Demons (46 page)

Stephen saw it now, and he understood. The quantum uncertainty at the root of matter bent itself to will. Normally will was too weak to bend it much, but
this
will was imponderably concentrated, powerful enough to transmute reality. To give power to those who tapped into it—and that would include the power to cure Jonquil and to give him and Jonquil life in that continuum of ecstasy he’d all too briefly experienced.

“YES!” he shouted without a mouth, and plunged in spiritual flight toward the great Yggdrasil of this world, the Black Pearl at its center.

But this being was all senses—more senses than mind—and it sensed him coming. It thrashed its limbs to stop him, clawing at him with its crackling, sentient tendrils; the murderous, sentient whips snapping all about him. He flew betwixt them—just barely.

“Medusa!”
Was that Jonquil’s voice?
But he couldn’t let anything distract him.

Never before had he felt so vibrantly present as at that moment when he dove and spun and veered and wove like a swift through a hurricane-lashed forest, using every erg of his mental focus to avoid the trapping lashes of the ego giant’s limbs.

Then he was approaching the Black Pearl.

“Medusa!”

“Jonquil?”

The message from Jonquil came to him compressed into a thousandth of a second:

“Don’t look into the Pearl. Turn your perception away. But open your arms and envision yourself growing big. Imagine swallowing it. Do not look into it—it’s like looking at Medusa.”

He was plunging toward the Black Pearl. It was bigger than his arms could contain.

But he did as she said, envisioned himself growing gigantic, plunging into the ego tree, swallowing the Black Pearl, taking it like a pill.

He felt it enter him—and he shrieked with agony. It burned. It was like swallowing a sun whose fire was pure hatred.

And then he was sinking into the trunk of the ego tree, sucked into it, letting it digest him, and flying to . . . the world of men. Ash Valley, California.

How quickly the rain clouds had gathered, Glyneth thought, as she tossed the cell phone in the back and turned the van around. The rain came tentatively at first, pattering down on the windshield, then lashing it so she had to turn the wipers on high. Her heart felt like a hard, dead lump inside her. She felt cold and very, very lonely. Because she had chosen to die.

She couldn’t turn her back on these people. She knew it was a waste of time to go back to Ash Valley, but she was going anyway. Because it was partly her fault this had all happened. That boy she had smashed with a length of pipe, that woman tearing her hair in the street. Dead people piled like some sick celebration of the Holocaust: She had failed them, and she should die with them. Maybe she could help someone, somehow.

She had been on the van’s cell phone for some minutes. The highway patrol had heard about the disaster in Ash Valley, but no one wanted to hear that it had been orchestrated on purpose.

I just don’t deserve to survive,
she thought.
I could’ve saved those people somehow.

The rain fell so hard the road was hidden by a sheet of water.

The rain!
she thought, with a rush of realization.
And the wind!

Together they would wash the D17 from the air. Maybe some who had taken shelter, out of the open air, might survive. She could help a few of them escape the demon, the butchering lunatics who stalked the ruins of Ash Valley. But those sons of bitches in the other vans might well make sure they didn’t make it. The demon hadn’t killed them all.

She looked in the glove compartment, and found what she’d hoped to find. A loaded .45 automatic.

Stephen cackled with joy as he felt the power begin to seethe out from the Black Pearl burning at the core of his being.

He sat up on his wrecked-car throne and raised his fists into the downpour, calling down lightning and dancing with it as it struck to ignite fires in the methane of the rotting corpses piled around him.

The rain hissed into the smoldering remains of the burning houses; it churned the exposed dirt of the Ash Valley park into mud. It cleansed the air of the poison—but the toxin had done its job. It had killed hundreds of the humans, had sacrificed their life energies in order to bring him here, and it would make it possible to bring the others: a second, greater swarm, an invasion of the seven clans that would dwarf the first. But they would turn men into gods, not demons. The sacrifice had laid the groundwork, had opened the gate wide enough . . . and now it was up to him, to it, to her, to the god and goddess he had become, to give birth to a new world.

The rain eased off and Glyneth was a little surprised at the way the vans were racing out of Ash Valley. Were they rushing to get out ahead of the authorities? She glimpsed only one of the driver’s faces. It was etched with naked fear.

What could they’ve seen that was worse than what had already happened?

But then she saw it herself as she got within a few blocks of the park. A giant.

She slowed the van to a crawl, craning to look up at it.

The demon had grown, fed by the sacrifices. It was about six stories high, she guessed. Now seven, now eight.

There was something else. Something almost astronomically repulsive about it.

It was pregnant. Male or female or both, it didn’t matter: It was obviously, gruesomely pregnant. Its glowing middle was swollen, and, through skin stretched to transparency, she could see many thousands of small figures squirming like sperm under a microscope, like maggots in a boil—but she could see their silhouettes, now and then, when they became briefly disentangled from one another: Gnashers, Grindums, Spiders, Dishrags, Bugsys, Sharkadians, Tailpipes. All writhing in the translucent sac of the demon’s belly.

How soon before it gave birth? Did Winderson and his friends know?

Probably not, she guessed. That Certain One deceived its followers.

She could just make out, behind the demon’s features, a faint semblance of Stephen’s. He had helped them bring this about somehow. Something in him had completed the magical circuit.

She drove onto the side street that led into the park. There was a single van there, half blocking the road, and three men stood beside it, arguing. They had their gas masks down around their necks—the air must be safe, now. Two of them were pointing at the giant a block away, standing up to its ankles in corpses, the skyscraping, swag-bellied demon shaking a stiff dead man at the sky like an insane queen threatening with its scepter.

She slowed her van, looking for a way around them. The taller man, the one she’d seen talking to Dickinham near the park that day, spotted her and seemed to recognize her. Probably the guy from the trailer, too. He stalked toward her, cocking his .45. She snorted at his overblown confidence. She powered the window down, leaned out, and said, “Peace, asshole.” Then she shot him through the throat.

He fell, clutching his spurting neck. She fired at one of the other men; he fell. The third ran from her and then screamed as the demon took a single step, picked him up, and threw him whirling into the sky.

He never did come down.

She hesitated, wondering if she should crash the van into the giant’s legs.
Useless. Try to find some of the local people, get them out to safety.

Then the demon spotted her—and it bent down, smashed the van with its fist, crumpling the roof and sending it rolling into the ditch.

Stephen—and the demon—shook the world with a roar of rage.

There she was again, mocking him! This time she wouldn’t scurry away into the night! He could feel the children! And the seeds of the new world inside him roared in gleeful agreement, squirming in a wash of dark energy.

The Stephen thing reached down for her.

“Hiya, boy kid.”

Stephen felt himself shriveling up, going somewhere else, somewhere within . . .

He looked around. Where was he now?

He was in a big empty room made out of leather. He sat on the floor, panting, shaking from the sudden disengagement.

It was a round room with irregularly curved walls, two high windows shaped like eyes, a sort of grate shaped like a partly opened, fanged mouth. The light came from the eyes and mouth, falling from those three sources across the man sitting on the floor, opposite him, leaning back against the leathery wall with a sad smile on his face.

Boy kid.

Something his father had always called him.

His father: wearing the clothes he’d worn when he’d taken his son fishing: the same old flak jacket and jeans and hip boots. His father with the sagging face, the humorous brown eyes, the tousle of receding, curly gray hair.

“Dad?”

“Yep. It’s me.”

Stephen looked down at himself. He could see his hands now, his body. He was naked but embodied. And it was the body of a boy. “Where are we? How’d you get here?”

“We’re not where we seem to be. What you see is a construction that represents reality somewhat symbolically. Our spirits have been transported to a neutral bubble in astral space. Amateurish cartooning on my part, really. I created it. I can’t sustain it long. The Circle has called me. Somewhere in Russia, those who could get together called me. They pulled me from where I wandered, contacted me through the Gold in the Urn. Those who’ve gone on before, and who try to help us as they might, managed to pull together enough power to bring me here to talk to you, to give you a choice.”

“But this place . . .” Then, looking around, it struck Stephen: He was inside a big, hollowed-out head. And he recognized the shape: It was the head of the demon.

“Yes, the demon you’ve inhabited.”

“He is a
god
!” Stephen shouted, springing to his feet.

“So they tell you. It’s the apotheosis of irony, really, to call that ludicrous, bloated, murderous demon a god. And they’re telling you that the carnage you have seen all around him is just an illusion—and if you won’t believe that, then next they’ll lead you to believe the carnage is justified. You’re not in a rational state—you haven’t been since that girl took you into her bed. You were seduced, by her and Winderson both. Do you know, Stephen, how Winderson came to be indebted to me?”

“What?” Stephen felt drunk. “How?” Stoned and dizzy and half numb. His mind, he supposed, was shutting down. He’d had to deal with far too much.

“I’ll tell you: He’d date-raped a girl when we were in college. He drugged her with that date-rape drug they had back then. He drugged her and he raped her and then, in his drunkenness, he called in two of his friends and he let
them
rape her. Well, the girl told a confused story about the whole thing. He was arrested—and he had a lot to lose. He would’ve gone to jail. He was my roommate and he could be very likable. At the time he made it sound as if he’d just gone a little wrong, and it was going to ruin his life.

“I didn’t have some great destiny ahead of me as a leader of my father’s corporation. I had no other friends, but I had a weakness, a need to sacrifice myself, so that others would like me. So I said I’d take the rap. I’d say I drugged her as a prank—and that he hadn’t known she was drugged. That he left, didn’t know the others took her, later. All lies. And I got a suspended sentence—the Windersons pulled some strings. But the university threw me out, naturally.

“I got into another school—again, with the Windersons’ help—and eventually I became a schoolteacher.

“But
he
did it, Stephen. He did those things to that girl—not me. What sort of person would do that, hm? Ask yourself that, boy kid. Dale Winderson’s that cold, and more. He’s sacrificed a town full of people because he believes the power generated here will give him immortality and his own little cosmos to play around in. It’s their fantasy, foisted on them by the dark puppeteer who squats on his Saturnian throne.”

“I . . . you aren’t really my father. This is some kind of test.”

“I really am your father. I’m a spirit, now, Stephen—but just as real as I was in material life. I had the chance to develop my being, once dead, in a certain place I cannot describe, and the circle brought me here to reason with you. To tell you that if you struggle to control the demon, you
can
succeed. If you refuse to identify with his desires, his lusts, you
can
control him . . . but it means reaching in and taking the Pearl out—that node of pure will. Sacrificing it—the
real
sacrifice that should be made. Show the Pearl to them, Stephen. The four members of the Undercurrent you know—they arranged this so they wouldn’t have to see it directly. Funny how here, the men possess demons and not vice versa. But that’s always been the secret.”