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professor and I armed ourselves with a baseball bat and a long piece of old pipe left by some plumber behind the water heater. We went to the door to the corridor and bent near it to listen. There was a thrashing noise and then a steady thumping that sounded to me like it was from the apartment across the hall. Someone shouting for Allah. Pleading for Allah. Then—just the thumping, the sound having developed a wet quality.
    The professor said, “No. Come.” He turned on his heel and, breathing hard, went back to Melissa’s bedroom and switched on the TV. He changed channels until he found another report. We followed him in.
    “We need to know—” he began. But someone on TV finished the remark for him:
    “Can they be killed? We are about to find out.”
    You know from the reality programming shows how real-life action looks on television. It hasn’t got the good camera angles or the impressive splashing of the squibs or the special-effects explosions or even great visual crispness—the image is washed out, badly lit. It looks herky-jerky and uncertain. Half the time a cop tackling a criminal looks like a guy playing football with one of his friends. It’s a lot of off-balance fumbling, and it’s over so quickly you can’t make out what happened.
    But there were at least a dozen in the SWAT team. The demons—five Sharkadians, that I could count, and a Grindum—were all over one of those small school buses they use for mentally handicapped kids; and the kids were in there, slow kids and Down’s syndrome kids and deeply pathological kids, a yellow box of them on wheels. The SWAT advanced toward them, firing with something like gleeful esprit, perhaps because the demons had no guns and because they were feeling the impact of the rounds, the bullets knocking them back, skidding them off the bus. The commentator, sounding a bit drunk, was saying something about a game a lot of us had played in childhood, Doom, and how Doom might’ve been designed like some kind of premonition to prepare us for this—
    And then a Grindum that had been knocked down by a swarm of bullets simply stood up and advanced against a stream of gunfire, jerked a gun from a wilting cop’s hand, melting the gun in its own claws, and, as the man turned, took him by the throat and forced the molten metal of his gun—bullets exploding—down his throat. The others were running or were being pulled apart, like flies in the hands of sadistic children. I could see no wounds on the demons though bullets hailed into them.
    The Grindum bounded on its giant grasshopper’s legs back to the bus, lunged inside, and began to snap little heads off in its jaws.
    We switched the television off and put our pipe and our baseball bat aside.
    No. They cannot be killed. They can be inconvenienced by weapons. They can be slowed down and forced to reconstitute themselves if you shatter them sufficiently, but they cannot be killed by any conventional means: more proof that they are supernatural creatures, if any more were needed.
     
     
    One night in 1986: I’m ten years old and something has awakened me and I can’t get back to sleep. I thrash in the bed. It’s June, and neither warm nor cold, but the sheets seem to abrade my skin and the air seems heavy over my bed. I can feel it pressing on my eyelids. The noise from the living room woke me, I suppose. But it’s not the noise that’s keeping me awake, it’s a kind of shiver that pulses through the house from down there. It’s my mother. I can feel her down there, shaking with anguish, although—I know this from past experience—she’s probably curled up in a chair staring at the TV, not visibly shaking at all. Now and then she’ll uncoil, with a whiplash movement like an eel on a hook; I’d seen it many times already this year. But once more I get out of bed, and wearing only my briefs, I go to the second-floor landing in our half of the divided Victorian and look down the worn wooden stairs at Mom