Pandemonium

an expression of mild curiosity. There was no one else in the room, but she was performing just the same.

I didn’t know what to say. Commander Stoltz and at least three of his men were dead, killed by the Shug. The rest of the Human League, all except Bertram, had fled in the helicopter. True, they’d come to kill me, so they weren’t about to go to the police. But there were still four dead men. You couldn’t have people die in your town and just pretend it didn’t happen. You had to at least look into it, didn’t you?

But no. If they called in the cops, what could they do? Arrest Toby, kill him? And then the Shug would just move on to the next host. This couldn’t have been the first time people had disappeared at the lake. It wouldn’t be the last.

O’Connell watched my face, saw me get it.

“It’s Harmonia Lake, Del,” she said.

Holy shit.

“You’ll still have to answer some questions, though,” she said. She paced to the window, leaned against it. “Lew wants to know what happened to him. He wasn’t happy with my answers.”

“What’d you tell him?” I said.

“Exactly what I saw,” she said. The morning light was behind her, and I couldn’t make out her face. “I saw him snap handcuffs like chopsticks, shrug off a Taser, disable two armed men. I saw him save his brother from drowning.” She paused. “That’s what I saw. Now why don’t you tell me what happened.”

“I was at the bottom of the lake, remember? I was unconscious until—”

“Don’t lie, not to me,” she said quietly.

It was too hard to look into the sunlight. I stared down at the mound of bedclothes covering me from chest to toes like a white casket.

“How’d you do it, Del?”

“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