Demon Theory

by Stephen Graham Jones

  On her way out Nona tosses the sister bookend onto the bed as well.

  “For anything else,” she says, and then is out the door.

  AS she’s presumably making her way down the stairs there’s already another dialogue in process, around the three-wheeler:

  “So where’d you almost get it done?” Egan asks over the rising storm. He fake hangs himself to show what he’s talking about. Hale gauges the distance between him and Egan and then looks away, to the cellar, and just manages not to see the blue cigarette smoke still rising from the vent pipe during a wind lull. There, obviously—the cellar—what he isn’t telling Egan.

  Egan continues: “Just looking for a good beam myself, man. There’s not enough of us to go around another night.”

  Hale looks at Egan as if trying to figure him out, and they’re locked like that when Nona opens the front door, the living room phone cradled in one arm, a snow shovel in the other.

  The wind nearly blows her over.

  “The third stooge,”105 Egan says under his breath, where no one else can hear.

  “How long?” Nona asks, then clarifies: “Till night, I mean?”

  Egan uncovers his watch, tries to tap it alive, no luck. He shrugs with his lips, the rest of him too bundled up to relay anything.

  “Two hours?” he says, nodding upward to the storm, the distinct chance of premature darkness. “Not counting this BS.”

  “And how long to the highway?” Nona asks, but Egan makes a show of demurring, waits for Hale to answer—which he doesn’t.

  Nona begins clearing a three-wheeler runway with the shovel, and Hale gathers a plank, falls in.

  IN the upstairs bedroom Seri’s in quiet panic mode, wrapped in blankets, standing at the window, phone in hand [indicating for someone outside to pick it up, pick it up], bookends neglected, behind her on the bed. Another mistake in the making. And Nona left the door open behind her, it would seem. Just past it the attic stairs are lowering m.o.s.106—the jeep hatch opening on Neve all over again.107 Seri’s not looking behind her, either.

  EGAN stumbles away from three-wheeler duty and up to the phone, sits in one of the ancient Kennedy rockers, breathless, rocking to stay warm. We hear only his side of the conversation.

  “Walking dead108 here,” he says. “No, this isn’t Con. Con’s … yeah … okay, I’m sorry … well it’s not going well. We’re doctors, not mechanics … even with Wonder Woman109 on our side … what’s that?”

  He steps as far from the house as he can while still holding the phone, looks up as if gauging distance too.

  “Ten feet maybe. Eighty of wire.”

  Now he looks to Hale and Nona, per orders. From his POV Hale is slipping, trying to push the three-wheeler.

  “Could be,” he says about them. “Minimum wage gets minimum work, and we’re not even getting paid, y’know? Okay, okay. That was a joke … yes because I’m scared. You should get to know your classmates better, Ms. Serendipity Parker.”

  He smiles, shivers, holds the phone close then listens long, narrowing his eyes, trying to keep up.

  “Could be,” he says finally. “Like he’d camp at the convenience store waiting for the phone to ring, though, in this, just for a good samaritan badge? So he could be listening right now, then, right, is that what you’re getting at?”—[to the idea of the eavesdropping bum]—“Hello, sir, mister indigent?” and, instead of hokey split-screen, we simply cut away into the eighty-odd feet of wire between them, winding at high-high speed down blue red green white etc., to a moment of darkness which could be anything, could be the convenience store bum listening in, or could just be a handy close-up of the receiver Seri’s holding to her mouth. When she moves, the bum-spell is broken, and the shot expands to medium, her off to one side, still looking out the window, yards and yards of open bedroom behind her. The attic stairs already down. Suddenly she’s the teenage babysitter far too alone in an unfamiliar house.110

  This time only her side of the continuing conversation comes through.

  “I’m just saying what if,” she says, almost whispering. “He could have even followed us here somehow. Rode under the truck like DeNiro,111 I don’t know … of course I know it’s not him, I saw them, remember? … okay, one of them.”

  On cue—with her “one”—a gargoyle-headed FIGURE approaches calmly, as if curious, half-hesitant even. The camera angle makes it look too tall, almost preternatural. Something wrong with the legs, too. The music is bone-deep by now, and twice as shrill.

  “I’m just—” but she’s interrupted by something out the window. She shakes her head, relays to Egan: “They’re calling you … yeah … leave the phone off the hook, though, for me?”

  From her POV, then, Egan stumbles out to Hale and Nona, the runway they’ve dug. The wind almost pushes him over. He looks up to Seri and spreads his fingers for her, meaning ten—ten feet. Another kiss of death. Seri smiles, finally consoled, then turns around, to an empty room. Too empty. She knows. Looks to the bookends, half a room away. Past them the attic stairs.

  She shoulders the phone.

  “Anybody …?”

  BUT the receiver on the porch is talking to no one, to us, is spilling Seri’s o.s. voice, already distant, trailing off:

  “Someone, please. Okay, okay. The reason why med school then. Because it takes the longest. Because it costs the most, because it changes your name … because I don’t want … because doctors aren’t supposed to die … please … ”

  AND when the shot draws back, past the uncradled receiver is the three-wheeler, Hale, Nona, and Egan at the uphill end of their hard-earned and quickly filling runway.

  “I’m just saying you’re the lightest, Nona,” Hale is saying, “not necessarily the weakest. It’s a compliment.”

  Nona smiles at him as if she was just playing anyway, pecks him on the cheek, and while close to his ear—i.e., far from Egan—whispers “You okay?”

  Hale nods. “We just need to get out of here,” he says.

  “But we’re still …?”

  “Alive,” Hale says, in lieu of the “together” Nona seems to have been meaning, and Nona pulls back, climbs onto the three-wheeler.

  “Now when we—” Hale starts, putting his hand down on the shifter, but Nona’s already interrupting, evidently not all the way satisfied with Hale’s answer: “I know about gears, guys. My father already taught me.”

  Egan smiles, makes scared-eyes. “This some sort of urban mating dance?” he asks. “Am I in the way here?”

  “Just push,” Nona says, settling herself behind the bars, and they do.

  IN the upstairs bedroom Seri is walking softly toward the door, suspicious of everything, talking herself calm: “Just close your eyes just close your eyes … ”112

  With great effort and misplaced trust, she does, and when she opens them the figure is there, looming in place, wearing black rubber hip waders and either Egan’s lost gargoyle mask or no mask at all.

  It’s finally on-screen.

  In the wader’s belt is one side of some dismantled garden shears/hedge clippers, and the edge is shiny sharp, ground fine.

  Seri sums it all up: “Oh.”113

  They stare at each other, locked in their respective places, the figure cocking its head ever so slightly, a Voorhesian tic.114 Which is bad news. It reaches for Seri’s shoulder with its gnarled gargoyle hand and Seri avoids that hand gently, and they dance like this for about five steps, then Seri bends slowly to the bed, comes up with one of the marble bookends in her near hand.

  Her blankets fall away and she’s in undergarments again, eyes still X’ed.

  The figure is unmoved.

  She smiles for misdirection and the move she makes is fast, calculated, unexpected: she lofts the bookend window-wards, allowing the figure to catch it, and then, as it’s extended, absorbing the marble weight down its arm and shoulder, she nails it hard in the gargoyle face with the other bookend. It goes down to one knee, and the bookend rebounds to Seri somehow
. She takes a step closer, holds the bookend this time and hits the figure with everything she’s got, driving it lower even—blood spilling from the mask onto the hardwood floor (so it is a mask), the blade carving painful designs in that floor—and just as she’s about to bring it down again the figure’s hand rises deadly fast, catches her wrist midswing, and the weight of the bookend carries it out of Seri’s hand and through the window just as the three-wheeler roars to life, suddenly getting even louder, meaning we’ve cut outside, to Nona tearing away from Hale and Egan. Hale as he falls is all about relief, salvation. Egan as he falls is simply bitter cold. But they’re not the focus here. The shot moves alongside Nona, her inserted right toe shifting professionally up into second, the front tire going weightless for a moment, somewhat justifying the brief balloon-tire close-up which seamlessly expands into the black hip waders of the gargoyle-headed figure, Seri held close to them as it stands, the flat of the garden-shear blade pressed into her cheek. She instinctively flinches back upon realizing what it is and with zero effort it opens up the side of her face, allowing an unwanted flash of ivory molar before the blood. And the blood is everywhere now, from both of them. Seri tries to hold her face in place.

  “No no no!” she screams, breaking free, backing away.

  The figure looks down to her, its face unable to register either rage or pity, whatever it’s feeling.

  Seri makes it to the bed. Crawls under the bed.

  Soon enough it sags, the figure standing on it, and then the blade comes down through the mattress, Seri narrowly avoiding it more times than should be possible, catching a few Sarah Connor scratches115 in the process. And screaming the whole time.

  Finally the stabbing stops, the mattress unsags, and Seri breathes premature relief, holds it in until the foot of the bed lifts. The figure drags Seri out by the ankle. She thrashes around for all she’s worth but it’s no use. It manages to pull her up into its arms, cradle her, stroke her hair with its off-hand, with what must be Egan’s lost glove, its eyes watching her from some place far inside itself. Its eyehole framed POV regards her.

  She still has the phone.

  NONA pulls back around to Hale and Egan, the blue-grey smoke of the three-wheeler whipping away. She downshifts into neutral inches from both of them and stands on the foot brake, sliding with confidence, kicking snow like an Olympic skier. Egan sits in place, brushing himself off. Hale stands, unsure, something there in his hand.

  He shakes the snow off of it. Close-up, it’s the marble bookend. Hale half-smiles when he finally recognizes it.

  “Wonder how long this has been here?” he asks.

  “About ten seconds,” Nona says, and she’s already in motion toward the front door, the three-wheeler still idling evenly.

  Hale nods toward it for Egan.

  “Now that’s how you do it,” he says.

  Egan rolls his eyes and turns around, to Nona’s commotion, the house, and his POV has a low angle on the window, the blurred action of Seri and the gargoyle figure struggling within, Seri bringing the phone up into the masked face again and again, the figure stumbling, trying to hold on to her, failing: Seri finally bucks lengthwise out of its arms, bringing her feet the unexpected (gymnastic) direction—over her head—tucking herself into a smooth roll.

  But behind her is the window.

  Phone still in hand, she crashes through, twisting as she goes. Hale and Egan are right there to witness too. And it is ugly: her twisting does keep the glass out of her skin, but it also manages to garrote the phone cord around her neck. It draws tight, her neck audibly snapping, and there she is, the swinging corpse we’ve been waiting for, bloody in lingerie,116 eyes already X’ed over.

  “Shit,” Egan says, half in appreciation almost, but Hale isn’t there to agree, is already at the door with Nona, the door which seems to be unaccountably locked.

  “No no no,” Hale is saying.

  BACK to the bedroom, close on the old-style phone cord absolutely planted in the wall, but stretched taut. Feet approach in hip waders. The garden-shear blade comes down silently, severing the phone cord, Seri outside jarring a few feet lower, but the cord is wrapped around the bed leg. The bed creaks toward the window, as if Seri’s pulling the room down with her. It’s a nice visual effect, but the gargoyle figure stops it with a well-placed foot. One of its gloved hands lowers into the shot then, and, with the other, begins reeling Seri in. As her head clears the windowsill there’s a crashing downstairs as Hale, on the porch, assaults the door with the snow shovel. Once, twice, three times, then, finally, the door gives, swings brokenly back onto darkness (thick curtains over the living room windows, already blocked with furniture). Nona rushes in but Hale catches her at the bottom of the stairs, and it’s a blind grab: from their POVs—or just Hale’s, it’s not clear—the int. of the house is vague shapes, lots of shadows. The shot reverses and they’re squinting painfully, their pupils not yet caught up with the move from reflected snow to no electricity.

  Because he has to though, Hale tries to look up the stairs, and, from his angle, there’s a large, blurry figure with demon ears, way top-heavy with Seri over its shoulder. And then it’s gone.

  “It can’t be,” Hale says to himself. “It fucking can’t be.”

  Nona breaks free, gropes up the stairs, pulling Hale behind her.

  As they pass under the attic Hale holds it closed with the shovel, and once in the room he stops breathing, isn’t thinking to breathe: the hardwood floor hasn’t soaked up any of the blood, and it’s been stepped through, spread around. Wind coming through the window. Nona is drawn to it, looks down to Egan, still sitting, pointing above them at the gargoyle figure agile on the roof with Seri, looking back once then disappearing.

  NONA looks away from Egan, to Hale, sitting on the edge of the bed, holding the shovel with both hands, blade up, pressing his head into the backside of it again and again.

  The three-wheeler is still idling, part of the b.g. noise.

  Nona reaches for Hale but is hesitant to step through the blood. Before she can navigate through, the b.g. idling shifts slightly. Into second gear. Nona spins to the window.

  “He’s got the damn three-wheeler,” she says. “Shit. Hale?”

  Hale’s useless though.

  TEN feet below them Egan toes the three-wheeler into third too early, pulling the engine down dangerously close to nothing. He compensates with the throttle, lowering the whole right side of his body into it, the front wheel rising.

  When he finally gets control again he looks back once in either apology or derision, or both at once somehow, and then he’s gone.

  IN the bedroom Hale is still in flagellation mode, Nona sitting by him now, staring blankly.

  “Perfect,” she says. “And then there were three. Then two.”117 She looks to Hale, unplugged from reality. “Or one and a half,” she adds.

  Each time Hale hits his head—the stitched-together wound reopening the slightest bit, as if onto something else, something buried inside him, leaking out—we jump into his continuing flashback, where he’s fourteen, mired in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, terrified beyond words at what’s in front of him. After maybe three back-and-forths from the bedroom to his flashback, a distant hammering asserts itself: Nona, nailing a looted plank across the broken front door. They’re in the living room, fast-forwarded, Hale on the couch, mid-interrogation.

  “What do you mean it can’t be?” Nona asks. “Or what did you mean? You have seen them once, right? One, I mean. When it took—”

  “I saw something, yes. God. I was fourteen, Nona.”

  “We all were once. It’s no crime.”

  “You didn’t kill anybody.”

  “Neither did you.”

  They stare at each other, not mad.

  “Jenny was already … ” Hale says, answering her original question, then starts again: “She didn’t walk, I mean. When she went outside. She wasn’t walking like the paper said. Like I said to the paper
.”

  BACK to the flashback, just after dinner, Jenny apparently dead in her wheelchair. This all from Hale’s liminal (kitchen/living room) POV. The front door swings open, and framed in it is STAN, Hale’s father, garden shears in hand, snow blowing in behind him. He doesn’t care. He’s seeing Jenny. He walks to her arms-first, shakes her, slowly realizing.

  “That you, dear?” Hale’s mother calls from the kitchen. “Stan?” Hale’s POV tracks around to her, bent over the sink, anonymous from the back, her hair strawberry-young instead of the grey we know from the opening scenes.

  She doesn’t investigate, though, so Hale returns to his father, who calmly—too calmly—picks his daughter up from the wheelchair (seat-cushion springs relaxing), holds her out to Hale as if to show him what he’s done, and then, as the dishwater stops, or, because it stops, he carries her out the front door, attaching visuals to the dragging footsteps from earlier. It’s all from the same audio track.

  Hale follows him out to the cellar, where he has to lie on his stomach to see in the left-open door, the drill bit anchor-as-counterweight holding it open. Over his shoulder, down the stairs, is Stan, cradling Jenny, humming some distinctive lullaby, scratching her a grave with the shovel in his free hand. A big enough man to do that.

  When the hole bottoms out on some half-poured concrete, an aborted floor project, he lays her gently into it. But she’s too long.

  He closes his eyes, opens them back, not so much resolved as just resigned. Breathing deep, he raises the shovel with both hands, saying “there there” all the while, then as we pan up Jenny’s body—resting on her delicate torso—he brings the shovel down, bones cracking wetly, and the way her upper body moves it’s as if in reaction to pain, as if she wasn’t really dead after all.

  Her eyelids are mostly still.

  “SO,” Nona says, choosing her words, “there never were any … demons.”

  She’s kneeling by Hale, watching his mouth.

  “Him,” Hale says. “My dad.”