Demons (22 page)

“This we understand.”

“Listen your maj-hystery—O, Queen of Grit and Sour Smells—LISTEN! It must be what you call ‘sooner’! Your enemies are seeking the Retriever, too! Too, too solid, this flesh—only
your
flesh, my dear, is really like a balloon filled with red, diluted mud and just a spark of life, and how easy it is to pop a balloon!”

It waded once more across the ceiling, down the wall, into the floor, this time turning right side up, coming at her through the floor. Sunk into the floor up to its waist, its hands hidden in the tile as if it were a bog.

It giggled delightedly.

“My darling dear, my queen, go little Queenie, oh!”

It jerked its arm up and its taloned hand came free of the floor as it lashed out at her.

She stood her ground, exerting her magical Will to maintain the integrity of the circle’s bubble of protection—so that the demon’s raking talons stopped at the boundary of the circle.

Then it laughed, its laughter a demented song.

And it reached through what she’d supposed to be her infallible wall of protection, its arm extending, stretching like soft plastic . . .

And it tickled her under the chin with its claws. Then it pinched her right nipple.

She hardly dared breathe. It could have touched her whenever it wanted, she realized.
It could kill her whenever it chose.

Its jaws widened, as if the back of its head were unzipping to open them all the way around. Three hundred sixty degrees of jaws, so that they should have fallen apart, upper separating from lower, head from neck. But instead, the complete circle of upper jaws oscillated like a coin spinning on a table just before it falls flat. And then the jaws snapped shut, the demon chirping,

“Hee!”

Other heads emerged from the ceiling, the wall, the floor. There, a head popped up from the tile—it looked like a man’s head with the features scrambled, set free to move about, so that they wandered about the front of the skull: The eyes crawling like snails, the lips humping along like caterpillars, the nose sliding to dance around what appeared to be a cigarette made of flesh. Then the features found their organization, wandered into place, and became the Prince people had called a Bugsy.

“Be minth, Valentinth,”

it said.

“I’ve got somethingth for yewww, about ten feeth under the floor here.”

A Grindum, roaring so that the walls shook, was shouldering its way from the wall. The raggedy feelers of a Dishrag waved and beckoned from the ceiling. A Sharkadian was moving across the floor toward her like—

Like a shark.

And she was backing toward the door.

“Your advice is understood, O Prince,” she said, managing to keep her voice from quavering much, hardly able to hear it herself over the pounding of her pulse. “I will accelerate the program. And now—I banish you back to—to your—”—

The Sharkadian leapt up from the floor like a killer whale leaping from the sea, and came at her—

And grabbed her as she turned to run. It gripped her shoulders from behind.

“You . . . you will release me. . . . Now . . .”

There came a metallic singsong cackling, and then she felt herself propelled, like a drunk from a bar, out the door . . .

To fall on her face on the sidewalk, skinning her nose and palms. She heard the door slam behind her.

Panting with fear, face and hands burning, she got to her feet and almost fell again, swaying on rubbery knees. The men in the van stared at her, but didn’t come out to help. The treacherous cowards.

She steadied herself and turned to look. The rest room building’s door was closed—and the lock was locked.

She hurried to the van. She got in and gasped, “Turn on the filter.”

The air cleanser hummed. She sat quietly in her seat as the van hastily backed up, then barreled down the road. The others looked at her but chose not to ask why she’d been ejected that way. They were afraid of her, perhaps—or afraid to know.

Her hands gripped her knees; her knuckles were white.

It couldn’t be,
she thought,
that we never had control of them. That couldn’t be. I must’ve done something wrong, incanted something badly. My Will must have failed. They couldn’t have been toying with me all along.

I am queen of the sorceresses. I am a goddess, Becoming. I am no one’s plaything!

When they got to the highway, the sorceress spoke aloud. “Anybody got anything to drink?” she rasped. “I mean, something strong?”

2

Portland, Oregon

There were twenty-three people sitting in a circle around the large, cluttered, musty old room. They sat on straight-backed chairs or, straight-backed themselves, on floor cushions. A conference table had been moved out in order to make room for the group. The window shades were drawn, and a small electric chandelier overhead had been dimmed to the brightness of a few candles.

The room was just a little too warm, and Ira was wishing he’d taken off his sweater before the sitting. He didn’t want to distract the others by taking it off now. It was a raw November evening outside, and most of them had overdressed. Ira sat in a light sheen of sweat, directing his attention to his inner world, to his sensations, to his feelings, to his heart and the heart within his heart, and to a certain place in the very center of himself. He watched detachedly as his train of free associations slipped endlessly by. He was distantly amused by many of them.

There was something else, something indescribable . . . something that flowed out of the present, from the silence that lay within the innermost circle of his watchful detachment.

Everyone was completely silent; it had been some time since Yanan, the leader of the meditation, had spoken. Ira could feel him there, but he couldn’t read him. Yanan was an enigma.

But no—they weren’t completely silent. Though they didn’t speak, it was just before dinnertime, and their stomachs gurgled and mewed, absurdly loud in the quiet. Sometimes it sounded like an orchestral section, tuning up. Santos, from Brazil, cleared his throat; an Egyptian woman sitting nearby shifted in her chair, grimacing with discomfort. They’d all been sitting on the hard seats for an hour and a half.

A man to Ira’s left sniffed, probably trying not to sneeze; someone’s stomach made a soft
eeep
sound. Ira had to smile.

Ira usually chose to do his sitting with his eyes open. He found himself looking at Paymenz. Beardless now but bearlike in his enormous brown sweater, Paymenz sat across from Ira, eyes closed, deep in meditation. He wasn’t yet used to Paymenz without a beard—his face looked too round, too pale, too tired without it. The erstwhile professor was going through changes, despite his age. He’d discarded as “energy-wasting and distorting” his old interest in ritual magic and divination. Paymenz instead had chosen the purity of the struggle for higher consciousness.

Ira himself had taken the same path—but sometimes, as now, he felt it was more a fishhook than a path. He felt, at times, impaled by the methods of this esoteric school; at such moments he felt himself squirming in the struggle to suffer all things consciously—like a shrike’s victim squirming on a thorn.

He was young in this school, he knew, despite having a certain gift for it. And he knew that he was still a slave to his lower impulses—like his resentment over Melissa’s absence, her going abroad with their son, Marcus. He knew the boy missed him, he could feel it, even now. Why couldn’t she have left Marcus? Her mission would take her to an obscure monastery in Turkmenistan, and the boy might succumb to some exotic Middle Eastern bacterium there; or he could be kidnapped by militants, taken hostage. Nine years old, wandering through the wastelands not far from the Afghanistan border.

But not alone. There were guides, protecting them. And of course, Nyerza was there.

He was ashamed at the naked surge of jealousy that rose up in him. Nyerza—who’d gathered her in his arms that night, as they’d hidden beneath the city . . . Nyerza in charge of his wife—and his son. If she’d had to insist on taking Marcus to that hard land, couldn’t she have told Ira why?

It would’ve been better if Melissa had lied. But instead she had said, with her typical disarming openness, “I don’t know why. But he has to go with me.”

She didn’t even know why she’d taken him there.

Ira was yanked back to the work at hand when Yanan spoke, bringing them to the end of the group meditation.

“And now we return our attention to the normal flow of events, to the social world, and the world of time.” His accent soft, faintly Middle Eastern. He was a small, compact man with a boyish brown face, though he was at least sixty. His curly black hair showed only the faintest peppering of gray. His wide flexible mouth was always on the verge of a smile—perpetually implying one, even when he didn’t smile.

Ira sighed inwardly, annoyed with himself for letting his mind wander. But there wasn’t any point in beating himself up about his lack of discipline. Anyone in his position would find it hard to stay cool and detached. He should have insisted on going with Melissa himself.

He’d
tried
to—but Yanan and Paymenz had made it sound as if it were a test of his faith and humility to stay here. If he hadn’t seen the demons nine years ago, if he hadn’t felt what he’d felt then, seen what he’d seen, he’d wonder if he was in a damn cult now. Perhaps, after nine years, it had deteriorated to just that.

Yanan stood and stretched, and that was the signal for the others to do so. Ira stood, grimacing as sensation came back into his legs but grateful to be able to move.

Yanan was there, gazing up at him. “Many kinks in the arms and legs today, eh?”

“My damn back hurts as soon as I stand up.”

“And why is that, do we know? Hm? Eh? It is you who put the hurts in with your tension. You sit today like a crocodile biting down. Crunch, all of your muscles. Big tension. Who’s in charge, you or the muscles, eh? Hm?”

“The muscles. My aunt Edna. Anybody but me.”

“You have an Aunt Edna? Is she with us?”

“No, that was a joke, I don’t have an Aunt Edna.”

“Ah! A joke! Too bad it’s not funny, eh? Hm?”

“Yeah.” Ira laughed softly. “Too bad.” The others were shuffling out of the room, carrying chairs, fetching the coffee table, saying nothing. “Okay, I’ll work on relaxing.”

“You’re worried about the Urn, the wife, the baby. You feel trapped in all this. Sometimes you like to be in it; sometimes you wish you had never started. Yes, eh?”

“Yes, eh.”

“Now you’re making fun of me?”

“Yes, eh.”

Yanan laughed and punched at Ira’s midriff. “Come on, let us have some coffee. No, first I make my evening prayers. Then we have some coffee. Eh? Hm?”

THE JOURNAL OF STEPHEN ISQUERAT

It only happened twice. The first time was when I was thirteen, the second time I was fifteen. I guess I’d convinced myself—sort of—that it hadn’t been real, that it was some kind of dream. And I kind of suppressed it. But when I took the psychonomics test, I remembered it, and it felt like the memory of something real.

Then I talked to Mr. Winderson, and met Latilla and got the tour of the psychonomics training room where those people sat at the desks. (None of them ever looked up! It was weird.) And after visiting that place and stumbling onto Mr. Deane, I remembered again. So I guess I’ll write it down in my journal. Maybe I can copy and paste it later for some psychonomics project.

It was winter, that first time, and we were snowed in. That was when Dad worked at that school in the Idaho panhandle. Nice kids, but the parents got really uptight when he mentioned evolution. Dad stuck it out there for two years.

The second year the snow was so high it buried the back of our one-story house and drifted halfway up the picture window; it was heavy enough it made the glass creak. We were way out in the boonies, away from anybody. I only saw my friends at school. It was Christmas vacation, and the power went out and we heated with wood, used lanterns for light. The County people kept saying they were going to plow our road, but somehow it never happened. Dad made arrangements for groceries to be brought out by a neighbor who had a snowmobile. Without power there was no TV, no Internet, no computer at all. I read, and we tried to enjoy the snow, but days passed and the claustrophobia, the cabin fever, got worse and worse.