The Hellion shuddered behind my eyeballs, reminding me: I’m here. I am with you always.
That evening we stopped at the front desk to check for messages, just in case O’Connell had suddenly remembered a handy incantation from the Necronomicon. Louise gave us directions to a restaurant. Lew complained that there were mice in his room.
“The mice aren’t in your room,” Louise said. “Your room’s out with the mice.”
We ate dinner fifteen miles away in a town called Merrett, at a storefront Italian restaurant with five tables —and one of those was the yellow chair table permanently reserved for the Fat Boy. The garlic bread was buttered French bread sprinkled with garlic powder, and the tomato sauce looked orange. I was glad I wasn’t hungry. My stomach had tightened from lack of sleep and the constant agitation of the Hellion. The demon had been in motion since O’Connell’s place, a ceaseless scrabbling. I wanted to pound my forehead against the table. Lew took my plate and started finishing off my lasagna, just like when we were kids.
I said, “You know what I saw down in the basement the other day?”
“RADAR Man comics?”
“Close. I mean, that too. But I opened up Life and Death.”
“Heh,” Lew said. “The Cyclops threw a fit.”
“I was thinking, you could use the oceans on the Risk board to have naval battles. You know, with the stuff from Battleship.” I’d had this idea weeks ago, staring at the ceiling from my bed in the psych ward. He nodded, chewing. “You’d have to figure out how to hide the ships. Maybe draw a grid on the oceans, but still use the Battleship boards to keep track of them.”
“But the ships should be able to deliver troops, or fire on the countries.”
“Oh yeah, for sure.”
We headed back to Harmonia Lake, Lew driving, and despite the distraction of the demon I found myself nodding off, only to wake up with a jerk, as if I were the one behind the wheel. My plan to stay awake until cured was not going to work, but I couldn’t afford to fall asleep, not like this. I’d have to strap myself in tonight. Tie a gag around my mouth and hope that it stopped the Hellion from screaming. I’d have to do this every night for the rest of my life. Lew and I sorted out by dashboard light our key and block sets. Lew said he was going into the main house to call Amra. “Give her a kiss for me,” I said. “Tell her I’m sorry I stole her husband.”
I walked down the gravel road to my cabin. With each step, the demon threw itself against the cage of my skull. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and cold air gusted from the lake. I found the cabin steps in the dark, and started up. Lightning flashed silently from somewhere out of sight, briefly revealing the silhouettes of trees and a cloudpacked sky. A fish was impaled on my door. A skinny, foot-long thing with an alligatorish snout. Fresh.
I stared at the door, wondering if I’d imagined it, but my eyes picked out the details in the gloom. Two of the barbs of the driftwood were poking through the fish’s white belly. There didn’t seem to be much blood. In the next stutter-flash of lightning, I made out two dark, dried trails running down from the puncture wounds like tear-driven mascara. The thunder rolled, louder and closer. Okay. There’s a fish on my door.
I kept my head back as I inserted the key, turned it, and pushed open the door.
I flicked on the lights. The room was empty. The only place where there was room for anyone to hide was under the double bed. I knelt quickly, lifted up the bedspread. Dust and dark. I shut the door slowly, so as not to dislodge the fish. I wasn’t sure I wanted it on my door, but I knew I didn’t want it lying on my stoop like some banana peel primed for Dagwood’s return home. I sat down on the bed, pulled the duffel bag toward me, and rustled through my clothing, pulling out bike chains and locks and piling them next to me on the bed. When I came across the oil rag at the bottom of the bag, I set it on my lap. Unwrapped it like a baby. The gleaming gun, a box of ammunition.
I opened the ammunition box. The bullets looked shiny and new, but who knew how old they were: ten years, twenty? I couldn’t remember Dad firing this thing. Maybe the gunpowder was unstable. Maybe the gun would explode the first time it fired.
At first I couldn’t eject the clip, but then my thumb found a latch at the top of the grip and the magazine pulled free. It was empty. I picked a bullet from the ammo box, lined it up with the mouth of the magazine, and pressed it down into the spring-loaded chamber. I fed another bullet into the slot, and another. There was a possibility that no one had mentioned. Maybe only I could let the demon out. Maybe it needed me to open the gate. And if my brain shut down before it opened, then maybe it couldn’t get back into the world. Maybe it would end with me. That would be some kind of accomplishment, wouldn’t it? The first guy to erase a demon from the world. I pushed the eighth bullet down into the spring-loaded magazine, then slipped the magazine back into the gun with a solid clack. The Hellion jumped at the sound, and I shut my eyes until it settled down. Rain began to clatter against the roof, sounding like applause. I slid my hand around the grip, lifted the gun, and touched the mouth of the barrel to my lips. The barrel was shaking, and I had to steady it with my free hand. I opened my mouth slightly, my upper lip sliding over the nub of the gun sight, then opened wider, let the metal slide between my teeth. I wanted my teeth out of the way, even though that couldn’t make much of a difference. I sat there, breathing in the smell of oil, tasting iron.
A simple thing. A little pressure on the trigger. I thought about Lew. He’d be so pissed. He’d have to call Mom, try to explain. I couldn’t think about Mom.
I pulled out the gun, wiped my lips, then my eyes. My eyes were flooded. I moved the gun to the side of my head and pressed the muzzle to my temple. Breathe in. Breathe out. Squeeze.
Ah, who the fuck was I kidding? I dropped my hand to my lap, still holding the gun. I couldn’t walk up to that cliff, couldn’t throw myself off. I was paralyzed. Too infatuated with my addiction to breathing, unable to extinguish my irrational belief that there was another way out.
Hope wasn’t a thing with feathers, it was a hundred-pound ball and chain. All you had to do was drag that sucker to the edge and throw it over first.
A hard knock on the door. I jerked at the sound. Jesus Fucking Christ, I could have fired the thing accidentally. I looked down at the
.45, and embarrassment swept over me, as if I’d been caught masturbating. I had to hide the gun. I stood up, quickly wrapped the pistol and ammo back in the oil rag, and stuffed the bundle deep into the duffel. The knock sounded again. What the hell does it take for a guy to get a couple minutes alone these days?
I smeared the tears from my eyes and lurched toward the door, then realized the chains and locks were still piled on the bed like a nest of snakes. Fuck it. Lew knew about the chains. I yanked open the door.
O’Connell stood there, the hood of her silver jacket pulled over her head, the rain ricocheting from her shoulders and head, forming a nimbus. The fish was still in place, one eye watching us.
“Yeah?” I said stupidly.
“I have a question, Mr. Pierce,” O’Connell said. “How did your mother lose her eye?”
SMOKE STACK JOHNNY
SAND CREEK, KANSAS, 1983
He came walking out of the middle of nowhere, ambling down the snowlined tracks with a pipe in his teeth, huffing clouds like a steam train. Despite the terrible cold, no jacket or gloves, just overalls and a blue flannel shirt and a blue-striped cap.
The conductor of the train saw him first. He stood in the cab, looking out the frosted window as he talked on the radio with the dispatcher, explaining why the train wasn’t moving. Even with the heaters on and the train stopped, it was only forty degrees in the cab. The toilet in the nose was frozen over.
