Demons

by John Shirley

  Ira remembered an expression from his boyhood. Mom’s “Boyfriend Thing” had used it: You’ll find your ass in a world of pain.

  And here it was—the world of pain. Mountains and valleys, seas and winds of pain. Some pains dull, some sharp, some spiking brightly colored, others like an ashen plain.

  He wanted to make something up, to make these men happy, to make it end, but he couldn’t talk; his mouth was quivering in some kind of rigor like lockjaw. It just wouldn’t work, and he felt himself slipping away.

  Don’t let go, he told himself. You’ll die. But death would make it end, at least. Marcus needs you. Melissa . . .

  He struggled to hold on, to speak, and he struggled within himself. Looking up at the men standing over him, he saw that they were there, and then again they weren’t there. They were simply human appetites and responses, a kind of robot but entirely biological. And as time slowed for him, the batons coming at him in slow motion, the men shimmered, and fora moment he saw their true selves hidden by the masks of demons: The men hitting him were Grindums, scaled down to human size, with grasshopper legs, insectile heads, twists of horns, jaws that spun on their heads like drill bits, and Akesh had become a Bugsy. . . . But . . .

  But the demons had hollow eyes, and inside their empty eye sockets there was another face entirely, looking frightened and trapped: a child trapped inside the demons.

  And then the vision vanished. They were just men again—and the batons struck and bit and ripped at him. The frightening part was that he wasn’t able to feel the batons as much now. The numbness was terrifying, too. They could be ripping him apart and he wouldn’t know it.

  Then he saw someone else: a man from his own country, he thought, judging by the man’s face and clothing. He was a tall, middle-aged man with shiny black hair; he wore a silk San Francisco Giants jacket and jeans tucked into cowboy boots. Maybe he was from the embassy. Maybe the man was here to help. He gestured, and Ira’s inquisitors stepped back.

  As Ira lay there panting, the pain sweeping over him again in mounting waves, he glimpsed something small and metal-glass shiny hovering in the air near the ceiling—a silvery bullet-shaped flying projector with a glass tip. Was it something hallucinatory, a vision like the demons he’d just seen?

  But no—this was real technology; he’d seen it before. And Ira realized that the figure was slightly transparent. The man was a life-sized hologram, projected by the hovering device so that Akesh could see this man, talk to him. Talk to the hologram. The actual man might be anywhere in the world.

  Ira felt himself close to slipping away again . . . afraid that if he went he’d never come back. Marcus needed him. Melissa needed him.

  Akesh spoke to the translator, said something like, “Mister Wondasham?” and then asked a question in the hybrid language of Turkmenistan. The translator whispered something to the little flying machine as if talking to a hovering insect. The machine transmitted the question to the man, somewhere far away.

  “Yes,” the hologram responded, the voice coming rather tinnily from the little floating projector. “He is known to us. Until recently he was protected by proximity to certain people. If we’d gone after him and the girl, the others, the Circle—they would’ve been able to trace the attack back to us; they’d have moved against us. But now he’s blundered into our hands, away from those who shielded him. You did well to tell me. No, don’t translate all that. Just tell Akesh that I know who this man is and that, ah—” The image flickered with interference, then sharpened again. The hologram went on. “And tell him that this man is not one of the environmental terrorists. But he’s something even more dangerous to West Wind—to his government’s partners. He must be made to tell us where the Gold in the Urn has gone. You fools have lost her—so where is she going next? What are they doing at the shrine with the old Shaikh? Ask him—but first, let him lie there and think. Give him a blanket and some soup so he doesn’t die on us. Thengive him another . . . treatment. If he doesn’t respond, after one or two more treatments, make all record of his coming here disappear. And then I’d take it kindly if you’d kill him, if he isn’t already dead by then.”

  Akesh asked one more question—his gestures made clear it was a question. The translator whispered it so softly Ira couldn’t hear it over the booming, the off-key singing in his head. Pain had its own sound, today.

  The hologram’s only answer to the question was yes.

  Then the hologram vanished, and the little bullet-shaped projector flew away.

  Ira thought: Isn’t that a funny way to put it: “I’d take it kindly if you’d . . . if you’d . . .”

  But he began to slip away again.

  There was just time for one more thought: The man had said they had lost track of the Gold in the Urn. They had lost track of the woman. So she at least was safe from them. Oh, thank God. Melissa was . . .

  The sheer misery of being conscious was too much. He stopped fighting. It was delicious to slip into unconsciousness. Nothingness never felt better.

  Elsewhere in Turkmenistan: The desert

  Shaikh Araha sat in the front passenger’s seat of the Jeep, beside Nyerza; Melissa rode in the back, beside the boy who called himself Marcus, who sometimes spoke like a dead man she’d known as Mendel.

  Now, as she glanced at him, as the Jeep bounced over the rutted road in the predawn grayness, he seemed like an ordinary boy. A grave expression on his face, but boys sometimes were grave, weren’t they?

  The word grave made her want to sob. Wasn’t that where her boy was, really? Wasn’t he dead?

  He was here but not here. She shivered and pulled the blanket more tightly around her.

  The sky was clear, but it was cold. The stars seemed points of ice overhead melting where the dawn was coming in the east.

  “I’m glad you’re coming with us Shaikh Araha,” said Marcus. Then he muttered something else in Dutch—a language Marcus could not speak.

  “I am not glad of it,” the old dervish said. “I had more to do at the shrine. But when I drugged the sentries, had my people tie up the men they left to watch you, it was—what is the expression?—casting the die, don’t you know. Now I am a fugitive. I just hope that Hiram and the others get away. They should be all right with my Tekke friends.”

  Melissa leaned forward to speak to Nyerza. Her tone was cold, as it had been with all of them since she’d learned what they’d done to Marcus. “The message from Yanan—did he say when exactly Ira got to Ashgabat? Where he was going?”

  Nyerza spoke without taking his eyes off the road, just turning his head a little so she could hear him over the clunking and rumbling of the Jeep. “No. We presume he was attempting to go to the Fallen Shrine. He seems to have landed, but he never came through customs, according to the dervish Yanan sent to meet him.”

  “What? What does that mean? How could he have landed and not—” She broke off, shaking her head in disbelief. “Oh, hell.”

  “We don’t know,” Nyerza said. “He might be fine.”

  After a while, the Shaikh said, “He is not ‘fine.’ I have a friend who works in the government. Sometimes he can arrange to have people deported or transferred to another facility. If we were to get in and out with the right papers . . .” He sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe. It will be a great risk for him to do this. But . . . I don’t know.” He shook his head just once and the gesture had so much resignation in it.

  Melissa had fought weeping, ever since the revelations of the previous morning. But now she let it come. The chill desert wind sucked away her tears before they reached her cheeks.

  THE JOURNAL OF STEPHEN ISQUERAT

  Writing this early evening, in my cubicle. Still recovering.

  Psychonomics. They call it psychonomics.

  I was lying on my back on the bed in the observatory, and I was looking up through the telescope eyepiece, some kind of little mirror really, and I was seeing an orb in there. I heard Harrison Deane say (I remember his exact words), “Tha
t’s the planet Saturn you’re seeing. It’s seeing you quite as much as you’re seeing it.”

  He asked if I felt anything strange, like a pulsing in my skin. I said yes. He said that an electromagnetic field was taking hold of me. It was quite harmless, he said, but it would put me into a kind of trance, and then my spirit was going to be projected into another place. I asked if it was going to Saturn. He said it would be just passing through there. My spirit was going into another universe, of sorts.

  He said I would find myself passing through “certain unusual scenes.” He said, “You can’t be harmed there—you’ll just be passing through in a way that protects you.”

  Then he said I’d find myself in an office. An ordinary business office, and all I had to do was speak to the man I found there. “Speak with your mind only but as clearly as you can. That will be your first real use of psychonomics.” He said I had to memorize these words: Yes to the West Wind buyout offer. He made me repeat them.

  It was as if all I could see was that ringed orb, filling up my whole sight, getting closer and closer. I managed to repeat, “Yes to the West Wind buyout offer.”

  “Good,” I heard him say. Then I couldn’t hear anyone say anything for a while, because there was a sort of white-noise staticky rushing sound that was getting louder and louder.

  Then I felt a snapping feeling, like something broke in me except it didn’t hurt, and suddenly I was standing there, standing next to Deane and staring down at my own body, which was still lying on the gurney-type table, staring up into the telescope lens.

  Standing outside my own body, I could see that my mouth was slightly open, and a little drool was dripping onto my chin. I tried to reach out and touch my arm, but the white noise got so loud I was swept away by it, and then I was falling toward a glowing sea of energy that changed color from one second to the next. I crashed through it, and it was like turning inside out and outside in but without any pain. I could see Saturn again, hanging there in space above me, it seemed.

  But then the planet was below me and I was falling toward it.

  Stephen stopped typing. He couldn’t think of a way to describe what had happened next. Was that it—or was it that he couldn’t bring himself to write about it? He leaned back in the desk chair in his cubicle and reached for his Styrofoam cup of coffee. He sipped, then put it down. The stuff didn’t taste good cold.

  He looked at his laptop. Maybe it was unwise to write this stuff down at all.

  It had been a way to get the images out of his head. Project it into his computer file. He had to think about it. It wouldn’t leave him alone. It demanded attention. And it demanded a decision.

  He leaned back and closed his eyes. Think about something else. Think about Jonquil.

  But his mind’s eye was filled with the planet below him. Saturn. Or so it appeared. Torn from his body, projected through space, up had become down. He had rushed down into the planet’s atmosphere: an endless storm of multicolored smoke. He passed through layers of shimmering liquid metal, one inside the next. Then he found himself traveling over a gleaming, seething landscape, no longer feeling he was going down—it felt like straight-ahead movement.

  All this time, Stephen’s mind was in a receptive, observational state—it was as if he were racing ahead of his emotional reactions, ahead of his disorientation at being torn from his body, his world, as if he were being pursued by his human feelings and he just managed to keep them from catching up.

  If they did catch him, he would, of course, go quite mad.

  There was something ahead written in living fire in the sky: a kind of glyph, or rune, big as a mountain, and he could feel that the rune was somehow alive and intelligent. It was watching him fly toward it. Stephen was just a soul, a spirit, but it could see him.

  It was shaped like a cross with a wicked hook at the bottom; there were crosshatch elaborations that seemed to shift through a series of meanings.

  As Stephen hurtled toward it, he almost understood its meaning.

  It was a symbol that was also a place; it was a creature that was also a door; it was exactly on the cusp between good and evil. It was physical, but it was purely mental. It thrived on contradiction.

  He flew into its center, and through it, like going through a door . . . a door to another world.

  Then Stephen found himself in that world, no longer winging along but standing on solid ground. He was on a crag that reached up out of a sea of iridescent mist. The sky was crowded with symbols. There was no sun, no visible light source. Everything seemed to add its own faint glow to the collective illumination.

  He looked at the ground. Nothing here was really solid; but the probability of the ground being solid under his feet was sufficient, was just enough, that it remained solid.

  He looked down again and realized he couldn’t see his feet. He looked at his hands, but they weren’t there. He could feel them, but he couldn’t see them. He had no eyes to look around with, but somehow he looked around. He was a node of perception—yet he was walking along the top of a mountain peak. It was shaped like a rough stone ax blade, this peak, and he walked along the edge of the blade to its highest point.

  There were other mountain peaks in the distance, rising out of the pensive sea of mist.

  Stephen found some comfort in this plane’s almost earthly orientation. At least, the ground was under him; there was a sky above. A strange sky, to be sure. It was indigo around the horizon, becoming gunmetal blue overhead; a sky nervous with flocks of spinning runes, almost like spinning airplane propellers as long as he only glanced at them. But if he looked at them closely, each took on a particular runic shape, became a three-dimensional figure of quivering blue-black ink hanging in the sky. In his peripheral vision they became spinning propellers again. There were hundreds of them, floating in the abyss below the rim of the peak, hovering over the iridescent mist. There were hundreds more in the sky, thousands, some distant, some near. But when he looked at the distant ones, they suddenly seemed near.

  He knelt on the stone, on his unseen knees, and looked over the edge into the churning sealike mist, which seemed to shift between violet, purple, beetle-green, second by second. When he looked into it, it seemed to react, as if it sensed the pressure of his attention.

  The sea of mist developed faces, the mocking faces of infants that became old faces, then rotted in fast-forward to become oozing skulls, with tongues waggling in their eye sockets. These blew up suddenly into showers of something like flower petals—that might have been sparks of feeling, feelings of regret.

  The mist churned faster, and a wave of the iridescent fog surged in slow motion into a spout that spun, shaped itself into familiar forms.

  The spout of mist shaped into Jonquil. Jonquil nude. She reached for him. Then it fell back, like a waterspout falling into a sea, disintegrating. Another spout surged up: his father, trying to say something to him, shaking his head—

  “Dad?” Stephen murmured.

  Then his father disintegrated into the sea of mist, and the spout surged up again, spinning to a new shape like wood on a lathe, becoming something not quite man-shaped, something hideous—a demonic creature whose fang-rimmed mouth grew out of all proportion to its head, its maw becoming cartoonishly gigantic, gaping to swallow him.

  Stephen jerked back from the edge of the abyss. Don’t look down there again.

  He muttered aloud, “What the fuck am I supposed to do here?”

  Then he heard a voice—Harrison Deane’s voice—echoing in the telescope room, as if that room were all around him as much as this place was.

  “Guidance is . . . not quite connecting . . . Increase the . . .”

  “Where are you?” Stephen called out. “What am I supposed to do?”

  For a moment he could feel the table under his back, the cool air of the telescope room. In the next moment there was only the mountaintop in the sea of mist.

  He touched the stony ground with his unseen hands—it was no particular tempe
rature. Its color was black, seamed with white veins, but the craggy facets of its surface altered again, constantly recrystallizing, the veins rethreading. Somehow he knew that this mountain was composed of the stuff of mind: It was the production of mentation, like everything here. The stones, the mountains, were crystallizations of ideas held in common, somewhere. Some society’s assumptions, formed into rough, irregular blocks of inwardly shifting stone.

  Stephen wrenched his mind away from that. Think too much about what this place is, and you’ll get lost in your mind and never get out. Follow the thread of your purpose.

  He walked down the slope of the peak, and at the farther edge found what might be a crude path, carved—or assumed—into the cliff side. He descended the path, careful not to look into the abyss to his left. He was still well above the sea of mist.

  As he descended, he felt a kind of sickening flip-flop in his middle and felt himself to be upside down; looking down the cliff path was looking up. Now he was ascending, though the path continued the same way. Above, on the mountaintop—what should have been the bottom of the mountain—he saw a wretch, a frightened, insubstantial ghost, terrifyingly familiar. Stephen wanted to reach out to that person to comfort him.