Pandemonium

by Daryl Gregory

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  D a r y l G r e g o r y

  “Hi, Pastor Paul,” Lew said.

  The man pushed himself out of his seat. He was dressed in khakis and a striped golf shirt, his brown leather shoes too dressy for the rest of the outfit.

  My mother stayed seated, her face pleasantly blank. He came to me first. The groceries made a hug impossible, thank God. I shifted the bags slightly and held out a hand. He clasped my hand between his own. “Del, Del, Del.” He slapped the back of my hand, then gripped my shoulder. “I can hardly believe it. You look just like your father.”

  I hadn’t seen Pastor Paul since my father’s funeral. My mother had stopped going to church when I was small, but my father had put on his suit every Sunday, dragging Lew with him. I stayed home to watch TV. I was jealous of Lew, but he begged to stay home so often that I knew I was getting the better deal.

  I suddenly remembered a show I used to watch. It only played on Sunday mornings, and it was called something like The Magic Door. The magic was all done by green screen: a live-action guy with a guitar and a weird cap—an acorn?—who was magically shrunk down to the size of animal hand puppets. The guy would go through a door in a tree and come out in this magical forest, and sing songs where half the verses made no sense to me. It wasn’t until high school that I realized it was a program for Jewish kids, and the mini guy was singing in Hebrew.

  The pastor moved on to Lew, giving him his own hearty handshake. I remembered that aggressive enthusiasm. I never went to Sunday school, but I’d gotten to know Pastor Paul from his frequent visits. He’d arrive at odd times—the middle of a Saturday afternoon, or an hour after supper—and my parents would have to drop what they were doing and make him coffee. If I wasn’t around he made a point of asking for me, and Dad would make me come in from the backyard. Pastor Paul always made a big fuss over me, asking me how I was doing, telling me how much I’d grown, even if I’d just seen him the week before. He was big into tousling my hair. He was a tousler.

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  “So what have you boys been up to?” he asked. “Your mother says you’ve moved out west, Del. Colorado. I hear it’s real pretty.”

  “In the dark, it’s a lot like Illinois.” My stock answer. He nodded, not really hearing me. “Those mountains are beautiful.”

  Lew put away the groceries while the pastor and I talked about nothing. Most of the nothing was handled by Pastor Paul. Whenever I started to answer a question or make a comment, his attention seemed to immediately move on to the next thing he was going to say. After five minutes he announced that he had to be going, and five minutes later he announced it again. We gradually made our way to the front door, where he pulled on his elaborate winter coat and talked some more as he zipped, buttoned, snapped, and cinched. He pumped my hand again. “I’ve thought a lot about you over the years,”

  he said. It was almost exactly what Dr. Aaron had said. “I’m glad to see you doing well.”

  I almost laughed at that.

  He clapped me on the shoulder again. “I swear, you look just like your father. He was one of the ‘Chosin Few,’ you know. Not many men survived that battle.”

  “That’s true.” I didn’t know what else to say to that. I don’t remember my father talking about Korea.

  “I always said, he was the one you wanted behind the wheel of the bus in a snowstorm.” He nodded. “Well, I’ve got to be going.”

  I stayed on the porch, getting colder in the breeze, as he finally climbed into the Buick. I watched him pull away and then shut the door behind me.

  “I don’t like that guy,” I said.

  Lew laughed. “Pastor Paul? Come on, he’s a nice old man.” Mom shook her head, frowning. “What?” Lew said.

  “How often does he come over?” I asked.

  She shrugged, and carried the coffee cups to the sink. “Once a month. Maybe every few weeks.”

  Lew laughed. “Hey, he got the hots for the Widow Pierce?”

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  D a r y l G r e g o r y

  Mom gave him the look that Lew and I called the Brush-Back Pitch.

  I followed her. “What’s he want? Do you like him visiting you?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Then why do you put up with him?”

  “He’s just doing his job.”

  “What job? You’re not even in the congregation anymore. Is he trying to get you to come back?”

  “Oh no.” Her voice was hard. “I’ll never set foot in that church again.”

  I looked at Lew. Lew looked at his hands.

  “Oh, and your friend Bertram called,” Mom said. Her voice had shifted instantly back to normal. “He said he really needed to talk to you.”

  “Bertram?” I hadn’t spoken to him since the nuthouse. How the hell had he gotten this number? Maybe the slans had beamed it to him.

  “He said he really had to talk to you. I wrote his number on the fridge calendar.”

  “Mom, listen, if he calls again, just tell him I’m not in, okay?”

  Mom gave me the Brush-Back Pitch (which Lew enjoyed—we were tied now at one apiece). She wasn’t going to lie to anybody.

  “Did you remember the sour cream?” she said.

  Lew was already heading toward the door.

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  I awoke with a start and immediately groaned in pain. I was on the floor, my right arm and leg stretched up onto the bed, where my wrist and ankle were manacled to the frame. My elbow fired tracer shots of pain up the back of my arm.

  “Del, open the door!” My mother. This wasn’t the first time she’d called my name, I realized. Either her shouting or my fall had woken me up.

  “It’s okay,” I said. My throat was raw. So I’d been screaming again. I pushed myself off the floor, got a knee under me. The dimly lit room whirlpooled around me—the Nembutal was still in my bloodstream—

  but the pain in my elbow lessened.

  Louder, I said, “It’s okay! I just fell out of bed.”

  I crawled back onto the mattress, my right arm and leg clumsy and dead as prosthetics. Circulation started to return, and every joint on the right side of my body ached in unison: shoulder to wrist, hip to ankle.

  The foam-padded manacles were padlocked with Kryptonite combination locks. Blue polymer-wrapped bicycle chains looped from the manacles to the crossbars in the bed frame.

  “You were yelling,” Mom said. “Are you sure . . . ?”

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  D a r y l G r e g o r y

  I fumbled with the lock at my wrist. It was upside down, and my vision was fuzzy at the edges. I dialed the first number, and dragged my finger to the next tumbler. “It was just a nightmare,” I said. I pushed the last number into line, until I was looking at “9-9-9.” I pulled, and the lock opened. I tugged my hand free of the manacle.

  “It’s okay. Just go to bed, Mom.”

  I lay facedown, my heartbeat rushing in my ears, until she walked away from the door. I almost drifted asleep again, but forced myself to sit up, rub my face until I was awake enough to unlock my leg and get out of bed. The red LED alarm clock read 3:50. I was sleepy, but sleepy wasn’t good enough.

  I turned on the light, found my duffel bag, and swung it onto the bed. I fished out the orange pill bottle from the right-hand side, rattled it. Three pills. I’d taken only one before going to bed, but that had been a mistake. I needed to be either awake or out. I looked at the clock again. Only a few hours until dawn. I dropped the bottle back into my bag without opening it. When I came back from my walk, my mother was in the laundry room, moving my clothes from the washer to the dryer. I stopped short, then saw that they were the clothes I’d put into the washer before I left. It didn’t look like she’d gone into my duffel bag.

  “You don’t have to do that,” I said.

  I turned sideways to move past her in the narrow space, a coffee cake under one arm and the three-pound Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune under the other. T
he laundry room was really a breezeway that connected the garage to the house and did double duty as a mudroom. My dad had built it, under close supervision by my mother. She said he had hands of concrete, hell on anything smaller than a 2x4 or more fragile than sheet metal. He never worked on a piece of wood trim that didn’t snap.

  “You already got to the bakery?”

  “Seven o’clock Sunday morning, and it was packed.” I went into the kitchen, set the box on the counter. “Same old Polish ladies. That place hasn’t changed a bit.”

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  “You didn’t go back to sleep, did you?”

  I shook my head, even though she couldn’t see me. “Sorry about that. I didn’t mean to wake you up.” I felt embarrassed and guilty, as if she’d caught me wandering around the house naked. She started the dryer and came into the kitchen, drying her hands on a paper towel. She threw out the remains of the coffee I’d made at four—I’d needed plenty of caffeine—and started a fresh pot. I busied myself getting down plates and cutting slices of the coffee cake. We sat down at the table and divvied up sections of the Trib. The cake wasn’t sweet in the center—nothing in the Polish bakery was as sugary as something from a regular bakery—but it tasted better to me than any roll or donut I’d found. Or maybe it was just nostalgia. We ate and read in silence for a long time.

  The demon I’d seen at the airport two days ago was mentioned on page three. It was a brief story, a follow-up to whatever they’d run the day before. The victim was not going to be charged—nobody thought he was faking. Experts agreed it was the Painter strain of the disorder. (Those were the official terms—strain, disorder—as if marrying a medieval word like possession with more medical and modern-sounding partners tamed the idea, boxed it up into something tidy enough for science.) Best guess, there were perhaps a hundred distinct strains—

  a science-weasel way of saying one hundred demons. The CDC recorded over twenty thousand cases of possession a year in the US, some lasting weeks and most lasting only minutes. Some people were hit repeatedly, as if being struck by lightning charged them for life. Most of the time they were seized by the same demon, but sometimes it was a different one every time. The government hastened to add that the reports contained an unknown number of false positives, false negatives, incorrect diagnoses. Demons left behind no DNA, no wake of antibodies in the bloodstream, no cellular changes in the brain. A possession—especially a brief, one-time possession—was easy to hide and easier to fake. Different people were highly motivated to do either. Demons could make you do awful things—but awful things could make you famous. Possession survivors showed up on TV all the time. 3 6

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  Next to the airport story was a sidebar on the International Conference on Possession and its outlaw para-conference, DemoniCon. DemoniCon was not, technically, even a conference: it had no charter, no committees, no reservation agreements. It was an improvised annual party that followed ICOP around the globe. Demonology cranks, hobbyists, and demon fans bought up hotel rooms in whatever city ICOP was being held at that year, tried to crash the more interesting ICOP events, and then made nuisances of themselves. People were worried about more cases of possession cropping up because of the conferences, or worse, more cases of copycat possessions. Nobody wanted armed impersonators of the Pirate King or the Truth running around. Security was supposed to be tight, though that would make no difference to a real demon. Nothing could stop a real demon.

  “Lew’s coming at ten?” Mom said.

  “So he says.” Amra and Lew had driven back to Gurnee last night. It was an hour up and an hour back, depending on traffic, but Chicagoans seemed to take this in stride.

  “And you’re staying in the city both nights?”

  “Uh, yeah.” I got up and refilled my cup. The “Self Clean” light was blinking. I hadn’t told her about ICOP, or Dr. Ram. I hadn’t even told her about seeing Dr. Aaron, except that we’d had a good visit, and that she’d gained a lot of weight.

  I hadn’t told her anything, and Mom hadn’t pressed me. This wasn’t like her.

  “I’m worried about you, my son,” she said.

  My son. That always floored me.

  “I’m going to be fine,” I said automatically. “I’ve just been . . .” I sat down again, the coffee cup hot against my fingertips. “Mom, back when I was little . . . how did I snap out of it? If it wasn’t the prayer thing, what happened? Did I just wake up one morning . . . back?”

  “I suppose you were too young to remember.”

  “I was in bed for a long time, I remember that. There were these straps. Right?”

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  She gazed at the floor. “You were in the hospital for almost three weeks. All they knew how to do was sedate you and keep you tied up. We took you out of there, but even at home you had to be watched all the time, even at night, because you’d get up and tear around the house. You started a fire in the living room one night, to roast marshmallows. You were wild. And so strong.

  “But you weren’t mean—you didn’t try to hurt anyone, not on purpose. You were just careless. You didn’t know your own strength. Lew was seven, and much bigger than you, but even then, well, eventually your father . . . your father and I decided that you had to be kept in your room. Your father boarded up the windows to keep you from escaping, and we put a bolt on the outside of the door. A lot of that time, because of the tantrums, you had to be strapped down. We fed you in bed, though all you wanted to eat was peanut butter sandwiches and ice cream.”

  “I scream, you scream,” I said, half singing it. Mom looked up at me sharply, and then away. “You’d chant that at the top of your voice.”

  “Lovely.”

  She sighed. “You weren’t easy to live with.”

  “So what changed? When did I get better?”

  “It didn’t happen in one day—it didn’t happen in one month. The thing you liked, the thing we finally figured out, was stories—you’d lie still for stories. I read from picture books and the jokes from the paper, Lew would read you comic books. I told you stories from my childhood, talked about all the things you’d do when you grew up . . . oh, anything I could think of. We went through every book in the house, then went to the library every other day for a bag more. This was after my surgery, and it was a lot of strain, but some days I think I did nothing but read to you and take Tylenol.”

  “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel,” I said.

  “Oh Lord yes. We must have read Mike Mulligan five hundred times.”

  I loved that book. “Okay, so then . . .”

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  “Then you calmed down. Gradually, we let you play more in the room, and you behaved yourself when you came out. You just got better and better.”

  I shook my head. “But how did you—when did you know I was me? What happened to let you know that the demon was gone?”

  She smiled, shrugged. “I just knew. There was one thing, though. For the longest time you hadn’t called us by our names. Lew was ‘that big boy.’ Your dad was ‘mister,’ and I was ‘that tall lady.’ And then one day I was feeding you lunch and you called me ‘Mom.’ ” She shrugged. “That was enough for me. I knew then I had my little boy back.”

  Inside the shower I let the hot water beat on my skull and tried to drown myself in noise: the thrum and hiss of the shower; the indistinct male rumbling of the voice on the clock radio on the bathroom counter; the intermittent faint trill that could have been a telephone in the next room. It didn’t help. Through all this, wired directly to my nervous system, was the rattling pressure of the thing in my head. I twisted off the shower and slid open the glass door. The phone was ringing. It stopped a moment later.

  Had to be Bertram. He’d left two more messages on Mom’s machine while we were out last night, and I hadn’t called him back. Why did he think it was okay to call me? We’d gotten to know
each other in the hospital, as much as you could get to know someone nutty as a fruitcake. We’d had hours to fill with talk as we made circuits of the wing. But that was the extent of the relationship. We were hospital friends.

  I opened the cabinet door under the sink and took a large, fluffy towel from the stack of large, fluffy towels, none of them older than a year. Mom had joined a towel club—a bunch of ladies who agreed to buy each other towels on their birthdays. For some reason Mom found this easier than just going out and buying herself ten new ones. I dried off and started opening drawers, looking for a comb.

  “Del, it’s Dr. Aaron.”

  “Really?” I unlocked the door, opened it a crack. A lick of cool air

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  against my shoulder. My mother stood there, covering the receiver with a hand. I shrugged and took it from her.

  “Dr. Aaron?” My voice echoed in the small space. I leaned back, closed the door.

  “Del, I’m sorry to bother you. But I’ve been looking at some of my old notes, and something occurred to me. Do you have time to talk today?”

  I looked at my wrist, but I’d taken off my watch. It must have been about 9:30, though. “I don’t know. My brother’s coming by in a little bit, and I’m going into the city for a couple days.” I’d already told Dr. Aaron about ICOP, but I didn’t want to say it aloud. It seemed impossible to talk quietly in this echoing room. I picked up my watch from the sink top. It was 9:40.

  “I think we need to talk before you go,” she said. There was an edge to her voice. “It should take only a few minutes.”

  Was this about the sleeping pills? Maybe she’d reconsidered. Or maybe she’d decided what I really needed was to check into rehab. No, it sounded like something else.

  “Okay, listen, let me get dressed and . . .” In the drawer was a gray earring box. I picked it up, ran my thumb over the velvet top. “How about the Borders by Randhurst Mall? They have a café. You live in town, right?” It was only two minutes’ drive for me. We agreed to meet at the bookstore in twenty minutes. Lew would probably be late anyway.