My spices sat there next to my coat, and now even I thought they’d been a stupid idea. If I bought pepper in Sticks and Stones, it probably would have been harvested with all the rest of the pepper, but at least the people who purchased it, imported and shipped it would have done so with an intent. And that intent, if it was tangible at all, would affect the vibration. This pepper? A dollar ninety-nine and a little cardboard shaker jar? It was made for picnics, not exorcisms.
And then I looked at the cinnamon-sugar. Cripes—what was I thinking? And I wasn’t even high.
I couldn’t tell anymore if my hand was cold from the paranormal cold spot, or if it had just gotten that way because I’d been holding it out in front of me so long. I looked at my stupid spices again. Salt for protection, cinnamon to enhance psychic ability, and pepper to drive away evil. I figured I should start with the cinnamon.
My first impulse was to snort it. I’m guessing I picked that up prior to my Camp Hell training, and that it wasn’t my most effective course of action. I took some into my hand, and I sniffed it—but not too close. Yet. Smelled like cinnamon. Come on, I told myself. Think.
Or rather, visualize. White light. Third eye. Internal faucet. Okay, I could do that much. I smelled the cinnamon, and I imagined myself full of white light. I think I felt something. Something more than the desire for a piece of toast—though that was there, too. My eyes were closed. I’m not sure when that happened. I opened them. The cramped enclosure that stunk of germicide and gleamed with stainless steel had a soft glow. It did. It wasn’t just wishful thinking on my part.
I wondered what I was supposed to do with the spoonful of cinnamon-sugar now. I didn’t see a garbage can. It didn’t seem right to drop it on the floor. I stuck my hand in my pocket and shook it off.
The palm of my hand felt sticky, and cinnamon darkened the creases. I wiped my hand against the side of my jacket and hoped the material was dark enough to hide it. Still sticky. I wiped it again. I felt a little tug, kind of like when you walk through a spiderweb, and I realized I had been busy fooling around with the sugar on my hand while my psychic faucet was turned on high. I looked up, and staggered back. Something was visible where the cold spot had been. Something moving.
Not moving like a person, though. And ghosts like that, who moved wrong, really creeped me out. I backed toward the door, toward Zig—who might even be able to help me fend off the creepy crawlies if he was anything like Jacob. I watched the thing move, floating, undulating, and I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Or any other feature, for that matter. It looked like something that might grow up from the floor of the ocean. Were we in a low spot, someplace that used to be underwater? And if so, what the hell used to live there that would leave a ghost behind it that looked like that?
Several minutes passed while I stood there and stared at the thing. All the exorcism texts I’d read the night before blended together in my mind, shuffled like a deck of cards, a phrase here, a phrase there, but nothing that made any sense with the phrases before or after it. It was all just a bunch of meaningless static now.
I called Jacob. He had read more than I had. He probably even remembered what it all meant. But his phone went right to voice mail, and I figured he was probably in court, which meant he could be hours. My phone was sticky with sugar. I snapped it shut and tucked it into my breast pocket.
The ghostly sea creature grew fainter. I focused on it, and it grew brighter again. At least it seemed to be stuck in one place. Something that can’t chase you isn’t quite as scary as the stuff that can. I took a couple of steps forward and tried to figure out what I was looking at. My shoe brushed against the convenience store bag, and I remembered my salt and pepper. I didn’t actually remember what I had meant to do with them, not now that I was actually staring at a supernatural being, but I remembered that they were there.
I peeled a plastic safety seal from the pepper, screwed off the top, and sniffed it. I coughed, and my eyes teared. I wiped the tears away with my sticky cinnamon hand. Not yet, something told me—some tiny part of my brain that remembered my focus groups at Camp Hell. Always begin with salt.
Too bad I hadn’t thought of that before I broke out the cinnamon sugar. I opened up the salt, said a silent apology to whoever had to sweep the floors, and laid down a salt circle around the perimeter of the enclosure.
I looked down at the salt, and considered it. It didn’t feel like anything to me. What was missing? I thought about Miss Mattie telling me to feel God’s love shining down from heaven. And in a more secular recollection, I recalled one of the Camp Hell trainers telling me to activate the herbs.
White light, faucet, silver full-body condom. Check. Then I imagined some of the white light shooting out from my fingertips, superhero style. I imagined the salt circle lighting up like I had just dropped a match on a circle of gasoline.
Three things.
One, I reenacted too many fake Evel Knievel stunts when I was in first grade.
Two, it occurred to me that the ghostly sea creature was not a sea creature at all. It was a flame.
Three, everything was glowing now, as if I was in an overexposed eighties New Wave video. I don’t think it was really glowing, of course. It was just my very literal brain letting me know that my activation had actually done something. The same way Richie had, when he’d been praying over that suicide.
Now it was safe to break out the pepper. I could snort a little more cinnamon-sugar too, if I was really set on it. But it didn’t seem like I needed to. You know how sometimes if a little is good, a lot must be better? Talent isn’t like that. It’s more like the vodka in Crash’s freezer. Some is good. But beyond a certain point, it can be too much.
I eased toward the flame with the pepper shaker held two-handed against my chest. The pepper wasn’t activated yet. All I had to do was think about it, flow some of that white light into it, and then it felt warm to my touch, as if I was holding a hot cup of coffee.
I took a couple more steps, and then looked at the ghostly thing. Yup. It was definitely a flame.
I thought harder about the pepper. The cardboard shaker felt hot, really hot, like the coated paper might actually start smoldering. Damn it. I wished I had a ritual, an incantation of some sort that would make it feel like I was actually doing something, and not just flinging spices around and making an ass of myself. But Miss Mattie’s method didn’t ring true for me, and neither did Richie’s.
“This isn’t your place anymore,” I whispered. “You’re on another plane now. Move along.” I stabbed the pepper shaker out in front of me, hoping for some distance. I felt lame beyond belief. But I did it.
It flickered. But it was a flame, and that’s what flames do.
I dug the top of the pepper shaker off with my thumbnail and poured a mound of it into my palm. I realized that I’d never had any clue how strong black pepper smells when I was sprinkling it over my mashed potatoes. My eyes watered hard, and I held it away from my face.
“This is a hospital,” I explained to the ghost flame. “People come here to get better. And you…well, it looks like you’re not helping.”
The flame didn’t talk. It just…remained where it was. On fire.
“So here’s the deal. You gotta go. Today.”
It sat there. Flaming.
I intended to follow that up with a very official-sounding “now,” only I was overwhelmed by the smell of the pepper before I got the word out. A sneeze ripped through me instead, a massive convulsion that threatened to turn me inside out, and caused me to spray spit, pepper, and white light all over the back of the enclosure.
The flame shot high, like some invisible hand had cranked up the etheric gas burner, and a heartbeat later, dwindled to nothing as if it had used up all the oxygen in its final, bright moment.
My sticky hand was covered with pepper. And so was the back half of the enclosure. I sneezed again. My eyes burned. I wiped my nose on my upper arm, then sneezed a third and final time.
&nbs
p; “Do you need anything?” Zigler called through the fabric wall.
I spotted a box of tissues. “No. I’m good.” I wiped my nose, and my face, and my cinnamon hand. I didn’t bother with my suitcoat—that would only call attention to any sticky spots by highlighting them with paper lint. “Actually, I think I’m done.”
The curtain opened a few inches and Zigler’s face appeared in the gap. “The cold spot’s gone?”
I held my hand over the spot where the ghost flame had flickered. I closed my eyes, sucked some extra white light into myself, and I focused. Nope. Nothing. All clean.
Except that tiny shiver.
Damn. I opened my eyes and looked. There was a hole in the floor, maybe two inches in diameter, edges charred black all around, and through it, movement. “C’mere a minute,” I told Zig.
He squeezed into the enclosure.
“Notice anything funny about the floor back there?”
Zigler edged by me and looked. “There’s some sort of granular residue on the floor.”
I rolled my eyes. “Salt, pepper, and cinnamon.” I refrained from adding that the cinnamon was in a shaker with sugar, and that I’d found it on the same shelf as the syrup and the toaster pastries. “Other than that?”
“It’s a little damp. Don’t tell me I’m looking where you just sneezed.”
“Probably. Nothing else?”
He straightened up. His knees popped. “You want to give me a hint?”
“A hole in the floor that you can see through, all the way down to the level below. You don’t see that?”
“Hm. That’s different.” Zigler checked again, as if he might have missed it. “No hole.” He juggled a few filled notepads, and then he nodded to himself and frowned. “We’re above the old coal cellar.”
As in, the basement. Oh boy.
My phone rang in the elevator on the way down. The caller I.D. read Unavailable. “Bayne,” I said.
“Detective?” A pleasant female voice. Laura. “Agent Dreyfuss would like to speak to you.”
I sighed. “Yeah, sure. Put him on.” The elevator doors opened. Zig and I stepped into the basement lobby. There was a giant urn with a fake plastic tree inside. I think the moss that covered the base of the trunk was real, though. Someone had stuck a wad of gum in it.
Laura patched Dreyfuss through. “You do know that it’s okay to ditch Sergeant Warwick’s assignments to work on mine,” he said, “don’t you? He won’t harbor any hard feelings. Cross my heart.”
“It’s, uh….” I wished there was a place I could sit. There wasn’t. I followed Zig down a series of corridors that got smaller and dingier the farther we went. “I need to do more research. Richie’s a pro, but I can’t work the way he works.”
“Right, you never bought the whole heaven and hell bit either. I can respect that. What about the reading material I sent over?”
“It was….” I sighed. I couldn’t think of a word to describe it. “There was a lot of it.”
“I tried to be thorough.”
I noticed. The banker’s box had been fifty pounds of thorough. “Was there something I missed?” he asked me.
“Plain English would’ve been nice.”
“No kidding. Do you think you’ve got a book in you, Detective? Because really, the market’s ripe for a text on mediumship that hasn’t been soaked in technical terms in an attempt to make it sound legitimately scientific. You’d need to publish under a pen name, of course, to keep some right-wing religious kook from gunning you down in the SaverPlus parking lot. But still—I think the world could use a definitive work on spirits.”
“No. I don’t think so.” I wondered if he knew I’d recanted my testimony on Roger Burke. He had to.
Zig stopped in front of a security door and ran his high-level pass through a card reader. The door clicked open.
On the off-chance that it hadn’t yet filtered back to Dreyfuss that Burke’s lawyer had enough to spring him once the judge got around to looking at his case, I figured I should sneak back and pump whatever information I could from Doctor Chance before I found myself banned from the FPMP headquarters. Whatever was haunting LaSalle had been there for years. One more day wouldn’t hurt it.
Zigler opened a dented steel door and stepped into a room. I followed. “I guess I could stop by and…Jesus Christ.”
The room was on fire.
-TWENTY EIGHT-
“I gotta go,” I said. I closed the phone with numb fingers and slipped it into my pocket.
“You sense something?” Zig asked.
Saying that I sensed something in that room was so far beyond an understatement that I needed a whole new word for it. Ghost flames licked the walls, and spirit soot darkened the ceiling.
Old cardboard crates were stacked high on a pallet, boxes for shipping hospital equipment. They obscured the room, and the ghost flame danced on them, lighting them without casting any shadows.
“What is it?” Zig said. “You’re white as a sheet.”
Spirit was so thick in the room that it was just as real as the physical to my eyes. Maybe more. I shuffled my feet to keep from tripping over a piece of rubble that I couldn’t see because the ghost flames blotted it out. “This is it,” I said.
“What? What is it?” Zigler sounded scared—which rattled me, because he wasn’t the one who was supposed to be scared. He couldn’t see the weird world that happened in the same space as the one we were trying to live in, that poked through every time I thought I’d gotten a handle on things.
I rounded an eight-foot stack of boxes and banged my shin against some spare ductwork that was piled against the side wall. The noise it made was huge, and hollow, and disproportionately startling. “Fuckshitsonofa….”
A figure stood in the center of all the flames. It whirled to face me. My hand went to my gun. Stupid. And then to my pocket. Cinnamon sugar. Oh, fuck me.
The temperature plummeted. “What is it?” Zig barked. Ductwork rattled as he approached.
“Fire.”
“Fire? My God, I can see your breath.”
I took that as a cue to start shivering, partly from the cold, and partly from the look on the ghost’s face.
She was young, I think. Or skinny and flat-chested, at least. The old-fashioned hospital gown didn’t offer me any clues, and her face…her face was twisted to the point where she could’ve been eighteen or forty-eight and I wouldn’t have known the difference.
Her mouth dropped open like she was screaming, but no sound came out. She disappeared and reappeared in almost the same spot, and the shape of her mouth changed. Still open, but like it was a glimpse of a different scream on a different day. She flickered. A new scream, still silent, framed by twin tear tracks. Another flicker—more of a strobe. She was closer now, mouth open so wide I could see the dark, mercury-laced fillings that covered her molars. Another strobe—fuck, she’d nearly appeared inside my left arm. I staggered back.
My hand went for my gun again. Damn it. Wrong world. I should probably talk to it. See if it was a full ghost or just a repeater. But sonofabitch, I was scared.
“G-girl. Woman, I mean. Caucasian. Um. Age…fuck, I dunno.”
“Vic. Maybe we shouldn’t….”
I took a deep breath, and I held it, because I realized my breathing had gone fast and shallow, and was leaving smokelike puffs in front of me in the air. I wanted to look at Zig, show him I’d heard him, but the freaky ghost stuttered all over like a film loop hopping forward in a projector, and when she reappeared, her face was right in front of mine, mouth open in a silent scream, glassy eyes huge, jittering, riveted on my face.
I bolted.
The ductwork rolled out of its stack with a thunderclap clatter.
I ran all the way to the security door and pulled. It didn’t budge. I kept pulling, as if that would make any difference, until I felt Zigler’s hands on my shoulders, dragging me off the door.
Once I was out of the way, he swiped his key card, and we ran until
we got to the elevators.
A janitor watched with mild interest as we both tried to catch our breath. I turned away so he couldn’t see the terror on my face. Zig and me, we were the PsyCops. We weren’t supposed to cut and run.
Zig motioned for the janitor to go ahead and take the elevator. Once he was out of the way, and the two of us were alone, he bent his head close to mine, and he spoke. “What the fuck was that?”
A small, distant part of me thought it was funny that he’d finally dropped the F-bomb in my company. But mostly I was still shitting myself. “I…I….”
“You know what? If it’s that bad, maybe I don’t want to know.”
I chafed my upper arms through my sportcoat. My sprained elbow gave an ugly twinge. “It’s…she….”
“Maybe I don’t want to do this.”
I stopped trying to figure out where to begin and looked at Zig. “What?”
“You heard me. Maybe it’s not worth it.”
My toes felt numb. I stamped my feet. “Really? I mean, uh, what’re you saying?”
“I told myself those zombies were the worst thing I was ever going to see. I told myself it was a fluke, and it could never happen again—that the chances of anyone else having both the twisted idea to do something like that and the ability to carry it off were as unlikely as lightning striking the same guy twice. And I told myself that if I could handle that, I could handle anything.”
“You did. I mean, you can.”
“Victor, back there in that basement, when the zombies were…were…moving around on those tables…. Twitching? And dead? You didn’t even blink.”
“This is nothing like those zombies.”
“No shit. Because this time, you’re scared—beyond scared. You’re terrified. And whatever’s got you scared? I don’t want any part of it.”
The elevator door opened, and we both flinched. A guy wheeled a cartful of hospital linens by us, and we both stood there awkwardly until the sound of the squeaky wheels died away.
“It was, um…a ghost woman. In a fire.”
PsyCop 5: Camp Hell Page 23
