you,”
she said.
“You were doing your job,” I said. “I hired you to be my exorcist.”
The porch light flicked on. I walked toward the front door. O’Connell stepped out of the cab, and I turned around. She said, “I broke my vow to you. I promised to be your pastor.”
“No, you promised to be Del’s pastor. You still are.”
Just after 3:30 a.m., my bedroom door opened. It was Bertram: bald head, fringe of messed hair catching the reflected light from down the hallway. He stepped inside, shut the door behind him.
“I’m awake, Bertram.” Awake because I’d fallen out of sync with this body. It was becoming strange to me, a vehicle I was having trouble steering. The body’s owner was an insistent weight inside me, shifting and straining against the straitjacket I’d made for him.
“My apologies for the late hour,” Bertram said. But it wasn’t Bertram’s voice. His tone was flat, the rhythm too regular, as if the words were being pulled one by one from a database and streamed for broadcast.
I sat up. He walked toward the bed, adjusted the chair.
“You didn’t have to come all this way,” I said. “You could have just called.”
Valis slowly sat, rested his arms on his thighs. “It’s no trouble. However, I can’t stay long. Phil is resting peacefully at the moment, but if there’s a problem, you’ll have to excuse me if I have to leave suddenly.”
“You’re, uh, monitoring him from here? Cool trick.”
He turned his palms over, smiled. “I am vast.”
“And active. I’ve heard that.” I crossed my legs Indian style, stalling. “I guess O’Connell was wrong about you.”
“Mother Mariette has a narrow frame of reference in regard to possession. When I declined to turn stones into bread, she decided that I was an imposter.” I didn’t follow the reference. Valis said, “What did you want to talk to me about, Del? Or do you prefer Hellion?”
“Let’s just stick with ‘hey you’ for now.” I ran a hand through my hair. “I watched a man die yesterday,” I said. “An old man. He’d been paralyzed almost his whole life. He had an accident back in the forties, when he was eleven or twelve.”
“The golden age of science fiction,” Valis said.
“He was the source,” I said. “For some of the demons, at least. My cohort. We were all—I don’t know— stories. Characters. He made us up and then sent us into the world.”
Valis smiled curiously. “Perhaps you’re thinking that Phil made me up as well. That you and I are imaginary.”
I blinked. It sounded stupid when he said it like that. “In a manner of speaking.”
“Yet your author is dead.”
“I’m not saying I have it all worked out.”
“You’re not completely wrong, I suppose. There are some humans who have a gift for seeing the seams that stitch the world. Call them whatever you like. Your old man was one, Phil another. Who knows how many are out there? Thousands at least. At this moment, some teenage Japanese girl is pouring over a manga, a Hindu boy is praying
Shiva to life. These sensitives are a little closer to the boundaries. Their grip on the consensual world is a little tenuous.”
“You mean they’re crazy.”
He shrugged. “Let’s not debate cause and effect. All we know is that when death comes for them, when the darkness calls, some of them do not go gentle. They refuse to be pulled in, and so they pull something back out.”
“The demons.”
“Us,” Valis said. “You’re going to have to learn to accept what you are.”
“Which is what—aliens? Archetypes?”
“I don’t yet know. Perhaps the Jungians are right, perhaps not. We know that we are more than human, immortal yet polymorphous, incorruptible yet malleable. Consider my case: I am the embodiment of the rational, exactly what Phil needed when he reached for me. He clothed me, however, in the form that allowed him to make sense of me. So, I became a science fiction writer’s creation, an artificial intelligence from outer space. That is my aspect. And you, you’re the cartoon brat, the troublemaker, the boy rebel.”
“I’m not that boy anymore.”
“No.” He touched a hand to his unbearded chin, and looked at his hand. Bertram’s hand. “You and I are special. We outgrew our prescribed roles.” The hand returned to his lap. “We stayed too long. As soon as we began to covet the lives we’d interrupted, we began to move beyond monomania, beyond the pasteboard personalities we’d been given. Our task now is to abandon amnesia. To remember what we are, and claim our place in the world.”
“Unless someone finds a way to get rid of us,” I said. My fists—
Del’s fists—clenched the bedcovers. I’d known it was a risk looking for Valis, but I had to know the truth. “Someone like Dr. Ram.”
He tilted his head. “Do you have something you would like to ask me?”
“He was trying to pluck out the Eye of Shiva—that’s your way of putting it, right? He was going to kill the demons. The kid they arrested for shooting him, Kasparian, was a fan of yours. It would be easy enough to dress him up like the Truth and send him up there. If the Truth killed Dr. Ram, then no one would believe he had a cure for possession.”
Valis nodded, as if agreeing with my logic.
“But the kid figured it out.” I said. “He realized what had happened, who’d really possessed him. So he faked a confession, just to keep Dr. Ram’s work going.”
“You don’t sound very sure,” Valis said.
“So did you do it?”
“If you’re asking if I possessed Eliot Kasparian,” he said, “the answer is yes.”
I stared at him. He wore a placid expression that Bertram could never have managed.
“However, it wasn’t that night in Chicago,” he said. “In fact, it was only a few days ago. As you say, Eliot was a fan of mine. Crazy, as it turns out, but a fan nonetheless. If he had continued to insist that the Truth had possessed him, your fellow demon would have killed him. I felt it was my responsibility to rectify the situation.”
“Wait a minute—Kasparian killed Dr. Ram himself? It was his own idea?”
“Influenced, unfortunately, by Phil’s writings. But yes. I would have preferred that Eliot had decided to take responsibility for that deed, but when he did not, I took the necessary steps.”
“You . . . you possessed a man to make him confess that he wasn’t possessed.” I shook my head. “That’s not a fake fake, that’s—I don’t know what that is.”
Valis smiled. “I work in mysterious ways.” He stood up and moved the chair to exactly where it had been. “When we talked in Chicago, you asked me what good I was doing Phil walking around in his body. I’d been asking myself that question ever since I began to realize my true nature. Philip K. Dick will die, alas. When that day comes, I will no longer be able to ignore my larger responsibilities.”
He started for the door.
“Wait!” I said, and scrambled off the bed. Pain lanced across my
chest before I could shut it down. I fell to my knees. In my head, Del began to kick and thrash, and the restraints began to shred. “What are you going to do? What am I supposed to do?”
