Her screech turned into the roar of the guardian as it rushed into the room and pounced past us toward the source of its agitation in the back room. I couldn’t hear Christelle screaming over the shriek of the beast, but I saw her thrashing at the air as if she were being attacked by unseen things. Then she sat down in a heap, landing in her chair as if broken.
I tried to grab her, shake her, but she had no more substance than a cloud, not even the electrical tingling of an entangled soul. There was no Christelle there, just a shape.
Then she looked up, her face composed and blank. “Do you have an appointment?” she asked.
“Christelle. Listen. Concentrate. Do you know what happened to you?”
“I couldn’t say. Do you have an appointment?”
“No, Christelle. It’s Harper. I want to talk to my dad. Do you know what happened to him? Do you know what happened to you?”
The bland, blank expression didn’t flicker. “The doctor isn’t in right now. Would you like to make an appointment?”
“No, Christelle. I want to know what happened to you.”
“The doctor isn’t in right now,” she repeated. “Would you like—”
“No!” I shouted at her, but she didn’t change her expression or her words; she just continued to ask her mindless question. I gave up, not sure if I’d destroyed whatever was left of Christelle’s lingering memory or not, but quite sure she wasn’t coming back for a while. Whatever intelligence had occupied the space that had been my father’s office had fled, at least for now, and there was nothing I could do.
I left the building, taking care to restore the lock so it clicked closed behind me. A troubling weight of emotion dragged at me as I went: confusion, frustration, grief, and horror. I didn’t know much more than I had when I arrived about what had befallen any of us: my father, Christelle, or me. I wasn’t any closer to knowing why I was the way I was, either.
I tried to shake my mind clear and think hard as I headed back to my car and then onward to my hotel. Christelle’s disconnection from events and her panic might mean she had ceased to exist—at least as a human—after that Thursday in 1986, but what had happened beyond that and who was responsible, I didn’t know. The weird encapsulation of time in the office might account for the incomplete haunting phenomena and the odd silence in the Grey surrounding the time and place of my father’s death. The anomalies—Christelle’s shattered memory and Dad’s lack of presence—had to be related, but what the relation was and how it might be connected to me and my being a Greywalker was still a mystery. Much as it might clear a few things up, it appeared that I wouldn’t be talking to my dad anytime soon. The presence of the guardian beast and the way it had come rushing in each time I got close through the layers of history and connection was not good. I’d have to find another route to the information I wanted and I’d have to tread with care. I might be a Grey creature as far as the beast was concerned, but I’d seen it eat Grey things that misbehaved. I didn’t want to be the next meal or a mindless loop like what remained of Christelle LaJeunesse.
My thoughts left me disturbed and I, childishly, couldn’t face sleep with the chill of them in my mind. Even a long, hot shower couldn’t dispel them after I returned to my hotel room. I paged Quinton and left a code on his pager. Quinton had an excusable paranoia about certain bits of technology, and though I’d upgraded to a cell phone, he never would. We’d worked out a set of codes that communicated volumes in only a few digits—the shorter the burst, the harder it was to trace or crack. I left a code that required a reply. He called back within minutes.
“Hi, it’s me,” he said.
I recognized the voice, of course, and drawled a pleased and tired, “Hey,” feeling a small warmth kindle in my chest.
“How’s the dead boyfriend?”
I bit my lip for a second before answering, “He’s a jerk. And things are becoming stranger than I’d expected.”
“Do you have any answers yet?”
“Not many. My dad—” I choked on the words.
“Honey? Harper? Are you all right?”
His endearment melted the ice block in my throat. “I’m . . . still confused by a lot of things. I don’t want to discuss them now. I just wanted to hear your voice.”
“I like hearing yours, too. I’ve been working on a ghost detector. I’m not sure I’ve got it right, but I’ll show it to you when you get home.”
“I’d rather not talk about ghosts right now.”
“All right. Chaos has been chasing things around that I can’t see and she runs over and tries to steal your shoes. But she only wants your shoes. I think she misses you.”
“She just loves shoes,” I said, imagining the crazy little ferret running manically around the condo or Quinton’s bunker, chasing ghosts and giving her wicked chuckle of glee as they fled before her. She’d dived fearlessly into the Grey when we’d first encountered it and taken on the guardian beast single-handed. I’d had a little trouble getting her back. She was fearless, but she’d learned to pick her fights better after that. You can’t win against an invincible force of the Grey, even if the battle is epic, at least to a fuzz-butt who weighed less than two pounds.
A pleasant silence fell between us and I closed my eyes, thinking I could almost see him.
“She’s not the only one who misses you,” Quinton said.
I smiled. “I miss you, too, and I’ll be home soon.” The conversation wandered and drew to a soft close as I dwindled toward sleep.
“I’ll see you soon,” he whispered before I reluctantly hung up and turned to roll into the covers, falling asleep with the comfort of his thoughts wrapped around me.
TWELVE
Will Novak screamed in my sleep. I jerked awake, twisting in my bed to spot the gruesome vision that had awakened me, so realistic was it that I had been sure I was present. I was sick of grim visions. First Cary, the office, Christelle, and now Will, the antiques auctioneer I’d met back when the whole Greywalking adventure started. He’d been in my nightmare of my death, too, but this was not the same dream at all. This was a hopeless, terrifying vision about Will himself.
We’d broken up over the ramifications of my incomprehensible life a year earlier, but I’d kept a soft spot for Will in my heart. He was in England now, working. And he was fine. Or he had been the last I’d heard from him. I didn’t want to relive any of that, either, but it seemed my past—whether connected to my Greywalking ability or not—would not leave me alone.
To hell with it; it wasn’t late over there. It was . . . I checked the clock and did the math . . . about 3:30 in the afternoon. I picked up my cell phone and poked the button for his number. In a minute, a male voice answered.
“Hello?”
“Hi. Michael? It’s Harper Blaine.” Michael was Will’s much-younger brother. He was attending college somewhere in London since they’d moved there more or less permanently when Will and I broke up. Will worked researching provenances—the backgrounds of antiques—for Sotheby’s. It had been a dream offer just when he’d needed it most. We’d tried to keep the relationship going, but the distance and my bizarre job had killed it.
“Oh. Hi, Harper. Umm . . . can I . . . help you?” I hadn’t called since Will and I had broken up, and Michael sounded confused to hear from me.
“I just wanted to talk to Will. Is he home?”
“No. He’s at work. He’ll be home in about three hours, if you want to call back.”
“How are you guys doing?”
He replied cautiously. “We’re fine. I’m working on a bike for a motorcycle rally this summer and Will’s OK, I guess. Works a lot. You know: the big brother thing.”
“Yeah, I know that thing. Is he still on your case about school?”
“I’m out for the summer hols soon. He still doesn’t like the bikes, but we get along OK if I don’t cut class too much for them.”
That sounded like the Novak brothers I knew. Michael plunging into his enthusiasms and Will watch
dogging him.
So my harrowing dream had been only that—a dream—however disturbing and realistic. No one had chopped off his limbs or stuffed him in a box, and Michael wasn’t a burned skeleton on a garage floor, either. I was still unsettled, but I took a long breath and made myself calm down.
“OK. Well. I guess I don’t need to talk to him, after all. Thanks, Michael.”
“No problem.”
We both hung up in an awkward silence. I must have sounded nuts. I felt a bit nuts, too, for giving in to the need to check on them. The sense of something being out of joint lingered, although there seemed to be no reason for that feeling—just the aftereffect of the dream—and I chided myself for calling. Of course, I wouldn’t have forgiven myself for not checking if there had turned out to be something wrong. Still . . . crazy ex-girlfriend was not a part I liked playing.
I left a string of numbers on Quinton’s pager that meant I’d been thinking of him. It made me feel a bit like a clinging girlfriend, and yes, it was mushy, but it made me smile and that was a good trick after the fright that had awakened me.
It was too early to show up at my mother’s house. I had no desire to intrude on any private moments between her and Damon. The thought of observing Mother setting another matrimonial trap made me gag, and the false friendliness her current prey displayed on meeting me was just as cloying. My reaction might be due to the contrast between reality and my now-ruined fantasy of what life had been with my father, but I still found Damon and his presence repulsive. Unfair and irrational of me, maybe, but that’s how I felt.
I could just guess at the sorts of heavily varnished tales about me that my mother had been laying on him. Since he hadn’t thrown me out of the house, I had to assume it was the Darling Daughter version and not the Ungrateful Spawn of Satan version—I’d been both before. Considering her performance the previous day, I figured I was probably growing horns in her mind right now. Yet another reason to hold off arriving until after the man du jour had gone and avoid any scenes.
A short workout and a shower didn’t help mitigate the fact that it was the morning after a terrible day and night as much as I’d hoped. It still felt too early, and I hadn’t even changed time zones. I called room service for a pot of expensive coffee and some food and sat down on the bed to prowl through my father’s box again. If I couldn’t talk to him or his no-doubt-dead receptionist directly, I could still try to get some sense of the real man from what he’d left behind. I knew I had romanticized him, just as I had romanticized Cary, but I needed truth now, not fantasies.
Most of the paper in the box was business files, which told me about his patients and his work habits but not much more. I noticed that his handwriting was very precise when in business mode, small and neat. The office as I’d seen it in the past had been wrecked, but the simple Grey memory of it had been squared away and orderly. The writing on his business correspondence didn’t quite cross the line to fussy, but it was careful. In the journals it had been looser but still very legible, which I couldn’t say for most people’s casual writing.
All right: He’d been a bit type A, the sort of man who wore a button-down shirt even on his days off. I could remember him smiling and being silly with me, so he hadn’t been too stiff, but if I was being honest, he hadn’t been the life of the party, either. I had idolized him and built him up as an ideal parent in contrast to my demanding, peripatetic mother. I might not have been right about her, either, but that was not the issue of the moment.
I paused to eat and pour more coffee, and then I shuffled deeper into the box. At the bottom I found a couple of paperback books: The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester and Chuck Yeager’s autobiography. I’d never read either book, but I knew who Chuck Yeager was and, according to the blurb, the Bester was a sort of space-faring version of The Count of Monte Cristo. Space adventures, ordinary guys rising to heroism and glamour. I hadn’t pegged my dad as fanciful, but it might have explained his marriage to my mother. They had both been starry-eyed, but his romanticism had turned inward while my mother’s had turned outward. If I hadn’t seen the hole where the end of his life should have been, I might have thought his visions had gone as sour as my mother’s and written him off as merely crazy, but that void—whether it was caused by him or something else—and the terror that had poured out of Christelle changed everything. He might have been nuts—he sounded it near the end—but he hadn’t been imagining that something uncanny and terrible had surrounded him.
Melancholy seemed to ooze from the box as I piled Dad’s things back inside. I set the journals on top; I’d have to ask my mother if I could keep them and the little metal puzzle, which I put into my pocket. By then it was nearly noon, so I called her.
“Hello, Mother.”
“Oh, hi, sweetie!”
“Are you going to be home this afternoon? I want to bring the box of stuff back and take a look at those photos.”
“Sure! Come right up.”
There was one more thing I wanted to check; a last-ditch chance but I couldn’t ignore it. “I want to drive past the old house first. What was our address when we lived in Glendale?”
“You mean the house on Louise?”
“Did we ever live in another house in Glendale?” How could she irritate me so much with so little effort? I wondered.
“Well, no, of course not!” she snapped.
“Then the house on Louise must be the one I want.”
She sighed dramatically and rattled off the address. “When will you be done?” she asked.
“In a couple of hours. I’ll bring the box by about . . . two.”
“All right,” she replied, her voice a little sharp. “We can have lunch.”
I hoped it wouldn’t be the same minuscule meal of fruit I’d seen abandoned on her breakfast plate the previous morning, but I didn’t think I should refuse. “I’ll see you then.” Hanging up was a relief. She still made me feel unreasonable and clumsy even on the phone. I hoped I’d get the last of what I needed from her today, so I could go home as soon as possible. Any good feeling I’d had for my hometown was curdling fast.
The house on North Louise Street would be my last shot at finding any trace of my father’s ghost, short of dumb luck. I couldn’t think of any other places he might linger, and the house was a long shot as it was. The strangeness in his office made me think he wasn’t going to be found just haunting around, but I might find a loop or some other trace that might tell me something.
I’d kind of expected something more . . . impressive, but once I got to it, it was just a house. Plain California stucco on a narrower lot than its neighbors, palm trees at the curb, a long driveway on one side to a garage in the back. It was only a few blocks, a short walk, from what was now Paul Arkmanian’s office.
My memory saw the house as much larger than its narrow two stories. I sat and stared at it a moment, the house looking just the same in both the Grey and the normal so it seemed to be sitting in a pale shadow of itself. Wind chimes and shiny crystals hung from the porch rafters and in the windows. A rainbow-striped flag made a curtain for one pane on the upper floor. Subtle signals of the private life the residents kept quietly confined within the walls they’d cleaned of any trace of previous tenants. There weren’t any particular lines of energy or gleams of residual emotion clinging to the house. No one loved it, or hated it, or lingered in it. It was just shelter, nothing more.
I got out of the car and walked across the street to look more closely at the house, but nothing changed. There were no ghosts here, no extraordinary extrusion of the grid or traces of more than passing emotional storms. It was as clear as scrubbed glass. Curtains twitched in nearby windows and I sighed, knowing it was only a matter of minutes before one neighbor or another called the cops to investigate me and my obsession with the house on Louise Street. I shrugged and went back to my car.
I wasn’t any closer to talking to my father or figuring out what had tied us both to the Grey or when or how. I co
uld almost understand, in a confused sort of way, why he’d written his suicide note to me—or at least not to my mother—but that didn’t answer the questions I had. Disappointed, I turned the car around and headed back to Hollywood and up the hills to my mother’s stormy white villa.
THIRTEEN
My mother was on the terrace, practicing a complex yoga pose when I arrived. She looked like a scarlet pretzel wrapped in green energy tissue. She untied herself as I entered with the box on my hip.
“I’ll be done in just a minute, sweetie. You can put that on the kitchen counter and sit down out here.” Then she wriggled into a more tortuous position than before and became very quiet.
I put the box down on one of the empty chairs—petty rebellion, that—and sat down on another, surveying the table for signs of lunch. It was just on two o’clock according to my watch, so her lack of preparation wasn’t due to me. She just wasn’t ready, which was no different from my childhood; if we had an appointment that furthered her ideas for my life, she’d be sure to have me dressed and prepped at least an hour before we needed to be gone. I would sit or stand, careful not to muss my audition clothes, until she was ready, which would always be in the nick of time, or just past it. We would rush to auditions and photo shoots in a flurry of shouting and speeding and narrowly missed traffic accidents. If we were too late, the drive home would be a misery of recrimination.
I shook off the urge to grind my teeth and put my booted feet up on the empty table while I waited. Ten minutes later, my mother unwound herself and trotted over to glare at me as she wiped her face on a designer towel.
“Really, Harper, I taught you better manners than that. Get your feet off the table. Now.”
I left them where they were. “I thought we were having lunch.”
“We certainly won’t be having anything if your feet are on the table, Snippet.”
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