Pandemonium

I heard the distant growl of the Toyota’s muffler and started stepping toward the house. O’Connell parked the truck, and got out with two big plastic grocery bags in her arms.

“What’s this?” I said.

“Camping supplies. There’s more in the back. What were you doing out there?”

“The call of nature.” There was no sense telling her about the plane. She’d only try harder to make me leave. I went around to the back of the truck and got three other bags from the bed. One held bottled water, rolls of toilet paper, a carton of cigarettes. The other bags were stuffed with what looked like big beach towels, purple and trimmed in silver.

“Is this all for me?” I asked. “Or are you staying?”

“You’re lucky Olympia has no hotel.”

I set down the grocery bags inside the door, then went back to the truck to get my duffel and O’Connell’s bag. O’Connell followed me out and retrieved a pizza box from the seat of the car. She said, “We’d better get set up before it gets dark.”

We ferried everything upstairs and split up the supplies. I didn’t have to ask if she wanted to sleep separately. O’Connell took the back bedroom with the double bed; I, of course, took the room with the comics.

The things that looked like towels were exactly that: Kansas State University beach towels. I guessed she couldn’t afford sleeping bags.

“Can I show you something?” I called. O’Connell came to my door. “Please,” I said.

She sat on the purple towel I’d spread out on the bed. I sat next to her, and handed her the book I’d found, opened to the inside cover. In a wobbly hand someone had written, “Property of Bobby Noon.”

“His name was Bobby,” I said.

“Congratulations,” she said.

“And that’s not all.” I began to show her the magazines and comics I’d set aside. I pointed out the heroes and villains on the covers: the Shadow, Captain America, the crazed Japanese soldiers.

“They’re blueprints for the cohort,” I said. “The Truth, the Captain, the Kamikaze—they’re all here.”

“What about the Little Angel?” O’Connell’s demon, the little girl in the white gown. “What comic book character is she?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Some kind of Shirley Temple–Little Lulu amalgam. Like what’s-her-face in The Little Rascals—the token girl.”

“Who kills old people and terminal patients.”

“Hey, I’m not saying this explains everything. But think about it—

so many of the cohort are like characters straight out of the pulps.” I looked around for the Katzenjammer Kids book, spotted it by the bookcase, and brought it back to her, stepping around the many small piles of pages. I carefully opened the book to the page I’d seen. “Look at this—it predates anything in Dennis the Menace.”

One of the panels showed the blond-haired Katzenjammer boy firing a slingshot at his drunken uncle, knocking his glasses into the air. “O’Connell, I’m in here.”

She stared at the page for a long moment, then stood quickly and walked to the window—I winced as her foot came down on a Hit Comics with Kid Eternity on the cover. She leaned close to the cracked glass, gazing across the fields. “This doesn’t tell us anything new, Del. We already know the archetypes take whatever forms exist in the culture—”

“No! No. Look at all this. I was drawn here for a reason. This is ground zero. This is where it started. With Bobby Noon, the boy on the rock.”

“What are you saying?” She didn’t look at me. “He dreamed you into being?”

“Or summoned me.”

The dying glow made a moon of her face. In a few minutes the room would be dark. I looked around for the flashlight, and O’Connell suddenly jerked back from the window.

“What is it? O’Connell?”