“Make yourself at home,” I said. I stood near the open doorway, rain splattering the back of my shirt, and nodded toward the fish.
“Mind telling me what this thing is supposed to be?”
“Northern pike.”
“I can see that,” I said. Though I’d had no idea what kind of fish it was. “Who put it there?”
“You can thank Louise. It’s a service of the motel, like a mint on your pillow.”
I don’t check in people after eleven. I can’t put you into cabins that aren’t prepared.
“And that would be because . . . ?”
“Think Passover,” she said. I frowned. “Blood over the door, angel of death? Children of Israel?”
“I missed a lot of Sunday school,” I said.
“Consider it a sign of respect, then. Part of our tradition.”
I got an image of those wooden barbs, nailed up at every house around Harmonia Lake.
“You haven’t answered my question, Mr. Pierce.”
I closed the door, went to the bed, and started pushing the chains into my duffel. “So how do you know about my mom?”
“You want genealogy, call the Mormons,” she said. “You want demonology, you call Red Book.”
“Who?”
“Hardcore Jungians. Possession’s their specialty.” She sat down and fished through the inner pockets of her jacket, finally drawing out a pack of Marlboros and a lighter. “They keep records of every possession, every witness too.” She leaned forward, light glinting off her stillwet scalp, and tapped a cigarette from the pack. “You were in there more than once, I might add.”
Not just for the Hellion, I guessed. I’d witnessed a few possessions, and my name must have shown up in a few police reports. I zipped the duffel and stood there, unwilling to sit down at the table with her, or to sit on the low bed and have her look down at me. O’Connell lit the cigarette with the quick motion of a longtime smoker. Rain drummed the roof.
“You were evaluated by a psychiatrist when you were first possessed, right after your mother’s surgery,” she said, leaning back again.
“The doctor wrote it up as a case study in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. You honestly haven’t heard of this before now? He didn’t use your name, of course, but the time periods match your story. Someone in the Red Book Society helpfully made the connection to your mother’s accident years ago. When I called, it only took minutes to pull out your name.
“After all, the doctor could change your name, but he couldn’t change your sex, or your age; all that’s pertinent to the profile. Like that little slingshot—that’s a signature prop of the Hellion. But even more than the slingshot, there’s that particular move—shooting the glasses off someone’s face. Now, that’s something that can’t be easily faked. The little kid’s gotta have strength, coordination. Of course, you probably didn’t mean to smash her eye to a pulp. But still, it’s a hell of a shot.”
“It wasn’t me,” I said.
“I know,” she said. Resigned to it.
Fuck you, I thought. Now you believe me?
I turned away from her, but the room was too small to pace. There was nowhere to go but outside.
“Before you were possessed,” she went on in that new, weary voice,
“dozens of adults were injured by the Hellion firing that thing at people’s faces. But after you, even though people kept reporting appearances of the Hellion, not a one. In the twenty-one years since your mother was injured, no child has done what you did.” She paused, and when I looked at her, she was watching my eyes. The weariness was a pose; her body was relaxed, but her eyes were filled with the same energy I’d felt back at the hotel. “You were the last one, Del. You trapped it.”
“Jesus Christ!” I shouted, then started laughing. “What do you think I’ve been trying to tell you!”
We sat in the small room as the rain came down and the ceiling clouded with cigarette smoke. O’Connell asked pointed questions and I answered at length, making this something between a clinical intake session and a confession. I was tired of choosing my words, sparing the gory details, managing everyone’s reactions. With a kind of escalating, giddy recklessness, I told her everything, daring her to disbelieve me. The first possession, the wild behavior, the way they’d strapped me down until they thought they’d driven the Hellion out. I told her about the accidents that brought it back to my awareness, the black well that wanted to pull me in, the pressure in my skull, the wolf-out sessions. I enumerated the ways I’d tried to keep the demon strapped down: the therapy sessions with Dr. Aaron, the stay in the psych ward, the drugs. My bid to get Dr. Ram to cut the thing out of me.
“The receptors in the brain that Dr. Ram identified, I think they’re like . . . antennas. Broadcasting stations. Remove them, and you—”
Something in her face told me this was old news to her. I remembered the first time I had seen her, walking into the hotel with Dr. Ram, deep in conversation. “You thought he was on the right track too.”
“I did, until the Truth killed him. I’m not sure why or how Dr. Ram was lying. Maybe he was faking his data.” She shrugged. “We’ll find out sooner or later, I imagine.” She put out the stub of her cigarette, reached for her pack. “Now. Tell me again how your family drove the Hellion away. They strapped you down and read you books?”
“Lew read me comics. My mom read me Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. I loved it.”
“What do you mean, you loved it?” Before I could answer she stood up, frowning. She leaned into the little window that overlooked the lake and cupped her hand to the glass.
I heard it then, over the pattering rain. The chop of helicopter blades. The sound grew louder, until it was directly overhead: a deep, thumping drone. The helicopter was either very close, or very, very big. It passed on, but we could still hear it.
“Search and rescue?” I asked.
“I don’t think so.”
The sound grew loud again as the helicopter circled back. I went to the door and opened it. Fifty yards away, over the motel parking lot, a circle of lights descended through the dark and rain like a UFO, settling behind the silhouettes of trees. The helicopter filled almost the entire parking lot, the blades of its twin rotors nearly brushing the tree limbs. It looked like a Huey, one of those huge transports the army used, but it was newer and sleeker than that. A Huey redesigned by Audi.
Lew came up behind me. We were ten feet from the edge of the parking lot, back in the trees. “What the fuck is going on?” he said.
“What’s she doing here?” Meaning O’Connell. The priest had pulled on her silver jacket and was jogging for the porch of the main house, where Louise stood with a long coat pulled around her. The old woman looked pissed.
The only marking visible on the helicopter was a logo painted onto the side door and the nose: a gold H in a gold circle.
“We’re being invaded by Hilton?” Lew said.
“Maybe they’re buying out the motel.”
The rotors gradually slowed. Louise stepped down from the porch and stalked toward the helicopter, past the plywood cutout of the Shug. O’Connell called to her and then reluctantly followed. The side hatch slid open and five bulky, helmeted men jumped to the ground and fanned out. Lew and I instinctively crouched. The men wore some kind of blue-black camouflage, and they were heavily encumbered with packs, belts, and bandoliers. Jutting from the back of each helmet was a thick black cable that ran down the man’s back to connect to the pack at his waist, giving the men the appearance of ponytailed warriors from a Chinese martial arts flick. In their hands they carried bulbous things that looked like Star Trek phasers. None of them seemed to have seen me or Lew, but they were scanning the trees.