got it taken away from him. So.” I pushed the chair forward again, pulled it back. I couldn’t look at their faces. “So why don’t we do something useful and find me a body. My own goat. Maybe a murderer or something, somebody who doesn’t deserve their skin anymore.” I looked up. “How about that? Got any serial killers in those files?”
“This isn’t all about you and the boy,” O’Connell said.
“No? Who the hell is it about then?”
She gestured at the fan of pictures on the table. “Those kids. Toby. Dr. Ram. Everybody who’s been possessed, everybody who’s had their lives ruined by the demons.”
“You mean you.”
“Yes, me too!” She was on her feet now, her pale skin flushed.
“And your brother, and your mother, and everyone who’s ever—”
Meg said, “Siobhan, please . . .”
O’Connell stalked toward me. “We have a chance here—maybe the first real chance we’ve ever had. You’re one of them, Del. What they know, you know. We can find out how the demons do what they do; we can find out how to turn you—”
She shut her mouth.
I raised my eyebrows. “You were about to say, turn me off.”
The Waldheims watched us. No one said anything.
“Okay.” I nodded, ran a hand through my hair. “I can get behind that. That’s what I want too. Tell me how.”
O’Connell and Fred exchanged a look.
“You already have a plan,” I said.
“We think you should try to jump again,” O’Connell said.
“What—now?”
“If you’re ever going to leave your current body, you’re going to have to practice,” she said. “Better to do it into the body of a volunteer, in a controlled environment surrounded by people who could take care of the boy.”
“Who’s the volunteer? You?”
O’Connell seemed embarrassed at this. Meg looked away. Then the Other Dr. Waldheim raised his hand.
“Fred?!”
My head swiveled between the old man and the women. “Are you
all crazy? O’Connell, you saw what happened last time—I almost killed my brother. There’s no telling what I would do to, to—”
“An old fart,” Fred said agreeably. He laid his book on the table.
“I don’t think the plan is perfect either,” Meg said. “But we can’t bring others into this.”
“I’ve been possessed before,” Fred said.
“How long ago?” I said.
“We don’t think you’d repeat the mistakes of your first time,”
O’Connell said. “That was a dire situation—you were drowning, and you panicked. This time . . .”
“No. We find another way. We—” I stared at the open page of the book Fred had put down. “What is that?” I said.
“Painter artifacts,” Fred said. “From 1985 to 1992.”
“No, that picture.” I picked up the binder, looked at the photograph in its plastic sleeve. A drawing had been scratched and scraped with coal or black dirt, onto a slab of concrete that could have been a section of highway. The drawing was hardly more than an outline, a fuzzed sketch of a woman.
She leaned into the corner of an armchair. Her hair had fallen across her face, hiding one eye. The other eye was closed. Her lips were slightly parted. A book lay splayed open on the floor, as if it had slipped from her fingers. It was a picture book: a few smudges suggested paragraphs; faint lines hinted at a brontosaurus neck, a boxy head, tractor-tread feet. Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. There weren’t any distinguishing details that would allow a stranger to match the woman in the picture to a real person. But the way her hair fell across her face, the way her legs were tucked under the chair . . .
“I need to borrow this,” I said. I nodded toward the stack of albums.
“I need all of them.”
An hour in, I realized my project required more space, and I moved from my bedroom to the library. Under the gaze of the Black Well painting I laid out the piles of plastic-wrapped pictures into clusters and series, setting out trails of stepping stones that ran in and out of the niches, around the furniture, turning the room into a giant game board. The chronology of the pictures’ creation had nothing to do with my organizational scheme, and neither did geography. Or style and material, for that matter: the same subject could be tackled in sculptures, chalk drawings, paintings, collages. The demon’s name was the Painter, but that was a misnomer.
I crouched over the smallest series, only three pictures. The first was the sketch of my mother—Del’s mother. The label on the back of its cover sheet said it had been created in Moab, Utah, on September 8, 1991. Next to it, from two years earlier and several states away, a sculpture made out of wood and bits of tin and barbed wire that somehow looked like a young, chubby Lew. Last, a smear of yellow and green paint created in Hammond, Indiana, 2001 that I recognized as my father’s 1966 Mustang gleaming in the driveway. None of them created anywhere near the times they depicted—Lew was a high schooler by ’89, my mother sold my father’s Mustang when he died in
’95—but that seemed to be the point. These weren’t snapshots from a moment in time. None of them were photorealistic. These were interpretations, images fished from my memory, distorted and glossed by emotion.
“Are you finding what you need?” a soft voice said behind me. Meg had appeared in the room, silent as a cat.
“I don’t know,” I said. I looked at my watch—already past 1 a.m. I should probably be in bed, but I wasn’t tired. This body was just a vehicle. I could drive it as fast as I wanted until the gas ran out. “I feel like there’s gotta be some kind of message here.”
“You aren’t the first to be fascinated by the Painter’s work,” Meg said. “Most of the originals are in the hands of private collectors, though Red Book has tried to acquire as many as possible. Everyone is searching for clues in them—the government, academics, hundreds of hobbyists on the Internet. A theory for everyone, and everyone with a theory.”
I had suspected as much at IPOC—all those academics were the tip of the iceberg.
“The Boy on the Rock, for example.” She stooped, picked up a picture from one of the trails I’d laid, and showed it to me. I’d found a dozen pictures of a kid maybe eleven or twelve, at a stream. Sometimes he sat with his arms around his knees, sometimes standing, about to dive, sometimes climbing up onto a boulder, a towel draped across his back. I’d first seen one of the pictures in the ICOP slideshow.
The kid wasn’t me, wasn’t Lew, didn’t seem to be any of the Hellion victims. I didn’t know what to make of him, but he seemed important to the Painter.
“He’s got the most regular features of any of the subjects,” Meg said. “Everyone’s tried to identify him, match him to a photo of somebody real. The government interviewed thousands of people back in the seventies. Lots of near misses—you can find plenty of fresh-faced boys, and even plenty in bathing suits—but no hundred-percent matches. Still, there are theories. It’s a self-portrait of the original Painter. Or he’s the Painter’s son. Or he’s the archetype of innocence, a cherub. Or he’s not even been born yet; he’s the one the Painter is waiting for.”
“To do what?”
She shrugged, smiled. “You know how it is with messiah stories.”
