Demons (48 page)

Stephen smashed another lens. Then he tossed the tools aside, went out to make some calls and find a car.

Portland, Oregon

Ira let it wash over him. Just being home with family. Being safe and fed and warm and knowing something, at least, had been accomplished. Not perfectly accomplished. Too many had died. But it hadn’t been for nothing.

Professor Paymenz laughed and shook his head. “Marcus, I am
not
going to play poker with you for Oreos. Last time you got all the cookies, I got the humiliation, you got the bellyache, and your mother got mad at me.”

Ira sat on the sofa, with books piled on either side of him; he was watching a lava lamp. The absurd goo stretched up, buckled, globuled, rose, rearranged . . . all in a pretty, artificially rosy light.

They were in the living room of Paymenz’s apartment, cluttered with lava lamps, malodorous with cat boxes, coated with cat fur, crowded with bookshelves. It was an hour after the simple dinner Melissa had made for them. Ira had picked at his food as usual; Yanan had gone home shortly after dinner, apologizing that there was work he must do.

“Come onnn,” Marcus pleaded with Paymenz. “Be my homie dog, Granddad. One hand. Just one hand.”

“Oh, go on,” Melissa said, her eyes misting, “play him for cookies. He’s been through a lot.”

“We don’t have any Oreos.”

“I got some for him. They’re in the cabinet over the fridge.”

“You were ready to spoil him.”

“Just a little.”

Paymenz sighed. He reached up to tug his beard—but it wasn’t there, and he scratched his chin instead. He went to the kitchen with Marcus, they got the cards and cookies, and began to play at the kitchen table.

“Yo-whoa!” Marcus said. Just exactly like the Marcus of old. “I get to shuffle, not you!”

“I’m your granddad, you know, have some respect. Okay, you shuffle. Paranoid kid. What a generation of vipers.”

Melissa came to sit by Ira. She had to move a stack of her father’s books to the floor before she could sit down. She took his hand.

He looked down at it a little self-consciously: The bones had mostly healed straight. His hand had been only slightly broken. One of his cheekbones had healed a tad crooked, he knew.

Ira started to say something about the dead in Ash Valley. About Glyneth, sick in a hospital, only a few blocks away. About the price they had paid.

But he decided against it. Not so long ago, he’d have said it. He’d have hammered on the dark side; he’d have railed about the night and brought everyone with him into the darkness.

Now it was different. Now he had died. Now he was something new. He was the same and he was different.

So he said nothing, and he simply held her hand.

And he thought, looking around the room, that each little lamp, each light source cast a shadow—and without the lamps and the window, the room would be
completely
dark. And Melissa sat in a dim part of the room; her face illuminated mostly from the window, the moon and stars and the city’s light. The light on her face, in that moment, was like the light you saw on the Earth in photos taken from space. In a way, they were always in the dark. As the whole Earth was always floating in the perpetual dark of interplanetary space—but for the Sun. There was only a vast darkness broken by individual light sources. And each source added its light to the whole.

“I’m just incredibly, amazingly relieved that Marcus is himself again,” Melissa was saying. “I know it wasn’t possession—I know Mendel
was
Marcus—and Marcus was Mendel, but it just wasn’t natural. There was a Marcus that was particularly him, that child. That was lost . . .”

“He’s back now. Mendel’s gone to sleep. Our boy is well and happy.”

She smiled at him. “Funny how you seem more optimistic—after something so terrible happened to you.”

He shrugged and kissed her.

The doorbell rang. Melissa swore, then got up to answer. It was the old shaikh, Araha, and a man Ira didn’t recognize. But he guessed who it was, and went to shake his hand.

“Stephen Isquerat,” said the young man.

“Hi, I’m Ira. This is Melissa.”

Stephen was looking around. He seemed bemused.

Melissa chuckled. “Not what you expected, right? So—how’s Glyneth?”

“Responding to treatment. The cancer isn’t . . . too advanced. It was so sudden . . . but I think she’ll be all right. I’m going back to the hospital in a couple of hours. They’re doing some more tests now.”

“Our faithful young Stephen has set up a cot beside her,” Araha said. “How is the boy?”

Melissa beamed. “He’s great. His old self.”

“Have you no coffee, nothing for an old man?”

“I’ll get it—coffee and cookies. You guys push whatever needs pushing onto the floor and find a seat,” Melissa said, bustling into the kitchen.

Stephen went and sat down, across the room, looking abstractedly into a golden lava lamp.

Marcus shouted, “You cheater! No way you got a straight!” from the kitchen.

Ira smiled. Araha looked gravely at him. “She believes?”

Ira nodded. “More or less. Anyway—I’m very grateful to Mendel.”

“Well—he’s not precisely acting. He has found that he can go to a playful, innocent place in himself, and be the boy. He is, after all, the boy. It took some time for him to find it. He will be the boy for her, for as long as she needs it.”

Ira glanced at the kitchen. He could hear Melissa chattering with them; she hadn’t heard Araha. It was all right. She was no fool, but Mendel’s performance was seamless. And she wanted to believe.

“Come,” Araha said. They went to sit with Stephen.

Stephen smiled at them, but Ira saw that he had tears in his eyes and his hand shook on the arm of the sofa. Ira could see that he had to make a perpetual effort at seeming well, seeming okay with himself, and that he was just propped up, somehow.

“What is it?” Ira asked gently.

“I . . . helped what happened . . . to happen. I was part of it. The dead . . . children . . . all the suffering . . .”

“Yes. We all failed. But you succeeded, too. You did something great. And the harm you did was really just humanity’s fallen state showing itself once again. It was everyone’s sin.”

Araha nodded approvingly. “You take care of Glyneth . . . but they tell me you’re a volunteer with other cancer patients.”

“It’s what I want to do—to help heal people.”

“You will. You see, we all fail. But we go on, and we redeem ourselves where we can, Stephen. Simply . . . wherever we can.”

JOURNAL OF STEPHEN ISQUERAT, JUNE 2

Glyneth and I will be married next month. God bless her.

But the joy is a little blighted today by a government announcement. The lies and cover-ups about Ash Valley have come to a culmination: chemically induced insanity, hallucinations. Only a few people at West Wind are being prosecuted. Payments are being made. West Wind’s stockholders have voted to make an enormous settlement with survivors and relatives of victims, and yet West Wind’s stock has gone up. . . . It’s higher than it was before.

I have to let it go. Just let it go.

It’s not so hard, now, to let it go. Since the day ofthe Black Pearl, I’ve never quite shaken the feeling of the unreality—or limited reality—of the material world. It comes and goes. For a while I could feel nothing but remorse. But now . . . when I’ve accepted my part in things, the ghostly feeling comes back: the feeling that everything is spirit. People are just spirits, waves on the sea of spirit, surfacing in this world for a while, then sinking back.

Before, it frightened me—that sense that mind and spirit underlie all physical reality. That, despite appearances, it’s all just . . . spirit.

But now, it’s a comfort to feel it. Because that truth is what redeems existence itself.

The waking have one world in common;
sleepers have each a private world of his own.

—HERACLITUS

Selected Works by John Shirley

novels

A Splendid Chaos

Eclipse

Eclipse Penumbra

Eclipse Corona

Wetbones

City Come A-Walkin’

The Brigade

And the Angel with Television Eyes

Spider Moon

short story collections

Black Butterflies

Darkness Divided

Really, Really, Really, Really Weird Stories

Heatseeker

A Del Rey
^®
Book

Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

Copyright © 2000, 2002 by John Shirley

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. A portion of this work was previously published as a novella under the title
Demons
by Cemetery Dance Publications in 2000.

Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

www.delreydigital.com

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

Shirley, John, 1953–

Demons / John Shirley.

p. cm.

eISBN 0-345-45504-5

1. Demonology—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3569.H558 D46 2002

813′.54—dc21 2001043478

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