Demons (21 page)

Remember,
she told herself,
when any two meet, one is always the servant.

She glanced over her shoulder. The men in the van, in their military drab, would see to it that she was not interrupted.

Removing her gas mask and goggles, letting them dangle around her neck like grotesque necklaces, she entered the dank, noisome building and thought about how the secrets to the keys of power were found in the darkest, foulest swamps of the sorceress’s inner world, the place within her that corresponded to this reeking box.

She paused, just inside.

The windowless rectangular room was shadowy on one side, where an overhead light was burnt out, harshly lit on the other side. The fly-specked light was enclosed in a metal cage. It burned relentlessly. But suppose it went out?

You are in charge,
she told herself.
You are beyond fear.
And she spoke the names in her mind.

The walls separating the men’s and women’s rest rooms had been torn down by her associates at her request. Even that was symbolic! The subsuming of male and female into one! But the toilets remained, still reeking of old urine and faintly of feces. The urinals were still there, on the men’s side, and the graffiti on the walls over the urinals.

The room was only apparently empty. She knew
it
was there.

She closed the door behind her and walked to the lit part of the room, her heels clacking on the tile floor, echoing from the concrete walls. She told herself she chose that part of the room only because it would be easier to see the design. She drew the vial from her purse, uncorked it, found the little paintbrush, and dipped it into the red fluid, which was only partly blood. She painted the symbol around herself on the floor, chanting as she did so, feeling those particular energies rising up inside her.

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.”