Possession

by Kat Richardson

  “Push!” he commanded. “We cannot tear it apart, but we can force it back. Push!”

  I felt rocky and sick, my feet unstable on the shifting sand that covered the floor, but I reached down toward the grid, trying to anchor myself to the energy of the Grey and draw it up through me like I had before. I pulled with mind and will and thrust the rising energy toward the horrifying thing. I could hear Carlos, dimly through the ringing in my ears, muttering words that bled and sparked in the Grey, sending growing ripples outward that tore through the phantasm before us. The power I shoved upward became a tsunami carrying the barbed, coruscating words into the creature, tearing it in two and tumbling the parts away into the blackness between the hot lines of the grid.

  The world collapsed on us, bearing me to the floor. Carlos knelt beside me, peering into my face. His touch made me cold and I imagined black coils of stinging vines curling up my arm and digging at the torn part of my shoulder.

  I stifled a sob of pain and tried to pull away from him. He stared at me a moment longer, then let go. Heat flooded back into my body as soon as his hand left mine. I gasped in air that tasted of dust and spilled beer as the normal world came back into focus.

  “Stymak,” I murmured, turning toward him.

  Carlos had moved over beside him, his hands hovering a scant half inch above the medium’s shoulders. A dim blue glow lay in the thin gap between them as Carlos bent his head and concentrated. The glow sank into Stymak and Carlos moved back, keeping a wary eye on him.

  The necromancer turned his head and caught my attention. “Better it be you nearby when he wakes,” he said.

  I scrambled across the floor to Stymak’s side as Carlos backed farther away. I felt like death warmed over and mashed flat, but took the man’s hand and felt for a pulse. I sighed in relief when he had one.

  “Stymak? Stymak?” I said, patting his hand and bending close to keep my voice low. The sound of music and conversation from the taproom beyond was unchanged, and I hoped no one had noticed any disturbance.

  The overhead light came on and I jerked my attention to the doorway. Just Carlos, standing next to the switch and guarding the door.

  Stymak moved and groaned, then lifted his eyelids. His eyes were bloodshot and his face was wan. “I think . . . I’m going to be sick.”

  I grabbed a box of trash bags off the floor nearby and yanked one off the roll. Stymak turned white and barely snatched the bag quickly enough to save his friend’s floor. He was spectacularly and noisily ill.

  When he was done, he looked at me and asked, “What the hell happened?”

  “I’m not sure. I think we got an unexpected visitor.”

  “God, I feel like I’ve been hit by a combine harvester.”

  “I think you’re still intact,” I said. “It’s a bit of a mess here, however.”

  Stymak looked around and sighed. “Could be worse. I hope my recorder’s all right. . . .”

  Carlos and I started putting the room to rights while Stymak staggered around, looking for his digital recorder. He found it wedged between two boxes of cocktail napkins and brought it back to the table we had just set back on its feet. Carlos shoved a chair toward him, carefully not touching the medium or looking directly at him. I was too tired to be openly amused at the powerful and terrifying necromancer doing housework. I kept my mouth shut and continued cleaning up.

  Carlos slipped out into the bar as I dumped the spilled sand into the trash can by the door and went to sit with Stymak.

  “How does it look?” I asked.

  “Seems OK.” He pressed the Replay button.

  A whispering chorus muttered from the device. “Run. Flee. . . . They come. . . .”

  Stymak paused the playback. “They? Uh-huh.” He nodded to himself. “I thought there was something else along for the ride.” He looked up at me. “What happened? I saw the beginning of a manifestation—a face formed in the sand—but things got a bit hazy after that. I had the impression of something . . . foreign, something . . . hungry, grasping. I thought it bit me. . . .”

  “It was Hunger Incarnate,” Carlos said, a slight frown creasing his brow. “It called itself Limos.”

  He had reentered the room silently, carrying a pitcher of beer and three glasses. I tried not to laugh at the sight of the vampire as cocktail waitress, but a snort escaped me anyhow. Carlos set down his burdens on the table and reclaimed a chair, arching an eyebrow at me in challenge. I chose not to accept and ducked my head.

  Stymak seemed a bit stunned by what Carlos had said, but he was nodding as if taking the idea in while he poured beer into the glasses. He guzzled a mouthful, making a face before he washed the first taste away with another.

  I added my ideas of what had happened. “I think those voices on the recording are the ghosts themselves—the ones that have been attempting to manifest through Julianne and the other patients. I don’t think they ever really got to us—they never spoke up, even after you’d asked several times.”

  “They remained at bay,” Carlos said. “I felt them outside, but they didn’t enter the circle—they were restrained.”

  “Uh-huh,” Stymak grunted, pushing the other glasses over to us. “I had that feeling, too.” He tapped his recorder. “This sounds like a lot of the other recordings. Some garbled talk, warnings about something coming . . . but this time something came and it didn’t come by itself.”

  “It came with Linda Hazzard. I thought they were the same thing at first,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure it’s two separate entities. Hazzard starved her patients, so maybe the sensation of hunger was connected to her. . . .”

  Carlos shook his head. “No. Quite separate. Hunger may be what drew one to the other, but the sensation of starving was animate and separate from the ghost of the woman, Hazzard, who killed the voices.”

  Stymak and I both stared at Carlos.

  “Can you not hear the thread that binds them together? Not all were her victims in life, but they are all in her power now.”

  “That’s not what’s giving us the creeps, Carlos,” I said. “It’s the idea of animate hunger.”

  “You saw it for yourself.” He glanced at Stymak, but didn’t lock his gaze with the pudgy medium’s. “You felt it tear into you. Did it not seem the embodiment of hunger, feeding on your soul?”

  Stymak shuddered and turned his face aside. “Ugh . . . I’d like to forget that feeling.”

  “You would do well to remember it,” Carlos suggested, his voice resonating through me. Judging from Stymak’s wince it had the same effect on him. “That way you will not fall victim to other hungers, to temptations that consume you in the same unremitting need that burns you to a shell but never lets you go.”

  Stymak, wide-eyed, gulped beer too fast and coughed, doubling over until the fit passed. “I . . . hope I never go wherever you’ve been, man.”

  Carlos inclined his head, but said nothing.

  “What did the ghost . . . thing say while I was . . . out of it?” Stymak asked, looking at me and very much not at Carlos.

  I thought back before I spoke. “She . . . or it . . . said something about tribute—that I had disturbed the tribute. And something about the wheel turning to feed the damned.”

  “‘When the wheel turns, when the hunger of the damned is sated.’ That is what the creature said,” Carlos quoted. Leave it to a necromancer to have a perfect memory for the horrible.

  “There’s some connection to the Great Wheel,” I said. “It’s come up before. It appeared as dermographia on my skin and other spirits have mentioned the Wheel. Though I’m not sure how turning a Ferris wheel sates the damned. Or what this business about tribute means.”

  “The souls that are bound together would be the tribute,” Carlos said. “They were gathered by Hazzard, but for what purpose?”

  “Given to Limos,” muttered the voices from the recorder. Stymak self-consciously pushed the button and turned it off. “I didn’t do that,” he said. “It just came on.”
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  Carlos and I both nodded.

  “Typical ghost crap,” Stymak continued, glaring at the recorder as if it understood his discomfort.

  I tried to think aloud. “No. No, it’s not. The ghosts were all people who died of starvation. They were gathered by Hazzard, who starved her victims to death, so she has an affinity for them, even in the afterlife. Gathered as tribute for Limos—some kind of otherworldly manifestation of hunger. And in return for tribute, this . . . thing is going to turn the Great Wheel and sate the hunger of the damned. Does that sound as totally loony as I think it does?”

  Stymak nodded vigorously, but Carlos grinned. I glared at him. “What?”

  “It’s no wonder she likes you.”

  “Who? What?” I demanded.

  “Hazzard. She said she wants you for her own.” His wolf grin struck me cold. “Because you are thin. She believed, did she not, that fasting was healthful? She would find a thin but healthy woman like you to be very attractive. Ideal, even. A paragon. She touched you, marked you. And then the messages began, because you were tied to her just like the starved ghosts she had gathered for Limos.”

  “Hang on . . .” I said. “If I’m tied to Hazzard and therefore to the ghosts she gathered, why are her messages appearing on my skin? Shouldn’t I be just like another of the ghosts?”

  Carlos shook his head. “You can’t be like them—you’re alive. Hazzard said, ‘You should be mine for all I’ve done.’ She thinks you should be her prize once their plan is successful. A victim to torment and starve forever.”

  I shivered. “I really don’t like that idea, but it implies that there’s some plan between Hazzard and this Limos to ‘sate the damned,’” I said.

  Carlos nodded.

  Stymak watched our conversation with horror clearly writ on his face. “Who or what is ‘the damned’?”

  “It must be Hazzard herself,” Carlos said, looking not quite convinced of his own argument. “The ghosts are not damned, merely unable to leave this place. The other entity is not human—it cannot be damned, but it can be fed.”

  “Damned or not, it can’t—” Carlos shot me the coldest glare I’d ever seen, cutting me short. He gave the tiniest shake of his head, warning me off what I’d been about to say. I reformed my idea before I spoke again. “Tribute cannot feed the hungry. . . .” I said, thinking aloud. “Hazzard already brought souls as tribute to Limos. So Limos owes her something in return that they plan to get by turning the Wheel . . . ?”

  “The fat ones!” the recorder blared.

  Stymak hit it on the tabletop. “Stop that! I know you’re only trying to help, but this is just not the time.”

  “The disturbed spirits—that’s the extra energy in the system,” I said.

  Carlos got it, but Stymak was lost. “What are you talking about?”

  “Never mind, Stymak, just a tangent. Don’t worry about it. Just hold on to the idea that ghosts or death represents energy.”

  “I know that.”

  “Someone wants more energy, more food, more tribute. They plan to get it from ghosts, and if you don’t have enough ghosts to go around, you make them.”

  Stymak was shaken. “Jesus!”

  “Exactly. There’s another phrase that keeps coming up in the transcripts—‘beach to bluff and back’—and Julianne keeps painting pictures of the bluffs and the beach in the area that’s now the waterfront and Pike Place Market. It’s all along the State Route Ninety-nine tunnel route, and the Great Wheel makes a very convenient central point to push energy from once it’s been gathered there. All the patients had contact with the tunnel and that contact made them ideal conduits for the ghosts once the patients were injured enough to become comatose.”

  “So . . . Julianne’s persistent vegetative state isn’t natural?” Stymak asked.

  “I don’t think so. I never did—did you?”

  He shook his head, but it was a weak movement.

  I went on. “The ghosts are forcing it to linger so they can scream for help, not just for themselves but for the people who’ll be riding the Great Wheel when Hazzard and Limos put their plan into motion. Hazzard doesn’t have any corporeal power to do anything to the Great Wheel, so she has to get someone to help her topple the Wheel and take the lives of the tourists on it.”

  “Limos,” Carlos supplied. “It is no ghost. It has power of its own as well as that of the ghosts gathered by Hazzard.”

  I felt sick and put my hand over my mouth. Stymak had turned the color of parchment, appalled by only half the knowledge Carlos and I had.

  Carlos gazed at me with eyes that smoldered with pain and death. “Very clever, isn’t it? Hazzard and Limos will upset the Wheel and dine on their share of the souls drowned in the ever-hungry sea.”

  “We have to figure out what they’re going to do and when,” I said. “It must be soon, because once the patients’ souls have faded out, I suspect their bodies will die too and we can’t let that happen.”

  TWENTY

  I was impatient to talk to Carlos without Stymak around, but I needed the medium’s help first, so I reined myself in.

  “Given to Limos . . .” The recorder had played that segment again and although I wasn’t very comfortable with it, I’d produced the photos of my dermographia. Stymak had looked them over and passed them on to Carlos by putting the phone on the table and pushing it toward him. He wouldn’t touch the vampire even through the intermediary of the device.

  “Did you ever listen to those recordings I sent?” Stymak asked me.

  “I couldn’t get more than the one phrase I mentioned. I was going to have my . . . someone try translating them or running them through various decryption and filter programs, but he hasn’t been available.”

  “I don’t think it’s that complicated, now that we’ve done this. I think it’s just backward. Because you remember the first time we heard this—at the Goss house—there was that phrase, umm. . . .” He searched through his pockets until he found a memory card, which he swapped into the recorder.

  He pushed the button and the speaker squealed a bit before it let out the words “. . . Slows row someel vague rot codeth—” He clicked it off and looked up, accidentally catching Carlos’s eyes, and then shifting his gaze to mine. “Makes no sense, does it?”

  I shook my head. I’d had the same problem with some of the written pieces I’d seen at Sterling’s house and the dermographia that afflicted Jordan Delamar.

  “But if it’s just backward, ‘slows’ could be . . .” He wrote the word on one of his notebooks and then wrote another under it. “That could be ‘souls’ and ‘row’ could be . . . ‘oowwrr’ . . . ‘our’ and then comes ‘someel’ . . . which could be . . . ‘leemos’ . . . that’s got to be Limos—the hunger-monster thing, right?”

  “Yes. The ghosts also said ‘Given to Limos,’ and there it is again,” I said, retrieving my phone from Carlos and looking through photos for what I wanted. “Here. The message on Jordan Delamar’s skin.”

  I handed the phone to Stymak, who read it aloud. “Given as Limos tribute, those who wasted away. Given to the wheel of death and birth, to break the wheel we are driven.” Stymak put my notebook down and listened to his recording again, writing the message down phonetically and then writing under it, “Souls, our, Limos, gave, tor thedock . . .” He stared at it. “No . . . that’s not right. That’s got to be ‘the doctor,’ so the whole thing is perfectly backward.”

  He rewrote the sentence forward: “The doctor gave Limos our souls.”

  “They’ve been saying the same thing over and over—we just didn’t get it,” Stymak said. “God, how could I have missed that? Backmasking! It’s the oldest trick in the book!” Then the color rushed out of his face and he stood up, looking more than queasy. “Holy Jesus.” He dashed out of the room.

  I glanced at Carlos.

  He cocked an eyebrow at me and I took that as permission to pick up the conversation we hadn’t had earlier. “I think the ghosts given in
tribute account for the extra energy in the system we were discussing last night,” I said.

  He gave it some thought and nodded. “They could. A few recent cases of starvation might have been required to start the cycle, however.”

  “At least two homeless people—one of them a contact of mine—died of starvation near the end of last year or the beginning of this one. That’s right in the time zone. There could be other deaths that didn’t come to my attention, or anyone else’s, especially if there was a more obvious cause of death, like cancer or HIV. And here’s another thing—Quinton mentioned a box that sounds like it might be some kind of portable shrine his father brought from Europe for this project of his. He says it contained something when Purlis arrived, but was empty when he got a look at it himself. But it had dirt from the tunnel project on it. I’ve seen Purlis around the square off and on for about a year now, so I think he hid the shrine in some segment of the construction near or in Pioneer Square for a while—probably in one of the monitoring wells—because the area has a high homeless population. There are always a few who don’t or won’t get enough to eat, so they’d be a nice attraction for this hungry monstrosity. And his presence in the area might help explain how he caught on to your people, too.”

  “The disruption of the soil accounts for the initial upwelling of ghosts and magic, but the continued presence of Limos would explain why the rise continued, rather than falling back. With Limos loose and fed, she could have been a formidable problem for us, but she hasn’t been.”

  I wondered at his use of “she” but I didn’t want to derail my train of thought with that right now, and instead I said, “I think the deal between Limos and Hazzard is not just for their own profit. I think Purlis must have some stake—”

  Carlos cut me off with a quick motion of his hand and a glance at the door. In a moment Stymak returned and sat down again, looking pale, smelling slightly sour and wiping his face with a damp towel. “Sorry. This thing is wigging me out.” He looked again at the transcript he’d started and at my photos. “Couple of these guys are kind of poetical, aren’t they?”