Six, continued

After a few moments of stunned silence, we tentatively began to ask questions. Whereas the unsightly demons had been evasive and enigmatic in answering the few questions I had ventured in the cave, Farrow seemed eager to supply us with information and ask a few questions of his own. Farrow, it turned out, was a lesser demon, which he informed us was the lowest class of the four classes of demons. The lesser demons were below the unsightly demons, who were below the sightly demons, who were below the angels.
“Angels are demons?” Michael asked, confused. “What exactly is a demon?”
“Angels are spirits, and spirits are demons, so angels are demons,” Farrow answered. “And demons are … us.” He seemed to think a moment, as if searching for a more profound answer, then shook his head and shrugged. “We’re just us. The inhabitants and guardians and makers of the world. Hmm, that sounds grand. I’ll have to remember that one.”
“Yes, but,” I didn’t want to sound ungrateful or demanding, but that didn’t mean a thing. “Who are you, exactly?”
“That’s not a very easy question to answer,” Farrow said, a bit reproachfully. “But I’ll do my best to answer you anyway. I guess it is a really interesting question, when you actually get into it. It’s strange that we are all even called demons, because we’re not really the same at all. Lesser demons,” he put a little ironic emphasis on the word lesser as if to say we all knew that was a misnomer, “well, we’re the only ones who are actually born into this world. We are of this world, while the higher demons and the angels are called to it. Is that what you are? Are you higher demons? You don’t look like the unsightlies or the sightlies. I suppose you could be angels – I’ve never seen one. Are you angels?” The last was said a bit accusingly, as if we’d been putting him on the entire time.
“Oh no, we’re definitely not angels. We’re…” Michael paused, then laughed. “We’re just us. We’re people.” Farrow looked confused. “Humans?” Michael tried again. Farrow shook his head again, still confused. “Well we’re not any kind of spirit. We, um… I think we came on that mountain…somehow.” It didn’t really explain who we were or how we got there, but Farrow was excited nonetheless.
“Ah, yes, of course!” He exclaimed. “We were so glad when you brought it… we thought it would help us trap her, but—well, you saw. She just went over it, silly thing. But still, it’s nice that you brought it with you – it’s very pretty. Spruces up the place quite a bit I think.” He smiled at us appreciatively.
“What do you mean, trap her?” I asked. “Trap who?”
“The sun, of course. We try every day, but it’s a very difficult process.”
“But – why are you trying to capture the sun? That’s not even possible – the sun is billions of light-years away, there’s no way you could possibly reach it with ropes.”
Farrow looked at me as if I were crazy. “Of course we can reach her with ropes. What’s billion? What’s light-year? No, no, no. You are very confused. We reach the sun every day, we always catch her with our hooks. That’s never the problem. The problem is that she is so strong. She pulls and pulls and we can’t hold her down. This was the best time ever, I think, though. The pegs were a good idea, even if they didn’t hold. I think we’ll improve on the process next time. I’m sure Tyrrian is already planning some sort of enhancement, he’s very clever like that.” He smiled again, looking very positive.
I looked at Michael, feeling distressed. We were getting answers now, but they weren’t making any sense. Michael just shrugged.
Farrow seemed oblivious to our confusion. Apparently, trapping the sun with ropes and pegs was the sort of normal, everyday activity demons were involved in. Lesser demons, anyway. Who knew what the other demons were involved in. For some reason it made me think about all those movies where aliens show up to take over the world. I suddenly wished there were more movies from the aliens’ perspective. If there had been, I might have been a little more prepared for exactly what we were supposed to do in this situation. Farrow had no idea we were confused, because he wasn’t confused, and why should he be? This was his world where everything made sense. Only nothing made sense and none of these communications seemed to be bringing us closer to an understanding. Now that I thought about it, it was a miracle we could communicate at all.
“Wait a second,” I said, voicing my thoughts aloud. “How are we communicating? How do you speak English?”
“English? What’s that?” Farrow tilted his head until he was almost looking at me completely sideways.
“It’s… what we’re speaking,” I answered, now confused more than ever. “It’s the language we’re using now to communicate. The Unsightly demons didn’t speak it, at least – not naturally. They spoke something different when they weren’t speaking to us. How do you speak English?”
“I don’t speak English,” Farrow insisted. “I speak our self-speak. All of the lesser demons speak this from birth. We taught it to the Unsightlies,” he said this proudly, then shrugged and said “well, they didn’t really need it, because they can mind-talk, but we taught them anyway. And I guess they needed it, to talk to you, so we did a good thing. Ha.” Now he looked positively delighted. It didn’t seem to bother him at all that it made no sense that we were all speaking the same language. Didn’t it bother him at all that we showed up speaking his “self-speak”? At some point, I’m going to have to just take this all for granted I thought, and sighed.
“Now listen,” Farrow said gently. “These questions are very fun and I want to do more of them, but the Unsightlies are pushing me. They think we should go now. I’m just going to go find Tyrrian so we can begin our descent.”
“Descent?” I blinked.
“Yes, into Madness,” Farrow answered.
Right, I thought, as if we aren’t already there.