I walked down the gravel road to my cabin. With each step, the demon threw itself against the cage of my skull. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and cold air gusted from the lake. I found the cabin steps in the dark, and started up. Lightning flashed silently from somewhere out of sight, briefly revealing the silhouettes of trees and a cloudpacked sky. A fish was impaled on my door. A skinny, foot-long thing with an alligatorish snout. Fresh.
I stared at the door, wondering if I’d imagined it, but my eyes picked out the details in the gloom. Two of the barbs of the driftwood were poking through the fish’s white belly. There didn’t seem to be much blood. In the next stutter-flash of lightning, I made out two dark, dried trails running down from the puncture wounds like tear-driven mascara. The thunder rolled, louder and closer. Okay. There’s a fish on my door.
I kept my head back as I inserted the key, turned it, and pushed open the door.
I flicked on the lights. The room was empty. The only place where there was room for anyone to hide was under the double bed. I knelt quickly, lifted up the bedspread. Dust and dark. I shut the door slowly, so as not to dislodge the fish. I wasn’t sure I 1 3 6
D a r y l G r e g o r y
wanted it on my door, but I knew I didn’t want it lying on my stoop like some banana peel primed for Dagwood’s return home. I sat down on the bed, pulled the duffel bag toward me, and rustled through my clothing, pulling out bike chains and locks and piling them next to me on the bed. When I came across the oil rag at the bottom of the bag, I set it on my lap. Unwrapped it like a baby. The gleaming gun, a box of ammunition.
I opened the ammunition box. The bullets looked shiny and new, but who knew how old they were: ten years, twenty? I couldn’t remember Dad firing this thing. Maybe the gunpowder was unstable. Maybe the gun would explode the first time it fired.
At first I couldn’t eject the clip, but then my thumb found a latch at the top of the grip and the magazine pulled free. It was empty. I picked a bullet from the ammo box, lined it up with the mouth of the magazine, and pressed it down into the spring-loaded chamber. I fed another bullet into the slot, and another. There was a possibility that no one had mentioned. Maybe only I could let the demon out. Maybe it needed me to open the gate. And if my brain shut down before it opened, then maybe it couldn’t get back into the world. Maybe it would end with me. That would be some kind of accomplishment, wouldn’t it? The first guy to erase a demon from the world. I pushed the eighth bullet down into the spring-loaded magazine, then slipped the magazine back into the gun with a solid clack. The Hellion jumped at the sound, and I shut my eyes until it settled down. Rain began to clatter against the roof, sounding like applause. I slid my hand around the grip, lifted the gun, and touched the mouth of the barrel to my lips. The barrel was shaking, and I had to steady it with my free hand. I opened my mouth slightly, my upper lip sliding over the nub of the gun sight, then opened wider, let the metal slide between my teeth. I wanted my teeth out of the way, even though that couldn’t make much of a difference. I sat there, breathing in the smell of oil, tasting iron.
A simple thing. A little pressure on the trigger. I thought about Lew. He’d be so pissed. He’d have to call Mom, try to explain. I couldn’t think about Mom.
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I pulled out the gun, wiped my lips, then my eyes. My eyes were flooded. I moved the gun to the side of my head and pressed the muzzle to my temple. Breathe in. Breathe out. Squeeze.
Ah, who the fuck was I kidding? I dropped my hand to my lap, still holding the gun. I couldn’t walk up to that cliff, couldn’t throw myself off. I was paralyzed. Too infatuated with my addiction to breathing, unable to extinguish my irrational belief that there was another way out.
Hope wasn’t a thing with feathers, it was a hundred-pound ball and chain. All you had to do was drag that sucker to the edge and throw it over first.
A hard knock on the door. I jerked at the sound. Jesus Fucking Christ, I could have fired the thing accidentally. I looked down at the
.45, and embarrassment swept over me, as if I’d been caught masturbating. I had to hide the gun. I stood up, quickly wrapped the pistol and ammo back in the oil rag, and stuffed the bundle deep into the duffel. The knock sounded again. What the hell does it take for a guy to get a couple minutes alone these days?
I smeared the tears from my eyes and lurched toward the door, then realized the chains and locks were still piled on the bed like a nest of snakes. Fuck it. Lew knew about the chains. I yanked open the door.
O’Connell stood there, the hood of her silver jacket pulled over her head, the rain ricocheting from her shoulders and head, forming a nimbus. The fish was still in place, one eye watching us.
“Yeah?” I said stupidly.
“I have a question, Mr. Pierce,” O’Connell said. “How did your mother lose her eye?”
D E M O N O L O G Y
S MOK E S TAC K JOH N N Y
SAND CREEK, KANSAS, 1983
He came walking out of the middle of nowhere, ambling down the snowlined tracks with a pipe in his teeth, huffing clouds like a steam train. Despite the terrible cold, no jacket or gloves, just overalls and a blue flannel shirt and a blue-striped cap.
The conductor of the train saw him first. He stood in the cab, looking out the frosted window as he talked on the radio with the dispatcher, explaining why the train wasn’t moving. Even with the heaters on and the train stopped, it was only forty degrees in the cab. The toilet in the nose was frozen over.
“I think we’ve got a bigger problem,” the conductor said, and signed off. The pipe-smoking stranger waved jauntily up at the windows, then walked right up under the nose of the diesel, out of sight. The conductor went to one of the side windows, then the other, but couldn’t see anyone. He quickly pulled on his gloves, opened the cab door, and leaned out, squinting into the icy wind. The freight train stretched back in a straight line over the blank white plain, a hundred and sixty cars—twice too long for such
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cold weather, but the Rock Island was going into its third bankruptcy and the company was running everything they could. The stranger and the two other members of the crew—the train ran with just a conductor, engineer, and one brakeman—were nowhere to be seen. The conductor hopped down and hustled around the front of the train to the other side. It was twenty below, but he’d already started to sweat. About ten cars down, the engineer and brakeman crouched beside a boxcar, waving a flashlight at its underbelly. The stranger was halfway to them, striding through the snow beside the tracks.
“What’s the problem, boys?” the stranger called out heartily. “Outta air?”
The engineer looked up, surprised, then stood up. “Who the hell are you?” he said, his voice carrying easily in the cold air. The conductor frantically waved his arms as he ran, trying to get the engineer to shut up. The stranger didn’t seem to take offense. “Why, I’m the king of the rails, that’s who! I’ve got coal in my teeth and steam in my lungs! There’s never been an engine I couldn’t fix or a locomotive I couldn’t drive. No grade too steep, no snow too deep. I’m Smokestack Johnny, and I ride the high iron!”
A moment of stunned silence, and then the brakeman said, “Who?”
The engineer said nothing. He’d been a railroad man for fifteen years, but the brakeman was a kid only a month into the job. The conductor finally caught up to them. He was breathing hard and he felt sick to his stomach, but he forced a shaky smile onto his face. “What can we do for you, Johnny?”
The stranger whipped around. “Hey there!” he said, beaming. “You must be the conductor.” He was a handsome man, his jaw as square and clean shaven as a Burma-Shave ad, his hair as black as axle grease. “Say, we rode together once, didn’t we?”
The conductor gulped, nodded. “Back in forty-eight. You took us through Chicago.” He still got the nightmares.
“Right!” Johnny said, then laughed his big laugh.
“Course, not everybody on that crew was all that polite.” He winked at the other two men. “A few of those boys had to be dropped off a little early, if you know what I mean. But we made it across the ol’ Mississip, didn’t we? Record time!”
The conductor tried to laugh with him. “Yessir, record time.”
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D a r y l G r e g o r y
“Right! Now let’s see about getting this iron horse moving.”
Johnny marched off toward the end of the train. The engineer looked at the conductor with fear in his eyes. He must have seen the pictures from the last time Johnny had ridden the Rock Island line, two years before: a hundred derailed cars flung over the bridge and onto a Missouri highway. The new kid, though, still didn’t seem to grasp the seriousness of the situation.
“Why don’t you go up to the head end and keep the engine ready,” the conductor told the engineer, loudly enough for Johnny to hear. The engineer knew who to talk to at dispatch.
The engineer glanced back at Johnny. “You sure?”
“Just go.”
The conductor and the brakeman jogged to catch up with the demon. Every few cars Johnny ducked under, took a quick look around, and sometimes rapped the air brake pipes with his knuckles. At the thirtieth car, a piggyback flatbed with a truck trailer latched onto it, he said, “I think I see your problem.”
All three of them squatted down under the car. It was still cold, but they were out of the wind.
Johnny stuck his finger into an ice-encrusted ventilator. “Your A-1’s frozen open. Musta popped when you dumped your air at the yard.” He turned to the young brakeman. “I need a pipe wrench, son, and a coupla fusees.”
The brakeman looked at the conductor, and the conductor nodded. A few minutes later the kid came back lugging a tool chest as big as a suitcase, and a smaller red plastic case. The stranger popped open the plastic case and took out a long red fusee.
“Watch your eyes,” he said, and broke off the butt of the flare. The end sparked, and began to hiss red flame and white smoke. He held it like a magic wand, playing the fire over the frozen valve, and started to sing:
“Johnny told the brakeman, get your hand off that wheel, Johnny told the brakeman, get your hand off that wheel, We’re going through Altoona
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At a hundred and ten,
And if we don’t get up that mountain
We ain’t comin’ down again.”
His voice was rough and big. He didn’t hit all the notes, but he got near enough. Then the fusee sputtered out, and he tossed it into the snow behind them.
“Let’s see you use that wrench,” he said to the brakeman, and the kid hefted a pipe wrench two feet long. The stranger showed him where to grip the vent. The kid yanked on the end of the wrench, but it didn’t budge. He pulled and pulled and even bent over it to put his weight into it, but the wrench didn’t move.
“Let me give you a hand with that,” the stranger said. He gripped the cold metal in one naked hand and jerked down. The valve end popped off with a squeal and bounced against the ground. The demon laughed. “Don’t feel bad, son—you loosened it for me!”
The conductor picked up the valve in his gloved hands, heard a rattle, and shook it. Something black fell out of it. The conductor picked it up, regarded it suspiciously. It was a lump of coal. Who would have jammed a lump of coal into the ventilator?
“I’ll show you a trick,” the stranger said. He took the valve end from the conductor, turned it sideways, and fit it back on the pipe, capping it. “It ain’t legal, but it’ll get you home.”
It took an hour and a half to pump the pipes back up to the minimum PSI. Johnny sat in the cab with them, filling the air with smoke, stories, and old railroader jokes that only the brakeman hadn’t heard before. “Know why the conductor’s got the best job on the train?” Johnny asked. “Because he don’t have to work with the conductor!” He’d slap his knees and laugh hard. No one else could manage more than a forced chuckle. Finally the conductor sent the brakeman running to the back of the train to release the handbrake, and the engineer started bringing the electricals online.
“So,” the conductor said casually. “How far you riding with us today, Johnny?”
“Just as far as Olympia,” the demon said.
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The engineer said, “We ain’t going to—”
The conductor cut him off. “If that’s where you’re going, Johnny, that’ll be just fine. I’ll radio the dispatcher.”
The engineer’s eyes were wide. “We can’t just switch over,” he said quietly. “That’s not even our road.”
“It is now,” the conductor said.
Johnny whooped his approval. “Get outta my way, boys,” the demon said. “I’ll show you how to drive.” He started the bell, then pulled twice on the air horns and set the throttle to notch 1—all as natural as a man pulling on his shirt. The train started to move, and the brakeman had to run to get back in the cab.
Johnny moved smoothly through the notches. The train picked up speed, and then he started to sing. He bellowed “Rock Island Line” and
“Casey Jones” and “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.”
They hit the Hutchinson switch much too fast—the conductor thought he could feel the cars swaying off the curve—but the wheels held and they rocketed onto Kansas & Oklahoma’s north-running track. Johnny had them on notch 8 by then, running faster and faster, like a twelve-year-old happy to let his Lionel fly off the track. They flashed past little towns like Nickerson, Sterling, and Ellinwood, the crew holding their breath at every crossing. One of the K&O peddlers ahead of them just managed to pull into a side-out, its last car almost jutting past the switch, and they cleared it by two feet, whistling past at a hundred miles per hour.
The track turned west, running straight into the dropping sun. The snow lit up like fields of crushed glass. And then he picked up the song he’d been singing while working on the ventilator:
“Johnny told the fireman to shovel that coal, Johnny told the fireman to shovel that coal, We’re stokin’ up that firebox
Until the smokestack screams,
And if the boiler blows, boys,
Be sure to save the steam.”
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Olympia was a little bump of a town that came up on their left. The demon laid on the air horns and kept blowing, a long wail that must have been heard all the way to Dodge City. He sang out:
“Johnny told the conductor, better say your prayers, Johnny told the conductor, better say your prayers, There’s a diesel train a-comin’
And it’s riding on our track.
We won’t be here much longer, boys,
But I’ll be comin’ back,
Lord, I’ll be comin’ back.”
He set the throttle and marched to the cabin door. The brakeman stood up in alarm, but the conductor and the engineer didn’t move.
“It’s been a great ride, boys!” Smokestack Johnny said. His smile was bright as a headlamp. Then he yanked open the door and stepped into the wind.
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I opened my mouth, closed it.
O’Connell made a disgusted noise and pushed past me. She went to the table, pulled off her jacket, and draped it across the chair back. She wiped the water from her face, and her gaze fell on the pile of chains on the bed. She looked at me, eyebrows raised, as if to say, Are those yours?
“Make yourself at home,” I said. I stood near the open doorway, rain splattering the back of my shirt, and nodded toward the fish.
“Mind telling me what this thing is supposed to be?”
“Northern pike.”
“I can see that,” I said. Though I’d had no idea what kind of fish it was. “Who put it there?”
“You can thank Louise. It’s a service of the motel, like a mint on your pillow.”
I don’t check in people a
fter eleven. I can’t put you into cabins that aren’t prepared.
“And that would be because . . . ?”
“Think Passover,” she said. I frowned. “Blood over the door, angel of death? Children of Israel?”
“I missed a lot of Sunday school,” I said.
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“Consider it a sign of respect, then. Part of our tradition.”
I got an image of those wooden barbs, nailed up at every house around Harmonia Lake.
“You haven’t answered my question, Mr. Pierce.”
I closed the door, went to the bed, and started pushing the chains into my duffel. “So how do you know about my mom?”
“You want genealogy, call the Mormons,” she said. “You want demonology, you call Red Book.”
“Who?”
“Hardcore Jungians. Possession’s their specialty.” She sat down and fished through the inner pockets of her jacket, finally drawing out a pack of Marlboros and a lighter. “They keep records of every possession, every witness too.” She leaned forward, light glinting off her stillwet scalp, and tapped a cigarette from the pack. “You were in there more than once, I might add.”
Not just for the Hellion, I guessed. I’d witnessed a few possessions, and my name must have shown up in a few police reports. I zipped the duffel and stood there, unwilling to sit down at the table with her, or to sit on the low bed and have her look down at me. O’Connell lit the cigarette with the quick motion of a longtime smoker. Rain drummed the roof.
“You were evaluated by a psychiatrist when you were first possessed, right after your mother’s surgery,” she said, leaning back again.
“The doctor wrote it up as a case study in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. You honestly haven’t heard of this before now? He didn’t use your name, of course, but the time periods match your story. Someone in the Red Book Society helpfully made the connection to your mother’s accident years ago. When I called, it only took minutes to pull out your name.
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