Pandemonium

building, and opened a door on the first floor. Double beds. The carpet crunched from old spills, and the air was thick with a sickeningly sweet scent—some perfumed cleanser. I expected at any moment to detect the horrible smell it was trying to mask.

“Oh my God,” I said.

O’Connell looked annoyed. “Sleep in the truck, then.”

“No, no, this is great. No fish on the door, but you can’t have everything.”

I dropped my duffel and the comic box onto the bed by the window, thinking I could channel a little fresh air across my face as I slept. I tried to open the window, but it was sealed. Then again, maybe keeping the window closed on the first floor of a shady motel wasn’t such a bad idea. Only one other car in the parking lot right now, but more people would arrive later.

“Checking to see if we were followed?” O’Connell said. “You spent the whole trip looking out the back window, when you weren’t buried in these comics.”

I turned around, and she had the box open. She picked up an issue of RADAR Man, flipped it open to a random page.

“Bertram thought the demons were performing for each other,” I said. “That they were watching each other. But maybe it’s worse than that. Maybe they help each other.”

O’Connell shook her head. “They’re too self-involved, wrapped up in their own stories. They don’t cooperate.”

“What if there was a threat to all of them? Like Dr. Ram—”

“Dr. Ram was killed because he was a threat to some fanatic’s worldview,” she said without looking up. “And this—” She shook the comic. “This makes no sense. ‘Yo, bozo boy’?”

I walked around the side of the bed, looked over her shoulder. It was the climactic fight scene, and my sixth-grade drawing skills had been taxed to their limits. I’d been trying out some of those Jack Kirby forced perspectives, and RADAR Man’s fists looked as big as cars.

“It’s simple,” I said. “RADAR Man, aka Robert Trebor, aka Bob, has tracked Doctor Awkward to his lair in Bob’s hometown.”

“Doctor Awkward?”

“They’re palindromes,” I said. “Doctor Awkward is D-R-A-W—”

“Oh, I got it.”

“Anyway, the doctor’s kidnapped his girlfriend, Hannah, and made a clone of her, except that the polarity of her brain’s been reversed. The clone is evil and left-handed.”

“Of course.”

“So the evil Hannah says, ‘Yo, bozo boy! I’m alive; evil am I!’ And RADAR Man says, ‘Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live!’ ”

“Lovely dialogue,” she said.

“Hey, you try to write in all palindromes. Lew had this book, Big Book of Word Games or something, with pages of these things. We wanted to write the whole story that way, one big continuous palindrome. That would’ve been the ultimate, an entire book you could read forward or backward.”

“The ending is present in the beginning,” she said. “As always.”

“Is that like a theological insight or something?”

“The alpha and the omega,” she said. “I didn’t invent it.” She handed me the comic and walked to her suitcase. “I’m going to take a shower.”

“Oh, okay,” I said nonchalantly. “I’ll take one after you.”

She glanced back at me with an expression I couldn’t parse, then picked up a small nylon bag and carried it into the tiny room that held the shower and toilet. She closed the door behind her. After several long minutes, the water sputtered on.

I lay down on my bed and focused on the comic book page, trying to stare past the image of O’Connell, naked, face turned up to the shower head, water streaming down her neck . . . dr. awkward: Do Good’s deeds live on? No, Evil’s deeds do, O God. r a d a r m a n : Egad, an adage! Draw, O coward!

Which doesn’t make much sense, because the doctor doesn’t have a gun. RM’s own RADAR gun knocks both Dr. Awkward and the evil Hannah back into one of the big funhouse mirrors the doctor keeps in