Temporary Agency

1

When I was fourteen, a cousin of mine angered a Malignant One. It was a big case, a genuine scandal. Maybe you remember it. At the time, when it all ended, I just wanted to forget about the whole thing. But a couple of years have passed and I guess maybe it’s time to think about it again.

The Bright Being lived in the office building where my cousin Paul worked analyzing retail sales reports. I don’t know how she got there, really. We never did find that out. I don’t even know how long she was there. I mean, before Paul met her. Maybe she lived on that same spot long before the building went up. Maybe she even lived there for thousands of years, way before the Indians came. No one really knows how old the Beings are. Some people say—I read this in a book, actually—that the Bright Beings, the Malignant Ones and the Benign Ones, go back to the beginning of the universe. According to this Sacred Physics book, the Big Bang Story that broke open the cosmic ylem egg showered out the Beings along with all the quarks and tachyons and all the rest of them. The Beings came from a kind of impurity in the ylem, a sort of aesthetic flaw in the original story. So maybe the Ferocious One lived at that spot for millions of years, embedded in the granite of Manhattan Island, waiting for humans, for victims—like my poor cousin Paul.

Or maybe she never lived there at all until the building went up. Maybe the contractor summoned her, maybe he offered her space in her building in exchange for help in getting his contract bid accepted. I thought of this because of what happened later. And because of what happened with the Defense Department.

Even if you don’t remember Paul’s case, you’ll certainly remember the Pentagon scandal. How half the Defense Department turned out to be Malignant Ones and the other half paying them off. How a lot of people said the chairman of the joint chiefs himself was a Malignant One. That one never made it into the papers, but everyone heard about it.

And you probably remember Alison Birkett. It was the Pentagon scandal that made her famous, after all. Before that she was an unknown lawyer specializing in demonic possession. But then that peace group came to her with their suspicions of “preternatural harassment”, and she began to investigate, and to push. And she kept on investigating, and pushing, for something like five years, until suddenly the story was all over the papers and the TV, and everyone wanted to interview and photograph Alison Birkett. Remember the Time magazine cover? They shot her standing on the steps of the Supreme Court, wearing a sharp suit, with the wind blowing a few strands of hair across her face, and the word “Demonbreaker” slashed across the bottom of the page.

I was just a kid then, but somehow Alison Birkett seemed really special to me. I watched the news every night on TV, hoping to see a feature about her. When one of the networks promised a special hour-long interview with her I begged my parents to let me stay up late that night. And I cut out the picture from Time and got a glass frame to preserve it and hang it over my desk.

I followed the scandal more closely than most adults, every detail. I still remember all the excitement, the new charges coming out every day in the paper. I remember the demonstrations, the peace groups in their rainbow robes and animal masks, chanting and waving those orange streamers in huge figure 8s as they marched on the Pentagon. And I remember the incredible excitement when the president ordered the Spiritual Development Agency to drive out the Ferocious Ones. They came in procession, with their twelve-foot banners and fluorescent masks, their drums and bells and electronic trumpets.

I was just a kid. I’d never seen anything like it. We all got off school, just like it was a national sacred-day, and I remember sitting in front of the TV all day long, watching “the big circus”, as my father called it. My mother went nuts trying to get me to eat, especially when they drew those huge lines out from the corners of the building, changing the Pentagon to a giant Pentagram. Wow, I thought, this is it, now it’s going to happen. And I was right, too. The TV blanked out the sound so we couldn’t hear the actual formulas the SDA chanted, but we could see the electric fire in the air as the Beings left the walls, only to get trapped in the triangles drawn on the outside of the building. And then when they did the banishment, and erased the lines, and declared the Pentagon “free and liberated”, I cheered and screamed and bounced up and down on the rug in front of the TV.

And I’ll never forget my father then, how much he shocked me when he said, “Oh, sure, right. And just in time for the commercials.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Listen, Honey,” Daddy said, “our beloved Spiritual Development Agency puts on a good show, but don’t you believe everything they say.”

“Mike!” my mother shouted at him. “She’s only a child.”

I guess he realized he’d given me a little more cynicism than I could handle because he said to me, “I’m sorry, Sweetheart. Your daddy’s just shooting off his mouth.”

But the damage was done. “You’re lying,” I screamed at him, and ran upstairs to my bedroom. There I took down the picture of Alison Birkett and looked at it while I cried. For a few seconds I hugged it, but then that seemed kind of dumb so I put it back on the wall.

I thought about all that stuff after everything that happened with Paul. I thought about the Pentagon, the things my father had said—and something else. Maybe if I’d done things differently, I could have helped Paul, really helped him. Maybe if I hadn’t been so trusting, if I’d acted early enough, I could have really done something. Maybe if I’d remembered what my father had said, I wouldn’t have expected the SDA to take care of us. I was only fourteen, remember. You can make yourself feel pretty guilty when you’re fourteen.

Of course, none of us knew anything at all about this when Paul went to work at that building. And when he met that—woman—and got involved with her, he never suspected she was anything different than what she seemed. I mean, you hear about such things happening but you never think it’s going to happen to you. Romance with a Bright Being? Come on. It sounds like something out of supermarket magazines, right? “I lost my husband to a Malignant One”, or “Movie star’s new boyfriend a Ferocious One! Details inside!”

Maybe Paul should have guessed something, or at least been a little more careful. Because he did get a warning. When he first got the job he went to a Speaker for a divination. He went to a Bead Woman actually, one of those women who use coloured beads to make their predictions. He took me along. Paul and I were really close, despite his being ten years older than me. We were each an only child and we kind of thought of each other as brother and sister, especially after Paul’s folks died in a car crash during his last year of college.

So we went to this Bead Woman who said her blessings and threw out her beads on a silk scarf. Right in the centre lay a red bead with yellow bands, and all around it lay a circle of little black ones. And all the others had scattered to the edges of the cloth. Danger, the Speaker said. Danger and isolation. Paul asked what kind of danger, but she said she couldn’t tell because all the other beads had “retreated”. They talked about it and then Paul decided that since he’d asked about work it had to mean danger at his new job.

So Paul decided to do an environmental enactment for his workplace. I helped him. It was fun. We went down to the big spiritual supply centre on 34th Street and got some sacred paper (made from old clothes worn by the major New York storytellers), and some sanctified chalk and some great miniature office furniture (I loved the little fax machine; it was so cute), and some little plastic dolls to signify Paul and his co-workers, and finally a package of official SDA flash powder. Then we went downtown to Paul’s studio in the Village where he had what has got to be the smallest sanctuary you’ve ever seen (growing up in the suburbs can be pretty boring, but at least the houses all have decent-sized sanctuaries). We drew a circle on the floor for sacred ground and set up the office inside it. Then we labelled one of the dolls with Paul’s boss’s name and just wrote “co-worker” on the others, and set them out. Next we took the biggest doll and wrote Paul’s name on it, including his official enactment name. While Paul marched the doll into the circle I moved the other dolls back and forth, as if they were all happy and excited about Paul’s joining the company. After that, we sang songs of harmony and success while Paul wrote out a few “positive realities” on the sacred paper. Paul burned the paper on a silver enactment tray and then scattered the ashes on the dolls at their miniature computer desks. Finally, we sang a couple more songs, general all-purpose praise stuff, while we set off the flash powder in the silver bowl that went with the tray. And then Paul took me down to Chinatown for dim sum.

Well, we certainly had fun. And maybe it would have worked—if the danger had been coming from his office. But in fact it came from another office entirely, one down the hall near the restrooms.

Later on, the SDA questioned Paul pretty heavily about his early encounters with the Being. I’m sure they were trying to get themselves off the hook, in case we decided to go public after all about what she was doing there. And who her clients were. But Paul didn’t know or suspect anything when he first saw her. Why should he? As far as he knew, she ran a temp agency. He only went past her office at all because it was on the way to the men’s room. In fact, most of the time when he went past it the office was closed. And the few times the door stood open he just saw her on the phone, or entering stuff into a computer. He did notice her. But all he saw was a beautiful woman—long wavy red hair, smooth curves, violet eyes. She wore suits most of the time, he said, kind of severe no-nonsense, with skirts just above the knee.

Paul noticed her and so did all the other guys in his office. But as far as he could tell she took no notice at all of him or any of the others. Some of them called her “the Ice Queen”. (Why couldn’t she have decided to melt for one of them instead of my cousin Paul?) A couple of times, he said, he tried speaking to her at the elevator but never got anywhere. Once, he said, he was standing outside her open office (he didn’t say what he was doing there) when her phone rang, and after she’d answered it she got up and went over to close the door. Paul said when he saw her the next day in the lobby he felt himself blush but she just walked right past him.

So what changed her? What made her suddenly go after him, of all the men who worked there? Paul was always vague about this with me, sometimes saying he had no idea, other times hinting he knew something, but didn’t think it was important. I’ll have to guess, but I do have an idea.

What I guess is that Paul did something which made him more attractive. I think he did one of the forbidden enactments. Now, I don’t mean anything really nasty. Paul would never do anything violent. But just before the Being got interested in him, Paul went on a holiday—a hunting trip, he said. A packaged tour. And he got nervous whenever I tried asking for details. That wasn’t like Paul. From around when I was twelve he would always tell me pretty much everything. So I think he went off to one of those “lodges” men go to, and I think he did something a little more serious than dolls and tiny office furniture. Something with a vow of secrecy, and maybe a couple of “service” women wearing nothing but body paint and soft furry animal skins.

Men do these things to increase their potency. That’s what the magazines say, anyway. Whatever Paul did, it sure got the attention of the “lady” down the hall. He walked past her office one day just after his trip. She was writing on a chart or something, Paul said, when suddenly she stopped, put down her pencil and looked up at him. Directly at him. She looked curious, he told me, as if she was seeing some interesting animal she’d never encountered before. I remember he laughed when he told me this, just a few days after it happened. Of course, that was before he knew what she was. But I didn’t laugh with him. It gave me the creeps, even then.

Paul said he was so startled he almost ran away. Instead, he did his best to smile at her, but she was already back at her work. So he forgot about her until that afternoon when he was waiting for the elevator to go home. He was just standing there, feeling tired, when he heard a voice behind him. The funny thing is, he never remembered what the voice said, just the way it made him feel. He found himself closing his eyes and smiling, and swaying back and forth slightly as if he was balancing himself against a strong wind. He opened his eyes and turned around, and there she was. She had her blazer draped over her arm and she was wearing a satiny blouse, pink, Paul said it was, and I bet it was open pretty far down, but Paul didn’t say that.

In fact, when he first told me about this fantastic woman he’d met he sounded so gushy I should have suspected something just from that. He told me how she touched his arm and all the tiredness left him, how it was like sitting on the grass and watching the river go by. Paul never talked about girls like that. Paul never talked about anything like that.

They went out for a drink, then dinner, to some place Lisa knew. That was the name she used, Lisa. Lisa Blackwell. Goddamn her.

When they said goodnight they kissed, and even though it went on for a while that’s all they did. And then she smiled at him, “like a kid” Paul said, “like she was younger than you”, (“Thanks a lot” I told him, but he paid no attention) and it was okay, he said, it was okay they didn’t go any further, because he knew they would do so, maybe the next time or the time after.

I said, “You better make sure she gets a little older first”, but Paul was unstoppable. He just wanted to go on about how okay it all was.

They slept together a few nights later. The SDA investigators made a big fuss about this. Paul told me they asked him over and over what it felt like, didn’t he suspect anything? He just kept repeating to them that it was like sleeping with an ordinary woman. That wasn’t what he told me. At the time he went on and on with one soupy description after another. He even told me how he prayed that when I started sleeping with boys I would find something so perfect. I said, “Maybe you and Lisa can coach us.” But he was beyond sarcasm.

If Paul’s ga-ga language didn’t make me suspicious something else should have. He didn’t want me to meet her. Now, I didn’t meet all of Paul’s girlfriends. I mean, it wasn’t like he submitted them to me for approval. But usually, whenever he got serious about someone he’d invite me for lunch or something, so we could all get to know each other. With Lisa he got all evasive whenever I asked to meet her. I don’t think he knew he was doing it. He kept saying how he’d told Lisa all about me and how she couldn’t wait to meet me. But it never worked out. He would promise, but always “next week”, or after a sales conference, or an out of town trip.

Finally, we did make a date. Paul and Lisa invited me to go with them to the Summer Drum ceremony in Central Park. I don’t know how many people reading this have ever been to the Central Park Drum. Most towns have a Summer Drum, but not like this one. Over one hundred thousand people come, many after days of deep mud retreats, so that all they’re wearing is globs of dried dirt. People dance, sometimes on one leg, people fly the most amazing kites (some nine levels high, each with its own guardian spirit), people throw sanctified Frisbees painted over with patterns of perfection, groups of three hundred people or more go deep travelling in meditation together, people lie on the grass and hum for hours…And then there are the drums, as many as seven thousand of them. The first time Paul took me I thought we’d all bounce up into the sky when the drums started.

Paul and I considered the Central Park Drum something special between the two of us (maybe because we had to fight so hard the first time to get my parents to let me go). When the second Thursday in June approached and Paul just talked about Lisa, Lisa, Lisa, I really felt like he just wanted to get rid of me. So it relieved me when he called to make a date to meet him and Lisa at Founder’s Circle on 59th Street before the start of the ceremony.

The thing is, I never made it. My mom drove me to the train station and I waited there, holding my little travelling enactment bag so I could join in with the collective part of the ceremony. And I waited. I waited ten minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour, with all the commuters muttering about last straws, and robber baron prices, and the other drum followers checking their watches and saying blessings, until finally a garbled loudspeaker voice told us the train was cancelled. Fire on the tracks. Next train in two hours. Maybe. I called my mom and she offered to drive me into the city. I thanked her about twenty times, calling her “a true hero of the revolution”. She laughed and said she’d be right there.

Forty minutes later, she pulled into the train station. Roadblocks all up and down the highway, she said. Industrial action by the State Police who didn’t like the state budget crunch taking away their paid personal enactment days. So finally we set out, and in five minutes we had a flat tyre. No problem, I assured my mother, I’d done tyre changing in preparation-for-driving class. With Mom worrying about me getting my good enactment dress dirty I did the tyre a little more slowly than I would have liked, but then it was finished. Off again. Mom said she’d get the tyre fixed after she dropped me off.

We got onto the highway. Clunk, clunk—another flat tyre. So that was it for my trip to meet Lisa Blackwell. By the time the AAA towed us to a gas station and did a purification ceremony on the car, I knew Paul and Lisa would be lost among the hundred thousand.

That night, when I called Paul, he sounded relieved. He denied it when I told him, but I was sure I was right.

He began to look different. His weight went up and down. Sometimes he’d look as skinny as the star of a hunger enactment. Other times he looked all puffed up, like he’d eaten nothing but doughnuts for a month. I even asked him if he was bulimic. He claimed his weight hadn’t changed in two years. One time he came to my house for dinner and I got the strangest feeling, like he was fading away, like I could almost see the wall right through him.

His behaviour changed too. Nothing really wild. But he talked a lot. Paul always used to keep silent, especially at family parties. Now he made himself the centre of attention, telling jokes, spouting political theories, giving advice on the economy. And he bragged. Paul never bragged about himself, but now he was telling us all about his two promotions in two months, his special commendation from the CEO, even how much he spent for a new suit. I wanted to scream at him. Or kick him.

My folks didn’t notice anything. They just said wasn’t it great Paul was coming out of his shell? Wasn’t it wonderful he was doing so well? And in such a short time. And didn’t Lisa sound sweet?

How could we have been so damn stupid? He even told us how Lisa—wonderful sweet Lisa—had received a vision of Paul going all the way to the top. As if she’d done a “selfless offering” and the Powers had granted her a psychic vision. Damn. If only we’d gotten the fog out of our heads maybe we could have intervened.

But it was up to Paul to recognize that something was wrong. He started getting strange dreams. There were lots of lights, he told me later, glowing on the sides of buildings, swooping down out of the skies, flaring up in front of his face. And when he’d put his hands up or made a noise he’d hear laughter. Except he wouldn’t see anybody. Other dreams, instead of lights he’d see holes. Holes in walls, in the street, in stores and lobbies of buildings. And nobody would see them but him. In the dream Paul would point out the holes to people. “Watch out,” he’d say to an old woman, “you’re going to step in that hole.” But instead of looking, they’d just shove him out of the way. Sometimes holes would appear in people’s bodies. In the dream he’d go over to examine them, sometimes even reach inside their bodies and find nothing but garbage. He’d call people over to help, but they’d all just laugh. A few times, Paul told me later, he woke up from these dreams feverish or even vomiting.

I asked Paul if he ever took the dreams to NORA, the computer for the National Oneiric Registration Agency. No, he said, once he woke up, he’d just wanted to forget about them. I asked him if he’d done enactments to cleanse his dream spirit. No, he told me, and looked surprised. He’d never thought about it.

Even awake, he started acting funny. If he didn’t see Lisa he just stayed home and did nothing, not even watch TV. He stopped seeing his friends, he stopped seeing me. He started getting scared at really odd moments. He’d see a bus pulling up to a kerb and suddenly panic as the door opened. As if a wild dog or something would come leaping out at him.

But what really worried him finally was Lisa herself. She never tired. At first, he liked that. “She can go on and on,” he said to me once, before it started to scare him. When he was with her he never got tired, either. They could make love four or five times, he told me, something he said he could never do with anyone else. “It’s almost like inflight refuelling,” he said. Of course, he was bragging again. And yet—I don’t think he realized this—he became all sad after he said it. We were drinking tea and I remember he stared into the cup like an old-fashioned Speaker looking for a message in the leaves.

Finally, he would fall asleep and dream his strange dreams. He always figured Lisa was asleep too, until one night he woke up in the middle of the night and she was just lying there, wide awake, staring at the ceiling, and smiling. When she turned and reached for him he jumped back. He had to go pee, he told her. She laughed. In the bathroom, he said, he thought his heart would punch right through his chest. He didn’t know why, he said, he just felt so scared. But then she called him and suddenly he found himself excited. You know, aroused. He told me it was like his “thing” had gotten a life of its own and was running away with him.

After that, Paul tried to pull back from her, see her less, stay home, go out with friends. Nothing worked. I don’t mean he lost control, like some sort of drug fiend, or found himself calling her and hating himself for doing it. No, I mean he couldn’t stay away. He literally couldn’t. He would sit down, alone, in front of the TV with a rental movie on the VCR. He’d even put on pyjamas and get into bed. And then suddenly he’d find himself ringing her bell, with only the slightest memory of getting dressed, leaving the house with the TV still running, and getting a cab to 79th Street where Lisa lived. Or else he’d go to a bar with some friends, tell jokes and drink for half an hour, then excuse himself as if he was going to the men’s room, and instead just leave and go uptown to Lisa’s.

For a while he thought—he tried to think—it was an ordinary obsession. He even went to one of those groups for “love addicts” where they do enactments to purify their bodies and ask their higher powers to shield them from the lower powers. But when the others talked of their need for reassurance because their parents had never loved them, or described the thousands of dollars they’d spent at singles’ retreats, Paul knew his problem came from another level.

He kept thinking he should do something, maybe a freedom enactment. But he could never seem to do it. He would plan one, set up his sanctuary with strings of flowers and twenty-four-hour candles, spray the air with purifier, and go off to work, determined to go home right away and fulfil the inner path, as people say. Instead, he’d let Lisa take him off to a disco and then her apartment, and by the time he’d get home, the candles would have burned out and flower petals would lie all over the floor.

One time he tied his childhood spirit string around his wrist when he went to work. Since Paul’s parents’ death the string had meant a lot to him. He used to keep it in a special glass case on his permanent altar. When he put it on that day, his wrist stung for a moment and he found he wanted to yank it off and throw it away. Instead, he left it on, and suddenly the pain vanished and he closed his eyes and smiled. He went to work, he told me later, more cheerful than he’d felt in weeks. At lunchtime when he saw Lisa she “twitched” (his word) when he kissed her. That night, when they made love, she said she wanted to play and gave him some kind of costume to wear (he wouldn’t say what). Only, he had to take everything off, including the string. The next morning when he got dressed he couldn’t find it. They searched the whole bedroom, until Lisa persuaded him he better get to work. She’d give it to him when she found it, she said. Sure.

And then, one night, Lisa had some kind of appointment. So Paul stayed home for once and was watching Slade!, that cop show on TV where the hero investigates possession for the SDA. In the episode, Slade goes to a Southern town to investigate some mysterious deaths and gets stonewalled by the local sheriff’s office. At one point, a woman is running through a swamp, trying to escape a group of Malignant Ones who’ve taken the form of dogs and cats. She takes refuge in a cabin and bars the door. Inside, she recites the Standard Formula of Recognition. You know, “Ferocious One, I beg you to release me. I know that nothing I have done deserves your Malignant Intervention.” Well, in the story, she gets halfway through the formula when one of the dogs smashes through the door and knocks her to the ground. Then, after they all attack her, they change into the local cops. Shock. Horror. Commercial.

But for Paul the real shock came with his reaction to the Formula. Without realizing it, he started to say it out loud in his apartment. He got as far as “Ferocious One, I beg you to release me. I know—” And then he stopped, gasping in pain. He felt, he said, like someone had kicked him in the stomach. When he stopped speaking the pain eased, but he was shaking and sweating. A couple of minutes later, he thought of trying it again, but just the thought filled him with terror. The panic stopped as soon as he gave up the idea of trying to say the Formula.

Paul didn’t sleep much that night. He just lay in bed, wondering if he should call the SDA emergency number, telling himself it could wait until morning, jumping every time he heard a strange noise outside his apartment or even the wind against his window. Over and over again he thought how if he wasn’t saying the Formula he should do something else, maybe set up a ring of protection, or else just write down his fears on sanctified paper and burn them. Instead, he just lay in bed, terrified. But when morning came, it all seemed okay again. Paul found himself laughing at his “paranoia”. His suggestiveness. He shouldn’t watch so much TV, he told himself.

Two days later, however, he managed to tell Lisa he was sick and was going to leave work early. Come to her office, she told him. She could make him feel better. Heal him. Her friends told her she was a natural healer. She had healing hands, they said. Her friends said she should quit her temp agency and run a hand sanctuary.

Paul realized he had never met Lisa’s friends. Not a single one. Nor her family. He started to feel clammy and cold, and thought how he didn’t need to lie to go home sick.

He left his office but he didn’t go home. Instead, he changed his suit for jeans, T-shirt, dark glasses and cap, and sat in a diner across the street from the building. When Lisa left he followed her. At first, he tried to stay close to the buildings, even duck into doorways. But after a couple of minutes, when she didn’t look back, he got bolder, even moved up close. This is ridiculous, he told himself. If she did spot him, she probably would just laugh at him. Never let him forget it. Maybe he could convince her it was some sort of sex game. He half felt that way himself. He would get aroused and instead of him following her, it felt like Lisa had hold of his penis, like a tow rope, and was pulling him along (his image, not mine).

He followed her to a hospital, the huge Mirando Glowwood Sanctuary for the Healing Arts on 7th Avenue. Paul expected they would need passes to go up to the rooms, but no one seemed to take any notice of either of them as he followed her past the front desk to the giftshop, where she bought a mixed bouquet of flowers, and then up a couple of flights of stairs. Paul found himself relaxing. After all his suspicions, she was just visiting a sick friend.

Paul never found out what was wrong with the man in room 603. He was so concerned that no one give him away he didn’t even bother to notice if the floor focused on any special area of medicine. When Lisa entered the room Paul strolled past the doorway, slow enough to notice a man asleep or unconscious in a private room, with a man and woman in chairs beside the bed. Friends of Lisa, he thought, with a guilty thrill that he finally could meet some of her friends if only he could think up an explanation for how he got there. But then the man and woman just got up and left, seemingly without even noticing Lisa was in the room. Paul pretended to be reading the names posted outside a room down the hall until the two had left, and then he moved back to just outside 603, where he could look inside without being noticed.

Lisa had pulled back the sheets and now was unbuttoning the man’s pyjamas, all without him moving or opening his eyes. Paul said he looked like he’d been lying there, unconscious, for a long time. There were sores up and down his body. When the man’s body lay all exposed, Lisa began to undress. Paul told me how he wanted to run, to get as far away as he could, but he couldn’t make himself move.

The moment Lisa straddled the man, he came alive. Or rather his body came alive, thrusting into her and thrashing on the bed. The man himself stayed unconscious, his face as blank, Paul said, as the sky. Nor did anyone else seem to notice anything. The bed thumped, strange noises came out of the man’s throat, yet people just walked by—patients in bathrobes, visitors, nurses. Once, a woman in one of those candy-striped volunteer outfits bumped into Paul, smiled cheerfully and walked on, taking no notice either of the pounding noises inside the room or Paul staring back at her terrified.

As the body rolled about with Lisa the sores opened up, spitting out a thick mixture of blood and pus, like a fountain with ten or twenty spouts. Paul watched it soak the bed, ooze down onto the floor. He watched Lisa scoop it up in her hands and smear it all about the man’s face. She’s killing him, he thought, and knew he should run for help, or at least cry out. But he just stayed and watched.

When Lisa finally lifted off the man, he went limp again, draped across the drenched bed. Only now Lisa took the flowers she’d bought and placed them on the man’s genitals, where they—clung. That was the word Paul used. The flowers seized the man’s crotch like some animal feeding on his discharges.

Despite everything, Paul said, he was sure he didn’t make any noise. He didn’t gag, or shout, or anything. Lisa just stood there, naked, with her back to him and said, in a friendly voice, “How was that, Paul? Was it what you expected? Was it scary enough? Or should I have laid rats on him instead of flowers? I could still do that if you like. I just thought this might be more fun.”

Paul wanted to run, but he couldn’t. He could hardly stand upright as Lisa turned and came towards him. “Ferocious One,” he managed to say, “I beg you—”

Lisa laughed. “Paul, Paul,” she said, “it’s much too late for that. And why would you want to send me away? Haven’t I told you I love you? Didn’t I promise to make you rich?”

“Promise?” Paul said.

“Go to work next morning. My intuition tells me your boss wants to send you on a management training course.” She stepped towards him.

“No!” Paul shouted, and then he did jump back, out of the doorway. Finally, people were looking at him. A man on crutches stopped to stare. Paul said, “I never…I thought they just—”

“Oh, Paul. You don’t really think you got all those promotions by your own talents, do you? Trust me, darling. Let me take care of you. Let me help you.”

Now Paul ran. Pushing people out of the way, he hurtled down the stairs and out of the lobby into the street. He ran as hard as he could, pumping his arms like you see on TV (I can see him, with his cap and dark glasses, and his mouth gulping for air. Poor Paul. Poor dumb Paul).

A few blocks down he dared to turn around. Lisa wasn’t following. At least he didn’t see her. Maybe she’d taken some other form. Maybe she’d disguised herself as an old woman walking on the other side of the street. Or a cat sitting on a stoop. Or a car parked illegally in front of a pump. What did he know, after all, about Malignant Ones and their powers? It’s the kind of thing you learn in school, fourth grade sacred studies class, and then forget right after the test.

When he saw a cab, he started to hail it, then stopped. What was an empty cab doing in midtown at that time of day? Maybe that Russian-looking cab driver was Lisa. Or another Malignant One coming to her aid. But maybe it was a Benign One. A Devoted Being who had noticed Paul’s danger and jumped in its taxi to come to his rescue. How could he know? How could he know? How could he tell the difference? He took the bus.

Crammed in with shoppers and office workers, Paul wished he could just close his eyes, let the crowd hold him up, and sleep. Finally he made it to his apartment building and the fear hit him all over again. Lisa had a key. Lisa didn’t need a key. She probably could fade right through a closed window. But if he didn’t go in, where could he go? How could he live? He told me later he imagined himself lying in some corner outside the men’s room in Grand Central Station.

When he told me all this, he stopped at that point in the story. “What happened?” I said. “Did you go inside? What did you do?” He wouldn’t look at me and I knew he’d done something he thought was terrible. Finally he confessed. He said he went to the super and told him he’d smelled gas before and was nervous to go back in, and would the super check for him and wave out the window if everything was all right? “I gave him ten bucks,” Paul said. “Can you believe it? Ten bucks and maybe that thing would be there waiting for him?”

“But it’s okay,” I told him. “She wasn’t there. So he ended up with ten dollars for doing nothing.”

“I guess so,” Paul said. I’d never seen him look so low.

“And you got here safely,” I reminded him.

“Right. So now you’re in danger too.”

“Come on,” I said. “All we’ve got to do is figure out how to get rid of her.” I almost blushed, knowing how dumb that sounded.

When Paul got inside, he said, he ran all around, checking the bathroom, the closets, even the small cabinets under the bathroom sink. He didn’t know what he was looking for, he just had to look. What could he do, he thought, what could he do? I imagined him standing there, outside that tiny sanctuary of his, maybe hitting his hand against his forehead.

While he was trying to figure out what to do next, the phone rang. Paul reached out, then stopped. When the answering machine came on, he waited through his announcement. And then she was there, telling him cheerfully, “Silly Paul, why don’t you pick up the phone? You know I won’t harm you. I’ve got some wonderful ideas for later in the evening.” Then her voice sharpened. “Paul! Pick up the phone.”

Paul told me later that he had no idea how he managed to resist. His hand moved out to the phone, he stood there almost touching it, his hand shaking. He probably would have picked it up if the doorbell hadn’t rung. He jerked his hand back and ran to the door. The super stood there, looking confused. “Sorry to bother you,” he told Paul, trying to look over Paul’s shoulder. “What’s that?”

The answering machine, Paul told me later, had screeched, as if someone had run a fingernail along the tape.

Paul thanked the super, told him everything was okay, said goodbye—and then asked him please to stay there. While the poor confused man stood in the doorway, Paul got out his carryon bag and threw in some clothes, his shaving stuff, and the cat’s claw he’d gotten during his first winternight initiation.

I’ve wondered since if the super was really a Devoted One. Isn’t that what they do, help you at some crucial moment? No way to know. People always say the Benign Ones lift you gently, the Malignant Ones knock you down with a club. But Paul wasn’t thinking about anything like that. He just pulled his stuff together as fast as he could. And called me.

I still feel good about that. He called me, his fourteen-year-old kid cousin. I know I didn’t protect him, not in the long run. And I guess he didn’t expect me to save him or anything. But he needed help and he called me. I’ll always love him for that.

“Ellen!” he said when he got me on the phone. “Ellen. Oh, my God.”

I said something dumb, like, “What’s wrong?”

“Lisa,” he said, and stopped.

“What is it?” I asked him. “Is she hurt?” Dumb.

“She’s…she’s not—”

“She’s not hurt?”

“She’s not human!”

“No!” I said. “Oh Paul. Oh God.” He didn’t have to say the label. I knew. Stupidly, I said, “Is she there?”

“No. No, of course not. Of course she’s not here. She just called…I couldn’t—What can I do? I tried the Formula. She laughed at me. I got sick the first time. And then she just laughed. Ellen, what am I going to do?”

“Get over here,” I said. “Where are you?”

“Home. My place.”

“Get out of there. Right now. Come here.”

“I don’t want you getting hurt,” Paul said.

“Don’t worry about that,” I said. “I’ll protect us.” Brave talk. “Just get the train. Take a taxi from the station. Ask for Johnny or Bill. Tell them you’re my cousin. You got that? Johnny or Bill.”

“Yes.”

“Hurry.”

“Shouldn’t I do an enactment?” Paul asked.

“Do a quick one.”

“What should I do? I can’t think.”

“Um—do you have flash powder?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Okay,” I said. “How about that traveller’s amulet I gave you that time you went to Europe?”

“It’s in my sanctuary.”

“Great. Go put it on.”

Slow seconds passed while I heard Paul moving things around and cursing. Finally he came back on the phone. “I can’t find it,” he said. Panic pushed his voice up. “She must have taken it.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “Just…just sprinkle the powder around the edges of the floor and especially on the threshold. And—” I was thinking fast. “Write down—take off your shoes and socks and write out—Do you have an SDA body marker?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“Great. If you can’t find it, don’t worry. A regular pen will do. But use the marker if you can. Write down the Formula for a safe journey and a safe arrival on the bottoms of your feet. Then light the powder—”

“Should I put my shoes back on?”

“Yes, of course. Light the powder on the threshold and at the same time ask the Devoted Ones for help, and then jump over the powder. Have you got that?”

“Yeah,” Paul said.

“Okay. Leave the phone off the hook so I can hear. And when you leave give me a shout so I can hang up my phone.”

It took Paul at least five minutes, during which I could hardly breathe I was so scared I’d hear him scream or something. Finally I heard the hiss of flash powder and then, from a distance, “Okay, Ellen.”

Softly, I prayed, “Bless your feet, and bless your hands, and bless your eyes and mouth. Earth move you in safety and joy across Her shiny face. Go, Paul.”

I went downstairs, acting calm so my folks wouldn’t find out anything and panic. I figured the last thing we needed was my folks getting hysterical. They’d call the police or something, or just start screaming and no one would do anything.

I got a piece of sanctified chalk and some of my own flash powder and matches from my altar and stuck them in my skirt pocket. Then I went to the kitchen for a glass of milk and cookies. Wholesome. A kid getting a snack. I strolled outside and as soon as I was out of sight of my folks I got to work. I walked three times around the house, flicking drops of milk from the glass onto the ground as I prayed to the Hidden Mother for blessings and protection on the house and all our family. Next I crushed the cookies and scattered the crumbs along the flagstones and the driveway and out to the road, calling for Devoted Ones to flock to Paul’s aid and lead him safely out of danger to my house. In the street I drew a box for the house and then two stick figures for Paul. One showed him inside the house, holding hands with a smaller stick figure (me). The other showed him outside with a circle around him, protection against a pair of bat-like wings above his head. Lisa. Then I drew dots from the Paul out in the danger place to the one safe in the house. While I made two little piles of flash powder, one on each Paul, I called once more on the Benign Ones to help him, thanking them in advance. “Devoted Ones, we thank you for your devotion. We know that nothing we have done deserves your precious intervention.” I fired up the flash piles, waited ten seconds, then dashed back inside.

Upstairs in my room I took all my stuffed totem animals and lined them up on the windowsill. “Take care of him,” I begged them. “Please guard him now. Please.” I didn’t move from that window until I saw Paul step out of the taxi. Then I threw myself downstairs and out the door.

Maybe I should have stayed at the window until he actually got to the house. I don’t know. Maybe if he’d made it all the way under his own power he would have stayed safe, with the strength later to fight back. Because maybe something was taking care of him, feeding him, and when I ran out to get him, I drove it away. Or maybe I weakened my own safety enactment by leaving the house. I don’t know. When I saw him—he was limping, with his face screwed up, as if he’d twisted his ankle—I filled up with joy and fear at the same time, and just couldn’t wait. If I did something wrong, if I made it worse, I hope Paul forgives me.

We told my folks Paul had hurt himself running and needed to sit down in my room while I brought him some tea. When I got Paul alone, and brought up the tea, I opened a fresh can of blessing powder, sprinkled some on his face and then his bad ankle (he fell running for the train), and finally around the edge of the room. And then I had him tell me everything. It was pretty scary. A couple of times, like when he got to the flowers in the hospital, I had to stop him, holding up my hand like a traffic cop until I could catch my breath. When he finished, I hugged him, with my head on his shoulder so he wouldn’t see me cry.

I knew I couldn’t do that for long. We had to take care of him. We had to get him some real protection. As well as sprinkling some more blessing powder, we touched our amulets together, stuffed our pockets with prayers written on sanctified paper and put Nora and Toby, my two most powerful stuffed totem animals, in their SDA sanctified travelling cases to take with us. Then I called the taxi company and asked them to send Billy right away.

As we headed downstairs, the phone rang. We were almost out the door when my mother called from the living room, “Paul? It’s for you. It’s a woman.” You’d think she’d find it confusing that someone would call Paul at her house. But no, her voice sounded like wasn’t it wonderful that she could help two such marvellous people get together. Paul started to walk towards her. I stared at him for a moment before I realized what was happening. When I grabbed his arm he almost shook me loose. I held on, though, and hollered to my mother, “We’ve got to leave, Mom. Tell her she missed him.”

“Won’t that be rude?” my mother said. “She sounds so sweet.” But I already had Paul out the door, where, thank the powers, Billy was already pulling into the driveway.

That has got to be the scariest trip I have ever taken, worse even than my high school wilderness initiation. Everyone looked like a Malignant one—the driver cutting us off on the Expressway, the traffic cop halting our lane, the boy roaring past on his motorcycle, even the bag lady sleeping on the sidewalk outside the Nassau headquarters of the SDA.

We told the secretary we needed to speak to an investigator. “Urgently,” I said. She sent us to a woman about twenty-five, with large amazed eyes. She wore a red blouse and a cotton jumper and had her hair pulled back with a velvet band. While Paul was talking—he got pretty worked up, waving his arms and trying not to cry, he was so scared—the woman, Julie her name tag said, wrote everything down, constantly telling Paul it was all right, he was safe now. “Your SDA” would protect him.

After she finished taking down his story she went for her superior, a man about forty or fifty, very businesslike, but still basically friendly. Until he asked Paul where he’d met the Ferocious One. “I told you,” Paul said, “at work.”

“Fine,” the man said, “but where exactly is that?” He smiled at Julie who looked embarrassed that she hadn’t gotten such a basic detail. Paul told him the address. He froze. His pen stopped in mid-air, his head in mid-nod. Finally he looked up at Paul and said, “And you say she worked in an office?”

“She ran a temp agency,” Paul said.

The man’s mouth twitched. “Just a moment,” he told Paul, and walked off. Looking a little confused, and embarrassed, Julie told Paul again that everything would be fine. About a minute passed and then Julie’s boss called her from a doorway. He said, “Ms Stoner,” instead of Julie. When she left the room he closed the door behind her.

About five minutes later the man came back alone. He said, “Now then, Mr—” He looked at his clipboard. “Mr Cabot. Why do you think this woman, this Lisa, is a Malignant One?”

“Think?” Paul said.

I stepped forward. “Excuse me,” I said. “What’s your name?”

“Please, young lady,” he told me. “I’m trying to check your—” His voice went up in a question.

“Cousin,” I said.

“Cousin, fine. Your cousin’s story.”

“You can check it a lot easier if you tell us your name,” I said.

He sighed. “John Sebbick.”

I smiled sweetly. “Thank you.”

“I don’t understand,” Paul said to him. “What do you need to check?”

Sebbick said, “You must realize, Mr Cabot, we get a great many claims made here. People accuse their co-workers, neighbours—” he smiled, “—lovers all the time.”

“I’m not accusing her,” Paul half shouted. “She’s a Ferocious One.”

“So you say.”

“I told you what she did with that sick man. In the hospital.”

“What you say she did.”

“I don’t believe this,” Paul said. “Why won’t you believe me?”

“Excuse me,” I said, and smiled as big a smile as that goddamn bureaucrat. “Mr. Sebbick, this man has come to you for help. Isn’t that your job? To help him?”

“Young lady,” he said. He looked like he’d pat me on the head if he wasn’t afraid I’d bite him. “The SDA does not need children to tell it its job.”

I wasn’t going to let that one stop me. I said, “What are you going to do for him?”

“We will investigate his story,” he said.

“That’s not good enough,” I told him. He looked at me like I was a Ferocious One. “He needs protection,” I said. “How are you going to protect him?”

Sebbick said, “We will determine who needs protection in this case.”

I took Paul’s arm. “Come on,” I said, “let’s get you some real help.” He looked at me, grateful, as if he thought I could beat down the whole SDA. I felt myself blush and turned Paul around before that bastard Sebbick could see.

Outside, Lisa was waiting. I didn’t need Paul to introduce us, I knew her immediately. She wore a strange triangular-shaped dress, with wide sharp shoulders and hard narrow hips. Her face shone and her golden hair lifted softly in the breeze. She stood back against a black convertible with its top down. She smiled, and for a moment I walked towards that smile, until I realized what I was doing and stopped myself. Next to me, Paul was shaking.

“Poor sweet Paul,” she said. “I told you, you don’t need to be frightened. I have no plans to harm you.”

“Leave him alone,” I blurted. Great. Really effective.

She looked down at me. She seemed suddenly much taller. The points on her padded shoulders gleamed, like knife blades in the sunshine. She said, sweetly, “This must be your little cousin. What a lovely child.” Her mouth opened very wide. “Would you like me to swallow you?”

I felt dizzy, nauseated. My feet slid around, as if I was standing on ice, as if the street would crack open and drop me into freezing water. Somehow, my hand went out and found a parking meter. “Ferocious One,” I said, and gasped as a pain shot into my side. “We beg you—” The pain became unbearable, and I knew it would stop if I just stopped talking. I said, “We beg you to release us.” My side ripped open and I screamed. When I looked down I saw blood and meat pouring out onto the sidewalk. I jerked my eyes away as I forced the final words out. “We know that nothing we have done deserves your Malignant intervention.” And the pain ended. I gasped in relief, and when I looked down my clothes weren’t even torn.

Sometimes the old stuff works better than we know. The Formula comes to us from the Tellers after all, and not the SDA. Lisa pretended not to notice, but she backed away. Laughing, she slid into her open-top car. “I told you,” she said to Paul, “you don’t need to be afraid of me. I’m on your side. Even the SDA will help you if I tell them to.” She laughed again, and then she looked at me. I held on to the parking meter. She said, “Goodbye, Ellen Pierson. I’m sure we will meet again.” And then she drove off.

On the way home, Paul decided to tell my folks. Well, they reacted just the way I knew they would—Mom crying and fluttering her arms, Daddy ranting about the SDA and its “ineffectual posturing”. Only, they added a new twist. They attacked Paul for involving me. “A mere child,” my mother called me. Cute.

I tried to push them onto what really mattered. “The SDA’s not just ineffectual,” I tried to say. “They’re blocking him. That Sebbick”—I stopped myself saying “bastard”—“guy is very effectual. You should have seen the way he smirked at us.” No good. They weren’t listening. The whole thing had scared them too much. They talked about the danger to me, but they really meant the danger to themselves as well. “We’ve got to do something,” I kept saying, and, “How can we get protection?” It was only when they suggested Paul “go home and get some rest” that I realized what was going on. They wanted to get rid of him. They figured if he stayed there in our living room Ferocious Ones would come smashing through the picture window at any moment.

“He’s not going anywhere,” I said. I made my voice so calm, so firm, that my father just stared at me.

My mother said, “But she’ll get all of us if he stays here.” When nobody answered her for a second and she realized how that sounded, she added, “We’ve got to think of you, Ellen.”

“If we send him away,” I said, “we’ll really expose ourselves to danger.”

“What do you mean?” my mother asked.

I was improvising, trying to pull stuff out from what I remembered from school. I said, “The Devoted Ones don’t like it when humans turn against each other. If we lose the support of the Devoted Ones what’ll we do if Lisa decides to attack us just for being Paul’s family?”

I could see them wavering. I pushed on. “At his own place it’s already too late. He’s already invited her in. Here we can put up a wall of protection. We can get help.” I felt like I was explaining things to two year olds. I just prayed that the Guardian of Inappropriate Speech would stop Paul from saying something dumb, like how he didn’t want to make any trouble and maybe he should go home. But he just sat there, bent over, his eyes fixed on the middle of the rug. And finally my folks gave in. Paul could stay, they said, “at least for a few days”.

I added, “While we get some help.”

“Right,” my father said, as if he’d thought of it.

As soon as I knew they weren’t going to change their minds I told them of the enactment I’d already done and suggested maybe we could do it over, all of us together. Daddy said Paul should stay inside. “We don’t want to tempt anything,” he said, but he just likes to take charge. So we went through the routine, mostly Daddy and I, while Mom followed along behind us.

When we got back inside, my father called his lawyer. I was afraid he might not push it hard enough, but he was great. He shouted at the man, told him he had to get the best person and he had to get him right now.

After my father put down the phone, we all said nothing for a while. No one looked at anybody. I don’t know how long we would have stood there like that if we didn’t hear a knock at the door. My mother half shrieked, my father said, “Oh God,” Paul whimpered, and I don’t remember what I did. Because we all knew who it was. None of us moved, and then the knock came again, and then Paul started to get up. Now, Malignant Ones can’t force their way into a house, at least for the first time, unless they’re invited. That much I knew. But Paul was contaminated, and none of us was sure just what that meant.

I ran over to him and grabbed his shoulders and held on. He was sweating or crying or both, because his face was all wet, and I think I was crying too, but I held on to him. Daddy ran up and held him too, and then Mom came and put her arms around all of us and together we said the Formula and then the prayers of protection we’d made up for our enactment. And the knocking stopped.

We stood there a long time, hanging on to each other and shaking like one big animal. And then the phone rang. We all just looked at it, letting it ring on and on, until finally my father picked up the receiver. Before he said anything, he switched on the loudspeakers. “Hello,” he said, and his voice broke.

A woman’s voice sounded in the room. “This is the office of Alison Birkett,” she said. “This is a protected line, federal registration no. 7237785. You may speak without fear or danger.”

Oh my God, I thought, he did it. Daddy did it! He got us Alison Birkett. The SDA itself had turned against us and none of us had any idea why. But now the woman who’d broken the Pentagon Possession, who had forced the Defense Department to admit its involvement with Malignant Ones, had come to save us. I ran and hugged Paul. “It’s her,” I whispered. “It’s Alison Birkett.”

Not exactly, for the woman said, “Please hold for Ms Birkett.”

A moment later a firm alto voice came on. “Good afternoon,” she said. “May I speak with Mr Michael Pierson?”

“Speaking,” my father said.

“Your lawyer, Mr Athenauer, asked me to call you.”

“Yes,” Daddy said. “Yes, thank you very much for calling.”

“Perhaps you could tell me the problem,” she said.

We took turns, first Daddy, then Paul, then me. I couldn’t believe I was speaking to her. I still had her photo over my desk. She didn’t talk down to me, or treat me like a child or anything. She just listened and asked a lot of questions, and afterwards she said, “You did very well, Ms Pierson. Having the name of the official will help us move much more quickly. Thank you.”

“Thank you too,” I said back.

When Daddy asked what would happen, Ms Birkett said, “The first thing we need to do is secure your house and your presence on an emergency basis. I’ll send my team over. Then we need to discover why the SDA refused to help your nephew. I’m going to file a request under the Freedom of Information Act. Usually these things take months, but I believe I can expedite it. There are ways. With luck, we will know something within two weeks.”

“Two weeks?” my mother said. She sounded like she wanted to run away from home.

Ms Birkett said, “If nothing else, the request should shake some people up.” I could hear the smile in her voice. After telling us how the team would identify themselves, she said goodbye and hung up. “Goodbye,” I said softly, even though I knew she couldn’t hear me.

The depossession team arrived half an hour later, two men and a woman, all carrying old-fashioned black doctor bags. They wore one-piece protective suits, heavy-tread boots, insulated gloves and animal head masks. The woman was small, about my height. She wore a crocodile mask and on the groin of her protective suit she’d handpainted a silver circle over two wavy blue lines—the moon of power over the river of continuous birth. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

While they unpacked their equipment, my mother asked, “Will our house be okay?”

“Oh, we don’t anticipate any trouble,” the taller of the two men said. He wore an elephant mask. “Ms Birkett said this was a prophylactic operation.”

They stayed four hours, measuring, taking readings on the house and on us (“Do we have to undress?” I asked the crocodile lady, but all she did was move a stick up and down my body, like when they check for guns at airports), chanting, sprinkling powders, drawing signs on the doors and windows, filling rainbow-coloured balloons with some kind of gas and then popping them in the air, and finally, spraying the four of us with some sort of mist from an unmarked plastic pump bottle (I asked if they used to use aerosols before the ozone crisis, but the crocodile only grunted). They gave each of us a smaller pump and told us to spray ourselves every time we left the house.

Before they left, the elephant warned us not to allow any strangers into our house. “No salesmen,” he said, “no polltakers, no free samples, no meter readers or deliveries of bottled gas or anything like that, no building inspectors, no one. If you need any repairs done make sure you know the person ahead of time. And if you have any friends over, even family, make sure they don’t bring over any third parties you’ve never met before. If they do, simply apologize and don’t let them in, no matter how much your friends vouch for them. Do you understand that?” We all nodded. “Good. Now—this is very important—when people come over that you do know, make them say their names out loud before they step over the threshold. Make them say, ‘My name is blank’ before they enter the house. The same goes for anyone who might lean over the windowsill.”

I said, “We’ll keep all the windows closed.”

“Good,” the elephant said.

Mom said, “Won’t it seem kind of strange if we ask people to say that? I mean, if we know them anyway?”

I knew what she meant. They’ll know we’re possessed. People will talk about us. I said, “We can tell them we’re doing a blessing enactment. They get to take part by saying their names.”

“Good girl,” the elephant said, and the crocodile added, “You would all do well to listen to this young lady. From what Ms Birkett tells us, she knows what she’s doing.” I really had to fight to keep my face straight.

My father asked, “What about going out?”

“No problem,” the elephant said, “at least for the three of you. The measures we’ve taken will effectively seal you against personal intervention. At least if you make sure not to invite her into your house. That’s the important thing. For Mr Cabot the situation is a little more touchy. He should stay inside as much as possible.” Paul nodded.

Mom said, “How long will this go on? We can’t live like this forever.”

I can’t be sure, but I think the elephant glanced at me before he answered her. “I’m sure Ms Birkett will take care of it, and then you can resume your normal life.”

“Shouldn’t we go see her or something?” I asked.

The crocodile said, “She’ll call you.” And then they wished us good luck, made some sweeping hand signs over our heads—and left.

Paul spoke first, the first real sentence he’d said in hours. “God, I’m so tired.”

“C’mon,” I said, “I’ll take you upstairs.”

He half turned towards my folks. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m really sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Mom said, and Daddy added, “We’re getting help, that’s what matters.”

I was happy to arrange the guest room, to make Paul’s bed and get him towels. I was happy to get away from my parents. After I’d set up Paul, I went to my room and took down the photo of Alison Birkett. For quite a while I sat there, holding it in my hands, looking at the way she just stood there, as firm as a tree on the stone steps of the court.

We saw Ms Birkett thirteen days later. Those two weeks were really hard for me. They were hard for everyone, of course, and I guess I was as scared as the others, but I also had to speak to my friends and everyone, and not tell them what had happened. I stayed in the house as much as possible, telling my friends I was sick, but of course they still called. Like my best friend, Barb, who wanted to tell me about trips to the beach and the club. I couldn’t tell her how I’d faced a Malignant One, or that I’d spoken with Alison Birkett. My parents asked me to keep it secret, but I would have anyway. I didn’t want to push my luck.

I could talk to Paul, of course. And I did, except sometimes that just made it worse. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but he got so depressed, he kept saying how he was putting everybody in danger, how Lisa had “corrupted” him and now it was too late, how we could back out if we wanted, how he wouldn’t blame us and we should save ourselves—

One evening, Paul said to me, “Maybe I’m making a mistake.”

At first I didn’t want to answer. We were sitting in the living room—my folks had gone down to the den to watch TV—and I really just wanted to read. Finally I sighed and said, “What kind of mistake?”

Paul sat with his elbows on his knees and a full cup of coffee between his two hands. Great, I thought, just what I needed, Paul spilling coffee on my mother’s rug. “I don’t know,” he said, “Lisa kept saying she’d never hurt me.”

“She’s a Malignant One,” I reminded him. “It doesn’t matter what she says.”

“Yeah, I know. But sometimes you read about Malignant Ones helping people. Picking up some individual and, you know, just doing things for him.”

“You mean like promotions?”

“Well, yeah. Lisa said she loved me, you know.” Before I could say anything he rushed on, “Sometimes you see something on TV, about some great statesman, or billionaire, who dies and they discover a Malignant One helped him his whole life and that’s how he became so rich or important. And obviously the Malignant One didn’t harm him. It helped him. You know, Benign Ones won’t do that. They’ll help you in some crisis, if they feel like it, but they won’t really take hold like that. Malignant Ones—”

“First of all,” I said, “you don’t know what happens to these great figures after they die.”

“Come on,” Paul said, “you don’t believe that old superstition about the dead suffering endless torture, do you?”

“That’s not the point. You just don’t know. And what about all the stories of people who make deals with helpers and suffer horrible agonies in this life? Like last month, on 20/20. Did you see that?”

He shook his head.

I said, “Some woman in Arkansas summoned a Ferocious One to save her from bankruptcy. She ended up in the hospital, vomiting crude oil for two weeks without stopping. Do you want something like that to happen to you?”

“No, of course not.”

“Paul. Listen to me. Malignant Ones are not good for people. Okay? You got that?”

He smiled. “Sure. Okay. It’s just that she always said—”

“Paul?”

“All right. Okay.” He put down the coffee cup and came over to hug me. “Thanks,” he said. “You’re the greatest kid cousin anyone ever had.”

“We’re going to take care of you,” I said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

For most of the thirteen days everything went pretty well. We had some small incidents. A couple of times when my folks or I answered the phone we heard a noise and then whoever (or whatever) it was hung up. Once, Paul picked up the phone and though he said nothing he started to sweat. My mother saw it first and shouted for my father who ran up and grabbed the receiver out of Paul’s hand. After that, we forbade Paul to answer the phone. And several times people came to the door, with prizes they said, or government business (my father got a jury summons; he told the man to put it in the mailbox), even a box supposedly to make us part of the TV rating system. But nothing actually happened. And then, on a Sunday morning, my grandmother—or at least someone who looked and sounded just like her—showed up at the door.

“Mom!” my mother said. “Um—hi.” Grandma never just shows up. And she never goes anywhere before three o’clock.

“Well?” Grandma said. “Isn’t anybody going to invite me in?”

I ran up before Mom could say anything. “Make her say her name,” I said. Behind “Grandma” I could see a car that looked just like hers. It even had the dent on the back fender and the Sacred Wildlife Fund sticker on the side window.

While Mom stood there looking confused and unhappy, Grandma said, “Will somebody tell me what’s going on? Why can’t I just come in?” By now Daddy had joined us, and when I looked back I could see Paul standing in the kitchen doorway. “Paul,” Grandma said, “what are you doing here? Michael? Why is everyone acting so funny?”

“Say your name,” I told her. “Say ‘My name is’ and then your name.”

She laughed nervously. “Ellen, what are you talking about?” To Mom, she said, “Really, June, this is not very funny.”

Daddy ordered, “Say it. Say ‘My name is’ and then your name.”

Mom stared at the floor as her “mother” said, “June, I don’t know what’s going on with Ellen, but Mike too? And you? Are you going to take part in this silliness?”

Half crying, Mom said, very softly, “It’s part…part of a blessing enactment? You have to…For the house. Everyone has to say their name. Please.” She repeated, “Please?”

“Well, I’m just sorry,” Grandma said. “I thought I was welcome in my own daughter’s house. Obviously, I was wrong.” She turned and headed for her car.

While my father closed the door, my mother stood crying, with her arms crossed over her chest in an X. “I can’t live like this,” she said. “I just can’t stand it.”

Daddy said, “Honey, I’m sorry.” He reached out for her, but she twisted away. He added, “You did that really well. I’m proud of you.”

“Don’t patronize me!” she shouted at him. “I don’t want to do really well. I want a normal life.” She ran into the bathroom and slammed the door.

She was in there less than a minute when she started to shriek. Daddy and I came running, but the door was locked. “Honey,” Daddy shouted, “open the door.” A sickening smell was washing over us and I suddenly realized my sneakers were getting wet. I looked down to see brown water coming under the door. Mom’s screams died down as she fumbled open the lock. Inside, sewage was pouring out of the toilet—over the bowl, out the top of the tank, through cracks in the sides—“Make it stop!” Mom cried. Holding his hand over his face, Daddy sloshed through to the main valve. Looking back at me, he said, “Ellen, get out of here. Run.” The handle came off in his hands. “Shit,” he said.

I ran, but only to the basement where I shut off the main valve, and then back to the kitchen for the pump bottle. On the way, I could hear Paul, crying or something, but I couldn’t pay any attention. When I got back to the bathroom my folks were stuffing things down the toilet bowl. Fighting not to vomit, I sprayed the toilet, the floor and the air, my parents, myself, all the while repeating the Standard Formula, as well as our own enactment spells and the ones the team had taught us. The flooding stopped. We all leaned against the walls, gasping.

“How am I going to clean this up?” Mom said. “How can I clean this up?” I went into the living room and called Alison Birkett’s office. When the answering service came on I told the woman “My name is Ellen Pierson. I need to speak with Alison Birkett right away. It’s an emergency.”

When the return call came I grabbed it before the first ring had even ended. “This is Alison Birkett,” she said.

I took a breath and told her the story, trying to make it complete and concise. I’d been practising while I waited for her call.

Ms Birkett asked a few questions and then she said, “My very deep apologies, Ms Pierson. I will send a clean-up team immediately. If it serves as any consolation, I suspect that this attack came as a last ditch effort by the enemy. Frustrated rage.”

“Last ditch?” I said.

“Do you think you and your family can come to my office tomorrow morning?”

“Yes,” I said, “of course.”

“Good. It may not seem like it in the context, but I do have good news. 9 o’clock?”

“I’ll tell my parents.”

“Fine. An escort will arrive at your house tomorrow at eight. Please be sure to convey my apologies to your parents and tell them that the clean-up team will be there within the hour.”

“I won’t forget,” I said.

“I’m sure you won’t,” Ms Birkett said. “You’ve done very well, Ms Pierson. Very well indeed. I look forward to meeting you.”

“Thank you,” I managed to say. When we’d said goodbye and I’d hung up the phone I repeated to myself, “ ‘I look forward to meeting you”. Wow.” Then I ran to tell my folks the news.

2

The office was a little smaller than I’d expected. There was a desk—some kind of dark red wood—and some leather-chairs, and walls of books, most of them in sets of twenty or so volumes. I wondered how many years you had to go to school to learn all that stuff.

Alison Birkett was a little fatter than she’d looked on the cover of Time. A little shorter, too, but otherwise she looked just like I’d imagined her as I lay awake half the night. Wavy red hair which she pushed back from her face. Narrow nose and wide mouth, which gave her face a lot of movement, a lot of expression. When she frowned, you really could see it. When she smiled, she let it take over her face. She wore a grey silk blouse open at the neck and with the sleeves rolled up slightly, and a straight dark purple skirt. Round her neck, on a silver chain, she wore the three peaked medallion of the Winged Lady of the Mountains. Just above her left wrist I could see a small crescent-shaped scar, a mark of initiation. She noticed my looking at it. Her eyes dropped to her arm and then back at me, and she smiled.

She shook all our hands and said our names without our telling her. When she came to me she nodded once and said, “I’m very pleased to meet you, Ms Pierson.” Right there in front of my parents. If the chair hadn’t been there I might have fallen over.

She sat down in a chair at the side of her desk, with her legs out before her, crossed at the ankles. “First of all,” she said, “that disaster yesterday.”

“It was horrible,” my mother blurted. “Absolutely horrible.”

Ms Birkett nodded. “I know. Just hearing about it sickened me. I am very sorry you had to suffer such an outrage. As I told your daughter, however, it will not happen again. And the SDA will pay for the damage.”

“The SDA?” my father repeated.

“Let me explain what I’ve found out. To begin with, the F.I. request turned out to be quite a battle. Our government agencies do not like giving up their secrets. Especially the embarrassing ones.” She looked at Paul. He was breathing heavily. “When we talked on the phone,” she said, “you told me that your Lisa ran a temp agency.”

He said, “That was her cover.”

“Oh no,” Ms Birkett said. “That part of her story is actually true. Except that she does not find little typing jobs for secretaries. Lisa Black Dust—that’s her proper designation, by the way—Lisa Black Dust 7 runs a temp agency for Malignant Ones.”

None of us spoke for a moment, then Mom said, “I don’t understand. You mean she hires out demons?”

Ms Birkett nodded. “Precisely.”

Mom said, “But who are their clients?”

Ms Birkett smiled again before she spoke. “Corporations, lobbyists, large charitable organizations—but mostly the United States’ government.”

My father whispered, “Oh my God.” Paul moaned.

“The government?” I repeated.

“That’s right. Various agencies, investigatory arms and, I suspect, the White House, though sections of the report came blacked out. ‘National Security Sanctification.’ One part that was not censored, however, described the involvement of one particular client of Black Dust 7. The Spiritual Development Agency hires her services on a very steady basis. When Mr Cabot and Ms Pierson came for help they spoke first to an underling. Someone ‘not in the loop’ as the expression goes. When Mr Sebbick came on the case, however, the situation changed dramatically. For Mr Sebbick knew Lisa Black Dust 7’s cover name and the location of her operation.”

I said, “So the noble SDA tried to shut us up in order to protect themselves.”

“Exactly, Ms Pierson. And protect their convenient relationship. And they might have succeeded except for one factor their over-confidence failed to take into consideration. You and your family refused to let the matter drop. You contacted me.”

I grinned, “Too bad for them they didn’t get a Malignant Speaker to tell their fortunes.”

Ms Birkett laughed. “Yes, and lucky for us.”

My father said, “I’m glad you two find this so funny.”

“Not at all,” Ms Birkett said, but something of a smile remained. “I assure you I recognize the urgency. In the past two weeks I have done little else but work on this case.”

Mom asked, “But what do they do for the government?”

Ms Birkett shrugged. “Spying, sabotage, manoeuvering decisions by other agencies, or even other governments. Possibly assassinations.”

“The French prime minister,” I blurted. “His so-called heart attack.”

Her eyes narrowed, and then she nodded very slightly. “I spoke out of turn,” she said. “A bad habit. I think we had best keep such speculation amongst ourselves.”

I looked at the floor. “Of course,” I said.

My mother said, “This is horrible. It’s…it’s just horrible. How does the government pay the Malignant Ones?”

Ms Birkett said nothing for a moment, then, “I don’t think you want to know that.”

“Oh,” Mom said. “Oh.”

Paul said, “What am I going to do? What can I do?”

Ms Birkett said, “You already have done it, Mr Cabot. We have done it.”

“I don’t understand,” he said. But his voice sounded a little stronger.

Ms Birkett leaned back in her chair. “We have something on them. We know something the government would not like to see published in the New York Times.”

Mom said, “But what can we do with it? I mean, we can’t just give interviews to the Times.”

“Please,” Ms Birkett said, “I do not envision you appearing in the newspapers. Quite the contrary. The possibility is simply a threat, a weapon.”

“I still don’t understand—” Mom said, but Ms Birkett stopped her. She held up a sheet of paper dense with writing and some sort of sacred seal stamped on the bottom. “This,” she said, “is a cease and desist order, issued this morning by Judge Malcom Bennett. Judge Bennett is a very useful man. A number of times, when the government and I have come to an agreement, Judge Bennett has given it the appearance of judicial compulsion.”

Daddy asked, “What exactly do they cease and desist doing?”

“The order, in fact, does not restrain them so much as compel them. It requires the SDA to cease protecting Black Dust 7 and to begin protecting you and your family. In short, to do its duty.”

Mom said, “But that horrible…that disgusting…yesterday—”

Ms Birkett nodded. “The agreement came into effect at 12:01 this morning. Yesterday was Black Dust 7’s last chance to express her rage. I had demanded immediate application, but the SDA argued that they needed time for their technicians to establish controls. Now they will pay for that mistake. I have already made some phone calls and begun the paperwork for damage claims.”

Daddy asked, “Do you need information from us for the claims?”

“There’s no hurry. Marjorie—my secretary—will get the details from you after the depossession process.”

“This court order,” Daddy said. “It doesn’t order them to stop hiring Malignant Ones to do its dirty work?”

She shook her head. “No. It does require the government to cease all dealings specifically with Black Dust 7 and her agency. It does not, however, require anything further from them. The language is very careful.”

“And we don’t go to the Times?”

“No. What purpose would it serve? This agreement secures your safety. If we expose the government, that will remove the incentive to protect you. We certainly don’t want any repeats of what happened yesterday. Or worse. And I assure you, the government will continue to deal with Malignant Ones, no matter how much we expose this particular arrangement.”

I said, “So we just let them continue.” As soon as I’d said it, I wished I could take it back. I felt so ungrateful.

Ms Birkett said, “I’m afraid so, Ms Pierson. We take the victory we can get.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I mean, thank you.”

Paul asked, “How can we trust the SDA? They could say they’re protecting me—us—and do nothing.”

Ms Birkett said, “Of course. That is why I have demanded that my own team monitor the entire depossession process. And remember, the threat of exposure will remain.”

My father asked, “What’s to stop them just—getting rid of all of us? If we’re gone, we can’t expose them.”

“They would have to get rid of me as well. And I have created various information-dumping routines ‘in the event of my untimely disappearance’ as they say in the movies.”

“Wow,” I said.

Paul said, “What about afterwards? How do I know she’ll leave me alone?”

“Because of the protection the SDA will give you. And because it will suit the government for you to remain unharmed. And the government will make sure it suits the Malignant Ones.”

Daddy asked, “But can the Malignant Ones themselves control her?”

“Oh yes. The Bright Beings, the Benign Ones and the Malignant Ones together, actually form something of a single entity. The individual Beings appear to us as separate, like people, but we might describe them better as branches of that one entity. Configurations, to use the proper term.” She paused. “The point is, they can control her, and they will.”

Paul said, “What about my job? Am I going to have to walk past the damn temp agency every time I go to work?”

“Certainly not,” Ms Birkett said. “All traces of Lisa Black Dust 7 and her agency will vanish from the building.” She smiled. “When you return to work, your colleagues will no doubt tell you of the week the government shut down the building. ‘Resanctification of an architectural landmark’ I believe they will call it.”

We stayed in her office a little bit longer, talking about what would happen, what the SDA would do, how they would reseal our house and purify Paul’s apartment, how they would take us to a depossession centre, how we’d have to sit around in quarantine for a week but nothing would hurt.

Finally we had to leave. My folks shook her hand and hurried out of the office. Paul shook her hand, too, but he didn’t look at her. I think he was crying.

The escort team, two women without any masks but carrying government sanctified electronic spirit dispersers, waited in the doorway. They looked bored. I got up last and shook her hand, trying to do it as strong as she did. I was halfway to the door when she called to me, “Ellen,” she said, and I turned. She was smiling. “I’ve enjoyed meeting you,” she said. “If you find yourself downtown, please feel free to drop in on me.”

“Oh yes,” I said. “Yes, I will. Thank you. Thank you very much.” And then I left.

The depossession took five days. To be honest, it was mostly kind of dull. We had to go to an SDA safe house upstate, along the Hudson. It was very pretty, with views of the cliffs and lots of woods. Except we didn’t get to look around much. We chanted and sweated and wrote things on paper and made “substitutes” (dolls, that is; you should have seen my father’s!). At least we got to do some stuff down by the river, at night. Most of the time, however, I had to sit in my room, or else lie down on a surgical table while people in lab coats and sanctified masks (I kept looking for the crocodile woman but she never showed) smeared creams and smelly oils on me and wiped them off, or painted pictures and wrote words on my belly, or else ran tests with electrodes attached to my head, lights shining in my face, and so on.

I don’t know what I was expecting, maybe the building shaking, slime pouring out of the walls, shrieks and wild laughter—you know, the kind of thing you see on TV shows.

Only once did something really weird happen, and it wasn’t the kind of thing you expect. It was night time and they’d taken me down to the river again, a small cove with a ring of metal poles near the edge of the water. My caseworker tied a black silk blindfold around my eyes and then directed me to sit down in the centre of the ring. The poles gave off a low rhythmic hum.

For a while I just thought about school or something. Slowly, the hum got louder and my head started to hurt. Suddenly, I heard giggles behind me. I turned my head, frightened. Why were the techs giggling? But the sound came from somewhere further back, somewhere in the woods.

I reached up to pull off the blindfold. “No,” my caseworker said. “Leave it on.” My hand didn’t move, just held on to the cloth. “Leave it alone,” the caseworker said. I let go.

The giggling got louder, then changed to moans and sighs. I could hear voices, though I couldn’t hear what they said. Until a voice I knew said, “Two is lovely, but three’s a feast. Ellen?” I pulled off the blindfold. Outside the circle of poles, beyond the stupid techs who didn’t seem to notice anything at all, Lisa Black Dust 7 and Alison Birkett lay naked together at the edge of the trees.

“No!” I shouted, or something dumb like that, and covered my eyes with my hands.

“Don’t leave the circle,” my caseworker told me. I could hardly hear her, the roaring in the poles had gotten so loud. It ran from pole to pole, round and round the ring. “What do you see?” the caseworker asked. I shook my head. Alison Birkett’s voice called my name again.

When I looked again, she and Black Dust 7 were kissing each other and doing things with their hands I don’t want to describe. And suddenly I could feel them touching me, sliding invisible hands all over my body. I thrashed around like someone slapping away a swarm of bugs.

“Don’t leave,” my caseworker said again, but I just shouted at her, “Shut up!” Okay, I told myself, don’t panic. Trying to ignore the laughter and those horrible hands all over me, I closed my eyes, took a breath—and said all the formulas and prayers the techs had been teaching me over the past few days. The laughter died away, the hands became feathers.

And I wanted them back. I wanted to stop the chants and the formulas, I wanted to bring back the voices, the hands. I felt so lonely, so ashamed. Alison Birkett would hate me, no one would ever love me. No one ever had loved me. But now these two wonderful beings had come to rescue me. Why was I driving them away? Didn’t I know they only played a game, pretending to be enemies so they could trick the idiots, like my parents and the SDA? They couldn’t fool me, they knew that. I was much too smart for any of that. Why was I driving them away? If I joined them the three of us could do anything. They needed me, Alison Birkett needed me. If I turned her down now, she’d never speak to me again.

Thank mine and everyone else’s guardians that the caseworker didn’t say or do anything. I’m sure if I’d heard that whining voice I would have given up the protections just to spite her. Instead, I clenched my fists and said as loud as I could, “Ferocious One, I beg you to release me. I know that nothing I have done deserves your Malignant Intervention.” I repeated it twice more, louder each time. Inner conviction, they say, is half the working. When I opened my eyes again, they were gone.

I wondered a lot what Paul was going through. If the monster could do that to me, what would happen to my poor cousin, the only one of us who’d actually given in to her? I only saw him once during our time in the safe house. I saw him at the other end of a corridor. I called to him but he turned away, and then my own caseworker pushed me into another lab room.

After five days they pronounced us “free and liberated”. Just like the Pentagon, I thought. We shouldn’t have any more trouble they assured us. But just in case, they gave us each a silver medallion to wear around our necks, charged and sanctified in the SDA laboratories and triggered with our own special enactment prayer. We had to say the prayer when we woke up or went to sleep or ate anything (“even a piece of chewing gum” my caseworker told me) or washed our hands or went to the bathroom—but especially if we felt afraid. “Remember,” my caseworker said, “fear is the danger sign. Don’t ignore it. Don’t convince yourself it’s nothing or it’s just nervousness. In all likelihood it will be nothing, but don’t ignore it. Any time you feel afraid, say your protection.”

We were standing on the lawn and she was giving me a last-minute lecture, but I was really just looking for Paul. I knew my folks had finished, but where was Paul? Suddenly I saw him, in the doorway shaking hands with his own caseworker. He was laughing.

“Paul!” I shouted, and ran over and hugged him. I felt like a dumb kid, but I couldn’t help myself. He looked so wonderful, so healthy. He separated from me, grinned, then hugged me again. He was wearing a shirt I’d never seen before. It looked new and I wondered if his caseworker had given it to him.

Ms Birkett’s people drove us home. I wanted to ask how they liked working for her and stuff like that, but it didn’t feel like the time. My folks said almost nothing, just stared out the window. Paul did most of the talking. He talked about getting back to work, about whether he should give back the promotions (he laughed when he said it, and then added “But why shouldn’t I get something out of this? I’ve sure as hell suffered enough.”), how great it was not to feel scared all the time, how he almost wished he could have seen Lisa’s face when they banished her from the building. And yet, when he stopped talking and turned to the window, I could see him trembling.

I didn’t see Paul too much during the next few weeks. We talked a couple of times, and he told me a little about all the questions they’d asked him about Lisa and what he’d done with her. But nothing about what had happened to him over the five days in the safe house. And then he stopped calling me, and to be honest I didn’t call him.

I didn’t see Alison Birkett, either. I don’t know why, I kept wanting to call her, to make up some excuse why I had to go downtown so I could visit her. But somehow I never did it. It wasn’t because of what had happened by the river. At least I don’t think it was. I mean, I knew very well that the thing with Black Dust 7 was not Alison Birkett. But maybe I thought if I saw her I would have to tell her. I don’t know. So instead, I went to the library and read about her, everything I could find.

I also didn’t see much of my friends. The thing was, I still couldn’t tell them. The agreement with the government demanded that we keep the whole thing secret. I guess I could have made up some story how I’d met Alison Birkett, but what was the point if I couldn’t give the real reason? And I didn’t feel much like talking with them if I couldn’t talk about everything that had happened. So I mostly went to the library, or stayed home and watched TV, or else rode my bike down to the shore.

And every day I said my words. And did my enactments and made my offerings.

Three weeks passed before the “incident” happened. That’s what the newspapers called it later. There were two, really, mine and Paul’s, but Paul’s was more spectacular. My incident took place in a teashop on Northern Boulevard, near my home. I’d been down in the library, feeling sleepy, so I thought, I know, I’ll go have some tea. Ye Village Tea Parlore (no kidding, that’s really what they called it) had just opened, selling lots of herb teas and gooey cakes and yoghurt and blueberry scones.

So I was sitting there at a glass-topped iron table in a pink chair that hurt my back, when this kid came in. He looked about my age, but he sure didn’t look like anyone from this neighbourhood. He wore a torn T-shirt and dumpy jeans and shoes with big holes in them. And he started to spray paint graffiti all over the walls. I couldn’t believe it. Just coming in off the street like that. I turned around, figuring someone would come charging from the kitchen to throw him out. Instead, the waitress and the owner just stood there, watching. And then they turned to me. And smiled. With my face. They looked just like me, except they were versions of me all pitted with disease.

I looked again at the graffiti. My name was all over it. And the rest of it—it went on and on about blood and filth and lot of things I don’t want to repeat. Behind me one of the women laughed, an hysterical giggle.

Don’t panic, I ordered myself. You’re protected. I grabbed hold of my medallion. It felt hot in my hand—like it was angry. I whispered my private formula. The boy’s grin faded. Behind me the laughter stopped. I said the protection again, louder this time. The boy’s face spasmed and he dropped his spray can. Wow. I grinned. You bastards, I thought, I’ve got something that can make you hurt.

I was tempted to go after them, but instead I just got myself out of there. I backed out of the door, and when I got to my bike I held on tight to my medallion and kept saying the words while I fumbled open the lock. Finally I got it free and rode off as fast as I could.

When I got home I dropped the bike on the lawn and ran up to my room where I called Alison Birkett. “Damn,” she said (in the middle of everything I really liked an adult cursing and not apologizing). “This should not have happened. This is not going to happen again.”

“Can I come see you?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, please do. And I’ll start making some phone calls. I apologize to you, Ms Pierson. This should not have happened.”

I called my mother and told her I’d be back a little later than I’d thought, then rode my bike to the train station. When I got to the office, Ms Birkett had just heard from Paul. He’d been in a taxi which had started going faster and faster, until he realized the driver planned to drive it straight into the side of Paul’s office building. At the last moment, Paul said his protection and the taxi suddenly blew out all four tyres so that it grated to a stop halfway up the sidewalk. In the middle of all the screaming people Paul escaped the car and ran up to his office, where he locked the door and called Ms Birkett.

While she told me the news, she kept her fist clenched. I kept expecting her to bang it on the desktop. She also told me how Paul had encountered signs all week long and ignored them. The phone would ring and he’d hear nothing but liquid sounds, like running water. Once, he was taking a shower and the water became incredibly sweet, like perfume. And one night he was watching TV when instead of a commercial he just heard a soft voice calling his name over and over.

“That’s one way they work,” Ms Birkett said. “They lure you off your guard with subtle seduction, and then they attack. Your cousin should have called me immediately. I suspect his laxness emboldened them to attack you as well. But”—and she pointed a finger at the air—“that does not excuse this happening. The government assured us that the Beings would control Black Dust 7. If anything, it sounds like they’re helping her.” She picked up the phone. “Marjorie,” she said, “get me Jack Morally on the phone. Right now.”

Wow, I thought. The head of the SDA. “Do you want me to wait outside?” I said.

“No,” she said, and switched on the speaker. “I want you to hear this.” For eight minutes (I timed it) she shouted at Jonathan Moralty. She was sarcastic, she threatened him, she sounded like a school principal putting down a gym teacher. At the end, he swore to her that it would not happen again, that the defence would hold, that he could and would compel “the other side” to keep their commitments and constrain Black Dust 7. He promised to investigate, to let her know (“in days, not weeks” she told him) who had let down their guard, what had happened, what he was going to do about it, and on and on. It was incredible. “Wow,” I said as she hung up the phone. I grinned at her. “Wow.”

She smiled back at me, not really like an adult to a child, more like another kid. “Sometimes,” she said, “you have to talk tough to these people.” There was a pause and then we both started to laugh. “Oh God,” she said, still laughing. “I sound like a gangster movie.” That set us off all over again.

After that, I felt kind of embarrassed. “I guess I better go,” I said.

She ignored me. “Tell me about yourself,” she said. So I told her about where I live, and school, and how a lot of times the other kids all seemed like jerks to me. She nodded and said she used to feel that way too. “Still do, sometimes,” she said, and we both laughed again. Then she asked me if I knew what I wanted to study in college. I didn’t dare look at her as I said, “I kind of thought I would study demonic law.”

She didn’t say anything personal or cute. She just said, “It’s a good profession. A lot of work, a long time to study. But it can be worth it. When you apply to colleges, let me know. I’ll write a recommendation.”

My mouth fell open. It really did, just like they say in stories. “Thank you,” I said finally. “Thank you very much.” I could just imagine those college admission officers opening up yet another application envelope and finding a rec letter from Alison Birkett.

I went home a little after that. I didn’t look forward to facing my parents. I thought they would ground me or something for running off to Ms Birkett by myself, but all they cared about was the attack. How could it happen, they wanted to know. Didn’t Alison Birkett say Lisa Black Dust 7 was just a branch of a single entity? What did it mean? Though it kind of excited me that they were questioning me, I finally got them to call Ms Birkett. After half an hour shouting on the phone they calmed down. A few days later, the official SDA report came. It didn’t say that much really, just promised extra vigilance, greater surveillance, that sort of thing. After a few weeks without any trouble, things sort of got back to normal.

Over the next couple of months I came into town to visit Ms Birkett about once a week. They weren’t very long visits. I’d go in with my father, or Mom if she needed to go shopping, and I’d stop by the office for maybe half an hour, then meet Mom or take the train home. A couple of times she took me to lunch. When school started it was a little harder, but Ms Birkett often worked Saturdays and my folks sometimes went into town for cultural stuff on Saturday so that worked out.

Maybe I should have spent some of that time with Paul. Maybe if I’d been there for him things wouldn’t have happened the way they did. I did go see him pretty soon after the incidents. I was excited, actually, and I guess I went on too much about the stuff Ms Birkett had said on the phone and how she’d treated the SDA head like a bad boy. Paul didn’t seem to care. He tried to smile a few times, but mostly he just sat bent over, not saying anything.

I think I got annoyed with him, because I started to attack him for not reporting the strange phone calls and the other stuff that had happened.

“But they weren’t anything bad,” he said.

“Not bad?” I yelled. “That cab driver almost drove you into a building.”

“I mean the things before that,” he said. “Some of them were kind of nice. Like the smell in the shower.”

“Ms Birkett says that’s how they pull you in. Get you to lower your guard.”

Paul shrugged. “I guess.”

“Paul,” I said, “I want you to promise me you’ll protect yourself. Please.”

He smiled at me. “Sure.”

“Promise you’ll report any strange events. Even pleasant ones.”

Still smiling, he nodded. “Okay. I promise.” We hugged each other, but when I let him go, he just sat there again.

“It’s just…I don’t know. Sometimes I just feel so lonely.”

“You can always call me,” I said.

“You know,” Paul said, “she always said she would never harm me.”

“Paul!” I yelled at him.

He held up a hand. “I know, I know,” he said. “I promise.”

“And promise you’ll call me if you feel lonely.”

“Okay,” he said. “It’s a deal.”

I know I should never have taken his word. I know I should have kept after him. Maybe made him see a therapist or something, someone to wave rattles over his head and “travel the circles of his inner being” (I read that once in a brochure). But instead, I just went off on my own. With Alison.

But I was with him when it happened. I saw it even though I couldn’t stop it. In a horrible kind of way I’m glad about that. I would have hated it if Alison Birkett had told me on the telephone.

What happened was that I went to see Paul one day. I’d like to say I was worried about him, but what really happened was that my folks had been complaining about my seeing Ms Birkett too much. My mother even said it was “sick”, until I screamed at her to take it back. So when I had a day off from school I called Paul and got him to invite me for lunch. It was the only way I could get into the city. I figured that after lunch he would go back to work and I could stop in at the office.

He seemed really happy to see me. We went to a Chinese restaurant where everybody stared at us for laughing so hard. I loved seeing him like that. But then, when he paid the bill and we started back, his mood collapsed. He stopped joking, he mumbled or said nothing when I spoke to him.

By the time we reached his building I was starting to get angry. Why was I wasting time with this mopey slouch cousin of mine? I almost walked away from him at the bronze and glass door leading into the lobby. But I followed him in, along with a couple of men and women in suits.

Paul’s building was one of those early model office towers, with overlapping plates of steel outside and lots of polished wood and brass inside. A mosaic of the Army of the Saints driving the Malignant Ones out of New Chicago filled the floor of the circular lobby. Usually the building super kept the floor all clean and shiny. It’s a big tourist attraction and helps keep the rent high. That day, the tiles looked all dull, as if someone had tracked mud and gas station grease all over them. When I looked at it I felt queasy, but Paul didn’t seem to notice, even though he walked with his head down.

We went to the row of elevators, with their glossy walnut doors. In a moment, I thought, I can get rid of him. Go see Alison.

I started to hear voices. Crowds of whispers, hisses, laughter, people shouting something too far away for me to make out what they were saying. I looked around, surprised. There were only about twenty people in the whole lobby. It’s in my head, I realized. Get out of my head. I stamped on the floor, hit my hands against the side of my head. And then the elevator door opened.

A bright light burst out of the steel box. I shouted and jumped back. When I could see again the elevator floor heaved and rolled. I shook my head and stared. The floor was covered with snakes.

I started to scream. People were screaming all around me, climbing all over each other to get away. I started to run. But Paul just stood there. He looked at the snakes with his mouth hanging open, like a baby watching TV. “Paul!” I shouted. “Run. Get away from there.” He turned towards me and squinted, as if the light in the elevator had blinded him. A second later he was back looking at the snakes.

I’ve seen snakes at the zoo and usually they don’t make any noise. But these were deafening, more of a buzz than a hiss, and it got louder and louder every second, making me feel like my head would crack open. When I said my formula of protection I stumbled over the words twice before I could get it right.

Holding on to my medallion with one hand I grabbed Paul’s arm. “Get away from there!” I screamed at him. “Say your formula. Say it!” He shoved me and I fell back on the floor. As loud as I could I said my own formula and then the Standard Recognition. In my head the buzzing softened. But in the elevator the snakes didn’t go away. Paul covered his ears. “Paul!” I called again. He turned to me and shrugged. When he stepped into the elevator the door closed behind him.

I ran up and kicked the doors, hit them as hard as I could. “Give him back!” I yelled. “You promised! Give him back.” Someone grabbed me. A cop, I think. A moment later a needle slid into my arm. I remember I looked at it amazed and then tried to pull my arm away. Too late. “Ferocious One,” I said. “Please release me…” And then the drug hit me and I was gone.

I woke up in a hospital bed with my mother slumped over in a chair next to me. “Mom?” I said, and her head jerked up.

“Ellen,” she said. “Thank God.”

For some reason my arms were folded across my body. I tried to reach out a hand but couldn’t. Shit, I thought, I’m paralyzed. But when I flexed my muscles there was nothing wrong with them. The hospital, or the cops, had tied me into a restraining sheet. I tilted up my head to look at it. Sky blue, with an eye of power in the centre radiating circles of protection, it held me like a huge bandage, with my arms pulled over each other like someone about to bow in a sacred pose of purification. “Get this off me,” I said.

“Honey, please,” Mom said.

“Get this goddamn thing off me.”

My mother stuck her head out the door. “Help,” she called, and just like in the movies a couple of nurses came running into my room.

Looking up at their masked faces (a duck and a pig) I tried to sound as calm as possible. “Do you mind telling me what this is about?” I said, nodding my head at the sheet.

“For your own protection,” the duck grunted. She should be wearing the pig mask, I thought.

“Well, can you take it off me?” I said.

The duck said to her pal, “Go get the portscan, okay?” So I had to wait while they wheeled in a white machine with lots of dials and screens, and long wires with tiny rubber tips at the end to place against my face, head, heart and groin.

“How do I configure?” I asked the pig.

Instead of answering she said to the other nurse, “Readings all fall within the 210-225 range.”

I asked, “Is that normal?” She hesitated, then nodded. “Great,” I said, “now will you unstrap me?” They didn’t move. I looked at my mother. “Mom,” I said, “can you get them to take this off me?”

“Honey,” she said, and stopped. Her face scrunched up.

I realized suddenly why they didn’t want to unstrap me. “Oh God,” I said. “Paul.” I could still see his shrug before he stepped into the elevator. “Where is he?” I asked. Nobody answered. “He’s dead, isn’t he? They got him. Tell me they got him.”

My mother just nodded. When I started to cry she came and reached toward my face with a crumpled tissue, but I did my best to turn my head. I guess crying was the right response, because a few moments later the nurses undid the sheet and I could blow my own nose.

The hospital kept me overnight. Observation. I didn’t mind. I didn’t want to think. I don’t think I wanted to go home. Some time in the afternoon I suddenly noticed stitches on my right arm just below the elbow. It didn’t look like a wound. It was too neat. It looked more like surgery. “What’s this?” I asked my mother.

Once again, she looked all embarrassed, even ashamed. Finally, she said, “It’s a chip.”

“A chip? What do you mean?”

“A microchip,” she said. She held out her arm and pushed up the sleeve of her blouse. “Look,” she said, “I’ve got one too. The hospital put them in. Daddy too.”

“Why are they sticking microchips in us?”

“It’s…it’s to monitor what happens.” She looked so scared she could hardly talk. “They said this way they could intervene if…if anyone…anything should threaten us. They’ll know before it happens, they said.”

“Great,” was all I could say. “Terrific.” Goddamn them, I thought. Why couldn’t they have given one to Paul? Stupid bastards.

With the chip in, the hospital let me walk around. After visiting hours that night, when my folks had gone, I just went up and down the floor. I thought of watching TV or calling people on the pay phone at the nurses’ station. But I just kept walking until they gave me a pill and sent me to bed. I remember some Ragged Healer by the side of my bed, hopping from one bare foot to the other, and shaking maracas over me as I was falling asleep.

There was one phone call especially I thought of making. My folks had told me that Alison Birkett had wanted to come see me, but thought she should ask first. Good thing, I told them. Because I didn’t want to see her. I had her home phone number, though, and after my folks left I kept thinking of calling her. Except I didn’t.

At home the next few days, I didn’t do much more than I’d done in the hospital. My folks didn’t push me to go back to school. Most of the time I sat in my room. I tried to read or watch TV, but couldn’t concentrate. When the phone rang, I just let it go on and on and didn’t answer.

And then, on the fourth day I was home, I put on the all-news cable station. And there lay my cousin Paul, all alone in an empty elevator, his hands and face so puffed up you could hardly tell he was a human being and not some lump of clay stuffed into a suit.

I didn’t cry or scream. I just sat there, watching the TV and shaking. When the report ended—I didn’t hear a word—I grabbed the framed picture of Alison Birkett—it still hung above my desk—and threw it at the TV as hard as I could. Then I grabbed all the money I could find and jumped on my bike to head for the train station.

When I got to the office it was almost like Marjorie, her secretary, had been waiting for me. She jumped up from her desk to tell me, “You can’t go in there.”

“Get out of my way,” I ordered.

“She’s in conference,” Marjorie insisted.

“With whom? Jack Morally? The president? God?” When I tried to run around her she grabbed my arm.

I heard a voice I’d once thought was the most beautiful sound I knew. “For heaven’s sake,” Alison Birkett said, “let her in.” Marjorie dropped my arm and I stood there, out of breath, just looking at her.

She looked all worn out, like somebody in pain, or someone who’s been crying for days. It shocked me, but it didn’t make me feel better. Over her shoulder she said, “Robert, will you please excuse me? I’m sorry to break off our talk. I’ll have to get back to you later.” Someone mumbled something and then a man in a suit left the office. “Come in,” Ms Birkett said. “Please.”

Inside her office, she knew better than to offer me a seat. We just stood there, looking at each other. Finally, Ms Birkett said, “I’m sorry, Ellen. I’m so, so sorry.”

“Why?” I said. “Because your little scheme failed? Because you’ve tarnished your perfect reputation?”

She just said again, “I’m sorry, Ellen. Please believe me.”

“I believed you when you said you’d protect him. I fell for all your big buddy buddy talk with the goddamn SDA. I believed you!”

“And I believed it would work.”

“Why? Why didn’t you realize? You’re the expert. You’re supposed to know everything, do everything.”

Her face looked like it would break apart and I thought, don’t you dare, don’t you dare cry. She said, “I thought…I thought the SDA could control them. And I thought I controlled the SDA. Oh God, I was so stupid.”

“I trusted you,” I said.

“I know. And Paul trusted me. That poor boy. Ellen… I… I’m—” She stopped. I guess she realized she’d already said how sorry she was.

I said, “He just wanted love. That’s all he wanted.”

“Love and power,” Alison Birkett said. “Just like all of us.”

And that did it. I don’t know why, but I just started to cry. I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t, all I could do was run on like a double faucet, with my shoulders jerking up and down. She held open her arms, timidly, halfway. I might have resisted if she’d been more confident. Instead, I half stepped, half fell into her hug.

I don’t know how long she held me. It felt like a long time. I think she was crying with me, but I’m not sure, I was crying enough for both of us. When I stopped and pulled loose from her, I didn’t know what to do, if I should say something, or run out of the office.

Alison said, “I understand the SDA put a chip in you.”

I shrugged. “Yeah. I guess they told you.”

“I might as well let you know,” she said. “I got them to tell me the frequencies and I’ve had my own teams monitoring the readings day and night. We can no longer trust the SDA for anything.” When I didn’t answer, we both just stood there.

That’s when she brought up the other thing, the part of this I’d known would come up sooner or later. “Ellen,” she said, “there’s something we need to talk about. I don’t know if this is the right time, but I’m not sure there’ll ever be a right time.” She waited. When I didn’t answer, she sighed, “I suppose you know what I’m going to ask. I’m sure you’ve thought about it. I’ll have to speak to your parents as well, but I wanted to ask you first. The question is this: do we fight? Do we go public?”

Well, I had thought about it. I’d imagined her asking me that question, or something like it, and I believed I wouldn’t know what to say. I thought I didn’t care. But I didn’t even hesitate, I answered right away. “Yes,” I said, and my hands amazed me by clenching into fists. “I want to get them. I want to make them hurt.”

She sighed. “You’re too smart not to know what will happen. Especially after that damn TV spectacle of Paul in the elevator. The reporters will be all over you. You, your parents, anyone they can find. The magazines, the newspapers and especially the TV people, they’ll come at you like an army of Malignant Ones themselves.”

“And you,” I said.

She shrugged. “It’s my job. With me, they’ll come to my office. With you, they’ll come to your house.”

I said, “Maybe Nightline will hire Lisa Black Dust 7.”

She smiled. “Maybe they already have.”

“I want to fight.”

“Yes, I know. I do too. You have no idea how much I want that. I want to go after them more than I’ve wanted anything in a very long time. But please, Ellen, think about it. At least until I speak with your parents. I…I can try to protect you. I’m certainly not going to promise. Not after what’s happened. But if we do fight I will do everything I can to help all of you. With the media as well as the enemy. And I do promise never to take you or your safety for granted.”

Well, it turned out that just getting my folks to talk with Ms Birkett took a couple of weeks. She’d tried to call them, apparently, and my father had threatened her, while my mother had simply refused to speak at all. When I tried to push them into a discussion of what we should do they pulled the “you’re just a kid” routine on me.

I figured Daddy was the weak link and went to work on him. I played up all his anger at government cover-ups, at corruption, at the SDA having too much power. But he was scared. It was one thing to shout and shake his fist, but another to actually do anything. When I tried to talk about Paul, and not just the government, he always changed the subject.

It really amazed me when my mother turned out to be the one to give in. I hadn’t even really talked with her about it, though a couple of times she’d intervened between me and my father. But I knew how scared she was. I saw her once doing the laundry. She opened the washing machine lid and jumped back, as if snakes would come slithering out at any moment. And a couple of times I’d caught her gripping her amulet really hard, with her eyes closed and her lips moving. And then one night we were all sitting at dinner, none of us saying anything, and Mom looked like she wanted to cry, and I was thinking, great, just what I need, when suddenly she banged her fist on the table, and said, “Damn! Damn, damn, damn.”

Daddy stared down at his plate a moment, then he got up to walk over to her. “Honey,” he said, and tried to put his arms around her.

She pushed him away. She growled and pushed him away. I’d never heard her growl before. She looked up at him, and even though her head was shaking no, she said, “I want to go see Alison Birkett.”

So we did it. It took several more days of discussion—especially about the precautions we needed to take, the extra teams Ms Birkett had brought in to watch over us (she had them implant a second chip in each of us, with frequencies known only to her staff), the methods to make sure the story got out if anything happened to us—but we finally did it. We all sat there in the office, Daddy and Mommy and I all holding hands, while Alison called the New York Times and offered them the biggest story since the Pentagon scandal.

Maybe you saw the headlines. “Man Found Dead In Elevator Was Under SDA Protection.” That’s how we started. Alison said we should break the story “in increments” to let it build. But it didn’t take long for the blockbuster to get out. If I’d wanted, I could have saved another Time cover. And Newsweek too. I still remember the Newsweek one. That repulsive picture of Paul’s body and above it, in flaming letters, “Demonic Corruption”, with smaller letters underneath: “Alison Birkett Accuses US Government Of Hiring And Protecting Malignant Ones.”

That was half the attack, the media pressure. The other half was a lawsuit against the SDA. We charged them with malfeasance, malpractice and various other mals, and demanded $10,000,000 in damages. At first the idea overwhelmed me. Alison Birkett and I were suing the SDA! But somehow, I don’t know, after a while it kind of sickened me. That we might get rich because Paul fell for some stupid Ferocious One. Paul had hoped to get rich. All that talk about promotions. And now the snakes had gotten him, and we were asking for $10,000,000.

In a way, we did need money, if not that much. Alison had her teams watching over me and my folks day and night. As well as checking our personal readings, they monitored the house, Daddy’s office, even my school. At the moment, she was paying them herself, but she couldn’t keep that up for long. And of course, when you ask for a lot of money you get more publicity than if you ask for a little. Even so, I didn’t like it.

I felt kind of rotten about the media uproar too. At first, it knocked me out, the idea of being on television. But then it just exhausted and finally disgusted me. Actually, Alison did a pretty good job of shielding me. She managed to break the news in ways that emphasized the government’s part in what happened and not me and my folks (she even apologized to me for “trivializing” my “heroism”). Maybe you saw that creep John Sebbick squirming on 60 Minutes. I enjoyed that one.

Still, just being Paul’s closest relatives guaranteed us all a place on, you guessed it, Nightline, and anyone else who could get a hold of us. At least after a couple of weeks the interest in us faded, revived only a little by the lawsuit. (I still remember a letter that described Mom and Dad as “tawdry money-grubbers trying to cash in on a genuine tragedy.” How can people write such things about someone they don’t even know?)

I did have to stay home from school for a while. I even had to stay off the street. People would recognize me from TV and think that that entitled them to come up and talk to me. Usually, they gave me the “poor dear child” routine, but a couple of people ran away or made hand signs of protection against me. One woman started screaming at me. Apparently she thought I had summoned the Malignant Ones to attack Paul and now would do the same thing to her. That same day, a woman in the supermarket recognized my mother and actually pronounced the Standard Formula against her.

But even that kind of craziness died down and we went back more or less to our normal lives. I was a big deal in school for a while. I noticed that a lot of the kids, and the teachers too, couldn’t seem to decide whether they wanted to hang around with me or get as far away from me as possible. Some parents tried to ban me from the school as a danger to their own kids. Nothing personal, they assured everyone, but what would happen if Lisa Black Dust 7 sent her snakes at me in the school cafeteria? But when everything stayed safe over a couple of months, and I stopped showing up on their evening news, everyone lost interest. I could go back to being a kid again.

The lawsuit just seemed to get stuck in technicalities. Ms Birkett assured me it was moving along, but it looked to me more like a legal video game between her and the government. Outside the suit, the scandal bogged down in debates about special prosecutors versus congressional hearings. A lot of lawyers and constitutional experts worked themselves into a frenzy arguing about whether the Bill of Rights covered “non-human entities” and whether Ms Birkett, or Congress, could legally compel Bright Beings to testify. That’s where it looked like things would stay for a long time.

And then I started seeing Paul.

The first time was on a billboard near my school. It was lunchtime and I’d gone for a walk after eating by myself. I’d been doing a lot of stuff by myself. It wasn’t that people were shunning me. They’d mostly gotten over that. I just felt, I don’t know, kind of strange around my friends. Anyway, after lunch I went for a walk to a candy store. I had to pass this cutesy billboard which shows a guy in a sports car waving his hand. They’ve got it rigged so the metal hand actually moves back and forth. Now, I’ve seen this thing hundreds of times. I never look at it any more. But that day I looked up as I came towards it—and the man in the car was Paul.

He didn’t look like Paul, he was Paul. The waving hand even wore Paul’s initiation ring from college. “Paul!” I shouted.

A car jerked to a stop. A man about sixty leaned his head out. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I don’t think I know you.”

I stared at him. “Huh?” I said, or something equally clear.

He sighed. “You called me. I’m Paul, right?”

“No,” I said. “I mean, I didn’t mean you. I meant him.” I pointed up at the billboard. The man next to me shook his head, muttered something and drove off. I just stood there, squinting up at the billboard. Because when I’d looked again, the face had returned to its normal bland nothing, with the hand empty of rings or marks of any kind.

I went back to school and somehow got through the afternoon. On the way home, I wondered if I should tell my folks, or Ms Birkett. I don’t think I made an actual decision not to tell them. I just didn’t.

Just as I didn’t think about it. Or tried not to. For a week, whenever it came into my mind, I did my best to push it away. Somewhere in my head, I was wondering why the monitor teams hadn’t picked up anything and if their precautions would turn out as useless with me as they did with Paul. Then one night I was lying in bed, watching the little television my folks had given me to replace the one I smashed throwing Alison’s picture at it. I should have been sleeping, with school the next day, but I felt so awake. So I watched some soap about a bunch of pilgrims on their way to the Beach of Marvels in Northern California, and then the news. And then came one of those talk shows where everybody’s lively and no one’s ever depressed or suffering. And you know how they always start with the announcer blaring the name of the host and the audience goes wild? Well, this time the announcer shouted out the usual stuff about live from Hollywood and all the wonderful guests, and then suddenly he said, “And here comes…Paul!” And sure enough, there came my cousin, dancing out from behind the curtains, waving his hands, bowing and grinning in mock embarrassment at the adulation of his fans.

Well, I screamed. I screamed so loud I don’t know how the windows stayed in the walls. Seconds later, my folks came tumbling into the room like circus clowns, shouting “What’s wrong” and “What is it?” and other clever remarks. Nothing, I told them. Bad dream. Because by then the host had turned back into his usual obsequious self.

Are you sure? they asked. My Mom gave me a searching look, and my Dad suggested maybe I should “see someone”. Oh no, I told them. Nothing to worry about. Just fine, thanks. I hated the thought I might have to go back to that damn hospital. More important, I was scared. Too scared to talk about it or get help. Because seeing Paul on network TV did not strike me as all that different from strange sounds on the telephone or a shower that smelled of perfume. I could have called the emergency number the protection team had given me, but what would I do if they said they hadn’t detected anything? I went to bed that night holding on tight to my protection and saying my formula over and over.

Paul didn’t go away. Two days later I was walking on the old shopping street of our town when I saw a meter maid giving a ticket to a blue Mercedes. As I walked past her she glanced up from her pad—and Paul was looking right at me. I ran. I didn’t wait for the meter maid to change back from my dead cousin in drag, I took off down the block, nearly knocking down an old lady who shouted after me. I didn’t stop to help her or apologize. I was scared she’d turn into Paul.

That time I got as far as standing by the telephone, taking deep breaths and reciting Alison Birkett’s home phone number over and over in my mind, like some deep meditation release chant. When I finally walked away without calling I almost had to laugh. At one time I would have loved an excuse to call her at home. But not that excuse.

The next day I had a date with my friend Barb to go to the park. The last thing I needed, I thought, was Barb going on about her latest catalogue of cute boys who’d asked her to some school ritual or something. I thought of cancelling, but I didn’t want Barb attacking me. We’d been friends since second grade, and she’d been getting upset that since I became “famous” I’d stopped seeing her.

We were walking down by the pond, with Barb doing all the talking and me nervously looking at everyone who passed, even dogs and squirrels, when a skateboarder spun by us. I didn’t even notice him. I was looking the other way at a baby carriage. Suddenly Barb grabbed my arm. “Ellen,” she said. “That kid on that skateboard? He looked just like your cousin Paul.”

Barb will probably never know why I hugged her and kissed her and then ran off as fast as I could. “Alison,” I shouted into the phone by the park restaurant. “He’s alive!”

Ms Birkett met my parents and me at the SDA headquarters in Manhattan. The protection team came too; it was the first time I’d seen them in weeks. I don’t know what I expected, really. Maybe some great enactment to bring Paul back from the dead. What I got was tests. Though my folks made a weak protest, and I didn’t like the idea at all, we let Ms Birkett convince us we had to get some scientific basis for what was going on. At least it wasn’t like the hospital. They didn’t strap me down or anything, and they did all the testing in a large open room with a carpet and couches.

As a government agency, the SDA displays portraits of the president in all their offices. You know the kind—an official government photo of our nation’s leader smiling blankly in his official bird costume and sacred headdress, with painted-in guardian spirits hovering in the background, like Secret Service agents. In the middle of all their testing, when I realized none of it was going to do anything worse than bore me, I started looking around the room and my eyes clicked on the president’s portrait. Paul was there. His face looked down at me from underneath the president’s jewelled and feathered cap of office. “There he is,” I told them. “Right there. In that picture.”

They all stared and then a bunch of them ran over with their meters and gauges. By the time they’d reblessed their equipment the photo had changed back again, but that didn’t stop them. After about ten minutes they announced “Significant computational levels of post-manifestational residualism.” SDA people love talking like that.

They went back to me after that and tested me all the rest of the afternoon. Later, I found out they had sent teams to the various places and objects where I’d told them I’d seen Paul. At the end of the day they reported that early indications showed that the “manifestations” were genuine (I figured that that meant I wasn’t crazy) and did not come from “the enemy”. That was why the protection teams hadn’t picked up anything. They’d set their monitors for Bright Beings only. The investigators said they needed to do further tests and run computer analyses, but I could go home.

Wait a minute, I told them. Go home? What did they plan to do? Analyze. Examine. Ponder. Report in five days. I jumped up and strode from the office. “Ellen?” Alison Birkett called, but I didn’t turn. A moment later, my folks came scurrying after me.

The week went more quickly than I thought it would. Paul appeared twice—once as my school principal in the middle of an assembly, the second time as a kid running out of a store, with the store owner chasing him and calling him a thief. I almost joined the chase, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good. Even if I’d caught him, he would have changed back again.

Six days later (it took them an extra day) we were all back there; me, my folks, Ms Birkett, her own team, the SDA techs, and their boss, a real “holycrat” as Alison called such people. Only now two other people had come along; government lawyers in their dark suits and short haircuts. Alison had invited them. Summoned them was more like it. Told them they would “hear something vital to our mutual concerns”. So they came and sat upright, frowning at both the SDA and Alison Birkett, who appeared very relaxed in an antique chair with curved arms and a flared back. She wore a dark gold suit and had her hair combed back from her face. Leaning back in her chair she set her right elbow on the chair arms and rested her chin in the bridge between her first and second fingers. She looked the absolute model of fascination as she listened to the techs explain what was happening.

It must have taken some doing even to look fascinated. The whole thing was about me and Paul, but I still felt like going to sleep. “Transcendental biology” the SDA people called it, a subject even more confusing to me than sacred physics. What it came down to was this. When people die they take several weeks to really let go of their attachment to their bodies, or rather their memories of their bodies—“the post-consciousness morphological field” as one of the techs put it. Once the dead person does that they suddenly discover their guide and off they go to the “Whistling Land” as a deep meditation traveller once called the Place of the Dead.

This is the way it’s supposed to work. Sometimes, however, if the death comes as too great a shock, the person gets jolted right out of his morphological field. And then he can get stranded, because by the time the guide shows up the person’s spirit essence has wandered off and the guide can’t smell where to find him. Not knowing what to do, the dead person tries to get back to the world of the living.

“But why me?” I asked. “I mean, why does he appear just to me?”

“Well, we don’t know that he does,” the holycrat said. “Perhaps he manifests to others who simply fail to identify him.”

“Oh,” I said cleverly. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“But in fact,” one of the techs said (his boss frowned at him, but he didn’t seem to notice), “detached spirits usually try to fix themselves to a significant figure from their past existence. The technical term for this is emoto-tropism.”

Another joined in, “Don’t forget, in several of the manifestations, such as the television programme, only Ellen perceived the anomalous presence.”

“Though not all,” said yet another. “Let’s not forget the presidential portrait. Or the incident with the skateboard.”

I wanted to ask how we could help Paul, but before I could speak Alison signalled to me to keep silent. She said, “It looks like we might have a special opportunity here. A chance to act in the best interests of both my clients and the government.”

Later, after the meeting, Ms Birkett took my folks and me to a restaurant in Greenwich Village. While we ate lunch she explained what she had in mind. “We could keep after them,” she said, “but frankly, the lawsuit would take years. And believe me, the strain would not help you, and it certainly would not help Paul. He needs anchoring.”

My mother said, “Can’t they just release him? Maybe they can summon some sort of guide for him.”

“Perhaps,” Ms Birkett said. “But maybe we can think of something else.” Sometimes, she said, the Bright Beings can raise up a human spirit.

Mom said, “You mean Paul can become a Benign One?”

“Not exactly. But he can become a helper or a guardian.”

Dad said, “And does that mean we just let the government off the hook?”

Ms Birkett said, “Believe me, the scandal will not vanish just because we come to a settlement concerning our private suit. After all, we brought the suit to draw attention to the case. In that sense, it has served its purpose. Maybe the time has come for you to get back your lives.”

“I don’t know,” Dad said.

“Let me put it this way,” Ms Birkett said. “If it serves the politicians and the media to pursue this, they will do so with or without our suit. And if they decide it does not serve their purposes, they will let it quietly die away, no matter what we do to keep it alive.”

“What about Paul?” I asked. “Doesn’t anybody care what Paul wants?”

Alison nodded. “Yes. Exactly. Ellen, Paul has attached himself to you. What do you think he would want? To go to the Place of the Dead—provided we could somehow arrange that, and I don’t know that we can—or to find a fixed place here in the world?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and could feel myself wanting to cry. “I just don’t know.”

She leaned forward slightly, and I think she might have taken my hand, or patted it, if my folks hadn’t been there. “I’m sorry,” she said, “Maybe we all need some time to think.” I nodded, not looking at her.

Mom said, “Perhaps you could investigate what we could get? For a settlement, I mean.”

“Certainly,” Ms Birkett said.

We left pretty soon after that. I don’t think any of us cared very much about dessert. In the car, my folks argued most of the way home. Not about the case, or Paul, just dumb-things. Petty things. I thought, this has got to stop.

Over the next few days one thought came to me over and over—if only he would speak to me, if only I could ask him. The next time he appeared was on a TV commercial. Remember that beer company that used a dog as a mascot? Well, one evening they ran that commercial between a couple of sitcoms and the dog came out with Paul’s face. “Why don’t you talk to me?” I said to the TV. “How am I supposed to know what you want?” But then the commercial ended and he was gone.

The next time was in a fitting room in a department store. The ladies’ fitting room. Paul replaced the elderly woman who counted how many items you were holding and gave you a plastic card with the number on it. Some poor woman noticed his young male face and gave a little shriek, but I paid no attention. “I love you, Paul,” I said. “Please tell me what we should do. Please.” He said nothing, just looked at me, with such sadness I realized that “broken heart” was more than a corny cliché. I hurt, as if my heart had shattered in my chest.

“Did you want to try these on, Miss?” the woman asked, suddenly back in her body. I threw the clothes at her and ran out of the store.

When I phoned Alison at home she thanked me for calling. She hadn’t wanted to push me, she said. She asked if I could come to her office.

“Shall I bring my folks?” I asked.

“If you like. But you might want to hear the terms yourself first.”

I went alone. My folks didn’t expect me for several hours and I had my allowance for the train. When I got to her office she was wearing jeans and a man’s shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

She said, “I had a long talk with the government people. Several long talks, to be honest. We came to a tentative agreement. If you and your folks drop the suit, they will publicly admit culpability and pay damages of $750,000. They will also take on the cost of the independent team monitoring your protection.”

“What about Paul?” I said.

“And the Bright Beings have agreed to dissolve Lisa Black Dust 7. Completely dissolve her, as if she never existed.”

“What about Paul?” I repeated.

She was fiddling with something on her desk, a totem of some sort. I realized she didn’t want to look at me. She said, “Paul becomes—if we agree to the settlement—Paul becomes a guardian spirit.”

“Of what? He’s got to be a guardian of something.” I never knew I could talk to her like that.

She sighed. “Elevators,” she said. “The Bright Beings have offered to make Paul the guardian spirit of elevators.”

I started to laugh. It wasn’t funny. I just couldn’t help myself. “Elevators,” I said. “Oh God, Paul. Elevators!”

3

So now you know. When you step into an elevator, that narrow steel pole that stands next to the door—the one with the dots for eyes and an oval for a mouth and strands of nylon at the top for hair—that’s my cousin Paul. Or at least the “husk” as they say at the SDA. The physical chamber for the spirit to inhabit. Do you touch it? Do you rub the steel or touch the mouth for good luck, for protection? If you ride an elevator on the way to a business appointment, do you kiss the pole and say something like, “Blessed Spirit of this vehicle of ascent, carry me to victory with my new client”? Does it make you feel better?

I went to see him the other day. I went back to that building where he used to work, where he did whatever dumb stupid thing he did to attract the interest of Lisa Black Dust 7. I got in an elevator—there’s a whole row but it doesn’t matter which one, he inhabits all of them, in every building—and when it took off, and everyone who’d wanted to had touched the husk and stepped away, I went over to the pole and whispered, “I’m sorry, Paul. I love you. I hope it’s what you wanted.”

I don’t know, but I think the face, the dots and the oval, glowed slightly. Just a little. Just for a moment.

When I got home that evening, I went to my room and dug something out from the back of the cabinet underneath my desk. My framed Time magazine cover of Alison Birkett. For a while I just held it in my hands and looked at it. I should just throw it away, I thought. What’s the point of keeping it there, under my yearbooks and my old report cards? Throw it away. But I didn’t. Instead, I hugged it to my chest and lay down on my bed, with my knees drawn up against my arms. And I cried. I cried for Paul, I cried for Alison. Most of all, I guess, I cried for me.