by Brian Hodge
At first I wasn’t sure what I was looking at: Xeroxes of hand-drawn maps, hastily scrawled notes from the exorcist’s journal appearing in the tiny yellow pools of my flashlight, pages upon pages of Latin phrases translated into English. Transcripts of the possessed boy’s ravings. Most of the entries recorded places, dates, and people — “Saxony, 608 AD, black pox, Ezekiel Commoner, fifteen year old stable boy, lost in trance,” and “San Francisco, 1901, Pastor Hinman, forty-three year old washer woman, cold stupor” — and they went on and on like that, page after page of spontaneous voices issuing forth from the corrupted vocal chords of Christopher Mirrish. And I went through at least fifty pages before landing on something I could use— a note written by the exorcist in the margin: Entity seems to have an aversion to holy water heated to the scalding point. Then he jotted: Perhaps a connection to infectious disease?
There was a sudden noise behind me, something papery whispering across the room. I spun around and saw nothing, but heard a strange scuttling noise, like tiny, brittle legs scurrying along the inside of the walls, and I noticed the large, carved, sandalwood crucifix above the cadenza was hanging upside down. There was a muffled moaning coming from the opposite wall which sounded just like my mother on her death bed. I will never forget that sound, that breathy death rattle. Heart racing, I quickly pulled a few dozen Xeroxes from the file, and folded them into my pocket.
Then I got the hell out of there.
A few minutes later I was in my rust-bucket Toyota, speeding through the cold night-mist and the blur of broken neon storefronts. I was chain smoking, trying to ignore the icy terror constricting my throat. It took me fifteen minutes to make it to Northwestern Medical Center, another fifteen to park and find the correct wing according to notes from the file. By the time I arrived at the fluorescent corridors of the Long Term Critical Care ward, visiting hours were drawing to a close. I had to flash a phony detective shield in order to get past the Nazi crone at the reception desk.
Christopher Mirrish was in Room 213, nestled in the molded contours of a coma bed, IV drips connected to his lifeless wrists, his pale face canted at an unnatural angle, as though his neck had been broken. I stood there for a long moment, staring at that battered shell of a human being. I could see his eyes moving beneath his translucent eye lids — REM sleep — and it started dawning on me what was going on: He was dreaming. Within the cold, stone cocoon of his coma, Christopher Mirrish was having a nightmare.
Gooseflesh washed over me, heart hammering. I slowly started backing out of the room.
There was a pay phone across the hall, next to the men’s room, and I dialed my shrink’s emergency number with a trembling hand. The answering service answered, and I told them it was an emergency.
A few minutes later, the voice of Mary Anne Garcia was on the line. “Hello? Jimmy?”
“I’m having a crisis,” I said. “Can you come down here? I’m at the hospital.”
“What’s happening?”
“You’ve got to help me with the dreams.”
After a long pause, the voice said, “Take a deep breath, Jimmy.”
“No! Listen to me. I’m not hysterical. I’m not being irrational. The last session we had, you said there are techniques, devices —”
“Let me call the attending in the psych ward —”
“No, no, I need you, I’m having a crisis here, and I must not fall asleep before I see you.”
“What’s the matter, Jimmy? What’s happening?”
I let out a pained sigh, then said very softly, “If I don’t talk to you before I go to sleep tonight, I will probably not survive.”
Another long pause. “Give me fifteen minutes.”
It took her twenty.
She arrived dressed in a khaki raincoat and scarf, an ID tag hanging around her neck. She looked a lot older than her thirty-eight years. We found a quiet place in the chapel at the end of the corridor, a place we could talk. The room was empty, and Dr. Garcia sat in the front pew, the soft light of a luminous crucifix reflecting off her olive skin.
I was pacing across the front of the altar. “How does it work?” I said, craving a cigarette. There was no smoking in the chapel, and I wasn’t about to break that rule. I was still a Catholic, after all.
“How does what work?”
I looked at her. “Whattya call it — lucid dreaming?”
She sighed, then reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a small black object the size of a deck of cards. It had a vinyl cover and a hank of electrical wire wrapped around it. “I thought you might bring it up,” she said. “So I brought the sample from my office.”
“What is it?”
She gave me a withering glance. “If I show you this, you’ve got to promise me you’ll reconsider medication.”
I told her I promised, then asked again how the thing worked.
She showed me how to operate the device, how it either plugged into the wall or worked off six double-A batteries. Then she demonstrated it, and taught me how to adjust it to my own personal biorhythms, my own tactile sensitivity.
“What do they call this thing?” I said finally, cupping the device in my palm.
She let out a weary sigh. “They call it a panic switch.”
I chose a nice warm spot on the carpeted floor behind the altar. I didn’t want to waste time going home, and besides, sometimes I can sleep better in foreign surroundings. I never could figure out why. But there was something comforting about the meager little chapel. It was tranquil and safe, and I was fairly certain it would remain deserted for hours. And even if someone did come in to pray or meditate, it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility for them to see some hapless visitor slumbering in the shadows behind the altar, dealing with some private grief.
But most importantly, all the soft, inverted lighting and innocuous icons — the crucifix, the simulated stained glass, the multi-denominational legends etched along the imitation oak joists — somehow served to bolster my confidence, and give me the nerve to do what I had to do.
I lowered myself to the floor and attached the diastolic clip to my fingertip.
The Panic Switch — available through most major pharmaceutical companies as well as The Sharper Image catalogue for $199.95 plus shipping — is a diabolically simple device. Before going to bed each night, the user connects the sensor to his or her fingertip, and then watches an LED window on the device that blinks a simple phrase while a mild pulse of electricity is sent into the user’s finger: THIS IS A DREAM… THIS IS A DREAM… THIS IS A DREAM. Then the user goes to sleep. And when he or she reaches the REM state and starts dreaming, the sensor reads the galvanic skin response and starts sending the same pulse into the user’s finger. In the dream, the user’s subconscious mind responds in kind, and the user sees an imaginary LED floating in dream-space that says THIS IS A DREAM.
Then the user can control events: a state known as “lucid dreaming”.
I lay my head down and felt the tiny pulse of electricity in my fingertip, the point of a delicate little icicle gently stabbing me, the window of the device in my left hand blinking its impassive message. There was one other component. A tiny ring of plastic around my right thumb, a button extending into my palm like a leaf that makes a cricket sound when clicked. This was the panic switch, a way out of a dream if things get too dicey. Programmed to squeeze, my right hand was my safety net.
It took me a while to drift off, my brain was so full of fire and brimstone. I stared at the fiberglass crucifix hovering over me, radiating cool, inverted light, and I thought of my mother, and how she always took me out for ice cream after mass. I thought about how much I hated that fucking evil sickness that took her from me, and how the demon was the incarnation of this terrible immune disease that had taken so many lives.
Sometime in the wee hours I finally drifted off —
— emerging into another world.
I was standing in the noxious shadows, cowering behind the trunk of a massive, ancient tr
ee, as a bloody killing frenzy unfolded before me. The monstrous baby was mauling one of the surgeons, gobbling at the man’s throat in watery, orgiastic gasps of blood and tissue. The rest of the surgical team — two doctors and three nurses — were already dead, lying sprawled across the strange outdoor surgical suite in pools of onyx-dark blood, their pus-stained tunics spattered and dotted.
A neon sign dropped from the empty air above me, flashing in my face: THIS IS A DREAM… THIS IS A DREAM… THIS IS A DREAM.
I snapped my fingers, and a stainless steel .357 magnum with a six-inch barrel appeared in my hand. I’m not sure why I chose this particular gun — my subconscious was doing a lot of the work right now — but it didn’t matter. I was lucid now, and powerful, and this little fucking demon baby was about to meet its match. I could feel the panic switch in my palm like a little, cold, plastic coin. I wasn’t going to need it.
I stepped out of the shadows and strode toward the death scene, thumbing back the hammer, bellowing at the beast with God’s voice: “BAAL!!”
The creature arched its back suddenly like a mongrel cat, whirling around, fixing its yellow gaze on me. Its mouth peeled away from rows of jagged incisors until it resembled a mocking smile. Then a throaty, whiskey-cured voice cackled out of the thing: “Your mother was delicious, Jimmy, a delicacy, and just the beginning —”
I fired five times, the muzzle flashing like a photographer’s strobe.
The blasts barely missed the demon child, most of them chewing divots from the tree trunk, sending fragments of bark and debris in all directions. The beast spun and started across a wasted field behind the tree. The field was strewn with pieces of my childhood bedroom, broken panels of my crib, torn Mickey Mouse lampshades, shredded pajamas stained with bile and urine, and dozens upon dozens of diseased corpses, victims of the plague years, charred and contorted by the cleansing fires. I chased the monster across this terrible field, my strides huge, athletic, inhumanly powerful. I was a Tyrannosaurus Rex with an endless supply of hollow-point bullets filled with scalding hot holy water.
Ahead of me, the beast — no longer a baby, but some kind of hairless quadruped with leathery skin, saber teeth and powerful haunches — was charging toward a burning building that was just coming into view on the horizon. I raced after the thing, firing my unlimited supply of blessed high-powered slugs. The bullets popped and boomed like a Chinese fireworks display, tracing out across the dreamscape on radiant filaments of holy light, just barely missing the demon.
The beast was scared, I could feel it, and I was lucid and full of righteous rage. This creature – Baal — was the embodiment of sickness, the Bringer of Plagues, and I was going to be the one to punch its ticket. For my mother. For all the innocents who had suffered.
In the distance — visually about a hundred yards away, but hard to judge in dream-time — the demon was approaching the burning building. It was an old fashioned gothic cathedral like St. Lukes, the Catholic church my mom used to take me to as a child. Flames licked up the side of the steeple, curling around the cross. Thick black smoke poured out of the lintels and galleries, and super-heated rays of overcast light distorted its shape. The beast galloped through an open entrance into the flickering darkness inside, and I followed it.
Inside the church, the air was on fire, the heat-waves sparking and fizzing. The long, central nave was a battlefield of debris and over-turned pews, and I cautiously moved along one wall, gun raised and gripped in both hands, the timbers collapsing around me. I could feel the heat on the back of my neck, and the tiny plastic button in my palm — the panic switch — pressed against the beaver-tail grip of the pistol.
“BAAL!”
My voice was swallowed by the jet-engine roar of the fire, and all of a sudden I didn’t feel so powerful anymore. In fact, I felt just a little bit terrified. How could this be happening? This was my dream, goddamnit! I owned this place!
I could see a figure in the smoke and flickering light ahead of me — near the ruined altar — something huge and hairy, hunched over a limp object on the floor. I approached, holding the gun with trembling hands. Something was wrong. I could hear my own voice, thin and reedy like a frightened child, reciting the Novena in my ears: Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you, blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
In the flickering light, the thing in front of me came into focus — enormous, feral, half-man half-goat, whiskered in wiry fur, foaming at the mouth, its body hectic with lesions and open sores. Its mammoth spine was arched, its loins thrusting into something sprawled on the floor beneath it. I could hear its noxious breath, the orgasmic gasping noises as it humped its victim.
I screamed.
I could see my mother’s emaciated body beneath the demon, jerking with each thrust, and she was near death, and all at once I was cast back in time, standing helpless at my mother’s death bed, watching her die in that airless bedroom with the oxygen tanks and stained sheets. Eyes sunken, flesh pallid and ashen, she was gasping her last breaths, and I’ll never forget that sound — her mucousy, ragged breaths — and all of a sudden I felt my eyes burning with tears, the anguish coursing through me, and I was sobbing suddenly, sobbing uncontrollably, and the gun was gone, and my strength was gone, and I was a puny, frightened teenager witnessing his beloved mother’s death, and I did the only thing I could think of doing.
I pressed the panic switch, and the dream winked out of existence.
I staggered backward in utter darkness, flailing for purchase, reaching for a hand-hold. It was as though the fabric of the dream-scape had been torn down the middle, revealing a vacuum of pitch-black space behind it. The change was so abrupt, so violent, so unexpected, the breath was practically knocked out of me.
I landed on the something solid — a floor, as it were — and cowered there for a moment, my heart racing. Was I awake? I couldn’t tell, it was so dark, and I was still pretty groggy, pretty dazed. I saw no signs of the hospital chapel, no soft, inverted lighting, no imitation stained glass. But I did see a faint capillary of light in the blackness before me. I could just barely make it out — a yellow bruise growing brighter by the second. I managed to rise to a sitting position, catching my breath.
Somebody was hurrying toward me. I saw the dull outline of a young man holding a kerosene lantern, his face partially obscured by shadows. There were others. A women following close behind him, an older man a few paces behind her. They came quickly, with a desperate sort of purpose.
“Mr. Quint?” the young man said in an urgent, hushed voice as he approached. Dressed in a dirty hospital gown, he had a gaunt, haunted face. I recognized the prominent chin, the pale green eyes.
“What’s going on?” I said in a hoarse whisper, gazing around the darkness. In the firelight I could see the charred parquet floor of the dream cathedral, the busted timbers of ancient pews, and the shards of broken colored glass.
“You’re still in the dream, Mr. Quint,” said Christopher Mirrish. “We don’t have much time.”
“What —?”
“He’ll be back soon enough,” warned the women in the stained pinafore dress behind Mirrish. “Stopping the dream just makes him more powerful.”
“There’s strength in numbers,” the older man said, his grizzled face reflecting the kerosene light. “We gotta get outta here.”
They helped me up, then quickly ushered me through the burning shadows and out a side door.
The air outside the church was crackling with heat and death-stench, and I nearly stumbled a couple of times. They helped me across a killing field, then up the side of a rubble-strewn hill that resembled a Serbian ghetto.
“You’ve been chosen, Mr. Quint,” Mirrish was saying as they boosted me up the hill.
“Chosen for what?”
“The Movement,” the young man said. “Your mother recommended you.”
“My mother?�
�� I felt buoyant, unsteady. “My mother’s been dead for ten years.”
“She loved you very much,” said the old woman in the pinafore dress. “I imagine she’d be very proud.”
“What movement?” I asked.
Christopher Mirrish glanced at me as though my question were ridiculous. “The resistance movement, Mr. Quint. It’s up to us to keep the thing trapped.”
I looked at him. “Trapped?”
“That’s right — here in the nightmare.”
We were nearing the top of the ridge. There were others waiting for us in a grove of dead, skeletal trees. A black man with an antique rifle. A little girl in a camouflage jacket. Somber glances were exchanged. I noticed they each wore a necklace with a crucifix.
“Let’s go,” the black man said, and started down the rutted path. His voice was strained with fear and determination. “There’s reinforcements waiting for us.”
I was numb with panic as I followed Mirrish and his motley gang toward the gloomy horizon, a deeper dread stewing in me, a realization. These people were familiar. I recognized their faces from the file in Father Parrick’s office. Case studies documented by the church. Victims of possession. Each of them currently lying in some critical care ward somewhere, life support equipment breathing air into their ravaged bodies.
In the dream, we were all heading toward a ghost ship of a city, its skyline blackened by decay and pollution, its thoroughfares desiccated like hardened arteries.
My new home.
Purgatory for the hunter and hunted alike.
I followed them across the outskirts, trying to remember the words to the Lord’s Prayer, compulsively clenching and unclenching my right fist.
The panic switch was gone.