said that she’d performed a successful exorcism on a young girl who’d been possessed by the Little Angel, and that the priest had performed
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several other exorcisms in the States. Over the next few years she racked up a series of wins, saving two other girls from the Angel, but also casting out demons as various as the Pirate King and the Painter. After 1999 she’d dropped out of sight—or at least, out of sight of the media and the web. We could find no phone number or e-mail address in the directories. The last known address came from a mention in the Spring, 1998, issue of the C. G. Jung Psychological Club of Philadelphia newsletter, which said that she was Mariette O’Connell “of”
Harmonia Lake, New York.
That’s when I found the hotel phone number. After the failed conversation with the old lady clerk, I told Lew that I had to go there, I had to find O’Connell. Lew looked at me, shook his head, and shuffled off to bed. To Amra. He came out ten minutes later, said we should leave in the morning before rush hour, and went back to the bedroom. The overhead light suddenly flared bright, making me wince. I sat up, heart pounding. I’d been dead asleep. Shit. I lurched out of bed before I could fall asleep again. The room was freezing. The little window had grown more translucent; the sky had grown marginally lighter.
I pulled on my shoes, tugged a sweatshirt out of my duffel, and opened the door to damp gray chill. A thick fog soaked up the light spilling past me, absorbed the feeble predawn glow forcing its way into the sky. I could see only the porch’s wooden steps and the suggestion of tree limbs—everything else was gray milk. I walked around the open space in front of the cabin, working my arms and flexing my neck like a boxer, as the grass wet my shins and the air lightened around me. Next to the cabin I found a path of stepping stones and followed them around the shack to a wooden dock that jutted into cloud. I walked down the creaking dock, hands jammed in my pockets. A slap and splash as something hit the water. The Shug!
That was my first thought. I stood there, heart racing—and then got a mental image of me standing there shaking like Don Knotts, and laughed. Wait till I tell Lew.
Ripples tocked against the pilings. I could see only a few feet into 1 1 8
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the fog. The ripples died. The narrow patch of water visible at the end of the dock smoothed, turned glossy black.
“Oooh-kay,” I said to myself. “Time to—”
Something big moved under the water, a pale expanse of flesh twice the size of a man, gliding just under the surface . . . and abruptly nosed down, diving, a smooth hump like a whale’s back barely breaking the surface. I screamed, fell back on my ass. Scrambled backward like a crab. I twisted sideways, somehow got my feet under me, and ran. The dock did not quite meet the shore; my foot fell into the gap, a drop of six inches, and I plunged headlong into the rocky dirt. Somehow I managed to tuck my bandaged hands into my midriff and hit with my right shoulder and cheek, a two-point landing that left me stunned and stupid.
A handful of seconds. I rolled onto my back and pushed myself up on my elbows. I scanned left, right, left, watching for movement in the shifting fog, ears straining. I heard nothing but the rasp of my own breath. The water lapped against the shore. I got up, backed my butt against a tree, and hunched there, panting.
Jesus Christ. Jesus Fucking Christ.
I eventually realized I was saying that out loud, and shut up. The sun had finally edged over the surface of the lake, and trees emerged from the fog. My breathing slowed to the point where I could stand up straight. To my left, behind the clump of trees where Lew’s cabin sat, another dock became visible. The expanse of water between the docks was smooth and empty.
I shook my head, and a low chuckle started in my chest. I couldn’t stop it. Oh Jesus. Wait till I tell Lew.
Still laughing, I turned toward the path back to the cabin. Twenty yards down the shoreline, the Shug waded out of the water. 8
Eventually I realized Lew was calling my name. I looked back toward shore to see him stumble through the bushes and nearly put his foot into the water. He clumped toward the dock. Even at this distance I could tell he was annoyed. I waved at him and went back to my conversation. The next time I looked back Lew had stopped midway down the landing. He was staring, but not at me.
The Shu’garath sat with his legs over the side, ankles in water, naked except for black plastic goggles on his forehead and a pair of dark nylon trunks. A gigantic baby, hairless and pale as a cave fish. I gestured Lew forward. My brother raised an eyebrow.
“Lew, I’d like you to meet the Beast from the Depths, the Terror of the Northern Lakes, the Shu’garath himself—Toby Larsen. Toby, this is my brother, Lew.”
Toby stood slowly, rising up to nearly seven feet. An expanse of milk-white skin. Huge thighs. A keg torso pregnant with a Buddha belly: glossy and tight and almost translucent, like something extruded by a glass blower. He gave off a powerful, yeasty odor. Lew had to look up at the man, a rare experience for Lew. And Toby looked down. Broad nose, tiny ears that seemed almost 1 2 0
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vestigial, rubbery pink lips. He blinked. His eyes seemed tiny compared to the black goggles perched on his smooth, Beluga forehead. Toby lifted one arm, a slablike thing with none of the comic book definition of a body builder’s. A weightlifter arm, a blacksmith arm. I gave Lew an admonishing look. Lew came to his senses and took the man’s giant paw in his own.
“Pleased to meet you,” Lew said. Without looking away from him, he said to me, “I couldn’t find you. I looked in your cabin . . .”
“I was out here and Toby swam right by me, scared the shit out of me! Do you know this man can hold his breath for nearly eight minutes?”
Toby shrugged: a ripple of meat.
“So,” Lew said. “You’re the Shug.”
“For thirty-five years,” Toby said. His voice was surprisingly soft.
“Shug number five,” I said.
I gave Lew the abbreviated version of the story Toby had told me over the past hour. Back in the twenties, Harmonia Lake had been a popular stop on the road between New York City and Montreal. Hotels, gas stations, resorts. Oliver Hardy had fished there. When the first Shu’garath was sighted in 1925, the indistinct photographs and breathless newspaper accounts only made the place more popular. Somebody got the idea of swimming around as the Shug, and for a while there was even an annual Shug festival: fireworks and eating contests and a boat parade. But in the fifties the interstate went through to the west, and then the only people who stopped into town were the Shug watchers. They still got a few tourists—the museum’s listed on the web, he said proudly—but most business came from fishing.
“So what does being the Shug involve, exactly?” Lew said, deadpan. “I mean, you swim around in fifty-degree water—”
“No, no,” Toby said. “It’s about forty-eight right now. But I’ve been in there colder than that. I can take the cold. I’ve got the insulation.”
“Sure, sure. But still . . . swimming around and scaring the shit out of people. That’s not exactly a full-time job.”
Toby stared at him. I lifted a hand, started to say something. Toby said, “I also do children’s parties.”
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I barked a laugh. Lew nodded, keeping a straight face. The big man pulled the goggles down over his eyes. “Besides, somebody’s got to do it. As long as there’s a Harmonia Lake, there’s gotta be a Shug.”
He padded to the end of the dock, stopped, looked over his shoulder. His head like a planetoid embedded on rolls of neck fat. “Oh, try Louise’s walnut hotcakes.”
He dove in, vanishing beneath the water. When he didn’t come up, Lew and I walked to the end of the dock. The fog had burned down to wisps. Harmonia Lake was much larger than we had suspected last night. The opposite shore was dimly visible across the water, on the other end of a road of sunlight. I couldn’
t guess at the lake’s shape; left and right the shoreline disappeared and reappeared as it traced scallops of land, the gaps hiding anything from shallow coves to vast expanses of water.
Lew and I watched for a few minutes, then started walking back up the dock, but both of us kept looking over our shoulders to see if the water had broken. At the shore we stood and waited: eight minutes, ten. We never saw him surface.
“Are you sure it was him?” Lew said. He was trying to pace, but the short metal leash of the pay phone kept yanking him back. Lew’s cell phone still hadn’t managed to find a signal, and it was cramping his style.
I stabbed another triple-stacked wedge of pancake, smeared it through the syrup. I’d stopped being even faintly hungry fifteen minutes ago. Now I was stuffed, engorged, infused . . . and I couldn’t stop putting the food in my mouth. The coffee was terrible and the bacon was ordinary, but the pancakes were avatars of some perfect Ur-cake whose existence until now could only be deduced from the statistical variations in other, lesser pancakes.
“Have you called the police?” Lew said into the phone. He glanced up at me, glared, then pivoted away. “I think you should call the police.”
I stabbed, I smeared, I swallowed. The Baby Condor woman, 1 2 2
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Louise, poured me more coffee and pointedly ignored Lew, who was obviously making too much noise.
Lew carefully put the phone back on the hook. He didn’t immediately come back to the table. He walked toward the gift shop, stopped, and then walked back. He leaned into the table, arms straight, and addressed the salt and pepper shakers in the middle of the table. “He’s sitting in a van outside our goddamn house.”
I didn’t have to ask who he was talking about.
“This van’s been parked on our street,” Lew said. “Amra passed it on the way to work, saw him sitting there. He’s fucking stalking her now.”
“Is he still there?”
“She called the cops, but the van was gone by the time they got there.” Lew stared at the checked vinyl.
I started to say: Bertram’s harmless, afraid of his own shadow.
“This is unacceptable, Del.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay?!”
“Okay!”
I got up awkwardly, levering my feet over the bench. A pound of weapons-grade carbohydrates sank lower in my gut. I sifted through my wallet until I’d found the ATM receipt where I’d written Bertram’s number after he’d called Mom’s house. My calling card was right there, but I didn’t know how many minutes were left, and why should I pay for it? I called collect. It rang only once—then there was a silence as whoever picked up negotiated with the computer to accept the call.
“Oh my God, is it really you, Del?” The connection had the clipped metallic sound of a cheap cell phone. His voice sounded strange—Bertram and I had never talked on the phone before—but I recognized him. “Where are you?” he asked.
There was no way I was telling him—the next day he’d be outside my cabin door. “What are you doing, Bertram? How the hell did you get to Chicago?”
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In the hospital he’d always been hunched over the phone by the nurses’ station: a little white guy, bald with a fringe of sandy hair, pudgy except for skinny legs. Every phone call he received was critical, every discussion freighted with meaning. To Bertram, casual conversation was a contradiction in terms. But Bertram wasn’t in the hospital in Fort Morgan; he was in a van in Chicago.
“It’s imperative that you and I talk,” Bertram said. “In person.”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen. I can call you in a couple weeks, but right now I need you to—”
“You don’t understand, this is important,” Bertram said. “I told my commander about your, uh, situation. This someone—I can’t say his name over the phone—very much wants to meet you. He has a solution, a kind of procedure that would allow you to be free of your, your . . .”
“Situation.”
“Exactly! I can hear in your voice that we understand each other.”
Understand each other? All I could think was, Bertram has a commander. Commander of the Human League.
“This is bigger than just you,” Bertram continued. “With your help, we can change the world.”
Jesus, Lew was right. Bertram, and all his fellow Human Leaguers, thought I was the Anti-Slan Firewall.
In the background of the call I heard a male voice say something I couldn’t pick up, and then Bertram said, “Del, if you would just tell us where you are, we could meet you.”
“Bertram, if this is about the—”
“Don’t say their name!” he said, panicked. “For goodness’ sake, you have no idea of the range of their scans. In 2004—”
“Bertram.”
“—a soldier in Srinagar—”
“Bertram, I need you to focus.”
“Focus?” he said, wounded. He exhaled loudly into the phone. I could picture him bent over his knees, the cell phone mashed into his face. “I am more focused than I have ever been in my life.”
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I stepped away from the phone, shaking my head, and the receiver cord brought me up short. I turned around as Mother Mariette O’Connell walked through the front door.
She was dressed in a silver nylon jacket, padded and stitched in a diamond pattern, zipped up to her neck. She glanced in our direction and then went left, toward the front desk.
She stopped.
“Here’s the deal,” I said to Bertram, speaking quickly. “Don’t call my mother. Don’t call my brother or sister-in-law. And do not, under any circumstances, go near their houses. The next time they see you, they’re going to call the cops. Do you understand?”
O’Connell turned, frowning. Her eyes narrowed. Bertram breathed into the phone. “Del, I’m just trying to—”
I thunked the big receiver onto the metal hook—an old-fashioned pleasure that cell phones couldn’t match—and then O’Connell was marching toward me. “What the fuck are you doing here?” she said. Lew didn’t budge from the table. The coward.
“It’s imperative that you and I talk,” I said. A moment later I was sitting on the ground.
“Ouch,” Lew said.
“Can somebubby gib me a nabkin?”
Louise came out of the kitchen holding the coffee pot, and froze. O’Connell turned away, shaking out her hand. My teeth must have broken the skin of her knuckles.
Lew pulled a tuft of napkins from the chrome dispenser, dropped them on my lap. I dabbed gingerly at my lower lip. I was in no hurry to get up.
“What did you do to her?” Louise demanded.
O’Connell spun back toward us. “And who are you?” she asked Lew.
He held up his hands. “I’m the driver.”
“Then you know your way back,” she said. Without turning away from Lew she looked at me, raised her arm, and pointed: a wrath-ofGod, get-thee-to-a-nunnery point. I didn’t know anyone outside of the
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nuthouse who looked comfortable wielding a gesture like that, but she was a natural.
“I told you in Chicago,” she said. “I can’t help you. You were traumatized by a demon as a child? See a therapist. You have no right to come to my hometown, bother my friends, and harass us. Go home, Mr. Pierce.”
I carefully peeled the napkins away from my lip, stared at the bright red blot. My mouth still stung, and more blood welled to the surface. I looked up at her until she dropped the finger.
“I guess Toby had you pegged wrong,” I said.
“Who?” Louise said, shocked.
“The Shu’garath? The gigantic guy who swims around in the lake?”
Louise said, “Toby talked to you?”
“Toby doesn’t talk to people,” O’Connell said.
“Well he talked to me. He’s a nice guy
, though I wish he had warned me about your right hook.” A warm dollop of blood seeped over my lip like gravy, and I patted at it. “He said that of course you’d help me. Said that if anybody could help me, it was you.”
“I’m retired,” O’Connell said.
Louise looked from me to O’Connell, her bird eyes expectant. We followed O’Connell’s Toyota pickup down the highway. Gray primer blotches covered the once-blue truck like a tropical disease. A few miles north of the motel she turned onto a steep dirt road that looked like it had been shelled by artillery. The pits were much deeper than the Audi’s clearance, and Lew had to ease in and out of them at an angle to avoid bottoming out. O’Connell immediately left us behind, and the next time we saw the pickup it was parked in a muddy clearing. On one side of the clearing was a steep drop-off, Harmonia Lake spread out below. On the other side was a collection of low, ramshackle structures. Or maybe one complex structure. It was hard to tell.
At the center of the cluster was a mass of rounded aluminum that 1 2 6
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used to be a silver Airstream trailer. The trailer had grown several new rooms, as well as a couple of porches, a deck, two open-sided sheds, and many awnings, constructed of barn-wood planks, vinyl siding, and rusting sheet metal. Covered walkways, roofed in thick green plastic and floored with sections of warped plywood, connected to a Plexiglaswalled greenhouse and two garages. One garage door was open, revealing an old pontoon boat surrounded floor to ceiling by industrial junk.
Lew and I walked gingerly over the muddied driveway and reached one of the front porches. A door had been left open for us. Next to the frame was a driftwood sculpture like those at the motel, all glossy hooks and barbs. The wall below it was stained, the deck glittering with fish scales, as if she’d been hanging her catch of the day on the thing. Lew gave me an appalled look.
I knocked on the frame, and could see O’Connell moving in a distant room.
“Take off your shoes and have a seat,” she called.
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