“What are these sculpture things, folk art?” I said. “They were at the motel, too.”
She didn’t answer. The front room was long and low-ceilinged, three barn-plank walls secured to the naked, curved side of the Airstream trailer by angle irons. The wooden walls were insulated almost floor to ceiling by books, on shelves built out of the same knotted wood as the planks. A few spaces had been hollowed out of books to make room for odd bits: two huge open-faced stereo speakers like the kind I used to have in high school; an undersized, cheap-looking electronic organ that looked like a starter instrument for ten-year-olds; a framed picture of the pope.
The largest hole accommodated a cast-iron wood stove squatting on a platform of bricks. The books were kept back from the stove and the big pipe that ran up to the ceiling, but not far enough for my comfort. The room looked like it could go up in a flash. Arrayed around the stove were four worn, comfortable-looking armchairs upholstered in oranges and browns, on a carpet of 1974
gold shag. Lew sniffed and rubbed his nose. Dust mites that had been
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evolving for decades in the room’s substratum clacked their mandibles in anticipation.
Something about the picture of the pope looked off, and I leaned closer. It was John Paul II, looking saintly. The picture had been ripped into ragged pieces and then carefully taped back together. O’Connell came through the hatchlike doorway in the side of the trailer. For some reason I expected her to offer tea, but her hands were empty except for a pack of cigarettes. The jacket was gone. She wore a knobby silver cross over a faded black concert T-shirt for Tonton Macoute, a band I’d never heard of. It was the first time I’d seen her without the voluminous cassock or some other bulk hiding her shape. I couldn’t decide her age: Thirtythree? Forty-two? She was a small thing, with thin arms and a narrow waist. She had breasts.
“Sit,” she said.
We both sat. I didn’t look at Lew—I was afraid he was rolling his eyes. O’Connell remained standing, her arm on the back of the armchair opposite us. Next to the chair was a floor lamp with a round glass table at its middle. The tabletop had just enough space for an ashtray heaped with ashes and broken-spined butts. Her chair, obviously.
“So what is it you want from me, then?” she asked. I looked at Lew, but he was studying his hands. O’Connell made a disgusted noise. “Come on now, you can say it. You think you’re the first person to come after me with that religious glow on his face?”
“When I was a kid I was possessed,” I said slowly.
“So you said.” I’d told her as much in Chicago.
“I was five, and for a while we thought it had gone away. But recently I figured out that it never left. It’s still here.”
“All this time,” O’Connell said, nonplussed.
“And lately,” I said, plunging on, “it’s been trying to get out—it has gotten out, a few times. I don’t think I can hold it back anymore.”
She laughed. “If it wanted out, me boy, it would be out.”
“Listen,” Lew said testily. “All he wants is for you to get rid of this thing, okay?”
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“Get rid of it? And put it where?” she said in the tone of a schoolmaster. She sat on the arm of the chair. “You can’t destroy a demon. You can’t kill it. You can’t even send it back to the fiery depths. All you can do is try to persuade it to go somewhere else. To someone else. Forget about everything you saw in those Exorcist movies—pentagrams and holy water and ‘the power of Christ compels you’ and all that shite. It doesn’t work. Even Jesus, when he cast out demons, just sent them into swine—and no, I can’t manage that trick. No one else has figured it out either.”
“There’s got to be something you can do,” I said. Trying to make it sound like a statement, not a plea. “You’ve exorcised other people. The Little Angel in New Jersey, the Pirate King in San Diego.” Witnesses had seen her cast out demons—Lew and I had read the stories, and they were from reliable sources—newspaper and magazine sites, not crackpot websites and free-for-all discussion boards. “I know you can help me,” I said. “You saw the demon in me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Back at the hotel. You looked at me, and you knew I’d been possessed.”
“Mother of God, you think I have magical powers. Has it crossed your mind that you’re not possessed at all, that you’ve simply got mental problems?”
“Are you kidding? All the fucking time.” I ran a hand through my hair. “All I want is what you did for them, for those other people. I want you to get this out of me. Whatever the cost.”
Her mouth turned down in what could have been restrained anger, or disgust. She tapped a cigarette from the pack. “All right then,” she said. She lit the cigarette, inhaled. She held it between her index and middle finger, the other fingers folded against her palm.
“The standard rate is five hundred dollars an hour. Two hours up front.”
Lew leaned forward on his elbows. “Uh, a thousand bucks would buy this house, your pickup, and all the pot you’re probably growing in that greenhouse.”
“It would be a donation to the Church,” she said evenly—or as
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evenly as she could with all those Irish notes in her voice. I loved the way she said “church.” She said, “I’ve taken a vow of poverty.”
Lew opened his hands. “Obviously.”
“It’s a deal,” I said.
Lew looked sideways at me. “Del . . .”
“I said, it’s a deal.”
“You’d be wise to listen to your driver,” O’Connell said. “I’ve told you twice—I can’t help ye. It’d just be throwing your money away.”
“It’s all right, I’m broke anyway.”
O’Connell stared at me, then laughed quietly, smoke tumbling over her lips.
“Sounds fair to me,” Lew said to her. “You can’t help him, and he can’t pay.”
“As long as we understand each other,” she said. She put her smile away like a wallet. She slid into the chair, crossed her legs, and leaned back into the upholstery. She tapped her ashes into the ashtray beside her.
“A demonology lesson, then. Start the clock.”
There are three ways to get a demon out, she said. Four, actually, but only three were viable.
All of them depended on persuading the demon to leave. There was no forcing the thing out, no compelling. The demon had to leave of its own free will.
But it was persuasion at the emotional level. Demons weren’t rational. You couldn’t reason with them, argue with them. They weren’t people, they were archetypes—two-dimensional characters acting out a familiar, ever-repeating script. Their goals were always the same, their methods predictable. The hosts changed, the specifics changed, but the story was always the same.
First, you could try to give the demon what it wanted—accede to its demands. If you brought the current story to a satisfactory conclusion, then perhaps it would move on to the next victim, to play out the next episode.
Or you could convince the demon that it wouldn’t get the story it 1 3 0
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wanted. Frustrate it; deprive it of its fun. You could try sensory deprivation and drive it out with boredom. Or you could simply put it in an environment it didn’t like, a setting or situation that ruined the story: take the Little Angel out of the hospital, take the Pirate King off the ship. Or you could make the victim into an unattractive host. It depended on the demon. The key was to learn the story, then subvert it. The third way was to use a goat: some other host to take on the demon. Someone who more perfectly matched the demon’s needs, both physically and emotionally; someone the demon found irresistible. It wasn’t necessary to kidnap anyone, or trick them into shaking hands with the devil. There were plenty of volunteers, people who’d love to be a God toy. Probably half of the people
at DemoniCon were praying that some demon would choose them, make them special. There were even professionals who’d dress up to lure a demon, though their success rate wasn’t high; the demons seemed to recognize hacks. No, a good goat was an earnest volunteer. All you had to do then was introduce the goat to the demon and let nature take its course.
“Think of possession as a hostage situation,” she said. “The bad man is inside the house, holding the girl with a gun to her head. You can’t rush the house. All you can do is give in to his demands, or try to convince him that the demands will never be met. Or, you can broker an exchange of hostages.”
“You said there were four ways,” Lew said. “What if exchanging hostages doesn’t work?”
O’Connell waved a hand. “Kill the hostage,” she said. I got up from my seat, paced the floor. The carpet under my stocking feet felt greasy. Lew steepled his hands, thinking. O’Connell lit another cigarette.
“We need something else,” I said finally. “None of those will work for me.”
“Except the last one,” the priest said.
“Hey,” Lew warned her. Then: “Besides, they’re all the same idea.
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If all demons do is jump to the next host, then all we’re ever doing is exchanging hostages.”
O’Connell gave him a nod, the cigarette between her knuckles.
“The driver’s got it.”
“So we have to find the right goat,” Lew said. “It’s like rigging a honey pot on a mail server.” O’Connell gave him a look, and he started to explain. “I work on computer networks. Sometimes to protect everybody else from spam, you put a new mail account on the server, and have it respond to all kinds of shit—mailing lists, Nigerian banking scandals, penis enlargement ads. The spam pours in. We collect all the addresses, blocking those from hitting the good mail accounts.” He sat up in his chair, warming to his idea. “Except that spam is infinite, and demons aren’t. If the demon’s in the honey pot, it’s not in you. And hey, there are people who’ll volunteer to take the hit for us. All we need is the right goat.”
“We can’t do that,” I said.
“All we’re talking about is doing it sooner, not later,” he said. “One way or another, the demon’s going to find its way to another host. Maybe years from now, maybe tomorrow, but shouldn’t you get to choose? You’ve done your time, man. Let somebody else have it for a while.”
I shook my head, but Lew was no longer looking at me. “So how do we find a goat?” he said to O’Connell. “What kind of person are we looking for?”
She shrugged. “Depends on the demon. The goat may be a particular type of person, or just somebody who happens to be in the right place at the right time. The Captain takes only soldiers, Smokestack Johnny appears only on trains, the Shug . . .”
“Let me guess,” Lew said. “Only takes fat, bald guys.”
She nodded. “Who live around the lake.”
“So this Shug thing,” he said. “It’s not a publicity gimmick—like, Nessie of the Finger Lakes. It’s a real demon.”
For some reason, this didn’t surprise me. I think I’d known from the moment I’d met Toby.
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“The Shug protects the lake,” she said. “It’s tradition.”
Lew shook his head. “Some tradition. You know, you’d think any guy with a weight problem or a receding hairline would move out of the neighborhood pretty damn fast. I mean, the minute that Toby—”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
“—started losing his hair he shoulda got out of Dodge. Or started dieting. A big white boy like that—”
“Toby knew what he was doing!”
Lew sat back in his chair, clearly skeptical.
“Let me tell you about Toby,” O’Connell said. “One day when he’s seventeen, eighteen years old, this fine, good-looking lad suddenly shaves his head, starts eating everything in sight. He starts taking midnight swims. He works on his lung capacity, trying to stay fit despite the weight. Obesity and extreme exercise don’t mix, after all. The Shug hosts tend to die of heart attacks, or drowning, or both.”
“Wait a minute,” Lew said. “He wanted to be Shug?”
“He was making himself into the perfect host. His family was upset, of course. Toby’s father especially. He was a big man, and he had a temper.”
“A big man?” I asked. “A big, bald man?”
O’Connell smiled tightly, and made a small gesture with the hand holding the cigarette. “He wasn’t going to leave, he’d lived here his whole life. And he wasn’t in the best of health. Toby knew what he had to do, and he did it.”
“Holy shit,” Lew said.
As long as there’s a Harmonia Lake, there’s gotta be a Shug. O’Connell looked at me. “So you see, it’s just a matter of knowing your enemy. Which one is yours, Mr. Pierce? Why don’t you sit down and tell us which demon you think has set up house in your soul.”
I didn’t sit down. The air between us was hazed with smoke. Inside my head, the demon scraped and shuffled, restless. I pressed my hand against the cool, curved side of the Airstream, breathing through my teeth.
I can’t live like this, I thought.
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“It’s a demon called the Hellion,” I said. “It usually strikes kids who—”
“I know the Hellion,” O’Connell said shortly. “It’s certainly a clever choice.”
“I didn’t choose anything,” I said.
“The Hellion was part of the postwar cohort. Very active from the forties until about twenty years ago, when sightings suddenly became scarce. You’re the right age, and your story’s a tidy explanation for why it’s been so shy lately. Of course, you have a slight problem in that the Hellion didn’t disappear with you. There were dozens of sightings in the eighties—”
“Unconfirmed,” I said.
“Oh please, what’s confirmation? Parents are swearing that their child is possessed. Sure, the likeliest answer is that their little darlin’
just has attention deficit disorder, or maybe he never ‘attached’ to his mother, or maybe he’s just throwing a tantrum. But that still leaves a lot of cases. And there’s really no way to tell one way or another, is there? Who gets to decide who’s possessed and who’s not?”
“You do,” I said. “You know.”
“What does it matter?” Lew said, exasperated. “If the goat thing works, that ends the argument. All we need to be talking about now is how to find a replacement.”
“We can’t do that,” I said again.
Lew sat back, shocked at something in my voice.
“The Hellion only takes children,” O’Connell told him. “Specifically, fair-haired lads about waist high.”
“Oh,” Lew said. “Right.”
Lew and I didn’t talk on the way back to the motel. When we pulled into the parking lot he said, “We’re done here, right?” Here: the middle of the woods in Bumfuck, New York. O’Connell had made it clear she thought I was faking, and even if I wasn’t, she didn’t have much to offer. No rites, no rituals, no magic spells. Just the bargaining skills of a hostage negotiator, and a chance to sacrifice some innocent kid for my sake.
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“Let’s go home,” I said.
But Lew was too worn out from yesterday’s day-long drive to start back tonight. We decided to get some sleep and head out early tomorrow. He went to his cabin for a nap while I walked the edge of the lake, one eye out for the Shug. The water was mirror-still. I felt fragile from lack of sleep, my limbs connected by misfiring circuits. The Hellion shuddered behind my eyeballs, reminding me: I’m here. I am with you always.
That evening we stopped at the front desk to check for messages, just in case O’Connell had suddenly remembered a handy incantation from the Necronomicon. Louise gave us direc
tions to a restaurant. Lew complained that there were mice in his room.
“The mice aren’t in your room,” Louise said. “Your room’s out with the mice.”
We ate dinner fifteen miles away in a town called Merrett, at a storefront Italian restaurant with five tables—and one of those was the yellow chair table permanently reserved for the Fat Boy. The garlic bread was buttered French bread sprinkled with garlic powder, and the tomato sauce looked orange. I was glad I wasn’t hungry. My stomach had tightened from lack of sleep and the constant agitation of the Hellion. The demon had been in motion since O’Connell’s place, a ceaseless scrabbling. I wanted to pound my forehead against the table. Lew took my plate and started finishing off my lasagna, just like when we were kids.
I said, “You know what I saw down in the basement the other day?”
“RADAR Man comics?”
“Close. I mean, that too. But I opened up Life and Death.”
“Heh,” Lew said. “The Cyclops threw a fit.”
“I was thinking, you could use the oceans on the Risk board to have naval battles. You know, with the stuff from Battleship.” I’d had this idea weeks ago, staring at the ceiling from my bed in the psych ward. He nodded, chewing. “You’d have to figure out how to hide the ships. Maybe draw a grid on the oceans, but still use the Battleship boards to keep track of them.”
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“But the ships should be able to deliver troops, or fire on the countries.”
“Oh yeah, for sure.”
We headed back to Harmonia Lake, Lew driving, and despite the distraction of the demon I found myself nodding off, only to wake up with a jerk, as if I were the one behind the wheel. My plan to stay awake until cured was not going to work, but I couldn’t afford to fall asleep, not like this. I’d have to strap myself in tonight. Tie a gag around my mouth and hope that it stopped the Hellion from screaming. I’d have to do this every night for the rest of my life. Lew and I sorted out by dashboard light our key and block sets. Lew said he was going into the main house to call Amra. “Give her a kiss for me,” I said. “Tell her I’m sorry I stole her husband.”
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