Demons (10 page)

In our underground lair, I sipped my vile coffee; I looked at Nyerza sidelong, now and then, and at Melissa. Though they weren’t holding hands, I thought, with a stabbing pang:
They are lovers
.
She is his.

And I told myself:
He’s a great man, he deserves her. I don’t.

It didn’t help.

That’s when Mendel came in carrying a sheaf of printouts. He laid them with trembling hands in front of Paymenz, who seemed surprised himself at Mendel’s state.

“Are you quite all right, Monsignor Mendel?” Paymenz asked. This was the first and only time I heard him called monsignor, and it was news to me.

“I . . . have seen something . . . a bit of personal precognition . . . how things will end with me, at least, with my embodiment, and it is—it is not something I wish to discuss. But we have much else to discuss: The demonic declamation that you recorded from the television appears to be in a language related both to proto-Sumerian and the most ancient language associated with Egypt.” He turned to his notes and went on, “It translates, to the extent it is translatable, as follows: ‘Now at last is the long-delayed feast commenced; the sheep have been driven to the”—possible translation—‘temple, and the slaughter is’—unintelligible. ‘How richly run the”—possible translation—‘gutters, of jade and adamantine. The circle closes; the circlefor which this world was created . . .”—untranslatable— ‘cleave to my”—untranslatable—‘Our fast is at an end . . . What astounding pretensions are theirs; how the”—unintelligible—‘roll their eyes, how they”—possible translation—‘bleat and try to rise on hind legs like men . . . How few the men”—or: ‘true humanity”—‘and how”—possible translation—‘transient . . . Come now, attendants and brethren and”—untranslatable.”

Mendel laid the text aside, took a long, slow breath, and looked at the others. “This business about the circle closing, the apparently foreordained foreplanning of it . . .”

Nyerza shivered visibly. “Perhaps it is . . . demonic hubris.”

“It could be that they knew someone would translate and they sought to demoralize us,” Paymenz said.

“It could be,” Mendel said. “But deep in my soul there is a dread as never before. . . .”

“What was that line from Dickens,” Melissa said. “Something about, are these the shadows of what will be, or what may be, if the way to the future is unaltered . . .”

Mendel smiled fondly at her. “Do you know, I believe that something speaks through you, my dear, something precious.”

She looked at him in openmouthed surprise. Then managed, “Sure—Dickens.”

Mendel chuckled.

Paymenz shook his head at Mendel. “Do not speak of it yet. Now, as to the industrial accidents?”

Mendel nodded. “It seems that recently two to three thousand men and women associated with manufacturing, especially in the chemicals and petroleum fields, have just . . . disappeared. Indeed: They vanished the night before the demonic attack. And, my friends, each one of them was an executive or key person associated with a company that had either had a major industrial accident or was responsible for a long-lasting cancer corridor, a record of much death and sickness around their factories, invariably covered up or, I think the expression is, glossed over, by . . . spinning doctors?”

“Spin doctors,” I muttered. “The Conscious Circle— Are there those who are . . . conscious or—or powerful, esoterically powerful . . . who are opposed to—to the Conscious Circle?”

“Yes. It is possible to be conscious but to be sick—to be conscious does not mean to be good,” Mendel said. “There are very few such people—only a handful. But there are only 23 conscious people in the circle—only 23
good
conscious people in the whole world.”

“Only 23!”

“Your mouth is hanging open, Ira,” Paymenz said. “It is a grotesque effect.”

“But—how can you know there’re only 23?”

“We know,” Mendel said dismissively. “As for the sick ones, the dark magicians, they may manipulate hundreds of others, using certain abilities that come to such people when they become partially conscious—telepathy, psychic control, and so forth. They have their own agenda, you see, but it is not that they are
opposed
to us particularly. They are indifferent to us as long as we do not get in their way. They wish to make themselves gods. They believe that each can rule his own universe, his own cosmos, and exploit it for his pleasure, if they become powerful enough.”

Paymenz said sadly, “Some people become the apotheosis of selfishness and call it exalted.”

Mendel nodded. “Now as to—” He broke off, looked at the ceiling, and frowned. He shivered and buttoned the top buttons of his shirt, though it was quite warm.

Melissa said suddenly, “I’m worried about my cats, Dad.”

Kind of a non sequitur, I thought, but typical of Melissa. The remark was something that I loved her for, though I don’t know why.

Nyerza looked at her with lifted eyebrows. “Cats?”

She scowled at him, knowing what he was thinking. “Yes. Cats. I know—the world is being eaten alive. All those people. And I’m worried about my cats. That’s just how I am. I need to know they’re okay.”

“They have water and dry food, my dear,” Paymenz said, patting her hand.

Brows knit, Mendel glanced again at the ceiling—then in the direction of the conference room where we’d met the demons.

Nyerza snorted softly, was saying, “Well, this is so American—to be concerned about cats at such a time.”

I looked at Nyerza and thought, with a little flush of mean-spirited triumph:
Being “awakened” apparently doesn’t necessarily make you always compassionate, always empathetic. It doesn’t make you perfect. And it doesn’t take away lust.

Nyerza looked at me. I had the uncanny sense that he’d read my mind. I looked away.

“You’re quite right,” Mendel said, smiling gently at me. Mendel! Not Nyerza. “We are imperfect, even—even then.”

Melissa looked at Mendel, then at me. “Ira didn’t say anything . . . did he?”

Suddenly Mendel lifted his head and seemed to sniff the air. He looked at Nyerza, and both looked at the ceiling. Then at the hallway.

“The forbearance is at an end,” Mendel said.

“Is it?” Paymenz said, going pale beneath his beard. “It was always surprising—”—

“What are you
talking
about?” Melissa asked, her voice rising, breaking, the knuckles white on her clenched hands.

I reached out instinctively and took her hand; she let me do it. Her hand opened in mine like a blossom.

She looked at Nyerza, then at me. “Could we go somewhere and—and talk, Ira?”

Then the screams from above began. The room shook; a subterranean thunder rattled the pipes; plaster sprinkled, then rained down like flour from a sifter.

Nyerza ran to the police guards, shouting.

Drawing their weapons, the men hurried into the hallway, a ramp slanting gradually to stairs leading to the next floor.

Mendel had slipped away, off to the room he slept in—to hide?

Then a reptilian stench rolled into the room, a wind laden with a palpable reek that seemed to coat the inside of my nose and mouth with viscosity—like the putrid discharge you get on your fingers from handling a garter snake.

Nyerza was trying to herd us back from the hallway entrance when something rolled down toward us, down the ramp to our feet: a furry ball; the severed head of one of the guards. Then another came rolling down seconds later to bump with a wood-block clunk into the first. Someone screamed—I think it was me, not Melissa—and the demons we’d encountered in the conference room upstairs were there: the Gnasher and behind him the great sinuous bulk of the Tailpipe.

I remember thinking:
Just as things are beginning to make sense, chaos comes for me.

I pulled Melissa back—she sagged on rubbery knees, making it hard to move her—and I wanted Mendel to be there, to explain, to make things rational again.

As if I’d summoned him, Mendel entered the room. At first he seemed the emblem of absurdity: He’d changed into a costume. Mendel carried a silvery broadsword. He’d taken off his coat; over his shirt he’d draped a tunic that was also a sort of banner, called a tabard, front and back: a red Christian cross on a white background.

“A crusader!”

the Gnasher hooted gleefully, gnashing its teeth loudly. The Tailpipe was too big for the hall but somehow oozed into the room like lava behind the Gnasher, who struck an elegant pose and swung his genitals like a zoot-suit chain.

“What a delight! And with a sword! I’m almost disappointed you can’t slay me like Saint—who was it?—Saint Someone.”

This last was addressed to Paymenz, who was murmuring something that might have been an incantation and might have been a prayer in what sounded like Hebrew.

“It was Saint George,” Mendel said, and ran toward the Gnasher, shouting, “For Saint George! For Jesus, the King! For the King!”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,”

I heard the Gnasher mutter.

Then the sword whistled down, cleaving the demon to its groin, like some mighty blow in an Arthurian saga—but the wound sealed up behind the slash. The demon smiled sadly as it healed itself, almost disappointed. It gripped Mendel’s wrist, crushing, making him fall to his knees with pain.

“Run, you imbeciles!” Mendel shouted, as the Gnasher with its free hand wrenched the sword’s grip from Mendel and drew the sword casually from its own gut as from a scabbard.

Paymenz stalked toward the demons, incanting louder, raising his hand. The Gnasher laughed in Paymenz’s face and ignored him, turned the sword on Mendel, gutting him like a chicken. Paymenz raised his voice and was almost in the Gnasher’s reach as Melissa screamed, “No, Daddy!” and I strained to hold her back as she tried to run to him.

Nyerza strode up and struck Paymenz on the back of the neck, so that Paymenz buckled.

“You must take care of the girl and the Gold in the Urn, Israel!” Nyerza shouted to Paymenz as he dragged him back a few steps. Then Nyerza lifted Paymenz, threw him clear—even as the leviathan tail of the steaming, oozing black Tailpipe lifted and slammed at him. Nyerza dodged aside, was hit glancingly so that he was spun back away from the demons to fetch up against the wall, dazed but uninjured.

The Gnasher had slashed Mendel open, so that blood spread in a widening pool. Mendel was quivering, but his eyes were empty; he was dead or in shock. The Gnasher seemed to be probing for something in Mendel’s insides . . . with his hands, with his sword, with his mouth, searching more and more frantically through Mendel’s wet wreckage.

“Where is it? Where!”

Its fury made its voice resonate through my head.

“The spark! Where!”

After that it raged in the language we called Tartaran: the language of demons. But a baseline meaning was conveyed: rage, pent-up seeking, frustrated hunger. The Gnasher stepped back from the body and roared.

As if expressing the Gnasher’s frustration by proxy, the Tailpipe raised its tail and smacked it down on Mendel’s body, so that bone ends ripped into pink-white view and teeth rattled from a shattered jaw.

Melissa swayed; her mouth dropped open. She whimpered. I only felt like doing those things.

The Gnasher took a step toward us. Paymenz stepped in front of me and Melissa. Nyerza got to his feet.

Suddenly Mendel was there, intact, apparently alive, as we’d last seen him. But somehow I knew that it wasn’t his body I was seeing. “Here is the spark you seek,” he said, though his mouth didn’t open.

The Gnasher turned to him and slashed with curving talons that went through Mendel, as if through a hologram. Mendel smiled distantly.

“You cannot harm me thus,” said Mendel. “What you call my spark is a flame, and it burns in the realm of All Suns, where you cannot reach it.”

Mendel turned to Nyerza and said, “Use the Gold as a shield.”

Then Mendel was gone. It wasn’t as if he blinked out, it was more like the passing of a memory.

The Gnasher bellowed,

“One spark gone, these remain, calling to their inheritor! Purchase ye my insurance, one payment only! Live forever within me and immediately cash in your premiums! We are a full-service organization!”