Pandemonium (25 page)

The sound grew louder as I climbed. When I rounded the final landing I found the source: a white girl, eight or nine years old, dressed in a white lacy nightgown. Her glossy brown hair hung in curls to her shoulders. She sat on the step in front of the third-floor exit, sobbing into arms crossed over her knees, her shoulders shaking. Her feet were bare and dirty up to the shins, as if she’d walked for miles through fields.
I stood very still. There was no way past her.
She lifted her head, looked down the stairs at me. Her eyes glistened, and her cheeks were wet. “No one will
help
me,” she wailed.
I put a hand on the rail, moved up a step. They said the Angel could kill with a touch.
“I
haff
to get inside, but he won’t let me. I try and try, but he’s so
big
and
strong
and I’m just a little
girl.
” She wiped at her nose. “None of the others even listen to me. And
you
won’t help me, you’re just a kid and you never listen to
anybody.
All you do is play nasty pranks.”
“I’m not like that,” I said. “Not…now.” I took another step, stooped a bit.
“I’d like to help you,” I said. “Let me go up there. There’s a friend of mine, a woman with no hair, and I’m afraid she might be in trouble.”
She rolled her eyes. “The
bald
lady? What kind of girl would make herself so
ugly
like that?” She sniffed. “She
said
she’d help me, but she was no help at
all.
”
“What happened?” I said quietly.
The Angel shook her head, exasperated. Glossy curls swayed and bounced. “See for yourself.”
She stood, wiped at her cheeks, and leaned back to pull open the heavy door. I followed her out.
The long hallway was empty for most of its length. At the end, where it T’d with another corridor, a man stood in an open doorway, arms crossed over his chest. He wore a red top and red tights, and a white cape that hung down his back. A figure lay on the floor in front of his white boots.
I walked forward, a sick feeling in my stomach.
It was O’Connell. She lay sprawled at his feet, one arm flopped across her chest, the other stretched in my direction, reaching toward a pistol that lay on the floor. Her eyes were closed. Her mouth pooled with blood.
The caped man looked at me, smiled. His face was square and handsome, and his hair, so black it was almost blue, shone as if coated with Vaseline. “Hi there,” he said. The Boy Marvel, I presumed. But a full-grown man, just like in the comics.
I slowly walked forward. “I just want to take her out of here,” I said to him.
The Little Angel spun to face me, her small fists clenched. “
What
did you say?”
“I’d like to move her,” I said to the man, and stepped closer.
He moved too fast for me to see. One moment his arms were crossed over his chest; the next they were straight in front of him, and I was flying back. My shoulder hit the floor first and I tumbled.
I landed on my chest. I couldn’t breathe. My lungs felt like they’d been smashed to the back of my ribs.
“No one gets to the boy except through me,” the caped man said. His voice carried easily, like a radio actor leaning into the mike.
I turned to my side, gasping. Twenty feet away, at the other end of the hallway from the Boy Marvel, the Truth stood with his hands at his sides, his face shadowed by the brim of his hat. Beside him stood a gray-haired man wearing only pajama bottoms. His chest and wide belly were covered with white hair. The old man looked at me for several seconds, then he opened his hand and showed me the silver butter knife he was holding.
I got my elbows under me, pushed myself to a sitting position. Who the hell was this now?
The old man closed his fist, then turned to the wall and plunged the tip of the knife into the drywall. He dragged down, slicing a line that puffed chalk, then slashed sideways. Three more quick strokes and he’d carved the suggestion of a hallway and the outline of the door. He looked over at me and winked.
The Painter. Well, fine. At least there’d be a record of this night.
The demon wouldn’t help me, but neither would he get in my way. That wasn’t his job. And the Truth wouldn’t interfere unless somebody violated his code of honesty.
I got to my feet and turned back to the Boy Marvel. The Little Angel stood between us, her arms crossed petulantly. “But he
wants
me in,” she told the caped man. “You know he does. How long do I have to wait?”
“What—” I coughed wetly. “What did you do to O’Connell?”
“I never hit a lady,” the caped man said. He stepped over O’Connell’s body, picked up the pistol. “But she was no lady.” He gripped the gun by both ends and frowned in concentration, like George Reeves working on a rubber prop. The muzzle snapped away from the base, and metal parts clinked to the floor.
He shrugged, tossed the two pieces at me. The pistol grip struck the floor and broke open. Bullets bounced out of the cartridge and rolled, glinting in the yellow light.
O’Connell had lied. She hadn’t thrown away my father’s .45. She’d kept it, probably as protection against me.
“Nobody’s a threat here,” I said to the Boy Marvel. “I’m not trying to get past you. I just—”
“No!”
the Angel screamed. She bunched her fists and glared at me. “You
promised.
You said you’d
help
me!”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Suddenly she spun toward the caped man and dove between his legs. She wasn’t fast enough. He grabbed her by one ankle and hauled her into the air. Her gown fell over her head, revealing ruffled white bloomers.
“Now wait just a gosh darn minute!” he said.
She screamed and clawed at his chest. Whatever the Angel’s power, he was immune. He lifted her higher, and his free hand closed into a fist.
“You’re not acting like a young lady,” he warned.
The body he inhabited belonged to an innocent man: some mechanic or dentist or cable repairman who’d been a little too handsome, a little too square-jawed. He didn’t deserve to die. But neither did the girl who’d been possessed by the Little Angel. Somewhere a mother and father had awakened to find their daughter vanished.
I stooped to pick up one of the copper-colored bullets, gasped as ribs grated against each other. The slingshot was still in my back pocket.
I tugged the weapon free. Tucked the bullet into the leather pouch. Pulled back the old black rubber until gray cracks opened in its skin. The Angel angrily jerked and swung in the man’s grip, arms pummeling the air, intermittently blocking my view of his face.
A one-in-a-million shot, I thought.
“Hey Marvel,” I said.
The Boy Marvel glanced toward me, eyes widening in surprise.
I fired. His head jerked back, and his body pitched backward into the room. The Angel dropped to the ground almost on top of O’Connell.
I let go of the slingshot and glanced behind me. The Truth and the Painter were watching, but they made no move to stop me. I shuffled forward until I could crouch next to O’Connell. I touched her throat. Her skin was warm, but my hand trembled too much to discern a pulse.
“My goodness!” the Angel said. She rose to her feet, brushed off her gown. She shook her curls at the caped man. “No one’s ever done
that
before!”
I glanced up. There was only one patient in the room—an ancient man who lay propped up and unmoving in the bed. His thin arms, pale as onionskin, lay atop the blankets. Wires and tubes connected him to the machine beside him.
I stood up, stepped carefully over O’Connell and the caped man in the doorway.
The old man was as unmoving as a corpse, eyes half-lidded and unblinking. One thin, clear tube dropped from an IV stand and disappeared down one nostril. Only the beeping of the machine told me he was alive.
His face was cracked and yellowed as old paper. Little remained of the boy in the pictures, the boy on the rock. Barely enough to recognize him.
“Hey, Bobby,” I said.
He didn’t move. He stared out the windows, where the glass pulsed with blue: squad cars on their way, or already at the entrance below the window. The sky was the color of fog.
“Uh-oh,” the Little Angel said.
I turned, and the Boy Marvel sat up, a wide grin on his face. His right eye was a pulpy mess, and red tears ran down his cheek. He reached into the bloody socket and pulled out the bullet. He flicked it at me, sending it whistling past my ear.
“You
are
a little hellion,” he said. He hopped to his feet, smoothed back his greased hair.
“And you’re a
meanie,
” the Angel said.
The caped man lunged for the girl. She screamed and danced back. I threw myself across his arm.
He lifted me easily, and I hung on. “That’s enough, gosh darn it!” he said sternly. He spun me, jerked his arm, trying to shake me off. I clamped down, arms wrapped around his steely biceps. He whipped me back and forth, and I cinched tighter.
I shouldn’t have had the strength for this. The pain in my chest should have paralyzed me or driven me unconscious.
He smashed me into the wall, pressed a forearm into my neck. He gritted his teeth and bore down. Somehow I hung on. Like a man possessed, I thought. I would have laughed if I could.
The room’s only patient ignored us. Outside the window I could see dawn light striking the tin roof of the farmhouse, the stark posts of the barn, the toppled sections of the silo. Spots appeared in my vision, and my thoughts began to spiral down strange paths. How many years had Bobby watched his farm—decades? I wondered how many years he’d lain there, trapped, before he started longing for someone to end it.
Of course the Boy Marvel couldn’t perform that task—it was against his nature. He’d never allow anyone to hurt the boy. Not even another demon.
But the Angel had her job to do. O’Connell must have understood what was happening. Last night she’d figured out that Bobby Noon was alive, that he was watching them from the hospital. Or maybe she’d known for longer than that. She’d been the Angel’s avatar for so many years that she’d probably felt the call too. Maybe she’d come to Kansas with me because she knew she’d have to play the angel of death one more time.
Someone needed to play that role. I thought of Commander Stoltz, hauling me along the dock:
We can’t live like this—we can’t live with these monsters.
I heard a distant drone, but my attention drifted back to the caped man. He leaned into me, his arm like an iron bar at my throat. The wound I’d given him was too bloody to have ever been depicted in Bobby’s golden-age funny books. I was struck by several other uncomic details: the stubble on his jaw, the stink of his breath. The frayed cape was homemade, the red uniform too tight and pulling apart at the seams, as if he’d outgrown it years ago.
The drone grew louder, as did the sound of my pulse pounding in my ears. No: Del’s pulse. Del’s ears. If this body stopped breathing it wouldn’t be me who died. The demon and its cohort would remain. I’d understood last night that out of the hundred demons in the world, my own little family had been born out of the boy who lived there. I just hadn’t realized we’d be reuniting so soon. The gang’s all here, I thought.
No. Not the whole gang. The Truth and the Painter had come, and the Little Angel, and Captain and Johnny. The Boy Marvel and I made seven.
One of us was missing.
I kicked weakly at the caped man’s shins, tried to speak. We had to get out of the building, get everyone out, but any croak I managed to make was drowned out by the noise. The drone had become a roar.
Outside the window, sunlight flashed on metal. It dove toward us out of the sky above the farmhouse: A blur of propeller, a bright bubble glass canopy, and wings like a silver knife edge.
The Boy Marvel abruptly dropped his arm and turned toward the window. I fell to the floor, gasping, and covered my head with one arm.
The engine roar seemed to fill the room—and abruptly fell away. We were on the top floor of the hospital, and the aircraft must have passed only twenty or thirty feet above our heads.
I looked back toward the doorway. O’Connell still lay on the floor, her mouth bloody, but her eyes were open.
The Boy Marvel stood at the window, hands on his hips. He laughed. “Well
that
was a close one, eh?”
I slowly got to my feet, shook my head. I tried to speak, coughed instead.
The Boy Marvel glanced back at me, cocked his head, and then he heard it. The growl of the plane’s engine, rising in pitch. It had turned around for another pass.
I was too tired to try to protect myself this time. I fell back against the wall, eyes on the ceiling. The plane passed overhead a second time, then appeared in the window, flying away from us, nose down. The circles on the undersides of the wings looked like two eyes.
“Whoa, Nelly!” the Boy Marvel said, awed and happy as a kid at a fireworks display. And of course we had the best seats in the house. One more show for Bobby.
The light from the fireball lit the caped man in a halo. The sound arrived an instant later, making the window shudder. The plane must have been loaded with fuel to cause such an explosion.
“Aww,” the Boy Marvel said, suddenly deflated. “It hit the house.”
I stepped closer to the window. The top story of the farmhouse had vanished, and the structure below was nothing but a mass of fire. Black oily smoke roiled into the sky.
The Little Angel tiptoed into the room. She caught my eye, held a finger to her lips.
The girl climbed up on the bed. She straddled the old man’s hips and leaned forward to hold his face in her hands so that he seemed to be looking into her eyes.
“Wait—,” I said, the sound rasping in my throat.
The Boy Marvel turned away from the window. He saw her and shouted, his voice like thunder.
The Little Angel daintily kissed the old man on his unmoving lips. “Nighty night,” she said.

16

I’m alive; evil am I.
Del’s mother wanted to take me to the emergency room. She saw the bruise at my neck, lifted my shirt, and gasped at a deeper, larger bruise the shape of Australia. But I was done with hospitals. I told her I was fine, that I just needed to lie still for a while.
She quickly changed the sheets in my old room. I lay down, and she brought a chair into the room and sat beside me. She asked me questions, and I answered them truthfully, but I knew that much of what I said didn’t make sense to her. Bertram popped in and out, not wanting to listen in, unable to stop himself. He kept asking if we needed food, drinks. Neither of us was hungry, but I consented to iced tea. Del’s mother waited until Bertram was gone, and then she said, “I don’t understand—why did you go to Kansas?”
I thought about the paper-thin clues I’d followed: a few paintings, a page in a comic book, a made-up town that happened to exist. The chain of reasoning had a kind of dream logic, but like a dream it made less and less sense the more I examined it. It didn’t matter that it had turned out to be true. The certainty I’d felt along the way, the magnetic pull of that little dot on the map—those came from something else. Some
one
else. I’d been drawn to Olympia as surely as any of the other demons.
“I have to start from the beginning,” I said. “When Del was possessed.” She started to say something, and I charged on. “I don’t know how it happened, but after your son was possessed, somehow you got me to stay. And your son, Del—”
“Stop talking like that,” she said angrily. One eye glistened with tears; the other regarded me coldly. “Why are you talking about yourself like that?”
“This is the story you have to hear,” I said. “When your son was five years old, he was possessed by a demon. And the demon decided to stay.”