Pandemonium

nuthouse who looked comfortable wielding a gesture like that, but she was a natural.

“I told you in Chicago,” she said. “I can’t help you. You were traumatized by a demon as a child? See a therapist. You have no right to come to my hometown, bother my friends, and harass us. Go home, Mr. Pierce.”

I carefully peeled the napkins away from my lip, stared at the bright red blot. My mouth still stung, and more blood welled to the surface. I looked up at her until she dropped the finger.

“I guess Toby had you pegged wrong,” I said.

“Who?” Louise said, shocked.

“The Shu’garath? The gigantic guy who swims around in the lake?”

Louise said, “Toby talked to you?”

“Toby doesn’t talk to people,” O’Connell said.

“Well he talked to me. He’s a nice guy, though I wish he had warned me about your right hook.” A warm dollop of blood seeped over my lip like gravy, and I patted at it. “He said that of course you’d help me. Said that if anybody could help me, it was you.”

“I’m retired,” O’Connell said.

Louise looked from me to O’Connell, her bird eyes expectant. We followed O’Connell’s Toyota pickup down the highway. Gray primer blotches covered the once-blue truck like a tropical disease. A few miles north of the motel she turned onto a steep dirt road that looked like it had been shelled by artillery. The pits were much deeper than the Audi’s clearance, and Lew had to ease in and out of them at an angle to avoid bottoming out. O’Connell immediately left us behind, and the next time we saw the pickup it was parked in a muddy clearing. On one side of the clearing was a steep drop-off, Harmonia Lake spread out below. On the other side was a collection of low, ramshackle structures. Or maybe one complex structure. It was hard to tell.

At the center of the cluster was a mass of rounded aluminum that used to be a silver Airstream trailer. The trailer had grown several new rooms, as well as a couple of porches, a deck, two open-sided sheds, and many awnings, constructed of barn-wood planks, vinyl siding, and rusting sheet metal. Covered walkways, roofed in thick green plastic and floored with sections of warped plywood, connected to a Plexiglaswalled greenhouse and two garages. One garage door was open, revealing an old pontoon boat surrounded floor to ceiling by industrial junk.

Lew and I walked gingerly over the muddied driveway and reached one of the front porches. A door had been left open for us. Next to the frame was a driftwood sculpture like those at the motel, all glossy hooks and barbs. The wall below it was stained, the deck glittering with fish scales, as if she’d been hanging her catch of the day on the thing. Lew gave me an appalled look.

I knocked on the frame, and could see O’Connell moving in a distant room.

“Take off your shoes and have a seat,” she called.

“What are these sculpture things, folk art?” I said. “They were at the motel, too.”

She didn’t answer. The front room was long and low-ceilinged, three barn-plank walls secured to the naked, curved side of the Airstream trailer by angle irons. The wooden walls were insulated almost floor to ceiling by books, on shelves built out of the same knotted wood as the planks. A few spaces had been hollowed out of books to make room for odd bits: two huge open-faced stereo speakers like the kind I used to have in high school; an undersized, cheap-looking electronic organ that looked like a starter instrument for ten-year-olds; a framed picture of the pope.

The largest hole accommodated a cast-iron wood stove squatting on a platform of bricks. The books were kept back from the stove and the big pipe that ran up to the ceiling, but not far enough for my comfort. The room looked like it could go up in a flash. Arrayed around the stove were four worn, comfortable-looking armchairs upholstered in oranges and browns, on a carpet of 1974

gold shag. Lew sniffed and rubbed his nose. Dust mites that had been