Demons

by John Shirley

  But when she came to the living room, put her hand on the door, I heard, almost immediately, the hasty retreat of the Bugsy padding away down the hall outside.

  A little later we heard a rustling outside the window and saw a Sharkadian flying the Bugsy down from the roof in its arms, the two of them pausing to look toward us, about fifty feet past the balcony railing, hovering to stare before flapping awkwardly away.

  The day after the Bugsy, with radical foolhardiness, I decided to visit some kids I’d been giving art lessons to. The soldiers wouldn’t accompany me. I got there without running into the gangs. On the way I saw the things I described near the opening of this narrative. The Grindum, the man in the Volvo, and me on my way to teach an art lesson.

  On the way home I had to dodge a van full of drunken, glue-sniffing kid fundies. Gangs of hysterical teens who think they’re supposed to bring about the final judgment by punishing the enemies of God, which is whoever they happen on when they’re out on the town. Half the time, happily, the demons get them. They nearly ran me down, but I cut through a burned-out Tofu Chef place and lost them in the alley.

  Since then, some days of quiet. A Lull. I think it’s a Monday afternoon. It’s dull gray outside, like a Monday afternoon should be, anyway. The only noise is the occasional gunshot. The looters, I guess. Shot on sight, lately.

  Quiet. But Melissa and I can both feel it: the imminence. Something is about to happen. Meanwhile, she’s meditating in her room and I’m wondering if I’m—

  Hold on, there’s a pounding at the door. Someone pounding. Going to check it out.

  Why don’t we have a fucking gun here?! Going . . .

  I’m back; I washed out my mouth but still taste vomit. My hands are shaking. Hard to write.

  When I went to the living room, Melissa was opening the door—why, I don’t know. Stupid to open the door, though the metal chain was across the gap.

  Standing in the hall was a young guy in a Day-Glo orange VR-connect jumpsuit, the kind with all those little jacks on them and lots of peeling stickers from software companies slapped on between the jacks. The VR doesn’t work very well, and when they use it they look like idiots, walking on their squirrelly little treadmills, and if they aren’t real careful the goggles get disconnected or the wires pulled out of the suit. VR heads get into it anyway. This VR head was shaved, even his eyebrows; he’d have been rockstar-good-looking if not for that. He seemed clean, and, at first, he seemed sane: He didn’t seem like a Bugsy slave. And he wasn’t one.

  “Do you need food?” Melissa asked. “We have a little to spare. Some canned stuff.”

  “I could use some,” the guy said. “I live in the building here, you know, just a floor down.” He stuck his hand in the space between door and frame as if to shake hands.

  Melissa made as if to shake it. I pulled her back. He withdrew the hand, grinning, showing pearly white teeth. His manicure was perfect, too. “Look, we should stick together—the people in this building. I’ve got a good wireless Internet connection, the very best, if you wanta come and check it out. I do that Clan Collector website. That’s mine, you know. My name’s Dervin. Just Dervin.” He looked at Melissa, then me. “You don’t know the name?”

  “No . . . The what website, did you say?” I asked.

  He seemed genuinely surprised. “Clan Collector. You never heard of it? You’re kidding! It’s the third most popular site in the country. All seven clans of demons are totally represented . . . even some interviews!” He spoke fast, clasping his hands again and again to emphasize each statement. “We’ve got the best graphics showing them from different angles, rundowns on clan-specific styles of killing—the whole thing. Files on all the different worship cults, chat rooms, fan voting—right now the Gnashers are the most popular. There’s a lot of Bugsy fanatics out there, though. Me, I think there’s something majestic about the Tailpipe. And I think if we could learn the Tartaran terms for the clan types we could give them names that are, you know, more fitting, that honor the whole gestalt of that demon type. And I’m working on that.”

  Melissa and I looked at each other, then at the stranger. “Did you say fans? And . . . Bugsy fanatics?” She turned to push one of the cats, a fat tabby named Stimpy, away from the door. The cat wanted to get to what he thought would be outside, and he was pacing behind us, staring at the partly open door into the hall.

  “Sure. The demons have a major fan base.”

  “A fan base?” she said. “But they’re slaughtering us. In huge numbers.”

  “Well, yeah, but serial killers had a big fan following, and so did Hitler. Still does. I spoke to a Gnasher online—he said he was a Gnasher and I think he was, but that’s, you know, controversial in fan circles—um, spoke to him in the chat room, right? And he said Hitler is actually—” He broke off. Chuckled. “You guys are staring at me like I’m nuts, but you’re really the ones who’re out of it. There was a Fox Channel special—they have that mobile Fox Channel transmitter, on that bus that uses that satellite info and dodges the demons. They have that show The Clans and it’s just pure demonophile stuff.”

  “O-kayyyy,” I said. “Whatever. We can let you have some canned goods, what you can carry. I know the building’s been getting unevenly supplied—there was a raid on the Army convoy or something, and uh . . .”

  “Ahh—actually . . .” He was exchanging stares with the tabby cat. “I’d rather have one of your cats. One or two. You have, what, five?”

  Melissa tilted her head as she gazed at him, trying to see if he was kidding. “You’re joking, right?”

  “Um—no. I can trade you all kinds of stuff for a couple of cats. Or as many as you want to give me.”

  “Food’s that hard to get?” I asked. “I just offered—”—

  “No, it’s for sacrifice. I’ve got an online relationship with that Gnasher—it’s online and ongoing. It’s safe, online. But to continue the contact, he requires sacrifices, and he’ll accept animals.”

  “No,” I said. “Not a chance. Good-bye. Move away from the door or I’ll shout for the soldiers.”

  Then I saw that he was staring at Melissa’s chest. I thought, at first, he was staring at her breasts, but his gaze was lower. And he was reaching behind him. I’ve got an online relationship with that Gnasher. Online and ongoing.

  “Oh shit,” I said. He put his shoulder against the door so we couldn’t slam it, and he whipped the automatic pistol around to shove it through the opening. “Run, Melissa!” I yelled.

  I jerked the wrist of his gun hand toward me with one hand, the other pulling his elbow, pulling him off balance. He instinctively pulled his arm back a little so the gun tilted up, and I pushed, hard—and Melissa helped me, ignoring my glare—and the gun muzzle went back as the gun went off pointing into Dervin’s right eye socket, blowing his eye back into his skull, his brains out through the top of his head in a sudden, brief, thick-red fountain.

  We threw his body off the balcony. I don’t expect anyone will come and ask about it.

  Then I had to run to the bathroom to vomit, as Melissa knelt by me, sobbing softly and stroking my hair.

  I’m going to go brush my teeth again. At least my hands have stopped shaking.

  In spring 1989, I came home from school to find our television taken apart, all over the living room floor, and my mom and her boyfriend, Curtis, crouched, tweaking amidst the parts.

  “I know what you think,” she said, grinning, so crankedup it was an involuntary grin. I saw she’d lost a couple more teeth.

  I snorted and tried to ignore them, skirting the wreckage of the TV, the tools they’d used to take it apart, trying to escape upstairs. Curtis was glaring at me, jaws working, grinding—like a Gnasher, it seems to me now. There was a buzzing in his deep-hollowed eyes, a vein throbbing on his forehead. (Yeah, the Bugsy’s doomed pet, Robert, looked like Curtis, except Curtis was somewhat cleaner.)

  “You got a problem, kid?”

  “No.” I was almost to the sta
irs. Then I stopped, staring. My boom box my aunt had given me. They’d taken it apart. They’d destroyed it. I stared at it, tears in my eyes. It was almost the only thing I owned. I loved music. And they . . .

  “There was a—a bug in it. Curtis found a bug in it,” Mom was babbling. “There was a whatdoyoucallit govermint gover-mind mind-control controller bug in it. Hon, we found it—where is it, I’ll show you!”

  She scrabbled in the parts and came up with a piece of the CD laser.

  “That’s for reading CDs,” I said, barely audibly. “That’s not—”—

  But Curtis heard me and snarled, “You’re saying I’m full of shit?”

  I shrugged, dazed, wiping my eyes. “You just . . .” I wasn’t thinking about what I was saying anymore, which was a mistake. “You just do what crank cases do. You guys are tweaking and you take shit apart and you can’t get it back together because you’re on a tweaking thing. They all do that. It’s a simple inevitability.”

  Curtis guffawed. “You hear that pretentious shit?” He put on his lame version of an English accent: “It’s a ‘simple inevitability’!” He stood up, locking his eyes on me.

  My mother was feeling the plunge, the crash, slumping where she sat. Her voice was dead as she muttered, “Oh leave him alone; let’s put this shit back together—”—

  “You know why he talks that way, the little fucking snot? He studies art, he reads Jane fucking Austen! How come? To keep himself separate from us, that’s what, to make himself higher—oh, he’s on a real higher fucking plane, your little prick—”—

  “I don’t know why I’d want to keep separate,” I said, wishing I could shut up and run. “Why I wouldn’t want to be a crank burnout, I don’t know.”

  “You little fuck! What’d you call me!”

  After that, he was up and hitting me, and I was trying to shield myself with my school backpack and he was tearing it from me and swacking me with it, knocking me down, kicking me, cracking my ribs. Then I was scrambling away as my mom tried to pull him back, babbling something about I was just a kid and didn’t understand and forgive him, Curtis, for he knows not what he does. And then he caught me and was dragging me back by the shirttail and I was tearing my shirt to get away from him and running through waves of pain to get to the back door and shouting incoherently. He threw a stereo tweeter at me—it went through the kitchen window—and then he was hitting Mom because she was holding him back and I turned to pull him off her and he hit me, knocked me flat, breaking my nose, and then I heard shouts from the front door.

  Some cop had been passing at the corner and a neighbor flagged him down; she’d heard the shouts, seen the window shattering.

  Curtis went to jail and did time for assault and possession of a controlled substance, and I went to a foster home, lucked into some pretty nice foster parents, and for two years I focused on doing art that had nothing to do with me or my life and never thinking about anything except what kept me out in front of the pursuer, the dogged pursuit of what it hurts to think about.

  Later, 1999, I was out on my own, pretty young, and believing that pure art was the only way out of human suffering. Then I heard about my mom’s suicide. Nothing. I felt nothing. I was out in front of feeling anything about it, way out in front and going at a good clip ahead of it.

  And then one day I was given an assignment I didn’t want—to do some art inspired by a newspaper article, any article. I tried to be inspired by a science article, but nothing came. The only article that seemed to transfer onto the canvas was a long piece about the slave children of Haiti. Was it December 1999? I think so. There were, I read, an estimated two hundred thousand children in Haiti sold into virtual slavery, into indentured servitude and worse, by their parents, sometimes for as little as ten dollars. More often than not the child was given a box in the yard to sleep in, was not allowed to meet the owners’ eyes, not permitted to play with other children, not acknowledged at birthdays or Christmas. They were unpaid, underfed, barely clothed, oft-beaten servants. It was technically illegal, but the authorities in Haiti shrugged and said there was nothing they could do because it was “traditional.” I began to draw photo-realistic images of the children—I began to see particular children who, I felt, were not imagined, who really existed, who were actually living in these conditions, often competing with dogs for scraps to eat; working despite having fractured bones, fractures received in beatings . . . dying . . . and replaced by others. And I couldn’t sleep. I began to feel them out there, to feel their suffering like radiation in the air, like heat or a burning UV light. Then I heard about several thousand Albanians kept in prison by the Serbians even after we’d bombed them into submission in Kosovo: twelve-year-old boys crammed in with men, fifty to a room made for eight, forgotten by the diplomats. I could feel them there. I read about children in Africa forced to join roaming gangs who called themselves revolutionaries—forced, as initiation, to shoot their own sisters and brothers in the head. I felt their feelings as if they were my own, shared them in waves, transmitted through some unknowable medium. Children in the United States whose parents were crack addicts, speed freaks, brutal drunks; children who were taken away from abusive parents and, because there were not enough foster parents, were put in juvenile detention lockups and forgotten—though they’d committed no crime. I could hear the whimpers, the groans of the suffering in the world, and I heard something else—sardonic laughter behind it all. I saw the indifference of those who committed these crimes, and I saw the motivation behind that indifference: simple abject selfishness, pure appetite. And I saw, beneath that selfishness, that unfettered appetite, the faces of demons . . . of demons . . . of demons.

  The nervous breakdown was swift in coming. But I was in the hospital for only three months. I quit the medication the day I quit the hospital. I simply learned to plug my ears, to not hear the groan of the world. To deaden myself. To go back to sleep.

  I managed it most of the time, anyway. Most of us do. It’s a skill you learn.

  Then the sky thickened, and the clouds hung heavy, and gave birth to the Seven Clans . . .

  7

  Has it been three days or four? With all that’s happened, and happened so fast, and the journey across the various time zones—I don’t know.

  A few days ago I woke to hear Melissa talking to someone. It wasn’t the way she talked to the cats.

  I sprang from bed, afraid there’d been a break-in, found her in the living room—on a cell phone I hadn’t seen before. She was looking at a drawing I’d done . . . done and done and done over again.

  “No, I think this is it. Come and see it. Now, seriously. Okay.” She broke the connection, turned to see me staring at her.

  “Where’d you get that phone?”

  “Nyerza gave it to me. I just haven’t needed it till now. They gave it to me for something specific. We’re here about you, as much as anything else, you know. They felt you needed a haven, a familiar place to go to ground for—” she pointed at the drawing “—for this, I think. They’re on their way here. I have to meditate. Wait out here, okay?”

  “But . . .”

  She wouldn’t say anything else and didn’t come out of her room till they arrived four hours later, in the same helicopter they’d left in.

  Nyerza and Paymenz came into the living room, looking around with, I thought, relief. Cluttered and eccentric, but it was a home, even so. I wondered what conditions they’d been living in. Both men looked haggard; Paymenz wore the same clothes I’d last seen him in. He embraced Melissa, shook my hand, greeted the cats, as Nyerza stood at a small wooden table I used for my art, looked at one of my drawings.

  “Have you had enough to eat?” Paymenz asked.

  “Sure,” I said. With the intermittent famines going on out there, it would’ve been childish to complain about the quality of the food. We were lucky to eat anything.

  “There appears to be a corpse on the roof,” Paymenz said. “The birds have been at him, so it’s hard to
tell, but he seems to have been . . . filleted.”

  “Yes. There was a Bugsy up there, but the Bugsy wouldn’t come near Melissa. The guy on the roof was supposed to get at her, some way. He failed and—”—

  “And have there been other human attacks?” Nyerza asked, looking up from the table.

  “One. Prompted by some guy’s Internet contact with the demons, oddly enough.”

  “Not so odd,” Paymenz said, sitting wearily on the arm of the easy chair. “They’ve been very playful that way.” He smiled crookedly. “The Gnashers have developed a real affection for mass media. I expect them to sign with William Morris soon.”