curve—but the wheels held and they rocketed onto Kansas & Oklahoma’s north-running track. Johnny had them on notch 8 by then, running faster and faster, like a twelve-year-old happy to let his Lionel fly off the track. They flashed past little towns like Nickerson, Sterling, and Ellinwood, the crew holding their breath at every crossing. One of the K&O peddlers ahead of them just managed to pull into a side-out, its last car almost jutting past the switch, and they cleared it by two feet, whistling past at a hundred miles per hour.
The track turned west, running straight into the dropping sun. The snow lit up like fields of crushed glass. And then he picked up the song he’d been singing while working on the ventilator:
Olympia was a little bump of a town that came up on their left. The demon laid on the air horns and kept blowing, a long wail that must have been heard all the way to Dodge City. He sang out:
He set the throttle and marched to the cabin door. The brakeman stood up in alarm, but the conductor and the engineer didn’t move.
“It’s been a great ride, boys!” Smokestack Johnny said. His smile was bright as a headlamp. Then he yanked open the door and stepped into the wind.
9
I opened my mouth, closed it.
O’Connell made a disgusted noise and pushed past me. She went to the table, pulled off her jacket, and draped it across the chair back. She wiped the water from her face, and her gaze fell on the pile of chains on the bed. She looked at me, eyebrows raised, as if to say, Are those yours?
“Make yourself at home,” I said. I stood near the open doorway, rain splattering the back of my shirt, and nodded toward the fish.
“Mind telling me what this thing is supposed to be?”
“Northern pike.”
“I can see that,” I said. Though I’d had no idea what kind of fish it was. “Who put it there?”
“You can thank Louise. It’s a service of the motel, like a mint on your pillow.”
I don’t check in people after eleven. I can’t put you into cabins that aren’t prepared.
“And that would be because . . . ?”
“Think Passover,” she said. I frowned. “Blood over the door, angel of death? Children of Israel?”
“I missed a lot of Sunday school,” I said.
“Consider it a sign of respect, then. Part of our tradition.”
I got an image of those wooden barbs, nailed up at every house around Harmonia Lake.
“You haven’t answered my question, Mr. Pierce.”
I closed the door, went to the bed, and started pushing the chains into my duffel. “So how do you know about my mom?”
“You want genealogy, call the Mormons,” she said. “You want demonology, you call Red Book.”
“Who?”
“Hardcore Jungians. Possession’s their specialty.” She sat down and fished through the inner pockets of her jacket, finally drawing out a pack of Marlboros and a lighter. “They keep records of every possession, every witness too.” She leaned forward, light glinting off her stillwet scalp, and tapped a cigarette from the pack. “You were in there more than once, I might add.”
Not just for the Hellion, I guessed. I’d witnessed a few possessions, and my name must have shown up in a few police reports. I zipped the duffel and stood there, unwilling to sit down at the table with her, or to sit on the low bed and have her look down at me. O’Connell lit the cigarette with the quick motion of a longtime smoker. Rain drummed the roof.
“You were evaluated by a psychiatrist when you were first possessed, right after your mother’s surgery,” she said, leaning back again.
“The doctor wrote it up as a case study in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. You honestly haven’t heard of this before now? He didn’t use your name, of course, but the time periods match your story. Someone in the Red Book Society helpfully made the connection to your mother’s accident years ago. When I called, it only took minutes to pull out your name.
“After all, the doctor could change your name, but he couldn’t change your sex, or your age; all that’s pertinent to the profile. Like that little slingshot—that’s a signature prop of the Hellion. But even more than the slingshot, there’s that particular move—shooting the glasses off someone’s face. Now, that’s something that can’t be easily faked. The little kid’s gotta have strength, coordination. Of course, you probably didn’t mean to smash her eye to a pulp. But still, it’s a hell of a shot.”
“It wasn’t me,” I said.
“I know,” she said. Resigned to it.
Fuck you, I thought. Now you believe me?
I turned away from her, but the room was too small to pace. There was nowhere to go but outside.
“Before you were possessed,” she went on in that new, weary voice,
“dozens of adults were injured by the Hellion firing that thing at people’s faces. But after you, even though people kept reporting appearances of the Hellion, not a one. In the twenty-one years since your mother was injured, no child has done what you did.” She paused, and when I looked at her, she was watching my eyes. The weariness was a pose; her body was relaxed, but her eyes were filled with the same energy I’d felt back at the hotel. “You were the last one, Del. You trapped it.”
“Jesus Christ!” I shouted, then started laughing. “What do you think I’ve been trying to tell you!”
We sat in the small room as the rain came down and the ceiling clouded with cigarette smoke. O’Connell asked pointed questions and I answered at length, making this something between a clinical intake session and a confession. I was tired of choosing my words, sparing the gory details, managing everyone’s reactions. With a kind of escalating, giddy recklessness, I told her everything, daring her to disbelieve me. The first possession, the wild behavior, the way they’d strapped me down until they thought they’d driven the Hellion out. I told her about the accidents that brought it back to my awareness, the black well that wanted to pull me in, the pressure in my skull, the wolf-out sessions. I enumerated the ways I’d tried to keep the demon strapped down: the therapy sessions with Dr. Aaron, the stay in the psych ward, the drugs. My bid to get Dr. Ram to cut the thing out of me.
“The receptors in the brain that Dr. Ram identified, I think they’re like . . . antennas. Broadcasting stations. Remove them, and you—”
Something in her face told me this was old news to her. I remembered the first time I had seen her, walking into the hotel with Dr. Ram, deep in conversation. “You thought he was on the right track too.”
