Labyrinth

EIGHT

As we walked away from the policemen, I felt the hot/cold presence of Simondson’s ghost in my pocket, thrumming in the metal box. Grey things whispered in my ear, not quite comprehended, not quite ignored. “Are we clear?” I asked Quinton.

He bent down and adjusted the dog’s leash, shooting a look back toward the old brewery under the cover of his long coat. “Yup. They’re checking out the bar up the street.”

I lifted the ferret out of my collar and she made a disgusted chittering sound. “Don’t give me that, you furry knee sock. You almost got us in trouble.”

“How?” Quinton asked. “I didn’t see her doing anything.”

“She was wiggling down my back trying to get into my pocket with the box full of ghost.” I put my free hand into the pocket in question. As my fingers brushed the metal surface, an electric shock ran up my arm and with it came a shriek of sound. Chaos made a high-pitched bark and twisted in my hand as I jerked, consumed in the moment of noise.

My grip failed and Quinton grabbed the ferret, tucking her into one of his own pockets before reaching to catch me as my knees buckled. I pushed him away, afraid the shattering noise in my head would envelop him, too. The shouting, muttering cacophony meant nothing, a jumble of sounds and words running over one another, breaking apart in my mind like exploding fireworks. I pulled my hand out of my pocket, clasping both of them together at my chest, bending as if I’d been punched by a heavy fist. The sound fell away slowly, leaving a single word in its fading echo in my mind: “maiandros.”

Quinton hooked his arm around me against my will and hauled me upward, the dog dancing alongside us. I braced for another blast of uncanny sound, but it didn’t come as he moved me along. “Are you all right? Can you breathe now?”

I sucked in air, stunned to realize I was almost faint from lack of oxygen. I’d blown out my breath when the sound hit, as if I had, indeed, been physically struck in the gut. I nodded and settled my breathing into a normal rhythm, pulling out of his arm to walk on my own. But I stayed close. “I don’t know what happened. Did you hear anything?” I asked.

“No. What did you hear? I mean, that is what happened, isn’t it? You heard something . . . weird?”

“More like I got hit by the sound, but it doesn’t make any sense. What I heard doesn’t mean anything to me. It was just . . . words and noise....” I had a feeling, a certainty. . . . “We have to go back and get into that building. There’s some . . . information there.”

“How do you know?” he asked, but he turned around with me and started walking back to the brewery office with Grendel’s leash in one hand and the ferret peeking out of his pocket under the other hand.

“I just do. It’s . . . like the sound told me something I know but can’t understand in words. It makes my head ache, though.” I rubbed at my right temple, feeling a low throb in my skull like a migraine coming on. Was there something dire about Simondson? Was his ghost some kind of trap set by Wygan and his minions? It didn’t seem that way, but . . . the discomfort, the creeping sense of hidden knowledge ticking like a bomb at the back of my mind gave me pause. Not enough pause to stop my progress to the office, but enough that I frowned over it all the way back.

The cops hadn’t come back around on their beat yet so we had some time, though we didn’t know how much. I took a moment to steady myself, get my mind back on the task at hand and not on the freakishness of what had happened a few minutes earlier. Then I turned to Quinton. “You should go on without me.” He started to object but I cut him off and continued. “If the cops come back, you shouldn’t be here. They’ll recognize you and Grendel. I’ll be inside, and while they might recognize me, they’d have to get close first. I can meet you back at the truck.”

“What if something else happens to you? I don’t like leaving you without backup. Things seem a bit off the rails, here.”

I waved his last comment off and addressed the rest. “I still have my cell phone, and if I don’t call or turn up at the truck within thirty minutes, you come looking for me. But you won’t be any help if you get arrested for trespassing or run off for loitering.” Then, just because she’d been so jumpy about it, I put out my hand for the ferret. “I’ll keep Chaos with me. She can raise the ghost alarm if something’s too close.” I didn’t like endangering the little animal, but I needed any edge I could get and she’d reacted faster to the presence of whatever was ringing my ears than I did. Without Quinton around to spot for me, I’d have to rely on Chaos and my own skills—which weren’t inconsiderable but currently left me a little confused.

Since London, I’d noticed subtle changes to what I could do in the Grey and with what ease. I’d flicked a ghost away like it was no more than a wisp of smoke and torn a piece from Simondson’s substance without stopping to think if I could. Wygan’s goal was to make me into something new, and it seemed that, even without his hands-on interference, I was changing whether I liked it or not. I’d learned that I couldn’t fight being part of the Grey, but I still didn’t like these new powers—they worried me when I thought of what they might mean to Wygan’s plan. Didn’t mean I wasn’t going to use them, for now at least.

I checked the area for anyone who might be freaked out by what I was about to do and then watched Quinton start away. He moved reluctantly, looking back over his shoulder twice before Grendel decided to bolt after a rat that had scuttled out of a brush of wild fennel growing from the packed dirt of an alley.

Chaos had been into the Grey once before, so I thought she’d be all right to come along, so long as she was all the way inside my clothes. I tucked her into my shirt as I went up the office steps on the darkest side. I slid into the Grey and felt my way through the layers of time until I found one in which the office was occupied and its doors stood open to a long-ago afternoon’s hop-scented breeze.

Once inside, I checked for the ferret and she chuckled at me, apparently feeling no ill effects of passing through a physical barrier. Well, at least I now knew it worked, though not the parameters and limits. I let her crawl up and poke her head out of my collar. I began walking around the shadowy edges of the first room, looking for signs, either normal or paranormal, of what had happened to Simondson.

The main floor was broken into two unevenly sized rooms with a small atrium and staircase between them. There were more rooms upstairs and at the back, I assumed, but the ground floor was what interested me at the moment. The more northerly downstairs room was open all the way to the second-floor ceiling with an open gallery around the back and inside wall. It was this room we’d looked into from outside, where we’d seen the marks of industrial glue on the floor. Nothing seemed to excite the ferret and I wasn’t getting much of an indication of activity, except in a vague way as the ghosts of a generation or two of clerks went about their business without a care for us. The other room, the southerly one, was slightly smaller and completely closed up with blinds and white paper on the windows, hiding any activity within. Chaos wriggled and made her angry chuckle, wanting down onto the floor to explore for herself. I kept a tight hold on her as I looked around.

Here the carpet had been pulled up as well, leaving the same sort of mess: loops of glue marks on the floor, gummy with dirt and something like sawdust; broom marks in the detritus; and snakes’ nests of black electrical cable connected to nothing. I looked at the mess through the Grey, hoping for something more useful and trying not to leave any fingerprints or other evidence that might link me to the scene whenever the cops got in—as I was sure they would eventually. Ferret footprints might be a little less conspicuous than human fingerprints, so long as the forensic technicians thought it was just the track of a rat or two, but I was still reluctant to let Chaos down, just in case.

The cold washed over me and with it the strange chorus of babbling and shrieks that had plagued me since I’d returned from London. I tuned it out as best I could and looked around. Near the interior wall, farthest from the windows, I spotted a formation in the Grey, like a field of broken stone thrusting up through age-old peat and fog. I moved closer to it, keeping to the upper levels of the Grey, wary of being sucked into anything before I knew what it was. Chaos let out a fierce chitter as we advanced, just as intrigued as I was.

Drawing near, the cold of the misty world between the worlds fell away and a tingling heat bled out from the strange structure. It looked like . . . no, it was a ring of shattered temporaclines, shards like mirrored glass tipped and ruptured from their proper places. Rifts of motion and memory skittered across the ghostly surfaces of the broken layers of time. As I got closer, the temperature rose and Chaos seemed to pull away from it, sniffing and going still. It reminded me of what I’d seen at my father’s old office, a ring of unearthly fire standing around the place his ghost should have been, an impenetrable darkness at its center and a fury circling its edge.

I turned my head, searching for any sign of the Guardian Beast. It had rushed to harry me at the border of the zone in Dad’s office, but here there was no sign of it. Whatever had happened here didn’t seem to threaten the Grey directly as the other incident had. I reached for one of the broken shards of time and felt a jolt of electricity at my fingertips as I touched it and it came away in my hand.

I’d only once held a piece of the material Grey before: when I’d grabbed and used a ghostly knife in the underground cells of an abandoned prison beneath the streets of London. This was like holding on to electrified ice. It crackled and sizzled with cold that arced up my arm. The moment of time contained in the shard replayed like a broken film as I stared at the shattered piece of memory: twenty seconds of Simondson cowering in the corner while two figures stood in front of him holding heavy objects I couldn’t quite see. Something white moved behind Simondson, coming into view for only a moment. “Break the spell.” The voice was Wygan’s. Then the vision broke off, sharp as the shattered edge of the temporacline.

I snatched at the next shard of memory, hoping for more information, but all I got was the same wrecked moment of time from different angles, as if the broken temporacline was a hologram, smashed into a dozen pieces but showing the same thing, no matter where you looked. There had to be more. . . .

I pulled Chaos out of my shirt, holding her tightly by the harness. The ferret looked around, her whiskers twitching. I studied the area where I had no doubt Simondson had died cornered and beaten, cocking my head side to side as I looked for ghostly traces in the unsettled mist. I’d rarely seen temporaclines less than two decades old and the residue of broken time struck me as something else done by Wygan and his minions. It didn’t have the same impact as the hole left at my father’s office, so I guessed it wasn’t the same thing. This wasn’t something locked up and hidden; it was just someone’s way of removing evidence. The void of Grey information was just a convenient side effect for whoever had broken the plane of time. If that was the case, they might have left a few other things behind. . . .

Chaos jerked and tried to jump from my hands to the floor. I knelt down, keeping a grip on her as she began wiggling like a mad thing and chuckling to herself. She wrenched out of my hands and dove through the mess of broken temporacline, dancing in fury over a tiny spot on the floor and snapping at something dark and gleaming near the corner.

It was a tiny loop of black energy almost invisible against the filthy floor and the heavy mist of history that lay on it. Black. Dead. The ferret stopped dancing and watched as I reached through the knife-edged circle of shattered time and hooked the thread of Grey energy onto my pinkie, trying not to leave a fingerprint on the dusty floor as I did. The remnant of some lifeless thing unspooled at the speed of chilled molasses, reluctant to reemerge from the grid of Grey energy beneath the city.

I persisted, standing and pulling with a steady pressure until it came free and cast up a pall of memory and a loop of remembered action. It wasn’t Simondson or his ghost, just a bit of the building’s recent cache of time. The scene unfolded and spread into the corner, playing forward like scratched film, the sound thin and partially covered by the squabbling whisper of the grid that had invaded my head and the noise of the ferret scrambling back into the safety of my shirt.

Simondson stood in the corner. The light in the memory of the room seemed to flicker and change at random times, as if it were changing color, though to me it was all a dim silver and gray, like an old black-and-white movie on a dirty screen. Two male figures faced Todd Simondson, vampires I thought, until I recognized the stance of one: Bryson Goodall—whatever he was. Even in the loop of memory, pale and shuddering as it was, I could see something magical clinging to Simondson, glittering in the silvery mist like a rage of moths. The sound cut in and out as the second villain swung a long, heavy object into Simondson’s side.

“. . . know why you did it ...” That was Goodall, I thought.

Simondson buckled and cowered into the confluence of the walls.

Wygan walked past, barely casting them a glance, his mouth moving. “. . . the spell. She’ll sniff ...” I thought I could fill in the first part since I’d already seen it. He was telling them to break the spell. Perhaps whatever it was that had compelled Simondson to attack me...?

Goodall reached out, curling his free hand around Simondson’s head. “Jackass ...” Then he pulled his hand back, closing his fist and yanking the glimmer away. He flinched a little as the web of spell-stuff tore and came dangling and dying into his grip.

Simondson screamed.

“. . . rid of him.” Was that Wygan who’d spoken? I couldn’t tell with the sudden howling of Simondson coupled with the garbled muttering in my ears.

Goodall and his companion belted him with their blunt weapons. Simondson collapsed, but the careful beating went on and the scene darkened, as if someone had turned off the lamps. I thought I smelled something burning—like circuit boards and wires smoldering into flame. I heard a rattle and a roar that chilled my spine. Then the image shuddered and started again.

I watched for another moment, compelled to learn more even as I felt sickened by what I saw. Until something buzzed and burbled against my hip, insistent and getting louder. . . . I shook myself, dropping the loop of memory. It whipped away into the floor, fading until I could no longer see it in the mist that was receding as I struggled back to normal, pestered to the surface of reality by my cell phone vibrating in my pocket. Chaos rumpled about in my shirt as if she, too, had been shaken from a daze.

I took a few cautious steps away from the corner death had occupied, groping for my phone as I set my feet only where they would leave no significant marks. I squatted down and answered.

“Yeah?”

“Where are you? You’re running late. The patrolmen are heading back around your way.”

It was Quinton. I took a couple of relieved breaths before I answered. “How long till they’re here?”

“Five minutes to sight of the office, I’d say, coming from the north on the opposite side of the street.”

“OK. I’m on the way out. See you at the truck.”

If I got out fast enough, I could stay to the darkened side of the building below the freeway ramp. They wouldn’t see me until I crossed the street.

I wanted to look around more and try to figure out what the electrical cables were for, but that was not an option: I didn’t know if the cops would inspect the office building again, hang around the bars across the street, or what. Quinton was taking a risk watching them at this point. They’d notice him if he kept it up. I had to be gone before they came down to this end of the block. I slipped into the Grey and found my way out through another balmy ghost of a summer day, onto the darkened asphalt beneath the freeway.

I strode out, keeping the building between me and the path of the policemen until I was a long block down. Then I crossed the road, timing myself between two trucks that rattled along the dray-haunted street with the sound of a dozen car wrecks. I nipped down the block until I was below the old Georgetown City Hall building and checked back up the street for the cops.

No sign. They must have stopped in a shadow or a doorway farther up the road—probably talking to the bouncer of one of the clubs. I made my way around by the long route to the lonely row of houses facing the plastic playfield.

The old man was still on his porch, but he didn’t pay me any mind this time, his odd aura keeping close as I made my way to Quinton and Grendel, strolling along the edge of the fake grass. The ferret took the first opportunity to abandon the snug confines of my clothing for the luxurious complexity of Quinton’s coat pockets.

“Find anything?”

“Some pretty disturbing stuff,” I replied. “Not something the cops could use as probable cause for a search, though. And,” I added, casting a glance toward the strange old man, “I’d rather discuss it elsewhere.”

Quinton nodded and we piled back into the Land Rover and headed away from Georgetown, looking for sign of any tail as we went.