“I know.”
“So you’re Mister Big Fat Liar Pants.”
“Basically.”
And there was more. I told them about getting turned down by Dr. Ram and going out drinking, but I didn’t mention meeting Valis, throwing a drink in the fake Piper’s face, or the rest of the night’s wanderings. Not because I was embarrassed, but because I didn’t have the energy.
The Audi’s tiny dashboard clock said that it was almost 10 a.m. The street in front of the Hyatt was clear of pedestrian protesters; evidently even Rapturists had to go to their real jobs on Monday. The DemoniConners were probably sleeping off hangovers. Lew parked under the glass canopy protecting the entrance and turned on his flashers. He glanced at Amra, then looked at me. “You want me to go in with you?”
“No, I’ll be right back.” Lew’s cell had rung three times during the drive, and it had pained him to ignore the calls. Lew was the Man now, and for all I knew, Amra was the Man too. The fact that both of them had taken off work to bail me out heightened my humiliation. Gourmet shame.
“I’ll go in,” Amra said. She climbed out of the backseat. “It’s pretty cramped back there. Lew, give him your jacket.”
Ah: the bloody shirt. I slid my huge mummy hands through the sleeves of the golf jacket, gritting in pain as I forced them through the narrow wrists, and Amra zipped me.
We went arm in arm to the front desk. Three clerks were huddled in the doorway to the back office, their blue-uniformed backs to us, talking to someone deeper inside the office. Their words were too low to hear, but the conversation seemed intense. I stood for a full minute waiting for them to notice us. I kept my
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arms down to hide the bandages. The lobby was too cold; chills ran up my neck. With each passing moment, I felt sicker. Finally, Amra said, “Excuse me? Can someone help us?”
One of the clerks, a black woman much taller than me, reluctantly broke away from the group. “Checking out?” she said. She barely looked at us; her attention was still back with the huddle.
“Hi,” I said. My voice was gravelly, and I was conscious of the stink of my breath. “Uh, last night . . .”
Last night what? I trashed your hotel, pummeled some security guards, and was arrested, but I really need the bag I left behind. Jesus, even if they had the duffel, they might not give it to me. How many thousands of dollars did I owe them?
Amra spoke up again. “Last night, when we left the hotel, we left a bag behind in the room.”
I looked at her. That “we” touched me.
“What room was it?” the clerk asked.
Amra looked up at me. I blanked, then tried to reel it out of memory. “The thirtieth floor,” I said. “Thirty fifteen?”
She typed on a keyboard tucked under the lip of the desk; typed again; then studied the screen, her expression suddenly cold. There was no way to see what she was looking at, but it didn’t require much of a guess.
“Delacorte Pierce?” she said.
I nodded, feeling a stone drop into my gut.
“Could you wait one moment. The manager would like to speak with you about the bill.”
It was not a request.
The clerk went to the doorway and leaned in past the other clerks. The wall behind the desk strobed with colored light. I looked over my shoulder, the movement hurting, and froze. Outside, a police car had pulled into the entranceway, lights flashing. A second squad car pulled in behind it, then an ambulance. The lobby pulsed with blues and reds.
“Del?” Amra put her warm hand to my damp neck. Sweat had broken out down my back. I finally put a name to the emotion that had 9 0
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been growing in me since I’d woken up in the drunk tank: dread. Something bad had happened last night.
“Dr. Ram,” I said, almost whispering it.
“What?”
Two paramedics came through the door with a wheeled stretcher between them, escorted by four police officers. Everyone in the lobby stepped out of the way and froze, the pedestrian version of pulling onto the shoulder.
A few yards from me, the wall opened—a door disguised as paneling—and a short white man with precisely cut white hair strode out, followed by two other uniformed clerks. They intercepted the paramedics and police in the middle of the lobby. The white-haired man, some kind of manager, exchanged a few words with the paramedics, then led the group to the elevators. I suddenly recognized a face among the onlookers: Mother Mariette, the bald priest I’d seen talking with Dr. Ram yesterday. She wore a gray smocklike thing with baggy sleeves, black leggings, heavy boots. No clerical collar. She pressed back against a column until the cops and paramedics passed. She watched them for a second, then strode toward me and the exit, pulling a wheeled suitcase behind her. Her eyes were fixed on the exit, her expression determined. I fought the urge to duck behind Amra. But I had to know.
“Amra, just try to get my bag. Please.”
I walked away quickly—as quickly as I could, with the muscles of my back seized tight—until I was in the priest’s path.
“Mother Mariette,” I said.
Her eyes flicked toward me, but she kept moving, angling to step around me.
She didn’t recognize me, and I wasn’t surprised. She’d barely glanced at me when she spoke to Valis on the way into the hotel, and she hadn’t even seen me in the bar.
I stepped directly into her way, forcing her to stop. She looked me in the face for the first time. She was not tall, just past my shoulder. From anything farther than ten feet, her narrow face and long neck
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made her seem much taller. Her lips were set in a hard line, her eyes rimmed in red. She’d been crying.
“Mother Mariette, is it Dr. Ram?”
Her lips parted; her eyes widened. Red and blue lights played over her pale skin.
“Is he dead?”
Just as quickly her expression changed. Flat, controlled rage slammed down like a welder’s mask. “Step away,” she hissed. She pushed past me, not quite running.
I glanced back at Amra. She was staring at me, frowning in confusion. I started after the priest, running a few steps before the pain forced me into a walk. Mother Mariette reached the door as another car pulled into the entranceway, this one an unmarked vehicle with a blue light on the dash.
By the time I got outside she was ten yards down the sidewalk, the gray smock rippling in the wind, the wheels of the suitcase rumbling over the cement. Lew was in the car, the cell phone pressed to his ear, his eyes on the police cars. He hadn’t seen me. I hurried after Mother Mariette, making small, involuntary grunting noises as I went. I forced myself to catch up to her, and when I was a few feet away I put out an arm and touched her shoulder. She spun away from me, throwing out a straight arm that struck my bandaged hand, knocking my arm aside, and I yelped in pain.
“What is it you want?” she said.
I cradled my hand, blinking away tears. “Jesus, you didn’t have to—”
“Out with it. Who are ye?”
“You don’t know me. I was—”
“Speak your name,” she commanded.
She was so angry, and I was still distracted by the throb in my hand, but that Irish voice was knocking me out. “Speak” and “name” were near rhymes, stuffed with extra vowels.
“Del,” I said. I sucked air, coughed. “Del Pierce.”
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She stared at me, large eyes set wide in that finely shaped skull. Thirty seconds of silence.
“You’ve been possessed,” she said finally. “Recently, too.”
She sensed it in me, sensed the Hellion. She misunderstood it, thought it was something else—a residue, a taint—but she saw it. I’d never met anyone who could do that.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“You’re one of those goat boys.” She righted her bag, gripped the handle firmly.
“Wanting a bit of cosplay, scaring yourself with pentagrams and incantations, praying to some god that you don’t wake up as yourself in the morning. Only now it’s happened, and you don’t know what kind of shite you’ve gotten into.”
I wanted to rub my hand, but it would only hurt more. “I don’t understand half of what you’re saying.”
“Sure you do. You wanted Dr. Ram to tell you you were special. And then what happened? Got a little angry? Maybe you’re going to tell the police that you blacked out. You just woke up with the gun in your hand.”
“Dr. Ram was shot?”
Another emergency vehicle, this one a white-and-red van, rolled past us. Mother Mariette turned her back to me and started walking, away from the hotel. I hurried after, but keeping an arm’s length between us.
“Please tell me,” I said. “How did he die? Was it a demon? Which one?”
“The one that uses forty-five automatics,” she said.
“Oh shit,” I said. My father’s gun was a .45. I had no memory of getting out the pistol. I’d left the party, tried to find my room . . . and then nothing. But the demon would have had no trouble finding it.
“Only rumor, of course,” she said. “Perhaps it wasn’t the Truth. I’m sure you’ll read the definitive account in the papers.” We reached the light at Lake Street, at a confluence of silver skyscrapers. A park of some kind lay off to our right.
She gestured at the window behind me. “Get me a coffee to take
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away, Mr. Pierce.” The corner of the ground floor was taken up by a café.
“What?”
“Black, two sugars.”
She stood there, waiting to see if I’d move. No, waiting until I moved.
Maybe it was the Priest thing, maybe the Woman thing. Maybe it was the Woman Priest thing. I obeyed.
The line at the counter stretched almost to the door, and I suddenly remembered that for thousands of people—millions of people—
nothing unusual had happened last night. They’d woken up in the same bed they’d gone to sleep in, next to the same people they’d slept with for years. Now it was just another coffee break, another venti latté
and lemon honey seed muffin, then back to the cubicle to delete an hour’s worth of spam. Poor deluded sheep. They weren’t any safer from demons than the poor fuck who’d gotten taken by the Truth last night, but they refused to admit it. They weren’t immune; they were just undiagnosed.
The line moved quickly, and in a minute the venti paper cup was burning my fingers. (But only the fingers: I held the cup in my left hand, but my palm was too thickly wrapped to feel the heat.) She wanted two sugars, but there weren’t any cubes. Of course not; when was the last time I’d seen sugar cubes anywhere? I poured some sugar into the cup, but that didn’t seem like enough, and I poured again. Now it seemed like too much.
What the hell was I doing?
I snapped down the plastic lid, then sidestepped the tables and incoming customers until I was outside again. Mother Mariette was leaning against the wall, eyes closed.
“Your coffee,” I said.
She opened her eyes, took the cup from me, and held it up to her lips, but didn’t drink. She closed her eyes again and let the steam from the slit mouth of the cup pass over her face. Her breathing slowed; her body grew still. I realized that from the moment I’d seen her in the lobby she’d been in a state of high excitation, an electron ready to 9 4
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jump. And now, moment by moment—praying, meditating?—she was dumping energy. Blowing off steam.
She opened her eyes again.
There were a dozen things I needed to tell her. About the Hellion, my slipping control, the solution I’d worked out from Dr. Ram’s research. But Dr. Ram was dead, and I was running out of time.
“I need your help,” I said. “When I was five years old I was possessed by a demon. And ever since then, it’s stayed with me. Inside me. And when I read about Dr. Ram, I got an idea for a surgical technique—”
“We wrestle not with flesh and blood,” she said. Not looking at me.
“But against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of darkness in this world.”
I waited, but she didn’t say more.
“See, that doesn’t really help,” I said.
She sighed. “I know where you’re going with this,” she said, not unkindly. Her anger had dissipated, and now she seemed merely tired.
“You’re not the only person to see the possibilities of Dr. Ram’s work. Spiritual amputation, chemical inoculation, surgical exorcism . . . at the very least a method to positively identify cases of possession. And thanks to Dr. Ram’s death, his line of research is closed, and I doubt anyone will pick it up.”
“What do you mean, closed? If anything, this proves he was on the right track. The demons feared him so much they killed him to stop him.”
She looked at me, smiled faintly. “The demons have no master plan, Mr. Pierce. They don’t work together toward some agenda. Each of them is an obsessive, each of them wants what it wants. If the Truth killed Dr. Ram, it was for one reason—he said he had a cure, and he was lying.” She shrugged. “That’s the Truth’s job. Punish the liars.”
She grabbed the handle of her bag. “Good day, Mr. Pierce. This is the last day of our acquaintance.” She stepped off the curb, between the bumpers of the stopped cars, and the roller bag dropped and bounced behind her.
“Wait! You’ve got to help me! What am I supposed to do?”
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She stopped halfway across the intersection, looked back at me.
“There’s nothing you can do,” she called back to me. “At least not against the demons, for they do with ye what they will. But if I were you . . .” The light turned green, but she took no notice. “I’d hire a good lawyer.”
She strode the rest of the way across the street, holding up traffic. Someone was going to run her down, or at least lay on the horn—this was Chicago, for Christ’s sake.
But no. She reached the far curb without incident and walked north, toward Lake Michigan, the plastic wheels of the suitcase clattering over each crack and crevice of the sidewalk. Lew and Amra lived in Gurnee, a far northern suburb that was home to the biggest amusement park in Illinois, Six Flags Great America. From the guest bedroom I could see the hump of the highest section of the American Eagle roller coaster rising up over the bare trees. It was actually two roller coasters, on twin wooden tracks, so that theoretically the coasters could race each other, but in practice they never ran near the same speed.
“Do you ever go?” I said. When Lew and I were growing up, we had gotten to go to the park once or twice every summer, starting back when it was called Marriott’s Great America.
He looked up, saw what I was talking about, then went back to work clearing the bed. “No.” He’d been using the bed as an extra desk, loaded with stacks of papers, technical manuals, and foam-filled boxes that could have transported high-tech pizzas. Most of this garbage went into the closet.
Lew was mad at me, but trying not to be, an unnatural state that he couldn’t maintain for long. He’d only be himself after he’d blown up.
“Did Amra tell you yet?” I said.
“Tell me what?” he said.
But I knew she had. The hour-long ride home had been nearly silent, but right after we’d arrived at their house she and Lew had stayed in the kitchen while I went to the guest room with the blue duffel bag and the black nylon convention bag, shut the door behind me, 9 6
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and unzipped the duffel. Some of my clothes were missing—when the hotel people had grabbed my luggage from the room, they hadn’t bothered retrieving the shirts and pants I’d hung up in the closet. But better that than trying to pack them up; I didn’t want them going through my bag. The important things were there: the bike chains, the Kryptonite
locks, and my father’s gun. Still there. I had almost broken down then. Tears welled up, goggling my vision. I unwrapped the oil rag around the pistol, hefted it in my hand. I lifted it to my face, wiped at my nose, and sniffed. A gun after it’s fired smells like cordite or something, doesn’t it? My knowledge of guns came only from television and Elmore Leonard novels. I couldn’t smell anything. The weapon didn’t seem any different from when I’d wrapped it up at Mom’s. Nobody had used the gun, I told myself. Not me, not the Hellion, not even the Truth. I’d rewrapped it, weak with relief. As I’d stuffed it deep in the duffel bag, on the other side of the door Lew had been making outraged noises he barely tried to conceal. Amra had told him. The hotel bill had been four thousand and some-odd bucks. None of my cards would cover it.
And now Lew couldn’t even look at me. He pulled the bedspread off the bed, spilling white kernels of foam and paper clips, and bunched it up. “I’ll get you a fresh blanket,” he said, and carried the bundle to the hallway.
I tried to empty my pockets, fumbling with bandaged fingers. Wallet, keys, crumpled ones and fives, change, a folded card from the Hyatt that said “Please tell us how we’re doing.” I used my palm to spread open the card. Inside I’d written “T & S” and a phone number. Tom and Selena. I dimly remembered promising to call them when I got to California, but why did I say I was going to California?
Lew stalked back into the room and without a word started spreading the blanket out.
“I’ll pay you back,” I said, which we both knew was bullshit. We’d understood from high school on that it was Lew’s job to make good grades, find a high-paying career, buy a two-story house in the suburbs, and generally become Dad. It was my job to fuck up. Occa-
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sionally this annoyed me, but most of the time I was comfortable with the division of labor. Lew’s job was nearly impossible, and mine came naturally.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said.
“At least you’ll get the bail money back.”
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