Demon Theory

by Stephen Graham Jones

  “And you would have recognized her?” Egan asks, falsely incredulous.

  “She didn’t see anybody,” Nona clarifies for Egan, then turns to Hale again. “And you checked all the rooms?”

  “There’s just hers and the bathroom and the towel closet. And she wouldn’t be in ours.”

  “‘Ours’?” Egan asks, but Nona’s in charge. “Then where else could she be, Hale? Work with us here … ”

  Hale doesn’t answer, instead stands, studying the room. “Where the hell’s Gin?” he asks.

  “Warming the porcelain with her better end,” Seri says, rote. “Why, more toll?”

  Egan snickers, looks away. Hale shakes his head and walks to the front door, opens it. Just beyond the porch the storm is hunched over for the long haul, blowing, whiting out reality. Behind Hale the o.s. query continues.

  Nona: “Does she have a car?”

  Egan: “Use the present tense, Nona. Good.”

  Hale shakes his head no, no car.

  “What about groceries?” Seri asks. “She did eat, right?”

  Egan, in passing to the suddenly seductive Eisenhower-era radio, whispers to Hale that “This should be an easy answer.” Hale nods to himself as if for control, then turns calmly around, pins Egan to the wall by his gargoyle lapels. As Virginia returns, stealing the shot for her entry, Nona and Seri are separating Hale and Egan.

  “I miss something?” Virginia asks.

  “Just round one,” Con says, en route to the radio himself.

  Nona looks from Egan to Hale. “We were just about to discuss leaving,” she says.

  Hale looks away from her, to the radio, where Con’s dialing in that same weatherman, still ad-libbing doom through the static, recommending stay put, hunker down, expect the worst, etc.

  “This place is great,” Con says appreciatively, spinning an old tin sign on its nail.

  “Scary,” Seri corrects.

  “Hallo-weenie … ” Egan adds, keeping an eye on Hale.

  But back to Virginia again: “I thought we were going to discuss leaving?”

  “You heard the weather, Gin,” Nona says.

  “But you said we were going to talk—”

  “And we’re about to.”

  Seri does: “The truck is four-wheel drive, right?”

  Hale closes the door, locks it. “Doesn’t have the clearance … now. With the storm. Or the weight.”

  “Even with all us trick-or-treaters inside?” Con asks.

  “And our candy?” Seri adds. She upturns the pockets of the trench coat she’s wearing and it’s all the sweets Hale wanted for glucose. Much candy. But Nona only shakes her head at it, turns her own purse up on the coffee table. When she lifts it away it spills all the various urban survival tools the convenience store would have had: key chain knives, lighter-sized squeeze flashlights, a road flare, two tampons, Horrorscope scrolls decorated with jack-o’-lanterns, bubble gum tape, etc.

  Con is incredulous. “You expecting a siege, Noan?”

  “Someone had to plan ahead,” she says.

  They dig in. Con gets Egan to fence him with a miniknife, and then kisses the sucker-ring Seri is offering ladylike. He bites it off then smiles with it puckered, doing his best fox-smile.38 Virginia stands purposely in front of the lamp, blocking it, and squeezes a flashlight behind her index finger, extended like E.T.39

  “Home, home,” she says with all the necessary creak, then collapses on the couch into Hale, who moves over.

  “Sorry,” she says.

  Hale shakes his head no. “If she’s not here then she must have got to town somehow—”

  “—leaving us this whole creepazoid40 house … ” Con finishes. He circulates beer to all, starts a toast.

  “Doctor,” he says, can raised, and they all say it in series (with some duck-duck-goose/Spies Like Us41 lilt)—

  “Doctor.”

  “Doctor.”

  “Doctor.”

  —until Nona, the last one before Hale.

  “Doctor?” she says to him, and he finally relents, touches cans without quite saying the word.

  The lights flicker with the storm but don’t go down.

  AGAIN the ext. of the house, from a high angle, the lights holding steady for now. Descent is a soundless rush, the wood shakes becoming irregular things with grain, impact imminent, but then, suddenly and without explanation, no more aerial view, no more snow, no more wind. Penetration. We’re inside, the octagonal attic window high in the shot serving as orientation. The only other thing visible in the dried-velvet darkness is an even-breathing, cold white moisture rising once, twice, dollied42 toward, positioned on the screen so that there would be room above the implied mouth for eyes, if the eyes were open.

  IN the downstairs bathroom Hale shakes off, flushes, then on a whim reaches deep into a high cabinet. Extracts a dated porn mag.

  “Home again home again,”43 he says, but the reverie is cut short by a dull thud from above, which for us already translates as attic. Before he can even reconceal the mag we cut ahead of him to Egan, in the living room, the Wizard of Oz on the ancient VCR, heads screaming with the tornado. It’s early in the show yet. Con isn’t there, so Egan’s filling the conversational void: “In an alternate world Betamax dominates, y’know. The only reason it lost out in this one is that my dad liked to record football, which is longer than beta’s two hours.”

  “Meaning we’re all living in your father’s world?” Nona halfheartedly objects.

  “We all have fathers,” Egan says, and then Hale is upon them, counting heads.

  “Where the hell’s Con?” he demands.

  “Mister expendable crewman?”44 Nona asks.

  “Mister beer run,” Seri says, as if Hale should have expected it.

  Egan adds the finishing touch, motioning toward the front door: “Blizzard of Oz.”45

  Hale shakes his head, and instead of asking them why they let Con leave—which the impatience of his body language suggests he really really wants to do—he just walks to the front door, pulls it violently open, turns his head from the snow gusting in, but still, doesn’t look away.

  FROM an ambiguously elevated vantage point—possibly aerial, possibly rooftop—Con’s footprints lead from the overhang of the porch to the SUV, only go one way. Hale’s dim shape appears leaning over the porch railing, and then we’re over his shoulder with Nona and Seri, holding themselves against the cold. Hale’s POV studies what he can make out of Con’s tracks and then peers up, up, until Nona asks it: “What already?” “That damn movie,” Hale says, loud over the wind.

  “Tornado?” Nona asks.

  Hale shakes his head no. “Monkeys,” he says, not really to her, and Nona studies him, his word (if she even heard it), then flinches when Seri steps forward, leans over the railing, calling: “Connn, Conway, Conagher,46 Conner, Connnnnn … ”

  “—Conan,”47 Nona quietly tags on, her first comic attempt. It’s counterbalanced immediately by Con himself, staggering out of the bushes, some massive head wound leaking down over his face. Seri screams. Hale freaks, backpedaling. When Con staggers onto the porch, though, Nona cocks her head, steps forward, and pushes him easily back off, the roan-haired corpse mask he’s evidently had in his bag all along now apparent, a bad joke.

  He falls laughing into the snow, lifts the mask to speak. “Timing, man,” he says, all agrin. “Shit. I had you.”

  Hale starts to say something, stops, then says something else: “You’re an asshole, Con. You know that.”

  “Among other various and sundry other things,” Con says, palming an apologetic beer to Hale, hanging two six-packs over the porch railing. Hale holds on to the beer, seriously inspecting Con’s tracks to the SUV. Behind him, reentering the house, Nona leans close to Con, whispers, “You’re digging your own grave. You know that too, right?”

  Con rolls his eyes in mock fear, nudges Seri. “Co-nan,” he overpronounces, “like the barbarian,” and then wrestles her inside.

 
; Left alone, Hale has to concentrate to open the beer, has to calm his hands down. After some extended inner debate he turns it up, slams it, drops the can, then slams the door behind him too as he enters. On the porch now, the only sound is that of multiple locks engaging, the can rolling away.

  WHAT feels like fifteen or twenty minutes later—judging by the comfort level achieved—the crew is lounged around Oz, Con the only real motion, patting himself down for the cigarette he doesn’t have.

  “It’s starting,” he says, and when Virginia turns to him, explains: “Withdrawal”—then, to Seri—“My barbarian side.”

  Virginia bats her eyes in false mercy and is just getting back to Oz when the electricity sputters again, this time pausing the blue monkeys midair. We go close on the inset48 television screen, through the static/snow, and either one of the monkeys is still moving without the rest of the flock or betamax isn’t wholly reliable for playback purposes.

  Seri sees this, looks around for support.

  “This isn’t funny,” she says. “Did you see that?”

  “What?” Hale asks.

  “The … the movie,” she says.

  Nona smiles. “This is the country, city girl. Lions and tigers and bears—”

  “—oh my,” Con finishes in falsetto.

  The tape ejects itself before Hale can see the unpaused monkey, and Virginia succinctly turns off the television set. “The tube might blow,” she explains. “We had it happen once.”

  “Serious, guys,” Seri says, still trying to drum up support. But there is none. The wind pushes up hard against the house, spooking Virginia.

  “We should talk or something,” she says. “To keep from all this listening. Like about why we’re being doctors, maybe?”

  “Or surgeons,” Egan adds, inspecting his nails (the putative reason he wouldn’t pump gas).

  “Why medicine, I mean,” Virginia says back, “school. All this debt.”

  Con spins the close-up of a beer can, makes a show of arranging it to point at Virginia. “You first,” he says, “bachelorette number one,49 baring her Hippocratic soul.”

  Virginia smiles at Con, in a good way. “Don’t laugh,” she says, to everyone, then gets stage fright. “No. Hale first. It’s his goshdarn house, after all.”

  “Pass,” Hale says.

  But Con is leaning down with his talk show beer-as-microphone. “You’re amongst friends … ” he leads off, then corrects, tilts his head Nona-wards. “… and lovers,” he adds, “and Egan, too, of course.”

  “Thanks,” Egan says, and Con shrugs no problem.

  Hale looks to Nona, who’s already looking at him. “You don’t have to,” she says to him quietly, changing the atmosphere Con was creating. Everyone turns to Hale, whom we’re tight on, the conversation about him continuing just o.s.

  Seri: “Like he can’t, now.”

  Con: “Misss-ter tease.”

  Virginia: “He hasn’t really teased, y’all. Hale—”

  “You don’t have to,” Nona repeats, trying to protect him.

  “It can’t be that cheese,” Seri says. “C’mon. It’ll be worse the way Con makes it up.”

  “Yeah,” Con says, playing along: “‘There he was with his appendicitis Barbie doll50—’” But before he can finish Hale nods, has made a decision. His mouth spans the width of the screen:

  “It was stupid. I was fourteen—” and like that he becomes a partial v.o.,51 narrating the static flashback: a younger Hale, balancing on a picnic bench, his head in a noose. We don’t recognize where he is, but it’s dark, damp, a black and white feel though there is color. It’s just off some. Enough.

  “I thought it would be like that Air Force show,” his v.o. says, “that one with the song. Gere, Winger—” “—the obligatory suicide near the end of Officer and a Gentleman,”52 Egan interrupts, pulling us back to the correctly tinted living room just before fourteen-year-old Hale would have stepped off that bench.

  “Love lift us up where we belong … ”53 Egan sings, precisely on key, snagging an appreciative smile–nudge combo from Con.

  “My father had an extensive video collection,” Hale explains, ignoring Con and Egan, nodding instead to the many-tiered video cabinet.54

  “And so you went to medical school?” Seri prompts. “Because of the movies, or because of …?”

  Hale nods, shrugs. “The medics brought me back. Twice.”

  “From where?” Seri asks.

  “Think Flatliners,”55 Nona answers.

  Egan leans forward, piqued. “So what’d you bring back for us, then?”

  For a beatslong awkward silence Hale just looks away, leaving Virginia room to own up to what she started, push on: “With me it was that doctor on Field of Dreams … ”56

  “… Archie fucking Greene!”57 Con says, way too excited about it. “I thought I was the only—”

  “—why, though?” Egan asks, not yet distracted. “Richard Gere’s performance didn’t make you … try to do that, did it? I mean, not that we wouldn’t understand … ”

  “You don’t have to answer,” Nona says, “he’s just doing this.”

  Egan leans back, picks up the song where he left off, nominally to himself but clearly for Hale: “… where the eagles fly, on a mountain high—”

  “Like I said,” Hale interrupts, unflinching, “I was fourteen. It was two years after my sister got hurt. You remember that space on three-wheelers, between the foot peg and the rear tire?”—holding the index fingers of his two hands maybe six inches apart—“She was eight. Her feet were … the same size, about. Close enough to fit. I told her I’d get us home before dark. The grass was tall. It was April. Her foot—” His hand shows how Jenny’s foot slipped under.

  Seri has her fist to the hollow of her throat. “I’m sorry,” she says, bold black X’s still crossed over her eyes, beginning to run.

  “Yeah,” Hale says, “well it’s November now. I’m all better.”

  Using only the tilt of his head, Egan questions this “all better.”58

  “How about you then?” Hale asks him. Egan just rubs his fingers together over imaginary money, though. “Thought it was assumed,” he says. Con is next, volunteers: “I saw my first speculum at the tender age of sixteen … ”

  Virginia throws candy at him for this, and the electricity falters on cue. Nona stands in the unsure light. “That’s it,” she says. “We’re going to need some candles, blankets, that kind of stuff.”

  “Just until morning,” Hale adds.

  Virginia’s already standing. “A scavenger hunt?” she asks, “like church?”

  Con shakes his head no, not like church, but keeps his mouth closed about it.

  Egan studies the int.59 of the house they can see from the living room. “This where we pair up for safety, Nona?”

  Seri sees how the pairing up is looking, though: Hale and Nona, Con and Virginia, her and Egan. She shakes her head no to him. “Go stand in the shower and wait,” she says.

  “I’ll be thinking about you … ” Egan trails off, reversing her Psycho60-jibe. Seri flips him off where he can see it this time, huffs off.

  This gets a smile from Nona. But there’s Con and Virginia to deal with, already traipsing kitchenward. She calls after them: “And nobody goes outside to make snow angels, clear?”

  “Yes ma’am,” Con calls back, saluting, and in moments Egan is upstairs and Seri’s gone somewhere, leaving Hale and Nona in the living room. The lights go out for a bit. Hale makes his way to the uncradled phone, listens to it. The same crackling.

  “The one time the lines aren’t bowing to the storm,” Nona says.

  This is their first time really alone for us. Medium shots, not much between them.

  “Best thirty-five cents I ever spent,” Hale says, setting the phone back down.

  Nona draws closer, without quite touching him. “Your sister’s name was Jennifer,” she offers.

  Hale nods. “Past tense,” he says, “yes.”

&nbs
p; AND then the flashback continues, gets visuals and loses Hale’s v.o. Not the attempted suicide but the accident he blamed for that attempt: this time he’s twelve, but it’s the same young actor, different hair. He and an uncrippled Jenny are on a three-wheeler in a field, her foot on the foot peg inserted over and over, the grass rushing past beneath, pushing her shoe back. Her heel catches on the knobs of the balloon tire, gets thrown forward. Hale looks down from being kicked then buries his thumb in the throttle, the four-stroke engine buzzing, whining, topping out, the house there ahead. But then the shot widens, pulls back until, for all their speed, the three-wheeler seems to be hardly moving. The effect is that distance equals the slow motion of accidents: Jenny slips quietly under, leg first, not even a sound.61 Hale slides to a stop yards ahead, and we’re with him, on him. He’s looking back at what’s hidden to us, and there’s no emotion in his face, not yet.

  IN the upstairs hall Egan is trying the knob of bedroom door number two62—Hale and Jenny’s—but it’s locked. With his squeeze light clamped between his teeth he explores the hall, feeling for the switch, finally stumbling onto Jenny’s old wheelchair. He sits in it. Wheelies back and spies the attic string, caught in his small beam of light like a bad idea.

  He pulls on the string and the stairs fold down silently for him, the hinges black with grease.

  “Hello-hello-hello,” he whispers, doing the Krueger-echo63 himself, half smiling, but in the attic his o.s. voice is more foreboding than funny, coming weakly through the opening in the floor. The beam of his squeeze light stabs up jerkily, and the POV watching him scuttles over, behind some trunk or chest, breathing calmly enough that the retreat outside—to an ext. shot—is welcome, a necessary prolonging.64 From a ground-level view which makes the house look taller and narrower than it has before, the many lights go out all at once. The snow is bright in comparison.

  IN what initially seems to be that same breathing darkness of the attic a squeeze light is squeezed on, but in its haze is Virginia, hesitantly opening kitchen cabinets. The breathing turns out to be Con, in her b.g., rifling through the drawers by lighter light. Virginia directs her beam into the cabinet she’s just opened and immediately inside is a wall of creamed corn. The next cabinet is the same—the whole row.65 Before she can comment on it the electricity surges back on, is unsteady at best.