I snatch the gun from the table.
She says, “Who are you really, Harry Potter?”
“Lex Luthor,” I admit. “That’s why I had to change my name. The thousandth time someone asked me why I hated Superman, I started wishing my name was just about anything else, even Fidel Castro.”
“You are the first of your kind I’ve ever encountered.”
“What kind is that?” I wonder.
“Inaccessible. I possess everyone who sleeps in the motor court, roam their memories, and embed recurrent nightmares that will destroy their sleep for weeks after I’ve departed them.”
“I’d prefer a free continental breakfast.”
Not stiffly, like a zombie, but with her usual grace, she walks—almost seems to glide—to the counter beside the cooktop and opens a drawer. “Sometimes I seize control of motor-court guests while they’re awake—use a husband to brutalize a wife or use a wife to tell her husband lies about infidelities that I imagine for her in delicious detail.”
Ardys stares into the drawer.
“When they leave,” the Presence says through her, “they’re beyond my control, but what I’ve done will have a lasting effect.”
“Why? What’s the point?”
Ardys looks up from the drawer. “Because I can. Because I want to. Because I will.”
“That’s a tidy little moral vacuum.”
Obeying the beast that rides her, Ardys withdraws a meat cleaver from the drawer. In her voice, the hidden demon says, “Not a vacuum. A black hole. Nothing escapes me.”
I suggest, “Delusions of grandeur.”
Raising the cleaver, Ardys approaches the dinette table, which stands between us. “You’re a fool.”
“Yeah? Well, you’re a narcissist.”
I find it dismaying that we never quite outgrow the schoolyard and the puerile behavior thereof. Even this puppetmaster, with almost godlike power over those it controls, feels the need to belittle me with childish insults, and I feel obliged to respond in kind.
Through Ardys, it says, “You’re dead, shitface.”
“Yeah? Well, you’re probably ugly as hell.”
“Not when I’m in this bitch.”
“I’d rather be dead than as ugly as you.”
“You’re ugly enough, shitface.”
I reply, “Sticks and stones.”
She starts around the table.
I circle in the other direction, taking a two-hand grip on the pistol and aiming it point-blank at her chest.
“You won’t shoot her,” the Presence says.
“I killed a woman earlier tonight.”
“Liar.”
“Freak.”
“Killing the bitch won’t kill me.”
“But you’ll have to find another host. By then I’ll be out of the house, and you won’t know where to look for me.”
She throws the cleaver.
My paranormal ability includes occasional prophetic dreams but not, darn it, glimpses of the future while I’m awake, which would be really, really helpful in moments like this.
I don’t expect her to throw it, I haven’t time to dodge, the blade whooshes past my face close enough to shave me if I had a beard, and chops into the cabinetry behind me, splitting the raised panel on an upper door.
The puppeteer is probably limited to the physical capabilities of whatever host it inhabits. I am maybe fifteen years younger than Ardys, stronger, with longer legs. The Presence is right, I won’t kill Ardys, she’s innocent, a victim, and now as she returns to the knife drawer, there’s nothing I can do but split in the figurative sense before her rider uses her to split me literally.
I race along the hallway, reaching the foyer just as the front door opens and a tall, husky guy halts on the threshold, startled to see me. He must be the husband, William Harmony. I say, “Hi, Bill,” hoping he’ll politely step out of the way, but even as I speak, his expression hardens, and he says, “Shitface,” which either means that the insult is so appropriate that it’s the first thing people think to say when catching sight of me or the Presence has flipped out of Ardys and into her spouse.
Although I don’t know Bill as well as I know Ardys, I don’t want to shoot this innocent, either. Call me prissy. If I retreat to the kitchen, the puppeteer will flip out of Bill and into Ardys once more, and she’ll have a carving knife or a butcher knife, or a battery-powered electric knife, or a chain saw if they happen to keep one in the kitchen. Bill is wearing a sailor’s cap, which is appropriate, because his neck is as thick as a wharf post, his hands look as big as anchors, and his chest is as wide as the prow of a ship. There’s no way that I can go through him, which leaves me no choice but to sprint up the nearby staircase to the second floor.
SIX
I am perpetually—sometimes darkly—amused by the workings of my mind, which can often seem less rational than I would like to believe they are. The human brain is by far the most complex object known to exist in the entire universe, containing more neurons than there are billions of stars in the Milky Way. The brain and the mind are very different things, and the latter is as mysterious as the former is complex. The brain is a machine, and the mind is a ghost within it. The origins of self-awareness and how the mind is able to perceive, analyze, and imagine are supposedly explained by numerous schools of psychology, although in fact they study only behavior through the gathering and the analys
is of statistics. The why of the mind’s existence and the how of its profound capacity to reason—especially its penchant for moral reasoning—will by their very nature remain as mysterious as whatever lies outside of time.
As I race up the stairs to the second floor, intent upon not falling into the hands of the possessed Bill Harmony, who looks like he has the strength to break me apart as easily as I might break in half a breadstick, I am afraid of dying—and therefore failing to protect Annamaria as I promised—and at the same time I am mildly embarrassed by the impropriety of dashing pell-mell toward the more private portion of their residence, into which I haven’t been invited.
I hear myself saying, “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” as I ascend the stairs, which seems absurd, considering that my trespass is a far lesser offense than the puppetmaster’s intention to use Mr. Harmony to bash my brains out. On the other hand, I think it speaks well of human beings that we are capable of recognizing when we’ve committed an impropriety even while we’re in a desperate fight for survival. I’ve read that in the worst Nazi and Soviet slave-labor camps, where never enough food was provided to inmates, the stronger prisoners nearly always shared rations equitably with weaker ones, recognizing that the survival instinct does not entirely excuse us from the need to be charitable. Not all human competition has to be as brutal as that on the Food Network’s Cupcake Wars.
At the head of the stairs, as I hear Mr. Harmony thundering up the two flights behind me, I discover that the hallway leads right and left. I turn left, trusting my intuition, which unfortunately isn’t 100 percent reliable.
Out of a room to my right, a boy of about fifteen, bare-chested and barefoot, wearing pajama bottoms, erupts as if catapulted, slams into me, drives me into the wall, and reveals himself to be possessed when he says, “Shitface.”
Although the impact knocks the wind out of me, although I drop the pistol, although the boy’s sour breath reeks of garlic from the previous night’s dinner, and although I am beginning to be offended by the unnecessary repetition of that insult to my appearance, I am nevertheless impressed by the puppeteer’s ability to switch from host to host in what seems like the blink of an eye. Cool. Terrifying, yes, but definitely cool.