Pandemonium

by Daryl Gregory

  She walked to the side of the bed near my head, put her hands on her hips. “Last night you were afraid you were going insane. You said the Hellion’s memories were breaking through into your own. You were losing yourself.”

  “I was a little freaked out last night, but I’m fine now. I can handle this.”

  “You are so far from handling this.” She crouched, bringing her head even with mine.

  “Now . . .” She lifted one of the bike chains into view. “Three numbers. What’s the combination?”

  “Uh, that would be six, followed by six . . . and I’m sure you can guess the last one.”

  She shook her head, opened the first lock. Then she walked around the bed to my other arm. While she was working on the next combination, I peeked under the blankets. Boxer briefs, my erection as clearly delineated as the trunk of a cartoon elephant. My need to pee had turned into an ache.

  She undid the second chain. Hands finally free, I began to unfasten the manacles, leather-padded medieval things I’d purchased from

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  a fetish website. The steel loops were big enough for a shower curtain rod to be threaded through them—I’d seen the pictures—and more than wide enough for the bike chain. My shoulders were stiff, but I felt a hundred times better than yesterday. The cuts in my fingers barely hurt. “What if I’d died in my sleep?” I said. “These chains are pretty strong—I’d be attached to your bed for weeks.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t cut through the chains.”

  She gave no indication she was joking.

  I scooted down to the edge of the bed and started reeling in the chain so I could get at the lock. “Do you know what time it is? My mother’s got to be at the hospital by now. She’ll be frantic.”

  She didn’t answer, and I looked at her.

  “They arrived this morning,” she said. “I called Lew and told him you had to get out of the hospital because you were losing control of the Hellion.” She tossed a length of chain onto the bed. “Hardly an exaggeration. I said you’d be back in touch after we returned from the city.”

  “Wait—what city? New York City?”

  “Get dressed,” she said. “We have an appointment at Red Book.”

  I didn’t think she meant the magazine.

  As soon as she left the room, I pulled open the duffel bag and started sifting through the clothes, running my hands through the folds. Nothing. I started pulling out the clothes, shaking them one by one.

  “Oh, one more thing,” O’Connell called back. “I threw out the Nembutal too.”

  The three-story brownstone was buried somewhere in the heart of the city—I had no idea where, and I didn’t think O’Connell did either. Once we’d squeezed through the George Washington Bridge, slow as toothpaste, she began taking unpredictable rights and lefts, shouldering across lanes, dodging down side streets, and merging onto fourlane avenues. Nearly midnight and the traffic was still dense. O’Connell was the worst driver I’d ever ridden with—worse than 1 8 6

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  Lew, worse than even me, and I’d driven through guardrails. Several times I found myself inches from sheet metal or the scowling face of a taxi driver. She seemed oblivious to the other cars, and even to the road in front of her, one hand on the steering wheel, the other pinching a cigarette, navigating by temperature, or road texture, or smell—

  anything but street signs.

  “You know,” I said casually, “there’s this thing called MapQuest.”

  But O’Connell had stopped talking to me. She hummed and muttered to herself. Maybe she was praying. An hour and a half after crossing the river, and seven hours after leaving Harmonia Lake, O’Connell braked to a stop in the center of a dark street double-lined with parked cars. Without saying anything she got out of the truck, leaving it running. I opened my door and stepped out, as much to get air as to see where she was going; O’Connell had smoked the entire way, and my eyeballs felt like gritty ball bearings. O’Connell walked up the steps of one of the brick apartment buildings we’d passed and pressed a doorbell. Above the door, a circular window of stained glass glowed like an eye surveying the street: red and blue and purple panes outlined in dark-leaded curves, swirling out from the center like petals dragged through water. I looked away from the window, feeling queasy. The apartment door opened, and an older woman with short white hair stepped out, hugged O’Connell. The women exchanged a few words, and then O’Connell strode back to me. “We can park around back,” she said.

  “Was that one of the shrinks?” I asked. She’d told me that the people we were visiting were psychiatrists, “absolutely brilliant.” They’d become her therapists when she was eleven, after the first string of possessions. “They saved my life,” she said. She’d been vague on how exactly they’d helped her, or what she expected me to get out of meeting them. “Just be honest with them,” she said. “They’ll be able to straighten this out.”

  She steered the truck into an alley. An iron gate swung open automatically and closed behind us. She parked diagonally on a small brick-paved patio, and we pulled our bags from the bed of the truck.

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  The white-haired woman met us at the back door, ushered us in, and set the alarm behind us. O’Connell said, “Del, this is Dr. Margarete Waldheim.”

  “Meg,” the woman said, and shook my hand. I must have winced. She glanced down, turned my hand in hers, looking at the cuts. “Have you been fighting?”

  “Just with furniture,” I said.

  “Ah. I always stick with the softer pieces—seat cushions, pillows.”

  She was younger than I had thought from the street, maybe in her fifties—the white hair had thrown me off. A ruddy, apple-shaped face. Shorter than O’Connell, not fat but sturdy. She wore a green-striped man’s dress shirt untucked over black stretch pants, and thin black shoes like dance slippers.

  “Anyway, welcome to Bollingen,” she said.

  I glanced at O’Connell. What happened to Red Book?

  “Bollingen is the name of the house,” O’Connell said. I still didn’t know if Red Book was the name of a cult, an institute, or a giant computer that would tell me my future. She led us down a dark-paneled hallway, past a tiled kitchen and half a dozen closed doors, while O’Connell talked about the trip in. She didn’t mention the labyrinthine tour of Manhattan. We arrived in a high-ceilinged foyer at the front of the house. Set into the floor was a slab of granite inscribed in Latin: vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit. Non vocatus deus—no vacations for God?

  I made the mistake of looking up. High above the door was the circular window I’d seen from the street. The panes, viewed from the inside, were bruise-dark and glinting, like half-seen blades about to spin.

  “You okay, Pierce?” O’Connell said.

  I looked away from the window, ran a damp hand through my hair.

  “What? Oh, yeah. Tired I guess.”

  “The design came from one of Dr. Jung’s paintings,” Meg said.

  “During his Nekyia period, he became fascinated with circular forms, circles within circles. Some of his works resemble Indian mandalas.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. And what the hell was a Nekyia?

  One thing was clear: Jungians loved yargon.

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  O’Connell said to Meg, “Is the old man upstairs?”

  At first I thought she meant Jung himself, but that couldn’t be—

  he’d died in the fifties or sixties. She must have meant the other Dr. Waldheim.

  “He’s turned in for the night,” Meg said. “And I’m about to collapse myself. I’ll show you to your rooms. If you’re hungry, though, make yourself at home. Siobhan can show you the kitchen.”

  “Wait a minute—Shavawn?” I repeated phonetically. O’Connell looked at me. “Mariette is the name I took when I became a priest.”

  Me
g laughed quietly. “I can never remember to call her that.” She led us to side-by-side rooms on the second floor. “There’s a journal in the desk,” Meg said. “In case you have any dreams.”

  “Okay,” I said, as if she’d told me where the towels were. “Thanks.”

  I closed the door, dropped my duffel on the floor. Outside, Meg and O’Connell murmured together, their words indistinct. The room was a cozy space smaller than my dorm room at Illinois State, but bigger than my hospital room in Colorado. There was one skinny door besides the one I’d come through, but I didn’t feel like hanging up my clothes. Most of the room was taken up by a high bed on a cast-iron frame (convenient for chaining), an armless wooden chair, a small writing desk with a lid unfolded to reveal—yes indeed—

  a handsome leather-bound journal and two fat pens. I flipped through the thick oatmeal-colored pages, but although a few pages had been torn out, nobody had left behind any nighttime notes. Outside, the women stopped talking. O’Connell’s door opened and closed.

  I sat down on the bed, and the mattress sank beneath me. The thing in my head shifted slightly. It had stayed quiet all day, as if the long drive had jostled it to sleep, and I pushed my thoughts away from it before it could wake up. Thinking about the demon seemed too much like summoning it.

  I stared at the walls instead: dark rose wallpaper that looked like it had been put up in the forties. Opposite me was a large water stain in

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  the shape of a heart—and not a valentine heart. A fat smear sprouting from its top was disturbingly aortic.

  Someone knocked on the door—but it wasn’t the hallway door. I curled out of the bed and cautiously opened the skinny door I’d taken for a closet. O’Connell stood there, holding a big folded white towel and a washcloth.

  “I was wondering where those were,” I said.

  Behind her was a bathroom tiled in checkerboard black and white, and another open door. Her room looked bigger than mine.

  “Will you be singing in the shower tomorrow?” I asked. Her face tightened. “Of course not.”

  Jesus, she could get pissed so fast. “You have a beautiful voice,” I said. She made a dismissive sound like a cough. “No, really,” I said.

  “You could have been a singer.”

  “And you could have been a bicycle repairman.” She pressed the towel and washcloth into my hands, and while I put them on the desk she stood in the doorway, looking around at the space. I bet her room really was bigger.

  “So. Shavawn.”

  “No, it’s—” And she said it in a subtly different way. I made a face and she spelled it for me.

  “Ohhh,” I said. “Siobhan. You know, I’ve seen that in print but I never knew how it was pronounced.”

  She didn’t quite roll her eyes. “Any other questions?”

  “Nope. Yes! The Latin thing by the door.”

  “Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit,” O’Connell said. “Dr. Jung wrote that above the door to his house. ‘Summoned or not, the god will be there.’ ”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Goodnight, Mr. Pierce.” She walked toward the bathroom door.

  “And please don’t oversleep, the Waldheims are early risers, and we’ll want to get started.” She nodded at the bed. “Need someone to strap you down? Or do you need to have a wank first?”

  I barked a laugh. My face heated. “What?”

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  “It must be difficult with your hands tied down.” Her tone was clinical. “And it will help you sleep.” The muscle behind my balls thumped like a bass string.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  “Suit yourself. I’ll see you in the morning.” She turned and disappeared into the bathroom, closing the door behind her. A moment later I heard her own door close.

  I sat down on the bed and let the collapsing springs roll me backward. Siobhan. I lay there, staring at the ceiling, my dick as hard as the Washington Monument.

  The sound was like a faint, drawn-out squeak, repeating rhythmically like a rusty hand pump. Very faint at first, then growing slowly louder. I sat up in my cocoon bed. In the windowless room I couldn’t guess what time it was, but it felt like hours since I’d threaded the chains through the bed frame and lain down, waiting for sleep. The manacles lay open and unattached.

  I’d tried O’Connell’s sleep advice. She’d been wrong. The sound grew louder—chirr-up, chirr-up—and then passed by my door and moved on.

  I eased out of the bed, pressed my ear to the hallway door. I thought I heard the squeak again, very faint, then the sound of a door opening. A half minute passed in silence.

  I turned and found my jeans in the dark, felt around for my T-shirt, pulled them on. I went to the door again. Nothing. I slowly twisted the knob and eased the door open.

  The hallway was slightly brighter than my room, soft light coming from around the corner where the balcony overlooked the foyer. To my left, the corridor was darker, running perhaps twenty feet before it ended in an oversized door. I headed toward the light, in the same direction the sound had been moving. I passed O’Connell’s door, then two other doors, my bare feet quiet on the narrow Turkish runners. I felt like a teenager sneaking past his parents. I leaned around the corner. The balcony was empty, the row of

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  doors along it all closed. There was one door opposite me that was ajar, the room dark. Had it been open when Meg showed us to our rooms? I couldn’t remember if I’d looked down that way. I stepped onto the balcony. I could hear no one on the stairs, no one on the floors above or below. I glanced down at the empty foyer, then at the open door. “Summoned or not, here I come,” I said to myself. The circular window, hanging level with the balcony, glinted like a waking eye.

  I trailed one hand along the polished banister until I reached the open door. “Hello?” I said, and rapped lightly on the door frame. I didn’t expect an answer, but I felt it was good to go through the motions, just in case I was cross-examined later: Did you knock before you went in? Yes, Your Honor, I even announced my presence. I glanced behind me once more, then reached inside to the lefthand wall. I found a light switch, flicked it on. Directly in front of me, the Black Well.

  “Shit!” I said aloud.

  It was only a painting, but it still took me a moment to calm down. I stepped inside the room, put a hand against the wall. I was in some kind of cathedral-ceilinged library. The walls cut in and out, creating dozens of nooks and multiplying the wall space. Towering bookshelves alternated with narrow, green-draped windows, and the remaining spaces were filled by paintings and tapestries and glass frames of every size. In the center of the room were several fat leather chairs surrounded by long tables that held stacks of books, small glass cases, Tiffany-style desk lamps. The centerpiece seemed to be a podium holding an open book the size of my mom’s family Bible. The Black Well painting hung on the wall opposite the door, in a dark frame maybe three feet wide and four feet tall. I walked around the crenellated edge of the room, distracted by all the exotics hanging on the walls: African masks; pen-and-ink drawings of mythological animals and armored knights; tapestries of unicorns and demons and lines of pilgrims; plaques and awards in German and French and En-1 9 2

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  glish; black-and-white photographs of bespectacled men with pipes and dark-eyed women in large hats; honorary degrees; framed prints from old books, some illustrated with arcane symbols. Most striking were the dozens of paintings, many of them multicolored mandalas but others art-nouveau-style renderings of fantastic characters: a winged man with a devil-horned forehead; a bearded man in robes; a long-haired woman naked except for a black snake draped over her shoulders.

  But my attention kept returning to the Black Well painting. I approached it obliquely like a swimmer fighting the current, and stopped a few feet away.


  The well wasn’t rendered exactly as it had appeared to me under the lake, but the painting caught the essence. Bands of black and red and purple spiraled and twisted away from the eye, promising an infinite regress. I put a hand out, hovering above the canvas. I pictured my hand plunging into it, the well sucking in my arm, my body. I stepped back, feeling nauseous.

  Behind me, the chirp of rusty hinges. I whipped my head toward the door.

  An old man pushed an antique wooden wheelchair into the room.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to—”

  He held up a hand—to silence or reassure me, I wasn’t sure which—and rolled the chair toward me. It was an ungainly, slatbacked thing like a steamship deck chair mounted on rusting bicycle wheels. The man pushing looked as old as the chair. He was thin, all forehead and white hair, dressed in a loose white shirt and blue pants that could have been pajamas or hospital scrubs. His hair started at ear level and dropped to his shoulders, clouding into a white beard that fanned his chest.

  “December of 1912,” he said. His voice was quiet but penetrating.

  “Dr. Jung experienced what some people call a breakdown, and what others call a breakthrough.”

  He pushed the empty wheelchair to a spot between a chair and couch. “The doctor referred to it as his Nekyia, his Ulysses-like descent into the underworld.”

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  Oh, Nekyia, I thought. Right. Of course.

  “He said it was as if the floor literally gave way beneath him, and he chose to fall,” the old man said. As he talked he carefully adjusted the chair’s angle, backing and filling until it was aimed directly at me.

  “Into the depths. Into the womb of primordial life.”

  He straightened, then nodded at the Black Well painting. “Can you imagine, choosing to fall into that?”

  There was a wink in his voice. I couldn’t tell if he was laughing at me or trying to convince me he was in on the joke.

  “You must be Dr. Waldheim,” I said. O’Connell had told me they were a married couple.