“Was that one of the shrinks?” I asked. She’d told me that the people we were visiting were psychiatrists, “absolutely brilliant.” They’d become her therapists when she was eleven, after the first string of possessions. “They saved my life,” she said. She’d been vague on how exactly they’d helped her, or what she expected me to get out of meeting them. “Just be honest with them,” she said. “They’ll be able to straighten this out.”
She steered the truck into an alley. An iron gate swung open automatically and closed behind us. She parked diagonally on a small brick-paved patio, and we pulled our bags from the bed of the truck.
The white-haired woman met us at the back door, ushered us in, and set the alarm behind us. O’Connell said, “Del, this is Dr. Margarete Waldheim.”
“Meg,” the woman said, and shook my hand. I must have winced. She glanced down, turned my hand in hers, looking at the cuts. “Have you been fighting?”
“Just with furniture,” I said.
“Ah. I always stick with the softer pieces—seat cushions, pillows.”
She was younger than I had thought from the street, maybe in her fifties—the white hair had thrown me off. A ruddy, apple-shaped face. Shorter than O’Connell, not fat but sturdy. She wore a green-striped man’s dress shirt untucked over black stretch pants, and thin black shoes like dance slippers.
“Anyway, welcome to Bollingen,” she said.
I glanced at O’Connell. What happened to Red Book?
“Bollingen is the name of the house,” O’Connell said. I still didn’t know if Red Book was the name of a cult, an institute, or a giant computer that would tell me my future. She led us down a dark-paneled hallway, past a tiled kitchen and half a dozen closed doors, while O’Connell talked about the trip in. She didn’t mention the labyrinthine tour of Manhattan. We arrived in a high-ceilinged foyer at the front of the house. Set into the floor was a slab of granite inscribed in Latin: vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit. Non vocatus deus—no vacations for God?
I made the mistake of looking up. High above the door was the circular window I’d seen from the street. The panes, viewed from the inside, were bruise-dark and glinting, like half-seen blades about to spin.
“You okay, Pierce?” O’Connell said.
I looked away from the window, ran a damp hand through my hair.
“What? Oh, yeah. Tired I guess.”
“The design came from one of Dr. Jung’s paintings,” Meg said.
“During his Nekyia period, he became fascinated with circular forms, circles within circles. Some of his works resemble Indian mandalas.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. And what the hell was a Nekyia?
One thing was clear: Jungians loved yargon.
O’Connell said to Meg, “Is the old man upstairs?”
At first I thought she meant Jung himself, but that couldn’t be—
he’d died in the fifties or sixties. She must have meant the other Dr. Waldheim.
“He’s turned in for the night,” Meg said. “And I’m about to collapse myself. I’ll show you to your rooms. If you’re hungry, though, make yourself at home. Siobhan can show you the kitchen.”
“Wait a minute—Shavawn?” I repeated phonetically. O’Connell looked at me. “Mariette is the name I took when I became a priest.”
Meg laughed quietly. “I can never remember to call her that.” She led us to side-by-side rooms on the second floor. “There’s a journal in the desk,” Meg said. “In case you have any dreams.”
“Okay,” I said, as if she’d told me where the towels were. “Thanks.”
I closed the door, dropped my duffel on the floor. Outside, Meg and O’Connell murmured together, their words indistinct. The room was a cozy space smaller than my dorm room at Illinois State, but bigger than my hospital room in Colorado. There was one skinny door besides the one I’d come through, but I didn’t feel like hanging up my clothes. Most of the room was taken up by a high bed on a cast-iron frame (convenient for chaining), an armless wooden chair, a small writing desk with a lid unfolded to reveal—yes indeed—
a handsome leather-bound journal and two fat pens. I flipped through the thick oatmeal-colored pages, but although a few pages had been torn out, nobody had left behind any nighttime notes. Outside, the women stopped talking. O’Connell’s door opened and closed.
I sat down on the bed, and the mattress sank beneath me. The thing in my head shifted slightly. It had stayed quiet all day, as if the long drive had jostled it to sleep, and I pushed my thoughts away from it before it could wake up. Thinking about the demon seemed too much like summoning it.
I stared at the walls instead: dark rose wallpaper that looked like it had been put up in the forties. Opposite me was a large water stain in
the shape of a heart—and not a valentine heart. A fat smear sprouting from its top was disturbingly aortic.
Someone knocked on the door—but it wasn’t the hallway door. I curled out of the bed and cautiously opened the skinny door I’d taken for a closet. O’Connell stood there, holding a big folded white towel and a washcloth.
“I was wondering where those were,” I said.
Behind her was a bathroom tiled in checkerboard black and white, and another open door. Her room looked bigger than mine.
“Will you be singing in the shower tomorrow?” I asked. Her face tightened. “Of course not.”
Jesus, she could get pissed so fast. “You have a beautiful voice,” I said. She made a dismissive sound like a cough. “No, really,” I said.
“You could have been a singer.”
“And you could have been a bicycle repairman.” She pressed the towel and washcloth into my hands, and while I put them on the desk she stood in the doorway, looking around at the space. I bet her room really was bigger.
“So. Shavawn.”
“No, it’s—” And she said it in a subtly different way. I made a face and she spelled it for me.
“Ohhh,” I said. “Siobhan. You know, I’ve seen that in print but I never knew how it was pronounced.”
She didn’t quite roll her eyes. “Any other questions?”
“Nope. Yes! The Latin thing by the door.”
“Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit,” O’Connell said. “Dr. Jung wrote that above the door to his house. ‘Summoned or not, the god will be there.’ ”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Goodnight, Mr. Pierce.” She walked toward the bathroom door.
“And please don’t oversleep, the Waldheims are early risers, and we’ll want to get started.” She nodded at the bed. “Need someone to strap you down? Or do you need to have a wank first?”
I barked a laugh. My face heated. “What?”
“It must be difficult with your hands tied down.” Her tone was clinical. “And it will help you sleep.” The muscle behind my balls thumped like a bass string.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’m fine.”
“Suit yourself. I’ll see you in the morning.” She turned and disappeared into the bathroom, closing the door behind her. A moment later I heard her own door close.
I sat down on the bed and let the collapsing springs roll me backward. Siobhan. I lay there, staring at the ceiling, my dick as hard as the Washington Monument.
The sound was like a faint, drawn-out squeak, repeating rhythmically like a rusty hand pump. Very faint at first, then growing slowly louder. I sat up in my cocoon bed. In the windowless room I couldn’t guess what time it was, but it felt like hours since I’d threaded the chains through the bed frame and lain down, waiting for sleep. The manacles lay open and unattached.