Pandemonium (17 page)

11

I woke to darkness and thumping bass and synthesized strings: an eighties funk power ballad. The male falsetto had to be Prince—nothing compares to Prince—but I didn’t recognize the song. The woman’s voice singing along with the recording was breathy and keening at the same time, threatening at any moment to veer off key.
The thing in my head was quiet. Still there, though: it breathed warily, an animal crouched in the corner of a dark room.
I lay there inhaling the powdery, foreign scents of an unknown bed. I had no idea how long I’d slept. It’d been almost 2 a.m. before I’d gotten out of the hospital—the nurses hadn’t wanted to let me check out, but O’Connell was formidable. I’d fallen asleep only minutes after getting into her truck, and had woken up briefly to navigate through a series of small rooms. She’d insisted I sleep here, rather than on the couch, and I hadn’t argued.
There was a window above me on the curved wall to my right, but it was dark on the other side—which meant that the window looked out on another room, or that it was still night, or worse, night
again
—and the deep ache in my arms and legs told me I’d been sleeping too long in one position.
Holy shit. Mom had to be freaking out.
The song ended, and in the break, I yelled out, “Hel-lo!” The next song started—another eighties number, but U2 this time. A minute later the door opened and O’Connell leaned in. She was in rock-chick mode again: black T-shirt, black jeans. Despite the singing a moment ago, she didn’t look happy.
I wasn’t in the bed so much as on it: I lay on top of the covers, with several blankets thrown over me. I lifted one arm a few inches, as far as it would go.
“You can untie me now,” I said.
She stepped back and closed the door, leaving me alone in the dark again.
Ooookay.
Sometime last night, after I’d babbled and cried for a couple hours and finally fallen asleep, O’Connell had tied me spread-eagled to the bed frame with the combination locks tucked out of sight and out of reach, an arrangement impossible for me to set up on my own—and one I didn’t much like now. The situation put me in mind of more than one Stephen King novel, and I’d had enough of horror stories.
Bono was emoting through the second verse when she came back into the room carrying a vinyl-padded kitchen chair in one hand and my blue duffel bag in the other. She set the chair near the foot of the bed and dropped the duffel onto the bed between my spread legs. She made no move toward the chains.
“I really need to pee,” I said.
“Let’s talk first,” she said.
“About what?”
“Oh, I hardly know where to start.” She sounded peeved. “The county sheriff stopped by for a talk this morning. Not about the Shug, about Dr. Ram. They found the killer.”
“What? That’s great!”
“Some DemoniCon fanboy named Eliot Kasparian. He claims he was possessed, woke up wearing a trench coat and holding a pair of guns. He’s in custody.”
“So was he possessed by the Truth, or is he faking?”
“I hope for his sake that he’s not lying,” she said.
Good point, I thought. The Truth didn’t like fakers. But if he really was possessed, then it was Dr. Ram who’d been the liar.
O’Connell said, “We’re not completely off the hook, boyo. The sheriff says that the police still want to talk to all the hotel guests who were there that night, especially the ones that checked out that morning. Especially the ones that might be showing up on security camera tapes.”
“You told him I was here?”
“Her. I didn’t have to—she’s smart enough to figure out where you went when you checked yourself out of the hospital. Plus, you were snoring.”
“She didn’t think it odd that I was chained up in your bedroom?”
“I didn’t open the door. Officially, she doesn’t know where you are.”
“Why would—why would she go along with that?” And why would O’Connell stick her neck out for me?
“She’s a friend. And she lives here. The ladies of the lake watch out for each other.”
I didn’t know what she meant by that. Were there any male residents of Harmonia Lake? I hadn’t met any. Maybe only women stayed, because they weren’t candidates to be the next Shug.
“This is a huge relief, though,” I said. “So you want to unlock me?”
“We’re not quite finished with our conversation,” O’Connell said, and unzipped the duffel. I tried to sit up, but the chains kept me from raising more than my head. “Hey, that’s my stuff!”
She ignored me. And then I realized that of course she’d already been into the duffel—she’d gotten the chains and locks.
Shit.
“I have rules, Del.” She pulled something else out of the duffel, a rectangle of cloth. Ah. The oil rag that had been wrapped around the pistol. “One of them is, I will not have guns in my house.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
“Oh, I’ve already taken care of it.”
“What’d you do with it? That was my dad’s army pistol!”
“It was also a forty-five automatic, the same model the Truth uses. The same model that killed Dr. Ram.”
“But that’s over now—you know it wasn’t me!” I tried to sit up, but all I could do was lift my head in a forceful manner.
“You still can’t go around carrying ready-made
props
—especially ones that put holes in people. The demons can possess
anyone
—whoever they want, whenever they want. They’re especially attracted to those who’ve been possessed before, even by another demon. You’re already marked, Del. So, let’s not make it so easy on them, eh?”
“What did you do with the gun?” I said.
“I heaved it into the lake.”
I blinked at her. I didn’t know whether to be angry or relieved.
“Next,” she said. She pulled out the black nylon bag I’d gotten at the ICOP conference. She withdrew from it a sheaf of stapled papers and started slowly turning the pages. “Now
these
are interesting souvenirs,” she said. “Out of all the academic crap at the conference, this is what you take with you. What did you think you’d do with these, apply a little guilt, a little leverage to get me to take your case?”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” I said.
She spun the packet at me. The pages landed on my chest, open to the page she’d been looking at. At this angle I couldn’t read the words, but I saw the photocopied picture and realized what I was looking at. The “Little Angel” paper from the Penn State woman.
“What are you mad about?” I said. “This is just some research paper I picked up.”
But there was something about the girl in the picture, even viewed sideways. She was maybe nine years old, dressed in a white gown. Even in black and white, after multiple generations of photocopying, the girl’s beauty was evident. Pale skin, high cheekbones, a head bursting with curls.
“When was this taken?” I said.
“Nineteen seventy-seven,” she said. “I was eleven.”
“I didn’t know,” I said. I looked up. “I swear it, it’s just something I picked up and put in my bag. I thought you grew up in Ireland.”
“My mother and I moved to New York when I was eight, after my parents divorced. The Little Angel found me soon after. I didn’t move back to Ireland until I was a teenager.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t—”
“Stop it. Whatever you had in mind, it doesn’t matter. I don’t require
motivation,
Del. I don’t need to be manipulated into helping you, and I don’t respond to pity. There are thousands of people who’ve been possessed, and it doesn’t matter if I was one of them—the job’s the same.”
“The job…,” I said, unsure. “Being an exorcist?”
“Being your pastor.”
“Oh. I mean, that’s nice and everything, but I don’t think I need—”
“Del.”
She walked to the side of the bed near my head, put her hands on her hips. “Last night you were afraid you were going insane. You said the Hellion’s memories were breaking through into your own. You were losing yourself.”
“I was a little freaked out last night, but I’m fine now. I can handle this.”
“You are so far from handling this.” She crouched, bringing her head even with mine.
“Now…” She lifted one of the bike chains into view. “Three numbers. What’s the combination?”
“Uh, that would be six, followed by six…and I’m sure you can guess the last one.”
She shook her head, opened the first lock. Then she walked around the bed to my other arm. While she was working on the next combination, I peeked under the blankets. Boxer briefs, my erection as clearly delineated as the trunk of a cartoon elephant. My need to pee had turned into an ache.
She undid the second chain. Hands finally free, I began to unfasten the manacles, leather-padded medieval things I’d purchased from a fetish website. The steel loops were big enough for a shower curtain rod to be threaded through them—I’d seen the pictures—and more than wide enough for the bike chain. My shoulders were stiff, but I felt a hundred times better than yesterday. The cuts in my fingers barely hurt. “What if I’d died in my sleep?” I said. “These chains are pretty strong—I’d be attached to your bed for weeks.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t cut through the
chains.
”
She gave no indication she was joking.
I scooted down to the edge of the bed and started reeling in the chain so I could get at the lock. “Do you know what time it is? My mother’s got to be at the hospital by now. She’ll be frantic.”
She didn’t answer, and I looked at her.
“They arrived this morning,” she said. “I called Lew and told him you had to get out of the hospital because you were losing control of the Hellion.” She tossed a length of chain onto the bed. “Hardly an exaggeration. I said you’d be back in touch after we returned from the city.”
“Wait—what city? New York City?”
“Get dressed,” she said. “We have an appointment at Red Book.”
I didn’t think she meant the magazine.
As soon as she left the room, I pulled open the duffel bag and started sifting through the clothes, running my hands through the folds. Nothing. I started pulling out the clothes, shaking them one by one.
“Oh, one more thing,” O’Connell called back. “I threw out the Nembutal too.”

The three-story brownstone was buried somewhere in the heart of the city—I had no idea where, and I didn’t think O’Connell did either. Once we’d squeezed through the George Washington Bridge, slow as toothpaste, she began taking unpredictable rights and lefts, shouldering across lanes, dodging down side streets, and merging onto four-lane avenues. Nearly midnight and the traffic was still dense.
O’Connell was the worst driver I’d ever ridden with—worse than Lew, worse than even me, and I’d driven through guardrails. Several times I found myself inches from sheet metal or the scowling face of a taxi driver. She seemed oblivious to the other cars, and even to the road in front of her, one hand on the steering wheel, the other pinching a cigarette, navigating by temperature, or road texture, or smell—anything but street signs.
“You know,” I said casually, “there’s this thing called MapQuest.” But O’Connell had stopped talking to me. She hummed and muttered to herself. Maybe she was praying.
An hour and a half after crossing the river, and seven hours after leaving Harmonia Lake, O’Connell braked to a stop in the center of a dark street double-lined with parked cars. Without saying anything she got out of the truck, leaving it running. I opened my door and stepped out, as much to get air as to see where she was going; O’Connell had smoked the entire way, and my eyeballs felt like gritty ball bearings.
O’Connell walked up the steps of one of the brick apartment buildings we’d passed and pressed a doorbell. Above the door, a circular window of stained glass glowed like an eye surveying the street: red and blue and purple panes outlined in dark-leaded curves, swirling out from the center like petals dragged through water.
I looked away from the window, feeling queasy.
The apartment door opened, and an older woman with short white hair stepped out, hugged O’Connell. The women exchanged a few words, and then O’Connell strode back to me. “We can park around back,” she said.
“Was that one of the shrinks?” I asked. She’d told me that the people we were visiting were psychiatrists, “absolutely brilliant.” They’d become her therapists when she was eleven, after the first string of possessions. “They saved my life,” she said. She’d been vague on how exactly they’d helped her, or what she expected me to get out of meeting them. “Just be honest with them,” she said. “They’ll be able to straighten this out.”
She steered the truck into an alley. An iron gate swung open automatically and closed behind us. She parked diagonally on a small brick-paved patio, and we pulled our bags from the bed of the truck.
The white-haired woman met us at the back door, ushered us in, and set the alarm behind us. O’Connell said, “Del, this is Dr. Margarete Waldheim.”
“Meg,” the woman said, and shook my hand. I must have winced. She glanced down, turned my hand in hers, looking at the cuts. “Have you been fighting?”
“Just with furniture,” I said.
“Ah. I always stick with the softer pieces—seat cushions, pillows.”
She was younger than I had thought from the street, maybe in her fifties—the white hair had thrown me off. A ruddy, apple-shaped face. Shorter than O’Connell, not fat but sturdy. She wore a green-striped man’s dress shirt untucked over black stretch pants, and thin black shoes like dance slippers.
“Anyway, welcome to Bollingen,” she said.
I glanced at O’Connell. What happened to Red Book?
“Bollingen is the name of the house,” O’Connell said. I still didn’t know if Red Book was the name of a cult, an institute, or a giant computer that would tell me my future.
She led us down a dark-paneled hallway, past a tiled kitchen and half a dozen closed doors, while O’Connell talked about the trip in. She didn’t mention the labyrinthine tour of Manhattan.
We arrived in a high-ceilinged foyer at the front of the house. Set into the floor was a slab of granite inscribed in Latin: VOCATUS ATQUE NON VOCATUS DEUS ADERIT.
Non vocatus deus
—no vacations for God?
I made the mistake of looking up. High above the door was the circular window I’d seen from the street. The panes, viewed from the inside, were bruise-dark and glinting, like half-seen blades about to spin.
“You okay, Pierce?” O’Connell said.
I looked away from the window, ran a damp hand through my hair. “What? Oh, yeah. Tired I guess.”
“The design came from one of Dr. Jung’s paintings,” Meg said. “During his Nekyia period, he became fascinated with circular forms, circles within circles. Some of his works resemble Indian mandalas.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. And what the hell was a Nekyia? One thing was clear: Jungians loved yargon.
O’Connell said to Meg, “Is the old man upstairs?”
At first I thought she meant Jung himself, but that couldn’t be—he’d died in the fifties or sixties. She must have meant the other Dr. Waldheim.
“He’s turned in for the night,” Meg said. “And I’m about to collapse myself. I’ll show you to your rooms. If you’re hungry, though, make yourself at home. Siobhan can show you the kitchen.”
“Wait a minute—
Shavawn?
” I repeated phonetically.
O’Connell looked at me. “Mariette is the name I took when I became a priest.”
Meg laughed quietly. “I can never remember to call her that.” She led us to side-by-side rooms on the second floor. “There’s a journal in the desk,” Meg said. “In case you have any dreams.”
“Okay,” I said, as if she’d told me where the towels were. “Thanks.”
I closed the door, dropped my duffel on the floor. Outside, Meg and O’Connell murmured together, their words indistinct.
The room was a cozy space smaller than my dorm room at Illinois State, but bigger than my hospital room in Colorado. There was one skinny door besides the one I’d come through, but I didn’t feel like hanging up my clothes. Most of the room was taken up by a high bed on a cast-iron frame (convenient for chaining), an armless wooden chair, a small writing desk with a lid unfolded to reveal—yes indeed—a handsome leather-bound journal and two fat pens. I flipped through the thick oatmeal-colored pages, but although a few pages had been torn out, nobody had left behind any nighttime notes.
Outside, the women stopped talking. O’Connell’s door opened and closed.
I sat down on the bed, and the mattress sank beneath me. The thing in my head shifted slightly. It had stayed quiet all day, as if the long drive had jostled it to sleep, and I pushed my thoughts away from it before it could wake up. Thinking about the demon seemed too much like summoning it.
I stared at the walls instead: dark rose wallpaper that looked like it had been put up in the forties. Opposite me was a large water stain in the shape of a heart—and not a valentine heart. A fat smear sprouting from its top was disturbingly aortic.
Someone knocked on the door—but it wasn’t the hallway door. I curled out of the bed and cautiously opened the skinny door I’d taken for a closet. O’Connell stood there, holding a big folded white towel and a washcloth.
“I was wondering where those were,” I said.
Behind her was a bathroom tiled in checkerboard black and white, and another open door. Her room looked bigger than mine.
“Will you be singing in the shower tomorrow?” I asked.
Her face tightened. “Of course not.”
Jesus, she could get pissed so
fast.
“You have a beautiful voice,” I said. She made a dismissive sound like a cough. “No, really,” I said. “You could have been a singer.”
“And you could have been a bicycle repairman.” She pressed the towel and washcloth into my hands, and while I put them on the desk she stood in the doorway, looking around at the space. I bet her room really was bigger.
“So. Shavawn.”
“No, it’s—” And she said it in a subtly different way. I made a face and she spelled it for me.
“Ohhh,” I said. “
Siobhan.
You know, I’ve seen that in print but I never knew how it was pronounced.”
She didn’t quite roll her eyes. “Any other questions?”
“Nope. Yes! The Latin thing by the door.”
“Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit,”
O’Connell said. “Dr. Jung wrote that above the door to his house. ‘Summoned or not, the god will be there.’”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Goodnight, Mr. Pierce.” She walked toward the bathroom door. “And please don’t oversleep, the Waldheims are early risers, and we’ll want to get started.” She nodded at the bed. “Need someone to strap you down? Or do you need to have a wank first?”
I barked a laugh. My face heated. “What?”
“It must be difficult with your hands tied down.” Her tone was clinical. “And it will help you sleep.” The muscle behind my balls thumped like a bass string.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’m fine.”
“Suit yourself. I’ll see you in the morning.” She turned and disappeared into the bathroom, closing the door behind her. A moment later I heard her own door close.
I sat down on the bed and let the collapsing springs roll me backward.
Siobhan.
I lay there, staring at the ceiling, my dick as hard as the Washington Monument.