Demons

by John Shirley

  2

  “Dad?” Melissa said in a voice that quavered only a little.

  He reached out and took her hand but kept watching the sky.

  Then the droplets burst like fungus pods, and gave out black spores. And the specks of black took on more definite shapes, shapes that soared and dropped and called from the distance with hooting, anticipatory glee. And then we saw little black cones forming on the streets below and exuding not lava but inverted teardrops, mercuric and quivering, that burst in counterpoint to cloud drops, scattering nodes of black that took shape and joined their fellows above. And we saw some of them drifting closer, coming toward us and to the other buildings in the city, growing as they came not only in the change of perspective but in individual size; and one of them—with a row of leather wings like thistle leaves up and down its back—came to grip our building, five stories below, with long ropy arms and legs that ended in eagle’s claws. It was what we later came to call a Sharkadian. Its body was theoretically female—with leathery green-black breasts, and a woman’s hips, and even a vaginal slit. But gender is only a parody among the demons. The Sharkadian’s head didn’t maintain the mock femininity—it was jaws and only jaws, and it used them to bite off a chunk of concrete balcony. It chewed meditatively for a moment and then spat wet sand. A man came out on a nearby balcony to see what all the shouting from the street was, and got out half a scream before the Sharkadian leapt on him and snapped part of his skull away, not quite enough to kill him instantly. It’s been noted many times that the demons rarely dispatch anyone quickly; they always play with their food.

  In the square below there was deep-throated laughter and weeping, pursuit hither and thither.

  On our balcony the professor began to intone, so rapidly he seemed to be thinking hysterically aloud, something like, “It was this morning that I reflected that science knows all and nothing at once; that they may assert the core of the atom is the nucleus, a hydrogen atom comprising a single stable, positively charged particle, the proton, say; electrons around other sorts of particles making a kind of shell of particle-wave charge, and they are entirely correct, yet all they’re doing is labeling phenomena, just labeling, labeling. . . .”

  Melissa came to cling to me, but I could not enjoy the contact. I was about to drag her inside to tentative safety, when a demon—one of the almost elegant Gnashers, clashing its teeth as it came—settled onto the balcony beside ours; and thenwe were petrified, unable to move. We watched as a terrified woman on the neighboring balcony—Mrs. Gurevitz, I thinkher name was—tried to flee back inside. The demon pulled her close and, typical of the Gnashers, simply forced her to sit and engaged her in conversation for a while, telling her unctuously that it saw in her mind that she hated her bullying husband but was afraid to leave him because of the money problem, because she had no skills; and why didn’t she have skills—because she was basically a mistake perpetrated by her mother in a careless moment, not a real person who could develop skills, not like her sister, who was a lawyer, there was someone real. And the woman writhed in her chair as both the demon and the professor droned on. The professor saying sotto voce to no one in particular: “They may assert, for example, that the region in subatomic space in which an electron is most likely to be found is called an orbital, but it’s just a label, a tag used in describing the behavior of certain forces under certain conditions, that description accurate but offering no real insight into the nature of that thing—they don’t know why the atom is that way, even if they can describe the series of events that took it there. It’s just as mysterious as if they’d never studied it at all.”

  I wasn’t sure if he’d gone mad—or was stunned into a stream-of-consciousness volubility.

  Finally, as I saw four demons coming toward us through the air, I began to struggle with my paralysis, with rigidity of fear so pronounced that wrenching loose from it seemed to tear something in my mind.

  But there—I was moving, I could grab the professor’s arm and Melissa’s, and pull them toward the glass sliding doors to the kitchen as the four demons drifted closer, closer; these creatures, who were appetite personified, whom I’d later know as Spider clan, drifting with their wispy bodies toward us on parachutes of spun glass that they express from their loins, coming closer and very deliberately to our balcony and no other . . .

  We stumbled through the open doorway, and I pushed the professor and his daughter behind me and fumblingly slid the glass door shut. I locked it, though the act seemed to mock me with its futility.

  3

  The spidery things that had drifted to the balcony were not eight legged, like actual spiders, but only three legged, tripodal, each leg long and thin, jointed, and feathery like certain spiders but big, about two and a half yards long. Their upper parts, as big as laundry baskets, were like oversized suction cups, with a single yellow eye that seemed to slide around the convex top at will, slitting the skin as it went to peer out where it would. There was a sucking mouthpart in the concave underside where the three legs met; a membrane on the rim exuded the web stuff, like ectoplasm that mimicked spider silk. The connection to the parachute of demon silk broke when the spider latched onto the balcony, and its sail drifted and fell to the ground far below—where cars were exploding and fires gushing up—like a flag cut from a pole.

  The three-legged spider thing sucked itself closer to the balcony, one of its legs probing at the doorway.

  I pushed the still-babbling professor to the apartmentdoor, started to open it, and then fell silent—listening to the bubbling, breathing sound from the other side. From the hall. The low chuckle. The whimper. Someone’s “Please . . . please don’t—” suddenly cut off. “Ple—”—

  I put the door chain in place. Paymenz had his arms around Melissa, whose face had gone so gray I was afraid for her.

  Paymenz’s expression changed from second to second: one moment delighted wonder, then sorrow, then fear—fear for Melissa as he looked at her.

  I stepped into the doorway to the kitchen and peered around the edge of the dead refrigerator—which Melissa had filled with racks of dirt and used to grow salad mushrooms. I peered at the glass balcony doors, expecting to see them shattering. But instead the spider creatures seemed to have settled down onto the balcony, draping themselves over it, extending their legs to grip the outer walls, the outdoor light fixture, the drainpipe, the doorframe, arranging themselves at odd angles to one another. They seemed to be in a languid state of waiting. Then someone was drawn up, thrashing, from below, snatched perhaps from a lower balcony: a Chinese gentleman in a powder-blue suit. Perhaps he was from the Asian Studies department, the thought echoed in my head, ludicrously irrelevant. Round face quivering with terror, arms pinioned to his sides by the demon silk that wound around him, he was hoisted by the silk to the Spider clan demons. The two nearest pulled him apart between them, with swift movements of their giant pipe-cleaner legs, and stuffed him into their suctioning maws. Their bodies expanded to encompass the gushing halves of him, and then rippled, squeezing and relaxing, squeezing and relaxing, pulping him inside. He lived long enough for a brief muffled scream. Then they spat out the empty skins like grape peels.

  A moment later the demon who’d had the upper half of the Chinese gent began to convulse, to shudder—then to strain like a woman in labor, to exude from its nether membranes a finer ectoplasm that spun to form itself into shapes . . . shapes of Chinese children, a Chinese woman, a ghostly boy. . . . Members of the man’s family? His memory of himself?

  The other spiders toyed with these productions as they emerged, pulling them apart, sniffing at them with the ends of their legs, where there were things like nostrils near the grasping claws.

  Then I felt the professor pull me back into the living room. He seemed to be swaying in front of me, far away and yet very near. But it was I who was swaying.

  “You were about to faint, young man,” he said. “Your knees were buckling.”

  “Yes.” After a mome
nt, sinking onto the edge of a sofa arm, I said, “It’s not a dream, is it?”

  “No.”

  “What do we do now?”

  Paymenz sighed. He sat down heavily on a split-open ottoman. “First, I apologize. I . . . began to babble out there. I was useless. Useless as—as bosoms on a . . . whatever that expression is. That’s always been my failure: Faced with the abyss—which, really, is just an infinity of possibilities—I crumble. Into drink, sometimes. And good Lord I need a drink . . . but as for what to do—this calls for, ah, emergency measures. And we must have . . . we must obtain . . . information—so we must do the unthinkable. Melissa . . .” He took a deep breath, and then he made the decision, and he spoke it aloud: “Take the television out of the closet . . . and turn it on!”

  He said this the way another man would say, Get the shotguns out, and load them.

  To Paymenz, a television was more dangerous than a shotgun.

  We’d hooked car batteries to the little TV cord.

  “The phenomenon seems to be global,” the newscaster was saying. “And it seems to be genuine. Early reports of mass hallucinatory drugs introduced into the water system and an outbreak of rye-mold toxicity turn out to be wrong—as we here at KTLU can attest. Our own Brian Smarman was brutally killed this afternoon by the phenomenon.” He was an almost cardboard cutout newscaster; his hair looked like it had been poured into a cast, and, like many local newscasters, he was heavily caked in makeup. His voice quavered only a little.

  “Did you ever notice,” I said hoarsely, “that the closer you get to Los Angeles, where the anchormen want to be, the better looking they are? We’re halfway up the state from Los Angeles so we get the offbrand-looking newscasters. Up around Redding they’re all goofy-looking ducks who’re saving their money to buy condos—”—

  “Have you ever noticed,” Melissa interrupted, gesturing for me to be quiet, “how you tend to toss out irrelevant remarks when you’re nervous?”

  I had noticed it, actually, yes.

  The newscaster was going on hesitantly. “We—” he looked at the paper, seemed to doubt whether he should read it, and went on “—we are calling it ‘the phenomenon’ because there is such disagreement about the nature of the attacks. Alien invasion, invaders from another dimension, robots created by an enemy nation, and the first signs of—of Judgment Day—we’ve heard all these explanations. Observers from the station here—” his voice broke a little “—seem to agree that—that the beings in question are demonic or supernatural. However, a zoologist who encountered the beings and lived—I do not seem to have his name here—believes that they could be ‘some other form of biological life.’ ”

  “Now will scholarship’s imbeciles have their day,” Professor Paymenz muttered.

  “Shh, Dad,” Melissa chided him. She held on to his arm. We were all three of us huddled on her bed in her bedroom, the farthest from the front door and the balcony; the little satellite-seeker TV was on her bed. How I’d longed, in better times, to be in her bed.

  “Oh, we have a brief interview with a—it just says a ‘theorist from San Francisco State”—Dr. Laertes Shephard.”

  “Shephard!” Paymenz burst out. “A theorist, is he! Why don’t they mention why he’s here instead of at Stanford—kicked out of Stanford . . .”

  Footage showed Shephard looking strangely calm and collected standing by a window, smoke rising from the skyline behind him. “We will need to look at this phenomenon from every angle, from fresh angles—from below if necessary, as it were—and ask ourselves, could this be a part of the natural order, just coming into its own? Perhaps this is not their first time here. Could they have visited Earth at the time of the dinosaurs and contended with the great reptiles? Could they come along to precipitate a jump in evolution? If we understand their natural function we will—”—

  “We lost that feed,” the newscaster muttered, as he replaced Shephard. “We . . .” He seemed to stare into space for a moment.

  “Poor man,” Melissa said, looking at the newscaster. “He so wants to run and hide.”

  “Why did they interview Shephard?” I asked. “What’s an economist got to do with all this?”

  “Putting a finger in every intellectual pie is his specialty,” Paymenz growled. “He insists that economics is natural selection and natural selection is economics—got a minor degree in biology so he could make the argument and not be laughed at. . . .”

  “We . . . we’ll go on now to . . .” The newscaster was shuffling through the paperwork on his desk as if it were something that newscasters actually used. “I have here somewhere . . .” The newscaster looked off camera. His lower lip quivered. A shadow fell over him. He lunged from his seat, leaving the frame, and the image dissolved into snow.

  But the sound feed continued for a moment. “They—!” It sounded like the same newscaster, but his voice was attenuated by distance and terror. “—demons, just—my family—if you could—stay in your—No!”—

  Then came a voice speaking in some language I didn’t recognize. A silky voice, but the silk ribbon stretched into an infinity of darkness.

  The professor dived the length of the bed, nearly bouncing the little TV off it as he went, stabbing at the button on the built-in digital recorder.

  “Dad—we do have a remote!” Melissa said.

  “Quiet, girl.”

  The voice babbled from the static and snow in some unknown language. It rose and fell in painfully unfamiliar accents and rhythms.

  When the silky, murderous voice finished its rant, the television went silent; there was not even the sound of static.

  “It—it sounded sort of . . . well, sort of like Greek,” Melissa ventured.

  “No, I don’t think so,” the professor murmured, combing crumbs out of his beard with his stubby fingers. “If we succeed in recording it, we shall make its translation one of our plansof campaign.” He looked around. “So this is my daughter’s room.”

  “You’ve been in here many times, Dad,” she said, “bursting in on me to tell me something that could easily have waited.”

  “Been in here but never really looked,” he said. “Not really.”

  The room contained raw wooden shelves with books on two sides; stacks of books functioned as bookends upholding more shelves. In one corner was a zigzag tower of old magazines: the entire print run of Visions. The third wall was dominated by an elaborate homemade shrine to the Sophia, the feminine spirit of wisdom: a dozen goddess figures—Hindu and Greek and others—surrounded a Black Madonna, an Africanized Mother Mary. The corners of the room hung with dusty violet and green scarves, and the table next to the bed was scarred by fallen sticks of incense. Opposite the shrine was a poster of a movie star, Jason Stoll, whom I hated the instant I saw him on Melissa’s wall. He was young, muscular, sensitive eyed, confident, dressed in fashionable understatement. Every girl needs one, I thought.

  The books, crammed in every which way, were mostly novels and old textbooks—she’d had three years of liberal arts—and obscure volumes of “forgotten lore” her father had given her.

  Someone screamed, long and bubbling, from the hallway. There was a desperate pounding on the front door that stopped abruptly.

  Our feelings had been frozen, looming over us like a stop-motion tsunami, until that instant. Now the film ran forward, and all those feelings crashed down on the three of us. People may react differently to the same stimulus. But we all felt the same thing and knew we felt it together. As if steel chains had been kept in some freezer somewhere and then clapped onto us all at once, we all shrank, at the same moment, from the icy shackles.

  Melissa spoke in the coiled silence. “Dad . . .” Her voice was small. “Is it some sort of Armageddon?”

  He hesitated only a moment. “I do not believe it is.”

  I looked at him in surprise. He nodded. “Yes, I mean that. I do not believe it is Armageddon, biblical or otherwise.”

  “But,” I asked, “what do we do, then
? I mean—if we don’t just wait for . . .”

  Paymenz reached into a stack of books, pulled out The New Oxford Annotated Bible, and flipped expertly to the passage he wanted. He read it aloud.

  “Book of Job, chapter five, verses 17 and 18: ‘How happy is he whom God reproves; therefore do not despise the discipline of the Almighty. For he wounds but he binds up; he strikes but his hands heal.’ ”

  He put the book on the bed, laid his hand thoughtfully on it. “We go with the assumption that all this is happening for a reason. Whatever happens, there is an appropriate human response. A lawful response, along with the natural reactions—fear, anger, whatever you feel. Even during the Holocaust there was an appropriate response, when physically fighting back was not possible. Even then, seeing your children taken away and murdered, there was a spiritually appropriate response. Hard to enter into the state where that response is possible sometimes. But it can be done. We will find the appropriate response.”