Demons

by John Shirley

  Some of the soldiers whimpered, seeing the demons gather.

  “More are coming,” said the man in the Sharkadian hood, stepping forward; the Bugsys holding back. The man adopted a low, portentous voice. “Your destruction of the new world will end here.”

  “We destroy nothing,” Paymenz said. “We only awaken.”

  “And what becomes of those you damage with your waking?” the man demanded. “They go mad; they kill themselves.”

  “Some do—awakening such people brings to them a particular remorse, one that’s hard to bear. They have more to be remorseful about.”

  “You are murdering them with your black magic,” the man said, perplexing us all.

  “Black magic?” I blurted.

  “The angels whom your magic has blighted, darkened, have been winnowing the human race, removing those whose souls were not pure enough to ascend at the great dance to come.”

  I had to laugh—maybe from a weariness-bred hysteria. “Angels! Is that what they’ve told you? Winnowing? Purifying? You see them torture and mangle people and you still believe they have some kind of good intentions?”

  “We see the distortion your dark magic has brought about!”

  I looked at the rest of the parading mob. I saw there were at least fifty who were dressed more or less normally; and among those painted faces were many expressions besides hostility: dismay, confusion, confoundment, uncertainty. It gave me hope.

  “Yes, Ira,” Nyerza said, voicing my thoughts. “Doubt can be heartening—some of them do doubt. Doubt is the gate that opens to truth.”

  “Shith on themth, fugemall,” said the Bugsy. It gestured to three men near him who raised their rifles. “Killum bathuds!”

  Nyerza opened his mouth to speak, but an echoing crackle of automatic fire erupted from the guardsmen.

  And the three mob riflemen fell dead.

  The crowd fell back—retreating but not dispersing—an electric uncertainty holding us all in place.

  I tried to pull Melissa to cover, but she gently pushed my hands away and fell to her knees, facing the mob, her lips moving in prayer. The holy men with us followed suit; each of them praying in the posture of his tradition.

  There was a single gunshot from the mob, which whistled over our heads—a rifle shot from a shaking, skinny young man, naked and gaping. His tentative gunfire was returned by the guardsmen—returned conclusively. He spun around with the impact of a dozen bullets. The crowd cried out and drew back farther, away from the fallen man; most of them throwing themselves down for cover or hunkering behind trees. A few dropped their guns and raised their hands.

  Others took up shooting positions behind the trees.

  The demons in the sky veered closer. The Bugsys raised their fists.

  The guardsmen took aim; the gunmen in the mob took aim.

  Then the sky grew dark.

  There were no clouds. But in fearful silence, the sky darkened of itself. I looked at the sun—there was no eclipse. All the sky, instead, was eclipsed—not blackened but darkened so that a deep twilight reigned.

  Then the Gold in the Urn emerged from Melissa.

  The Gold shimmered and sparked in the air in front of her as she continued to pray. The orb seemed to grow—to become thirty, forty feet across. And as it grew, details became evident. I seemed to make out a swirl of faces within the light—men and women of all races, ancient races and modern, Asian and European and African and Latin. Was that Mendel? It seemed so.

  Everyone gazed at the Gold. It was the greatest source of light, with the sky blotted; even the Bugsys seemed frozen with a kind of profound misgiving as they stared into the swirling radiance of sheer conscious being.

  Melissa’s voice came from somewhere—from the Gold as much as from Melissa—and it seemed to carry that more-than-human resonance that vibrated in the heart and the head as well as the ears:

  “There are those held captive here only by their fear and their uncertainty: To those I say, pray for self-knowledge, pray to see yourself as you are, pray to see your connectedness to the Higher and to see the false for what it is. Pray to see your rootedness in the nature-mind, in a self that is no individual but that delights in your individuality; pray to see your essence; pray to see your sleep; pray for awakening. Pray for the murderers and the murdered. Pray for That Certain One; pray for demons and the demon ridden; pray for your enemies; pray again for yourself. If you know that you know nothing, your prayers to know will be answered. Pray to see yourself as you really are.”

  There was an immediate response from many in the mob, a cry of despair paradoxically mingled with sudden hope. I saw almost half of them go to their knees. Praying, praying to see themselves as they really were, the bad with the good. I saw their anguish, their relief. I heard them shouting many things but all the same. I heard Shephard crying out, sobbing. I saw the Bugsys jumping up and down with fury. I saw Gnashers coming through the crowd from the rear, rending as they came . . . then freezing in place, to make ready for what came next.

  Then I saw the incubus. That’s what I call it, anyway.

  It didn’t come all at once but seemed to come in questing fingers of iridescent black ooze that streamed across the dirt between the dead trees, streaming from a gathering of demons behind the mob. The demons froze in place like statues as the ooze nosed its way from them in rivulets and shiny-black glutinous branchings to merge into a great pool before us—before the Gold in the Urn.

  Like a sentient pool of petroleum, the black syrup purposefully churned and took shape: many shapes, seven shapes.

  Seven black imps stood before us. I stared at them, expecting to see shapes that corresponded to the seven clans. But they were all the same shape, a silhouette of a human being, an androgynous human being, both male and female, each about two feet tall. Each was filmed with an iridescent sheen that was almost exactly like the brackish colors gasoline makes on a puddle of water.

  The imps rushed toward one another, and then bounded into a manic, circular dance, as we stared in disgusted wonder. The circle grew smaller, and they began to clamber, to cluster, to crawl stickily onto one another, like a sickening mockery of acrobats who make a tower of human bodies. They stood one atop the other, clutched together, and formed a shape synthesized from the sum of their small bodies, an almost Escherian formation of the big out of the small: a seven-foot-high incubus made of oily, iridescent, faceless imps, tightly clasped one against another. Its own face was a crude suggestion of eyes, nose, and mouth, a contemptuously unfinished sketch. The imps that constituted its body seemed to squirm up and down, outlines visible within the androgynous shape of the incubus.

  It turned its eyeless face toward us, and we felt its gaze on us like a swarm of lice.

  One of the holy men screamed and threw himself flat. With a hoarse cry, Mimbala tried to rush at the thing. Nyerza pulled him back, but not before Mimbala fired a pistol at it. We could see the vitreous surface ripple with the impact, but the bullet was drawn into it and swallowed.

  But still Melissa knelt, praying, serene. Still the Gold in the Urn burned and turned in the air, unperturbed. The holy men prayed; Paymenz prayed; Nyerza prayed; and I . . . I’m ashamed to record that I only stared at the scene in paralyzed fear.

  The incubus reflected a little of the light of the Gold in the Urn. It took a step toward the Gold and put out its hands, and the Gold reacted with a spasm that was a kind of retreat or revulsion. Melissa only twitched; her face showed a sickened grimace and then became serene again.

  The demons howled in glee.

  The incubus made to advance once more.

  Then Shephard was up, staggering from his wheelchair, past the orb of light, directly into the path of the incubus. He shouted wordless defiance and flung himself at it, fists raised—and vanished shrieking into it as wholly as the bullet had.

  A useless sacrifice, I thought, choking with a grief that Shephard perhaps didn’t merit—but then, for me, Shephard was all wretches who wan
ted redemption, and my grief for him was very personal.

  Melissa stood and spoke. She was smiling, her voice calm and clear:

  “He’s there still—our lost friend Professor Shephard! All of you, here! Pray for this man who betrayed us all—pray for him!”

  The incubus seemed to hesitate at the edge of the circle of light—and took a step back. The light expanded to encompass the space the incubus had occupied.

  The demons raged and stamped forward in desperation at this, but the light of the Gold, expanding warningly, held them at bay.

  And we prayed for Shephard, who had vanished within the incubus of the seven imps.

  That was the incubus’s undoing: a prayer for another, for an enemy, predicated on prayer for self-knowledge.

  So it seemed inexorably right when we saw Shephard’s face emerging from the incubus—gone!—and then reappearing for a moment, one of the half-seen faces in the Gold in the Urn, weeping with joy.

  And as Shephard appeared, the incubus began to fall apart—first into its component imps, then into a pool of black that seeped into the cracks of the earth, and vanished from sight.

  The demons roared in frustrated fury but fell back before us as we followed the Gold in the Urn and Melissa, marching forward through the gate into the final Industrial Sacrifice Zone, down underground, where more than a thousand slept in their own fluorescent-lit purgatory.

  Those among the mob who had heard Melissa, who had prayed for self-knowledge, followed us joyfully through the gate into the underground place. And out again after it was over—back to what remained of their lives.

  The demons lit into their remaining followers, rending in fury—but many escaped as the awakenings began and the demons ran in terrified confusion and began to fall away into themselves, falling into nowhere. Vanishing from the Earth.

  Getting smaller with distance as they went nowhere at all.

  Almost a year since I wrote the above.

  The Gold in the Urn passed from Melissa that day, months ago, as soon as she emerged from the final ISZ. She collapsed—but only from exhaustion.

  She opened her eyes once as I wheeled her on a gurney to the plane. She murmured, “All sparks are struck . . . from . . .” Her eyes closed.

  She was asleep—the good sleep—before she finished saying it. I said the rest for her: “From the same forge.”

  She slept for two days. When she woke, the Gold was gone, but she was changed. She awoke . . . awake.

  Melissa is two months pregnant. I’m hoping for a boy. She’s hoping for a girl. We argue about the name. Right now I’m in our bedroom, working at a little wooden TV tray table. I’m looking forward to us moving out of here soon and into our own place, something larger. Just now she’s teaching a seminar at the Hall of Remembering; I’m supposed to meet her for dinner. Chinese food.

  We’re living with her father, who’s had not only his electricity returned, and water, but has had an unspeakably large government grant quietly bestowed on him. “Perhaps”—Paymenz chuckled—“the grant will go the way of this administration, if this rhetoric continues.”

  He said this the night we watched with real amazement, on the evening news, the government giving its official opinion that the demons had not existed as a physical reality, that it had all been some kind of hallucinogenic gas attack by a cult of industrialists who had had an obscure world-domination plan.

  There is, somehow, no existing footage of the demons—nothing on video or digital. Nothing. It has all gone black. We have our own explanations for that; the officials have theirs. It doesn’t matter.

  All the deaths, the spokesmen said, were carried out by human beings, some of them in costume, possibly some robotically augmented. Those who remember otherwise, said the spokesmen, remember hallucinations formed by suggestion, spawned by faked video and mass hypnosis. The previous President was allegedly killed by a hallucinogen-addled assassin.

  The world tries to forget, as of course it must. A World’s Fair is planned, an Olympics. There is much reconstruction. But there are enough of us who remember—millions who are sure of what they remember—and who know that the spiritual world is the material world; that the material world is the spiritual world; that the universe is just a conception in a mind that dreams what it must, that calls for us to return to its deepest places, through awakening to who we really are.

  Me, I’m doing a little writing and some graphics for Memorial magazine, which Paymenz funds and which I oversee. Melissa is just Melissa—most of the time. She only rarely chooses to show her true self to me. Her higher self is hard for me to look at—there are no sunglasses for that light. But she opens the shutters a little when she teaches the hundreds who come to her, to hear her speak at the unprepossessing little edifice they have built for her, the Hall of Remembering, in an oak grove on a former cattle ranch near Martinez.

  And a sadly smiling, mustachioed little man named Yanan has come from Turkey to live near us. He was sent by Nyerza, he said, to be my special instructor, to prepare me for the time—maybe soon, maybe years from now—when I will enter the Conscious Circle.

  Every so often, I take a step closer to that place where I see myself as I really am; where I see who I really am; where I forgive the unforgivable. Every step toward that place is joyful—but every step hurts.

  BOOK TWO

  UNDERCURRENT

  “I believe that Demons take advantage of the night to mislead the unwary—although, you know, I don’t believe in them.”

  —EDGAR ALLAN POE

  Nine Years Having Passed . . .

  1

  San Francisco

  Let us speak plainly. Let us not be cute about it. Stephen Isquerat only dreamed what happened in the little room at the top of the pyramid of the West Wind building. There is such a building, but there is no such room, not precisely. It exists only in the dream and, perhaps, in the place where dreams refract reality.

  You woke in bed remembering it, he said to himself, all that working day. It was just a dream, and again, just a dream. So let go of it.

  But the memory of the dream had dug into his mind like a tick. The squirming faces, the mushroom trays.

  Stephen was still thinking about it at five that afternoon as he sat in a squeaking chair in Dale Winderson’s office in the West Wind building in downtown San Francisco, waiting for an audience with Dale himself, West Wind’s CEO.

  “An audience with the pope!” his supervisor, Quellman, had said, laughing off his envy. Envy because it was young Steve Isquerat who had been summoned to see Dale himself in person, privately. It had to be an opportunity; the CEO didn’t fire anyone in person.

  Stephen wished he could change seats. The deathly dry breath of the air conditioner snuffled and whirred at the back of his neck; he could feel it lifting the little hairs there. But Winderson’s receptionist glanced at him sharply from time to time across her track-lit domain, the dust-blue expanse of synthetic carpet; he might seem eccentric if he abruptly changed seats. She was young and flare coifed and sullen, behind that vast U-shaped desk situated under the enormous WW logo, a small thorn of a woman compressed between the huge symbol and the huge desk.

  There were no windows. Outside, he knew, it was a crisp late-autumn day, pleasantly misty. In here, seasons didn’t exist.

  He shifted in the seat, and it squeaked reproachfully. The seats squeaked whenever you sat down or moved in them at all. They were made of a West Wind product, Inimicalene, a polymer that had always made Stephen recoil when he touched it. A variant of it was used as a kind of cellophane, and having to open things wrapped in the squeaky, repellent substance always made him react as if a cold drink had hit an exposed tooth nerve.

  He squirmed again under the air conditioner’s chill breath on the back of his neck . . . and twitched at the squeak of the chair.

  As a supervisor of new product development, he’d suggested they might replace Inimicalene with a variant that was less uncomfortable to the touch. Everyone at
the meeting, he remembered, had stared at him.

  Uncomfortable? What did he mean?

  No one admitted the stuff was loathsome, but he saw them all shudder when they touched it.

  And there was something in that experience, he reflected, that he couldn’t grasp, something connected to the dream—a feeling of revulsion that could not be articulated.

  The dream played itself again in his memory, even as he tried not to think about it, even as he tried to ready himself for his meeting with Winderson.