Poltergeist

CHAPTER 27

I got lucky and caught a bus up to the cemetery to pick up my truck and retrieve the trap for Celia. I left the Rover questionably parked near the theater and bought myself inside. The lobby was busy with a moving crowd of filmgoers—a few faces seemed almost familiar, but none of them was part of Tuckman's group. I peered through the Grey for Celia, my eyes skipping over mist-shrouded faces.

Flashes of jagged time and paranormal streamers of yellow and red tangled over the crowd, vanishing through the ceiling. Whoever I wanted was upstairs. I shoved my way through the crowd and up the steps. I bolted around several normal people on the landing and pelted on to the top floor and through the staff only door to the attic, following the thickening thread of energy and feeling it pulling on my bones.

There were voices above me and I slowed down, quieting my steps along the edges of the treads. So long as they were talking, no one was killing anyone—I hoped. I swapped the silvered glass jar into my left hand and let my right drift to my back. Pistol still snug in its holster under my jacket, I continued up the stair.

At the top lay a low corridor with two doors—one an inch or so ajar. I didn't have to duck, but I could feel the rough ceiling catching my hair as I sidled along the wall toward that door. I drew close and squinted through the opening.

The room was a storage area full of old equipment. Small, half-height doors on each end probably led to smaller attic spaces full of wiring and pipes. Dust-choked slices of light fell through a louvered ventilator just above Ian's head, leaving pale stripes on the floor in front of Ana's feet. Celia's threads were festooned like thick ropes around the room, clothing Ian in spectral illumination, but I couldn't see the entity itself from my position.

"— stupid little slant-eyed bitch," Ian hissed.

"Shut up! Just shut up, Ian!" Ana yelled. "You tell me where you got these!”

She flung a shiny object at him. It jangled to the floor in a sprawl of bright brass, steel, and black plastic.

"Those are Mark's keys. Where did you get them?" Ana demanded, her voice rising in hysteria.

In the mote of light I could just pick out the tubular shape of the bike lock key.

"You want to know?" Ian asked, his face going feral and calculating. "Then come real, real close and I'll whisper in your ear. We'll cuddle up like we used to and I'll tell you everything you want to hear.”

Ana clamped her jaw tight, starting to lean forward.

I could feel the pressure of Celia's presence crush against me and the room flickered red to my eyes.

I shoved through the door.

Airless, sweltering, the room blazed in hot colors and thick coils of Grey energy. Ian and Ana both jerked their heads toward me. I could see a red line, flaring and thick as an ancient python, pulsing from Ian's body. Ana's own yellow thread was spindling away, drawing her, helpless, toward him.

I rushed to her and shoved her out of the room. "Run," I ordered, slamming the door. Then I turned back to Ian. It would be useless, but I drew the gun anyway, hoping Ian would choose to concentrate on the apparent and immediate threat, rather than on his ex-girlfriend. The press of Celia's power pulled back as if the entity were surprised. I knew it was Ian's surprise, but the feeling was eerie nonetheless.

"How 'bout you tell me where you got those keys," I invited. "But I think I'll stay right here—you don't look so cuddly to me.”

His eyes locked on the gun for a moment, then shifted back up to me. There was a quiver of tense uncertainty in the air between us. "You. . you stupid, stupid bitch.”

"You're awfully fond of that phrase. Tell me about the keys.”

"Fuck you.”

I laughed. "Heck of a vocabulary you have, Ian. With that sort of charm, I guess you figured Ana'd come crawling back to you.”

"She did!”

"Didn't look that way to me.”

"I'd have gotten her back. Her and that half-breed bastard.”

"Wrong kind of Indian," I needled.

"Shut up! You don't know what you're messing with. I can hurt you without even touching you! I can take them out the same way." I could almost see him calculating his chance of launching Celia against me versus the risk of a bullet.

"Like you took out Mark?" I asked, drawing on his vanity—hoping his desire to brag would hold him back a moment.

Viciousness dripped from his voice. "He deserved it! I didn't even know I could do it, but it was easy. How could Cara want him when he was faking things I could do for real? He didn't deserve her!”

"And you killed him because Mark had what you couldn't get. What, did you see him with Cara? Or did you follow her to his place?" I heard something moving with stealth toward the door. I had to draw Celia away from whoever gathered their strength there.

Ian ranted on. "She acted like a whore," he spat. "She told me off, but I followed her. When I saw her come out, I was angry and it was so easy! He was a liar and a cheat and it was easy to crush him. And it felt so good—like breaking something you've always hated. I just wanted him dead and he was dead. And it'll be the same with that slut and her fuck toy!”

Ragged instants of memory flared as he screamed at me: wrenching impressions of creatures suffering; the green snap of bone; the powdery smash of plaster and a wash of blood; unholy thrill reflected in a dying eye.

My hand tensed around the pistol grips and I felt the HK's cocking lever compress the spring to the limit. A desire to squeeze the trigger and wipe out the source of those images fought with my urge to puke. But I only looked at Ian and raised a cynical eyebrow.

He glared at me, his stare blazing, his whole form seeming engulfed in flames and fury. The presence of the entity bloomed and expanded at my back, grinding against my spine, teetering on the brink of eruption. I felt flayed and sick with the sudden stink of it—dead things vomited up by the sea to rot on the shore in the reek of half-burned gunpowder.

I laughed at him again. I decocked the pistol and tucked it back into the holster.

"You sad, ridiculous boy. You think you can hurt them with that?" I demanded, jerking my head toward the mass of Celia gathering behind me. "You'll have to come through me first, freak.”

Celia exploded against me as I dove into the Grey I scrambled through the history of the building, finding an open door and dodging through it as heavy boots pounded into the room. Shouts, shots, noise faded into the mist of the Grey as I ran from the unnatural thing behind me.

It howled like Nemesis descending. I stumbled, tumbled, plummeted into void space. . and landed with a jarring thump in something that stank of sewer and boiled with eldritch things. I was somewhere deep in the underlay of Seattle's history. Keeping a hand tight around the ghost-bottle, I clambered back to my feet and ran as fast as the clutching, ravenous mist would let me. I hurtled down a long tunnel of reek and screams.

Celia caught me and buffeted me into an incorporeal wall. My head rang against stone and I slid down into cold. I wondered for an instant what would happen if I died here, but I didn't want to find out and scrabbled away as the entity re-gathered its force.

Its action was sporadic as it stabbed and grabbed at me. I assumed other things distracted Ian's attention or the poltergeist's assault would have been relentless, but Celia was stupid enough to be single-minded even without his direction. It drew back after each attack, then pressed in again. I searched for exits and grabbed the first upward route I spotted, pulling myself without looking through a hole that felt like a mouth lined with raking teeth.

Icy fluid rushed over me and I found myself standing in a culvert of filthy water. An old storm drain. I'd come back up into a more recent time shard. I jumped for the rungs of an access ladder as Celia smashed against my flailing legs, tossing me back down into the water. I rolled to cushion the glass and came up panting and dizzy.

The bloodshot yellow whirlwind of energy and knife-blade time pulled back, a little dimmer and smaller than before. I realized it was losing energy with each sally. But it was still powerful enough to kill me if it got a good chance and until then, it would drain my energy with every assault. I held the flask out and ran at it, hoping to catch it, but it slewed up and vanished into a fold of history.

I took the opportunity to climb to the surface and out a manhole.

I tumbled into the path of a beer wagon. I dodged out of its way, skidding onto the sidewalk to be cut through by the heedless ghosts of long-dead pedestrians. I shuddered as they passed through me and my legs went weak. Celia hadn't reappeared yet and I was grateful for that.

I kept my feet and caught my breath, staring around, looking for a sign of the time or the place. I couldn't recognize the location. A massive building rose to my right and below me was a steep hill cut with streets of narrow, Victorian row houses, more like something from San Francisco than Seattle. I stared at the large building beside me on the crown of the hill. It was a massive structure, five or six stories with gabled roofs and corner turrets. There was a bell tower sort of thing in the middle of the main wall and a sign—

Celia smashed into me from behind, but with nothing to crush me against, I flew forward, curling myself into a ball around the precious ghost-bottle and somersaulting into the base of the building—which felt as solid and hard as anything I'd ever fallen against in the normal world. I peeled my eyes open, feeling the container still whole against my chest and belly.

Now I could read the sign. Washington Hotel. I'd never heard of a Washington Hotel, and this corner, towering over the Sound, wasn't familiar at all. The cornerstone near my head had a list of names, among them Arthur Denny.

I shook myself and got to my feet, rubber-legged. This was the old Denny Hotel. On Denny Hill. The hill washed away by R. H. Thomson during the Denny Regrade.

Now I knew where I was, the Pacific Place Mall somewhere deep in the historyless soil beneath me, and knew how I might trap the entity and force it into the flask. I began staggering down the ghost hill, feeling for a slot in the sediment of time. I could hear Celia shrieking and buzzing as it came on.

The edge of history fluttered under my groping right hand. I riffled through the knife-sharp edges of memory, pushing and scrambling for the harsh light of my own time. When it canted up like a whale broaching, I heaved myself onto it, careening through the Grey to be spit out into the normal.

I fell a few feet onto hard cement steps, keeping the bottle intact at the expense of my own limbs. Something wrenched in my left knee and shoulder as I landed on the upper steps of the Convention Center transit station. A scruffy kid with a long skateboard and two days' worth of unshaven barbed-wire beard grabbed my right elbow and helped me back to my feet.

"Oh, man, that was a real header! You OK, lady?”

"Yeah, yeah," I panted.

I took off before he could say more, feeling a hot stab in my left knee with every jolting, pounding step. I made for the corner of Seventh and Pine, just a couple of blocks west.

Four on a Saturday afternoon. Traffic was heavy, but slow enough for me to barge through. I could feel Celia's pressure against my back the whole time, but the entity was growing as tired as I, and I managed to stay ahead—I had more to lose.

A clerk in the upper lobby of the Barnes & Noble yelled at me to slow down as I rocketed through the doors and down the escalator. I didn't have the breath to tell him I'd only be a minute or I'd be dead. I slalomed through the crowd and back to the deep cell-signal death zone where science fiction shared space with romance novels.

A whey-faced teenager with long, lank hair squatted on the floor reading English-translation manga when I skittered to a halt at the end of the freestanding shelves that faced the book-lined basement walls. I backed myself up against the romance novels, facing the hard corner of SF. The shelf shuddered and rocked against my spine. My chest heaved and my throat felt raw and lined with corroded brass. There was no history to cut through here. Celia would have to play on my turf and come down the aisle just like a human.

The hot yellow knot of energy whipped around the corner and slammed down hard enough to shake the stacks. I didn't have the energy to taunt it. I pointed the open neck of the silvered vessel at it and braced.

It rushed. I tipped the bottle. One edge of the mass caught on the silvered glass and the thing smacked me hard on the side as it was whipped around like a leaf caught in a vortex and sucked into the trap. I snatched the stopper from my pocket and slammed it home.

I slumped to the floor against the corner of the shelf, a small cascade of novels pattering to the floor around me. The kid with the manga stared at me, gaping.

"What?" I asked. She shook her head.

From my other side a voice said, "Miss. I'm going to have to ask you to leave now.”

I looked up into the clean-shaven face of a security guard.

"OK," I replied. "I'm ready to go now. Can you give me a hand?”

He seemed a little confused, but put out a hand and helped me back to my feet. He appraised me, his eyebrows in a quizzical W. "What. . what happened to you?" he asked, leading me toward the downstairs doors.

I limped forward, my knee and shoulder throbbing. "I was hit by a car," I lied. I wasn't going to say I'd been smacked with a fake poltergeist.

His expression escalated to terrified. "Oh, no! Do you want to sit down?”

"No. No, I'll be all right. Just get me out of here." He escorted me all the way onto the street, leaving me under the mall's Pine Street portico. A dirt-crusted man with a hand-lettered sign harangued the automotive traffic against trusting the police or a certain apartment manager while a combo of electric violin and ordinary sax played jazz to a grinning bulldog.