Demons (45 page)

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.

A double beep came from the mechanism on the dash, and a green light flashed. She pulled off the gas mask and gratefully inhaled clean air.

As she drove, her soft weeping became wracking sobs as Glyneth for the first time had a moment to think about more than survival.

“We failed,” she said aloud. “
I
failed.”

The circle had wanted her to confirm Winderson’s part in what was being planned, had wanted to confirm their suspicions about Latilla. Who was she, really? They were sure about George Deane; they assumed H. D was part of it. Winderson, a master of public image, had covered his involvement well. He hadn’t been one of the active invokers nine years before. They’d held a group of Saturnian adepts back, in case they failed, a group called the Undercurrent.

Winderson had been closely associated with Deane, and with the network of companies who’d promulgated the invasion . . . the invasion she remembered clearly, unlike so many around her. She’d seen Grindums and Spiders and Dishrags ravaging through a mountain community where she’d been doing work for the Sierra Club. Most of her friends had died that day.

Driven half mad by what she’d seen, Glyneth had looked for an explanation, for understanding. Through a certain Dominican in Snow Mass, Colorado, she was introduced to Yanan and Paymenz, and service to the Conscious Circle. And it was they who told her how the invasion had come about and what big industry’s part in it had been. She began an obsessive canvassing of corporate America—looking for patterns, connections to That Certain One. Then she heard about psychonomics from a disgruntled former trainee, and she began to look closely at West Wind. She used a fictitious academic background to get into the company . . . and Yanan pointed her to Stephen.

When it became clear just how deadly Dirvane 17 was—and equally clear from the e-mails she’d intercepted how many state officials had been paid off about what was happening in Ash Valley—she tried to convince Paymenz to do something sooner, to alert the more sympathetic newspapers, the EPA, the CDC, the U.N.,
someone,
for God’s sake.

Paymenz had begged her to hold back. “The circle says not yet. They say that it’s important for reasons I don’t really understand that Stephen Isquerat turn the tide himself. It’s no accident, his role in this—he possesses a gift, and that’s why the Undercurrent wants to twist it to their own use. But that gift can work against them. If we simply report them, they’ll cover up, make excuses. They have to be stopped permanently. We could lose some people in Ash Valley, but it might save millions later.”

“No, goddamnit.” She sobbed, now. The van fishtailed on the road; she was having difficulty seeing through her own tears. Thick clouds were gathering. A rainstorm, soon.

Up ahead, a group of cars was burning in the center of the highway. She had to drive on the shoulder to get around them.

“No . . .” No, they should have done something—
anything
—to stop this. That kind of logic—let a town die to save others later? That was like West Wind’s logic.

No!

They had failed. The mass sacrifice in Ash Valley happened too soon. The intervention would come too late.

It was all just plain too fucking late.

“What’s happened?” Latilla’s harsh voice, heard from some distant corner of the sky. “Have we lost him?”

“There was interference.” Harrison Deane’s voice. “They are dogging us, somehow.”

“I feel them; it’s making me sick to my stomach.”

Wasn’t that Jonquil’s voice? Was it possible? Stephen wondered vaguely. Could she be here or with them?

Where was
here
?

He was walking along one of those floating mountain peaks made of assumptions, another mountain whose base was its peak. If he looked closely at the ground beneath his feet, he could see it shifting within itself, as if constantly reaffirming its stony substance.

He couldn’t bear looking at the nervous streamers of mist between the whirling symmetries in the sky. The faces that formed, when he looked at the mist, seemed so
afraid
.

Stephen felt wrung out, numb, and deeply afraid. He felt that for the first time he understood the expression
hanging by a thread
.

If he didn’t hang on to that thread of identity within himself, he would shatter into a thousand Stephens, each to be sucked into one of those whirling symbols in the sky, each to be consumed by one of the living vanities who’d ruled that other world. He’d be annihilated by a thousand outlandish appetites.

The ecstasy he’d felt—he’d do almost anything to get back to it. Maybe . . . anything.

But the last part of the journey . . . had it been a dream, that vision of Ash Valley, of Glyneth? It had to have been. To become a demon, squatting in a great mound of corpses . . . maddened, dying people in a masque of death, dancing and murdering all around him . . .

The Reverend Anthony. Had he really killed him?

“He’s beginning to—”—

“Silence, idiot. You have forgotten our connection to his consciousness, here.”

They had, after all, told him that what he was to experience was real. So that . . . was real? All those dead people—really dead?

“Stephen . . .” Jonquil. She was here! He could see her!

She was lying a few yards away, in a sort of girl-shaped groove cut into the ground, wearing only the nightgown she’d worn at the hospital. He hurried to her, knelt beside her, taking her warm hand in his. He couldn’t see his own hand—but he could feel it touching hers.

She seemed to see him anyway, looking right at where his eyes should be.

“Stephen—it’s getting worse. My sickness. I need the Black Pearl. It’s the only thing that can stop them.”

“Who, Jonquil? Who’re our enemies?”

“An ancient circle of magicians, Stephen. This struggle of magicians has always gone on, but they have lately disguised themselves as
good
people. They attack us because they know we’re creating a new and better world. They made you see what they wanted you to see—they made it seem that the god form you inhabited was something evil. They made you see dead people where there were living ones. They made you see depravity in Ash Valley, where there was only strength and goodness!”

“So it was them—they made it seem that way?”

She looked at him and drew him close, as if she saw his skepticism and blotted it out by encircling him—what there was of him here—in her arms.

“What can I give you, Stephen?” she breathed into hisears. The entire universe became suffused with the scent of gardenias.

“I . . . want you, Jonquil. And . . . I want . . . I want that feeling I had, that first rush that I felt, that feeling of ecstasy—like I never had to be scared of anything. I was the ruler of a universe of pleasure. . . . Oh God, oh fuck! I want that again. I want to be there with you! I saw you there—and I love you, Jonquil!”

“And I love you, Stephen. But I’m going to die unless you bring the Black Pearl to me. The rest of us don’t have the gift of
going
like you do. You have an amazing gift for astral travel.”

“But you’re here . . .”

“I can only go so far. But you—why do you think you can travel in these places without going mad? No one else could go so far as you have and keep his sanity—not a human being. It’s part of your gift. And you can go where the Black Pearl is. You have the gift of carrying its substance within you.”

He could no longer hold himself back. He tried to lift her, to gather her in his arms—to mingle himself with her. But his hands plunged into warm mush—which became a syrupy mire, her entire body liquefying and running across the shifting stones under his knees.

“Jonquil!”

He stood up, and watched as her liquid remains, her rippling face, sank into the stone of the mountain, like water into loose sand. Gone.

“Help me . . . go to the Black Pearl. You must go of your own free will, because it is your will that takes you there. Find the Black Pearl. Take it to the god you inhabited before. His strength will become mine and I will survive! And I promise you, we will find the ecstasy of the dark glory, Stephen!”

With hands he couldn’t see, he reached out to the sky. “Tell me, then! Tell me where to go to save her!”

He found himself moving toward one of the whirling symbols, the symbol of Saturn.

And through it—through an inversion, an inside-out of himself that was becoming almost familiar, feeling he would explode but clinging to that inner thread as he fell through the sea of energy and emerged . . .

. . . in the sunless world of struggling egos, the thrashing groundless trees of energy wrestling with wires of desire. A landscape without land, an infinity of crackling loci, each trying to consume the next.

But one had grown bigger than all the others. It was like the tree Yggdrasil compared to the rest, overshadowing them all like a giant among midgets. Over an eon this tree had grown a single dark fruit, a dark globe that throbbed within the twisting, ever-restless branches of shoots, just above the incandescently pumping central trunk. Was it indeed black, this fruit, this Pearl? It was as silver as it was black, as iridescent as it was silver. It was as absolutely its own spherical shape as the cosmic egg had been before the Big Bang, yet it was quivering within itself with the concentrated electricities of undiluted will.

He knew this with the gnosis of the astral world—with the knowledge of sheer perception: He knew it for a certainty. The Black Pearl was an accretion of pure, selfish will. It was the movement toward the fulfillment of desire from a thousand, thousand egos, swallowed up by this great ego and stored here like a million lightning storms of electricity contained in a single battery.