Demons

by John Shirley

  Doubts flickered, and were gone.

  She was queen here.

  She spoke the names again.

  “Well? You said something, maybe?”

  The voice was by turns fruity and reptilian, mocking a human ethnicity.

  “You’re asserting dominance over me, I believe, dear lady?”

  It laughed—or made a sound like a musical saw in the hands of a lunatic, a sound that she took to be laughter.

  It was a male voice, more or less, but there seemed to be more than one voice, and certainly more than one timbre; and she knew that the princes, despite the implication of gender in that human term for them, were neither male nor female. Some of them, when they showed themselves on this plane, possessed humanlike genitalia—but these were affectations, decorations, and sometimes weapons.

  She looked around and saw its head thrusting out of the wall, as if through a porthole that didn’t exist, between the polished metal mirror and the old stainless steel paper towel dispenser. Issuing from the wall itself, quite seamlessly, it almost looked like another kind of bathroom fixture.

  It was the head of what some people, during the invasion, had called a Gnasher.

  Mostly jaws, that head, with rather pretty blue human eyes set along the top of the flattish skull—set in a way human eyes would never be: like the eyes of a manta ray. The flexible, shark-toothed mouth wrapped most of the way around the head, which was now tilted back a bit on its dragon-skin neck, to grin at her.

  “Come over here and give us a wet one!”

  it said.

  “I remain centered in my power,” she said, both ritually and declaratively, “and you at my periphery. So be it.”

  “Oh, don’t be so stuffy!”

  The head turned in place, as if in a socket, upside down, then right side up again.

  For a vertiginous moment she felt that it was she who was extending from a wall, standing on the wall in defiance of gravity, and the demon—as ordinary mortals called them—was sticking its head up out of the ground, like an animal emerging from a burrow. She felt as if she might fall into those gaping, mocking jaws . . .

  She growled at herself in quiet fury. It was exerting some kind of influence, some sort of psychic disorientation on her; and she was falling for it like a tyro. Idiot! Wake up and take your throne! You are its queen or its victim. Choose to be its queen!

  She found her orientation again and muttered names of control.

  “Yes indeedy,”

  the Gnasher said jovially, effortlessly reading her mind.

  “You do deserve to be a queen—and you must have all a queen’s trappings. Hence and therefore . . .”

  Suddenly, behind her, there was a metallic squealing, the grating crunch of dislodged concrete. She only half turned before something thrust under her from behind. She fell back onto a toilet.

  The toilet, she realized, had pulled itself from the wall, extending on pipes and scraping across the floor, leaving bits of porcelain behind. It had scraped through the magic diagram; but it didn’t matter. The diagram, she knew, was really just a device that forced her mind into the proper state to control the entities summoned.

  The toilet induced her to sit, like a magic chair in a Disney cartoon, and the demon threw its voice, so its laughter was now reverberating from the bowl of the toilet and up through her hips. She squelched an urge to leap up, screaming, slapping at her rump—an infantile mental picture formed of the toilet and its hinged seat having grown teeth, snapping at her. Instead she forced herself to lean regally back, as if all this was her own will.

  “Any seat is a throne for the queen of sorcerers, even in mockery, even in irony,” the sorceress said. “Why not give me a plunger for a scepter? But it won’t diminish my power, which increases in every light, even in the garish light of ridicule.”

  “Well said!”

  the demon crowed with an utter lack of sincerity, its voice still coming from underneath her. The Spirit Prince began to move easily up within the concrete wall, as if it were liquid, making it ripple faintly. As it went, its body began to emerge from the wall projecting horizontally—first shoulders, then upper breast. It began to declaim the demonic glossolalia that some adepts in the Undercurrent imagined to be of great significance but which she felt was just an oblique method of seeding disorientation.

  “Undertake to appreciate the undertaker, for the identity in question is held to be contingent, and not a matter of necessity, i.e., of the meaning of the terms used to report observations of the two kinds in question. Let us then celebrate Jeremy Bentham, British philosopher, mouthpiece for the quantitative comparison of the amounts of pleasure and pain that will occur as the consequences of alternative courses of action. Had I been there!”

  It threw out a number of phrases in Tartaran she could not handily translate as it emerged to its waist, wading through the wall, up toward the ceiling. Its soliloquy returned to English.

  “Oh! Had I but been there when Bentham enumerated the Dimensions of Pain and Pleasure. Do y’know, he laid ‘em out according to intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, purity, fecundity, and extent! And how much more directly he can study the dimensions of pain, in particular, and the pleasure in others quite beyond his reach, now that he belongs to the Lower Princes!”

  The sorceress snorted. She knew that “the Lower Princes” was a term used to describe the “devils” employed by “Satan” in “Hell” to feed on those who had insisted on remaining outside what the Conscious Circle called “God’s Sphere of Light.” Every so often the Spirit Princes tested the leaders of the Undercurrent, to see if such mythology frightened them.

  She stood and said, “Cease the projection of your voice.”

  “How’s this, girlfriend?”

  it asked. Its voice was coming from the air, about ten feet to the left of its head.

  “That will do. Now let us proceed to our Great Work. The preliminary steps are completed.”

  The demon had reached the ceiling now, and was upside down like a repulsive chandelier. Its arms were not quite free—the hands were still sunk into the material of the ceiling.

  “The preliminary steps are completed, she says . . .”

  It was just possible, she knew, that given the chance—once her head, say, came within reach of its talons—the Gnasher would kill her, and kill her gleefully, even if it did disrupt the Spirit Princes’ agenda. It was more than just impulsiveness—the Princes had no sense of human values and did not always place planning ahead of murderous delight.

  Its drool fell from spike-glittering jaws, to sizzle on the floor.

  “How nonchalant she is! ‘The preliminary steps are completed!’ Oh, really? I think not!”

  Its voice continued to project across the room, and she realized it was attempting to divide her attention, to make her giddy. She decided to act as if it didn’t bother her. Though it did.

  “And, you know,”

  it went on,

  “I really do think ‘not.’ I think: Not! Not is what I specialize in thinking. And I am here to tell you that you rubbery-bag THINGS do NOT!”

  It snapped the word NOT at her with its cymbal-clashing jaws, its upper body lashing at her like a cobra, so that she staggered back and fell onto the toilet again, banging her tailbone painfully. It laughed like the mad musical saw and drew casually back, continued speaking, now and then darting its head forward with the louder words, just to see her twitch.

  “You temporary bag-fluid THINGS do NOT have the necessary item. Cease all prevarication! You have it NOT! Nor do you truly have control of the retriever of the necessary item! Such as I cannot go into the place where the necessary item is—it would be like a human swallowing its own brain! But one of you pink primate THINGS can go there. In the sequence you experience, YEW”

  —its accent had suddenly become Texan—

  “do NOT have the necessary I-TEMMMMM!”

  “Hear me now, O Prince!” she said, standing. “You are a prince,
truly—but I am a goddess as well as a queen. I am She Whom You Will Obey! Stand your ground outside the circle! Your queen and goddess commands you!”

  “Oh, sure. Whatever,”

  it said, its accent becoming Southern Californian. It waggled its head in an impossible mockery of human affectation. Since it was hanging upside down from the ceiling, it looked like a spastic bat.

  “You’re all, ‘stay out of my space, yo,’ and I’m all, ‘don’t GO there, girl.’ ”

  “Cease this banter,” she commanded. “It does not confuse me. And harken now: The necessary item is soon to be in place. We’ve only just located the retriever.”

  “Now hear this, SKIN THING,”

  the demon snarled, mocking her tone.

  “What you think of as the schedule within what you call the ‘flow of time”—the choreography of probability, my little queen—will have to be subjectively accelerated. Am I speaking two-dimensionally enough?”

  “I am a three-dimensional creature,” she said, trying to refute its intimidation.

  “There you err. Only in trivial aspects are you three-dimensional.”

  It said something rapid, almost gibbering, in Tartaran and some form of ancient Latin she couldn’t translate, then went on in English.

  “Now I tell you this: The Retriever must be exposed to your worldly workings; his hands must become dirty or we cannot guide him. He must walk through the fields and smell the death and not repent.”

  “This we understand.”

  “Listen your maj-hystery—O, Queen of Grit and Sour Smells—LISTEN! It must be what you call ‘sooner’! Your enemies are seeking the Retriever, too! Too, too solid, this flesh—only your flesh, my dear, is really like a balloon filled with red, diluted mud and just a spark of life, and how easy it is to pop a balloon!”

  It waded once more across the ceiling, down the wall, into the floor, this time turning right side up, coming at her through the floor. Sunk into the floor up to its waist, its hands hidden in the tile as if it were a bog.

  It giggled delightedly.

  “My darling dear, my queen, go little Queenie, oh!”

  It jerked its arm up and its taloned hand came free of the floor as it lashed out at her.

  She stood her ground, exerting her magical Will to maintain the integrity of the circle’s bubble of protection—so that the demon’s raking talons stopped at the boundary of the circle.

  Then it laughed, its laughter a demented song.

  And it reached through what she’d supposed to be her infallible wall of protection, its arm extending, stretching like soft plastic . . .

  And it tickled her under the chin with its claws. Then it pinched her right nipple.

  She hardly dared breathe. It could have touched her whenever it wanted, she realized. It could kill her whenever it chose.

  Its jaws widened, as if the back of its head were unzipping to open them all the way around. Three hundred sixty degrees of jaws, so that they should have fallen apart, upper separating from lower, head from neck. But instead, the complete circle of upper jaws oscillated like a coin spinning on a table just before it falls flat. And then the jaws snapped shut, the demon chirping,

  “Hee!”

  Other heads emerged from the ceiling, the wall, the floor. There, a head popped up from the tile—it looked like a man’s head with the features scrambled, set free to move about, so that they wandered about the front of the skull: The eyes crawling like snails, the lips humping along like caterpillars, the nose sliding to dance around what appeared to be a cigarette made of flesh. Then the features found their organization, wandered into place, and became the Prince people had called a Bugsy.

  “Be minth, Valentinth,”

  it said.

  “I’ve got somethingth for yewww, about ten feeth under the floor here.”

  A Grindum, roaring so that the walls shook, was shouldering its way from the wall. The raggedy feelers of a Dishrag waved and beckoned from the ceiling. A Sharkadian was moving across the floor toward her like—

  Like a shark.

  And she was backing toward the door.

  “Your advice is understood, O Prince,” she said, managing to keep her voice from quavering much, hardly able to hear it herself over the pounding of her pulse. “I will accelerate the program. And now—I banish you back to—to your—”—

  The Sharkadian leapt up from the floor like a killer whale leaping from the sea, and came at her—

  And grabbed her as she turned to run. It gripped her shoulders from behind.

  “You . . . you will release me. . . . Now . . .”

  There came a metallic singsong cackling, and then she felt herself propelled, like a drunk from a bar, out the door . . .

  To fall on her face on the sidewalk, skinning her nose and palms. She heard the door slam behind her.

  Panting with fear, face and hands burning, she got to her feet and almost fell again, swaying on rubbery knees. The men in the van stared at her, but didn’t come out to help. The treacherous cowards.

  She steadied herself and turned to look. The rest room building’s door was closed—and the lock was locked.

  She hurried to the van. She got in and gasped, “Turn on the filter.”

  The air cleanser hummed. She sat quietly in her seat as the van hastily backed up, then barreled down the road. The others looked at her but chose not to ask why she’d been ejected that way. They were afraid of her, perhaps—or afraid to know.

  Her hands gripped her knees; her knuckles were white.

  It couldn’t be, she thought, that we never had control of them. That couldn’t be. I must’ve done something wrong, incanted something badly. My Will must have failed. They couldn’t have been toying with me all along.

  I am queen of the sorceresses. I am a goddess, Becoming. I am no one’s plaything!

  When they got to the highway, the sorceress spoke aloud. “Anybody got anything to drink?” she rasped. “I mean, something strong?”

  2

  Portland, Oregon

  There were twenty-three people sitting in a circle around the large, cluttered, musty old room. They sat on straight-backed chairs or, straight-backed themselves, on floor cushions. A conference table had been moved out in order to make room for the group. The window shades were drawn, and a small electric chandelier overhead had been dimmed to the brightness of a few candles.

  The room was just a little too warm, and Ira was wishing he’d taken off his sweater before the sitting. He didn’t want to distract the others by taking it off now. It was a raw November evening outside, and most of them had overdressed. Ira sat in a light sheen of sweat, directing his attention to his inner world, to his sensations, to his feelings, to his heart and the heart within his heart, and to a certain place in the very center of himself. He watched detachedly as his train of free associations slipped endlessly by. He was distantly amused by many of them.

  There was something else, something indescribable . . . something that flowed out of the present, from the silence that lay within the innermost circle of his watchful detachment.

  Everyone was completely silent; it had been some time since Yanan, the leader of the meditation, had spoken. Ira could feel him there, but he couldn’t read him. Yanan was an enigma.

  But no—they weren’t completely silent. Though they didn’t speak, it was just before dinnertime, and their stomachs gurgled and mewed, absurdly loud in the quiet. Sometimes it sounded like an orchestral section, tuning up. Santos, from Brazil, cleared his throat; an Egyptian woman sitting nearby shifted in her chair, grimacing with discomfort. They’d all been sitting on the hard seats for an hour and a half.