Pandemonium

by Daryl Gregory

  I got to my feet and turned back to the Boy Marvel. The Little Angel stood between us, her arms crossed petulantly. “But he wants me in,”

  she told the caped man. “You know he does. How long do I have to wait?”

  “What—” I coughed wetly. “What did you do to O’Connell?”

  “I never hit a lady,” the caped man said. He stepped over O’Connell’s body, picked up the pistol. “But she was no lady.” He gripped the gun by both ends and frowned in concentration, like George Reeves working on a rubber prop. The muzzle snapped away from the base, and metal parts clinked to the floor.

  He shrugged, tossed the two pieces at me. The pistol grip struck the floor and broke open. Bullets bounced out of the cartridge and rolled, glinting in the yellow light.

  O’Connell had lied. She hadn’t thrown away my father’s .45. She’d kept it, probably as protection against me.

  “Nobody’s a threat here,” I said to the Boy Marvel. “I’m not trying to get past you. I just—”

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  “No!” the Angel screamed. She bunched her fists and glared at me. “You promised. You said you’d help me!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Suddenly she spun toward the caped man and dove between his legs. She wasn’t fast enough. He grabbed her by one ankle and hauled her into the air. Her gown fell over her head, revealing ruffled white bloomers.

  “Now wait just a gosh darn minute!” he said.

  She screamed and clawed at his chest. Whatever the Angel’s power, he was immune. He lifted her higher, and his free hand closed into a fist.

  “You’re not acting like a young lady,” he warned. The body he inhabited belonged to an innocent man: some mechanic or dentist or cable repairman who’d been a little too handsome, a little too square-jawed. He didn’t deserve to die. But neither did the girl who’d been possessed by the Little Angel. Somewhere a mother and father had awakened to find their daughter vanished. I stooped to pick up one of the copper-colored bullets, gasped as ribs grated against each other. The slingshot was still in my back pocket. I tugged the weapon free. Tucked the bullet into the leather pouch. Pulled back the old black rubber until gray cracks opened in its skin. The Angel angrily jerked and swung in the man’s grip, arms pummeling the air, intermittently blocking my view of his face. A one-in-a-million shot, I thought.

  “Hey Marvel,” I said.

  The Boy Marvel glanced toward me, eyes widening in surprise. I fired. His head jerked back, and his body pitched backward into the room. The Angel dropped to the ground almost on top of O’Connell. I let go of the slingshot and glanced behind me. The Truth and the Painter were watching, but they made no move to stop me. I shuffled forward until I could crouch next to O’Connell. I touched her throat. Her skin was warm, but my hand trembled too much to discern a pulse.

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  “My goodness!” the Angel said. She rose to her feet, brushed off her gown. She shook her curls at the caped man. “No one’s ever done that before!”

  I glanced up. There was only one patient in the room—an ancient man who lay propped up and unmoving in the bed. His thin arms, pale as onionskin, lay atop the blankets. Wires and tubes connected him to the machine beside him.

  I stood up, stepped carefully over O’Connell and the caped man in the doorway.

  The old man was as unmoving as a corpse, eyes half-lidded and unblinking. One thin, clear tube dropped from an IV stand and disappeared down one nostril. Only the beeping of the machine told me he was alive.

  His face was cracked and yellowed as old paper. Little remained of the boy in the pictures, the boy on the rock. Barely enough to recognize him.

  “Hey, Bobby,” I said.

  He didn’t move. He stared out the windows, where the glass pulsed with blue: squad cars on their way, or already at the entrance below the window. The sky was the color of fog.

  “Uh-oh,” the Little Angel said.

  I turned, and the Boy Marvel sat up, a wide grin on his face. His right eye was a pulpy mess, and red tears ran down his cheek. He reached into the bloody socket and pulled out the bullet. He flicked it at me, sending it whistling past my ear.

  “You are a little hellion,” he said. He hopped to his feet, smoothed back his greased hair.

  “And you’re a meanie,” the Angel said.

  The caped man lunged for the girl. She screamed and danced back. I threw myself across his arm.

  He lifted me easily, and I hung on. “That’s enough, gosh darn it!”

  he said sternly. He spun me, jerked his arm, trying to shake me off. I clamped down, arms wrapped around his steely biceps. He whipped me back and forth, and I cinched tighter.

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  I shouldn’t have had the strength for this. The pain in my chest should have paralyzed me or driven me unconscious. He smashed me into the wall, pressed a forearm into my neck. He gritted his teeth and bore down. Somehow I hung on. Like a man possessed, I thought. I would have laughed if I could. The room’s only patient ignored us. Outside the window I could see dawn light striking the tin roof of the farmhouse, the stark posts of the barn, the toppled sections of the silo. Spots appeared in my vision, and my thoughts began to spiral down strange paths. How many years had Bobby watched his farm—decades? I wondered how many years he’d lain there, trapped, before he started longing for someone to end it.

  Of course the Boy Marvel couldn’t perform that task—it was against his nature. He’d never allow anyone to hurt the boy. Not even another demon.

  But the Angel had her job to do. O’Connell must have understood what was happening. Last night she’d figured out that Bobby Noon was alive, that he was watching them from the hospital. Or maybe she’d known for longer than that. She’d been the Angel’s avatar for so many years that she’d probably felt the call too. Maybe she’d come to Kansas with me because she knew she’d have to play the angel of death one more time.

  Someone needed to play that role. I thought of Commander Stoltz, hauling me along the dock: We can’t live like this—we can’t live with these monsters.

  I heard a distant drone, but my attention drifted back to the caped man. He leaned into me, his arm like an iron bar at my throat. The wound I’d given him was too bloody to have ever been depicted in Bobby’s golden-age funny books. I was struck by several other uncomic details: the stubble on his jaw, the stink of his breath. The frayed cape was homemade, the red uniform too tight and pulling apart at the seams, as if he’d outgrown it years ago.

  The drone grew louder, as did the sound of my pulse pounding in my ears. No: Del’s pulse. Del’s ears. If this body stopped breathing it 2 6 6

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  wouldn’t be me who died. The demon and its cohort would remain. I’d understood last night that out of the hundred demons in the world, my own little family had been born out of the boy who lived there. I just hadn’t realized we’d be reuniting so soon. The gang’s all here, I thought.

  No. Not the whole gang. The Truth and the Painter had come, and the Little Angel, and Captain and Johnny. The Boy Marvel and I made seven.

  One of us was missing.

  I kicked weakly at the caped man’s shins, tried to speak. We had to get out of the building, get everyone out, but any croak I managed to make was drowned out by the noise. The drone had become a roar. Outside the window, sunlight flashed on metal. It dove toward us out of the sky above the farmhouse: A blur of propeller, a bright bubble glass canopy, and wings like a silver knife edge. The Boy Marvel abruptly dropped his arm and turned toward the window. I fell to the floor, gasping, and covered my head with one arm.

  The engine roar seemed to fill the room—and abruptly fell away. We were on the top floor of the hospital, and the aircraft must have passed only twenty or thirty feet above our heads. I looked back toward the doorway. O’Connell still lay on the floor, her mouth bloody, but her
eyes were open.

  The Boy Marvel stood at the window, hands on his hips. He laughed. “Well that was a close one, eh?”

  I slowly got to my feet, shook my head. I tried to speak, coughed instead. The Boy Marvel glanced back at me, cocked his head, and then he heard it. The growl of the plane’s engine, rising in pitch. It had turned around for another pass.

  I was too tired to try to protect myself this time. I fell back against the wall, eyes on the ceiling. The plane passed overhead a second time, then appeared in the window, flying away from us, nose down. The circles on the undersides of the wings looked like two eyes.

  “Whoa, Nelly!” the Boy Marvel said, awed and happy as a kid at a

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  fireworks display. And of course we had the best seats in the house. One more show for Bobby.

  The light from the fireball lit the caped man in a halo. The sound arrived an instant later, making the window shudder. The plane must have been loaded with fuel to cause such an explosion.

  “Aww,” the Boy Marvel said, suddenly deflated. “It hit the house.”

  I stepped closer to the window. The top story of the farmhouse had vanished, and the structure below was nothing but a mass of fire. Black oily smoke roiled into the sky.

  The Little Angel tiptoed into the room. She caught my eye, held a finger to her lips.

  The girl climbed up on the bed. She straddled the old man’s hips and leaned forward to hold his face in her hands so that he seemed to be looking into her eyes.

  “Wait—,” I said, the sound rasping in my throat. The Boy Marvel turned away from the window. He saw her and shouted, his voice like thunder.

  The Little Angel daintily kissed the old man on his unmoving lips.

  “Nighty night,” she said.

  16

  I’m alive; evil am I.

  Del’s mother wanted to take me to the emergency room. She saw the bruise at my neck, lifted my shirt, and gasped at a deeper, larger bruise the shape of Australia. But I was done with hospitals. I told her I was fine, that I just needed to lie still for a while. She quickly changed the sheets in my old room. I lay down, and she brought a chair into the room and sat beside me. She asked me questions, and I answered them truthfully, but I knew that much of what I said didn’t make sense to her. Bertram popped in and out, not wanting to listen in, unable to stop himself. He kept asking if we needed food, drinks. Neither of us was hungry, but I consented to iced tea. Del’s mother waited until Bertram was gone, and then she said, “I don’t understand—why did you go to Kansas?”

  I thought about the paper-thin clues I’d followed: a few paintings, a page in a comic book, a made-up town that happened to exist. The chain of reasoning had a kind of dream logic, but like a dream it made less and less sense the more I examined it. It didn’t matter that it had turned out to be true. The certainty I’d felt along the way, the mag-

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  netic pull of that little dot on the map—those came from something else. Someone else. I’d been drawn to Olympia as surely as any of the other demons.

  “I have to start from the beginning,” I said. “When Del was possessed.” She started to say something, and I charged on. “I don’t know how it happened, but after your son was possessed, somehow you got me to stay. And your son, Del—”

  “Stop talking like that,” she said angrily. One eye glistened with tears; the other regarded me coldly. “Why are you talking about yourself like that?”

  “This is the story you have to hear,” I said. “When your son was five years old, he was possessed by a demon. And the demon decided to stay.”

  When the Little Angel bent to kiss Bobby Noon, I braced myself. I don’t know what I expected, exactly: a long roar as the Black Well yawned open and sucked me back to my birthplace, or maybe a simple blackout as my connection to the world was extinguished. Instead, we three demons looked at the old man and then at one another. Then the Little Angel climbed down from the bed and skipped out of the room. The Boy Marvel went to Bobby’s bedside and knelt there, distraught. He’d failed his most important duty. I went to O’Connell. She was conscious now, but not quite coherent. She looked at me questioningly, and all I said was, “We have to go.”

  The police didn’t try to stop the Truth from leaving in his car—

  they weren’t that stupid. One cop did call out to me as I walked out supporting O’Connell. I told him to step back and he obeyed. I helped O’Connell into the truck and drove back out to the highway. We passed the fire engines a minute later. The smoke from the burning farmhouse stayed in my rearview mirror for miles, a black tornado against blue sky.

  O’Connell’s jaw was as purpled as my chest. Later she realized that she’d lost a tooth and loosened two others. Her first words, after a 2 7 0

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  half hour of driving, were slightly fuzzed. She said, “Is the old man dead?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Why are you still here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She leaned against the window, closed her eyes. She’d succeeded, and failed completely.

  “I thought he was the key,” she said in a cracked voice. “I thought if he died, then the demons would die with him. A few of them at least.” She looked out the windshield at the flat Kansas skyline. “Just the cohort, that handful of demons, they ruined hundreds of lives. Thousands. Stopping just them, that would have been worth something, wouldn’t it?”

  “Do you want me to take you to a hospital?” I asked. She shook her head. “Jesus, no.”

  After that she stayed on the other side of the cab, head leaning against the window, not talking. Maybe she was afraid of me. When we stopped for gas, she went inside while I filled the tank. I used my credit card at the pump, not caring anymore if the police were trying to track my movements. They had Dr. Ram’s killer. Or at least a person who had confessed to it. The pay phone outside the station had a dial tone. I fished through my wallet for the water-rumpled Hyatt card. The ink had run and blurred, but I could make out the number. I got out my calling card and started punching numbers.

  A woman answered. “Hi,” I said, trying to sound normal. “Is this Selena?”

  “Ye-es,” she said cautiously.

  “This is Del Pierce. We met a couple of weeks ago, at ICOP?”

  “Of course I remember.” Her tone was cool. Maybe the police had talked to them. Tom and Selena had told them about my rant against Dr. Ram. I was just some drunk guy they’d met at a convention. Who knows what I was capable of? She said, “How are you doing?”

  “Fine. I’m fine. Listen, I’d like to talk to Valis—Phil. Mr. Dick. Is he there?”

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  “I’m sorry, he’s sleeping at the moment.”

  “Sleeping?” I repeated stupidly. I wondered what artificial men dreamed of. “Okay, when he gets up, could you . . . just ask him if he’d call me. Let me give you a number. I won’t be there until tonight, but he can call anytime.” Selena seemed reluctant, but she took down the number. I thanked her and hung up.

  O’Connell came out of the shop with bottled water, snacks, a travel pack of aspirin. She saw something in my face and stopped.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I just want to get home,” I said.

  When we arrived that night at the house where I grew up, I stepped out of the pickup, leaving it running. I had nothing to take inside: everything had been left at the farmhouse. I closed the door, and O’Connell scooted behind the wheel. She stared straight ahead, the side window open between us like a confessional. “I tried to kill you,”

  she said.

  “You were doing your job,” I said. “I hired you to be my exorcist.”

  The porch light flicked on. I walked toward the front door. O’Connell stepped out of the cab, and I turned around. She said, “I broke my vow to you. I promised to
be your pastor.”

  “No, you promised to be Del’s pastor. You still are.”

  Just after 3:30 a.m., my bedroom door opened. It was Bertram: bald head, fringe of messed hair catching the reflected light from down the hallway. He stepped inside, shut the door behind him.

  “I’m awake, Bertram.” Awake because I’d fallen out of sync with this body. It was becoming strange to me, a vehicle I was having trouble steering. The body’s owner was an insistent weight inside me, shifting and straining against the straitjacket I’d made for him.

  “My apologies for the late hour,” Bertram said. But it wasn’t Bertram’s voice. His tone was flat, the rhythm too regular, as if the words were being pulled one by one from a database and streamed for broadcast.

  I sat up. He walked toward the bed, adjusted the chair. 2 7 2

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  “You didn’t have to come all this way,” I said. “You could have just called.”

  Valis slowly sat, rested his arms on his thighs. “It’s no trouble. However, I can’t stay long. Phil is resting peacefully at the moment, but if there’s a problem, you’ll have to excuse me if I have to leave suddenly.”

  “You’re, uh, monitoring him from here? Cool trick.”

  He turned his palms over, smiled. “I am vast.”

  “And active. I’ve heard that.” I crossed my legs Indian style, stalling. “I guess O’Connell was wrong about you.”

  “Mother Mariette has a narrow frame of reference in regard to possession. When I declined to turn stones into bread, she decided that I was an imposter.” I didn’t follow the reference. Valis said, “What did you want to talk to me about, Del? Or do you prefer Hellion?”

  “Let’s just stick with ‘hey you’ for now.” I ran a hand through my hair. “I watched a man die yesterday,” I said. “An old man. He’d been paralyzed almost his whole life. He had an accident back in the forties, when he was eleven or twelve.”

  “The golden age of science fiction,” Valis said.