“After all, the doctor could change your name, but he couldn’t change your sex, or your age; all that’s pertinent to the profile. Like that little slingshot—that’s a signature prop of the Hellion. But even more than the slingshot, there’s that particular move—shooting the glasses off someone’s face. Now, that’s something that can’t be easily faked. The little kid’s gotta have strength, coordination. Of course, you 1 4 6
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probably didn’t mean to smash her eye to a pulp. But still, it’s a hell of a shot.”
“It wasn’t me,” I said.
“I know,” she said. Resigned to it.
Fuck you, I thought. Now you believe me?
I turned away from her, but the room was too small to pace. There was nowhere to go but outside.
“Before you were possessed,” she went on in that new, weary voice,
“dozens of adults were injured by the Hellion firing that thing at people’s faces. But after you, even though people kept reporting appearances of the Hellion, not a one. In the twenty-one years since your mother was injured, no child has done what you did.” She paused, and when I looked at her, she was watching my eyes. The weariness was a pose; her body was relaxed, but her eyes were filled with the same energy I’d felt back at the hotel. “You were the last one, Del. You trapped it.”
“Jesus Christ!” I shouted, then started laughing. “What do you think I’ve been trying to tell you!”
We sat in the small room as the rain came down and the ceiling clouded with cigarette smoke. O’Connell asked pointed questions and I answered at length, making this something between a clinical intake session and a confession. I was tired of choosing my words, sparing the gory details, managing everyone’s reactions. With a kind of escalating, giddy recklessness, I told her everything, daring her to disbelieve me. The first possession, the wild behavior, the way they’d strapped me down until they thought they’d driven the Hellion out. I told her about the accidents that brought it back to my awareness, the black well that wanted to pull me in, the pressure in my skull, the wolf-out sessions. I enumerated the ways I’d tried to keep the demon strapped down: the therapy sessions with Dr. Aaron, the stay in the psych ward, the drugs. My bid to get Dr. Ram to cut the thing out of me.
“The receptors in the brain that Dr. Ram identified, I think they’re like . . . antennas. Broadcasting stations. Remove them, and you—”
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Something in her face told me this was old news to her. I remembered the first time I had seen her, walking into the hotel with Dr. Ram, deep in conversation. “You thought he was on the right track too.”
“I did, until the Truth killed him. I’m not sure why or how Dr. Ram was lying. Maybe he was faking his data.” She shrugged. “We’ll find out sooner or later, I imagine.” She put out the stub of her cigarette, reached for her pack. “Now. Tell me again how your family drove the Hellion away. They strapped you down and read you books?”
“Lew read me comics. My mom read me Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. I loved it.”
“What do you mean, you loved it?” Before I could answer she stood up, frowning. She leaned into the little window that overlooked the lake and cupped her hand to the glass.
I heard it then, over the pattering rain. The chop of helicopter blades. The sound grew louder, until it was directly overhead: a deep, thumping drone. The helicopter was either very close, or very, very big. It passed on, but we could still hear it.
“Search and rescue?” I asked.
“I don’t think so.”
The sound grew loud again as the helicopter circled back. I went to the door and opened it. Fifty yards away, over the motel parking lot, a circle of lights descended through the dark and rain like a UFO, settling behind the silhouettes of trees. The helicopter filled almost the entire parking lot, the blades of its twin rotors nearly brushing the tree limbs. It looked like a Huey, one of those huge transports the army used, but it was newer and sleeker than that. A Huey redesigned by Audi.
Lew came up behind me. We were ten feet from the edge of the parking lot, back in the trees. “What the fuck is going on?” he said.
“What’s she doing here?” Meaning O’Connell. The priest had pulled on her silver jacket and was jogging for the porch of the main house, 1 4 8
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where Louise stood with a long coat pulled around her. The old woman looked pissed.
The only marking visible on the helicopter was a logo painted onto the side door and the nose: a gold H in a gold circle.
“We’re being invaded by Hilton?” Lew said.
“Maybe they’re buying out the motel.”
The rotors gradually slowed. Louise stepped down from the porch and stalked toward the helicopter, past the plywood cutout of the Shug. O’Connell called to her and then reluctantly followed. The side hatch slid open and five bulky, helmeted men jumped to the ground and fanned out. Lew and I instinctively crouched. The men wore some kind of blue-black camouflage, and they were heavily encumbered with packs, belts, and bandoliers. Jutting from the back of each helmet was a thick black cable that ran down the man’s back to connect to the pack at his waist, giving the men the appearance of ponytailed warriors from a Chinese martial arts flick. In their hands they carried bulbous things that looked like Star Trek phasers. None of them seemed to have seen me or Lew, but they were scanning the trees.
Lew grabbed my shoulder. “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” he said into my ear.
“No, wait,” I said.
Two more men appeared in the open hatch of the helicopter. The first man was square-shaped, waist as wide as his broad shoulders, belt cinched tight under his gut, making his legs look skinny. He was completely bald. He wore a silky flight jacket over the same camo gear as the other men, but he was helmetless. There was something on his face, though—a kind of metal mesh, as if he’d made a form-fitting mask of chicken wire.
The man next to him was much shorter. He was dressed in street clothes—dark chinos and a gray, fuzzy sweater—but his head was covered by the same black helmet as the camo goons. His face was scrunched in concern, and he kept glancing up at the bigger man.
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“The H doesn’t stand for Hilton,” I said under my breath. Louise shouted something, and several of the men shouted back—
commando shit like “Get down! Freeze!”—aiming their little science fiction weapons at her and O’Connell.
I stood up and Lew grabbed my arm. “What the fuck are you doing?” he said.
“They’re here for me!” I said.
I stepped forward, and some of the men swiveled to face me, barking orders to halt. I lifted my hands in the air and stepped onto the gravel of the parking lot. The foot soldiers surrounded me. I resisted the urge to glance backward at Lew, hoping they wouldn’t notice him, but no—they yelled for him to come out with me. From the helicopter doorway the smaller man waved excitedly. I waggled a hand, but only slightly—I didn’t want to give these guys an excuse to shoot.
The man with the chicken-wire face hopped down and strode toward me with an assured smile, like a pastor welcoming a sinner back to church. He was fifty, maybe sixty years old, the stubble on his scalp gray. A few feet from him I realized that the metal on his face was no mask; copper wire was stitched into his skin, threaded over and under. The skin was raw and peeling.
He held out a hand, and the skin there was embroidered too—a mesh glove.
“Delacorte Pierce,” he said in a booming, theatrical voice. “I am Commander Stoltz of the Human League.”
He stood there, hand out and smile steady, waiting for me to shake. The goons—I could only think of them as goons—seemed to aim their phasers a little more forcefully, if that was possible. They were all white men, faces wide and puffy beneath their black helmets. Some of the bulk that I’d attributed to body armor turned out to be bee
r gut and man boobs: most of these guys were seriously overweight. I gripped Commander Stoltz’s hand. The commander didn’t wince, exactly, but his smile faltered for a moment. The ridged skin of 1 5 0
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his palms felt like scar tissue, and was alarmingly hot, like a waffle iron warming up.
The short man in the sweater looked up at me, beaming. “Hi, Del!”
I sighed. “Let me guess: Caller ID.”
He shook his head, smiling. “You called collect. But the calling number shows up on my bill. I got it on the web.”
I’m an idiot. I never should have called from a landline. “I thought we had an agreement, Bertram.”
“You’re going to thank me later,” he said.
I didn’t think so. I nodded toward the goon to my right, at the thing in his hand that looked like a plastic bar of soap. “What are those supposed to be?”
“Show him,” Commander Stoltz said.
No boom or pop: just a delicate zip! and my vision went white. I hit the gravel on my side, my limbs useless. The pain, when it caught up to me a second later, was mathematically pure. And it didn’t stop. A thin wire connected my chest to the mouth of the goon’s gun, and the pain flowed for an absurdly long time.
The goon must have released the trigger at some point, but it was several seconds before thoughts could tumble into the void where the pain had been. My body felt like a pile of cooked, boneless meat. One of the camouflaged men did complicated things to my wrists, and commented on all the bandages on my hands. The other man fastened one of those helmets onto my head. I couldn’t marshal the neuromuscular resources for even a feeble thrash. Bertram leaned down into my line of sight. “I’m really sorry about this, Del. I really am.”
Fuck you! I shouted. You just fucking Tasered me! Converted through my nonworking vocal cords, this came out; “Faaagaaah!”
Somewhere above me in the unseen land of the vertical, much shouting. Lew, O’Connell, the goons, even Louise—all of them yelling. God, they wouldn’t Taser an old woman, would they? The shock would kill her.
“Take these people inside,” the commander ordered.
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“You’re making a terrible mistake,” O’Connell said. Those hard Irish r’s.
“There’s no mistake,” Stoltz said. “You have no idea how dangerous this man is. But don’t worry, we have no intention of harming him. Bertram, go with your colleagues and explain the situation to these people.”
I should have been scared, or angry, but all I could think was : Colleagues. Co-leagues. Heh.
“Shouldn’t I stay out here with Del?” Bertram said. “I could help—”
“That’s an order,” Stoltz said.
The man behind me pulled my torso into a sitting position. My helmeted head lolled forward like a bowling ball. Two goons herded the group to the main house. Lew glanced back as they reached the top of the steps, and hesitated. The gunman behind him gestured with his Taser, and Lew reluctantly went inside.
The commander patted me on the shoulder. “Let’s walk and talk.”
“At first I didn’t believe Bertram’s story,” Commander Stoltz said. “He has a history of mental troubles, as you know.”
I was too afraid of being Tasered again to point out that this was coming from a human hot plate who got his operating instructions from a pulp science fiction novel. We were walking slowly down the gravel road toward my cabin, one Human Leaguer a few feet ahead of us and two behind, their flashlights bouncing along the ground with us, skidding up into the trees. It had taken a few minutes to get my land legs back. My hands were cinched behind me in some kind of plastic cuffs, and they’d also fastened one of those packs onto my back. It was heavier than it had looked on the fat boys; the thing must be all battery.
“The independent evidence, however, was irrefutable. And considering your recent troubles in Chicago, it seemed as if indeed you were losing control for good. You must understand that we had to act quickly.”
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“Oh, sure, of course,” I said, keeping the sarcasm out of my voice. I tried to subtly flex my hands, but the cuffs, whatever they were made of, had no give. I needed to stay calm, think my way out of this, but all I wanted to do was run screaming into the trees.
“The helmet you’re wearing operates on the same principles as my own personal integrity system,” he continued. “The constantly shifting electromagnetic field creates a kind of Faraday cage that interferes with the psionic frequencies of the GedankenKinder. Not only does it—”
“The who?”
“The Thought Children. A parallel race, descended from Neanderthals, with psychic abilities far beyond our own. The source of the so-called demons.”
What the fuck? Neanderthals?
We’d passed Lew’s cabin and my own. The yellow light shining through the trees ahead of us came from the safety light above the washhouse door.
“I thought you guys were all about the slans,” I said. “Bertram said—”
“Bertram’s only been a member of the league for a year. He’s not been fully authorized, and his personal integrity system is not up to the required level.” The commander touched me on the shoulder, trying to impart the seriousness of the matter. “We’re at war with telepaths, Del—intelligence can’t be trusted to an unsecured medium.”
“But you’re telling me,” I said.
“This is on a need-to-know basis—and I very much want you to understand some things, my friend. Bertram’s already told you that Van Vogt”—he pronounced the name Van Vote—“used the word ‘slan’ as a code for what popular culture has mislabeled ‘demons.’ That much is obvious, even to the casual reader. What Bertram has not been trusted with are the many other coded meanings embedded in the text. For example . . .”
There was no way of stopping the commander now.
“. . . consider the tendriled and tendrilless slans in the book. Van
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Vogt made the tendrils external, which is excellent melodrama, but does that mean we should be on the alert for people with actual snakelike appendages growing out of their heads?” He laughed dismissively. Oh yeah, how silly. “Only now do we understand that ‘tendrils’ represent the physical structures present in the brains of the GedankenKinder, deformations that human neuroscientists have only recently confirmed. And think about the emphasis in the book on electronic thought broadcasters and receivers, and all the uses of numerical combinations and codes. Once I understood how Van Vogt had sowed the book with clues to the psionic blocking frequencies, it was only a matter of time until I could build our own versions of the Porgrave devices. That helmet you’re wearing—while it’s not quite up to the level of the three-sixty system I use—is more than adequate to block their telepathic scans. And as for ‘possession,’ mental transference in either direction, what Van Vogt called ‘hypnotic control,’ is completely impossible.”
My God, I thought. It’s always the same. One day this guy’s the assistant manager at Home Depot, the next he’s a prophet with a direct line on eternal truth. It didn’t matter if it was John 3:16 or the Kabala or No Money Down Real Estate audio tapes. It all came down to the Book, the Mission, and the absolute fucking Certainty. I tilted my helmeted head toward him. “And you’ve tested these things,” I said skeptically.
“My system has never been penetrated,” he said, clapping a hand on my shoulder. “Not once in the ten years since I discovered the frequencies. It’s our greatest weapon against them, Del.” We went past the washhouse, all the lights behind us now. I’d walked this way earlier, but nothing seemed familiar in the dark. The road ended somewhere ahead of us—it couldn’t be more than fifty yards—at a cabin that had looked vacant to me this afternoon. At least, its eye-stabber door decoration hadn’t had a fish on it. Beyond the cabin was a short pier, and beyond that was nothing but water
and forest and a footpath snaking through the trees, roughly skirting the lake. “The field generator accomplishes with technology what you’ve managed to do on 1 5 4
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your own, by accident. But it’s not perfect. Which brings us to our problem.”
“There’s no problem,” I said earnestly. I didn’t know what this walk in the woods was about, but I did not like being tied up and jerked through the forest like a squealer in a mob film. “The demon’s totally under control.”
“Del, Del.” He chuckled condescendingly. “We know your control’s slipping. Bertram told us all about it. Isn’t that how you two ended up meeting each other in the first place?” He was pleased with this point. “No, your system isn’t working at all.”
“You want to put me in a cage, is that it? Or you want to wire me up like you. That’s the solution Bertram was talking about.”
He shook his head, but I couldn’t make out his expression. It was dark, and the helmet had slid down, obscuring my vision. He gripped the back of my arm and tugged me forward.
“I wish it were that easy. Or rather, that simple. Installing a threesixty system is no trivial matter. It’s painful—I can attest to that—and the chance of infection is very high. But once you’re fully wired, there’s no better defense on the planet. However . . .”
I didn’t like the sound of “however.”
“As good as the three-sixty system is, it’s not secure enough for your needs. Now, most of us, we’re only trying to keep the slans out, whenever they might turn their attention to us. And if they succeeded in psychically seizing me, I’m only one man, a citizen no more important than any member of the league.” He’d delivered the speech before. No doubt the Man of the People thing went over real big with the troops. “But with you, Del, the beast is already inside the cage. Say that we fitted you with the three-sixty system—what if the power supply fails? What if you cut yourself and break the field? These are dangers I constantly live with, but with you, the stakes are much higher. Can we risk letting the beast out? Can we allow the Hellion to ruin the lives of untold children?”
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