Pandemonium

what happened in the pool. I mean, when I first hit the rail everything went black for a second—but just a second. I remember right after the air bag hit me, the car filled with this stuff like gray smoke. I found out later that it was the cornstarch they packed the air bag in to keep it from molding or something. Then I went through the rail and bounced against the air bag a few times, but afterward my forehead wasn’t bleeding or anything. I didn’t even get a black eye.”

“When you say everything went black, you mean you blacked out?”

“No, I didn’t go unconscious—I just couldn’t see anything. I don’t think I was knocked all the way under—it happened too fast. I just . . . saw black.”

“Like ‘a black well’ opening up?”

Heat rolled up my chest, made my ears roar.

“Del, after we talked yesterday, I looked up my old notes from our sessions. When you first visited me, we spent a lot of time talking about your near drowning. You talked about a ‘black well,’ a deep hole that you saw at the bottom of the pool. You could feel it sucking you in.”

“I did?”

“Do you remember that?”

“Not really.” The shiver had passed. I pressed my palms into my knees. “Some.”

“And this time?”

“Some.” I looked up, smiled, but couldn’t hold it. “There was something like that. Like a well. When I hit the guardrail I kind of lurched forward, and for a second there I saw it, this blackness, and I felt like I could . . . like it was sucking me in. But I held on. I stayed awake, and then I was getting whipped around inside the car. A second later I was at the bottom of the ravine.” I shook my head. “You think that means something?”

“Del, both times after you saw this well, the noises came back. Some people when they have near-death experiences, they see a tunnel, and perhaps—”

“The tunnel, the light, and Grandma and Jesus at the end of it with their arms open to greet me. I’ve read about this. That’s just oxygen starvation.”

“That’s one theory—oxygen starvation and endorphin release. But say that the Jungians are right, and there are outside archetypes or memes that the brain is receptive to. One way to think of this black well is that it’s a gateway—a gateway that opens when you’re most vulnerable.”

“So I’m near death, and the demon jumps back in.”

“Maybe.” She pursed her lips; it was killing her to agree with demon. Dr. Aaron liked things agnostic. But she nodded. “Maybe. It explains a lot. Each time the well opened, it came after you. It’s like an opportunistic infection. But the good news is that you’ve fought it off before. And if the current exercises aren’t working, that just means we’ve got to try new ones.”

“It’s a really good theory,” I said flatly.

She blinked. “But you don’t think so.”

“I wish you were right, Doc. A couple of months ago I would have bought it.”

“A couple of months ago—when you were hospitalized?”

I breathed in, breathed out. Cleansing breaths. “See, it’s not just the noises now. I developed this sleepwalking problem.”

She frowned, and I laughed. “Okay, that’s not the right word,” I said. “Sleep-raging, maybe. Wolfing out.”

Her head tilted a fraction. This was what she used to do when I was fourteen. A little tilt, the right bit of leverage, and she could open me like a bottle.

“It didn’t start until a couple months after the car accident,” I said. “The noises had grown worse, but I was hanging on. I was getting to work most days. Then on a Thursday night I woke up, and my downstairs neighbor was pounding on my door.” I smiled, remembering how it had taken me a few seconds to realize that the pounding wasn’t coming from inside my head. “Anyway, I was on the floor in the front hallway, tangled in the bedsheets. I didn’t know why I