Demon Theory

by Stephen Graham Jones

  “But you covered for him. To the reporters. To the cops.”

  “To my mom.”

  Nona doesn’t say anything to this. Hale continues: “He’s not the one that killed her though.”

  Nona looks away in mute exasperation. “So as you see it then,” she says, “you were covering for yourself, for that wreck that happened two years before?” Hale’s nonanswer is practically yes. Nona laughs through her nose. “What’re you going to tell the papers about Con, Seri, Gin … your mother?”

  Hale leans back into the couch. “At this rate,” he says, “maybe nothing.”

  “No,” Nona says, standing, walking, inspecting the living room, “somebody always lives. You’re Charles Bronson118 here, Chuck Norris.119 We’re all just stages for you, rungs on the ladder of self-awareness. A good night of confrontation therapy. Each time one of us dies you’re forced that much closer to dealing with your whole father-sister thing. This is all for you, Hale.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. And whatever story you tell, you did lie to us, by omission. You made it sound fun, even. ‘Let’s go play doctors.’ God. You’ll probably be back here in another ten years with a new crop—a new date—working through your memories of us.”

  For punctuation Nona swings the hammer onto her thumb, the nail she was aiming for a clear inch away.

  She grinds her teeth hard, leaves her thumb there. Breathes. Won’t give in.

  “Do you know why me and med school?” she asks. “You never asked. It’s a standard first-date question.”

  Hale watches her, waits.

  “Because I didn’t want to be a nurse. And now here I am, all coded female, weak, a love interest, a potentially shrieking victim … ”

  “No,” Hale repeats, rising to her, taking the hand of her hurt thumb in his hand. Not kissing it, though. Not quite.

  “No to which one?” Nona asks.

  “Say them again.”

  Nona looks away, back. “Love interest was one,” she says.

  “I shouldn’t have brought you out here,” Hale says in return.

  “Into your childhood … ” Nona starts, then cuts herself short: “You didn’t kill her, Hale. People die. Even children. Even little sisters.”

  “You weren’t there.”

  “But I am here,” she says. “And I’m not dead yet”—holding her thumb out, indicating it—“in spite of my best efforts.”

  “Maybe it’s you that lives, then,” Hale says, “the love interest … Miss Bronson … or would that be Mrs.?”

  “Maybe it’s us,” Nona says back, smiling, “who knows? Egan could even be talking to the DPS about us right now … ”

  “I’m sure he is … ” Hale says around a spreading grin, and suddenly there’s a false o.s. laugh from the direction of the kitchen: Egan standing in the doorway. There all along.

  “Mister and Mrs. Easy Prey,” he says, correcting Hale’s naming. “Guess you didn’t notice the gun was gone, either.” He saunters in, his entry line made. Hale and Nona look for the gun without moving and it is gone.

  “Shit,” Hale says.

  “Why’d you—?” Nona starts.

  “Couldn’t take the survivor’s guilt,” Egan finishes.

  Hale corrects: “You didn’t know the way out.”

  “That too.”

  “How’d you get back in?” Nona asks, peering behind him.

  Egan shrugs. “Guess I didn’t lock that utility door as well as we might have liked.”

  “Great,” Nona says, “excellent.”

  “So you heard …?” Hale asks weakly.

  “And filled in the blanks. Just one thing, though. For the Scooby-Doo ending.”120

  Hale falls into a couch, looks back up in defeat. “Go,” he says.

  “You never answered her. Not why you made the cover story up, but where you got it from, really.”

  “She didn’t ask that,” Hale says.

  “Well she is now,” Egan says. “Or I am.”

  When their male stare-off session threatens to last for hours, Nona cuts it short, defending Hale with a breathless recital, pop-psych 101: “When memory of an event is unclear, repressed, et cetera, the individual will, in hopes of maintaining a coherent narrative, try out various hypotheses, with the high likelihood that what’ll be recalled will be in line with one of those hypotheses—however out-there.” Hale and Egan stare at her for an explanation. “Donahue,121 I think,” she says, already waving it away.

  “But that’s just it,” Egan says. “He wasn’t recalling it, right? As he says, he was making it up. From nothing, he’d have us believe, right?”

  “He was—” Nona starts, about to take another defense angle, but Hale puts a stop to all this: “It was made up already,” he says.

  IN the beat after he speaks we cut upstairs, to his bedroom, no more figures sleeping in the smaller bed. What’s important is Jenny’s wall, the drawings in focus, dwelt upon now as they must have been then—charcoal angels, winged, clawed, hermaphroditic, terribly beautiful. In an oval mirror122 nested among the drawings is the gargoyle-masked HEAD, listening to Hale, o.s., below:

  “She thought they were really coming for her. For two years it was all she talked about. All we heard.”

  The gargoyle head looks away, directing us back to the living room, the curtains hardly even glowing with daylight anymore. It’s slipped away already. Hale’s still talking:

  “And then my mom turned her on to Swedenborg. Emanuel Swedenborg.123 ‘Emanuel’ means ‘Christ.’ In seventeen forty-four Swedenborg looked in the mirror and saw Jesus—”

  “Which would have been himself, right?” Nona asks. “‘Emanuel?’”124

  Hale doesn’t answer, just continues: “He talked to angels too, after that, or, the angels talked to him. About what they wore, the things they ate. Their daily habits. What they thought of us.”

  Egan rubs thought from the bridge of his nose: “So if you would have gone so far as to believe in these … her … Swedenborg’s angels—”

  “She said she was dying,” Hale interrupts.

  “You were humoring her?” Nona asks.

  Hale shakes his head no. “I tried to talk her out of it … out of them.”

  Egan carries it further, though: “But it was because she was dying that the angels were coming in the first place, right? The way she saw it. Like big flies … heavenly vultures?”

  Nona crinkles her nose at the fly association, reevaluates Egan.

  Hale finally nods.

  Egan smiles.

  “So if the angels only come when you’re dead,” he says, “then you buying into her angel theory would be accepting that she was dying … that you … ”—[searching for the right nonoffensive word here]—“you mortally wounded your kid sister that day.”

  “You just didn’t want to have killed her,” Nona sums up.

  “So you made the ‘demons’ do it,” Egan adds. “Tidy. Matlock125 couldn’t have even caught you. Except your dad read the newspaper a little too closely—”

  “—as a script,” Nona finishes. “Now we’re back where we started.”

  “At the end,” Egan adds.

  Before Hale can say anything—and he looks ready, if reluctant—there’s what might be a footstep on the ceiling above them. They all watch it, waiting.

  “And I guess demons can come anytime now?” Nona says.

  “There aren’t any demons,” Hale says. “There can’t be.”

  “Then nondemons,” Egan says, positioning himself away from where the footstep seemed to have fallen. “At least now we hypothetically know who he thinks he is … the friendly neighborhood angel of death.”

  “His father, you mean,” Nona says, “right?”

  “Of course … ” Egan says, looking at Nona, her purple thumbnail. “We should really take a look at that cartoon thumb there, y’know … if you can keep from, what was it? ‘Shrieking,’ that was it … ”

  Nona flips him off affectionately.
/>   BEHIND the house the three-wheeler is idling quietly, its approaching tracks already filled in. It’s dark dark, starless, and under the weight of it all the three-wheeler sputters out, the silence hissing in its absence. Around the edge of the house is the kitchen window, and behind the window is a candle moving back and forth, casting irregular shadows onto the wall opposite Hale and Egan, on separate couches in the living room. The candle isn’t in the shot, is in the kitchen with Nona, evidently. Hale blinks, rubs his eyes.

  “How long was the sun even up?” he asks Egan.

  “About ten minutes,” Egan says with the flat edge of his voice.

  Hale smiles. Recites Seri: “‘No sleep for twenty-four hours … ’”

  “Plus,” Egan says. “And time’s almost … ”

  Hale wavers, waiting for Egan to complete his sentence, then nods off.

  “… up,” Egan finishes, smoothly palming some yellow amphetamine-type pill into his mouth.

  THE kitchen faucet turns on suddenly and Nona holds her thumb under the cold water. Relief. The candle is steady now, in a saucer she’s rigged by the sink.

  Behind her the kitchen is unusually large. The utility room door open, pantry too, the burlap calendar not letting it close. So many points of entry. Of all of them, too, she looks to the living room. “Hale?” she calls, no response, then, half-worried: “Egan?”

  “Wide awake,” Egan answers, o.s.

  Nona crosses the kitchen, towel in hand, leans into the living room. Looking for all the world like the mother of the house, dinner just over. In her POV there’s Hale, sacked out, as uncomfortable as any human could ever be and twice as asleep.

  “He had a hard day,” Egan explains, swallowing, “or night. Both.”

  “Let him sleep,” Nona says. “We’ll go in shifts or something.”

  Egan shrugs “whatever.” “You really think you could close your eyes?” he asks. “I mean, if you didn’t have a concussion, a guilty conscience?”

  Now Nona shrugs, and in the absence of conversation sonars in on the faucet dripping annoyingly behind her. She walks by candlelight to the sink, giving the pantry wide berth.

  “You did lock that utility door this time, right Egan?” she calls back.

  BUT in the living room Egan is watching Hale, deep in some personal REM sequence.

  “Shhh,” Egan says, waving her voice away. “He’s dreaming … ”

  NONA’S almost to the sink by now, talking herself through: “She said to herself ‘I’ll just check out that noise, because noises never signify danger, right? Just a harmless little faucet, dripping … ’”

  She turns it off, and when her POV rises to the window over the sink—her hand still on the faucet—there’s the inevitable gargoyle head over her shoulder, looking dead-eyed back at her.

  Because it’s set up to look like a reflection, she whirls around fast, but behind her is just linoleum, a refrigerator. Open doors telling her nothing. Or, too much. Her whole being sags with realization: it wasn’t a reflection. She sways her back to run but doesn’t quite make it: an arm shatters through the window, bodily drags her out by the hair, her hand the last thing, finally taking the faucet with her.126

  Her candle-rig flickers with the new breeze. Water gurgles sickly from the broken faucet stump.

  Egan’s o.s. voice comes from the other room, distant, insistent: “Nona?”—and then he’s on Hale’s couch, shaking him violently, Hale’s eyes still twitching. We go close on the right lid, the eye beneath staring hard at the ground where Jenny was buried. The mound still there, fresh, telltale fabric around, just starting to rot. His POV expands slightly, and in the lower third of the screen the picnic bench he’s standing on presents itself mutely. This is it, his Officer and a Gentleman moment, yet another piece of the disjointed flashback. The shot reverses and his lips are moving. Mid-word, then, he steps calmly off, holding the rope with his hands. Slowly and without much resolve he lowers himself, his neck taking the weight in increments, blood trapped in his face, rising to the surface, vessels going off in his eyes like fireworks.

  He keeps his arms by his side too.

  From his POV again, the room spins as he spins, the centrifugal force finally seeming to sling the POV away. An out-of-body experience here. The room settles down. Hale’s strangling body becomes a twitching object seen from above, reducing itself in size as the OBE127 POV rushes up the vent pipe Hale on the couch flailing resistance and emerges in open air, melting snow. On the porch is Hale’s mother in motion—all strawberry hair and dish towel hands, no face, and young, the same indistinct actress as the other flashback.

  “Haaaale …?” she calls, then again, the shot focused on her lower body so that she’s any of us, all of us, her feet nervously crossing the lawn. Then she sees the open cellar door, moves reflexively toward it, out of the shot. She doesn’t hear what the OBE POV is hearing either: the deep moan of the angels circling above, charcoal black and just as crude. One becomes aware of Hale, separates itself from the rest, falls into a dive, wings tucked, air rushing past it, ‡Egan still trying and trying to wake Hale, Hale backing into the couch, away from Egan, the diving angel.

  “No no no,” Hale says in his sleep.

  Egan fumbles his pills out, forces two down Hale’s throat, no immediate effect. In desperation then he steadies Hale’s head as best he can, pincers onto the lone remaining stitch.

  “You’ll forgive me later,” he mumbles, leaning back, the inserted stitch match-cut to Hale’s suicide rope, not breaking, but gathering slack as his mother lifts him desperately from the knees, pulling Hale’s POV backward down the vent pipe, the demonic angel mere microns from him, close enough to be an undivine smell, close enough to have a scar across one eye, a history.

  EGAN falls back with the stitch, and Hale’s head wound is worse than before now, seriously aggravated. Hale, disoriented, unsure, attacks Egan—fists, elbows, and tears. Egan curls into a defensive ball. Hale’s assault becomes less brutal as he wakes fully. Which isn’t to say he’s in a good mood.

  “Where’s Nona?” he demands, and gets the answer from how Egan avoids the question: “It was supposed to be me, man, I know,” he says. “You and her were the ones, Gere and Winger. I am sorry, for what it’s worth.”

  “How?” Hale asks, but all Egan can do is shrug, nod to the kitchen.

  “I guess they’re housebroken, now,” he says, a bad, wrong joke.

  Hale sits down hard onto the stone hearth.

  “This is where I’m supposed to get all mad, right?” he says.

  Egan plays along, adds the tagline:128 “Because it’s personal now.”

  Hale does an eyebrow-lip combo that illustrates exactly how mad he isn’t. More like defeated, ready for it all to be over.

  “You’re right,” he says. “It was supposed to be her—”

  “The final girl. Nona Lee Curtis.”129

  Hale winces for Egan as Egan tries to compose his split lip. He turns his back, his POV studying the kitchen door, and we cut behind him, to Egan, surly, in pain, trying out his lips, whistling the distinctive lullaby of Stan’s. Straight from the basement of Hale’s continuing flashback.

  Time slows in Hale’s POV. The lullaby becomes more real than just Egan whistling it.

  Hale spins, pins Egan by the gargoyle lapels for the second time. “Where,” he demands, “where in the hell is that from? Where’d you hear it?”

  Egan shrugs, either confused or acting confused.

  “Are you in with him?” Hale asks. “Is that it? Is that what you were doing those thirty minutes up there? That why you came back?” He throws Egan down hard, stands over him. “Where’s Nona, Egan? Take me to her. Now.”

  When Egan won’t stand, Hale reaches behind for the fireplace brush, holds it backwards, the handle end dangerous enough.

  “I think he took her from the kitchen,” Egan spits. “I thought we were past all this shit by now.”

  “After you, then,” Hale says, stepping around Eg
an, waiting for him to get up, lead the way.

  “Whatever you say, man. It’s your goddamn house, your goddamn father, your goddamn girlfriend … ”

  NONA’S candle is guttering in its saucer. Hale and Egan approach it, Egan hands up, singing to himself, for Hale: “Devil inside devil inside every single one of us the devil insi-ide.”130

  The wind through the broken window slaps them in the face as they reach the sink.

  “Makes you won-der,” Egan continues, reaching for the hard note, “how the other half died … ”

  And then, agile as ever, he plants his hands on the counter and vaults effortlessly over the sink, out the window, instantly becoming small fast and running away in the window-framed POV, where we stay, Hale’s even breathing filling the theater.

  Somehow he controls it.

  MOMENTS later the three-wheeler is still in the same place: just in front of the utility room door. Nothing moves, then more nothing, just wind, snow, and finally the stillness is est. enough to be violently shattered by the utility door bursting open. Nona’s road flare arcs out, already lit, followed by Hale, apparently heedless of the sky now.

  He walks a straight line to the three-wheeler. The inserted gas-cap fuel gauge is deep in the red. But enough, it would seem. Hale nods, breathing the cold air through his nose, breathing it fast, Egan’s speed kicking in, beading sweat on Hale’s upper lip. He looks down to his hand and it’s trembling. He steadies it as best he can, digs for the three-wheeler’s onboard wrench, removes the spark plug after about four bad tries, pockets it.

  “Fuck you, Egan,” he says.

  He stands then, trying to resist the wind, everything, and is easily taken into a clean headlock from behind, by Stan, in mask, materializing out of nowhere. Hale tries to fight but his father has size, position, and some pretty badass gargoyle gloves. Hale finally relents, is let go. They’re on their knees in the blowing snow, facing each other for too long.

  “So get it over with already,” Hale says, “fucking cold out here. Or is that part of it?”

  Stan pauses, emphasizing that he’s not responding to that. “Your sister,” he says, his voice deep and level, “Jennifer’s belief in angels was simply her way of dying. For your mother it was the movie, Oz. Everyone has their own way. For you—”