Demon Theory

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Sandro climbs into Metatron’s chair, the joystick coming naturally to him.

  “Michael Stipe,” he says, in wonder. Rush stumbling from monitor to monitor, keeping his hand on the wall, pulling things down. Sandro thumbs the red REC button on the joystick and “Losing my Religion”286 cues on, as if from that button.

  BUT it’s with Nona too, R.E.M. Not as insistent, but there. And she is losing whatever religion she had—standing in front of the freight elevator door she told Con not to run back to.

  It’s been savaged a little by TJ. Some of her blood is still there, not yet dry.

  From a low angle and behind, Nona is small before the door, is standing in front of a mosaic, a little girl awestruck, trying to understand, see it all at once; make sense.

  She looks up at the ceiling, tries to cross herself but does it all wrong, so that her finger slices jagged across her throat, a bad little image made jerky and important in the editing room.

  That’s not all, though. Next she extends her arm to the door, her hand, that same thirsty finger, stops just shy of the blood, hesitating, her reflection distorted in the polished chrome.

  “What am I becoming?” she asks, the music fading, and then does it, touches the blood, keeps her finger there in spite of the burning, until some slips between the extreme close-up lines of her finger.

  She collapses, is somewhere in JENNY’s childhood. After the three-wheeler accident but before the burial. In her and Hale’s upstairs room on the floor. Drawing with a lump of charcoal. Her withered legs gathered beside her.

  She looks up to Nona’s POV, her eyes too innocent for words.

  “I only have black,” she explains, the most we’ve heard from little-girl Jenny.

  Nona’s POV lowers to Jenny’s level, studies the current drawing: pretty much it’s what we expected—a half-drawn Swedenborgian angel that’s already looking like a demon. In action. Straight from Jenny’s wall in the original.

  Nona’s finger extends—is still extending—and touches the demon, comes away sooty.

  “Are you an angel?” Jenny asks.

  Nona shakes her POV no. “I’m … your brother’s friend,” she says. “What are you doing?”

  “Drawing,” Jenny answers perfunctorily, in her best Carol Anne.287

  “Really, I mean,” Nona says back.

  Jenny smiles, most of her face hidden in blonde hair. “Are you a devil, then?” she asks.

  Nona shakes her POV no again, but is compelled to follow Jenny’s gaze to her own finger, the soot-become-blood. The same finger she touched the elevator door with. She gasps.

  “I think I’m ready now,” Jenny says. “I’ve been praying.” She tries to stand then, but can’t: her leg, hip, and lower back are still seriously injured, as if never tended to. A younger Zelda.288

  She holds her decaying arms straight out to Nona, for Nona to pick her up. Like she did for Hale in the original.

  And Nona wants to.

  Jenny adds the finishing touch: “Are you … my mom?” she asks, weakly, shyly, Nona not even able to answer. Able only to pick her up, hold her close. Spin around the room. Not see the heavy-handed demon-sketch, finished now, inserted: it has Jenny’s fine features, a little-girl face. And a bleeding line welling up diagonally across that face.

  But back to Nona: over her shoulder, Jenny’s eyes are rolling back to yellow, and she whispers it into Nona’s ear just before they crash into blackness: “Tell my brother I still love him.”

  IN that blackness are two things: 1) the dim outline of a service door on the ceiling, and 2) a thin line of emergency light—the meager space TJ forced between the freight elevator doors.

  Suggesting Hale could have been in on Nona’s communion somehow.

  A few floors below, Michael Stipe is back on the air and pounding as Rush retraces his path from security to oncology, the signs passing overhead in a blur, the electricity starting to surge on unsteadily, unpredictably. He’s pulling everything he can down behind him, pushing doors open he doesn’t enter, leaving them swinging. Twice TJ is on him, sending him sliding, but he’s still wet enough with the extinguisher foam that he’s invisible in her washed-out POV.

  He’s not taunting her anymore, either. Just trying to breathe, stay alive. Not cough up too much more blood.

  Once TJ stops, studying Rush’s bloody spit and the ID bracelet he lost. The close-up of the bracelet reads JACOB RUSH, “Jacob” being the angelic push here, TJ mispronouncing it for us in case it didn’t stick: “Ja-cub.” She looks from the bracelet up the hall and redoubles her pursuit, tearing everything up she can.

  Ahead of her, Rush is standing at the door to chemo, unsurprised.

  “Guess this is where I’m supposed to be,” he says.

  He looks from the door back to TJ, just exiting one of his swinging-door rooms.

  She balls up her anger and impatience and screams it out all at once, forcing Rush back into Oncology for the second time. He leaves the door swinging, swinging, TJ bursting through moments sooner than seemed possible, floating glass throughout the shot, almost a 3-D effect.

  Rush is already retreating down the hall. Past the radiation signs we’re trained to watch for, wait for. Signs we’re supposed to have already guessed. But he stops at the supply closet first, the lights overhead still surging.

  TJ swings her POV down the hall, to the opening supply-closet door.

  By the time she gets there, slamming it, Rush is nowhere.

  We go tight on her face as she listens, listens, and then her expression slowly changes: this time it’s the demon swaying its back—TJ bending away from the handful of syringes slamming into her wing buds, Rush hammering them down all at once, emptying them into her. The same stuff the nurse gave him earlier.

  TJ screams in pain, banging from wall to wall, the protean lights evoking William Hurt, Altered States.289 She’s changing nearly as much, too, veins and muscles reorganizing themselves. But there are the chemo drugs to deal with: they well up graphically under her skin, burn and pop, and we almost feel sorry for her, what she’s going through.

  Finally she falls by degrees, tries to get up, goes facedown instead.

  Rush waits it out for a bit, going to eight on his hand, then steps carefully over TJ’s demon wings, extending wet and useless from her back, forced out too early by the chemo meds. Rush flinches away from contact with them. Placing himself immediately in front of the radiation booth.

  He looks down to TJ. “Green eggs’ll fuck a person up,” he says, “even you,” TJ’s yellow eye opening to his voice.

  Before she can do anything he comes down hard and unexpected with a chair, onto the back of her head, and then drags her by the arm into the radiation booth, positions her as he must have been positioned. Closes the door.

  On a peg by the viewing window are some safety goggles. He puts them on, breathes twice, then turns the large dial way past safety.

  Now it’s a waiting game: when the lights surge on the radiation kicks in and TJ flails at the door, the wall, the glass. Last is the glass. She’s screaming too but the booth is soundproof.

  The lights surge back on one more time, long enough for her to slide down, out of sight, and then they go off for too long.

  In the darkness the reflected lenses of Rush’s goggles back away but don’t leave. Keep watching. Which is a punishable offense: when everything’s at its most silent—the signature theme even absent—TJ crashes through the unbreakable glass, alive, the power coming on behind her, for her, all her human traits burned off, her wings hanging limp and bloody from her back.

  In her POV the radiation light casts Rush’s shadow against the wall.

  She looks from it to him, and he looks back at her, at himself, to her again.

  She can see him now. His shadow.

  “Ja-cub,” she creaks, and Rush cocks his hand to flip her off, isn’t able to complete the motion before she makes a rag doll of him, colors him with his own blood, then finally feasts on him, her
skin still smoking hot.

  Not dead yet. More like reborn.290

  FROM a low angle and looking in from ext., ER lights up, the power steady, the broken doors trying to swish open and closed, only one of them halfway making it, waking a gunshot VICTIM, who passes back out.

  Otherwise it’s dawn.

  THE fluorescent lights rouse Nona too, but just barely. She’s partially sitting against the freight elevator door. Looking bad.

  The first thing she does is stare hard at her index finger.

  The second is throw up.

  The third is turn—vomit stringing from her mouth still—to the elevator buttons, remembering they were pushed sometime in the night. The UP one blinking.

  “No,” Nona says, reaching for it too late.

  The elevator behind the door is rising, though.

  “JD,” she says, reaching after him, “Hale,” then falls into the stairway, a series of shots291 of her on floor after floor, hitting the buttons too late each time, the elevator going up, up.

  Soon enough the stairs end at a heavy door.

  Nona sags, looks down, ahead, finally chooses ahead. Inserts her key into the lock, the door swinging wide onto the roof, Nona framed in the doorway, drawing into herself, the morning sky in her POV so so threatening, like she can just fall up into it. Like she has before.

  She collapses in that doorway and the shot widens off her, making her small against it all: a helipad complete with copter, various radio antennae, monstrous a/c condensers, etc. Just off the helipad is the freight elevator, and in the weak int. light of that elevator the doors are in a loop, are jerking again and again against the bent pin. Which is slowly being worked up and out.

  BUT back to the roof, off the roof, down the side of the building, through a window, TJ looking up from her hurt place to the wonderful Christmas sun.

  It glistens off her leathery black skin. Her wings flex luxuriantly in it.

  MOMENTS later she crawls out through the window, up the side of the building, her wings trailing behind her, still heavy but beginning to move with each other.

  NONA’S POV catches TJ’s black claw, reaching over the roof. TJ follows, majestic, deadly. Way past stopping now.

  Nona closes her eyes, still urging herself on voicelessly, talking herself out into the open, mouthing, “Go go go.”

  She does, stiff legs, clenched fists and all.

  Before her is TJ, standing on the precipice, turning once to study the corniced gargoyle. It would be as big as her if it weren’t crouched, protecting the building.

  Nona walks softly to TJ, and TJ turns, waits. Extends her great wings in the sun, which is truly daunting.

  “Jenny,” Nona says, no response, then repeats, with volume: “Jennifer Sweren.”

  TJ looks away.

  Nona continues: “You’re not … you don’t have to be … look at your leg … it means part of you still remembers who you are … ”

  TJ doesn’t look but we pan around anyway, and the back of her leg is still shredded. The muscles contract as if TJ can feel the weight of our stare.

  “Are you still in there?” Nona asks, talking to Jekyll via Hyde.292 “Is there anything left? Don’t you see what they’re doing here …? They brought you back just to birth one of their own … but you don’t have to let them … ”

  Suddenly they’re both in the improbable b.g. of the helicopter keys, trailing out of the helicopter ignition.

  And TJ is listening.

  “You’re not one of them,” Nona is saying. “You’re already … dead. I’m sorry.”

  TJ raises a black hand, runs it painfully along the side of her face.

  Looks down to Nona.

  IN the freight elevator the pin finally falls loose, and the doors open, sunlight piercing the int.

  We cut back across the roof before there’s any motion, though, TJ turning her back on Nona, resisting the argument it would seem—which is to say able to be intrigued by an argument. Which is to say not quite invulnerable. TJ rolls her massive shoulders, her wings extending again, just almost dry, and they flap awkwardly once, twice, and then the weight is off her feet. But she’s not quite ready. And, coming back down, her bad leg gives and she folds into a leathery pile, smaller than would have seemed possible.293

  Nona approaches, brushes the pads of her fingers along the ridge of TJ’s shoulder, but her touch drives TJ up to her roaring full height. She backhands Nona across the roof, to the helicopter rails, the copter keys jingling.

  The idea being that if radiation failed, maybe blades won’t.

  But then TJ sees something: in her POV it’s a thin rail of a shadow against the rising sun. Hale, standing. On the other side of the roof. So weak.

  Nona sees him too, all the water in her head rushing to her eyes.

  “JD,” she says, unable not to smile, then louder: “Hale.”

  TJ looks from Nona to Hale, as if the name means something to her—still—and then Hale becomes the physical proof for Nona’s argument: he looks away from Nona, back to TJ. “Jenny,” he says, calling to her. Calling attention to himself.

  But too, now TJ’s aware of the sky above, the WINGED SHAPES volplaning three thousand feet above the earth, waiting for her.

  Decision time.

  Hale looks to Nona one last time, shakes his head no, or good-bye, or something that Nona can read, flail against. “Hale … ” she screams, “no … ” but yes: Hale, with TJ watching, crosses his arms across his chest coffin-style then falls backwards off the roof of the hospital,294 into this Christmas morning, and TJ’s yellow eyes water at some preconscious, undemonic level, and she floats across the rooftop—half-flying, half-running, the balls of her feet barely touching the ground—and dives thoughtlessly after him. Her brother.

  Nona, alone on the roof, tries to form words, can’t come close. Instead holds her face in her hands and gives up.

  TWO things more: 1) the slow pan off the edge of the roof revealing that the side of the cornice gargoyle previously out of sight is now broken away, as if whatever was inside is already out, and 2) TJ and Hale, mere yards from crashing into the concrete at top speed, TJ cradling Hale but unable yet to fly, her wings trailing behind them, a cool shadow engulfing them both, from above.

  IN pathetic relief the sprinklers rain on in ER, then in a series of shots throughout the hospital. Everywhere except in the security room, it would seem. Sandro looking to the sound of water on the door.

  Rush’s videotape ejects itself from the recorder.

  It’s still made up like a postcard, Con’s handwriting on it—CHRISTMAS EVE. Con either unconscious or dead in the f.g., resolving in.

  Sandro neatly crosses out EVE, leaving just CHRISTMAS, then makes a show of pushing the door buzzer.

  The door swings open on his wheelchair, waiting for him, the trusty lime green steed, all-aluminum.

  NEXT is the mahogany door of Dr. Watkins’s office opening at long last, Dr. Watkins emerging as if waking after a long and bad dream.

  Soon enough he’s in his own series of shots as he rises through the hospital, surveying the damage, Golden Earring’s “Twilight Zone”295 pounding in louder and louder, an apt song for the state of the hospital—the fire damage, trashed doors, dead people, etc. It’s unclear whether Dr. Watkins sees all this or whether we’re cutting ahead, recapping, but it doesn’t matter. The expression on his face is childlike, impervious. Insisting on some other, explainable story.

  Finally he’s in an elevator, taking him wherever. Which is up.

  HE steps out the same door Nona unlocked, is suddenly on the roof. She hears the gravel crunching under his feet.

  He walks to the edge of the roof, gets all wet-eyed. Opens his arms as if to embrace the city. Laughs to be alive, and then gets pushed cleanly off, Nona standing behind him, breathing hard, mad, already looking away from what she just did—Sandro floors below, depositing the CHRISTMAS tape into a mail slot, not aware of the window behind him, being blotted out by a large leath
ery shape, moving simply up.

  ON the roof, Nona still has her back turned, doesn’t see the adult demon sweeping up into the sky behind her, TJ and Hale’s destroyed bodies in tow, the demon’s wings making small work of the ascent.

  She does turn to the flapping, though, but is too late: from Hale’s POV it’s the same footage from earlier, when he was dead—his bloodied arm grasped by a demon claw at the top of the frame, pulling him deeper into the sky.

  He goes close on the blackness of the claw, his POV fading us out, and remains there long enough for the credits.

  DEMON THEORY 18

  Part III of a three-part novelization of the feature film trilogy The Devil Inside, as adapted from D, the unauthorized best-seller inspired by the case notes of Dr. Neider, as recorded in a series of interviews conducted during his residency at Owl Creek Mental Facilities and originally published in the journal P/Q as “Narrative, Me-dia, and Allocution: Genre as Mnemonic Device.”

  the eternal is also here,

  only the way to it is brutal

  —Gerald Stern

  THE third starts with a siren, darkness, some road whipping past. Always some road whipping past, always night. We fade in on the top of the ambulance, keep up with it down the two-lane ribbon, cut inside where it’s dark all over again, the only thing to hold on to the windshield and whatever headlight it allows, but that’s at the front end of things. We’re in the back, where the patient rides. Where somebody’s riding.

  A voice comes over the driver’s shoulder—male, muffled, insistent: “Just go get her. Trust me. Take the highway to junction 139 and then—” but the voice is cut short, the tape squeal giving it away as a recording. It rewinds violently, starts again: “… get her. Trust me. Take the highway to junction 139—” Again, shorter: “… Trust me. Take the highway [rewind]. Trust me. Take the [rewind]. Trust me [rewind]. Trust me,” the screen fading in on the PLAY button of an old tape recorder. A scrubbed-clean fingernail on that button, the skin around it once-burned, healed over now.

  “You heard him,” a familiar female voice says, and the driver—SKOPEK, big enough to be a WWF296 contender, dressed in orderly whites—angles the rearview mirror down to the voice, and in the reflection it’s NONA, hospital gowned, her hair grown back natural, a strawberry blonde almost—est. that enough time’s passed for it to do that.