Pandemonium (13 page)

DEMONOLOGY
SMOKESTACK JOHNNY

SAND CREEK, KANSAS, 1983
He came walking out of the middle of nowhere, ambling down the snow-lined 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 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.”
“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
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 hand-brake, 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.
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.”
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.

9

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 after 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.
“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 still-wet 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.
“After all, the doctor could change your name, but he couldn’t change your sex, or your age; all that’s pertinent to the profile. Like that little slingshot—that’s a signature prop of the Hellion. But even more than the slingshot, there’s that particular move—shooting the glasses off someone’s face. Now, that’s something that can’t be easily faked. The little kid’s gotta have strength, coordination. Of course, you probably didn’t mean to smash her eye to a pulp. But still, it’s a hell of a shot.”
“It wasn’t me,”
I said.
“I know,” she said. Resigned to it.
Fuck you, I thought.
Now
you believe me?
I turned away from her, but the room was too small to pace. There was nowhere to go but outside.
“Before you were possessed,” she went on in that new, weary voice, “dozens of adults were injured by the Hellion firing that thing at people’s faces. But after you, even though people kept reporting appearances of the Hellion, not a one. In the twenty-one years since your mother was injured, no child has done what you did.” She paused, and when I looked at her, she was watching my eyes. The weariness was a pose; her body was relaxed, but her eyes were filled with the same energy I’d felt back at the hotel. “You were the last one, Del. You trapped it.”
“Jesus Christ!” I shouted, then started laughing. “What do you think I’ve been trying to tell you!”

We sat in the small room as the rain came down and the ceiling clouded with cigarette smoke. O’Connell asked pointed questions and I answered at length, making this something between a clinical intake session and a confession. I was tired of choosing my words, sparing the gory details, managing everyone’s reactions. With a kind of escalating, giddy recklessness, I told her everything, daring her to disbelieve me. The first possession, the wild behavior, the way they’d strapped me down until they thought they’d driven the Hellion out. I told her about the accidents that brought it back to my awareness, the black well that wanted to pull me in, the pressure in my skull, the wolf-out sessions. I enumerated the ways I’d tried to keep the demon strapped down: the therapy sessions with Dr. Aaron, the stay in the psych ward, the drugs. My bid to get Dr. Ram to cut the thing out of me.
“The receptors in the brain that Dr. Ram identified, I think they’re like…antennas. Broadcasting stations. Remove them, and you—”
Something in her face told me this was old news to her. I remembered the first time I had seen her, walking into the hotel with Dr. Ram, deep in conversation. “You thought he was on the right track too.”
“I did, until the Truth killed him. I’m not sure why or how Dr. Ram was lying. Maybe he was faking his data.” She shrugged. “We’ll find out sooner or later, I imagine.” She put out the stub of her cigarette, reached for her pack. “Now. Tell me again how your family drove the Hellion away. They strapped you down and read you books?”
“Lew read me comics. My mom read me
Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel.
I loved it.”
“What do you mean, you loved it?” Before I could answer she stood up, frowning. She leaned into the little window that overlooked the lake and cupped her hand to the glass.
I heard it then, over the pattering rain. The chop of helicopter blades. The sound grew louder, until it was directly overhead: a deep, thumping drone. The helicopter was either very close, or very, very big. It passed on, but we could still hear it.
“Search and rescue?” I asked.
“I don’t think so.”
The sound grew loud again as the helicopter circled back. I went to the door and opened it. Fifty yards away, over the motel parking lot, a circle of lights descended through the dark and rain like a UFO, settling behind the silhouettes of trees.