Greywalker

Chapter 25

Part of the corrupt charm of big cities is their acceptance of the wacky, weird, and outrageous within business as usual. But I doubt there were many other venues that hosted something as unpredictable as Radio Freeform. Format varied wildly from minute to minute; you could be scratching along with an old Bill Broonzy blues tune and smash into a cut from Lunchbox next. Your brain and ears might feel assaulted, but it would hold together. Wygan, the overnight man, had a deft touch with the mix. It was his name Alice had inked at the bottom of the list.

Late-night DJ was a pretty good gig for a vampire, I thought, and a well-known local voice wasn't likely to attack me. I drove to the row of red and white broadcasting towers on top of Queen Anne Hill and parked in the small, deserted lot outside the tiny building. I was glad that this phase of the project was nearly over. I was tired, felt low-level ill and ready to call it quits, no matter how much Alice threatened. I was a little jittery from her threats and too much caffeine, but I figured this one would be easy. Nothing could be as bad as Carlos.

Beside the steel security door was an intercom with a switch. I pushed it. A cautious voice answered. "'Ello?"

I leaned toward the box and spoke. "Hi. My name is Harper Blaine. I'm a private investigator. Alice Liddell told me to contact Wygan. Can I talk to him?"

I heard a guffaw. "Alice sent you to me?" I recognized the soft slurring of Wygan's working-class English accent. "Sure. Why not? Hang on. I'll buzz you through. Just us chickens here tonight." The low electronic burring of the latch cut off any reply.

The corridor beyond the door was painted industrial green. The lighting was poor enough to make the dirt on the linoleum look like a pattern instead of bad housekeeping. I closed the door behind me and walked. The booth was a beacon of red light pouring through Lexan. I wondered why it was red.

I hadn't reached the booth's door before I began feeling queasy. It might have been the way the light strobed and switched to amber, but I was afraid I'd underestimated my mental and physical exhaustion. The Grey was flickering in the corners of my eyes. When I reached it, the door was open a crack and the moans of unhappy electronic instruments leaked out. I peered through the window beside the door.

A lanky, pale man waved at me. "Come on in. Mic's not live."

I stepped in. "You're Wygan?"

Leaning back in his fully gimbaled leather chair, the bony young man shot his arms straight into the air above his blond electroshock hair. "I am the eggman, I am the walrus! Goo goo g'joob!" he caroled. "Alice sent you?"

"Yeah, but I'm really here on behalf of Cameron Shadley." I looked around, trying to hold on to normal. I grasped at the first thing. "What's with the lights?"

"Keeps a certain creature away from me. He doesn't like the changing colors." He peered at me, snickering, as if he was just waiting for the punch line.

I couldn't imagine what would want to come in here. The booth was small and lined floor to ceiling with automated CD racks behind smoked-glass doors. A homemade stand in one corner had three light bulbs arranged across the top of it: red, blue, and amber. They alternated at a slow pace. A narrow strip of white light ran over the top of the horseshoe-shaped control console, which was heavy with switches, sliders, dials, and keyboards as well as several video monitors. One of the monitors was showing old, mute episodes of Lost in Space. Various meters and LED displays flashed or flickered silent information. Every shadow writhed.

"Close the door, would you, love?" he asked, flipping switches. "What good's a soundproof booth with the door standing open, hmm?"

I closed the door and remained standing. I tried to hold it back, but the steamed-mirror world battered against me as I got closer to him.

"You should sit down." He grinned at me, teeth snaggled, yellow, canines pronounced and elongated. His smile was a poleax, and my knees buckled. I thumped down into an empty chair, aware of shadows pooling thicker, like oozing tar, in the corners of the room, exuding a low reek of antiquity and decay. It was an ancient and foul corner of the cold blackness I'd fallen into when I touched Cameron. My stomach flipped and tried to stretch itself around my spine. A thin halo of blue and red wavered around Wygan's head.

He cocked his head back and forth, looking like a hungry velociraptor. "Alice sent you to me about Cameron?" He gave an incredulous snort. "Pull the other one."

I shook my head. "You're not what I was expecting," I confessed, swallowing discomfort. His proximity sent ripples through every sense I had, normal or not. Carlos was a teddy bear by comparison.

"Must be my charming and sophisticated on-air personality," he quipped and brayed hundreds of hot slivers through me. "Hang on a tick—track's almost over."

He held one finger up in the air to me, then spun himself 450 degrees to face his console. His hands darted over the controls like albino spiders as a row of red numerals counted down. Then he flipped a switch and eased a slider down, leaning into the microphone. "Now here's a prezzie from me to you—a whole album side of classic Floyd from Dark Side of the Moon." He flipped off the microphone and leaned back into his seat. The room seemed to roll and shift with his every movement.

He swung the seat back and forth a few times, then spun it to face me. "So Alice sent you to me. About Cameron." An eddy of darkness followed his movements. He pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows in amusement, shrugged. "What of him?"

I found it hard to speak. "He hired me and I'm trying to stir up a little dirt on a vampire named Edward."

His face twisted. "Edward Kammerling," he breathed. "Yes…" The Grey surged around him, lighting his aurora with white lightning strikes and shivering the world between us.

Sudden cold trembled my bones. "You don't like him."

He turned an ophidian gaze on me. "I'll see him to hell… in my own time. If I'm in a very charitable mood, I might not make him eat the parts I dismember him of." He studied me with a baleful stare. I felt like a bird about to be swallowed. "They are as insignificant as fleabites, the lot of them, beside you."

I stammered, "What?" forcing words out as my stomach twisted and my lungs fought air that hung in clouds before me.

He laughed flaying knives and ice. "To think such flyspecks brought you here! I've waited so long for you." He made a motion, as if opening a door. "Why don't you come all the way in and see?" Ambient sound shushed away and a shock wave rolled out from the bright door now standing between us—the door to the Grey. The silence howled over me and shoved me deeper into the chair.

I fought my way up and started for the real door, stumbling on numb legs. This time the dragon-smoke door wouldn't lead to the white place I'd chased Alice into. It reeked of something much worse. "I don't think so," I stated.

"I think otherwise," he barked and launched through the doorway, ripping open the fine seam between normal and Grey, pushing the glowing boundary wide.

Reality split open with a roar as the Grey rushed over us, slamming the breath from my lungs. I thrust back against it and felt my protection shatter and whirl away into the flood. I gasped for air and fought the icy battering of a storm of shadows and boiling silver mist. The world shuddered and the urge to retch wrenched my innards.

White claws dug into my upper arms and held me upright. I sucked in the thick cold, eyes clenched shut, struggling, and began screaming.

Wygan shook me. "Scream! Scream, my delight, my own. There's no one to hear but me. No one, no one," he crooned, his voice moving slow and cold as a half-frozen river, deep under ice, under my skin. "Open your eyes. Open the eyes within and see your pretty new world. See what I am giving you. A gift. A gift so needful."

I fought to get out of his grip, which seemed to pierce all the way through me in javelins of ice. I felt tears streaking my face, warm tracks in a frozen world. My eyelids ground open against my will.

Wygan held me to the padded wall. His eyes glowed, and red fire and white sparks danced jagged lightning strikes around us in a world of roiling, tormented shadow and coiling mist. His eyes were snake-like. His skin gleamed pearlescent and finely marked with tiny, over-lapping fringes. His ice white hair was a sculpted ridge that camouflaged the true shape of a saurian skull. The Grey surged around us like water from a broken dam, and I was drowning.

I stared back at him in strangled silence, my lungs frozen in my chest. I wanted to bolt, to claw, swim, dig my way out of there, but in the prison of his gaze, I could do no more than shake. Half a smile tore his face.

"Fear," he murmured. His breath smelled of tombs. "I could feed upon you for days. Look at my world. My prison of hunger, cold, unbridgeable distance, without touch, without warmth, but what I can steal. This is my torment, my gift. Look at it!"

He whipped me in front of him, thrusting me into a maelstrom of writhing, tortured shapes and animate cold. Twisting, arctic forms pressed against me, gaping, changing ever and ever into unending nightmares intangible and horrible, stabbing cold fingers of avarice and hunger through me. They devoured me, tore me, inhabited me in mouthless screams. I gasped and sobbed and tried to pull away from them, felt them sucking my thoughts and my life away in unraveling skeins, emptying all thought, even emotion, fear, self-preservation, draining me to bleak despair.

I sagged, and he let me fall to my knees.

"You don't see it," Wygan whispered behind me. "You haven't ascended to your proper place. Worthless fools and incompetents. They discovered you, but could not mold you as I told them to."

My mind flashed hot images: the apparently crazy man in the alley; the unkillable assailant in my garage; the break-ins… I couldn't get words to form properly, only choking out, "You… you?"

As if he could see my thoughts—or had sent them—he laughed, the sound slashing me. "You reentered this world, incomplete, half made. You needed honing to your true shape. But they failed. Cowards. Imbeciles. Faulty tools like Alice, clinging to their own paltry half-lives, petty schemes." His voice spiked upward into my skull. "Ages waited! And at last!"

He stepped to my side and crouched, a slender reptilian creature cloaked in a clot of gruesome shadow and dancing fury-light. "But you aren't here as you should be. You haven't grown to it. Imprisoned, blind, weak! You are no good to me. How can you walk where you can't see? And I must have you or cannot cross. You must see what I can see but cannot touch. Touch what I can take but cannot feel. I will make you what you ought to be."

He reached into the mist and hooked a thread of glimmering blue on one white claw. "Your power is too small. You must embrace it, must grow for me. Take this."

I cringed back with a whimper. "No. No, I don't want it," I protested, my voice a weak trickle of steam in the cold.

"Did I offer you a choice?" He pushed his tangled claw into my chest, ripping me open, unbleeding. I tried to yell, but nothing came out.

The blue thread went taut and vibrated, then shimmered and crawled over me, spreading over my limbs and up to my head. The thread passed over my eyes and blinded me a moment, then faded. The shape of it vanished, seeming to sink into me, knitting me closed again around its adamantine knot within my ribs.

The mist-world blazed and faded like fog under sun. The shape and color of the Grey changed, roaring with a tangle of light, fountains and smudges of illumination, glowing forms of vibrant color and force, lines as straight and hot as highways in the desert, as twisted as tornadoes, wild as wind.

The studio, formed of soft mist, was limned in gleaming threads around us, and the top of Queen Anne Hill spread away beyond it, through inconsequential walls, glimmering with phantom fires and falling into an ink-dark stain of cold nothingness—the Sound. In the distance, the black beast howled in rage and I felt it gather itself and rush toward us, all teeth and claws and unquenchable hatred.

The Grey was alive inside me and I felt it vibrating, coiling, binding into me like a malevolent vine growing from the living seed Wygan had planted. I could feel the pulse of it. I shrieked despair.

Wygan laughed. "Yes! You will grow to the part I need you to play. But we'd best go now, before the hungry one ruins the party."

He let go, his touch withdrawing with the same sensation as cactus spines drawn from my skin. The Grey lapped over me like a wet sheet and slid away, leaving a single, indissoluble thread that vanished between my breasts.

I was on my knees by the studio door. My clothing and face dripped. I fought nausea, gagged and swallowed bile, gasped to catch my breath again. I staggered to my feet.

"You doin' all right?" Wygan asked. He was still in his chair.

I gulped. "Alive."

He giggled, and the sound rubbed against my nerves like ground glass. "More or less. But you should be able to keep yourself that way now, until I need you. Now you see it as it really is, and you can use that. You'll need to learn the part, though, or something may hurt you."

I turned and stared at him, shivering in shock. He looked back and smiled a little, sending a breaker of cold over me. The light in the booth turned blue, though the bulb on the stand was amber.

"I… know all I can stand to."

"For now. You can let yourself out, I think."

He turned his back to me, tugging on his headphones and crouching over the console. Will Robinson pursued Dr. Smith through bars of Led Zeppelin, casting a blue shadow from the video monitor in the shape of a giant reptile, which grinned at me.

I bolted out the door and stumbled, tripping, desperate for distance, toward the door.

"Don't forget me," he called out, a shadow voice gliding on a non-existent breeze. I heard him laughing behind me all the way.

I staggered out to the Rover and leaned against it, bowing my neck to press my face against the cold solidity of the old truck's side. I shivered and gulped mouthfuls of ordinary Seattle air to stop myself howling out loud. There was an ache in my chest where Wygan had touched me, black pain equaled by the tearing horror rampaging through my mind. I hated myself for this trembling weakness, and more so for what had happened. I crawled into the backseat and curled into a sickened ball as my thoughts screamed and raged:

What are you? Raped, ripped, re-formed. What are you, now? Ignorant fool. These are vampires; a monstrous redesign of humans, psychotic by our standard, alien, divorced from humanity. What drives them is not what drives you. It never will be. Never again. They are not human. They are not humans! And neither are you. Not anymore. Insect. Half monster. What are you, now?

I lost track of time, hysterical, quivering in a crumpled wad of misery, despair, and self-disgust. After a while, I noticed I was stiff, cold, and stinking—right after I unclenched long enough to throw up. Hanging upside down, shivering and crying, some kind of common sense reasserted itself. The nearest vampire was just inside the building, laughing still, and I was sitting like a tethered goat.

I had to drive with care, in spite of an urge to speed. I couldn't see well through my swollen eyes and the streets flickered Grey, overlaid in mist and silver, outlined in streaks of neon-bright light. I pulled over a couple of times and tried to breathe slowly and attentively until it stopped. It would not recede. The trip home was very long.

I jerked awake at a sound and cowered under the covers. The beeping continued and the bed shuddered as Will fumbled for his pager on the nightstand.

I hid my face in my pillow and moaned, "Make it go away."

He flopped backward with the pager on his chest. "It's just Mikey, letting me know he's at work." "He works on Sunday?"

"Usually it's me. Mike volunteered to do the paperwork so I could sleep in." He rolled over and grinned at me. "Wanna go back to sleep?" I peeled the pillow aside. "No."

His smile got wider as he felt my toes sliding up his leg. "Feeling better?"

"Much," I replied. If I focused my attention on Will, I didn't have to think about what had happened in the night, didn't have to look at it, shimmering in the verges.

I had forgotten the note I'd left with Michael. The sight of the scarecrow figure in the darkened hall outside my home had made me recoil in fear. When Will stepped into the light, my relief flooded out as a puddle of idiotic tears and shaking. He was very sweet, even when he told me I stank and put me in the shower. I kept sliding down into the bottom of the tub and crying until Will gave up being a gentle-man and got in with me. I clung to him and things improved from there, even though I refused to tell him what had happened.

Now I was disgusted with myself for having blubbered and oozed like a jellyfish.

He caught me frowning as he snatched away my pillow. "Hey. Want to take another shower?" he asked, laying on a wicked grin.

I was slow on the uptake. "Do I need one?"

"From a hygiene point of view, no. But interesting things seem to happen in your shower, so I thought it was a good place to start."

I made a rude noise, grabbed back the pillow, and swatted him with it. He dove under the covers and tickled me.

Will let the horrors of Saturday night lie and kept me too distracted to think about them most of Sunday. After an afternoon of goofing off, he even agreed to come and look at the parlor organ with me on Monday and never speculated about whatever it was we were doing together.

After Will had gone, the misery and uncertainty began to close in again. Typing up my notes sent me into fits of shivering and crying. I thought of quitting. I could not face any more nights like Saturday, but I wasn't sure I'd done enough to destabilize Edward. And if I could not move him in the direction I wanted, neither Cameron nor I stood a chance of seeing another spring. What did I have to offer Edward that was more attractive than the pleasure of taking my head off? I couldn't trust vampires. I wasn't even sure that I could look at Cameron without either screaming or putting a bullet in him—not that it would do any good.

I closed my eyes, trying to think, but only slipping around the edges. The Grey washed against me, chill and nauseating. I felt that I was standing on a dock—a world—afloat on the surface of another world, pitching with the motion of unknown tides. The disconcerting feel of electricity zipped along my nerves, but I kept my eyes closed against those twisting threads of fire. I didn't want them, or anything to do with Wygan's realm or vampires or ghosts or any of the rest of it. I felt the insubstantial ground shivering and thought of stepping oil the dock…