Pandemonium (24 page)

DEMONOLOGY
BOBBY NOON, BOY MARVEL

OLYMPIA, KANSAS, 1944
“Prepare to be annihilated, imperialist dogs!”
The Boy Marvel appears above them, his white cape fluttering in the breeze, feet planted wide on the cement wall of the bridge. The summer sun makes a halo behind his head.
The girl on the bank, the innocent hostage, says nothing. The two Jap spies disguise their fear with laughter. “I dare you to come down here and say that,” the taller one says. “I double dare you!” says his partner. The Johnson brothers are waist-deep in the creek, leaning against the big rock that pokes out of the water like the back of a hippo. Their sister, a six-year-old with pigtails, waits with wide eyes.
“Just watch me,” says the Boy Marvel. He adjusts the knot at his neck, straightens his cape. The sheet was stolen from his grandmother’s linen closet and cut down with his pocket knife—a crime, perhaps, but one the Boy Marvel deemed necessary.
He crouches and stretches out his arms. After a moment, he straightens, readjusts the cape.
“Ha!” the taller Johnson boy says. “You’re a damn coward!” He’s thirteen, a year older than the Boy Marvel, and he curses whenever adults are out of earshot. His younger brother and fellow spy is only eight, but he’s too scared of his brother to ever tell on him. Their sister is allowed to watch as long as she doesn’t talk or get in the way.
The rock is eight feet from the bridge, give or take. They’ve all seen the high school boys jump from the bridge and land in the deep water on the other side of the rock, but none of the trio have ever attempted it. It’s a daredevil stunt. You can’t even get a running start; you have to do it right from the wall.
“Don’t call me that,” Bobby Noon says.
The Johnson brothers crack up again. “Coward!” they shout. Bobby’s been called a lot of names. Crybaby, scaredy-cat, liar-liar-pants-on-fire. He’s missed a lot of school for what the teacher called “emotional problems.” Bobby used to hear voices, see people who weren’t there. Bobby acted so crazy, the kids said, that even his momma couldn’t take it, and that’s why she ran off with that Kansas City man.
But ever since his dad’s ship went down somewhere in the Pacific, he won’t stand for being called a coward. You can get him to do almost anything if you call him that. Bobby knows this about himself but can’t help it.
He crouches again, summoning mysterious energies. The spies step away from the rock—they don’t want Bobby to land on
them.
Their sister covers her eyes.
The Boy Marvel leaps. Arms straight, toes pointed, head up. His cape-widened shadow stretches over the awestruck spies. This is a moment they’ll remember forever, he thinks.
He’s falling now. The rock’s shining back rushes toward him, too fast, too close. He ducks his head into his arms, pulls his legs up to his chest—
Ker-Wop!
He hits the deep water with his knees—perfect cannonball—and his shins smack the rocks at the bottom of the creek. He lays there curled in the cold water, savoring the victory, not caring that his legs are probably bleeding. Finally he pushes to the surface, beaming. The brothers can’t believe it—your cape hit the rock you were so close! The older boy slaps him on the back. The younger boy and girl are looking at him like he’s a hero.

They fool around in the water for a couple more hours, but no else tries the jump. Not Bobby—he’s proven his point—and not even the older Johnson boy. Maybe he’s too scared by Bobby’s close call. They reread Bobby’s funny books, and Bobby even reads one aloud to the little Johnson girl. The brothers think she has a crush on Bobby.
When the brothers get bored with reading they make Bobby come up with another game—Bobby’s the one with all the ideas. The other kids think he reads too much, and think he’s being a show-off when he uses words like
annihilated
and
electrodynamics.
But he’s real good at made-up games.
Billy instructs them on how to set up a barricade by the end of the bridge and arms them with Tommy-gun sticks, on alert for strange cars driven by foreign agents. The Johnson girl, being a girl, is supposed to hide. But only two cars and one tractor go by, and they’re all people they’ve seen a thousand times before, so Bobby tells them that the agents are disguised as their friends and neighbors. So informed, they shoot out the tires of the next car that comes by.
At suppertime the Johnson boys walk home, their kid sister trailing after them. Bobby stays on the bridge with his copies of
Captain Marvel
and
The Shield
and
Action Comics.
From his perch on the wall he can look south toward the roofs of town, or north to the hospital on the hill, or across the fields to where the red silo pokes up like a rocket. His grandmother’s voice is too weak to call him from this far. He’s twelve, and he’s the man of the house now. He can go home when he damn well wants to.
He bunches the damp cape into a pillow, lies down on his back upon the wall, and holds the
Captain Marvel
over his head to block the sun. He doesn’t have to read the words anymore; he’s got them all memorized. Gram hates that he spends his money on the books, even buying the used ones from the other boys, but she doesn’t try to stop him.
His dad liked comics. In one of his letters he said they passed them around the ship until they were all taped up like wounded soldiers. Nobody’s told Bobby what happened to his father, but he knows. For the millionth time, he pictures his dad on the deck of the destroyer, blue sleeves pushed up his forearms, a copy of
Captain America
rolled into his back pocket. He’s hammering away with his antiaircraft gun at the Japanese Zero diving straight for him out of a cloudless blue sky. The airplane grows huge, a thousand pounds of metal already breaking up under the hail of bullets, trailing oily black smoke and fire. And now his father can see the face of the pilot, a madly grinning man with a white bandanna wrapped around his head, the red circle in the middle of his forehead like a third eye.
For the millionth time Bobby pushes the picture out of his head, stares hard at the pictures in his book. He makes himself consider again who’d win in a fight, Captain Marvel or Superman.
“Hey,” a voice says.
Bobby looks over, and it’s the little Johnson girl walking on the road, barefoot and in her white nightgown. “Did you sneak out?” he says.
“Read me another,” she says.
A wind ruffles the comics lying on the wall behind his head. He reaches up to hold them down, but one of them takes off, fluttering in the air over the water. He twists and grabs it, crumpling it in his fingers—it’s
Action Comics
#32—and then he’s slipping off the wall. His left hand scrabbles for the edge, but his fingernails scrape uselessly off the cement surface, and he drops.
He’s rolling as he falls, and strikes the water on his back. The creek is shallower here, only three feet deep, and choked with rocks. He doesn’t feel anything when he strikes bottom and the stones jam against his spine.
He lies there for a moment, stunned. He’s almost reclining on the rocks, his face only six inches from the surface. His vision is blurred, but he can see the wavering gray rectangle of the bridge, the bright sky, and between bridge and sky a dark blot. It’s the silhouette of the girl’s head. She’s staring down at him.
His breath’s been knocked out of him. He should sit up now. He tries to lift his head, but nothing happens. He can’t move his legs or his arms either—it’s as if he’s become buried up to his ears in quicksand. The one thing he can feel is a burning at the top of his lungs. He tries to open his mouth, but not even that’s working.
He stares up at the bridge, and the girl is still looking down at him. Stupid girl. She was too small to help him anyway. He thinks, if only one of the Johnson brothers would run out of their house right
now
they’d be able to save me.
The burning in his chest goes away, and he stops feeling anything at all. He’s not thinking of anything either except the hole that’s appeared in the sky. It’s a black blot, growing larger, like the mouth of a tunnel rushing toward him. He’s seen that blackness before. He’s heard the voices that come out of it. He’s always been careful to look away, to run from it when he could.
But not this time. He can’t run from it, but now he knows he doesn’t have to. Now he knows what it is.
The blackness is a door. All he has to do is open it.

The Boy Marvel, on patrol high above Olympia, Kansas, looked down to see the farmboy slip from the bridge and plunge into the rushing stream. Someone’s a little clumsy! the hero exclaimed. He swooped toward the lad and landed with a splash.
Need a lift? he queried. He picked up the boy in arms as strong as Hercules, and zoomed down the road with the speed of Mercury.
As luck would have it, there was a hospital nearby. The Boy Marvel kicked open the doors and walked through with the sopping wet boy in his arms. Is there a doctor in the house? he called jauntily. The nurses were amazed. Someone said, Why, that’s the Noon boy! And someone else said to the hero, How did you carry him all this way—you’re just a boy yourself! But the Boy Marvel only smiled and said, All in a day’s work, ma’am.
Before he left, the hero leaned down to Bobby Noon and whispered, I’m going to teach you a secret. He told Bobby how to make a high-frequency whistle that only superheroes could hear. Whenever you need me, the Boy Marvel said, just whistle.
And with that the caped hero vanished.
Bobby couldn’t move or talk, but the doctors and nurses knew how to take care of him just the same. They put him in a clean room with windows that faced his farm. For the first few years his grandmother came by every afternoon to read to him. After that, he told stories to himself.
He measured the hours by the calls of the freight trains. He watched the skies.
Sometimes he got bored, so bored that he dreamed of running wild. He’d jump out of bed and knock over the food trays and yell at the nurses. And sometimes, especially at night, he got scared. He’d hear what sounded like the drone of a Japanese Zero, or the pad of small bare feet on the hallway tile. He’d tell himself to be brave. There were heroes in the world. And Bobby could call on the most powerful one of all.
Someday he’d put his lips together and whistle, and the Boy Marvel would come speeding out of the Kansas skies like a bullet.

15

I awoke to the distant howl of a freight train.
The sound was familiar, comforting. I blinked up at the dark, content to be safe in my bed, thinking about the train coursing along the prairie. I could almost hear the engineer shouting into the wind as he leaned out the window.
The mash-note chord sounded again, then again, louder. In the second or two of silence between the blasts I heard a car engine start up.
I got to my feet, still sleep-drunk but rapidly waking. This wasn’t my house, wasn’t my bed. Outside the star-cracked window—past the fields, past the highway and the black bulk of the hospital silhouetted against the slate gray of the sky—the headlamps of a train plowed through the dark. The thrum and clack of the wheels carried easily through the damp air. It was impossible to tell how far away the tracks were, but the train seemed to be moving extremely fast.
I reached the window and looked down at the front yard. The headlights of O’Connell’s pickup flicked on, and the truck backed up, turned toward the road. I yelled her name.
Where the hell was she going?
I looked up at the hospital, its top windows still lit, and suddenly understood what O’Connell had seen from the window a few hours ago. How the farm must look from a window in the top floor of that hospital. How the Painter had always painted it that way, looking down, from a distance.
Bobby Noon was watching the farmhouse. He’d always been watching.
I turned and started for the door, then realized I was barefoot. I found the first gym shoe, finally found the second under the bed. I yanked them on, sockless, stamping on the heels as I reached the hallway.
I called O’Connell’s name, not expecting an answer, and ducked into her room. Even in the gloom I could see that her bed was empty. I turned and plunged into the pitch-black staircase, taking the stairs two at a time, using my arms as guides and shock absorbers, and stumbled into the living room.
The front door was ajar. I knocked it wide and ran outside.
The bones of the barn raked the gray sky. It was near dawn, and the crescent moon hung low behind the house.
O’Connell had taken the road, but I could head straight for the hospital through the high-grown fields.
I ran.
The frost-hardened grasses whipped at my arms and hands, tangled my feet. I could see nothing but the night sky, the blur of grass, and the lights of the top floor of the hospital jittering in my vision. Invisible rocks and depressions tripped and jarred me, and several times only momentum kept me upright. Finally I saw a slice of deeper black through the tops of the weeds—the road.
Something seized my foot, and I slammed onto my chest. I lay for a moment, the breath knocked out of me, and finally pushed myself up onto hands and knees. I sucked air, and began to cough.
My foot was still trapped. I reached down, felt the metal teeth of barbed wire biting into my shoes, gripping the cuff of my jeans. My ankle burned. Nearby I could see now the outlines of a fence, knocked flat in this section, but still connected to upright posts through strands of wire. A few feet in that direction and I would have run into the wire at full speed.
I stood awkwardly, my right foot and leg still trapped. I carefully pried the wires away until only my jeans were still snagged. I hopped forward and ripped them free. Then it was a long step over a drainage ditch, and I was standing on the road.
The hospital’s peaked entrance was perhaps a hundred yards away, lit by sconces to either side of the double doors. O’Connell’s pickup was parked under it.
I jogged up the road, huffing now, exhaling clouds, my feet slapping the black pavement. I’d stopped trying to think. The top-floor windows watched me approach, unblinking.
Car lights swept up from behind me; I glanced back, then jumped aside as a long black car roared past. The car swung into the hospital entrance and skidded to a stop just behind the pickup.
I slowed, catching my breath. Fifty feet away, the driver’s-side door opened. A figure stepped out: gleaming black shoes, razor-creased charcoal pants, black trench coat. He straightened, flexed gloved fingers, and adjusted his slouch hat, each movement precisely choreographed.
He slowly turned his head in my direction. A hatchet-nosed man. His eyes were in shadow, but his gaze pinned me like a prison searchlight. I froze, waiting for him to lift those hands, waiting for the glint of pistols.
His head tilted forward in what could have been a nod. Then he spun away from me, the trench coat fanning, and stalked through the hospital doors.
I almost knelt then, my legs spongy with fear and relief. I bent over, hands gripping knees, and breathed deep.
It’s only a demon,
I told myself.
Just like you.
Sirens approached from the distance.
I reached the front doors before I realized I was running again.

To my night-widened eyes, the lobby was lit like an operating room. The front desk was abandoned, but nearby a woman’s voice made a sound like a scream or a squeak. I leaned around the corner.
A dozen yards down the hallway a heavy woman in a blue pastel smock tried to press herself into the wall, her head down and arms crossed over her chest. The Truth stalked past her without turning his head. When the demon reached the next intersection of hallways he glanced back, as if making sure I was following him.
Fuck you, I thought. I’m not following you anywhere.
The Truth disappeared down the side hallway. I ran toward the nurse, touched her shoulder. She cringed but didn’t scream. She was maybe fifty or sixty, with carefully hair-sprayed black hair.
“Have you seen a bald woman?” I said. “Kind of thin and angry?”
She stared at me, then shook her head.
It didn’t matter. I knew where O’Connell was heading. I’d find her on the third floor.
“Call the police,” I said to the nurse. “Then try to keep people in their rooms.”
She shook her head. “I can’t, I can’t—”
I heard someone shout in fear, then the slam of a door. I yanked the woman upright and said, “Where are the elevators?” She gestured vaguely in the direction the Truth had taken. “Okay,” I said. “Now please call the cops.”
I reached the intersection. The hallway to my left seemed to stretch the length of the building. Several people in patient gowns and bathrobes peeked from their doorways. They were looking at the Truth.
The demon strode down the middle of the corridor. He reached the bank of elevators and stopped, turned. He looked in my direction. Waiting.
I ran out of the intersection, away from him. There had to be another elevator, or a set of back stairs. Anything was better than getting into a box with a serial-killing agent of justice.
I slowed to a jog, and started looking at signs, trying to find a way upstairs.
“Hey you!” a voice said angrily. I looked back. A man in blue scrubs, not much older than me, marched down the hallway toward me. “What are you doing in here?”
That question had too many possible answers. I picked the simplest. “I need to get to the third floor,” I said.
The young man—doctor or orderly or whatever he was—was passing an exit sign when a tremendous bang stopped him in his tracks. The fire door beneath the exit sign bulged inward. Incredibly, the man started to walk toward it.
“I wouldn’t open the door,” I said. But it was too late; a second blow sent the door clanging open.
A big man dressed in blue spandex stepped into the hallway, a disc of metal big as a manhole cover hanging on his arm. The Captain. Leaning on him was Smokestack Johnny, wearing his traditional overalls and his blue-striped cap. He had one arm draped over the Captain’s shoulder. His right leg was missing below the knee.
The Captain pointed at the man in scrubs. “Corpsman! This man needs medical attention.”
“I had me a bit of an accident,” Johnny said cheerfully.
I turned and ran.
The hallway ended a dozen yards later in a left turn. I stutter-stepped around the corner, then found myself in a long corridor that ran along the back side of the hospital. A few seconds later I saw a white plastic sign that said STAIRS. I threw myself against the door and got inside the stairwell, chest heaving.
Five seconds, passed, ten, and my breath began to slow. How many demons were here? How the hell had they all decided to converge? And where the hell were the cops? Even Mayberry had two cops.
I slid to the side and slowly raised my head to look out the door’s square window. The length of hallway visible to me was empty.
I turned and started up the stairs, using a hand on the railing to haul myself up. I forced myself to ignore the burning in my legs, the sweat running into my eyes.
On the second-floor landing I swung around the bend and was almost bowled over by a middle-aged man hurrying down. He was dressed in pajamas, and a length of IV tube hung from his arm. He jerked back from me, terrified. “No,” he said. “No.” As if I were a mugger with a knife at his throat.
I stepped aside, raised my hands. “Be careful down there,” I said. “It’s crazy.”
No, that wasn’t the right word. All those demons—the Captain, the Truth, Smokestack Johnny, little ol’ me—it was too much at once. Too much for anyone to take.
Pandemonium.
He ducked his head and swept past me, heading down. I looked up. Somewhere above me, a small voice was crying.