Pandemonium (9 page)

Lew and Amra lived in Gurnee, a far northern suburb that was home to the biggest amusement park in Illinois, Six Flags Great America. From the guest bedroom I could see the hump of the highest section of the American Eagle roller coaster rising up over the bare trees. It was actually two roller coasters, on twin wooden tracks, so that theoretically the coasters could race each other, but in practice they never ran near the same speed.
“Do you ever go?” I said. When Lew and I were growing up, we had gotten to go to the park once or twice every summer, starting back when it was called Marriott’s Great America.
He looked up, saw what I was talking about, then went back to work clearing the bed. “No.” He’d been using the bed as an extra desk, loaded with stacks of papers, technical manuals, and foam-filled boxes that could have transported high-tech pizzas. Most of this garbage went into the closet.
Lew was mad at me, but trying not to be, an unnatural state that he couldn’t maintain for long. He’d only be himself after he’d blown up. “Did Amra tell you yet?” I said.
“Tell me what?” he said.
But I knew she had. The hour-long ride home had been nearly silent, but right after we’d arrived at their house she and Lew had stayed in the kitchen while I went to the guest room with the blue duffel bag and the black nylon convention bag, shut the door behind me, and unzipped the duffel. Some of my clothes were missing—when the hotel people had grabbed my luggage from the room, they hadn’t bothered retrieving the shirts and pants I’d hung up in the closet. But better that than trying to pack them up; I didn’t want them going through my bag. The important things were there: the bike chains, the Kryptonite locks, and my father’s gun. Still there.
I had almost broken down then. Tears welled up, goggling my vision. I unwrapped the oil rag around the pistol, hefted it in my hand. I lifted it to my face, wiped at my nose, and sniffed. A gun after it’s fired smells like cordite or something, doesn’t it? My knowledge of guns came only from television and Elmore Leonard novels.
I couldn’t smell anything. The weapon didn’t seem any different from when I’d wrapped it up at Mom’s. Nobody had used the gun, I told myself. Not me, not the Hellion, not even the Truth.
I’d rewrapped it, weak with relief. As I’d stuffed it deep in the duffel bag, on the other side of the door Lew had been making outraged noises he barely tried to conceal. Amra had told him. The hotel bill had been four thousand and some-odd bucks. None of my cards would cover it.
And now Lew couldn’t even look at me. He pulled the bedspread off the bed, spilling white kernels of foam and paper clips, and bunched it up. “I’ll get you a fresh blanket,” he said, and carried the bundle to the hallway.
I tried to empty my pockets, fumbling with bandaged fingers. Wallet, keys, crumpled ones and fives, change, a folded card from the Hyatt that said “Please tell us how we’re doing.” I used my palm to spread open the card. Inside I’d written “T & S” and a phone number. Tom and Selena. I dimly remembered promising to call them when I got to California, but why did I say I was going to California?
Lew stalked back into the room and without a word started spreading the blanket out.
“I’ll pay you back,” I said, which we both knew was bullshit.
We’d understood from high school on that it was Lew’s job to make good grades, find a high-paying career, buy a two-story house in the suburbs, and generally become Dad. It was my job to fuck up. Occasionally this annoyed me, but most of the time I was comfortable with the division of labor. Lew’s job was nearly impossible, and mine came naturally.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said.
“At least you’ll get the bail money back.”
I couldn’t help it; I just wanted to poke him until he burst.
“There are towels in the bathroom,” he said. “And I’ll get you some clothes that—”
“Lew! Del! You should see this!” It was Amra. I followed Lew to the kitchen. A small TV on the counter was showing a picture of Dr. Ram. I recognized the photo from his book jacket. Almost immediately the story switched to a report on fighting in Pakistan.
“Somebody was shot at the Hyatt last night,” Amra said. She was shook up. “That’s why all the police were there. His name was Ram, he was a neurologist or something.”
Lew turned to face me. His anger was gone, replaced by shock, or something like it.
“It wasn’t me,” I said.
“This guy who was murdered—you went ballistic last night, and they have you on file. How do you know you weren’t involved?”
“Oh, it’s worse than that.” I carefully sat down on a kitchen chair. My back was still torqued. Not only had I lost control, I told them, but people had seen me with Dr. Ram, and later heard me ranting about how he wouldn’t help me. Then I’d gotten off on the wrong floor—Dr. Ram’s floor—no doubt around the time he was shot. “To top it off,” I said, “I gave him my MRI reports. Somewhere in his room are a bunch of papers with my name on them. See? It’s practically an open-and-shut case.”
Lew and Amra exchanged a look. I admired that marital telepathy, the way they could check in with each other without speaking.
“We know a lawyer,” Amra said.
“I don’t have time for that,” I said. “I’m not going to turn myself in.”
Lew pulled out a chair and sat down. “Del, listen to me—” “There’s a woman who can help me,” I said. “Mother Mariette. I need to find her, look her up on the Internet or something, find out where she lives—”
“That bald woman you went off after?” Amra said. “How can she possibly help you?”
“She’s an exorcist.”
Lew made a dismissive noise. “Jesus, Del, you can’t just latch on to some religious quack. You’ve got to get serious, we’re talking about murder here. This Mother Mary—”
“Mother Mariette,” I said. “She’s Irish, I think—she’s the only person I’ve ever met who actually says
ye.
And she’s a priest of some kind. I’m not exactly sure what church she’s in, we’d have to find that out.”
He sat back in his chair, looking pained. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “A bald Irish exorcist nun…”
“Lew, she saw the Hellion in me. Nobody else has ever done that before—none of the shrinks, none of the doctors, not even Dr. Aaron.” I leaned forward. “This woman is
the shit.
”
No one said anything for a long moment.
Then Lew said, “You’re going after her, I guess?” He saw something in my face, and shook his head. “Where does she live, fucking Dublin?”
“I don’t know. Yet.”
He sighed, got up, and left the room. A moment later he came back with his laptop. “Go take a shower,” he said. “I’ll Google her ass.”

DEMONOLOGY
THE TRUTH

LOS ANGELES, 1995
Later, when the videotape played on every news channel in a seemingly continuous loop, it was easy enough to hear: a percussive sound like a cough, picked up by the microphones inside the courtroom. But no one watching the scene live on television, and no one inside the crowded chambers at the time, seemed to recognize it as a gunshot.
In the minutes before the attack, the single television camera allowed in the courtroom was focused on the defendant’s table. O. J. Simpson—or Orenthal James Simpson, as the prosecution had repeatedly referred to him during the trial—stood impassively as Judge Ito issued his instructions. On the tape, many people are partially visible behind Simpson, including three California State police officers in brown uniforms, but it is Johnnie Cochran who is directly behind him. Cochran was not the architect of Simpson’s possession defense—that was Robert Shapiro—but it was Cochran who had successfully sold the jury on it. The blood, the glove, the black bag: the obviousness of it had made his case. Who else but a man possessed would leave so clear a trail?
When the court officer read the verdict for the first count—for the murder of “Nicole Simpson, a human being”—Cochran gripped Simpson’s shoulder and pressed his forehead into the taller man’s back. Simpson smiled in relief, and nodded. Murmurs rolled through the courtroom. Then the second verdict was read for the murder of Ronald Goldman.
It was at that moment that Marc Janusek, a building janitor for over fifteen years, shot Officer Steve Mercer as he stood guard outside the courtroom. A few seconds later, out of sight of the camera, the door to the courtroom was pushed open. Cochran looked over Simpson’s shoulder at the movement, but at that moment Simpson was lifting his hand and waving to the jury. He mouthed the words, “Thank you.”
The first clue to the television audience that something was amiss was when one of the police officers, Dan Fiore, ran toward the defendant’s table. He grabbed Robert Shapiro by the shoulders and shouted, “Get down! Get down!”
Janusek, the janitor, moved into the frame, his back to the camera. He was dressed in a black trench coat and a wide-brimmed fedora, and was carrying two silver pistols, though only one is visible on the tape. The next gunshots, however, were from Officer Tanya Brandt. Brandt, an African-American and the only female officer providing security inside the courtroom, fired her service revolver twice into the possessed man’s back.
Janusek turned quickly, the trench coat fanning around him. He raised his arm, and fired once. Officer Brandt fell to the ground, out of the camera’s sight.
Troopers converged from all corners of the courtroom. One officer tried to tackle the possessed man, but was immediately thrown off. Another officer fired at nearly point-blank range, but Janusek was spinning, and only later was it determined that the shot had missed. The bullet tore through Janusek’s coat and struck the wall only inches from where prosecution lawyer Christopher Darden was standing. Janusek, however, abruptly stopped moving, and three officers immediately threw themselves onto him, smashing him to the ground.
The following moments were chaotic, but a rough order of events was reconstructed from the tape and from later interviews.
Every person in the courtroom, with the exception of the three troopers restraining the possessed man on the floor, was trying to exit by any means possible. Most were heading toward the large door at the rear of the court, but many were also moving forward, toward the bench, to the three doors that led to the judge’s chamber, the jury room, and the hallway.
The camera swung from the pile of officers wrestling with Janusek and focused on Simpson. Fiore and another officer were pulling and pushing the defendant toward the judge’s chambers. Simpson stayed hunched as he moved, his hands on the back of Fiore. Cochran, Shapiro, and Simpson attorney Robert Kardashian were just behind. Fiore suddenly stopped, and Simpson stumbled into the officer’s side.
Fiore turned, reached over Simpson, and grabbed the other bailiff by the front of his shirt. Fiore lifted the bailiff off his feet and tossed him sideways. He hit the floor and skidded into the prosecutor’s table.
Cochran seemed to be the first to realize that the demon had jumped. Cochran grabbed Simpson by the arm and pulled him backward. Officer Fiore stepped forward and punched Cochran in the face, breaking his glasses and sending him to the ground. Simpson stared at Cochran, then looked up at Fiore. There was a long moment in which neither man moved. Then Fiore smiled, opened his mouth, and laughed: a deep, rolling laugh that seemed to go on and on, filling the room.
Only a few yards away, Janusek had gone still, and at least one of the officers holding him down seemed to understand what had happened. The camera showed one of them abruptly stand and move toward Fiore, his arms out.
It was impossible to determine how many bodies the demon occupied in the next thirty seconds. Suddenly, officers were turning on each other. Faces collapsed under vicious punches, leg and foot bones snapped from kicks delivered near the mechanical maximum of human force, disabling both attacker and target. As soon as one man struck, he would abruptly lose concentration, his hands would drop—and another man would take him down. Within half a minute, every police officer but one was unconscious.
The middle of the courtroom was empty except for Simpson and Fiore. Both men seemed frozen in place. Then Fiore knelt down, and calmly smashed his forehead into the floor.
Fiore would survive, as would all of the officers, including the two who were shot, Steve Mercer and Tanya Brandt.
Janusek, motionless since being tackled by the police, got to his feet. His face was bloody, his nose smashed flat. He straightened the trench coat and recinched the belt. Then he stooped to pick up the fedora from where it had been pushed under a chair. He placed the hat firmly on his head, and then, facing Simpson, tilted the brim down in a kind of salute. Then he lifted both hands, the silver pistols plainly visible. O. J. Simpson, forty-eight years old and one of the greatest rushers in collegiate and NFL history, did not run.

7

Lew swung onto the shoulder and hit the brakes, sliding on loose gravel. We came to a stop under the dark rectangle of an unlit billboard, the road walled on both sides by forest.
Lew slapped on the dome light. “Give me the directions,” he said.
“These directions?” Lew hadn’t wanted me to print them out. We didn’t need any fucking MapQuest directions, he’d said. The Audi had GPS.
“Shut up and give me the fucking printouts.”
“It says the same thing it did the last twenty times I read it to you,” I said. “Highway Twelve, then thirty-five point two miles to Branch Road, then—”
“There is no fucking Branch Road!”
“Maybe not on your little blue screen there—”
“Jesus Christ, would you shut the fuck up about the GPS?” For the past two hours our little yellow arrow had glided across a blank blue screen. The satellite connection still seemed to be working, but the DVD of map data had nothing to say about this patch of Appalachia.
I said, “You spent what, fifty thousand dollars on this car? How much would it cost to get one of those that showed actual roads?”
He gripped the steering wheel with both hands and stared out through the windshield. “Give—me—the fucking—”
“Take ’em.” I slapped the pages onto his lap, then got out and slammed the door behind me.
It was 1:30 a.m., forty degrees, and dark, no light but the fingernail moon slicing in and out of high, opaque clouds. I felt like I had the flu: nausea, headache, aching joints. My hands still burned in their bandages.
We’d left Gurnee just after 5 a.m., ahead of the morning rush, zipping down the skyway through the heart of Chicago and riding a cresting wave of traffic onto I-80, heading east into the rising sun. Lew barely slowed through the toll plaza; thanks to the I-Pass on the Audi’s dash, each toll automatically deducted from his credit card. The female voice of the Audi’s GPS prompted us before every turn.
So
twenty-first century. If I weren’t so nervous about being pulled over by the cops, I might have enjoyed it.
Ten miles past Gary, Indiana, we drove into a wall of lake-effect snow and lost WXRT just as the angels were coveting Elvis Costello’s red shoes. We emerged twenty minutes later to sun and sweet driving. Ohio had been colonized at forty-mile intervals by glass-and-concrete flying saucers—the nicest oases I’d ever seen. Spacious and clean, appointed with shiny restaurants, arcades, and gleaming restrooms that clairvoyantly flushed, rinsed, and blow dried—everything but wiped your ass. We assembled a multivendor breakfast of Burger King hash-browns, Panera’s asiago bagels, and Starbucks venti lattés. Then while Lew revisited the auto-john, I stopped into the gift shop for ibuprofen and other medical supplies, and also picked up a newspaper. There was a short article on the Hyatt shooting.
“Did they catch the shooter?” Lew said.
“No arrests, no suspects, but they’re interviewing ‘persons of interest.’”
“It’s not too late to call the cops,” Lew said.
“No. No way.”
“Fine then,” Lew said, and handed me the keys. “You drive.”
“Really?”
The offer wasn’t entirely altruistic. As soon as he got in the passenger seat he set his beautiful silver laptop atop his lap and proceeded to daisy-chain himself to the car: cigarette lighter to laptop to cell phone to headset to ear.
“Smile,” he said, and took my picture with his phone. “I’m sending this to Amra.”
“You guys do this all the time?”
“Sure. We send each other pictures during the day. Or just IM. And e-mail, of course.”
“Lew?”
“Del?”
“What do you do when you two have sex, put on body suits and touch serial ports?”
“Nobody’s had sex through serial ports since 1987. We’re strictly FireWire, bro. My baby needs the bandwidth. Don’t you, baby?”
I hadn’t even realized Amra was on the line. I tried to ignore Lew while they talked, but it was impossible. There were several
really
s? and sudden glances at me that kept me on my toes.
“Okay,” Lew said, and pulled off the earphones and mike. “The cops called, but Amra thinks it was just routine, they were calling everybody who stayed in the hotel.”
“Do they know who did it yet?” I asked.
“It doesn’t sound like it, but I’ll check the online news in a sec. But here’s the weird thing. Did you call any of your friends and tell them that you were at our house last night?”
“What are you talking about? Of course not.”
“A guy stopped by this morning as Amra was getting ready for work. He said his name was Bertram Beech. This is the same guy who was calling Mom’s house, right?”
“He was at your
house
?”
“She said the guy creeped her out. Very intense, said he had to speak with you, said it was a matter of life or death.”
“No way.”
“Uh,
way.
What kind of head case says ‘a matter of life or death’?”
“The Bertram kind,” I said. “Did she tell him where I went?”
“Of course not. But listen, man, you can’t have him coming by the house again. Call him and tell him that it’s not cool.”
“All right, I’ll call him.” What could Bertram want? The phone calls were bad enough, but now he’d traveled all the way to Chicago, and somehow found Lew’s house. Well, that maybe wasn’t that difficult. I’d talked about my family with him in the hospital, and these days it wasn’t hard to find a phone number for almost anybody.
I suddenly realized that I was coming up on the bumper of an RV, and switched over to the left lane.
“Who is this guy?” Lew said. “Somebody from Colorado?”
“I met him in the hospital.” I saw the eyebrow raise in my peripheral vision. “Yeah, that hospital. He believes that powerful telepaths are secretly in charge of the planet, and that they’re possessing people for their own entertainment.”
“Powerful telepaths…,” Lew said.
“Slans,” I said.
Lew burst out laughing.
“You mean you didn’t know that
Slan
was nonfiction?” I said. “Bertram belongs to an organization that believes that Van Vogt intentionally—”
“What did you say—Van Vaht? It’s Van Voh.”
“No it’s not. You’ve gotta pronounce the
T
at least.”
“What, Van Vote? Don’t be an idiot. I bet you still say Submareener.”
“My
point—,
” I said.
“And ‘Mag-
net
-o.’”
“—is that Bertram thinks
Van Voggatuh
used fiction to cloak the truth.”
“As opposed to, say, your friend P. K. Dick, and Whitley Strieber, and—”
“Streeber.”
“And L. Ron Hubbard, who just made up shit and said it was the truth.”
“Exactly.”
Lew nodded. “I find your ideas intriguing, and I’d like to subscribe to your newsletter. What’s the name of this fine organization?”
“It gets better,” I said. “The Human League.”
“No way.”
“I’m not sure they realized the name was taken.”
“My God,” Lew said. “It’s the perfect cover for an elite fighting force—an eighties New Wave band! This is so
Buckaroo Banzai.
” He refolded his legs, no easy task in the Audi. “So this Bertram guy must have been thrilled to meet you, one of the pawns of the overlords. Did he explain why the masters of Earth would bother possessing an underemployed graphic artist and not, say, the national security advisor?”
“Oh yeah. He was convinced that my possession—well, all the showy possessions, like the Captain?—were for the entertainment of the other slans, kinda like theater for superhumans. The slans came to power in the forties, and they’re long-lived, and that’s why so many of the demons are so old-fashioned. They like their old radio shows and comic books—the Shadow, Captain America.”
Lew snorted. “Sure, that makes sense. They keep it a secret that they’re running the world, then they blow their cover by playing dress-up like Trekkers?”
“Only Trekkies say Trekkers,” I said. “There must be two types of slans—the responsible, world-dominating type, and the role-playing, geek slans.”
“White-boy racist geeks, judging from how my black friends reacted to the O. J. killing.”
I snorted. “Like you have black friends.”
“So did you tell Bert your theory that you’d trapped a demon?”
“We had a lot of time to talk.”
Lou sighed. “Well no wonder.”
“No wonder what? And it’s not a theory.”
“Say the slans are in charge,” he said. “These telepaths can invade any mind they want, bouncing around people’s heads like packets on a network. They go wherever they want, dropping into your personal hardware like a virus. But you, you’re special.”
“I’m antiviral?”
“Not exactly. You didn’t kill the demon, you just quarantined it, like a sandbox that keeps Trojan horse programs from dialing out.”
“You really gotta work on your metaphors,” I said. “How’s a sandbox supposed to stop a Trojan horse?”
“Shut up,” he explained. “The important thing is that you’ve trapped one. It can’t get out and infect other people. If you could teach people how to do that—”
“I don’t
want
to teach people how to trap one. It’s awful. Even if I knew what the trick was, which I
don’t,
nobody would want this thing in their head.”
“It can’t be worse than being possessed,” he said.
“You don’t get to have an opinion.”
“Okay, okay. Fine. But say that once you get this thing out of you, you could use the same trick that kept it in to keep it out. You’d own the world’s only demonic firewall.”
I rolled my eyes.
He pointed at me. “You, my friend, may be the ultimate weapon in the war against the slans.”
“Oh my God,” I said, my voice going spooky with awe. “That would make me…”
“The Chosen One!” we said simultaneously.
We rode in silence for a while. Then Lew said, “But seriously. Bertram can’t come to the house, not while Amra’s there alone. You gotta call him and tell him to cut that shit out.”
“I told you, I’ll call him.”
“Okay,” Lew said.
“Okay.”
We made great time crossing Ohio and Pennsylvania. My thoughts kept jumping from Dr. Ram to Valis to Mother Mariette. Lew distracted me by reading from some of the more tangential web pages we’d only skimmed the night before when we were looking up the priestess. Then he started streaming music from his laptop to the car radio.
“You got to hear this one,” Lew said. It started with a U2 guitar blast from “Vertigo” overdubbed with their spoken intro to “Helter Skelter,” which abruptly became Jet’s “Are You Gonna Be My Girl.” And all the chords matched. I hadn’t realized they were so similar.
“Hey, that’s cool,” I said, and then shut up, because suddenly Paul McCartney was singing “Lady Madonna” over that thrash of Jet chords, and it sounded like
those
two songs were meant for each other. And then as soon as I settled into that, a guitar riff from the Joe Walsh song kicked in—that one about “life’s been good to me so far,” I couldn’t recall the name. And then it was all three—Beatles, Jet, and Joe Walsh—punctuated at random by distant shouts of “What the fuck is going on!” that sounded like snippets from a Sex Pistols track. I couldn’t stop giggling.
“Holy shit!” I said to Lew. “Where did you get this stuff?”
“Downloaded it. They call ’em mash-ups.”
“I think I’m in love.”
He had hours of this stuff on his hard drive. We cut northeast into New York, and Lew played me Doors versus Blondie, Depeche Mode versus Marvin Gaye versus Cypress Hill, Madonna versus Sex Pistols, and on and on. It was like these DJs had tapped into all the pop songs in my brain, into the collective radio in all our brains, and remixed and relayered until the songs were having sex and making strange, beautiful babies.
Eventually we left the interstate behind and the music ran out, along with Lew’s cell phone service. For the past few hours we’d been twisting and bobbing along two-lane back roads, rollercoastering through pitch-black forests. And now we were lost. Or rather, the world was lost. The GPS told us exactly where we were, but had no idea where anything else was.
Permanent Global Position: You Are Here.
I walked away from the car, toward the trees, sucking in cold air. A few feet away from the headlights, it got very dark. I stood there, letting my eyes adjust. What had looked like a solid wall of shadow resolved into individual trees, evergreens interspersed with bare-limbed things with interlocking branches. Snow was still mounded under some of the trunks. Somewhere out there was a town called Harmonia Lake, and presumably a lake to go with it, and a house or trailer or tent that might have been, and might still be, Mother Mariette O’Connell’s home.
I crossed my arms against the cold, turned my back to the woods, and started back to the car. Lew, illuminated by the dome light, was flipping through pages of printouts and cursing.
Suddenly a light above the billboard sputtered to life, silvering the grass. I realized I wasn’t alone, and looked up.
A gray-green humanoid monster reached toward me with huge webbed hands. It was hairless, with a wide, pale belly like a toad’s, caught in midstride as it stalked out of some dimly rendered swamp on thickly muscled thighs, its crotch conveniently shadowed. The head was bald and round, mouth agape, neck gills fanned. It stared down at me with black goggly eyes.
“Oh Lew?” I called out. “Lew!”
He looked at me, scowling. I nodded at the sign.
The billboard was faded and peeling, but below the painted monster the huge block letters were clear enough: HAVE YOU SEEN THE SHUG?! And then below that, slightly smaller: MUSEUM & GIFT SHOP—HARMONIA LAKE MOTEL 2 MI. ON RIGHT.
Lew shook his head, then crumpled the remaining pages and tossed them in the backseat. “Fucking MapQuest,” he said.