Christopher Fowler - Personal Demons

'Go on, get out of here,' said Brett, releasing his grip. Elias started the engine. Before he drove off, he leaned from the window and handed Brett a card with the address of the church printed on it. 'You must watch for the signs that you have been chosen,' he exclaimed. 'They will be natural symbols of peace and harmony, and they'll be surrounding you in ever greater force until the appointed time!'

'And don't let me catch you near my property again!' Brett called back. Sure, he thought, shaking his head, I'll keep an eye out. Meanwhile, stay the hell away from me.

Over the next few weeks, he worked long, late nights on a TV campaign his team was developing for a new kind of cola. The primary-coloured commercials they produced together were vacuous and irritating, and somehow seemed to provide an ironic comment on his empty life. Lately he noticed Mara was seeing more of her fancy man, even though she insisted she was visiting a friend in the Valley. After the campaign was delivered, he decided to take the family on vacation to Hawaii. Hiring a yacht, they headed out into the seas around Maui, even though Mara hated the ocean. Brett hoped the enforced intimacy of the boat might help them get back together.

One morning he was swimming aimlessly in the calm clear waters when his wife leaned over from the deck railing and called urgently to him. 'For God's sake, Brett,' she shouted in agitation, 'don't move a muscle!'

All around him, numbering in their thousands, poisonous jellyfish had gathered. The Portuguese men o' war gently bobbed in gelatine star clusters. Gingerly, he pushed his left arm through the water, nudging them aside. Then his right. He made no sudden movements. It was important to do nothing that would scare them into stinging.

Incredibly, he managed to reach the boat completely unharmed. The family watched as the jellyfish gently dispersed like an expanding universe.

Other oddities occurred that spring. One night they were drawn from the house by a scrabbling noise above them, and found birds of every imaginable species landing on the roof. Two days later, a vast brown swarm of bees surrounded the car as he waited in traffic at the corner of La Brea and Melrose. Other drivers got out of their vehicles to watch and take photographs. The bees massed noisily, dancing back and forth on the hood of the Mercedes before dispersing into the sky. Shiny-backed beetles swarmed in the basement, much to Mara's consternation. She shivered in horror as their iridescent bodies rippled crossing the floor. 'Looks like you've developed an affinity with nature, honey,' she half-joked.

It wasn't just living creatures that were affected, either. Technology started behaving strangely, too. Brett's infrared laptop began to pick up odd scrambled signals whenever he was around. One morning it beamed a huge file of biblical gibberish into the RAM of his office computers, crashing the system. The next day he was working on the laptop when his spreadsheet fuzzed away into the ether, to be replaced by a badly drawn image of a bird bursting into a blaze of flame. The repair shop could find nothing wrong with it. They suggested that maybe someone was playing a practical joke.

The episode with Elias had itself become something of a joke in the Ellis household, but it was one that stopped being funny the very next night. Brett had given up waiting for Mara to come home and was getting ready for bed. He was standing in his darkened bedroom when he suddenly had the feeling he was being watched. Pulling his T-shirt over his head, he walked to the windows and looked down into the scrubland beyond the back yard. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw dozens of people standing among the trees and bushes, motionless and silent, staring up at his house. In the flickering shadows they looked like statues. Presumably they were all members of this crazy church. The sight chilled him to the bone. For the first time he felt that something genuinely weird was going on. Furious, he rang the number Elias had given him.

Over at the Church of the Phoenix, Elias answered the call.

'Keep your congregation the hell away from my house,' warned Brett, 'or I'll get a restraining order put on you and your "church". I'd like to know what your leader thinks about this.'

'We have no leader.' The old man spoke so softly it was difficult to hear him. 'I know it must all seem very strange to you.'

'Then perhaps you'd like to explain what's going on.'

'I can't talk on this line. There's someone else in the building, and I think he's listening in. I'm in great danger, Mr Ellis. I've received the true sign at last, only…' he paused uncomfortably, 'only it wasn't at all the sign I'd been expecting, and now I think something terrible is going to happen. I've been so blind. I've been used, Mr Ellis, duped. My life may even be at risk. I need your help. I can't trust the congregation here any more. Please meet me somewhere and I'll explain.'

'I'm not going to meet you, not now, not ever,' Brett replied, slamming the receiver down, even though Elias sounded genuinely terrified.

On the TV news the next morning, the Ellis family heard how a man's body had been found hacked to pieces and thrown in a dumpster. A short-order cook had discovered the corpse in the car park of a sleazy strip-joint near the airport. As they watched the screen, a photograph of Elias appeared inset in the corner.

Feeling partly to blame for the death of a man who only wanted to watch over him, Brett decided he had to do something. He did not want to spend several hours in a police interview room. The LAPD still had a long way to go to win respect from the local populace. Instead, he decided to head downtown and pay a visit to the church.

As his shiny blue Mercedes coasted the intersections across town, Brett began to realise how far away he had grown from his roots. He never visited areas like this any more. His life was a rat-run from home to the agency and back. The strangeness of the streets and the people bothered him. He eventually located the clapboard church on a dusty litterstrewn backstreet. It was one of many fringe denominations that existed in the run-down Spanish area. Apart from two teenaged boys hanging out beside an abandoned truck, there was no-one around. Brett double-checked the alarm on his Mercedes.

The door of the church was open. Inside it was clean and smartly kept, lit by natural light alone. An attractive young woman in jeans and a white T-shirt stepped out of the shadows by the vestry, making him start.

'I'm Lisa Farrell,' she said, brushing her hair from her eyes and shaking his hand. Her voice surprised him. She had a middle-class English accent. 'I know who you are. We all do. Come in back, I'm making some tea.

'I only recently joined the Phoenix,' she explained as they sat across from each other, sipping from hot mugs. 'I have to get this tea sent out from London. You can't buy it here, and it still doesn't taste right because of the water.'

'I heard what happened to Elias.'

'It's a terrible world, Mr Ellis.' She shook her head in bewilderment and sipped. 'The police say they have some leads, but I'll be very surprised if they do.'

'Aren't you rather a long way from home?'

'My father invited me over. He lives here with his new wife. Originally I had only planned to study Phoenix for a sociology project, but I came to believe in quite a bit of what they were teaching.'

'And what is that, exactly?'

'Elias and his followers believe in the eventual heavenly redemption of mankind. From their own "scriptures" and other archive sources, they've selected a group of people who are somehow going to lead the world into a new dawn of enlightenment.'

'How convenient. Just in time for the new millennium.'

'That's right,' she said, missing the irony in his voice, 'commencing in this year of 2000. They have dates for each of the big events, worked out accurately to the hour.'