served as a matte backdrop to the gigantic hunk of silver that hung from her neck on industrial-gauge chain. The crucifix was a nine-inch-long naturalist rendition of Jesus in maximum agony mode. It looked like it weighed five pounds.
I didn’t know how long she’d been standing there. It was too late to pretend to be sleeping.
“Hi,” I said.
“How are you feeling?” she said. This was probably a required question for clerical visits. The forms must apply even to dubiously ordained priests of schismatic sects.
“Not bad,” I lied. My mouth felt cottony, and I cleared my throat.
“Warmer.” They’d put some kind of hot-water tube vest around my chest, and now that my temperature was above the danger zone, they let me heat up my extremities too. The nurses had piled four or five blankets onto me, covered them with a sheet, and tucked the edges tight, creating a perfectly smooth mound that hid any suggestion of legs or arms. I hadn’t moved enough to disturb their handiwork.
“Your doctor’s amazed at your progress.”
“This morning I impressed my nurses by sipping chicken broth. Very exciting.” I smiled, but I didn’t have the energy to sell it. I changed the subject. “Have you seen Lew?”
“I stopped in just now. He’s fairly medicated at the moment, not in any pain.” She walked to the end of the bed. She didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands. “He doesn’t remember rescuing you. That’s standard.”
Standard for possession, she meant.
I tried to change the subject again. “That’s good in a way,” I said.
“The less he knows, the less he’ll get sucked into the investigation.”
“What investigation would that be?” O’Connell’s face was set into
an expression of mild curiosity. There was no one else in the room, but she was performing just the same.
I didn’t know what to say. Commander Stoltz and at least three of his men were dead, killed by the Shug. The rest of the Human League, all except Bertram, had fled in the helicopter. True, they’d come to kill me, so they weren’t about to go to the police. But there were still four dead men. You couldn’t have people die in your town and just pretend it didn’t happen. You had to at least look into it, didn’t you?
But no. If they called in the cops, what could they do? Arrest Toby, kill him? And then the Shug would just move on to the next host. This couldn’t have been the first time people had disappeared at the lake. It wouldn’t be the last.
O’Connell watched my face, saw me get it.
“It’s Harmonia Lake, Del,” she said.
Holy shit.
“You’ll still have to answer some questions, though,” she said. She paced to the window, leaned against it. “Lew wants to know what happened to him. He wasn’t happy with my answers.”
“What’d you tell him?” I said.
“Exactly what I saw,” she said. The morning light was behind her, and I couldn’t make out her face. “I saw him snap handcuffs like chopsticks, shrug off a Taser, disable two armed men. I saw him save his brother from drowning.” She paused. “That’s what I saw. Now why don’t you tell me what happened.”
“I was at the bottom of the lake, remember? I was unconscious until—”
“Don’t lie, not to me,” she said quietly.
It was too hard to look into the sunlight. I stared down at the mound of bedclothes covering me from chest to toes like a white casket.
“How’d you do it, Del?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“You might want to keep your voice down.” She stood up, but her face was still in shadow. “You jumped. You possessed your brother, you controlled him, and then you jumped back into your own body. You can try to pretend it didn’t happen, you can pretend it was some neardeath hallucination. But you did it.”
“Look, I’m not saying that . . .” I took a breath.
“Okay,” I said. “Something happened. But I don’t know how—it just did, okay?” I bought myself time to think by closing my eyes and opening them slowly, as if dealing with some internal perturbation. Hospital Bed Tactic 12.
“I told you about the black well,” I said. “I saw it again. And this time I went into it. I . . . rode it. And at the end of it was . . . Lew.”
“You’re telling me,” she said, “that you just clicked your heels and wished real hard.”
“I don’t know how it works,” I said. “What the hell do you want from me?”
She stepped away from my window, circled my bed. I could see her face again, and it was sealed tight, the same mask I’d seen her use too many times now.
“So what now, then?” she said icily. She crossed her arms under her breasts; the crucified Jesus tilted up, his eyes on mine. “You’re all cured?”
“No,” I said. “It’s still here.” I sat up in bed, felt a wave of dizziness, and shut my eyes. “The Hellion’s still inside. I can feel it.”
“Now, that’s interesting.” She went to the door, looked over her shoulder at me. “So why didn’t it jump when you left it? You weren’t holding it back anymore. That’s what you’ve been doing all this time, isn’t it, holding it back?”
Lew was only two doors down, but it might as well have been a mile. We could have called each other, I guess, but I didn’t want to bother him. They’d told me he could barely lift his arms, so how would he pick up the phone? He must have made at least one call, though. My mother called me at noon to tell me that she and Amra would be there by this evening—tomorrow morning at the latest. They were driving in, and they didn’t know if they could get there by the end of visiting
hours. She asked only a few questions—just enough to confirm the basic story she’d gotten from Amra, who’d gotten it from Lew. Mom was restraining herself. For now.
I spent most of the day inert as a statue, falling in and out of sleep without moving my head. Nurses came in at two-hour intervals to take my temperature, but their questions didn’t require more than a grunt or a nod. I thought about Christopher Reeve. I tried to imagine lying there paralyzed, watching each day’s sunlight track across the wall. But Reeve hadn’t stayed in bed. Okay, he was rich—high-tech wheelchair, staff of nurses, as many physical therapists as he wanted—but he was determined. People magazine said he worked for a year just to learn to move his pinky. How motivated was that? Eventually he even retaught his body to breathe on its own. Inch by inch, he was clawing his way out of that chair.
And then? Superman gets killed by a fucking bedsore infection. The sky outside the window darkened. Visiting hours came and went, without Mom and Amra. I closed my eyes in relief.
“You snuck up on me,” Lew said.
I sat in the dark in the chair beside his bed. I’d been watching him sleep for a long time, trying to decide if I should wake him. It was past midnight. The night staff seemed to be skeletal, and no one had noticed me shuffling down the hallway like an old man. It was only two doors, but it took me forever. I felt like my muscles had turned to jelly under the water, but I forced myself to keep lifting one foot, then the other. Move the pinky, Mr. Reeve.
“Sorry about that,” I said.
“Didn’t know you were mobile.” His voice was slowed a notch from painkillers.
My face heated with embarrassment. “You got the worst of it.”
