Demon Theory

by Stephen Graham Jones

  “Santa Claus,” she says, intoning it all wrong, and then turns her head catlike and mad in the direction of the waking scream of the the next yellow-eyed coma patient, apparently scared of what she’s become, thrashing all around, Vangelesti not retreating to the hall and safety as a sane person might, but into the nurse station, the shattered window now covered with plywood. Worse still, he locks himself in. He can still see through one narrow crack though, by emergency light.

  He closes his eyes, opens them, and then the door to the coma unit opens and closes as well, and in his POV Jenny crosses the floor, the new coma patient backing away in fear, up the wall. In the instant before Jenny reaches the patient, however, she becomes aware of Vangelesti’s eye through the crack, turns, and he backs away, under the desk. Only has sounds now: the hall door locking; lots of crashing, chasing, coma patient screaming; death.

  And then, nothing. Which is worse.

  Vangelesti watches the knob of the nurse station door, palms Lin’s fingernail file in defense. To hear better, he stops breathing.

  IN the new darkness of Rush’s room Virginia is still on the bed, knees drawn up, laptop beside her. She stands carefully, angles toward the door, bumps into something. Looks behind her, at the only source of light, dim but there: the glow off the screen of the laptop.

  She returns. Pulls up the desktop properties, then clicks through all the properly inserted tabs to COLORS, where she chooses WHITE, then, under the Resolution tab, she jacks it up to its highest setting, so that, when all this is applied, the screen goes halogen white for her. She adjusts it even brighter, holds it in front of her like a flashlight. Smiles.223 Steps out into the hall, where, distant, hardly even real, there are flashlights flitting around like fireflies—there and gone.

  “Hey,” she says, not loud enough at all. She tries the in-house phone on the wall—dead—then keeps walking, leading with the laptop, the walls on either side decorated with construction paper sleighs, aerosol snow, etc. A stone-still FIGURE pressed into the wall, undetected, head tracking her. Once a door opens, a bedbound patient looking at her from within, but then it’s closed again. Soon enough the figure is off the wall and stalking her. Over her shoulder it’s impossibly quick—peeking out from this pillar, that gurney, etc., the music muffling its approach.

  Virginia spins twice trying to catch it and then just walks backward, right into another FIGURE: Curtis.

  “Thank God,” Virginia says, clinging to him.

  But Curtis is looking beyond her, suspicious too.

  “Come on out,” he says, and slowly, either four or five elven interns and nurses skulk into the shot. Which is how the “figure” was impossibly fast: numbers.

  “Your demons,” Curtis says to Virginia, and then they’re all crowded around: “We were about to recruit her, Curtis,” one of them says, an INTERN who at first looks to be TJ from the original, at least until she pushes her hair out of the way, waiting for Curtis to answer.

  “I think she’s already been recruited,” he says, looking to Virginia, “right?”

  “You’re still having that play?” she asks back, both doubtful and incredulous at once.

  “For the kids,” a SECOND ELF adds.

  “Christmas Eve,” a THIRD chimes in, turning on his upturned flashlight, the rest following suit, aiming at his so there’s a makeshift Bethlehem Star near the ceiling.

  Curtis nods toward them. “Safety in numbers,” he says to Virginia, his voice all about concession, and Virginia agrees—“Therapy, right?”—and falls in.

  “HOW long has it been?” Con asks Rush, Rush joysticking through the monitors, Con glued to the individual one, which is locked on a door reading BASEMENT / AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

  “Four hours,” Rush says, “officially Christmas morning. [looking to Con’s monitor with him for a moment] I’d say it’s either dead or locked down there for good, kimo.”

  “You didn’t see it, chemo.”

  “I saw enough.”

  “Well it can’t get in here,” Rush says, looking at the door.

  “Amen,” Con says, the radio in the b.g. all about static.

  “You think the fire department would have waltzed in by now,” Rush says, already trailing off, into Dr. Watkins’s office, an antique kerosene lamp guttering on his desk. Dr. Watkins in the chair opposite, his trademark beeper suddenly piercing the silence.

  He looks at the number—not inserted, this time—calmly opens a drawer, removes a cell phone. Looks from the pager to the phone keypad enough that we know that’s the number he’s dialing.

  “Yes,” he says into the phone, “like I told the sergeant, everything’s fine here. We’re fully prepared for power shortages, and I’ve been assured about the phones … more people would only … protocol just to send them to St. Mark’s … we’re doing all right, considering … the drills you had us run through are … yes, yes … put your son’s bicycle together, there, Lieutenant Danows—Karl … ”

  He ends the call, sets the phone slowly back into the drawer. Locks the drawer. Watches it.

  UNDER the desk in the nurse station Vangelesti is half-asleep, covered in sweat and bathed in some mild amber light, source unknown but convenient. He jerks awake to the hall door, suddenly opening and closing in the coma unit. Pretty much zero light in there, and only two sounds: 1) hesitant footsteps near the door, and, from somewhere else, 2) wet creaking, flesh tearing. Not unlike the birth sounds from OR3 earlier.

  The shot pans around to the plywood window of the nurse station, a sliver of Vangelesti’s amber light peeking through.

  MOMENTS later the nurse station side of the plywood bends tentatively in, the sound huge in the tight confines, Vangelesti flinching up into the bottom of the desk, crawling out, his POV watching the plywood disappear gradually, nails moaning, wood splintering. He balls his fists in anticipation.

  When it finally falls away it’s Nona.

  “Who … what are you doing here?” she asks.

  “What are you doing here?” Vangelesti asks back, a standoff. Nona shakes her head in exasperation, reaches over into Lin’s desk, extracts a flashlight. Holds it up for Vangelesti as if showing that that’s all she was after.

  “The door …?” Vangelesti starts, noting the keys on Nona’s belt she just used to gain entry.

  “It was too close to the window,” Nona answers, all business, sweeping the flashlight first over the window in point (unbroken, tree painted on it; dangerous) and next over the coma unit, all the butterflied people; Lin. The two patients past the drain bed are missing.

  “No,” Nona hisses, crouching down, sweeping the ceiling now too: nothing. She works her way deeper into the aisle of beds, homing in on the empty space where Hale used to be, Vangelesti starting toward the locked door then just crawling through the window instead, after her. By the time he gets to her she’s gathered Hale’s drip bag and has spotlit the most remote corner, the two other coma patients discarded there, their faces eaten off, the rest of them sufficiently ravaged.

  Still enough left of them to tell they were yellow-eyed though: inhuman, wrong.

  Nona keeps the light trained on them, loses some faith: “Shit. I thought they were the bad guys here.”

  Vangelesti crosses himself and Nona notices, eyes him, this.

  “It was just a little girl,” he says, incredulous.

  But then Nona directs the beam of her flashlight farther into the corner, where the real mess is: a still-steaming chrysalis direct from Species224 but blacker, neater, more symmetrical. Not a pod,225 though. Leading up from it, Nona following it with the flashlight, is a trail of black wetness. It ends at a large ceiling vent, still dripping, the drops eating into the floor. The low angle is all about fear, childhood, being small and having to look up.

  “It ran away,” Nona says, thinking aloud again: “I think we interrupted it.”

  “It was just a little girl,” Vangelesti repeats.

  Nona spotlights the chrysalis again, amends: “Lin
da Blair,226 maybe.”

  IN the grey-silk insulation between floors the thermal POV is writhing across the topside of some ceiling, screaming, growing too fast, her human fingers lengthening painfully. Rolling around she finally falls through the ceiling, lies curled on the floor of a hall, the insulation glittering in the air around her like fairy dust. Slowly, she stands. Her hair’s still blonde, the gown too little now. In a suggestive way. No longer the actress used for Jenny, but one well into adolescence. The wing buds remain though, the giveaway it would seem, something to file for later.

  Before she can face the shot we cut back to her enhanced POV, stumbling down the hall, stopping for a moment to study an intense little point of heat on the other side of a supply closet door, a slight body-shape lying beside it. The shot reverses then, instantly tight on this next Jenny’s thin lips, trying to make a word that wants to start with H—. Before she can finish though, she backs suddenly away from the door, turns to run headlong away. Taking the right of two halls when she comes to an intersection.

  Instead of following her we pan up, draw close to the sign on the ceiling: ER, with the arrow pointing after her.

  THE intense little point of heat in the supply closet is a flashlight. It’s set on the bed by a still-comatose Hale—surely Nona’s doing. In case he wakes up is the suggestion here.

  But not yet: his eyes are still in REM, looking long and deep into the steamed mirror from the upstairs bathroom of the original. Another POV flashback, his own reflection vague enough that it’s just male, neither fifteen years old nor twenty-whatever. Or both.

  Over his reflected shoulder is the figure. Again.

  He has the thermometer in his hand, the water running—everything developing precisely as before—and he’s just standing there staring, long enough for us to fully backtrack, reorient, remember.

  “Jenny?” he says, voice distorted in the inner ear, but the figure just stands there.

  And then things do develop in another direction: instead of looking back to the thermometer, his POV turns slowly to the doorway, the hall, and there she is, Jenny, all grown-up—tall, blonde, deadly beautiful, face hidden in shadow.

  He reaches for her and she’s gone, toward the stairs.

  “Jenny?” he says again, to himself, voice weak, overfull.

  He follows, faceless as she is.

  AN indefinite number of stories up, the stone gargoyle is just sitting there, precipiced, but the expression now seems different in some indefinite way. It doesn’t move, though. Just stares.

  WAY below, in some sort of sink/viewing room—stainless steel everywhere—is the vague back of a male doctor. At a sink. Washing a nasty forearm cut by the light of surgery eyeglasses, flashlights built into the sides. Twin beams. Markum. In his POV the surgery glasses are blurring his hands; he fumbles for more soap, pumps it all over the counter and tries to hide his mess, then slows, looks carefully around, checking all eight windows, arranged octagonally.

  “Hello?” he says, no response. Meaning it’s safe enough for him to depocket some pills, swallow a couple, lean down to the sink to wash them down.

  When he stands, adolescent Jenny has appeared in the doorway, a waif leaning against the jamb, straight out of a Calvin Klein commercial.227

  Markum flinches, drops a pill.

  Jenny enters, picks the pill up. Returns it to him, places it in his mouth, on his tongue. Smiles.

  Markum smiles back, looking over his glasses at her, the gown hanging off in all the right places.

  “Hello,” he says.

  Jenny nods a disinterested hello back.

  “Do you need … anything in particular?” Markum asks.

  Jenny nods again, follows Markum’s twin lights down to her chest, the headlight-joke reversed.

  “Is there … somewhere we can go?” she asks, voice still awkward, untried.

  Markum draws closer, eveready.228 Looks around, swallowing loud. “Here?” he asks.

  In response, Jenny drapes herself around him, the gown collecting around her ankles, the rest of her pressing up against Markum, hidden.

  “How old are you?” Markum asks, suspicious.

  “Ask me in ten minutes,” Jenny says, covering his mouth with hers. The shot pans along his twin light beams to the glass they happen to be aimed at, and then around, how they’re reflected in every window.

  Without warning they all shudder in unison. All we get at first is a wet sound, the visual delayed, indirect: on one of the monitors in the security room. The camera positioned so that two of the eight windows are in its frame. Black fluid—blood—splashes up against the glass. Mid-ash, guilty cigarette hanging, Con turns his POV to the monitor too late to see it happen. All he has to go on is the backside of the spatter pattern, sliding down, coating the glass.

  He strains with the joystick, jerking the camera all the wrong ways, until finally the monitor is all plaster, staring at the ceiling.

  “Shit shit shit,” he says, trying to push away in Metatron’s bolted-down chair.

  “Use the force,229 Conan-san,”230 Rush says, suddenly over Con’s shoulder, nodding down to the controller, Con’s inability. Finally he just takes over, switching monitors with a trigger button, with ease, getting the window in the frame again. “Evidence of a misspent youth,” he says distractedly, in explanation to Con. “While you were looking in the window of the girl’s locker room I was playing Nintendo.”231

  “You had your joystick, I had mine,” Con says.

  As Rush fine-tunes the image he slows down, angles his head half-away from the blood. “Tell me that’s iodine,” he says, trailing off, Con looking over to some motion on another monitor, on all the monitors. At his thigh the nicotine-gum drawer is open, the silver wrappers and the basement door an easy segue to Nona’s keys turning the close-up of a lock. The supply closet. From an angle down the hall, the light spilling over her and Vangelesti from the opening door suggests transport, ascension, possibility, even though we know it’s only Hale’s flashlight.

  He’s still there.

  “You’re not the one who brought him in, are you?” Nona asks Vangelesti, a longshot, Vangelesti casting a disinterested eye on Hale.

  He shrugs. “Don’t pay attention to their faces,” he says. “That’s usually not what needs our attention.”

  “‘Our’?”

  “Cat … my partner and me.”

  Nona looks to him, waiting for more. “You’re right,” she says after a few beats, pulling the sheet off Hale, “it’s not his face that needs attention.” Hale’s midsection is still bloody, bruised, in bad shape. Nona hands the drip-bag to Vangelesti for him to administer, then takes a towel from his belt and starts patting Hale tenderly clean. Gets some on her hands.

  Vangelesti smiles, shakes his head. “You don’t know where he’s been,” he says, offering the latex gloves every last person except Nona and Con seems to have somewhere on their person. But Nona doesn’t take the gloves, doesn’t seem to even be hearing him. Is way past protection. Staring at the blood on her finger, breathing deep and afraid, turning suddenly to Hale, his eyes twitching so much his cheeks are even moving.

  The blood seeps impossibly into the lines of her fingerprint, her breath rushing in loud and close.

  IN the continuous flashback, Hale’s stepping out of the bathroom, the front door closing softly. Jenny leaving.

  His POV walks down the hall after her. Some peripheral motion in his mother’s bedroom but it doesn’t resolve, is already gone.

  “Jenny,” he says again, voice still distorted.

  The front door opens before him. Outside it’s blinding white, the snow crazy bright. The only point of darkness is the cellar door,232 yawning open in the middle of the screen.

  Hale retraces his steps to it and descends, running his hand along the roof for support, nicking his index finger on a nail.

  Standing in the corner,233 face still hidden, is grown-up Jenny.

  “Jenny,” he says, awash with relief.
>
  She turns half-around, a mass of blonde hair.

  “You … you didn’t … ” Hale starts, and she nods no, she didn’t die. “I’m sorry … ” he says, starting to cry, and she shakes her head for him not to be.

  “You’re my brother,” she says haltingly, as if just discovering this, the angle still behind her, so she doesn’t have a face. So Hale can’t see that the back of one of her legs is bare meat, chewed into by a three-wheeler tire. As if, in this imperfect world,234 her injury is resurfacing.

  Hale smiles with his eyes, nods. Wipes his face with his hand, his index finger leaving blood there.

  Jenny takes his finger, places it in the close-up of her mouth, her lips full. “My brother,” she says again, seemingly trying to make him better, stop the bleeding or at least not waste it.

  Hale’s POV centers on his finger in Jenny’s hungry mouth, then tracks back up his arm, stopping to backfocus on the ground, a skull there in the packed dirt, watching him. A child’s broken skull. Jenny too.

  When he looks back down his arm to his hand, he sees what he should have been seeing all along: his fingers in something’s mouth. Female, yes. Yellow hair, yellow eyes. But hardly human. The lower part of her spine bare in passing.

  Hale stumbles backward up the stairs, exploding into the whiteness of the flashlight Vangelesti is shining into Nona’s eyes—one then the other.

  “You okay?” he asks.

  Nona looks past him, to Hale, still unawake.

  “Hale,” she says. “His name is Hale … Sw … Sweren. Hale Sweren.”

  She looks to Vangelesti, then, her voice weak, dreamy, addicted: “It really happened,” she’s saying. “Oh God. He’s there right now … ”

  “Where?” Vangelesti asks, but Nona, in response, only looks to her hand, the blood. And then from the blood to the blood source, Hale.

  “He’s … talking to me,”235 she says. “It’s … it’s the … his … Oh God, it’s his sister.”

  She looks to Vangelesti for him to believe but he only backs off, hands raised.

  “Tell me more,”236 Nona says then, to Hale, kissing him lightly on the cheeks as she works her hand gently into his Videodrome wound, flashing her back to her Red Sonja–stand from the original, shear blade in hand, her POV angled across the predawn yard, Hale stumbling through the front door, away from her, to the ringing phone.