Demon Theory

by Stephen Graham Jones

  And then things go totally calm. Peaceful almost, the tips of her hair lifting.

  And then she hears it coming from the sky, her smile catching, just half-formed.

  By the time she looks up, still ready to smile, it’s too late, and her world is leathery black, right up against her face.

  LYING partially on top of Hale, her hand still in him, she flinches, in some unconscious state. When Vangelesti turns her over her eyes are rolled back white and she’s gibbering.

  Vangelesti swallows.

  THE cut from the supply room to the Christmas play is harsh, jarring, all sound, motion and flash(ing)light, Jesus Christ Superstar237 all over again. In the round, too, a circle of sick children watching, content, warm—the campers gathered around the campfire, nothing bad happening yet.

  In the wings, Curtis is talking to Virginia, a little impromptu therapy: “Blackouts do happen, Virginia,” he’s saying. “There doesn’t have to be anything more supernatural than rats for the electricity to fail … ”

  “But I said this was going to happen, Curtis,” Virginia pleads, the shot backing unsteadily off her. Moving over the shoulder of an approaching blonde intern, weaving among curtains, children dressed as sheep, as angels, etc. Virginia’s voice still available, though she’s small in the distance: “This is proof,” she’s saying, “isn’t that what you wanted?”

  The three wise men suddenly kickdance their way into the show, taking Virginia’s breath away. She pats her sternum for more, the shot tight on her hand.

  “You said we were all going to die though, too,” Curtis redirects, sweeping his arm wide over everyone, his living counterproof.

  At the last moment before the blonde reaches them Virginia turns, startled.

  It’s TJ, from the original.

  Over her shoulder is Nurse Hilda, the prod here. “Another willing thespian,” Hilda says, smiling an evil smile, offering TJ to Curtis.

  Virginia studies TJ close.

  “This is … ” Hilda begins for Curtis, her hand on TJ’s shoulder, the rest of her at a loss for the name Virginia supplies, talking in a dream: “TJ.”

  TJ smiles. Could either be a late-addition/carryover from the original or straight out of Hale’s flashback.

  “How did I know your name?” Virginia says, TJ ignoring the question, cataloging the audience, the play, everything.

  “Quite a production, right?” Curtis says, and TJ nods.

  “Quite a production,” she repeats flatly.

  A long shot down a darkened hall: two flashlights approaching—Con and Rush. Rush shines his light on a security camera in passing and Rush pounces his light on it too. Con jerks his beam away.

  “I said don’t cross the beams,” Con says.

  “‘Streams,’” Rush corrects, twitching his light closer. “It was don’t cross the streams, Venkman.”238

  “Just don’t do it,” Con repeats, clearly.

  But Rush tries, casually.

  They walk faster, dueling. Refusing to acknowledge the game they’re playing.

  “Why not, then?” Rush says. “Is it bad luck?”

  “According to my father it’s a waste of good battery power,” Con says, then shakes his head, confesses quietly: “And it makes for more darkness.”

  “Understandable,” Rush says, still planing his beam in on Con’s. “You want me to be your wingman,239 watch your back … ”

  Exactly when the beams are about to touch, Con avoids it by simply turning his off in anger, doubling the darkness.

  Rush shines his light on Con in response. Behind him is a window, blood on the inside of it. In slow, reluctant response to Rush’s change of expression, Con turns his light on, the shot reversing with it to the spotlit security camera above them, that they were looking through, from security.

  “Already … ” Con says, with all due reverence, and depockets a Taser from somewhere, shines the light into the sink/viewing room, Con and Rush small on the other side of the glass, blood coating every surface. Hardly enough of Markum left to tell it was ever him.

  Suddenly a FIGURE stands into the flashlight light, her back to the screen, Con and Rush feinting away, Con’s Taser hissing electricity.

  Through the glass though, it’s Nona.

  One of her hands is bloody to the wrist, which looks guilty enough without boxcutter. But then she has that as well.

  She falls through the door, collapses into the hall.

  “Are either of you doctors?” she demands, looking between them, from Con’s security jacket to Rush’s inserted ID bracelet, meaning no. She turns to run, for help maybe, but Con is advancing with the Taser here. Nona brings the blade up in uncertain defense.

  “I don’t want to,” she says, “please … you don’t … ”

  The standoff is tense—nostalgic too—for a few beats but then it melts, by degrees, the two of them watching each other.

  “… Nona,” Con finally says, but Nona takes the recognition apart by looking down to her name tag, confirming its presence, there since the beginning but never important until now.

  “Are you one of them?” Con asks.

  “Are you?” Nona asks right back, smiling one side of her face.

  “We didn’t just kill somebody,” Rush says, stepping into the frame.

  “How do you—?” Nona starts, then glances fast at the glass, Markum all over it.

  “That wasn’t me,” she says, drawing the blade back into the handle in a goodwill gesture. “I was looking for him. I needed a doctor. I need a doctor.”

  “You’re that custodian … ” Con says, still figuring.

  “And you’re wearing Metatron’s jacket.”

  Con looks down, is.

  Moving slow then, Nona reaches forward, removes the radio from his shoulder, presses the button. “Met … Met, come in, over—” she starts, but the words catch in her throat, her POV directed to Rush’s pants, the antenna peeking out, the static synching up with the button she’s pressing, testing. “Shit,” she says. “Where is he?”

  Con shakes his head no, though, the genre equivalent of polite respect for the recently dismembered.

  Nona closes her eyes in despair, opens them.

  “I just need a doctor,” she says. “My … Hale. He’s dying … ”

  IN the supply closet though, it’s worse than that: Hale’s dead, Vangelesti emergency-breathing for him, pumping his chest, his midsection spilling open with every pump, a piece of one of the stone gargoyles on the roof falling away. Another Ghostbusters move: the suggestion is there’s a gargoyle inside the statue, sloughing the stone skin off.

  BACK inside slowly: the play is continuing, is to the manger-part now, everyone with candles, flashlights dimmed. Singing. Virginia and TJ standing behind the sheep-children, as angels, paper wings and all. Virginia is singing softly, watching everything, especially TJ. TJ is just moving her mouth mechanically. Watching everything as well, except Virginia.

  “You’re not singing,” Virginia says to TJ.

  TJ looks over to her, smiles a little. “I don’t … know this one,” she says, an apologetic shrug.

  “But everybody … ” Virginia starts, doesn’t finish, distracted: “TJ,” she says, studying TJ’s profile, and while they don’t have anything much to say the play unfolds: Joseph, Mary, and Baby Jesus going through the motions, TJ rapt on it. When one of the lighter INTERNS swoops down on guidelines—harness, Vulcan-ears240 and everything—TJ reacts violently then recovers, plays embarrassed; smiles, claps too loud. The intern dangling, the lines tangled in her fake wings.

  Not impressed by the flying intern is Sandro, in the audience, obviously still shaken.

  His POV scans across the cast members, almost to the standing angels, drawing tight first on Virginia, who’s got her brows lowered to TJ, in concentration: “Your name,” she says, “it’s T … Theresa … Theresa J— Jen—”

  TJ looks to Virginia, waiting.

  “Jane,” Virginia spits out like a lie, her eyes wid
ening into awareness, memory, a nostalgic flash of TJ from the original, receding the opposite way down the hospital hall, looking back once to Virginia’s POV, shrugging thanks, the last time Virginia would have seen her, o.s.

  BUT TJ shakes her head no.

  “Jane,” she repeats, tasting it, testing it, “no. Not Jane,” but regardless, Virginia has her by the hand, is leading her out of Sandro’s POV in the instant before he would have seen her.

  TJ’s enhanced POV allows the signature Virginia is to drag her through curtains and props, etc. In a patch of velvet darkness we cut behind them for a moment, to the play, a little foreshadowing: the GRINCH241 lurching into the nativity, Joseph, Mary, and the Wise Men all dumbfounded. A TIMMY242 look-alike in the front row raising his crutch in defense, the Grinch turning to face him, his made-up face grinning wide, everyone booing him. He rages at them nevertheless, arms raised comically, head thrown back with the seasonal thrill of it all, his arms directing us to the darkness above him.

  WHEN we pan back down it’s onto Vangelesti, sweating from all this emergency breathing. But not giving up. Hale under his hands, limp, his unmoving eyes centered on the projection of his own raised arm, which is crushed, mangled, stretched. Being used to pull him deeper and deeper into the sky of some ideal morning, a black claw buried in his wrist at the top of the frame, the earth rushing away, the supply closet door slamming open, Nona, Con, and Rush falling in, Vangelesti backing away, gasping.

  Things are moving fast now, the scenes rapid-fire.

  “No!” Nona yells, clinging instantly to Hale, Vangelesti pulling her off. Making eyes to Con about her.

  “Vangelesti,” Con says, as grim hello.

  “She already … did it to him once,” Vangelesti explains, Nona going limp in his arms.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she says, then looks to Con with a plea: “Save him.”

  Con looks to Vangelesti and Vangelesti just shakes his head no, that it’s too late. Then Con looks to Nona. “You know … who I am,” he tells her.

  Nona looks from Con to Hale, Hale to Con, as if saying his name will be the price. She closes her eyes, lets it come: “Con-something.”

  Con nods, still confused, then leans over Hale, hesitates; recognizes: “Me and Gin. Out in the country.” He looks to the crew as if they should remember. “I’ve saved his life once already.”

  “You—?” Nona starts.

  “Brought him in, yeah,” Con finishes, “small world,”243 giving Hale some effort, pumping and breathing and pounding, Rush on pulse-watch, shaking his head no, no.

  Finally Con depockets his Taser. “And I’m not going to let him die now,” he adds, “clear.”

  “No—” Rush says, too late.

  Hale’s body stands on head and heels with electricity, throwing Rush back. Con follows it up with more CPR. Vangelesti takes over pulse duty, shakes his head no. Con does it all again, twice, three times, until the Taser doesn’t have any juice left.

  “Shit,” he says, throwing it aside.

  Everyone collapses as one then, the shot from directly above, the lightbulb at the edge of the frame, as if standing in for the white light directly in front of NDE244 Hale, beckoning.

  Their postures are all about the absence of hope.

  Except for Nona. She shakes her head no, gets grim in the mouth. Starts crossing the floor to Hale, doesn’t make it before Virginia’s voice comes in: “I figured it out,” she’s telling the person dissolving in slowly as Curtis. “My dreams.”245

  Curtis leans back in his director’s chair—which seems about half-contrived—and laces his fingers into a church in Virginia and TJ’s f.g., meaning therapy’s in session again.

  “And …?” he says.

  “And the birth … Halloween … that barbecue case,” Virginia starts. “It’s the—”

  “Gargoyles,” Curtis interrupts, anticipating her.

  “Yes,” Virginia says. “They used that Sweren woman as a surrogate, a host.”

  “Like the cuckoo bird … ” Curtis says.

  “To get one of their own in, with … maybe that’s how they’re all born … or, they wanted to make a breed, a hybrid …?”

  “This isn’t the X-Files, Virginia.”

  “I don’t know why, okay?”

  “Give it a couple of minutes,” Curtis suggests, his tone patronizing. “Maybe they just don’t have quality day care in the underworld?”

  Virginia looks away in exasperation, holds her head in her hands, controls her words. “This isn’t how it’s supposed to work,” she says. “You’re supposed to be supportive, understanding—”

  “But not to the point where I enable your delusions. That wouldn’t be professional, now would it?”

  “Well then let’s pretend again—” Virginia starts, Curtis tilting his head toward the stage.

  “Isn’t your big singing number coming up?” he smiles, watching the play. “Right after the angel-piñata, thing …?”

  “Fuck the play, Curtis,” Virginia says, drawing Curtis’s renewed attention.

  He leans forward. “So then yes, let’s pretend you’re having a breakthrough,” he says. “Prompted by …?”

  Virginia pulls TJ into the conversation. “Proof,” she says.

  “Proof?” Curtis asks, incredulous.

  “She’s from my … memories. I told you about her. The one that stayed behind. Didn’t come with us. Look in your notes, doctor.”

  TJ looks to Curtis and nods that Virginia is right, all right. “I remember it too,” she says flatly.

  Virginia laughs with relief. “I’m not crazy,” she says. “It’s the world … ”

  “Might I speak with this young lady in private?” Curtis asks Virginia, winking once. “Just to see if what you have is contagious or not … ”

  “And if it is?” Virginia asks, standing.

  “Then we’ll quarantine you in your own private room,” Curtis answers, still half-playing.

  Virginia looks at the two of them and Curtis shushes her away. Leans back and crosses his legs at the knee. Runs one long index finger thoughtful up the side of his face, studying TJ, who’s looking him dead in the eye, her head cocked ever so slightly, her mouth ready to grin. Or something.

  IN the supply closet, m.o.s., Nona withdraws her lips from Hale’s mouth, either a kiss246 or a breath, hard to tell. She runs her fingers down his arm to his wrist. Thinks she has a pulse—a weak, wet sound. Con is standing on the other side of the gurney; she nods to Hale’s left wrist for him.

  He takes it, shakes his head with disbelief. Checks again, nods yes then locks eyes with Nona, slouching down memory lane with her again.

  Nona looks down to her own inserted name tag and says it: “This isn’t right, is it? Us, this?”

  Con shakes his head no. “It was … Gin,” he says, like a question. “The other time.”

  “The first time,” Nona corrects.

  Con raises his eyebrows with doubt at the last instant, though. Looks to Vangelesti. “Were you saying prayers for him or something down there?” he asks. “Cashing in a few old markers from seminary?” Which gets Nona looking at Vangelesti too, thinking aloud again, her new trademark: “Vangelesti … e-vangelesti … practically a cleric.”247

  “This isn’t Dungeons and Dragons,” Rush says, still hurting from the Taser.

  “More of a priest, anyway, right?” Con says to Vangelesti, correcting Nona, explaining: “I mean, clerics are druids, right?”

  Nona takes it in stride, never stops talking to Vangelesti: “So what does your kind know about demons?” she asks.

  “Demons,” Vangelesti laughs. “That’s why I got out. All that BS.”

  “BS?” Nona asks.

  “Bachelor of Science,” Vangelesti says, “biology. My thesis was on the naked mole rat.248 You’ve heard of it?”

  Nona shakes her head no, narrows her eyes at Vangelesti. We go tight on his mouth as he narrates the inevitable:

  Curtis and TJ’s therapy se
ssion. In Virginia’s peeking-through-the-curtain POV, it’s muted by distance.

  “The naked mole rat,” Vangelesti voices-over, TJ leaning forward to Curtis. Biting her lower lip suggestively, as if absorbed in his therapeutic questions. “He spends his life underground. Thus the naked part, the blind part, et cetera. Hair and eyes aren’t essential to them. They’re not attractive. Look like an aborted Shar-Pei. Which isn’t to say they don’t have an elaborate social structure … ”

  As he speaks, Curtis leans forward, questioning TJ, and TJ is just nodding yes, yes, mechanically. Leaning back in her chair—Sharon Stone under interrogation: cool, collected, coiled.249

  She turns to Virginia’s curtain, Virginia hidden in complete darkness, and winks. Virginia jerks back.

  Curtis’s POV follows TJ’s though and he sees nothing.

  Vangelesti continues: “… like termites, or bees. They have queens and workers and all that. Or, like us. They are mammals, I mean. Now this is the interesting part … ” and it is: TJ looks back to Curtis, reaches calmly over to his shirt pocket. Removes his glasses folded there, balances them on the arm of the chair. In preparation.

  Curtis watches this happen too, allows this invasion, is still watching when TJ’s hand snakes forward, through his now-empty pocket and deep into his chest, to his heart.

  She cleanly removes it, then plants her mouth over his, begins feeding on him, lumping him down her throat.

  His legs pedal the air in front of his director chair. His forearm crushes the glasses.

  The shot pans over to Virginia, bent to a tear in the curtain, unable to look away, her wings behind her, small and useless. Eyes filling with water.

  Vangelesti’s v.o. goes on: “… when a queen dies or is killed or abdicates or whatever, the whole social structure should fall down. The hive should collapse. [Beat, beat; Virginia breathing fast, Curtis shriveling, looking like Cat did in the closet.] But it doesn’t. Instead something gets triggered in some nobody mole, and that mole morphs into the queen, starts taking on all her physical characteristics, everything. Until there is a queen, and the social order is maintained … balance. Which is more or less why I didn’t finish seminary, because … because if there were demons, like you say, then, humanity, the naked mole rats, in defense, one of us would morph into an angel, or whatever the opposite of a demon is, right? Because we needed one. I mean, it’s a natural thing, not supernatural … no God involved there … ”