Demons

by John Shirley

  DEMONS

  John Shirley

  THE BALLANTINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  NEW YORK

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Lexicon

  Epigraph

  Book One

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Book Two

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Other Books by John Shirley

  Copyright

  For Richard Smoley

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This book is a novel in two parts and two separate novels, at once. The second novel is a sequel to the first. It was written some considerable time after the first, but it could not stand alone—Demons Book Two is dependent on Demons Book One.

  The material on clandestine government and military projects, sent by Glyneth to Stephen in Chapter Four of Book Two, is all quite real.

  Both parts of the novel were written before September 11, 2001, but—they are not without relevance. . . .

  LEXICON

  TAILPIPES Massive leviathans but varying in shape at will; often are more or less like a giant slug with nothing like a head. Skin may erupt with mouths that steam. They show no sentience and may be controlled or dominated by Gnashers.

  SPIDERS Three-legged but spiderish in shape, intelligent yet arachnoid/insectile in activity—airborne via sky-gliding parachutes of web.

  SHARKADIANS Can fly via rows of smallish leather wings that shouldn’t be big enough to carry them but can. Head is all jaws; body is ostensibly like a human female, but with clawed hands and feet. Pure savagery. May be dominated by Bugsys.

  DISHRAGS Shaped like bunches of furry rags big as VW bugs; can contort so they resemble some sea creature—no definite shape. Wrap and slowly crush victims, often with psychic/metaphysical/quantum continuum disruption.

  GNASHERS Talkative; at times, appear to have an agenda; are verbally sadistic; telepathic. Humanoid but have four arms; jaws are like Sharkadians’ though the mouth parts are a little smaller, and with the addition of upper head parts; have human eyes. They possibly function in a leadership capacity, but no one is quite certain.

  GRINDUMS Giant grasshopper legs, insectile/human heads with curling horns, big grinding jaws that move sideways, at an angle, or revolve as they choose. They can generate great heat at will.

  BUGSYS Parodies of humans; no two are alike but all are similar in style, complete with skin that resembles clothing but spotted with oozing sores. They can sometimes be stymied for a while by offering to play cards with them—they love gambling. Tend to chatter idiotically . . . Like the Gnashers, speak English or any language of Earth at will—or their own tongue.

  TARTARAN Demon language.

  Who is a holy person? The one who is

  aware of others’ suffering.

  —KABIR

  BOOK ONE

  DEMONS

  A PROLOGUE

  It’s amazing what you can get used to. That was a platitude; now it summarizes life for everyone. It means something powerful now. People can get used to terrible privation, to famine, to war, to vast and soulless discount stores. Some got used to prison; some got used to living alone on mountaintops. But now . . .

  This morning I saw a choleric-looking, pop-eyed sort of a middle-aged man in a threadbare suit stop his huffing old Volvo at a street corner, look about for cross traffic, accelerate slowly to creep across the intersection—the traffic lights, of course, not having worked for a long time, not through the whole north of the state. And one of the demons turned the street to soft hot tar, the demon rising up, howling, from the stuff of the street itself, rows of fangs in the creature’s absurdly big jaws gleaming and dripping. The demon was one of the Grindum clan—giant grasshopper legs, insectile heads with just enough human about them to sicken: curling horns, big grinding jaws that move sideways or at an angle or revolve on their skulls like an owl’s head on its shoulders. The Grindum swam in the hot asphalt with a conventional freestroke, humming some tune.

  The Volvo began to sink in the steaming asphalt. The driver merely got a good grip on his briefcase, opened the car door, used the door handle for a ladder rung, ran along the roof of the car to the hood, and jumped to the curb. Landing rather neatly, he continued on his way, not even looking back, hurrying only a little. He didn’t even turn around as the demon, chattering in Tartaran, snapped the door off the car and sailed it through the window of a bank. The bank was long closed, as most of them are now.

  A woman came out of a bar, too drunk to heed the warnings of her friends, and the demon heaved the car atop her, his iridescent green-black scaly torso still half buried in the molten street. I wondered absently if he were standing on a pipe down there.

  I had already turned away from the street corner and saw most of this by glancing over my shoulder, now and then, in a measured retreat. If you ran in panic, the demon was more likely to notice you and pursue, especially the Grindum clan. The Sharkadians, on the other hand, are more methodical: When they’ve selected a neighborhood, they’ll stalk through it and cut you down as they find you—or toy with you and leave you sorrowfully alive, wishing they’d killed you—whether you’re running or not.

  I made it around the corner. I heard another scream but didn’t go back to look. I had an appointment to teach art to children, and I was looking forward to it. Creating little personal works of art raises them, for a few minutes, out of the fear and depression that haunts the young now, though the art usually expresses fear of the demons. And when they’re raised up a little, in that moment of self-expression, they raise me up with them.

  So I was not going to risk being late. Or risk, for that matter, being torn limb from limb or sat upon and whispered to for hours before being dispatched. My heart was beating faster as I hurried away, but I was all right. I was . . .

  Used to it? I suppose it isn’t really true. You can’t be really used to them. You can only adapt, more or less.

  But not everyone has. Certainly more people than ever before go quite mad, utterly psychotic, daily; driven mad by the presence of hundreds of thousands of flesh-and-blood demons who appear randomly and all too frequently among us now. Those who were mad before the transfiguration of the world feel more at home.

  Some of those who were the babbling neighborhood schizophrenics sport a rather annoying look of smug vindication these days.

  People sometimes tell jokes about the demons. “How can you tell a Sharkadian from a Gnasher?”

  “Easy. A Gnasher doesn’t like a screw-top cap—he always uses real cork to stop up their necks after he pulls their heads off.” (You had to be there. Gnashers put on aristocratic airs.)

  For a brief while, some said it was all a hoax. In the first day or two of the demonic invasion you could dismiss even the television footage as staged, perhaps special effects, a government scam to necessitate martial law. Often those who made such a claim in the media met a demon within minutes. They were then reduced—in the butcher’s sense of the term—or watched their loved ones reduced.

  There are some who said, for a time, that the coming of the seven clans of demons—their random dominance of our world, in daylight as much as night—was a fulfillment of prophecy. If the commentator was Christian he said it fulfilled Revelations. The Jews, the Sikhs, the Muslims pointed to other prophecies. The Fundamentalist Christians, anyway, were easily refuted: The Second Coming part never came about. They waited and waited for th
e Judgment; for the angel with the flaming sword, for the Rapture, for the dead to rise (now and then the demons raise the dead, but not the way the Christians expected), for Jesus to come in his glory.

  Jesus was a no-show. Naturally, the evangelists rationalized his conspicuous absence: The Sacred Timetable, don’t you know, is a little off, that’s all. But the most “righteous” of them were eaten alive, a limb at a time, in public, no differently than sinners. I remember when the demons rampaged through Oral Roberts University. The sniggering delight that some hipsters and cynics took in this brutal series of bloody atrocities was most embarrassing—for the rest of us cynics and hipsters.

  People adapt; they have their little ways. Some adapted by giving the demons little classification nicknames, which later caught on—names like “Gnashers” and “Dishrags” somehow making the creatures seem less threatening—or by spinning theories about them, trying to evolve methods of avoiding or controlling them, none of which work. There were TV specials for a while, demands on Congress, the short-lived National Guard assaults, resulting in forty thousand dead soldiers. The TV series The World in Crisis came to a grinding halt when every reporter was slowly and lovingly masticated by giant Grindums.

  There were those, of course, who asserted at first that the demons were space aliens or the confabulations of aliens or multiple races of space aliens come to invade, that the invaders resembled demons only because our past encounters with the aliens left ancestral memories of their shapes, extraterrestrial shapes, remembered as “demons.” You know the sort of thing. But anyone who has survived an encounter with one of the seven clans is left with no doubt that these are supernatural creatures. There’s no question that they are quite specifically demonic, that not only are they not aliens, they distinctly belong here. How does one know this? It’s another one of those intangibles that, ironically, define the creatures. Once you’ve encountered them—you simply know. You can feel their miraculous nature; you can feel they’re somehow rooted in our world. And after having such encounters, Close Encounters of the Nearly Fatal Kind, the purveyors of ET explanations fall silent.

  I’m writing this now because of Professor Paymenz’s theory. I should say one of his theories—he has so many. This one is something like Paymenz theory number 1,347. Dr. Israel Paymenz believes that we can communicate with other times, other eras, through the medium of a sort of higher, ubiquitous ancestral mind that links all humanity. He believes that writers and poets and declaimers in the past sometimes “dictate” to writers of the later eras through this psychic link; that historians of the future communicate, unconsciously and with only partial accuracy, with the writers of the past—thus the more believable science fiction. So it is that much writing is, unknown to us, a kind of Ouija affair; only, the receiver is not hearing from the dead but from people of another time, from the living of the past and future.

  Not very likely, that theory; I doubt he believes it either. But writing this, at a time when I feel resoundingly helpless, makes me feel better.

  So I try to believe his theory . . . which leaves me writing this just eleven years into the twenty-first century, hoping to warn the previous century, or even earlier. Not warn them of some specific act or mistake. We don’t yet know why the seven clans came. But I dream of warning that they will come, so that, perhaps, the people of the past can begin looking for the why in advance. The demons certainly have given us no whys nor hows nor wherefores. They delight in communicating only what confuses.

  Though the demons will talk to us sometimes, they are, of course, notoriously unhelpful. When the President went with a delegation, including the Vice President, to see an apparent demon clan chieftain—we don’t know for certain he was a chieftain; their hierarchy is arcane, if they have any at all—who was stalking the West Wing of the White House, they had a rather extensive conversation, nearly fifteen minutes, that was recorded and analyzed and that offers exchanges like this, transcribed from near its end:

  THE PRESIDENT: And why is it, please, that you have come to—to us, now?

  GNASHER CHIEFTAIN: Home is where the heart is. Boy Scouts have a salty sort of taste, with marshmallow overtones. I like your tie. Are those Gucci loafers?

  THE PRESIDENT: Yes, yes, they are. So you’re familiar with all our customs?

  GNASHER: I’ve never killed a customs agent. Are they good to kill? Never mind. Where is your wife?

  PRESIDENT: My—she’s . . . in Florida.

  GNASHER: Does the Vice President have sex with her? Which vices does he preside over? I’m just fucking with you about that. But seriously: Do you like sweet or salt best?

  PRESIDENT: Could you tell me please why you have come here and if there’s something we can give you . . . some arrangement we can make. . . .

  GNASHER: I wonder what you’d look like inside out. Like a Christmas tree?

  PRESIDENT: We are willing to negotiate.

  GNASHER: I can almost taste you now. You once had a dream you cracked open the Moon like an egg, and a red yolk came out and you fried it on the burning Earth, didn’t you, once, eh? Did you? Do speak plainly and tell me: Did you?

  PRESIDENT: I don’t believe so.

  GNASHER: You did. You dreamt exactly that. People think someone like me would delight in the carnage of a battlefield, but I prefer a nice mall, don’t you?

  PRESIDENT: Yes, certainly. Perhaps in that spirit—

  GNASHER: You wish to sell me cuff links? Can you breathe in a cloud of iron filings? Let’s find out. Let’s discover a new jigsaw, a new 3-D puzzle, shall we? The human body, disassembled, might be put back together in a way that makes sense. You could make a fine buckyball out of the bones and a yurt from the skin and a talk show host of the wet parts. What an imaginative people you are. We stand in awe at the outskirts of Buenos Aires in the summertime, each fly a musical note. Can we send out for ice cream? For girls who work in ice cream parlors and their boyfriends in their electric Trans Ams? Taste this part of my leg. It tastes differently from this part. You won’t taste? I have a penis. Would you prefer it? Do you like salty or sweet? Seriously. Choose one. Would you like to see my penis? I asked for it special. There’s a catalog.

  With that, a steaming green member pressed from a fold on the Gnasher’s lower parts, and as the President tried to back away the Gnasher caught him in a long ropy sweep of its arm and pulled him close and forced him to his knees. In front of the TV cameras.

  An eruption of gunshots from the Secret Service had no effect, of course, on the Gnasher. It was the Vice President—a decisive man, who’d been broodingly biding his time for two years—who took a pistol from the President’s bodyguard and shot the President in the back of the head. It was obvious to everyone there, and to a sympathetic Congress the next day, that the Gnasher, after all, was choking the President to death with his engorged, steaming green penis. It was a question of restoring dignity to the President and the office. The Vice President fled the scene, sacrificing a number of Secret Service men ordered to delay the pursuing demon while he escaped.

  “It’s profoundly tragic,” the Vice President said afterward, “but it’s God’s will. We must move on. I have certain announcements to make. . . .” He is reported more or less safe in a certain underground bunker.

  But I should tell you how it began. It was months ago. Despite the usual outbreaks of savagery, the wet snow of the ordinary was blanketing the world. The miraculous rarely shows itself. When it does, it comes seamlessly, and for some reason, everyone is surprised.

  1

  As for me . . . I was up in a high-rise in San Francisco, those months ago: the morning the demons came.

  I had gone to see Professor Paymenz or, to be perfectly honest, to see his daughter under the auspices of seeing the professor. It was housing that San Francisco State had arranged for him—they had a program supplying subsidized housing to teaching staff—and as I arrived I saw another eviction notice from SFSU on the door. Paymenz had refusedto teach comparative religion a
nymore, would lecture only about obscure occult practices and beliefs, and rarely showed up even for those classes. He hadn’t ever had his tenure settled, so they simply fired him. But he’d refused to leave the university housing on the simple but contumacious grounds, as he explained, that he deserved this more than the teacher down the hall, who taught “existential themes in daytime television.”