by John Shirley
Into ecstasy.
A dark ecstasy, a nightmarish glory that seemed to lift him into the air with sheer rushing delight. It was sexual, and more than sexual: rapture and a thundering cascade of megalomania. He felt as if the rush were lifting him off the floor. It was like his charged blood was itself straining toward the ceiling and carrying him up with it.
“Ahhhh. . . . Jonquilll,” he heard himself say quite uncontrollably.
He saw her then—Jonquil floating before him, naked, arms open, lips parted, labia parted, breasts in a slow-motion weightless dance. “Stephen!”
The two of them were floating—and he realized with a cracked joy that he was staring down at the others, that he was levitating ten feet above the center of the pentagram. Some part of his mind registered distantly that not one of those watching him seemed in the least surprised.
He reached for her, but the swarming in the air around him thickened and he could see nothing but a tornado of black dots, each one embodying some intense earthly desire squeezed into a throbbing mote.
He was hoisted to an unknown center point, felt himself locked to some kind of axis through the engine of energies lifting him. He could feel that axis—almost as an axle, a long rod connected to the infinite fires of all chaos—going right through him, penetrating him under the sternum, pinning him in space. He could feel it rotating inside him, a spike of energy that burned as bright and hot as an acetylene torch.
It was unbearable. He screamed—but it was a scream that expressed joy as much as horror, changing from one to the other from split second to split second.
His whole body shook with waves radiating outward from that central axis, like seismic waves rippling flesh and bone, cracking joints. Then he felt the now-familiar wrenching and wailed to know he was being pulled out of himself.
Crashing down—and up—through the surface of the seaof energy again, flying through living symbols, membranes of molten metal, then finding himself in the meta-landscape he’d seen before, with more of the mountain peaks like the one he’d traversed: a mountain range of interlocked preconceived ideas that here became solids.
The sky was restlessly busy with those detached, impossibly whirling airplane propellers that were spinning symbols—were they spinning or just in more than one place at the same time?—iron crosses or reverse swastikas or shifting geometrical shapes, each with its own feeling axis.
He realized he had come here through one of the living symbols, as if it were a portal. He felt himself drawn to another, unable to hold back from it. Once he drew close, there was an inexorable suction that pulled him in . . .
. . . so that he passed into yet another subplane that extended from the previous one. It was a sunless world without ground; there was nothing but sky—no reference for upor down—and an infinite field of what looked at first likeluminous, violently contending leafless uprooted trees, their branches and roots constantly whipping at one another, wrestling, intertwining to seek a grip. Never in cooperation, only in contest; tearing, their movements whippingly frantic so that they appeared to fast-forward in the cinema of his mind’s eye. They weren’t plants; they weren’t organisms. They were more like enormous thrashing branchworks of sentient, discrete energy, closer to sustained lightning than to creatures of matter, and they filled a world that was otherwise a blue, seething mist, a world without ground, empty except for these contending organisms of pure will.
A relentless natural selection held sway here, so that some grew while others diminished; and one in particular was overtaking the others around it, using the energy of each overwhelmed enemy to take on two more.
Stephen understood somehow that these were living beings of his own universe, seen as if through a metaphysical X-ray device, exposing their hidden psyches.
He found himself drawn to the largest of these, and one of its seeking tendrils seemed to sense him. It lashed out, entwined him, and pulled him screaming soundlessly into its crackling core.
And he became one with it. He was it—and he understood it from within. Understood all these beings: They were egos, their minds primitive, their desires exquisite and always uppermost. Their substance was defined by desire. Each branch was a desire, sustained for a moment, satisfying itself as bestit could, receding for another moment, so that each raking branch of desire appeared and vanished in a flicker, reaching out, grabbing, taking, sinking back—all happening so fast that the afterimage of one lingered while the next appeared. Thus the tree effect: the distorted, hungry, bushiness of raging forks of energy.
Now in the midst of the growing creature he felt a terrible, shattering exaltation that nearly consumed his identity as he grew with stolen life. Suddenly he was overwhelmed and lost himself in the life force, the ego of the thing he was occupying. And he felt the raging crackle of its yearnings as his own, as distinct wants, each reaching for an orgasmic culmination in the human scenes that rushed flashing by. He felt sex become rape and ejaculation; he felt hunger becoming theft and gorging; he felt the domination of others and then their destruction; he felt anger becoming violence; he flashed on himself fulfilling all of this in the human world, in people: a young man in a gang rape of a thirteen-year-old girl, ravaging her sleeping innocence; a fat man at his overladen table; a neurotic teacher screaming at a young child, “You’re a moron!”; an angry girl gangster shooting another girl in the head. He was all of them! He was fucking! He was biting down! He was crushing! He was killing!
But there was another, growing sensation. That he—the being he had become—was itself being consumed. Was itself about to be swallowed by something else from some other place. His pure desire had made it just the right flavor, the perfect sustenance for That Certain One.
So the thing Stephen had become was itself swallowed and blasted within this other something. Propelled, like a nutrient in a man’s bloodstream used for some specific purpose, into a subdimensional bowel . . . into yet another vessel.
Now he was in the human world again, but he wasn’t there as a human. He had entered a far more powerful vessel. But he had entered the continuum for traveling they called a street. Someplace Stephen vaguely recollected—but who was Stephen?
To one side were rows of big boxes, used for storing goods to be bartered for a currency—they called them shops. There were vehicles parked in the street—combustion-powered vehicles on black wheels. The name “Ash Valley” came into his mind. There was an open space around him, what they called a park. Now it was occupied by hundreds of wretched, poison-maddened souls, capering with milky eyes and flailing arms around a mound of their own dead. And squatting within it was . . .
Stephen.
Or—whoever he was. Hadn’t he been Stephen? They were dancing around him as he sat on a throne contrived of a shattered, burnt-out car among the heaps of tangled, torn corpses, like a guru sitting amid offerings of flowers. The bodies had gone all purplish and green and red like flowers; little fires burned here and there among them. How gorgeous! What thunderous music he heard in the contemplation of it!
“HA-HA-HAAAAAA!”
He laughed, rocking with delight, slapping his knees with his leathery hands.
Hands! Great, dark, clawed hands! Yes, now he had a body! Humanoid but four-armed, with serrated teeth in great snapping jaws, human eyes, twice the size of any of these little creatures capering around him . . . what was it they called his kind? A Gnasher? Nonsense—he was a spirit prince! A prince in the court of That Certain One, a great power, a reigning principality. See how the spark-vessels danced around him!
He leapt to his taloned feet and danced, himself, kicking the heads from corpses in his unbridled delight—a dance of triumph, victory over these underlings, with a world of his own to rule! They had given him this world in exchange for the power that would eat them alive. Ho, their excellent mistake, the delicious jest: thinking that they would consume it while it consumed them!
And now he was here, and it all belonged to him!
Then he saw
one of them who was not one of his servants. He sensed that her mind was free from the poison and from That Certain One. She wore a mask to protect her from the toxins that his allies had spread over these others to inflame their worst instincts and destroy their higher reasoning. The substance that soon would coat, would transform, the entire world. She had protected herself from it!
In a rage of frustration, he bounded toward her . . . saw her stumble back and raise her arms over her head in protective reflex and despair.
In some flickering back room of his mind, another small frightened self shouted weakly, No! That’s Glyneth! Don’t hurt her!
But it was a small distant voice, lost in his roar of murderous delight.
Glyneth had twice tried to escape from the riotous square, the shattered park, the demon presiding over this Hell on Earth—and twice the armed men in gas masks, blocking the side streets with their vans, had driven her back, pointing their military-issue .45 automatics.
She’d had to continue moving to keep from being borne down by the teeming, milky-eyed victims of D17 who shambled through the park. Some were like people in the throes of a nervous breakdown, walking around wailing, pounding their heads. Others were like people who’d flipped into a killing rage, stalking through a house or business, shooting anyone in sight. Still others were dull, robotic, as they dragged the dead to the heap in the center of the carved-up park.
Thirty feet in front of her, a man was raping the body of another man; then he collapsed, a corpse himself, atop the first. Other men were copulating with living and dead women in the reeking, pallid heap of disarrayed bodies.
She looked around now for a house she might break into—a place where she might find shelter—or for a way out past the men in the gas masks, the men carrying electronic clipboards and digital video cams. But the houses were all burning or loud with screaming, smashing people. Then a big Indian guy came staggering toward her. She turned to run—and saw the demon coming toward her. The Indian stopped in his tracks, seeming to listen to some inner voice, then he began to drag a dead body toward the great heap in the park.
Till now the demon had remained still, as if it were meditating; it had taken no notice of her. She had walked around under its baleful gaze like a rabbit creeping past a dozing hawk.
But suddenly the demon woke from the strange stupor that had held it, leapt to its feet, and capered about—and then it spotted her. It took a step toward her.
She knew there was no running from it. She fell to her knees and began the inward prayer.
Then she felt a hand on her shoulder and looked up to see a man standing at her side. His face was unseeable: His head was caught up in a globe of fire.
After a moment she realized that he wore a bubble-shaped helmet and that the fire was the reflection of the burning buildings.
She turned and saw that the demon was hesitating.
She heard an amplified voice booming from the man’s bubble helmet. “Every hour has been the hour of Judgment; every day has always been Judgment Day! And now the day shows itself for what it is! I am here to witness, Lord the Christ! In the name of the Annointed, I witness!” She recognized his voice: the street preacher she’d seen that day in the park.
“You, sir! It is you, who stays the demon’s hand now!” Reverend Anthony boomed. “The man within the shell! Let the actual man rise up! Let him take command of the demon as a horseman rides a horse! I call on Christ and his apostles to give him the strength! I give him my life, Lord—to witness thy truth!”
What had stopped him? Stephen—the semi-Stephen, the demi-demon—wrestled inwardly with the aversion, the sudden visceral need to recoil from the solemnity in the shape of the man standing behind the woman he’d intended to kill and eat.
He took another step toward this peculiar, shouting little man, but when the figure in the bubble helmet blocked his way, babbling his eccentric invocations, Stephen found himself rooted to the spot as if part of him were recoiling, another part pulling forward, each part canceling the other so he couldn’t move at all.
The frustration built volcanically inside him till he tore free, erupting into motion.
Lunging at the man, he gripped him by the throat, smashing his helmet with his free hand, making glass fly—then blood as he squeezed the man’s throat till his head exploded—the little man praying all the while.
And it was as if dying was this human’s greatest weapon against the thing Stephen had become. Stephen felt a kind of back-blast from that death; it ripped into him: a sudden freeing of pure spirit. Stephen/not Stephen recoiled in horror. Spirit was what the demon kind craved, yet they could tolerate only the sparks, and even those they could consume only briefly. But this—it was like expecting a small flame and getting an all-consuming fireball.
Stephen recoiled within the demon more with each second, withdrawing from it even as it leapt over the girl’s head, forgetting her in its anguish, clawing at itself, running toward the men in gas masks—the men standing by their vans in the side streets. It charged, roaring into them, ripping and tearing. Surely the fire could be put out with the blood of mortals. Three of them fell, and still the demon felt no better: Their blood could not cool its misery.
Panicking, it turned and ran on all fours like a loping wolf back to the great stinking heap of corpses, to climb and burrow into it. Then the demon was hidden, curled up like a fetus, and Stephen at last was able to wrench himself free.
He found himself falling upward through a crackle of energy, to emerge from a whirling portal into the world of floating mountains and sentient mist.
Seeing Reverend Anthony killed, crushed in the demon’shands, Glyneth fell to her knees to pray for him and for forgiveness. She had allowed the evangelist to sacrifice himselffor her. Her gas mask was saturated and she coughed as a billow of greasy smoke drifted over her. The demon, seeming onfire from within, had leapt over her to the military intelligence men blocking the side street. She had looked awayfrom what the demon did to them—but she looked again when the demon ran back to the mound of corpses, to burrow itself away.
Gagging and coughing, she got up and sprinted toward the side street. She had to jump over dying people as she went—ordinary people, hairdressers and policemen and teenagers and grocers and nurses, all succumbing to the final effects of Dirvane 17.
The event had onionskin layers: an experiment with pesticides was actually a military intelligence experiment; the military experiment was actually the first stage of a mass human sacrifice; another kind of summoning.
From a Professor Shephard, Paymenz had learned that certain members of military intelligence were also members of the Undercurrent: survivors of those who’d summoned the demons nine years before.
And here was the fruit of it: men, women, and children crawling, clawing like rabid animals, dying.
She ran past one of the men who’d perpetrated this—himself dying, torn in half.
She mouthed, I’m sorry, because not even such a man should die that way, and, slipping on his blood, she fell, whimpering. And breathing hard—her filter was almost used up. In a minute or two she’d be breathing D17.
Oh, God, she could become one of those people: the white-eyed shamblers. Ex-people. Pitiful and murderous.
She got up and ran full tilt, dodged a clutching hand that thrust from the cab of an overturned fire truck, just glimpsing the milky-eyed giggling face that went with it.
She ran, hearing her own breath coming harder and harsher in the gas mask, the goggles steaming up, blurring . . . and then she saw the van. A silver-gray van, seemingly deserted.
It was intact, with a door standing open. Cautiously, she looked inside. No one there. And no other gas masks. But the keys were in it!
Chest tightening with hot wires as the gas mask’s overtaxed filter began to shut down, she climbed in, closed the doors, made sure the windows were shut, turned on the engine—and spotted a switch on an unfamiliar cylindrical dash mechanism labeled INTERNAL AIR CLEANSE.
She nodded to herself. This van belonged to the Pentagon experimental team; they’d have that kind of accessory. But it’d take time to work.
She hit the switch, coughing as the air came thinner and thinner through her mask, and put the car in gear, roared off down the road.
Ahead, in the center of the street, a round-faced middle-aged woman in a yellow knit pantsuit—the top of it torn half away, exposing her bloodied breasts—was weaving along, tearing out handfuls of her hair as she went, her eyes flat white, her lips foaming red. Alone in the midst of the street, in profound distress and beyond help, she seemed to represent all Ash Valley’s victims. She was probably someone’s mother, Glyneth thought, and tears began to flow. She had to suppress an impulse to run the woman down just to end her misery. Instead she veered the van around her and kept on toward the edge of town.