Poltergeist

CHAPTER 32

I had parked the Rover on Jackson and started on foot into the real heart of Chinatown. The thin yellow strand in front of me pointed mostly south and a bit east. I came down Maynard, past the red-and-yellow painted front of the Wing Luke Asian Museum, to Hing Hay Park on the corner of King Street. This short stretch of King, from the railroad terminals at Fourth to the current freeway overpass that soared over the remains of Ninth, was the place the Chinese had resettled after the Seattle Fire and the end of the Exclusion Act. The whole stretch of buildings ahead and to the east had been built by Chinese businessmen between 1890 and 1930.1 paused a moment to get my bearings and watched a troupe of kids—black, brown, and yellow, wearing Halloween masks—playing on the wet, rust-colored bricks of the park, ducking in and out of the red-pillared pavilion, to the annoyance of a couple of old men playing checkers on the stone tables inside. I heard the kids whoop and chatter, skipping away as the men waved impatient hands at them. Teenagers and young men grown too old too fast gathered in clutches around the benches and stone tables at the edge of the park, talking trash in half a dozen languages.

The stores and restaurants—shabby, but proud—were busy with the Sunday dim sum crowd. Visiting Caucasians goggled along the streets, standing out, pale in the mixed throng, to the China Gate, Four Seas, Sun Ya; ducked into Pink Godzilla for Japanese video games; carried tinted bakery boxes or bags from Uwajimaya and the Kinokuniya bookstore bulging with imported food and manga, or clever bribes for the evening's invasion of trick-or-treaters. The odor of food and fortune cookies, garbage and wet asphalt mingled with the sounds of Sunday chatter and random music in snatches from every opening door.

I checked the compass-like thread of Grey.

Ana and her parents lived a block to the southwest, as the crow flies, but the thin strand of yellow pointed southeast. I went east along King and stopped again on the next corner.

Now the strand looped around and pointed back toward May-nard. I turned, looking up and down the street. I spotted a narrow alley behind an apartment building. A sign at the mouth of the alley on the south side of King directed traffic to an aquarium and pet store, children welcome it declared.

I started to stroll across the street against the light and drew up short as a blue and white SPD patrol car rolled around the corner from Maynard. I watched the car come toward me, then turn south again onto Seventh, its occupants looking intense and stern.

I crossed the street and strolled back toward the alley, pausing again at the door to an import store beside the pet store sign. I pretended to read the sign on the door as I checked the yellow strand again.

Due south. Ian was down the alley somewhere. I poked my head around the corner. The alley was only half the length of the block on the west side, the far end being a parking lot for one of the restaurants. Only a few back doors opened on the rest. It seemed an unlikely place for a pet store.

I started down the alley. It was just wide enough for a delivery truck to get down and I could see a gouge high up in the green-painted tile on my left from where one hadn't been careful enough. A gold carp wind sock fluttered over the door to the pet shop, flicking a desultory tail over the alley with each gust of food-scented breeze. Silvery shades of Grey flickered in the shadows of padlocked doorways as I walked toward the fish.

From the green wall on my left, a deep doorway with once-impressive double doors—secured with a rusty chain and aging padlock—and a rank of glass brick gave up an unpleasant gleam in shadow. I walked past and entered the pet store.

Pretending interest in a tank of goldfish, I looked down at the Grey tether around my neck. It pointed back toward whatever lay behind those chained doors. I started to sink toward it and felt a ghastly wash of emotions and deadly cold.

"Can I help you?”

I jerked back from the repulsive sensation and turned to face the man behind me. He was slender, about fifty-five to sixty, and wore a faded green bib apron over his clothes. Thick, unfashionable glasses magnified his eyes so he seemed to stare through me.

"I'm just looking," I said.

He inclined his head. "Well, we have lots of fish, lots of aquarium equipment, if you like. I have some new goldfish in the back, some little birds, too. Do you keep fish?”

"No. I have a ferret. I'm afraid she'd eat them.”

"Oh, yes. Curious and hungry. That's the ferret." He started to walk deeper into the narrow little shop, into a half-gloom lit by the glow of the fish tank lights.

I followed him.

"How long has this shop been here?" I asked. "Looks like it's been here forever.”

"Oh. . almost thirty years. Fish and birds are good pets for apartments. Fish are very beautiful." He stopped beside a tank full of brilliantly spotted fish with bulbous bodies and bulging eyes, trailing long fins that floated in the water like the garments of drowned women.

I stopped to admire them. Or try to. They floated, serene, then swam in sudden, wiggling bursts: startled fishy geishas flouncing their kimonos. The sign beside them read veiltail demekin. They were very expensive.

I looked up and caught the man studying me.

I smiled. "What's in the shop next door?”

His eyes narrowed and his expression went cold. "Nothing.”

"What used to be there, then?”

He drew back from me, stiff and disapproving. "That was the Wah Mee. A very bad thing happened there.”

"I'm sorry. I didn't know. What bad thing?”

He sighed, shaking his head. "You should let it alone—people here still hurt over it. You should go now—go on. Get out of my shop." He advanced on me, picking up a mop from a nearby bucket.

I hurried out and stopped against the wall farther down the alley. The shopkeeper stood in his doorway and glared at me for a while, then went back inside, closing the door. Now I really wanted to know what had happened behind those padlocked doors. The entity was in there, which meant Ian was in there. I didn't dare walk past the row of glass brick again. If Ian could see out of the scratched, pitted glass, he might recognize me and bolt before I could return with Carlos. I studied the indentation in the wall that formed the recessed doorway. There was another narrow door between it and the aquarium shop-perhaps the back door to the import shop or to the mysterious space itself. I drifted away down the alley to Weller, thinking how I could find out more about the padlocked shop.

I headed toward Sixth on Weller, thinking. The mysterious doors were almost in a straight line with the back of Ana's building, a mere block and a half from the front door. The shop, Ana's home, and my truck's parking spot to the north on Jackson made a near-perfect equilateral triangle. As I walked, distracted with geometry, something crept into my mind.

I'd seen two more patrol cars pass by—one on Maynard, another on Sixth—and been passed by a duo of foot patrolmen. I went into a tea shop on the corner of Sixth and Weller and ordered a cup of bubble tea. Sitting at the bar, facing Sixth, I lingered over the thick, sweet concoction and gazed out the window.

I could see the front of Ana's building from my seat. Another customer—a Filipino man with neatly trimmed hair—read a newspaper and nursed a pot of tea. I took my cup and slipped back outside.

I strolled, looking in shop windows, gazing around like a tourist. I didn't spot Solis, but I guessed he or his partner was nearby. Halloween and Sunday shoppers notwithstanding, there were too many cops and too many people with time to kill loitering near the Fujisaka condominiums. I kept walking and checking for another hour. I stopped in a bakery called Cake House My Favorite and glanced out the floor-to-ceiling windows before I moved on to the hobby shop next to Pink Godzilla to watch the street through the displays of Japanese collectible toys and video game posters. Then I looped back down past Union Station, the Metro stop, and the Asian Antique Emporium on Fifth, back across through the new Uwajimaya Village, and past the Nisei apartments.

The patrols were loose, but the clutches of loiterers were concentrated within a block of the Fujisaka. I suspected there were cameras and telescopes trained on the front door from one of the empty shop spaces in the old Uwajimaya building and from one of the buildings on Maynard. That's what I would have done if I'd been Solis—guard the doors at front and back, put patrols on the street and outlying watchers on the corners, if I could get them. If there had been no other major crimes this week, the detective pool would be available to assist him for a while. Ian's threats against Ana and Ken were only twenty-four hours old and serious enough to warrant attention for a few days. At some point Sous would have to drop the assistants and maintain the surveillance himself, but not yet.

And Ian wasn't likely to wait very long. He had the entity back now, and his fury was still hot enough to make him impetuous. I only hoped he'd wait until after dark to attack. It seemed likely, since the entity was weakened and it made sense to let it recharge a bit. Also, the confusion of costumed children and party-seeking teens would cover any sally Ian might make to view the results. He could sneak out into the open end of the alley and see the back of the Fujisaka building, hear the sirens on Sixth, watch the confounded police emerge from their useless ambush. No one would look his way for a few minutes and he could slip away into one of the half-empty buildings or under the freeway to Little Saigon, a few blocks farther to Rainier Valley or up to First Hill by routes no car could take. If the cops didn't spot him at once, he'd ease into the mess of Seattle's jumbled downtown neighborhoods and vanish.

My knee ached with a low throb, demanding rest and ice. I headed back to my truck.

I looked up the Wah Mee when I got back to my office—I had several hours to kill until dark—and recoiled from the information.

There was a lot of history to the Wah Mee. It had started out as a speakeasy, then been a swanky nightspot when the International District swung all night and hosted some of the biggest names in jazz. By 1983 it had become a little seedier, and was then a private gambling club for local Chinese business owners. The night of February 18, 1983, three young Chinese men had taken fourteen of their neighbors prisoner in the club and robbed and shot them all. Only one survived. "The Wah Mee Massacre" remained the worst mass murder in Washington history. But most people didn't remember it had happened and some, like the pet shop owner, didn't want to be reminded of the community's betrayal by three of its own.

"The bottle is broken and the genie is loosed," Carlos rumbled. His disquiet was infectious, hitting me in cold, black waves. "Unfortunate." Id brought him up to speed as I drove toward Chinatown.

"Yes, it is," I agreed, refusing to apologize. "We'll have to adapt. The good news is that I found Ian—or at least where he's holed up. He's just outside the police surveillance zone, but there are patrols both on foot and in cars. We'll have to move in from the east with care and get through the door fast. There are two doors on the alley. Both are padlocked, but Ian must have gotten through one of them. There used to be a door on King Street, but that area's an import shop now and cut off from the old club. I think I could make my way in, but it's not a route you can take and I'd rather stick together, if we can.”

He continued to growl in the back of his throat for a few moments. "All right. Since you cannot simply decant the entity onto your trap, you'll have to lay the trap and lure it in.”

"This isn't going to be easy, is it?”

"It never was. But this will be riskier initially and our time will be shorter. The police will be curious if we give them cause.”

"Yeah. And the detective in charge knows me on sight.”

"Complicated.”

"We'll just stay out of his sight until we're done. Then you leave and I'll take the fall for the break-in.”

Carlos fell silent for the rest of the drive.

I parked the Rover under the freeway and stopped Carlos before he got out. I handed him a package I'd picked up.

"It's a cape," I said.

He raised an eyebrow at me.

"We have about three blocks to go down a major street with cops patrolling it," I explained. "It's Halloween, so we're going in costume—no one will notice—so I figured, why not dress the part?" I was going out on a rickety limb, but it had seemed like good camouflage at the time.

"I see. And what are you?”

I held up die fluffy ears on their headband. "I'm a cat burglar." I already had the all-black outfit on. I got out of the Rover and put the ears on, then clipped the tail to my belt. I hoped it wouldn't foul my pistol if I needed it. I stowed the spare clip and my cell phone in my jacket pockets and locked the truck.

Carlos's natural menace was not diminished by the cheap polyester cape. Six feet plus of Iberian glower and a palpable badass aura went a long way. I pulled on gloves as we strode down the street toward Ian's hiding place.

Small monsters were parading on the streets amid an upwelling of the unseen. The wet air boiled with ghosts and the world felt slippery beneath my feet. We came to the corner and I stopped, glancing down to be sure the thin yellow strand still pointed into the alley.

"It hasn't moved yet," I muttered to Carlos.

"It will soon. Something is shifting toward death.”

Maybe it was the suggestion, or maybe I caught it, too, but a frisson ran up my spine and the street seemed to ripple. My bones itched. I cast my gaze around, looking for cops, and led the way down the alley when I saw none. Their attention was in front of them, not behind.

We drifted down the darkness to the chained doors. Carlos started to reach for the lock, then drew back. "This is the Wah Mee.”

"Yes," I answered. "You know about it?”

"It drew me here. I can feel them still. The thirteen.”

"And Ian?”

His brows drew down. "Yes. Beyond this wall. He revels in it. He doesn't know what drew him here, but he feels the bloody carnage. He is feeding the entity on the death within.”

His frown became a black storm of anger. I pulled a small fold of the Grey between us, pushing the horror of him back.

"Carlos," I begged in a whisper. "We have to move.”

He touched the chain, sliding his hands down to the crusted padlock. His fingers found a broken link and he lifted the lock away. The defaced and weathered mahogany door pulled open with a thin sigh, as if relieved by our presence.

We eased into the vestibule. The door swung shut. Before us was another pair of doors. Red doors and a sea of heaving Grey. I saw the phantom portal swing open and three shapes rushed out into the night, laughing. Carlos pulled open the real door and we walked into the empty bar, into a maelstrom of unhealed pain and memory.

The curving question-mark bar and dining area were thronged with ghosts. They packed the space, layer upon layer, moving through each other, coming and going up the stairs at the back, through the door behind us. Laughing, talking, the calling of a dealer from the other room, the TV behind the bar flickering images of ancient shows and forgotten news. Then shouting, the sudden screams of a woman. The ghosts thinned, some going on, oblivious, as a confusion of robbery and death played out in front of us through their heedless, vaporous bodies.

"What the hell—?”

I backed away from the consuming images in which I'd been lost and felt a padded rail at my back. I'd wandered into the bar without knowing I'd moved. Through the boil of Grey I saw Ian in the gambling room a step below, through an arch of lucky-red pillars, the floor still stained with twenty-year-old blood where fourteen people had been shot in the head and left to die.

Carlos grinned at him, shedding his cape. "I want to speak to you, boy.”

"Miss Clever Dick and her cop friend," Ian said. "Fuck you.”

Carlos laughed and the world shuddered as he started toward Ian.

The sudden reek of rot and the whirling knives and hot light of the phantasm shot down toward Carlos. He batted it aside and continued, grinning, fangs bared, the whirl of his own bleak darkness spreading like ink in water.

Ian jumped back in the face of the impossible, implacable thing bearing down on him.

I brushed off the cat ears and started in, tripping over a spectral corpse that stared with horrified eyes from a spreading pool of silver blood.

The thing that had been Celia dashed me into one of the pillars. I rolled to the floor, feeling the hot flow of phantom gore over me. I pulled the tangle from my pocket, its thorns prickling into my still-sore hand through my glove.

The entity dove again, blazing bloodred: pure fury and hate now. I slid across the dust-thick floor and tumbled to my feet through an oblivious pair of dancing ghosts, swaying together in incongruous romance among the bleeding images of the dead.

I dropped the tangle onto the dancing ghosts, who swirled into sudden stillness—a faded photograph superimposed on the memory of the night three young men robbed and shot fourteen of their neighbors.

I heard Ian scream and started to look, catching a movement of black out of the corner of my eye.

Then the dervish of hate swept down on me again, howling. And froze in the shade of the dancers buried knee-deep in the horror of murdered bodies.

I wavered.

Carlos roared. "Now, Blaine!”

I dove into the entity, into the knives of time and the barbed wire of Ian's fury woven into it. I slipped and twisted my way through the tesseract of what had been Celia, just as I had run through time and space to elude and capture it, feeling blood in the palm of my glove where the thorns of the tangle had ripped my hand. I slid over frozen lakes of memory and crashed deeper into the structure of power and madness, seeking the center, where the control must lie.

Something was muttering, crooning images of terror."… in the fire, limbs crisped and split. . own living eyes…”

The entity's tectonic plates of memory shifted, sliding and buckling under me, throwing me against the agony of a shred of Mark's death, hanging in the frozen storm like a drop of crystal. The dancers had stopped but the other ghosts had not and they brushed through the suspended entity, disturbing chimes of memory and pain that rang on my own bones.

"… implacable. They crawl beneath your skin…”

That voice; part Ian, part Carlos, speaking nightmares. I shook the sound from my ears, staggering back into the depth of the thing I hoped to destroy.

"… dolls of flesh…”

I buried my hands in the tangle of energy and memory, wrenched at the structure that resisted me, fought as if alive, pulsing in my grip and burning over my nerves. Nausea swamped me as I felt I was tearing some live thing to shreds. I gagged and clutched for support, reeling in the swamp of remembered blood rising from the floor on the tide of unwholesome light. I was lost in the maze of knotted rage that had been Celia, unable to find the core and open it up to be destroyed.

"… drinks your soul and will…”

Desperate, I clutched at my own thin thread and followed it down into the clenched bud of the monster's core. Coiled tight, the heart of the entity looked like a pulsing spiral-rose of blood and fire. Wincing with fear, I clutched the thing and twisted it backward, unwinding the spiral through a writhing curtain of time.

"… eternal…" No, not Ian. Carlos, turning Ian's horrors back on him!

Then the core opened and I stared down into the web of human desire that had formed it. Four broken threads, one more frayed almost through, my own a pale golden color against the yellow and blue weave, shot with ashen gray and warped with Pyrrhic red. The red lines pulsed like arteries, feeding on something, swelling toward an overload of corrupted power as something else fed on the brightness of the life that bound the entity together. White flashes of memory seared my eyes and I tried to turn away.

Images and sensations erupted in my mind: a book tumbled from on high and struck my chest; a whirling brooch sliced into my cheek; a wooden slab rammed into my thigh; a shocked instant—

I tried to rip myself out of the fully flowered heart of the thing— out of the boomerang memories of Ian's cruelty pouring from the collective memory of the entity. I struggled in the net of flooding madness.

A tide of specters washed around the room, crashing against the corner where Carlos stood, muttering over Ian. Nightmares and memories, every eternal terror that ever crawled or clawed through the thoughts of men, he poured into the gaping mind of the young man who shuddered and dwindled at his feet.

"What are you doing?" I gasped. "Stop it!”

Carlos turned a vicious face to mine. "Is he worth your life? Look to the charm!”

I shot a glance down and saw below the shape of murder that the tangle was burning to a circle of ash. Only a small fragment of thorn and vine remained. I threw myself back into the construct s core.

My heart racking, trepid, against my ribs, I grabbed for the blazing center of the vile red core, for Ian's control line. My bleeding hand closed on the power line and the agony of the inferno roared up my arm, spreading through my body. A sad sigh of smoke coiled up and the splayed layers of the entity shrieked as they rushed inward.

I bit down, tasting blood, yanking with all my might as the dancers lurched. Time and memory crashed in and I yelled, plummeting backward, shredded by the flying knives of history whirling outward.

The stained floor slammed into my back, ramming my pistol into my kidney, my shoulder making a grinding sound as I hit. Reality swam in the mist of Grey and near-unconsciousness.

Carlos bent over me. "You're not done." He hauled me to my feet, his touch stabbing me with horrors, and set me before a tangled skein of yellow and blue threads that hung pathetically in the air, wafting in an unfelt breeze as the shooting played out again around us. "Finish the job," he added. "Pluck it out.”

My left arm hung limp from a misshapen shoulder. With my right hand, I pulled the frayed strand of Celia's tether from around my own head and tore it from me. It felt like some horrible weed was drawn from my flesh, its spreading, spidery roots gone deep into my limbs. I stumbled and shied from another touch of Carlos's hands.

I panted and blinked, finding the last pathetic shred of the entity turning in the air as from a gallows. I stuck my good hand into it, pushed, and it fell to pieces. The shower of yellow and blue threads glittered and vanished.

I sank to my knees, looking toward Ian. He was huddled in the corner against a broken table, staring, cloaked in a strange, black haze. His lips moved, but he didn't see anything normal people would see and the words were a gabble of broken thoughts. I hadn't pulled the plug fast enough to save him from the memories of his own actions, the torments he had inflicted on the helpless filtered through Carlos's necromancy and poured back into his mind like poison. He seemed smaller, burned hollow, and I knew I hadn't imagined that Carlos had somehow drawn the living power of the entity through Ian into himself as he drove him mad.

"You bastard," I muttered. My shoulder and knee were throbbing and I had no more energy to express my fury, revulsion, and despair.

He chuckled, the burn scars on his face fading as I watched. "I am. He was not so very hard to break—his mind already teetered on the edge. I only made sure he would fall into chaos, not into power. It's best.”

"When I believe you, I'll let you know," I whispered, swaying. My back blazed pain, my tongue was clumsy in my mouth and I tasted blood from biting it. The world swam in blazing colors and restless silver ghosts.

"Even in victory, you spit like a cat." I felt the rolling disturbance of his amusement. "Formidable creature. Assure yourself this was necessary. It was what had to be for everyone's sake.”

There was some noise from outside. Carlos glanced over his shoulder. "Do you wish to leave here?”

"No," I gasped, falling against the wall and sliding down. "The cops—”

"Are coming." He stood and melted into the darkness.

I was alone with the ghosts. The twenty-year-old memory of robbery and murder played again before my eyes. I waited for the police as I watched the shade of the lone survivor of that bloody night crawl from the room.

Solis found only me and Ian.