by John Shirley
She hesitated, wondering if she should crash the van into the giant’s legs. Useless. Try to find some of the local people, get them out to safety.
Then the demon spotted her—and it bent down, smashed the van with its fist, crumpling the roof and sending it rolling into the ditch.
Stephen—and the demon—shook the world with a roar of rage.
There she was again, mocking him! This time she wouldn’t scurry away into the night! He could feel the children! And the seeds of the new world inside him roared in gleeful agreement, squirming in a wash of dark energy.
The Stephen thing reached down for her.
“Hiya, boy kid.”
Stephen felt himself shriveling up, going somewhere else, somewhere within . . .
He looked around. Where was he now?
He was in a big empty room made out of leather. He sat on the floor, panting, shaking from the sudden disengagement.
It was a round room with irregularly curved walls, two high windows shaped like eyes, a sort of grate shaped like a partly opened, fanged mouth. The light came from the eyes and mouth, falling from those three sources across the man sitting on the floor, opposite him, leaning back against the leathery wall with a sad smile on his face.
Boy kid.
Something his father had always called him.
His father: wearing the clothes he’d worn when he’d taken his son fishing: the same old flak jacket and jeans and hip boots. His father with the sagging face, the humorous brown eyes, the tousle of receding, curly gray hair.
“Dad?”
“Yep. It’s me.”
Stephen looked down at himself. He could see his hands now, his body. He was naked but embodied. And it was the body of a boy. “Where are we? How’d you get here?”
“We’re not where we seem to be. What you see is a construction that represents reality somewhat symbolically. Our spirits have been transported to a neutral bubble in astral space. Amateurish cartooning on my part, really. I created it. I can’t sustain it long. The Circle has called me. Somewhere in Russia, those who could get together called me. They pulled me from where I wandered, contacted me through the Gold in the Urn. Those who’ve gone on before, and who try to help us as they might, managed to pull together enough power to bring me here to talk to you, to give you a choice.”
“But this place . . .” Then, looking around, it struck Stephen: He was inside a big, hollowed-out head. And he recognized the shape: It was the head of the demon.
“Yes, the demon you’ve inhabited.”
“He is a god!” Stephen shouted, springing to his feet.
“So they tell you. It’s the apotheosis of irony, really, to call that ludicrous, bloated, murderous demon a god. And they’re telling you that the carnage you have seen all around him is just an illusion—and if you won’t believe that, then next they’ll lead you to believe the carnage is justified. You’re not in a rational state—you haven’t been since that girl took you into her bed. You were seduced, by her and Winderson both. Do you know, Stephen, how Winderson came to be indebted to me?”
“What?” Stephen felt drunk. “How?” Stoned and dizzy and half numb. His mind, he supposed, was shutting down. He’d had to deal with far too much.
“I’ll tell you: He’d date-raped a girl when we were in college. He drugged her with that date-rape drug they had back then. He drugged her and he raped her and then, in his drunkenness, he called in two of his friends and he let them rape her. Well, the girl told a confused story about the whole thing. He was arrested—and he had a lot to lose. He would’ve gone to jail. He was my roommate and he could be very likable. At the time he made it sound as if he’d just gone a little wrong, and it was going to ruin his life.
“I didn’t have some great destiny ahead of me as a leader of my father’s corporation. I had no other friends, but I had a weakness, a need to sacrifice myself, so that others would like me. So I said I’d take the rap. I’d say I drugged her as a prank—and that he hadn’t known she was drugged. That he left, didn’t know the others took her, later. All lies. And I got a suspended sentence—the Windersons pulled some strings. But the university threw me out, naturally.
“I got into another school—again, with the Windersons’ help—and eventually I became a schoolteacher.
“But he did it, Stephen. He did those things to that girl—not me. What sort of person would do that, hm? Ask yourself that, boy kid. Dale Winderson’s that cold, and more. He’s sacrificed a town full of people because he believes the power generated here will give him immortality and his own little cosmos to play around in. It’s their fantasy, foisted on them by the dark puppeteer who squats on his Saturnian throne.”
“I . . . you aren’t really my father. This is some kind of test.”
“I really am your father. I’m a spirit, now, Stephen—but just as real as I was in material life. I had the chance to develop my being, once dead, in a certain place I cannot describe, and the circle brought me here to reason with you. To tell you that if you struggle to control the demon, you can succeed. If you refuse to identify with his desires, his lusts, you can control him . . . but it means reaching in and taking the Pearl out—that node of pure will. Sacrificing it—the real sacrifice that should be made. Show the Pearl to them, Stephen. The four members of the Undercurrent you know—they arranged this so they wouldn’t have to see it directly. Funny how here, the men possess demons and not vice versa. But that’s always been the secret.”
The father stood up, walked over to his son, and put his hands on the boy’s shoulders. “You’re going to have to give up a great deal. You’ll have to accept the pain of knowing what you’ve done. It’s going to hurt. But it’ll be worth it.”
Stephen felt like a little boy, again—sobbing out an explanation to his father. Here, he was only the small person at the center of himself—the undeveloped essence of himself . . . still a child. “But Jonquil—I have to save her!”
“Uh-huh. Son, you know inside somewhere that the hospital was a setup. It’s a real hospital, but everything you saw there was theater. The nurse was an actor. That girl isn’t sick, Stephen. Right now she’s joining the others in the observatory. Why do you think you’ve been hearing her, seeing her? She’s well, she’s strong—and she’s a monster, Stephen.
“They’re using you. They want to feed on the whole world. Their kind have been feeding on the world like parasites for a long time now. They want to swallow it whole. Like they’ve swallowed you.”
“Dad, I haven’t got the strength to fight it!”
“Yes, you do,” Stephen’s father said, taking his son in his arms. “Yes, you do. Just be willing to sacrifice everything. The truth is, you have nothing to lose. Jump that abyss, son. Faith will carry you over it.”
“I don’t have any goddamn faith!”
“Do you trust me? You sometimes did when I was alive.”
Stephen wept onto his father’s shoulder. He knew it was really him. He could feel it: This was really, authentically, palpably his father. “Yes . . . yes I do.”
“Then trust me in this. You can take command. . . .” Stephen’s father hesitated, looking at the light coming through the windows. He cocked his head as if listening. Then he nodded. “It seems I have to go now. We’ve used up all that we’ve paid for—all the grace we had, to hold your mind in this place. We got you here between two blinks of an eye, Stephen. When I let you go back, you’ll be on your way to kill someone. And you don’t have to kill her, Stephen. In less than a minute the great antibirth will happen—and those living appetites will burst into the world, through you. All at once, they’ll explode out of the demon.
“But try to remember. Remember yourself, remember me—and you will be able to choose. In order to choose, you must see that you are inside a monster—and you must wake up inside it.
“Good-bye, son. See you again sometime.” His father kissed his cheek.
“Don’t go!”
But he was gone, and the place d
issolved around Stephen, becoming fibrous, rotting away like an old jack-o’-lantern. Dissolving . . .
Stephen was again standing up to his ankles in corpses, towering over the ruins of a small town, shaking his fists at the sky—and bending to tear a young female human from the little gray vehicle.
The van rolled onto its roof. Glyneth crawled out through the half-crumpled window frame, not caring that edges of broken glass were raking her sides, carving strips of skin away. The van was on fire, and she could feel the pressure of an imminent explosion building inside it. She could smell the gas fumes. She didn’t want to burn to death here. Better to let the monster tear her apart.
She managed to squirm clear, got to her feet, and took a few steps—when the explosion smashed her down again. The wind knocked out of her, she lay shaking in the mud beside the road. Flames danced along the frame of a small red-painted tricycle lying on its side nearby. She could see the crumpled child who went with the tricycle lying in the yard, facedown in mud, quite obviously dead.
She began to pray again, feeling as if she were praying into a void because God seemed absent from all creation.
“Great Organizer, Christ and Buddha, forgive me my surrender to despair . . . lift me up. . . .”
She looked up to see the demon squatting, about to take her into his claws. It was squatting carefully, out of deference to the great obscene hemisphere of its swarming belly. Just a dozen yards from her, that swollen sac—and through its translucent skin she could see faces leering at her in sickening delight.
“Stephen!” she shouted at it, though she knew it was useless. “Stephen, wake up!”
The great taloned leather hand reached for her. She thought absurdly of King Kong and Fay Wray, and laughed harshly at the death that she was going to have.
But—was it toying with her?—the demon hesitated.
She saw a sort of clearing in its eyes—it seemed to see her, as if for the first time. To recognize her.
She heard a voice rumble from deep inside it.
“Glyneth . . . pray . . . for me . . .”
She knelt, closed her eyes, and prayed—with all her being. She had nothing to lose.
Stephen struggled to hold himself back. Watching Glyneth, he could see the prayer as a kind of emanation, a living energy.
And then something carried by the prayer, like water carried in cupped hands, washed over him, and he knew with a crystallized inner certainty: Winderson and Jonquil had been lying to him.
And he had been lying to himself. He had killed a good man—the Reverend Anthony—with his own hands. And he had helped them do all this to Ash Valley. He saw himself, then, as he was, within the demon—the ragged, mewling face at the other end of the mountain he’d glimpsed that day.
No. That wasn’t going to be the way of it. He didn’t have to do any of this.
But a thousand roars of fury shook him—he felt them boiling up inside. They sensed his change of heart; they would overtake him. The demonic offspring would burst free—
He straightened up, and very deliberately, using his claws, tore into his own middle, just above the belly, and wrenched the Black Pearl free.
Its energies removed, that which kept the demonic colony in this world collapsed.
Glyneth felt something change, felt it in the air. There was a sense of unseen rejoicing. The Gold was rejoicing, somewhere.
She stood, in time to see the demon stumbling backward, falling to its knees, swaying there, one hand holding the strobing black light of the Pearl, the other clutching at the wound in its belly.
From which thousands of demons now erupted. Birthed into the world.
We failed—the Circle failed! she thought, despairing.
The giant demon hitched itself backward and leaned on a house that creaked and cracked under its weight, as the Black Pearl vanished from its talons. And it looked with confused fascination as the mass birthing rippled and roared over the ravaged park. Demons hopping, leaping, slashing, whirling—demons birthed but lost without the Black Pearl.
The newborn demons surged outward in a wet squirming gray-green mass, almost like a swarm of bees, but each one big as a man, or bigger. The two-story-high mass writhed as the demons clawed at whatever was nearest . . . and then focused their frustrated attention on the giant who’d birthed them. Thousands of demons turned, as one, against the giant demon, coming at it in ravenous waves, like the charge of an army. The giant squealed in rage as they attacked it like piranha, all of them at once, so that its shredded flesh sprayed into the air from their thousands of gnashing jaws, slashing claws. When it was reduced to a shell, a smoking miasma, they hesitated, blinking.
And turned on one another.
Without the correct completion of the ritual—without the Pearl’s energies that would have disseminated into each of them—they had no power to attack the world of men. They turned in murderous wrath on each other, demon consuming demon.
Glyneth watched in frozen revulsion as the seething diabolic swarm began to implode, each vanishing into the other.
Until the army of demons seemed to drain away into itself, the squealing mass shrinking as if it were falling from a great height, to vanish to a great depth. They were completing—through rage and carnage—the vast abortion of a thousand, thousand demons . . . who were sucked one into another and then into the hole in space from which they’d come, drawn away into the rift in probability with the sound of a sudden gigantic indrawn breath. And a single collective wail of despair.
Where, though . . .
Where was Stephen?
Bald Peak Observatory
Jonquil walked out of the shadows toward the group arranged around the pentagram. She was drawn there in spite of herself. She knew she should run. She couldn’t.
In the center of the room, the throng of black nodes had coalesced around Stephen and compressed into his hands.
Latilla screamed. In Stephen’s hands lay the Black Pearl.
“No—not here! In the god! It must be inside the god! It must feed the young!” she cried out, backpedaling frantically away from him.
The onyx sphere in his hands was exactly as big as the Gold in the Urn had been when first released—but it was the Gold’s opposite. Its black light seemed to summon every gaze in the room. It demanded their attention. They felt themselves drawn to stare into it.
Jonquil walked toward the Black Pearl. So did Winderson, Harrison Deane, and the general and Latilla. They tried not to, but they couldn’t help themselves. They moved like sleepwalkers.
As awareness returned to him, Stephen didn’t look at the object he held in his hands. He felt a guidance from somewhere, and he knew what to do. He stared over their heads. He was particularly careful not to look at Jonquil, especially when she begged, “Stephen—take it away!”
He shook his head firmly, and he waited.
Waited.
Medusa.
They stared into the Black Pearl . . . and saw themselves in it. Saw themselves reflected in it. It was a spherical black mirror.
In it, they saw themselves as they really were; they saw their naked souls.
They screamed.
Still, they were drawn to approach it, and, one by one, they put their hands on it.
Then they were gone.
Their bodies fell to the floor—Winderson, H. D., Latilla, the General, Jonquil—staring, breathing . . . empty. Their minds, their essences, what shreds of soul they had, had all been drawn into the Black Pearl.
Out of the corner of his eye, Stephen saw their faces writhing in fish-eye distortion within the Pearl. He felt himself tugged to look closer . . . and forced himself to look at the ceiling.
The telescope.
He heard a gentle whispering from within himself. He walked to the metal stairs, and up the clanking flights to the telescope. Still looking away, using only his peripheral vision, he pressed the Black Pearl against the lens of the modified telescope. It was sucked up, like a bubble going backward into a
bubble pipe, vanishing into it. There was a burst of dark energy at the other end of the telescope as a screaming, living substance blasted away into space. He looked to see where the telescope was pointed: the moon.
He shuddered, suddenly so weak he was near collapse. He wanted to get away from here.
But first he climbed down to the bodies lying around the pentagram. They were alive but truly empty. Comatose. Vegetative. They would live out their lives, silently decaying in a mental hospital.
He looked around and found a tool closet. In it were a hammer and chisel, and he took them back to the stairs. He carried the tools up to the telescope, and smashed it as well as he might.