Revenant (12 page)

He glared up at me, shaking. “I need the money. You think I’d rob a priest for nothing? I had to do it. I need the money!” I almost had to admire his skill: It must have been tricky lifting the guy’s wallet through the side slits in the cassock and clothes beneath, but now the pickpocket was shaking so hard, I was surprised he’d managed it.

“You didn’t have to choose a priest.”

“Those priests, they aren’t so pure. Look, I just . . . You don’t know what it’s like. You—what do you want? You want to help somebody? Give me the damned wallet!”

I studied him for a moment. He was shivering now, sweat oozing off his bruised forehead and his nose running. He was in a bad way and what did it really matter to me, in the end? He hadn’t done anyone physical harm and unless the priest was carrying something unusual in his wallet, he wasn’t going to be as badly off as this guy.

I looked into the wallet and saw a few euros, two slips of paper with notes in Portuguese, and some ID cards—nothing that seemed significant and nothing that gleamed with threads of Grey.

I sighed. “I’m going to regret this. . . .” I scooped the money—which wasn’t much—from the wallet, but retained the rest and handed the cash to the skinny, quivering thief. “Here. Now, find another part of town to work for a while. And see a doctor about your head—you hit the wall hard enough to break something.”

He clutched the thin stack of bills to his chest and squirmed against the wall as I left, making no move to follow me. I eased back into the temporacline, shivering, and made my way to the corner.

Quinton didn’t jump when I reemerged into the normal world, but he did raise his eyebrows at me as I reclaimed my things. I put on the hat, tucked the wallet into my purse, and started walking up the hill toward a white building that I could see on the right-hand side of the road. It had a Roman cross on the roof and a Maltese cross carved into the pediment below it, as if the builder had wanted to be sure to cover his bases. Quinton caught up in a step or two.

“How’s the thief?”

“Has a headache, may have given himself a concussion, but considering how perfectly his language centers were working, I think he’ll be OK.”

“‘Given
himself
a concussion’?”

I nodded. “Ran headfirst into a wall. All I did was direct the course. He’s one messed-up little addict.”

“Addict? How can you tell?”

“Aura color, too thin, has the shakes—I’m surprised he could lift the wallet at all with the way his hands were trembling.”

Quinton made a speculative noise. “Huh . . . That’s odd. . . . Addiction and teen usage rates are down since Portugal decriminalized personal use.”

“Down doesn’t mean none. This guy is one of those who fell through the cracks.”

“Well, they don’t have much in terms of prevention and rehab programs right now because of the austerity measures. They had to cut them.”

“Makes it hard to get on your feet when there’s no one to help you up. I let him keep the money. I hope I didn’t do the wrong thing, but the guy was so pathetic that I figured it was better to let him go.”

Quinton shook his head. “For him, I think nothing’s ever going to get better. But for a lot of others, it might if there was money and hope. The lack of economic support for education, rehab, and other programs leaves a hole in the social structure that is too easily exploited by the fearmongering of people like my father.”

I thought about it as we walked on.

On our right, the road opened out into a large terraced garden that hung at the top of a cliff overlooking another part of Alfama and the river beyond. The view as the sun dipped lower in the west was breathtaking, gilded and burnished with red and gold and delineated by purple shadows. At the top of the rise on the terraced side stood the small white church—Santa Luzia—with the Roman cross gleaming on the roof in the golden light of the westering sun and beaming
in its own time-built corona of pale blue—very much like the aura of the priest who’d been robbed.

I walked through the heaving memory of the earthquake and what seemed like endless fire to the doors of the church and slipped inside with Quinton in my wake.

It was a very traditional little Catholic church and it had a collection box for donations to the needy. I put the priest’s wallet into the box, sure it would be found soon and hoping that I hadn’t made a big mistake.

Twilight was descending rapidly on this side of the hill when we left the church to find our way back to the house. I could see shadows lengthening in the narrow streets ahead, taking on strange shapes as a whistling sound wound down the road. Something black rose up into the sky, thinning to nearly invisible once it climbed into the dying light of the sun above the hill. I followed its flight over the castle and Quinton looked up with me.

“What is it? I can barely see. . . .”

“It’s familiar, but I don’t know. I think I saw something like it earlier in the day, but that one was a lot farther off. It’s something Grey, but that you can see it, too, is worrisome.”

“Something of Dad’s?”

“I hope not.”

The shape that now looked more like a ripple in the wind than something solid turned on an updraft and began back toward us. The light seemed to tear it into pieces as we watched and things began falling from it. In a moment, nothing remained but falling debris.

A few people ran out from the street ahead, looking back at the pale objects falling from the sky, chattering and nervous. We both began running toward the spot not far away where the falling bits
had disappeared behind stucco walls. We came out from the throat of a narrow road where the Grey began to sing high, shrieking discords, into sudden, ancient devastation. Directly before us stood the graffiti-adorned ruins of perhaps half a dozen old houses knocked down by the earthquake of 1755. Windows had been bricked up to hold back the hillside, weeds and flowers grew over the remains of tiled floors, and a couple of cars had been parked among the crumbling walls near one of the rebuilt sections that was painted a slapdash white, allowing the ghosts of graffiti past to peep through. Pale green things, like sticks, lay scattered all over the abandoned foundations, smoking a little as if they were hot or burning with acid.

Before I could think of what they reminded me of, my knees buckled and I felt as if someone had punched me in the chest. Quinton caught me as the unexpected blow of remembered anguish and death made me stumble and fall. He swore and pulled me up, hitching his arm around my waist to haul me to his side and run for an archway that pierced the whitewashed wall ahead. As I wound my arm around his back, I felt something hard in his pack that wasn’t a laptop, but I had no breath with which to ask him about it.

We dove into another narrow, roofed passage between tall plastered buildings. Every step away from the untouched ruins brought relief from the keening pain of the skeletal buildings and their song of death and loss. I was able to unbend and walk more upright, but the ache of death was still with me and my lungs felt like they were too heavy to fill. I gasped short breaths as we went forward. We stepped out into a luxuriously tiled courtyard where expensive cars had been parked on this side of a gateway. Ignoring suspicious glances, we hurried through the tiny square and out into the street.

On our right, where the road turned the corner toward us, was an outdoor urinal that gave me a shudder of another sort, both funny
and repulsive with its fancy iron sign that read
URINOL
and a steel silhouette
of a young boy pissing off the top of the sign against the thousand-year-old stone wall. Steel privacy screens ended two feet above the tiled road. The smell was unmistakable.

Catching my breath at last, I muttered, “Out of the frying pan . . .”

“And into the
pissoir
,” Quinton added.

But ahead I could see the freestanding arch I’d walked under as I came down the steep road from the castle. “I know where we are,” I said.

“Oh, good, because I’m lost.”

TEN

I
put my hand over Quinton’s bag and rubbed the surface, pressing just hard enough to feel the rough shapes of the objects within. Most were rectangular, flat, or tubular. One wasn’t. He watched me with a wary look.

“So,” I said, leaving my hand over the odd shape, “is that a gun in your bag or are you just happy to see me?”

Quinton’s expression grew more tense. “Better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it. At least with my dad and his creeps in town. Does it bother you?”

“No. I’m just not sure how helpful it’ll be. And they’re a liability here, aren’t they?”

He shook his head. “Not really. Unless someone searches me, then I might be in trouble.”

I was still out of breath, so I took a step away from him and leaned against the wall, far enough away from the outdoor urinal to avoid anything that might have splashed, but still too close to avoid the smell. It did bother me a little—usually I’m the one carrying while Quinton relies on his brains and ability to adapt. I wasn’t sure
the reversal was comfortable, but there was no reason to object that I could see. “We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.”

“OK. My turn: You have any better idea what that thing was that fell from the sky?” he asked.

“No. It’s familiar, but I’m not sure about it. Another thing to discuss with Carlos. He should be up by the time we reach the house.”

Quinton nodded and I walked to him to put my arm back around his waist and start up the hill.

Even without Rafa’s map, I remembered the route back to the house below the castle and we made it up the steep, twisty streets in the swiftly falling dusk with no further trouble. The problem arose when I didn’t have the gate key. There was no light, camera, or intercom box and the gate was locked, but there was a very old-fashioned bellpull of the sort that looks like an ornate handle on a stiff iron rod. I yanked on it, leaving Quinton to stand peering in through the iron vines of the gate.

“I think someone’s coming,” he said after my third try.

In a few minutes, a man with a flashlight approached the gate and shone his beam on us.
“Boa tarde. O que é que você quer aqui?”

“Rafa?” I asked. “Is Rafa here? I lost my key.”

“Rafa? The old housekeeper?” The man scowled. “She retired in 1992 and died in 2000. She was eighty-five. When did you receive a key from her?”

“Will you think I’m crazy if I say this morning?”

He seemed to consider it, but decided I wasn’t. “Is your name Harper?”

I nodded, disturbed and frowning.

“Then, you had better come in.”

I looked at Quinton, knowing he’d heard the conversation.

He shook his head. “I’m not much help if it’s a ghost thing and I
don’t get along with that timey-wimey stuff if it’s not. It’s better if I wait here until you’re done.”

“All right,” I said, feeling reluctant to walk away from him but sure I didn’t have a lot of choice. I put my hand into my purse and held on to the other key, knowing how it must work and hoping it would help me find the right temporacline through which to reach Rafa or Carlos. I followed the man with the flashlight toward the house.

“I was concerned when your box was empty,” he said.

“Rafa helped me out.”

He grunted. “I’ve never heard of the ghosts doing much here before. They break things once in a while, but otherwise, you’d never know the place was haunted.” He gave me an odd, sideways glance and amended, “Well, you might.” Apparently someone had told him more than my name.

The female ghost I’d seen on the stairs that afternoon rushed me as I stepped into the entry. It was much darker now, and only a small lamp near the stairs was lit, so I hadn’t seen her before she was on me. She shoved me backward and then dragged me forward again, leaving my guide to stand, openmouthed, at the doorway as the ghost whisked me up to the gallery. She pulled me up the stairs and I could hear the man coming along behind us, shouting, “Where are you going?”

The ghostly woman dragged me up the last flight, to the door of my room. I put the key in the lock and twisted. . . .

The sound of the man behind me ceased and the formerly dark hallway was illuminated with dim bulbs in distant lamps from another decade. Rafa came down the hall toward me from the back of the house. She didn’t look like a ghost, but they never do when seen in their native temporacline.

“I feared you were lost.”

“I was. My gate key was stolen and I couldn’t get back in the right way.”

“But you have found another. Dom Carlos will be asking for you in a few minutes, I think.”

“I have a friend downstairs at the gate. He needs to come in, too.”

“Oh. I shall have to find more keys,” Rafa said, and turned to go to the stairs and walk down.

She left me at my door without another word. I stared after her, then turned my head to see the ghost who had dragged me upstairs still standing by my side. She had a thin face framed in elaborate dark braids and curls, and her clothes were easier to see now—something like an elegant nightgown with a wide, scooped neck that barely covered the hard line of a long corset, and a voluminous silk robe thrown loosely over it all. She looked grave and pale, even for a ghost, as she studied me.

“Who are you?” I asked. “What do you want from me?”

“Amélia. I do not forget,” came her thoughts into my head, not really words, but the meaning as clear as if spoken. She vanished like a blown-out candle, leaving only a curl of mist to mark her place.

“Damned capricious spooks,” I muttered. I relocked the door and the illumination instantly flickered down to just two dim night lamps. The man who’d let me in turned around from where he’d been standing farther down the hall, looking startled, and walked toward me, flipping a wall switch as he came, which turned on a newer, brighter set of bulbs in antique-styled sconces along the walls.

In the light, I could see he was an older man, in good health and with excellent posture that had made him seem younger in the dimmer illumination. He was puzzled by me, but not scared. “There you are!”