Demons by John Shirley

hallway. We passed a glass door through which I could see an enormous auditorium where groups of querulous people argued with the man at the podium in flagrant disregard for protocol. I couldn’t make out most of what they were saying. I caught only crusts and spatters of sentences. “. . . the Islamic Front claims . . . the result of prayers—who are we to say it’s not. . . . Let each man seek out his own salvation . . . perhaps sacrifice . . . the collective unconscious . . . quantum creations. . . . We’re fools . . . dead minutes from now, everyone here. . . . Hysteria won’t . . .”
    “There’s food in the private conference room,” Nyerza was saying. “But I must prepare you: First, we will pass by a Gnasher. I have just come from observing another one with a Tailpipe at the university.”
    “These don’t sound like scientific terms to me,” Melissa said. Somehow, then, she had an air of speaking just to see if she still could.
    And in fact Nyerza seemed surprised she’d spoken. “No—already a slang has arisen for the various demons. Reports indicate six kinds so far. One of the creatures has remarked that there are seven expected. The seven clans, he said.”
    “You call them creatures,” Paymenz said. “Is this an evaluation on your part? Apart from ‘creatures’ as in the created of God, the word has implications of—”—
    “Of the confines of the biologically conventional, or perhaps extraterrestrial. So I use it wrongly. It is an incarnate spirit, in my opinion. A malevolent spirit, these.”
    “Demons.”
    “Quite. Here—I warn you, when we pass the Gnasher and the Tailpipe—in this room, the Lull may end, they may attack. . . .”
    Outside the room were six young National Guardsmen, three of them black, two Hispanic, and one a chinless, spindly Caucasian. They looked as if they were debating between accepting a probable death, when the Lull was over, or deserting.
    It was a large conference room, empty but for video screens filling one wall and an oval conference table. The room was windowless; a skylight threw an increasingly rusty light on everything. The table should have collapsed under the weight of the creature occupying most of its surface. The big demon was a Tailpipe, like the one we’d seen squatting in the gas station, something like a pilot whale out of water, but its body was even blunter, curled cobralike in on itself. Nestled in one of its coils was a Gnasher, using the bigger, duller demon as a sort of beanbag chair.
    The Gnasher was the color of a red and black ant; its head exactly that red, almost like colored vinyl, its body exactly that black. Its head sat on its long thin neck like an ant’s, but it had a man’s jaws, although oversized and gnashing, clashing loudly between sentences, like some exotic metallic percussion instrument—and its eyes were those of a man, the pretty blue eyes of a movie star, and its corded arms were lean and there were four arms, and they were leathery black. The Gnasher lifted its head languidly as we looked in and, unexpectedly, began to speak. It spoke at length to us—Nyerza took a step back at this. We stood in the open doorway and listened to the demon as it spoke. Its hands were talons and only talons; impossibly prehensile claws that rippled delicately like a Balinese dancer’s fingers to emphasize its words. It had an enormous phallus, armored in big, spurred scales. I couldn’t see the rest of its lower parts.
    “We should have a tape recorder going. This is the first time it has spoken,” Nyerza murmured to Paymenz.
    “I’ll remember every word,” I said, my voice sounding whispery, husky in my own ears.
    “Ira has a photographic memory,” Paymenz muttered.
    The demon reverberated on.
     
    “I am so delighted to see you. I feel the delight as a violet fire on the roof of my mouth as I look at you, and I stiffen with recognition.”
     
    Its voice was a languid purr, but every word stood out like billboard