"Okay, look, look," I said, raising my hands in surrender, standing up, gazing around the room. How many ways can a person say 'No thanks'? How many ways can a guy bail? At that moment, in that crazy, gloomy chamber of velvet and rituals, I only knew of one, and it came out of me on a rush of nervous tension. "What I do is, I trace bail bond skips for low level schlubs down on LaSalle," I said. "And I'm sorry about your boy, Mr. Mirrish, but I have no idea what you people are talking about, so if you'll excuse me, I've gotta be getting back to the planet earth."
And before any of them could muster a response, I was already out the door and halfway down the hall, making a bee-line for the exit.
That night, alone in my apartment, belly full of bourbon, I passed out on my sofa —
— and started dreaming I was hunting down a demon.
In the dream, I started the search down at the Harold Washington Library, thumbing through city directories — as I always do at the beginning of a trace — looking for a friend or a relative of the fugitive, people to interview, various threads to start weaving together. But this time, there were little details right off the bat that made no sense. I was wearing my Uncle Jim's raincoat, and the power was off at the library, and there was a foot of stagnant water on the first floor. Behind the reference stacks, immersed in brackish filth, was a massive metal file with the demon's name etched into it: BAAL. And inside the file I found these filthy bandages, used syringes, and maps, all kinds of maps, maps of Europe during the black plague years, maps of various epidemics. In my mind, in the dream, I made a connection between sickness and the demon, and I found myself wondering whether the doctor who had treated the Mirrish kid would know something.
I left the library, and all of a sudden I was standing outside Holy Name Cathedral, and don't ask me how I got there. Rain was slashing down across the stone steps, and there was a blue cage light flickering above a side door, the word MORGUE displayed above the door. I went inside, and found an old World War II surgical unit in there — the lightning crashing, and the blood on the walls, and the floor slick with gore, and all these dead bodies lined up on antique gurneys. I followed the hallway around a corner, then down a staircase into the darkness of the cellar. There was an old, wizened doctor down there — the same doctor who had treated Christopher Mirrish during the torturous days of the exorcism ritual — and he was seated at a dilapidated desk, his hunched back facing me, his flyaway grey hair like a spider web on his bald pate. I went over and said something, and he turned around, and I have to say he had the most extraordinary face I've ever seen. Terrible open sores ravaged his wrinkled visage, some of them the size of half dollars. Huge pocks of glutinous pus glistened along his cheeks, and loose flesh hung around his jaundiced eyes. His mouth moved quickly, but his voice came out at a different rate — out of synch — like a motion picture that was running through a broken projector. "The entity moves through infection, through illness," he said. "Especially in times of plagues." And then one of his sores — the walnut-sized lesion below his nose — started slithering off his face like a snail, leeching down his arm, then down his leg. And in the dream, at that precise moment, in my head, a warning alarm sounded because I recognized the sore. My God, it was slithering across the floor toward me, and I recognized the damn thing, the crusty edge, the salmon colored pus, the bloody center, and it was coming toward me — ME! —
— and then I woke up with a start in my living room, my heart doing the Watusi in my chest.
It took several minutes for me to get my bearings, and by the time I was conscious enough to see clearly — and my heart had stopped racing — I realized that it was morning, and I had been dreaming all night, and I was drenched in sweat on my second-hand Broyhill sofa. But the worse part — by far — was the surreal, lingering memory-fragment in the back of my mind like a cavity, or a seed caught in one of molars, touched off by the dream's residue still clinging to me.
I remembered bathing my poor sick mother in her final days, gently sponging her malnourished, bony back, her spine protruding like a tiny petrified railroad track. I remembered the lesion between her shoulder blades. I remember being afraid to touch it. I remember the guilt.
These were things I didn't want to remember. "I don't care how fascinating it is, I don't want anything to do with it."
I was sitting in my shrink's twenty-third floor office, clutching the arms of a Herman Miller recliner, trying to keep my emotions in check. I was scared shitless, my body clammy and rashed with goose bumps under my cable knit sweater. The "it" I was talking about was the insane job that I had turned down the day before but could not get out of my head.
"But in this day and age!" the doctor marveled, pacing behind her desk. Mary Ann Garcia, PhD, was a short woman with raven black hair tied in a severe ponytail. Her hose whispered as she moved. "I read somewhere that the Chicago diocese just recently assigned a full time exorcist. This stuff still goes on. You know. But hiring a bounty hunter! That's amazing."
"You're not listening." I was fidgeting in my chair, digging another cigarette out of my pocket. I lit it, snapping my Zippo with nicotine-yellowed fingers. "I don't want any part of this — whether it's bullshit or real or whatever — I don't want to be anywhere near it."
"The Catholic thing again," she murmured.
"Yes," I confessed, "I'm Catholic, and yes, shit like this gives me the jeebies."
She paused and looked at me. "You turned the job down, right?"
"That's right."
"Then what's the problem?"
"The dreams are the problem."
"It was just one dream."
"I want to make sure it never happens again," I said and took a drag.
"Why? Because it scared you so badly?"
I shook my head. "Not exactly."
"Then why?"
I thought about it for a moment. "Because... I don't want to end up finding this thing... even in a dream."
After a slight pause, she muttered something that sounded like, "Pink elephants."
I looked at her. "What?"
"It's like trying not to think about pink elephants."
I rolled my eyes. "Jesus Christ, I pay you a hundred and fifteen an hour for this?"
"I'm serious, Jimmy," she said. "The dream has nothing to do with demons, unless you're talking about your own personal demons."
I sighed, taking another drag. I knew exactly where the shrink was headed, and I didn't want to go there, equating every bad thing in my life to my mother's sad demise. A sickly woman throughout most of her life, my mom finally succumbed to full blown AIDS nearly ten years ago, and being her only child, I was her caretaker. I watched her die in slow motion, and it changed me forever.
"I gotta go," I finally said, getting up, snubbing out my cigarette in a crystal ashtray.
I barely heard the doctor's protests as I strode out the door and down the hall to the elevator.
By the time I got outside, the rain had dwindled to a dull, gunmetal mist.
I didn't feel like going home, so I took a taxi across town to my favorite saloon — The Red Lion — and I sat there in the cool, malty darkness for a long while, nursing a Guinness and feeling sorry for myself. What the hell was happening to me? Things used to be so simple. Clean and simple. Some joker gets busted, and his bail is set at ten thousand, and this joker decides to go to a bondsman to get sprung. The joker gives the bondsman ten percent — a grand, let's say — as well as the deed to his house as collateral. If the joker skips town before his trial date, the bondsman calls me. I get twenty percent of the bond, plus expenses, for tracking the joker down. Nice and tidy. Clean. But not this time. This time, things were as messy as a room full of stepchildren.
Sometime after midnight, I wandered home through wasted city streets and abandoned construction sites. The rains had lifted, but the night sky was still roiling like a cauldron. I barely recognized my street, the shadows reaching deep into the alleys, the distant sirens warbling as if underwater. My building l
ooked ill, congested with soot. My apartment was a low-rent studio six stories up — four walls and a scarred hardwood floor. I had thrown a couple of rugs here and there, some mismatched furniture, but mostly it was a place to keep my books and my computer gear — a perfect lair for a solitary obsessive too frightened of loss and pain to gamble on a relationship.
It was almost 1:00 AM, and I was exhausted, but I refused to go to sleep and risk having another dream. I drank coffee, and I sat on the fire escape, and I drank some more coffee, and I went through half a pack of Marlboros, and I watched some infomercials, and sometime around 4:00 the inevitable finally happened.
I drifted off. Back in the bowels of Holy Name Cathedral, I stumble backward through the shadows as my mother's lesion crawls across the stained tile toward my left foot. This horrible reanimated sore is roughly the size of a silver dollar, its pus-filled center as pink and gelatinous as a raw oyster, and it radiates pain— both physical and emotional. It makes a smooching noise as it slithers toward me. I slam against the back wall, the dust and debris falling on me, and then I make a snap decision. I search in my pocket for a Kleenex or a swab or a handkerchief— something to get a sample of this terrible moving wound— and I find a wadded tissue, and I reach down to the floor and make a swipe at it, and the thing jumps, slipping out of my grasp, dodging me. The doctor cackles. The sore slithers away, and I chase it toward a community shower with rusty exposed plumbing and stained tiles, and I'm just about to grab the sore when it slithers down a drain.
Somehow I manage to pry the rim off the drain and crack off a few of the adjacent tiles and bricks underneath it. Now the hole is big enough for a grown man to pass through, and I peer down into the dark and see the sore about twenty feet away, leeching down the inner wall of the sewer, trying to escape. I climb down the side of the shaft, using footholds embedded in the scabrous clay. I descend through several levels, past the sediment of fossilized human skulls and ritually slaughtered animals. I get tangled in a phalanx of roots and detritus, and soon I realize I'm caught in the limbs of a tree. I'm in a huge old oak in some netherworld forest beneath the sewer, and I've lost visual contact with the sore, and I'm helpless and alone.
I hear the sounds of an operation: Stainless instruments clanking, monitors beeping, artificial lungs breathing like bellows, and the hushed directives from the surgeon's voice— "Clamp, please, thank you, now I need a twelve millimeter mother killer"— and I manage to lower myself down the massive trunk, then drop down onto an iron apron skirting the base of the tree. I'm in the middle of an outdoor surgical suite in some dark industrial wasteland. Giant smoke stacks vomit deathly black vapors in the distance. Nineteenth century surgeons with leprosy on their faces and pus-stained linen tunics and primitive instruments are operating on the massive tree trunk. The head surgeon plunges a bone saw into the bark, and gouts of blood burble out of the ancient oak. He begins to cut, and I'm standing there like a ghost, watching this inexplicable operation, and I ask the doctor what he's looking for, and he says he's looking for the devil's virus, and I'm about to ask him something else when suddenly: RRRRRRIPP!! The tree opens like an enormous, leathery vulva, and out bursts a monstrous baby with luminous eyes and serpentine fangs, and it goes straight for my throat —
— and I sprang forward with a jerk.
Eyes fluttering, heart palpitating, back throbbing with pain, I was sprawled across a ratty Lazy Boy recliner next to my book shelves. It was dawn, and the grey sunlight was slanting in my window.
But this time I wasn't paralyzed by the fear. This time, I had awakened with a strange kind of resolve, galvanized by terror, inspired by grief, and driven by decades-old rage.
This time, I was going to fight back.
Way back in 1872, the United States Supreme Court made an obscure ruling known as Taintor vs. Taylor, which set forth rules and regulations regarding the activities of bondsmen and their agents. Under this obscure new law — which is still in effect today — if a guy skips his bail, the bondsman has the power to cross state lines, carry weapons, break-and-enter, make arrests on the Sabbath day, or do whatever it takes to bring that fugitive back to justice. It supersedes any local laws, and it basically gives guys like me the freedom to be creative while tracking down a scumbag.
Of course, this Mirrish situation didn't exactly fit the specifications of an ordinary skip. There was no bail, no bounty, no crime to speak of in a technical sense. Nevertheless: There was an abomination of nature, and there was a fugitive. And there were patrons seeking justice. The question was: What kind of justice was I expecting? Did I actually believe that the "virus" in my dreams was the same "entity" that had consumed Christopher Mirrish? For that matter, was it even possible to correlate something in a nightmare to the banal strictures of the waking world?
I intended to find out, and I intended to do it before I fell asleep again.
First stop: St. Vincent de Paul church on Delaware Street — the scene of the original job interview. Over the last twelve hours, I had tried a number of times to call Father Parrick, leaving messages that I had decided to take the job after all. His assistant had continually given me the big kiss-off, explaining that the church was no longer involved in the Mirrish matter, and they were handing over the files to the authorities, and they would appreciate it if I would stop calling. Mirrish had also fallen off the face of the earth, his office repeatedly claiming he was out of town and could not be reached. Even the attorney, Andrews, was nowhere to be found. I figured they had either hired another bounty hunter, or they were going vigilante — maybe using somebody from inside the church.
I waited until nightfall.
By 7:00 PM, St. Vinnies' rectory office was a ghost ship, and I used a spring key on the rear door to jack the lock. Inside, it was as silent as a mineshaft as I wandered through the dark, cloistered hallways. The air smelled of musty books and stale coffee. I found the door to Father Parrick's office open, the file right where he had left it: Top desk drawer under a stack of hymnal flyers. I got the thing out and started scanning pages with my halogen pen-light clenched between my teeth.
At first I wasn't sure what I was looking at: Xeroxes of hand-drawn maps, hastily scrawled notes from the exorcist's journal appearing in the tiny yellow pools of my flashlight, pages upon pages of Latin phrases translated into English. Transcripts of the possessed boy's ravings. Most of the entries recorded places, dates, and people — "Saxony, 608 AD, black pox, Ezekiel Commoner, fifteen year old stable boy, lost in trance," and "San Francisco, 1901, Pastor Hinman, forty-three year old washer woman, cold stupor" — and they went on and on like that, page after page of spontaneous voices issuing forth from the corrupted vocal chords of Christopher Mirrish. And I went through at least fifty pages before landing on something I could use— a note written by the exorcist in the margin: Entity seems to have an aversion to holy water heated to the scalding point. Then he jotted: Perhaps a connection to infectious disease?
There was a sudden noise behind me, something papery whispering across the room. I spun around and saw nothing, but heard a strange scuttling noise, like tiny, brittle legs scurrying along the inside of the walls, and I noticed the large, carved, sandalwood crucifix above the cadenza was hanging upside down. There was a muffled moaning coming from the opposite wall which sounded just like my mother on her death bed. I will never forget that sound, that breathy death rattle. Heart racing, I quickly pulled a few dozen Xeroxes from the file, and folded them into my pocket.
Then I got the hell out of there.
A few minutes later I was in my rust-bucket Toyota, speeding through the cold night-mist and the blur of broken neon storefronts. I was chain smoking, trying to ignore the icy terror constricting my throat. It took me fifteen minutes to make it to Northwestern Medical Center, another fifteen to park and find the correct wing according to notes from the file. By the time I arrived at the fluorescent corridors of the Long Term Critical Care ward, visiting hours were drawing to a close. I had to flash a phony det
ective shield in order to get past the Nazi crone at the reception desk.
Christopher Mirrish was in Room 213, nestled in the molded contours of a coma bed, IV drips connected to his lifeless wrists, his pale face canted at an unnatural angle, as though his neck had been broken. I stood there for a long moment, staring at that battered shell of a human being. I could see his eyes moving beneath his translucent eye lids — REM sleep — and it started dawning on me what was going on: He was dreaming. Within the cold, stone cocoon of his coma, Christopher Mirrish was having a nightmare.
Gooseflesh washed over me, heart hammering. I slowly started backing out of the room.
There was a pay phone across the hall, next to the men's room, and I dialed my shrink's emergency number with a trembling hand. The answering service answered, and I told them it was an emergency.
A few minutes later, the voice of Mary Anne Garcia was on the line. "Hello? Jimmy?"
"I'm having a crisis," I said. "Can you come down here? I'm at the hospital."
"What's happening?"
"You've got to help me with the dreams."
After a long pause, the voice said, "Take a deep breath, Jimmy."
"No! Listen to me. I'm not hysterical. I'm not being irrational. The last session we had, you said there are techniques, devices —"
"Let me call the attending in the psych ward —"
"No, no, I need you, I'm having a crisis here, and I must not fall asleep before I see you."
"What's the matter, Jimmy? What's happening?"
I let out a pained sigh, then said very softly, "If I don't talk to you before I go to sleep tonight, I will probably not survive."
Another long pause. "Give me fifteen minutes."
It took her twenty.
She arrived dressed in a khaki raincoat and scarf, an ID tag hanging around her neck. She looked a lot older than her thirty-eight years. We found a quiet place in the chapel at the end of the corridor, a place we could talk. The room was empty, and Dr. Garcia sat in the front pew, the soft light of a luminous crucifix reflecting off her olive skin.
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