“Celia?” Dale asked in a nervous voice.
“Maybe it’s Mark. . . .” Patricia suggested.
The table quivered, as if gathering itself.
“Nonsense—” Cara snapped.
The table sprang upward and fell back, digging its feet into the carpet. It jerked and shuddered, writhing under their fingertips like an animal in pain. Patricia yipped as it trampled her foot.
Hot light flared over the table in pure white fury and I felt a sympathetic burn along my limbs. The table spun under its brilliant Grey canopy, rising on one leg and striking Cara and Ian hard in the ribs. Cara dropped to her knees as the table knocked into Ian a second time before coming back down. Ian staggered backward, holding his side as the rest stared around.
“The pressure—” Terry started.
The stereo erupted in a burst of uncoordinated noise as the table rushed toward the glass divider, rising off the floor with a sudden bump. Alarms squealed and pinged in the observation room.
“No!” Terry shouted at his instruments. “It can’t do that!”
“There’s nothing wrong with the device,” Quinton said, poking the monitors with his meter, but his face was pale. “But it’s getting awfully hot—”
The table crashed into the glass, gouging a hole as big as a beach ball. Icy air gushed through the breach, dragging a stink of smoke and acid into the booth. I gagged on it and bent my body around a sudden punch of discomfort as the table thudded back to the floor. Unobstructed by glass, I could now see the four large power masses hovering over Cara, Ian, Ana, and Ken. Ken’s Grey walls and Ian’s prismatic flashes had vanished as if burned away. The four miniature storms of energy tore at the table in pulses of red and yellow.
Shouts broke out in the séance room. The table, cloaked in throbbing, paranormal fire, lurched into Ken, ramming him against the wall below the shattered window. Ana shrieked as the table attacked him again and again. Ken flailed and disappeared below our view, the hot red and yellow energy still hovering over him like a carrion bird on the thermals.
A bright orange flash struck the stereo and it blared a jumbled cacophony of swing music, chopping up “Jumpin’ at the Woodside” with “In the Mood” and “Sing, Sing, Sing.”
“Stop it!” Tuckman demanded, jumping up and blocking all exit from the observation room. Terry and I stared over his shoulder toward the pandemonium, appalled.
“I’m not doing anything!” Terry shouted.
“The meters are flipping out. There’s something really nasty in there,” Quinton snapped. “Where’s the damned fire extinguisher?”
I couldn’t keep track of which angry knot of energy had done what anymore. The room was thick with the dizzying strobe and strain of Grey forces, a rising tsunami of fury and panic. A cataract of books rushed up from the bookshelves and pelted down on the people in the room. Something red snatched at Patricia’s head and she shouted in pain. A spangle of blood and the bright shape of her earring arced to the floor.
Under the boiling storm of Grey, the table lurched again, scrabbling its feet against the floor like a bull and jerking toward the corner beside the door. Ana was in its path, half crouched on the floor, covering her head with her arms. Nearby, Dale had flattened himself over Cara. Ian, Ken, and Wayne had all vanished onto the floor near the broken observation room window.
On the video monitor, there was no violent storm of light, only the strange movement of shadows from the swinging chandelier. I could see Wayne patting at Ken’s legs, his voice steaming in the room’s uncanny cold, sound smothered in the screaming of the stereo, then turning his head to watch the table.
I looked back through the broken window. Trailing red and yellow streamers, the table charged toward Ana. She dodged, jumping over the Stahlqvists and Ian, and ran up onto the couch, still covering her head with her arms as if she were being bombarded by an invisible flight of ravens.
The table jerked forward, changing direction and tipping toward the sofa cushions. Ana bounded across the upholstery, her feet skimming over the back, to leap off the arm of the sofa nearest the door as the table crashed down onto the couch.
Wayne ran to catch her, scooping her from the air with a ropy arm. He wrenched at the door handle. It came away in his hand.
The table bounced and wheeled on its edge, sweeping toward the door.
Beside me, Quinton and Terry began beating at the monitor board with their jackets as smoke erupted from below. “Get out! The panel’s catching fire!”
Dale Stahlqvist snatched at a leg of the rolling table, pulling it away from his wife and Ana. Red and yellow light strobed in the room, lending a disjointed, horror-film aspect to the scene. Patricia picked up a wooden chair and began to beat at the rogue table, screaming at it as blood ran down her neck.
I needed a closer look at Celia. In the confusion, I bolted toward the observation room door as the board full of Christmas lights in the séance room exploded, raining colored glass and sparks over Ana, Cara, and Wayne. The stereo let out a final tortured howl and fell silent as both rooms blacked out.
I heard the whoosh of a fire extinguisher behind me as I rushed into the hall. The séance room door crashed open, flooding the hall with Celia’s hot glow and tangled lines. Wayne, Ana, and Cara rushed out as I skidded into the sudden fire and knives of the poltergeist.
A tornado of fury twisted around me, pulling and tearing at me with murderous power. Crystal planes, glittering like ice sheets, cut kaleidoscopic slices of time, flaying me with instants of memory—flashes of lives and shattered jumbles of faces . . . and the odor of gunsmoke and salt wrack. The sensation of foulness pushed against me and I reeled forward, desperate to escape it.
Then I was through it and the séance sitters were milling, hysterical and gabbling, into the hall around me. Acrid smoke and the smell of the extinguisher’s chemicals flooded from the rooms on a raft of chill. But I still had the other smell in my nose—the stink that had clung under the scent of superglue at Mark’s apartment. The odor of the poltergeist.
Turning, I saw the hot swirl of Celia’s shape collapse, spiraling away like water down a drain and leaving only dim, frayed threads like a spiderweb spun between the participants. I shuddered. It was a force—an entity—capable of great destruction, and the feel and smell of it only confirmed the sickening idea that had been growing in my mind for a while. I had passed through the thing that had killed Mark Lupoldi.
It hadn’t just been present and it wasn’t a coincidence. One or some of these people had created a killer ghost. I had no doubt of it, but Solis wouldn’t like it. He would require a more prosaic solution and I might have to be the one to point him to it. No one else would or could.
I stood in the hall, breath heaving, and looked them over. Ken was still missing. Tuckman and Terry had come into the hall with Quinton a smoke-wrapped step behind them. Cara had allowed Dale to comfort her and I could see thin blood trickling from beneath her bandage as she leaned against him. Wayne had vanished again, leaving Ana in the care of Ian.
I caught up to Wayne exiting the séance room. Glancing in, I could see Ken sitting up against the control room wall. He shook his head as if dazed or deafened. I looked at Wayne.
“Bruised, but not broken, I think,” he said. “Just knocked silly. How ’bout you call the medics and I’ll take a look at the rest?”
“We’ll have to keep them calm and here and not let them go wandering off like Cara did last time.”
“Check. Go tell Tuckman. He’ll listen to you more than me.”
“OK. Be back in a minute.” I glanced in at Ken one more time, but he hadn’t changed any—his shield of blankness was still missing, but there was nothing much else to see. I dug up my cell phone and called 911 as I headed for Tuckman.
Quinton buttonholed me. “I really don’t like this.”
“Join the club. What went wrong?”
He gave me a grave look. “I was going to ask you that. The machinery was all doing what it shoul
d have—right up until the electrical surge that fried most of it. What caused the surge seems to be your field, not mine.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know, either. Some kind of ghost energy, but—”
He waved my explanation aside. “I don’t want to know. Magic just makes my head ache. What I do want to know is if this is going to attract cops.”
I chewed my lip. “I think so. There’s a murder investigation involved and I suspect the detective in charge has been watching at least a few of these people.”
“Then I need to go, but I’ll call you later. There’s something I need to check out.”
“Something wrong?”
“Maybe, but I want to be sure first. I’ve got your cell phone number. I’ll call you when I know. Now, I’m out of here.”
I reserved judgment on his mysterious habits and blew out a breath. “I’m stuck a while longer or I’d offer you a lift back to Pioneer Square. Will you be OK?”
He chuckled. “I’m great at getting around. But you be careful, Harper. This thing’s a mess.”
I gave him a sardonic look. “No duh.”
He gave me a small smile, then shook his head and loped for the back stairs with his pack slung over one shoulder.
I caught up to Tuckman next, hearing the screech of a siren and the clatter of noise from in front of the building. “Hey,” I said, catching his arm to turn his attention from the hysterical Patricia, who was still pinching her bleeding ear. “You’re going to have cops all over you in a few minutes and you need to keep this bunch contained—”
The Medic One team hustled up the stairs with their kits. Wayne sent them to Ken first, then resumed his position blocking the main stairs.
Tuckman seemed a little dazed. “What? Why?”
“I suspect that Detective Solis has been keeping an eye on you and your group. Someone has surely called campus security about the noise and the smoke, and Solis’s guys will be right behind them. Keep these people in order and under control and try to get them coherent. No detective is going to buy the idea that your pet ghost got loose and attacked a few people—especially not when one of your project assistants died in mysterious circumstances a week ago.”
His respiration was a little fast, his eyes still a little glazed. I leaned in and peered into them. “Do you understand me, Tuckman? Hello?”
He blinked several times. “Yes. Yes, I think so.” He shook himself back to normal. “I need to keep them together. Will you stay or have you other concerns elsewhere?”
I smiled at him. “I have other things I have to do. I need to talk to you about all of this, but it’ll have to wait.”
“All right.” He nodded and stepped away from me, beginning to move through the small crowd, soothing them and organizing their thoughts for them.
I watched the ghost-makers wander for a moment, beginning to fall back under Tuckman’s calm. They seemed frightened and confused—unaware of what power they wielded. Most of them. But at least one of them was acting.
I followed Quinton’s lead and slid away before the cops arrived. I had an appointment I couldn’t miss. Not even for Solis.
TWENTY
Carlos paused a moment outside the building to study it, as I had a week before. The Grey fog of yellow and black that I had hung over the building the night of Mark Lupoldi’s death had thinned and contracted to a single blazing spot on his window. The police cars and barricades were gone, but the building still had an air of violation and depression.
Carlos said nothing until we were upstairs and standing in front of Mark’s door. The snap lock had been engaged but it was old, unsophisticated, and poorly installed—easily bypassed with a credit card.
“Corruption is rife when even the locks take bribes,” he observed.
I raised an eyebrow. I’d never expected a joke out of Carlos. “It doesn’t usually work,” I replied. “This just happens to be a very cheap lock in a run-down building.”
I closed the door behind us, locking us into the murder scene. The landlord had not cleaned the apartment yet and the bloodstains and print-kit residue still marked the walls. Carlos looked it over and nodded approval as he began pacing around the room. His tread made no sound in spite of his size. He put his hands out as if touching objects as yet invisible to me.
I sank down into the Grey, hoping to see something of what he saw. The cold silver mist swelled over me, shot with the phosphorescent glow of energized objects, heaving and flickering with the shapes of ghosts and memories. Layers of old tenants had built up a map of their daily routines, laying a path paved with ghost footprints around the bed, kitchen counter, and bath. A similar pearly patch floated near the windows, where generations of tenants had gazed out, watered their plants, or sat to read in the sunlight a while.
I pushed myself deeper, to the lines of the grid. Bright white, yellow, and blue dominated the vertiginous view through the blackness between the worlds. I felt dizzy at the apparent emptiness below my feet. Cars left a blur of displaced energy overhead on the black smear of the Aurora Bridge as the neon wire-frame world rolled down to the cold cut of the canal below.
A tangled stain of red and yellow—like strands of poisoned cottonwood fluff—lay upon the air a few feet from me. They didn’t seem to hover, but to have become caught on some invisible hook in the air. A boiling shape of black and red moved around them. I started toward it, curious, then saw it reach out, beckon to me. The shape was Carlos’s presence in the deepest levels of the Grey. It was heavier and more solid than I would have expected, though it had strange rents and holes.
I fixed my sight on the shape that was Carlos and eased back toward normal, watching the energy-shape change and clothe itself in layers of power, appearance, and memory as I surfaced. Jagged shards of glittering ice danced in his shape and clustered through him, reflecting sudden glimpses of history before he regained the dark, hulking cloak of shadow and blood I was familiar with.
I emerged with a shudder. Carlos watched me, one eyebrow raised. We were standing in front of the bloodstained wall, facing the cracked dent Mark’s body had made in it. I could barely see the faded red and yellow threads, hanging at chest height. Carlos pulled a filament from it and brought it to his face.
“This is the trace of your ghost.”
“So it was here.”
“It was. A strange ghost, as you said. It is very difficult for me to read—it’s not dead. It’s alive. It is a living thing of this power, created by ignorant will, thriving on many power sources. One is not alive—a natural power source, but not that of a human life. It is not the life of the man who died here. He is not part of this . . . entity.”
“What is it, then? They call it a poltergeist, but it doesn’t seem to be that.”
“A thought-entity,” he answered. “The accumulation of their will with this power source they stumbled on, displaced time, memory, things dragged from their proper place in the net of combined human desire. It should not be as powerful as it is, except for whatever power source they found. A strange creature . . .”
He rubbed the strands between his fingers and breathed in whatever odor rose from it, frowning and casting his glance to me.
I looked at the bloodied wall. “Could it have caused that?”
“It did. I would not expect it of daylighters, usually. But the mind that guided it is unrestrained.”
“It was controlled? By a single person?”
“Without doubt. The smell of this is strange, though.” He plucked another thread of it and I shivered. “It has a scent of you, also, and has the tang of fury and madness, surprise ... desire? Odd.” He crushed the strand in his hand and drizzled it out as dust on the floor. “Why does it smell of you?”
“I fell in it earlier today and got caught in it at least one other time at one of their séances,” I replied. “I suppose that would account for the smell of it on me.”
Carlos frowned cold ripples across the surface of the Grey. “I did not say you smelled of it—
though it clings to you. It brought the odor of you with it here.”
I stared at him and my mind spun through the chronology of Mark’s death. “Wait. When I first investigated the lab, some of the threads of it were gathered under a table—I didn’t know what it was at the time. I slipped and my head and shoulders plunged into the knot of threads, like a large version of that little snag here. That was the day Mark was killed. Maybe an hour or two before he died.”
Carlos closed his eyes and smiled.
A surge of despair swamped me. “Did I have something to do with this?”
“No. The trace of you is a mere shred and I wouldn’t have recognized it without your presence now.”
“But—” I started to object, unsure I hadn’t somehow pushed this thing.
His glance cut through me. “You own nothing of this.”
“Then what happened here?” I asked.
“I can’t see the whole of it—the death was quick and the shock short. The man who died did not linger. This thing came as fury and struck him with its power unleashed. It flung him, crushed him, sweeping the room like flash fire, then was gone.”
“Did it take anything?”
Carlos snorted. “If it did, I cannot see that. It has no story, only these near-extinguished remains of its rage. The power of it amazes me.”
“I think I know where the extra power came from. The room the group picked to work in has a power line nearby.”
“A ley line.”
“It seems like a feeder line to a grid nexus, not a big source, but they seem to have dragged it from the position I’d expect.”
Poltergeist (Greywalker, Book 2) Page 20
