Halfway down the stairs Hale becomes aware that there’s no Stan in the living room below. He tightens his grip on Nona, walks softer.
“You didn’t even—” Nona says, and Hale’s already whispering back: “There was no pulse. I checked. Goddammit. I even tried to … ”
They reach the bottom of the stairs, Hale standing at the front door, looking out, Egan rising behind him, smiling his smile.
“They got him,” he says, his voice hardly even there. “They fucking got him. Swoosh, swoosh … just like your … ” but he collapses before he can finish. Nona separates herself from Hale in order to catch Egan. In her arms Egan coughs blood—dark and vital now—passes out.
Nona indicts Hale with a look.
“They were … ” Hale tries, “they were fighting.”
Still though, Nona just stares, as if daring him to lie more. Her unasked questions drive him out the door. The wind slams it shut behind him, leaves him hunched against the wall moments later, afraid to venture any further, afraid to do anything.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” he says.
NONA has Egan on the couch, is stroking his matted hair.
“It’s okay,” she’s saying. “I’ll be your nurse. Just don’t tell anybody.”
Egan opens his eyes, barely gets any words out: “False ending number one … ” Nona smiles, nods. He tries to go on—“It’s the … ”—can’t. Dies.
Nona speaks for him, her voice devoid of all irony: “It’s the sister. I know.”
BY the amount of snot frozen to Hale’s face he’s been on the porch a good while. The door opens and Nona joins him, careful not to touch her butt to the frozen planks. She leans the cleaned blade against the house, between them, hands a jacket over. Hale takes it, nods out to the yard, Stan’s abbreviated tracks still there enough to make out.
“My dad taught physics,” Nona says, apropos nothing. “This is another date question. Did you know they have a demon theory too?”
“Maxwell’s demon,”141 Hale says grimly, but Nona shakes her head no.
“The information sorter, right? Okay, then they have two. But the other one.”
“Descartes. That there’s a demon creating—maintaining—all this. Just to fuck with our heads. So we never know what’s real.”142
“Which is pretty much the definition of evil.”
Hale nods.
“That’s metaphysics, though.”
Hale turns to her, waiting. Nona smiles. “Guess your demonology’s a little out of date. Demon Theory Sixteen.143 The idea is that if you balance a sack of flour on your head and knock on the table sixteen times, a demon will appear. Like the Candyman. Bloody Mary.”144
“They’re real, Nona,” Hale says. “I don’t know how but they are.”
Nona is ignoring him though. “And if you knock those sixteen times with no result, then you simply escalate, knock seventeen times. And so on.”
She knocks on the porch, a demonstration. They both tense up, wait, nothing. Or, nothing yet.
“It’s a model,” Nona continues, “a parable, a scientific allegory. The push is that you need a less random way of generating hypotheses than knocking on tables. Just because sixteen times produced no result doesn’t mean that seventeen will. It’s about misplaced faith.”
“I’m telling you—”
“Demon Theory Sixteen isn’t based on facts, Hale, that’s the thing. And neither is what you think. We haven’t exhausted all the possibilities with real people yet.”
Hale laughs. “But there aren’t any ‘real’ people left,” he says. “What else could they be?”
“You didn’t create them. That’s not how the world works.”
“I created my father, the … whatever he was.”
“Self-fulfilling,” Nona says. “That’s different.”
“And they’re different.”
“There is no ‘they,’” Nona says, starting to get exasperated by Hale’s lack of logic, “there is no them. It’s your sister, Hale, as bad as you don’t want to hear it. There. Now don’t say anything.” Hale doesn’t. “The facts,” Nona says: “Your mother’s not physically capable of all this, your father’s … incapacitated somewhere [sweeping an arm expansively across the yard], and your sister, she’s the one with all the motivations here. She was buried alive, Hale, her legs—”
“She wasn’t alive,” Hale interrupts.
Nona stands, motions at the cellar, still glowing red at the edges. The yard, miles of open sky around it.
“Then let’s go decide this,” she says. “Once and for all.”
Hale looks away from the cellar. “She’s not there,” he says. “I checked. It doesn’t mean anything, though. My father could have gotten her out.”
Now it’s Nona’s turn to laugh. “Yet you cling to your demon theory. Her demon theory. I’ll be your next stage of awareness, then, Hale. Watch her come for me.”
She bends then, to kiss him good-bye, and the kiss gets a little carried away, Hale trying to keep her there maybe. She draws back smiling, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.
“So what do they think of us,” she asks, “Swedenborg’s angels? We all grubby and mortal to them?”
Hale looks away. “They hate us,” he says. “Flat out hate.”
This doesn’t do the mood any good.
Nona squints at his coagulated wound, picks at it. He draws back.
“My stitch?” she asks, but Hale’s already somewhere else, is holding her by the wrist.
“Don’t—” he says, but she pulls away.
“This is what it takes,” Nona says. “For you. To ever be free of here, of her. I’m not afraid. We’re both women, human, people. Un-supernatural. She can die just like the rest of us, Hale, I’m sorry. We can’t stay on this porch forever, y’know … ”
She smiles at the end of saying it, then two-hands the blade, walks off into the yard, watching all the angles. “Red Sonja,” she calls back, showing her teeth savagely, dawn there in the east, and then she offers the challenge three-sixty: “Come out and play, Jennifer … Show your brother that there aren’t any demons, c’mon … We won’t be here tomorrow night … Last call … Going once … going twice … ”
The shot reverses onto Hale, thin-lipped, watching. Shaking his head no, but appreciating her, what she’s trying to do for him.
He closes his eyes only when the phone rings, keeps ringing. In a flash he’s up, scrambling stiffly inside to pick it up. Behind him, outside, there’s a great whoosh, and when his POV makes it back around, Nona’s gone. Her tracks end midstep, no blade in the ground, even. Hale stands in the darkened living room listening to the phone, his own o.s. voice coming through as if across a great distance: This is Hale.145
He lays the receiver down carefully, backs away from it. Shakes his head no, no.
But the connection is still made, maintained.
Sunlight penetrating now, the rope from his suicide flashback being cut in half by a medic’s serrated belt knife, the ripping sound seeming to come not just from overhead but from upstairs.
“Please,” Hale says, “no.”
He follows the banister up though, nudges the attic stairs closed, the springs pulling hungrily at them. Pushes his old bedroom door open for more light. There at the recessed end of the hall, JENNY, in her chair, way-way desiccated, legs cleanly broken, clothes still on—new clothes it seems, as if she’s been recently dressed.
She raises her arms for Hale to pick her up.
He does.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “God, I’m so sorry.”
HE walks out the front door holding Jenny as his father held her when he carried her: cradled to his chest. Three-day maggots crawl between the two of them, brother and sister. The storm is abated, the snow blinding white by now, the two of them small on it. Hale walks to the most open space in the yard he can find, where Nona just was, holds Jenny up as high as he can.
“Take her,” he says—insisting on hi
s demon theory—then louder: “Take her, take her, please … ” but then Jenny’s hanging arm wraps around Hale’s, her hand clamps onto his shoulder, and the only sound is crunching footsteps ‡in the melting snow. The footsteps belong to someone in uniform-blue pants, walking away from the cellar. By the gait, the legs are male. The trim of the house in the legs’ b.g. is the same color it’s been in the other flashbacks. The shot moves with the legs, anticipates them, reveals an older-year-model ambulance emergency-parked in the yard. The legs pass through the shot and it expands, and it is a male, a medic type, no face yet. A female paramedic is already at the ambulance, sitting on the running board tossing snow at nothing. She’s sad, defeated; her shoulders talk about it. VIRGINIA. It’s sewn onto her jacket. It’s her.
“I thought he was going to make it that second time,” she says. “God I hate this job.”
“No you don’t,” the male medic says back in CON’s voice. “He was already dead. Practically, I mean.”
Virginia walks around the ambulance, opens the door, spilling out the radio, INXS’s “Devil Inside.” It remains. Con turns back to the cellar one more time, regards it, then leans over, cupping a cigarette in the windless cavity of his body. It won’t light, though. Again and again he tries.
“Let’s get out of here,” he finally says to Virginia, though she’s out of hearing. “I hate the country.”
As he walks to the ambulance he throws the wasted match and it lands in the snow, just to the left of Egan’s gargoyle mask, its icy grin rigid, enduring, fading out only for the credits.
DEMON THEORY 17
Part II of a three-part novelization of the feature film trilogy The Devil Inside, as adapted from D, the unauthorized best-seller inspired by the case notes of Dr. Neider, as recorded in a series of interviews conducted during his residency at Owl Creek Mental Facilities and originally published in the journal P/Q as “Narrative, Me-dia, and Allocution: Genre as Mnemonic Device.”
I can feel the Devil walking next to me.
—Murray Head
THE sequel begins the same as the original: with a siren fading in, wailing overhead, moving blind through the crackling darkness, the nature of the emergency not yet on-screen. Tires screech around a corner this time, though, the sound trapped in brick alleys, resounding back, accreting in our inner ear until the flashing red light of the ambulance resolves itself, then the rest of the ambulance, a moving POV from a high angle and behind, as if the ambulance is being followed, tracked from above, the shot accelerating ahead suddenly, rushing in for a close-up of the driver’s mouth, mostly covered by the CB handle he’s holding hard there, his hand bloody, charred, lips angry with heat. In the b.g. of his hand is the other paramedic, CAT. She’s blood-splattered, staring blankly out the window, as if in shock. Scratching the diamond of her solitaire on the window. The divider immediately behind their heads is pulled shut, the patient hidden from view.
The driver makes a hard, one-armed turn, scraping a parked car, dragging sparks between them. He overcorrects, recovers, leans back into the static of the CB: “Yes,” he says, lips sardonic-thin, “call the psych guys, hell, call them all. And somebody in a priest costume, over.” When dispatch doesn’t come back he holds his hand up, into his POV, palm in, just above heart level. Inspecting the damage.
As he spreads his fingers for a better look, the CB handle snaps to the dash, jarring the shot back, and through the front glass he’s nobody we recognize. VANGELESTI. The airbrushed bug-shield on the nose of the ambulance reads CANNONBALL RUN,146 in fast, leaning-back letters that don’t fit the mood, the paramedics’ expressions, the mirror dangling off the passenger door.
The ambulance slips past in a rage of sirens then, stranding us with a large, barking dog, forcing us to cut miles ahead, come in at car level to the emergency lane of county hospital, other ambulances already gathered around. And it’s a packed house tonight, Halloween again—slush everywhere, satanic masks on the dashboards of ticketed vehicles, candy in the gutters, twin jack-o’-lanterns guarding the entrance doors, swishing open and closed for no one, the draft they’re making pulling a stray lid closer, closer, drawing it in.
To the immediate left of the entrance is a dark recess, open to the sky some fifteen stories overhead. The recess is maybe four feet wide and unnaturally deep, the result of added wings. Smoke coming from it too, the guilty cigarette momentarily inserted, glowing red with nerves: CON, exhaling.
He’s wearing scrubs, sitting on what was once a stoop, ankle deep in trash. Framed by a long-neglected metal door behind him, chocked open. Across from him is VIRGINIA, holding herself against the cold, wearing a crucifix around her neck.
Con offers the cigarette—“warm,” his advice—and Virginia takes it as if she smokes, inhales, coughs it out. Hands it back. She shrugs to Con like an apology and Con doesn’t respond, instead directs his POV up, the slit of sky overhead, narrow enough to be safe.
He exhales, filling his field of view with smoke, then looks dramatically through it to Virginia, who’s already looking all furtive at him, a question there on her lips, in a weak voice: “You still having those dreams?”147
Con laughs through his nose, looks away, back. Crushes the cigarette out then puts another in his mouth, now large on-screen, as the paramedic’s just was. One side of his mouth comes to a sharp point, not quite a smile.
“You really think they’re just dreams?” he asks, the scene slamming shut with that, on that, opening back up to an uncomfortably broad night sky, no reference points, no ambient city light, no cloud cover. Too much altitude for insects or bats. Just stillness, more stillness, finally getting est. enough for a falling FIGURE to pass heavily through the shot, backside to the ground, arms out. We follow, and it’s STAN’s destroyed corpse, dropped from somewhere high high above. The bud of an icicle forms from the tip of his nose. Deep in his b.g. but getting larger is the country house, looking just the same: blanketed in snow, no electricity.
The corpse falls for nearly ten art-house seconds—delicate orchestral music coming through, butterfly-type associations twittering in the unconscious—and finally crashes through the trees, craters into the ground, the thin nose-cicle breaking off with impact, twirling back up in high-res slow-mo, counterclockwise. It falls too, and shatters. From an angle directly above, the corpse is simply thrashed—torn, broken, in rags, etc. Part of the leaf litter.
But still, the necessary fingers move, per Nix148—one, two, three, then the pinkie.
Stan rises, limps through the snow to the lightless house, stooping for a moment to pick something up, hesitating over the unkempt hedges.
He stands on the porch, waiting.
The front door finally opens on cue and it’s Hale’s MOTHER, still old, wrapped in an afghan, leaning on a cane. She studies Stan, scowls.
“You,” she finally says.
Stan nods once—beat, beat—and when she tries to slam the door shut on him it only breaks his fingers, and that doesn’t even begin to slow him. He juggernauts through to the living room—silhouetted in the doorway for a moment, an imposing figure. A familiar figure. No campy Honey I’m homes,149 but nevertheless, he is. Hale’s mother is backed halfway up the stairs by now.
She already has a cross in one hand, a Bible in the other.
The inserted Bible slips from her fingers when Stan crosses all the way over the threshold, and it tumbles a long time toward the stairs, its monogram flashing SWEREN in goldletter, the rosary that was in it as a bookmark scattering into individual beads. One rolls against the toe of Stan’s workboot. He looks down to it.
Hale’s mother swallows, holds the cross out, between her and Stan.
“I don’t know what you think—” she begins, but Stan isn’t listening. “She’s gone,” the mother continues, interrupting herself, some shriek welling up in her voice now. “There’s nothing … you can … nothing… ”
Stan only undresses her with his corpse eyes as she sputters out, though, and then, with childlike
deliberation, he puts on the gargoyle mask he’s been clutching in his other hand, wears it carelessly, Leatherface-crooked.150 It’s caked with ice, weathered.
He begins undoing his belt.
“No,” Hale’s mother says, her eyes spreading into awareness, the rest of her old self already running up the stairs, falling twice on the spilled rosary beads-as-marbles, rising with her cane, finally locking herself in her bedroom, the cane wedged under the knob. Vague shadows hulking and flitting outside the window, there and gone.
The knob of the bedroom door turns and she tries to hold it.
“It won’t work,” she’s saying, praying, eyes closed, “it’s not that easy, please … it’s too late … I’m sixty-seven ye—”
In the end, though, she can’t keep him out: the cane clatters down, springs give, tumblers tumble, strikeplates moan, and Stan enters. Stiff-arms her onto the bed. Loosens his ragged jeans.
Smiles behind the mask.
FROM a POV perched directly above them, on the roof, the top of the trees are motionless, the shingles rotten but interesting. Eventually, heated breath rises, steams the lens some, and just as it’s starting to clear, Hale’s mother screams, reversing the shot—a glistening black tail there, whipping up and out of sight at the last flapping instant—her scream bleeding into the screaming going on behind the divider of the ambulance, just backing up to the emergency room entrance, everything bathed in flashing red light.
In the cab Vangelesti looks to Cat, still just staring.
“You coming?” he asks, no response.
He touches her wrist carefully for a few moments, with his good hand—bridging us into her head, where a lemon wedge is being soundlessly squeezed into a tall glass of what looks like water—and then nods good-bye to her, rounds the ambulance in maybe two steps, looks Con and the other male INTERN in the eyes, to see if they’re ready.
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