Body Surfing

garage on 66th between Lexington and Third. During the four-block walk to his townhouse he kept looking around, but there was no sign of Leo or Larry. Just a bunch of Hunter College students careening drunkenly through the streets, celebrating the last week of the semester. I should be in school, Q. thought. Taking finals, hitting parties, deciding whether to go naked beneath my cap and gown with the rest of the track team. Instead I’m walking up Lexington next to a man carrying a violin case with a shotgun folded inside it. Q. wondered how everyone they passed couldn’t guess what the case contained. Hadn’t they ever seen a Jimmy Cagney movie?
    Q. started. He had never seen a Jimmy Cagney movie. He hadn’t, but Leo had.
    He turned to the doctor.
    “He said you hypnotized me.”
    The doctor’s eyes were invisible behind the light reflecting off his glasses. “I apologize. It seemed the quickest way to ascertain if indeed you had been possessed.”
    The word hung heavily in the warm air like a streak of fog. Possessed .
    “How’d you know? I mean, what made you think I’d been…”
    “The same things that made you think you’d been possessed. Your uncharacteristic behavior in the days leading up to the accident, not to mention the fact that you survived the impact unscathed. And then of course the memories, the unexplained knowledge. Anschluss, Mogran, etc., etc. Demons can wreak remarkable changes in their hosts, both to their bodies and their minds.”
    They walked in silence for a few steps. Q. had so many questions he didn’t know where to start. Who, what, when, where, why. But he decided to open with:
    “How do you know about all this?”
    The doctor nodded.
    “I am a member—a tertiary member, admittedly—of an organization called the Legion.”
    “What, like the Foreign Legion? The Legion of Superheroes?”
    The doctor laughed. “It is appropriate that you mention comic books, since the Legion was founded by a writer of children’s literature. Does the name Jordan David ring a bell?”
    Q. wracked his brain. “I don’t think so.”
    “The City of Frozen Souls.”
    “Oh, right! I read that ten times when I was a kid!” He laughed sheepishly. “I never was very good at names.”
    If the doctor heard him, he gave no sign. He launched into a speech that Q. sensed he’d rehearsed many times.
    “Though he was American, Jordan David was often grouped with Hans Christian Andersen and Lewis Carroll, who wrote before him, and J.M. Barrie, who came after. They were the major propagators of the so-called Cult of the Child, a literature of symbolic, often surreal stories that evinced an enormous fear of, and fascination with, adult sexuality. In their own time, all four men were widely believed to have been virgins, but later evidence revealed all of them were in fact sexual deviants, at least by the standards of their day. Andersen and Barrie were homosexuals, and David and Charles Dodgson, which was Lewis Carroll’s real name, were heterosexual pedophiles.”
    “Um…” Q. was stumped.
    “It was David’s belief—formulated long after the fact, of course—that he, Andersen, Dodgson, and Barrie were all victims of the same demon. I am compressing things enormously here, but suffice to say that after years of investigating, David learned that the demon’s name was Karena. The strange acts she forced the men to engage in while she possessed them left them understandably frightened of sexual relations, so they channeled their ‘unhealthy’ impulses into art. Only David ever figured out that they’d been groomed to do this by Karena herself. For some reason, she hadn’t masked herself in him as well as she had in the others, and when writing his book didn’t exorcise the unwanted memories and feelings, he devoted his life to researching the possibility of possession. In time he met others who also believed they’d served as unwilling hosts to some alien entity or other, and they banded together to pool their efforts.”
    “The Legion.”
    “Exactly. The City of Frozen Souls proved enormously successful, and David used the money he earned to fund his activities. Over the years, he and his compatriots amassed a large archive of data about the entities they came to call Mogran. The name was the result of intense hypnotherapy sessions, in which the unconscious levels of former hosts’ minds were plumbed for any bit of information they might hide within them. Many current members of