Poltergeist (24 page)

I got a stare from a panhandler and a squeak from a woman who had nearly trodden on my foot. I was still next to the Wild Ginger, but I'd moved out a bit onto the edge of the sidewalk that led down to the Triple Door. I put my hand on the wrought iron rail that rimmed the air shaft around the club's frontage. Glancing down the street, I saw Ana, distinctive in her fluffy white coat, standing in front of the club and looking down the road when she wasn't checking her watch.

I spotted the curious yellow snake of energy I'd seen before uncoiling around the Second Avenue corner. Ana didn't see it, but I did, and watched it coming. Limping a little, his jaw tight with each step, Ken George came around the corner at the other end of the questing yellow thread. Ana spotted him and bounded down the hill to meet him and put her arm around his waist. His blank planes of Grey fell away, the energy threads braided up together, mingling around the couple and the gleam-shot mass of Celia that hung close beside them. Sparks of pink, white, and blue fizzed like firecrackers around the couple, and red bolts shot across the reflective blades that thrust through the entity following Ken and Ana into the club and out of my sight.

The diminished size and the passivity of Celia left me scowling. The fake ghost had rattled the glass at us in City Centre, but took no other actions as Ana and I had walked down the street. And now it had floated behind them brilliant-colored, but passive. I wished I knew what the display meant, but I was still learning—I had avoided deeper knowledge of the Grey at times and now wished I hadn't. Every time I thought I had eliminated something, or gained information, I came up against contradiction as dense as the sudden wall in the Grey.

I toyed with the idea of following the couple into the club and hanging out in the lounge to see what happened next, but I knew they would spot me. Sight lines in the Musiquarium lounge were short and broken, and if the two had gone into the main showroom, I'd have to take potluck on a seat—if the show wasn't sold out already. I'd have to let it go and turn my energy to something more productive.

I called Mara Danziger.

When I called, Mara was stuffing food into Brian and had to relay her answers to me through Ben. She made some guesses, but said she could only confirm them in my presence, so I was heading for another evening with the Danzigers. I hoped Brian would be in a calm mood, as I was already tired.

Mara let me through the door to wonderful quiet. I stood in the entry hall and blinked, looking around for signs of rhino. Mara grinned at me, her green eyes sparking with mischief.

I cast her a wary glance. "You've put him in a barrel in the basement," I stated.

"No," she replied, laughing, "though I'm sure he'll be as hung-over in the mornin' as if we had done. His Irish nature is showin' through— I'm afraid he snatched a whiskey glass and helped himself before we could stop him. He was as fluthered as a fiddler at a wedding, then out like the proverbial light." She fairly skipped ahead of me to the living room.

"Brian didn't have any help getting at that whiskey glass, did he?" I asked.

"Not a bit," she replied, plumping down on one of the pale green sofas with a whoosh of breath. "The horrors'll probably cure him of ever drinking another drop again. If the Children's Services ever get wind, they'll call me an unfit parent for letting him at the booze the once and I'll never hear the end of what damage I've done my poor child. But it's blessed quiet for once. Ben just took him up to bed.”

"How much did he get?”

"Oh…not much—less than half an ounce, and that watered. He just grabbed the glass and took a drink, then made the most awful face! You'd have thought he'd swallowed fire. Then he dropped a perfectly good glass of Jamey on the floor and ten minutes later he was passed out on the rug. I finally understand why my aunt used to slip a tot into my cousin's bedtime milk. He was a right monster." She caught her breath, then blew it back out in a cheek-bulging gust. "My, I am blathering on. Now, let's see what's on with you. Oh.”

I stopped on the verge of sitting down as Mara stared at me with surprise. "What?”

"There's somethin' tangled on ya. Some magical thing.”

I looked down at myself. "It must be the damned poltergeist, though I don't see anything.”

"Well, you wouldn't, would you? It's rather like tryin' to see the back of your own head without a mirror. Every time you look it moves around. I suppose I could snip it off…”

I had an idea and I put up my hands to keep her back. "No. If I'm connected to it, it's connected to me, and I can follow this line to it— if I can find the thread to follow.”

"Would you want to?”

I thought about it. "I might. Can you remove it later?”

"Well… yes. I don't see why not. Its not the same as that knot or whatever it is that monster stuck in you—though that might be why it's caught on you. Attracted like to like. Grey things sticking together like Velcro.”

"I hope that won't be happening a lot in the future.”

"Not likely. It's never happened before this. Just a moment, let me get the mirror so you can see it.”

A mirror—

But she'd already jumped up and run out of the room. I shrugged and sat on the sofa in the comfortable creaking of the old house muttering to itself. Albert wafted in and circled around the room before fading away again, and as I relaxed and let the Grey flood in on me as it wished, I could see the curling, golden vines of Mara's protective charms that lay over the house. Without the charge of the rhino-boy, the Danzigers' home was serene and more restful than my own. The poltergeist didn't seem to be able to penetrate it any more than most other Grey things.

Mara returned with Ben and a small silver hand mirror. She told Ben to sit down a moment and brought the mirror to me.

"Let me just get this charm back in place," she said, muttering and fingering the edges of the mirror. She made a shape on the surface that glittered a moment in blue and gold before it sank into the mirror and vanished. "There now. It's a silly trick, but it shows you the back of yourself." She glanced into it. "Hm. My hair wants brushing. Here, you take a look and see if you can spot the thread.”

She handed me the mirror and I took it, looking into the surface and seeing only a patch of straight brown hair. "You may need to move it about a bit to see more of yourself. Hold it out farther," Mara suggested.

I stretched my arms out and moved the mirror around slowly. It was strange seeing my own back from such an angle, like a weird camera. The reflection in the mirror moved like a regular mirror: in the opposite direction of my perceived motion. The small, weird view made me feel a little dizzy, but I spotted the thin yellow thread. It circled my head and neck, then spun away into the deepness of the Grey the same way I'd seen similar strands on the séance members. Now that I knew what to look for, I could catch a hint of it out of the corner of my eye.

"That's going to be a real pain to try and follow," I said.

"Why would you want to follow it?" Ben asked.

"To find the poltergeist and the person on the other end—the one who has control of the thing. I don't know how I'll follow something that's behind me, though.”

"Just twist it around to the front," Mara suggested.

I looked askance at her.

"Here, I'll give it a go," she said. She put her hands up on either side of my head and hummed a bit as she tried to get ahold of it. "Stiffer than I thought," she muttered. "There's something awfully strong on the other end, but it doesn't actually care if it's behind or before, so…" She gave a grunt, concentrating hard, and made a sudden twist with her hands. "There," she crowed.

I gasped as something wrenched across the back of my eyes. A ripping sensation like a hank of hair being yanked from the back of my head flooded my skull with a flash of pain that vanished as fast as it came. "Ow.”

"Oh. I'm sorry. It shouldn't have hurt.”

"It did. Not much, but…" I rubbed the back of my head but felt nothing unusual. Another look in the backward mirror showed my head as it usually was, the yellow thread twisted now to leave its tail in front, though the loop around my head remained as it had been. I looked down my chest and saw a weak yellow gleam near my left arm.

"It's a bit off to the left…" I observed.

"I could give it another shove," Mara suggested.

I was quick to nip that idea in the bud. "No. I can work with this. How am I supposed to chase after this thing, though? When I tried to take a look at it once earlier tonight, it was cut off by a building. Or I think it was a building.”

"Probably. You're not a superhero, you know. Can't see through walls.”

"You can't?" Ben asked.

I frowned at him. "No." Then I realized he was chuckling in his beard. The unexpected respite from their offspring seemed to have made the Danzigers goofy.

I had never discussed the deep Grey with them, the blaze of energy defining the shapes of the world like intelligent fire in a pit of cold blackness. It had been all I could do at the time to say that it was not what any of us had thought it was. I didn't want to discuss it now, either, even if I thought I could have. I'd never had any luck before.

I gave them both a quelling glare. Ben looked a little sheepish, but Mara just made a face at me.

"I imagine once you're in the Grey, some things remain as hard and opaque as they are out here," Mara said. "But I suspect that getting around it's a matter of finding a bit of a hole to go through. Once you've got a path you can follow the strand—or at least get a look at it.”

I groaned. "Are you expecting me to dive in there and chase this thing around right now?”

"Why not?" she said, getting comfortable on the sofa again. "Let's see what we can do about this. I'll have Albert spot you, just in case.”

"I think I can manage without a spotter by now," I said.

"Still," said Mara. "I think what you'll need to be doing is bending the Grey a little while you're inside.”

"Like I do with the shield edge? But that seems to isolate me from the Grey, not help me move around in it. Why am I supposed to be bending this stuff anyway?”

"So you can push the layers around until you find a hole to go through and follow that strand. You've said there seem to be layers to the Grey and it must be easier to bend a single layer just a bit than to pull the whole edge around. You should be able to pull on the layers of it the same way you pull on the shield. That's what I want you to try. Go in and look around. If you can see layers, try pushing and pulling on them and see if you can move them aside a little.”

It sounded crazy, but then the whole thing always did. I shrugged. I breathed slowly, let go of normal, and slid the rest of the way into the mist.

The Danzigers' living room, old as the house was, was not thick with the memories of furniture and other peoples lives. Mara had cleared much of that away when they'd bought the house, but some still remained as shades over shades. The humpbacked shape of an old sofa wavered a few feet from me. In the Grey, its form had the substance of memory. I moved toward it and peered sideways, then straight, through thick and thin veils of mist and cold steam. The sofa flickered a little and I could see that it seemed to flatten a little when viewed from the right angle. I put out my hand at the same angle and pushed.

The ghost sofa warped and bent. I grabbed at it and tugged. It slid. I could do it, but I didn't see what purpose it had, except rearranging the Grey furniture that littered my office and condo.

I pushed myself back from the Grey, breathing a little harder than I'd expected.

"I can do it," I puffed. "Not sure what the point is, but I can shove the furniture around, at least. It's tiring, though.”

Mara shook her head. "I think that's the poltergeist strand dragging on your energy. Pushin' around in the Grey takes some work, but it shouldn't take that much or you'd be exhausted all the time.”

"I used to be.”

"Not anymore. Not in a long time, eh?”

"True. I'm getting used to this stuff and it doesn't seem to be trying to kill me anymore.”

Ben was looking at me oddly.

"What?" I asked.

"I've never seen you do that before. It's rather fascinating.”

"I can't begin to imagine why.”

"You sort of… fade out. I mean, you're here, but it would be easy to miss seeing you. In fact, you look a bit like most people think a ghost looks.”

I rolled my eyes. "Goody.”

Ben just looked intrigued.

I turned back to Mara. "I'm still not sure I see the point.”

"Well, if it's true that the Grey has layers, then it must have layers of time as well.”

"Yes," Ben chimed in. "We've been discussing it and it seems to me that since memory loops exist in the Grey—that's what the most common ghosts are, after all—these memories must be isolated capsules of time. So the Grey must be stacked up with layers of time, like fragments of pages. Like an archeological dig into time itself. Layers and layers emerging as fragments here and there. Time isn't strictly contiguous in the Grey.”

"Then that explains why it sometimes seems too much or too little time has elapsed when I'm in the Grey.”

"Yes, it would," Mara answered. "It would also give you another way to move through the Grey—by digging into the layers of time.”

"I'm not following you," I said, shaking my head in confusion.

"Neither time nor space are exactly the same in the Grey as they are out here—they simply can't be," she explained. "If a bit of time past can stick up through the present time and show itself as a ghost memory, then it seems likely you could dig down to some other fragment of time, if you can find one nearby.”

"I believe that's how ghosts seem to move through walls," Ben put in.

"How?" I asked.

"Moving along the plane of time fragments in the Grey. The ghost exists on his own time plane. When he seems to walk through the wall, what he's really doing is moving through an open space that existed there in his time. The building has changed, or the space has shifted in the Grey, but on his time plane or fragment, there's no impediment, so he just walks on through. You move like a ghost when you're in the Grey. So if you can get to a layer of time where a barrier doesn't exist, you can move through it, too.”

"But I'm not from that time plane.”

"I don't think it matters in your case.”

"So I could dig down to the days of the Duwamish and walk around on the historic mudflats, if I wanted to?”

"Not quite," Mara interjected. "You can only reach what's there. It's not a solid plane. It's fragments and slices all jumbled up. It's memories. If there's no memory or event strong enough to survive in a spot, there'll be no bit for you to access and you might have to move along in space to find the right bit of time. You might even have to emerge from the Grey to move to another location if the Grey is forgetful.”

I rubbed my hands over my face. "I'm having a hard time sorting this out.”

"Why don't you try again, in the Grey," Mara suggested.

I did try. I immersed myself in the shifting world, studying it and looking for the bits of time that they mentioned, catching occasional flashes like the sun on glass, but pushing the Grey around made me dizzy and tired. Every time I emerged, Albert was somewhere nearby, but never too close, and regarding me through his tiny spectacles as if I were doing something rather shocking. By the end of twenty minutes—or that's what the clock said—I was cranky and had managed to move about as far as the living room doorway. It felt like I'd spent hours at it.