Demon Theory

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Nona shakes her head.

  “Sorry?” Lin says, already making a beeline for the nurse station, finger in mouth, festive toe-bells filling the place with jingling. Her feat somehow forgotten.

  After Lin’s gone Nona just stands there. “No, Lin,” she says, sarcastic as ever, “you go take care of yourself. I’ll get this. Really.” She laughs a sick laugh, retrieves her mop, and approaches the bed, the patient still on his side. In her POV Lin is already manically tending to her broken nail.

  Nona shakes her head, tests the weight of the bed by trying to lift it. It won’t budge. She narrows her eyes at the patient, not understanding, then extends an arm, a hand, but just as she’s almost there—contact microns away—thinks better for some reason, retracts.

  “This won’t hurt a bit,” she says to him, going to her hands and knees again, reaching under. “I do it every day,” she adds, with that last-word lilt. Under the bed the wet Pepsi bottle slides ahead of her fingers though, and she finally manages to knock it once and for all into the grateless drain. From a tight shot directly above, her fingers inspect, inspect, don’t figure it out.

  “Like they pay me enough for this,” she says, standing, evidently giving up. Removing herself from danger is the idea. Because she’s not supposed to be dying, not yet anyway. But then she has the mop, is stabbing under the bed, tempting God, the genre, mopping up the mess, bumping the frame—the inserted patient’s index finger either moving or moved, hard to tell—finally getting the mop caught in the snaggle-toothed drain.

  She pulls, pulls, no luck, and then goes under again, fed up, this time her whole torso, extracting the mop strand by strand, running her finger carefully along what’s left of the drain grating. “What the hell …?” she mumbles, looking left, right, then, reluctantly, up, her POV reeling back from the mass of dried blood and mucus on the underside of the bed. In backing away, though, her hair catches in the frame, accelerating her breathing considerably, her POV looking desperately at the next bed over. Expecting anything.

  From an angle even with the bed—where she’s in the lower half of the now horizontally split screen, caught, and the patient’s in the upper—the patient’s eyes smoothly open, and they’re distended, yellow, a black slit for a pupil, telltale green smudge on his nose. His hand is right at the edge too, so close to Nona.

  Before he can move, Nona frees herself with the painful and real sound of hair tearing and rolls over twice, fast, only to find herself under the next bed, more mucus and blood directly above. She steamrolls on, the third bed the same story, and after her next frantic roll there are no more beds. She scrabbles away, to the wall, then just sits there rubbing the blood and mucus from her arms, breathing hard, trying to understand.

  “Lin!” she screams, but Lin is soundproofed, filing away.

  Nona stands against the wall, only advances with great effort, giving the row she was in wide berth, and then, realizing the opposite row might be more of the same, steering clear of it too. So she has just about nowhere to go.

  “Lin!” she screams again, crying now, but Lin is oblivious. Nona clenches her teeth together hard, narrows her eyes, and calmly grabs a flowerpot full of fake flowers. Lin’s filing comes in as Nona must be exaggerating it in her mind: grating, incessant. “Fuck your nails,” Nona says, then runs forward, hurls the flowerpot at the nurse station window, her throw placing her ahead of the drain-bed.

  In the acres of b.g. behind her, then, and with agonizing slowness, the patient sits up, looks around, but by the time Nona turns on him he’s sloughed off onto the floor, his motionless foot just visible.

  Lin jingles out too late to see anything, fingernail file in hand.

  “Your patients are acting up,” Nona says to her, her tone all about understatement, indicating the empty bed. Lin looks from it back to her window, the cracks radiating out from impact, still collapsing, and then she makes a show of not taking her eyes off the mess Nona is. She steps slightly away from her, the bells on the toes of her shoes jingling once, in time with a much louder Salvation Army bell, a tight ext. shot of someone swinging it: Con, sullen, sunglassed against the daylight. Wearing the grimy Santa hat, a loud RUB IT EASY MAKE IT HARD181 T-shirt, and knee-high motocross boots, scrub pants tucked into them. He’s alone at the front of the emergency entrance, cigarette in mouth, donation kettle hanging slack and empty beside him. As the shot pans over for a full view, the subtitle that’s evidently been there all along gets a dark b.g.—DECEMBER 23—then dissolves as Vangelesti approaches, paramedic overalls in hand, sizing Con up from all the angles.

  Con thumbs a cottonball from his right ear.

  “I see you’re in the spirit,” Vangelesti says.

  “I am the spirit,” Con says, unsmiling. He offers the cigarette to Vangelesti and Vangelesti takes it, brings it partway to his mouth, but is able to resist. Just barely, though.

  “I’m not like you anymore,” he tells Con, holding his bandaged hand up for display. “Once burned, twice shy … ”182

  “Save it for New Year’s,” Con says back. “How is she, my favorite Cat?”

  “Physically or otherwise?” Vangelesti asks and answers.

  “Your astute, paramedical opinion.”

  “Scared,” Vangelesti says after a medium pause.

  “Welcome to my world,” Con says back, then evaluates Vangelesti. “You went to some seminary, right? In your other life …?”

  Vangelesti nods.

  “Why’d you come over, then?” Con asks. “Religion to science, I mean. You a double agent or what?”

  “You talk like religion and science are exclusive or something.”

  “Spoken like a true man of the cloth.”

  “Well then why this sudden interest?”

  Con shrugs. “No real reason,” he says, then confesses: “Virginia, I mean.”

  Vangelesti doesn’t get it, but Con’s not elaborating. Not even looking at Vangelesti anymore, but up. He starts jangling the bell then as if there’s nothing more to be said, so Vangelesti takes his cue, backs through the swishing doors. It doesn’t last, though: his POV considers Con for a moment through the glass, and then he’s out there again. Con smiles, surrendering the cigarette butt-first, but Vangelesti shakes his head no, instead grabs Con’s wrist and takes the bell.

  Silence; traffic.

  Going slow to show what he’s doing, then, Vangelesti unwraps a stick of nicotine gum, chews it for a few beats, then winds it expertly around the bell’s clapper.

  He shakes it for Con and there’s no noise.

  “There’s a moral to this,” he says loud clear and slow for Con, dropping a piece of gum in Con’s front pocket as he backs away, washing his hands in the air, disappearing through the swishing doors a second time.

  Alone, Con smiles, looks from his cigarette to the bell and back again. He leans over to ash in the donation kettle, then removes the other cottonball, gives it to the wind.

  It blows to the forefeet of the same mean dog. The dog sniffs it, watching Con.

  “Merry Christmas,” Con says to it, making his hand into a finger gun and pointing, then sighting higher, up, up, to the hospital cornices stories above, an anatomically correct stone gargoyle there, leering back at him.

  NEXT is a bright blue splinter with no context, spanning diagonally across the screen, and for an instant it’s the terrycloth blue slipper Hale’s mother left in the snow last time around. As the shot backs off, however, the blue splinter is lodged in the X-ray of a skull, the X-ray viewer mounted on the wall of a darkened room. Light glances off a male DOCTOR’s glasses as he turns to Cat, the skull menacing her over his shoulder, grinning. She studies the X-ray and caresses her similarly trashed forehead—stitches, gauze, etc. Sags even deeper into the aluminum crutch she’s leaning on, her leg in a full cast.

  The doctor taps confidently on the blue splinter with his pen. “The good news is it’s shatterproof,” he tells her. “And you don’t have to worry about rust or metal detectors. The b
ad news is there’s a windshield in your head.”

  “But you can get it out, right?”

  “The question we have to answer first is, is it worth getting out?” the doctor says back, then smiles. “Does the driver need it for repairs, is that it? Because I know a place that actually sells these—”

  “I don’t want it in me, anymore,” Cat interrupts. “That’s the thing.”

  “A common response,” the doctor answers. “Patients have the same initial reaction to pacemakers, insulin pumps, foreign livers … bullets, yes. Fetuses. But in time—”

  “I’ll step in front of another car,” Cat says. “A whole truckload of cars. Because I can’t go on like this.”

  “The visual incongruities you’re experiencing are nothing unusual, understand … considering both the nature of your injury and … ” He fumbles the end of the sentence politely away; Cat picks it up: “The barbecue case.”

  “The barbecue case you initiated, yes, thank you.”

  “You don’t know what I’m seeing, though,” Cat says weakly. “What I’m having to see.”

  The doctor moves to embrace her, does. “As much as it feels like it, Cat, Catherine, I guarantee you this isn’t the Twilight Zone, you’re not seeing into some different, other world—” Cat pushes him away before he can finish.

  “Just too deep into this one,” she says.

  The doctor holds his hands up in mock surrender.

  Cat closes her eyes to ask her question: “It’s in my temporal lobe, right? The glass?”

  The doctor nods a professional nod, undims the lights.

  “Temporal as in time,” Cat says to herself, defeat there in her voice.

  “Pardon?”

  Cat looks up, shakes her head, smiles. “Think about it,” she says, “optics. The glass is acting like a lens. Making me see … ahead, or through, or, I don’t know … somewhere we don’t usually look.”183 She shrugs.

  “You almost died,” the doctor says, like an explanation. “Your synaptic pathways are still trying to make room for the windshield you planted there. Some people—”

  “Are lucky and go blind.”

  The doctor stares at her. She stares back.

  “Is there anything I can take, then,” she asks, “to not see? Just for a few days? Until my synaptic pathways make room or whatever?”

  The doctor shakes his head no. “Why would we even develop something like that?” he asks back. “Especially when there’s people out there doing it with homemade alcohol?”

  “I guess you wouldn’t,” Cat says, and hobbles awkwardly through the ER, sweating, breathing hard from her POV: through one curtain is a code-blue man, doctors crowded all around. In Cat’s POV the doctors and the room and everything are normal, but the man is in black and white, and already decomposing. But still moving. Cat backs away, into a tray of medical supplies. She turns instinctively and there’s another patient on a gurney, all of him normal except his leg, which in her POV is already rotting, evidently going to have to be amputated.

  Cat screams quietly, reversing the shot, and falls into another tray, her hands latching onto supplies, trying to catch them. The people naturally come out of the woodwork to help her too, and suddenly she’s in a Romero movie, three zombies for each normal person,184 all trying to get her.

  She claws her way out, crutches her way down the hall as best she can, really sobbing now. Accidentally looks in a room and forces herself to look away, swallow, walk toward the elevator already waiting for her, opening to release two wheelchair kids: Sandro and Jenny, with their wagon. Each with green paint all over their faces.

  Cat flattens herself against the wall as they pass, and Sandro isn’t even in her POV, just Jenny, the most radically decomposed so far. And the most aware of how she looks, maybe.

  Cat forces herself to focus on the elevator. As she’s stepping in, pushing all the buttons just to be alone, Jenny seriously eyeing her from down the hall, Vangelesti rounds the corner, zipping up his paramedic overalls.

  Cat looks at him and starts screaming and then can’t stop, holding him away with the crutch while she gets the door closed.

  Bad news, though: the door is polished chrome. As the shot pans around, the elevator descending, red arrow blipping, the top of Cat’s leg cast becomes important. Lined in it from her gauntlet-run through ER are two bottles of alcohol, random samples of pills.

  Her POV turns slowly to the door then, her inevitable reflection, but an instant before she gets there the close-up of Dr. Watkins’s beeper intrudes. He turns it off with one hand, studies the message. Across the mahogany desk from him is a half-eaten lunch, and, past that, Nona. She’s not a happy camper. In her b.g., on a shelf by the door, are rows and rows of jars, each containing a different organ of the human body, the organs all floating, the jars arranged bilaterally, gonads to eyeballs, with a musculoskelatal schematic sketched in behind. A whole person there, in pieces.

  “You don’t understand what you’re up against here,” Nona tells him in her spooky-best Donald Pleasence,185 but Dr. Watkins nods that he does: “The custodian,” he says. Nona rolls her eyes. He continues: “The custodian who wants the hospital shut down on … vague allegations of the supernatural, what has to amount to a handful of suspicions?”

  Nona nods.

  “Suspicions founded on … ” Dr. Watkins says, looking through his papers, “bloodstained beds and … patient weight? Am I getting this right?”

  “He lost eighty-five pounds in three weeks,” Nona says, getting strident. “Is that normal?”

  Dr. Watkins shrugs. “Accelerated weight loss isn’t unheard of in the comatose.”

  “Have you had what was on his bed analyzed?”

  “It’s in the lab,” Dr. Watkins says back, motioning vaguely somewhere. “But I remind you that some of our beds rotate between departments. There could have been a gunshot victim on there last summer … ”

  “In the other two beds as well?”

  “It’s a violent city, Miss Pearson.”

  “It’s about to get worse.”

  Nona watches him watch her. Asks her question: “Have you had anything show up in the ER yet, then? Anything more unusual than usual?”

  “It’s the silly season,” Dr. Watkins says in explanation, then looks away, deep into the LED readout of his beeper.

  Nona smiles, presses him: “What about that barbecue case?”

  “The barbecue case?”

  “Halloween night. Seven weeks and eighty-five pounds ago.”

  “I wasn’t on that shift,” Dr. Watkins says, as if reciting. “We were badly understaffed, I’m afraid. But to get back to the matter at hand. You’re not the first custodian to come to me over the years about patient … irregularities in the coma ward.”

  “He had paint on his nose, though.”

  “Which doesn’t necessarily mean he was walking around. The nurse seems to recall one of the children over by his bed. And you know how children can be with paint.”

  He touches his own nose in demonstration, continues: “It seems that ever since Robin Williams glorified—”

  Nona interrupts by slamming her hand onto the table. “Wrong aisle, Doctor,” she says, leaning as far forward as the desk will allow. “We’re not talking Awakenings,186 here. We’re talking Jaws. I’m telling you, the mayor, to clear the beaches.187 And you’re afraid to.”

  Dr. Watkins leans back, studies Nona. “Fear … ” he says, drawing the word out, his voice retreating smoothly o.s., narrating the close shot of the coma patient, lying flat on his back.

  “… yes,” Dr. Watkins continues, “fear. Of closing the doors to patients in need, patients with lawyers. We can’t have them expiring on our sidewalk.”

  “You’d rather just bring them on in, right?” Nona says, a v.o. as well.

  As she speaks the patient’s eyelids slide back with her words, as if impossibly hearing them. The eyes are yellow where they should be white, the pupils reptilian.

  “There�
��s no need to get confrontational, Miss Pearson. A person in your position—” “I know I’m a janitor, Doctor,” Nona interrupts, suddenly back in the mahogany office.

  Dr. Watkins nods, opens what must be her file, looks from it to her. “And a video store clerk,” he adds, listing, “and a pet groomer, and, oh, I see, yes. A former resident of—”

  “Okay,” Nona says. “So I was committed to—”

  “Delusional.”

  Nona stares Dr. Watkins down. “I put it on my application like I was supposed to,” she says.

  “And we thank you for your honesty,” Dr. Watkins says back. “May I ask, however, about the nature of your … delusions? This was, what, a year ago?”

  “Fourteen months,” Nona says, looking momentarily away, to a distorted flashback of herself in a padded room, the ORDERLY across from her leaving a paper tray of food, walking out, swinging wide for the massive demon wings casually attached to his back. Nona in the flashback looks fast away, back to Dr. Watkins, waiting on an answer.

  “It’s not important.” she says. “You’ve already made up your mind.”

  “Might I ask then how long you’ve been without your medication?”

  “How do you—” Nona starts, rising, then trails off, sits back down. Looks away. Answers her own question: “He told you. Markum. That rat fucking bastard.”

  Dr. Watkins nods gravely. “Everything,” he adds, staring her down now. “We’re electing not to get the police … and their specially trained dogs involved, here. If you cooperate.”

  “‘Cooperate,’” Nona says, standing now, all about manners. “Allow me. If I either quit fomenting suspicion or else foment it at my new place of employment, wherever that may be, right?”

  Dr. Watkins shrugs, accepts.

  “Meaning as of right now I officially don’t work here anymore?” Nona asks, Dr. Watkins agreeing again: “If that’s how you want it.”

  Nona contains herself somehow, just heads glaring for the door, talking to herself: “Meaning I don’t have to clean up any more messes … ” At the door she turns, waves hidey-ho to Dr. Watkins, with her fingertips, then slams the door as hard as she can, the organ jars on the wall crashing to the ground. Meaning body parts are already getting scattered around.