Demons (23 page)

It was snowing, sleeting really, early one night, and Dad wouldn’t let me go outside. But it had been just too long like this. I was sitting by the fireplace, staring into the flames. Dad was up in the loft reading something. I just sat there and stared, and the fire sort of sucked in all my attention. It was like I was escaping into it. It was like the whole world was blue and red and orange flames. Then suddenly one of the logs—I don’t know if it was because of pitch or trapped water—burst in half, and I jerked back.

But my body
didn’t
jerk back. It was whatever rides around in my body—my spirit or mind or both, I don’t know. It wasn’t much more than a
moving point of view
really. It was moving back away from my body . . . so I saw my body sitting by the fire, leaning back on outstretched hands, staring blankly. I was floating upward, away from that body.

I remember thinking,
Is that what I look like? It’s not like seeing yourself in a mirror. I look goofier than I thought.

I wasn’t scared at all. It was like I floated away from fear when I floated away from my body. Then I saw some wood, dust, and spiders, and I knew I was going through the ceiling. I saw my dad, his back to me. I tried to call out to him, but I couldn’t speak.

Then I was falling, but falling
up
—that’s how it felt, like I was free-falling but upward, really rocketing up over the cabin. Up was down, down was up, and I was falling up. I watched the roof of the cabin receding below me and the melted outline of the snowy fir trees. A white owl perched near the top of a pine. The owl seemed to see me as I passed. Then I fell upward into a hole in the sky. It was like it wasn’t sky anymore—it was another world. I saw men and women rising like threads of smoke around me, each of them changing: They were a baby, a child, they were adult, they were old, they were babies again . . . flickering through that whole sequence and babbling to themselves. I seemed to see a sky filled with stars that were actually
words
of some kind, written in some language I couldn’t understand. The stars seemed to be talking to me, all of them at once.

I remember thinking:
I’m dying. But what about Dad?

That thought seemed to trigger a change, and I burst out from the other world, back into the sky over the cabin. It wasn’t like I came from up or down or sideways, it was like I
exploded into being
there, like fireworks expanding from a small missile of chemicals to a big, flaring, burning, shining shape in the sky, all at once.

Then I was just a point of view again, and I was drifting down through the roof and down to the fireplace.

There was a nasty clicking feeling—definitely not pleasant, it was like getting a hammer in the elbow—and then I was back in my body, lying on my side, feeling sick to my stomach. Shaking and crying.

My dad heard me and came downstairs to see what was wrong and I tried to talk about it and couldn’t. So finally I told him I’d fallen asleep and had a nightmare, and after a while I almost believed that’s what had happened.

The second time was almost a year later. I was at a school in L.A., and I was depressed that day to start with. I had PE first period, we were doing softball; and I missed an easy catch—I just choked up—and then I struck out at bat, and the other guys jeered at me big-time. Screwing up in sports was standard for me. I was feeling pretty down on myself. Then a girl I was interested in, Trisha, who was editor of the school literary magazine, walked up to me with a look on her face like she was going to eat something tasty.

She said she’d gotten my note in her editorial cubby asking her if she wanted to go to the spring dance, and she said, “The answer is, please don’t embarrass me again by asking. Some people heard about you asking me and they gave me a lot of crap. Capish?”

I don’t know why I thought she’d be sensitive, editing the school literary mag. It was a lot of dreck anyway.

So I was even more down on myself after that encounter with Trisha, and then a big lunk of a kid named Greg Monnard spotted me after school. He was a kid with died-white Eminem hair, a thick, naturally brawny body, big feet that turned outward, and his pants hanging low off his ass. He walked up to me, with no expression at all on his face, and just knocked me down,
bang!
, with a right to the side of my head. I went down, I rolled onto my side. Then Greg sat on me, and whenever I tried to get up, he bent over and backhanded me or ground his heel into my knee. As he sat on me he lit a cigarette. “Sit still, till I’m done with my cigarette. I don’t want to sit on the grass. I think there’s dog shit on it.” So he used me as his bench while he smoked his cigarette, just smiling a little bit, as if at all the irony in the whole world, while a crowd gathered to watch.

That’s when it happened again. I just couldn’t
stay
there. I had to, but I couldn’t. So the part of me that can leave my body backed out and was hovering over Greg and the crowd and my body down there. Suddenly all the pain and misery was gone. I flew upward and I didn’t want to come back to my body at all. I went through that hole in the sky and was back in the place where smoky spirits, changing from baby to child to adult to old, were floating upward, transforming as they went. The stars were talking runes again. And then I seemed to fly right into one of those stars, or through it like it was a door.

I passed through a world of living lightning bolts and then into a place where there was nothing but a constantly changing landscape, as if the land shifted like the sea does in a storm, and there were wailing, miserable spirits trapped there. Above them all was a being who was as big as a mountain, towering over everything. He had a beautiful face, and he had twisted horns, and he had wings that were broken and bleeding. His lower half was hidden because he was stuck in ice up to his waist—the ice was the only thing that didn’t shift and change in that world.

He turned his head to look at me, and
I felt his looking
like an ant would feel the beam from a magnifying glass. I felt myself shriveling up under that gaze, and I knew I was going to be trapped there, too, if I stayed. So I thought about my dad, and my body, and how I wantedto grow up to be a rich and powerful man, who people wouldn’t beat up on, and then I was back in my body, twisting out from under Greg Monnard.

I felt sick and disoriented, but different, and even stronger in some way. I guess it was that I wasn’t afraid of Greg anymore. He seemed so
small
after what I’d seen.

So after I squirmed out from under him, I grabbed the cigarette out of Greg’s mouth—he was pretty surprised!—and shoved it down his shirt. He backed away, yelling and slapping at himself, and then I kicked him hard in the pit of the stomach. He fell on his ass, gasping, and smoke was coming out of his shirt. I reached down, tugged it so the cigarette came out, and flicked it away. Somehow, taking the cigarette out of his shirt so it wouldn’t hurt him anymore gave me some kind of style or grace, like I had some character he didn’t have.

“I tried to let you be the big man,” I said, “but you went too far. And you are just so
small
.”

Some of the people watching applauded, and Greg didn’t bother me anymore after that.

But for the next couple of days I was afraid to sleep, afraid of my dreams, of feeling like the real world wasn’t real enough. I decided that what I’d seen was some weird mental aberration, like a seizure, a hallucination like the things epileptics see. It worked in my favor this once, because in my disassociated state I’d lost my fear of Greg. But I decided I had to never let it happen again, because if I did let it happen, I was going to end up being put away somewhere. I’d get lost in my own head, and they’d put me in an asylum.

I saw ten minutes or so of a show about Out-of-Body Experiences—OBEs, they call them—on the Discovery Channel, a year or so later. I turned it off pretty quickly.
No,
I told myself,
bullshit. Not real.

So I talked myself again into believing it hadn’t been real.

But now, somehow, I know it was real. It was a real OBE. And maybe I have a kind of talent for it that Winderson wants to use somehow. So maybe it was a good thing.

I hope I can deal with it. Just seems to me that a person could go insane after a few experiences like that.

“I don’t think we’ve met, have we, Mr. Isquerat?” the woman with the red-blond hair asked, riding up the elevator with him.

A little more blond than red, that long wavy hair. Stephen thought of a pinup girl from the middle of the last century, painted on some bomber: an almost perfect face, dimpled chin, something glittering in her crystalline blue eyes. She wore a red leather coat opened in the front to show off voluptuous curves

tautly wrapped in a cream-colored blouse, a pantsuit, and red pumps to match her coat. Her nails were the color of her suit. He didn’t usually note so many details, but this woman made Stephen stare. She was perhaps a little short, a little too plump, but she carried herself with the supreme confidence of an overpaid cover girl.

“You
are
Mr. Isquerat?”

“Hm? Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t answer you.” He felt his face burning. He’d been staring instead of listening. “I mean, in my mind I answered yes.”

“I’m not usually a mind reader. Only every third Wednesday.”

He chuckled dutifully, trying to identify her perfume. Gardenias? Yes, but very understated gardenias. The elevator reached the eleventh floor of the West Wind building and he followed her out. “I’m
Stephen
Isquerat. . . .”

“I’m the boss’s niece. Better be nice to me!” Her face was deadpan, except her eyes laughed.

“There was never any chance I wouldn’t be. I’m . . .”
No, don’t say “I’m only human.”
“Anyway—if you’re Mr. Winderson’s niece, then you’re Jonquil? He mentioned you to me once.”

“Well, he better had. He’s under strict instructions to mention me to every up-and-coming guy he brings in around here.”

“I don’t know how up-and-coming I am. . . .”

“I hear he’s got great plans for you. You’re going to revive psychonomics, I think?”

“Maybe—soon as I figure out what it is.”

She chuckled. “You and me both.”

But somehow he thought she was just playing along, that she knew
exactly
what it was all about. It gave him an uneasy feeling, but he quickly forgot it, looking into her eyes. What was that song his dad had liked?
“Crystal Blue Persuasion”?
“Well . . . uh . . .” He looked around in confusion. Eleventh floor.

She pursed her lips to keep the smile out this time. “Wrong floor?”

“No, no I just . . .” He sighed. “Yes, okay. Wrong floor.”

“I’ll take that as flattery. See you later . . . two floors up, I think.”

“Sure. Later . . .”

But he didn’t see her till it was almost time for him to go to Ash Valley.

Ira was sipping coffee flavored with roses. Seated across from him, at the small table of the Turkish-style café, Yanan watched and almost smiled. Paymenz, sitting on his right, glowered into his own undrunk coffee, chewing fitfully on a gooey wedge of baklava. There was canned Turkish music playing, but Ira was only vaguely aware of it.

“You like the rose coffee?” Yanan asked. “You got such a look on your face, maybe you don’t like it.”

“I do though,” Ira said. “It interests me. It’s like . . . the taste of the coffee is interrupted by something anomalous—like planting a coffee bush in a rose garden—normal expectations are stretched, opened up. A certain delightful tension in the two flavors. And the smells are oddly harmonious.”

Paymenz looked at him dourly. “All this from a sip of coffee? What, you’re Proust now?”

“Well, I . . .”

Yanan laughed. “Look at Paymenz! He’s in a bad mood! Why do you identify with your bad mood, Paymenz, eh?”

“You know my inner state so well? Just because I’m not kicking up my heels?”

Yanan only smiled. Paymenz shrugged and glanced at Ira, both of them thinking along the same lines: Yanan might well be able to see into Paymenz’s inner state, even if the professor put up a good front.

Paymenz
was
in one of his dark moods; typically, he’d swing abruptly from ebullient to dark. It was an inborn tendency: He knew it, and everyone else knew it.

After a moment, Yanan said, “It’s possible, Professor, you are not truly identified with your depressed mind. But I think you are. Like Ira, you worry about Melissa and the boy. Nyerza is with them—they will be all right. But perhaps it’s more selfish than that, hm?”

Paymenz nodded, smiling sourly. “Yes indeed. It’s also a feeling that the important part of my life is over. I did too much damage to my soul before the invasion. And now . . . I have lost hope for myself. I’m too tired to find what I once had. I don’t even know what to do professionally anymore. I’m angry that all that was revealed to the world those nine years ago is . . . lost. So even that effort seems wasted. I know—it’s self-pity. Or sounds like it.”