Demons

by John Shirley

  There was a disturbance in the air and a blurring of the details beyond—then Winderson appeared, smiling at Stephen. It was an encouraging smile, a hopeful smile, a don’t-disappoint-me-you’re-like-a-son-to-me smile.

  Stephen nodded. “I guess we’d better . . . get to it. Whatever it is.”

  But he didn’t move.

  “Righty-oh, as Felix the cat liked to say,” Latilla said, taking Stephen’s arm firmly. “We’d best get to it. Right this way.”

  Feeling numb, Stephen moved obediently to the table in the cone of cold light.

  Ash Valley

  Late afternoon. The air heavy, the air hurting the back of the throat.

  Bonnie Halpern was sitting on the stoop of her little house in Ash Valley, and she wasn’t thinking at all about the dead baby girl in her crib.

  It should have been surprising and horrifying that she didn’t care about her little girl being dead in the house. But she was way beyond feeling surprised.

  Horace hadn’t come home that morning. She was trying to think what that meant. She had a vague sort of feeling that it should mean something. She was trying to think about the baby, too. Something hurt in her, and it had to do with the baby, somewhere, but there was no connection between the place that hurt and her mind. She knew it was there, but she couldn’t feel it herself. It was like she was all cut up into jigsaw puzzle parts, and the parts weren’t quite fitting together anymore. They were barely connected at all.

  She was wearing her nightgown, with nothing under it, and her slippers. Nothing else. Normally she’d never come out to the front steps dressed that way. But it didn’t matter today.

  The phone was ringing back in the house. Bonnie knew who it was: her boss, Larry, asking why wasn’t she at work waitressing at his place over near Shasta. He’d been calling all day. She’d heard his voice leaving messages on the answering machine, a little more irate with each call.

  She could answer the phone and say, Hi, Larry, little Rosalie’s dead. Dead at nine and a half months old. Yesterday I loved her, but today I don’t seem to care that she died during the night for no reason. My husband’s missing. I don’t care about that either. If you were here I’d probably hurt you.

  Too much trouble to go to the phone and say all that.

  She got up and looked around, her eyes burning. She squeezed them shut and rubbed the lids, then looked again, trying to see the street. Some of it she could see, and some of it she couldn’t. It was like a big color photograph, and someone had cut random pieces out of the photo. The street looked cut up, fragmentary—and she felt like the street looked.

  Bonnie could see the little pine-lined side street she lived on that led down to the town square, with its park in the middle, where the fir trees had stood. They cut them down yesterday. But the houses across the street were snipped away, too; there was a strobing gray nothing where the houses were supposed to be. Part of the street in front of her was there, and part of it wasn’t.

  Something was calling to her. It was too low-pitched to hear, but she could feel it in her joints.

  The call shivered into her, like the chill that comes before a fever, and it filled her loins and the emptiness at the center of her with a hot, delightful presence. She felt complete, now, and was grateful for the feeling. It told her what it wanted, and she complied without a second of hesitation. Anything to keep it inside her. She felt so much better now.

  She got up and went into the house, went to the crib and picked up Rosalie’s dead body by a pudgy, still-soft arm. Soft—but cold now. She went back to the front stoop, holding the dead child by her small wrist. She dangled like a handbag. One of her blue-green eyes was open, the other closed, like a broken baby doll.

  Bonnie walked down the two steps to the sidewalk, and down the street. She saw Mrs. Schneider watching from her living room picture window. Old white-haired Mrs. Schneider: She had one of those paper breathing masks on and she lifted her hand to the mask and she shook her head, staring at Bonnie and the baby. She closed the drapes.

  Bonnie followed the call’s vibration, walking down the middle of the street. It was coming from the center of town. Maybe from the park. As she walked toward its source, the call got stronger and stronger.

  Now she saw the others, walking that way—men and women. Two were naked, most were dressed as they ordinarily dressed; a few others dragged bodies along behind them. One man was dragging the body of his ten-year-old son. She knew them both, though she couldn’t remember their names now. A woman was dragging her husband’s body after her. It looked like the front of his skull had been smashed in.

  The crowd got bigger and bigger as people came from the houses and joined the procession. It was a silent parade, no one saying anything, just marching along, all of them looking kind of contented, some even crying with happiness.

  There were others, too, in uniforms she’d never seen before: men in gas masks. They didn’t join the procession. They just watched.

  The procession continued toward the center of town. No one walked too fast or too slow.

  Someone screamed, “No, no, no, sweetheart, no, no, no!” from the little condominium complex on the corner. Then the screaming stopped.

  They kept on another block and came to the square at the center of town, Bonnie swinging Rosalie’s little body in time to the cadence of the procession. Rosalie’s diapers were hanging half off her body now. Her skin was turning blue.

  They paraded onto the street that ran next to the park rest room. Two other processions came from other directions. Across the way, there were houses, burning.

  There were already some people there in the street. Most of them were dead. The marchers were laying more bodies down, smiling, some of them patting the dead affectionately. Then, she saw Mr. Harrison—wasn’t that his name? The man who owned the hardware store.

  Mr. Harrison from the hardware store, handily equipped with a new ball-peen hammer, walked up to the stout middle-aged Mexican lady who watched the kids of the farmworkers, during the season, and he smashed her head in with the hammer. Methodically, chunk chunk chunk, smiling vacantly.

  When she was dead, he dragged her to the pile. A voice boomed from a white van, parked on a side street. It was an amplified voice calling out a name in a language Bonnie didn’t know. But she knew somehow it was the name of the person who’d called her here.

  The vibration that had called them was audible now. It was a rhythmic thrumming that made them all dip and straighten again, a slow, spontaneous group dance, in a circle around the mound of bodies. Bonnie danced slowly, swinging the dead baby at her side in counterpoint.

  Above the mound, Bonnie could see a face. It seemed to make itself out of the smoke from the burning houses. It grew more defined as she watched. It had an enormous toothy mouth, and its eyes . . .

  But then she heard someone hoarsely calling her name. She looked down and saw her husband, Horace, lying on his stomach, on the edge of the mound of the dead. Only, he wasn’t dead. He was wearing his mechanic’s overalls but had lost his shoes. He was trying to crawl out of the mound, and she could see that he was fighting the voice, the vibration, the call.

  Bonnie walked over to him, swinging the baby. She dropped the baby on the ground in front of him. He crawled toward it, his mouth working like a puppet’s. The puppeteer was a mute.

  Horace reached a hand out to the baby, and at the same time Bonnie knelt. She reached out her hands to his neck and began to strangle him. He was too weak to resist. “This is for you,” she said to the face forming itself over the mound of the dead. “Please give me that feeling again. . . . This is for you . . . this is for you. . . .”

  Bonnie kept squeezing her husband’s neck for several minutes after he was dead. Then she looked up to see Mr. Harrison standing over her with the ball-peen hammer.

  “This is for you,” Mr. Harrison said. He wasn’t talking to Bonnie.

  He brought the hammer down hard on her forehead, and she fell into a hole that pass
ed through the entire world—and the hole, she saw, was a mouth, and the mouth swallowed her.

  She heard something thinking. It was not thinking in her own language, but she understood it anyway.

  The spark, the spark, the spark, oh, if only it would remain with me.

  Then there was a flash of black light. After that, Bonnie was as dead as anyone ever is.

  5

  On approach to Ashgabat, Turkmenistan

  Dawn, and Aeroflot 233, shivering in its metal bones and reeking of jet fuel, was en route from Athens to Aleysk, Russia, with one stop in Turkmenistan. Ira hadn’t been able to sleep on the flight. The jet was a relic of the twentieth century, and whenever they hit any turbulence he could hear bolts rattling in their sockets.

  The pilot made an announcement in Russian. The scarf-wrapped old woman in the print dress sitting beside him translated. “He say we are on approach to Ashgabat.” She seemed like a babushka, but she’d informed him that she was a retired college professor. She watched serenely as he took out his palm viewer, set it on the tray table, and once again unzipped his home video files of Marcus.

  “Is lovely child,” she murmured. “Very good heart, you can see. Is true?”

  “Yes, yes indeed,” he said, his own heart wrenching as he watched Marcus, a diminutive figure lost on the small screen, Marcus, just a month ago, trying to ride a skateboard. Too young for a skateboard, his mom had said, but Marcus admired Ira’s cousin Varnie, who was a skateboard champion; who made balletlike ollies look easy; who carried off “variel flips to 5-0 grinds, heel flips to 360-shove-its in the half pipes,” all this with aplomb and only the occasional cracked femur. Varnie had given him a skateboard, and Marcus was showing off for his dad, trying to learn how to turn corners and do the most simple skateboard jump—an ollie. Marcus japed at the camera, then skateboarded toward it, wobbly but determined, singing the lyrics to a popular song as he came, making fun of his own feeble attempts to shred, his voice full of pleasurable self-deprecation:

  “Ever’body rides, everybody jacks

  Ever’body paysa jumpin’ tax

  You gotter pay a toll to shred my site

  Look uppa me getter dizzy widda height—

  I’m all wheels . . . all wheels . . .”

  Then he fell on his rump, laughing, Ira’s handheld camera shakily dipping to keep him in frame. Marcus cracked, “I needa mediscan—but not if the girls are around . . . ow damn.”

  Did Melissa take a portable medical scanner with her? Yes, Ira was sure she had. He’d made sure, and he’d charged its battery, too.

  As she watched Marcus on the little screen, the babushka professor laughed. Eyes stinging with tears, Ira nodded, smiling, and fast-forwarded to another scene: Marcus playing with Kenny, the little Chinese kid who lived down the street with his grandparents. The kid was eleven but was as small as Marcus, and he didn’t seem much more mature. The two boys were playing a holographic game, in which they darted in among projected images and tagged treasures from the capering 3-D figures of elves and pretty witches. But one of the figures, a troll, looked a little too demonic . . . and the boy burst into tears. The boy’s parents had been killed by a Sharkadian, Ira knew. Marcus switched off the hologame and, with an amazing lack of pretense, put an arm around the sob-wracked boy. Comforting this child who was two years older than him, he said, “I know what you mean, Kenny. I do.”

  As his Russian companion leaned into the aisle to argue with the attendants—demanding coffee and apparently being told they were too close to landing—Ira went to another file, artwork he’d made on a portable digital-art pad.

  He stared at the image, shook his head, baffled. He’d been trying to sketch Marcus from memory. He’d done it before, without difficulty, but this time his sketches of Marcus’s face seemed blurred, mixed with some other face, seemed too grown-up, and . . . different.

  A male flight attendant signaled him to put away his palm viewer and put up his tray table. They were about to land in Turkmenistan.

  The airport near Ashgabat

  Customs.

  He was drooping with fatigue in a Tower of Babel, voices in Greek, Turkish, Russian, Farsi, and some local dialect. He stood in a long line in a room with flaking pale-green walls and fluorescent lights on the low ceiling. He looked at his watch. Only eight minutes had passed since the last time he’d looked. He’d been sure at least half an hour had passed.

  The line finally moved a step or two. He pushed his overnight bag ahead with his foot, took the step, and prepared to wait some more.

  He checked his palmer for the third time since arriving. No messages from Melissa. He felt a gripping tension in his shoulders and stretched, then pushed his overnight bag ahead with his foot. He got out his passport again, thinking: As if having it ready makes the line go faster. He grimaced at his photo.

  Someone took the passport from Ira’s hand. He snatchedat it, but one of the strangers—there were two of them—slapped his hand away.

  Ira had an impression of unfamiliar uniforms, of jet-black eyes, solemn, almost bored expressions, and glossy black mustaches. But his eyes were drawn to the Uzis they cradled.

  The shorter one pocketed Ira’s passport. When he started to protest, they flashed cryptic identity cards at him, gripped him firmly by the elbows, and dragged him out of the room.

  Everyone in line was careful not to show too much interest as Turkmenistan state security took Ira away.

  They hustled him into gray daylight, sleeting wind, and a street braying with car horns, and then quickly into a military-green Jeep. The shorter of the two men drove; the larger man sat in the back with Ira.

  They drove down a service road and out into the stony desert flecked with shrubs, and past the mazy pipes and gray towers of a refinery. There was a new chain-link fence around it, topped with razor wire. They didn’t enter the refinery grounds, but Ira found himself staring, as they passed, at a sign next to the gate, its text repeated in Turkish, Cyrillic, and, at bottom, in English:

  A WEST WIND INTL REFINERY

  IN COOPERATION WITH THE REPUBLIC OF TURKMENISTAN

  They left the refinery behind, continuing for three, maybe four miles through more of the bleak landscape. The Jeep reached the warehouses and junkyards on the outskirts of Ashgabat, which gave way to a warren of old, perhaps ancient, buildings of stone and clay and tile, tenements relying on one another to stand straight.

  “If we could swing by the American embassy,” Ira said, “I think all this can be straightened out, whatever the misunderstanding is.” They ignored him. “Could you at least tell me—”—

  The big man beside Ira took his Uzi in his left hand and backhandedly smacked its muzzle against Ira’s lips—not hard but sharply. It stung, and Ira got the message.

  They passed a mosque, and down a side street Ira saw the distinctive cross of the Russian Orthodox church. He felt an urge to shout out the window for help, and shook his head at the foolishness of the impulse.

  Next came a zone of more spacious streets, of high glassy buildings, skybridges, squat state edifices of beveled concrete. Here solo copters buzzed by overhead, natural-gas scooters crowded the street, and now and then a limo drove by. Cops in elaborate uniforms waved them through checkpoints.

  Within thirty minutes of leaving the airport, they pulled up in front of a tall building of tinted glass and pitted concrete. They hustled him around the corner and through a back door, past two checkpoints, and down four flights to a sparsely lit level of what appeared to be detention cells. Down to whimpers and hoarse, despairing laughter.

  They pushed him into a nearly barren, cold little room with brown-stained cement walls, a hole in the floor, and a cot. He tried once more to demand to speak to an ambassador, a lawyer, a supervisor. One of them, before locking him in alone, said, “Soon begin interrogation, sit quiet.”

  He never saw those two again. The ones who came later wore no uniforms.

  Turkmenistan, the Fallen Shrine

 
“Mom—come on, wake up! You gotta see this three-eyed guy out here! He might embarrass you but he’s pretty cool. Mom, you have to check it out.”

  Melissa sat up, blinking around at the little room where she’d been sleeping beside Marcus on a pallet. She hadn’t been able to see it much when they’d gone to sleep—but there wasn’t much to see: a lamp in one corner and no decorations, daylight coming brightly through the open door. She shook her head at Marcus, starting to laugh at his excitement. Then she remembered all they’d been through, and the laughter died on her lips. “Marcus! Sit down. You’re sick, and we’ve got to have you looked at before you go running around. You couldn’t be recovered already; you’d need food and—”—