Pandemonium (23 page)

O’Connell maneuvered the pickup slowly down the uneven road. Tall grass whisked the doors.
Forms took shape. The line of thick posts became the charred bones of a barn, without roof or walls. And stretching away from the barn, a ragged jumble of curled and twisted sheet metal, half hidden by weeds and small trees: the silo’s cylinders, knocked apart and rusted by rain and years.
“You’re sure about this?” O’Connell said.
“Not a bit.”
She parked in a patch of former lawn that hadn’t grown quite as wild as the fields.
I stepped out of the truck, holding one of the plastic sheets from the Painter binder, and slowly turned: the gray farmhouse and its rusting tin roof, two stories tall but cringing against the wind. The outline of the barn, the disassembled remains of the silo.
I kept lifting the sheet, measuring it against the scene in front of me. The Painter’s drawings captured a vibrant, living farm, and this place was long dead. The barn and silo had burned, and the heat must have been tremendous. All that was left were the massive posts and beams of the barn, the heat-twisted skins of the silo. The damage had been done long ago—decades maybe.
But the bones were right. The buildings were the right distance from each other. In my mind’s eye, the silhouettes matched.
The house’s windows were unbroken except for one in the center of the second floor: a starburst of cracks that caught the light, and a small hole in the middle like a dark pupil.
I stepped up onto the porch and looked back at O’Connell. She leaned against the hood of the truck, arms crossed, watching me. Behind her, the highway was hidden by the high grass, but the top floors of the hospital were visible a quarter mile away.
I grinned and tried the front door. The knob rattled but didn’t turn all the way. I moved along to a window, cupped a hand to the dirty glass. It was too dark inside to see anything.
I pushed up against the window frame, but it didn’t budge. “Have you got a hammer or something?” I called.
O’Connell fished under the truck bed’s tarp and brought me a jack handle. “Now you’re adding breaking and entering to your list,” she said.
“No,
we
are.”
A couple weeks ago I might have hesitated to break the law. Mom had raised me to be a good boy. Or at least a conventional one. But after Dr. Ram, after the Shug, after all the varieties of shit that had gone down in the past ten days, I didn’t give a damn anymore. I could raise a little hell.
I smashed in the window, then ran the jack back and forth along the edges of the window until the shards were cleared. I leaned in. The sunlight showed a dim room populated by hulking furniture. I put a leg through the window and levered myself inside.
“Coming?” I said.
“Why not.”
We were in a front room, surrounded by couches and chairs. It looked like the occupants had walked out of the house one day and never looked back. A cup sat on the end table. The lamp was still plugged in by its huge black plug. Everything lay under a thick coating of dust, and a faint animal funk hung in the air.
I moved toward a bookcase crowded with knickknacks and squinted at a framed photograph that held pride of place. A man in a navy uniform, my age or maybe younger, stared humorlessly at the camera. He held the hand of a boy who could have been ten or eleven, head tilted as if he doubted the picture would come out. The soldier and the boy shared narrow eyes and a thin nose.
“Jesus,” O’Connell said. She stood just behind me. “That boy.”
“Yeah,” I said. “The boy on the rock.” We’d been looking at pictures of him for days.
We moved from room to room, through shafts of dusty light. The small dining room held a table and six chairs. In the middle of the table was a vase sporting a dozen dead twigs, the leaves long turned to dust and blown away.
In the kitchen was a low iron stove and a small round-shouldered refrigerator. The floor was decorated with mouse turds, and the counters were coated with dirt, accumulating topsoil. Dishes sat in the black, mold-covered sink. A nearly intact snakeskin curled against a baseboard.
I didn’t want to open the refrigerator, but I pulled open the cabinets. The shelves were full of white dishes and orange-tinted glass bowls and tall drinking glasses.
O’Connell nodded toward the calendar hanging near the back door: May, 1947.
“Shit,” I said.
I’d expected an empty house, or a trashed hangout for teenagers, but not this museum. It looked like no one had entered the place in fifty years.
“Is any of this familiar?” O’Connell said.
“Not exactly,” I said. But it didn’t feel
un
familiar. It felt like a copy of a copy of someplace I’d visited, or maybe a place I’d read about in a book. “Let’s try upstairs.”
The stairs groaned and creaked under my weight, and I walked up gripping the gritty banister. At the top was a short hallway with four doors, two in each direction. The peaked ceiling was close, designed for smaller people.
I went right, pushed open a door that faced the rear of the house. The small room contained a double bed with a knitted blue bedcover, and a chest of drawers topped by a framed mirror. Dust coated every surface, but not as thickly as downstairs.
I opened the door on the other side of the hallway. Only one window here, overlooking the front yard. It was the cracked window I’d seen from outside: The hole was the bull’s-eye.
It was a little boy’s room. A narrow bed occupied one corner, under a St. Louis Cardinals pennant. The closet was open, empty metal hangers glinting like teeth, and clothes had slipped from the hangers into a pile. Two tall bookshelves, half the shelves full of hardcover books leaning against each other, the other half filled with stacks of magazines, some of them spilling across the floor.
“You’ve got that look on your face again,” O’Connell said.
I walked into the room and stooped to pick up the nearest magazine, already knowing what it was.
The page was torn down the right side, and grime had faded the colors and muddied the lines, but I still could make out the pictures. In the first panel, a golden-age Captain America, skinny and goofy looking in his half mask, punched a buck-toothed Japanese soldier across the room. It had to be from the early days of
Captain America Comics,
1941 or 1942.
O’Connell stepped into the room and I held out a hand. “Just don’t step on anything.”
She looked around at the room.
“Why?”
I started picking up the comic books and stray pages: a black-and-white “paste-book” of Katzenjammer Kids newspaper strips; some Timely comic book I didn’t recognize featuring the original Vision; an issue of
Boy Commandos
complete except for the missing cover and back page.
O’Connell made a huffing noise, then disappeared.
The floor was thick with treasures. A dozen pages of black text on gray paper from an issue of
Black Mask.
A copy of
Weird Tales
with a beautifully lurid cover. A ten-issue run of
Blackhawk,
the Polish air ace.
Soon I’d found scores of complete comics and pulps—
Thrilling Western, High-Seas Adventures, Detective Comics, Dick Dare—
and I hadn’t even started on the books on the bookshelves. Who knows what the rest of the house was hiding.
“Del.” O’Connell had returned.
“Uh-huh.” I delicately turned the page of a
Captain Marvel.
He was fighting Nippo, a Japanese spy armed with magical black pearls. I pitied any Japanese kid trying to grow up in America in those days.
“You’ve been at this for an hour,” O’Connell said. “I’m starving.”
“This is a classic Captain Marvel. You know, Shazam?” O’Connell leaned in the doorway, holding a cop-sized flashlight that I’d seen in the truck’s glove compartment. “Never mind,” I said. “I forget you grew up a girl. See, Billy Batson’s this little kid, an orphan newspaper boy, but when he says this magic word he turns into this big guy with a cape and gets the powers of the gods—the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the, uh, something of Atlas, then Zeus, Achilles, and the speed of Mercury.”
“Some of those aren’t gods.”
“You know what I mean. Look, I found a
Detective Comics
with the Joker in it—the Joker!” I looked up at her. “We have to stay here.”
She glanced at her watch. “I don’t know, what time does it get dark? I don’t want to be—”
“I mean for the night.”
“Not a chance,” she said.
“All right then, I’ll stay. You find a hotel, then pick me up in the morning.”
“What? No. I’m not going to leave you here alone. Why in God’s name would you want to stay here?”
I looked around at the comics, the bed, the Cardinals pennant. The afternoon light gave everything in the room a shimmering quality, the bed and bookcases and yellowing pages of the comic books trembling from some inner energy, on the edge of snapping into place.
“I don’t know. I just…Listen, why don’t you get something to eat. Bring me back something if you want. I just need some more time here.”
“We’re not staying the night,” she said.
After a while she left me sitting in a patch of light on the floor, a comic book spread across my knees.

When I walked outside to pee, the sun was dropping. The nearest thing to a bathroom inside the house was a cinderblock room that looked like a late addition to the property; inside was a footed tub, a dry toilet, and a foul-smelling drain set into a cement floor slicked with mold. I decided that outdoors was more sanitary, and headed for the high grass near the barn.
Something glittered in the grass. I zipped up, walked a few feet. Half buried in the ground was a rusted length of metal shaped like a wide sword. Another blade was nearby, still connected to the central cone.
A propeller.
I walked toward a raised clump of weed and metal, where the base of the silo had been, stepping carefully over metal junk hidden in the tall grass. At the center of this clump was the wreck of the plane, or rather, enough pieces to reconstruct the idea of a plane: one wing, a black chunk of engine, a tangle of metal and bubbled glass that had been the cockpit. It had all burned to near shapelessness.
I circled around the remains of the craft. It looked like it had been the size of a Piper Cub, or a World War II fighter. At any moment I expected to see a skull, leather cap and goggles miraculously intact. But surely the pilot would have been buried when the crash happened. How long ago?
I heard the distant growl of the Toyota’s muffler and started stepping toward the house. O’Connell parked the truck, and got out with two big plastic grocery bags in her arms.
“What’s this?” I said.
“Camping supplies. There’s more in the back. What were you doing out there?”
“The call of nature.” There was no sense telling her about the plane. She’d only try harder to make me leave.
I went around to the back of the truck and got three other bags from the bed. One held bottled water, rolls of toilet paper, a carton of cigarettes. The other bags were stuffed with what looked like big beach towels, purple and trimmed in silver.
“Is this all for me?” I asked. “Or are you staying?”
“You’re lucky Olympia has no hotel.”
I set down the grocery bags inside the door, then went back to the truck to get my duffel and O’Connell’s bag. O’Connell followed me out and retrieved a pizza box from the seat of the car. She said, “We’d better get set up before it gets dark.”
We ferried everything upstairs and split up the supplies. I didn’t have to ask if she wanted to sleep separately. O’Connell took the back bedroom with the double bed; I, of course, took the room with the comics.
The things that looked like towels were exactly that: Kansas State University beach towels. I guessed she couldn’t afford sleeping bags.
“Can I show you something?” I called. O’Connell came to my door. “Please,” I said.
She sat on the purple towel I’d spread out on the bed. I sat next to her, and handed her the book I’d found, opened to the inside cover. In a wobbly hand someone had written, “Property of Bobby Noon.”
“His name was Bobby,” I said.
“Congratulations,” she said.
“And that’s not all.” I began to show her the magazines and comics I’d set aside. I pointed out the heroes and villains on the covers: the Shadow, Captain America, the crazed Japanese soldiers.
“They’re blueprints for the cohort,” I said. “The Truth, the Captain, the Kamikaze—they’re all here.”
“What about the Little Angel?” O’Connell’s demon, the little girl in the white gown. “What comic book character is she?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Some kind of Shirley Temple–Little Lulu amalgam. Like what’s-her-face in
The Little Rascals
—the token girl.”
“Who kills old people and terminal patients.”
“Hey, I’m not saying this explains everything. But think about it—so many of the cohort are like characters straight out of the pulps.” I looked around for the Katzenjammer Kids book, spotted it by the bookcase, and brought it back to her, stepping around the many small piles of pages. I carefully opened the book to the page I’d seen. “Look at this—it predates anything in
Dennis the Menace.
”
One of the panels showed the blond-haired Katzenjammer boy firing a slingshot at his drunken uncle, knocking his glasses into the air. “O’Connell,
I’m
in here.”
She stared at the page for a long moment, then stood quickly and walked to the window—I winced as her foot came down on a
Hit Comics
with Kid Eternity on the cover. She leaned close to the cracked glass, gazing across the fields. “This doesn’t tell us anything new, Del. We already know the archetypes take whatever forms exist in the culture—”
“No! No. Look at all this. I was drawn here for a reason. This is ground zero. This is where it started. With Bobby Noon, the boy on the rock.”
“What are you saying?” She didn’t look at me. “He dreamed you into being?”
“Or summoned me.”
The dying glow made a moon of her face. In a few minutes the room would be dark. I looked around for the flashlight, and O’Connell suddenly jerked back from the window.
“What is it? O’Connell?”
She took another step back. “I just realized…I can see the lights on the top floors of the hospital from here.”
“Yeah?” Then, “Oh, right, we should cover the windows, they’ll see the flashlight bouncing around in here.”
I helped her take the dusty covers from the beds. We carried them downstairs, shook them out in the front yard, then went back in and covered the window in my room. We did the same in O’Connell’s room, even though we could see nothing out the window but darkness.
“Del,” she said softly.
I couldn’t see her face. She held the flashlight pointing at the floor.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what?”
She didn’t answer for a moment, then: “I’m sorry if you felt like I doubted you.”
That wasn’t what she was going to say.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “
I
wouldn’t have believed me. Tomorrow we’ll go into town, find out about the Noon family.” I almost said, Find out about the plane crash.
“We’ll get to the bottom of this,” I said.
I crossed the hall to my room, using the edge of the door frame to guide me. I moved gingerly through the dark, trying to remember where I’d left comics on the floor, and found the bed with my shins.
The sheet glowed faintly against the window. I stepped forward, pulled it down. A three-quarter moon was rising over the hospital. Several of the top windows of the building flickered a faint blue: television light.
The air coming through the hole in the window was frosty. I felt my way into the duffel, pulled out a cotton sweater, and something clattered onto the floor. I reached down, and my fingers found the wooden handle of the slingshot. I held on to it, moving it from hand to hand as I pulled on the sweater.
I lay down and the bed frame popped alarmingly, but didn’t collapse. I used the duffel for a pillow, my feet framing the moonlit window. Not enough light to read by, though. I should have taken the flashlight.
I’d found the farm and the House that Time Forgot. I’d found the boy on the rock. Tomorrow I’d pull answers from this town like teeth. And somehow, eventually, I’d figure out what to do with the body I’d stolen. The kid rested inside my head like a spent bullet.
I stretched the slingshot, aiming the empty pouch between my feet, through the hole, straight at the moon’s villainous chin.
Draw, O Coward!
I fired. The moon refused to go out.