Demons by John Shirley Page A

see it? It was as if, instead, I felt it and made some accommodation in the visual part of my brain.
    She felt it, too, and went pale, looking up at me. “They . . .”
    “They don’t want me to. I’m not . . . while they’re there, it has to be . . . someone like . . .” It hurt to say it: “Someone like Nyerza . . .” I took my hand away from her thigh; the invisible grip went from my wrist. It all seemed so . . . lawful. So inevitable. We didn’t question it.
    She laid her head against my shoulder. “But the time will come.”
    “I don’t know if I’ll ever be . . .”
    “You might, but that’s not what I meant. They won’t always be with me. Not in the way they are now.”
    “If we live.”
    “Yes. If we live.”
    “But you’ll belong to Nyerza.”
    After a moment, she said, “No, I don’t think so. He’s . . . a great man. But though he knows better, it’s difficult for him to think of a woman as his equal. And even when I’m close to him I’m not close to him. And . . . there was a sense, when he was—was in me . . . that he was talking to them . . . like I was the phone booth. I didn’t care for it. I should be honored, but . . .”
    “Do they—do they speak to you? Inside?”
    “No. Well, yes and no. They hide their light so I am not blinded. Sometimes I think I feel . . . sort of feel them saying something . . . but I hear no words.”
    “Saying?”
    “I don’t know how to put it into words.”
    We said no more that night, and soon she went to bed. I haven’t tried, since. But sometimes she takes my hand, or I take hers, and we hold hands; sometimes she comes into the circle of my arms, and we stand quietly in the middle of the room.
     
     
    In our area, the police are still operating, in a furtive kind of way. Mostly curtailing the gangs of looters, trying to suppress the parades, because there are always deaths at the parades or in their wake.
    The parades wind through the streets, the paraders clashing garbage can lids, clanking bottles together, chanting, many of them naked and bright with fanciful body paints. How it began, no one seems quite sure. The parades skirt the areas where the demons are roaming, seem to flirt with them, to invite them. They seem to believe, according to a radio report I heard, that if they thus offer themselves up en masse, the participating individuals have a better chance of survival: Choose from us but choose not me.
    I watched with binoculars, one dusk, as one of these spontaneous parades of the half mad wended, clashing and banging and chanting with an elliptical rhythm, into the square below the apartment building. I watched as a Dishrag fluttered down from the sky like a wet autumn leaf just broken from the tree, coming down, soon, to tumble across the ground, now like a tumbleweed but not tumbling at random. It was seeking and finding, as it closed on one of the paraders. The demon colloquially called a Dishrag is like fuzzy, blotchy gray-and-blue terry cloth crumpled up into a ball, about ten feet in diameter, capable of partially unfolding to entrap its victims.
    The Rag bounced in pursuit of a short, fat man—perhaps picking the easy kill from the herd—as the parade parted for the hunt, the crowd gawping in awe as the demon’s bounce became a pounce, knocking the man down, closing over him like a sea creature enfolding a fish. The victim’s arms and feet protruded from opposite sides of the crumpled, furry ball. As it crushed him, squeezing the juice from him, something else was expressed from him, pressed out by unimaginable psychic pressures, a visible emission of his mental battery, a kind of electric-blue discharge of images, key psychological moments sketched on the air. It was something like the smoky shapes I’d seen coming from the victim of the Spiders—but this was like the movement of a light pen caught in slow time exposure: the brief, streaky-blue glow outline of the victim with his parents, his mother beating him with a