Demons (11 page)

And it strode toward us.

“There has to be a way out!” I said, backpedaling, dragging Melissa with me.

Nyerza shook his head. “They will pursue: The only way out is through.”

So saying, he took Melissa by the wrist and swung her in front of him.

And pushed her toward the demons.

I shouted something—I don’t know what it was—and ran after her to pull her back as the Gnasher opened its great jaws to snap at her head, and then felt Paymenz and Nyerza gripping me, each taking an arm. Melissa put her hands in front of her face—

The Gnasher stepped toward her—

Then there was an effulgence. No, a scintillation, a sparkle from just in front of Melissa issuing from the area of her sternum. I saw, now, a sparkling, a slowly turning ball of sparkle, each spark big as my hand, the whole growing as it emerged, stabilizing at the size of a bushel; a grand, turning sparkle of gold and violet and electric-blue, the gold predominating, the whole giving off a keening sound so high-pitched you couldn’t quite hear it and yet you felt it in your joints. Slowly turning, the orb of unfading sparks hung in the air between Melissa, who seemed in a trance, and the Gnasher . . .

Who reached for it . . .

And then recoiled, the demon whimpering so pathetically I wanted to say, There, there . . .

The wheeling ball of sparks moved toward the demons, seeming to draw Melissa like a sleepwalker behind it, and the Gnasher wailed in his own language and clawed its way up onto the steaming black bulk of the Tailpipe, as if taking comfort there, and then scrambled back away from Melissa. The great quivering, steaming, many-mouthed eelskin flank of the Tailpipe still barred our way, as we stumbled after her, but then the Tailpipe oozed itself into two parts, a kind of macroscopic mitosis, one part splitting off to the right, the other to the left, like the Red Sea in the Moses story. There was a clear path between the quivering ends, and we hurried between, through the oily stink of it, and up the ramp, past headless bodies, and to the stairs. I turned to see the Tailpipe flow seamlessly together behind us, and it commenced to follow, until the Gnasher shouted something in Tartaran, and it held back.

“This way,” Nyerza said. “We go to the helicopter.”

I looked at Melissa; the globe of incandescence had vanished, receded into her. She stared into space, listening, with tears in her eyes, as Paymenz whispered something to her.

“Okay,” I said. “A helicopter. That’s fine. I’ll go for that. Sure. Let’s do that.”

Paymenz held Melissa in his arms, at the back of the chopper; I sat near the front, behind the pilot’s seat. The pilot was a dour, stooped, gray-haired black man in a paramilitary uniform without markings: Mimbala, whom Nyerza said had once been an army chief of staff for some African country. Mimbala had started the chopper and left it running in some kind of idle, having gone to consult with a spindly white man from the FAA who was trying to provide a strategy for flying safely past the drifting Spiders, the darting Sharkadians. We could see them, instead of airplanes, speckling the sky here and there in the distance. Our chopper’s blades were chuffing so slowly I could have hung on to them and swung around, like a child at play; and I had an impulse to do just that—to do something meaningless, mischievous, anything to deny the darkness pulling at our hearts like G-force tugging an astronaut who realizes his shuttle won’t make it into orbit. Like the astronaut, I wanted to take to the sky.

Mostly to keep my mind busy, I began to question Nyerza. “The thing that came from her, that drove them back, that saved us—was it the Gold in the Urn that Mendel mentioned?”

“Yes. It needs a human being to be the Urn, the repository, for a time. We planted it in Melissa.”

“Is that . . . is that what you were doing with her last night?” I asked, leaning toward him so Melissa wouldn’t hear, my voice as soft as possible over the humming of the idling engine, the chuffing of the rotors.

He looked at me in frowning puzzlement. “No. That was . . . just a man and a woman. Spontaneous, as you say.”

“Not a ritual?”

“No. It was quite natural.” He looked out the window, signaled to the pilot. Mimbala raised a hand, palm outward, to say wait a moment. Nyerza turned back to me, sighing. “I will miss having Mendel physically near. The Urn . . . the Gold . . . this is what the demons call sparks, the being force of many lives, who’re consolidated, in this case, to one purpose. They meditate together, and this keeps them together. They are like— In some cultures they are called bodhisattvas, the awakened, who return to help us. When we realized that the catastrophe was coming—though we did not know what form it would take—we consulted with these beings, these Ascended Masters, and asked for their help in its most powerful form: the Gold in the Urn. But our connection to it needed to be kept in one place and protected. A few years ago, Melissa was selected as the bearer, the Urn.”

“She knew this?”

“She did not. I’m embarrassed to say it was done without her knowledge, as she slept. But this was done with the cooperation of her father. Harmlessly and painlessly.”

“A few years ago . . .”

I remembered. Melissa had been depressed, gloomy, much more into the goth thing. Writing bleak songs like the one the demon had mocked her with. Then she’d changed—almost overnight. Becoming more centered, more confident, optimistic.

“The Gold . . . it possessed her?”

“Not at all. It only rode there, in her. But there has been some influence on her, I have no doubt. Its radiance would have been felt, though they try to keep themselves secreted deep within. The demon was trying to drive the Gold from her, perhaps, when it recited her song—a song from a time when she was ruled by, as you might say, quiet despair: that thing that, in some people, opens the door for the diabolic.”

I thought I should be angry that Melissa had been used this way. But then, the Gold seemed to have helped her; and it saved us all today.

“The demons can’t hurt her, at all, while the Gold is with her?”

“In time, they will make their own dark orb and hunt her down—destroy the Urn to destroy the Gold—using their own merged darkness to get to her, surely. Or they may use humans to attack her. But this, you see, will take time. How much, we only speculate. A month or six weeks perhaps, Mendel told me. . . . Ah, here comes Mimbala.”

Mimbala returned to the chopper and threw switches, pulled levers; and it thrummed, and the rotors swished faster and faster, the world tilted, and we angled into the sky.

We are alone, Melissa and I, in the professor’s chilly, dark apartment, alone with restive cats and dead lava lamps. Except Melissa is never alone, even when I’ve left her in another room. The Gold is with her, though unseen. It is silent, transparent; it is singing and scintillating: all of these.

I finished writing all the foregoing yesterday. Yes, it’s amazing what people can get used to. We’ve been here for weeks, since the chopper pilot landed on the roof of the building.

“There’s canned food and water stacked floor to ceiling in that back storeroom,” Paymenz had shouted, over the throb of the chopper. “My divinations, you see, led me to stock up:
I,
at least, took them seriously! Now you may sing hosannas of praise to my foresight!” He grinned; he was trying to make light of his departure.

“Dad—stay with us!” Melissa shouted. “Or take us with you!”

The engine got louder. “Arrangements . . . They won’t come here. . . . Must go with Nyerza . . . Events are shaped by . . . various convergences . . . luminous . . .” Luminous something. Repercussions, maybe? “We’re going to try to locate the—” I couldn’t make out the rest. They took off as he shouted, “Back in touch when possible. You are safe if you stay with her, Ira.”

That’s not good for my masculine vanity, but it’s true: Melissa keeps me safe.

I don’t go out, because I could be killed; Melissa doesn’t go out because she doesn’t want to see anyone killed. And the looters, the gangs, could take her; use her and kill her, as they have with too many others.

The Spiders departed the balcony some time ago. But streamers of black smoke twist up randomly across the glassy vista of the city.

Depression comes sometimes, like a wolf prowling at the edge of a campfire’s light. I throw what fuel I have on the fire.

The first few days we slept most of the time, she in her room, me on the living room couch, where I could keep an eye on the front door, pretend I was useful as her guardian. We slumbered away a weighty emotional exhaustion, absorbing, in riotous dreams and dozing depression, all that we’d seen. The demons, the flight through the city, the Gnasher, the flare of sex, the reshaping of paradigms, the brutal killing of Mendel and his triumph, the revelation of the Gold in the Urn . . . the Gold, the living wheel of burning spirit that possessed Melissa and yet didn’t possess her; that seemed to hum in the background, unheard but felt by those feeling parts of us that are usually dormant.

What people can get used to . . . People managed a routine even at Dachau; they found ways to survive psychologically—harder than surviving physically.

In Cambodia, in the days of the Khmer Rouge, peopleadapted to being forced into an insane plan for an anti-intellectual agrarian utopia, a utopia based on mass murderand the destruction of ideas and common sense; masses ofpeople, after seeing their loved ones butchered, forced fromthe cities onto farms, forced to work fourteen-hour days,seven days a week, 365 days a year; to give up all theirold culture, their music, their traditions, every single one of their beliefs; to wear black pajamas and nothing else ever;to be slaves to a demented scheme of social engineering. They adapted; they survived.

Demons invade the world; people find ways to adapt, to get used to the horror.

Is it, really, any worse than the Killing Fields?

But often I felt a craving for the ordinariness that had reigned before the demons, for the very banality I had sometimes railed against. The mindless, childish ubiquity of mass media and consumerism; the welcome distraction of dealing with traffic and laundry and phone bills. What a relief real banality would be . . .

We passed the time as we might, making a pact, for the sake of sanity, to leave the TV and its battery in a closet, and listen to a radio news show only once a day. After two weeks Melissa asked me to listen alone, away from her. She spent the time meditating, every so often muttering in some language she shouldn’t know; in reading, writing feverishly in a journal.

She encouraged me to paint, to draw, with whatever was handy. I felt tense, my art balled up inside; I was reluctant to let it out, to express it. But she gently insisted and came to muse over my drawings, my pen and inks made with all the wrong sorts of pens and inks.

Sometimes, as I drew, I seemed to see, in my mind’s eye, a pentagram superimposed over a city I didn’t recognize. I reproduced the city as a simplified map, street lines intertwined with hermetic symbols, and figures of myth.

One night, in the light of battery-operated lanterns, we sat around the living room, trying not to hear the distant soundsof shouting, combat, sirens, and, from far off, the
crump
of what might be a plane crashing. Some nights were worse than others; this was one of the bad nights.

She’d asked me to read to her, anything I wanted. I chose the Sufi poet Rumi—consciously or unconsciously. I glanced up at her from time to time as I read. She was curled sideways in an easy chair, with two cats nestled in her hollows; she wore a dark purple sari, no shoes. Her feet were drawn up onto the cushion, one hand toying with a silver ring on a toe, her eyes hidden by the drape of her hair. She made me ache.

“A lover gambles everything, the self,
the circle around the zero! He or she
cuts and throws it all away.
This is beyond any religion.
Lovers do not require from God any proof,
or any text, nor do they knock on a door
to make sure this is the right street.
They run and they run . . .”

I felt her looking at me then and glanced up at her, and our eyes met. Her gaze seemed open, as never before. I found myself putting the book aside and crossing the room to her, bending to kiss her. She lifted her head to return the kiss, and moved aside on the big chair so I could slide in beside her, the cats irritably jumping to the floor and slinking away. Then Melissa eased herself onto my lap, and I drew her into the circle of my arms. We kissed more deeply. My hands found their way to her thighs, and she let them explore upward from there. . . .

Suddenly I stopped, and looked down at my hand. It was as if there was a cold, bony grip on my wrist, holding it back, though nothing could be seen. Nothing except a blue-gold sparkling, a throbbing shimmer, that never quite declared itself. Did I see it? It was as if, instead, I felt it and made some accommodation in the visual part of my brain.