Demons

by John Shirley

  “There are some things uncles aren’t meant to hear,” Winderson said. “Maybe I should . . .”

  “No, it’s okay,” Jonquil said. “The doctor will be here in a second anyway. I have to rest. I don’t know how long I have, Stephen.”

  Stephen remembered the journey through the telescope, through the multicolored sea. He shivered, feeling again the terror of falling toward a living maze crawling with demons like a wound with maggots.

  But Jonquil was dying, and there was a way, they said, to save her. This was his chance to be a hero, like Horatio Hornblower. To sail into unknown realms and bring back the prize. He was, after all, in love with her.

  Wasn’t he?

  He wondered where Glyneth was. He found himself wishing he could ask her about all this.

  “We need your decision now, Stephen,” Winderson said gently but firmly.

  Jonquil squeezed his hand, drawing his gaze back to her. She looked at him, lips compressed in a way that betrayed her hope, though she managed not to seem like she was imploring him. “Will you help me, Stephen?”

  No pressure, he thought and almost laughed aloud. But when he looked in her eyes, he couldn’t look away. Finally he said, “I’ll do what I can.”

  “We’ll need to take my chopper back to Bald Peak immediately,” Winderson said, looking at his watch.

  As if to seal a pact, Jonquil pulled Stephen close and kissed him. Then she whispered, “When I’m well . . . I want you. The two of us, again . . .”

  “I—I’ll be there. Just whistle.”

  He straightened up, and she lay back, as if the conversation had exhausted her, and closed her eyes.

  In a daze, Stephen followed Winderson out into the corridor, the bodyguard trailing behind. They went down the hall, up a series of stairways, to a helipad on the roof of the hospital. A small gold-and-black West Wind chopper was waiting, a pilot already seated in the cockpit.

  Winderson climbed in first. The bodyguard took Stephen’s arm to help him, as if he were a frail old lady, and then climbed in to sit behind him. Stephen wondered: Is this guy a bodyguard at all? Maybe he’s more than that.

  The pilot was a bald white man with dark glasses and a pencil-thin mustache. Winderson never said a word; the pilot seemed to know their destination. The chopper lifted seconds after the door slammed shut, and they tilted sickeningly into the sky, leaning toward Ash Valley and the observatory.

  Stephen felt close to retching from the juddering of the chopper as, fighting turbulence, they curved through the air to head north. But at least most of the sense of unrealness had gone, his feeling that everyone was a ghost. Somehow Winderson had grounded him, got him involved with real life once more. He didn’t understand the Black Pearl thing—it must be some kind of metaphysical object that would help Jonquil cure herself, some mind-body connection he could help her make. But the main thing was, he was back in the swing—and he had a chance to help a woman he desired to the depths of himself.

  After they left the San Francisco peninsula behind, the helicopter’s passage steadied, and so did Stephen’s stomach. He tried not to think too much, keeping his mind occupied by looking at the roads snaking through the agricultural checkerboard far below. But despite himself, he found himself musing: Is what I’m doing really what my father wanted for me when he set this job up?

  He remembered his father reading poetry to him on Halloween, when he was a boy: “Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore’ . . .”

  His father would be with him nevermore. Dad had been so dulled by pain and then drugs at the end, they hadn’t talked much. And just after this, Stephen had gone off on a business trip, on money he’d earned from online trading, and his father had died. There had been no last words for Stephen.

  But sometimes he thought he felt his dad trying to say something to him.

  Suddenly he remembered the Reverend Anthony. The swirling death in the water at Ash Valley. The gull on the hood of the Hummer. People in gas masks. And what Glyneth had said about a possible military connection. It nagged at him. Maybe it was time to clear the air.

  He was, after all, in with Winderson now—he would be saving Winderson’s niece’s life. Which meant he was empowered to ask awkward questions. He thought, Ask about it—get it off your chest.

  He took a breath and plunged in. “Dale . . . I saw some stuff in Ash Valley that made me wonder. Dickinham said . . . well, I had the impression he was talking to military people about the D17 test . . .”

  Winderson frowned, and then shrugged. “Yes, Stephen—the military. Well, the military wants to use the stuff to protect military personnel in places where there’s a heavy mosquito presence, risk of encephalitis, tsetse flies—that sort of thing.”

  “But in town . . . I mean, people had to wear gas masks. And all the dead animals. I’m just worried about the publicity angle—if it gets out of hand. D17 seems so powerful. It just seemed like . . . overkill.”

  “Ah. Yes, it could be, Steve, that we . . . miscalculated. To be sure, the stuff was sprayed near the town, it was picked up by a wind, blown over the town. . . . There are always factors that are difficult to predict. But you see, my boy, in the long run we’re trying to increase food production, find ways to fight insects that have grown resistant to pesticides. There are more than six billion people on this planet. You can’t sneeze without hurting someone somewhere.

  “You’ve got to see the big picture, Stephen. And from the top of the corporate ladder, I assure you, you will understand!” He smiled warmly.

  Stephen felt some of the weight lifted from his shoulders. It was true: He had just panicked; he’d forgotten the big picture.

  The chopper shuddered onward. At last Winderson said, “Almost there,” and Stephen saw the observatory swinging into view ahead and below.

  He glanced at Ash Valley . . . and did a double take. Staring.

  The new roads that West Wind had been building were more clearly marked out now, though they were still just straight-edged gouges in the land. They extended raylike from the outskirts of the town, sharply angling in convergent lines that made five points, symmetrical all around the town: a giant pentagram carved in the land, with the town at its center. And the trees had been cut down in the park, pulled right out of the ground. In their place was a symbol, in the very center of town, marked out with the same roadlike gougings, visible only from the air.

  Stephen had seen that symbol before—in the heart of his astral vision. The rune that was a creature—it had been shaped like that.

  Exactly like that.

  Rostov, Russia

  Melissa sat by Ira’s comfortable hotel bed in Rostov. It was still dark out, but on the verge of dawn. She saw the transferral papers that had gotten Ira out of prison, folded in a side pocket of Nyerza’s grip—they really must destroy them. She said a quick prayer, asking that Araha’s friend in the government, a Sufi-in-secret, didn’t pay for those documents with his life.

  Nyerza had made some calls to associates from the Circle, who had arranged to have a private cargo plane waiting for them just over the border in Iran. They’d flown from there to the Caspian Sea and northwest to Rostov. Melissa had wanted to find a hospital in Iran, but Araha had warned that there were too many corrupt Irani officials who might, for a price, arrange for their extradition back to Turkmenistan, since by now they were being sought. She’d worried all through the journey that Ira might at any moment die of internal injuries. But, heavily sedated, he’d slept through the truck and jet rides, all the way to Rostov.

  Nyerza hadn’t seemed worried. He’d accomplished his mission. After all, she thought bitterly, Mendel was back. That was why they’d come to Turkmenistan: to annihilate her son’s personality with the reawakening of a previous incarnation.

  The hospital had been crowded and squalid. X-rays revealed no life-threatening physical trauma or serious internal bleeding in Ira—only a cracked collarbone, a minor concussion, a chipped kneecap, dozens of deep bruises, some broken teeth—and
it was decided to take Ira to somewhere he could be more comfortable. Someplace quiet.

  Now the only sounds were Ira’s raspy breathing, the hissing of a samovar, the sound of men talking with Marcus over their teacups in the next room. None of them had slept much, but the old dervish and Nyerza were already up, talking. And Marcus.

  Marcus.

  Mendel.

  A boy’s voice, a strange man’s words. She could scarcely bear to be around him.

  They lied to me, she thought furiously. They knew what would happen to Marcus. They needed Mendel’s consciousness back fully, and they’d sacrificed her child. They could claim, if they wanted, that Marcus had always been Mendel—that he’d only forgotten it. They could claim that being Marcus had been a kind of amnesia—an amnesia that had simply ended.

  But something had died that day in the cave.

  She brushed some hair from Ira’s eyes; he stirred in his medicated sleep and groaned. Every movement hurt him, even in sleep: He was one great mass of bruises. They’d managed to get some broth down him, and the doctor had given him a vitamin shot. But he couldn’t eat solid food. There was too much facial swelling, too many cracked teeth.

  “My poor, foolish husband,” she murmured. “Why didn’t you stay home?”

  She heard Marcus speaking, in tones measured, thoughtful, and grave, in the next room. All the innocence had been cauterized from his voice.

  She was lucky to have Ira alive. He’d endured only a single day of torture; in many countries, prisoners were tortured over and over again, forced to endure unspeakable cruelties. Strange to think that this wreckage of a man beside her had gotten off lightly.

  How would he digest the experience? she wondered. He was sensitive—no man was more sensitive—but he was tough in a lot of ways, too. His wounded childhood, the confrontation with the demons, the man he’d had to kill that day, the monster on the roof—all this had toughened him. And he had the advantage of Yanan’s teaching; he might have been able to keep some part of himself safe, something to build on. But still . . . look at him!

  The world had been induced to mostly forget the demons, to blur the memory, to distort the truth. What else, she wondered, had been suppressed through the psychic influence of That Certain One throughout the history of humanity? Perhaps some of the demons had invaded before, in one guise or another, and perhaps humanity had been made to forget that time, too.

  A sickness was pervasive in the world—the sickness of humanity’s vanity, its selfishness, its lusts, and its brutalities—and it was worse than ever.

  It could be, she thought, a resonant pang of despair forcing tears from her eyes, that we are losing the battle. That we have lost.

  As she had lost her son.

  The radiator under the window began to hiss, drawing her gaze, as if whispering to her, Look over here.

  She looked out the half-curtained window, at the hard-edged buildings, the contrasting cathedral set among them. The dawn light, shining behind the dome and Byzantine cross, made the Orthodox cathedral seem as if it were cut out of black paper. She watched as the light increased, to grant the cathedral dimension with a patina of rose and gold. The high-rise buildings around it began to seem like mere place holders, incomplete architectural notions; but the church looked permanent, like a fully realized idea.

  She felt a glimmer of hope—until Marcus walked in. “Mel—Mother, how is he?”

  “Sleeping.”

  “Good. Good.” The boy stood awkwardly in the door, looking at her. Looking at her like an adult who wants to help but doesn’t quite know how. Not like a child who needed a hug. And yet what would have helped her would’ve been the child who needed the hug.

  “Best let him sleep,” Melissa said hoarsely. “I’ll watch over him.”

  “Certainly. Good. Yes.” Marcus cleared his throat, then went back into the kitchen.

  She bent over her husband, her face close to his breast, and wept, her head in her hands.

  After a moment, the sound of Ira’s breathing changed, and she felt his hand on her head, stroking her hair, comforting her.

  Ash Valley

  Glyneth felt another twinge and a particular wet warmth and said, “I have to make a stop.”

  “We’re there,” Dickinham responded, as he pulled the hydro Hummer up at a muddy construction site. It was late afternoon, the sky lowering, streamers of mist blurring the edges of the brown, wooden construction trailer at the end of the new gravel drive, where two new roads from the town of Ash Valley converged in a point. For the moment, there was no work being done. The site was vacant. There was an office trailer, along with a couple of inert, mud-spattered earthmovers, a large van, and a chemical toilet outhouse.

  “I’ll just run into that bathroom,” Glyneth said.

  Dickinham glanced at her, as if hesitating to give permission, which she thought strange, and then nodded. She climbed down from the Humvee, slogged through the mud. She glanced toward Ash Valley. There was smoke rising over there. It looked like a major fire, maybe two. Funny, she didn’t hear sirens. But then, they’d closed off the roads to Ash Valley.

  She went into the bright blue-plastic outhouse, with its astringent smell of chemicals, its fruity rot of feces. She locked the door, opened her purse, and found a tampon.

  Normally her period was comforting to her. Though it was the end of her cycle, it meant she could still have children. She wanted that, someday. But today she had the uneasy feeling that it was like a little death inside her.

  It’s just that death seems to’ve overrun this valley, she thought, as she finished and tugged up her jeans. They’d had to drive around two dead deer and a half-dozen dead dogs on the way here.

  She stepped out into the cleaner air, then stopped and looked out at the wet fields. Even here, if she opened herself to it, she could feel the connection to the Earth, to the biosphere, that had brought her into environmental politics—and then, through Professor Paymenz, service to the Circle. A sense of something indefinably precious, and fragile at the same time as being mighty. Her responsibility to protect. So when they’d asked her to take on a false surname, a fake work history, and penetrate West Wind as Stephen’s assistant, she’d said yes, though it meant lying down with dogs.

  Why had Dickinham asked her to come out to this mudhole anyway? Glyneth wondered. She was Stephen’s assistant, not Dickinham’s.

  Slinging her purse strap over her shoulder, Glyneth trudged to the brown trailer and stopped near the door, to look at the van with the military plates parked at the other end. Wasn’t that the van they’d seen in town? She found herself listening to the low, almost whispering voices coming from the trailer. Stealthy voices.

  She moved to crouch under a small screened open window.

  “She sent him a file with background on MK ULTRA, a dozen other projects,” Dickinham was saying. “We just started intercepting her palmer transits, and no one got around to evaluating them till this morning.”

  A murmur from the other man—she couldn’t make out what he was saying.

  “I think she knows about the mind-control aspect, and I got a projection from Winderson just before I came out here. Told him about it. He says to assume it’s our enemies. Assume she knows. That she’s an initiate of some kind . . . one of them.”

  Another murmur.

  Dickinham answering, “No, most of them are protected from that kind of detection, especially if they’re associated with the Conscious Circle.”

  Listening, she shivered with a succession of chills that felt like the beginning of a flu. So now she understood why they’d brought her out here.

  They knew—and they were going to kill her. Feed her to That Certain One.

  She backed away from the window, and, as quietly as she could move in the sucking mud, she returned to the Humvee. No keys. Dickinham had taken them with him.

  She popped the hood and found a confusing array of wires. She located the starter battery and tore it out, glancing at the trailer. N
o movement there. But any moment . . .

  Her mouth felt dry, tasted metallic. She could feel her heart stuttering.

  So this is what real fear is like, Glyneth thought, tasting it, seeing it objectively but not letting herself identify with it too strongly. Trying to stay calm, as conscious as possible.

  She closed the hood—too loud—and hurried, crouching, to the van. It was unlocked but keyless. Trying to get its engine cover open, she cut her fingers, cursed under her breath in frustration. Finally it popped—and she couldn’t find its battery. It was some kind of hybrid engine, and the battery was a huge affair underneath it somewhere.