Demons Read online

  Demons!

  edited by

  Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-110-8

  Copyright © 2013 by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann

  First printing: July 1987

  Cover art by: Ron Miller

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  Electronic version by Baen Books

  Acknowledgment is made for permission to print the following material:

  "The Willow Platform" by Joseph Payne Brennan. Copyright © 1973 by Stuart David Schiff for Whispers #7. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "The Night of White Bhairab" by Lucius Shepard. Copyright © 1984 by Mercury Press, Inc. Originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1984. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "The Mangier" by Stephen King. Copyright © 1976, 1977, 1978 by Stephen King. First appeared in Cavalier, December 1972. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday & Co., the author, and the author's agent, Kirby McCauley, Ltd.

  "The Last Demon" by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Reprinted with permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. From Short Friday by Isaac Bashevis Singer, copyright © 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964 by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

  "The Golden Rope" by Tanith Lee. Copyright © 1983 by Tanith Lee. First appeared in Red as Blood, DAW Books, 1983. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Basileus" by Robert Silverberg. Copyright © 1983 by Ogberg, Ltd. First appeared in The Best of Omni Science Fiction No. 5 (Omni Publications International Ltd., 1983). Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Twilla" by Tom Reamy. Copyright © 1974 by Mercury Press, Inc. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 1974. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Tom Reamy.

  "The Purple Pterodactyls" by L. Sprague de Camp. Copyright © 1976 by Mercury Press, Inc. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 1976. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Goslin Day" by Avram Davidson. Copyright © 1970 by Damon Knight. First appeared in Orbit 6, Berkley Books, 1970. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agent, Richard D. Grant.

  "Nellthu" by Anthony Boucher. Copyright © 1955 by Fantasy House, Inc. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 1955. Reprinted by permission of the author's estate and Curtis Brown, Ltd.

  "Snulbug" by Anthony Boucher. Copyright © 1941 by Street & Smith. First appeared in Unknown, December 1941. Reprinted by permission of the author's estate and Curtis Brown, Ltd.

  "One Other" by Manly Wade Wellman. Copyright © 1953 by Fantasy House Inc., for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 1953. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "An Ornament to His Profession" by Charles L. Harness. Copyright © 1966 by Conde Nast Publications, Inc. First appeared in Analog, February 1966. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agents, The Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc.

  The editors would like to thank the following people for their help and support:

  Susan Casper, Jeanne Van Buren Dann, Patrick Delahunt, Edward Ferman, Virginia Kidd, Trina King, Shawna McCarthy, Brian Perry and Tawna Lewis of Fat Cat Books (263 Main St., Johnson City, New York 13790), Stuart Schiff, Bernie Sheredy, the staff of the Vestal Public Library, Michael Swanwick, Bob Walters, Tom Whitehead of the Special Collections Department of the Paley Library at Temple University (and his staff, especially John Betencourt and Connie King), and special thanks to our editors, Susan Allison and Ginjer Buchanan.

  For Lucius Shepard

  But woudst thou bid the demons fly Like mist before the dawning sky.

  —Sir Walter Scott

  DEMON

  1. In ancient Greek mythology: A supernatural being of a nature intermediate between that of gods and men; an inferior divinity, spirit, genius (including the souls or ghosts of deceased persons, esp. deified heroes).

  b. Sometimes, particularly, an attendant, ministering, or indwelling spirit; a genius.

  2. An evil spirit.

  a. Applied to the idols or gods of the heathen, and to the "evil" or "unclean spirits" by which demoniacs were possessed or actuated.

  b. In general current use: An evil spirit; a malignant being of superhuman nature; a devil.

  c. Applied to a person (animal or agency personified), of malignant, cruel, terrible, or destructive nature, or of hideous appearance. (Cf. devil)

  d. An evil passion or agency personified.

  —Excerpted from The Oxford English Dictionary

  The Willow Platform

  by

  Joseph Payne Brennan

  A grimoire is literally a black magic textbook, a compendium of ancient spells, potions, ceremonies, and incantations to induce the various dark lords, devils, demons, shades, and elementals to manifest themselves and serve the sorcerer in his pursuit of power, wealth, or knowledge. The earliest and most legendary grimoire is the Emerald Table of Hermes Trismegistus, which is still shrouded in mystery. The original tablet, carved out of pure emerald, has never been found, although a variant Latin version surfaced in the thirteenth century. There are other texts: The Key of Solomon; The Lemegeton, or Lesser Key of Solomon; The Grimorium Verum; The Red Dragon; The Heptameron; the German grimoire known as Doctor Faust's Great and Powerful Sea-Spirit; and others. The great grimoires concentrate on the most important of the dark dignitaries, cataloging and describing them, for it's all important to know the true name and form of a summoned demon or lord. But lesser spirits are also cataloged: those demons that are slightly easier to summon and command, such as the malignant and implacable elementals born of fire, water, air, or earth; and their cold and sinister cousins, the fly-the-lights that can be brought to life only in darkness. The mature and experienced sorcerer tries to control these nightmarish beings and force them to his will, but this can be an even more shocking and dangerous enterprise for a neophyte.

  In fact, a little knowledge can be . . . deadly, as veteran horror writer Joseph Payne Brennan shows us in this disquieting tale of summoning and sacrifice set in rural New England.

  Joseph Payne Brennan's short stories and poems have been included in over a hundred anthologies, and his fiction and poetry has appeared in Commonweal, Esquire, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, American Scholar, New York Times, Magazine of Horror, and Georgia Review. His short fiction can be found in his own collections Nine Horrors and a Dream, The Dark Returner, Scream at Midnight, The Casebook of Lucius Leffing, and The Shapes of Midnight, among others. His poetry collections include Webs of Time, As Evening Advances, Death Poems, and Edges of Night. Two of his stories have been adapted for NBC's Thriller television series, and another story, "The Calamander Chest," was recorded by Vincent Price. He has been awarded the Leonara Speyer Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, and the Clark Ashton Smith Poetry Award for life work.

  Thirty years ago Juniper Hill was an isolated township, with a small village, dirt roads and high hilly tracts of evergreen forest—pine, hemlock, tamarack and spruce. Scattered along the fringes of wood were boulder-strewn pastures, hay fields and glacially formed, lichen-covered knolls.

  Ordinarily I stayed in Juniper Hill from early June until late September. As I returned year after year, I came to be accepted almost as a native—many notches above the few transient "summer people" who stayed for a month or so and then hurried back to the world of traffic, tension and tedium.

  I wrote when I felt like it. The rest of the time I walked the dirt roads, explored the woods and chatted with the natives.
/>   Within a few years I got to know everyone in town, with the exception of a hermit or two and one irascible landowner who refused to converse even with his own neighbors.

  To me, however, a certain Henry Crotell was the most intriguing person in Juniper Hill. He was sometimes referred to as "the village idiot," "that loafer," "that good-for-nothing," etc., but I came to believe that these epithets arose more from envy than from conviction.

  Somehow, Henry managed to subsist and enjoy life without doing any work—or at least hardly any. At a time when this has become a permanent way of life for several million persons, I must quickly add that Henry did not receive one dime from the township of Juniper Hill, either in cash or goods.

  He lived in a one-room shack on stony land which nobody claimed and he fed himself. He fished, hunted, picked berries and raised a few potatoes among the rocks behind his shack. If his hunting included a bit of poaching, nobody seemed to mind.

  Since Henry used neither alcohol nor tobacco, his needs were minimal. Occasionally, if he needed a new shirt, or shoes, he would split wood, dig potatoes or fill in as an extra hay-field hand for a few days. He established a standard charge which never varied; one dollar a day plus meals. He would never accept any more cash. You might prevail upon him to take along a sack of turnips, but if you handed him a dollar and a quarter for the day, he'd smilingly return the quarter.

  Henry was in his early thirties, slab-sided, snuff-brown, with a quick loose grin and rather inscrutable, faded-looking blue eyes. His ginger colored hair was getting a trifle thin. When he smiled, strangers assumed he was wearing false teeth because his own were so white and even. I once asked him how often he brushed his teeth. He doubled up with silent laughter. "Nary brush! Nary toothpaste!" I didn't press the point, but I often wondered what his secret was—if he had one.

  Henry should have lived out his quiet days at Juniper Hill and died at ninety on the cot in his shack. But it was not to be.

  Henry found the book.

  Four or five miles from Henry's shack lay the crumbling ruins of the old Trobish house. It was little more than a cellar hole filled with rotten boards and fallen beams. Lilac bushes had forced their roots between the old foundation stones; maple saplings filled the dooryard. Old Hannibal Trobish, dead for fifty years, had been an eccentric hermit who drove off intruders with a shotgun. When he died, leaving no heirs and owing ten years' taxes, the town had taken over the property. But the town had no need of it, nor use for it, and so the house had been allowed to decay until finally the whole structure, board by board, had dropped away into the cellar hole. There were hundreds of such collapsed and neglected houses throughout New England. Nobody paid much attention to them.

  Henry Crotell, however, seemed fascinated by the moldering remains of the Trobish house. He prowled the area, poked about in the cellar hole and even lifted out some of the mildewed beams. Once, reaching in among the sagging foundation stones, he was nearly bitten by a copperhead.

  Old Dave Baines admonished Henry when he heard about it. "That's an omen, Henry! You'd better stay away from that cellar hole!"

  Henry pushed out his upper lip and looked at his shoes. "Ain't 'fraid of no old snake! Seen bigger. Last summer I rec'lect. Big torn rattler twice as big!"

  Not long after the copperhead incident, Henry found the book. It was contained in a small battered tin box which was jammed far in between two of the foundation stones in the Trobish cellar.

  It was a small, vellum-bound book, measuring about four by six inches. The title page and table of contents page had either disintegrated or been removed, and mold was working on the rest of the pages, but it was still possible to read most of the print—that is, if you knew Latin.

  Henry didn't, of course, but, no matter, he was entranced by his find. He carried the book everywhere. Sometimes you'd see him sitting in the spruce woods, frowning over the volume, baffled but still intrigued.

  We underestimated Henry. He was determined to read the book. Eventually he prevailed upon Miss Winnie, the local teacher, to lend him a second-hand Latin grammar and vocabulary.

  Since Henry's formal schooling had been limited to two or three years, and since his knowledge of English was, at best, rudimentary, it must have been a fearful task for him to tackle Latin.

  But he persisted. Whenever he wasn't prowling the woods, fishing, or filling in for an ailing hired hand, he'd sit puzzling over his find. He'd trace out the Latin words with one finger, frown, shake his head and pick up the textbooks. Then, stubbornly, he'd go back to the vellum-bound volume again.

  He ran into many snags. Finally he returned to Miss Winnie with a formidable list of words and names which he couldn't find in the grammar.

  Miss Winnie did the best she could with the list. Shortly afterwards she went to see Dave Baines. Although, in his later years, Baines held no official position, he was the patriarch of the town. Nearly everyone went to him for counsel and advice.

  Not long after Miss Winnie's visit, he stopped in to see me. After sipping a little wine, he came to the point.

  "I wish," he said abruptly, "you'd try to get that damned book away from Henry."

  I looked up with surprise. "Why should I, Dave? It keeps him amused apparently."

  Baines removed his steel-rimmed spectacles and rubbed his eyes. "That list Henry brought Miss Winnie contains some very strange words—including the names of at least four different devils. And several names which must refer to—entities—maybe worse than devils."

  I poured more wine. "I'll see what I can do. But I really can't imagine what harm could come of it. That book is just a new toy to Henry. He'll tire of it eventually."

  Dave replaced his spectacles. "Well, maybe. But the other day Giles Cowdry heard this funny high-pitched voice coming out of the woods. Said it gave him the creeps. He slipped in to investigate and there was Henry standing in a clearing among the pines reading out of that moldy book. I suppose his Latin pronunciation was pretty terrible, but Giles said a strange feeling came over him as Henry went on reading. He backed away and I guess he was glad enough to get out of earshot."

  I promised Dave I'd see what I could do. About a week later while I was taking a walk through the woods in the vicinity of Henry's shack, I heard a kind of chant emanating from nearby.

  Pushing through a stand of pines, I spotted Henry standing in a small open area among the trees. He held a book in one hand and mouthed a kind of gibberish which, to me at least, only faintly resembled Latin.

  Unobtrusively, I edged into sight. A fallen branch cracked as I stepped on it and Henry looked up.

  He stopped reading immediately.

  I nodded. "Mornin', Henry. Just taking a stroll and I couldn't help hearing you. Must be a might interesting little book you've got there. Can I take a look at it?"

  Ordinarily, Henry would greet me with an easy grin. This time he scowled, "Ain't givin' my book to nobody!" he exclaimed, stuffing the volume into a pocket.

  I was annoyed and I suppose I showed it. "I didn't ask to keep the book, Henry. I merely wanted to look at it." Actually this wasn't entirely true; I had hoped to persuade him to give me the book.

  He shrugged, hesitated and then, turning, started off through the woods. "I got chores. No time for talk," he muttered over his shoulder.

  The next day I reported my failure to Dave Baines.

  "Too bad," he commented, "but I suppose we'd better just forget about it. If he won't give that infernal book to you, he won't give it to anybody. Let's just hope he loses interest in it after a time."

  But Henry didn't lose interest in the vellum-bound book. On the contrary, he developed an obsession about it. He went hunting or fishing only when driven by acute hunger. He neglected his potato patch. His shack, never very sturdy, began to disintegrate.

  Less often during the day now, but more often at night, his high-pitched voice would be heard arising from one of the dense groves of pines or hemlocks which bordered the dusty country roads. Scarcely anyone in Ju
niper Hill knew Latin, but everyone who heard Henry's chant drifting from the dark woods agreed that it was an eerie and disturbing experience. One farmer's wife averred that Henry's nocturnal readings had given her nightmares.

  Somebody asked how Henry could see to read in the dark, since nobody ever had seen a light in the woods from whence the sounds emanated.

  It was, as is said, "a good question." We never found out for sure. It was possible that Henry had finally memorized the contents of the book, or part of it. This, however, I personally found difficult to believe.

  Henry's explanation, when it came, was even more difficult to accept.

  One hot summer morning he turned up at the village general store. He looked emaciated and his clothes were in tatters, but he seemed imbued with a kind of suppressed animation. Perhaps exhilaration might be a better word.

  He bought a two-dollar work shirt and three tins of corned beef. He did not appear chagrined that these purchases very obviously emptied his tattered wallet.

  Loungers at the store noticed that he was wearing a ring. Some commented on it.