Body Surfing

mended, and Jasper sensed that the damage to the brain was going to require precise attention to get it back in working order. The edges of his vision were still blurry, and everything had a greenish tinge to it. And he was starving . This kind of work required massive amounts of energy,and Larry was as lean as Jarhead had been fat. Jasper needed to get some calories ASAP, or his host was going to pass out.
    He found a bucket of McKennedy’s in Sue’s fridge and gnawed the meat off six greasy chicken legs, washed it down with a half gallon of milk. Then he shuffled to the bedroom for a change of clothes. The first thing he saw was the dildo that Sue, under Leo’s control, had shoved in his host’s ass. It took all his self-control to keep from puking up his chicken.
    The psychiatrist burned in Larry’s psyche as the first woman—hell, the first person—who’d ever understood him. Taken all he had to give and added her own spin to the mix. Jasper patted his host’s pocket, found the engagement ring Larry’d been carrying around for the past two weeks. He tried to tell his host it’d be okay, that he would slip it on Sue’s finger before he knew it and they’d live out a life of sexually obsessed connubial bliss. But he had a hard time believing his own words. From the trace memories Leo had left in the paramedic’s mind, it looked like the demon had performed extreme psychic surgery on Larry’s girlfriend. It was unlikely she’d remember her own name, let alone her lover’s. But who knows, maybe Larry could make Sue fall in love with him all over again.
    Jasper himself was more worried about Jarhead. Now that he was in Larry, Jasper could see the difference between the way he took control of his hosts and the way Leo interacted with his. Despite the fact that this control was greater, Leo’s touch was infinitely more delicate than Jasper’s, his needs and desires synched up with impulses that already existed within the psyches of the people he inhabited. By contrast, Jasper had simply replaced Jarhead and Larry’s consciousnesses with his own. He realized now how difficult it was going to be for them to recover. Somewhere out there Jarhead was probably wondering what the hell had happened to him. Where he’d been for the past two days and why the world and his body looked and felt and sounded so different.
    Jasper looked at the cracked face of the Patek. The hands of the watch were stuck at 8:32 P.M. A little window indicated that the watch had stopped on April 18.
    With a start, he realized he was looking at the exact moment of his death. He wrapped his left hand around the watch to cover up its macabre message, squeezed so hard he felt the cracked glass shatter beneath his palm. Jesus Christ. He was dead. He was really fucking dead. He was dead, but he wasn’t dead .
    Just then the land line rang. Jasper eyed the jangling instrument warily. It was three in the morning. It seemed unlikely it was a social call—although with a swingin’ couple like Sue and Larry you couldn’t be too sure. It might be the hospital, of course, calling for Sue, but they’d probably call on her cell. No, somehow Jasper knew this call was for him, although whether “him” meant Jasper or Larry was another question entirely. The one thing he was pretty sure of was that he shouldn’t answer.
    “Hello?”
    “Yes, hello. I’m trying to reach Mr. Lawrence Bishop.”
    A woman’s voice, professionally distant. Only Jasper’s sensory control allowed him to hear the tiniest of tremors. Not so much fear as anxiety, as if she were trying to cover something up.
    “This is Larry Bishop.”
    A brief pause. Jasper strained his ears, heard first the breath of a whisper—“It’s him”—and then, as if from across the room, a second voice, almost ridiculously by-the-book: “The suspect is in the house. Repeat: the suspect is in the house.”
    Meanwhile, the woman who had called him was still talking:
    “Oh, yes, Mr. Bishop. I’m so sorry to call you at this hour, but, well, I have some bad news about your—”
    But Jasper had already set the phone down on the dresser. He trotted outside as fast as he could on his stiff left leg. No doubt the police had found Sue tied to a gurney, her mind shot from what most doctors would probably assume was a combination of drugs and trauma, her vagina raw from hours of fucking, and filled with his host’s semen besides. Now they were after her attacker. Her torturer. Her