Demon Lights

by Michael M. Hughes

  Ray felt as if someone had plugged him into a wall socket. “How did you find them?”

  Jeremy motioned for Ray to walk with him. They were in the meditation gardens, flanked by rows of bright flowers glowing in the early morning sun. Two tylers followed a few paces behind them. “We’ve known about this particular location for some time. The remote-viewer teams determined a while back there were a large number of children on the premises. For what purpose, we don’t know, but Lily has been collecting gifted children for several years.”

  Ray took a deep breath. It was hard to believe this was happening. “So your psychics found them? Are you sure they’re right?”

  “Not just the viewers. One of our remaining allies—a very reliable source in what remains of the U.S. military—told us that a woman and a boy matching Ellen and William’s descriptions were taken there. But we don’t know why Lily’s there, what she’s doing, or how long she’ll stay.”

  “So we need to act fast,” Ray said.

  “Yes. I have a strike team preparing as we speak. My very best soldiers.”

  “I’m going,” Ray said.

  Jeremy raised an eyebrow. “If you wish. I can’t stop you, and I will hold up my end of our bargain. But it won’t be an easy trip, Ray. Getting across the U.S. is extremely difficult now, especially with our network in ruins. There are no guarantees you will make it there. And no assurances you will find the two of them. Or even come back alive.”

  “I understand.” He was not negotiating. “When do we go?”

  Jeremy clasped his hands behind his back. “The team will have a briefing tomorrow night, then you’ll leave as soon as supplies arrive. A day or two at most. Much of what we need is being flown in. You’ll be traveling to a place that is very, very cold and very remote. As you can guess, we don’t have a lot of heavy coats and snowmobiles here.”

  “I’m ready.” He’d been thinking about this moment for ages, but now that it was here it felt unreal. He needed to calm down, too, because he was ready to jump out of his skin.

  “You realize I am taking a huge risk in allowing you to go. You’re not trained for this sort of assault, and you will be taking the place of someone who is. And what would normally be a purely offensive operation—taking out the whole compound—has now become a search and rescue mission as well. That adds even more complications.”

  Ray swallowed. “I appreciate that.”

  “I know you do, Ray.” Jeremy rested his hand on Ray’s shoulder. “I’ve meditated deeply on this. It has been clear since Micah told me about you that you have a part to play in this unfolding story. As do Ellen and William. How and why you are part of it, and how it will come to an end, I don’t know. That’s beyond my understanding and even the reach of our best oracles. But now that the real endgame is under way—and these are the days we have known would come—it is clear you became a player in it for a reason.”

  “Finding the two of them is the only thing I’ve wanted since I got wrapped up in all this. Just tell me what I need to do.”

  Jeremy stared into Ray’s eyes. “There is one thing. That favor for me.”

  Ray gritted his teeth. Of course. As Mantu had warned him, Jeremy’s generosity came with conditions. “Damn you, Jeremy.”

  “We can leave in an hour. We’ll take the copter and be at the dig site by the afternoon.”

  Ray lowered his head. “Goddammit. You know I can’t say no now.”

  “We help one another here at Eleusis,” Jeremy said. “That’s how we accomplish the Great Work—doing what needs to be done, with charity and generosity for the good of all sentient beings.”

  Ray blew out a long stream of air. Always platitudes.

  “The tylers will escort you back to your room and bring you when we’re ready to go.” Jeremy turned and the tylers stepped forward.

  “Wait,” Ray said.

  Jeremy stopped.

  “Let Mantu go with us. To get Lily.”

  Jeremy shook his head. “Ray, you know I can’t—”

  “Bullshit. Of course you can. He’s trained. He’s probably one of the best you have. He can prove his loyalty. Make up for breaking his obligation.”

  “And take the chance he’ll go off again? Disappear with you somewhere? I’m sorry. That is not negotiable.”

  “It’s negotiable if you allow it to be. You can snap your fingers and let him go.”

  “No. I’m sorry. The rules were not made by me. They are quite literally carved in stone. I have no choice but to enforce them.”

  Ray closed his eyes and sighed. At least he had tried. “Okay. But let me see him again. Before I leave. One last time. Since I might not make it back.”

  Jeremy nodded. “Fine. You may visit him tomorrow.”

  The tylers stepped forward.

  “See you soon,” Jeremy said.

  —

  Ray had to close his eyes for the last half of the trip. Beneath the motion sickness was a creeping dread. He wanted to believe Jeremy—that he would be safe, that the thing they’d found in the jungle was just a harmless artifact. But his knotted guts said otherwise.

  “Ray. We’re landing. Hang on.” Jeremy was smiling, his eyes bright with anticipation. Ray didn’t like that look.

  Once they were out of the copter Jeremy wasted no time. “Let’s go,” he yelled above the engine noise. “It’s just down that trail.”

  Ray’s nervousness got worse as they walked. When the trail opened into a clearing he felt his legs about to give way. Something similar had happened the first time he’d seen the jagged rocks that made up the formation called the Hand in Blackwater. He’d puked and passed out, scaring the hell out of Ellen and William.

  Ahead of him was a dome. Huge, maybe seventy-five feet across, white canvas stretched across a geodesic frame. Two people were walking into it through a doorway. Ray froze. They were wearing biohazard suits.

  Jeremy turned and pushed through the two tylers. “Are you okay?”

  “No,” Ray said. “Why are they wearing those hazmat suits?”

  “It’s a precaution for those who need to stay down there and work for extended periods. There’s a large pool of organic liquid surrounding the object, with a layer of mercury on the top. But it’s not harmful if you don’t touch it, and we’re only staying for a little while. So don’t let the suits spook you.”

  Ray swallowed. “If something fucked up happens to me, I swear, Jeremy—”

  Jeremy held up his hand. “You can leave if you need to. But I think you’ll discover your fear is unfounded; most people find its energy stimulating and enjoyable. Even healing, in fact. They want to stay as long as possible because it seems to recharge their batteries, physically and mentally.”

  Ray breathed deeply. Once again, he was being told not to trust his instincts.

  “And while you’re there, remember to do as I asked. Just start talking to me. I’ll be holding the recorder. Say anything that comes to your mind. Thoughts, images, feelings.”

  “I’m already feeling something. And I don’t like it.”

  “That is valuable, too, but I think it’s simply based on things that happened to you in the past. Sometimes we innately fear things that will turn out to be transformative. Fear can be a great gift.”

  “Fine. Let’s get it over with.”

  —

  Ray nearly turned and ran the minute he stepped through the door into the dome. A tunnel sloped sharply down into the ground, but on the surface, on a raised mound of dirt in the center of the dome, were half-excavated skeletons arranged in circle. Small skeletons, their feet pointing to the center. Branching out like petals of a flower.

  Skeletons of children.

  “What is this, Jeremy?”

  Jeremy stopped in front of the tunnel. “Those skeletons were found at the original dig by a team from Berlin. The ancient people of the area buried their children here, directly above the object.”

  Ray blinked. “Like some sort of offering?”

&n
bsp; “No. They couldn’t have been aware of the artifact’s existence. We carbon-dated organic elements in the soil at the artifact’s level to around two hundred and fifty million years ago. It would not be an exaggeration to say it has now rewritten everything we know about history. Not to mention biology, astronomy, physics…” His eyes widened. “Everything.”

  Ray stared at the bones. They were so small.

  “But most important, it may be the sacred seed carrier mentioned in the True Scriptures. The Light Bringer—the mother vessel that carried the germs of life and consciousness across the vastness of space.”

  Ray’s mouth was so dry it hurt to talk. He pointed at the circle of bones. “This…this is how they laid us out. With our feet in the middle like that. When I was a kid. In Blackwater. When they were using us to summon the lights.”

  Jeremy seemed distracted. “Well, yes, that is interesting, and of course I made the connection myself. But this practice, this circular style of burial formation, is transcultural. We’ve seen it in Asia, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere. So don’t let it worry you.”

  Easy for him to say. “Were they sacrificed?”

  Jeremy nodded. “Yes. Many of the bones show signs of trauma. Knives, mostly, and some blunt force wounds to the head. Broken ribs indicating removal of hearts. But sacrifice was common among these people. Being sacrificed was considered an honor—the victims went willingly to give their lives to the gods. So we can’t judge their actions by our modern standards.”

  The fuck I can’t, Ray thought.

  Jeremy turned to the two tylers. “Please help Ray if he needs it. It’s an easy walk down, but steady him if necessary.”

  The tylers nodded. Ray held up his hand. “Wait. If I decide to run, stay out of my way. And if I get sick or start acting crazy—you’d better bring me up right away. Understand?”

  “Certainly,” Jeremy answered. “Let’s go.”

  Ray followed Jeremy down a series of cinder-block steps. The tunnel was supported by thick beams and sheets of plastic stretched across the ceiling. Bright LEDs were strung from beam to beam like Christmas lights. He couldn’t tell if it was just his claustrophobia, but his entire body was going wobbly.

  And there was something else, too—like a sustained bass note from a concert speaker that made your guts ripple. A deep, heavy bodily vibration. It actually felt kind of pleasant. Jeremy held out his hand. “We need to be alone,” he said, and the man and woman in hazmat suits stepped around them, their faces vague and shadowed behind plastic, and headed back up the tunnel.

  “Now,” Jeremy said, his smile widening, “only a few people in the world have been privileged to see what you are about to see. An artifact so old it may have brought certain forms of life to this planet like a cosmic seed carrier. Sent to us, through time and space from an unknown world by unknown beings, bringing the spiritual and biological energy of a thousand suns.” He pulled apart a black plastic curtain and clicked on his digital recorder. The tylers ushered Ray inside.

  The thrumming force of the object was like walking into a tough, invisible membrane. The tylers helped Ray sit down on a bench. His eyes were vibrating, wiggling in their sockets, and it was hard to focus.

  It took him a moment to understand what he was looking at. A pool with a layer of liquid mercury on its surface. In the center of the pool was the top half of a black sphere, about ten feet in diameter. It looked like it was made of highly polished stone, so shiny and mirrorlike it shot off sharp, blinding beams from the artificial lights.

  “My God,” Ray whispered. His fear was obliterated now. He wasn’t quite sure what he was feeling, but the energy coming off the object was blasting through him, bathing each of his cells in its raw power. The feeling was almost sexual, like the intensity right before an orgasm. “Jesus Christ, Jeremy.” He struggled to say something but his eyes were glued to the obsidian surface of the object as it appeared to grow in size. It was growing, as if he was being pulled into it.

  And just like that he was somewhere else. Lost in blackness.

  “What are you seeing, Ray?” Jeremy asked.

  “Stars,” Ray whispered. Thick nebulae and swirling spiral galaxies against an impossible emptiness. And out of it, moving at a speed that made no sense, the artifact traveled. “It’s moving.”

  “Good, good,” Jeremy answered. “Keep it up.”

  A blue and white globe. The Earth, expanding in his vision.

  “Coming to us. So…long ago.” The object plunged through the Earth’s atmosphere, burning hot and red like a coal, and crashed into the watery surface, rippling outward with an explosion of waves, blasted ferns, and vaporized thickets of swamp grasses.

  The artifact was telling its story, unfolding it like a movie in his head.

  “Don’t stop talking.” Jeremy was giddy, but he seemed a thousand miles away. “Just tell me what you’re seeing.”

  The movie jumped forward in a time-lapse blur of growth and decay. Winds and rains and floodwaters swirled and receded. Animals mated and killed around the object, spilling their life’s fluids, their flesh and organs congealing and melting into the soil. As the parade of animals died and rotted, dark earth and snarling vegetation rose, and the black sphere was swallowed by the soil and loam and water and rocks.

  “Animals. Buried. Then people.”

  Humans, dressed in skins, feathers, and shells and unaware of the black orb below them, danced, made love, and prayed. They piled up stones in a circle, burned fires, cut off the heads and carved out the hearts of their sacrifices. A blur of limbs and song and guttural liturgies rose and fell with the rising and setting of the sun.

  “It’s…the center. The people…feel it. Even though it’s underground. It’s reaching out to them.”

  “Yes, yes. Good, Ray. Don’t stop.”

  Time slowed. Strange lights visited the site, appearing, hovering, and quickly vanishing in the sky above it. Drawing more people. A group of naked children were brought to a clearing above the object. Led by tall men painted all in black ocher, save for their giant white exaggerated eyes.

  “Men. Painted black. Tall men. Bringing a bunch of children.”

  The children were made to lie down, their feet together in the center of the stone circle, heads outward, arms by their sides. The flower formation. Just like him, Kevin, and the other children at Blackwater.

  “No,” Ray whispered. But it was too late. And he couldn’t make it stop, couldn’t unsee what was happening.

  “Tell me, Ray. Just tell me what you see.”

  But he couldn’t speak. The knives came down, black, gleaming stone blades, just like Lily’s terrible Uzzul’uüš. Waves of them plunging and slashing. Gushes of blood spraying, then leaching down, through the soil, pulled into the heart of the black sphere. And then it was over and then more time passed and it happened again. And again. More children, every time the stars locked into the right positions in the sky.

  The black-painted men brought women, too, dancing ecstatically, coupling in wild orgies in the dirt with each darkening of the moon.

  It wanted them—their sexual energies, their worship, and their blood, and especially the blood of the children. Over and over again, they came, they fucked in the dirt, brought their children and murdered them, bathing in the growing energy of the black sun beneath them in an endless cycle of death.

  And then it changed. Ray felt his mouth open, but before he could scream it pulled him in and showed him—

  Now. This is happening right now.

  Another one of its kind, embedded not in quicksilver but warm, shifting sand. Men with computers and one with a video camera. Somewhere in the Middle East, wearing thawbs and kaffiyehs. The man with the camera lifted it to his face. Another pointed at Ray and started shouting in Arabic.

  A flash of light.

  Then another sphere, in a jungle. South Asia. Surrounded by a huge, barbed wire fence and soldiers with automatic rifles on the perimeter. One man, meditating in full lotus positi
on on a blanket, suddenly opened his eyes and stared right into Ray’s. I see you, he said with his mind. Who are you, traveler?

  Make it stop.

  And still another, embedded in frozen earth. It was so cold Ray shivered as the icy wind clawed into his marrow. A woman in a thick, fur-rimmed coat stood before the object, her head hung as if in prayer. Her hooded face hidden in a circle of fur and shadow.

  The energy was so wild now, so strong, he felt like he could fall into it and never get out. And, to his horror, he realized he would have welcomed that absorption. Complete dissolution of everything he was. Annihilation in its overpowering hypersexual void.

  Something was coming out of it. Something hungry.

  The woman in the fur-lined hood raised her head. Opened her eyes. Looked straight into his.

  Ray’s screams rose in pitch with the deafening blast of noise inside his head.

  Lily’s laughter broke through it all. And then everything went the most lifeless, sterile, and empty shade of white.

  —

  He came to in the helicopter, strapped into his seat. Jeremy wiped his forehead with a cool rag. “Ray. Good.” He smiled. “You did well. You’re okay. We’re heading back to Eleusis.”

  Ray wiped his eyes. His head was pounding and his muscles ached as if he’d just run a marathon. “I told you,” he said. “Goddammit, Jeremy, I told you.”

  Jeremy nodded, his eyes downcast. “I’m sorry you had a bad reaction. It was clearly a bit overwhelming for you, and for that I am deeply sorry.”

  “It wasn’t a bit overwhelming. It is wrong. It is very, very fucking wrong. It’s evil.”

  Jeremy looked bemused. “Ray, our fears color our impressions. Your body and mind were not prepared, and it shocked you. So your—”

  “Bullshit.” Ray leaned forward, his face in Jeremy’s. “I saw what it is. It feeds on blood. The blood of children—and they kept feeding it. It lives on death, just like the thing Crawford summoned.”

  “Ray—”

  “And this isn’t the only one. There are more of them.”

  Jeremy raised his eyebrow. “More? More artifacts?”

  “And she has one of them! Lily. Fucking Lily. She looked right through it and saw me. She knows, Jeremy.”