Read Pandemonium for Free Online Page B

mother was in the laundry room, moving my clothes from the washer to the dryer. I stopped short, then saw that they were the clothes I’d put into the washer before I left. It didn’t look like she’d gone into my duffel bag.

“You don’t have to do that,” I said.

I turned sideways to move past her in the narrow space, a coffee cake under one arm and the three-pound Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune under the other. The laundry room was really a breezeway that connected the garage to the house and did double duty as a mudroom. My dad had built it, under close supervision by my mother. She said he had hands of concrete, hell on anything smaller than a 2x4 or more fragile than sheet metal. He never worked on a piece of wood trim that didn’t snap.

“You already got to the bakery?”

“Seven o’clock Sunday morning, and it was packed.” I went into the kitchen, set the box on the counter. “Same old Polish ladies. That place hasn’t changed a bit.”

“You didn’t go back to sleep, did you?”

I shook my head, even though she couldn’t see me. “Sorry about that. I didn’t mean to wake you up.” I felt embarrassed and guilty, as if she’d caught me wandering around the house naked.

She started the dryer and came into the kitchen, drying her hands on a paper towel. She threw out the remains of the coffee I’d made at four—I’d needed plenty of caffeine—and started a fresh pot. I busied myself getting down plates and cutting slices of the coffee cake. We sat down at the table and divvied up sections of the Trib. The cake wasn’t sweet in the center—nothing in the Polish bakery was as sugary as something from a regular bakery—but it tasted better to me than any roll or donut I’d found. Or maybe it was just nostalgia. We ate and read in silence for a long time.

The demon I’d seen at the airport two days ago was mentioned on page three. It was a brief story, a follow-up to whatever they’d run the day before. The victim was not going to be charged—nobody thought he was faking. Experts agreed it was the Painter strain of the disorder. (Those were the official terms— strain, disorder —as if marrying a medieval word like possession with more medical and modern-sounding partners tamed the idea, boxed it up into something tidy enough for science.) Best guess, there were perhaps a hundred distinct strains—a science-weasel way of saying one hundred demons.

The CDC recorded over twenty thousand cases of possession a year in the US, some lasting weeks and most lasting only minutes. Some people were hit repeatedly, as if being struck by lightning charged them for life. Most of the time they were seized by the same demon, but sometimes it was a different one every time.

The government hastened to add that the reports contained an unknown number of false positives, false negatives, incorrect diagnoses. Demons left behind no DNA, no wake of antibodies in the bloodstream, no cellular changes in the brain. A possession—especially a brief, one-time possession—was easy to hide and easier to fake. Different people were highly motivated to do either. Demons could make you do awful things—but awful things could make you famous. Possession survivors showed up on TV all the time.

Next to the airport story was a sidebar on the International Conference on Possession and its outlaw para-conference, DemoniCon. DemoniCon was not, technically, even a conference: it had no charter, no committees, no reservation agreements. It was an improvised annual party that followed ICOP around the globe. Demonology cranks, hobbyists, and demon fans bought up hotel rooms in whatever city ICOP was being held at that year, tried to crash the more interesting ICOP events, and then made nuisances of themselves.

People were worried about more cases of possession cropping up because of the conferences, or worse, more cases of copycat possessions. Nobody wanted armed impersonators of the Pirate King or the Truth