City of Masks

15

In Gloucester, Edgar spent the morning at the site, setting up equipment and thinking about Cree. The equipment part was easy. The house was tall, weathered to gray, with a Wyethesque starkness that was austerely beautiful. It had tall, narrow windows, elaborate cornices in the Victorian tradition, and porches knotted with gnarled wisteria vines that wound among the gingerbread. Generations of birds had nested in its eaves and streaked its buckling clapboards with droppings. Inside, the empty rooms smelled of dust, mouse piss, and old wood, except when gusts of sea breeze rattled the windows and blew drafts of clean, briny scent through.

Giving Edgar a little shot of adrenaline as the invisible cold moved in the rooms. For all its charm, the place keyed him up. Put him on edge.

Part of the house's appeal derived from its proximity to the rugged shore, Edgar decided, so different from the broad California beaches he'dgrown up with. From its windows and porches, or from the iron-railed widow's walk, he could see up and down the coastline, irregular steep headlands meandering to the north and south, interspersed with salt marshes and sand beaches. New England seemed drenched in history. With her synesthetic and empathic talents, Cree would love this place and the seemingly endless layers you could sense here; but even a thickheaded, cognitive-normal California engineer could appreciate it. Sometimes, staring across the ragged, winter-brown fields toward the water, Edgar imagined he could sense prior presences: the early Native Americans, the probable Norse seafarers, the Pilgrims, the successive waves of European immigrants who had lived and striven and died here. The vistas brought back images garnered from grade school history classes: the Salem witchcraft trials, the American Revolution, the whaling industry with its far-flung wooden ships.

Whoever had lived here, from whatever era, their lives had revolved around the sea – the cold, gray-green, salt-smelling North Atlantic that surrounded the spit of land on which the house stood.

To the north, the fields sloped gently away toward the water, ending abruptly in rocky cliffs. At low tide, the shore rocks humped out of the water, shaggy with black seaweed and crusted barnacles; at high tide, they lay like slumbering whales just under the surface, waves foaming over the rugged tops. Straight east, the water tossed and rolled out to the horizon line, where a lone freighter slouched slowly out to sea. To the south stretched a vast, flat labyrinth of salt rnarsh, islands of grasses and reeds interspersed with waterways that became stagnant pools and glistening mud flats at low tide.

Lonesome, he'd told Cree. Especially without Cree here. Especially today, when the gray-green sea was the exact hue of Cree's eyes.

He wished he'd done a better job of cheering her up when she'd called. He wished he'd persuaded her to wait on the New Orleans investigation, come out here first. Clearly, she'd felt some intuitive attraction to the case, wanted to dive into it for reasons she couldn't express.

The Wainwrights had offered to help him set up the equipment, but he had turned down their well-meaning companionship, agreeing instead to meet them for lunch. They were both avid talkers, eager to tell every last scrap of information on the house, the history of the area, the gossip in town, the ghosts they'd seen. Good company, but right now he needed to concentrate, and he made a point of never letting a client near the equipment.

With Cree's talents unavailable, he relied primarily on technology, and even for a preliminary he traveled with enough gear to require he rent a minivan to carry it. He began with the four tripods, and once they were in position he began attaching the compact array of electronics that would top each. The infrared sensors would reveal the presence of light below the visible frequencies, and the multiple EMF meters would show electromagnetic activity in several spectral bands; the ion sensors would reveal electrostatic activity, plasma discharge, combustion, or radioactive decay. With sensors at all four corners, every cubic centimeter of the room would be covered; ghosts manifesting virtually any level of energy discharge or consumption would get caught in the act.

A gust of wind shook the house, and the sudden rattle of loose panes in the nearest window startled him. He shook his head at his own nervousness but had a sudden insight about why a haunted place put you so on edge. It had to do with the feeling of the unseen – that the world is so much bigger than most people cared to admit. Most human beings thought of physical spaces as delimited: a room, four walls, ceiling and floor, earth below, sky above. Simple. But in reality we're walking around blind, he thought. We're groping our way in an infinite place full of unimaginable happenings. A ghost makes us uncomfortably aware of how tiny and how blind we are, how strange the universe is, how right there its unseen dimensions are.

Cree would see that in more metaphysical terms. He wished he hadn't ended their conversation the way he had: You'd do fine without me. It sounded more like a goad or an accusation than he'd intended. He'd been tired, missing her, disappointed that she didn't seem to want him in New Orleans. And he was worried about her. Cree lived nearer the edge than anyone he'd ever met. And New Orleans, though he loved the place, had a sunny face and a shadowed one; bad surprises lurked in its darker corners.

Damn it, Cree.

It had been four years since he'd attended the American Psychic Research Society's Seattle conference. At the time, he'd claimed a defensibly limited belief in the possibility of extracorporeal manifestations, but he hadn't believed in love at first sight until the first presenter of the afternoon session came to the podium. She was a woman somewhat above middle height, not pretty so much as compelling: dark hair, mobile lips framed by a fine, strong jawline, eyes whose calm intensity registered even halfway back in the conference room. She'd been dressed in what he'd call casual chic – clogs, a tweed jacket over crisp blue jeans – but she'd spoken with such clarity, conviction, and compassion that her words carried great authority. Her lecture had concerned the importance of psychology in investigating paranormal phenomena, particularly the importance of the emotional and neuro cognitive link between witnesses and unknown entities. God, she had rocked that crowd back on its collective heels! Scholars of the paranormal ranged from serious scientists to technogeeks to folklorists to gullible hobbyists to complete paranoid schizophrenics, and none of them were particularly glad to hear what she had to say. Especially since it was so persuasive.

Edgar had been mesmerized equally by her perspective and her person, this Cree Black whose name he'd encountered occasionally in the field but whom he'd never met. When he shut his eyes, he found he liked the music of her voice and the way her sober pronouncements could yield rapidly to a mischievous, ironic humor.

Yeah, yeah, like it was all totally rational, he chided himself. At one point, she had stepped to the side of the podium to demonstrate a witness's body language; when she'd finished, she'd paused for a moment with one fist to her waist, one hip a little out, and the sweetly curved silhouette had taken his breath away.

After her talk, he'd joined the small crowd that clustered around her at the edge of the stage. He'd waited his turn to greet her and then surprised himself by proposing professional collaboration: between his background in engineering and physics and hers in psychology, he said, they'd make a good team, come at the problem from both sides. She was in a great mood, riding the nervous high that most people felt after speaking in public, and her sparkling hazel eyes had seemed to dance with his. But up close he could see sadness in her face, too, and an existential hunger, and suddenly he felt that he had to know about that part of her.

She'd thanked him for his offer. Otherwise, she'd shown no more interest beyond accepting his business card.

But two months later, she'd called: Would he care to help her with a case in South Dakota? Since then, he'd witnessed her unique abilities too many times to doubt their reality or effectiveness, or the benefit to those needing her help. Still, in many ways he was no closer to putting them into any kind of rational perspective than he was that first day. Cree Black was an endlessly unfolding mystery, endlessly confounding. Always throwing some new challenge his way, demanding he expand his outlook. He loved that aspect of being around her. Even the problem of her lingering loyalty to Mike, though an obstacle to defining their relationship, intrigued and touched him. He knew enough about his own emotional constitution to know that, under similar circumstances, he'd have similar confusions.

Okay, so he'd be patient. She deserved that. But.

The ache came into his chest again, and he did his best to put the whole question out of his mind. There was work to be done. If only the sea didn't gaze into the windows with water the exact hue of Cree's eyes.

He finished mounting the last of the assemblies, then checked the portable power supply and turned on the system. He checked it by simply walking in a circle in the room. If everything was in order, the infrared would record the heat signature of his body, and the sensitive multiple EMF field meters would measure the minute electromagnetic activity of his nervous system. Sure enough, when he reviewed the readings, he saw that the gauges had responded in exact relation to his proximity to each array.

He checked his watch and realized it was time to head back to Gloucester to meet the Wainwrights for lunch. He knelt to open the last of his equipment cases and had just finished setting up the tripod when he heard a door open and footsteps in the entry hallway. Old Helen Wainwright, he knew, dreaming up another excuse to come out and see what he was doing. The uneven gait resulted from the lingering stiffness of her recent hip replacement.

"I'm in the music room, Helen," he called loudly. "I'm almost done, just have to get my video gear in place and we're all set for tonight. You're welcome to look, but please don't touch. It's all calibrated and a little delicate."

She didn't answer, but he heard her continue through the front hallway and into the echoing dining room. Edgar took out the visible light video camera, slipped in a new data disk, then dug in the side compartment of the case for the right lens. Mrs. Wainwright stopped at the doorway.

Bent over the case with his back to her, he didn't turn. "It's a wide-angle lens, so it'll take in the whole room. Does make things look like a fishbowl, but it'll make darn sure we catch our ghost if it emanates visible light."

She didn't respond, so he turned to greet her. But she wasn't there.

"Helen?"

No one answered.

"Mrs. Wainwright?" Edgar stood and went to the dining room door. The big room was empty, as was the long hall that led down the landward side of the house.

The skin up and down his spine prickled. He ran into the corridor, to the kitchen, then back to the front entry hall. Looking out, he saw only his rented minivan there, door-handle deep in the uncut winter-brown grasses of what had once been the driveway.

Edgar felt a little dizzy. It had happened! He'd experienced a ghost heard one, anyway! He'd witnessed a paranormal phenomenon! It was eerie, and that sense of standing blind in a huge, mysterious place deepened. It was intimidating, awe-inspiring, chilling.

He recovered enough professionalism to note the exact time of the event, then went through the whole house just to make sure no one was there. For the first time the attic under the cobwebbed mansard roof struck him as creepy, and the basement was almost unbearable – that sense that anything, absolutely anything, could happen. Edgar Mayfield could fall through a hole in the fabric of space-time, a crack between dimensions, and vanish forever.

But nothing out of the ordinary happened. And there wasn't anyone there.

Calming a little, he returned to the music room, where he stood silently for a few minutes, listening. Beyond the erratic whistle and rattle of the wind, there were no more sounds. At last he decided he couldn't wait any longer, the Wainwrights would be wondering where he was. Still, there was one more trick he liked to pull. Before he left the room, he opened the bag of baking flour he'd bought on his way over. He took a small handful and, working his way from the back toward the doorway, sprinkled flour until a uniform white film covered the floorboards from wall to wall. As an afterthought, he continued dusting through the dining room and down the hallway. It was a primitive but effective way to reveal whether a manifestation recorded by the equipment had a tangible, physical presence as well – whether it could disturb matter as it made disturbances in the electromagnetic spectrum. Also a way to snag would-be hoaxers: an entity that left, say, size-eleven Nike waffle-soled prints in the sifted flour would probably not be a compelling candidate for further study.

Getting into the van, he looked back at the house, stark and lonesome on its hill, and felt the shiver return. With it came a wild exhilaration. Cree, he thought, / did it, it happened to me! I understand now! At least a little.

"Yeah, but unfortunately, it isn't that simple," he told the Wainwrights.

Along with a mix of other local citizens and out-of-season tourists, they had taken a booth in the North Harbor Diner and were eating cube steak and haddock filets. Helen Wainwright was in her late sixties, a slim, tough old Gloucester native whose ancestors had been whalers and fisherfolk for many generations. Despite her hip replacement, she was fit and made a point of walking three miles every day, rain or shine. Her husband, James, was a little older and wasn't faring as well: emphysema. He had a habit of puffing out his cheeks, blowing his breath through pursed lips as they walked, and had taken to making every move, even lifting a water glass to his lips, slowly – a strategy to conserve oxygen. He'd been a fishing boat pilot for most of his life before buying in as part owner of a fish-processing plant in his later years, and he knew the waters of this coast as well as anyone alive. They were both practical people, sharp and alert. And very keen on the ghost they and their daughter had seen, very interested in the whole phenomenon of paranormal research. Not wanting to bias their stories, Edgar had decided not to tell them about his recent encounter. They'd been talking about what he hoped to record with his equipment, what he'd found in past cases.

"Well, why not? Why isn't it proof?" James huffed indignantly. "You say you've recorded physical evidence of ghosts. With all this high tech nowadays, what's the problem?"

Edgar had chosen the haddock, as he had every day since he'd arrived – it was the best fish he'd ever eaten, broiled with butter, salt, pepper, and nothing else, perfectly fresh and flaky white. He took a bite and chewed reflectively as he thought about how to answer.

"The advances in technology are a double-edged sword," he said finally. "It's true that they provide us with new ways to perceive and record anomalous or very subtle phenomena. But they've also raised the bar of proof."

"How so?" Helen asked.

"Well, think of technological changes in your own lifetimes. Once upon a time, a photograph was proof of something, right? Then, as our knowledge of the medium improved, we learned to fake photos so well you couldn't tell. Okay, then we went to film – surely, if you had a moving picture of something, it was genuine, right? And that was more or less true for some years. But you folks saw Forrest Gump, right? Tom Hanks talking to Richard Nixon and all that? To say nothing of, say, furassic Park. Nowadays the media of film, magnetic-tape video, and digital DVD are so easy to fudge that even a clean, focused recording of a ghost doesn't prove anything to anybody."

"But you've got your, your infrared things and all that business – " "Oh, yes, I've got supersensitive equipment that'll record physical phenomena of all kinds – 1 don't have even a tenth of my stuff here now. But what can I prove? I can show a skeptical scientist the record of my near-field EMF readings, say, and a seismic record of vibrations in the floor, and I can claim they occurred at the same time as the video I've got of a spectral light moving in a room. But how can I prove they have any connection? And any one of them can be easily faked, especially in the digital era."

The Wainwrights toyed with their food, frowning.

"So, what's the point?" Helen asked. "If no one's going to believe anything you come up with, why bother?"

Edgar chuckled. "Sometimes I feel the same way! I get especially mad at these professional debunkers, those hypocritical pricks, lemme tell you – " Edgar caught himself getting wound up and had to make an effort to bring his righteous indignation back down to a dull roar. He gave them an apologetic look. "To answer your question, nothing'll ever be proved to die-hard skeptics until it can be shown to fit an encompassing physical theory, one that accommodates accepted scientific theories and applies also to other, accepted phenomena. So that's my long-term goal to find the overarching patterns of paranormal events and test them against what we know from normal-world observation. My partner is a psychologist who studies the role of human emotion and neurology in paranormal phenomena. Between our two approaches, sooner or later, we'll put it together."

Mr. Wainwright looked at his wife. "Got his dander up about them debunkers, didn't he," he observed drily. "Can't say I blame the fella."He gave Edgar a wink of complicity with one rheumy eye. The Wainwrights had experienced skepticism from their community after they'd seen and heard the specter at the house.

Edgar felt a rush of affection for these two. He'd been here for less than a week, and already he felt as if he'd known them for years. Their daughter, the primary witness, was a different matter – she struck him as a chilly bitch with a big chip on her shoulder – but the elder Wainwrights felt like family.

"So what's on our agenda this afternoon?" Helen asked.

"Okay," Edgar said. "Sighting times. I need you folks, and your daughter and her husband, to tell me when you've experienced anything out of the ordinary at the house. I mean literally the day, the hour, the minute. Patterns – it's all about patterns."

Helen took her husband's wrinkled hand. "I think we can do that, can't we, dear?"

James nodded and squeezed his wife's hand. They'd been married, they told him, for forty-four years, and their closeness, that sense of being a team, moved Edgar. What would it be like to know someone that well?

And then he thought, Damn it, Cree. With the familiar ache came something of a determination. Maybe it was time to do something about this, be up front with Cree. Try to move past the status quo of their relationship, take it a step deeper. What would that mean – proffering a ring on bended knee? Maybe so. Maybe that's exactly what they both needed, maybe that would move their relationship forward.

Or maybe not. Maybe it would chase her away completely. And that was too dire a thing to contemplate. The indecision gripped him. What was needed, greater patience or more impulsiveness?

But Helen had opened her purse and taken out her calendar, and it was time to concentrate on the matter at hand.