Pandemonium (26 page)

When the Little Angel bent to kiss Bobby Noon, I braced myself. I don’t know what I expected, exactly: a long roar as the Black Well yawned open and sucked me back to my birthplace, or maybe a simple blackout as my connection to the world was extinguished.
Instead, we three demons looked at the old man and then at one another. Then the Little Angel climbed down from the bed and skipped out of the room. The Boy Marvel went to Bobby’s bedside and knelt there, distraught. He’d failed his most important duty.
I went to O’Connell. She was conscious now, but not quite coherent. She looked at me questioningly, and all I said was, “We have to go.”
The police didn’t try to stop the Truth from leaving in his car—they weren’t that stupid. One cop did call out to me as I walked out supporting O’Connell. I told him to step back and he obeyed. I helped O’Connell into the truck and drove back out to the highway. We passed the fire engines a minute later. The smoke from the burning farmhouse stayed in my rearview mirror for miles, a black tornado against blue sky.
O’Connell’s jaw was as purpled as my chest. Later she realized that she’d lost a tooth and loosened two others. Her first words, after a half hour of driving, were slightly fuzzed. She said, “Is the old man dead?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Why are you still here?”
“I don’t know.”
She leaned against the window, closed her eyes. She’d succeeded, and failed completely.
“I thought he was the key,” she said in a cracked voice. “I thought if he died, then the demons would die with him. A few of them at least.” She looked out the windshield at the flat Kansas skyline. “Just the cohort, that handful of demons, they ruined hundreds of lives. Thousands. Stopping just them, that would have been worth something, wouldn’t it?”
“Do you want me to take you to a hospital?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Jesus, no.”
After that she stayed on the other side of the cab, head leaning against the window, not talking. Maybe she was afraid of me. When we stopped for gas, she went inside while I filled the tank. I used my credit card at the pump, not caring anymore if the police were trying to track my movements. They had Dr. Ram’s killer. Or at least a person who had confessed to it.
The pay phone outside the station had a dial tone. I fished through my wallet for the water-rumpled Hyatt card. The ink had run and blurred, but I could make out the number. I got out my calling card and started punching numbers.
A woman answered. “Hi,” I said, trying to sound normal. “Is this Selena?”
“Ye-es,” she said cautiously.
“This is Del Pierce. We met a couple of weeks ago, at ICOP?”
“Of course I remember.” Her tone was cool. Maybe the police had talked to them. Tom and Selena had told them about my rant against Dr. Ram. I was just some drunk guy they’d met at a convention. Who knows what I was capable of? She said, “How are you doing?”
“Fine. I’m fine. Listen, I’d like to talk to Valis—Phil. Mr. Dick. Is he there?”
“I’m sorry, he’s sleeping at the moment.”
“Sleeping?” I repeated stupidly. I wondered what artificial men dreamed of. “Okay, when he gets up, could you…just ask him if he’d call me. Let me give you a number. I won’t be there until tonight, but he can call anytime.” Selena seemed reluctant, but she took down the number. I thanked her and hung up.
O’Connell came out of the shop with bottled water, snacks, a travel pack of aspirin. She saw something in my face and stopped.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I just want to get home,” I said.
When we arrived that night at the house where I grew up, I stepped out of the pickup, leaving it running. I had nothing to take inside: everything had been left at the farmhouse. I closed the door, and O’Connell scooted behind the wheel. She stared straight ahead, the side window open between us like a confessional. “I tried to kill you,” she said.
“You were doing your job,” I said. “I hired you to be my exorcist.”
The porch light flicked on. I walked toward the front door. O’Connell stepped out of the cab, and I turned around. She said, “I broke my vow to you. I promised to be your pastor.”
“No, you promised to be Del’s pastor. You still are.”

Just after 3:30 a.m., my bedroom door opened. It was Bertram: bald head, fringe of messed hair catching the reflected light from down the hallway. He stepped inside, shut the door behind him.
“I’m awake, Bertram.” Awake because I’d fallen out of sync with this body. It was becoming strange to me, a vehicle I was having trouble steering. The body’s owner was an insistent weight inside me, shifting and straining against the straitjacket I’d made for him.
“My apologies for the late hour,” Bertram said. But it wasn’t Bertram’s voice. His tone was flat, the rhythm too regular, as if the words were being pulled one by one from a database and streamed for broadcast.
I sat up. He walked toward the bed, adjusted the chair.
“You didn’t have to come all this way,” I said. “You could have just called.”
Valis slowly sat, rested his arms on his thighs. “It’s no trouble. However, I can’t stay long. Phil is resting peacefully at the moment, but if there’s a problem, you’ll have to excuse me if I have to leave suddenly.”
“You’re, uh, monitoring him from here? Cool trick.”
He turned his palms over, smiled. “I am vast.”
“And active. I’ve heard that.” I crossed my legs Indian style, stalling. “I guess O’Connell was wrong about you.”
“Mother Mariette has a narrow frame of reference in regard to possession. When I declined to turn stones into bread, she decided that I was an imposter.” I didn’t follow the reference. Valis said, “What did you want to talk to me about, Del? Or do you prefer Hellion?”
“Let’s just stick with ‘hey you’ for now.” I ran a hand through my hair. “I watched a man die yesterday,” I said. “An old man. He’d been paralyzed almost his whole life. He had an accident back in the forties, when he was eleven or twelve.”
“The golden age of science fiction,” Valis said.
“He was the source,” I said. “For some of the demons, at least. My
cohort.
We were all—I don’t know—stories. Characters. He made us up and then sent us into the world.”
Valis smiled curiously. “Perhaps you’re thinking that Phil made me up as well. That you and I are imaginary.”
I blinked. It sounded stupid when he said it like that. “In a manner of speaking.”
“Yet your author is dead.”
“I’m not saying I have it all worked out.”
“You’re not completely wrong, I suppose. There are some humans who have a gift for seeing the seams that stitch the world. Call them whatever you like. Your old man was one, Phil another. Who knows how many are out there? Thousands at least. At this moment, some teenage Japanese girl is pouring over a manga, a Hindu boy is praying Shiva to life. These sensitives are a little closer to the boundaries. Their grip on the consensual world is a little tenuous.”
“You mean they’re crazy.”
He shrugged. “Let’s not debate cause and effect. All we know is that when death comes for them, when the darkness calls, some of them do not go gentle. They refuse to be pulled in, and so they pull something back out.”
“The demons.”
“Us,”
Valis said. “You’re going to have to learn to accept what you are.”
“Which is what—aliens? Archetypes?”
“I don’t yet know. Perhaps the Jungians are right, perhaps not. We know that we are more than human, immortal yet polymorphous, in-corruptible yet malleable. Consider my case: I am the embodiment of the rational, exactly what Phil needed when he reached for me. He clothed me, however, in the form that allowed him to make sense of me. So, I became a science fiction writer’s creation, an artificial intelligence from outer space. That is my aspect. And you, you’re the cartoon brat, the troublemaker, the boy rebel.”
“I’m not that boy anymore.”
“No.” He touched a hand to his unbearded chin, and looked at his hand. Bertram’s hand. “You and I are special. We outgrew our prescribed roles.” The hand returned to his lap. “We stayed too long. As soon as we began to covet the lives we’d interrupted, we began to move beyond monomania, beyond the pasteboard personalities we’d been given. Our task now is to abandon amnesia. To remember what we are, and claim our place in the world.”
“Unless someone finds a way to get rid of us,” I said. My fists—Del’s fists—clenched the bedcovers. I’d known it was a risk looking for Valis, but I had to know the truth. “Someone like Dr. Ram.”
He tilted his head. “Do you have something you would like to ask me?”
“He was trying to pluck out the Eye of Shiva—that’s your way of putting it, right? He was going to kill the demons. The kid they arrested for shooting him, Kasparian, was a fan of yours. It would be easy enough to dress him up like the Truth and send him up there. If the Truth killed Dr. Ram, then no one would believe he had a cure for possession.”
Valis nodded, as if agreeing with my logic.
“But the kid figured it out.” I said. “He realized what had happened, who’d really possessed him. So he faked a confession, just to keep Dr. Ram’s work going.”
“You don’t sound very sure,” Valis said.
“So did you do it?”
“If you’re asking if I possessed Eliot Kasparian,” he said, “the answer is yes.”
I stared at him. He wore a placid expression that Bertram could never have managed.
“However, it wasn’t that night in Chicago,” he said. “In fact, it was only a few days ago. As you say, Eliot was a fan of mine. Crazy, as it turns out, but a fan nonetheless. If he had continued to insist that the Truth had possessed him, your fellow demon would have killed him. I felt it was my responsibility to rectify the situation.”
“Wait a minute—Kasparian killed Dr. Ram himself? It was his own idea?”
“Influenced, unfortunately, by Phil’s writings. But yes. I would have preferred that Eliot had decided to take responsibility for that deed, but when he did not, I took the necessary steps.”
“You…you possessed a man to make him confess that he wasn’t possessed.” I shook my head. “That’s not a fake fake, that’s—I don’t know what that is.”
Valis smiled. “I work in mysterious ways.” He stood up and moved the chair to exactly where it had been. “When we talked in Chicago, you asked me what good I was doing Phil walking around in his body. I’d been asking myself that question ever since I began to realize my true nature. Philip K. Dick will die, alas. When that day comes, I will no longer be able to ignore my larger responsibilities.”
He started for the door.
“Wait!” I said, and scrambled off the bed. Pain lanced across my chest before I could shut it down. I fell to my knees. In my head, Del began to kick and thrash, and the restraints began to shred. “What are you going to do? What am
I
supposed to do?”
“We’re gods,” he said in that flat voice. “It’s time we started acting like it.”

In the morning Bertram knocked lightly, then backed into the room carrying a breakfast tray. “Room service!” he said with forced cheer, and stopped short. “Del, what’s the matter?”
“I’m fine.” The boy scraped at the inside of my head with something that felt like claws, and I clenched my jaw. It had been like this since Valis left. I couldn’t maintain my concentration, and the pain from my ribs spiked with every movement.
I breathed carefully. “How’d you sleep?” I asked.
“
Me?
Fine, out like a light.”
He set down the tray across my thighs. Coffee, bagel, newspaper. One of the headlines read “Jungle Lord Frees Chimps at Brookfield Zoo.” Nothing had changed. The world was as demon-haunted as ever.
“You want cereal?” Bertram said. “I can make you cereal. How about aspirin?”
I nodded toward the doorway. “How is she?” I asked.
“Your mother? Yeah, well, not good. She came down for a while, and I could tell she’d been crying,” he said. “She called Lew, and Amra’s driving him over in a little bit. They’re all very…worked up.” He stepped back from the bed, knocked into a stack of Rubbermaid boxes, and stopped them from wobbling. “What did you say to her?” he said.
Del lurched, and I winced. I covered it by looking away, out the window. I could see the whole backyard—the big willow tree with the stepping blocks still nailed to the trunk, the top of the garage, the new wooden fence Lew had put up a few years ago. Beyond the fence were the buildings of the industrial park. When we were kids it was open fields, a creek, a small forest. They’d kept some of the trees, put in a walking path, built a bridge over the creek.
“Bertram, I need you to do me a favor.”
He came around the bed, sat in the chair, and leaned forward. “I told you, I owe you. Anything you want, Del. Anything.”
“This is a big one,” I said.
I told him what I wanted. He blanched, but he stayed in the chair; he hung with me. He asked a dozen questions, most of which I couldn’t answer. But he agreed.
In half an hour he was packed. I heard him saying his good-byes to Del’s mother, their words indistinct. I’d told him what to say if she questioned him, but she didn’t seem to put up much of a fight. The taxi must have arrived then. The front door opened and closed, and Bertram was gone.
Lew and Amra arrived a short while later. They talked for a long time in the kitchen, and then they were coming up the stairs. I put my hands under the blanket, where I could clench my fists unseen. Del pitched against the inside of my head. I’d done this to myself, I realized. I’d let him out, and I didn’t have the will to shove him back in.
Del’s mother opened my door. “Are you awake?” she said. She looked years older than last night.
Lew and Amra came in behind her. Amra leaned over the bed and hugged me gently. I inhaled, memorizing her perfume. Lew still limped, his knee gripped in a complicated brace. He looked much better than he had in the hospital, but his color was still a little gray, and he seemed thinner. He carefully sat in the chair, and patted my shin through the blanket.
“We both look like shit,” he said.
My face heated and my throat closed, the body’s response to signals for guilt, shame. I’d almost killed him that night at the lake. Killed him without thinking.
Lew said, “Hey man, don’t—don’t sweat it. I’m fine. The doctors say I’ll be fine. I don’t look
that
bad, do I?”
The three of them stood around my bed for a few minutes. Amra tried to make small talk, but conversation proved too awkward, too full of silences. Under the covers I dug my fingernails into my palms. Finally Amra said, “Why don’t we let you two catch up.”
Lew watched the women leave. “Mom’s been telling us some wild stuff,” he said.
“It’s all true,” I said.
He grimaced. “Maybe not. You’ve had some crazy shit go down, and it’s easy to get confused, to jump to conclusions.”
“Yeah.” I coughed, cleared my throat.
A minute passed. “Shit,” Lew said.
“He’s still here,” I said. “The little kid.”
Lew nodded. “That’s what Mom said.”
“You’re going to have to start all over,” I said. “Dad’s gone now, and Mom’s too old to do this on her own. You and Amra are going to have to help.”
Lew looked stricken. “What are you talking about?”
“I can’t stay, Lew. I’m barely holding on here.”
“Oh Jesus.” He pushed himself to his feet. “You can’t just…” He walked to the window.
“The last time, he woke up screaming. He was freaked out, that’s all. He was surrounded by strangers. Just hold him down, keep talking. He’ll recognize you. I know he’ll recognize you.”
“This is bullshit,” he said. “This is total bullshit.”
“Lew.” He finally looked at me. “Come here. Come on.” He walked toward me. “Put your hands on my shoulders. That’s it.”
He leaned over me. His hands gripped my biceps. “Like this?” he said.
“Harder.”
“I don’t think I can do this,” he said. His tears were running into his beard. “You’re a lot bigger than you used to be. I just had a heart attack a couple weeks ago.”
“You big baby,” I said through gritted teeth. “You’re saying I can take you now?” Del threw himself against my skull. I grunted, closed my eyes.
The Black Well blossomed above me. Bobby Noon was dead, but the network of souls, the well’s myriad tunnels, remained. I’d been born somewhere in that dark.
At the bottom of Harmonia Lake I’d relearned the secret of jumping. All you have to do is break this habit of breath and blood. Take everything and everyone you love, and throw them away. All you have to do is die.
Lew yelled, “Mom! Amra! We need you!”
“Shut up,” I said. “And hold on.”