Pandemonium (12 page)

There are three ways to get a demon out, she said. Four, actually, but only three were viable.
All of them depended on persuading the demon to leave. There was no forcing the thing out, no
compelling.
The demon had to leave of its own free will.
But it was persuasion at the emotional level. Demons weren’t rational. You couldn’t reason with them, argue with them. They weren’t people, they were archetypes—two-dimensional characters acting out a familiar, ever-repeating script. Their goals were always the same, their methods predictable. The hosts changed, the specifics changed, but the story was always the same.
First, you could try to give the demon what it wanted—accede to its demands. If you brought the current story to a satisfactory conclusion, then perhaps it would move on to the next victim, to play out the next episode.
Or you could convince the demon that it wouldn’t get the story it wanted. Frustrate it; deprive it of its fun. You could try sensory deprivation and drive it out with boredom. Or you could simply put it in an environment it didn’t like, a setting or situation that ruined the story: take the Little Angel out of the hospital, take the Pirate King off the ship. Or you could make the victim into an unattractive host. It depended on the demon. The key was to learn the story, then subvert it.
The third way was to use a goat: some other host to take on the demon. Someone who more perfectly matched the demon’s needs, both physically and emotionally; someone the demon found irresistible. It wasn’t necessary to kidnap anyone, or trick them into shaking hands with the devil. There were plenty of volunteers, people who’d love to be a God toy. Probably half of the people at DemoniCon were praying that some demon would choose them, make them special. There were even professionals who’d dress up to lure a demon, though their success rate wasn’t high; the demons seemed to recognize hacks. No, a good goat was an earnest volunteer. All you had to do then was introduce the goat to the demon and let nature take its course.
“Think of possession as a hostage situation,” she said. “The bad man is inside the house, holding the girl with a gun to her head. You can’t rush the house. All you can do is give in to his demands, or try to convince him that the demands will never be met. Or, you can broker an exchange of hostages.”
“You said there were four ways,” Lew said. “What if exchanging hostages doesn’t work?”
O’Connell waved a hand. “Kill the hostage,” she said.

I got up from my seat, paced the floor. The carpet under my stocking feet felt greasy. Lew steepled his hands, thinking. O’Connell lit another cigarette.
“We need something else,” I said finally. “None of those will work for me.”
“Except the last one,” the priest said.
“Hey,” Lew warned her. Then: “Besides, they’re all the same idea. If all demons do is jump to the next host, then all we’re
ever
doing is exchanging hostages.”
O’Connell gave him a nod, the cigarette between her knuckles. “The driver’s got it.”
“So we have to find the right goat,” Lew said. “It’s like rigging a honey pot on a mail server.” O’Connell gave him a look, and he started to explain. “I work on computer networks. Sometimes to protect everybody else from spam, you put a new mail account on the server, and have it respond to all kinds of shit—mailing lists, Nigerian banking scandals, penis enlargement ads. The spam pours in. We collect all the addresses, blocking those from hitting the good mail accounts.” He sat up in his chair, warming to his idea. “Except that spam is infinite, and demons aren’t. If the demon’s in the honey pot, it’s not in you. And hey, there are people who’ll
volunteer
to take the hit for us. All we need is the right goat.”
“We can’t do that,” I said.
“All we’re talking about is doing it sooner, not later,” he said. “One way or another, the demon’s going to find its way to another host. Maybe years from now, maybe tomorrow, but shouldn’t
you
get to choose? You’ve done your time, man. Let somebody else have it for a while.”
I shook my head, but Lew was no longer looking at me. “So how do we find a goat?” he said to O’Connell. “What kind of person are we looking for?”
She shrugged. “Depends on the demon. The goat may be a particular type of person, or just somebody who happens to be in the right place at the right time. The Captain takes only soldiers, Smokestack Johnny appears only on trains, the Shug…”
“Let me guess,” Lew said. “Only takes fat, bald guys.”
She nodded. “Who live around the lake.”
“So this Shug thing,” he said. “It’s not a publicity gimmick—like, Nessie of the Finger Lakes. It’s a real demon.”
For some reason, this didn’t surprise me. I think I’d known from the moment I’d met Toby.
“The Shug protects the lake,” she said. “It’s tradition.”
Lew shook his head. “Some tradition. You know, you’d think any guy with a weight problem or a receding hairline would move out of the neighborhood pretty damn fast. I mean, the minute that Toby—”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
“—started losing his hair he shoulda got out of Dodge. Or started dieting. A big white boy like that—”
“Toby knew what he was doing!”
Lew sat back in his chair, clearly skeptical.
“Let me tell you about Toby,” O’Connell said. “One day when he’s seventeen, eighteen years old, this fine, good-looking lad suddenly shaves his head, starts eating everything in sight. He starts taking midnight swims. He works on his lung capacity, trying to stay fit despite the weight. Obesity and extreme exercise don’t mix, after all. The Shug hosts tend to die of heart attacks, or drowning, or both.”
“Wait a minute,” Lew said. “He
wanted
to be Shug?”
“He was making himself into the perfect host. His family was upset, of course. Toby’s father especially. He was a big man, and he had a temper.”
“A big man?” I asked. “A big, bald man?”
O’Connell smiled tightly, and made a small gesture with the hand holding the cigarette. “He wasn’t going to leave, he’d lived here his whole life. And he wasn’t in the best of health. Toby knew what he had to do, and he did it.”
“Holy shit,” Lew said.
As long as there’s a Harmonia Lake, there’s gotta be a Shug.
O’Connell looked at me. “So you see, it’s just a matter of knowing your enemy. Which one is yours, Mr. Pierce? Why don’t you sit down and tell us which demon you think has set up house in your soul.”
I didn’t sit down. The air between us was hazed with smoke. Inside my head, the demon scraped and shuffled, restless. I pressed my hand against the cool, curved side of the Airstream, breathing through my teeth.
I can’t live like this, I thought.
“It’s a demon called the Hellion,” I said. “It usually strikes kids who—”
“I know the Hellion,” O’Connell said shortly. “It’s certainly a clever choice.”
“I didn’t
choose
anything,” I said.
“The Hellion was part of the postwar cohort. Very active from the forties until about twenty years ago, when sightings suddenly became scarce. You’re the right age, and your story’s a tidy explanation for why it’s been so shy lately. Of course, you have a slight problem in that the Hellion didn’t disappear with you. There were dozens of sightings in the eighties—”
“Unconfirmed,” I said.
“Oh please, what’s confirmation? Parents are swearing that their child is possessed. Sure, the likeliest answer is that their little darlin’ just has attention deficit disorder, or maybe he never ‘attached’ to his mother, or maybe he’s just throwing a tantrum. But that still leaves a lot of cases. And there’s really no way to tell one way or another, is there? Who gets to decide who’s possessed and who’s not?”
“You do,” I said. “You know.”
“What does it matter?” Lew said, exasperated. “If the goat thing works, that ends the argument. All we need to be talking about now is how to find a replacement.”
“We can’t do that,”
I said again.
Lew sat back, shocked at something in my voice.
“The Hellion only takes children,” O’Connell told him. “Specifically, fair-haired lads about waist high.”
“Oh,” Lew said. “Right.”

Lew and I didn’t talk on the way back to the motel. When we pulled into the parking lot he said, “We’re done here, right?”
Here:
the middle of the woods in Bumfuck, New York.
O’Connell had made it clear she thought I was faking, and even if I wasn’t, she didn’t have much to offer. No rites, no rituals, no magic spells. Just the bargaining skills of a hostage negotiator, and a chance to sacrifice some innocent kid for my sake.
“Let’s go home,” I said.
But Lew was too worn out from yesterday’s day-long drive to start back tonight. We decided to get some sleep and head out early tomorrow. He went to his cabin for a nap while I walked the edge of the lake, one eye out for the Shug. The water was mirror-still. I felt fragile from lack of sleep, my limbs connected by misfiring circuits. The Hellion shuddered behind my eyeballs, reminding me: I’m here. I am with you always.
That evening we stopped at the front desk to check for messages, just in case O’Connell had suddenly remembered a handy incantation from the
Necronomicon.
Louise gave us directions to a restaurant. Lew complained that there were mice in his room.
“The mice aren’t in your room,” Louise said. “Your room’s out with the mice.”
We ate dinner fifteen miles away in a town called Merrett, at a storefront Italian restaurant with five tables—and one of those was the yellow chair table permanently reserved for the Fat Boy. The garlic bread was buttered French bread sprinkled with garlic powder, and the tomato sauce looked orange. I was glad I wasn’t hungry. My stomach had tightened from lack of sleep and the constant agitation of the Hellion. The demon had been in motion since O’Connell’s place, a ceaseless scrabbling. I wanted to pound my forehead against the table.
Lew took my plate and started finishing off my lasagna, just like when we were kids.
I said, “You know what I saw down in the basement the other day?”
“
RADAR Man
comics?”
“Close. I mean, that too. But I opened up Life and Death.”
“Heh,” Lew said. “The Cyclops threw a fit.”
“I was thinking, you could use the oceans on the Risk board to have naval battles. You know, with the stuff from Battleship.” I’d had this idea weeks ago, staring at the ceiling from my bed in the psych ward.
He nodded, chewing. “You’d have to figure out how to hide the ships. Maybe draw a grid on the oceans, but still use the Battleship boards to keep track of them.”
“But the ships should be able to deliver troops, or fire on the countries.”
“Oh yeah, for sure.”
We headed back to Harmonia Lake, Lew driving, and despite the distraction of the demon I found myself nodding off, only to wake up with a jerk, as if I were the one behind the wheel. My plan to stay awake until cured was not going to work, but I couldn’t afford to fall asleep, not like this. I’d have to strap myself in tonight. Tie a gag around my mouth and hope that it stopped the Hellion from screaming. I’d have to do this every night for the rest of my life.
Lew and I sorted out by dashboard light our key and block sets. Lew said he was going into the main house to call Amra. “Give her a kiss for me,” I said. “Tell her I’m sorry I stole her husband.”
I walked down the gravel road to my cabin. With each step, the demon threw itself against the cage of my skull. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and cold air gusted from the lake. I found the cabin steps in the dark, and started up. Lightning flashed silently from somewhere out of sight, briefly revealing the silhouettes of trees and a cloud-packed sky.
A fish was impaled on my door. A skinny, foot-long thing with an alligatorish snout. Fresh.
I stared at the door, wondering if I’d imagined it, but my eyes picked out the details in the gloom. Two of the barbs of the driftwood were poking through the fish’s white belly. There didn’t seem to be much blood. In the next stutter-flash of lightning, I made out two dark, dried trails running down from the puncture wounds like tear-driven mascara. The thunder rolled, louder and closer.
Okay. There’s a fish on my door.
I kept my head back as I inserted the key, turned it, and pushed open the door.
I flicked on the lights. The room was empty. The only place where there was room for anyone to hide was under the double bed. I knelt quickly, lifted up the bedspread. Dust and dark.
I shut the door slowly, so as not to dislodge the fish. I wasn’t sure I wanted it on my door, but I knew I didn’t want it lying on my stoop like some banana peel primed for Dagwood’s return home.
I sat down on the bed, pulled the duffel bag toward me, and rustled through my clothing, pulling out bike chains and locks and piling them next to me on the bed. When I came across the oil rag at the bottom of the bag, I set it on my lap. Unwrapped it like a baby.
The gleaming gun, a box of ammunition.
I opened the ammunition box. The bullets looked shiny and new, but who knew how old they were: ten years, twenty? I couldn’t remember Dad firing this thing. Maybe the gunpowder was unstable. Maybe the gun would explode the first time it fired.
At first I couldn’t eject the clip, but then my thumb found a latch at the top of the grip and the magazine pulled free. It was empty.
I picked a bullet from the ammo box, lined it up with the mouth of the magazine, and pressed it down into the spring-loaded chamber. I fed another bullet into the slot, and another. There was a possibility that no one had mentioned. Maybe only I could let the demon out. Maybe it needed me to open the gate. And if my brain shut down before it opened, then maybe it couldn’t get back into the world. Maybe it would end with me. That would be some kind of accomplishment, wouldn’t it? The first guy to erase a demon from the world.
I pushed the eighth bullet down into the spring-loaded magazine, then slipped the magazine back into the gun with a solid
clack.
The Hellion jumped at the sound, and I shut my eyes until it settled down.
Rain began to clatter against the roof, sounding like applause.
I slid my hand around the grip, lifted the gun, and touched the mouth of the barrel to my lips. The barrel was shaking, and I had to steady it with my free hand. I opened my mouth slightly, my upper lip sliding over the nub of the gun sight, then opened wider, let the metal slide between my teeth. I wanted my teeth out of the way, even though that couldn’t make much of a difference. I sat there, breathing in the smell of oil, tasting iron.
A simple thing. A little pressure on the trigger.
I thought about Lew. He’d be so pissed. He’d have to call Mom, try to explain. I couldn’t think about Mom.
I pulled out the gun, wiped my lips, then my eyes. My eyes were flooded. I moved the gun to the side of my head and pressed the muzzle to my temple.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Squeeze.
Ah, who the fuck was I kidding? I dropped my hand to my lap, still holding the gun. I couldn’t walk up to that cliff, couldn’t throw myself off. I was paralyzed. Too infatuated with my addiction to breathing, unable to extinguish my irrational belief that there was another way out.
Hope wasn’t a thing with feathers, it was a hundred-pound ball and chain. All you had to do was drag that sucker to the edge and throw it over first.
A hard knock on the door. I jerked at the sound. Jesus Fucking Christ, I could have fired the thing accidentally. I looked down at the .45, and embarrassment swept over me, as if I’d been caught masturbating. I had to hide the gun.
I stood up, quickly wrapped the pistol and ammo back in the oil rag, and stuffed the bundle deep into the duffel. The knock sounded again. What the hell does it take for a guy to get a couple minutes alone these days?
I smeared the tears from my eyes and lurched toward the door, then realized the chains and locks were still piled on the bed like a nest of snakes. Fuck it. Lew knew about the chains. I yanked open the door.
O’Connell stood there, the hood of her silver jacket pulled over her head, the rain ricocheting from her shoulders and head, forming a nimbus. The fish was still in place, one eye watching us.
“Yeah?” I said stupidly.
“I have a question, Mr. Pierce,” O’Connell said. “How did your mother lose her eye?”