Pandemonium

to meet me. I’d forgotten how quick she was, how in sync we could be. It was like we were picking up where we left off years ago.

“When did they start?” she asked. “While you were in the ER?”

“Faster this time. I was still in the car when they started.”

She pursed her lips. “So how are you handling it? Are you using your exercises?”

“I’ve tried them.” I’d worked with Dr. Aaron for months before she taught me something that could smother the sensations in my head. The exercises were mental plays I could enact. The one that worked best was one I called Helm’s Deep. My mind was a fortress, and the noises—the pounding, the shaking, the metal-on-metal rasping—

were orcs coming over the walls. All I had to do was knock them off the parapets. If they kept coming, I just had to back into the keep and seal the door. And if they came through the door, I retreated to the caves. Yeah, it was cowardly, but there were no frickin’ elves to help me out. And it had worked—until now.

I ran a hand across my neck. “The door’s closed, but I can still feel them.”

“How are you getting through the day?”

I laughed. “I don’t know. I can’t just ignore it—sometimes it’s the loudest thing in the room.” Loudest was the wrong word, but she knew what I meant. “I’ve learned to not respond, at least in front of people. I keep my face blank; I try not to wince when it startles me. I just . . . concentrate on what people are saying. And I keep nodding.”

“That must be incredibly tiring.”

I laughed, ran a hand across my mouth. “You have no idea.”

“The Nembutal . . . are you using that to help?”

“During the day? No. That’s just to help me sleep. I mean, I can sleep most of the time, it’s just that sometimes I can’t sleep. Look, I know you’re worried about the pills—”

“Nembutal’s a heavy-duty barbiturate, Del. They use it to knock people out before operations. It’s heavily addictive, and a hundred milligrams isn’t far from overdose territory. You have a few beers when you take one, and you could end up like Marilyn Monroe.”

“I’m not about to get addicted. Trust me, that’s not what I’m worried about.” I lifted my hands from my lap, dropped them. “Doctor. Do you think possession is real?”

“Of course.” She tilted her head. I remembered that gesture from our sessions. “Del, I know you’re not making this up. And neither are the thousands of people who’ve been affected by it. ”

“That’s not what I mean. Not possession the disorder. Oldfashioned possession. Do you believe you can be taken over by some outside force—some god or demon or whatever—or do you think it’s all just . . . delusions of delusional people?”

“No one knows, Del. What matters is—”

“Just tell me what you believe, Doctor. Yes or no. Are people just going crazy, or is it something else?”

She frowned, seemed to weigh her answer. “I think that yes, there are people who are psychotic, or who have multiple personality disorder, who also say that they’re possessed. There are even people who aren’t psychotic who want so badly to be possessed, or want to explain some past trauma, that they convince themselves that they were seized by some higher power. I’m not talking about people who fake possession—there’ll always be people who’ll use the O. J. defense. But there are people like yourself, Del, who don’t want to be possessed, and who aren’t liars and aren’t ‘crazy.’ The Jungians—”

“Oh God, not the Jungians.”

“There’s a reason eighty percent of psychotherapists are Jungians. The idea of the collective unconscious, continually recurring archetypes, the nonphysical independence of the soul—all that makes a lot of sense given the evidence. There are so many cases of possession where the victim displays knowledge or skills that they don’t have access to, like seizing control of a plane, opening a bank vault. The literature is clear, and the Freudian explanation for possession just doesn’t stack up, in my estimation. All these possessions can’t be just the expression of the victim’s innermost drives.”

“Well, there’s the Piper. He looks like pure id.”

“But that’s an archetype too—the satyr.” She waved her hand.

“We’re getting off track. You want to know what I believe.” She leaned back in her chair, crossed her hands in her lap. “I’m not a Jungian, and