Seawitch

NINE

Pleiades was impressive. It shone like its namesake; every inch of paint and trim gleamed. Even in the Grey the big blue sailboat had a sheen to it that exuded a low hum of self-satisfaction. We stood on the finger dock and admired it for a few moments before Solis tried knocking on the hull as he had with Mambo Moon. This time there was no answer except the tiniest of shivers in the Grey. The moment of waiting silence passed and he glanced at me.

I shrugged. “If she’s in there, she’s not going to come out.”

“And we may not board without permission. Do you believe Miss Knight is inside?”

“I don’t think so. But I think she’s probably got some kind of alarm system, so even with permission from the owners, we still wouldn’t catch up to her.”

“If we entered under a warrant, the alarm would be directed to the police. We would already know the situation and ignore the call.”

I shook my head. “That’s not the sort of alarm system I meant.”

He eyed me askance. “You imagine something . . . extra?”

“I’m not imagining anything. I can see it, remember? When you knocked, it sent out waves and I don’t mean in the water. There’s something not normal about that boat.”

Solis stood still and studied me a moment in silence. Then he turned away, saying, “What do you suggest now?”

“I suggest you leave,” answered a voice from the main dock, a strange harmonic vibrating under the tone.

We both looked up. A pretty young woman stood at the beginning of the finger dock with her arms crossed over her chest and glared at us belligerently. She was a dead ringer for Shelly Knight except that her hair was red. I’ve known blondes who dye their hair red to combat brassiness or a tendency to go green from chemicals in water, but this didn’t look like a bottle job: It looked like her hair was alive in some strange way I couldn’t put a finger on that turned it the vibrant red of oxygenated blood. I didn’t dare sink deeper into the Grey right in front of her and everyone who might be looking this way, but even restricting myself to a mere glance, I saw her energy corona as a huge, writhing, barbed tangle of green, blue, and red that stretched out to each side and down toward the dock and the water like a thirsty vine run amok, rustling with the sound of talons on glass.

She narrowed her eyes as Solis produced his badge and ID card and walked toward her. I kept a step behind, letting him partially hide me from her view; I didn’t like the cold, squirming sensation that her scrutiny brought and I’m not always sure how much a paranormal creature can tell about me from a glance, so I preferred she get as short a glance as possible. The fish didn’t seem to like her, either, raising a drumroll of splashes just out of sight. The corner of her mouth twitched in irritation at the sound but she didn’t turn her gaze from us.

“I beg your pardon for the intrusion,” Solis began, drawing closer. “We’re seeking Shelly Knight or any relatives or friends here who may have known her twenty-five to thirty years ago.”

“I don’t know her.”

“Is not your name Knight?”

He didn’t say anything else, just looked at her with that bland, inquiring glance that tricked people into talking just to fill the silence.

“Jacque Knight. Not Shelly.”

“Related?”

“She’s not my mother or whatever it is you imagine.” Her voice swooped like poetry.

“I do not imagine. I only ask, since you bear a striking resemblance.” Knight tossed her head and the coiling strands of her aura flexed and tightened like snakes constricting on prey, throwing off a cloud of gray-green mist. “How lucky for her. Now shove off.”

Solis shrugged and cocked his head slightly. I couldn’t see his expression, but I thought he’d probably raised his eyebrows in an expression that needed only a muttered “meh” to imply her anger was a meaningless inconvenience. He’d pulled it on me often enough. “I apologize for taking your time.” He stepped around her and I followed him, cutting only the swiftest peek at her as we passed. I caught a disconcerting glimpse of something only half-human with hair that reached and coiled the same way as her aura. . . . I shivered, my skin instantly clammy.

A chilly whisper song and an urge to move on and forget I’d ever met Jacque Knight blew over the raised hairs on my arms and neck but I refused to give in to it. And I could tell by his stern posture that Solis wouldn’t, either—which made me frown in thought, pushing the unnatural suggestion out of my mind.

“You feeling . . . disinclined to loiter?” I asked under my breath.

“Yes, but I won’t run.”

We walked along the dock toward the gate in silence and spoke only once we’d stepped out onto the public promenade. We both shivered a little and exchanged uncomfortable glances as the pushy sensation faded.

“You felt that,” I said. “That insistent ‘Get the hell out of here’ sensation.”

“Only the desire to put distance between myself and that young woman—who’s too young to be Shelly Knight,” Solis observed, continuing to stroll along the pavement at an easy stride no longer edged in restraint. So he’d felt it but he didn’t want to discuss it, at least not yet.

I took the hint. “But definitely related, in spite of what she said,” I added, staying on the case. Two women with such similar names couldn’t look so much alike and have no family in common—no matter how distant. But there was the small matter of her aura, which boiled with energy. I’d met plenty of magic users and strange creatures whose power let them live long beyond a single human lifetime—hell, I’d been told I probably would, too, and I would bet my abilities weren’t even a flickering match light compared to Jacque Knight’s, whatever she was. And that, of course, made me wonder more about Shelly. . . .

Solis paused on the walkway and turned to lean against the railing, his back to the docks. “I agree. I shall have to look into her records—and Shelly’s—once I’m back in the office. We’ll have to wait for the log pages so there is no point in pursuing that at this moment. I could put some time in on other cases. . . .”

“If you like. I’m actually slow right now, so this is the only big thing on my agenda; I’d still like to close it as soon as I can, though. So right now I want to take one more look at Seawitch. You don’t have to come along if you prefer to avoid my weirdness. Or, you know, you want to get back to those other cases.”

He turned his head and regarded me with that odd silent glance of his. Then he shrugged. “I prefer not to leave you alone in my crime scene. My other cases can wait a little longer.”

I caught myself starting to laugh at the absurdity of it but I didn’t let it slip out. “All right. Time for act two of the Harper Blaine Creep Show. I should have brought my tap shoes,” I muttered to myself.

Solis accompanied me to Seawitch without any further comment. He was back to inscrutable and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. On the one hand, it was normal for him; on the other, it was so normal, I wasn’t sure whether it was a sign of acceptance or rejection.

As we neared the boat I saw a man standing on the bow of the boat in the slip across from it. He had his hands on his hips as he faced Seawitch. With the sun lowering toward the water ahead of us, it was difficult to see anything but his shape: average height with ropy-looking limbs and a hard hemisphere of belly that defied gravity. The shape of his head in shadow was curiously elongated at the bottom and, as we got closer I saw he had a long ponytail tied low at his neck. It reminded me of Quinton’s now-cropped queue, which hadn’t yet regrown long enough to gather into a proper tail so it just stuck out awkwardly, revealing cowlicks neither of us had known he had. A touch of chill seemed to reach from Seawitch and I momentarily wished I was at home with Quinton, teasing him about those cowlicks, instead of here, walking toward a haunted ship.

The man on the near boat turned to watch us as we walked toward Seawitch’s boarding steps. I stopped and looked up at him and he returned my stare with a slightly out-of-focus gaze from eyes red rimmed and gummy due to lack of sleep. I remembered what the yard manager had said and called out, “Are you Stu Francis?”

He gave an affirmative grunt and nodded. “Who’re you?” His voice sounded rough, as if he’d been smoking unfiltered cigarettes since grade school.

“My name’s Harper Blaine. This is Detective Sergeant Solis. We’re investigating Seawitch.”

Another affirmative grunt and nod from Francis. “Wouldn’t want to be you guys. Damn thing’s spooked.”

“Spooked?”

“Got ghosts like a freighter’s got rats.” Several heavy splashes spattered water onto the end of the dock. “Damn fish! Crazy-ass salmon!” Francis shouted at the water. “Get the hell out of here!” Then he fixed his watery stare on me. “It’s this damned boat, I’ll betcha. Got the fish acting crazy. Saw two otters and a harbor seal in here, too.”

“Is that unusual?” I asked.

“You betcha. Salmon follow the water scent up the river; they don’t pause to rest until they clear the locks. They never come in here on the way up, only on the way down. But this year they’re in here like a swarm of cockroaches. Kept me up all night, banging on the hull, chattering.”

I must have looked skeptical because he added, “And don’t tell me fish don’t talk. They make all kinds of noise up against the hull. Sounds just like a bunch of teenagers whispering in class. ‘Blah, blah, blah, yak, yak, yak.’ Man can’t get any sleep! Talking about a shipwreck in Spain. What are salmon doing in Spain, anyway?”

Spain? I thought, something tickling at my brain. I reconsidered the origin of his rheumy eyes—they might have resulted from consuming a considerable amount of alcohol regularly as well as from a handful of sleepless nights.

“Mr. Francis,” Solis interrupted. “Why do you believe the Seawitch is haunted?”

“Screams. Couple of nights ago she started screaming.”

“You heard screams from inside the boat?” Solis clarified.

Francis glared at him and shook his head adamantly. “No, sir. I said she screamed and I meant it. The noise inside came later. Boats make noises all the time—when the wind comes down off the point in winter and plays on the masts and rigging, it can sound like a chorus of wolves and lost souls. But this wasn’t the north wind. There wasn’t any wind! I never heard nothing like this before.” He jabbed a finger at Seawitch. “That thing screamed.”

Francis made a noise in his throat that could only be called a harrumph and swung on his heel to stomp away into his own boat. Somehow he managed to slam the hatch as he did.

Solis and I exchanged puzzled frowns, then turned around to face Seawitch.

The boat looked less inviting than ever, especially when contrasted with the boats we had just come from; it was neither shiny nor homey and I could not imagine anyone wanting to hang out with friends on the dock near it, either. In just a single day the boat had gone from sad and spooky to outright nasty, the coils of Grey that hung on it now churning and billowing like a nest of angry snakes. For a moment I thought of Jacque Knight’s grasping aura and shivered.

Solis watched me. “You have changed your mind?”

“No,” I answered. “But I think this is not going to be as much fun as the last time.”

“You have an odd idea of fun, Ms. Blaine.”

I don’t know why that torqued me, but it did. Maybe it was the malevolent energy bleeding off Seawitch, Francis’s weirdness affecting my thoughts, or just my own discomfort left over from the day before and Solis’s reserved silence on matters freaky, but I turned and glared at him. “I think you can drop the ‘Ms.’ now, since we’re stuck together on this. I don’t expect you to like or respect me—or even believe me—enough to be friends, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mock me.”

Solis raised his eyebrows and looked genuinely surprised. “I find you strange but I do not mock you. What would you have me call you?”

I bit my tongue; I was being unreasonable. I was good at my job and I’d helped him out plenty of times—sometimes more than he knew—but I was worried that my revelations about just how “strange” I was were straining the relationship when I wanted it to be smoother, not harder. So if I overreacted now, any breakage would be my own fault. I took a long, slow breath and replied more evenly, “I’m sorry. Just Blaine, or even Harper, will do. What do you call the cops you work with?”

“I call them by their last names—it’s written on their badges.”

I laughed. It just came over as amusing that he implied he couldn’t remember people’s names without a label on them. Solis flushed a little and looked aside. He cleared his throat and waited for me to wind down. When I stopped chuckling he glanced at me and then at the boat again.

“Shall we proceed, M—” he caught himself and restarted. “If you’re ready, shall we proceed, Blaine?”

I grinned at him. “Yes, we can, Mr. Solis.”

“I like ‘Sergeant Solis,’” he replied with the hint of a smile. “It makes me feel taller. Which, beside you, is a feat. And my wife likes it.”

“I didn’t know you were married,” I said. Apparently we had broken some serious ice.

Solis nodded. “Sí.”

I raised my eyebrows, but he didn’t volunteer any more. He only gestured toward the boat and waited for me to precede him.

We started up the stairs to Seawitch’s aft deck. On the third step I felt cold and the pressure in my lungs increased as if we were diving into deep waters. I made the last steps and paused, catching my breath with an effort. Solis watched me and started to raise his hand as if to take my arm, but I waved him off and headed for the interior. He followed wordlessly, a frown of curiosity on his face.

Just inside the salon I turned back to him. “This is where things get . . . weird,” I said. “You ready?”

He gave it a moment’s serious consideration—he wasn’t taking this lightly and I felt a wash of relief, pretty sure that before replying he was recalling what I’d shown and told him yesterday. I didn’t push him to find in my favor; he had to do it himself. He seemed to brace himself, then gave a tiny nod. “Yes.”

“If . . . you can’t see me, call out. I don’t want to get separated.” Then I let myself slide a little closer to the Grey without getting too thin in the normal world. I would be glad of Solis’s presence if things got too rough but he’d be no help if he couldn’t see me. And I did expect it to get rough: The slice of the energetic world within Seawitch was aboil with colored mists, not just the thin threads I’d noticed the day before. A volume of foggy shapes seemed to battle in knots and whorls of green and red and blue that tangled and roiled against one another. It was like walking through the fringe of a war zone where the fighting had broken down to small but desperate skirmishes.

I stepped forward with care, resisting the urge to sink to a more elemental level and dodge some of the mist world’s turmoil. Streamers of animate fog buffeted me like ropes cut loose in a wind. The slender, bright thread of purple energy that had led down the stairs the first time I’d been aboard was missing this time. Shredded or removed, I wasn’t sure, but I had the strong impression that the energetic conflict up here was only a diversion from whatever was waiting in the engine room. I glanced around to spot Solis, seeing him as a ghostly version of himself with his carefully contained energy much brighter and more colorful than I normally saw it: a vibrant yellow with swirling sparks of blue and gold. Interesting . . .

I eased out a little and motioned to Solis to follow me down the stairs to the lower deck. Then I slid a bit back into the Grey and pursued the sense of something waiting. Through the crew quarters and down the passageway to the engine-room doors, the writhing smoke let me know I was taking the right path. I considered slipping through the doors in the Grey, but I didn’t want to lose Solis, so I stepped back to the normal plane one more time and waited for him to catch up to me. He was a lot closer than I’d realized and we both started a bit, coming nearly nose to nose. He hadn’t seemed that near, but the Grey does strange things to time and distance.

“Sorry,” I muttered.

Solis gave a tight smile. “De nada. So, it’s the engine room?”

“Something is. What, I’m not yet sure, but there’s a lot of paranormal disturbance here.”

He nodded.

I frowned. “Do you feel or see anything, or is that just the conversational acknowledgment nod?”

He cocked his head slightly. “I have . . . an unsettled feeling. Like an intuition.”

That intrigued me and I hmphed a bit in agreement. I knew the feeling, that something trivial is actually important or that a subject is about to do something revealing. I also knew most successful cops are hunch players and instinct followers and I wondered if that wasn’t some unacknowledged touch of the Grey.

“See anything? Anything at all?”

“No . . .”

“Are you having an urge to look over your shoulder for something that you don’t quite see in the corner of your eye?” I knew that urge, that sensation of flickering motion that makes you turn to find . . . nothing. Of course, something is there in the ghost world but most people have no clue and they truly wouldn’t want one.

Solis squinted, his eyes shifting back and forth. Then he tightened his mouth and forced his eyes back to me. I guess that was as good an answer as his nod. I remembered I’d started out much the same way, learning to look around the filters we raise between ourselves and what we don’t want to see. Most adults can’t make themselves drop those filters—the habit is too strong and self-preserving—but a few find a way to peep in, however limited the view. And then there are those rare cases, like me, who get the unlimited pass and wish they never had.

Such an encouraging thought to hold in mind as I opened the engine-room door . . .

Even barely touching the Grey, the room was black with a darkness no electric light could dispel—gleaming, energetic darkness that moved and writhed and muttered with voices at the threshold of hearing. It wasn’t like the voice of the Grey that I’d once, in near madness, listened to; this was the babble of something contained in it, not the voice of the Grey itself. I could hear Solis catch his breath behind me as I stepped through the opening and was plunged deep into the source of the icy cold that had risen through the boat. My lungs froze and I stretched upward for a surface that was not there, striving for light and air and warmth as the blackness clutched me within its ever-collapsing folds. I stumbled forward and down . . . through a sheet of mist that shattered and hung in the space around me, so frigid that the air itself seemed filled with crystalline ice. I felt my legs buckle and the hard floor of the engine room struck hard against my knees. I was in the normal world yet I wasn’t, drowning in the darkness that struck and shook me like storm waves. I heard screams, prayers, and the fury-roar of a hurricane as it battered us, overturning the lifeboats and drowning the women and children before our eyes. . . . and the crew lashed in the rigging, crying out, mouths filling with salt water—

I wrenched myself away from the invading sense of the storm-battered dying. These were not my own thoughts but those of others—hundreds of others.

Stop. I could not even gasp the word, only let it shout in my mind across the blackness as I begged and hoped. . . .

The storm around me eased and I gulped in sea-wet air. Coughing, I choked out, “I want to help.” A flood of thoughts burst against me from all directions and seemed to cut through my flesh in cold iron needles of fury, panic, horror, and a thin, keening hope as dim and ephemeral as a will-o’-the-wisp. I stretched toward that spindly thread even as my body seemed to be buffeted by blows from unseen objects careening through the air on the eldritch hurricane’s rage. That thread of possibility flickered near me and I clutched it, reeling it in and pressing the growing, glowing skein to my chest.

The tiny warmth of it seemed to ease my breathing and loosen the gasping terror of drowning that clawed at my brain and clutched my lungs. “I want to help you,” I repeated, a little stronger now. “Show me . . .”

The storm ebbed down slowly, the troubled blackness diluting to a more ordinary darkness. The ghost-filtered illumination showed me a room lit by insufficient light through an open doorway partially blocked by a human shape.

I looked around. Still the engine compartment and closer to normalcy, but somehow . . . it was filled with hundreds of ghosts. They pressed close and yet fell back into the hull of the ship, continuing on into the Grey to an impossible distance and density somehow contained within the Seawitch’s engine room. They were black tangles of energy, barely human shaped with flickering storm light for eyes. I stared around at them all, infected with a sliver of their own panic.

Solis stepped through the doorway and strode to me, reaching down as if he were going to raise me to my feet. Then he glanced around, his eyes as weirdly illuminated as those of the ghosts, and stopped moving, his hands clutching my shoulders. He shivered and pulled me up, his eyes still moving, still taking in . . . whatever he was seeing.

A voice rose from the collective in the hissing of sea spume against rocks. “We did our part. Now uphold the bargain. Save us.”

Solis glanced at me. “Do you hear . . . ?”

I nodded. Then I put one finger to my lips, afraid his presence might disrupt the conversation I needed to have.

“It wasn’t my bargain,” I started. “I don’t know what happened or what to do. Tell me. Show me.”

The darkness of spirits shuffled and opened a narrow path between them. Solis and I both turned our heads to see where it led, but the only view was a hard green-gold gleam lying low in a sea of grime.

“You see—?” I started in a whisper.

“There is a light that cannot exist, gleaming where I cannot go.” His voice was low and unsteady.

“Yes, you can. Hold on to my arm and we can’t be separated. This is like walking a tightrope: Don’t look down and don’t look back until your feet are back on solid ground.”

I sucked in a preparatory breath, squared my shoulders, and felt his grip on my elbow. I started toward the glow. Solis came along a step behind me. I could feel the warm impression of his presence at my back, even though I didn’t dare turn to see him. I did not want them—whoever they were—to take any notice of Solis, nor did I want to lose sight of whatever it was they were showing me, leading me toward.

The ghosts remained nebulous and thready as we passed between them. I heard Solis breathing a little harder and faster than usual and I wished I knew what he was seeing, but it seemed a bad time to ask.

It felt like an hour but it must have been only a minute or two until we reached the gleam, walking slowly out of the Grey and back into the normal—or nearly normal—world. It lay near our feet, a reflection of light obscured by mucky water in the crook of the floor where it met the hull and gapped a bit here and there between the boat’s ribs. The reflection was duller here and the ghosts had become less present, though they were far from gone. I stooped and reached out for whatever the green-gold flash was coming from, shivering as my hands pushed into gelid water thickened with algae and gunk.

There was something cold and metallic below the water’s surface—just the merest inch or less of a curved edge sticking out. I pushed my long fingers between the hull and the thing to get a grip on it. It was hollow, and once I had hooked my fingers under the edge I pulled upward with care. The thing was chilly and heavy and felt too large to come back up through the narrow gap between the boat’s ribs.

Something clanked against the floorboards. Solid, normal floorboards. I risked a glance back over my shoulder at Solis, hoping he was really there, or really here depending on how I thought of it. He was and he stared down at me with a frown that was too tight around the mouth and too white around the eyes, but he was solid and willing.

“There is something?”

“Yes, something real, but it’s too big to pull through the hole. We need to lift this section of floor if we can.”

Solis reached into his jacket and brought forth a penlight. He sighed relief as the unexpectedly bright light came on at his flick of the switch, nearly blinding me. The flashlight cast a bright, shivering circle on the floor and hull just around the gap where my hand vanished into the hole. The illumination bounced off the metal edge I held on to and rekindled the strange spark of color we’d seen earlier. Solis played the light shakily across the floor until he spotted a seam nearby and, turning slowly, followed it to more seams.

“You will have to move to your right,” he said, his voice deadened by the insulation on the walls but no longer quivering. “Can you hold on to the object if you move?” Our return to the normal world must have reassured him everything was all right. I was a little less sure, but I’ve had more experience with ghosts.

I kept my own counsel on that score and replied, “I think so. It feels loose in here. . . .” I shifted the heavy thing into my left hand and shuffled awkwardly to my right like an injured crab with one claw dragging. It pulled on my fingers and made my knuckles feel swollen and overworked as it clunked along beneath the floor, jamming on ribs and thudding to a halt. I had to stoop like an ape and pass it from one hand to the other around each rib, then back into my left to drag it on until I’d moved my weight clear of the floor seam Solis was illuminating. My back, shoulders, arms, and hands ached from the strain and the chill, but I held on.

Solis bent and stuck his fingers into a depression in the floor to get a grip and lift the segment of floorboards. The thick planks came up with the screech of swollen wooden structures reluctantly scraping open. The smell of cold swamp water and brine wafted on the updraft.

Solis leaned the hatch against something bulky and denser than the ghosts. I guessed it was one of the engines, but I wasn’t sure and I wouldn’t risk my grip on the thing to look around. I wiggled the metal object loose from where it had lodged next to a rib and pulled it upward. It felt huge and ridiculously heavy for something hollow. . . .

Solis shone his light on it and it gave back another sickly green-gold shimmer.

“A bell . . .” I whispered as it came up into the light.

“Our soul . . .” the ghosts sighed, melting away and taking the remnant Grey with them. I didn’t think they were gone for good, just exhausted and satisfied that we had what they wanted us to have.

I turned the bell in my hands, letting the filth-crusted bronze catch the beam from Solis’s pocket flashlight as I wiped the worst of the gunk away. The bell was huge and weighed more than ten pounds, easily. I wasn’t sure, but it seemed too large for the bracket we’d seen the day before up near the boat’s bridge. The light caught on the cast edges of a deep engraving along the bell’s mouth. I read it aloud as Solis picked out the words with the penlight’s illumination: “S.S. Valencia.”