Pandemonium

girl in a white nightgown. Several seemed to have been taken in hospital rooms. The research paper’s title, in 78-point Futura, was “Cases for Nonlocal Intelligence,” followed by the smaller subtitle, “Information Transfer and Persistence among ‘Little Angel’ Possessions.”

“You’re looking for Dr. Ram,” she said. “Are you into the neuropsych end of things?”

“Yeah, kind of. And you’re working on the Little Angel?”

Otherwise known as the Angel of Mercy and the Girl in White. The demon possessed pretty, prepubescent girls, dressed up in lacy nightgowns, and went around visiting people on their deathbeds: cancer patients, motorcycle accident victims, burn unit residents. The Angel’s kiss killed them. Urban myth had it that her touch relieved these unfortunates of pain and gave them an overwhelming sense of calm. The deceased were silent on the matter.

“I know,” she said. “Been done to death.”

“No, no, I wouldn’t say that.” (Why not?) I picked up a copy from her own stack of articles. It was stapled, maybe twenty pages long. I looked at the abstract, something about how some girls possessed by the Angel knew things that only other Angels—Angels that had appeared in other states, in other times—would know.

“So you haven’t seen him, have you?” I said. “Dr. Ram?”

She shook her head. “Those papers were on the table when I got here to set up. But if I see someone I can tell them you stopped by.”

“No, don’t do that,” I said quickly. “I’ll catch him later.” I lifted her article and said, “Thanks for this. It looks interesting.”

I turned and walked away, making a show of reading the rest of the abstract with great interest. The research team had interviewed eyewitnesses to the visitations going back to the forties, concentrating on what the Angel had said that wasn’t reported in the media. Then they’d interviewed families of patients who had died during the visitations. They found out a couple things: One, Angels knew things about the patients that no stranger would reasonably know; and two, Angels knew details from previous visits that had never been broadcast or published.

I reached the end of the row, glanced back. She wasn’t looking at me, but there was no one between us. I tucked the paper into my tote bag. There was a garbage can ten feet away, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings by throwing it out in front of her. And the paper was garbage. So these “nonlocal intelligences” knew things they shouldn’t know, and seemed to be the same “person” possession after possession. In any decent junior high science fair, the appropriate response to those claims would be, Duh. And that pseudo-scientific phrase: Nonlocal intelligence. Every booth lobbied for some new term, each more ungainly than the last: meme, archetype, viral persona, possession disorder variant (PDV), intermittent shared consciousness (ISC), socially constructed alternate identity (SCAID) . . .

None of the names would catch on. Demon fit. Possession fit. A seventh grader could diagram that sentence: Demons possess you. Subject, verb, object.

I circled through the big room, shuffling sideways around clumps of people having minireunions—this must be quite the social occasion for academics who only saw each other at conferences. I couldn’t look at the poster titles anymore; I was just trying to get back to the only open door, where I’d come in. The bag dug into my shoulder. My face felt hot.

Ten feet from the door the way was blocked by people watching a slideshow projected onto the white wall. I shouldered my way through the crowd, and looked up as the picture changed. It was a picture of the farm the Painter had created in the airport—the same white farmhouse, the red silo and red-brown barn, golden fields bounded by lines of trees—but rendered in paint on a brick wall in some city, and on a much larger scale: judging by the garage door at the edge of the slide, the painting was at least fifty feet long and maybe twenty feet high. Then the picture changed, to a chalk drawing of a boy in swim trunks, arms around his knees, perched on a rounded boulder in a stream. A towel was draped over his back like a cape.

The thing in my head jerked and shuddered, and I clamped down on a wave of nausea. I pushed out of the crowd, not caring that people