Pandemonium

The white-haired woman met us at the back door, ushered us in, and set the alarm behind us. O’Connell said, “Del, this is Dr. Margarete Waldheim.”

“Meg,” the woman said, and shook my hand. I must have winced. She glanced down, turned my hand in hers, looking at the cuts. “Have you been fighting?”

“Just with furniture,” I said.

“Ah. I always stick with the softer pieces—seat cushions, pillows.”

She was younger than I had thought from the street, maybe in her fifties—the white hair had thrown me off. A ruddy, apple-shaped face. Shorter than O’Connell, not fat but sturdy. She wore a green-striped man’s dress shirt untucked over black stretch pants, and thin black shoes like dance slippers.

“Anyway, welcome to Bollingen,” she said.

I glanced at O’Connell. What happened to Red Book?

“Bollingen is the name of the house,” O’Connell said. I still didn’t know if Red Book was the name of a cult, an institute, or a giant computer that would tell me my future. She led us down a dark-paneled hallway, past a tiled kitchen and half a dozen closed doors, while O’Connell talked about the trip in. She didn’t mention the labyrinthine tour of Manhattan. We arrived in a high-ceilinged foyer at the front of the house. Set into the floor was a slab of granite inscribed in Latin: vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit. Non vocatus deus—no vacations for God?

I made the mistake of looking up. High above the door was the circular window I’d seen from the street. The panes, viewed from the inside, were bruise-dark and glinting, like half-seen blades about to spin.

“You okay, Pierce?” O’Connell said.

I looked away from the window, ran a damp hand through my hair.

“What? Oh, yeah. Tired I guess.”

“The design came from one of Dr. Jung’s paintings,” Meg said.

“During his Nekyia period, he became fascinated with circular forms, circles within circles. Some of his works resemble Indian mandalas.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. And what the hell was a Nekyia?

One thing was clear: Jungians loved yargon.

O’Connell said to Meg, “Is the old man upstairs?”

At first I thought she meant Jung himself, but that couldn’t be—

he’d died in the fifties or sixties. She must have meant the other Dr. Waldheim.

“He’s turned in for the night,” Meg said. “And I’m about to collapse myself. I’ll show you to your rooms. If you’re hungry, though, make yourself at home. Siobhan can show you the kitchen.”

“Wait a minute—Shavawn?” I repeated phonetically. O’Connell looked at me. “Mariette is the name I took when I became a priest.”

Meg laughed quietly. “I can never remember to call her that.” She led us to side-by-side rooms on the second floor. “There’s a journal in the desk,” Meg said. “In case you have any dreams.”

“Okay,” I said, as if she’d told me where the towels were. “Thanks.”

I closed the door, dropped my duffel on the floor. Outside, Meg and O’Connell murmured together, their words indistinct. The room was a cozy space smaller than my dorm room at Illinois State, but bigger than my hospital room in Colorado. There was one skinny door besides the one I’d come through, but I didn’t feel like hanging up my clothes. Most of the room was taken up by a high bed on a cast-iron frame (convenient for chaining), an armless wooden chair, a small writing desk with a lid unfolded to reveal—yes indeed—

a handsome leather-bound journal and two fat pens. I flipped through the thick oatmeal-colored pages, but although a few pages had been torn out, nobody had left behind any nighttime notes. Outside, the women stopped talking. O’Connell’s door opened and closed.

I sat down on the bed, and the mattress sank beneath me. The thing in my head shifted slightly. It had stayed quiet all day, as if the long drive had jostled it to sleep, and I pushed my thoughts away from it before it could wake up. Thinking about the demon seemed too much like summoning it.

I stared at the walls instead: dark rose wallpaper that looked like it had been put up in the forties. Opposite me was a large water stain in