here now. You may as well have the full tour. And maybe it’s good. Maybe there’s a reason for it . . . maybe they . . .”

  Winderson glanced at Latilla. She shrugged.

  “We just finished bathing him,” said the Filipino nurse, hurrying past them. “Don’t be long. He needs to rest.”

  The other nurse, a black woman with pensive eyes, glanced at Stephen as she followed her colleague out of the room. He had the feeling she wanted to say something to him.

  Latilla walked around to the other side of the bed. Deane didn’t seem to react to the people around him. He scarcely blinked; now and then he squeezed his eyes shut convulsively and snapped them open again. There was an IV in his arm, closed off at the moment. His bedclothes consisted of a single crisp sheet, tautly tucked in, covering him from just below his waist.

  “They’ve had to feed him intravenously most of the time,” Latilla said. “Poor man. How are you, Mr. Deane?” She didn’t seem to expect an answer as she reached over and tugged his pillow a little more squarely under the side of his head. He didn’t so much as glance at her. “Resting comfortably today? Mr. Winderson is here to see you.”

  Deane groaned, then. And went on as before.

  “Winderson is here, George!” the CEO announced cheerily, bending near Deane’s ear. Deane only groaned and turned away.

  Winderson straightened up, looked at Stephen a moment before remarking musingly, “You must be surprised to find a room like this up here.”

  “A little—but I suppose you wanted to look after him personally.”

  “Exactly. We can afford it, so why not.”

  “A stroke?” Stephen asked softly.

  Winderson shook his head and patted the recumbent old man on his bony, shivering shoulder. “No. Not exactly. More like . . . sabotage. Psychological sabotage. We have enemies, Stephen. Perhaps it’s just as well you meet a fallen warrior now and see what the stakes are. What we’re up against. You’ll learn more about all that in time. Just know that George here was a real pioneer in psychonomics.”

  Winderson reached out to give George Deane’s hand a squeeze. “We’ll let you rest, George.”

  Deane jerked his hand away from Winderson’s touch with a groan. Winderson grunted angrily and turned away. “You can go, Latilla. Don’t put any calls through to me.”

  “Well, I’m sure I don’t know why you even carry a palmtalker, you use it so little,” she muttered. Then she left the way they’d come in.

  Stephen watched her go. Was this really the woman he’d seen in his nightmare? A woman he’d never seen in life before today?

  No. Not possible. It must have seemed like it because the nightmare was still on his mind. He must have misremembered what the woman in the dream looked like . . .

  Winderson chuckled. “She’s been with me a long time. I let her get away with murder. This way, Stephen. Since you’re here, I might as well show you the rest.”

  They went through a side
door into what appeared to be some kind of trophy room. There was another window wall, with a view over the misty, gray city. Beyond the skyline, San Francisco Bay looked like a pool of mercury. The room’s other three walls were crowded with shelves of civic awards, plaques, and framed photos of George Deane shaking hands with famous people: politicians, movie stars, Presidents. There was a leather sofa with a few Edwardian chairs facing it. “We bring George in here from time to time,” Winderson said, settling on the sofa. “Have a seat.”

  Stephen sat across from him, changing his position several times, trying to look sufficiently relaxed yet sufficiently attentive. “This room is, um, encouraging to him? Psychologically?”

  “Smart boy. Yes, it’s a sort of gallery of his triumphs—to restore his confidence, his belief in himself. We don’t know exactly what happened to him, really, because he’s never said a word since it happened. But the MRIs—all the tests indicate it wasn’t a stroke. And we’ve seen others in variations of this condition.” He paused, watching as a streamer of cloud skated past the window.

  “God, I miss smoking. Love to have a smoke now.” He put his arm across the back of the sofa and gestured. “Sit over here, boy. It makes me feel more comfortable if I don’t have to raise my voice.”

  Stephen sank into the yielding cushion at the other end of the sofa.

  “Stephen, you’ve just had a little glimpse into psychonomics. Let me fill you in on a bit of history. It began for George in the early nineteen-seventies. He was interested in self-improvement, therapies of all kinds—Esalen, Gestalt, Janov, what have you. He was particularly impressed with the man who called himself Werner Erhard. George was involved in est and Forum—all the time husbanding his investments in oil and chemicals research. Therapy was an avocation, but he was looking for ways to fuse it with his industrial vocation.

  “Then he became involved with a Professor Shephard in something called pragmatic postmodernism—it involved the biology of economics, a kind of sociobiology of capitalism. He and Shephard developed the notion that business was a spiritual power—spiritual and telepathic being related—and they dubbed it psychonomics.”

  “Like those Christian businesses that try to use spiritual ideas in their workplaces?”

  “Not . . . as such, no. It was more like the power of the spirit and how businesses could enhance that power. That is, it assumed that there was a kind of invisible world of—of cause and effect that could be influenced by our state of mind.”

  “Psychically?” Stephen was for the first time more intrigued than nervous.

  “Well—yes. For lack of a better word. Some of it was expressed in psychic energy that flowed through a physical work structure—how a business, or a refinery, for example, was laid out.”

  “Sort of like feng shui?”

  “It did, in fact, employ some of those principles. And more. They went beyond that to what they called Psychic Pumping Stations. Certain individuals, in communication with certain, ah, you might say, spiritual influences . . . influences that could be spread psychically through a corporation. People in a corporation could be yoked together psychically to become of one mind, more or less. The result would be loyal, hardworking employees who would contribute their individual energy to the collective energy of the corporation.”

  “But that would still be only a—a psychological effect, wouldn’t it?”

  Winderson smiled wearily. “Only on the surface. I assure you, there’s also a psychic influence in business. Stephen, do you remember, a few weeks ago, being asked to take a test for us? You tried to guess what images completed a pattern. You also had to draw pictures inspired by numbers.”

  “Oh, yes. I thought it was some kind of psychological exam. I was hoping they picked me at random—spot-checking, so to speak, for unbalanced people.”

  “It wasn’t a psychological test, Stephen. And it wasn’t random. It was a psychic test. You’re not a psychic as such, but you do have a certain special potential, and that’s one of the reasons that you’re here. When your father asked me to give you a job, I had you tested along with some other people, and was gratified to discover just how remarkably strong your aptitude was.”

  “We weren’t told it was a psychic test.”

  “Again, it doesn’t test whether or not you’re a psychic. It tests to see if you have a certain psychic potential that can be . . . encouraged. Some have more than others. You have lots of it. And I want you to use that ability to take up where George Deane left off.

  “I want you to be the new director—and primary test subject—for the next step in the George Deane Foundation. You will become the point man, the living vector, for the new psychonomics.”

  Ash Valley, California

  The sorceress had arrived just at dusk in this little Northern California town. She had confirmed that there would be no more spraying that day, yet she wore a respirator and goggles, walking from the van to the outbuilding in the park at the center of town. She was walking to the room where it was waiting . . . if waiting was a word you could use. The Spirit Prince didn’t exist entirely within the mortal time flow, after all. . . . And would it really be there? They couldn’t enter our world completely until the working was done. At best it would be projecting its image—and perhaps some of its power—into the human world.

  She crossed the sidewalk to the rectangular cinder-block building marked PUBLIC REST ROOMS. Her pumps skidded just a little on the brown pine needles coating the cement. The town was quiet. There wasn’t anyone in the park, at least no one she could see. She supposed most of the townspeople were at dinner, eating in the living room and watching television, like they were supposed to.

  The tall old trees creaked in the breeze. There was a dead robin, seething with ants, lying just beside the closed metal door. She found that her hand was trembling as she brought the padlock key out of her purse.

  Shaking with anticipation, she told herself. Not fear. She should not be afraid of them: They were, ultimately, her servants.

  That morning she had risen and faced west. With the sun at her back, she had spoken the words, the sacred Names of Power, over and over, with her own mind and her whole being focused on the act of magical declamation. And she had visualized the rune in the heart of Saturn, had seen herself, in her mind’s eye, grow as big as the Earth, big as the Sun, big as the Solar System, big as the galaxy, a cosmos-spanning sorceress. And she’d truly believed in the vision.

  On the conduit of her belief, power had flowed into her. She summoned that power now, from the center of her being, as she unlocked the padlock.

  Everything was symbolic when you were dealing with the astral realms, the sorceress reflected. Simply leaving your vehicle to enter a building had its mythological significance: Imagine an ancient priestess leaving a chariot, entering a pyramid. Unlocking the padlock was symbolic always. It symbolized another milestone in the attainment of her own freedom, symbolized all the risks of Pandora’s box, symbolized unlocking the shackles put on her by the tyrant who had tried to keep humanity as pets in the Garden of Eden.

  When True Will brought about the convergence of worlds, she thought, the astral and the material, a tension arose, and synchronicity was bent to the service of symbolism.

  She replaced the key in her purse. It was time to go inside, to face the Spirit Prince.

  Remember, she told herself, when any two meet, one is always the servant.

  She glanced over her shoulder. The men in the van, in their military drab, would see to it that she was not interrupted.

  Removing her gas mask and goggles, letting them dangle around her neck like grotesque necklaces, she entered the dank, noisome building and thought about how the secrets to the keys of power were found in the darkest, foulest swamps of the sorceress’s inner world, the place within her that corresponded to this reeking box.

  She paused, just inside.

  The windowless rectangular room was shadowy on one side, where an overhead light was burnt out, harshly lit
on the other side. The fly-specked light was enclosed in a metal cage. It burned relentlessly. But suppose it went out?

  You are in charge, she told herself. You are beyond fear. And she spoke the names in her mind.

  The walls separating the men’s and women’s rest rooms had been torn down by her associates at her request. Even that was symbolic! The subsuming of male and female into one! But the toilets remained, still reeking of old urine and faintly of feces. The urinals were still there, on the men’s side, and the graffiti on the walls over the urinals.

  The room was only apparently empty. She knew it was there.

  She closed the door behind her and walked to the lit part of the room, her heels clacking on the tile floor, echoing from the concrete walls. She told herself she chose that part of the room only because it would be easier to see the design. She drew the vial from her purse, uncorked it, found the little paintbrush, and dipped it into the red fluid, which was only partly blood. She painted the symbol around herself on the floor, chanting as she did so, feeling those particular energies rising up inside her.