Pandemonium

by Daryl Gregory

  After the session with the Waldheims, though, I had slammed the doors and tripled the locks. I clamped down on him as tightly as I had in those years when I thought he’d vanished—the years between Dr. Aaron’s “cure” and my plunge through the guardrail in Colorado. Now that I knew what I was doing, maybe I could hold him down for years. Maybe I could throw him so deep in the dungeon that he’d never come back up.

  All I’d have to do then was live with myself.

  “What’s the theory on the farmhouses?” I asked. I stood and led her to the twenty or so pictures. I picked up the most recent one. “This one I saw the Painter do at O’Hare Airport a couple weeks ago.” No, less than that—today was Tuesday. I’d arrived in Chicago ten days ago. The police or maybe a reporter had gotten an overhead picture of the popcorn–and-litter collage: the quaint clapboard house, the red silo and barn, the tree-edged fields. I was struck by the same sense of familiarity that I’d felt at the airport, but it wasn’t as strong as the pictures of Lew or Mom. It wasn’t anyplace I’d lived.

  “Have you wondered about the smudge?” she said. She pointed to the dark blur in the sky above the house. At O’Hare the Painter had created it by scraping the heel of his shoe across the tile. “It’s in all the pictures.”

  “It is?” I picked up another one of the series, then another. Each picture showed the same farm, but in winter, in summer, at night. And

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  she was right—the smudge was always there. In the nighttime pictures it was a faint glow.

  “We could call in our experts to help you,” Meg said. “We didn’t want to bring anyone in until you were comfortable, but perhaps—”

  “No. No more people.”

  Meg frowned slightly. Of course they wanted to call in their experts. The entire secret society would be in a lather to meet me.

  “Promise me,” I said.

  She touched my shoulder. “No one else. I promise.”

  I moved away from her, my neck hot, and bent to pick up another picture. “About this smudge,” I said without looking at her. “What are the theories on that one?”

  “It’s never distinct enough to be a signature,” Meg said, easing gracefully back into scholar mode. “But it’s always there. It could be a bird, but because it also shows up at night, most people think it’s a plane . . .”

  “Holy shit,” I said.

  I stared at her. “I know where I’ve seen this,” I said. I scooped up several of the plastic-coated pictures and started for the library door.

  “What is it?” Meg asked.

  “There’s something I need from my mom’s—from her basement.”

  I had to wake O’Connell. If she wouldn’t go with me I’d just take the keys to her truck. “I’ve got to get to Chicago.”

  D E M O N O L O G Y

  T H E K A M I K A Z E

  OUTSIDE DENVER, COLORADO, 1955

  A plane roared up from behind them, so low it blew off the president’s ball cap. Eisenhower was in midswing. He sliced badly, sending the ball into the trees, and jerked his head up to stare at the underbelly of the aircraft. He could make out rivets.

  The plane zoomed away, disappeared over the next hill. The president cursed, something he rarely did. He turned to his golfing partner that day, George E. Allen, and said, “What the hell do those boys think they’re doing?”

  “Those boys” referred to the pilots of nearby Lowry Air Force Base, where Eisenhower kept his summer White House. Planes were frequently overhead, but they’d never buzzed the golf course. Allen laughed. “You ought to say something to their commander-inchief.” Even though Allen was a former secretary of the Democratic National Committee and an advisor to Truman, the two men rarely talked politics. Eisenhower valued their friendship, as well as the fact that Allen’s handicap was larger than Eisenhower’s fourteen.

  The president placed another ball on the tee, and grunted as he stood

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  up. The eighth tee box was on a slight rise, and he had a clear view of the green. He leaned on his club and mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. It was unusually hot for late September, almost tropical. In a few days they’d have to go back to Washington, back to the political swamp. The Republicans had taken a beating in the off-year elections a year ago, and his own reelection campaign was about to begin. He’d have to figure out what to do with Nixon. His staff wanted the man off the ticket. The drone of the plane grew louder again. Allen and Eisenhower looked around, saw the plane circling back, banking around to their left. They could see its glass canopy, the tops of its wings. The plane was just a Beechcraft trainer, but the air force seals had been overpainted with large red circles. Eisenhower squinted, said, “George, is there a man on that thing?”

  A figure in red clung to the outside of the plane’s canopy. A white cape, perhaps a shredded parachute, rippled behind him. One hand seemed to be flailing at the glass that covered the pilot. The two secret service agents who’d been trailing the president ran up the hill toward them. One of them said, “Mr. President—,” and grabbed Eisenhower’s arm.

  The plane came out of its turn. It wobbled, then straightened, the nose aiming down at them. Eisenhower could see the pilot’s face—he wore a white scarf around his forehead—and the face of the daredevil riding the plane’s back. The glass canopy had shattered, and the red-clad man was reaching down into the cockpit.

  The agents hauled Eisenhower and Allen backward and pushed them down the hill. Eisenhower ran several steps and suddenly fell to his knees. One of the agents pulled the president to his feet. The plane struck a moment later. The next morning, Vice President Richard Nixon came across a short item in the paper noting that the president had suffered an attack of indigestion. Nixon turned the page without thinking much about it; Eisenhower was prone to that sort of thing. It wasn’t until Sherman Adams, the assistant to the president and White House chief of staff, called an hour later that Nixon realized the seriousness of the situation. 2 1 6

  D a r y l G r e g o r y

  “There’s been an accident,” Adams said. “The president’s had a coronary.”

  Five minutes later Nixon entered a basement room of the White House already crowded with staff: Jim Hagerty, Len Hall, Jerry Persons, the Dulles brothers, and several men he didn’t recognize. It was clear that they’d been talking for some time, perhaps hours.

  Adams pulled Nixon aside and said, “Dick, you may be president within the hour.”

  The chief of staff told Nixon what they knew: a plane crash, a dead secret service agent, another badly burned. Eisenhower had been struck by shrapnel and suffered a heart attack sometime after the crash. He’d lapsed into unconsciousness soon after reaching the hospital. George Allen was wounded but in good condition. Allen confirmed that the plane had dived for them, and that they’d been saved by a “daredevil” clinging to the plane.

  “If he hadn’t made that kamikaze hit that hill we’d be dead,” he said. Nixon scowled. “What daredevil? What do you mean, ‘kamikaze’?”

  The men in the room turned to the Dulles brothers. Allen, director of the recently created Central Intelligence Agency, handed a folder to his brother, John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state. “The plane was one of ours, stolen from Lowry Air Force Base,” Foster said. “But it was painted like a Japanese Zero.”

  Nixon frowned but said nothing.

  “The pilot was Lawrence Hideki, an Air Force helicopter mechanic of Japanese descent. The ‘daredevil’ is unknown at the moment—perhaps he was another airman on base. We’re checking to see if Hideki was troubled by psychological problems, or if he had any links to Japanese extremist groups. But frankly, we don’t expect to find anything along those lines.”

  Again Nixon said nothing.

  “This is not the first such attack on American soil,” Foster said. “Yesterday Allen ordered a search for similar cases.” He laid out several folders, and b
riefly described three previous attacks: May 1947, a Japanese man dressed as a kamikaze pilot stole a crop-duster plane in Kansas and crashed it an hour later, killing eight people attending a farm auction. July, 1949, a plane painted like a Zero crashed into the side of the USS Cun-

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  ningham in San Diego, killing eighteen sailors. And in 1953, a secondgeneration Japanese sailor working on the aircraft carrier Antietam tried to hijack a fighter plane but was stopped before he could take off.

  “There may be more,” Foster said, almost apologetically. “We’re pulling records of all plane crashes and hijackings right now.”

  The room was quiet for a long moment. Finally Nixon spoke: “Did the president know about these attacks?”

  Allen Dulles stepped forward. “You have to understand, Mr. Vice President, nobody thought these events were related. In each of these cases, the pilots were men with no criminal record, no history of mental illness, and no obvious links to Japanese nationals. We had a handful of coincidences, nothing that rose to a level worth the president’s attention.”

  “Let me see the folders,” Nixon said.

  Word came of Eisenhower’s death at 8:00 p.m. A short time later, Nixon was brought into an adjacent room where several people waited: his wife, Pat; his secretary, Rose Mary Woods; Nelson Pym, a staff photographer; and Justice Hugo Black. Pat had brought the Milhous family Bible from their apartment. In the official photo, Nixon is listening to the justice, his expression tight-lipped and grim.

  After taking the oath of office, Nixon hugged his wife and returned to the briefing room. He didn’t have to call for attention; the atmosphere had already changed. President Nixon stood silently for a long time, arms folded tightly across his chest, staring at the table. When he spoke, he didn’t look up.

  “I’m no general,” he said quietly. “I can’t be the kind of leader President Eisenhower was.”

  Sherman Adams looked at Jim Hagerty with a worried expression. No one needed to tell them that Nixon was no Ike.

  “But I know conspiracies,” Nixon said. “I understand how the Japanese, a defeated people, may turn desperate. How even the most innocentseeming of men can be secretly plotting the destruction of the nation.” He didn’t have to explain: Nixon was the man who had brought down Alger Hiss, the man who’d held the reins of the Un-American Activities Committee. “This is a new kind of war, a new enemy, whose weapon is fear.”

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  D a r y l G r e g o r y

  Nixon looked up, into the faces of men who’d been plotting his political death a day before. He showed his teeth, a twitch of a smile. Some of the men looked away uncomfortably.

  “I promise you,” Nixon said. “We will root out this new enemy, wherever he is among us.”

  13

  “Let’s swing by again,” O’Connell said.

  “It’s not even been ten minutes,” I said. “We can’t do it too often, you know that.”

  We were parked in front of the Jewel grocery not a quarter mile from my mother’s house. I couldn’t see any way to “stake out” the house from any closer than that, not without getting caught in the same way that Amra had busted Bertram and the Human Leaguers. My neighborhood was a triangular clump of houses bounded by three very busy streets, the houses with their backs turned resolutely to the traffic. One road ran through the development, a wobbly horseshoe infested with cul-de-sacs. The place brimmed with retired people, the parents of the kids I’d grown up with. If my mom didn’t notice two people hanging out in an unfamiliar pickup, one of her understimulated neighbors definitely would. Worst-case scenario: they call the cops.

  So every twenty-five minutes or so we drove past my mother’s house to see if her Chevy Corsica was still in the driveway, then headed back to Jewel. We’d done this since 8 a.m. and it was almost noon. Her car hadn’t budged. We knew she was there, because I’d 2 2 0

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  called from a pay phone and hung up when she answered. We just didn’t know when she’d leave.

  I’m not saying it was a particularly well-thought-out plan.

  “Why don’t you just walk up to the front door?” O’Connell said.

  “Ring the bell and say, ‘Hello, Mother, I just need to look at something in the basement.’ ”

  “I’m not going to do that. I can’t just . . .” I shook my head. “I can’t.”

  “She’s still your mother, Del. She’s still the same person who raised you.”

  But I’m not the same person she raised, I thought. O’Connell made a disgusted noise. “I’m out of cigarettes,” she said, and slammed the cab door behind her.

  We were tired of driving, tired of each other. She hadn’t wanted to come to Chicago. She was sure the Waldheims could help me figure out more about my nature, about all demon nature, if only I gave them time. But I’d begged, told her I’d do it with or without her, and she’d given in surprisingly easily. Maybe she knew I needed her.

  She also didn’t fight me on the need to drive rather than fly. Neither of us wanted to put our names down on an airline ticket and get picked up for “questioning” as soon as we stepped off the plane. Eighty percent of the trip retraced the route Lew and I had taken out of Chicago. O’Connell’s rattling pickup was a lot slower than Lew’s Audi, but at least my chin wasn’t banging against my knees the whole way. We’d spent last night at a Days Inn just off the interstate—

  separate rooms—and had driven the rest of the way in this morning. The number of things we didn’t talk about was enormous. O’Connell opened the truck door and dropped a Tribune on my lap. “Eliot Kasparian confessed,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Dr. Ram’s killer. He admitted he made up the possession. He was fully conscious when he killed him.”

  I looked at the picture under the headline and recognized the face.

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  “Holy shit,” I said. It was the Armenian kid. “I talked to this guy that night. He was at the party—a big fan of Valis’. He said Dr. Ram was trying to cut out our connection to God.” I skimmed the article and found the phrase I was looking for. In his confession, Kasparian said that Ram was trying to close the “Eye of Shiva.”

  “He wasn’t lying,” I said.

  “Kasparian?” She tapped a cigarette from the pack.

  “Dr. Ram. He was on to something. The cure. He could have helped me.”

  “Somebody else, maybe,” she said. “Not you.” She lit the cigarette, exhaled in the direction of the half-open window, but the smoke seemed to eddy in the cab. I think I was up to a pack a day in secondhand smoke. “It’s been twenty-five minutes,” she said.

  “Okay, fine,” I said. “Go by the house again, and I’ll scrunch down.”

  “Fine.” She put the truck in reverse, turned to look over her shoulder as she started to roll, and hit the brakes. I looked up in time to see a maroon Corsica cruise by, the driver oblivious to the near crash.

  “Was that . . . ?” O’Connell said.

  “Yep.”

  “Oh my.”

  “Her peripheral vision’s not so good on that side.”

  “Then I suppose we should go.”

  O’Connell pulled into the driveway and I hopped out. It was Thursday, and I didn’t know anymore when Mom did her big shopping. She could have just been running to the store for milk. She could be back any minute.

  “Keep it running,” I said. I’d always wanted to say that. I walked briskly around to the back of the house, pushed through the chain link gate that never stayed shut, and stepped up to the back door, ready at any moment for SWAT teams to burst from the bushes. How in the world did people work up the nerve to break into strangers’

  houses?

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  D a r y l G r e g o r y

  The key was under the windowsill to the right of the door, in the notch my dad had cut out for that purpose. I dropped the key, fin
ally got it into the lock, and quietly pushed open the door. The kitchen smelled like chocolate chip cookies. Warm cookies. On the counter was a cookie rack loaded with six rows of happy, chunky mounds. Mom never made them just for herself—they were always for company, or for some special occasion. I couldn’t count the number of times she’d slapped our hands away from the plate. If we begged, she’d give us one apiece—one—and then banish us from the kitchen.

  I reached out, stopped, my hand hovering over the rack. Heat rose off them. She must have pulled them out of the oven right before leaving for the grocery store. She wouldn’t have counted them, would she?

  I pulled back my hand. Not yet. Take one on the way out. And one for O’Connell. That would be our reward. Surely Mom wouldn’t miss two.

  I went down the basement steps, my hand automatically finding the lightbulb chain.

  The brown box marked “DeLew Comics” was right where I remembered seeing it with Amra. The box was suspiciously light. I set it on the ground and pulled off the lid.

  Inside, a thin stack of comics, maybe twenty issues, fewer than a dozen pages each of faded, 81⁄2-by-11 sheets. I picked up the top issue. A muscular man in red-and-yellow striped spandex floated above a city street, surrounded below the waist by a massively overinked tornado. Shakily drawn cars flew through the air; bystanders cowered. Mister Twister #2. There’d never been a #3.

  I exhaled, laughed to myself. I’d been afraid the comics would be gone, evaporated like an imaginary friend. There were fewer copies than I remembered—weren’t there like a hundred left over?—but at least they existed. I wanted to sit down and read them right there, but there was no time. I fit the lid back onto the box and tucked it under my arm.

  I glanced around to see if there was anything else I needed, and

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  noticed a Ziploc bag on the floor. I picked it up, realized it was the set of white plastic buildings from the game of Life. Well, what used to be Life before Lew and I chopped it up for our own game. I scanned the shelves for the Life and Death boards and noticed the piece of wood jutting from an open plastic tub.