trees except for the grassy parking space out front.
Lew sighed. “You so fucking owe me.”
He kept the headlights on as we got our bags out of the trunk. The lake was a faint gleam through the trees behind the cabin. He handed me my key, wired to a wooden block big enough to be used as either a flotation device or mace, depending on the emergency. Lew glanced at the duffel and said, “You going to be okay?” Talking about the chains. Last night in their house Lew had watched, aghast, as I looped the chains through the bed frame, adjusting the slack.
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “Listen, thanks for coming with me. I know you hate to take off work.”
He waved me toward my cabin and turned away from me. “Go to bed.”
“Fair enough,” I said. I was tired enough to fall over. My cabin was only fifty feet from Lew’s, connected by a stone path through the trees, but a few steps away from the headlights I could barely see a thing. I kept my eyes wide and one hand out to stop me from ramming into trees. I eventually recognized the outline of a small porch, went up the three short steps, and nearly impaled myself: hanging on the door was another one of those squid- shaped driftwood eye-stabbers. My hand moved lower, found the knob, turned. The door was unlocked. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. I found the switch inside the room, and an overhead light came on. Something small and long-tailed darted into a hole in the wall.
The room was floored with specked linoleum, and some of the specks were dubious. A double bed took up most of the room, its brown-and-yellow polyester bedspread nicely complementing, in both style and time period, a small yellow Formica table with aluminum legs and a couple of matching chairs padded in split vinyl. A small square window opposite the door mirrored the light. There was no bathroom: no bath, no room, not even room for a bath. From the smell, the walls were insulated with old fish wrap.
“You in?” Lew called.
“Does yours have a Jacuzzi too?” I shouted back.
“Sleep tight, now.”
Outside, the headlights switched off (Lew’s magical remote control). I shut the door and dropped my duffel bag on the floor. It clanked.
Oh. Sleep tight. Very funny.
I could hear the lake creeping toward the cabin. The longer I sat in the little room, the clearer I could hear it, until it seemed to be lapping at the floorboards beneath my bed. Bloop. Blurp. Blu-doop. I sat on the bed, propped up and staring at the dead flies in the bowl of the overhead light. My rodent roommate stayed demurely out of sight.
The Hellion banged around inside my head like a drunk in a dark room.
On the ride today I’d realized that I’d been going about this all wrong. Knocking myself out with Nembutal obviously wasn’t the answer, because the demon was busting out anyway at irregular intervals. Besides, I was almost out of pills. And alcohol seemed to have no effect, because after infusing my gray matter with Coors Light I’d managed to not only black out but go rock-’n’-roll on a hotel. No, the only way to ensure a demon-free night was to stay awake. The question, then, was how long could a human being stay awake? Keith Richards could party for three days straight, but I wasn’t sure if he counted as a human being. I kept myself alert for a good hour by peeling off my bandages and poking at my poor beat-up hands. I re-covered the bigger cuts with fresh bits of gauze taped down with Band-Aids, and left the smaller abrasions to air out. The pain was useful, but for any long-term attempt at uninterrupted consciousness I needed chemical assistance. At the Ohio oasis I’d stocked up on packages of NoDoz and chased a few pills with my latte. I’d dry-swallowed a few more after getting into the cabin, but sooner or later I’d need to find something with a bit more oomph. Addiction didn’t scare me. That was like worrying about tetanus after a bullet to the head. I just needed to stay awake long enough to convince Mother Mariette to cure me. NoDoz wouldn’t cut it for long, though. If we didn’t find the exorcist quick, I’d have to build my own crystal meth lab.
Mother Mariette O’Connell, we’d learned (thank you, Google), was an Irish citizen and a priest in the Latin Tridentine Church, an Irish splinter group of the Church of Palmar de Troya in Spain, which itself (thanks again, Big G) was an apocalyptic cult that had broken away from mainstream Catholicism.
The Palmarians were run by “Bishop” Clemente Gomez who, upon the death of Pope Paul VI, declared himself to be Pope Gregory XVII of the Holy Palmarian Church. Gomez, a gay priest with abstinence problems, had been known in Seville as El Voltio—“too much voltage”—before a vision of Mary in the nearby village of Palmar de Troya triggered his religious conversion. He’d invented the Palmarian Catechism, which taught, among other things, that somewhere in space was the Planet of Mary—home to Elijah, Moses, and Saint John—where human sin had not yet reached, and that elsewhere was the Planet of the Anti-Christ, where salvation was impossible and demons from the fourth dimension were readying for Armageddon. Gomez lost his sight in a car accident in 1976, then declared that Mary would heal him, which she declined to do before he died. O’Connell had appeared in the United States sometime in the late eighties or early nineties. A San Jose Mercury News article from 1992
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
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 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.
