chest, open to the page she’d been looking at. At this angle I couldn’t read the words, but I saw the photocopied picture and realized what I was looking at. The “Little Angel” paper from the Penn State woman.
“What are you mad about?” I said. “This is just some research paper I picked up.”
But there was something about the girl in the picture, even viewed sideways. She was maybe nine years old, dressed in a white gown. Even in black and white, after multiple generations of photocopying, the girl’s beauty was evident. Pale skin, high cheekbones, a head bursting with curls.
“When was this taken?” I said.
“Nineteen seventy-seven,” she said. “I was eleven.”
“I didn’t know,” I said. I looked up. “I swear it, it’s just something I picked up and put in my bag. I thought you grew up in Ireland.”
“My mother and I moved to New York when I was eight, after my parents divorced. The Little Angel found me soon after. I didn’t move back to Ireland until I was a teenager.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t—”
“Stop it. Whatever you had in mind, it doesn’t matter. I don’t require motivation, Del. I don’t need to be manipulated into helping you, and I don’t respond to pity. There are thousands of people who’ve been possessed, and it doesn’t matter if I was one of them—the job’s the same.”
“The job . . . ,” I said, unsure. “Being an exorcist?”
“Being your pastor.”
“Oh. I mean, that’s nice and everything, but I don’t think I need—”
“Del.”
She walked to the side of the bed near my head, put her hands on her hips. “Last night you were afraid you were going insane. You said the Hellion’s memories were breaking through into your own. You were losing yourself.”
“I was a little freaked out last night, but I’m fine now. I can handle this.”
“You are so far from handling this.” She crouched, bringing her head even with mine.
“Now . . .” She lifted one of the bike chains into view. “Three numbers. What’s the combination?”
“Uh, that would be six, followed by six . . . and I’m sure you can guess the last one.”
She shook her head, opened the first lock. Then she walked around the bed to my other arm. While she was working on the next combination, I peeked under the blankets. Boxer briefs, my erection as clearly delineated as the trunk of a cartoon elephant. My need to pee had turned into an ache.
She undid the second chain. Hands finally free, I began to unfasten the manacles, leather-padded medieval things I’d purchased from
a fetish website. The steel loops were big enough for a shower curtain rod to be threaded through them—I’d seen the pictures—and more than wide enough for the bike chain. My shoulders were stiff, but I felt a hundred times better than yesterday. The cuts in my fingers barely hurt. “What if I’d died in my sleep?” I said. “These chains are pretty strong—I’d be attached to your bed for weeks.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t cut through the chains.”
She gave no indication she was joking.
I scooted down to the edge of the bed and started reeling in the chain so I could get at the lock. “Do you know what time it is? My mother’s got to be at the hospital by now. She’ll be frantic.”
She didn’t answer, and I looked at her.
“They arrived this morning,” she said. “I called Lew and told him you had to get out of the hospital because you were losing control of the Hellion.” She tossed a length of chain onto the bed. “Hardly an exaggeration. I said you’d be back in touch after we returned from the city.”
“Wait—what city? New York City?”
“Get dressed,” she said. “We have an appointment at Red Book.”
I didn’t think she meant the magazine.
As soon as she left the room, I pulled open the duffel bag and started sifting through the clothes, running my hands through the folds. Nothing. I started pulling out the clothes, shaking them one by one.
“Oh, one more thing,” O’Connell called back. “I threw out the Nembutal too.”
The three-story brownstone was buried somewhere in the heart of the city—I had no idea where, and I didn’t think O’Connell did either. Once we’d squeezed through the George Washington Bridge, slow as toothpaste, she began taking unpredictable rights and lefts, shouldering across lanes, dodging down side streets, and merging onto fourlane avenues. Nearly midnight and the traffic was still dense. O’Connell was the worst driver I’d ever ridden with—worse than Lew, worse than even me, and I’d driven through guardrails. Several times I found myself inches from sheet metal or the scowling face of a taxi driver. She seemed oblivious to the other cars, and even to the road in front of her, one hand on the steering wheel, the other pinching a cigarette, navigating by temperature, or road texture, or smell—anything but street signs.
“You know,” I said casually, “there’s this thing called MapQuest.”
But O’Connell had stopped talking to me. She hummed and muttered to herself. Maybe she was praying. An hour and a half after crossing the river, and seven hours after leaving Harmonia Lake, O’Connell braked to a stop in the center of a dark street double-lined with parked cars. Without saying anything she got out of the truck, leaving it running. I opened my door and stepped out, as much to get air as to see where she was going; O’Connell had smoked the entire way, and my eyeballs felt like gritty ball bearings. O’Connell walked up the steps of one of the brick apartment buildings we’d passed and pressed a doorbell. Above the door, a circular window of stained glass glowed like an eye surveying the street: red and blue and purple panes outlined in dark-leaded curves, swirling out from the center like petals dragged through water. I looked away from the window, feeling queasy. The apartment door opened, and an older woman with short white hair stepped out, hugged O’Connell. The women exchanged a few words, and then O’Connell strode back to me. “We can park around back,” she said.
“Was that one of the shrinks?” I asked. She’d told me that the people we were visiting were psychiatrists, “absolutely brilliant.” They’d become her therapists when she was eleven, after the first string of possessions. “They saved my life,” she said. She’d been vague on how exactly they’d helped her, or what she expected me to get out of meeting them. “Just be honest with them,” she said. “They’ll be able to straighten this out.”
She steered the truck into an alley. An iron gate swung open automatically and closed behind us. She parked diagonally on a small brick-paved patio, and we pulled our bags from the bed of the truck.
The white-haired woman met us at the back door, ushered us in, and set the alarm behind us. O’Connell said, “Del, this is Dr. Margarete Waldheim.”
“Meg,” the woman said, and shook my hand. I must have winced. She glanced down, turned my hand in hers, looking at the cuts. “Have you been fighting?”
“Just with furniture,” I said.
“Ah. I always stick with the softer pieces—seat cushions, pillows.”
She was younger than I had thought from the street, maybe in her fifties—the white hair had thrown me off. A ruddy, apple-shaped face. Shorter than O’Connell, not fat but sturdy. She wore a green-striped man’s dress shirt untucked over black stretch pants, and thin black shoes like dance slippers.
“Anyway, welcome to Bollingen,” she said.
I glanced at O’Connell. What happened to Red Book?
“Bollingen is the name of the house,” O’Connell said. I still didn’t know if Red Book was the name of a cult, an institute, or a giant computer that would tell me my future. She led us down a dark-paneled hallway, past a tiled kitchen and half a dozen closed doors, while O’Connell talked about the trip in. She didn’t mention the labyrinthine tour of Manhattan. We arrived in a high-ceilinged foyer at the front of the house. Set into the floor was a slab of
