Greywalker

Chapter 6

The door popped open to my knock. Ben Danziger was over six feet tall, broad-shouldered, bearded, and blue-eyed. His wavy black hair stood from his head in electrified tufts, and he looked like either a mad scientist or a terrified rabbinical student.

"Hi! You must be Harper Blaine," he exclaimed. "Come in, come in. Excuse the way I look. I've been doing the laundry and the static from the dryer always makes me look like a mad poodle." He held the door open and I stepped inside. The house did not glow as brightly inside, but it contained a low hum like the contented purring of a cat.

He turned and ducked through another doorway on the left. "Would you like a glass of tea?"

I followed him into the kitchen, dazed by his bouncing energy. "Yeah, sure."

You could have filmed commercials for Grandma's Old-Fashioned Something in there, among the rubbed hardwood floors and polished copper pots on racks.

Danziger excused himself to pop into the back room and toss a pile of clothing into a wicker basket. He paused and called out, "Honey, our guest's here!"

A voice came from a bulge in his chest pocket. "Start without me, darlin'. The baby's being stubborn."

He bounced back in and rattled around, piling objects on a wooden tray. He swept it up, then put it back down on a huge table and looked at me.

"I'm sorry. I didn't ask if you prefer your tea over ice. Do you?"

I was too surprised to say I had assumed that he meant iced tea when he mentioned glasses. "I don't care one way or the other."

"Ah. Good. I like Russian tea. Mara'll join us in the study."

Toting the tray, he led me up the staircase and around the landing to a small door. "Open that for me, will you?"

I opened the door and followed him up a last narrow flight of stairs into what used to be the attic. A large skylight had been installed on the southern slope of the roof, making a bright, comfortable small office—if you didn't mind ducking a lot. Wall sconces bounced more light up against the sloping walls and ceiling. Bookshelves stood wherever the walls rose over four feet. The lower, darker corners were stacked with boxes.

Danziger's desk was built of four wooden file cabinets and a wooden door. An old leather swivel chair stood on one side and an old leather couch on the other. He elbowed a clear space in the books on the desk and set down the tray. The soft, aged leather of the sofa squeaked and settled around me as I sat down.

Danziger began tinkering with teapots and tall, metal-caged glasses. "Water?" he asked.

"Huh?"

"Hot water in the tea? It's really strong, otherwise," he explained.

"Sure. Whatever you suggest."

He frowned in concentration, poured dark tea into one of the glasses, measuring it against some spot on the filigree cage, then added hot water with equal precision.

He handed me the glass, saying, "Skelly sent you to us because you've been seeing strange stuff. So tell me about the strange stuff."

I put up a hand. "Wait a minute. Let's start with some background. I don't know anything about you except that a doctor who seems a bit… unconventional suggested I talk to you. How can you help me? Just who or what are you?"

"Well, I'm a part-time linguistics professor at the U and I do some other research on the side—which is how I met Skelleher and my wife, Mara. I translate text to and from Russian, Czech, Polish, Ger-man, and a few other languages, and do related work in comparative religion and philosophy. I was a philosophy major once, and I got interested in comparative religion and started studying languages, met Mara, and one thing led to another… I used to teach religion and philosophy, too, but budget cuts… you know." He shrugged.

I looked askance at him. "And what does any of that have to do with my problem?"

Danziger gestured as he explained. "Well, when you really start to tangle with religion and philosophy, you eventually run up against all the mystical stuff about death and souls, the meaning of life, burden, responsibility, unity—all the really big, freaky topics. And then you have two choices: just jump over it and go on to the parts that don't bend your brain, or dive into the bizarre and try to run truth to ground. I guess I just like wrestling with the weird stuff and I ended up writing a book about it. So now I'm 'the ghost guy.»

I scowled. I had no wish to be an experiment in flaky science. "So you're some kind of parapsychologist."

He shook his head. "I'm just a strange type of philosopher, really. I don't know any ghosts, personally, except for Albert over there," he added, pointing into a corner.

I looked, saw nothing, turned my head and saw a slender, weedy shadow just inside the door. It was not particularly thick, but it had baleful cat eyes that glared at me. I started.

"What is that?" I demanded.

Danziger smiled. "That's Albert. We're pretty sure he was a boarder in this house during Prohibition and died here from drinking doctored gin. Poor old sot." Danziger shook his head and smoothed a hand over his hair, dispelling the last of the static so his dark hair flopped down and made him look like a half-wilted dahlia. "Anyhow, you can see him and that's good. I can't. I only know he's there because I've figured out the cold spot. Fakers always look where I point and swear he's right there."

The door opened beside the ghost. A tall, slender woman with flame red hair stepped into the study. Her eyes were slanted and green as a cat's, and she would have been stunning even if she had not gleamed from within. I doubted she'd been ill a day in her life.

She cocked her head as if to listen to the dark shape, then gave a rueful smile and shook her head. She spoke in a fluting Irish voice. "That's lovely, Albert, but you're blocking the door, aren't ya? Now, shoo." She flipped her hands at the shadowy form and it wafted away.

She turned to look at me and her eyes sparkled. "You must be Harper. I'm Mara. I see you've met Albert, our polygraph." She walked across to the desk and leaned down to kiss Danziger on the cheek. "Hello, love. Sorry I'm late. Brian was being obstinate. Would you pour me some tea?"

She plumped down onto the other end of the sofa with a biscuit and a glass of tea.

Danziger pointed at my own glass. "You should drink your tea while it's still hot, and try the biscuits and jam. The jam goes in the tea, not on the biscuits."

I mucked about with my tea while Danziger picked up a biscuit and studied it, frowning, as he spoke. "I did some reading this morning based on what you told me last night, and Mara and I discussed it. Have you been in some kind of accident recently?"

Startled, I put down my tea, untouched. "Yes. Do I still look that bad?"

He bit the biscuit and chewed, looking at me from under lowered brows.

It was Mara who spoke. "You do look as if someone's smacked you about a bit."

I took a slow breath. "Yes. A man I was investigating."

"Investigating?"

"I'm a private investigator."

"Damn," Danziger muttered.

The Albert shadow slipped behind him, spangling the air around them both with snowy mist. Danziger shivered and asked, "Were you hit on the head?"

"Yes."

"Knocked unconscious or…?"

Over his shoulder, Albert became more clear. The glowering eyes began to look more like glasses. I watched the ghost evolve and the words tumbled out. "Dead. For two minutes."

I told them about the hospital bed, the mists, the thing in the alley, maybe-ghosts, shadow-things, nausea… everything. By the time I was done, Albert looked almost there. "Your ghost is firming up," I finished.

Mara chuckled. "Ah, no. That's just you seeing him better."

I turned to her. "What?"

She gave a small shrug. "Ghosts exist in a place between here and there. When you're open to that world, you see them. When you're not, you don't."

Albert faded back a bit as Danziger spoke up. "When you're engaged with that world, your expectation or acceptance affects your perception and access. You've been fighting it, but when you talk about your experience, you accept certain facts—whether you can explain them or not—and Albert there is reinforcing proof that you're not crazy, that what you experienced is real, so you can see him a little better."

I shook my head. "I don't want to see him better. I don't want this stuff."

Mara sighed. "I fear you're stuck with it, since you can't un-die."

She must have seen me recoil. Her expression softened and she put down her glass before continuing. "That was a bit abrupt of me, but it's plain you can see Albert. There's a limited number of satisfactory explanations for that, plus what you've described. Do you think yourself mad?"

"No I… don't want to think I'm crazy."

Danziger chimed back in. "Unless you think we all share the same delusion—which is statistically unlikely—"

"Then it must be real, or we're all mad as hares."

"All right," I conceded. "Suppose we're not all crazy and that is a ghost." I pointed at the grim column of Albert's ethereal form, wavering between Ben and Mara, as if it was pacing. "Why do we see it? What is happening to me?"

Danziger grinned. "Ah, now that's where things get interesting. You see Albert for a different reason than Mara. Albert, like most ghosts, manifests by bringing an instance of his energy state with him. You're both able to access the energy state at which things like Albert become visible, so you're both able to see him. But you can do more than that; you can move around in that state and directly observe it, operate in it, even though you're not normally at that energy state yourself. It's very rare and really exciting stuff. You don't manipulate the energy state, however—that would be magic. But it's all energy, anyhow. So you experience the energy state of the Grey differently than Mara, but since you both have access to it, you both see Albert." He looked pleased and expectant.

I let him down. "What are you talking about?"

Mara rolled her eyes. "Ah, Ben, jumping right to the conclusion without demonstrating the proof. You must have been the despair of your Math prof." She turned to me. "He'll be rabbiting on about metaphysics and energy states for hours if we let him."

Danziger looked affronted. "I'm not that bad. But maybe we should start from a different perspective. Has anything like this happened to you before?"

I picked up the glass again and looked into the tea. "No." Weird flights of childhood imagination and bouts of the willies weren't relevant. Danziger nodded, but Mara narrowed her eyes at me and looked thoughtful while he went on.

"OK. So sometimes you seem to just walk in and out of these strange places, these mists, but other times, you just see some weird stuff?"

Mara cocked her head and, before I could answer her husband, added, "Sometimes you seem to hold it off and sometimes you don't?"

I glanced from one to the other. "That's exactly it."

Danziger picked up a book and began flipping the pages with a swift finger.

Mara carried on. "You've talked to a creature in the mist, been pushed on by one, but have you pushed anything around yet? Pushed the mist aside or away from you?" "No."

"You have no control over the coming and going?"

"Not really."

"And all of this has been growing more frequent and intense since you woke in hospital?"

"That's why I went to Dr. Skelleher. I thought there was something wrong. He says there isn't."

She sat back. "It's not wrong. It's just quite rare and hardly what they're teaching in medical schools these days."

I clenched eyes and fists. "What is it, damn it?"

Danziger had been running his finger down the pages as she questioned me. Now he paused and answered, "It's the Grey."

"What the hell is that?"

He pointed at my hands. "Don't squeeze so hard on the glass. They really hurt when they break."

I put the glass down with exaggerated care and glared at him. I'd have started screaming if someone else hadn't beaten me to it.

"Oh, God. The baby." Danziger pulled a baby monitor from his chest pocket. "We'd better go downstairs and continue where Brian can join in."

Shaking my head, I trailed behind Mara Danziger and the flickering shape of Albert. Ben brought up the rear, peeling away at the landing as Mara and I continued down the stairs.

"Are you confused yet?" she asked.

"Frustrated. Neither of you has answered my question."

"No, we haven't, have we. The why is, you're a Greywalker. Which means exactly nothing to you, yet."

"Not a thing."

"Stay for dinner and I'll try to explain while I'm cooking. Ben'll be right down, I'm sure, to help out."