Authors: Daryl Gregory
* * *
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move my legs.
A moment before, I’d been dreaming of water, and cold. Paralyzed, I sank through the icy dark. The Black Well filled my vision, above me and below me at the same time, a bottomless corkscrewing pit, a tunnel into space. I could sense something or someone waiting for me in the tunnel—no, thousands of presences. A vast congregation.
The next moment the water vanished. My eyes were closed, or else open but blind in the dark. My lips were covered by a hot weight, my legs still trapped. I knew then that the water had been a memory, a dream, but I couldn’t tell if I’d woken up.
Heat against my cock. I was hard, aching. I thrust into that heat, and my eyes opened a second time. Fully awake now. Electrically awake.
O’Connell sat astride my hips, her lips on mine, her hands pinning my shoulders. She was naked, the muscles of her neck limned in a sliver of lamplight.
I tried to sit up. Her mouth released me, but she didn’t look at my face. She put a hand on my sternum and pushed me onto my back with surprising force. I opened my mouth to speak, and she pressed a hand against my jaw, forcing the side of my head into the mattress, forcing me to look away from her. Her strength was fierce.
She began to grind against me. My shorts were still on, but the bedclothes had been pushed down, trapping my ankles.
“O’Connell.” I could hardly speak with her weight on my jaw. She rocked against me and made a sound between a grunt and a sigh. “O’Connell—”
She didn’t answer. She moved again and the grunt became something like a laugh.
I screamed through gritted teeth, twisted my arm out of her grip. Pushed her away from me, sending her tumbling off the bed.
She yelped as she hit the floor. I scrambled off the bed and turned to face her, my back pressed against the cold door.
“What the
fuck
!” O’Connell yelled.
“Who are you?” I said.
She stared up at me—looking me in the face for the first time since I’d woken up. In the dim light I couldn’t make out her eyes.
A long moment, then she said, “Del, it’s me.” She scooted back until she was sitting up against the other bed, one knee drawn up. “O’Connell.
Siobhan.
” Her voice sounded the same.
“How do I know?” I said.
“You already know.”
I felt for the light switch, flicked it on. She squinted against the light.
I’d known with the Shug. And I’d known that the Piper at the Hyatt was an imposter. I realized I could always tell, from the Painter possession at the airport, to the handful of other possessed people I’d seen in my life—even Valis. But O’Connell was definitely no demon.
I exhaled. Slumped to the floor. The dirty carpet crunched against my butt. “I’m sorry,” I said. I ran a hand through my hair. “I thought…I just…”
She stood up, walked to me, and crouched so that her face was level with mine. Her hand moved, and I thought she was going to touch my cheek, but she only wrapped her arm around her knee. She studied my face.
“I know what you thought,” she said. “I’ve thought the same things myself.”
“What, with me?”
“With everyone. I was possessed at least fourteen times, Del. I’d wake up in a hospital room holding the face of a dead woman, knowing that my lips had just touched hers. That I’d just
murdered
her. Sometimes I lost an entire week. The years between my tenth birthday and my twelfth are riddled with holes. I learned that anyone can disappear at any moment, replaced by a monster.”
“You’re too old for the Little Angel now,” I said. “You should be safe from her.”
“Maybe from her, but not the others. I became an exorcist, didn’t I? Looked too many demons in the face. Once you’ve been noticed, once you’re familiar to them, they like to find you again. You come to understand that they can take you at any time, anyone you’re close to. So. You stay on guard. You start watching for that change of expression, that alien voice.”
“Well, you were acting sort of different there,” I said, and laughed, then quickly cleared my throat to stop the laughter. “It’s just that, there’s that vow of celibacy thing.”
O’Connell said nothing. I looked up, and then she laughed. Her own laugh, dry and light. “I never said I was perfect.”
We locked eyes. Maybe trying to figure out if there was anybody else watching. She never looked away from me, but her expression slowly changed.
I could smell her, heady and rich.
I touched her calf, the underside of her thigh. Slid the edge of my palm into the folds of her. She was wet.
I wanted to roll her onto her back right then, but not on that awful carpet. I stood and pulled her to her feet.
I was hard again. So fast, despite all of this. The body has its own imperatives.
She touched my cock through the shorts, ran a fingernail along it, making me shiver. Then she gripped hard and stepped in close, holding me hot against her hip. She spoke softly into my ear. “I don’t want you inside me,” she said, almost whispering. “You have to be all right with that.”
“Okay,” I said, gasping. “Just…go easy.”
14
Kansas had the purity of a sixth-grade math problem, an exercise in scale and stark geometry. I couldn’t stop picturing our progress from above: the blue dot of the pickup creeping along a thin black line, bisecting a checkered expanse of barren fields regular as graph paper.
“So, this is Kansas.” It was the first thing O’Connell had said since we’d started driving this morning.
“We’re not in Missouri anymore,” I said. She didn’t get the reference.
I glanced down at the map on my lap, then back out through the dust-bright windshield, looking for a mile marker. Playing navigator.
Del led,
I thought.
Paradoxically, the extreme flatness of the terrain made me acutely aware that we were living on a big round spinning planet. Though the horizon looked as level as a windowsill, I could sense the Earth curving out of sight, the vast sky bending over us. We rode toward an immense wall of clouds, unguessable miles away.
My arm rested on the back of the seat. I leaned toward her, started to rub the back of her neck. She didn’t quite flinch, but after a moment she leaned away.
“Okaaay…,” I said. Dropped my arm. “So what’s going on. Last night—”
“Was last night,” she said.
Ah.
After we made love, she rested her head on my chest and I rubbed my hand up and down her fuzzed skull. I told her I’d wanted to do that from the moment I saw her; she mock-sighed and said, “Everybody does.” We fell asleep spooning like old lovers, but I woke up alone, my mouth tasting of cigarettes. O’Connell was already up, dressed, and packed. She didn’t speak during breakfast except to order and to answer my questions about the route we’d take.
“Is this about your vows?” I said. Maybe she was pissed at me for leading her into temptation. Which made no sense—she was the one who’d jumped me while I was sleeping—but I knew well enough that shame and guilt didn’t have much to do with logic.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, and turned on the radio.
Ever since we’d left Kansas City we’d been unable to pick up anything on the FM dial except country, Christian, and—weirdly—seventies hard rock. She quickly switched to cassette and jammed in another of her jarring mix-tapes: Pogues followed by the Clash and Nirvana, then Joan Baez, Lead Belly, and Jan & Dean. She would have loved Lew’s mash-ups.
Twenty miles and thirty minutes later the Beach Boys were dootdooting through “Heroes and Villains” (Part 2). O’Connell turned down the volume, a lit cigarette between her fingers, and said, “I think you’ve misunderstood something.” Her scholarly voice.
I tried to keep my expression neutral. “Yes?”
“Last night was about physical desire, Del. A collar doesn’t alter your chemistry, and I haven’t touched a body in six years. I shouldn’t have done what I done, but neither should you construe a physical act as some kind of…romantic overture.”
Overture?
“I’m not,” I said. “I didn’t. I just thought that—”
“Why is it so hard for men to believe that a woman can just be horny?”
Men?
Now I was
men
?
I turned away from her and stared out the passenger window, a frown holding my mouth in check. It would be a very bad time to laugh. But Jesus, what a relief! O’Connell just might be as fucked up as I was. All the things about her that kept me off balance: the costume changes from high priest to rock chick; the sudden lurches into hard Irish
aint
s and
ye
s; the abrupt swing from pastor to sexual aggressor and back again. She didn’t know who the hell she was, kick-ass exorcist or shell-shocked possession survivor.
Maybe everyone in the world was this inconsistent, this fragmented. All we could see of each other—all we could see of ourselves—was a ragged person-shaped outline, a game of connect-the-dots without enough dots.
A sign flashed past my window. “That was our turn,” I said.
She slammed on the brakes—which wasn’t a problem, since the highway was empty. We’d passed maybe five cars since leaving the interstate. She made a three-point turn and rolled back to where another two-lane road met the highway.
On the green sign was a white arrow pointing down the road and the words, OLYMPIA 15 MI. Below it, a smaller sign that said HOSPITAL.
“Hospital?” O’Connell said.
I shrugged. It wasn’t on the map. “Let’s see.”
As O’Connell drove I scanned the distant fields to either side of the road, eyes primed for a red silo, but I saw nothing but bare fields and distant clumps of trees.
The first sign of a town was a white, rusting water tower squatting near railroad tracks. The crossing was unguarded; we nosed up the rise in the road, looked left and right. One thing about Kansas at noon, we could see miles of clear track in either direction.
Low buildings rolled into sight ahead of us. We passed a handful of houses, an Exxon gas station and convenience store, a two-story brick building with AN-TI-QU-ES spelled out in peeling white paint between the upper windows—and suddenly we were at a stop sign, a four-way intersection that looked like it marked the center of town. I hadn’t seen even a WELCOME TO OLYMPIA sign.
“Which way?” O’Connell said. It didn’t seem to matter: left, right, and forward, the buildings petered out, giving way to open fields.
Unfortunately, nothing looked familiar. I didn’t need a voice whispering to me like in
Field of Dreams,
but I thought I deserved something. Some sign. At least a vague sense of déjà vu.
A Toyota pickup much newer than O’Connell’s pulled up to the intersection opposite us, stopped. The driver, a round-faced woman with long brown hair, waited for us to pull forward.
“A Toyota’s a Toyota,” I said.
“What?”
“Never mind. Just drive up to the edge and then we’ll turn around.”
Drawn onward.
As we passed the other driver, she waved, and I waved back. It seemed like the Kansas thing to do.
We covered the entire town in ten minutes. The stores tended toward the practical and cheap: Tire store, used bookstore, fabric shop, pizza place, bars. A tiny grocery. The biggest commercial enterprise was a John Deere dealership: a long sheet-metal building on a gravel lot stocked with a dozen old and new tractors and many large, serious-looking bladed attachments that, as an American male, I ought to have been able to identify. We only saw a few people on the street, and maybe a dozen parked cars, most of those near the elementary school, a new-looking building a few hundred yards south of the center of town.
“Anything ring a bell?” O’Connell said.
“Not really.” I ran a hand through my hair.
“Pick a direction,” O’Connell said.
“You think I made this up?”
She sighed. “Which way do you want me to go?”
“The town’s here, isn’t it?” I said. “I know that doesn’t mean Dr. Awkward’s secret laboratory is under the John Deere distributor, but it’s got to mean something. You’re the Jungian mystic—you should be digging all this synchronicity. This is your cue to jump into spiritual guide mode. Do some priest stuff.”
“Priest stuff.”
“I don’t know—pray or something. Dish out some ancient wisdom.”
“Fine. You start chanting, and I’ll get out the
I Ching
and throw some coins. Now
which fucking way
?”
I pointed north.
The problem was that I didn’t know what we were looking for. My whole thinking was this: the Painter kept drawing the farm; I drew the farm; therefore the farm is important. Back in the Waldheims’ library this had seemed like irrefutable logic. And when I opened that copy of
RADAR Man,
Olympia was waiting for me like a promise.
Jesus. First I’d hung all my hopes on shrinks, then Dr. Ram, then O’Connell. Now I was clinging to a fucking comic book.
We passed the mailbox-marked entrances to two farms, both with the name
Johnson
stenciled on the box. The houses and barns were set far back from the road, but the silos were silver and the configurations of buildings were all wrong.
A mile or so later we came upon a suburban subdivision plopped down in the middle of a field. Eight or nine houses, each of them newer and larger than any of the homes we’d seen so far, huddled together for protection against the wind. The stone and cement slab at the entrance said, CASTLE CREEK.
I didn’t see any creek, though a quarter mile later the road crossed a narrow cement bridge over a wide, rocky ditch. In the middle of the dry bed was a large round boulder like a hippo’s rump.
“What is it?” O’Connell said. “Did you see something?”
“What? No.”
“Do you want to keep going?”
“Forget it.” I gestured toward the building up ahead. At the top of a slight rise was a square gray building that had to be the hospital. “Let’s turn around up there and then try to find lunch.”
The circle drive took us up to a 1920s Greek temple: three stories of stone, with a jutting, peaked entrance propped up by white columns. The wooden sign posted out front read OLYMPIA SANATORIUM.
“Does that mean crazies or TB?” I asked. “I can never keep them straight.”
“TB, I think.”
We rolled back down the drive, past a small parking lot that held about a dozen cars, and came out at the highway again. “So I guess…pizza,” I said. It was the only type of restaurant we’d seen in Olympia.
O’Connell pointed us back toward town. She’d almost gotten up to speed when we passed a dirt road that I hadn’t noticed from the other side of the highway. The fields were unmown, and dried brush nearly engulfed an old mailbox. If it had been summer I never would have seen it through the foliage.
“Wait! Go back!” I said.
She pulled over without arguing. I hopped out and jogged back toward the dirt road. O’Connell put the truck in reverse and backed up to follow me.
I looked at the name on the mailbox again, then scanned the fields. In the distance, a picket of blackened timbers and a gleam that could have been the tin roof of a house. No silo.
O’Connell stepped out of the truck.
I showed her the name on the mailbox, a palindrome spelled out in faded blue paint: NOON.
“We’re here,” I said.