Labyrinth

SIX

It took a little more talking before the Danzigers felt they knew enough to let me head for bed in the basement guest room. Grendel, the fuzzy bodyguard, turned out to be our ace in the hole: Brian’s immediate response to the idea that we might go and take his playmate away was to throw his arms around the pit bull’s neck and literally dig in his heels. “No! Doggie stay!” he insisted. The plight of adults being a bit too abstract for even the brightest three-year-old, he went for the most important thing to himself: the pet. Ben and Mara exchanged a rueful glance and gave in, which earned a delighted squeal from their offspring. Rick was going to have a hard time getting his dog back.

Quinton had gotten a lot more sleep the previous night than I had and elected to stay up for a while and help the Danzigers out with some household projects. I suspected he wanted to pick their brains a bit more about the situation we were getting into, and Ben had looked more than happy for the opportunity to do some picking of his own, too. Whatever work Quinton did for the Danzigers would mitigate some of the obligation we both felt for the safety and quiet they had extended to us. Some, not all. I knew I was probably dragging them into the enemy’s sights and I didn’t like it, no matter how much they protested that they wanted to help. Quinton, too, come to that. It seemed that this had become his fight as well, whether I liked it or not.

I fell toward sleep wondering why Simondson had ended up in Georgetown. . . .

As I slept, I dreamed I was sitting at the bottom of a swimming pool, trying to make sense of conversations going on at a party above the surface. Distant, burbling sounds that were almost words floated in and out of my ears, and I could see them darting through the water like glittering, colored fish. My dead cousin Jill swam by, her long hair forming a blond cloud as she paused to look at me.

“This time, we’ll use the back door,” she bubbled. In the drowned light, her pale, dead skin looked blue. She swam away, dissolving into a school of neon-bright tadpoles that broke into sudden shapes and began spiraling around a single, flame-filled bubble. When the gleaming creatures reached the middle, they doubled back and swam out again: an endless gyre of brilliant flecks going in and out, round and round. . . .

A randomly bobbing conversation bubble popped, releasing the words “phone box” to rise to the surface and burst into the air as a disjointed gasp of sound. An effervescence of englobed words rushed past, swirling through the tangled net of light that the waves cast onto the bottom of the pool. A few bubbles collapsed, letting their syllables out into the water: “rosaceae,” “polyphony,” “etrier,” and “fur.” The glimmering tadpoles darted apart and away, fleeing the sudden voices and dispersing the dream into blank sleep.

In spite of the weirdness, I slept well once the dream left and woke feeling more clearheaded than I had in a while.

Quinton had stretched out on the bed beside me while I slept, still dressed and dozing only lightly. As I started to sit up, he rolled over and looked at me, propping himself up on one elbow. “Hey, how are you feeling?”

“Well enough to go hunting for ghosts.”

“Should we grab the dog? If we can separate him from Brian, that is.”

“I’m sure Ben and Mara have the parental equivalent of a crowbar somewhere. It can’t hurt to take the fur-covered assault weapon along. If nothing else we can always tell any busybodies that we’re taking Grendel for a walk. And who’d argue with that?”

“Only the suicidal.”

As if she knew we were talking about some other trouble-making animal, the ferret began to rattle her temporary cage’s door. We both looked at her and she gave us the imploring ferret look.

I let Chaos out to romp while I put on fresh clothes. “That reminds me. While I was in London, Marsden told me ferrets seem to have an affinity for the Grey. How, I don’t know, but it would explain her craziness around the vampires and ghosts.”

“Then we’ll take the carpet shark, too.”

It wasn’t too hard to get the dog to ourselves: we just had to wait until Brian went to bed. We took a lot of precautions as we left, looking for observers and tails, checking for tracking devices both technological and magical, and paying attention to the reactions of the animals—just in case.

The sun was still up but starting to slant a bit, lengthening the shadows around the old brewery as we passed it. Where the southern brewery building had stood until a few years ago, there was now a neatly paved parking lot, devoid of the chain-link that had once held back the rubble from the street. I’d read that the old building, not originally built for cold storage, had chilled the ground enough to form a ball of filthy ice as large as a house. The current owners’ plans for redevelopment of the lot into shops and apartments had come to a standstill while the site was dug out and thawed. The remaining walls of the stock and brew houses had been shored up with cement blocks and steel posts, leaving two walls of the shell standing empty, boarded doors and windows gaping in the upper stories between brick scars where the floors had once been. The ghost-shape of the original building flickered in the Grey, silver-touched with persistent lines of blue energy as if the magical grid had risen into the walls and was crumbling back to ground at a glacial pace. I shivered as I saw it and drove on, looking for a less exposed place to leave the truck.

I wanted to walk the neighborhood a little. If Simondson had been dumped at the brewery rather than killed there, I suspected he hadn’t been moved far. Wygan couldn’t have thought I’d miss the news that my assailant had died by violence, so chances were good that the location wasn’t a fluke.

We parked a few blocks away near an off-ramp and a playfield that sprouted artificial grass. A row of old-fashioned clapboard-sided houses in varying states of refurbishment or decay faced the field. A swaybacked house in the middle of the block hosted an elderly man with a Santa Claus beard and crow-sharp eyes who sat on the dilapidated porch. He didn’t stare at us as we got out of the truck, but the curious, blue-green energy around his head reached out, as if scenting us, then pulled back once satisfied we had no interest in him.

Grendel wanted to investigate the playfield but lost interest once he realized that only the grass near the bleachers was the real thing. Instead, he peed on the leg of a bench and then looked up at us, satisfied and ready to walk on. Chaos was happier to ride in my purse with her head sticking out the top. We passed under the freeway ramp and across two sets of railroad tracks within a block. Except for the cars parked at the curbs, the street we walked on looked like something straight out of the Old West: Buildings of corrugated tin, clinker brick, and horizontal boards crowded the narrow sidewalk leading toward the long brick-and-sandstone wall of the brewery’s late-Victorian buildings. Even with the sun still up in the long summer twilight, I could see wisps of ghost-stuff and bright scribe-lines of energy that chattered like squirrels. The Grey was as noisy as a train yard in this low-lying stretch of ground between the bluffs and the river. The animals seemed unaffected, except that they glanced around more than usual—like kids in a new neighborhood. This all struck me as odd, but I didn’t comment—it would do no good to discuss the strange degree of activity until I had a little more information, and it might be nothing more than the residue of a still-busy settlement that hadn’t been buried and remade like much of Seattle had over the years.

We stepped out onto Airport Way at the north end of the former brewery complex and turned south to reach the partially demolished buildings Solis had mentioned. I thought I heard something muttering in my ear, but there was nothing nearby, even in the Grey, besides Quinton and the animals.

Ghosts grew thicker as we moved along the sidewalk on the brewery side, mostly men in work clothes and teams of horses pulling wagons piled with grain, hops, or barrels. I could smell the horse dung and sweat, the sharp, bitter memory of fresh hops, and the sweet odor of boiling grain mash. The weird muttering was drowned in the harsher, louder cries of workers, the snort and whinny of horses, and the heavy roll and thump of barrels being loaded.

Quinton’s hand closed on my upper arm. “Harper?”

I shook myself. “What?”

“Just making sure you’re still here.”

I felt my brows pinch down in a scowl. It wasn’t quite a slip, but I shouldn’t have been sliding into the Grey like that. I wasn’t tired, so that wasn’t the cause now, but I didn’t see any other reason I would have gone a bit ghostly. I concentrated a little harder as we walked on.

The long buildings were pierced by recessed, black-painted doors and windows with sparkling-new glass, and odd ramps to old loading doors swooped here and there. Finally we reached the end of a building with two walls of soaring, arched windows and impressive double doors that faced a driveway and another building on the other side. A covered iron walkway crossed the driveway at the third story and a gate stood closed across the passage. Through the chain-link gate we could see a huge brick chimney near the train tracks on the far side.

The partial shell of a building on the other side of the driveway had a sandstone foundation that had been eaten away at the corners and mortar joints until it looked like rotting teeth holding up the charming brick edifice with carved stone signs above the big, boarded-up doors and windows that read “Brew House” and “Stock—” Just beyond the truncated stock house sign, the wall ended abruptly and the black expanse of the asphalt parking lot stretched to the south nearly another block to run up against the former brewery office building that now stood alone under the pylons of yet another freeway ramp. We’d arrived and, naturally, it was the spot with the aberrant lines of Grey energy that had given me the willies on first sight.

We stepped around the broken wall, over a parking bumper so new it gleamed white, and turned to look into the gutted remains of the stock building. A chill cut through me as we crossed the gleaming Grey power lines in the memories of walls that had once stood there, but the feeling faded as we left the ghostly walls behind.

A bit of tattered yellow crime scene tape still fluttered from one of the massive iron pipes that had been erected to brace up the remaining front wall. Sand, scrub grass, and tumbled bits of stone and garbage were the only floor the old stock house had. The brew house still had one complete room, but the jagged edges of more rooms that had once stood beyond the front one ran like raw wounds in the towering brick walls. Ivy and grass had rooted in the back wall of the brew house along a jerry-rigged plastic downspout that had broken apart halfway down. The stock house walls grew a thick coat of some horrid yellow spray foam at the second floor, but nothing else. Straight down from the foam and in the corner of the last standing walls, I could see a thin red smear of remnant energy—not a ghost but the mute energetic residue of something angry and violent.

The noise of the grid increased as I got closer, whining and rattling like blues guitar feedback on a cheap amp. I’d never heard so much local disturbance from the Grey’s power grid before. I wondered if it was an artifact of the asetem’s involvement, but I didn’t recall any such thing from London. . . .

There was no roil of vampires, nor the gut-blow of death lingering over the site, not that I’d expected it, but it might have explained the spine-crawling racket of the grid at this spot. I stepped up onto the sand mounded where the building’s floor must have been. Chaos made a chuckling noise in my purse. Grendel watched me with his ears pricked up and his shoulders a little hunched, as if his hackles might start rising in a moment. Pretty strange body language for a dog, I thought. Quinton held on to the leash and followed several paces behind.

I looked toward the yellow scrap of crime scene tape and guided my gaze along the line from pole to pole, searching for another bit of yellow or some indication of exactly where the body had lain. A second tag on the boarded doorway to the brew house and a small dark patch on the sand near the smear of red energy led me deeper into the site. I didn’t have to look hard for signs once I got close; the red haze resolved itself into the misty wire-frame shape of a human curled on the ground in a semi-fetal position. The dark patch, predictably, was blood, though very little and mostly smeared on the sand, not soaked in, where the body had lain, battered but not bleeding out. Either he hadn’t bled much at all, or, as I’d suspected, he’d been dumped on the sand after he was too dead to do more than ooze a bit.

I crouched down and put my hand on the bloodstain. The world seemed to drain away into silver mist and the screech of metal tearing apart under massive strain. I hadn’t meant to sink into the Grey, but the bloodstain had drawn me in. I started to back out, afraid for a moment that I had fallen into some kind of magical trap, but the Grey was no less fluid than usual. I wasn’t imprisoned, just sucked in. I took a few deep breaths and let myself fall all the way in.

My heart caught on a barb of sudden pain as I went and my breathing faltered as if I were feeling the distant echo of Simondson’s death but not the man himself. “Where did you come from?” I muttered as I looked around in the fog-built world, trying to pick up and follow with my gaze the miserable red thread of energy that marked Simondson’s temporary resting place. I concentrated on it and it got a little brighter, a weak tendril raveling toward the south until it broke off and died out. I dug my hand harder into the ground, a little frustrated that I couldn’t pick up more, and felt a piercing electric thrill in my palm, as if the dormant line of energy had suddenly gone live. I gasped a startled breath and heard the ferret chitter in alarm.

I shot a glance over my shoulder, staring down the length of the vanishing red thread, and saw a faint ghost resolving out of the Grey mist, walking toward me in jerks and starts, the thread seeming to haul it along. I grabbed onto the thread and reeled it in, yanking the reluctant ghost closer. He stopped on top of the spot where he had lain dead and glared at me in resentful silence.

As vague as his image was, I could see that his jaw was still square, his hair still blond, even though it was showing some gray at the temples. But he wasn’t looking as sleek as the last time I’d seen him; his residual self-image seemed to have skewed into an ugly awareness of what his greed had lost him. He looked like a stockbroker who hadn’t weathered the crash. Angry self-pity rolled off him in sickening waves. I stood up and hooked my fingers into his substance before he could escape. “Hi, Simondson. Remember me?”

Someone growled, but I wasn’t sure whether it was the ghost or Grendel. I shook Simondson a little. “C’mon, I know you can talk. How did you end up here?”

“Fuck off.”

“Nice. You haven’t gotten any sweeter now that you’re dead.”

“Which is your fault, you nosy bitch.”

“It’s my fault you’re a foulmouthed ass with a bad temper?”

He tried to spit, but it’s not an impressive gesture from a weak phantom. “I died because of you.”

“Like I haven’t heard that one before,” I muttered. “Why does it always have to be someone else’s fault with you, Simondson? It was your dead wife’s fault you robbed her daughter’s inheritance. Now it’s my fault you’re dead. Me, I’m betting on greed, vanity, and plain old-fashioned stupidity—your usual motives.”

He started to object and I rattled his vague substance in an offhand way while rolling my eyes. “Oh, please. Try something new. The truth would be good. Let’s start with the woman who convinced you to beat the living hell out of me two years ago.”

“Claire?”

Interesting: I knew her as Alice—I was pretty sure we were talking about the same female. “Petite thing, ruby-red hair, sharp teeth, smokes like a silent film star . . . ?”

The ghost nodded. He looked tired, as if whatever had befallen him at the end of his life had been exhausting and death wasn’t any more restful. But, of course, I had come along and made him wake up from whatever brand of eternal sleep he might have been enjoying. Or not. I felt no shame: This man had beaten me to death and I felt he didn’t deserve much respect from me now that he’d joined the post-life crowd himself. “You didn’t know me from a hole in the ground, so how did your Claire talk you into knocking my head in?”

The ghost wavered and blinked, seeming to cringe and fold into a smaller shape. “Can’t think,” he moaned.

“Try harder. How did she compel you to attack me? Who killed you? How? Tell me. Tell me any of it and I’ll let you off the hook.” I needed everything I could get to fight Wygan. . . .

I yanked Simondson a little closer, studying the thickening mist of his form as he tried to remember. When he seemed nearly corporeal, he began shaking, a choked squeal of pain singing out of his mouth in a red cloud. I sank deeper into the Grey, looking at the tangled skein of energy that was Simondson’s ghost. Red, a hot red that deepened to a bloody claret color at the core. I touched one of the swirling strands of his energy, hooked it with my finger, and pulled with a firm pressure.

The hot color leapt off him, running up my own arm like flame and nerve gas. The wretched arc of agony made me buckle and cry out. I nearly let go completely. Voices from everywhere and nowhere shrieked and gibbered in my head. I backed away from the deep level of the Grey, shaking. Simondson panted, a remembered response to surcease, and trembled.

I kept one hand on him, but I relaxed my grip, pushing him just a bit away from me in the depth of the Grey, letting him drift into a less corporeal state. He shuddered and breathed a blue gust, almost sexual in the quality of its release. Repelled, I had to force myself to keep him present.

He caught a breath he didn’t need and sagged a bit in his respite. “Let me go,” he murmured. “I can’t help you and it’s torture when I try to remember....”

“I can see that.” I didn’t want to investigate the how of it—I knew I’d have to eventually, but not this second. For now it was enough that I thought I had the principle of it. I guessed that this was something akin to whatever torment Wygan had my father tied up in: The Grey was in large part memory in various forms; when the memory was strong, the spirits were more corporeal, but as they became stronger and more “there,” they were also more subject to pain. Wygan had done something . . . horrible. A spell or binding of some kind that looped back through memory as agony.

Ghosts didn’t experience sensations like a live person, but they remembered them as if they were real and that was what Wygan had tied him to, somehow. As Simondson—or my father—tried to remember anything or act, he became more solid . . . and so it went in spirals of suffering: remember and be tormented, move toward presence and become engulfed in pain. It was better to fade down to the merest whisper of what you had been, to a shade and a shadow, and remain mute, stupid, and inactive. Unable to help anyone or even yourself until Wygan was ready to use you for his own purpose. Best, by far, to go away forever, if you only could.

Simondson groaned again, almost crying. “Let me out of this. Please.”

I could let Simondson go. I was sure of that, though the process of tearing his shape apart and out of the weave of the Grey would be miserable for us both. But I needed him. I needed his knowledge and I thought I might need him just because he was connected to me and what might happen next. But keeping him in this state—as I had no doubt my dad was also kept by Wygan—was cruel. Letting it go on sickened me, left me feeling like I was collaborating in the horror.

But still, I said, “No.”