Demons Read Online Free Page A

silent; the air grew turgid with imminence. Dr. Paymenz and Melissa and I found ourselves as silent as the birds, gazing expectantly at the clouds, then at the city, and then again at the strangely shaped clouds, as if the sky had developed nipples that were giving out a strange effluvium. But now the clouds up above bulged and seemed to swarm within themselves. . . .

 
     
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    “Dad?” Melissa said in a voice that quavered only a little.
    He reached out and took her hand but kept watching the sky.
    Then the droplets burst like fungus pods, and gave out black spores. And the specks of black took on more definite shapes, shapes that soared and dropped and called from the distance with hooting, anticipatory glee. And then we saw little black cones forming on the streets below and exuding not lava but inverted teardrops, mercuric and quivering, that burst in counterpoint to cloud drops, scattering nodes of black that took shape and joined their fellows above. And we saw some of them drifting closer, coming toward us and to the other buildings in the city, growing as they came not only in the change of perspective but in individual size; and one of them—with a row of leather wings like thistle leaves up and down its back—came to grip our building, five stories below, with long ropy arms and legs that ended in eagle’s claws. It was what we later came to call a Sharkadian. Its body was theoretically female—with leathery green-black breasts, and a woman’s hips, and even a vaginal slit. But gender is only a parody among the demons. The Sharkadian’s head didn’t maintain the mock femininity—it was jaws and only jaws, and it used them to bite off a chunk of concrete balcony. It chewed meditatively for a moment and then spat wet sand. A man came out on a nearby balcony to see what all the shouting from the street was, and got out half a scream before the Sharkadian leapt on him and snapped part of his skull away, not quite enough to kill him instantly. It’s been noted many times that the demons rarely dispatch anyone quickly; they always play with their food.
    In the square below there was deep-throated laughter and weeping, pursuit hither and thither.
    On our balcony the professor began to intone, so rapidly he seemed to be thinking hysterically aloud, something like, “It was this morning that I reflected that science knows all and nothing at once; that they may assert the core of the atom is the nucleus, a hydrogen atom comprising a single stable, positively charged particle, the proton, say; electrons around other sorts of particles making a kind of shell of particle-wave charge, and they are entirely correct, yet all they’re doing is labeling phenomena, just labeling, labeling. . . .”
    Melissa came to cling to me, but I could not enjoy the contact. I was about to drag her inside to tentative safety, when a demon—one of the almost elegant Gnashers, clashing its teeth as it came—settled onto the balcony beside ours; and thenwe were petrified, unable to move. We watched as a terrified woman on the neighboring balcony—Mrs. Gurevitz, I thinkher name was—tried to flee back inside. The demon pulled her close and, typical of the Gnashers, simply forced her to sit and engaged her in conversation for a while, telling her unctuously that it saw in her mind that she hated her bullying husband but was afraid to leave him because of the money problem, because she had no skills; and why didn’t she have skills—because she was basically a mistake perpetrated by her mother in a careless moment, not a real person who could develop skills, not like her sister, who was a lawyer, there was someone real. And the woman writhed in her chair as both the demon and the professor droned on. The professor saying sotto voce to no one in particular: “They may assert, for example, that the region in subatomic space in which an electron is most likely to be found is called an orbital, but it’s just a label, a tag used in