Demon Theory

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Con shrugs why not, which Hale answers by turning to Seri: “Now what do you think you know?”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Seri says.

  “That a requirement here?” Con asks, then shifts into wide-eyed realization: “You got the book!”

  Seri nods, corrects: “A book.”

  “The one from last time?” Hale asks, watching the kitchen door as if waiting for someone or something to enter.

  “Different version,” Seri says, looking to the fireplace. Con follows her gaze, closes his eyes in pain.

  “Why?” he asks.

  Seri shrugs, looks to Hale, then to nothing. “Because I like this version better,” she finally says. “What if everything that’s happening is only happening because we believe it’s happening?”388

  “Yeah. And I guess that’s your big flying dog parked out front?”

  “What?”

  “Neverending Story.”389

  Seri stares at him about this.

  “It’s called a good luck dragon, I think,” she finally says.

  “Falkor,” Con says, overenunciating, smiling at her as if completely disappointed. “But don’t worry, I hear what you’re saying. The reason you like your version better, it’s easy. You like having control of the knowledge. Watching us run around like lab rats, not knowing what’s what. Daddy’s little girl all grown up—”

  Midsentence, Seri cracks, attacks him with everything she’s got, and they fall onto Nona, Hale just watching all this emotionlessly from the other couch. Finally they flip over the backside, scooching Nona deeper into the couch, her face there against the cushions. Hale stares at her until Con stands, holding Seri somehow with his one arm, but Seri’s still trying to fight, leaning forward to Nona, screaming: “It’s her, it’s her!”

  Hale looks to Con and Con shrugs. “It’s his dad,” Con repeats, at rational volume. “We’ve been over this.”

  “That’s what she told you,” Seri says.

  “Who else could it be?” Hale asks, and Seri looks from him down to Nona. “She’s the one keeping us here. You even told me.”

  Con looks to Hale about this. Hale explains: “She did fry the ambulance.”

  Con digests this, defends Nona anyway: “Because she wanted us to have to finish this. Once and for all.”

  Seri laughs, shakes free of Con. Starts crying but not the kind of crying that wants consolation. Instead she starts putting jackets on.

  “Where are you going?” Con asks.

  “None of this is real,” Seri says. “It’s all in her head somehow. We are.” She turns to Hale before Con can answer. “Didn’t you ever wonder how your sister died in the first place, before your dad …?”

  “I didn’t have to wonder,” Hale says. “I knew. It was me.”

  “No,” Seri says. “That accident was like two years before, right?”

  Hale nods.

  “It wouldn’t have taken her that long to die,” Seri says. “Think about it.”

  Hale tries, waits for more but then Con’s got the floor, isn’t even in the same discussion as they are: “If it—this—was in her head,” he says, “then the medicine would have collapsed it. That’s what it does. But we’re still here. This is real.” For demonstration, he taps his prosthetic on the coffee table.

  Seri’s indifferent. Shakes her head no, it’s not.

  Hale’s watching her. “Then why do you need a jacket?” he asks, and she looks back at him, tears the jacket off in response. Gets back down to her bra.

  “Just like the first time, right?” she asks, the black X’s showing up darker on her face now.

  “You don’t want to go—” Con starts, but gets interrupted by the door, a faint knocking there, maybe just the wind.

  “That’ll be for me,” Seri says, then turns back to them one last time: “Don’t you get it? This is some mind game of hers. The only way out is not to play. To die. Then you get to wake up back in your life and—”

  Before she can finish though, Nona stirs, sits up vampire-style, using only her stomach muscles, no arms.390 Which is mechanically wrong, inhuman. And she’s not all there, is asleep again like she was when she did the ambulance.

  Con crabs his way over to her. “Nona?” he says weakly, no response. “Noan?”

  Hale narrows his eyes, studying Nona, and then everything gets pared down to Seri’s POV, and what she’s seeing is bad: about every twentieth frame of Nona is Nona with a demon head. Looking at Seri, into Seri.

  “Nooo!” Seri screams, falling back against the wall, in full panic mode. “No!” but then, in the same hardwood space where Egan died—the same where Nona’s bled twice now—a dab of blood starts welling up.

  “No …?” Seri says weakly, turning to Con, who’s evidently not seeing what we can, under the floor, what Seri seems to know about without having to see: the blood coagulating at top speed into a human face, getting corded with muscle, the teeth getting layered-in cheek, tendons whipping into place, etc. Staring straight at her. “Daddy … ” Seri whispers, pleads, and then, for her, Nona turns, smiles.

  “What is it, Serendipity?” she asks, in a voice not her own, maybe even a male voice, but by then Seri’s already blindly struggling the furniture out from in front of the door.

  “C’mon … ” she says to Con and Hale, never looking away from Nona, “can’t you see …?” but is all alone here. And crying hard.

  Finally she squeezes out the front door, falls onto the front porch, the storm immediately embracing her. She continues backing away from the house, her body wracked with cold and fear and everything bad.

  IN her wake Con asks it—“She’s not right, is she?”—no response. Just Nona’s even breathing filling the place, her staring directly into nothing.

  Con crosses the floor, dabs at the blood. “It’s just hers,” he says, nodding to Nona, “I don’t know what Sare—” but then he smears it a little, shakes his head in wonder. “Should be dry, though … shouldn’t it?”

  “I just want to go home,”391 Hale whispers.

  Con looks over to him, cracks a smile.

  “This is home, Haley boy,” he says, looking to the door, directing us out to the seriously, seriously faded WELCOME mat, and, past it, Seri, shrouded in whiteness. Afraid. Holding herself against the snow, trying to keep the house in her field of vision, losing her footing as a consequence. She rolls over and comes up red, bloody. From directly above, she’s deadcenter where all the punks got it. And unhappy to be there. She panics, can’t seem to escape the blood and body parts, and finally fetals up, starts mumbling to herself.

  We back off to the longest shot the visibility will allow, and just when it seems she’s given up, she stands, raising her head last. In a rush of wind her hair blows aside and her face is close-up, and she’s so calm now, so far over the edge. Slathered in other people’s blood.

  She holds her arms out.

  “It’s not cold,” she says, stepping out of the red snow, walking on. “I’m not even really here.”

  Her POV makes out a dim form, circling, far above.

  She smiles. Walks toward it, spinning like a little girl.

  “I’m ready,” she says, holding her arms higher, and the dim form makes a low pass, once, twice, Seri reaching childishly for it.

  “I understand now,” she says, her expression all about contentment, and as the dim form of the demon banks for another pass—the final pass is the idea—Seri tries to take another step forward but can’t.

  She looks down and her foot is too deep in the snow to see why.

  She tries again, no luck, and then the demon is upon her in slow-motion, its huge claw tenderly grasping Seri’s outstretched hand.

  For the briefest moment, Seri smiles, tears spilling all over again, and then the demon pulls.

  Seri closes her eyes to rise with it but instead the cartilage in her arm gets inserted for a flash, long enough for it to audibly tear.

  As the demon rises, the reason her foot was stuck is
revealed: it’s Stan, holding onto her ankle,392 trying to hitch a ride, his demon face terrible.

  Seri chokes, screams, and when the demon redoubles its effort, baring the ground of snow with its wings, her arm tears away from her shoulder, the demon’s foot coming down at the last second to grab her by the head, jerk her out of Stan’s grasp. Slowly then, she rises into the storm, leaving Stan facedown, Seri’s muffled screams dopplering away.

  IN the living room, things aren’t much better: Nona, still sitting up on the couch, starts spasming again, jutting her pelvis out as far as her back can arch, then flopping all over the couch. As if this is all somehow related to what’s going on outside.

  Hale stands, looks to Con for help.

  Con races over to Nona, trying to keep her from hurting herself but she’s strong now, tosses him off.

  Con clenches his jaw, steps back in for more, and then finds that Hale’s helping him. Together they restrain her.

  “What is it?” Hale yells, but Con has no idea.

  “Do something!” Hale says. “She’s going to die.”

  “If we just knew what she thought she had,” Con says, hopelessly, “we’d know what she thought she needed … ” and in answer Hale digs in his pocket, comes out with a syringe.

  He bites the cap off dramatically, spits it down, Con watching all this.

  “This is no time for you to be playing doctor again,” Con warns.

  “Well then what?” Hale asks, digging in his pocket again.

  This time his hand emerges with the ampoule of insulin from his mother’s medicine drawer.

  Con shakes his head no. “You don’t understand what that can—” but before he can finish, Hale’s plunged the needle into it, is filling the syringe.

  Once done, he holds it straight up as if it’s loaded, and looks up to Con. “Where?” he asks.

  Con hesitates, hesitates, then—already regretting it—rolls Nona’s sleeve to her other track marks, nods to them.

  Hale buries the needle in one of the scars, the backblood blooming for an instant, and then slams it all back into her.

  Nona screams. And screams. Con takes her protectively from Hale. When she calms down enough he sets her gingerly on the couch again, back in her sitting position.

  Her head lolls over, blood spilling from her mouth, onto the floor again, crossing the hardwood to join the rest.

  Hale and Con don’t see it happen this time either.

  “Now she’s going to die,” Con says, and begins pacing the room. Looks accusingly to Hale, studying his now-empty syringe. “Want to shoot her up with some Drano too, Doctor?”

  Hale just sits down on the edge of the coffee table, leaning forward to Nona. “She brought me back once,” he says, not really to anyone, letting the syringe go. Con, nervous, starts organizing the place; nods. “I was there,” he says.

  Hale looks to him as if he didn’t know this, then back to Nona, but we stay with Con, replacing the phone once, twice, but he’s shaking too much. Finally he just slams it down onto the base over and over, closes his eyes, smiles to himself. Looks to Hale.

  “If you would have just killed him like he told you to,” Con says, “like he asked you to. None of this … ”

  Hale shrugs like what could he have done.

  Con talks as if giving a report, then: “Yes, Hale pays attention in class, Mrs. Sweren, but he’s not very good at following directions … ” Self-satisfied with this, he gently recradles the phone. But then there’s a voice from behind him, not Hale; Nona: “Where’d you get that sense of humor?”

  Con turns to her in wonder.

  “Why?” he asks.

  We pan to Nona, awake again, looking bad and good at the same time.

  “Because you need to take it back,” she says, smiling, and slowly, all three of them are.

  IN the yard, Stan’s just lying there, beaten, his demon-masked face turned to the sky. His chest shudders with pain or cold or defeat or something he doesn’t want and then Nona does the voice-over, evidently talking to Hale: “He’s right, though. You should have done it,” and for the reaction shot we slam inside, close on Hale’s nervous face.

  “It’s not that easy,” he says.

  “I know,” Nona says, playing nice and friendly. “But all the same … ”

  “Why’d you say that, to Seri?” Hale asks Nona suddenly, changing direction.

  Nona looks from him to Con. “What?” she asks back.

  “You called her her real name,” Con confesses, then looks away. “I mean, I guess it was her real name …?”

  “‘Serendipity,’” Nona says, slowly, looking at them both. “I found it in the hospital computer. It means ‘the faculty for making desirable discoveries by accident.’” Nona pauses, chews her inner cheek. “But I didn’t—”

  “It wasn’t her voice,” Con says to Hale.

  “Yeah,” Hale says. “That’s kinda what sucks about it.”

  Beat, beat.

  “And then there were three,” Nona observes, wrapping the blanket tighter around her.

  “Four,” Con says, smiling, nodding to Nona. “You count for two, remember?”

  Nona smiles. Eyes the blood on the floor. Looks to Hale about it but Hale just shrugs.

  “Egan,” he says, “remember?”

  Nona nods, has a eureka moment: “Of course. He has to be here, or else it won’t be the same. I should have known.”

  She stands, shrugs the blanket off.

  “You going to help?” she asks Con and Hale, and, of the two of them, Hale stands. Takes the fireplace poker Nona hands him, drives it into the hardwood floor next to the blood again and again, until there’s a handhold. Together they pry up some boards, and under the bloodstain, attached to the underside of the floor, is the pulsing homunculus-looking thing we saw a few scenes back, Frank393 from Hellraiser all over again, its lidless eyes staring at them—EGAN’s eyes.

  Nona’s breath gets shaky, which scares Con.

  She looks to Hale, then in the direction of the front yard. To Stan. “We can’t let … this—it’s all going too far. It’s got to stop.”

  Hale takes the poker she offers.

  “You’ve got to do this,” she says, looking outside. “I’m sorry. But you’re the only one who can.”

  Hale stares at her, as if imploring, wanting more. “It’ll all be over … ” Nona says, in something like consolation, and their eyes meet in too tender a close-up. Hale starts to say something, has nothing, instead just mopes over to the front door, looks back once to Con and Nona before slipping out into the storm.

  Behind him Con says it: “Won’t they—?”

  “I don’t think they want him,” Nona says back, anticipating, already o.s., the Egan-thing’s eyes making up the whole shot, staring straight outside, Hale already standing over Stan, his backdrop the sky, demons circling high above, not diving for him, just like Nona said.

  “WHY demons?” Con asks Nona, in the living room. Nona stationed at the window, trying to see through the frost to Hale. Con continues: “Because they could be any shape, right? I mean, Grim Reaper394 or Ghost Rider395 or some shit, right?”

  “Little late to be asking those kinds of questions,” Nona says, not into it.

  “May not get another chance,” Con says, keeping an eye on the Egan-hole.

  “They’re archetypal,” Nona says finally, not looking away from the window. “Listen to the sounds: death, devil, demon. The forms are locked in our unconscious, in Hale’s father’s unconscious.”

  “Our father’s world,” Con recites, from the original.

  “What?” Nona asks.

  “Something Egan said.”

  “The demonic archetype is a Judeo-Christian device,” Nona continues, almost reciting. As if this is all so basic to her. “But it goes older than that too. Look at the hominid skulls from five-hundred thousand years ago.” She taps two fingers like fangs into the crown of her skull. “Leopard bites,” she says. “Which translates to death fr
om above. We finally stood up and then had to hunch over in fear. But the association was made. Up is death.”

  She looks back once to Con, and Con’s listening.

  “But then religion came, right? Mythologized it all for us. Heaven, at least in the West, is ‘up.’ And you don’t get there until you’re dead. You can’t just jump or float, though. No, you have to be carried, taken. Thus all the messenger-type gods, psychopomps, all that.”

  “Angels,” Con supplies, quietly.

  Nona nods. “Think of it like this, though. We’re lambs, by the Christian model. Eating grass and standing by still waters396 and all that. Then one day an eagle takes one of us, three of us, lots of us, until it becomes a regular thing. Pretty soon, then—just to stay sane and have the world be a good place—we project up as good … heaven. And we come to understand the eagle’s claws in our flesh as just part of it, the pain we have to pay for the ride.”

  “Shit,” Con says. “You’ve fucking really thought about this.”

  Nona looks back, gauges him.

  “I had three years, remember?” she says.

  Con readjusts his feet and kicks the syringe rolling across the hardwood.

  “Type one or type two?” he asks Nona, and she turns to him, confused. “Your diabetes,” he clarifies.

  Nona looks to the syringe, to her arm, making connections.

  Con smiles, shakes his head in disbelief. “Type three,” he says, “imaginary,” but Nona cuts him off, looks outside.

  “Have some respect,” she says. “What he’s doing out there isn’t easy.”

  Con tries to look out the window too. “Baa, baa,” he says, croaking out the sheep sound, looking up with falsely rounded eyes, the demons still up there, over Hale’s shoulder.

  “I’m sorry,” Hale says weakly, the saliva on his lips already frozen. As if he’s been motionless for a while now. He falls down onto both knees, drops the poker. “I can’t … ” he says, and buries his head into Stan’s decomposed, bloody chest.

  Stan’s eyes look down, at Hale, and with maximum effort he’s able to raise a hand, stroke Hale’s hair, Hale sobbing hard now, clinging to Stan.