though their success rate wasn’t high; the demons seemed to recognize hacks. No, a good goat was an earnest volunteer. All you had to do then was introduce the goat to the demon and let nature take its course.
“Think of possession as a hostage situation,” she said. “The bad man is inside the house, holding the girl with a gun to her head. You can’t rush the house. All you can do is give in to his demands, or try to convince him that the demands will never be met. Or, you can broker an exchange of hostages.”
“You said there were four ways,” Lew said. “What if exchanging hostages doesn’t work?”
O’Connell waved a hand. “Kill the hostage,” she said. I got up from my seat, paced the floor. The carpet under my stocking feet felt greasy. Lew steepled his hands, thinking. O’Connell lit another cigarette.
“We need something else,” I said finally. “None of those will work for me.”
“Except the last one,” the priest said.
“Hey,” Lew warned her. Then: “Besides, they’re all the same idea.
If all demons do is jump to the next host, then all we’re ever doing is exchanging hostages.”
O’Connell gave him a nod, the cigarette between her knuckles.
“The driver’s got it.”
“So we have to find the right goat,” Lew said. “It’s like rigging a honey pot on a mail server.” O’Connell gave him a look, and he started to explain. “I work on computer networks. Sometimes to protect everybody else from spam, you put a new mail account on the server, and have it respond to all kinds of shit—mailing lists, Nigerian banking scandals, penis enlargement ads. The spam pours in. We collect all the addresses, blocking those from hitting the good mail accounts.” He sat up in his chair, warming to his idea. “Except that spam is infinite, and demons aren’t. If the demon’s in the honey pot, it’s not in you. And hey, there are people who’ll volunteer to take the hit for us. All we need is the right goat.”
“We can’t do that,” I said.
“All we’re talking about is doing it sooner, not later,” he said. “One way or another, the demon’s going to find its way to another host. Maybe years from now, maybe tomorrow, but shouldn’t you get to choose? You’ve done your time, man. Let somebody else have it for a while.”
I shook my head, but Lew was no longer looking at me. “So how do we find a goat?” he said to O’Connell. “What kind of person are we looking for?”
She shrugged. “Depends on the demon. The goat may be a particular type of person, or just somebody who happens to be in the right place at the right time. The Captain takes only soldiers, Smokestack Johnny appears only on trains, the Shug . . .”
“Let me guess,” Lew said. “Only takes fat, bald guys.”
She nodded. “Who live around the lake.”
“So this Shug thing,” he said. “It’s not a publicity gimmick—like, Nessie of the Finger Lakes. It’s a real demon.”
For some reason, this didn’t surprise me. I think I’d known from the moment I’d met Toby.
“The Shug protects the lake,” she said. “It’s tradition.”
Lew shook his head. “Some tradition. You know, you’d think any guy with a weight problem or a receding hairline would move out of the neighborhood pretty damn fast. I mean, the minute that Toby—”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
“—started losing his hair he shoulda got out of Dodge. Or started dieting. A big white boy like that—”
“Toby knew what he was doing!”
Lew sat back in his chair, clearly skeptical.
“Let me tell you about Toby,” O’Connell said. “One day when he’s seventeen, eighteen years old, this fine, good-looking lad suddenly shaves his head, starts eating everything in sight. He starts taking midnight swims. He works on his lung capacity, trying to stay fit despite the weight. Obesity and extreme exercise don’t mix, after all. The Shug hosts tend to die of heart attacks, or drowning, or both.”
“Wait a minute,” Lew said. “He wanted to be Shug?”
“He was making himself into the perfect host. His family was upset, of course. Toby’s father especially. He was a big man, and he had a temper.”
“A big man?” I asked. “A big, bald man?”
O’Connell smiled tightly, and made a small gesture with the hand holding the cigarette. “He wasn’t going to leave, he’d lived here his whole life. And he wasn’t in the best of health. Toby knew what he had to do, and he did it.”
“Holy shit,” Lew said.
As long as there’s a Harmonia Lake, there’s gotta be a Shug. O’Connell looked at me. “So you see, it’s just a matter of knowing your enemy. Which one is yours, Mr. Pierce? Why don’t you sit down and tell us which demon you think has set up house in your soul.”
I didn’t sit down. The air between us was hazed with smoke. Inside my head, the demon scraped and shuffled, restless. I pressed my hand against the cool, curved side of the Airstream, breathing through my teeth.
I can’t live like this, I thought.
“It’s a demon called the Hellion,” I said. “It usually strikes kids who—”
“I know the Hellion,” O’Connell said shortly. “It’s certainly a clever choice.”
“I didn’t choose anything,” I said.
“The Hellion was part of the postwar cohort. Very active from the forties until about twenty years ago, when sightings suddenly became scarce. You’re the right age, and your story’s a tidy explanation for why it’s been so shy lately. Of course, you have a slight problem in that the Hellion didn’t disappear with you. There were dozens of sightings in the eighties—”
“Unconfirmed,” I said.
“Oh please, what’s confirmation? Parents are swearing that their child is possessed. Sure, the likeliest answer is that their little darlin’
just has attention deficit disorder, or maybe he never ‘attached’ to his mother, or maybe he’s just throwing a tantrum. But that still leaves a lot of cases. And there’s really no way to tell one way or another, is there? Who gets to decide who’s possessed and who’s not?”
“You do,” I said. “You know.”
“What does it matter?” Lew said, exasperated. “If the goat thing works, that ends the argument. All we need to be talking about now is how to find a replacement.”
“We can’t do that,” I said again.
Lew sat back, shocked at something in my voice.
“The Hellion only takes children,” O’Connell told him. “Specifically, fair-haired lads about waist high.”
“Oh,” Lew said. “Right.”
Lew and I didn’t talk on the way back to the motel. When we pulled into the parking lot he said, “We’re done here, right?” Here: the middle of the woods in Bumfuck, New York. O’Connell had made it clear she thought I was faking, and even if I wasn’t, she didn’t have much to offer. No rites, no rituals, no magic spells. Just the bargaining skills of a hostage negotiator, and a chance to sacrifice some innocent kid for my sake.
“Let’s go home,” I said.
But Lew was too worn out from yesterday’s day-long drive to start back tonight. We decided to get some sleep and head out early tomorrow. He went to his cabin for a nap while I walked the edge of the lake, one eye out for the Shug. The water was mirror-still. I felt fragile from lack of sleep, my limbs connected by misfiring circuits.
