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?”
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.”
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
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 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.
“What are these sculpture things, folk art?” I said. “They were at the motel, too.”
She didn’t answer. The front room was long and low-ceilinged, three barn-plank walls secured to the naked, curved side of the Airstream trailer by angle irons. The wooden walls were insulated almost floor to ceiling by books, on shelves built out of the same knotted wood as the planks. A few spaces had been hollowed out of books
