Demons

by John Shirley

  The two men and the woman bore him down. With inhumanly fast movements of their jaws, they tore red gobbets from his neck and shoulders, clawing bloody gel from one of his eye sockets, cooing and keening and giggling.

  A ripple of sick disorientation went through Glyneth, something beyond terror, and she almost vomited. But that would make too much noise.

  She turned away, looking inside for control of herself.

  Fear, horror—it’s all just internal weather, she reminded herself, the weather of the mind. Let it blow—but don’t let it blow you away.

  She began to splash determinedly through the darkness . . . then stopped, thinking: How many more of them are there, waiting up ahead?

  There was a smell she recognized in the air, too: D17.

  She remembered the gas mask and pulled it over her face, set it for high cleanse, and forced herself to go on—though it was even harder to see now. She brought out the little penlight’s pathetic illumination once more. It felt good to move; it warmed her a little. A dozen steps onward, and then her foot struck an obstruction—a painful one. She bit back a curse and felt under the water. Found a piece of broken pipe, three inches in diameter, maybe a foot and a half long. Instinctively, she picked it up.

  She went on, praying under her breath, then felt a sickening contact on her knee—she froze, afraid one of the madmen was about to bear her down as they had Dickinham. Something solid yet mushy, with bones inside it. Swallowing bile, she pointed the fading penlight beam down and saw the corpse of a Mexican man floating, caught against her leg. He was faceup, eyes glazed, lips dead white. A rat poised on its hind legs on the corpse’s collarbone, like a dog begging, peering up at her. She could see a ragged gash where it had chewed away the flesh of the dead man’s jawline, exposing bone.

  She knew this time she was going to vomit. She got the gas mask off just in time as she splashed frantically away from the corpse, pausing to empty her guts into the water. She found herself laughing bitterly as she forced the gas mask back over her face. Breathing the smell of her own vomit. Hearing the sound of her own harsh breathing in there. At least the mask protected her face from wet, toothy little animals.

  Keep going, keep going. Get out!

  Another forty yards, and the penlight finally gave out. She shook it, fiddled with its switch. “Fuck!”

  She shoved it in a pocket and continued on, feeling her way, thirty, forty, fifty steps, and saw another cylinder of wan light up ahead.

  Glyneth hurried to the light, almost falling in her haste. She stopped abruptly in the opening to the shaft for the manhole. Up above was an open sewer grating. A way out!

  But there were two people between her and the grating—both of them on the ladder.

  There was a blond boy of about thirteen, wearing only his underwear, pale and skinny, whining, weeping, trying to get up the ladder, to get out; blood streamed down his back, his legs. One of the sopping, giggling madmen clung to the rungs below him, his right arm twisted through a rung, his hand clamped to the struggling boy’s ankle. He was a slender, muscular man, perhaps half black, without a shirt, a handmade tattoo on his shoulder: 999. His loose trousers were crowded with pocket zippers. He wore slimy tennis shoes. In his left hand he gripped a clawlike gardening implement, which he’d dug deeply into the boy’s right calf. The wounds where it dug in ripped deeper and deeper as the weeping boy struggled.

  Glyneth made up her mind. She had to get out that way—and she had to help the boy.

  Fighting to keep control of herself, Glyneth hefted the pipe and came at the man from behind, grabbing a rung with her left hand, setting her foot on the lowest to hoist herself up, then bringing the pipe down hard on the back of his head.

  He turned a milky-eyed gaze at her, startled, as blood gushed from his split scalp. He let go of the blood-slick gardening claw and grabbed her firmly by the throat, squeezing. She hit him twice more in the same spot. His eyes seemed to clear for a moment—he gaped at her in confusion, as if trying to remember how he’d come to this—and then he fell onto her, knocking her off the ladder.

  Glyneth yelled as she fell back in the water, the weight of the man pressing her under, his blood curtaining the light away, closing the surface of the water with tightening skeins of red.

  She torqued her body hard to one side, dumping him off, and struggled to her feet, swaying, looking for the boy.

  Who was turning his own milky eyes to her—just as he leapt, snarling, laughing, at her.

  Her scream was cut short as he bore her back into the water, onto the man’s body. The boy gripped her throat, pressing his thumbs into her windpipe. She swung the pipe at his head, quivered with revulsion as it connected, hard, crunching into the boy’s skull.

  Sobbing, she rolled him off her, left him to float facedown in the water. Bubbles seethed up around his head. She let him drown. It was a kindness.

  She climbed the ladder as best she could, though it was awkward holding on to the pipe. She didn’t want to let it go now.

  The light grew brighter; the air a little warmer. Her relief at climbing to the open street, at the base of a streetlight, lasted only till she found that she was in the park square at the center of town, till she realized the warmth was coming from great, sky-licking fires consuming the entire block. She stumbled across the treeless, torn earth of the park, through rolling gusts of smoke. She saw the piles of bodies in the very center of the park and the other bodies being dragged there by the milky-eyed mob, by the shambling, giggling victims of the undiluted, aerial Dirvane 17 spraying that had taken place yesterday and today.

  Till she saw that something squatted in the center of the pile of bodies . . .

  Till she saw the demon.

  7

  Bald Peak Observatory

  “This time, Stephen, you must believe in what you see,” Winderson was saying, his voice reverberating from the observatory’s walls, its metal ceiling. “You won’t be able to go where we want you to go unless you know it’s all real. Your will won’t be forceful enough; it’ll be compromised. It’s all about will, in that place.”

  Stephen shook his head. “I can’t believe in it, not that way. . . .”

  They were sitting together on the metal steps that led up to the telescope. Part of the room was brightly lit, part in deep shadow. They were drinking coffee. Stephen was only pretending to drink his; he was afraid it might be drugged. If they drugged him, he’d lose all judgment of what was real.

  But what Winderson wanted him to believe in . . . no. It was as outrageous as believing that Christ had been resurrected, that “the Buddhas are everywhere, trying to help us, though they are long dead.”

  Because if the world Winderson wanted him to visit was real, was more than a sort of psychic shadow, then the demons might’ve been real.

  “He must be shown,” Latilla said, crossing the big, echoing room.

  She must’ve opened the door, Stephen thought, but he hadn’t seen her come in.

  “I don’t want to ruin him—” Winderson glanced at Stephen, modified the demurral “—pile on too much too soon. He’s got the gift, but he’s fragile.”

  “The alignment is tonight. The sacrifice has been made. We have only till exactly ten P.M. He is our only retriever.”

  As Latilla came toward them, crossing the canvas tarp that someone had laid over the floor, Stephen saw she was strangely dressed. She wore a robe of some kind—black, with white symbols sewn on it. Runes, maybe. And she was barefoot. She wore a silver circlet, like a metallic headband with a pentagram, pointing downward at the front. Within the pentagram was that familiar rune.

  Then another figure came from the shadows—a man in the uniform of a U.S. Army general. But he, too, wore a circlet like Latilla’s around his head. He was barefoot, too. A military uniform, with braid and brass—but he was barefoot. It looked ludicrous, really.

  These people, Stephen decided, are a little crazy. Definitely, don’t drink the coffee.

  “Stephe
n, this is General Maseck,” Winderson said, taking off his shoes. “General, Stephen Isquerat.”

  The general nodded brusquely. He was a gangly man, with a neck slightly too long, a pronounced Adam’s apple, a red mouth so pinched it seemed buttoned shut, a sharp nose, and angry blue eyes that stared at Stephen as if to challenge him to laugh at his bare feet. Stephen noticed they were pale, bony feet.

  “We lost touch with Dickinham,” Maseck said, going to a coffee urn set up on a table near the bottom of the stairs.

  “He’s dead,” Latilla said blandly. She went to the coffee urn but didn’t take a cup. Instead she took a handful of sugar packets, tore them open with her teeth, and dumped the sugar in her mouth.

  Stephen watched her, fascinated. She looked back, he thought, like a snake watching a mouse.

  What had she said about Dickinham? He’s dead? She hadn’t said, He was killed in a car accident. Or whatever. She just said that he was dead. As if it weren’t particularly unexpected.

  Stephen glanced at the door, wondering if he was so caught up in this thing now that he couldn’t get out.

  But there was Jonquil to think of. She was counting on him.

  Barefoot now, Winderson stood up, looking at Latilla. “Are you sure Dickinham is dead, mistress?”

  “Yes. I have been so informed. He rather carelessly fell afoul of some of the general’s pets. You must all work harder on internal communication.”

  Mistress? Stephen thought. Her whole manner of speaking had changed. The odd, affected character she’d played earlier seemed to have vanished. She seemed imperious now—despite eating handfuls of sugar—and very much in charge, as if she had dropped some kind of pretense. She was a sorceress and a queen.

  Maseck’s scowl deepened. “They are not my pets. . . .” He hesitated, seemed to realize he was speaking out of turn. “Mistress, they are a valid experiment.”

  “General,” Winderson said. He caught Maseck’s eye.

  Maseck glanced at Stephen and shrugged, then sipped his coffee. “What is it, then, we’re going to attempt tonight?”

  “There will be no attempt,” Latilla said, swallowing sugar. “There will be a doing. This will be accomplished.”

  “Yes,” Winderson said.

  “Yes,” the general said.

  “Uh . . . is—is my assistant around?” Stephen asked. “Glyneth?” He craved someone he could relate to.

  “Why do you ask about her?” Latilla said, her tone very careful, as she watched him.

  She was still an old woman in an unflattering hairdo, but Stephen found he couldn’t think of her as an old woman anymore. “Um—well she is, after all, my assistant,” Stephen said, not understanding why he had to defend his question.

  “Yes, so she is,” Winderson said, smiling at him. “But, uh . . . we’re all the assistant you’ll need tonight, Stephen. And remember—Jonquil is counting on you. Now, if you’ll come over here.”

  “Has the circle been consecrated properly?” Latilla asked, her voice harsh.

  “Yes, mistress,” Maseck said gruffly, as he drew the tarp back, exposing a huge pentagram recently inlaid into the floor in copper strips. The figure was about forty feet across. There were black runes within each point, and in the center was the hook-bottomed cross Stephen had seen before.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Stephen murmured under his breath.

  Latilla shot him a look that made him think of a reptile spitting poison. “Say no names, for whatever reason, that will interfere with the summoning.” Her voice had become almost a croak.

  Stephen found himself staring at the door. Winderson noticed and, all avuncular, took Stephen’s arm. “Right over here . . . stand at this point, Stevie. Oh, and take off your shoes. Helps the energies pass through.”

  Stephen hesitated. He felt Latilla looking at him. It was as if she were leaning against him with all her physical weight, though she was thirty feet away. “Take them off,” she echoed. Her voice had changed again; lower now, more guttural.

  Stephen felt weak in the knees and sank to the floor, began taking off his shoes, though he hadn’t made up his mind to do it.

  There was a pressure in his head, a squeezing.

  H. D. came in, then, taking off his shoes at the door. He was wearing a business suit; and he stripped off the gray jacket as he came, tossing it to one side. Barefoot in an Armani suit, he crossed to one of the points.

  Five people for five points.

  Stephen felt a wrongness that couldn’t be defined or quantified.

  “He’s not in the proper state,” Latilla said, glowering at him. Her voice was an inhuman squawk now—the sound of a hinge being torn off with a crowbar.

  “Stephen,” Winderson said gently, “just relax. We’re here to help humanity. To set an example—make everyone stronger, more efficient. Open up the world to a new kind of power. It’s just the latest innovation, that’s all it is.”

  Looking at the pentagram, Stephen thought: No—this has to be something ancient.

  “You’re going to feel terrific in a moment. You’re going to feel right. You’ll know you’re right! Remember, Stephen—the big picture. Something you see from the top of the ladder. It may seem a strange ladder, but this really is the secret of climbing it. Trust me, Stephen. And don’t forget—it’s going to save Jonquil.”

  Stephen took a deep breath.

  See the big picture.

  Help Jonquil.

  He nodded. “Let’s do it. I’ll do what I need to do, to help Jonquil. Whatever you need me to do.”

  Though Latilla was evidently some kind of priestess, seeming more than ever in charge, it was Winderson who began to chant in some language Stephen had never heard before. It had a strangely familiar ring to it, though. As if he’d heard it sometime, and had forgotten it. And yet . . .

  Latilla seemed to be doing something. Something he’d never seen anyone do before. She was standing within her point of the pentagram, her arms crossed over her chest, and her head was rolling in a slow circle on her neck. Her whole body was going rigid, veins standing out on her forehead, her neck. The others were watching her, but not Winderson. She shuddered and made a long slow hissing sound.

  Then something began to form in the air over the pentagram. Something tenebrous, agitated within itself like a swarm of flies. Something that looked hungrily out at them.

  Rostov, Russia

  On the other side of the world . . .

  Nine of them: holding hands at each point of the nine-pointed figure in the floor of the chamber, the grotto carved into naked rock, under the unknowing city. The smell of burning incense cloyed the room; candles guttered and blew in the niches; a charged breeze stirred Ira’s hair, though there should have been no wind here.

  Ira felt as if he were only now waking up from the nightmare. The humiliation, the beatings in a cold cubicle under a searing lightbulb, had been the culmination of a dark journey he’d been on without knowing it. Now in this dim, rocky chamber, in meditative communion with the others, he felt a connection to something that set him above all doubts, all misgivings. He had opened, inside himself, in a way he had never opened before, opened a door he hadn’t known was there, because he had nothing to lose. He’d already lost everything in the torture chamber. He didn’t care what he risked, now, by opening himself utterly to this higher vibration. He understood what had happened to Marcus, and it was all right.

  Now, he realized, they were all once more in place; he was where he should be. He was doing the appropriate step in the dance of life, and the music was sweet within him. He felt the bottled-up rage clearing away, like something dank and noisome drying under a sudden ray of sunlight.

  This cell of the circle had tried more than once; Marcus had had some trouble connecting, even though he was more than Marcus now. Melissa, too, had been distracted, her anger and uncertainty tormenting her: inner torturers. But Marcus had gone into a deep trance of some kind. Now, he had really connected with the higher, and with the white-bear
ded old priest and Araha and Yanan, as if to help them cross some gap, some interval.

  With Melissa and Marcus and Ira at last just where they should be, the darkness lifted.

  The walls began to shine. And something began to appear over the figure on the floor. Summoned, sustained there, by all of them. A living community of light: the Gold in the Urn. And then a man—conveyed by the Gold from the far side of Death.

  Bald Peak Observatory

  Stephen felt a tugging from Latilla. She stood opposite him, and she was looking at him, her head skewed so far to one side it looked as if she had broken her neck. She made a come-here gesture, and he found himself walking toward her, into the face in the center of the pentagram.