Pandemonium

fireworks display. And of course we had the best seats in the house. One more show for Bobby.

The light from the fireball lit the caped man in a halo. The sound arrived an instant later, making the window shudder. The plane must have been loaded with fuel to cause such an explosion.

“Aww,” the Boy Marvel said, suddenly deflated. “It hit the house.”

I stepped closer to the window. The top story of the farmhouse had vanished, and the structure below was nothing but a mass of fire. Black oily smoke roiled into the sky.

The Little Angel tiptoed into the room. She caught my eye, held a finger to her lips.

The girl climbed up on the bed. She straddled the old man’s hips and leaned forward to hold his face in her hands so that he seemed to be looking into her eyes.

“Wait—,” I said, the sound rasping in my throat. The Boy Marvel turned away from the window. He saw her and shouted, his voice like thunder.

The Little Angel daintily kissed the old man on his unmoving lips.

“Nighty night,” she said.

16

I’m alive; evil am I.

Del’s mother wanted to take me to the emergency room. She saw the bruise at my neck, lifted my shirt, and gasped at a deeper, larger bruise the shape of Australia. But I was done with hospitals. I told her I was fine, that I just needed to lie still for a while. She quickly changed the sheets in my old room. I lay down, and she brought a chair into the room and sat beside me. She asked me questions, and I answered them truthfully, but I knew that much of what I said didn’t make sense to her. Bertram popped in and out, not wanting to listen in, unable to stop himself. He kept asking if we needed food, drinks. Neither of us was hungry, but I consented to iced tea. Del’s mother waited until Bertram was gone, and then she said, “I don’t understand—why did you go to Kansas?”

I thought about the paper-thin clues I’d followed: a few paintings, a page in a comic book, a made-up town that happened to exist. The chain of reasoning had a kind of dream logic, but like a dream it made less and less sense the more I examined it. It didn’t matter that it had turned out to be true. The certainty I’d felt along the way, the magnetic pull of that little dot on the map—those came from something else. Someone else. I’d been drawn to Olympia as surely as any of the other demons.