Demons (8 page)

All the guardsmen were dead, soon after, for the Lull was over. Then the Gnasher and the Tailpipe moved into the auditorium and managed to kill a good third of the conferees before the survivors fled beyond reach. Beyond reach, for the moment.

We were in a basement conference room. The demons might materialize here; but they didn’t. There was a cafeteria buffet on a big military folding table, but none of us could eat, though the professor drank some wine.

Nyerza was wearily saying something about patterns, patterns, patterns noticed already, geographical patterns in the arrival of the demons. “It is not really at random, no not at all. It is around certain urban areas, like the rays from an impact crater on the moon, really, lines of them spreading out from a center, in which is . . . Do you remember the industrial accidents last year?”

Nyerza and Paymenz were near the barred door of the dull concrete room—a chilly room, with gray walls, pipes criss-crossing the ceiling; Nyerza standing, leaning against the wall, as most chairs were too small for him, Paymenz sitting cross-legged on a plastic chair that was hidden by his bulk so that he seemed to be seated on air, with a carafe in one hand and a plastic cup in the other, drinking and talking, one knee bobbing nervously. He looked sickly pale under the fluorescent lights. There was a chunky black SFPD cop standing guard at the door, staring wistfully at the wine bottles on the table, chewing his lip. Nyerza was lighting an oval cigarette. The cop almost said something to him about it, then I saw him shrug. Demons were tearing up the city—and he was going to give him shit about the no-smoking rule?

Melissa and I were seated on two plastic chairs. I had my arm around her; she leaned against me. It was more need for mutual comfort than anything intimate.

I wanted to tell her something.

If the end is coming, we should be somewhere else, making love and enjoying each other and, perhaps, praising God for whatever good there has been in our lives; grateful for one another and the goodness of our last moments together. . . .

But I knew I probably wouldn’t say it. And if I did, it would avail me not.

Suddenly she interrupted Nyerza and Paymenz, who stared at her as she said, “That poem he recited . . .”

“Yes, do you know the author? It might hold a clue,” Paymenz said.

“Yes, I do. It’s actually a song lyric. I’m the author.”

“You!”

“Yes. It’s a song I wrote two years ago, when I was in that folk group, The Lost.” She was staring at her hands on her knees. “I was going through a depression when I wrote it, and I was sort of— I was almost as morbid as Ira. And then, the demon looked at me and recited it: A song I wrote . . . wrote thinking about how my mom died, and how death doesn’t care if it comes at a, you know, reasonable time, and it just took my mom, and I . . .” She stared wonderingly into space and repeated, “That thing recited a song I wrote.”

5

They’d brought two folding cafeteria tables down into the basement room, pushed them together, and spread taped-together printouts over their Formica tops. “Please forgive this hasty presentation,” Nyerza said as he smoothed the printouts with his enormous hands. We were gathered around the tables, the professor and Melissa and Nyerza and me.

I was noticing Nyerza’s frequent glances at Melissa. He was suddenly very interested in her. She seemed drawn to stand close beside him. She glanced up at him; her nostrils quivered; her lips parted; she leaned just half an inch closer to him.

Oh yeah. Like I could compete with a giant black intellectual power broker from Central Africa.

On the printouts, taped together with Scotch tape where the images connected, was a map of the United States. There were six cities designated in black letters: New York; Portland, Oregon; San Francisco; Chicago; Miami; Detroit. Concentric circles in light red were drawn around each city, as if it were the epicenter of some outrippling force: each city the center of a bull’s-eye. The circles overlapped. Yellow dots marked the map in rough lines from each city—almost like the impact lines extending from the center of a lunar meteor strike. The meteor hits the moon, there’s a crater, and impact lines radiate from the crater in every direction. But the actual bull’s-eyes seemed slightly off center from the city marks.

“The yellow dots,” Paymenz said.

“Yes,” said Nyerza. “The demons. Where they appeared. We have here . . .” He drew another long printout, like a laser-printed scroll, from a briefcase and unrolled it over the map. “San Francisco. You see the epicenter of the strike points is over here—an industrial area to the southeast across the bay.”

“Where the accident happened,” I blurted. “Hercules!”

“Yes, the little city of Hercules,” Nyerza said, “all but wiped out a few years ago in an industrial accident. Very like what happened in Bhopal in the last century, I understand. Perhaps you lost friends or relatives there?”

“Nobody. But I have friends who lost relatives there.” I thought of Jerry Ingram, whose brother had been killed. I remembered how Jerry had put it: “Wiped out like a bug by pesticides . . . his whole family wiped out like bugs, his wife and kid wiped out like bugs. . . .” One of my very few real friends, Jerry. A writer. He’d slipped back into drug use after that—was supposed to be somewhere in L.A. If the demons hadn’t killed him—his own demons or ours.

“You know,” I said, staring at the printout, “it’s very like that artwork I did. I never showed anyone but Melissa. I used a map of Hercules . . . and the area around it . . . and . . .”

Melissa’s mouth dropped open. “God yes, you’re right! That is weird—it’s so . . . there’s something like that drawing . . .”

“I’ve got it, I think, in my palmer. . . . We could hook it up to your printer—” I broke off, feeling foolish. “I don’t know what the relevance is.”

Paymenz looked at me. “Relevance? The lines converge now. Serendipity and catastrophic coincidence, my boy, are the order of the day.” He turned to Nyerza. “Now we see, Nyerza, that intuition is our only guide in the present situation. And perhaps scholarship . . . Which reminds me.” He searched through a number of pockets till he found the little recording we’d made of the televised demon speaking in his own language. “If you could run this through your best translation programs . . . try Sumerian analogues.”

In an adjoining room was a row of workstations. The power was still on, then, and they had no problem loading the contents of my palmer into their system. I did a search through my saved art, scanned drawings mostly. A sketchy portrait of the magician A. O. Spare flickered by, an image of a pregnant angel giving birth to a demon . . .

“Interesting,” Nyerza muttered, at that.

. . . A painting of the planets in alignment and a planet-sized being of electrical energies leaping from one to the next; a sketch of Melissa sunning herself nude on a rooftop.

I scrolled past that one as hastily as possible, but Paymenz said, “Remarkable accuracy.” And put a hand in front of his mouth to hide a smile we couldn’t see anyway, under the beard.

And then the drawing: a scan of a map of the town of Hercules, including the refineries. And superimposed, using streets for part of its diagramming and other parts drawn in, was . . .

“A pentagram!” Nyerza said wonderingly. “Turned upside down.”

“Yes—horns upward,” Paymenz muttered. “Indefatigable, the conjunctions . . . synchronicities more meaningful than ever . . . the atmosphere sensitive . . . very sensitive . . .”

I spread my hands, trying to remember how the image had come about. “I had this—this sort of vision of the area of the industrial accident as a kind of . . . like a sacrificial altar with a pentagram drawn on it. You see the blood around the edges. I felt the people who died in that area had been sacrificed to . . . I don’t know.”

“To Mammon,” Melissa suggested.

“Perhaps not quite literally Mammon as such,” Paymenz murmured. “I wish I had that son of a bitch Shephard here.”

Nyerza tapped at the keyboard, and soon had my image superimposed over the map of Hercules with its demon manifestations.

Which lined up perfectly with the pentagram.

We passed the night in the rooms beneath the conference center. Army cots were brought to us, and Melissa and I lay down near one another, falling asleep almost immediately. There was just time for Melissa, lying huddled under a green blanket, turned away from me, to say, “You’re in trouble, you know, you sneaky brat. That one drawing of me on the roof . . . You’ve got that birthmark on my ass—a naked ass you’re not supposed to have had the chance to see. . . . You had to’ve spied on me when I was up there.”

“One time I was looking for you and you were asleep up there. . . . It was purely by accident. . . . I left immediately.”

“Immediately . . . my ass. You got the goddamn scene awfully detailed . . . you . . .”

“I can’t help having a photographic memory.”

But she was already snoring; I was asleep moments later.

Nyerza and Paymenz conferred with colleagues by Internet and phone, though some of the lines were down and power came and went. The next morning, in the little room with the printouts, we ate something an unnatural yellow, dry and glutinous and salty, we were told was reconstituted scrambled eggs.

“We have been working, developing a theory,” Nyerza said, hunched in a bass clef over his plate.

“Last night?” Melissa said. “You need rest, too, don’t you, Dr. Nyerza?”

He smiled shyly at her concern. I tried not to stare at her; I ground my teeth.

“I had a few hours, thank you,” he said. “Anyway, we theorize that this industrial accident in Hercules was not an accident, that its parameters were quite calculated. Here, in Detroit—another accident, some years back. In Miami, no accident but there were, instead, what are called, I believe, ‘cancer corridors,’ extending from the industrial site here. . . . Dr. Mendel believes—”—

“I believe they are also not accident,” said a short bald stocky man with an accent that might have been Dutch. He came in, pulling off his overcoat, tossing it on a chair, which fell over with the weight of it. He didn’t even glance that way. He was carrying a package, something long and narrow wrapped in brown paper. I thought of a sword in a scabbard, and then I thought,
That’s silly, it’s not a sword
. He put the package on the table.

Nyerza introduced Dr. Mendel. He had an ageless face that seemed to have some kind of Oriental cast to it, as if he were perhaps a quarter Asian and partly—what?—Dutch? German? I guessed he was something like fifty, but it was hard to tell. His eyes were fathomless black. He wore a rumpled gray suit and simple athletic shoes, and he moved with a strange springiness as he crossed the room and shook our hands. He seemed tired yet fed by some relentless spring of inner energy. There was an indefinable resilience about everything he did. “Yes,” he said, looking at the printouts. “I believe that none of this is an accident. Some happened before others—but each was timed. Some were greater pulsations, some lesser; that is, some events required sudden, widespread loss of life in a small area; in others, slow deaths, even suffering, was preferable. It was planned over a forty-year span. Maybe even more. Perhaps Bhopal was the beginning, really. For the demons are in other countries, too. But we have focused on this country as a sort of experimental subject in the study.”

“Planned by who?” Melissa asked.

“Now, that is the question. I prefer to wait before speculating too openly. . . . More information is needed.”

Who was this man?
I wondered.
And where was he taking us with all this?

He had an odd smell about him—not unpleasant. Rather exotic. Was it incense?

“If they were not accidents . . . these industrial horrors,” I said slowly, “and if—if the demons are the by-product, please tell us what you think. Speculate. Who planned it? How? What sort of ritual?”

I was beginning to speak faster and faster, with a growing excitement that fed on hope. Real hope—for if what was happening had an explanation, then it might have a solution. An explanation meant that the universe, life itself, was not some manic absurdity where any random god of chaos could inflict his demons on us. There was hope for an underlying meaning after all.

“I mean—if someone planned it, then there are rules, there are—”—

Mendel stopped me with a raised hand, as someone entered. I took it that he didn’t want these things discussed in front of the new visitor. Paymenz laid some printouts facedown atop those taped to the tables to hide them.

The visitor was Professor Laertes Shephard, looking exactly as I’d last seen him, though there was a quality in his eyes like a candle just after it’s been snuffed—a glow fading to ash. He came to where we stood at the tables, glanced at them and away.