Personal Demons

by Christopher Fowler

  'After tonight you will no longer need to use my library for the fulfilment of your fantasies,' he said, his steel-cold mouth descending to my throat, 'for your fantasies are to be made flesh, just as the nights will replace your days.' I felt the first hot stab of pain as his teeth met in my skin. Through a haze I saw the Count wipe his lips with the back of a crimson hand. 'You will make a very loyal custodian, little Englishman,' he said, descending again.

  Here the account ends. The library did not accompany Count Dracula on his voyage to England, but remained behind in his castle, where it continued to be tended by Mr Harker until his eventual demise many, many years later.

  PHOENIX

  It was the year 2000, supposedly the start of everything new, but everything new was already old again. True, the New Year's Eve celebrations had been noisier than most, and a bunch of people had been shot dead downtown, killed by pistols and rifles fired jubilantly in the air.

  Brett Ellis had thrown a party in a marquee for two hundred people. Some of the guests were his friends. Most were colleagues. Brett was an American success story; a wealthy, handsome Los Angeles advertising executive who had made his own way up the corporate ladder. Married with a young son, the thirty-two-year-old businessman lived in a beautiful Spanish-style ranch house in the Hollywood Hills with his elegant wife Mara and Davey, who was six.

  Brett was a vice-president of merchandising development for one of the new multimedia agencies now controlling American advertising. He had a reputation for being a hard negotiator, and for getting what he wanted. Remembering his own humbler beginnings, Brett simply wanted the best for himself and his family. His life was comfortable and predictable. He did not fear his enemies (of whom he had plenty) because he was at peace with himself and sure of his abilities. He was a little smug, perhaps, a little too complacent. In a town like LA, that didn't exactly make him a criminal.

  He certainly never paid much attention to the increasing number of homeless people on the streets, or the escalating incidents of violence he saw on the news. In his determination to assure himself that life was perfect, he had even managed to turn a blind eye to the obvious evidence that his wife had taken a lover.

  Then one day, Brett became aware that someone was following him, a shabby little man in a beaten-up red Volkswagen. The car was parked outside his office for a whole day, and parked outside his house while Brett and his wife were throwing a birthday party for Davey. When Brett ran out to speak to the driver, he pulled away from the kerb with a squeal of tyres.

  Brett called the cops. He was not prepared to take chances. He gave the police a full description of the man, but they told him they couldn't do anything unless he had been physically threatened. They had bigger problems to deal with. There were riots brewing once more in downtown LA, had been ever since New Year's Eve.

  Brett lay in wait for his stalker. He finally trapped him one evening when the day's suffocating heat broke in a cataclysmic rainstorm. Mara had taken Davey to the movies in Westwood. She hated driving anywhere in the rain. Brett was not sure she knew how to operate the windshield wipers. He saw the VW parked across the street when he got up to fetch a soda, and ran outside in his socks, surprising the driver, who was dozing at the wheel.

  Frightened, the old man told Brett his name was Elias. He worked at the Church of the Phoenix downtown, and he had been following Brett for several months.

  'What the hell do you think you're doing?' shouted Brett, losing his cool. His socks were soaked, and the stormy weather had given him a headache. When the old man refused to answer, Brett reached through the open window of the car and grabbed him by the collar. 'I swear I'll break your neck. Do you know what this is doing to me?'

  'I don't mean any harm,' begged the oldster. 'I have to be here. I have to watch over you.'

  'What are you talking about?' He loosened his grip on the shirt, frightened that he might really break the frail old man's neck.

  'You're one of the Chosen Ones,' Elias replied, 'as inscribed by the prophecies of Nostradamus and the Book of Daniel, and revealed in the doctrines of the Phoenix.'

  Brett should have walked away then, but he didn't. He hesitated a moment too long, and ended up staying to listen. The Chosen Ones, explained the old man, were a handful of decent law-abiding people who would lead the church – and indeed the whole world – into a pure new era of goodness and natural harmony. Clues and signs in certain church texts led the way to Brett's door. There were other Chosen Ones in the world who would help him to achieve this grand goal of world improvement at the start of the millennium, but he had to be patient. Perhaps Brett would like to come along to the church some time and join in one of the services – they would be very honoured to have him. In fact, some of the hymns were about him.

  'Just how am I supposed to change the world?' he asked against his better judgement. It was kind of flattering, the idea of being worshipped.

  'Well see, it's not possible to reveal the answer yet,' said Elias. 'We're still waiting for a further sign.'

  Elias explained that he was honoured to have been chosen to monitor Brett's movements, and to make sure that no harm came to him before his appointed time to act. In the eyes of his church, it was a privileged position to be in. He told Brett to think of him as a guardian angel.

  Clearly, Elias was a nut.

  But, Brett decided, he was a harmless one. It fed his ego to know that people were singing his praises, even if they too were all nuts. No-one ever sang his praises at work. However, he warned the little man that if he caught sight of him again, he would call the police to the church and have him arrested for harassment.

  'Go on, get out of here,' said Brett, releasing his grip. Elias started the engine. Before he drove off, he leaned from the window and handed Brett a card with the address of the church printed on it. 'You must watch for the signs that you have been chosen,' he exclaimed. 'They will be natural symbols of peace and harmony, and they'll be surrounding you in ever greater force until the appointed time!'

  'And don't let me catch you near my property again!' Brett called back. Sure, he thought, shaking his head, I'll keep an eye out. Meanwhile, stay the hell away from me.

  Over the next few weeks, he worked long, late nights on a TV campaign his team was developing for a new kind of cola. The primary-coloured commercials they produced together were vacuous and irritating, and somehow seemed to provide an ironic comment on his empty life. Lately he noticed Mara was seeing more of her fancy man, even though she insisted she was visiting a friend in the Valley. After the campaign was delivered, he decided to take the family on vacation to Hawaii. Hiring a yacht, they headed out into the seas around Maui, even though Mara hated the ocean. Brett hoped the enforced intimacy of the boat might help them get back together.

  One morning he was swimming aimlessly in the calm clear waters when his wife leaned over from the deck railing and called urgently to him. 'For God's sake, Brett,' she shouted in agitation, 'don't move a muscle!'

  All around him, numbering in their thousands, poisonous jellyfish had gathered. The Portuguese men o' war gently bobbed in gelatine star clusters. Gingerly, he pushed his left arm through the water, nudging them aside. Then his right. He made no sudden movements. It was important to do nothing that would scare them into stinging.

  Incredibly, he managed to reach the boat completely unharmed. The family watched as the jellyfish gently dispersed like an expanding universe.

  Other oddities occurred that spring. One night they were drawn from the house by a scrabbling noise above them, and found birds of every imaginable species landing on the roof. Two days later, a vast brown swarm of bees surrounded the car as he waited in traffic at the corner of La Brea and Melrose. Other drivers got out of their vehicles to watch and take photographs. The bees massed noisily, dancing back and forth on the hood of the Mercedes before dispersing into the sky. Shiny-backed beetles swarmed in the basement, much to Mara's consternation. She shivered in horror as their iridescent bodies
rippled crossing the floor. 'Looks like you've developed an affinity with nature, honey,' she half-joked.

  It wasn't just living creatures that were affected, either. Technology started behaving strangely, too. Brett's infrared laptop began to pick up odd scrambled signals whenever he was around. One morning it beamed a huge file of biblical gibberish into the RAM of his office computers, crashing the system. The next day he was working on the laptop when his spreadsheet fuzzed away into the ether, to be replaced by a badly drawn image of a bird bursting into a blaze of flame. The repair shop could find nothing wrong with it. They suggested that maybe someone was playing a practical joke.

  The episode with Elias had itself become something of a joke in the Ellis household, but it was one that stopped being funny the very next night. Brett had given up waiting for Mara to come home and was getting ready for bed. He was standing in his darkened bedroom when he suddenly had the feeling he was being watched. Pulling his T-shirt over his head, he walked to the windows and looked down into the scrubland beyond the back yard. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw dozens of people standing among the trees and bushes, motionless and silent, staring up at his house. In the flickering shadows they looked like statues. Presumably they were all members of this crazy church. The sight chilled him to the bone. For the first time he felt that something genuinely weird was going on. Furious, he rang the number Elias had given him.

  Over at the Church of the Phoenix, Elias answered the call.

  'Keep your congregation the hell away from my house,' warned Brett, 'or I'll get a restraining order put on you and your "church". I'd like to know what your leader thinks about this.'

  'We have no leader.' The old man spoke so softly it was difficult to hear him. 'I know it must all seem very strange to you.'

  'Then perhaps you'd like to explain what's going on.'

  'I can't talk on this line. There's someone else in the building, and I think he's listening in. I'm in great danger, Mr Ellis. I've received the true sign at last, only…' he paused uncomfortably, 'only it wasn't at all the sign I'd been expecting, and now I think something terrible is going to happen. I've been so blind. I've been used, Mr Ellis, duped. My life may even be at risk. I need your help. I can't trust the congregation here any more. Please meet me somewhere and I'll explain.'

  'I'm not going to meet you, not now, not ever,' Brett replied, slamming the receiver down, even though Elias sounded genuinely terrified.

  On the TV news the next morning, the Ellis family heard how a man's body had been found hacked to pieces and thrown in a dumpster. A short-order cook had discovered the corpse in the car park of a sleazy strip-joint near the airport. As they watched the screen, a photograph of Elias appeared inset in the corner.

  Feeling partly to blame for the death of a man who only wanted to watch over him, Brett decided he had to do something. He did not want to spend several hours in a police interview room. The LAPD still had a long way to go to win respect from the local populace. Instead, he decided to head downtown and pay a visit to the church.

  As his shiny blue Mercedes coasted the intersections across town, Brett began to realise how far away he had grown from his roots. He never visited areas like this any more. His life was a rat-run from home to the agency and back. The strangeness of the streets and the people bothered him. He eventually located the clapboard church on a dusty litterstrewn backstreet. It was one of many fringe denominations that existed in the run-down Spanish area. Apart from two teenaged boys hanging out beside an abandoned truck, there was no-one around. Brett double-checked the alarm on his Mercedes.

  The door of the church was open. Inside it was clean and smartly kept, lit by natural light alone. An attractive young woman in jeans and a white T-shirt stepped out of the shadows by the vestry, making him start.

  'I'm Lisa Farrell,' she said, brushing her hair from her eyes and shaking his hand. Her voice surprised him. She had a middle-class English accent. 'I know who you are. We all do. Come in back, I'm making some tea.

  'I only recently joined the Phoenix,' she explained as they sat across from each other, sipping from hot mugs. 'I have to get this tea sent out from London. You can't buy it here, and it still doesn't taste right because of the water.'

  'I heard what happened to Elias.'

  'It's a terrible world, Mr Ellis.' She shook her head in bewilderment and sipped. 'The police say they have some leads, but I'll be very surprised if they do.'

  'Aren't you rather a long way from home?'

  'My father invited me over. He lives here with his new wife. Originally I had only planned to study Phoenix for a sociology project, but I came to believe in quite a bit of what they were teaching.'

  'And what is that, exactly?'

  'Elias and his followers believe in the eventual heavenly redemption of mankind. From their own "scriptures" and other archive sources, they've selected a group of people who are somehow going to lead the world into a new dawn of enlightenment.'

  'How convenient. Just in time for the new millennium.'

  'That's right,' she said, missing the irony in his voice, 'commencing in this year of 2000. They have dates for each of the big events, worked out accurately to the hour.'

  'I guess they failed to predict the murder of one of their members. Tell me something I'd like to know, Lisa. Why have I been selected for a part in all of this? I'm an advertising executive, not a politician. Even if such a crackpot theory had some grain of truth, how could I have any influence on world events? I met Mel Gibson once at a premiere. That's about as far as I go in the "six degrees of separation" chain.'

  'Well, there you have me. Elias didn't tell his congregation everything.' If she didn't know, she didn't seem particularly curious, either. 'Your future has already been decided for you, Mr Ellis, just as it has been decided for me and everyone else. All you have to do is go along with it. Decisions will be made for you that are entirely beyond your control.'

  Lisa did not look or sound crazy. Despite his scepticism at her blind faith, he found himself drawn to her. She was very attractive. She replaced her mug and rose, holding out her hand once more. 'Now, if you'll excuse me, it's been a long day, what with the police…'

  As he left, looking back at the shabby little church from his car, he noticed the iron phoenix on the roof that acted as a weather vane. He did not expect to see it, or Lisa, again.

  But the strands of a strange fate were shaping themselves around Brett.

  For some time he had been thinking of moving the family out of Los Angeles and starting afresh elsewhere. His company had a vacancy in their Chicago office. The move would force Mara into a decision about their relationship. Brett discussed the possibility of a transfer with his boss, and two weeks later was in the middle of making all the appropriate arrangements when his son suffered an odd accident. Davey was kicking a football around in Griffith Park when a bird became trapped in a wire-mesh compound where leaves were being burned.

  Trying to rescue the panicked creature, whose wings were alight, the boy's face and arms were seared. His nanny, who had only stepped away from his side for a moment, managed to drag him clear of the fire, saving his life.

  The doctors told Brett that his son could not be moved from his hospital bed. The family's relocation would have to be delayed, or possibly even cancelled. Brett resigned himself to staying in LA, at least for the immediate future.

  It was an odd feeling, that his life was somehow no longer his own. He could find no way to explain it, nor his decision to contact Lisa Farrell and ask her about Elias. Specifically, he wanted to know what the old man foresaw that made him locate Brett in the first place.

  Lisa asked if they could meet at her apartment; she had something to show him. She lived in a rented mock-Tudor Santa Monica condo of astonishing ugliness just behind the freeway. Here they knelt on the kitchen floor going through stacks of Elias's documents and hardcopy computer files. Brett was amazed that the old-timer had even known how to switch on a computer.
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  'All churches are on-line these days,' Lisa explained. 'You should take a look at the fringes of cult worship on the internet some time. Talk about scary. There's a group of obsessives who translate prophecies, supposed "seers" who monitor signs of the coming cataclysmic change. They mostly preach new age gobbledygook, but there's this one priest among them who refers to the Book of Daniel, the only book of the apocalypse in the Old Testament – Revelations is in the New – and he points out that Daniel dreamed of four beasts who came to lay waste to the peoples of the earth. He and Elias found corroborative evidence from a variety of independent sources pointing to four people who will eventually change the fate of the modern world. Not by healing or restoring faith, though, but by "a cleansing test of righteous fire".'

  'Are you trying to tell me…'

  'That's right, Mr Ellis,' said Lisa with a smile. 'You're one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse.'

  'The sixth chapter of the last book of the New Testament, The Revelation of St John the Divine, tells of the seven-sealed scroll held in God's right hand. When the first seal is opened the four horsemen will appear, and represent the hardships the world must face before judgement, specifically conquest (pestilence), famine, war and death. The horses are white, red, black and yellow-green.

  'The world as we know it will then cease, wiped free from the poisonous effects of humanity so that life has a chance to grow anew. That's why nature has been reacting so favourably to you, Mr Ellis.' Father Matthew paused before a bush of English tea roses and checked the buds for damage. The manicured emerald lawns behind the church seemed to be the only green life left in this part of the San Bernadino Valley. The priest was clearly ill, and walked with difficulty. His skin was the colour of the pale dead petals that littered his rose beds. 'The final cataclysm will be triggered by events occurring to four people in four different locations,' he continued. 'We know that one of those locations is Los Angeles. Even the stars foretell this. The area is pinpointed by everything from ancient biblical scrolls to NASA maps.' He paused for breath, leaning on Lisa's arm. 'Any one of the acts occurring around the world could lead to a catastrophic disaster, but all four deeds must occur in order for the conditions of the Apocalypse to be fulfilled. The writings are most specific on this point.'