Pandemonium

blast from “Vertigo” overdubbed with their spoken intro to “Helter Skelter,” which abruptly became Jet’s “Are You Gonna Be My Girl.”

And all the chords matched. I hadn’t realized they were so similar.

“Hey, that’s cool,” I said, and then shut up, because suddenly Paul McCartney was singing “Lady Madonna” over that thrash of Jet chords, and it sounded like those two songs were meant for each other. And then as soon as I settled into that, a guitar riff from the Joe Walsh song kicked in—that one about “life’s been good to me so far,” I couldn’t recall the name. And then it was all three—Beatles, Jet, and Joe Walsh—punctuated at random by distant shouts of “What the fuck is going on!” that sounded like snippets from a Sex Pistols track. I couldn’t stop giggling.

“Holy shit!” I said to Lew. “Where did you get this stuff?”

“Downloaded it. They call ’em mash-ups.”

“I think I’m in love.”

He had hours of this stuff on his hard drive. We cut northeast into New York, and Lew played me Doors versus Blondie, Depeche Mode versus Marvin Gaye versus Cypress Hill, Madonna versus Sex Pistols, and on and on. It was like these DJs had tapped into all the pop songs in my brain, into the collective radio in all our brains, and remixed and relayered until the songs were having sex and making strange, beautiful babies.

Eventually we left the interstate behind and the music ran out, along with Lew’s cell phone service. For the past few hours we’d been twisting and bobbing along two-lane back roads, rollercoastering through pitch-black forests. And now we were lost. Or rather, the world was lost. The GPS told us exactly where we were, but had no idea where anything else was.

Permanent Global Position: You Are Here.

I walked away from the car, toward the trees, sucking in cold air. A few feet away from the headlights, it got very dark. I stood there, letting my eyes adjust. What had looked like a solid wall of shadow resolved into individual trees, evergreens interspersed with bare-limbed things with interlocking branches. Snow was still mounded under some of the trunks. Somewhere out there was a town called Harmonia Lake, and presumably a lake to go with it, and a house or trailer or tent that might have been, and might still be, Mother Mariette O’Connell’s home.

I crossed my arms against the cold, turned my back to the woods, and started back to the car. Lew, illuminated by the dome light, was flipping through pages of printouts and cursing. Suddenly a light above the billboard sputtered to life, silvering the grass. I realized I wasn’t alone, and looked up. A gray-green humanoid monster reached toward me with huge webbed hands. It was hairless, with a wide, pale belly like a toad’s, caught in midstride as it stalked out of some dimly rendered swamp on thickly muscled thighs, its crotch conveniently shadowed. The head was bald and round, mouth agape, neck gills fanned. It stared down at me with black goggly eyes.

“Oh Lew?” I called out. “Lew!”

He looked at me, scowling. I nodded at the sign. The billboard was faded and peeling, but below the painted monster the huge block letters were clear enough: have you seen the shug?! And then below that, slightly smaller: museum & gift shop—

harmonia lake motel 2 mi. on right.

Lew shook his head, then crumpled the remaining pages and tossed them in the backseat. “Fucking MapQuest,” he said. The Harmonia Lake Motel and Shu’garath Museum and Gift Shop was a Victorian stack of narrow windows and peaked roofs disappearing into black sky. A long, slope-roofed porch wrapped the house in a shadow mouth, toothed by gray posts. The windows were dark except for two narrow, faintly glowing panes on either side of the front door.

A light high on a telephone pole shone weakly on the empty parking lot. Two gravel roads, not much wider than walking paths, led from each end of the lot and disappeared into the woods; signs pointed toward cabins 1–2 and 3–5.

On the lawn in front of the house, a man-size wooden cutout of the Shug held its own rectangular sign, white letters dimly visible: bait.