Possession

THREE

As he’d expected, Quinton had not come home and I slept alone and got up in a strange mood, as if I’d been emotionally disconnected from the world and was floating along waiting for some feeling to rush into the void. Outside, Seattle was experiencing the usual “June gloom” of weird overcast that would give way late in the day to cool sunshine until the clouds slid back in for the night, the pattern seeming unbreakable even on the last day of the month. It made my city seem a little detached from the rest of the country, as if it just couldn’t make up its mind about summer.

When I reached the Goss house and Lily had escorted me back up to the former master bedroom, I saw that, once again, Julianne was painting. Lily left me to go and sit by her side. She seemed to have as little interest in Stymak and me as Julianne did at that moment. Stymak was doing something with his digital recorder at the white table again and no nurse was in evidence. I’d been left momentarily alone just inside the room’s double doors. I took the chance to look the room over, since there seemed to be no threat of flying blobs at the moment, and see what I’d missed the first time.

I started with Julianne’s latest painting on the easel—a rough cliff with some kind of low, rambling building along the top. The strokes were soft and yet precise, in spite of the speed with which they were being made. I almost recognized the place, but not quite. It didn’t look like a modern location; it looked more like something old and almost forgotten. I turned aside and surveyed the next piece, which was leaning against the wall nearby: a huge, rugged mountain of sharp sandstone-colored bluffs and smoky shadows rearing up against a lowering charcoal sky—draped in soft white scarves of cloud—from a foggy forest of tiny pines that clustered at its foot like anxious pets. My breath caught in my throat as I studied it. I didn’t exactly recognize this scene, either, but for a different reason—this one didn’t seem to be a real place so much as one that recalled real Washington places; it was strange and familiar and powerful, glistening with paint still wet a day later and the threads of some passing ghost form that had caught and lingered in the moisture. I turned slowly around to look at the other paintings in the room—most hung on the walls around the main doors and leading toward the bathroom, others just leaned against the wall. Dozens of paintings.

They were not the same. Some shared a similar style, but the rest varied as widely as an art school exhibition. There were some with strong colors and blocky forms; others were almost photo-realistic in their detail, picked out in clear shafts of sunlight and minuscule brushwork. Still others were more like sketches, lines of color roughly brushed to create just a shape or suggestion of a scene. This could not be the work of a single person—certainly not a bedridden, nonresponsive woman with the muscle tone of a limp towel. And over and over, the same scenes: the cliff, the mountain, a long beach of rock-strewn sand bordered by soaring pines in shades of green and gray marching up steep slopes to higher ground.

And all around the bed pressed a susurrant surge of spirits, like flotsam circling round and round the center of a maelstrom, drawn to the way out but unable to escape. I’d seen ghosts pulled to an object before, but I’d never seen this sort of expression. If I stared very hard, making my injured eye water, I could perceive among the dark shapes and writhing scribbles of energy individual ghosts reaching toward Julianne, or bending down to whisper into her ears and being swept aside again as the next moved closer. They kept circling, whispering, reaching. . . .

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” I said.

“Automatic painting,” Stymak said. “Like automatic writing. The spirit is channeled through the subject’s body and produces the work independent of the channel’s abilities, often while they are unconscious or in a trance state. Though I’ve never heard of anything on this scale.”

His voice jarred me out of my staring and I turned to him, letting my gaze pull back toward normal, though the Grey vision lingered, shading the room in silver and smoke. “Nor have I, though I do know what automatic painting is, Stymak—but you knew that, since you say you talk to ghosts.”

Stymak glanced away for a moment before he looked straight into my eyes. “I don’t quite hear the dead—I certainly don’t talk to them. I feel them, really. I can’t say I see them so much as I experience their presence. They whisper to me and I know they’re here.”

“You can get information from ghosts that aren’t in your immediate area?” I had a rusty memory of being told that mediums somehow talked to ghosts in the Grey in such a way that they didn’t have to be in the same literal space, unlike me.

Stymak nodded. “They compelled me here a few weeks ago and I met Lily and I saw Julianne and I knew the ghosts were here, that they are trying to tell us something through Julianne, but I can’t understand what it is they’re trying to communicate this time.”

“Why not?”

He shook his head. “It’s too loud. It’s like . . . there are a hundred people in a tiny room, all shouting different things at the same time. They press in and they recede again like a furious tide, but I can’t sort them out. It’s like trying to catch a fistful of seawater and separate a single molecule of salt. It’s an allegory, but it’s real. I can’t make it any more clear than that. Not to myself, and probably not to you, either. But you know what I mean. They indicate you do.”

“They? The ghosts?” I cast a glance back at them, clustering around the bed, but they didn’t seem to pay us any attention.

“Well, the ones that can hold a thought together at least. Your identity is like a thin, clear current in the river of their babble. It was hard to pick out at first, but I finally got it and when I got here and experienced the turmoil around Julianne, I thought I should mention you to Lily.”

“You mentioned me to Lily? She said she heard about me through Phoebe Mason.”

“The owner of Old Possum’s?” Stymak asked. “Yes. See, I didn’t have your name or know where to find you. I only knew who you were to the ghosts. They knew that you and Lily both knew this bookstore owner—”

“Phoebe.”

Stymak nodded. “All right: Phoebe. They let me know the connection, so I told Lily to ask Phoebe about you. And that’s how it works for me—strings of connections and associations and ideas, but not anything as easy as a voice saying ‘Hey, stupid, go talk to this lady at this address.’ Ghosts are kind of slippery and obscure most of the time, but I’ve learned how to be patient and put it together. Sort of decode them, I guess you could say.”

“But you haven’t decoded what’s going on with Julianne.”

“Oh, I have. But I don’t know why, or what they’re trying to tell us.”

“Have they let you know there are others?”

“Others like Julianne? Unconscious channels? I’m not sure. . . . The information I’ve been gifted with is confusing at best and . . . very noisy.”

“I’m given to believe it’s true. Can you confirm it with your ghosts?”

“Can’t you?”

“I haven’t tried yet.”

“You haven’t tried,” Stymak echoed, incredulous and staring as if he’d never seen so odd a fish as me. “What sort of medium are you? I mean, I don’t have a choice about hearing them. They’re in my head, like pieces of my own mind. I can’t not try because I don’t try to begin with.”

I had experienced the inability to tune out Grey voices for a while and it had nearly driven me insane, but I’d died again and the phenomenon had ceased—I was grateful for that, especially since the voices I’d heard had been part of the Grey itself, not just ghosts. “I’m not a medium,” I said, shivering at the idea of going through that all the time. “I’m more of a . . . fixer. I work out problems between the normal and the paranormal.” Stymak nodded while frowning as if he wasn’t sure he saw the distinction. “My contact with the paranormal is less mental and more physical than yours,” I explained, but I had the impression he didn’t understand that any better.

“I’m sure we all experience it differently,” he said.

Of that I was certain, but there was no point in saying so. I glanced around and noticed that Lily was watching our conversation from the corner of her eye as she looked after Julianne—who had stopped painting once again and lain back down. The ghosts had ceased circling the bed and seemed to be moving back, separating, and loosening their bonds to float out and fill the whole room in drifting clouds.

“There,” Stymak said. “The ghosts are moving. It’s like their attention is changing. Now might be a good time to try and talk to them, before they wander off.”

A dark form pushed forward to hover over Julianne, cutting off most of the other spirits. A few of the more self-aware ghosts did seem to be drifting away, as if they were tired of waiting and had decided to go elsewhere, but the repeaters and the barely-there lingered, stuck or unable to leave and moving neither toward the bed nor away from it. They wouldn’t be much help.

“Do you want to give it a go together?” Stymak asked.

I was eager to see how Stymak operated—and if he was for real or was just jerking my chain. Not to mention, we’d get more information from the stronger ghosts, who were now starting to pull away. “Sure,” I said. “How do you do this?”

“I usually just close my eyes and concentrate on drawing them to me and when they get close enough, I guess we ‘talk,’ though it’s not talking really. What do you do?”

“Kind of similar, except I go to them.”

“I’m not sure how that would work.”

“How ’bout you take my hand and we’ll see what we can do.”

Stymak frowned as if he wasn’t sure of my sincerity, but he moved closer and put out his right hand. I gave him my left and took a deep breath, waiting for him to close his eyes and do whatever he did.

I let the Grey sight flood over my normal vision as I slipped a bit closer to the land of ghosts, watching Stymak. The distant buzzing, muttering sound of the Grey swelled and, with a jolt of unpleasant surprise, I could hear voices. I hadn’t heard voices in the Grey in quite a while and I didn’t like the episode they reminded me of, but these weren’t quite the same and after a moment’s panic I settled myself down and let whatever was happening come to us.

Which was just what it did. The ghosts gathered around Julianne’s bed and some of the stronger ones that had started drifting away turned toward Stymak, fixing us in dead gazes. The voices grew louder.

I slid down lower into the Grey, looking for the brightness of the energy grid of magic and finding it suddenly in a swarm of color and silver ghostlight. A bright rope of twined blue and gold energy spun out from Richard Stymak’s bright white shape beside me. I’d never seen a living person with a pure white aura before and I wasn’t sure what it meant. I watched the rope weave and wave, luring the ghosts toward it, toward Stymak, while a crystalline voice nearest me—Stymak’s, I realized, though it sounded different here—called softly, “Hello, hello, I’m here. Come here. Hello . . .”

Three ghosts moved toward him, slowly at first, then rushing as if each wanted to be the first to arrive. Far away I heard a strained voice whispering, “Go away,” and the rattling, distant roar of the Guardian Beast. That particular monster that patrolled the borders of the Grey wasn’t coming closer, but I suspected it knew we were here. It’s an uncanny and unpredictable beast and, for lack of a better description, it’s my boss in the Grey, so I wasn’t sure if its attentive distance gave me comfort or scared the hell out of me.

The first of the ghosts, a coal gray form with a midnight face, its energy a tangle of fading blue light and dim red points, pushed against Stymak, brushing against me and leaving a scent of burned flesh in its wake. I shuddered at the smell and the strange sensation of jagged bones poking into my skin as if I’d embraced a fractured skeleton. It made a keening sound as the other two rushed up, pressing close to Stymak and jostling for his attention.

The three ghosts babbled in a squealing cacophony that set the rest of the ghosts to howling and jabbering like a mad chorus behind them. I tried to listen, but the words were a jumble, diced into useless sounds.

“One at a time, please,” Stymak said, panting. That at least was understandable, though I still wasn’t used to the violin-sharp clarity of his Grey voice.

The ghosts didn’t listen but continued to push and shove to get his attention, chattering incomprehensibly. I heard Stymak grunt as the darkest one of them shoved unusually hard, rocking him. Stymak’s energy dimmed and took on a greenish tone. “Stop! One at a time!” he said, sounding distressed.

I snatched at the pushing spirit and crooked my fingers in its tangled energy, pulling it away from Stymak. “Back off, jerk,” I hissed at it, giving it a shake. Flame flashed up my arm and I felt a jolt as the ghost fought back, then faded to a dim shape.

“Someel otsu vagueish . . .” it muttered, crumbling into black ash and blowing away in the swirling of the Grey, not destroyed but exhausted for the time being.

“What?”

But that ghost was gone and another one had pushed itself up to Stymak, talking so low and fast I could barely hear it as more than a chatter of teeth and a clatter of consonants. The last of the three ghosts had something more like a recognizable human face and form over the knot of pale blue energy at its core. It whispered and hissed with the other, the sounds of their voices harmonizing with each other and mixing with the background chorus of ghosts in a quavering dissonance that almost brought sense to the noise, but not quite. I could feel it, like pressure waves, trying to fall into a recognizable pattern but never quite matching up.

I let go of Stymak’s hand and reached for the two ghosts. The Grey wavered and shimmered, then realigned itself with a jolt. Stymak shivered, shedding his brightness for a moment before it flared back, not so bright as before but without the green tinge. “Who else is like Julianne?” His voice sang on the Grey.

The ghost chorus replied. “Jorvin. Stermar. Kadon. Derling.” Stymak shuddered, but I resisted touching him again. I brushed my tentative fingers against the ghosts and they flushed with a fleeting spectrum of color, whining like an ancient crystal radio. With a sudden pop, the ghosts sang back: “Kevin Sterling. Jordan Delamar. Sterling. Delamar. Delamar. Sterling. Kevin. Jordan . . .”

The ghost voices faded as the two primary singers slid away from Stymak, back toward Julianne again.

In the Grey I saw the dim form in the bed flare into color. The ghosts rushed toward her, swirling again into their desperate, dancing gyre.

I pushed away from the Grey, coming back into the normal as much as I could. The silver light of the world between still lay over everything in my left eye, but I could see the rest of the room normally. I glanced quickly at Stymak, who looked all right, if a bit pale and shaken, and then toward the bed.

Julianne sat up like a marionette being raised by a careless puppeteer, her limbs oddly flopping as her head lolled. She picked up the brush she had recently put aside and brought it to the wet canvas with strokes so harsh and slashing that they pushed the built-up paint aside and left a smear across the painting: “DelamarSterling.”

Then she fell back onto the bed, the heart and blood pressure monitors blipping faster for a few seconds before they reverted to their usual low, dull murmur. Eva Wrothen rushed into the room—I hadn’t realized she was even in the house and her appearance startled me for a moment. Then I turned to Stymak again.

He was blinking at Julianne. “That’s what the ghosts said.”