Wraith

by Phaedra Weldon

  Of course my limited search capability turned up zilch. I could call Rhonda and have her look it up, but I was sure she was still toting that book of everything around the shop looking for whatever it was that had caught her attention that morning.

  But it was getting late and Mom would be here with the car.

  I turned off the lights and settled onto the bed, flat on my back. I closed my eyes and went through the three deep breaths I’d always used to calm my nerves.

  Moving out of body was the easy part—almost too easy at times. So much so that when I was working in the public arena, like at Target, and an irate customer started berating me, my inclination was to astral out of that situation and strangle her—that is if I could affect physical objects.

  I mean, who’d know? Anyone astral traveling wouldn’t show up on a security camera. It’d look like the woman was like—choking on a chicken bone. Right?

  That’s how I learned to travel in the first place.

  Turning away from a situation too horrible to face.

  I stood and heard again the weird tearing sound that always followed my separation of astral and physical. It reminded me of the sound of Velcro. And in a way, my astral body was attached with Velcro.

  But like Velcro, I hoped my jumping out and jumping in didn’t wear down the attachment after a while to where it wouldn’t stick anymore.

  That would suck.

  It wasn’t two seconds in this form I noticed my arm still ached. I noticed it because “Ouch” the pain and because I normally didn’t feel anything when astral. The ache was much more pronounced in this form. I looked at it—the handprint was still there—a garish burgundy beneath my watch. Usually any physical ailments didn’t follow me into this realm, so what made this one different?

  Might be because it was made by someone of this realm yah dufus?

  Don’t you hate the voice of common sense?

  Though it did make me look around the room for any sign of Trench-Coat. There was none, and there shouldn’t be. Not with the ward up.

  The great thing about the warding Rhonda set up is that it allowed things out of the condo but not in. Except me. I don’t know how it does that. It was something I’d always wanted to ask Rhonda. If it didn’t let me pass back and forth, I’d never be able to get back to my body—especially quickly.

  Mental note: ask Rhonda about the mechanics. Don’t want to get caught out and slam into an invisible wall.

  That would suck worse.

  And I say suck worse because I have no idea what would happen to my body if I didn’t go back to it. Or what would happen to me for that matter. I mean I’m pretty sure I’m not supposed to be able to do what I do. I don’t think moving in and out of the physical was one of the loopholes the great creator of the universe intended.

  So—if I got caught out of the house and the house burned down—what then? Would Daddy, so to speak, disown me?

  Pphhtt.

  I checked the watch—it was zeroed at 237 minutes. I’d been astral three minutes.

  I rode the elevator down with old Miss Petra. I stood behind her hunched and blue-haired self. She lived on the same floor as me. Her condo smelled of cats and cinnamon, a bad combo of the cat box and air freshener.

  Usually the smell traveled with her. Fortunately, I couldn’t smell it in this state.

  Go me.

  Nona was outside in her Volvo wagon. She got out and opened the door for me. This wasn’t really necessary—I could sieve through a car door as easily (metal—yuck!) as I could most things—but Mom thought it was charming being the batty old bird. Sometimes it was good if people thought you were crazy on a regular basis.

  Then again, maybe not. This was Midtown. Crazy old ladies were a dime a dozen. Weirder things I’m sure have happened.

  “Ready?” Mom said as she got back in and backed out.

  “Yeah.” I wasn’t, and my stomach turned in knots again. Wow, the arm was gonna be a liability if it didn’t stop throbbing. It would definitely put a crimp in my feeling of omnipotence.

  What is up with the handprint? And should I tell Mom and Rhonda? No—Mom would see it as some omen and find a way to keep me from doing this job. And I needed the money.

  “What’s the plan if things go sour?”

  “I run like hell back to the car. And if I can’t get to the car, I shoot down the cord back to my body directly.” Of course, I still wasn’t clear how Mom would know if things went south—or if I’d jumped back to my body.

  So I asked her that.

  “I’m thinking that not returning to the car would be the first hint,” she said, turning onto Monroe Drive, past Ru San’s, my favorite sushi restaurant, just across from Ansley Mall.

  Well duh.

  I looked out the window. The day just got grayer, and I was glad I couldn’t feel the cold through the glass. Steve looked out the passenger window like a big Labrador who’d never been allowed out. Then again, I guess it would be awful to have to live in the same house and not go anywhere, year after year, decade after decade.

  Imagine never going out to eat, to see movies, to have drinks, or to play in the park.

  That was another kind of suck.

  4

  ARRIVAL went without a hitch—except for the “no parking available” situation in a nonexistent parking garage.

  I don’t know why Mom thought there was a parking garage. There wasn’t one. Luckily there was no sign of Trench-Coat either. And I thought he might not look or seem so scary in the daylight.

  Not that I wanted to find out.

  The sky kept darkening. Bring on the gloom. Radio voice said it’d dropped to forty-three. I watched the pedestrian traffic surround me as I walked toward the building, which at the moment didn’t have any of the same oogy as last night. Everyone looked miserable, but was it from their jobs or the weather?

  Wow, it looked really cold outside.

  Neener-nee.

  I followed a couple of suits in through the front glass doors after leaving my mom’s car, still chuckling at the honking horns when Debbie Reynolds stepped out of a Volvo and opened the door for…no one.

  The foyer looked pretty much the same as it had before, only there was a larger police presence. And more people. Different security officer—this one not snoring. Hadn’t noticed the chemically treated ficus trees near the elevators last night—the kind that never dropped leaves.

  I slipped into the elevator with about six other people. It was a risk as the closer they got to my astral form, the harder it would be to keep myself focused.

  See, there’s a little problem of physicality that I have when in this form, and being this close to people—there’s always the chance they’ll move into me.

  Literally. I’ll get an elbow in my astral form, or either a foot. Sometimes the whole person displaces me. Even in this form I take up space and exist in time—that whole spatial thing Rhonda talks about. But when there’s no room, I sort of mold around to fit, and that has in the past sort of caused blank spots in my memory.

  Kinda like being jam spread too thin on toast.

  Or did I just completely lose the point here? Just understand that it’s no fun on my part. For the person, it’s more like a feeling of being in a freezer with no skin.

  Luckily the people entering stopped, and since there were plenty of bodies surrounding me, no one blinked an eye when I said, “Hit twenty-eight please.”

  The suit closest to the panel pushed the number. The woman in front of me (I’d scooted to the back of the elevator) looked around. When she couldn’t find the source of the voice (being the only other female but me in there) she gave herself a mental shrug and faced front again.

  Isn’t it weird how everyone in an elevator faces the same way?

  Visitar Incorporated took up most of the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth floors. Their front door, visible right off the elevator, was impressive. Huge V superimposed over a globe exposing North America appeared to be their logo. The whole thi
ng decorated the wall behind the front desk.

  I moved around that desk and stood beside the receptionist. A petite African-American woman in a firecracker red dress with a hairdo that could pass for an ice sculpture. She was busy with someone on her headset.

  “Can you tell me where Mr. Hirokumi’s office is?”

  The woman never looked up from her computer screen. “Down the hall, turn to the right. Big doors. Can’t miss it.”

  She didn’t even ask me if I had an appointment. Then again, if she’d looked up, she’d have been talking to herself.

  The basic décor of the place is what I’d call corporate generic. Beige Berber carpet covered every inch of the floor that I could see. The walls were all painted a color very similar to Michael Jackson’s skin tone. Somewhere between neutral flesh and apartment blah. Framed pictures of mundane scenes decorated the walls. A boat here, a forest meadow there.

  Boring.

  The office was right where she said it would be. I started to move through the door—

  —and slammed into a solid wall.

  Nose first.

  I found myself on my ass looking up at the door. My ears rang. Okay—this was new.

  What the fuck? I stood and dusted myself off, then reached out with my right hand. There it was. An invisible wall a few inches in front of the door.

  I heard something and turned to look back the way I’d come. A statuesque brunette in a stunning jade green dress suit came down the hall. She had blue-black hair down to the hem of her high skirt.

  But that was where the stunning ended.

  This woman had no face.

  I should explain something here a minute—as I think I neglected it before. People don’t normally see me when I’m out of body—except for Tim, Steve, and Rhonda and Mom (and I honestly haven’t figured out their weirdness to this point). Yet I’m there.

  Which sort of lends to the myth of things existing around us all the time and we’re not aware of them. Like what Rhonda had said earlier, with ghosts and such on the ethereal.

  I’m on that plane of existence before Ethereal. Astral. That “other side” we see on the Sci Fi Channel.

  You know like Tom Edward. Or is it Bob? John?

  And while I’m on the astral plane, seeing is subjective. When I look at people, sometimes I see strange things. Wispy, smoky things. Like when I saw the darkness around Tanaka last night as he knelt there dying. And sometimes I just see colors. Not all the time. Normal people don’t seem to have those weird wispy things around them. Mom doesn’t.

  Whoa—I can’t believe I just called Mom normal.

  Around Mom I see wispy butterflies. With Rhonda I see colors. Pinks and purples, with hints of green. She can see me. And the color isn’t like some weird force field aura outlining their bodies (which is what I know you were thinking), but more like a two-year-old coloring parts of her body with crayon. A purple arm or a green leg.

  But with my six years at mastering what I could do, that’d been the extent of my senses. Until that moment.

  This woman didn’t have just colors—freaky enough, this woman had no face. I couldn’t see it. Best I can describe it—ever noticed something out of the corner of your eye but when you looked directly at it—it disappeared?

  That’s the way her face was for me. If I looked at her from the side, I could see she had one—a face that is. But I couldn’t make out her features. When I looked directly at her—nothing. Blank void.

  Creeped me the hell out. Which of course should have been the first clue I was on the right track but in the wrong place.

  The second clue was when she stopped in front of me and actually faced me (or I assumed her face was facing me). I couldn’t see her eyes, but I sort of knew she sensed me. Somehow. But not visually. When she put her hand up, I moved back.

  It took a few seconds for her either to lose interest or tell herself that cold feeling (that would be me) was nothing.

  I watched as she knocked on the door before opening it.

  When she opened it, I saw something part like the flaps of a tent. The air seemed to fold in on itself, Ah-ha! So there was something solid there.

  I moved in right behind her.

  And through whatever the hell it was that’d smacked me back on my butt. It was like moving through soured beer, thick and hard to swallow. Not that you’d want to.

  I didn’t have time to wonder too hard about what kind of ward this guy had up or why he had it in place (mental note: clue phone ringing!) because my jaw hit the floor when I looked into the office.

  Niiiiiice.

  The deep forest green carpet alone must have cost the company close to $150 a yard. The décor was Japanese urban American. Simple. Elegant. Lots of carved wood. To the right of the desk was a two-foot-by-six-foot Zen garden. A sand and rock garden actually built into the floor.

  A rich cat’s sandbox, complete with huge-ass boulders. I didn’t see the rake used to move the sand in patterns though. It probably tucked into a neato secret panel in the wall.

  Bamboo trees grew everywhere—from big terra-cotta pots to small, flat, glass bowls with clear beads.

  Water sheeted down the sides of a six-foot glass panel mounted in the center of a recessed pool in the floor. This piece of art separated guests from the rest of the office. Kind of like a small waiting room complete with two chairs and a low coffee table made of cherrywood covered in a fan of business magazines.

  Something was as wrong with the magazines as there was with the woman’s missing face. I recognized the titles. Newsweek, Business Week, Atlanta Magazine, Time, etc. I sort of flipped through them sometimes, like while waiting on my oil change when I hadn’t brought a book to read.

  But that was the only thing identifiable about the covers. Someone had mutilated the ones I could see, left the upper mastheads for the magazines there but cut out the lower halves where the feature picture and stories would be listed.

  I only wished I could move the books around and see if the entire stack was done that way. I knew in doctors’ offices they usually took a black marker and blocked out the mailing address to protect whoever left the magazines or donated them. But to remove the lower front page?

  Weird.

  The door opened behind me, and I stepped back, not wanting anyone to walk through me. This might be the cop.

  Or it could be Trench-Coat, though I doubt that thing needed to open doors any more than I did…yet I wondered if that invisible wall would give him the same pause as it did me.

  I glanced at the new arrival—then looked again. Astral double take.

  Well hellloooo beautiful… .

  If there is one thing television cop shows do, it’s give false impressions of our peacekeepers. Because if this was the cop I’m supposed to watch, I was going to have a hard time keeping my attention on the conversation.

  I had somehow concocted in my head that a lieutenant was a balding, short, uniformed, roundish man with a penchant for donuts and coffee and spoke with a New York accent.

  I didn’t know how this man was going to talk, but the visual was stunning enough for me. I just stood beside the gushing water and did a bit of staring.

  He was a good height, probably around six-foot-one or so. I’m five-foot-eight barefooted and was sure my head would tuck perfectly under his chin.

  The space between his eyebrows crinkled as he looked around the area with blue eyes. Wireless, round glasses perched on a nicely sloped nose. His lips were pulled tight as if he were tense. His hair was brown and cut close along the back and sides, though the top had a bit of length. Strands of hair turned and curled over his forehead.

  And he had sideburns. They added a nice touch.

  He was dressed in a gray suit and tie, with a tan trench coat draped over one arm.

  “Lieutenant Frasier?”

  I turned as he looked past me at the woman I’d followed in.

  “Yes ma’am. I’m here to see Mr. Hirokumi?” Not a New York accent. Definitely Southe
rn gentleman. Great smile. I could already feel an egg releasing just looking at him.

  Bootiful.

  I followed them past the gushing water into a spacious room of floor-to-ceiling windows. In the corner were a simple oak desk, credenza, and high-backed leather chair.

  There were more plants scattered about but none as impressive as the one to the right of Hirokumi’s desk, complete with waterfall and lava rocks. I was thinking I could probably make me one of those to put in my own living room.

  Though the sound of trickling water might make for frequent bathroom breaks.

  Hirokumi sat in his pilot’s chair. A formidable-looking man. Kind of like a sumo wrestler, only without all the blubber. In fact, from what I could tell from the tailored suit the man wore, there wasn’t an ounce of fat on him. Shouldn’t he be stroking a white cat?

  He made the cop look small when he stood.

  “Lieutenant Daniel Frasier,” Hirokumi said as he moved from behind his desk. He bowed, stiff and formal.

  “Koba Hirokumi,” Daniel said, and returned the bow. “I’m honored that you would agree to see me on such short notice.”

  “Cut the crap, Lieutenant.” Hirokumi moved away from Daniel and stopped in front of one of those windows. I could sort of see his reflection in it. A transparent ghost overlooking gloomy Atlanta. “You’re hoping my agreeing to see you personally will give you an in as to why Tanaka was here last night.” He gave a half turn in Daniel’s direction, but not giving him his full attention. “I’d hate to disappoint you. My intention was to look you in the eye and tell you I have no idea.”

  Daniel took a step to one of the chairs facing the desk and dropped his coat into it. “You haven’t looked me in the eye yet.”

  I liked this guy.

  Bold, cute, tall—single?

  Wanted to check for a ring, but the lieutenant slipped his hands into the pockets of his pants. Damn.

  Hirokumi nodded once, and I thought I glimpsed just the hint of a smile on his stalwart face. What was happening here? Was this man saying he knew why Tanaka was there—and if so—did he know about Trench-Coat’s existence?