Pandemonium

evolving for decades in the room’s substratum clacked their mandibles in anticipation.

Something about the picture of the pope looked off, and I leaned closer. It was John Paul II, looking saintly. The picture had been ripped into ragged pieces and then carefully taped back together. O’Connell came through the hatchlike doorway in the side of the trailer. For some reason I expected her to offer tea, but her hands were empty except for a pack of cigarettes. The jacket was gone. She wore a knobby silver cross over a faded black concert T-shirt for Tonton Macoute, a band I’d never heard of. It was the first time I’d seen her without the voluminous cassock or some other bulk hiding her shape. I couldn’t decide her age: Thirtythree? Forty-two? She was a small thing, with thin arms and a narrow waist. She had breasts.

“Sit,” she said.

We both sat. I didn’t look at Lew—I was afraid he was rolling his eyes. O’Connell remained standing, her arm on the back of the armchair opposite us. Next to the chair was a floor lamp with a round glass table at its middle. The tabletop had just enough space for an ashtray heaped with ashes and broken-spined butts. Her chair, obviously.

“So what is it you want from me, then?” she asked. I looked at Lew, but he was studying his hands. O’Connell made a disgusted noise. “Come on now, you can say it. You think you’re the first person to come after me with that religious glow on his face?”

“When I was a kid I was possessed,” I said slowly.

“So you said.” I’d told her as much in Chicago.

“I was five, and for a while we thought it had gone away. But recently I figured out that it never left. It’s still here.”

“All this time,” O’Connell said, nonplussed.

“And lately,” I said, plunging on, “it’s been trying to get out—it has gotten out, a few times. I don’t think I can hold it back anymore.”

She laughed. “If it wanted out, me boy, it would be out.”

“Listen,” Lew said testily. “All he wants is for you to get rid of this thing, okay?”

“Get rid of it? And put it where?” she said in the tone of a schoolmaster. She sat on the arm of the chair. “You can’t destroy a demon. You can’t kill it. You can’t even send it back to the fiery depths. All you can do is try to persuade it to go somewhere else. To someone else. Forget about everything you saw in those Exorcist movies—pentagrams and holy water and ‘the power of Christ compels you’ and all that shite. It doesn’t work. Even Jesus, when he cast out demons, just sent them into swine—and no, I can’t manage that trick. No one else has figured it out either.”

“There’s got to be something you can do,” I said. Trying to make it sound like a statement, not a plea. “You’ve exorcised other people. The Little Angel in New Jersey, the Pirate King in San Diego.” Witnesses had seen her cast out demons—Lew and I had read the stories, and they were from reliable sources—newspaper and magazine sites, not crackpot websites and free-for-all discussion boards. “I know you can help me,” I said. “You saw the demon in me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Back at the hotel. You looked at me, and you knew I’d been possessed.”

“Mother of God, you think I have magical powers. Has it crossed your mind that you’re not possessed at all, that you’ve simply got mental problems?”

“Are you kidding? All the fucking time.” I ran a hand through my hair. “All I want is what you did for them, for those other people. I want you to get this out of me. Whatever the cost.”

Her mouth turned down in what could have been restrained anger, or disgust. She tapped a cigarette from the pack. “All right then,” she said. She lit the cigarette, inhaled. She held it between her index and middle finger, the other fingers folded against her palm.

“The standard rate is five hundred dollars an hour. Two hours up front.”

Lew leaned forward on his elbows. “Uh, a thousand bucks would buy this house, your pickup, and all the pot you’re probably growing in that greenhouse.”

“It would be a donation to the Church,” she said evenly—or as