I gasped and jumped back with a shock of recognition. This man—this thing—had come running for me before. In an alley nearby, he—it—had asked if I were dead and tried to drag me into the Grey, back when I didn’t know there was such a thing. The last time I’d seen the . . . whatever it was, I thought it was just a drunk in an alley, but now I knew the Grey better and I could see it wasn’t a real man at all—not a ghost but some more corporeal eldritch thing. I reached for a fold in the Grey and yanked it between us, making a shield against the creature.
Where other things would and had fallen aside, its hand pushed through my shield as if it were no more than mist. I felt its cold fingertip touch my hand. It stopped without apparent momentum and raised its head, breathing a reek of rot into my face. Beneath its dreadlocked mane, the face was now half destroyed, twisted with barely healed scars on the right side that almost hid one terrible emerald eye.
It stared at me and I stared back, unable to fight it this time as its uncanny gaze held me. It peered at me as if it could see into my soul—if I have one—sighing as though relieved of some pain.
It drew in a deep breath and said, “Dead enough, lady. Yes.” It moved its filthy hand to my chest and made a patting motion of satisfaction. I felt the touch ripple through my rib cage and down my limbs. Then it laughed and scampered away in its queer, hunched posture, showing a back as recently and horribly scarred as its face.
I stumbled back and felt the cold bricks slipping under my boots as I started to fall. A quick scramble kept me up inelegantly, and I caught a mouthful of icy air, not realizing I hadn’t breathed during the encounter. I looked around, but there were no other strange creatures lurking nearby to ambush me, and none of the pedestrians hurrying away from the cold nor the homeless people huddling over their fires had paused to stare at the scene. The only person showing me any attention at all was the massive woman under the female totem, and she merely guffawed and waved as if my near pratfall was the funniest thing she’d seen all day. In spite of her merriment, I felt shaken and had to stand still a moment before I could continue the last block to my office.
The creature hadn’t hurt me—and I had no idea what it had wanted either time we’d met—but I was still unnerved. I couldn’t imagine what its sudden appearance meant, but I was pretty sure I wouldn’t like it when I found out. I tried to put it out of my mind as I climbed the stairs to my office, wincing as my knee complained. Discomfort quickly got the upper hand on speculation, and by the time I sat down to call Will for dinner, I’d pushed the incident aside but not completely out of my thoughts.
Will answered quickly, but he sounded a bit annoyed.
“Hi. Am I calling at a bad time?” I asked.
“Harper. No.” He took an audible breath and mellowed his voice. “I’m down under Alaskan Way at an old friend’s shop. It’s just—” Something crashed, sounding like a load of timber falling on a wooden dock, and a distant voice cursed. Will muttered something away from the phone before returning to our conversation. “I think he’s just broken a vintage phone box. So. Are you free for dinner?”
“Yes, I am. How ’bout you?”
“Not only free, but eager to get out of here and meet you.”
I smiled a little in response. “How ’bout the Bookstore?”
“I thought you wanted food. . . .”
“No, silly man. It’s a bar in the Alexis Hotel lobby at First and Madison. Good pub food, lots of old books on the walls, nice old wood furniture . . .”
He made a disgusted noise. “I hate places that use books by the yard as ‘interior decoration.’ ”
“They’re real books and you can take them out and read them—they’ll even let you buy them. Phoebe told me they bought them out from under her at a liquidation sale when one of the other used bookstores went out of business.”
“Well . . .” he said, still sounding dubious about it. “OK. I guess I can try it. I’ll meet you there in . . . fifteen minutes?”
“OK,” I agreed, but I found myself frowning as I hung up and started to gather my things together.
Will and I both liked old things and I’d thought the tiny bar and restaurant full of good old wood furniture and books would be pleasant, but now I wasn’t so sure. I didn’t remember much about the decor of the first place we’d eaten together—I’d been too interested in Will and thankful for not being hit by a car to care about it. It was frustrating to be always just a bit off—had he always been so picky? I didn’t think so. . . . But maybe dining together wasn’t our best skill, considering how often our meals had coincided with various unpleasant events.
Knowing I might not find a better parking space closer to the hotel, I walked down to First and caught a bus. I saw Will going into the restaurant as I got off at Madison.
Inside, I found Will seated at a small wooden table in a nook near the back—where the heat was. Even with double glazing, the tables near the large front windows were too cold to sit next to. Will grinned at me and I smiled back on the sudden surge of remembered giddiness I’d felt when we first met. It was a sweet, warm feeling I wanted to hold on to a little longer. I shucked off my extra layers and sat down across from him as the waiter handed us menus and left us alone.
“Hi, there,” I said.
“Hello, beautiful.”
My face got hot. I’m way too tall and tomboyish for that description, but the warm setting lifted my spirits more than I’d expected and I took the compliment as a sign there might yet be hope for us.
“How did your day go?” I asked.
He smiled at my corny question. “It was pretty good. I visited a friend in the business and he asked me to look at some stuff for him. And we found this.”
He picked up a white plastic bag from the seat beside him and handed it to me. “It reminded me of you.”
I made a mock frown and took the bag, reaching inside to pull out a wooden ball about the size of a large grapefruit. Then I really did frown. There was something strange about it, but I couldn’t figure out what—it didn’t have an obvious Grey gleam or anything like that; it was just . . . odd. The surface was covered with sharply etched rectangular segments, and as I turned it over something rattled inside. I noticed a little threaded cylinder inset into the ball to screw it onto a post of some kind.
As I was staring at the ball, the waiter approached and I put it aside to order. As soon as he was gone, I picked the ball up again.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s a puzzle box,” Will replied. “Charlie found it in an old house he was taking apart up in Leavenworth. Someone had used a pair of them for decorations on the newel posts of a staircase. Neither of us had ever seen round ones like that before and it was kind of a strange way to use them, so he asked me about them. But I couldn’t tell him anything except that the wood seems to be teak and the threaded cylinders are much newer than the boxes. Charlie gave me that one for my time and I thought you might like it—kind of mysterious and pretty with some kind of secret inside.”
“What’s in it?”
“Don’t know. We couldn’t get it to open. But, you know . . .” he added, blushing a little and shifting his eyes away, “I’ve learned that not every secret has to be revealed.” He let his gaze move back to mine.
I looked back down at the round puzzle box. “So . . .” I started, “umm . . . this is the Harper box?”
He looked so nervous that I started to giggle. Then we were both laughing, and he reached across the table and took my hand and kissed the back. The gesture was so overtly romantic and so out of character for the recent state of our relationship that it startled me. The arrival of the waiter broke us apart and covered my bewilderment.
Conversation became more mundane while we tended to our food. We were almost done and waiting for coffee when curiosity got the better of him.
“So,” Will started, “what happened at the train station?” Then he added very quickly, “You don’t have to tell me. This is just like, �
�Hey, honey, how was your day?’ ”
I shook my head, still smiling a little. I didn’t mind that he was interested. I just wasn’t going to tell him the whole truth, and that I did mind. “It wasn’t too bad, so long as you don’t mind the high ick factor,” I replied. “Some homeless man turned up dead in the train tunnel. I found him while I was looking for someone else and I couldn’t leave until the police got there and we discussed it. I’m sure the railroad isn’t thrilled about it, but the SPD didn’t order me to keep it quiet, so I guess it’s just a sad accident.”
“In the tunnel.” He looked a little green.
“Yeah. I figured you didn’t need to see it.” I let the subject drop and changed direction. “I like your day better. How ’bout you tell me more about puzzle boxes?”
“That one’s really unusual,” he started, pointing at the ball on the table beside me. His eyes began to shine as he went on. Will loved these sorts of odd old objects—and it had been the more accessible mysteries of things like this that had taken him to England and away from the uncomfortable quandary of my strangeness. “Most puzzle boxes are square- or cube-shaped, and the famous Japanese ones have intricately inlaid surface patterns to obscure the moving parts. Normally, I’d call something like this one—a round one—a burr puzzle, but those aren’t hollow and puzzle boxes aren’t usually round, so this is a hybrid.”
I sank into the warm rhythm of his speech, watched his pleasure in the conversation turn the aura around his head a bright gold, and didn’t think about dead men in tunnels for a while and wished this quiet moment wasn’t doomed to end.
THREE
As we left the restaurant, stepping back out into the deepened cold made more frigid by comparison with the cozy warmth we’d left, I tucked the puzzle ball into my bag. Beneath the restaurant’s doorway lights, a handful of moths trailed ghostly doubles in front of my face, making hash of my vision as we stepped onto the sidewalk and I slipped a little on the icy cement. Will caught my arm and kept me upright, the warmth of his touch spreading through me. The flutter of moth wings sounded like spectral whispers in my ears.
“Can I give you a lift back to your truck?” Will offered. “Mine’s just under the viaduct.”
I’d have been foolish to refuse a two-block walk to a comfortable ride in favor of walking the six frozen blocks to my parking structure or standing in the cold waiting for a bus. And having put a few patches over the rough spots of the morning and afternoon, the rest of the evening looked encouraging. I accepted and we began walking toward Elliot Bay.
The viaduct’s elevated double-decker road looms over the flatland of the waterfront like a concrete house of cards waiting to collapse onto the desolate parking lot wasteland beneath it. Blocks of old warehouse buildings on one side face the patchwork quilt of the waterfront businesses on the other. Crazed, pitted blacktop, striped with parking stalls and lane markers, stretches the width of the missing city block between them. An uneven fringe of stunted shrubs marks the edge of the old trolley line, but nothing else grows under the viaduct’s unloved shade.
I batted at the moths that muttered around my head and nearly missed the small animal that darted out from the scruffy hedge. Wan yellow light from the streetlamps on the waterfront gleamed on its russet fur. Doglike with huge pointed ears and a brush tail, it ran into the empty lane and then darted a few steps toward us before it cast a look over its shoulder and bounded away into darkness, dragging a shadow behind it.
Will stared after it and asked, “What was that?”
“A . . . fox, I think.” I didn’t know why, but a shiver of dread swept over me.
“Fox?” he questioned, taking a couple of steps away from me, following the vanished animal. “Where did it come from? We’re a long way from the zoo to be spotting an escapee.”
I turned to look where the fox had glanced and saw two vaguely human figures emerging from a shadow that should have been too small to hold them. The world around them boiled in the Grey and heaved layers of time like stacked plates in an earthquake. I faltered forward a step, and the figures moved into a thin slice of streetlight.
In the ordinary light, they looked like two men dressed in rags, stumbling a little from drink or debility, but as they moved forward into shadow again, they shed their normal aspect in my eyes. One was the shaggy creature that had braced me in Occidental Park and it was leading the other, shambling and putrescent, toward me. The clinging cowl of black threads and Grey strands like spiderweb wasn’t necessary for me to know that the thing was dead—a walking corpse. I gagged on the stink of decay the zombie carried with it.
The hairy man-thing held out a hand to me. “Help, lady. Free—”
Will pulled me back and stepped between us. “Don’t touch her,” he warned the scarred creature. “We don’t have anything for you. Go your way.”
“Will,” I started.
He put a protective arm up in front of me but kept his eyes on the two creatures. I knew he didn’t see what I did. He must have thought they were just a couple of bums panhandling a bit aggressively.
I began objecting again. “No, Will. Don’t!”
Will tried to push me back. The matted hair on the furry one’s head and neck rose like hackles on an angry dog. It lowered its head and growled. “No. Need lady!” Fury sparked in its green eyes and it jumped at Will, butting its head into his midsection.
Will tumbled backward and both the monstrosities rushed for him, voicing weird cries. Bright lines of Grey energy rippled around them as the three figures tangled on the ground, thrashing.
“No!” I shouted, plunging into the fray. I didn’t want to touch the Grey things and I didn’t want them to touch Will any more than they had. I grabbed onto him and hauled backward as hard as I could, pushing back on the Grey as I went. I shoved the edge between us and the shambling, furious things that flailed at Will. “Stop it!” I yelled at them. “Stop!”
Will’s hand connected with the zombie’s face and a chunk of rotten flesh fell away, trailing Grey strands on Will’s fingers like glue. The dead man’s jaw sagged open, unhinged on one side. Will recoiled with a shout, stumbling back and staring at the gaping thing and its feral companion. His shout turned into inarticulate sounds of horror, but I didn’t look back at him. The shaggy thing lurched forward again and I slammed my forearm across its chest, shuddering at the touch of its matted hair and knotted body.
“Stop!” I ordered. “Stop now or I won’t help you.” I was panting from the adrenaline surge. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? My help?”
The thing whimpered with frustration but turned its gaze to me at last. “Yes. Help,” it whined. It reached for the undead man and drew him closer to me. “Trapped. This spirit, tangled here. One of my people, before your kind. Free it.”
I peered at the standing dead man and saw a tangle of Grey threads, yellow, blue, and black under the unnatural spiderweb of soft Grey—similar to the stuff I’d seen in the train tunnel—that seemed to bind the rotting flesh together. The threads were inside the body, but the rot was well advanced and only the web of Grey held it to form. I’d pulled a living Grey thing apart before, deconstructed it by force, hating every burning instant. As I looked at it, I could make out a shadow of a face amid the tangled strands of energy and magic, a face that suffered and implored with a look where voice had long failed.
It was disgusting and repellent, but . . . I’d have to make the best of it. I didn’t know if I wanted the blue strand or the yellow one, but if I pulled them both out, I could disentangle them more easily. This old corpse shouldn’t have been walking around for any reason—he’d been dead a long, long time and deserved to lie down for good. My stomach lurched, but I braced myself to do it, sending a muttered “Gods help me . . .” to the sky as I pushed my hands into the rotten flesh.
The threads of spirit felt like live wires and burned my fingers. I gasped and bit off a yelp of pain as I hooked the living energy in my fists, squeezed my eyes closed against th
e coming flare of agony, and pulled. Fire and electric shocks jolted up my arms and down my spine, raging through my chest. And then the stands broke free. I staggered back, opening my clenched fists and closed eyes.
Underground (Greywalker, Book 3) Page 4
