Demon Theory Read online

  “Guess who?” she says.

  Markum sways his back, places his hands over hers. “Someone with nail polish,” he says, “and … yes. Breasts.”

  Virginia steps around him. “You call those breasts?” she says, and on cue Seri removes her hands, so that Markum’s attention is directed at Virginia’s chest. He cocks an appreciative eyebrow. Seri drapes herself over him, cheek to cheek, admiring with him, and then peels herself away, walks on, toward the double doors. Just before she reaches them she holds up Markum’s keys, dangling from her index finger. Success. Back to Markum. Virginia subtly nods Nona and TJ on, then leads Markum in the other direction, dragging him by the base of his skull, the rattail. Nona remains for only a moment, long enough to shake her head in general disapproval of the male species, and then she’s through the double doors as well, crowded under the PHARMACEUTICAL LOCK-UP sign with Seri, TJ trying the keys one after the other.

  Beside them is a morgue-routed gurney, a roman-nosed figure under the sheets. As Seri eases the door open the figure rises—a camp shot, all in good fun—and clamps onto TJ’s wrist. In the same instant Nona pulls Seri into the darkness of lock-up. We lose them for the moment, stay instead with TJ and the figure, the sheet sloughing off to reveal a large and matronly nurse. The insert21 of her name tag introduces her as NURSE HILDA. She puts her glasses on, and for a split moment Seri and Nona’s POV intrudes—Nurse Hilda, hairnetted, bespectacled, and Ratchet22-like through the narrow window set in the door of lock-up—and then back to the hall.

  “Broomhil—”23 TJ starts, catching herself.

  Hilda looks TJ up and down, appraising. “We’ve been wondering who it was, Theresa Jane. I must say I’m disappointed.” Her gaze remains on the syringes TJ has, and they weigh the evidence together for a long moment.

  TJ sags, caught; covers: “Me and my monkey, y’know.”

  Down the hall a drunken MUMMY lurches through a curtain, trailing interns and nurses and one security guard. Hilda depockets some soiled scrubs, evidently trash bound. But no longer.

  “Weren’t you on tonight?” she asks TJ, but TJ is rapt on the mummy. Hilda continues: “If you were on tonight, I mean, then you couldn’t have been … unexpected. It’s Halloween, dear. The hospital might be just the place for a young lady. Keep you occupied, safe from the … ” She doesn’t finish.

  TJ picks up where she left off: “Occupied, yes. Wouldn’t want to place myself in harm’s way or anything.” Her words are punctuated by an intern crashing bodily into a supply closet, its contents spilling over him. She takes the scrubs. As they leave mummyward, with the keys, Hilda leans into lock-up one last time before closing the door, her POV somehow missing Seri’s toe-tag in the only sliver of light, and then directs TJ down the hall, TJ trailing the syringes indiscreetly, the mummy suddenly looming over her.

  IN their wake, Nona nods to the now-empty narrow window. “Already our numbers are thinning,” she says, careful not to look at Seri. As if there’s a tenseness between them.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Seri asks.

  “It’s Halloween, dead girl. There’s a storm coming and all the beautiful sinners are headed out to BFE24 on a mercy mission. Do the math.”

  “Gloom it up, Nona, geez. You don’t have to come, y’know. Doesn’t take six interns to administer insulin to the elderly.”

  “If that’s all it is.”

  “You know something?”

  “I know Hale doesn’t want to go back out there, yeah. You were with him all those months. He didn’t talk about it?”

  Instead of answering immediately, Seri makes a show of reading Insulin off a container, finally shrugs. “We didn’t … talk a lot, I guess,” she says.

  Nona smiles a sardonic smile. “Of course, ” she says back, and then Virginia’s stage-scream comes rolling down the hall, resounding off everything, cutting the conversation short.

  BACK to Con, still in the emergency lane, smoking with the dead hand. He waves with it to the cabdriver, who pretends not to have seen him, rolls his window up anyway, becomes b.g.25 as Nona and Seri emerge. Planned moments later, Hale and Egan follow. They all climb in.

  “This all?” Con asks.

  Hale, riding shotgun, looks over the seat to Nona and Seri. “TJ, Gin?” he says, and Nona shakes her head no. “Looks like this is it, then,” he tells Con.

  Con pulls away, singing old Yes—“one down, one to go / another town, one more show”26—but is interrupted by Virginia running into the lane in front of him. He brakes hard, tires squealing, nose diving. Virginia’s breasts are all disarranged; in her hand is most of the braided rattail, a bloody patch of skin at the root. She shakes it off—not touching it anymore than she has to—and climbs in.

  “Don’t ask,” she says, and Seri tries hard not to laugh, almost makes it.

  Con rolls forward to the emergency lane exit, hesitates, hesitates, waiting for Hale to fill in: “Forty west,” he says. “And we need some candy and shit. A convenience store. Doctor’s orders.”

  Con pulls out, is replaced by a close-up of the slowly rolling numbers of a gas pump readout ($18.32 … $18.33 …). The SUV is nestled up by pump 3, framed by a bright convenience store. It’s picturesque in a neon, last-outpost sort of way. Seri is womanning the pump, mad about it, a raw deal of some sort implied. She’s cold in the drafty trench coat. And there’s Egan in the SUV window directly before her, the lone occupant, leaning forward in his warm grey wool to run through the radio channels. Seri flips him off where he doesn’t see.

  Past the SUV is Hale at a pay phone, the receiver to his ear. He’s cold, large and huddled on the screen, the busy signal loud and clear for us. Hunched just below him is a densely bearded FIGURE eating from a can of corn. Hale hangs up, retrieves his change and then drops it. The figure returns a coin, an unexpected move there. Hale redials.

  “C’mon, c’mon,” he says, and this time there’s ringing, once, twice, and the third time is in the house, the bedroom phone somehow back on its hook. Ringing and ringing, an ancient bell, loud enough it’s even audible from outside, past the window.

  HALE closes his eyes, impatient, then carefully balances the still-ringing pay phone receiver backside down on the hook, where it doesn’t disconnect. He squats down by the figure, who becomes motionless. The ringing of the phone is just there for them. Hale nods to it.

  “If she—” he says, and the figure completes it: “—you’re on the way, man. Got it.”

  They share a nod then turn as Virginia exits the store, her breasts normal, and moments later Con too, with the necessary beer. Last, Nona, waiting for Hale. They pile into the SUV again, and as Con pulls away Virginia’s false breasts are pushed out the window, roll and settle. The shot lingers on the unattached body parts long enough that we get it, but just in case: the convenience store CLERK is standing dutifully at his station. On the counter before him is an unopened pack of cigarettes, their receipt, and the cadaver forearm with a lit cigarette in hand, trailing smoke.

  “Fucking Halloween,” he says, and doesn’t touch the forearm.

  FROM a high angle the SUV is all alone in the wilderness, picking down a rut road, struggling through the snow. Inside Con and Hale are the last ones awake, except maybe Egan, but his mask is giving nothing away. Con withdraws a fugitive cigarette from behind his ear and lights it, the whole time keeping an eye on Seri’s black bra’d breasts in the rearview, jouncing with the uneven road.

  “Can’t believe I left my damn smokes,” he says, turning to Hale. “That means we can’t stay out here long, y’know. You don’t want to see me withdraw.”

  “Don’t worry,” Hale says, “there and back, in and out.”

  “Famous last words there, pilgrim.”27

  “Pilgrim,” Hale repeats, spitting the word, but Con corrects himself: “No, you grew up out here, eating bumpkin pie. Pioneer, I should have said. D. Boone and shit.”

  “Dee boondocks,” Hale says, pointing at a side road. “Not by choice.”<
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  Con takes the indicated turn, sliding slow toward a slight copse of pines.

  Hale leans with the slide but is too distracted to be worried about the trees. “She’s been living alone in that house for seven years now, y’know.”

  Con shrugs, realigns the SUV, his POV tight on the rearview, Seri jiggling there. “It’s America,” he says. “She’s old, hidden.”

  “And diabetic.”

  “How far along?”

  “I only … heard about it indirectly.”

  “Her diabetes you mean?” Con asks. “Shit. And I thought I was a bad son—[stopping respectfully]. What about your old man?”

  “Kind of what I always wanted to know,” Hale mumbles back, just when it seems he’s not going to answer.

  Con makes a show of retreating, focuses again on Seri’s chest in the rearview. He offers the passenger-side visor mirror for Hale. Hale looks, takes a long drink, and when he lowers his beer his mirror is crowded with the blue metal of Nona’s gun, held sideways just for him. He smiles.

  “All a misunderstanding,” he says.

  “He’s a doctor, Noan,” Con says, “we all are.”

  “Not yet,” Nona says, and casually directs the gun toward Con, who moves out of the line of fire, hands off the wheel, and in that instant the SUV rattles hard, veers, slides to a stalled stop, Con fumbling after his falling cigarette.

  “What the—?” Virginia says, sliding awake, into Egan, and from a sudden vantage point behind the SUV the cattle guard they just crossed comes into focus, slowly blurring into the f.g.28 as what’s beyond settles on-screen: the house,29 looming over them.

  INSIDE the SUV, Con forgets about his cigarette.

  “Welcome to Amityville,”30 Seri whispers, and after her words have had time to settle, Nona leans over the seat in admiration.

  “So here we are,” she says, “we’ve assembled the crew, isolated ourselves on Halloween night. One weapon between us, a storm moving in. One girl in lingerie and the other practically named Virgin. Young Doctors in Love31 meets Gross Anatomy32 and elopes into a whole nother genre.”

  Egan turns to her. “So where do you fit in?” he asks.

  “I’m the one who narrates our plight. Cassandra-figure,33 thirty-two B.”

  “B?” Seri asks, playful, and gets a nonplayful glare back from Nona.

  “And the gargoyle here?” Con asks.

  “Mister token,” Nona says. “Antisocial, vaguely ethnic, on scholarship, not here for the same trick-or-treating we are … Why did you come, Egan?”

  Hale doesn’t give Egan a chance to answer, though. “We’re just going to give her her insulin and leave, babe, okay?”

  “Headfirst or feet …?” Egan leads off, Nona isolated on one side of the screen, questioning Hale’s name for her: “Babe?”

  “For the second time, Egan,” Hale says, “fuck off.”

  Egan leans back just as snow begins falling on the windshield, monster flakes. Virginia reaches over the front seat, touches her finger to the glass.

  “Look at the clouds,” she says, “all full of snow and Christmas.”

  “Yeah,” Nona tags on, “The Nightmare Before Christmas.”34

  AS they exit the truck Nona looks to Hale.

  “‘Babe’?” she asks him, but since he’s too preoccupied with homecoming to answer, Con offers a substitute—“Old lady?”—and is already flinching from Nona’s feint, a motion both mute and ridiculous from behind the thin glass of the high attic window. At that height the slight impressions of Hale’s mother’s tracks are just visible.35

  BACK to ground level in a disorienting, through-the-glass rush. Con runs the bottom of his beer over the extremely level hedges, whistles appreciation. Hale is watching the sky, the window up there too. He becomes overly aware of Egan, looking up with him.

  “Your mask,” Hale says, “before we go in. Consider it toll.”

  “What?” Egan says, turning on him. “You know what this thing cost?”

  “It’s November already,” Hale explains, “after midnight. No more costumes.”

  Egan looks to the crew for help but there is none.

  “Pay the man,” Con says, “shit. It’s too cold out here for this mano to mano.”36

  Egan shakes his head in disbelief, looks at the rest of the crew not having to pay toll, but does it, removes the mask, never breaking eye contact with Hale. He tucks it in his belt instead of handing it over. As they trudge to the porch though, Hale nimbly lifts the mask and, before Egan can react, flings it out into the snow. The wind picks up ominously, on cue.

  “No more costumes,” Hale repeats, and Con looks suggestively to Seri, in her toe-tag and undergarments. She smiles suggestively back, preens the littlest bit. As they move out of the shot and onto the porch Egan remains for a few beats,37 looking for his mask through the storm. No luck. His POV does almost seem to intuit Hale’s mother’s abbreviated tracks, though. We can still see them anyway. They end roughly on the extreme close-up of the gargoyle mask, face-up in the snow, a frozen grin and empty eyes.

  “Sixty-seven dollars,” Egan says to himself finally, blowing on his fingers as if kissing the money good-bye, and in that silence the wind slams the front door violently open then shut, Virginia screaming for all she’s worth. Everyone looks to her, at her, impressed.

  “Sorry,” she says, “in character, y’know?”

  Con pulls her close to him, and she lets him.

  The door swings slowly open this time and there’s melted snow there on the floor, refreezing. Hale is closest. He steps forward but Con stops him just before he can cross over.

  “The gun, man,” he says, whispering in cheap imitation street talk, “never go in without heat.”

  Hale looks to Nona for the gun, but she already has an answer: “No bullets.” Hale interrogates her with his eyes. She doesn’t look away.

  “There was alcohol at the party,” she explains.

  Con muffles his laugh, looks away.

  “Our socially conscious Nona,” Seri says.

  “Screw it,” Hale says abruptly. “It’s my goddamn house, after all.”

  He pushes the door all the way open. Dark inside. A phone ringing.

  “It’s for you,” Con says, nudging Hale, and as Hale enters we get a wide angle of the storm behind them, here to stay.

  HALE’S POV immediately locates the ringing phone. He moves toward it, has his hand on it just as the lights come on, Nona at the switch.

  “Go ahead,” she says, prompting him.

  Hale lifts the receiver. “Hello.”

  No response, just crackles, maybe wind over the other mouthpiece. Hale shakes his head in disbelief, recradles long enough for it to ring once, answers again. The same.

  “It’s me,” he explains, then into the phone: “Dude, dude, hang up already!”

  No response.

  “Do phones even work like that?” Seri asks, half behind her hand.

  “Country phones do, I guess,” Con says, “person to person … ” and then everyone gets quiet, quiet enough for Seri to dig the insulin and syringes from the trench coat she’s wearing. She offers them to Hale.

  “For your mother,” she says, “right?”

  They all look up the stairs together.

  “Mother?” Hale calls, not too loud.

  “Not to be rude, Hale,” Seri says, “but, facilities?”

  “Through the kitchen,” Hale says without looking, “there.” Seri wanders off where he points, flitting from light switch to light switch.

  “Motherrr,” Hale calls again, this time louder.

  Egan takes two of the steps up, stands between Hale and upstairs. “Not to be critical, doctor,” he says, “but your bedside manner … ”

  “Is missing a bed, right?” Con asks.

  “Not to mention a patient,” Virginia adds.

  Nona nods agreement. “It’s your GD house,” she says.

  Hale looks back and forth from Egan to Nona. “That’s the right w
ord for it,” he finally says, then follows the banister up, his free hand opening and closing into a fist, dominating the screen, gently turning the doorknob to his mother’s room. Past him the hallway is dark except for an important glint he doesn’t quite see. He finds the room’s light switch without thinking, on the wrong side of the entryway. It doesn’t turn the overhead on though, just a weak lamp on the nightstand. The room is empty, but Hale’s POV sweeps twice anyway: the closed closet door, the dresser-mirror combo, the window to the left of it, the queen bed deadcenter, the nightstand beside it upturned. From its scattered contents Hale ferrets out a syringe.

  “Type one,” he says, and then to the bedroom, the house—his mother: “Where are you?”

  No reply. He leaves the lamp on, backs out, and is turning for the stairs again when the glint becomes peripheral for him. He approaches without hesitation. It’s a wheelchair, the same one from the waiting room of the hospital. Jenny’s. Dusty, unused. Hale kneels by it, places one hand on the armrest, almost penitent, and just as we’re beginning to be lulled by his stillness into some vague empathy with him, he’s replaced by a down-the-chimney shot of the flue slamming open for Con, already rolling away from the falling ash, standing, brushing the blackness from his sleeves. Evidently enough time has passed that the crew is wanting heat. Con casts a critical eye across the living room to Hale, in the witness box formed by the lowest two steps of the staircase.

  “I don’t know,” he says, “she’s just not there.”

  “Well she’s not down here either,” Seri says, then explains how she knows: “Got lost.”