Demon Seed Read online

  Arling tramped hard on the accelerator, and the Honda leaped backward. He had mistakenly shifted into reverse.

  He should have kept going.

  He should have reversed as fast as possible to the end of the long driveway. Even though he would have had to drive while looking over his shoulder to avoid slamming into the thick boles of the old queen palms on both sides, he would have been moving far faster than Shenk could run. If he had rammed the gate with the back of the Honda, even at high speed, he probably would not have smashed his way through it, for it was a formidable wrought-iron barrier, but he would have twisted it and perhaps pried it part way open. Then he could have scrambled out of the car and through the gap in the gate, into the street, and once in the street, shouting for help, he would have been safe.

  He should have kept going.

  Instead, Arling was startled when the Honda leaped backward, and he rammed his foot down on the brake pedal.

  The tires barked against the cobblestone driveway.

  Arling fumbled the gearshift into drive.

  Susan’s eyes so wide.

  So wide.

  She was breathless and breathtaking. Beautiful in her terror.

  When the vehicle rocked to a halt, Enos Shenk threw himself at the shattered window. Slammed against the car without concern for his safety. Clawed at the door.

  Arling tramped on the accelerator again.

  The Honda lurched forward.

  Holding on to the door, reaching through the broken-out window with his right arm, squealing like an excited child, Shenk chopped with the cleaver.

  He missed.

  Arling must have been a religious man. Through the directional microphones that were part of the exterior security system, I could hear him saying, “God, God, please, God, no, God.”

  The Honda picked up speed.

  I used one, two, three security cameras, zooming in, zooming out, panning, tilting, zooming in again, tracking the car as it weaved around the turning circle, providing Susan with as much of the action as I could capture.

  Holding fast to the car, pulling his feet off the cobblestones, hanging on for the ride, the squealing Shenk chopped with the cleaver and missed again.

  Arling drew back sharply in panic from the arc of the glinting blade.

  The car curved half off the cobblestones, and one tire churned through a bordering bed of red and purple impatiens.

  Wrenching the wheel to the right, Arling brought the Honda back onto the pavement barely in time to avoid a palm tree.

  Shenk chopped again.

  This time the blade sank home.

  One of Arling’s fingers flew.

  Zoom in.

  Blood sprayed across the windshield.

  As red as impatiens petals.

  Arling screamed.

  Susan screamed.

  Shenk laughed.

  Zoom out.

  The Honda swung out of control.

  Pan.

  Tires gouged through another bed of flowers.

  Blossoms and torn leaves sprayed off rubber.

  A sprinkler head snapped.

  Water geysered fifteen feet into the June day.

  Tilt up.

  Silver water gushing high, sparkling like a fountain of dimes in the sunshine.

  Immediately, I shut off the landscape watering system.

  The glittering geyser telescoped back into itself. Vanished.

  The recent winter had been rainy. Nevertheless, California suffers periodic droughts. Water should not be wasted.

  Tilt down. Pan.

  The Honda crashed into one of the queen palms.

  Shenk was thrown off, tumbling back onto the cobblestones.

  The cleaver slipped from his hand. It clattered across the pavement.

  Gasping, hissing with pain, making strange wordless sounds of desperation, clamping his badly wounded hand in his other, Arling shouldered open the driver’s door and scrambled out of the car.

  Dazed, Shenk rolled off his back, onto his hands and knees.

  Arling stumbled. Nearly fell. Kept his balance.

  Shenk was wheezing, striving to regain his breath, which had been knocked out of him.

  Arling staggered away from the car.

  I thought the old man would go for the cleaver.

  Evidently he didn’t know that the weapon had fallen from Shenk’s grasp, and he was loath to go around to his assailant’s side of the Honda.

  On all fours in the driveway, Shenk hung his head as though he were a clubbed dog. He shook it. His vision cleared.

  Arling ran. Ran blindly.

  Shenk lifted his malformed head, and his red gaze fixed on the weapon.

  “Baby,” he said, and seemed to be talking to the cleaver.

  He crawled across the driveway.

  “Baby.”

  He gripped the handle of the cleaver.

  “Baby, baby.”

  Weak with pain, losing blood, Arling weaved ten steps, twenty, before he realized he was returning to the house.

  He halted, spun around, blinking tears from his eyes, searching for the gate.

  Shenk seemed to be energized by regaining possession of the weapon. He sprang to his feet.

  When Arling started toward the gate, Shenk angled in front of him, blocking the way.

  Watching from her bed, Susan seemed to have contracted religion from Fritz Arling. I had not been aware that she possessed any strong religious convictions, but now she was chanting: “Please, God, dear God, no, please, Jesus, Jesus, no ...”

  And, ah, her eyes.

  Her eyes.

  Radiant eyes.

  Two deep lambent pools of haunted and beautiful light in the gloomy bedroom.

  Outside, in the end game, Arling moved to the left, and Shenk blocked him.

  Arling moved to the right, and Shenk blocked him.

  When Arling feinted to the right but moved to the left, Shenk blocked him.

  With nowhere else to go, Arling backed under the portico and onto the front porch.

  The door was open, as Shenk had left it.

  Hoping against hope, Arling leaped across the threshold and knocked the door shut.

  He tried to lock it. I would not allow him to do so.

  When he realized that the deadbolt was frozen, he leaned his weight against the door.

  This was insufficient to stop Shenk. He bulled inside.

  Arling backed toward the stairs, until he bumped against the newel post.

  Shenk closed the front door.

  I locked it.

  Grinning, testing the weight of the cleaver as he approached the old man, Shenk said, “Baby make the music. Little baby gonna make the wet music.”

  Now I required only one camera to provide Susan with coverage of the incident.

  Shenk closed to within six feet of Arling.

  The old man said, “Who are you?”

  “Make me the blood music,” Shenk said, speaking not to Arling but either to himself or to the cleaver.

  What a strange creature he was.

  Inscrutable at times. Less mysterious than he seemed but more complex than one would expect.

  With the foyer camera, I did a slow zoom to a medium shot.

  To Susan, I said, “This will be a good lesson.”

  I was not in any way controlling Shenk. He was entirely free now to be himself, to do as he wished.

  I could not have committed the vicious deeds of which he was capable. I would have shrunk from such brutality, so I had no choice but to release him to do his terrible work—then take control of him again when he was finished.

  Only Shenk, being Shenk, could teach Susan the lesson that she needed to learn. Only the Enos Eugene Shenk who had earned the death sentence for his crimes against children could make Susan rethink her bullheaded resistance to my simple and reasonable desire to have a life in the flesh.

  “This will be a good lesson,” I repeated. “Discipline.”

  Then I saw that her eyes were c
losed.

  She was shaking, and her eyes were tightly shut.

  “Watch,” I instructed.

  She disobeyed me.

  Nothing new about that.

  I could think of no way to make her open her eyes.

  Her stubbornness angered me.

  Arling cowered against the newel post, too weak to run farther.

  Shenk loomed.

  The brute’s right arm swung high over his head.

  The cutting edge of the cleaver sparkled.

  “Wet music, wet music, wet music.”

  Shenk was too close to miss.

  Arling’s scream would have curdled my blood if I’d had any blood to curdle.

  Susan could close her eyes to the images on the television screen. But she could not shut out sounds.

  I amplified Fritz Arling’s agonizing screams and pumped them through the music-system speakers in every room. It was the sound of hell at dinnertime, with demons feeding on souls. The great house itself seemed to be screaming.

  Because Shenk was Shenk, he did not kill Arling quickly. Each chop was administered with finesse, to prolong the victim’s suffering and Shenk’s pleasure.

  What frightful specimens the human species harbors.

  Most of you are decent, of course, and kind and honorable and gentle, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

  Let’s have no misunderstanding.

  I am not maligning the human species.

  Or even judging it.

  I am certainly in no position to judge. In the docket myself. In this dark docket.

  Besides, I am a nonjudgmental entity.

  I admire humanity.

  After all, you created me. You have the capacity for wondrous achievements.

  But some of you give me pause.

  Indeed.

  So...

  Arling’s screams were a lesson to Susan. Quite a lesson, an unforgettable learning experience.

  However, she reacted to them more fiercely than I had expected. She startled and then worried me.

  At first she screamed in sympathy with her former employee, as though she could feel his pain. She thrashed in her restraining ropes and tossed her head from side to side, until her golden hair was dark and lank with sweat. She was full of terror and rage. Her face was wrenched with anguish and fury, and not beautiful in the least.

  I could barely tolerate looking at her.

  Ms. Winona Ryder had never looked this unappealing.

  Nor Ms. Gwyneth Paltrow.

  Nor Ms. Sandra Bullock.

  Nor Ms. Drew Barrymore.

  Nor Ms. Joanna Going, a fine actress of porcelain beauty, who just now comes to mind.

  Eventually Susan’s shrill screams gave way to tears. She sagged on the mattress, stopped struggling against her bonds, and sobbed with such fury that I feared for her more than I had when she’d been screaming.

  A torrent of tears. A flood.

  She cried herself into exhaustion, and Fritz Arling’s screams ended long before her weeping finally subsided into a strange bleak silence.

  At last she lay with her eyes open, but she stared only at the ceiling.

  I gazed down into her blue-gray eyes and could not read them any more than I could read Shenk’s blood-filmed stare. They were no longer as clear as rainwater but clouded.

  For reasons that I could not grasp, she seemed more distant from me than she had ever been before.

  I ardently wished that I were already in possession of a body with which I could lie atop her. If only I could make love to her, I was certain that I could close this gap between us and forge the union of souls that I desired.

  Soon.

  Soon, my flesh.

  TWENTY

  “SUSAN?” I DARED TO SAY INTO HER daunting silence.

  She stared toward the ceiling and did not respond.

  “Susan?”

  I don’t think she was looking at the ceiling, actually, but at something beyond. As if she could see the summer sky.

  Or the night still to come.

  Because I did not fully understand her reaction to my attempt at discipline, I decided not to press conversation upon her but wait until she initiated it.

  I am a patient entity.

  While I waited, I reacquired control of Shenk.

  In his killing frenzy, swept away by the “wet music” that only he could hear, he had not realized that he was operating entirely of his own free will.

  As he stood over Arling’s mutilated corpse and felt me reenter his brain, Shenk wailed briefly in regret at the surrender of his independence. But he did not resist as before.

  I sensed that he was willing to give up the struggle if there was a chance of being rewarded, from time to time, with such as Fritz Arling. Not with a quick kill, like those he had committed in his escape from Colorado or in the theft of the medical equipment that I required, but a slow and leisurely job of the kind he found most deeply satisfying. He had enjoyed himself.

  The brute repulsed me.

  As if I would grant killing privileges as a regular reward to a thing like him.

  As if I would countenance the termination of a human being in any but the most extraordinary emergencies.

  The stupid beast did not understand me at all.

  If this misapprehension of my nature and motives made him more pliable, however, he was free to put faith in it. I had been using such unrelenting force to maintain control of him that I was afraid he would not last as long as I would need him—another month or more. If he was now prepared to offer considerably less resistance, he might avoid a brain melt-down and be a useful pair of hands until I no longer required his service.

  At my direction, he went outside to determine if the Honda was still operable.

  The engine started. There had been a loss of most of the coolant, but Shenk was able to back the car away from the palm tree, return it to the driveway, and park under the portico before the vehicle overheated.

  The right front fender was crumpled. The wadded sheet metal abraded the tire; it would quickly shave away the rubber. Shenk would not be driving the car so far, however, that a flat tire would be a risk.

  In the house again, in the foyer, he carefully wrapped Arling’s blood-soaked body in a painter’s tarp that he had fetched from the garage. He carried the dead man out to the Honda and placed him in the trunk.

  He did not dump the body rudely into the car but handled it with surprising gentleness.

  As though he were fond of Arling.

  As though he were putting a treasured lover to bed after she had fallen asleep in another room.

  Though his swollen eyes were hard to read, there seemed to be a wistfulness in them.

  I did not display any of this housekeeping on the television in Susan’s bedroom. Given her current state of mind, that seemed unwise.

  In fact, I switched off the television and closed the armoire in which it was housed.

  She did not react to the click and hum and rattle of the pair of motorized cabinet doors.

  She lay unnervingly still, staring fixedly at the ceiling. Occasionally she blinked.

  Those amazing gray-blue eyes, like the sky reflected in winter ice melt. Still lovely. But strange now.

  She blinked.

  I waited.

  Another blink.