Pandemonium

The room was floored with specked linoleum, and some of the specks were dubious. A double bed took up most of the room, its brown-and-yellow polyester bedspread nicely complementing, in both style and time period, a small yellow Formica table with aluminum legs and a couple of matching chairs padded in split vinyl. A small square window opposite the door mirrored the light. There was no bathroom: no bath, no room, not even room for a bath. From the smell, the walls were insulated with old fish wrap.

“You in?” Lew called.

“Does yours have a Jacuzzi too?” I shouted back.

“Sleep tight, now.”

Outside, the headlights switched off (Lew’s magical remote control). I shut the door and dropped my duffel bag on the floor. It clanked.

Oh. Sleep tight. Very funny.

I could hear the lake creeping toward the cabin. The longer I sat in the little room, the clearer I could hear it, until it seemed to be lapping at the floorboards beneath my bed. Bloop. Blurp. Blu-doop. I sat on the bed, propped up and staring at the dead flies in the bowl of the overhead light. My rodent roommate stayed demurely out of sight.

The Hellion banged around inside my head like a drunk in a dark room.

On the ride today I’d realized that I’d been going about this all wrong. Knocking myself out with Nembutal obviously wasn’t the answer, because the demon was busting out anyway at irregular intervals. Besides, I was almost out of pills. And alcohol seemed to have no effect, because after infusing my gray matter with Coors Light I’d managed to not only black out but go rock-’n’-roll on a hotel. No, the only way to ensure a demon-free night was to stay awake. The question, then, was how long could a human being stay awake? Keith Richards could party for three days straight, but I wasn’t sure if he counted as a human being. I kept myself alert for a good hour by peeling off my bandages and poking at my poor beat-up hands. I re-covered the bigger cuts with fresh bits of gauze taped down with Band-Aids, and left the smaller abrasions to air out. The pain was useful, but for any long-term attempt at uninterrupted consciousness I needed chemical assistance. At the Ohio oasis I’d stocked up on packages of NoDoz and chased a few pills with my latté. I’d dry-swallowed a few more after getting into the cabin, but sooner or later I’d need to find something with a bit more oomph. Addiction didn’t scare me. That was like worrying about tetanus after a bullet to the head. I just needed to stay awake long enough to convince Mother Mariette to cure me. NoDoz wouldn’t cut it for long, though. If we didn’t find the exorcist quick, I’d have to build my own crystal meth lab.

Mother Mariette O’Connell, we’d learned (thank you, Google), was an Irish citizen and a priest in the Latin Tridentine Church, an Irish splinter group of the Church of Palmar de Troya in Spain, which itself (thanks again, Big G) was an apocalyptic cult that had broken away from mainstream Catholicism.

The Palmarians were run by “Bishop” Clemente Gómez who, upon the death of Pope Paul VI, declared himself to be Pope Gregory XVII of the Holy Palmarian Church. Gómez, a gay priest with abstinence problems, had been known in Seville as El Voltio—“too much voltage”—before a vision of Mary in the nearby village of Palmar de Troya triggered his religious conversion. He’d invented the Palmarian Catechism, which taught, among other things, that somewhere in space was the Planet of Mary—home to Elijah, Moses, and Saint John—where human sin had not yet reached, and that elsewhere was the Planet of the Anti-Christ, where salvation was impossible and demons from the fourth dimension were readying for Armageddon. Gómez lost his sight in a car accident in 1976, then declared that Mary would heal him, which she declined to do before he died. O’Connell had appeared in the United States sometime in the late eighties or early nineties. A San Jose Mercury News article from 1992

said that she’d performed a successful exorcism on a young girl who’d been possessed by the Little Angel, and that the priest had performed