I slowly got to my feet, shook my head. I tried to speak, coughed instead. The Boy Marvel glanced back at me, cocked his head, and then he heard it. The growl of the plane’s engine, rising in pitch. It had turned around for another pass.
I was too tired to try to protect myself this time. I fell back against the wall, eyes on the ceiling. The plane passed overhead a second time, then appeared in the window, flying away from us, nose down. The circles on the undersides of the wings looked like two eyes.
“Whoa, Nelly!” the Boy Marvel said, awed and happy as a kid at a
fireworks display. And of course we had the best seats in the house. One more show for Bobby.
The light from the fireball lit the caped man in a halo. The sound arrived an instant later, making the window shudder. The plane must have been loaded with fuel to cause such an explosion.
“Aww,” the Boy Marvel said, suddenly deflated. “It hit the house.”
I stepped closer to the window. The top story of the farmhouse had vanished, and the structure below was nothing but a mass of fire. Black oily smoke roiled into the sky.
The Little Angel tiptoed into the room. She caught my eye, held a finger to her lips.
The girl climbed up on the bed. She straddled the old man’s hips and leaned forward to hold his face in her hands so that he seemed to be looking into her eyes.
“Wait—,” I said, the sound rasping in my throat. The Boy Marvel turned away from the window. He saw her and shouted, his voice like thunder.
The Little Angel daintily kissed the old man on his unmoving lips.
“Nighty night,” she said.
16
I’m alive; evil am I.
Del’s mother wanted to take me to the emergency room. She saw the bruise at my neck, lifted my shirt, and gasped at a deeper, larger bruise the shape of Australia. But I was done with hospitals. I told her I was fine, that I just needed to lie still for a while. She quickly changed the sheets in my old room. I lay down, and she brought a chair into the room and sat beside me. She asked me questions, and I answered them truthfully, but I knew that much of what I said didn’t make sense to her. Bertram popped in and out, not wanting to listen in, unable to stop himself. He kept asking if we needed food, drinks. Neither of us was hungry, but I consented to iced tea. Del’s mother waited until Bertram was gone, and then she said, “I don’t understand—why did you go to Kansas?”
I thought about the paper-thin clues I’d followed: a few paintings, a page in a comic book, a made-up town that happened to exist. The chain of reasoning had a kind of dream logic, but like a dream it made less and less sense the more I examined it. It didn’t matter that it had turned out to be true. The certainty I’d felt along the way, the magnetic pull of that little dot on the map—those came from something else. Someone else. I’d been drawn to Olympia as surely as any of the other demons.
“I have to start from the beginning,” I said. “When Del was possessed.” She started to say something, and I charged on. “I don’t know how it happened, but after your son was possessed, somehow you got me to stay. And your son, Del—”
“Stop talking like that,” she said angrily. One eye glistened with tears; the other regarded me coldly. “Why are you talking about yourself like that?”
“This is the story you have to hear,” I said. “When your son was five years old, he was possessed by a demon. And the demon decided to stay.”
When the Little Angel bent to kiss Bobby Noon, I braced myself. I don’t know what I expected, exactly: a long roar as the Black Well yawned open and sucked me back to my birthplace, or maybe a simple blackout as my connection to the world was extinguished. Instead, we three demons looked at the old man and then at one another. Then the Little Angel climbed down from the bed and skipped out of the room. The Boy Marvel went to Bobby’s bedside and knelt there, distraught. He’d failed his most important duty. I went to O’Connell. She was conscious now, but not quite coherent. She looked at me questioningly, and all I said was, “We have to go.”
The police didn’t try to stop the Truth from leaving in his car—
they weren’t that stupid. One cop did call out to me as I walked out supporting O’Connell. I told him to step back and he obeyed. I helped O’Connell into the truck and drove back out to the highway. We passed the fire engines a minute later. The smoke from the burning farmhouse stayed in my rearview mirror for miles, a black tornado against blue sky.
O’Connell’s jaw was as purpled as my chest. Later she realized that she’d lost a tooth and loosened two others. Her first words, after a half hour of driving, were slightly fuzzed. She said, “Is the old man dead?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Why are you still here?”
“I don’t know.”
She leaned against the window, closed her eyes. She’d succeeded, and failed completely.
“I thought he was the key,” she said in a cracked voice. “I thought if he died, then the demons would die with him. A few of them at least.” She looked out the windshield at the flat Kansas skyline. “Just the cohort, that handful of demons, they ruined hundreds of lives. Thousands. Stopping just them, that would have been worth something, wouldn’t it?”
“Do you want me to take you to a hospital?” I asked. She shook her head. “Jesus, no.”
After that she stayed on the other side of the cab, head leaning against the window, not talking. Maybe she was afraid of me. When we stopped for gas, she went inside while I filled the tank. I used my credit card at the pump, not caring anymore if the police were trying to track my movements. They had Dr. Ram’s killer. Or at least a person who had confessed to it. The pay phone outside the station had a dial tone. I fished through my wallet for the water-rumpled Hyatt card. The ink had run and blurred, but I could make out the number. I got out my calling card and started punching numbers.
A woman answered. “Hi,” I said, trying to sound normal. “Is this Selena?”
“Ye-es,” she said cautiously.
“This is Del Pierce. We met a couple of weeks ago, at ICOP?”
“Of course I remember.” Her tone was cool. Maybe the police had talked to them. Tom and Selena had told them about my rant against Dr. Ram. I was just some drunk guy they’d met at a convention. Who knows what I was capable of? She said, “How are you doing?”
“Fine. I’m fine. Listen, I’d like to talk to Valis—Phil. Mr. Dick. Is he there?”
“I’m sorry, he’s sleeping at the moment.”
“Sleeping?” I repeated stupidly. I wondered what artificial men dreamed of. “Okay, when he gets up, could you . . . just ask him if he’d call me. Let me give you a number. I won’t be there until tonight, but he can call anytime.” Selena seemed reluctant, but she took down the number. I thanked her and hung up.
O’Connell came out of the shop with bottled water, snacks, a travel pack of aspirin. She saw something in my face and stopped.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I just want to get home,” I said.
When we arrived that night at the house where I grew up, I stepped out of the pickup, leaving it running. I had nothing to take inside: everything had been left at the farmhouse. I closed the door, and O’Connell scooted behind the wheel. She stared straight ahead, the side window open between us like a confessional. “I tried to kill
