Demon Theory

by Stephen Graham Jones

“I imagine you’ll need that hand anyway,” Seri says, out of the blue. Con looks to her, waiting for the punchline. Seri gives it: “Since you left your spare one at the store, I mean.” Con smiles, lets the joke stand, some important ice broken there.

  Back to Nona, looking to Hale: “So where’s the breaker box?”

  Hale points at the dated cloth calendar (red rooster on brown burlap) between the pantry and the refrigerator. “There.”

  With everybody watching, then, he removes the calendar—hooking it over the top of the pantry door—and inspects the breakers. Close-up, none of them are tripped. Hale clacks them back and forth anyway.

  “But there’s the main switch, too,” he says, and almost before he’s done talking we cut to the window in the ext. door of the utility room. Through it, on a pole some ten or so yards out, is the main switch, the red plastic insulation of the handle mostly rotted away. The shot reverses, the switch suddenly in the f.g., and leaning over at the glass are Hale and Nona and Seri, gauging the open spaces, not a smile among them. Seri starts to turn around and we go close enough on the back of her head that by the time her turn is complete, we’re through the glass, in the utility room.

  Seri shivers. “I’m not going out there,” she says.

  Hale is still at the window, looking as high as he can around the eave.

  Nona stands. “They’ll think you’re dead already, though,” she says to Seri, who doesn’t get it at first, until Nona X’s her own eyes to show.

  IN the kitchen, Con has the corn cans arranged in a half-finished pillar now. He’s not working on it anymore.

  The whole crew’s there, mid-discussion.

  “Sounds like a kamikaze run to me,” Con is saying, shrugging the whole endeavor off.

  “We could have lights, though,” Nona says.

  “Or we could find out that the switch is already on,” Egan counters.

  “He’s right,” Seri says, then turns on Hale, messing with a mop. “And you don’t remember … up-on, down-off?”

  “It was off-limits,” Hale says, for what’s sounding like the tenth time. “But I do remember there was something wrong with it. Either up was on, or it should have been.”

  “I see,” Egan says. “Thanks for clearing that up.”

  “There should be fuses out there too,” Con says. “House this old. So even if our gracious host here did remember … ”

  Nona makes the decision for them: “Well, we need to look. To know.”

  Seri asks the obvious question—“Are they that smart, to turn off the power?”—and they all look to Hale. He fingers his stitch and nods, but Egan doesn’t wholly buy it, is the last to walk into the living room, where again, Con has built something: spanning the distance from arm to arm of the couch and then some is an extension of mop handles, yardsticks, tape, etc. At the tip is a squeeze light. Hale is watching the construction like he doesn’t approve, but can’t think of a good objection either.

  “Sun’ll be up in an hour,” Nona says to Con. “Not to rush you or anything.”

  Con smiles, and, for a finishing touch, ties a suture knot tight tight around the squeeze light, keeping it squeezed on.

  “Now that’s how you tie a knot,” he says for Nona, then, to the rest, holding the pole behind the couch for them, a gift. “Now run along and play.”83

  Hale takes the pole, balances it, nods, and leads the crew out, through the kitchen. Except Con; he stays on the couch. As Seri passes he snags her wrist, pulls her down by him.

  MOMENTS later the back door of the utility room is chocked open, and Egan is holding Hale’s arm as Hale reaches out with the pole, trying to keep the light steady enough to read the switch’s position, to make out through the glass of the fuse box whether the twin fuses are burned or not. In the door with them is Nona, holding an ancient pair of bifocals at about half-arm’s length, using them as binoculars, as opera glasses. The pole is too flimsy though. In her binoculared POV it waggles back and forth. She smiles to herself.

  “Seven years of medical school for this,” she says.

  Egan, straining to keep Hale from falling outside, hums the circus tune for her and Nona grits her teeth, looks through the glasses more, and her blurry, unsteady POV just makes out that the switch is up, at least, if that means anything.

  “COLD in here,” Con says, a line for Seri, close enough on the couch to him that she has to turn her head to reply: “And you’re still a pig,” she says.

  Con backs off, stands, wanders the living room, improvises a song about Seri—“Dead girls aren’t much fun,” to the tune of “Dead Puppies Aren’t Much Fun,”84 runs his finger along a shelf of books and on a hundred-to-one shot ferrets out the exact Arthur C. Clarke book fourteen-year-old Hale had in the flashback. It’s inserted for a moment—Childhood’s End—and, just in case we’ve forgotten, when Con flips the cover back there in pencil is Hale Sweren, written in columns, as if Hale had been trying on different signatures, different personas.

  Back to Con, framed by the fireplace brick: “I read this, I think … Overseers? These aliens come to Earth to help us or some paranoid fifties thing, and we all die.” He turns the book over, laughs a sick laugh at what he finds on the back. Tosses the book onto the couch by Seri. She looks reluctantly, and her POV lingers on the demon–gargoyle on the back cover, obviously the original of the newspaper clipping, which is something of a revelation.

  Con falls into the chair across from her.

  “Which came first,” he asks, rhetorically, “what Hale saw, or what Hale read?”

  Seri tries to assimilate this. While she does, Con looks around, smiles: “This is our window, isn’t it?” he offers.

  “Our window?” Seri asks.

  “Our chance,” Con says.

  He palms the SUV keys from his pockets. “You haven’t seen them, Seri. You don’t want to. Virginia … ”

  Seri doesn’t say anything; Con continues: “In the morning him and Noan are going to ride out of here. You know that’s how it’ll go down. Leaving you, me, Egan, and mister Rod Serling.”85

  “But—” she starts, gets cut off.

  “It won’t be an entertaining episode,” Con says. “Trust me. The way that book”—[Childhood’s End]—“ends is that we all die. But that’s Hale’s way. It doesn’t have to be ours.”

  “We can’t just—”

  “The plan is for two of us to ride out in the morning. It’s morning now. There’s you and me.” He holds up two fingers for her. “We can get help.”

  “But they’re going to get help … ”

  “It’ll be too late,” Con says, then mocking Hale: “‘The snow’s too deep. The truck doesn’t weigh enough.’”

  Seri considers, considers, rationalizes: “TJ. She’ll be … expecting us for breakfast.”

  “Exactly.”

  “All of us, though.”

  “We’ll make their apologies.”

  Con takes her hand, leads her off the couch, pushes the furniture out of the way enough that they can fit out the door. Seri goes first, leaving Con a moment alone in the living room. He looks back at the book on the couch, says it—“Childhood’s end my ass”—then closes the door quietly behind him, leaving us with another close-up of the back cover of the book, the demon–gargoyle looking out of the past, looking outside where Con and Seri are standing at the top of the porch stairs, the last covered place. Already cringing. Con gets Seri’s attention, counts on his fingers one, two, and as the third finger drops we get a high angle on them as they dash for the SUV, hand in hand, Con leading with the doorkey.

  In a rush, Con’s key scrabbling at the lock dominates the shot. Bad news, though: he feels around and the door is frozen shut, iced over.

  “Shit shit shit,” he says, slamming the flat of his hand into the door, but then Seri hands him one of the mini-knives. Con opens it with trouble—finally with his teeth—then, careless about the paint, uses it to chip the door open. It works. He smiles.

  “I love you Non
a fucking Pearson,” he says, then pushes Seri in, through. Again, leaving him with the last look. He takes it, turns to the sky—from which he’s small—and flips it off in good-bye.

  FROM a passenger-level angle in the backseat of the SUV, Con grinds and grinds the starter, pats the dash—“c’mon, c’mon”—and it’s taking long enough that Seri gets worried. She thumbs the automatic locks, the shafts huge and important on-screen, being sucked down into the door panel, and in that instant the SUV starts, as if from her thumb. She looks at it, doesn’t involve Con with the seeming chance that she helped.

  “Go already,” she says, “go,” but now the windshield’s iced over. Con jacks the defrost up to an inset High, tries the wipers, which only moan. He shrugs to Seri, and, refamiliarizing himself with the int. of the SUV, cocks his head as if remembering something.

  “What?” Seri asks. “We forget something?”

  “Almost,” Con says, then leans forward to feel around in the floorboard for his lost cigarette we’re already close on, from under the seat. It’s half covered with slush, nestled up against the seat rail. Impossibly, Con’s hand finds it, and even more impossibly, his anxious fingers don’t break it.

  He sits up, mister orgasm—“Ohhohohoho … ”—and pushes the lighter in, fumbles for the headlight knob too, and for an ext. instant again there’s that high angle over the SUV, the lights pushing out into the storm maybe ten yards.

  BUT back to the warmth of the SUV. “We haven’t really got time for a nicotine fit,” Seri says.

  “The truck has to warm up,” Con says back, distracted by the promise of the cigarette. He talks to it with love: “And there’s always time … ”

  His POV settles on the lighter knob, and he watches, waits, the cigarette already in mouth, and an instant after it pops out we’re tight on his lips as he inhales gloriously, holds it in, leans over to kiss Seri in celebration. Seri leans away though, into her own glass.

  “Drive, already,” she says, “or scoot your ass over.”

  Con smiles, exhales, looks in the rearview, which—even though it shouldn’t, with the ice and all—has the house there, all haunted and picturesque.

  “Good-bye Cueste Verde,”86 he says, exhaling again, smoking us out of the SUV, to a moving POV high above it, the SUV just spinning its rear tires, going nowhere. In our anxiousness for it to move we’re drawn to Con’s foot, buried in the accelerator, backing off to a medium shot of Seri. She shakes her head, and with her left hand nudges the truck into 4WD. The transmission and transfer case whine protest but finally catch, the front wheels inching the SUV away.

  “You want me to drive, Conan?” Seri asks, but is cut short by the SUV jumping forward blindly, traction there under the snow somewhere. Con rolls down his window to see in front of them, cigarette still in mouth.

  “You shouldn’t be—” Seri says, but then they’re already rattling over the cattle guard, everything in the truck shaking hard, including Con: when he opens his mouth to protest all this bouncing, he loses his cigarette out the window.

  FROM an angle behind them, the brake lights flare.

  FROM the passenger seat, Seri staring hard at Con: “Just get us out of here, okay? I’ll hijack a truckload of them for you, I swear. Just move.”

  Con isn’t listening, though. He turns away from Seri, leans his head out the window to see where the cigarette’s landed. The wind gusts past and when it’s gone there is something red at the tip, more or less cylindrical. But it’s the main power switch, Hale and Egan and Nona in the b.g., the pole spanning the distance between. Of the three of them it’s Nona who gets the shot, as she’s the most fed up. She lowers the bifocals, talks to herself: “Don’t do it, Noan. Don’t do it.”

  But she does—whips the glasses away and storms out to the pole. Throws the switch over once, twice, leaving it on ON. By this time Hale is with her, very aware of the sky above. He reaches up, tries to rub the window on the fuse box free of ice but ends up just making it worse.

  Nona opens her mouth, indicating breath, body heat, and Hale nods, lifts her by the hips (she’s that light) so her face is to the fuse box. She breathes, rubs the steam off, and the insert of the twin fuses shows the thick filaments to be undeniably unbroken—wholly whole.

  “Hunh,” Nona says, “guess it is the wires,” then catches something out of the corner of her eye, just around the house. When Hale tries to lower her she latches onto the post, resists, straining to see more. She does: in her POV the wind blows, the snow passes, and then, for a long and torturous moment, headlights sweep across the trees.

  “That rat bastard,”87 she says.

  CON’S POV can just make out the cigarette through two of the cattle guard pipes. It’s still lit. He turns to Seri.

  “Honk the horn,” he says, “and keep it honking, no matter what, okay? They apparently don’t like daylight or indoors, so maybe noise—”

  “Con—”

  “Just do it, Seri. We made it to the truck, didn’t we?”

  He nods to her to see if she’ll do it, and when she will [rolling her eyes okay] he steps out of the SUV, letting the storm in for a moment, then squats, reaching, his hand with the cigarette almost too balled up to clear the two pipes, but when it finally does, and he’s bringing it to his lips, the horn blasts and doesn’t let up, knocking the cigarette back into the cattle guard.

  “Goddammit, Seri … ” he says through his teeth, closing the door on her for maneuvering room. He gets the cigarette again. In his b.g., through the open SUV window, Seri’s head as she leans over is just where she can’t see him.

  Which translates into won’t see him.

  Meaning he’s alone, vulnerable.

  This is emphasized by a rough POV shift, high and angled overhead as he stands, taking a long-long drag—the romantic cigarette cupping pose again, his trademark, his downfall—and then looking up in the moments before impact. He narrows his eyes for what he can see coming at him, and gets large on the screen—near—the storm muted and unimportant all around.

  “Trick or treat … ” he says, his last joke, and then is hit, hard, and from inside the SUV his blood and brains splatter88 over the windshield ice.

  Seri freaks—“Oh god oh god oh god”—and just when she’s at the peak of it, about to slip over into hysteria, the roof of the SUV punches in, the doors jamming, Seri screaming. She thrashes all around, unable to open the door, scaring herself with everything, and finally, accidentally, kicks a foot through Con’s still-open window. She crawls out stomach up, crying, and ‡there on the roof is Con’s ravaged body, a truly gruesome sight—the first. His cigarette is still in his lips.

  Seri instinctively falls back, into the snow, kicking her legs free, and, realizing how open the sky is above her, rolls under the SUV to the centermost place, discovers the keys in her hand she must have taken.

  She can’t seem to contain the crying.

  It gets worse when her limited POV—the wide-screen effect, with the top lopped off by the chassis, the bottom by the snow—makes out thick black legs through the storm. It’s vague, but they seem to be testing the ground, as wingéd things will.

  And then they’re pointed, gone.

  Seri talks herself sane: “They won’t come in the daytime, they won’t come in the daytime, they won’t come in the daytime.”

  And it is getting lighter.

  SERI’S chant doesn’t reach the caved-in roof of the SUV, though. Especially not the cherry of Con’s cigarette, in fine detail. It glows a deep red, and then, around it, Con coughs once, dies open-eyed. Past him and the SUV the headlights still shine on virgin snow, headlights that are dim through the breathed-on window of the living room. Nona’s POV.

  “That rat fucking bastard,” she’s still saying.

  Behind her Hale is pacing and Egan is perched on the hearth, eating corn and reading Clarke aloud, as if he’s Lovecraft89: “‘There was no mistake. The leathery wings, the little horns, the barbed tail—all were there. The most terrible
of all legends had come to life, out of the unknown past.’ Sound familiar to anybody …?”

  “They didn’t get anywhere,” Nona says to Hale, ignoring Egan, “if it makes you feel any better.”

  “Why would that—?” Hale starts, then doesn’t know how to finish. Can’t think about it.

  Egan becomes important, tending to his corn spoon, nodding with Clarke’s prose. He puts the book down, saving the place with his finger.

  “I’m the unlikeliest to die, y’know,” he says. “Because I’m doing all the things you say would make me deserve to die.”

  “What?” Hale says, having to acknowledge this.

  “I may have to kill you myself,” Nona says, not giving up window duty yet [nor turning to speak].

  “Exactly,” Egan says. “Not only am I potential fodder for whatever’s out there, but it’s also unlikely that anyone here will save me.”

  “At this rate it’s unlikely there’ll be anybody to save you,” Nona says, turning around. But Hale’s into it now: “So?” he asks.

  “So I eat corn and read science fiction,” Egan answers. “The world’s a sophisticated place. Because I’m expected to die, I’m invulnerable. It’d be too obvious to kill me.” He licks his upside-down spoon, studies it, goes wistful for a moment: “Funny. He never eats a second can at home … ”90

  “I think you’re presuming an audien—” Nona starts to object, but Hale cuts her off.

  “If this is such a sophisticated world,” he says, “wouldn’t that mean that because you’re expected not to die, you have to?”

  Egan nods appreciation. “And they gave me the scholarship,” he says. “I’m impressed. There’s still a few minutes left till sunup, though. Many a slip.”91

  Hale extends an arm for the Clarke book.

  “That’s my book,” he says.

  “And your … demons?” Egan says back.

  The book doesn’t change hands. Time drag-asses by. Hale nods off enough that Nona has to nudge him awake.

  “No sleep for twenty-four hours, concussion boy, remember?”

  “We don’t know for sure if it’s a concuss—” Hale begins to answer, but is cut off by the door being rammed, hard, for the second time. The exact same sound as before.