Demon Theory

by Stephen Graham Jones

  She sits by it, gingerly tries to salvage a bar or two.

  “They tell me it’s psychosomatic,” she explains, peeling, chewing. “All in my head.”

  “But fevers and nosebleeds aren’t—”

  “Manifestations of an imagined condition,” Nona interrupts, “I know. Just don’t worry about it, okay? It’s happening to me, not you.”346

  Con shakes his head no.

  Nona stares back, holds the blanket over her shoulders, dances a fake little jig of health. “Anyway,” she says, “I—” but Con’s already finishing for her, with an English accent: “‘You got better.’ Yeah. Got some battery acid on your candy there, Noan.”

  “Leave her alone,” Hale says from halfway down the stairs and out of nowhere.

  Con leans back, closes the PDR grandly. “I’m just saying it’ll happen again,” he says, relaxing with the corn, “not that I would know anything … ”

  Nona and Hale aren’t listening though, are watching each other instead.

  “What do you remember?” she asks. “About last time?”

  Hale looks away, around, etc. “It’s like a movie in my head,” he says, swirling his finger first by his temple then just in front of his face, like an old-style projector, which is easy to miss the first time.

  “You’re a child of the twentieth-century, Haley,” Con says, bored. “You remember everything in cinematic terms. They’re the only ones you have.347 Your life is a movie.”

  “What kind, though?”348 Nona adds, to Hale.

  “Limited engagement, low production values … ” Con drones on, already annoying b.g for Hale and Nona: “Us?” Hale finally says, hesitantly, and Nona looks away, eyes wet as if this could be a love story.349 To emphasize that it’s not, the door suddenly gets rammed hard, the whole house shaking with it.

  Neither Hale nor Nona nor Con flinch, though. Con appreciates this. “Right on schedule,” he says, then looks to Nona as if waiting for her to ask Hale the question. She does: “What do you think?”

  Hale looks back to her, down her, to the close-up of her lower legs and feet, both wet. “You went … ” and then he looks back up to her face: “It was you.” He nods outside to show her what he means, what he saw.

  Nona looks at her feet as well, doesn’t answer; can’t. Looks at the floor all around, as if trying to figure it out too.

  Before she can get anywhere, though, the door is rammed again.

  Hale takes a long time deciding, then turns to Nona.

  “Gun?” he asks.

  Nona hands it over butt first. Hale runs his finger up where the clip should be. In answer—or in question too—Nona holds her empty hands up.

  “Didn’t you have it?” Hale asks, Nona apparently just as confused about it as he is.

  “It was too dangerous,” Con explains. “The one-armed man350 might have shot everybody … ”

  Hale shakes his head with early regret, holds the gun with one hand and unlocks the door with the other, turning the close-up of the knob reluctantly, still playing FBI.

  “One, two,” he counts, and on what would have been three the door crashes in on him, and in a blinding rush of snow Seri falls through, in her black bra and crying eyes. Latches onto Hale, who sees Nona see this, a complicated little triangle.

  Hale kicks the door closed, and, both hands behind Seri—in hug mode—manages to lock it.

  MOMENTS later—as est. by the snow Seri brought with her melted on the floor—the four of them are clustered on the couches.

  “So are you going to tell us or do we have to guess?” Con asks.

  Seri’s in some sort of shock-state though.

  “Multiple choice, then,” Nona says, leaning down in front of her. “Was it A, him, or B, them?”

  “‘Him?’” Hale asks.

  “He’s not hospital staff, is he?” Con says. “Shit. As if we didn’t have enough trouble keeping them outside. Then you go and invite one in.”

  In the lull that follows Seri answers, weakly: “C,” she says, watching the door, “both,” and then we zero in on the white of her left eye, suddenly swirling with activity, match-cut with an aerial POV, moving through the storm. Circling, rising. Below it, at ground level, is a deep and anatomically correct snow angel, complete with wings.351

  It burns into the screen.

  BACK in the living room Seri’s wrapped in Nona’s blanket now, shivering, her breath frosted. “Cold … ” she says, a comment on the last scene almost, and we pan over to the heatless fireplace, the candles flickering.

  “We didn’t make you go play in the snow,” Con says. But Seri’s looking to Nona, some sort of communion or understanding or truce going on between them.

  Finally Seri nods and Nona says it, flatly: “We haven’t tried the electricity yet.”

  Hale, sitting on the couch, raises his hand in whatever. Turns to Seri. “So you’re sure you didn’t just see him?”

  “Your father?” Seri asks back.

  “He’d have been in … costume,” Hale says.

  “Undead too,” Con adds. “Don’t forget undead.”352

  Seri just shrugs, looks away.

  Nona turns on Hale softly: “You really think it was him out there with Skopek?”

  In answer Hale directs his POV upstairs for us, the blade still there at neck-level in the hall. He doesn’t answer Nona. Just starts bundling up instead.

  “Electricity,” he explains, doing his arm up-down on the imaginary switch. “Like last time … ”

  “I don’t think you should be the one,” Nona says.

  “My house,” Hale objects. “My father.”

  “But how do we know you’ll come back?”

  Hale shrugs, looks kitchenward, and we cut ahead, Hale and Nona and Seri in the kitchen, Nona tying her torn blanket around Hale’s waist, Seri down to her bra again.

  “Just in case,” Nona says about the blanket, cinching the knot.

  Hale holds his arms up and lets it happen, lolling his head a little, just so we won’t miss the cruciform action going on here.

  “Okay,” Nona says, looping the slack, “that should be enough to get you there.”

  Hale wraps the slack around his arm, is about to leave when both girls at once start to say “Be carefu—” neither of them completing it.

  Hale shies away from this a little, steps backward out into the storm, Con calling from the living room—“Get me another beer while you’re out there, cool?”—and then Hale’s gone, his tether whipping in the void, classic 2001.353

  ON the couch Con is staring at the blank television screen, making a mock run through the channels, ad-libbing the Mutual of Omaha354 narration, the close-up of his Zippo flickering on the table. At its base is one of the HORRORSCOPE! scrolls Nona bought in the original.

  Con becomes aware of it, reaches for it, draws back as if it’s a trick. Looks around, reaches again.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” he says to it. But he does roll it open: close-up, it’s just foil, a hologram skull burned into it.

  “Ah-hh,” Con says, playing scared, but then the foil in his POV seems to reflect a little over-the-shoulder movement. He spins fast toward it but there’s only lint floating down from the second story, landing softly on the television. Con laughs about this some, segues smoothly into the Twilight Zone theme. He points the remote up, up, backtracking, and there at the top of the stairs, just visible through the railing, is his prosthetic.

  He looks down to his missing arm as if to be sure. Looks to the kitchen but Seri and Nona are midmutter, occupied.

  Finally he points the remote back at the prosthetic, then stands, drawn to it, narrating his steps: “Today Jim’s355 going to investigate the phantom limbs of the rural Midwest … ”

  AT the utility pole Hale is knocking snow off the close-up of the fuse box, and then, just before the fuse box would have been in the shot, it reverses for his reaction: “Shit.” Meaning it’s some unexpected discovery we’ll have to wait for.

 
; He looks back to the vague shape of the house, his tether tying him to it.

  AT the ext. utility door, Nona and Seri are still talking. Nona looking Seri up and down. “Do you even own any sensible bras?” she asks.

  “You kidnapped me from my bed, remember?” Seri says. “Anyway, we have to do it like the first time, right?”

  Nona looks out to where Hale is, hidden by the storm. “So you do remember,” she says. “Tell me, did Daddy dearest356 ever bring his work home?”

  “It wasn’t his,” Seri says. “It was the military’s—”

  “The good old government angle,” Nona interrupts.

  “And he wasn’t a psychologist,” Seri continues. “Your little Nancy Drew357 Etch A Sketch at the asylum got that part wrong. Try neurosurgeon.”

  Nona considers this, considers this, then asks it: “But he is dead?”

  “So you think it’s him out there, now?” Seri asks, “that he faked his death and then … ” but Nona isn’t answering. Seri shakes her head. “Twelve years ago. In his office—”

  “Unsolved. Fourteen wounds with a large blade of some sort. The prequel to all this, Hale playing his father or some shit.”

  Seri tries to stare Nona down for this, but Nona won’t look at her. So she has to say something instead, nodding outside: “When you were having your little seizure. It wasn’t him that helped you.”

  Nona does look to Seri about this.

  Seri smiles, adjusts her bra provocatively. “There were other … things in the room drawing his attention … ”

  Nona tightens her grip on the tether. In anger. “I am an escaped mental patient, Sare. Remember that. We have a certain … liberty in stories like this.”

  Seri turns back to the storm, says it, about Hale: “How long’s it take?”

  Which gets Nona wondering too. She hand-over-hands the tether back in, no tension, the other end cleanly untied, already frozen stiff.

  She sags against the doorjamb in defeat.

  EXT., through the storm and close on the fuse box, what Hale saw is finally on-screen: the glass broken, the twin fuses impaled with the empty gun clip, indicting Nona.

  This sinks in for a few extended beats then it’s back to Con, on his knees at the top of the stairs, reaching for his prosthetic. As if to shake hands. A Sistine358 moment. It passes with no fanfare: the close-up of his hand and the prosthetic’s are left and right, so they can’t shake.

  Con touches it with his fingertips then draws back. But it’s not moving. Just the flame of his lighter playing the usual tricks.

  Finally he drags the prosthetic to himself, wipes it down, reattaches it.

  “Now that’s more like it,” he says to himself, then drops the lighter in a fit of satisfaction. The hall goes pitch black, the lighter clattering deeper into it.

  “Well fuck me … ” Con whispers, creeping forward, forward. Soon enough he stops to listen, and he’s definitely not alone. The close-up of his mouth syncs “shit” and then the inserted flint of his lighter sparks, the flame catches, and the hall’s lit up again. Not by Con.

  He stands too fast—his POV catching a pale flash of skin on the other side of the lighter—and then turns to run, all one motion. Before he can even take his second step though a hand has him by the back of his jacket, and when the lighter wheel turns again we rush in close on what almost happened: Con decapitating himself on Stan’s blade, still stuck in the wall from when it crashed through the window.

  Con backs carefully away, turns to his savior: not Jenny as we half-expect, but Jakey Boy.

  They look each other up and down. Con chin-points down to his prosthetic arm.

  “Thanks,” he says, then rubs his neck, eyes the blade. “Don’t think they make a rubber head, yet,” he adds. “Least not one that talks.”

  Meanwhile, Jakey Boy in the lighter light is looking bad.

  “Newt,”359 Con says about him, but Jakey Boy shakes his head no.

  “A body,” he says back to Con. “They’d have put your head on a prosthetic body, wouldn’t they? Think about it. If they could do that kind of shit. Not the other way around.”

  “Con,” Con says in timed response, smoothly removing his prosthetic, extending it for a shake. “As in Conan—”

  “‘The Expendable,’” Jakey Boy finishes.

  Beat, beat.

  “You were listening … ” Con says.

  In answer, Jakey Boy looks behind him.

  “What’d they bring you out here for, Newt?” Con asks, nodding outside somehow. “To scare you?”

  “Initiation,” Jakey Boy answers.

  Con starts to say something else but Jakey Boy interrupts with his own name: “Jake. Jakey Boy.”

  Con shakes his head. “Not Soda Pop, Pony Boy360 …?” but Jakey Boy’s not getting it. “I’m too fucking old,” Con says then, looking off into the darkness, packing his cigarettes on his wrist. He offers one to Jakey Boy; Jakey Boy takes it, lights it off Con, coughs once and tries to pretend it’s not from the smoke. “They’ll kill you, y’know,” Con says, and Jakey Boy breathes deep.

  “Yeah,” he says, looking at the ext. wall, the blood in the yard: “I know.”

  “We’re inside,” Con explains when he gets it. “That’s usually okay.”

  For a few beats then they just smoke, and finally Jakey Boy says it: “Jennifer Sweren.” It gets all of Con’s attention.

  “How do you know about her?”

  “Your … Noan—”

  “‘Nona,’” Con corrects. “You’re not a friend yet. If anybody asks, you’re not even here.”

  Jakey Boy nods. Con reappraises him: “But Noan didn’t say anyth—”

  “She’s getting it all wrong,” Jakey Boy interrupts, casually displaying his F.A.M.E. book.

  “No,” Con says. “We … ” then starts again, holding his forehead, eyes closed in denial: “We hold these things to be self-evident. That my sometime friend’s father did a mercy killing on his little sister when she was—”

  But Jakey Boy’s shaking his head no, flipping through the book for the close-up of the right page, which he goes right past.

  The pencil afterimage of young Jenny in the snow lingers, though.

  “It couldn’t have been … him, though?” Con says, as if entertaining some fourth possibility, “Hale …?” but just when Jakey Boy is getting his face together to answer they’re cut short by the front door being rammed again, hard, harder than before. Some of that bad-luck timing.

  Con sweeps his POV down the stairs, back to Jakey Boy, then takes one last drag off his cigarette, crushes it out, and pushes Jakey Boy back into the darkness, with an order: “Stay out of sight, clear? We’re not finished here.”

  “Finished?” Jakey Boy says.

  Con shrugs apology. “Bad choice of words,” he says, and then is headed downstairs, leaving Jakey Boy alone in the hall, the book finally open to the right page but not inset close enough for us to read, quite.

  Meaning he’s still the only live person to have seen it.

  AS Con reaches the bottom of the stairs the door gets rammed again, hard hard, the hinges starting to give.

  Nona and Seri are already there, Nona’s half-burned files scattered underfoot.

  “Where have you been?” Nona asks, but Con’s eyeing Seri: “Dressed for the occasion?” he asks, and in response Seri flips him off. But then Con looks behind them, gets a little frantic.

  “Where is he?” he asks.

  “Where do you think,” Seri says, directing Con toward the shaking door.

  Con leans back against the banister. “Well then what, who—?” but Nona stops him.

  “They’re that smart,” she says, about the door, and Con closes his eyes in mental pain.

  “Even if it is him … ” Con says, smiling a futile smile. “Do we really know him this time? Is it even the same … him?”

  “Maybe he’s just got that beer you asked for,” Seri offers, keeping her eyes on them as she crouches, picking up t
he scattered files.

  “Unlikely,” Nona says, her voice Vulcan-dry.

  “But what if it is him?” Seri argues, still gathering, which is inching her closer to the door. “And they get him just because we—” but is interrupted by who-or whatever’s outside, trying to get in.

  They all watch each other for a few beats, until Con breaks it: “We’ve got to get a secret knock or something … ”

  “We need a plan is what we need,” Nona says, looking around, Con following her, and in that moment Seri stands, starts unlocking the door. The sound of bolts retracting in DTS361 is labored, final. Con and Nona too far from her to stop this from happening.

  “What the hell are you—?” Con starts, but Seri’s already answering, her voice toneless: “He opened the door for me … ”

  Nona completes it, underbreath, just as toneless—“Twice, now”—and then the door slams back, throwing Seri into Con, bright snow assaulting their dilated pupils.

  When it all clears a huge figure fills the door frame, and we cut to an extreme close-up of a demon finger.

  Before the tension can rise too high though, it’s Skopek.

  He stumbles forward, covered in blood and burns. Leans on the banister for breath, his back showing deep gouges, packed with ice.

  “Oh now this is pure bullshit,” Con says, backing away, “nobody lives through that … them,” and Skopek swivels his head to him, extends his hand, which is holding the one he cut from the demon.362 It’s black, already shriveling, the claws long long.

  “How does this fit into your little delusion?” Seri asks Nona, but Nona’s face is mostly hidden by her hair, blown forward by the storm, the door still open.

  THROUGH it, across the yard, Hale is scraping at the cellar door, trying to open it. But it’s not budging. He’s so intent on getting it open that he doesn’t even watch his back, small and easy from a moving, aerial POV.

  We go tight on his fingers trying to get underneath the lip of the door, and then back off so that there’s entirely too much screen behind him.

  Hale slowly gives up on the door, narrows his eyes, looks reluctantly over his shoulder—some shape there—and then rolls away, scrambles into the bushes. Branches snapping in all the places he just was, which is new territory for the trilogy: the woods.363