Demon Theory

by Stephen Graham Jones

  While they bicker and salvage Seri stealths around to the phone, lifts the receiver, rotary dials 911 in. Watches the suddenly hushed crew watch her do this. She smiles at them as if she’s won, is winning, but then lifts the receiver to her ear: nothing, just Con, doing his best female-robot voice: “Please hang up and try your call again.”

  She softly replaces the receiver.

  “You can’t do this,” she says.

  “We’ve already broken out of an asylum and stolen an ambulance,” Nona says. “Kidnapping’s small-fry.”

  “But I’ve never been here,” Seri says again, almost sobbing.

  “Just pretend you don’t remember, Sare,” Nona says. “Like it never happened.”

  “Did it?” Con asks. For us.

  Nona stares at everyone in sequence, ending on Hale. “Something happened,” she amends. “I’m not sure what, okay? Or with who, even. But I know it’s not over. The facts we can confirm are that he [indicating Hale] tried to hang himself … however long ago, for whatever adolescent, cinematic reasons. Enter Con and [searching for the name] … ”

  “Virginia,” Con supplies again, almost mad about it.

  “Virginia. You, or … or you-as-Vangelesti, you and some her anyway managed to save his life, get him to the hospital—”

  “In a coma, though,” Con adds.

  “—where all verifiable hell broke loose. More or less.” With “less” she nods to Con’s stump.

  “But it wasn’t really him in the coma, right?” Seri asks, anticipating Nona’s logic. “Because he was at the convenience store the whole time, waiting for us to pick him up?”

  Nona disregards her for the moment: “Before that, though, or during, we all had some sort of dream—remembered being here … ”

  “Demons and shit,” Con adds, waggling his fingers vaguely up.

  Hale nods. Seri looks away, still resisting.

  “Now,” Nona says, depocketing a stick of chalk, drawing a line on the wall, which gets an impressed smile from Con: “You brought your own chalk, Noan?”

  “They don’t let us have sharp objects at the hospital,” Nona says, concentrating hard on the line.

  “Because you’re … ” Seri says, “what’s the word. Unbalanced?”

  Nona resists the bait, continues, hashmarking her time line: “Five years ago something … a gate,324 got opened. On Halloween. And we got pulled through. To here, another here. The here on the other side of the gate, like a mirror—”

  “So we’ve really never been to ‘this’ here?” Seri interrupts. “Of course.”

  “But why us?” Con asks.

  “Because we were part of your daily life in the hospital,” Nona answers. “Yours and … Virginia’s. When you resuscitated him [Hale], he was dead for a little bit. Long enough for Stan to reach into you, through you—both of you. To us.”

  “Stan?” Seri asks.

  “His father,” Nona says, nodding to Hale. “I found him in the hospital database. Along with you. I printed it all out.” Together, she and Seri look down to the half-burned files, scattered everywhere.

  Con’s still backtracking, though: “You were the janitor at the hospital … ” he says.

  “Custodian,” Nona corrects.

  Hale smiles to himself. “And I always did want to be a doctor … ” he says.

  “And he let you be,” Nona says. “For a while.”

  “He?” Con asks.

  “His father,” Nona answers, tipping her head over to Hale.

  “But why?” Hale asks.

  “I don’t think he can help it. He’s caught in the gate too. Between life and death. Should be dead but can’t die.”

  As she says this we cut softly to either the attic or the cellar. Somewhere where light’s not reaching, anyway. A presence, though. Crying maybe, or breathing hard and scared. Either Stan, listening, alive again, or Jakey Boy, not dead after all.

  IN the living room the shot now is the fireplace, some salvaged candles flickering in it. The dialogue continues o.s., Con: “But what about the … things?”

  Nona laughs through her nose. “It’s like in the Twilight Zone when you miss dying somehow, a fluke, whatever. To maintain balance, death comes for you.325 Makes it personal. Closes the gate.”

  “Then why are we still here?” Hale asks.

  “Because he won’t die. Your father. Can’t. Now they’re feeding on us. Even using us to surrogate their young, get an unholy foothold in our world … ”

  “Jenny,” Hale says, looking away.

  “I’m sorry,” Nona says.

  “He was still trying to bring her back … ” Hale realizes.

  “He still wanted to bring her back,” Nona says. “They used that against him. But since he wasn’t, technically … alive at that point …?”

  Beat, beat.

  “I think he gets it,” Con says.

  Hale looks away, takes a beer. Loses himself in the ever-so-nostalgic pull tab.

  As Nona continues, she gets pushed o.s. by another POV shift, this one watching them from the second floor. Either Stan or Jakey Boy again. Skopek becomes aware of being watched, sweeps around for who.

  “Now you all know how this works,” she says. “If there was a gate opened, and there’s bad things on the other side of that gate, then that gate has to be closed. Simple as that. And the way they always close the gate is by, for instance, saying the spell backwards. Or, in our case, repeating what we remember from the other time we were here. All the same circumstances, except with a different ending. Think Watcher in the Woods.326 That’s why we’re here … all of us. For the sequel.”

  “Except him,” Con says, nodding to Skopek. “What’s he for?”

  Nona smiles. “He’s backup,” she says. “In case I’m wrong.”

  “In case?” Seri asks, incredulous. “In case? Because of some children’s horror movie you caught once on Nickelodeon in the dayroom through a haze of Thorazine you feel compelled to come out here and reenact a dream you had?” Nona neither nods nor doesn’t nod.

  “Ganzfeld,” Seri pronounces finally, in defeat, as if in explanation. Then talks down to them: “It’s a German term. G-A-N-Z-feld. A documented, psychological phenomenon. When you’re deprived of sensory input for too long—say, institutionalized?—you begin to hallucinate … see connections where there are none … come up with theories for your personal demons, which you want to be real, not imagined.” As illustration, she pans us over to Nona’s childishly drawn line.

  In the new silence everyone tries not to watch Nona, does anyway.

  “How do you know German psychology?” Con asks weakly, but Seri doesn’t answer.

  “Because her father was an experimental psychologist,” Nona says for her, wiping her nose triumphantly, “practically Nazi. A real Victor von.327 Experimenting with anti-aging chemicals or hormones or something. The kind of anti-aging that won’t let you die. Stan was his star patient, the only one who lived. And lived. And lived. That’s how he got you here the first time, Sare, through his association with your father. Because you weren’t hospital like the rest of us.”

  Now neither of them has anything to say.

  “He brought us all here so we could close it for him,” Hale says finally, “the gate. So he could die.”

  Nona nods.

  “But this time we’re really here, right?” Con asks, then, weaker: “Meaning we can really die … ”

  Nona keeps nodding.

  “So what now?” Hale asks.

  “We split up,” Nona says hopelessly, waving her fingers to all the rooms of the house at once—fingers which she notices are red with fresh nose blood. She makes a fist out of them, squeezing the blood out, continues: “Wait for it to start. Play along. Scream.”

  “What’s wrong with—?” Hale starts, cueing into her hand, but Nona interrupts: “Nothing.”

  “Nothing,” Seri repeats, her voice half o.s., the shot closing in for long, important moments on the blood Nona dripped, reacti
ng with the hardwood floor somehow. Reacting wrong. Finally the wood just slurps it in. Somewhere above it Con’s still talking, still on the old thread: “… but we’re not supposed to figure it all out this early, are we?”

  “Well …?” Seri says when there’s no answer, but before she can rally support there’s a loud scraping above them—ceiling, roof, somewhere, something.

  Nona forces a smile. Looks up in false wonder. “A noise,” she says.

  Con manages a low-volume fake scream: “Ah-hh.”

  “This isn’t funny,” Seri says. “We don’t have to split up … ”

  “What are you scared of?” Nona asks, her voice uncharacteristically breaking.

  Seri shakes her head. “You,” she says finally. “When your demons don’t come, then what? I mean, it is Halloween … ”

  Nona forces another smile, but the extreme close-up of the sharp corner of her lip is doing the Ethan Hawke twitch,328 giving something away. From her POV it’s consciousness: first the room goes soundless for her, as if there’s a barrier between her and the crew, and then the crew themselves start to fade. “Not now,” she says in her inner ear, but can’t stop whatever’s going on. The shot reverses long enough for a thin line of watery blood to run down from her left nostril. The last image her POV has to lock onto is the wall, the candles casting one of their shadows on it. And that shadow has gargoyle ears. Nona chokes some breath in, blacks all the way out.

  “Wait, this isn’t—” Con realizes, almost catching her in time.

  “Worse than I thought,” Seri says, and when Hale turns to her for more she has it: “TLE. Temporal Lobe Epilepsy … easy to diagnose. First … well, the seizures. Second, the patient will be highly verbal, dominate any conversation. And third, the patient sees … metaphysical importance in the most, um, ‘mundane’ things.”329 She looks around the house, showcasing the mundane.

  “This isn’t a seizure,” Con says. “Look at her. Feel her.”

  “Then what is it?” Hale asks.

  “Some sort of reaction,” Con says, “maybe withdrawal,” then to Seri: “How long since she kidnapped you?”

  Seri shrugs. “Eight hours?” which seems to be what Con wanted to hear.

  “She’s coming off whatever they had her on, then,” he says, rolling her sleeve back from the close-up of three years of track marks.

  “But she—” Hale says, gets interrupted by Seri, scanning the living room: “Goddammit. Where is he?”

  They all look around: no Skopek.

  Hale looks to the couch: no gun clip.

  And Nona’s supplies are trash.

  “Is this how it went the last time?” Seri asks Con, and Con shakes his head no.

  “She needs some immediate pharmaceutical assistance,” he says about Nona, then turns to Hale. “Wasn’t your mother old, sick or something? No disrespect, but don’t old people keep lots of unnecessary medicine around, to fend off the … inevitable?”

  Hale nods.

  “Syringes, even,” he says, and leans upstairs, all hangdog. But Seri stops him.

  “We don’t split up,” she says. “This is Plan B330 now.”

  “Does it still involve getting her some medicine?” Hale asks. After a short standoff—long enough to est. that Seri knows where the medicine is—she nods yes.

  “I’m not my father,” she says, and follows Hale up, motioning for Con to fall in.

  Con dutifully adjusts Nona on the couch, stands. “Just when Plan A was starting to make sense, too,” he says, then mounts the stairs behind Seri and Hale, flips his collar up with one hand.

  “‘We … ’” Hale says, looking back to Nona, alone.

  Con is the last conscious person in the shot. “Be right back,” he says, à la Stu,331 stepping up out of the frame, the empty stairs now b.g. for the fireplace candles, already dissolving into Con’s prosthetic, too slick for snow to cover it, too peachy to miss against all that blood. Soon enough some of the snow crumbles, though. A body taking shape. Stan, gasping for breath, coming back alive. Painfully. Looking bad too. All he can do is crawl, pull himself arm over arm away from the house, toward the cellar. Halfway there he comes face to face with Egan’s gargoyle mask, iced over, grinning at him. He crushes it in his leading hand, reaches the cellar. Pries the door up, letting the wind lift it for him. With maximum effort manages to fall awkwardly over the lip, into the mouth.

  The door slams shut behind him.

  Back to the prosthetic again. We hold on it for a few beats, and then an odd thing: The Wizard of Oz, wholly m.o.s., uncolorized; daytime. The Scarecrow’s C3P0 moment,332 when he’s just been dismembered by the winged monkeys. Their shadows are still retreating. His body parts are scattered all around. In case we miss the association, though, Con, in Hale’s mother’s bedroom, narrates what seems now to have been his projection: “I came for an arm … Noan came to prove she isn’t crazy … ” He looks up from digging in the nightstand, to Seri. “You came to pay for your father’s sins … ” Seri chews her cheek, looks around.

  “This isn’t Oz,” she says.

  “Well it sure isn’t Kansas anymore,” Con says back, then looks to Hale at the window—the prosthetic there in Hale’s POV—continues o.s.: “And Haley here came for …?”

  “Family reunion,” Hale mumbles sardonically. He turns from the window to Con, narrows his eyes at the INSULIN ampoule Con’s lifted from the medicine drawer, is holding up to the meager light, to read.

  “Find it?” Hale asks.

  “Don’t even know what I’m looking for,” Con says, still looking.

  Hale returns to his vigil. In his POV the prosthetic’s no longer there. “No place like home,” he says.

  “You can say that three times fa—” Con starts, gets interrupted by that scraping again. From the hall, the backside of the attic door swinging down, Seri at string control, rolling away from the dust.

  “It’s just me,” she calls into Hale’s mother’s room, then peers up into the darkness. Scrapes the door closed again, the first smart move in the trilogy.

  But then she notices the door to Hale and Jenny’s old room, cracked open the slightest bit.

  “If this was a movie … ”333 she says, and steps forward, her bad-idea motion completed by a figure opening the utility door, to outside. Nona fills the frame for a moment but the low angle and the blood dried on her upper lip suggest it might not really be her—or, all her.

  She steps out into the storm in just her T-shirt and rounds the house, beelines the ambulance, neatly shying away from the red snow, the shot tightening down finally to her popping the hood, reaching in. Underneath it’s like the distributor cap was just waiting for her to twist it off.

  She drops it into the deep snow at her feet, turns back to the house, becomes a shadow through the storm for an unclaimed POV buried in the back of the ambulance, nearly hyperventilating. Jakey Boy comes slowly into focus. He moves over, hiding himself better, and accidentally trips the tape player—Nona doing her best Anthony Michael Hall334—and it serves as a mental-type v.o. for Nona’s actions: “Dear Dr. Parker. We accept the fact that we’ve had to sacrifice our mental health and more for whatever it was you did wrong, but we think you’re the crazy one, for trying to play God in the first place. You see us in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But we’re not your lab rats. Not anymore. We found that one of us is a traitor, you see. Sincerely yours, the tragically undermedicated.”335

  As she crosses the yard—all this white open space—her suppressed agoraphobia doesn’t cue into the POV tracking her from above, the shot diving down for her back, almost to her when one of Jenny’s half-torched demons fills the frame. It’s still on the wall, but just barely. The shot reverses and Seri’s edged in the door. Opposite her Skopek is sitting on the foot of Hale’s bed, tranced out.

  “She had these same ones at the hospital, didn’t she?” Seri says softly. “In her room or cell or whatever …?”

  Skopek looks to her for a momen
t then back to the wall, his blank Kong-gaze resettling, and the way it calms him works as an understood yes to Seri’s question.

  “You don’t want to be here, do you?” she says. “This is an uncontrolled environment. There’s no schedules, no familiar faces … ” her voice pattering off into nothing, just sound to mask her approach. Finally she gets close enough to go palm-to-back with him, her middle finger dangerously close to the neon key string.

  As she talks her finger edges close to the weak hasp. “I bet you miss that, right? The meals, the recess … like elementary school for the rest of your life … ” Impossibly, too, she finagles the hasp open.

  The close-up of the keys falls into Skopek’s hand, though. He makes a fist around it, them, shows some teeth, but now Seri drapes herself over him, puts both her hands over his one.

  “No no no,” she says. “It’s just … well. Your friend, Nona. She, y’know, needs her medicine from the ambulance …?”

  Skopek still just stares, though. And then Seri steps between him and the wall.

  “She said you could … take me back too. While we’re out there.”

  Skopek looks her up and down, smiles with the corners of his eyes. “She said that,” he repeats, his voice booming, wholly unexpected, approximately twelve times more articulate than we’d been led to suspect.

  Seri reevaluates for us. “He talks … ”

  And more: he runs an appreciative hand up her side.

  “If that’s how you want it … ” she offers, running an index finger under one of the straps of her black lace bra, trademark Sharon Stone.336 The same bra from the original, too, when she was a corpse. Close enough, anyway. “Forget elementary school,” she says, going over the top now, biting the side of her index finger, batting her eyes.

  Skopek smiles a killer smile. “There were three endings to that, y’know,” Con says. The close-up of Hale’s eyes doesn’t register the words though, are still confused from whatever he saw outside.

  “What?” he asks.

  “That movie Noan’s modeling all this on. Watcher in the Woods. She said we had to do it like Disney did, but Disney didn’t even know what they were doing … You never saw it?”