Poltergeist

CHAPTER 25

Saturday began with a jerk and the clarity of knowledge that bursts to the forefront of the mind like a bubble. There was another source of information about interacting with the poltergeist. As soon as I had completed my morning routine, I made a phone call and arranged another meeting. Then I drove to the Danzigers' for breakfast.

I met Ben on the sidewalk. He was loping toward the little rose-covered arch that marked his front steps and waved to me, jogging to catch up.

"Hi," he panted. "Look what I got." He held up a large glass container that looked like a giant, old-fashioned lightbulb with a bit more neck. In his other hand he had a manila envelope.

"What is that?" I asked.

"It's an alembic. It's a distilling flask, effectively. Heatproof glass. One of the chemistry professors lives nearby and he gave it to me. It's got a chip in the top, so its not any good to him anymore—once they're chipped they tend to break or become unsterile. So I'm going to try an experiment with it and see if we can't make a genie-bottle for you.”

Enlightenment at last. "Ah. Mara told you.”

"Yeah," he replied, starting up the steps to the porch. I followed him. "She woke me up when she came to bed and I was thinking about it, so I called this guy and asked if he had anything like what you needed. Well, he didn't exactly, but he had this and he told me how to get a reflective coating on it—you want the reflective side pointing in, right?" he added, opening the front door.

I started to answer, but was interrupted by a squeal of laughter. While it was an improvement on some of the recent greetings from Brian, I still looked around the door with care before entering. There was no sign of the boy in the hall.

Ben took his prize into the kitchen.

Mara was lifting a waffle onto Brian's plate and waggling it on the fork so it flapped like a butterfly. Her son squealed again and raised his hands to snatch the waffle. Mara kept it just out of reach.

"Greedy. And what should you be sayin'?”

"Puh-leeeese?”

"That's better." She put the waffle on the plate with a scoop of chunky applesauce and a strip of bacon. Brian snarfed the bacon in three quick bites and washed it down with gulps of milk.

Mara noticed Ben and me in the doorway.

"Ah, is that it, then?”

Ben waved the alembic. "Yup." He held up the envelope. "John gave me some reflective coating film to put on the outside, too." He looked at me. "It won't be a beautiful job, but it should do the trick.”

"Are you sure?" I asked.

"Well, the theory's sound.”

Mara huffed. "Oh, sit yourselves down before you start going on and have some brekkie, or we'll be eatin' burned waffles with our soft-boiled theory.”

Ben sat at the end of the table farthest from Brian and set the alembic's neck upside down in his milk glass, so it looked like a giant glass dandelion puff.

"Sarnies?" Mara asked.

"What?" I asked.

"Sandwiches," Ben answered. "In this case, bacon in waffles so you can eat the whole thing with one hand. Yes, please," he added to his wife. Receiving his sarnie, he tinkered with the flask with one hand and talked between bites.

"See," he said, "this container should work if I can get this tint material on flat. The glass could be thicker, but this should do for a while. The material is more like ceramic, really, even though it's clear, so it's very dense. The Grey energy moves through it pretty slowly and the reflective surface should stop the ghost from getting out once it's in.”

"How does it get in in the first place?" I asked, managing bacon and waffle between sips of coffee.

"This is the good part. The reflective tint takes advantage of the reflective nature and density of the glass surface, so it's highly reflective in one direction and only a bit dark in the other. It's the same kind of thing they use on car windows. A form of Mylar, but very thin with some sticky stuff on the reflective side. Once it's in place, you can look in but whatever's in the flask will just see reflection and shadow. Um. . what was I saying?”

"How the genie gets in the bottle," I reminded him.

"Oh, yeah. Well, it has two options—it can enter through the material itself, though that would be very slow, or it can go in through the opening at the neck. You just sort of scoop it up. If you face the opening toward the poltergeist and get part of it to go in, the whole thing should be drawn into the container by the conductivity of the reflective surface. Once inside, it'll be momentarily confused by the reflection. Then you stopper the bottle with something nice and dense, like rubber—which I happen to have in the envelope, thanks to John Burke—and the ghost is stuck in the vessel, since it can't disperse through the reflective surface or through the density of the material itself. If you can corner it in some dense place—somewhere there is no history, no time fragments for it to slip away on—then it will have no option but to head for you and the ghost trap. The tricky thing is going to be getting it cornered in such a place.”

"Yeah, that's going to be the tricky part," I agreed with no small irony. First I'd have to stalk the wretched thing.

Mara snorted a laugh and went back to her own food. I watched Ben lay strips of reflective tint as thin as spider silk onto the glass and smooth them into place with a tongue depressor.

Brian crowed for more food and bounced in his seat.

"Oh. . blast," Ben swore, wrinkling a strip of the tint. He removed it with a single-edged razor blade and for a moment I wondered where it had come from, since I couldn't imagine anyone actually shaving with one.

I turned my attention to Mara and Brian—who wore more of his breakfast than he ate, since he insisted on raising his spoon as high as possible before pouring its load of waffles and applesauce toward his mouth. I counted us all lucky his arms weren't longer.

As we observed the spectacle, I asked, "Do kids have some kind of touch with the Grey that adults don't?”

They both paused before answering. Ben looked a bit curious, while Mara seemed mildly surprised.

"But of course they do," Mara said. She glanced at Ben.

He nodded, looking back to the flask. "Definitely. Children's perceptions of the world are different than those of adults. We know that they don't have certain types of brain structures, hormones, physical and mental developments, and so on before certain ages.”

"Babies don't develop depth perception until five months and more, and who knows what's going on while they learn to coordinate their eyes with their minds?" Mara added, trying to wipe her offspring down a bit. "Stop wigglin'! Are you a boy or a worm?”

"Worm!”

She raised her eyebrows. "Are ya now? Shall I put you out in the garden? Would you like a nice bit of dirt for lunch? We've some lovely fish guts for ya. Da and I shall have the fish.”

"Blech!" Brian shouted.

"All right, then, boy. Sit you still while I find your face under here…" Brian squinched his eyes and pursed his mouth while his mother wiped his face clean. She took advantage of the momentary lull to talk. "Yes, children seem to see the Grey things a bit more easily than most adults.”

"The theory," Ben said, "is that perception of the Grey is caused by the lack of a certain filter in the brain. The filter is something you develop partially by nature and partially by enculturation. Most people could see more if they weren't so thoroughly enculturated to ignore certain things. We learn to focus and to tune things out because our modern society offers too many stimuli for the human brain to sort efficiently otherwise. One of the first things we learn to stop seeing is the things others tell us we can't see. It takes a pretty stubborn mind— or one with a faulty filter—to persist in seeing things the rest of the world says aren't there. Now, my personal theory is that there's some other brain structure as yet unrecognized that determines the 'depth'— so to speak—of the Grey filter or if you have it at all. You see, that would explain why someone like me still can't see the Grey, even though I've been dismantling the culturally emplaced filters for years. Most people are literally Grey-blind, just as some are color-blind.”

Finishing with her son, Mara offered him a bit of plain waffle. "But there are as many theories as there are stars," she warned. "Some'll say it's an early contact with the Grey that keeps your mind open to it. Others that it's passed down by heredity or teaching. Or it's something you catch, like a dose of measles, or build up from contact, like fluoride in the water. You could be after arguing for any of them or all of them. But children do seem to have an affinity for it that adults often lack. And why are you askin'?”

I sipped coffee for a moment. "I couldn't get the hang of moving around to track the thread in the Grey. The whole layers-of-time thing didn't make sense to me," I explained. "I tried asking Carlos about it.”

Mara looked startled and stared at me, for a moment distracted from Brian. "Carlos? Why would you be going to him?”

"Because he has retrocognition—he can look at the past—and I thought he might see the Grey more like I do and know something more about time.”

"Did he?" she asked.

"A little, though he made it clear I was wrong about any similarity in our perceptions of the Grey. He kind of gave me the creeps about it.”

"More than usual?”

I remembered his hungry look and shivered. "Yeah." I shook it off. "Anyhow. I was thinking that I must just be doing it wrong and I needed some idea how. The children of one of the séance members play with the poltergeist. Like Brian seems to play with Albert. So it has to be easier than what I was doing. Or at least it has to be something a child can do. I'm going to talk to the kids' mother.”

"Right now?”

"As soon as we're done here. But that brings us back to genies in bottles.”

"Oh, yes. The ghost-catcher," Mara replied. "How is it?" A glob of sticky apple splattered onto her shoulder. "Oh, Brian!”

Brian's eyes got very large. "Uh-oh." He wriggled down to the floor and bolted for the hall.

Mara growled and closed her eyes. "Do you suppose he's a changeling? Because if so, I'd like a try at having him changed back. I'd walk through Galway and broken glass mother-naked if it would buy me a quiet week.”

"You could just give him more whiskey," I suggested.

"Never again," she moaned, getting up to chase after him.

"You can't just. . cast a spell on him to be quiet and come back?”

" 'Twouldn't be a good idea. Abuse of power and all—not to mention the side effects. I'll catch him the old-fashioned way. With guile and cunning.”

She laughed, then snuck out of the room on silent feet. I turned to look at Ben. He was grinning.

"I suspect she does use a little magic," Ben said. "She's so much better with him than I am.”

"You're not too bad.”

He laughed. "Praising with faint damns. Anyhow. How do you like it?”

He held up the glass vessel. Most of the lower bulb was now covered in a thin, dark blue coating that raised a rainbow sheen. If I peered at it through the Grey, the covered part looked black and solid. In the normal world, I could just see through it if I squinted a bit and got my head at the right angle.

"It's great," I said, a little surprised at how good it was.

Ben smiled. "Thanks. I'm not much good at arts and crafts, so I hope I've done it right. I'll finish up the neck and you can have it.”

I raised my coffee cup. "I hope it works.”

Ben's laugh was a bit rueful this time. "You're not the only one." He concentrated on his work as he continued, keeping his eyes down. "I hope this is a better guess than the last time.”

My heart sank at the memory of how badly I'd misjudged things on my first Grey outing, and I could almost smell the reek of burning again. I was still carrying reminders in the knot of Grey implanted in my chest and the magical resistance that kept me from speaking of certain things.

"There is no fault on your part," I said. "What went wrong at the museum was my fault—just mine. How many times have I said so?

Do I need to speak another language to make you believe that? Quick crash course in Russian—teach me how to say 'mea culpa' and we can stop there.”

He frowned at me. "Why?”

I couldn't say. The words would not come out, corked up with guilt and magical compulsion. I just shook my head and felt heavy. "It's not you," I muttered.

Ben finished the bottle in silence, slipped the black rubber stopper into the neck, and handed the whole thing to me. We could hear Mara and Brian coming back along the hall, the floorboards singing with their steps.

"Be careful with it.”

I took it with both hands. "I will." Then I smiled at him—a big, fat, footlights-to-second-balcony grin. "It'll be fine. Thanks.”

I made my good-byes to Mara in the hall, thanking her for breakfast and avoiding another shin-ramming by Brian with a quick slide to the door.

"Bye-bye, rhino-boy!" I called as I slipped out.

"Graah!" roared Brian. Then I heard him laughing as the door closed between us.

Brian was starting to grow on me and I wondered if I would start to like children by the end of the day, since I was spending so much time with them.

Patricia wasn't thrilled to see me again. I kept intruding on her Saturdays—which she was quick to inform me were the only time she saw her husband.

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Railsback," I said as she let me into the play yard once again. "You do understand, though, that the poltergeist will continue to hurt you and others until it's broken down. Dr. Tuckman called you about that, right?”

She nodded.

"I'm trying to help and I need your kids' help to do that. I'm only asking for a few minutes of their time.”

"I still don't understand how my babies can help you," she whined.

"They play with Celia. They know how to interact with it in ways we don't.”

"I still think it's Mark's ghost—”

"That may be, but it's Celia that killed Mark and it's Celia we have to get rid of.”

She gaped. "Celia killed Mark?”

I looked her in the eye and let the worst moments of this investigation well back up through me, every instant of understanding regarding Celia and what it was. Something of knowledge and horror arced across our shared glance and she recoiled, murmuring, "Oh, no. Did she really?”

"I believe it did.”

She backed away a step. "That's terrible. Terrible." She shook her head, but she seemed to be trying to shake the monstrous images her mind conjured, not to deny their possibility. "All right. You can talk to the kids, but only for a while—they have to get ready for lunch with their daddy.”

"Thank you.”

She called them over.

"OK, you guys, this is Harper and she wants to talk to you for a bit. Are you OK with that?”

They looked at her, squirming with impatience, and nodded. "Uh-huh," they chorused.

"Okey-dokey. Harper, this is Ethan, Hannah, and Dylan," she explained, pointing to each in turn. They looked at me with varying emotion. Ethan was suspicious, Hannah bored, and Dylan confused.

"Hi," I started, bending down to their level. I felt like an awkward giant in their presence, since none of them was even five feet tall yet.

They seemed like miniatures to me—I was sure they'd seem bigger up close. "Umm… I know you have a friend—a special friend—that other people can't see, and I wanted to ask you about her.”

"Him!" Ethan insisted.

"Is not!" Hannah hissed back. She looked at me with clear, earnest eyes. "Our ghost is a girl.”

"Is not!" Ethan fired back. "He's a boy.”

"Oh, boy," I sighed. "Hey, can we go sit down on the swings? I feel like a frog bent over like this.”

Dylan laughed. "You don't look like a froggy. You look like a monkey.”

"Well, then. . maybe we should sit on the monkey bars," I suggested.

"Not monkey bars. It's a jungle gym," Ethan corrected. The pontificator of the family.

I straightened up. "Jungle's a good place for a monkey, too, I guess. How 'bout we go there?”

I glanced at Patricia for approval. She shrugged and made a bitter smile. "All yours, lady.”

Hannah and Dylan grabbed my hands and dragged me to the jungle gym. I saw only the thinnest collection of yellow energy hanging about and wondered if this was a wild-goose chase.

Once we were at the jungle gym things changed fast.

Hannah told me to sit on a swing while Dylan and Ethan climbed up to the top of the slide.

"Celia is so a girl," she whispered to me. "Stupid Ethan.”

"How do you know?”

"I can see her. She's right over there, right now." She pointed to the shadowed end of the yard where a cataract of greenery hung down near the ground. As I tracked her finger, the haze of threads firmed and grew into a column of pale yellow, pierced with bright shards of time. It had come to her call, though it was only a very small version of the thing that had stormed through room twelve on Wednesday. I'd guessed right: it was diminished by use and probably recharging, since it made no move against me.

"OK, I see her, but she just looks like a blob to me," I admitted.

"It's hard to tell. She's kind of shy." Hannah shrugged.

The boys came down the slide with a ruckus and tumbled into the bark chips at our feet.

"Hey," I said. "Can you see your friend and show her—him—to me:

Both the boys pointed to the same yellow haze. "There," said Ethan.

"OK. When you play with your friend, do you have to do anything special?" I prayed they were articulate children and could explain their games.

Ethan snorted. "Duh! You have to open the doors. Then you can go in the ghost land.”

I felt dizzy and was glad I was sitting. The ghost land. They didn't really… go into the Grey, did they? "Oh. I'm sorry. I don't understand. I don't see any doors. Can you show me how to open the doors? I'd like to talk to your friend, too." It was hard not to sound like a moron and talk down to them. I was sure I wasn't doing this right, but I was trying. And hating it.

Ethan made a dramatic shrug of disgust and turned toward Celia.

"Come on," I urged the other kids, "you guys, too. Hannah. Dylan. Show me how. I'm a stupid monkey, remember?”

Dylan giggled. Hannah and Dylan joined their older brother and I faded down into the Grey. I could hear Patricia's slight gasp behind us and I prayed she'd stay out of it. I was doing this far too often, but it appeared I would have to do it a few more times. I'd have to break the habit when this miserable case was over.

The shifting cloud-world of the Grey was uncannily empty—the building rested in a hole dug from the cliff edge and little history existed here. The kids didn't have a presence so much as an impression; they made odd child-shaped holes in the fabric of the mist, limned in bright energy that fluttered through the spectrum as I watched. As I stared at them, the kids shifted and turned a bit sideways, moving their hands vertically up and then horizontally across. Where their hands disturbed the mist, a bright line appeared that resolved into a door shape. I felt sick. It was a doorway, just like the doors of dragon smoke and light I'd seen when I first came in contact with the Grey. The kids had called up a door. They'd turned sideways to it first. . looking at it from the corners of their eyes, just as I'd had to do, in the beginning. "Were they all little Greywalkers? Was it possible? They stepped through their door. But they still didn't have a presence in the Grey. What the hell was going on?

I sank down lower, to where the hot grid of the Grey became visible through the mist. The children looked like dark blotches now, standing on a tilting floor of mist.

As I stared at the structures around them, I saw that the Grey was full of layers just as the Danzigers had said, fluid things, like thermo-clines in the ocean, yet cutting through one another like rock strata. The kids were standing on one and Celia's weird yellow tangle on another. They moved toward the poltergeist, edging sideways, pushing with their hands and shoulders, slipping in between the layers and sliding on to new ones. I was dismayed at their approach—not much different than what I'd tried to do with Mara. But it didn't seem so hard for them. What were they doing that was different than what I'd done at the Danzigers'? They seemed to slip right onto the layers. .

Slipping. Moving sideways. It was always easier to see the Grey sideways. Mara had always referred to my sudden unexpected jolts into the Grey as "slipping" — a sort of sideways movement. That's what I'd done wrong: I'd tried to go at it forward, straight on. And the time layers had been there, but they'd been stiff and heavy. But I didn't need to move them. I just needed to slide onto them. Sideways!

Carlos had said that time would feel to me like rocks in a stream— eddies in a current. I put out my hand, into the Grey, toward the stacked and tilted layers of time. . and felt ripples, corrugations and fluttering edges. Standing sideways to them, I ran my hand along the stacks of ripples and they fanned like cards, flashing snapshots of time. I put my hand on one and pushed a little, just like tilting the table with Ben.

And I was in, sliding into time. I found the right layer—the one with a pale yellow edge the same color as Celia—and slid onto it, stalking toward the poltergeist and the children across the ghostly playground. Strange prickling sensations grated against my skin when I got close to Celia.

The bright, gleaming shards that hung in the structure of the entity shivered and rang like wind chimes. Looking at them was disorienting— the surfaces seemed solid, yet contained a baffling twist that came back on itself without end. I could see the children playing near those fragments, darting through Celia's web of energy like those fish that swim unharmed through the stinging tentacles of sea anemones. The thin yellow strands that fed the entity spun out for a distance until they broke off in sudden dark slabs of immovable space—the walls of the towers that were sunk around us into the timeless cliff. I could follow one thread with my eyes back to Patricia, who stood looking anxious beyond the heavy mist between herself and me. I could also see my own thin thread running into the mess that was Celia.

I moved a little closer and the entity recoiled from me, as if it knew I meant it harm. With a sudden rush of red and a blast of heat, it vanished. We all tumbled back, landing hard in the bark of the play yard by the jungle gym. I just lay on my back for a moment while the kids giggled and picked themselves up.

Patricia rushed toward us. "Are you guys all right? Did you fall?" "We're fine, Mommy," Hannah said. The boys were gruffer in their reassurance.

Patricia couldn't seem to decide what tone to take with me. She scowled, but didn't say anything.

I picked myself up, dusting off wood chips and shaking them out of my hair.

"Well?" Patricia demanded. "Did you get what you wanted?”

"Yes," I answered. I was a little out of breath and felt a touch shaky.

"Is it Mark?”

"Huh?" It took a moment for me to put the comment into context. "No, I'm sure it's not, but I'm not a medium, so—”

"You're not? But you—" She cut herself off and her expression grew a bit alarmed.

"I what?" I asked.

"You… I don't know. I thought you were the ghost for a minute.”

Well, that answered a question, of sorts.

"No, I'm no ghost," I said, smiling at the idea. I looked down at the kids who had lined up by their mother. "Thanks, you guys. That was really helpful.”

Hannah and Dylan smiled. Ethan frowned. "You made him go away.”

"Maybe. Sometimes they just go away on their own," I replied. I wasn't sure how I knew that. Guessing? Or dredging something up from memories I'd buried a long time ago?

Ethan would have said something more if his mother hadn't given him a swat on the backside. "Don't be rude. Now head upstairs. Go see Daddy!”

The kids scampered toward the elevator.

Patricia looked at me with a spooked expression.

"Do you need a lift to the funeral?" I asked.

She took a step back from me. "No. I'm not going. I can't get a babysitter and I can't just leave them with their father." She shook her head and kept backing. "And I don't want to see you here again. I don't want you near my kids again." Then she turned and bolted after her children, catching up to them and pushing them toward the elevator, fear boiling off her in anxious orange clouds.

As she ran away, I could see her strand of yellow energy turn a dull ash color, knotting on itself and vanishing through the buildings toward wherever Celia had fled. Before the elevator doors closed between us, it snapped and fell away like a burned branch collapsing into broken coals and cinders.

I let myself out, heading back for my office, and found myself laughing, aching gusts of amusement that brought tears to my eyes. If Patricia could have seen me, I imagined it would have confirmed her apparent opinion of my threat level.

Now I knew how this Grey time thing worked, but I needed an area with more history and mess to practice in. I could think of no place better suited than the messy historic district. And no one would be too surprised by a person acting a bit odd there; I'd have plenty of company.

Back in Pioneer Square, I saw what I'd expected to see: the Grey, streaked with glimmering layers of history, sheet-thin sections of time riven with sudden cracks and upheavals like sedimentary rocks pitched to the surface by a massive earthquake. Knowing what to look for and how deep into the Grey, I could spot tracks, shards, and loops of time scattered and strewn over the broken landscape of the Grey, each disordered slice or spire spinning out a ghost image or a pall of sensation. When I moved near them I felt the same prickling on my skin I'd felt near Celia, rather like the feeling of shaving with a dulled razor.

It was noon on a Saturday and Pioneer Square was moderately busy with locals. I was destined to look like a freak of some kind with this experiment, so I didn't worry about which kind. I turned in at the alley near my office building. Sinking into the Grey, I moved near one of the zones of heavy time striation and ran my hand along what seemed to be the edge. I felt it prickle and rime a cold flutter against my palm.

Back when I first met the Danzigers, Albert had led me through a tunnel open only in another time. I had done it by accident then. I could do it again on purpose. I didn't try to push them this time; I just nudged the layers of time sideways, letting them tip and looking at them as they slid over each other, flickering silver images of history in the cold mist and hot neon of the Grey. When I found one that looked empty and different, I concentrated on holding it and let myself slip.

The sickening pitch of sudden movement through the Grey made me retch. I hadn't experienced that sensation in quite a while and I didn't like the reminder. With an abrupt jerk, I staggered to a stop— though I hadn't moved in space. Swallowing back a rush of bile, I looked around. The soft orange of my office building's terra-cotta walls was gone and a building of wood and shingle stood in its place. Across the brick street another wooden building bustled with business where my parking garage normally stood. I stepped to the door that led to the nearest building and tried to open it. It resisted my efforts and I had to concentrate very hard on moving it. At last, it swung aside and I went through.

It was difficult to do anything in this shadow of the past. Everything resisted my attempts to move it—Carlos had said the past resisted bending. I found it easier to wait for someone else to open a door and slide through behind the oblivious memory of the person than to try and wrestle the doors myself. The shades demonstrated a wide range of consciousness. Some saw me and treated me as if I were like them; others didn't see me at all. A very small handful saw me, but seemed aloof or upset by my presence, and some of those tried to talk to me or touch me. I shook them off and looked for a way out of this plane of time—this temporacline?

It was much harder to spot the layers and shards of time from inside one but I caught the cold eddy of one's edge and tilted it, sliding again toward something. I felt several forces tugging at me, like currents, and headed for the strongest, jolting back to the alley behind my building and out of the Grey. That wasn't quite what Id wanted, so I tried again, sinking into the Grey, searching for the corrugated ripples of time planes. Again I found them, but I studied them more this time, looking for something specific.

I finally found one with no building in front of me and pushed it aside, then slid with the same sickening sensation of vertigo. This time, mudflats dropped away beneath me and for a moment I hung in the air at the street level of my own time. A sense of panic rescued me and I scrambled back to a more built-up time. I didn't want to risk falling to the original mudflats and then trying to reemerge in a building that sat twelve feet higher. But I stayed in the Grey this time. No sudden dump back into the normal.

At last I pushed it back and leaned against the alley wall, catching my breath. I felt as if I'd just completed a heavy workout. Glancing at my watch, I cursed. I had twenty minutes to get to Lake View Cemetery.