Lew snorted. “Sure, that makes sense. They keep it a secret that they’re running the world, then they blow their cover by playing dressup like Trekkers?”
“Only Trekkies say Trekkers,” I said. “There must be two types of slans—the responsible, world-dominating type, and the role-playing, geek slans.”
“White-boy racist geeks, judging from how my black friends reacted to the O. J. killing.”
I snorted. “Like you have black friends.”
“So did you tell Bert your theory that you’d trapped a demon?”
“We had a lot of time to talk.”
Lou sighed. “Well no wonder.”
“No wonder what? And it’s not a theory.”
“Say the slans are in charge,” he said. “These telepaths can invade any mind they want, bouncing around people’s heads like packets on a network. They go wherever they want, dropping into your personal hardware like a virus. But you, you’re special.”
“I’m antiviral?”
“Not exactly. You didn’t kill the demon, you just quarantined it, like a sandbox that keeps Trojan horse programs from dialing out.”
“You really gotta work on your metaphors,” I said. “How’s a sandbox supposed to stop a Trojan horse?”
“Shut up,” he explained. “The important thing is that you’ve trapped one. It can’t get out and infect other people. If you could teach people how to do that—”
“I don’t want to teach people how to trap one. It’s awful. Even if I knew what the trick was, which I don’t, nobody would want this thing in their head.”
“It can’t be worse than being possessed,” he said.
“You don’t get to have an opinion.”
“Okay, okay. Fine. But say that once you get this thing out of you, you could use the same trick that kept it in to keep it out. You’d own the world’s only demonic firewall.”
I rolled my eyes.
He pointed at me. “You, my friend, may be the ultimate weapon in the war against the slans.”
“Oh my God,” I said, my voice going spooky with awe. “That would make me . . .”
“The Chosen One!” we said simultaneously.
We rode in silence for a while. Then Lew said, “But seriously. Bertram can’t come to the house, not while Amra’s there alone. You gotta call him and tell him to cut that shit out.”
“I told you, I’ll call him.”
“Okay,” Lew said.
“Okay.”
We made great time crossing Ohio and Pennsylvania. My thoughts kept jumping from Dr. Ram to Valis to Mother Mariette. Lew distracted me by reading from some of the more tangential web pages we’d only skimmed the night before when we were looking up the priestess. Then he started streaming music from his laptop to the car radio.
“You got to hear this one,” Lew said. It started with a U2 guitar
blast from “Vertigo” overdubbed with their spoken intro to “Helter Skelter,” which abruptly became Jet’s “Are You Gonna Be My Girl.”
And all the chords matched. I hadn’t realized they were so similar.
“Hey, that’s cool,” I said, and then shut up, because suddenly Paul McCartney was singing “Lady Madonna” over that thrash of Jet chords, and it sounded like those two songs were meant for each other. And then as soon as I settled into that, a guitar riff from the Joe Walsh song kicked in—that one about “life’s been good to me so far,” I couldn’t recall the name. And then it was all three—Beatles, Jet, and Joe Walsh—punctuated at random by distant shouts of “What the fuck is going on!” that sounded like snippets from a Sex Pistols track. I couldn’t stop giggling.
“Holy shit!” I said to Lew. “Where did you get this stuff?”
“Downloaded it. They call ’em mash-ups.”
“I think I’m in love.”
He had hours of this stuff on his hard drive. We cut northeast into New York, and Lew played me Doors versus Blondie, Depeche Mode versus Marvin Gaye versus Cypress Hill, Madonna versus Sex Pistols, and on and on. It was like these DJs had tapped into all the pop songs in my brain, into the collective radio in all our brains, and remixed and relayered until the songs were having sex and making strange, beautiful babies.
Eventually we left the interstate behind and the music ran out, along with Lew’s cell phone service. For the past few hours we’d been twisting and bobbing along two-lane back roads, rollercoastering through pitch-black forests. And now we were lost. Or rather, the world was lost. The GPS told us exactly where we were, but had no idea where anything else was.
Permanent Global Position: You Are Here.
I walked away from the car, toward the trees, sucking in cold air. A few feet away from the headlights, it got very dark. I stood there, letting my eyes adjust. What had looked like a solid wall of shadow resolved into individual trees, evergreens interspersed with bare-limbed things with interlocking branches. Snow was still mounded under some of the trunks. Somewhere out there was a town called Harmonia Lake, and presumably a lake to go with it, and a house or trailer or tent that might have been, and might still be, Mother Mariette O’Connell’s home.
I crossed my arms against the cold, turned my back to the woods, and started back to the car. Lew, illuminated by the dome light, was flipping through pages of printouts and cursing. Suddenly a light above the billboard sputtered to life, silvering the grass. I realized I wasn’t alone, and looked up. A gray-green humanoid monster reached toward me with huge webbed hands. It was hairless, with a wide, pale belly like a toad’s, caught in midstride as it stalked out of some dimly rendered swamp on thickly muscled thighs, its crotch conveniently shadowed. The head was bald and round, mouth agape, neck gills fanned. It stared down at me with black goggly eyes.
“Oh Lew?” I called out. “Lew!”
He looked at me, scowling. I nodded at the sign. The billboard was faded and peeling, but below the painted monster the huge block letters were clear enough: have you seen the shug?! And then below that, slightly smaller: museum & gift shop—
harmonia lake motel 2 mi. on right.
Lew shook his head, then crumpled the remaining pages and tossed them in the backseat. “Fucking MapQuest,” he said. The Harmonia Lake Motel and Shu’garath Museum and Gift Shop was a Victorian stack of narrow windows and peaked roofs disappearing into black sky. A long, slope-roofed porch wrapped the house in a shadow mouth, toothed by gray posts. The windows were dark except for two narrow, faintly glowing panes on either side of the front door.
A light high on a telephone pole shone weakly on the empty parking lot. Two gravel roads, not much wider than walking paths, led from each end of the lot and disappeared into the woods; signs pointed toward cabins 1–2 and 3–5.
On the lawn in front of the house, a man-size wooden cutout of the Shug held its own rectangular sign, white letters dimly visible: bait.
Lew put the Audi in park. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
“Come on, you want to sleep in the car?” I got out and crunched toward the house, hands in my armpits, shivering. Lew reluctantly followed me. The air smelled faintly of rotting fish; the lake was somewhere behind the hotel. I patted the plywood shoulder of the Shug as I passed and went up the front steps. The porch creaked, naturally. Next to the door were a pair of broad-backed rocking chairs, a wicker table between them, and farther down, a porch swing on metal chains.
The front door was a two-part affair, a screen door in front of a wooden one. Nailed to the face of the wooden door, where the knocker would be, was a glossy hunk of driftwood, vaguely squidlike: bulbous and shiny on top, multiple twisting limbs below, each limb turning up at the end into a sharpened point like a fish hook. The black wood gleamed like it was still in water. The screen door was ajar. I opened it, tried the knob of the wooden door, and found it locked.