by Jim Johnson
I frowned at him. “Seems bright enough around here tonight without me.”
All the lights around the Memorial were on, some aimed toward the Memorial and others just lighting the paths around it.
He nodded, and waved his shopping bag at me again. “You light the darkness, you light the darkness!”
He then moved close to me, close enough that I could smell his lack of a bath, and he looked real close at me with clear eyes that looked terrifyingly lucid. “That Detective could learn something from you.”
My eyes widened and he gave me a strange little wink, and then bundled himself up again and started to walk away.
I called out, “Wait! How do you know Detective Bello?” I mean, what were the odds, right?
Cubes stared at me, glanced up the stairs toward the Memorial, and then back to me. “The old lady. She knows.” He nodded, then lifted his bag to point at me again. “Next time you see Malcolm, tell him Cubes said he should keep his head down. The old lady worries he ain’t gonna be careful enough.”
I puzzled over that statement as he turned and walked away. I called out, “Who’s this old lady?”
He kept walking away, clearly not interested in carrying on any more of the conversation. ‘G’night, Starlight.” He giggled as he moved off into the darkness.
I was tempted to follow him and push the question, but the buzzing in my ears and inner Sight had grown in the last few minutes, and now was enough of a distraction that I wanted to get up to the Memorial to figure out what the heck it was.
Guessing the secret of Cubes’s old lady would have to wait for another time. I gathered the ley threads around me in my usual protective cocoon of blue energy, and made my way up the smooth marble steps, hoping I was ready for whatever was waiting for me up there.
Chapter Seventeen
I REACHED THE TOP STEPS OF the Lincoln Memorial and stepped into the quiet central space, where the massive statue of Lincoln sitting down in his chair stared down at me from way up on high.
It was somehow colder in here than outside. Might have been the cross breezes coming in from all directions, but it had the taste of something else, something connected to the Veil and the Holding.
Something from the spirit world.
I wrapped my arms around myself against the chill, and then, remembering my training, risked using up a little mental energy to pull up a ley thread. It got warmer when I shifted the energies to activate it. I sensed the glow from my crystal increase in intensity along with the growing heat from the thread. I modulated my control of it, and set it to warm rather than toasty.
I didn’t feel at all confident enough to push it too much. The last thing I needed now was to lose control and somehow burn myself or someone around me. I’d work with Miss Chin on it some more later, and make sure I was doing it right before setting myself up with a ley thread heater and live in the tropics full time. There’s a lot to be said for independent research and study, but if that meant somehow accidentally burning down the Lincoln Memorial in the process, well, I don’t think I was quite ready to take on that much infamy.
So I shivered in the middle of the Memorial, staring up at the statue of a truly great man, wondering how the hell his monument was connected to the Veil, the Holding, and whatever weird stuff was going on that would inspire Detective Bello to bother me about it.
I skimmed the words engraved along the walls of the Memorial and then focused on the statue. I was missing something, I had to be.
Then, it hit me. I was being an idiot. I could almost see Miss Chin’s shrug of frustration and her little ‘ahem’ of disapproval. What had she said? Something about me still not used to my powers enough to use them automatically. If I had been a smarter Beacon, I’d have used my third Eye to look around as soon as I got to the top of the stairs.
I needed my Sight, and I had forgotten to use it, again.
I sighed and tried to stop heaping scorn on myself, but after so many years of doing it, it was kinda second nature. I forced myself to take a few deep breaths and then I pulled up another ley thread and wove it into my inner eye and blinked it and refocused on the Memorial around me.
And I gaped at what I Saw.
The Lincoln Memorial, built from light-colored marble and fine decorations, was completely plugged into the ley grid far below. Thin currents of light blue energy coursed over and through all the surfaces, along the massive marble throne, and pulsed along the statue itself, looking like glowing blue veins underneath old Abe’s marble skin.
The words engraved into the walls were limned in soft blue energies, and there were annotations made to the words, almost a whole separate speech, laid out in the blank spaces and even spilling out onto the floor, but they were all written in a language with characters I couldn’t read. The script looked like some sort of weird mix of Egyptian hieroglyphics, cuneiform, Greek, Japanese or Chinese, and some other characters that sort of looked familiar but which I couldn’t place.
I did a slow three-sixty in the center of the Memorial and let the incredible view sort of just sink in, realizing that I was seeing the place from a whole new perspective, one I had no idea had ever existed before, and one I knew I would never willingly give up seeing.
This was my future. There was so much here I didn’t understand, and so much I wanted to know. I remember my first semester at UPenn, as the bright-eyed hopeful freshman hungry for knowledge. Well, I had been hungry for some other stuff too, but mostly knowledge.
I opened up my senses, tapping into the ley grid for more power so that I could soak it all up, and I took a few moments to just exult in the sensation of being surrounded by power and knowledge, and beautiful blue arcs of energy buzzing through the walls of the Lincoln Memorial.
And then something ugly slammed into me from out of nowhere and I was knocked skidding across the marble floor. I crashed into one of the marble pillars near the statue. My head ringing from the impact, I flailed out for a ley thread and hurriedly threw up a feeble shield, and then I leaned over and literally threw up.
Bits of lunch splattered on the slick marble floor. I forced myself to take a moment to gather my senses and focused on whatever had hit me.
A shimmering, blurred form stood near the center of the marble floor, vibrating in the air in front of me. It sort of looked like a lost spirit, but I could feel the malice and hate pouring off it. The etheric energies all around felt polluted by this things’s presence.
Poltergeist, had to be—similar to the one Malcolm had to deal with. I was in trouble.
Miss Chin had given me the basics on poltergeists, but hadn’t gone into a huge amount of detail, particularly on how to fight them or how to protect myself from them.
The thing shimmered again and then lunged at me, faster than I could have thought possible.
I managed to throw my hands up along with another warding shield, but the sheer force of the thing passing so close to me knocked me off my feet and evaporated my little warding shield.
I hit the floor as the etheric energies of my ward collapsed around me. I sensed the intensity of my crystal, and reached into the top of my shirt and hoodie and pulled the crystal out of its hiding spot, and clenched its glowing form in one hand. The silvery light spilling out of it couldn’t be contained, and it helped to set the area around me in a bright blue and silver sphere that gave me comfort.
The ‘geist turned to face me and seemed to flinch at the muffled light in my hand. Noting this, I shifted my grip on the crystal and let all the light shine out.
The effect was profound. The ‘geist flinched back and actually backed off, slipping straight away from me and ducking behind a pillar. I got back to my feet, and, taking some renewed confidence in the light spilling out of my crystal, I gathered more ley threads around me and wove them together into a protective blue energy sphere with silver threaded throughout it, my personal coloring tinging the raw power from the ley grid.
With my glowing crystal bravely held out in front of
me, I moved toward the pillar the ‘geist had hidden behind. My sphere of protective energies moved with me.
“I know you’re in there! Come out and face me like a…uh…” I was gonna say ‘man’ but I had no idea if the thing was a man or woman, or had been a man or woman, or something else.
A dark form flashed toward me and bounced off the silver sphere with enough impact to make me stagger back, but I managed to keep my feet and my focus. The shadowy form recovered from the bounce and arced over toward the statue of old Abe, and moved out of sight behind it.
Thinking I had it on the run, I got my feet underneath me and pushed my brightly-glowing crystal out in front of me again, and then moved toward the near side of the statue, looking to see if I could move around it and confront whatever it was that had attacked me.
There was very little space behind the statue to pass through, but even then, I didn’t see anything unusual.
Well, not quite nothing. I refocused and raised my crystal up like a lantern, and focused on the narrow area behind the statue. The ‘geist was nowhere to be seen, but it was pretty obvious where it had likely gone.
Cut into the marble near the statue of old Abe was a ragged cleft of darkling energy, lined in blue energy tinged with orange and red. It reminded me a little bit of the permanent rift in the amphitheater in Old Town Alexandria, the one Miss Chin had taken me to on our first day of training.
This one looked, I don’t know, newer or rawer, or more ragged, like someone had just recently torn it open and created a new cut in the Veil.
I pushed myself against the cold wall to get an angle to glance inside the rift. The spiraling tunnel of light within connected the real world to the Holding. Someone or something had created a new stable conduit bridging the two worlds. Someone from my world might stumble close to it and get pulled into the Holding, and spirits malignant and otherwise from the Holding could find their way through the Veil to here, and wreak all sorts of mischief. Just as that ‘geist I had scared off had done.
I stared at the rift in the Veil, my mind whirling with questions and concerns. Well, crap. This was going to be a real problem.
Chapter Eighteen
I DIDN’T TRUST MYSELF TO TAKE the Metro home…just too many people to have to sit around. I was tired, scared, and jittery beyond belief. I rushed out to Constitution Avenue and flagged down a taxi. I climbed into the back and told the driver the address to my home, and spent a few long quiet minutes in the back of the cab catching my breath and trying to settle my rattled nerves.
I don’t know why that ‘geist inside the Memorial had me so rattled. Maybe it was the sudden appearance of it, or maybe the stable rift in the back of the statue, or something else. It was just…such a shock, I guess.
As the cabbie turned onto the GW Parkway, I found some semblance of balance and then tentatively reached out to the ley grid and pulled some energy from one of the ley threads and wove its strength into my tired reserves. I felt calmer after that, thinking maybe I could handle some more weirdness if it struck tonight.
The more I thought about the ‘geist, the more I also thought about the stable rift. I called up a mental image of it and tapped into the ley threads to enhance my memory of the details. The rift had a sharp blue tinge around it, the color of the ley grid and the Veil itself, but it also had elements of silvery white and yellow-gold. That meant that somehow both the Spinner’s energies and my own energies were somehow involved, and I wasn’t sure how that was possible. Unless…
Crystal City passed by through the windows, and I wracked my brain trying to recall those last moments during the fight with the Spinner in the Holding’s version of Branchwood. I had reached out beyond the Veil for strength from the ley grid, and had loosed a whole lot of power on the Spinner’s avatar.
So much power, in fact, that I remembered a tearing sensation within the Veil, or perhaps…
Shit. I suspected the rift in the statue was my fault. Hot, sour bile filled my throat and I just barely cried out to the taxi driver to pull over. I yanked open the door and puked out my guts just outside the car. I clambered out on hands and knees and tossed the driver a fistful of money and then resumed puking on the ground. He swore something in his native tongue and then tore off into the night, the jerk.
But I was focused on getting sick everywhere except on myself. After my pukes turned into dry heaves, I curled up into a ball on the cold pavement, somehow having the presence of mind to make sure I wasn’t laying in the middle of the road.
I laid there and stared at a clump of weeds poking up between a couple slabs of concrete, my mind racing as it reconstructed those last few moments from the fight with the Spinner. There had been a lot of energy thrown around that night, both within the Holding that the Spinner threw at me and Malcolm, and then more that I had drawn out of the ley grid and through the Veil and toward the Spinner’s avatar. I had managed to pretty much blow him to pieces, but…
I rolled over onto my back, closed my eyes, and then reached down into the ley grid and pulled a few threads and wove their etherics into my mind’s eye, and called up a mental image of the Veil, sensing its presence all around me. I focused and flew my mind’s eye along it, pulling back to get a larger view of it as if I was a bird looking down. The Veil didn’t operate in two dimensions, and Miss Chin had reminded me that my mind’s eye didn’t have to be in two dimensions either, so I sort of created a three-dimensional view of the Veil, which hurt my simple mortal brain.
I superimposed a map of the DC metro area onto the map of the Veil, and then focused on the amphitheater in Alexandria where Miss Chin and I had trained. I knew for sure there was a stable rift through the Veil there. It showed up on my little mental map as a green icon.
Then I focused on the location of the Lincoln Memorial, and added a red icon to that. I focused my senses so that I could pick up the unique feeling I got from a rift in the Veil, knowing that sort of empty, torn sensation that I couldn’t really easily put into words.
Once I had that sensation firmly in mind, I reached out with my tired mind and senses. I pulled on a few more ley threads and added their power to my reservoir, and then altered my senses to try and pick up any more rifts within the Veil, concentrating on that feeling of brokenness to try and pinpoint them.
I closed my eyes as I felt the energies course through me, filling every pore and cell in my body with a tingle of etheric energy. It was an amazing feeling; one I hadn’t really opened myself up much as yet. I’d have to ask Miss Chin about it, but for now, it felt amazing, like I was alone in the universe, floating free within the endless ocean of the ley grid, and even beyond its confines into a larger ocean of etheric energy that somehow encompassed the whole globe.
Skating along the edges of my consciousness was that feeling of being part of something much larger, of a greater presence existing outside the boundaries of the ley grid. I’d experienced this profound feeling just once before, when I was sure I was gonna die while fighting the Spinner. In that moment, just as now, I had thought that maybe I was skimming close to the presence of God, no matter how weird that might sound.
I shook off the cosmic thoughts and settled to focus on the here and now, and the shimmering Veil all around me. Soon, another red icon appeared on the map, somewhere near the Kennedy Center, and then another by the Capitol building, and then another and another and…
Soon my mental map of the Veil was peppered by red dots all over the place, so many that my map looked like it had suffered a sudden measles flare-up. I mentally cringed but kept feeding power into my senses, drawing from the ley grid and feeing my body get weaker and weaker from the exertion. I had to see it through, though—I had to get a sense of just how much damage I had accidentally caused. Miss Chin clearly hadn’t explained to me the breadth of the problem before us.
After several long moments, and nearly passing out from the effort, it was done. I eased off the power pull from the ley grid and let the extra etherics within my soul filter off
and fade away. I stared in a mix of wonder and horror at my blood-flecked map, appalled at the destruction on display.
I couldn’t easily count it, but it looked like there were at least two hundred separate rifts within the Veil, spread all over the DC metro area, inside and outside the Beltway. My map encompassed about a twenty-mile radius around the city, but even that was a hell of a lot of territory. There were way more rifts centered in and around the nursing home, which I guessed made sense, and then they spread out from there, becoming less frequent the farther out toward the edge of the radius.
Still. The map presented a lot of damage. I treated the map like a Google map and zoomed in on some of the closer rifts, realizing that they varied in size as well—some were fairly large breaks, almost person sized; while others were tiny, barely even pinpricks in the tapestry of the Veil.
I pondered that for a while. I wasn’t a Mender and barely knew anything about that role, but Miss Chin had told me that so far as she knew, there were no Menders in the DC area. I knew that Weavers in general had the ability to repair rifts in the Veil, though Menders were supposed to be particularly adept at it. Miss Chin, as a Warden, was competent at it, something she had said had taken her much time to learn. My training with her on mending the Veil had barely touched on the basics. I wasn’t about to start experimenting with mending out of the fear that I might just make things even worse than I already had.
I opened my eyes and stared up at the cold night sky, seeing a few stars sprinkled through the brighter ambient light from the city around me. It struck me that it was ridiculous to be laying on the cold ground, so I sat up and looked around.
I was in a bit of grass just off the road, and it took me a moment or two to realize I was about ten blocks off Mount Vernon, which meant I was a short walk home. Could have been worse.
I glanced at my cell phone but somewhere along the way I had been smart enough to turn it off. I flicked it on. I had a text from Abbie, reminding me that she was going to be home late. The phone seemed to work just fine otherwise, which was something of a marvel given how screwy electronics were around me when I manipulated the ley threads.
