Demon Theory Read online

  DEMON THEORY

  a work of fiction by

  STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-59692-978-4

  M P Publishing Limited

  12 Strathallan Crescent

  Douglas

  Isle of Man

  IM2 4NR

  British Isles

  Telephone: +44 (0)1624 618672

  email: [email protected]

  Originally published by:

  MacAdam/Cage

  155 Sansome Street, Suite 550

  San Francisco, CA 94104

  www.macadamcage.com

  ©2006 by Stephen Graham Jones

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jones, Stephen Graham, 1972—

  Demon theory / by Stephen Graham Jones. —1st ed.

  four parts

  ISBN 1-59692-164-1 (alk. paper)

  1. Medical students—Fiction. 2. Halloween—Fiction. I. Title

  2010

  Paperback edition: April 2007

  ISBN 978-1-59692-216-7

  Cover design by Dorothy Carico Smith

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  for my dad, Dennis and for Marta

  And is not that a mother’s gentle hand that

  undraws your curtain, and a mother’s sweet

  voice that summons you to rise? To rise and

  forget, in the bright sunlight, the ugly dreams

  that frightened you so when all was dark.

  —Alice in Wonderland

  DEMON THEORY 16

  Part I of a three-part novelization of the feature film trilogy The Devil Inside, as adapted from D, the unauthorized best-seller inspired by the case notes of Dr. Neider, as recorded in a series of interviews conducted during his residency at Owl Creek Mental Facilities and originally published in the journal P/Q as “Narrative, Me-dia, and Allocution: Genre as Mnemonic Device.”

  I know what happens at the moment of death.

  —Evgenii Kharitonov

  FIRST is the sound of a siren, insisting it’s there in spite of the as-yet lightless screen, dredging up gut-level associations of fire trucks, ambulances, vehicles full of purpose screaming down some thin road not walled in by buildings: instead of being amplified by brick and steel, the siren dopplers away in inverse proportion to the image fading in on-screen—as if the light’s chasing the fire truck away, the ambulance. And then it’s gone, the siren, which is to say we’re the motionless ones, the captive audience, left with a crouched figure, a mid-twenties male breathing deep in the poorly lit hall of an apartment building. CON.1 Wearing jeans and a couple of mismatched shirts, running shoes with blood or iodine on the toes, a detail barely perceptible before the close-up of the duffel bag he’s digging through.

  In the bag are the various clothing changes, pill bottles, and anatomy books of a medical student, possibly an emergency room intern. The one book title that resolves itself is Brain’s Clinical Neurology.2 Below it is the justification for the close-up: a pair of human forearms, cleanly severed just below the elbow, and, below them, a mess of roan-colored hair that seems to originate from the back of what nearly has to be a human head, getting jostled as Con removes the forearms. Just before it rolls face-up, though, a door crashes open down the hall. A female skeleton and a male flasher emerge, holding hands, running the other way, disappearing into the elevator, already all over each other.

  Con smiles.

  In his right hand is the severed right forearm. With his left he fishes a cigarette from the pocket of his outer shirt, spreads two of the cadaver fingers, and fixes the cigarette between them, then leans the forearm carefully against the wall. It stays. The left cadaver forearm isn’t so easy: to get the hand to hold the custom lighter, he has to break the hand into a fist, surgical tape it shut, then set the lighter in the well between thumb and forefinger. Success. He takes the left forearm in his left, the right in his right, and inspects, smiling, then hooks a foot through the duffel bag, drags it with him to the door the skeleton and the flasher spilled from.

  He swallows his smile, holds one forearm in the crook of his own, and just manages to get the lighter going. With a cadaver finger he rings the buzzer, then adopts a consciously romantic cigarette-lighting pose [leaning down to the cigarette as if there’s wind in the hall], recites poetry to himself:

  “Let me stand in your

  doorway and light my

  cigarette with the sun—”

  But the door opens before he can finish, party noise drowning out any more lines he might have had, the song a slow and sadistic remix of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”3 In the doorway is a mid-twenties female with large, obviously false breasts stretching her T-shirt to its fabric limits. Pooh-bear pajama bottoms, animal slippers with lidless eyes. VIRGINIA. Con exhales smoke, appreciating her breasts.

  “Virginia … ” he says, displaying the cadaver arms, “so you going to invite me in? Trick or treat … ”

  Virginia’s eyes remain level on Con. She shakes her head. “Thought you were on tonight.”

  “I’m on every night, haven’t you heard?”

  Virginia rolls her eyes, extends an arm to invite Con in, but Con doesn’t pass by immediately, instead takes advantage of their closeness by patting the outside of her false breasts with his false arms.

  “You’re what now,” he says, “the prototypical teenage victim?”

  Virginia smiles. “Not yet. But the night’s an embryo.”

  She doesn’t dignify the groping cadaver arms by shrinking away from them, either. She does direct Con’s gaze to the left one, though. “Your thumb’s on fire,” she says, already walking away, and after Con extinguishes the forgotten lighter and the charred thumb his POV4 zeros in on her receding pajama bottoms, follows her 5 into the party, which—through a series of est.6 shots—is replete with jack-o’-lanterns, surgeon’s masks, whiskey-filled IV bags, the remains of a commercial Ouija board, etc. Against one wall is a CPR dummy strapped into a lawn chair with its rubber eyelids gator-clamped open, so it’s being force-fed a slide show,7 a series of images lifted from some old movie, of a bat biting into a mouse, the black and white blood spilling down the wall.8 On the floor by the dummy is a cat-dressed INTERN, her thumb on the slide clicker, faster faster Ms. Basinger9—stop-motion blurring into animation, animation resolving that one trembling image of the bird and the bat.

  Soon enough the bat-figure perched on the back of the couch becomes important, easy to segue to—EGAN—a slender guy wearing all grey, no skin showing, and on his head an expensive gargoyle mask, pointy ears and all. He’s balanced well, oblivious to the party going on around him, oblivious even to the cat-dressed intern screaming when someone gooses her, setting off a cycle of false screams culminating in Virginia, outscreaming them all. Back to Egan though, who’s looking at the television set no one’s watching, one of the Howlings10 or something playing on tape, an aerial shot of a two-story house in the country, a bad place to be. As the television set draws closer and closer the party noise distances itself, until we’re through the convex glass ourselves, above this house in the woods.

  THE ext.11 of the house is well-kept, was once nice. Still lived-in. Blanketed in snow, no chimney smoke. Were the front door to open, it would be opening onto an apron porch. Opposite it, near the line where the trees begin, is an old-style cellar door set at an angle in the ground, a small rise behind it, topped by a vent pipe. Behind the house, not quite square with it, is a shed. Our aerial POV is circling slow, est., es
t. Getting closer and closer. Not quite behind Michael Myers’s mask12 yet, but the genre is familiar enough that the visual shuffle through the still-unopened front door isn’t uncomfortable.

  On the other side is a living room in keeping with the age of the house. It’s unlit, vague shapes of furniture hulking in the spaces between windows. A doorless kitchen entry to the right, landingless stairs to the left.

  The shuffling noise comes from upstairs.

  It’s irresistible.

  It’s an old woman in her bedroom, a MOTHER on her nightgowned knees, scrabbling through her nightstand drawer for something, holding the telephone in the crook of her neck. Via a close-up on the drawer there’s the scrap of paper she was looking for, the phone number with Hale written above it in block letters, and we stay close on that name and number as she rotary dials it in.

  THE cordless phone rings beneath the party noise. It’s on the counter directly behind the CPR dummy. The television isn’t in the shot. Soon all that is is the phone, ringing and ringing, until a female med student type—TJ, not in costume—happens to lean on it as she’s squeezing around a wide someone in the kitchen. She draws her hand back, startled, then picks the receiver up.

  “This is TJ.”

  She listens, nods, and then navigates dutifully through the party, beelining the shut door of the master bedroom, which we’ve already cut13 to and through: inside there’s an unsmiling, red-haired female, mid-twenties again, wearing a black trench coat and nursing a beer. NONA. She’s not happy; on the bed in front of her is a horizontal SERI, wearing only a suggestive black bra and pumpkin boxers, getting baby-powdered by HALE. Aside from the powder-cum-pallor and the cartoon X’s drawn over her eyes, Seri’s only costume is a toe-tag; Hale is dressed as Mulder to Nona’s red-haired Scully,14 all trench coat and will to believe. When he lingers too long with the baby powder over Seri’s farside breast, Nona smoothly withdraws an undeniably real 9mm from a shoulder holster, levels it on Hale.

  “Uh-uh, mister. Assume things. Bullets, position. Our first official date?”

  The shot now is standoff wide, so there’s no cutting back and forth. Seri cups her breast in her hand, as if protecting it. Hale assumes the position, hands up.

  “I—” he begins, but is mercifully cut short by the door opening, TJ taking stock as she enters with the phone.

  “Don’t mean to be interrupting your little threesome here,” she says, “but it’s for you, Hale. Your mother.”

  Nona lowers her gun. “You’ve been a bad boy, Fox.”

  Hale slowly takes the phone, fake flips it open qua Mulder, speaks importantly into it: “This is Hale.”

  HALE’S mother is still on her knees by the bed, the phone to her ear neglected. What’s important for her is the bedroom window. She’s breathing fast, irregular. Hale’s o.s.15 voice comes through the phone: “Mom? Mom, you all right? Mom, Mother …”

  “Hale,” she says back, almost a question.

  “Yes. Mom, is it your insulin, the house, what?”

  His mother smiles—“Come inside, dear”—and her words are punctuated by a leathery flapping outside the window. “Come inside, dear,” she says again, “the movie’s just beginning. That one you and Jennifer like so much.”

  “Movie?” Hale asks.

  His mother smiles then, her breathing becoming regular if shallow, and she answers—“All the blue monkeys”—her singsong voice leading us again to the window, where her POV lingers, draws tight, match-cuts16 to the window of Hale’s bedroom, a shot which widens to include Hale, holding the dead phone, and, opposite him, Nona, gun reholstered, beer dangling, mouthing the words Hale has evidently just spoken aloud: Wizard of Oz?17 Seri sits up on the bed, preoccupied with the powder in the lace of her bra.

  TJ studies the exchange between Hale and Nona, speaks: “Everything okay on the homefront there, Hale?”

  Hale looks at TJ as if registering her words one by one. “Homefront,” he repeats, when he gets to it, a partially voiced-over18 word that carries us back out to the country, to a frontal shot of the house, virgin snow and blueblack sky and something about to happen: the front door swings open, and framed for an instant in it is the slight figure of Hale’s mother, in her nightgown and house slippers. She leans on the jamb as she passes, pushes off to the banister guarding the porch, and holds on to that as long as she can, which is about halfway down the four wooden steps ending at ground level. For a few tense moments her descending slipper dominates the screen, pointing with its toe at the ground, the snow, the worn heel dragging but empty.

  She makes it without falling, breathes, a child again.

  From well above house level she’s insignificant; from roof level she’s the only motion there is. “Prey” is the unspoken word here. She has to lift her feet high to step down through the crusted snow. She holds her gown up just enough, steps, steps, and on maybe the fifth step out from the porch her right foot when it comes up is without a slipper, and instead of moving forward with her we stay with that slipper, already a high-definition terricoat-blue smudge, a color framed by sound, by her crunching footsteps, still crumbling at the edges, one after the other. There’s no music at this point, only a pensive strain to hear, to be warned. Anything. Even more laboring over the silent tracks.

  “Oh,” she says finally, o.s. but close, hardly a noise at all. But enough: her tracks end midstep, become a faltering line from the porch to nowhere. Above there’s only the octagonal attic window, giving nothing away, and past that the sky, but the sky’s too big to take in all at once.

  IN the emergency lane of the county hospital a cabdriver sits smoking, tapping the dash-mounted meter. Every tap coaxes the next number down prematurely. On his talk radio some weatherman is ad-libbing19 doom about the coming ice storm. The cabdriver ashes directly onto the radio knob, adjusts his pirate eye patch, and is busy admiring himself in the rearview when he’s blinded by reflected headlights. The headlights are an SUV, screeching up. In the cabdriver’s rearview the SUV’s doors open all at once, pouring out Hale and Nona and TJ and Egan and Virginia and Seri, Seri in Nona’s trench coat, Egan still in mask, Hale striding ahead. Con remains at the wheel, smoking with the dead hand, his window halfway down.

  “Fools,” he says, suddenly large on-screen, watching them traipse past the cab, toward the emergency entrance.

  IN the waiting room of the hospital the cab driver’s radio weatherman now has a face, on the wall-mounted television set. He’s still ad-libbing doom, making recommendations, etc., the coughing bank of senior citizens rapt on his every word. From their midst a bold six-year-old superhero emerges, climbs onto a chair, and changes the station to cartoons before any of them can react. But they will; it’s there in an old man’s curling lips. In the expectant hush before he rises, Hale walks in, full of purpose, his trench coat dramatic behind him. Before he can reach the restricted access door though, two things: 1) the desk NURSE slides the plastiglass divider shut, effectively muting the waiting room, and 2) Nona grabs him by the shoulder, keeps him from actually going through that restricted access door. From behind the dividing glass their words are lost—as are the superhero’s screams when he’s manhandled off the chair (the reason the experienced desk nurse insulated herself)—and we have to make do with gestures, with Nona directing him to a chair, leaning down so he doesn’t get up, finally kissing him once on the lips and then holding her finger there, which both quiets him and est. that this “first date” stuff is just a formality.

  The register nurse harrumphs, her voice reversing the shot onto herself, so she can flick an annoyed eyebrow at Hale and Nona, no longer muted:

  “—but she’s my mother,” Hale says over the waiting room buzz.

  “Which is why we’ll do it,” Nona says back.

  “Girl power,” Virginia adds, flaunting her foam breasts.

  Hale closes his eyes, opens them, shrugs defeat. “Maybe some syringes too.”

  “So she’s type one, then?” Nona asks, Hale not answer
ing when everyone turns to him.

  “We’ll just get it all,” Seri says over Nona’s shoulder, “maybe some goodies too,” and then her and TJ and Virginia are through the door, Nona rising to follow.

  “Don’t worry,” she tells Hale in a serious voice, and as she passes the desk nurse she waves a familiar hello, and the desk nurse nods gravely, directs us back to the waiting room, where Egan has taken up a gargoyle perch on the coffee table, the children quietly watching him, Hale watching the children in turn: the dracula with his lip pierced by false fangs; the candy-sick gunslinger girl; the albino-blond Plains Indian. The wan ten-year-old girl in a nonhospital wheelchair, her mouth moving around words that aren’t quite reaching Hale.

  JENNY.

  The words she’s making look like go back. Her head motion supports this.

  “Jenny?” Hale says, and half-rises toward her, turning at the last instant to Egan for verification, but Egan’s stone. By the time Hale redirects his POV, Jenny’s gone, the exit doors swishing shut, and beyond the doors there’s only the cab, Con’s SUV idling curls of blue exhaust.

  Now Egan’s watching Hale. “You don’t even know whether she’s type one or type two?” he asks. “Oral or intra-?”

  Hale doesn’t look at Egan.

  “How can you not?” Egan continues, then mocks, all whiny: “‘But she’s my mother.’”

  “Fuck you, Egan. You didn’t have to come, y’know.”

  Egan shrugs. “Just wanted to play old-time country doctor, you know. Like the rest of you.”

  With that he retreats to his surly perch. Past him the senior citizen man is using the end of his cane to run through the channels. They whiz by, straining Hale’s eyes. He looks below the television instead, to the vending machine, its rows of candy. Considers them.

  “Glucose,” he says, a eureka moment, but then in short order the machine steals his change and Egan holds out a grey, clawed hand with more—nickels and dimes and quarters—and we leave them there all extended and unresolved.

  FROM above and moving with them, Nona and Seri and Virginia and TJ form a lopsided, overcranked20 phalanx as they make their way down the hall, the waiting room far behind already. Nona’s at point. As they pass a wall of curtains TJ veers off, behind a curtain, and emerges with a handful of syringes, never breaking stride. They’re all about business. As the shot retreats, still following them, their prey comes into focus over their shoulders: MARKUM, a late-forties resident, walking toward a set of double doors at the end of the hall. His slacks/high-tops combination gives him away as not quite with it, as does the braided rattail hanging limp over his white collar. Seri accelerates, pads up behind him, covers his eyes with her hands.