Poltergeist (27 page)

Patricia wasn't thrilled to see me again. I kept intruding on her Saturdays—which she was quick to inform me were the only time she saw her husband.

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Railsback," I said as she let me into the play yard once again. "You do understand, though, that the poltergeist will continue to hurt you and others until it's broken down. Dr. Tuckman called you about that, right?”

She nodded.

"I'm trying to help and I need your kids' help to do that. I'm only asking for a few minutes of their time.”

"I still don't understand how my babies can help you," she whined.

"They play with Celia. They know how to interact with it in ways we don't.”

"I still think it's Mark's ghost—”

"That may be, but it's Celia that killed Mark and it's Celia we have to get rid of.”

She gaped. "Celia killed Mark?”

I looked her in the eye and let the worst moments of this investigation well back up through me, every instant of understanding regarding Celia and what it was. Something of knowledge and horror arced across our shared glance and she recoiled, murmuring, "Oh, no. Did she really?”

"I believe it did.”

She backed away a step. "That's terrible. Terrible." She shook her head, but she seemed to be trying to shake the monstrous images her mind conjured, not to deny their possibility. "All right. You can talk to the kids, but only for a while—they have to get ready for lunch with their daddy.”

"Thank you.”

She called them over.

"OK, you guys, this is Harper and she wants to talk to you for a bit. Are you OK with that?”

They looked at her, squirming with impatience, and nodded. "Uh-huh," they chorused.

"Okey-dokey. Harper, this is Ethan, Hannah, and Dylan," she explained, pointing to each in turn. They looked at me with varying emotion. Ethan was suspicious, Hannah bored, and Dylan confused.

"Hi," I started, bending down to their level. I felt like an awkward giant in their presence, since none of them was even five feet tall yet.

They seemed like miniatures to me—I was sure they'd seem bigger up close. "Umm…I know you have a friend—a special friend—that other people can't see, and I wanted to ask you about her.”

"Him!" Ethan insisted.

"Is not!" Hannah hissed back. She looked at me with clear, earnest eyes. "Our ghost is a girl.”

"Is not!" Ethan fired back. "He's a boy.”

"Oh, boy," I sighed. "Hey, can we go sit down on the swings? I feel like a frog bent over like this.”

Dylan laughed. "You don't look like a froggy. You look like a monkey.”

"Well, then…maybe we should sit on the monkey bars," I suggested.

"Not monkey bars. It's a jungle gym," Ethan corrected. The pontificator of the family.

I straightened up. "Jungle's a good place for a monkey, too, I guess. How 'bout we go there?”

I glanced at Patricia for approval. She shrugged and made a bitter smile. "All yours, lady.”

Hannah and Dylan grabbed my hands and dragged me to the jungle gym. I saw only the thinnest collection of yellow energy hanging about and wondered if this was a wild-goose chase.

Once we were at the jungle gym things changed fast.

Hannah told me to sit on a swing while Dylan and Ethan climbed up to the top of the slide.

"Celia is so a girl," she whispered to me. "Stupid Ethan.”

"How do you know?”

"I can see her. She's right over there, right now." She pointed to the shadowed end of the yard where a cataract of greenery hung down near the ground. As I tracked her finger, the haze of threads firmed and grew into a column of pale yellow, pierced with bright shards of time. It had come to her call, though it was only a very small version of the thing that had stormed through room twelve on Wednesday. I'd guessed right: it was diminished by use and probably recharging, since it made no move against me.

"OK, I see her, but she just looks like a blob to me," I admitted.

"It's hard to tell. She's kind of shy." Hannah shrugged.

The boys came down the slide with a ruckus and tumbled into the bark chips at our feet.

"Hey," I said. "Can you see your friend and show her—him—to me:

Both the boys pointed to the same yellow haze. "There," said Ethan.

"OK. When you play with your friend, do you have to do anything special?" I prayed they were articulate children and could explain their games.

Ethan snorted. "Duh! You have to open the doors. Then you can go in the ghost land.”

I felt dizzy and was glad I was sitting. The ghost land. They didn't really… go into the Grey, did they? "Oh. I'm sorry. I don't understand. I don't see any doors. Can you show me how to open the doors? I'd like to talk to your friend, too." It was hard not to sound like a moron and talk down to them. I was sure I wasn't doing this right, but I was trying. And hating it.

Ethan made a dramatic shrug of disgust and turned toward Celia.

"Come on," I urged the other kids, "you guys, too. Hannah. Dylan. Show me how. I'm a stupid monkey, remember?”

Dylan giggled. Hannah and Dylan joined their older brother and I faded down into the Grey. I could hear Patricia's slight gasp behind us and I prayed she'd stay out of it. I was doing this far too often, but it appeared I would have to do it a few more times. I'd have to break the habit when this miserable case was over.

The shifting cloud-world of the Grey was uncannily empty—the building rested in a hole dug from the cliff edge and little history existed here. The kids didn't have a presence so much as an impression; they made odd child-shaped holes in the fabric of the mist, limned in bright energy that fluttered through the spectrum as I watched. As I stared at them, the kids shifted and turned a bit sideways, moving their hands vertically up and then horizontally across. Where their hands disturbed the mist, a bright line appeared that resolved into a door shape. I felt sick. It was a doorway, just like the doors of dragon smoke and light I'd seen when I first came in contact with the Grey. The kids had called up a door. They'd turned sideways to it first… looking at it from the corners of their eyes, just as I'd had to do, in the beginning. "Were they all little Greywalkers? Was it possible? They stepped through their door. But they still didn't have a presence in the Grey. What the hell was going on?

I sank down lower, to where the hot grid of the Grey became visible through the mist. The children looked like dark blotches now, standing on a tilting floor of mist.

As I stared at the structures around them, I saw that the Grey was full of layers just as the Danzigers had said, fluid things, like thermo-clines in the ocean, yet cutting through one another like rock strata. The kids were standing on one and Celia's weird yellow tangle on another. They moved toward the poltergeist, edging sideways, pushing with their hands and shoulders, slipping in between the layers and sliding on to new ones. I was dismayed at their approach—not much different than what I'd tried to do with Mara. But it didn't seem so hard for them. What were they doing that was different than what I'd done at the Danzigers'? They seemed to slip right onto the layers.…

Slipping. Moving sideways. It was always easier to see the Grey sideways. Mara had always referred to my sudden unexpected jolts into the Grey as "slipping"—a sort of sideways movement. That's what I'd done wrong: I'd tried to go at it forward, straight on. And the time layers had been there, but they'd been stiff and heavy. But I didn't need to move them. I just needed to slide onto them. Sideways!

Carlos had said that time would feel to me like rocks in a stream— eddies in a current. I put out my hand, into the Grey, toward the stacked and tilted layers of time…and felt ripples, corrugations and fluttering edges. Standing sideways to them, I ran my hand along the stacks of ripples and they fanned like cards, flashing snapshots of time. I put my hand on one and pushed a little, just like tilting the table with Ben.

And I was in, sliding into time. I found the right layer—the one with a pale yellow edge the same color as Celia—and slid onto it, stalking toward the poltergeist and the children across the ghostly playground. Strange prickling sensations grated against my skin when I got close to Celia.

The bright, gleaming shards that hung in the structure of the entity shivered and rang like wind chimes. Looking at them was disorienting— the surfaces seemed solid, yet contained a baffling twist that came back on itself without end. I could see the children playing near those fragments, darting through Celia's web of energy like those fish that swim unharmed through the stinging tentacles of sea anemones. The thin yellow strands that fed the entity spun out for a distance until they broke off in sudden dark slabs of immovable space—the walls of the towers that were sunk around us into the timeless cliff. I could follow one thread with my eyes back to Patricia, who stood looking anxious beyond the heavy mist between herself and me. I could also see my own thin thread running into the mess that was Celia.

I moved a little closer and the entity recoiled from me, as if it knew I meant it harm. With a sudden rush of red and a blast of heat, it vanished. We all tumbled back, landing hard in the bark of the play yard by the jungle gym. I just lay on my back for a moment while the kids giggled and picked themselves up.

Patricia rushed toward us. "Are you guys all right? Did you fall?"

"We're fine, Mommy," Hannah said. The boys were gruffer in their reassurance.

Patricia couldn't seem to decide what tone to take with me. She scowled, but didn't say anything.

I picked myself up, dusting off wood chips and shaking them out of my hair.

"Well?" Patricia demanded. "Did you get what you wanted?”

"Yes," I answered. I was a little out of breath and felt a touch shaky.

"Is it Mark?”

"Huh?" It took a moment for me to put the comment into context. "No, I'm sure it's not, but I'm not a medium, so—”

"You're not? But you—" She cut herself off and her expression grew a bit alarmed.

"I what?" I asked.

"You…I don't know. I thought you were the ghost for a minute.”

Well, that answered a question, of sorts.

"No, I'm no ghost," I said, smiling at the idea. I looked down at the kids who had lined up by their mother. "Thanks, you guys. That was really helpful.”

Hannah and Dylan smiled. Ethan frowned. "You made him go away.”

"Maybe. Sometimes they just go away on their own," I replied. I wasn't sure how I knew that. Guessing? Or dredging something up from memories I'd buried a long time ago?

Ethan would have said something more if his mother hadn't given him a swat on the backside. "Don't be rude. Now head upstairs. Go see Daddy!”

The kids scampered toward the elevator.

Patricia looked at me with a spooked expression.

"Do you need a lift to the funeral?" I asked.

She took a step back from me. "No. I'm not going. I can't get a babysitter and I can't just leave them with their father." She shook her head and kept backing. "And I don't want to see you here again. I don't want you near my kids again." Then she turned and bolted after her children, catching up to them and pushing them toward the elevator, fear boiling off her in anxious orange clouds.

As she ran away, I could see her strand of yellow energy turn a dull ash color, knotting on itself and vanishing through the buildings toward wherever Celia had fled. Before the elevator doors closed between us, it snapped and fell away like a burned branch collapsing into broken coals and cinders.

I let myself out, heading back for my office, and found myself laughing, aching gusts of amusement that brought tears to my eyes. If Patricia could have seen me, I imagined it would have confirmed her apparent opinion of my threat level.

Now I knew how this Grey time thing worked, but I needed an area with more history and mess to practice in. I could think of no place better suited than the messy historic district. And no one would be too surprised by a person acting a bit odd there; I'd have plenty of company.

Back in Pioneer Square, I saw what I'd expected to see: the Grey, streaked with glimmering layers of history, sheet-thin sections of time riven with sudden cracks and upheavals like sedimentary rocks pitched to the surface by a massive earthquake. Knowing what to look for and how deep into the Grey, I could spot tracks, shards, and loops of time scattered and strewn over the broken landscape of the Grey, each disordered slice or spire spinning out a ghost image or a pall of sensation. When I moved near them I felt the same prickling on my skin I'd felt near Celia, rather like the feeling of shaving with a dulled razor.

It was noon on a Saturday and Pioneer Square was moderately busy with locals. I was destined to look like a freak of some kind with this experiment, so I didn't worry about which kind. I turned in at the alley near my office building. Sinking into the Grey, I moved near one of the zones of heavy time striation and ran my hand along what seemed to be the edge. I felt it prickle and rime a cold flutter against my palm.

Back when I first met the Danzigers, Albert had led me through a tunnel open only in another time. I had done it by accident then. I could do it again on purpose. I didn't try to push them this time; I just nudged the layers of time sideways, letting them tip and looking at them as they slid over each other, flickering silver images of history in the cold mist and hot neon of the Grey. When I found one that looked empty and different, I concentrated on holding it and let myself slip.