Bertram obeyed. O’Connell paused in her CPR to unbelt the drowned man and yank down his pants. “We need blankets, lots of them. Find Louise. Go!”
Bertram turned to go just as one of the Human League guards—
the one who had been thrown back into the wall by Lew’s punch—
came through the bushes at the shoreline. His beefy face was sweaty and flushed. He stared at the big man at the edge of the water, then down at O’Connell busy on the ground over the naked man. “They’re all dead,” he said to Bertram. “Harp, Torrence, Parrish. We’ve got to find the commander. We’ve got to get—”
Bertram nodded toward the pier, at the mass of cloth and flesh and wire. The Leaguer took a step forward before registering what he was seeing. He made a whining, despairing sound, then turned to Bertram in confusion.
“Go!” O’Connell ordered.
Bertram hustled toward the woods. The Leaguer hesitated, then bolted after him.
O’Connell resumed CPR, alternating breaths with compressions. In a few minutes she was panting with the effort. She sat up. “This isn’t working,” she said, trying to catch her 1 6 6
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breath. She looked at Lew’s body. It listed to the right because of the damaged leg but remained standing. It was shivering, but otherwise unmoving. Awaiting commands.
“Del, you’ve got to go back in.”
Lew’s body didn’t respond.
“You’ve done this before. The pool, Del. You saved yourself before. You have to go back in.”
How?
“I don’t know how,” Lew’s voice said.
“Dammit, you got out, you can get back in.” She got to her feet.
“You can’t stay—” She made a slashing gesture, aimed at Lew’s chest.
“In there. In someone else. Get back in your body, Del.”
My body.
A rumble of big engines. The rumble grew louder, then was joined by a rising whine. The helicopter lifted over the treetops in a ring of lights. It turned on its axis, tilted toward the lake, and zoomed away. In Lew’s vision, where the vehicle had disappeared was an absence, a dot of deeper black. The mouth of the well opened, edges fitfully expanding, eating the sky. The twisting shaft like a gullet, dropping, or rising, until it exploded into an infinity of tributaries that divided and divided again: black fireworks.
The well tugged at me, but less forcefully than it had under the water. I could resist it, or I could fall into it. All that was required was that I be willing to die, again.
Somehow O’Connell got us to the hospital in Louise’s ’92 Taurus station wagon, the only car big enough for all of us. Bertram rode with O’Connell up front. I lay diagonally in the back, covered with blankets. Lew rode in the middle seat, leaning against the window, Louise next to him holding towels to his nose. The muscles of Lew’s triceps were torn, and he couldn’t lift his arms. I was conscious, my eyes open. I could hear everything that was said, but couldn’t make myself move or talk. Just as well.
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The hospital was an underfunded, fifties-era county institution forty-five minutes from Harmonia Lake. When I arrived in the ER my core temperature was 83 degrees, my heart rate somewhere near twenty beats per minute. I was breathing slowly but regularly, which surprised them. At that temperature, my central nervous system should have shut down like a carnival in winter. The staff was small, but they knew hypothermia; plenty of drunk fishermen falling out of their boats. They fastened a mask over me that hissed hot, humidified oxygen into my lungs, and set up an IV of warmed saline.
They didn’t know what to make of Lew’s injuries, though. O’Connell told them that he’d dived in to rescue me from drowning, but he looked as if he’d been in a car accident. He’d burst dozens of arteries in his nose and cheeks, creating a full-faucet nosebleed that was surprisingly hard to stop. His face had swelled with blood, turning his eyes into piggy slits. As well as the torn triceps, several muscles in his back were pulled. His right kneecap had popped loose from the tendons, floating under the skin, and would require orthopedic surgery. Worse, blood tests showed that he’d suffered a heart attack. Only the massive amounts of adrenaline in his system had kept him from dying on the spot.
My shiver reaction came back online after thirty minutes of oxygen and IVs, and my core temp started to rise. This seemed to make the ER doctor very relieved. By morning I was breathing without the mask, and the rectal thermometer pegged me at a toasty 94.2. My first visitor was Bertram. He wouldn’t stop apologizing. “I swear to God, Del, that was never part of the plan! It’s—it’s—completely against the League philosophy! We use only humane, nonlethal weapons.”
“Humane? Have you ever been shot by a Taser?”
“But we’d never hurt you. ‘The use of force is a black crime.’ It’s one of our core beliefs. Killing you was never in the plan.”
“Bertram, you weren’t in on the plan, you were part of the plan.”
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He was crushed, and for a moment I felt sorry for him. A moment. I got him out of the room by telling him I was tired. If you’re in a hospital bed, you’re entitled to a range of efficient social tactics. Later in the morning O’Connell appeared in my doorway looking like Super Exorcist. She was back in her voluminous black cassock, which served as a matte backdrop to the gigantic hunk of silver that hung from her neck on industrial-gauge chain. The crucifix was a nine-inch-long naturalist rendition of Jesus in maximum agony mode. It looked like it weighed five pounds.
I didn’t know how long she’d been standing there. It was too late to pretend to be sleeping.
“Hi,” I said.
“How are you feeling?” she said. This was probably a required question for clerical visits. The forms must apply even to dubiously ordained priests of schismatic sects.
“Not bad,” I lied. My mouth felt cottony, and I cleared my throat.
“Warmer.” They’d put some kind of hot-water tube vest around my chest, and now that my temperature was above the danger zone, they let me heat up my extremities too. The nurses had piled four or five blankets onto me, covered them with a sheet, and tucked the edges tight, creating a perfectly smooth mound that hid any suggestion of legs or arms. I hadn’t moved enough to disturb their handiwork.
“Your doctor’s amazed at your progress.”
“This morning I impressed my nurses by sipping chicken broth. Very exciting.” I smiled, but I didn’t have the energy to sell it. I changed the subject. “Have you seen Lew?”
“I stopped in just now. He’s fairly medicated at the moment, not in any pain.” She walked to the end of the bed. She didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands. “He doesn’t remember rescuing you. That’s standard.”
Standard for possession, she meant.
I tried to change the subject again. “That’s good in a way,” I said.
“The less he knows, the less he’ll get sucked into the investigation.”
“What investigation would that be?” O’Connell’s face was set into
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an expression of mild curiosity. There was no one else in the room, but she was performing just the same.
I didn’t know what to say. Commander Stoltz and at least three of his men were dead, killed by the Shug. The rest of the Human League, all except Bertram, had fled in the helicopter. True, they’d come to kill me, so they weren’t about to go to the police. But there were still four dead men. You couldn’t have people die in your town and just pretend it didn’t happen. You had to at least look into it, didn’t you?
But no. If they called in the cops, what could they do? Arrest Toby, kill him? And then the Shug would just move on to the next host. This couldn’t have been the first time people had disappeared at the lake. It wouldn’t be the last.
O’Connell watched my face, saw me get it.
“It’s Harmonia Lake, D
el,” she said.
Holy shit.
“You’ll still have to answer some questions, though,” she said. She paced to the window, leaned against it. “Lew wants to know what happened to him. He wasn’t happy with my answers.”
“What’d you tell him?” I said.
“Exactly what I saw,” she said. The morning light was behind her, and I couldn’t make out her face. “I saw him snap handcuffs like chopsticks, shrug off a Taser, disable two armed men. I saw him save his brother from drowning.” She paused. “That’s what I saw. Now why don’t you tell me what happened.”
“I was at the bottom of the lake, remember? I was unconscious until—”
“Don’t lie, not to me,” she said quietly.
It was too hard to look into the sunlight. I stared down at the mound of bedclothes covering me from chest to toes like a white casket.
“How’d you do it, Del?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“You might want to keep your voice down.” She stood up, but her 1 7 0
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face was still in shadow. “You jumped. You possessed your brother, you controlled him, and then you jumped back into your own body. You can try to pretend it didn’t happen, you can pretend it was some neardeath hallucination. But you did it.”
“Look, I’m not saying that . . .” I took a breath.
“Okay,” I said. “Something happened. But I don’t know how—it just did, okay?” I bought myself time to think by closing my eyes and opening them slowly, as if dealing with some internal perturbation. Hospital Bed Tactic 12.
“I told you about the black well,” I said. “I saw it again. And this time I went into it. I . . . rode it. And at the end of it was . . . Lew.”
“You’re telling me,” she said, “that you just clicked your heels and wished real hard.”
“I don’t know how it works,” I said. “What the hell do you want from me?”
She stepped away from my window, circled my bed. I could see her face again, and it was sealed tight, the same mask I’d seen her use too many times now.
“So what now, then?” she said icily. She crossed her arms under her breasts; the crucified Jesus tilted up, his eyes on mine. “You’re all cured?”
“No,” I said. “It’s still here.” I sat up in bed, felt a wave of dizziness, and shut my eyes. “The Hellion’s still inside. I can feel it.”
“Now, that’s interesting.” She went to the door, looked over her shoulder at me. “So why didn’t it jump when you left it? You weren’t holding it back anymore. That’s what you’ve been doing all this time, isn’t it, holding it back?”
Lew was only two doors down, but it might as well have been a mile. We could have called each other, I guess, but I didn’t want to bother him. They’d told me he could barely lift his arms, so how would he pick up the phone? He must have made at least one call, though. My mother called me at noon to tell me that she and Amra would be there by this evening—tomorrow morning at the latest. They were driving in, and they didn’t know if they could get there by the end of visiting
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hours. She asked only a few questions—just enough to confirm the basic story she’d gotten from Amra, who’d gotten it from Lew. Mom was restraining herself. For now.
I spent most of the day inert as a statue, falling in and out of sleep without moving my head. Nurses came in at two-hour intervals to take my temperature, but their questions didn’t require more than a grunt or a nod. I thought about Christopher Reeve. I tried to imagine lying there paralyzed, watching each day’s sunlight track across the wall. But Reeve hadn’t stayed in bed. Okay, he was rich—high-tech wheelchair, staff of nurses, as many physical therapists as he wanted—but he was determined. People magazine said he worked for a year just to learn to move his pinky. How motivated was that? Eventually he even retaught his body to breathe on its own. Inch by inch, he was clawing his way out of that chair.
And then? Superman gets killed by a fucking bedsore infection. The sky outside the window darkened. Visiting hours came and went, without Mom and Amra. I closed my eyes in relief.
“You snuck up on me,” Lew said.
I sat in the dark in the chair beside his bed. I’d been watching him sleep for a long time, trying to decide if I should wake him. It was past midnight. The night staff seemed to be skeletal, and no one had noticed me shuffling down the hallway like an old man. It was only two doors, but it took me forever. I felt like my muscles had turned to jelly under the water, but I forced myself to keep lifting one foot, then the other. Move the pinky, Mr. Reeve.
“Sorry about that,” I said.
“Didn’t know you were mobile.” His voice was slowed a notch from painkillers.
My face heated with embarrassment. “You got the worst of it.”
He tilted his head in a suggestion of a shrug. “I guess.”
He was propped up in bed, his arms unmoving at his sides. His right leg was in a cast from thigh to calf, to stabilize the knee. My eyes had adjusted to the dark, but I couldn’t read his expression past the bandages, the bruises that looked like deeper shadows. 1 7 2
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“O’Connell says you don’t remember anything,” I said.
“One minute I was with her and Louise and the guards. The next, lying there next to the water, screaming my head off.”
“You don’t remember anything else—running after me, diving in?”
“Should I remember something?”
Run.
Faster.
“Nah. Get some sleep.” I pushed myself slowly out of the chair.
“Mom’ll be here in the morning and your sleeping days will be over.”
“But now you’ve woken me up.”
“You want me to read you a comic book?” I said.
“Hm?”
“Nothing. Mom told me about when we were kids. She said you used to sit with me and read me—” I got a clear image of Lew, holding up a page from The Flash. It was Flash versus Dr. Light, and Flash was moving in a red-and-yellow blur that was faster than light.
“You okay?” Lew said.
“I just . . .” My voice caught. “I just need to get to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.”
I used the door frame for support and shuffled into the hallway, managed to make it back to my room without getting busted by the nurses. I sat on the edge of the bed, unable to get that image out of my head: seven-year-old Lew in the chair, holding that Flash comic. How many nights had he sat there, waiting for his little brother to come back? Waiting for the wild boy who’d maimed his mother to go away. And Mom, reading Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel over and over.
O’Connell asking, What do you mean, you loved it?
I clicked on the bedside lamp. My vision was blurred, and it was hard to make out the instructions on the phone’s faceplate, but I finally got an outside line. The call was picked up after only two rings. Louise sounded exactly as she had the night I’d phoned from Lew’s house in Gurnee: tired and annoyed.
“This is Del,” I said, trying to control my voice. “Del Pierce.” Stu-
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pid: How many Dels could she know? How many had she just taken to the hospital? “I need to reach Mother Mariette. Can you tell her to call me at the hospital as soon you see her? Hello?”
The phone had gone silent. I thought she’d hung up, and then O’Connell came on the line. “What is it? What’s happened?”
I cleared my throat, ran the back of my hand over my eyes. “You knew, didn’t you? You knew before the commander showed up.”
“Knew what, Del?”
“I shouldn’t remember them reading to me. I shouldn’t remember being the Hellion.”
“No. Probably not.”
“When I took Lew, I could feel him, feel him fighting me. Fighting me just like—”
“Del, I�
��m coming over there. Don’t do anything. I’m giving the phone to Louise for a minute, so please stay on the phone . . .”
Oh God. The Hellion was still inside me, clawing at my skull. Kicking out the posts. And the walls were coming down.
D E M O N O L O G Y
T H E L I T T L E A NGE L
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, 1977
When the large black Mercedes pulled up to the curb, Dr. Wayne Randolph left the shelter of the awning and hurried into the rain like an eager doorman, umbrella at the ready. He didn’t care if he looked desperate. He liked to think he was smart enough not to pretend.
He opened the passenger door, and the old woman looked up at him from under her hat. She favored him with a brief smile. “You must be Dr. Randolph,” she said in a soft Swiss-German accent. They’d met years before at the first ICOP, but of course she wouldn’t remember him; he’d been just a medical student then. Dr. Toni Wolff, however, was the same as he remembered her from twenty years before: ancient, tiny, and somehow invulnerable, like a well-preserved insect specimen. She wore a formal black evening gown, and held a very informal brown leather bag on her lap.
“Thank God you could come so quickly,” he said. She’d made it across town in only twenty-five minutes, a New York miracle. “I’m sorry to interrupt your evening.”
“Thank you for calling Red Book,” she said. “Some of your colleagues
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stubbornly refuse our help.” Her voice, too, was as he remembered it: cigarettes and Switzerland. The driver, a trim, fortyish man dressed in a tuxedo, hefted an oldfashioned wooden wheelchair from the car’s voluminous trunk and set it up beside the car. “Hi, I’m Frederick,” he said. He’d just gotten Dr. Wolff into the chair when headlights slewed into the entranceway. A small white MG
skidded to a stop just inches from the Mercedes’ rear bumper. A young woman in a sleek red dress hopped out from behind the wheel and ran around the back of the sports car, somehow managing to move gracefully in six-inch clogs. “Sorry I’m late!” she said. Her black hair seemed to shine in the rain. The dress was some kind of silky wrap, tied at the hip, that threatened at any moment to become not a dress at all.
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