The demon smiled, which revealed small fangs. “I suppose you’re wondering why I’m in a dumpster.”
Lois glanced at Clark.
“It’s a funny story, really.” The demon chuckled uneasily. “I was ah…throwing something away, and I lost my car keys.”
There was a yowl from inside the dumpster, like that of a housecat.
The demon glanced down uncomfortably, and then kicked at something unseen.
“You’re a demon,” Lois said. It was a stupid thing to say, but part of her was having trouble believing it.
“A demon?” The demon smiled again. “Oh, no. I’m…um…circus folk. Yeah…”
The demon had protruding dog like ears, red pupils in his eyes and fangs. It wasn’t likely that he was a human being, but Lois glanced at Clark, who shook his head.
“Two hearts,” he murmured.
Lois glared at the demon and said, “Don’t lie to me! I can tell a demon when I see one!”
“Would you believe I just have a skin condition?” the demon asked hopefully.
Lois shook her head firmly, never taking her eyes off the demon. The longer she looked at him, the more he reminded her of one of those Shar-Pei puppies her mother had tried to give her in her senior year of high school.
They’d peed on her favorite dress.
“Get out of there,” Lois said.
The demon sighed and struggled to climb out of the dumpster. After he slipped and fell twice, Clark stepped over to the dumpster and hauled him out easily.
The demon gave one last longing look inside the dumpster. Moving to the side, Lois could see a cat working its way out of a hole in the side of it.
Out of the dumpster, the demon looked even worse. It wasn’t fat, but it had rolls of skin hanging off its arms. It was wearing a horrendously loud red Hawaiian shirt and a pair of jeans, which at least concealed any further monstrousness.
Shaking spaghetti off its sleeve, the demon turned to Lois and started to smile. Its smile died as it took a closer look at her.
“Damn.” It closed its eyes and said, “I really thought she was going to make it.”
Lois frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“I guess you’re the new girl in town.” The demon forced a smile. “Hi. I’m Clem.”
It held its hand out. Lois hesitated, and then took it.
Clem’s handshake was warm and friendly, firm, yet without trying to prove anything. The feeling in Lois’s gut was fading, although she was aware of Clem’s presence.
Glancing at Clark, Clem said, “What can I do for you?”
“You’re a demon,” Lois found herself saying, again. It was a strange sense of unreality that was descending on her. This must have been how it would have felt for Alice falling down the rabbit hole, only to discover that her whole view of the world was being changed forever.
“Right. I’m a demon. You’re the Slayer. He’s….I don’t know…a Hellgod maybe?” Clem smiled apologetically at Clark. “I’d have stayed out of your way if I hadn’t gotten distracted.”
“You can tell what I am?” Clark asked. Lois could hear the anxiety in his voice.
“With that much power? I could feel you coming halfway across the city. I just didn’t figure you were coming here.” Clem shook his head.
“What’s a slayer?” Lois asked suddenly.
Clem stared at her. “Wow. You really are new.”
“Just answer the question!” Lois snapped. Everyone had been giving her the runaround for days.
“You haven’t had a visit from some stuffy old English guy talking about destiny, have you?”
Lois shook her head, scowling.
Clem looked at Lois closely. “Aren’t you a little old to be a Slayer?”
“Hey!” Lois said. “I’m twenty six! I’m not exactly ready to go into a rest home.”
“By Slayer standards, you’re ancient.” At the look on her face, Clem took a step back and held up his hands. “I’m just saying…most of them get called in their mid-teens.”
“Called to do what?” Lois asked. “What is a slayer?”
“You’re the thing that gives the monsters nightmares.”
**************
The demon…Clem had a sporty red car parked at the end of the alleyway. He pulled a set of keys from a fold in the skin on his arm. Lois thought she saw a flash of a playing card as he reached for the keys.
“I don’t really know all that much,” Clem was saying. “Just the basics everybody knows.”
“So I’m some sort of …mystic warrior,” Lois said.
“Demon mothers all over the world threaten their kids with you.” Clem shrugged. “You or one of the others. One slayer dies, another is called.”
“Why me?” Lois asked.
Clem shrugged. “Why not you? It had to be somebody.”
“I’m a reporter!” Lois said. “Not some sort of boogieman for the monsters.”
Her mind flashed back to the Congo, and Lois had a moment of uncomfortable realization as she realized that she easily could become that thing.
Clem stepped back from her. “A reporter? Um…can I go being a guy with a skin condition?”
“What, afraid that the world will find out about you and all your man eating buddies?” Lois snapped. “Afraid the free buffet is going to dry up?”
“Hey!” Clem said, indignantly. “Not all of us are like that!”
“So you don’t kill humans.” Lois asked. He didn’t feel evil, but she’d been fooled before.
“I don’t kill them, I don’t eat them…I just try to live my life without making many waves.” Clem sighed. “Most of us are just trying to keep our heads down and stay alive.”
“How can you possibly blend in?” Clark asked.
It wasn’t a surprising question. Clark had spent his entire life trying to blend in, and to see that something that looked like a shaved Shar-Pei could somehow make a life for itself and own a car….
Clem shrugged. “There are businesses that’ll look the other way.”
Like hospitals that were secretly aware that some of their patients weren’t completely human. They probably had clinics that took the less human looking patients. It was breathtaking; the thought of an entire underground society that almost nobody knew about.
It was the kind of story that would win a reporter a Pulitzer Prize.
“Plus, put me in a coat and a hat in the big city, and most people go out of their way to not look at me.” Clem slipped his key into his door. “It’s like when you see the guy with the huge birthmark on his face. Nobody talks about it, and people just sort of look the other way.”
“It must make it hard to get a job,” Lois said. “So how did you afford the car?”
“I buy things for demons that can’t pass as well as I can.” Clem looked up at her. “A twenty percent commission on toilet paper and cigarettes isn’t much, but it’s more than fair.”
Lois tried to imagine some nonhumanoid thing smoking, and her mind drew a blank. Apparently some things were better left alone.
“So this place?”
“Used to be a demon bar,” Clem said. “They have to move fairly often. The wards have already faded on this one.”
“Wards?”
“They didn’t bother with them much back in Sunnydale, but in a lot of places they hire a magician to make people ignore things…people see them, but don’t make the connection.”
“So if they saw you…”
“They’d remember a guy in a great shirt.”
Lois glanced at Clark remembering the other missing address. “You could find one of these other places for us?”
Clem shrugged. “Well…I’ve been having a bit of trouble finding a new place. All the free places have squatters, and the places with rent are crazy expensive.”
Glancing at Clark, Lois sighed. “We could pay you.”
*********
Clem had refused to leave his car, so Lois was riding with him while Clark followed in the rental. Although she felt fairly safe with him, Lois kept one hand on the mace in her purse, and the other clenched into a fist.
His car smelled like cheetos and Buffalo wings, and so Lois had rolled with window down, only to be assailed by the worse smells outside.
Worse yet, he wouldn’t let her drive. She’d been distracted when she’d let Clark get in the habit of always driving; it was something she planned to break him of soon. Admittedly, it WAS Clem’s car. Still, there was a problem.
Clem drove like a little old lady.
People passed them by frequently, and many of them honked their horns angrily. It was amusing seeing those same people pass them and do a double take. Clem always had a jaunty grin and an uplifted thumb for them.
Still, Lois’s toe was tapping impatiently as Clem stopped at yet another yellow light.
“Can’t you drive any faster?”
“Better safe than sorry, I always say.” Clem said.
They rode in silence for several minutes. Clem finally spoke.
“You write a story about us, and a lot of innocent people are going to be hurt.”
“Demons or humans?” Lois asked sharply.
“Both.” Clem said. “Humans tend to get a little crazy when they’re afraid.”
Lois remembered the impact of her fists on flesh. She closed her eyes.
“What do you think is going to happen when you tell people that there are monsters living next door?”
“People will know enough not to get eaten?” Lois asked after a moment.
“Some demons you can’t tell from a human,” Clem said. “So the government rounds up all the obvious suspects and then people start looking at their neighbors.”
“That wouldn’t happen here,” Lois argued, but even as she said it, she knew it was a lie.
The Salem witch hunts, Japanese internment camps, McCarthyism, secret prisons in the Middle East. People forgot their ideals when they were afraid.
“They already tried it in Sunnydale. A friend of mine got locked up by the government.” Clem grimaced, which looked particularly grotesque. “It was a bad business.”
Glancing at Lois, he said, “Did you ever see a movie called a Clockwork Orange?”
Lois nodded.
“They put a chip in his head so he couldn’t hurt anybody.”
“Well,” Lois said. “Maybe he needed to stop hurting people.”
“How long do you think it’ll be before they start using that chip in jails with regular humans?”
Do a little brain surgery; make sure a murderer couldn’t hurt anyone before he was released. It was a blindingly simple idea, but a dangerous one.
If you could do it to murderers, then why not other criminals? Make it mandatory for anyone going to jail.
Give it to people who’ve just been detained. Give it to people who are not favored by the political party in power.
Give it to everyone who wasn’t police or a soldier.
It was a slippery slope.
“So what do you want me to do?” she asked. “Sweep it all under the rug like everybody else?”
“Why not?”
“So people don’t get eaten.”
“You write crime stories, right?” Clem slowed the vehicle and took a right turn. They were slipping back into another desolate part of town.
A glance in the mirror showed that Clark was right behind them, although he had to be as dissatisfied with their slow pace as Lois was. She wondered what he was thinking. Was he able to hear what they were saying from that far back over the sounds of two engines?
“You tell people about the bad parts of town, about the muggings and the killings and everything else.”
Lois nodded.
“Do people still go to those places and get mugged and killed?”
“Well…” Lois said.
“So all writing the story is going to do is going to get a lot of people hurt.”
Lois wasn’t so sure that it was people who would be hurt, but Clem had given her a few things to think about.
“How sure are you about that one Slayer dies another is chosen thing?”
“That’s how it’s always been. There was some confusion a few years back, and they somehow got a second one, but I don’t really know all that much about it.”
“And you’re sure I am one.”
“No question. All you…well…all I have to do are look. Demons can smell power. That’s probably why they’ve been avoiding your friend back there for all these years.”
“We’ve had a couple of encounters with vampires,” Lois said. “They never noticed anything odd about him.
Clem snorted. “Vampires can’t sense power the way the rest of us can. They’re as blind to it as most witches.”
Slowly pulling to a stop, Clem said, “Are you sure you’re ready for this? I guess you’ve been kind of sheltered before.”
Was she ready to leave her comfortable world of rational science and like Alice jump down the rabbit hole?
“Take me to your demons.” Lois was never going to be able to answer her questions unless she saw this underground society for herself.
Clem shrugged and got out of the car. Lois hesitated, then did so herself.
It was time to enter another world.
