Demon Theory

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Dr. Watkins doesn’t move muscle one until his beeper goes off beats later, and then he finally breathes, all at once. Doesn’t silence the beeper.

  IN a room all her own, Cat sits on the edge of the bed. On the nightstand beside her are all the bottles she looted from the ER, now empty. A tall glass beside them, getting all the screen time. Filled with clear liquid. Cat’s hand squeezes a lemon wedge into it—everything framed so it might as well be the vodka billboard all over—and then discards the rind.

  There’s no sound, nothing at all as her hand caresses the glass up, up.

  FROM an angle directly overheard, the coma patient’s bed is now empty, Lin tending to something across the row. Not her nails for once, but some paperwork. From behind the clipboard she’s holding she’s really into it, counting to herself: “Sixth, skip one, the eighth, skip one, Sunday which was the eleventh, twelfth …?”

  In her b.g. is the opposite wall, most of the high ceiling.

  Lin blurs slightly around the edges, becoming f.g., the backfocus preparing, anticipating.

  When it happens it’s both unexpected and necessary: the drain-patient skitters nimbly into the shot, crawling up the wall—an Exorcist III188 gimme—and then across the ceiling, keeping his body tight to the plaster, his yellow eyes on Lin. The extreme close-up of Lin’s broken black nail gets inserted, imbedded in his tricep, festering, inflamed. He reaches back to scratch it and it falls out, the hole it made evidently dry, and it tumbles slowly down, down, landing on the next bed over from Lin’s.

  Black on white.

  Lin sees it first as peripheral disturbance and next as what it is. She inspects, doesn’t understand. Looks to her own nails, the floor, then, finally, up, but in her POV the ceiling is now bare.

  STORIES above the ceiling, the stone gargoyle sits on the corner of the hospital, mad in the face, night rushing in all around it, ambulance lights racing soundlessly below, time-delayed.

  BUT back to Cat, asleep in her bed by now. Lying on her side so the vomit on her pillow is there. In case we missed it though, the shot lingers on the emptied glass, the pill bottles, etc., spilling off the nightstand. Her face more or less in shadow, getting light for a moment as the door opens silently, closes. Moments later her eyes open as well, in response, and in her POV now only the blurriest of images are available. The best she can do is to locate the wall the window’s on, the city beyond.

  “Who … ” she says, just waking, “who is it?” but gets no answer. Just a presence.

  “Vangelesti?” she asks weakly, trying to peer through the pharmaceutical darkness. “That you?”

  She rubs her eyes, blinks, gropes, all the typical reactions. Reaches for something on the nightstand and knocks the glass off. It shatters, startling her into a sitting position, her left hand sinking into vomit. Which pushes her almost over the edge. She swivels her head all around, and in another, breathing POV—the thermal one, but more defined now, as if adjusting to the int.—her leg cast doesn’t register. The rest of her does, though: she tries to step out of bed and falls instead, stands with the crutch, the POVs cutting back and forth between her limited one and the other, enhanced one.

  The breathing POV is playing with her too, it seems. Standing in front of the window, a vaguely humanoid figure, nothing more.

  “No, no, no,” Cat says, crying, swinging with her crutch.

  It scares her more to have the crutch touch something soft. To have the crutch pushed back.

  She feels her way to the bathroom, hobbles in, turns to close the door—the breathing POV approaching from all angles—but the bad luck crutch she doesn’t need anymore has fallen, won’t let the door shut. And she can’t see it, and it’s too low to feel. And now she’s going to die.

  The door opens slowly against her will, in spite of her protestations—“No no no please God no … ”—and then closes, locking us out, her screams muffled, not even making it to the sterile white hall, a long shot terminating at double doors, still moving, but settling, settling, the light level steadily increasing in inverse proportion to the doors’ movement. They just almost make it too, to stillness, but in the last instant the fluorescent whiteness wholly floods the scene, so we have to infer that they stopped, wait for the black letters dissolving in after them—CHRISTMAS EVE—the same size and font as the previous subtitled dates, but all the same, not a subtitle. More of a title card burning into the screen, radically enough opposed to the previous two so as to suggest that today will be similarly singular.

  The black words dissolve away as reluctantly as they appeared, and the whiteness becomes just another wall, the typical irregularities of plaster, midday sunlight directly on it.

  The shot pans to the source of light and it’s a green-tree’d window, electric candles off for the daytime. The nurse station just to the right, meaning coma ward.

  The sound of tearing flesh distinguishes itself, not a Christmas Eve sound.

  The drain-patient’s bed is empty, the moving shot passing over it.

  No Lin, either. Just the close-up of Hale’s comatose face, eyes characteristically twitching with flashback: the field of grass again, as seen from his POV, stretching out yellow for acres in front of the three-wheeler. The sound of the dry grass comes before the rising whine of the three-wheeler, the scene assembling itself piecemeal, Hale looking to his throttle thumb as if telling it deeper, more. He buries his wrist for speed, leans down close to the handlebars, the grass pressing on the toes of his boots, Jenny’s small feet just outside his on the peg, her hands clawing his stomach.

  “Hold on!” he yells, looking back to her once, her eyes nearly closed from the wind. She lays her head against his back, yips when her right foot gets grabbed by the rear tire, kicked forward.

  Hale looks down to it again, her foot, a familiar action, the moment he could have changed everything, but didn’t. It’s worse this time because we know it’s coming too, because this is the same flashback as in the original, only from his POV, unnarrated, unabridged.

  But the field is so big now. Hale wipes his face and focuses on the house, small in the distance, then gets distracted momentarily by a shadow that seems to be pacing them over the surface of the field, galloping over hill and dale effortlessly, as planes do.

  It’s interesting enough for him that there’s no sound, the scene falling back apart.

  In that silence Jenny gets pulled under.

  The three-wheeler rocks violently but Hale manages to contain it, stands hard on the foot brake, sliding to a stop, the grass dust that was following them now passing him, a golden haze, dredging up for us knee-jerk associations of sepiatone photographs, which is to say age, re-est. all this as flashback material.

  The shot is reversed now, old footage of his face looking back, but this time we cut to his POV, Jenny in the tall grass, her back maybe broken, her pelvis, a leg too—femur in the sunlight—and the rest of her small frame wracked with pain but something more, too: resistance.

  For a split moment she’s able to turn her head to Hale, flare her eyes, blood seeping down from one corner of her mouth, and then the sound comes back in a rush and she screams for way too long, with way too much anger for a little girl, driving the shot out, to where once again she and Hale are small in the distance.

  THE int. of a locker is harsh in comparison, claustrophobic, Nona reflected in the small mirror, collecting her belongings. Taped around her face are tabloid clippings of demon-related events. Cheap, sensationalistic stuff, lots of exclamation marks, doctored photos (devil’s face in a cloud of smoke, a scary yellow DEMONS scissored from a videocassette cover189). Nona collects two old jackets and behind them are all the hospital supplies she’s been squirreling away. The survival-type stuff we expect from her: flashlights, used dissection tools, rolls of surgical tape, etc. She looks at it now without confidence, sits alone on the bench directly behind her.

  On her slowly inset wrist is a hospital ID band, dot-matrix numbers preceded by JD—John Doe. Meaning Hale.


  She looks toward the door, in the direction we have to imagine the coma ward is, then hesitates, shakes her head no but rises anyway, walks mopless down the white halls, her POV watching the floor pass, not catching anyone’s eye. As if she’s ashamed. Just as the door of the coma ward approaches, we cut to the other side.

  SHE pushes through moments later, the number of frames per second instantly increasing, slowing her down, her POV sweeping first across the opposite row of beds—a body there in the drain-patient’s place, face covered with sheets—and then to the other row.

  The shot reverses onto Nona’s face, her reaction to whatever she’s seeing on that near row of beds: her eyes are all about No, no, no. The sound is still that flesh-tearing sound.

  “Please let me just be delusional,” she says to herself.

  The six patients down the line from Hale have had their midsections opened up, plundered. Big, graphic mess. And they’re still alive, one of them awakened even, her arm stabbing up, up.

  On Hale’s bed—the next in line—is the yellow-eyed patient, his skin tinged grey. He’s sitting on his toes like a bird, like Egan from the original, just perched on Hale’s hips now, his head to Hale’s belly, just now ripping it delicately open, snapping around to Nona, studying her.

  Nona backs up at first, then, with resolve, steps forward. Calmly grabs another flowerpot.

  “Get away from him you sick figment—” she says, hurling the flowerpot at the patient, who slithers around, easily avoiding impact. The flowerpot crashes at the end of the room. The patient looks from Nona to it, deciding, deciding, and then nimbly crawls over Hale to the wall, goes down the wall to the flowerpot, to inspect, hesitant like a dog with an empty shopping bag.

  Nona walks slowly forward, careful not to redistract the patient, and hooks onto Hale’s bed, pulls, pulls, but, inserted, the wheel brakes are engaged.

  She closes her eyes in pain, opens them. Can hear the patient nosing the flowerpot.

  For the third time, now, she goes to her knees, under the beds, this time to disengage the brakes, all four. It takes forever.

  When she finally makes herself stand again the patient is there on the wall, inches from her, breathing on her, touching her with his lips, their paired faces huge on-screen. Nona doesn’t panic, though.

  Instead, she smiles a fake smile, breathes in, and backs Hale out slowly, headfirst, the patient skittering up to the ceiling, watching her, her shoulder blades drawn together in anticipation, back swayed. But he doesn’t fall on her.

  Staring straight ahead, she makes it out the door, begins running.

  VIRGINIA pushes a similar door open without knocking. Two heads turn to her—Con and Rush, Rush in bed, laptop in lap, Con by the window, remote in hand, video camera rigged to the television.

  Virginia rolls her eyes, says it flatly: “You both have hats now.”

  “Status symbols,” Con says, flicking the grimy white pom-pom on his Santa hat over to the other side of his face.

  “Thought you were supposed to be outside spreading cheer,” Virginia says to him.

  Con shrugs, play-nods to Rush, the pity-case: “House call. He was depressed.”

  “Suicidal,” Rush tags on, his real attention online.

  Virginia looks to Con’s other hand, just out the window, cigarette in hand. “I guess, technically, you are outside, right?”

  “Bingo. Busty lass in white … ”

  On the television is the candy striper he was following. Virginia shakes her head, runs her finger along an improvised shelf of videotapes, selects one. Close-up, they’re just dates—Aug. through Dec.—and done up like postcards, ready for the mail. One of the tapes doesn’t fit with the rest, though. Virginia leans it out—Frankenhooker190—looks from it to Rush, an accusation. He’s online though, typing, impervious.

  Over his shoulder it’s a chat session, but the shot’s too cursory for dialogue, just handles along the left margin, back and forth: Donkey Kong191 and Fey Ray.192

  Con’s POV zeroes in on Virginia’s cross necklace.193 “You know Vangelesti’s officially religious?” he asks. “Real man of the cloth.”

  Virginia looks to Con now. “We need to talk,” she says, “serious,” but Con holds her off, is suddenly intent on the television, the tape advanced to Nona now.

  “Give us a name tag already,” he’s telling her. “Some full frontal, c’mon … I know I know you … ”

  “I said we need to talk,” Virginia repeats, her voice dipping down into the mother-tones for authority, but Con is too preoccupied, holding her off with his remote hand. She sits on the bed by Rush, lies back on his pillow to see the screen.

  “Well then let’s see some of these online distractions that you boys … ” she says, reading over his shoulder: “… Donkey Kong? [sneering] Yeah.”

  “Fey Ray, thank you,” Rush says.

  “This age-sensitive material?”

  Rush doesn’t respond, instead types: It’s not so bad here, really. Hot.

  Postcards? Donkey Kong asks back.

  No mail, Rush answers, holding a finger over his mouth as if for Virginia not to tell.

  “What?” she says.

  Donkey Kong replies with 555-1314.194

  No phones, either, Rush types. You know how it is. Just hyenas and lions and all these snakes … his finger loud on the period key, nervously ellipsing.

  When he’s done, his cursor blinks, blinks, waiting—Virginia saying “No phones, no mail, but internet?”—and then the reply: Mom says you never did have a passport.

  Rush: And you know how I feel about snakes.

  Mom says this isn’t healthy, Donkey Kong says back (spelling the next word about six times, indicating age), psychologically.

  Rush shrugs, looks away, Virginia studying him. Is she there right now? he asks.

  No.

  I don’t want to get you in trouble, Rush types, then adds: (lie).

  A long cyberpause then, Rush’s POV looking at the television, cued up to Nona walking past the video camera, looking into it.

  Donkey Kong’s reply finally comes, letter by letter, which isn’t how the chat was working before: What kind of snakes?

  Rush smiles ear to ear, asks Virginia a question: “What kind of snakes are in Africa? Big ones, I mean. That a seven-year-old would like.”

  “He thinks you’re in Africa?” Virginia asks back, no help.

  “Think Mowgli,” Rush prompts. “Wasn’t there a snake in Jungle Book?”195

  “Try the Bible,” Con offers, steadily rewinding, rewinding, then overshooting, the remote not responding. Nona backs away, into the television, receding down the hall. In trying to work the remote Con loses his cigarette out the window, finally gets the tape playing near the run-in with Jenny and Sandro. Something not right there, though, lots of static. He doesn’t fast-forward over it. “Look at this,” he says.

  Boa, Rush types, a guess.

  In Africa? Donkey Kong ripostes back.

  South America, I mean, Rush types reluctantly, uncertainly. They’re shaped the same, right?

  “God I wish I took geology,” he says to himself, Virginia correcting for him—“Geometry”—Con correcting them both with “Geography,” then adding, “But check this out,” the television, these two kids. Rush and Virginia are occupied, though. The question burning into the screen now is Where are you really? Mom wants to know (lie).

  Rush sags, defeated.

  “He really doesn’t know?” Virginia asks.

  “I’m the big brother,” Rush says. “We don’t die like this.”

  “Yeah, bu—” Virginia says, but Donkey Kong’s already interrupting: When are you coming home then?

  The cursor blinks, blinks, Rush not replying. “Soon,” he finally says, out loud. Africa is a long way off.

  “South America,” Virginia corrects. Rush winces.

  When there’s no reply he finally types, Fey Ray to Donkey Kong … No answer.

  “Look at this, man,” Con
says again, and now Rush folds the laptop half-closed and looks over the top in irritation, at his own back, approaching Sandro and Jenny in the hall, Con the cameraman zooming down onto his feet, doing the Saturday Night Fever196 music197 himself, falsetto and all. Soon enough things do look strange on-screen: through the static Jenny in her wheelchair is in black and white, and wrong somehow. Moving at a different speed almost.198 And inverted—black eyes, white pupils, etc.

  Rush looks to Con.

  “Your radiation?” Con asks, slowing it down to frame-by-frame, finally locking Jenny on-screen.

  “I’m not glowing,” Rush says. “What about the rest of it?”

  “You saw it,” Con says.

  “Do it again,” Rush says, leaning forward, and Con does, Virginia busy scrolling up through the chat, reading back, impossibly not seeing Jenny on one screen after she already impossibly picked her out of a wall of fifty.

  “The camera?” Rush asks, but Con shakes his head no.

  “Just her,” he says, ejecting the tape. “We can clean it up with better equipment.”

  “Metatron,” Rush agrees, easing out of bed, handing the laptop to Virginia.

  “Con—” she says. “What about—?”

  “We’ll do lunch,” Con says. “You supply the whipped cream, I’ll bring the cucumber.”199

  “Lunch is over,” Virginia says.

  “Christmas dinner, then,” Con says. “After the show … nine o’clockish?”

  Before Virginia can answer, he’s out the door, Rush a half-step behind.

  “Wait,” Virginia says, holding the laptop out to him. Close-up, the next line now is Donkey Kong here …

  Rush pauses in the doorway, holding a finger over his lips again, in plea, and Virginia stares, looks away. Leans back with the laptop, trapped.

  Now Rush is gone too, the door closed.

  “Africa,” Virginia says to herself, the photograph of Rush’s little brother across the room about half-important here, for her. She talks to herself as she types: “It would seem that a certain snake just carried your brother off for the afternoon, Ray … ”