Demons (7 page)

They shook hands. I thought that Nyerza seemed a little amused, looking Paymenz over; but it was not a condescending amusement, it was affectionate.

“I have gotten old, as you see,” Paymenz said, signaling for me and Melissa to get out of the car. “But you still seem—no, not the student I had, your maturity is evident—but still quite boyish.”

“Boyish at seven foot four? I enjoy the concept, sir. Thisis your daughter, perhaps? I am charmed. And—this young man?”

“He is—his name is Ira. He is here as my assistant.”

I was feeling numb. I was happy to be his assistant. He could have said, “This is my trained monkey—we’re going to teach him to ride a tricycle on a high wire today,” and I wouldn’t have blinked. Maybe he
did
say that.

“You all look so tired,” Nyerza said. “The emotions we have all had—it’s very draining, is it not? There are refreshments. Leave the car where it is, and I will have someone move it to safety. Come this way, please.”

We were walking down a long hallway. We passed a glass door through which I could see an enormous auditorium where groups of querulous people argued with the man at the podium in flagrant disregard for protocol. I couldn’t make out most of what they were saying. I caught only crusts and spatters of sentences. “. . . the Islamic Front claims . . . the result of prayers—who are we to say it’s not. . . . Let each man seek out his own salvation . . . perhaps sacrifice . . . the collective unconscious . . . quantum creations. . . . We’re fools . . . dead minutes from now, everyone here. . . . Hysteria won’t . . .”

“There’s food in the private conference room,” Nyerza was saying. “But I must prepare you: First, we will pass by a Gnasher. I have just come from observing another one with a Tailpipe at the university.”

“These don’t sound like scientific terms to me,” Melissa said. Somehow, then, she had an air of speaking just to see if she still could.

And in fact Nyerza seemed surprised she’d spoken. “No—already a slang has arisen for the various demons. Reports indicate six kinds so far. One of the creatures has remarked that there are seven expected. The seven clans, he said.”

“You call them creatures,” Paymenz said. “Is this an evaluation on your part? Apart from ‘creatures’ as in the created of God, the word has implications of—”—

“Of the confines of the biologically conventional, or perhaps extraterrestrial. So I use it wrongly. It is an incarnate spirit, in my opinion. A malevolent spirit, these.”

“Demons.”

“Quite. Here—I warn you, when we pass the Gnasher and the Tailpipe—in this room, the Lull may end, they may attack. . . .”

Outside the room were six young National Guardsmen, three of them black, two Hispanic, and one a chinless, spindly Caucasian. They looked as if they were debating between accepting a probable death, when the Lull was over, or deserting.

It was a large conference room, empty but for video screens filling one wall and an oval conference table. The room was windowless; a skylight threw an increasingly rusty light on everything. The table should have collapsed under the weight of the creature occupying most of its surface. The big demon was a Tailpipe, like the one we’d seen squatting in the gas station, something like a pilot whale out of water, but its body was even blunter, curled cobralike in on itself. Nestled in one of its coils was a Gnasher, using the bigger, duller demon as a sort of beanbag chair.

The Gnasher was the color of a red and black ant; its head exactly that red, almost like colored vinyl, its body exactly that black. Its head sat on its long thin neck like an ant’s, but it had a man’s jaws, although oversized and gnashing, clashing loudly between sentences, like some exotic metallic percussion instrument—and its eyes were those of a man, the pretty blue eyes of a movie star, and its corded arms were lean and there were four arms, and they were leathery black. The Gnasher lifted its head languidly as we looked in and, unexpectedly, began to speak. It spoke at length to us—Nyerza took a step back at this. We stood in the open doorway and listened to the demon as it spoke. Its hands were talons and only talons; impossibly prehensile claws that rippled delicately like a Balinese dancer’s fingers to emphasize its words. It had an enormous phallus, armored in big, spurred scales. I couldn’t see the rest of its lower parts.

“We should have a tape recorder going. This is the first time it has spoken,” Nyerza murmured to Paymenz.

“I’ll remember every word,” I said, my voice sounding whispery, husky in my own ears.

“Ira has a photographic memory,” Paymenz muttered.

The demon reverberated on.

“I am so delighted to see you. I feel the delight as a violet fire on the roof of my mouth as I look at you, and I stiffen with recognition.”

Its voice was a languid purr, but every word stood out like billboard copy printed on the projection screen of the inside of my skull.

“This is the joy of homecoming! How long we waited, forgotten children in a forgotten nursery, weeping for our return to those who left us to ripen in the outer darkness, whose patented polymer members drove the seed into the soil of the in between. My dear dears, how we hungered for the taste of your light, the one spark that each of you carries, that each of you monstrously denies us; how you hoard your little sparks, her fallen sparks—hers, not yours, little dears, but it’s all finders keepers with you!—and for a moment when we return to the source of our course, and we pluck the fruit, and we draw the root, and we consume the harvest in one sweet bite, or two at most, and we taste the spark, we have the spark, then, within us. Oh, for but a moment. Before it flickers out . . . before it flickers out, snuffing itself like a sniffing little sob. Before it goes, the spark of your inner light warms the infinite cold of our withins; for a moment the aching emptiness is abated, and we can pretend we are the created and not the residue, and the journey is fulfilled; and then the spark flickers and is gone and we must search again for another morsel. And how does the song go?”

As it paused to consider before reciting something like verse, I thought:
This is stupid, I should be running, hiding, and the only reason I’m not is because Melissa is here, watching me. And she would not run with me; she is so much braver than I am.

It seemed to savor, for a moment, the sound of one of the National Guardsmen weeping to himself, before theatrically clearing its throat to go on.

“Consider this:

His eyes are white-light ceiling bulbs,

his teeth syringe needles;

he’s attended by a retinue of shiny scarab beetles.

I stood a-teetering on the vacuum-breathing brink,

where you fall with the weight of a single thought you think . . .”

It’s very good, don’t you think? But to continue . . .

“where laughing things rise to find they truly sink

and white on white on white on white is the color of my ink.

I didn’t pass through the tunnel; the tunnel passed through me;

death will not hesitate to come unseasonably. . . .

It takes joy in coming unreasonably. . . .

I remember death—I remember death, oh but yes:

I’ve bargained with that smug old merchant of rest

though that time is past, and I pretend we never met

you know what hasn’t happened—will, onward, happen yet . . .

I no longer taunt the lion, nor will I walk the edge.

I withdrew from the void that shimmers past the ledge,

But every morning when I wake

I see the shadows smile

I know that it is but his whim to bide a while. . . .”

The demon’s mouth split his head in something like a smile. It seemed to me the demon was looking at Melissa, as he spoke . . . it seemed to me . . . as it went on.

“What do you think? One of your minor poets? Almost doggerel, in fact. But I like it. Because the fear of death is the tenderest thought you have for such as us, your forlorn offspring. The only elegy we have is your fear, your anticipation of darkness, and so we savor it, out of sentiment, sheer sentiment. How like the fish you are, swimming in the sea but unaware of it; you are the fishy swimmers awash in a sea of suffering! Waves of suffering break over us—to me, like the fragrance of a meal as it is cooked—how we mimicked you in our stony world, making meals over campfires when we could and appointing chieftains and kings and holding pageants—if you could see the pageants of our world, and how you were celebrated there!”

“What is your mission here?” Paymenz demanded suddenly. “What brought you here? Speak plainly!”

The demon simply ignored him, continuing:

“And now you at last acknowledge us, haughty till we squeeze her spark from you, and we are for a moment more truly one and—how did it go—‘what do I see, in the dusty mirror? Not a human being but a human error’ . . . And so we rectify, we return what you have supposed to be excrescence, to make you whole again, to rejoin, to warm ourselves with the singled-out sparks until the great spark, the tongue of flame that will not flicker out, is revealed to us. We shall turn our faces up to it. . . . No longer taking part in your world by proxy but a part of you as you become part of us.”

Saying this last, its voice began to boom, to make the very walls recoil in shivers, and it stood up.

“A part of us, a part of us, the infinite loneliness brought to an end, the serpent with its tail in its mouth swallows, at long last! He swallows and swallows in infinite repercussion!”

And the Tailpipe began then to uncoil, to rear up, and its slick black skin opened pores, which oozed something like petroleum and something like sewage sludge. I saw then that the pores were something else: They were the mouths of little girls, pink and perfect, complete with teeth and tongues, hidden before and now exposed and expressing black rivulets . . . and then steam, steam in place of the black ooze, hissing and smelling of sea trenches and filling the room with a congealing cloud of hot mist.

One of the guardsmen screamed and fired his weapon twice at the Gnasher. The demon’s mouth spread in a caricature of a grin as it turned toward the babbling soldier, and something blurry whipped out from the Tailpipe and encircled the young soldier, who was yanked instantly through the air to the Gnasher, who held him nose to noseless face, the soldier screaming as the Gnasher said,

“Look—it’s
magic
! It’s
your bullets
! See them!”

I could just make them out—the two rounds the soldier had fired were floating within the Gnasher’s eyes, pointed at him, cartoonishly replacing its pupils. The Gnasher moved—its movements too fast to follow. Then the soldier had no head.

The other soldiers began to fire, and Nyerza was pulling the professor and me back from the demons, from that mist-choked room; I thought I heard the Gnasher call,

“Melissssssaaaa!”

Then we were running down the hall. I looked back to see one of the soldiers, the spindly one with hardly any chin, his mouth twisted up like a little boy trying not to cry, wanting to run after us but a lifetime of fantasized heroism held him back, quivering there in the dirty mist that rolled from the door into the hallway. Then he ran into the room and was instantly killed. In a split second, his blood, most of it, flew back out the door and onto the corridor wall, as if tossed from an offstage bucket. I heard his last cry, a cry for Mama though no word was articulated: the echo of a million, million cries of suffering that had been going on for thousands of years. And I felt like an adult who sees a small child caught by spreading fire in a room; and the adult, who is not uncaring, chooses between himself and the child and runs out the front door, knowing that the child will die.