“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“You might want to keep your voice down.” She stood up, but her face was still in shadow. “You jumped. You possessed your brother, you controlled him, and then you jumped back into your own body. You can try to pretend it didn’t happen, you can pretend it was some neardeath hallucination. But you did it.”
“Look, I’m not saying that . . .” I took a breath.
“Okay,” I said. “Something happened. But I don’t know how—it just did, okay?” I bought myself time to think by closing my eyes and opening them slowly, as if dealing with some internal perturbation. Hospital Bed Tactic 12.
“I told you about the black well,” I said. “I saw it again. And this time I went into it. I . . . rode it. And at the end of it was . . . Lew.”
“You’re telling me,” she said, “that you just clicked your heels and wished real hard.”
“I don’t know how it works,” I said. “What the hell do you want from me?”
She stepped away from my window, circled my bed. I could see her face again, and it was sealed tight, the same mask I’d seen her use too many times now.
“So what now, then?” she said icily. She crossed her arms under her breasts; the crucified Jesus tilted up, his eyes on mine. “You’re all cured?”
“No,” I said. “It’s still here.” I sat up in bed, felt a wave of dizziness, and shut my eyes. “The Hellion’s still inside. I can feel it.”
“Now, that’s interesting.” She went to the door, looked over her shoulder at me. “So why didn’t it jump when you left it? You weren’t holding it back anymore. That’s what you’ve been doing all this time, isn’t it, holding it back?”
Lew was only two doors down, but it might as well have been a mile. We could have called each other, I guess, but I didn’t want to bother him. They’d told me he could barely lift his arms, so how would he pick up the phone? He must have made at least one call, though. My mother called me at noon to tell me that she and Amra would be there by this evening—tomorrow morning at the latest. They were driving in, and they didn’t know if they could get there by the end of visiting
hours. She asked only a few questions—just enough to confirm the basic story she’d gotten from Amra, who’d gotten it from Lew. Mom was restraining herself. For now.
I spent most of the day inert as a statue, falling in and out of sleep without moving my head. Nurses came in at two-hour intervals to take my temperature, but their questions didn’t require more than a grunt or a nod. I thought about Christopher Reeve. I tried to imagine lying there paralyzed, watching each day’s sunlight track across the wall. But Reeve hadn’t stayed in bed. Okay, he was rich—high-tech wheelchair, staff of nurses, as many physical therapists as he wanted—but he was determined. People magazine said he worked for a year just to learn to move his pinky. How motivated was that? Eventually he even retaught his body to breathe on its own. Inch by inch, he was clawing his way out of that chair.
And then? Superman gets killed by a fucking bedsore infection. The sky outside the window darkened. Visiting hours came and went, without Mom and Amra. I closed my eyes in relief.
“You snuck up on me,” Lew said.
I sat in the dark in the chair beside his bed. I’d been watching him sleep for a long time, trying to decide if I should wake him. It was past midnight. The night staff seemed to be skeletal, and no one had noticed me shuffling down the hallway like an old man. It was only two doors, but it took me forever. I felt like my muscles had turned to jelly under the water, but I forced myself to keep lifting one foot, then the other. Move the pinky, Mr. Reeve.
“Sorry about that,” I said.
“Didn’t know you were mobile.” His voice was slowed a notch from painkillers.
My face heated with embarrassment. “You got the worst of it.”
He tilted his head in a suggestion of a shrug. “I guess.”
He was propped up in bed, his arms unmoving at his sides. His right leg was in a cast from thigh to calf, to stabilize the knee. My eyes had adjusted to the dark, but I couldn’t read his expression past the bandages, the bruises that looked like deeper shadows.
“O’Connell says you don’t remember anything,” I said.
“One minute I was with her and Louise and the guards. The next, lying there next to the water, screaming my head off.”
“You don’t remember anything else—running after me, diving in?”
“Should I remember something?”
Run.
Faster.
“Nah. Get some sleep.” I pushed myself slowly out of the chair.
“Mom’ll be here in the morning and your sleeping days will be over.”
“But now you’ve woken me up.”
“You want me to read you a comic book?” I said.
“Hm?”
“Nothing. Mom told me about when we were kids. She said you used to sit with me and read me—” I got a clear image of Lew, holding up a page from The Flash. It was Flash versus Dr. Light, and Flash was moving in a red-and-yellow blur that was faster than light.
“You okay?” Lew said.
“I just . . .” My voice caught. “I just need to get to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.”
I used the door frame for support and shuffled into the hallway, managed to make it back to my room without getting busted by the nurses. I sat on the edge of the bed, unable to get that image out of my head: seven-year-old Lew in the chair, holding that Flash comic. How many nights had he sat there, waiting for his little brother to come back? Waiting for the wild boy who’d maimed his mother to go away. And Mom, reading Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel over and over.
O’Connell asking, What do you mean, you loved it?
I clicked on the bedside lamp. My vision was blurred, and it was hard to make out the instructions on the phone’s faceplate, but I finally got an outside line. The call was picked up after only two rings. Louise sounded exactly as she had the night I’d phoned from Lew’s house in Gurnee: tired and annoyed.
“This is Del,” I said, trying to control my voice. “Del Pierce.” Stupid: How many Dels could she know? How many had she just taken to the hospital? “I need to reach Mother Mariette. Can you tell her to call me at the hospital as soon you see her? Hello?”
The phone had gone silent. I thought she’d hung up, and then O’Connell came on the line. “What is it? What’s happened?”
I cleared my throat, ran the back of my hand over my eyes. “You knew, didn’t you? You knew before the commander showed up.”
“Knew what, Del?”
“I shouldn’t remember them reading to me. I shouldn’t remember being the Hellion.”
“No. Probably not.”
“When I took Lew, I could feel him, feel him fighting me. Fighting me just like—”
“Del, I’m coming over there. Don’t do anything. I’m giving the phone to Louise for a minute, so please stay on the phone . . .”
Oh God. The Hellion was still inside me, clawing at my skull. Kicking out the posts. And the walls were coming down.
THE LITTLE ANGEL
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, 1977
When the large black Mercedes pulled up to the curb, Dr. Wayne Randolph left the shelter of the awning and hurried into the rain like an eager doorman, umbrella at the ready. He didn’t care if he looked desperate. He liked to think he was smart enough not to pretend.
He opened the passenger door, and the old woman looked up at him from under her hat. She favored him with a brief smile. “You must be Dr. Randolph,” she said in a soft Swiss-German accent. They’d met years before at the first ICOP, but of course she wouldn’t remember him; he’d been just a medical student then. Dr. Toni Wolff, however, was the same as he remembered her from twenty years before: ancient, tiny, and somehow invulnerable, like a well-preserved insect specimen. She wore a formal black evening gown, and held a very informal brown leather bag on her lap.