Demon Theory

by Stephen Graham Jones

  “Father … ” Hale repeats, “Dad,” and in answer the close-up of two of Stan’s fingers massages their way into Hale’s left temple, forcing him back to the night Jenny died. From Stan’s POV this time, from the doorway of the house, everything in his line of sight in realer-than-life color except for Jenny, dead, black and white already, looking directly at him, Hale’s mother’s dish-sounds there behind everything, and the weightless lullaby she’s humming.

  Hale’s Arthur C. Clarke book falls soundlessly to the ground as Stan approaches Jenny, leans down to her, for her, and then something new: Jenny’s neck raw with ligature marks, Stan’s heart thumping hard and wet, some sort of white foam there under Jenny’s jaw line, like mucus but too much, too foamy.

  STAN’S eyes, close-up in the demon mask, are crying too, reliving it, and we pan down to his two fingers in Hale’s head. “Please,” he says somehow, then shifts the fingers slightly, cutting the flashback ahead to his shovel falling again and again, breaking Jenny’s legs to fit her in the makeshift grave in the cellar, Hale lying belly-down in the b.g., watching, his eyes trying hard to roll away, Stan’s fingers holding him there, making him look.

  “No!” Hale says, pushing away, to his knees. “No! You can’t get me to kill you just by showing me that! No … ”

  Beat, beat; snow blowing past them.

  In the demon mask then, Stan closes his eyes once, twice, and the third time his hand rises up out of the snow with the poker, and he swings it hard across Hale’s chest, drawing blood. Hale falls back, mad.

  “No!” he repeats, “No no no,” but Stan swings again, catching Hale in the leg, and Hale starts crying all over again, accepts—catches the poker the next time it comes and turns it on Stan, soft at first but then hard, burying it deep, over and over, killing him in every way there is, Stan’s limbs doing the death rattle long after he’s dead, because Hale won’t stop, can’t stop.

  When it’s done with, Hale spins like a hammer-thrower, flings the poker as far away as he can, then falls on top of Stan, holding him, hugging him, even at the end faking his way through a little remorse-driven CPR. But it’s all over.

  Finally, he closes his eyes and rolls onto his back, looks up, and in his POV there are no demons at all, and the storm’s calmer too, everything going grey and happy at the edges, Hale fading fast, into a good place: summer. The pasture by the house, the grass waist-high, the three-wheeler sputtering out under him. He’s twelve years old again, starting over.

  But still, he knows: the first thing he does is look behind him, and, magical as anything, Jenny rises from the tall grass, the only sign of the wreck a light grass burn on one side of her face, her hair matted with seeds, dust floating golden all around, the sun tynsdaling recklessly, irresponsibly.

  Hale smiles, as if remembering the other way it was, the way it should be, and then reaches out for her, says her name—“Jenny”—everything going bright and brighter as he draws near, until it’s all white, blinding, but only in one eye. Then it switches to the other, and it becomes apparent it’s a flashlight, one of the ones Nona brought, revived somehow, Con holding it, sweeping it away then back, repeating, repeating, the close-up of Hale’s pupil fixed, flecked with what looks like little bits of ash. Hale flinches back, disoriented.

  “Hold still,” Con says, still trying to do the exam. “Just got one arm here … ”

  Hale does.

  “Dilated, unresponsive,” Con says, shaking the flashlight for more juice. As if Hale’s pupil shouldn’t be dilated, unresponsive.

  Hale turns away from the exam. Stares blankly across the living room floor, the demon mask there, old and crumpled, melting. Still smiling.

  Nona’s rubbing the fingers of one of his hands; his other hand is under her shirt, in her armpit, warming.

  Hale isn’t understanding any of this.

  “You’re dead, my man,” Con pronounces, “according to current medical standards.”

  Hale turns to him, starts breathing faster.

  Con smiles, shrugs: “Could just be these working conditions, though … ” he says, shining the flashlight at the ceiling, the beam flickering. “These precision tools of rural-ass medicine … ”

  Hale follows his arm back to Nona.

  “You did it,” she says. “Your father. He’s really dead.”

  Hale smiles.

  “So it’s over,” Hale says, which gets some worried eye-action going on between Con and Nona.

  Hale catches on, sits up, takes his hands back from Nona.

  Nona shakes her head ever so slightly, No.

  Hale collapses in on himself.

  “What do they want, then?” Hale asks, giving up.

  Con shrugs, looks to the Egan-hole, nothing rising through it yet.

  “There’s one thing we haven’t tried yet,” Nona says, and with a magician’s hands she plucks an aged spark plug from her pocket, a relic from the original.

  Hale just stares at the plug blankly.

  Con tries to make sense of it, for us: “The It ending, still? After all this?”

  Nona nods, not looking away from Hale.

  “I’ll be her this time,”397 she says, “your sister. Maybe we just haven’t been going far enough back … ”398

  MOMENTS later the twin doors of the shed burst open, Hale and Con in the doorway, tall and thin like shadows, like the real end of things, a sunset shot.399 All that’s left is to ride off into it. Con looks to Hale for confirmation and then they enter together, Hale slow to touch the three-wheeler at first, his finger tracing around the edge of the decal on the gas tank.

  NEXT is Hale screwing the spark plug in, the three-wheeler hub-high in the drifted snow of the front yard.

  He looks over the three-wheeler to Con, trying to get a cigarette going against the wind. The only way he’s able to do it finally is to rig the cigarette between the broken fingers of his prosthetic, then smoke holding the prosthetic by the forearm, the first thing he ever did on-screen, in the hallway outside Hale’s apartment.

  At some level, Hale’s face shows a reluctant awareness of this.

  Con studies the three-wheeler. “Two-seater,” he observes. “You and her. Like it should be.”

  “We’ll come back,” Hale says.

  Con nods, pretending to agree. Breathes smoke out. “Just be careful with all this,” he says, looking out to the pasture, “with her, I mean. Your little ride. She’ll hurt herself like your sister did. Just to make it all the same.”

  “I hurt my sister,” Hale argues.

  Con stares at him, as if he’s beyond hope. “Not many girls would go this far, I mean,” he says. “I don’t want you to … I don’t want it all to happen again. Only have a limited number of limbs here, yeah …?”

  “Do you ever wish you’d never come out here?” Hale asks, and Con looks somewhere else.

  “It was a routine call,” he finally says. “Virginia was still new. She wanted to save the world.”

  “That’s not all bad,” Hale says.

  Con shakes his head no, it’s not. “It’s been fun,” he says to Hale, seriously, in a delayed-answer tone, and then cracks a smile. “That’s a joke.”

  Hale looks up, fiddling with the choke or something, and from his low-angle POV a small thing happens, slowly: Con’s cigarette blows from the prosthetic’s damaged fingers, falls lightly to the snow.

  The wind plays with it, rolling it away from the two of them, the cherry still there, receding.

  Con watches it, doesn’t look back to Hale. “Guess that’s my cue,” he says, and walks into the storm after the cigarette, fumbling comically after it, burning his image into the screen once and forever.

  It’s all about nostalgia, foreknowledge, trying to resist the inevitable.

  Hale raises his eyebrows at first, after him, as if to call him back, but then just buries his face in the three-wheeler seat, gets assaulted by the sound of something fast and heavy tearing into flesh, into Con. In the new silence great wings beat on
ce, twice, up.

  When it’s over Hale starts laughing, quiet at first then madder, and keeps laughing as he pulls the cord again and again, until the three-wheeler revs to life. He buries his thumb in it and makes it absolutely scream.

  FROM a long shot and high above, the three-wheeler is plowing as best it can through the pasture beside the house.

  Close up, Nona’s looking over Hale’s shoulder, her face already frozen.

  “Faster!” she yells, and Hale complies, looking down to their feet, the snow higher than the pegs, pushing their feet back.

  Hale reaches down into the snow, trying to hold Nona’s pants leg, but Nona kicks him away, back to the throttle. Nods onward,400 go.

  Hale does, still intent upon the snow rushing past them, into them, the three-wheeler bounding from the drift to drift, its balloon tires powdering the snow all around, floating it ahead and behind, until there’s only the moment, the engine sound whining out, into the silence of Hale’s head.

  He goes faster still, until speed makes the ground even, and then Nona lifts her legs as Jenny never did, wraps them around Hale’s waist so she’s safe, her arms around his neck, and Hale’s staring straight into the wind, trying to outrun everything, a restrained smile almost there on his lips.

  But the shadows pacing him on either side don’t fall back, no matter how deep he buries his thumb.

  “NO!” he screams, the wind muting his voice as soon as it leaves his mouth, and his POV makes out the sudden ravine hours too late: the front tire of the three-wheeler dips into it, doesn’t bounce out, and the forks bend over it, the rear-end of the three-wheeler lifting, catapulting Hale and Nona forward, headlong into whatever nothing’s ahead of them.401

  NEXT is a figure sitting alone on the couch, the living room in the disarray it’s been in the whole time. The figure is bloody, newborn, full-grown: EGAN, holding his head in his hands.

  Suddenly—because of no sound we can hear—he turns his face to the front door, and past it, emerging from the storm, is Hale, carrying Nona just as he carried Jenny before.

  SOON enough he’s standing in the open door. He looks to Egan and they stare at each other for way too long. Finally Hale steps in, lays Nona down on the couch.

  “Can you help her?” he asks, and Egan studies her, looks back up to Hale. Nods once, yes, and Hale just turns, leaves, not bothering to shut the door behind him, as if the cold isn’t real to him anymore.

  In his absence Egan crosses the floor to Nona, squats down by her, still agile as ever. Caresses her face. “I’m sorry,” he says, real regret there in his voice, and then scans around until he finds the syringe. He raises it, empties the last of the insulin professionally. Next is an unopened can of corn on the coffee table. He upends it and deftly works the needle through the weak part between the rim and top, fills the syringe with a creamy, unnatural yellow, what the black and white flashback of all the medical volunteers wasn’t able to show us.

  “One more time,” he says low and to himself, then rolls the syringe in his fingers longingly, lovingly. Leans over Nona, goes to one knee even, as if bedside. He runs the fingers of his other hand through her hair, searching, searching, and then finds it: the small wound she opened up by banging her head on the floor of the utility. Egan braces her head with clinical detachment—her neck at a severe angle—then calmly forces the needle into the wound, feels around with the tip of the needle, his eyes closed, and finally buries the plunger, pushing the yellow matter in all at once. Into her pituitary gland is the idea. His upper lip quivering with release.

  When he pulls it out, Nona gasps, coughs, chokes, but Egan’s done with her. He stands, looking around, and sees it finally: his demon mask, many years older than when he lost it.

  He walks over to it, picks it up, holds it at face-level. It’s grinning a frozen grin at him. He doesn’t grin back.

  From behind him Nona narrates: “‘If you’re frightened of dying and holding on, you’ll see devils tearing your life away.’” Egan turns to her; she cites: “Jacob’s Ladder,402 1990.”

  Egan stares at her, smiles in something like defeat. “See you in hell,”403 he says in farewell, nodding once toward the front door, one of his eyes badly bloodshot. Nona looks with him, and by the time she turns back he’s receding, walking out the back way, through the kitchen, the utility room, taking the mask with him, his form aging deeper into Dr. Parker with each step.404 The last thing he does is drop the corn can, as if he doesn’t want to remember any of this.

  Nona looks back to the front door, stands, her body motions slightly different now.

  She walks out into it one more time, becomes feet and legs standing on the porch. Calls to Hale but the storm won’t allow any sound. Across the yard the cellar is already open for her, waiting.

  She crosses to it, descends, becomes b.g. for Hale’s twitching feet, hanging straight down. Again. The bench kicked aside.

  Nona looks up at Hale’s face, not on-screen, and then she steps cleanly forward, hugs around his legs as his mother did, but instead of lifting like we expect, like we’ve seen, she pulls down as hard as she can, neck vertebrae giving way with a creaking wet tear, and the shot backs around behind her, and her pale red hair is the same strawberry as Hale’s mother’s, and now she’s wearing Hale’s mother’s dress, is Hale’s mother. Has been all along, the reason her face was never seen in the flashbacks.

  Close-up, too, she’s crying into Hale’s pants leg, however old he is now, and the shot rushes past her, out the cellar, through the front door, past Jenny dead in her wheelchair, soap suds from the dishwater still around her neck, and continues up the stairs, into the bedroom, Stan there on the bed, stabbed in the back with a cross, becoming unfocused f.g. for a lone picture on the nightstand: Stan and Nona and Hale and Jenny, a happy, young family, staring straight into the camera, smiling for eternity.

  LAST is a ballpoint pen, marking a period onto a full, full tablet. The letterhead reads, OWL CREEK.

  The shot backs off and it’s a man’s hand around the pen, a young man in a spanking-new doctor coat, his name tag inserted—NEIDER. His hand is shaking, the side of his right palm blue with ink.

  Sitting across from him is an old Nona—Hale’s mother from the opening scenes of the original. She’s in a muslin hospital gown.

  Evidently through with her story.

  “Well,” Neider says, in response, dragging it out into a stalling sound. Burying the ballpoint of his pen into the tablet. “So you … you had to kill him, to stop this … cycle from ever even starting … ”

  Nona nods, her eyes full of water.

  “But your husband, your daughter …?” Neider adds quietly, incredulously, trying to make sense of the carnage.

  Nona looks at him as if he hasn’t been listening. Nods for him to lean forward, making it into a maternal gesture somehow. Neider does, hesitantly, and she braces her frail self on his legs, draws her mouth close to his ear. “They’re with the angels,” she whispers, reverently, as simple as a child.

  Neider furrows his clinical brow about this, stands abruptly from Nona, her hand tangled in his coat for a moment.

  “But they didn’t … didn’t do anything,” he argues.

  Nona grins at his nervousness, his newness. Takes advantage: “I told him not to take her out on that death machine that day … ” she says with the perfect light touch, and then starts laughing without parting her lips, Neider backing off, intoning “thank you” like good-bye, slowly cueing into the dayroom television set, tuned to The Wizard of Oz, the blue monkeys swarming grandly across the sky. He half turns, and behind him is a bronze frame with the employee of the month—Con Simms, smiling from ear to ear, the original goofball. Lots of other Keyser Soze405–stuff tacked up suggestively. He turns back to Nona but Nona’s playing catatonic.

  Dr. Neider furrows his brow all around, walks to the door, reaches to his belt for his keys but they’re gone, are hanging from Nona’s index finger, buried in the folds of her gown, and she�
��s already looking out the large window, her POV rushing through the concave glass, across miles and years of dry, yellow cornfields, back to the house, a wordless “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” coming on strong.

  We slam through the front door and it makes the sound of three doors, and then we’re back to the first time, from a dislocated POV, Hale and Con and Seri and Egan and Virginia and Nona settled back into the couches, beer in hand, Hale saying it as if from far away, distorted—My father had an extensive video collection—the screen finally taken over by a book in the fireplace, burnt beyond recognition, fading into ash, trailing individual sparks up behind the credits.

  Never build three doors

  In a straight line

  A devil might rush

  through them

  deep into your house,

  into your life.

  —Michael Ondaatje406

  NOTES

  DEMON THEORY 16

  1 Screenplay convention for the first mention of a character. Uppercase is supposed to make it easy to find.

  2 By Walter Russell Brain, a baron. Originally published in 1969, now in its 7th ed.

  3 As Jon Bon Jovi says in his version of it recorded with Guns N’ Roses, about a hundred people—including Clapton, Jerry Garcia, Roger Waters, Tom Petty, Bob Marley, Zeppelin—have done this song, but still, it’s Dylan’s. From the soundtrack to Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 Pat Garret & Billy the Kid (starring Bob Dylan too). Bon Jovi says listening to the original inspired his soundtrack for Young Guns II.

  4 Common screenplay usage for “point of view.”

  5 Though the first use of arrows to guide the reader probably occurred in vellum, if not sand, the earliest use of them in popular form would be to guide us from panel to panel in some of Winsor McKay’s Little Nemo comic strips (1905–1913), one title of which was In the Land of Wonderful Dreams. While screenplays are of course more reliant on numbering (of scenes) for proper navigation, the storyboards that are generated from those screenplays often make use of arrows, both to show movement between panels and to indicate or explore camera angles.

  6Screenplay abbreviation for “establishing.”