Demon Theory

by Stephen Graham Jones

  As he says angel TJ turns her POV—as if hearing him—to Virginia, the angel through the curtain, bent over and watching. It’s a nicely choreographed moment, brings everything together for an instant.

  TJ rises, sloughing Curtis off.

  Wipes her mouth with the back of her arm.

  Virginia backs away, the curtain falling half on her, TJ steadily approaching—a POV bleaching everything out but Virginia.

  The chase begins.

  “LIKE with Jurassic Park, right?” Nona says to Vangelesti, back in the supply closet. “When the velociraptors needed a male in their social structure so one of the females—”

  “Strapped one on and filled in,” Con finishes.

  “Strapped one on?” Nona asks.

  “Filled in,” Con repeats, more suggestively.

  Vangelesti nods. “If there are demons … here,” he says. “Then there should also be an angel.”

  AS illustration, the shot closes in on the angel above the play, tangled in her own wires. Below it, in the play, Virginia is standing, singing, crying, hiding in plain sight. As if milling numbers could be protection.

  “THERE wasn’t an angel last time, though,” Nona says.

  “Last time?” Vangelesti asks, but Nona just looks away, and Con isn’t giving anything up.

  “It’s the sister,” Nona says finally, quietly, looking down to Hale. “His.”

  “But she—” Con starts, Nona already interrupting: “Came back, is coming back. Pet Sematary.250 Gage.251 Only she’s feeding. And infecting.”

  Con laughs a sickly laugh, like he doesn’t want to have to believe this. Like he’s reaching some limit of absurdity here.

  “And so she’s coming for him, now?” Rush asks.

  Nona looks to Con for an answer, and they don’t have one. “We have to assume … ” she starts to say, doesn’t finish.

  “Whatever it is,” Con says. “We’re just in the way here.”

  “Expendable,” Nona adds.

  Vangelesti steps forward, looking from one to the other. “It’s not like the hospital is locked, y’know?” He dangles his ambulance keys out for inspection.

  “He needs some real medical attention, though,” Con says, meaning Hale again.

  “A real doctor,” Nona adds.

  “Then I can take him to a real nother hospital,” Vangelesti caps on, no one adding to it. “What?” he asks. “You want to stay here?”

  Con says it finally, for him and Nona both: “It’s just that … outside … ”

  EITHER above the hospital or in his mind, the night sky he’s talking about is wide, empty, too big to see all at once.

  “SOME mild agoraphobia,”252 Nona fills in for him. “The irration—the rational fear of open spaces.”

  “Learned behavior,” Con sums up.

  “Then what?” Rush asks. “Get in line and wait? I mean, should we go ahead and fatten ourselves up…?”253

  “We get him put together properly,”254 Nona says, about Hale, “and then we hide. Wait for our angel.”

  “Meaning your demons are real?” Vangelesti asks.

  “They’re not ours,” Con says. “And yes.”

  AS they walk down the hall Con is singing “Send me an angel Send me an angel Ri-ight now.”255 Pushing Hale’s gurney, Vangelesti steering it, Rush and Nona on either flank, Nona with the light.

  As they pass an open elevator shaft Nona turns to Con, shushes him.

  In the new silence it comes through, up the shaft: “Silent Night.”256

  “’Tis the season,” Con says, moving on.

  But Rush stops. “The pageant,” he says, “shit. We can’t let—”

  “The children,” Nona finishes.

  Con looks from one to the other, incredulous, finally settling on Nona, rekindling certain things: “Always the noble one, right?”

  “Humane,” Nona amends.

  “I don’t know what you remember,” Con says. “But I’m no hero.”

  “Not much of a Santa Claus, either,” Vangelesti says. Con looks up at the hat he still has on then takes it off, throws it down, and we stay with it for a bit, their footsteps and wheels retreating. Opening a door. The real “Send Me an Angel” kicking in for Virginia, the one just moving her mouth to “Silent Night” now, no voice. Crying, her face wet with it.

  TJ steps into the frame, so they’re both in their previous positions. Licks a clot of blood from the corner of her mouth, her tongue wrong somehow, too quick and prehensile. She nurses her candle.

  Virginia has the cross that was around her neck in her hand now. In TJ’s POV it’s black black, casting a long shadow, everything else bleached white, the same image lifted for the promo posters and altered slightly, so that the shadow suggests wings. The candle flames are oily, the smoke heavy.

  TJ leans over to Virginia. “You’re not singing,” she parrots, and Virginia shakes her head no.

  “Who are you?” she asks back weakly, but TJ is occupied, watching the GHOSTS of Christmas Past, Present, and Future257 in some sort of Cotton-Eyed Joe258 kick line, the Grinch wearing Mary’s red259 wig in an act of mild subterfuge, trying to steal away with the infant-CPR dummy—Baby Jesus—the audience pointing this out to Joseph, who’s brushing the donkey down, blissfully unaware.

  The shot pans over Joseph’s shoulder and across the audience, to Sandro, not pointing at the Grinch, his POV on the angel-chorus again: first Virginia, racked with fear, and then TJ.

  “Huh?” Sandro says to himself, leaning closer, wheeling up a bit for a better angle.

  “Jenny?” he says, recognizing her all grown-up, and TJ hears this amid everything else, looks flat-eyed back at Sandro, the shot reversing for his reaction: instant panic.

  He starts wheeling back, into people, who push back against him.

  The close-up of Virginia’s candle falls to the floor, wax splashing, flame licking into a robe.

  Sandro screams, screams—“No, it’s her!”—stopping the play for an attentive beat. Long enough for the robe of an EXPENDABLE ANGEL260 to flame up, send her screaming into the kick line.

  Virginia realizes she’s done this, reaches out in apology, then simply turns, runs.

  Behind her TJ’s robe and wings are on the floor, no TJ.

  Some of the prop-hay goes up with the expendable angel. Sparks floating around like Virginia’s fireflies, a nice effect.

  The angel tangled in the lines above swats a spark off her arm, is suddenly the only one with a POV on TJ as she crawls insectlike over the manger in pursuit of Virginia. In passing, she sees the tangled angel, and leaps effortlessly toward her, all grace and silence and inevitability.

  A heavy metal door slides almost shut, Con, Nona, and Vangelesti leaning into it, Hale behind it. Getting locked in. The freight elevator, caught partway between floors.

  “This keep it out?” Rush asks.

  “Her,” Nona corrects.

  Con shrugs. “Four inches of steel …?” he says.

  “Famous last words,” Rush adds.

  “We could all stay in there with him,” Con suggests, hooking his head to the idea of Hale. “In case of respiratory failure or … ” but Nona is shaking her head no.

  “Just one of us,” she says, and looks to Rush.

  “Don’t give me any special treatment,” Rush says back, offended. “My days are already numbered … ”

  “Who put you in charge anyway?” Con asks Nona. “I do think I outrank you hospital-wise, right?”

  “I’m not the custodian, anymore,” Nona says.

  “Noan of Arc,”261 Con suggests, no grins.

  Nona looks to Vangelesti, then to Hale. “You did it once already,” she says, not quite putting Vangelesti on the spot. Not with her eyes, at least. “And … in the coma room … they must not like how you taste or something. Too holy.”

  “Anyway,” Rush adds. “You’re engaged. You have to live through this.”

  Vangelesti considers, considers; accepts with a nod.

&n
bsp; “Our angel,” Con says, about Vangelesti, stepping through the narrow entry of the elevator.

  Vangelesti holds the door for a moment, though. “Cat,” he says. “if you find her … ”

  Con nods, leans into the door. Surrenders his lighter to Vangelesti. “Say a prayer262 for us,” he tells him, and then, after the door’s closed, tapping on the door with his index finger for Nona: “Think he can do last rites through this?”

  INSIDE the freight elevator, Vangelesti first checks Hale’s vitals by lighter light, then drops a thick pin through two interlocking eyeholes on either elevator door, locking them together, the shot lingering on the naked skin of his forearm, the sweat there, the visual push here having to do with mole rats and God, Vangelesti squinting up at the service door in the top of the elevator, not even remotely lockable, the lighter hardly reaching it even. Making him half-blind. He doesn’t look away, though.

  OUTSIDE the elevator the hall is empty now, est. that Con and Nona and Rush are somewhere else: descending the stairs, playing a nervous game:

  “It makes sense, though,” Rush is saying to Con. “John Ritter263 … Jack Tripper264 … Jack T. Ripper … Jack the Ripper265 … just four degrees there.266 which you have to admit—”

  “Jack the Ripper didn’t pretend to be gay, though,” Con interrupts.

  “Well he didn’t have Mr. Roper267 to deal with, either,” Rush says back. “Just Scotland Yard.”268

  “Point.”

  “And did either of them ever get caught?” Rush asks.

  Con shakes his head no. Keeps following Nona.

  “And do the victimology,” Rush says. “Chrissy Snow, Janet Whatever. Both single in the city, promiscuous—”

  “Hardly streetwalkers, though,” Nona chimes in unexpectedly.

  “Yeah,” Con says. “And they’re still alive.”

  “You know this?” Rush asks back, intent. “What have you seen Janet in lately? I think three was company for him … ”

  “Okay, then,” Con offers. “Consider them dead. What about Jack?”

  “What about him?” Rush says. “He stepped back into that darkness … London fog … ”

  “Skin Deep,”269 Nona whispers, almost to a door, keys out. “John Ritter was in Skin Deep.”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Rush says, waiting for them to get it. Nona shakes her head when she does.

  Con gets a quiet behind-the-back five from Rush for it.

  “And I wonder why I need medication to deal with this place,” Nona says to herself, Con behind her, holding the door, mouthing ‘Medication?’ to Rush, who just shrugs, passes.

  Con looks after them both, and then to the darkness below, all the Jack Rippers hiding there. Decides to keep up, on.

  IN the bedlam of the play, Virginia is alone, skulking, the moving shot on her flashing suddenly to the enhanced POV, breathing hard now, not with exertion but with thrill, with ability: Virginia thinks she’s hiding behind a curtain but her body-signature is giving her away.

  Across from her, hiding as well, is a young young KID, perfectly still.

  “Leave,” Virginia whispers to her, “go,” but the kid can’t, seems to be seeing something behind Virginia. The shot reverses with Virginia and it’s TJ’s shadow, midair. Virginia rolls away, leaves TJ in the falling curtains. They aren’t going to hold her for long, though. Backing up without turning around, then, Virginia stumbles over a wiseman staff. She picks it up, and, more like it’s a wand than a weapon, starts tapping TJ with it, harder and harder, until she finally connects with what sounds like the head. The thrashing stops, TJ standing under the curtain like a campy creature from the fifties. She cuts through the cloth with a black index finger. Shakes her blonde head no.

  The kid scampers off, TJ turning to her momentarily, Virginia pleading “No … ”

  Veins ripple down one of TJ’s arms, altering the musculature, telling us she’s still changing. And it still hurts. She falls to one knee.

  Virginia approaches with the staff, backlit by the burning stage.

  TJ looks up to her, waiting, vulnerable, but in the end Virginia can’t do it. Cries and tries but can’t.

  Instead she holds her cross out, between them. In TJ’s weakened POV the cross is still trailing a radiation-looking shadow, as if it has power, essence, something. Virginia’s wings are important here, her posture, all of it.

  TJ stands, looks at the cross, and rolls her eyes back to yellow. New eyes.

  She smiles.

  Virginia starts backing steadily away, TJ advancing, a slow dance.

  At the last instant before TJ would have reached her, Virginia turns to run for a heavy door at the end of the activity room. Looks desperately behind her for TJ, who’s no longer there. Which is worse. Virginia sways her back just as in the original, runs, runs, and then at the next last instant Con’s face appears at the window in the door, cups a hand to see in. The potential savior here.

  Virginia reaches for him, starts to say his name, but never finishes, TJ’s fully-formed demon claw suddenly extending out the cavity of her mouth, TJ holding the corpse easily, the shot level on her legs and from three-quarters behind: her standing in the darkness, silhouetted against the door, Con in the f.g., his hand still cupped to the glass, his POV able to make out motion in the activity room, but not TJ. Not quite. He tries the handle for heat, holds it there, holds it there, and finally pulls it away in pain.

  “Smoke,” he says, and Nona nods. Looks to Rush.

  “You don’t have to … ” she says. “This isn’t your fight.”

  Rush smiles, shrugs. “Can’t be worse than chemo,” he says, but it is bad: they open the main door and the long est. shot is all about composition—the stage smoldering, chairs burning, crutches leaning against each other deadcenter, no one in between. The angel still tangled above it all, gutted, her entrails spilling, Drew Barrymore all over again.270

  “No way I’m cleaning this up … ”271 Nona says.

  With all due reverence Con adds Nona’s tagline from earlier—“Just when you thought it was safe to be inside”—then looks to the sprinkler heads, suffocating in smoke. Because he’s who he is, he jingles one, shrugs to Nona for an explanation: “Still trying to get over Halloween … ” she says.

  “Aren’t we all,” Con says back, pure Brandon Lee.272

  In the silence his sarcasm leaves, the stage-fire glows off their faces, meaning it’s gotten too calm: on cue, glass shatters behind them and we go close on Con’s face as he spins, already in cringe mode.

  It’s just Rush though, extracting the fire extinguisher.

  “In case of emergency … ” he says.

  Con sighs, smiles relief, catches the fire extinguisher when Rush tosses it. Looks down to the gauge (inserted: FULL) and then back up, to Rush, TJ there in his b.g. now, fierce, maw bloodied, mid-molt—leathery black demon skin showing through, the rest sloughing off.

  From behind, her wing buds are pulsing, bleeding, writhing. Almost out. The back of her once-hurt leg raw, festering, the injury rising.

  “Santa Claus,” she says to Con, still intoning it wrong. Con raises the fire extinguisher in response, managing one line before he depresses the trigger: “You’ve been a very bad girl … ”

  In TJ’s enhanced POV the white foam coats everything (mostly Rush), makes the black dim, fries the contrast she needs. Meaning Rush disappears. In case we don’t get this, she looks down to her arm, how everywhere there’s foam, there’s nothing, just scattershot scotomas.

  Con and Nona are still there as stick figures, though.

  The shot reverses to a close-up of TJ’s yellow eyes. Calmly, she wipes the foam off her face, then blinks, once with her outer lids and once with a clear inner set.273 So natural. The second pair of lids she leaves down, as protection.

  The door at the end of the hall opens in her POV, closes after Con and Nona, spilling into the activity room, already scrambling. Separating. In the moments before the door they just
came through opens, Nona looks desperately over to Con: “Don’t go back to … him,” she says, meaning Hale. “You’ll just lead her—” but then the door does slam open, TJ evidently mad now, silhouetted in the jamb and then gone like smoke.

  THINGS are tamer in the elevator. Just Vangelesti sitting on the floor, watching comatose Hale against the opposite wall, whose POV seems to have done the dramatically convenient trick of lining up with TJ’s for the moment, as she tracks Con across the floor. He’s running blind in the darkness, the music building up to false crescendo after false crescendo, stacking them up and up. Ahead of him is the same window Virginia was running for, a small point of light.

  TJ lowers herself to the ground somehow, stands, the same height as Con. Starts approaching, Hale’s breath coming faster and faster, Vangelesti narrowing his eyes at this.

  IN some darkness—presumably the activity room—something clicks as if opening, unretracting, extending. Light glances off it for a moment, and the disorienting pan to the back of TJ’s unhurt thigh, her hand dangling beside it, suggests that it was her velociraptor claw. But it’s too dark to be sure.

  From an angle directly above, TJ advancing silently on Con has the quality of a video game—the way the frame doesn’t move, just the players.274 Con stumbles into a file cabinet, falls, pushes it behind him. Finds himself face to face with Virginia’s fed-upon corpse. He starts dragging her with him, until her arm dislocates with a creaking tear that makes us cringe, squint, all the bodily reactions we’re paying for.

  Con widens his fingers, lets her go.

  Behind him, TJ steps easily over the file cabinet, Con crawling backward away from her now, almost to the wall, then there. Without looking away from TJ, his hand finds the handle of the door behind his head.