Pandemonium (11 page)

8

Eventually I realized Lew was calling my name. I looked back toward shore to see him stumble through the bushes and nearly put his foot into the water. He clumped toward the dock. Even at this distance I could tell he was annoyed. I waved at him and went back to my conversation. The next time I looked back Lew had stopped midway down the landing. He was staring, but not at me.
The Shu’garath sat with his legs over the side, ankles in water, naked except for black plastic goggles on his forehead and a pair of dark nylon trunks. A gigantic baby, hairless and pale as a cave fish.
I gestured Lew forward. My brother raised an eyebrow.
“Lew, I’d like you to meet the Beast from the Depths, the Terror of the Northern Lakes, the Shu’garath himself—Toby Larsen. Toby, this is my brother, Lew.”
Toby stood slowly, rising up to nearly seven feet. An expanse of milk-white skin. Huge thighs. A keg torso pregnant with a Buddha belly: glossy and tight and almost translucent, like something extruded by a glass blower. He gave off a powerful, yeasty odor.
Lew had to look up at the man, a rare experience for Lew.
And Toby looked down. Broad nose, tiny ears that seemed almost vestigial, rubbery pink lips. He blinked. His eyes seemed tiny compared to the black goggles perched on his smooth, Beluga forehead.
Toby lifted one arm, a slablike thing with none of the comic book definition of a body builder’s. A weightlifter arm, a blacksmith arm.
I gave Lew an admonishing look. Lew came to his senses and took the man’s giant paw in his own.
“Pleased to meet you,” Lew said. Without looking away from him, he said to me, “I couldn’t find you. I looked in your cabin…”
“I was out here and Toby swam right by me, scared the shit out of me! Do you know this man can hold his breath for nearly eight minutes?”
Toby shrugged: a ripple of meat.
“So,” Lew said. “You’re the Shug.”
“For thirty-five years,” Toby said. His voice was surprisingly soft.
“Shug number five,” I said.
I gave Lew the abbreviated version of the story Toby had told me over the past hour. Back in the twenties, Harmonia Lake had been a popular stop on the road between New York City and Montreal. Hotels, gas stations, resorts. Oliver Hardy had fished there. When the first Shu’garath was sighted in 1925, the indistinct photographs and breathless newspaper accounts only made the place more popular. Somebody got the idea of swimming around as the Shug, and for a while there was even an annual Shug festival: fireworks and eating contests and a boat parade. But in the fifties the interstate went through to the west, and then the only people who stopped into town were the Shug watchers. They still got a few tourists—the museum’s listed on the web, he said proudly—but most business came from fishing.
“So what does being the Shug involve, exactly?” Lew said, dead-pan. “I mean, you swim around in fifty-degree water—”
“No, no,” Toby said. “It’s about forty-eight right now. But I’ve been in there colder than that. I can take the cold. I’ve got the insulation.”
“Sure, sure. But still…swimming around and scaring the shit out of people. That’s not exactly a full-time job.”
Toby stared at him. I lifted a hand, started to say something.
Toby said, “I also do children’s parties.”
I barked a laugh. Lew nodded, keeping a straight face.
The big man pulled the goggles down over his eyes. “Besides, somebody’s got to do it. As long as there’s a Harmonia Lake, there’s gotta be a Shug.”
He padded to the end of the dock, stopped, looked over his shoulder. His head like a planetoid embedded on rolls of neck fat. “Oh, try Louise’s walnut hotcakes.”
He dove in, vanishing beneath the water. When he didn’t come up, Lew and I walked to the end of the dock. The fog had burned down to wisps. Harmonia Lake was much larger than we had suspected last night. The opposite shore was dimly visible across the water, on the other end of a road of sunlight. I couldn’t guess at the lake’s shape; left and right the shoreline disappeared and reappeared as it traced scallops of land, the gaps hiding anything from shallow coves to vast expanses of water.
Lew and I watched for a few minutes, then started walking back up the dock, but both of us kept looking over our shoulders to see if the water had broken. At the shore we stood and waited: eight minutes, ten. We never saw him surface.

“Are you sure it was him?” Lew said. He was trying to pace, but the short metal leash of the pay phone kept yanking him back. Lew’s cell phone still hadn’t managed to find a signal, and it was cramping his style.
I stabbed another triple-stacked wedge of pancake, smeared it through the syrup. I’d stopped being even faintly hungry fifteen minutes ago. Now I was stuffed, engorged, infused…and I couldn’t stop putting the food in my mouth. The coffee was terrible and the bacon was ordinary, but the pancakes were avatars of some perfect Ur-cake whose existence until now could only be deduced from the statistical variations in other, lesser pancakes.
“Have you called the police?” Lew said into the phone. He glanced up at me, glared, then pivoted away. “I think you should call the police.”
I stabbed, I smeared, I swallowed. The Baby Condor woman, Louise, poured me more coffee and pointedly ignored Lew, who was obviously making too much noise.
Lew carefully put the phone back on the hook. He didn’t immediately come back to the table. He walked toward the gift shop, stopped, and then walked back. He leaned into the table, arms straight, and addressed the salt and pepper shakers in the middle of the table. “He’s sitting in a
van
outside our goddamn
house.
”
I didn’t have to ask who he was talking about.
“This van’s been parked on our street,” Lew said. “Amra passed it on the way to work, saw him sitting there. He’s fucking
stalking
her now.”
“Is he still there?”
“She called the cops, but the van was gone by the time they got there.” Lew stared at the checked vinyl.
I started to say: Bertram’s harmless, afraid of his own shadow.
“This is unacceptable, Del.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay?!”
“Okay!”
I got up awkwardly, levering my feet over the bench. A pound of weapons-grade carbohydrates sank lower in my gut.
I sifted through my wallet until I’d found the ATM receipt where I’d written Bertram’s number after he’d called Mom’s house. My calling card was right there, but I didn’t know how many minutes were left, and why should I pay for it? I called collect.
It rang only once—then there was a silence as whoever picked up negotiated with the computer to accept the call.
“Oh my God, is it really you, Del?” The connection had the clipped metallic sound of a cheap cell phone. His voice sounded strange—Bertram and I had never talked on the phone before—but I recognized him. “Where are you?” he asked.
There was no way I was telling him—the next day he’d be outside my cabin door. “What are you doing, Bertram? How the hell did you get to Chicago?”
In the hospital he’d always been hunched over the phone by the nurses’ station: a little white guy, bald with a fringe of sandy hair, pudgy except for skinny legs. Every phone call he received was critical, every discussion freighted with meaning. To Bertram,
casual conversation
was a contradiction in terms.
But Bertram wasn’t in the hospital in Fort Morgan; he was in a van in Chicago.
“It’s imperative that you and I talk,” Bertram said. “In person.”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen. I can call you in a couple weeks, but right now I need you to—”
“You don’t understand, this is
important,
” Bertram said. “I told my commander about your, uh, situation. This someone—I can’t say his name over the phone—very much wants to meet you. He has a solution, a kind of
procedure
that would allow you to be free of your, your…”
“Situation.”
“Exactly! I can hear in your voice that we understand each other.”
Understand each other? All I could think was, Bertram has a
commander.
Commander of the Human League.
“This is bigger than just you,” Bertram continued. “With your help, we can change the world.”
Jesus, Lew was right. Bertram, and all his fellow Human Leaguers, thought I was the Anti-Slan Firewall.
In the background of the call I heard a male voice say something I couldn’t pick up, and then Bertram said, “Del, if you would just tell us where you are, we could meet you.”
“Bertram, if this is about the—”
“Don’t say their name!” he said, panicked. “For goodness’ sake, you have no idea of the range of their scans. In 2004—”
“Bertram.”
“—a soldier in Srinagar—”
“Bertram, I need you to focus.”
“Focus?” he said, wounded. He exhaled loudly into the phone. I could picture him bent over his knees, the cell phone mashed into his face. “I am more focused than I have ever been in my life.”
I stepped away from the phone, shaking my head, and the receiver cord brought me up short. I turned around as Mother Mariette O’Connell walked through the front door.
She was dressed in a silver nylon jacket, padded and stitched in a diamond pattern, zipped up to her neck. She glanced in our direction and then went left, toward the front desk.
She stopped.
“Here’s the deal,” I said to Bertram, speaking quickly. “Don’t call my mother. Don’t call my brother or sister-in-law. And do
not,
under any circumstances, go near their houses. The next time they see you, they’re going to call the cops. Do you understand?”
O’Connell turned, frowning. Her eyes narrowed.
Bertram breathed into the phone. “Del, I’m just trying to—”
I thunked the big receiver onto the metal hook—an old-fashioned pleasure that cell phones couldn’t match—and then O’Connell was marching toward me. “What
the fuck
are you doing here?” she said.
Lew didn’t budge from the table. The coward.
“It’s imperative that you and I talk,” I said. A moment later I was sitting on the ground.
“Ouch,” Lew said.
“Can somebubby gib me a nabkin?”
Louise came out of the kitchen holding the coffee pot, and froze. O’Connell turned away, shaking out her hand. My teeth must have broken the skin of her knuckles.
Lew pulled a tuft of napkins from the chrome dispenser, dropped them on my lap. I dabbed gingerly at my lower lip. I was in no hurry to get up.
“What did you do to her?” Louise demanded.
O’Connell spun back toward us. “And who are you?” she asked Lew.
He held up his hands. “I’m the driver.”
“Then you know your way back,” she said. Without turning away from Lew she looked at me, raised her arm, and pointed: a wrath-of-God, get-thee-to-a-nunnery point. I didn’t know anyone outside of the nuthouse who looked comfortable wielding a gesture like that, but she was a natural.
“I told you in Chicago,” she said. “I can’t help you. You were traumatized by a demon as a child? See a therapist. You have no right to come to my hometown, bother my friends, and harass us. Go home, Mr. Pierce.”
I carefully peeled the napkins away from my lip, stared at the bright red blot. My mouth still stung, and more blood welled to the surface. I looked up at her until she dropped the finger.
“I guess Toby had you pegged wrong,” I said.
“Who?”
Louise said, shocked.
“The Shu’garath? The gigantic guy who swims around in the lake?”
Louise said, “Toby talked to you?”
“Toby doesn’t talk to people,” O’Connell said.
“Well he talked to me. He’s a nice guy, though I wish he had warned me about your right hook.” A warm dollop of blood seeped over my lip like gravy, and I patted at it. “He said that
of course
you’d help me. Said that if anybody could help me, it was you.”
“I’m retired,” O’Connell said.
Louise looked from me to O’Connell, her bird eyes expectant.

We followed O’Connell’s Toyota pickup down the highway. Gray primer blotches covered the once-blue truck like a tropical disease. A few miles north of the motel she turned onto a steep dirt road that looked like it had been shelled by artillery. The pits were much deeper than the Audi’s clearance, and Lew had to ease in and out of them at an angle to avoid bottoming out. O’Connell immediately left us behind, and the next time we saw the pickup it was parked in a muddy clearing. On one side of the clearing was a steep drop-off, Harmonia Lake spread out below. On the other side was a collection of low, ramshackle structures. Or maybe one complex structure. It was hard to tell.
At the center of the cluster was a mass of rounded aluminum that used to be a silver Airstream trailer. The trailer had grown several new rooms, as well as a couple of porches, a deck, two open-sided sheds, and many awnings, constructed of barn-wood planks, vinyl siding, and rusting sheet metal. Covered walkways, roofed in thick green plastic and floored with sections of warped plywood, connected to a Plexiglas-walled greenhouse and two garages. One garage door was open, revealing an old pontoon boat surrounded floor to ceiling by industrial junk.
Lew and I walked gingerly over the muddied driveway and reached one of the front porches. A door had been left open for us. Next to the frame was a driftwood sculpture like those at the motel, all glossy hooks and barbs. The wall below it was stained, the deck glittering with fish scales, as if she’d been hanging her catch of the day on the thing. Lew gave me an appalled look.
I knocked on the frame, and could see O’Connell moving in a distant room.
“Take off your shoes and have a seat,” she called.
“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 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: Thirty-three? 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?”
“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 some
one
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 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.”