Greywalker - Vanished Part 2

"This room is always so chilly," my mother said.

"What?"

"You s.h.i.+vered, sweetie. It's because the room is cold."

I let that pa.s.s. If my mother believed that, she was less canny than I'd given her credit for. "Do you have another box I could put this stuff in? I want to sort through it at the hotel." "But you can do that here!"

"I'd rather take it somewhere else, out of your way," I replied. I knew my tone was cold, but I didn't care. Fear was creeping in and I wasn't going to give in to it, not in front of her.

My mother frowned but surprised me by just going away to fetch another box and not arguing. Maybe she realized that it wasn't an activity she was going to enjoy. She handed the flat-folded box to me along with a roll of tape and climbed back up on her ladder to watch while I repacked the contents of the split carton.

"You'll bring the rest back when you're done, won't you?" she asked as I hefted the box up into my arms.

"Yeah. Tomorrow probably. There are a few other boxes I'd like to take a look at, if you don't mind." "No, I don't mind." She sounded eager in spite of my frosty manner, and I supposed she was a little lonely-or just bored-during the day, while Damon was off doing whatever he did until dinnertime. I couldn't imagine what she did all day. I knew she didn't have a job; she lived on the proceeds of divorce and widowhood and whatever man she was clinging to at the time. Judging by her earlier comments, she saw other women as "the compet.i.tion," so I didn't imagine she spent her days hanging out with them, lest she come off the worse by comparison.

I forced myself to unbend a bit. "Mother, what do you do all day?" I asked as she followed me back up the stairs.

"What do you mean, sweetie?"

"What I said. What do you do all day? You don't work; you don't cook and clean-or you never did after Dad died. How do you kill the time all day?"

"I play golf. I go to my yoga cla.s.s. I shop. That sort of thing."

I don't know why her reply surprised me, but it did. "You don't dance anymore? At all?" "Oh, no, not other than socially. It's just too painful to see all those skinny little girls prancing around the studio like dogs in heat."

Another exasperated sigh escaped me. You just couldn't win with my mother: you were either too fat to be pretty or too pretty to be borne. The philosophical aspects of yoga seemed not to have taken root in her angry little soul. Had she always been like that? I thought so, but I was not objective. We walked up to the carport, and I put the box into the backseat of my rental car. I turned back to look at my mother, feeling strange at how much larger I was than this diminutive tyrant of my childhood. "I'll bring these back tomorrow, if you want them."

"Of course, sweetie!"

"I may have questions. . . ."

"That'll be fine. I'm just . . . so happy to see you!" she added, forcing a hug around my chest. I didn't know how to respond to this mercurial monster. Was she crazy or just controlling? I didn't know. I squirmed away. "I may want to look in other boxes," I reminded her.

"I don't mind," she said. "Call before you come, though-I might be out."

I didn't ask what she'd be doing. I didn't care except that it might slow me from getting what I wanted and getting out of that smog-bound lotus land and specifically away from her.

FIVE.

I thought I might regret it, but I drove away from my mother's house and around the backs of the Hollywood hills toward Mulholland Drive. I wasn't looking forward to this meeting, either, but I had to try to talk to Cary one more time before I got any deeper into the mystery of my own past. I wanted to know why he'd popped up now and what he'd meant by "things waiting" for me.

No matter what a ghost tells you, there's always the possibility that it's a lie or just plain wrong. They aren't omniscient or instantly truthful just because they're dead. They're as stupid and opinionated as they were in life, and even more limited in knowledge most of the time. Once in a while, they get hold of information that exists only in the Grey, and then things get a lot more complicated. I was betting that Cary had remained, in death, a lot like he'd been in life: curious, stubborn, cautious, and foolishly romantic.

I took the grumbling little car up the twisty roads of the hills until I reached the saddle where Mulholland crests the ridge from the southeast and starts down into the valley on the northwest, crossing Coldwater Canyon Road above the reservoir. I parked the car in the overlook-no more than a dusty, extra wide bit of shoulder to accommodate the desire of drivers to stop and stare at the view spreading on both sides of the road.

Just behind my car was an odd little hump where the roads met and a lone house perched at the top of the rise, glimmering through the brushy chaparral at the top of a gated road. On the other side of the turnout was the place Cary had parked the night he died so he could watch that house. I didn't want to put my car there, so I left it where it was and stepped out, being careful of the blind traffic coming across the ridge. I walked along the crumbling edge of the packed dirt. The scent of the dust and the plants swelled in the warming afternoon air, poisoned with the acid of exhaust.

To the south I could look down into the steep, storm-forged canyons of Los Angeles and its colony of rich and famous recluses and Spanish revival houses set in the twists of the arroyo walls. To the north the broader, rolling floodplain of the San Fernando Valley offered its more sanitized and spreading estates in the descending hills of Sherman Oaks and Studio City before the valley turned into an endless bowl of suburbia smothered in smog.

I came to a boulder that had been shoved and wedged at the edge of the turnout by the last big landslide, and I sat on it, waiting. If Cary was going to show up, I figured this was the place: about a hundred feet straight up from where he'd died.

After a while of sitting in the sun and staring into the Grey, I saw him, trudging up the canyon side, trailing uncanny flame and smoke. Cary didn't quite levitate, though his feet made no impression on the ground or plants he pa.s.sed over. He reached me and stopped, swirled in fire that crackled and stunk of burning creosote and charring flesh.

I gagged, but held it down with difficulty. A desire to shake and scream and cry and hide my face crawled beneath my skin. It wasn't just the smell but the presence of the man I used to love amid the flame and the suns.h.i.+ne and the odor of past and present warring in my senses. I'd never seen a ghost so horrible.

"Hiya, Slim," he said, staying a few feet away from me as if he thought he might set me alight if he drew closer. I wasn't sure he wouldn't.

"Hi," I faltered back.

"You look sad. What's wrong?" he asked.

"I don't know. You called me and now . . . things are crazy. My dad killed himself. Did you know that? Is that what you wanted me to discover about my past?" It sounded angry and accusatory, and I don't know why I said it that way-it just came out.

"No. I don't know what you need to find out. I just know . . . We're not like you. Dead is like being locked in a room in the loony bin with only a cruddy little window some tree's grown in front of. Sometimes you get out on the ward floor, but usually you're just in your room. You can't see much and you can't go out unless someone opens the door."

"Who opened it? Who let you out?" I thought if I knew who, I might be able to figure out what I was supposed to know.

Cary shook his burning head. The long-gone flesh was blackened and crisp, but the face was still his, though his eyes were only coals and his smile showed tombstone teeth against the inferno that engulfed him.

"I don't know," he replied. "I had the chance and I took it, but that window's starting to close. I'll have to leave soon."

"Then you'll have to talk fast." My voice caught in the back of my throat like smoke and stones. "I don't have a complete picture," Cary said. "Just the outline. What I can see or hear from my tiny window. I heard about you when you first came here. I couldn't believe you were dead. I tried to get to you then, but by the time I got close, you weren't with us anymore. And then it got so much harder to get near you. There are things after you. Things near you all the time. I don't know what to call them. They aren't the dead and they aren't the living. They watch you and they have been for a long time. They were watching you even when I died and since before then-a long time. Now something's happening. Something's . . . breaking. Suddenly it's like everything is unlocked around you and the things from your past are flooding out. I snuck out with them, but I can't stay. I don't think they mean you any good. They're . . . evil things. That sounds so crazy. . . ."

He was fading. I tried to reach for him, but my arms felt scorched and I jerked them back. "It's not crazy. Cary! Don't go!"

He put out his incorporeal hand, wreathed in fading fire, and stroked my cheek, sending a whisper of burning and chill over my face. "I'm sorry, Slim. If I told you I loved you, I lied. I miss you, but I don't want you here. I'm . . . so sorry. Be careful. They come out of the past. They come . . . from . . . evil." "No!" I shouted as he snuffed out and disappeared into the smoggy canyon air in a dwindling stream of smoke. I s.n.a.t.c.hed at the dark plume as it dissipated and got nothing but a handful of eucalyptus leaves and the odor of doused campfires.

"Cary!" I screamed, willing him to come back, knowing he was gone and I couldn't bring him back. I was outraged and hurt and torn into pieces. I thought of Quinton's uncomplicated affection and I hated Cary, but I kept yelling his name until I had to lay my head on my drawn-up knees and gulp my breath. I sat huddled in the umber-tinged sunlight until the dreadful sensation of loss was bearable. Not just Cary Malloy and whatever I'd thought we'd had, but my father and my belief in my past had all been swept away at a stroke, and I howled at the gashed hurt of fresh loss. Not even thoughts of Quinton and my home and my life could stop the ache of betrayal. The sound that tore itself out of me was not just of grief, but of fury. I wanted to find the truth-whatever it was-and devour it so I could never be lied to again. No matter how it hurt I was going to hunt it down.

SIX.

I returned to my hotel with that resolve to hunt the truth still as hard and s.h.i.+ning as steel, and the box of my father's things was the first hunting ground on my list. Resolve took a bit of a hammering as I dug into that messy cardboard repository of the past.

I started out trying to sort the items as I pulled them from the box, but in the end it was easier to just dump it all on my bed and sort by eye. A lot of the things in my father's box were obvious on sight: his appointments book, his desk diary, some kind of medical notebooks, catalogs for dental equipment that was twenty years out-of-date, checkbooks, ledgers, patient files, X-ray envelopes. . . . They all went into piles along with useless objects like a dozen yellowed, packaged toothbrushes and samples of dental floss. It took a couple of hours to get the piles sorted enough that the eerie glow of the Grey became easier to isolate.

I removed all the Grey items from the piles until I had one gleaming pile and a lot of dull ones. I shoveled the dreck back into the box for another time and only considered the things that throbbed with the traces of ghosts and magic. What I had-aside from a headache-was a small pile of notebooks, my father's appointment calendar, the suicide note, and a small metal puzzle that looked like a flat bunch of fancy, interlocked paper clips.

I recalled him carrying the puzzle in his pocket, and seeing it again brought on a rush of tearstained nostalgia. He'd always had a box full of small, cheap toys for his younger patients to take a "prize" from after they'd endured their cleanings and fillings, but this toy had always been much more interesting to me. He'd let me play with it once in a while, though I didn't remember ever solving it. Dad had always solved it with ease. Maybe that had been the beginning of my obsession with puzzles and mysteries. I dimly remembered his dismantling and solving it over and over on some occasions, the way some people use a stress ball or prayer beads.

I picked up the toy and slid a few of the metal parts back and forth, melancholy in my contemplation of it. It tingled slightly from the Grey energy that clung to it, but I got no particular feeling off it aside from that. I still wasn't sure I could put it back together once I'd taken it apart, and the preternatural gleam of it gave me pause, too. It might have been Grey just because it was a.s.sociated with my father-some of the things I handled every day had similar Grey traces-but the thought that there could be a more sinister reason turned my reverie cold and I laid it aside.

Next, I picked up the appointment calendar and leafed through it, seeing mundane bookings for the usual dental business up to and past the day he'd died. He hadn't made many notes other than the usual run of business, such as "needs flossing instructions," and so on. I put that aside as well and turned to the notebooks.

These were less business and more personal, and the books were chronological. I put them in order and saw that they started four years before his death, about the time my mother had pushed me into dance cla.s.ses. That was an interesting coincidence. I started the first entry and was soon sucked into my father's strange narrative.

One entry began: Veronica has given up on me and turned her attention to Harper. I feel sorry for the kid, but I don't suppose it'll do her any harm. I'm sure no good for them, but the watchers won't bother them if they aren't near me. They're watching all the time, but I don't know what I've done to get their attention. They even come to the office now. They just won't leave me alone.

It sounded like my dad was paranoid and I supposed that was what my mother had been hinting at when she said he was odd. I was startled at the mention of "watchers," echoing what Cary had told me about things that kept an eye on me, but I wasn't sure how they connected to my father. Still, the parallel sent a chill over my skin.

The entries went on for a while about his frustrations with my mother and increasing references to "they" and "the watchers." A little over a year later, the tone changed and the entries rarely spoke of business or even my mother and me.

It's the nightmares. They've crept out into the daylight. How could I have missed that for so long? Maybe because they changed shape? They invade everything, infest everything. They're like weevils, burrowing into the heart of everything and chewing it up from the inside out. They don't even leave my wife and kid alone now. I see them trailing after Veronica and Harper when they leave for cla.s.s. I have to make them stop.

He rambled on for a couple more years, trying to put his mysterious watchers off the scent, having nightmares both sleeping and awake. Then someone had come to see him-or that's what he said, but I wasn't sure if it had been a real person, a ghost, or some figment of his increasingly fractured imagination. He's not like the rest. He bends them and they sway to his will. White, white, white, pale and ghastly. G.o.d help me, I can't think of anything but that horrible film about the worm-man. Or did I dream that? I don't know. I just don't. I can barely work some days, they're so close. But I have to work. I have to! The patients, the singing of the drill, the routine suck them in and push them away at the same time. And this man-but he can't possibly be a man-he knows everything they see. They're his rotten little spies. He drifts in on a red tide, saying he owns me and taking what he wants. He took Christelle. He lured her away somehow, and she came back changed into one of them and now she's watching all the time, too. I tried to make her leave. I tried to fire her but she came back and I can't make her go. Veronica's furious. She thinks I'm s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g Christelle, but I could never touch that thing that's hiding in there. I know she's one, too. . . .

What had my father thought was hiding in his receptionist? An alien? A demon? Had there been anything at all or was he really, as my mother claimed, losing his mind? I'd thought I was losing mine when I first became a Greywalker. If Dad had also been in touch with the Grey in some fas.h.i.+on, but without the help I'd gotten from the Danzigers and others, maybe he had been going crazy. Or maybe not. Maybe hehad seen things that watched him.

He might have been some kind of psychic or medium; he didn't seem to be a Greywalker. He wasn't describing the same kind of experiences I'd gone through: He didn't speak of another world or the mist or the power grid; he never mentioned ghosts or vampires or any other monster I knew; he only wrote of the watchers and the white man-worm thing that threatened and cajoled him by turns, and some creature he called "the Thousand Eyes."

Whatever was going on with him, he'd been alone with it and it had been driving him insane, whether it was real or all in his head. The thought brought a fresh wave of grief for my crazy father in his solitary battle. Picking up this diary again was difficult. I saw the dates, and the horror of what I now knew and what I was seeing in his writing only grew with each word.

He'd finally lost his grip completely about three months before he killed himself.

Christelle won't come back this time. I killed the thing in her, but there wasn't any Christelle left once it was gone. There was just black stuff, like cremated remains. Poor Christelle. How long had she been gone? I thought I'd see her for a moment or two sometimes, but I was wrong. There was no Christelle in that thing I killed no matter what the worm-man said. But if Christelle was gone, when did she go? Did he kill her back at the beginning? Or did I? And he's so happy about it! He's happy, the monster! I can't believe what I did. Or how. I just reached, somehow, with my mind, not with my hands, and something came out of me and ripped her into bits. Oh, G.o.d, I'm sick. I can't stop throwing up. It's just blood and bile now and I feel like I'm going to die from the rot in me.

He's pleased. But not all the watchers are. The Thousand Eyes doesn't like it. It hates me now as much as it hates him. I can feel its loathing like radiation from a nuclear bomb that strips my skin and burns me alive. I won't do whatever it is the worm-man wants. I'd rather be eaten by the Thousand Eyes and burn in its gullet forever than let the other one win. He's evil. And I'm evil just by being near him. He didn't write much after that, except taunting notes to the watchers he now a.s.sumed read his journal and reported all to the worm-man: "I have a way to stop you" and "I know how to get help you can't kill, even if I told you who."

The last entry was the worst.

There were more. Like me. Before. But not like me. No, he says I'm special and he won't let me slip away from him, not even if I die. But I think he can't stop me. Veronica won't care-she's got everything she wanted. But Harper I feel bad about. She's so sweet, my little girl. I don't want her to have a monster for a father. I will stop it. There must be no more of this. No more of me, of things like me. I hope she'll understand it's not her dad who's done bad things, but a grown-up man who has to do something awful to keep what he loves safe.

The bottom of the page was torn out raggedly, and I didn't have to fetch the thing to know the texture and shape of the missing page would match that of his final note. A note meant for me. I felt sick and I covered my face, but tears didn't come this time, only the black sensation of horror and pity.

SEVEN.

I needed to talk to my dad, however dead he was. Whether he'd been crazy, or paranoid, or dead-on truthful, he'd been connected to Grey things. I'd have to go for a walk in the Grey and see if I could find him. The problem was I'd never done that, and though I thought I could, I wasn't sure how to find a specific ghost in the roiling, uncertain mist-world between the normal and the paranormal. I wasn't a medium or a necromancer; I couldn't just call to the spirit I wanted and expect it to show up. At least I didn't think I could, since that wasn't how my abilities worked for anything else-I'd gotten lucky with Cary showing up since he'd been trying to reach me as much as I'd been trying to find him. There was also a practical limit to how long I could spend wandering around in the Grey. It was exhausting to move through fully immersed, and it was just as big-in some places bigger-than the normal world. The Grey was filled with the sinkholes and rifts of time layers I called temporaclines, which stopped and started and broke or rose as they pleased. There were lots of places in the Grey where something in the normal or paranormal created a barrier that could only be negotiated by emerging back into the normal and going around the ordinary way.

It was almost dinnertime-I'd missed both breakfast and lunch-but I put off eating a little longer to pick up the phone and call the Danzigers. Sometimes they don't know the answer to my questions, and sometimes they had an answer that was wrong, but they at least had more experience with the bizarre than I did, even after two years more than knee-deep in it.

The phone rang longer than usual before Ben answered.

"h.e.l.lo?"

"Hey, Ben. It's Harper." Background noise at the other end washed the emotions out of my voice. "Oh, hi, Harper! How's Los Angeles?"

"Like the antechamber to h.e.l.l. I have a question."

"All right."

"Any ideas on how I can find a specific ghost? I need to talk to a particular individual who's been dead for about twenty-two years."

"Well, you could-Oh, no . . . you can't call them. Hrm . . . Hang on. . . ." I could hear him cover the mouthpiece with his hand as he turned to call for Mara.

I could barely hear some mumbling on the other side. Then a thump as the phone fell out of Ben's hand and dropped onto the floor.

A very young voice cackled into the phone. "Harper! Hahahaha! Come play with me!" "I can't today, Brian. I'm way far away."

"Are not! You're in the phone!"

A few more noises preceded the return of Ben's voice, although his son's carried on in the background. I figured he was probably holding on to the kid while he talked. "I'm sorry. . . ."

"That's OK. So what do you two think?"

"Well . . . we're agreed that you'll have the best luck looking in the places strongly a.s.sociated with the person who died. Like their home or office or the place they died. You know a ghost can haunt several places simultaneously, but they manifest intelligence in only one at a time."

"Yeah, that's kind of what I thought. I know I can't always get the attention of a repeater." "And if that's the only manifestation they have, it's going to be hard to get any information out of them." "Nearly impossible, actually."

"Really? I should write that down. . . ."

Ever since he'd been mauled by a legendary monster on Marsh Island, Ben had been on disability, staying home with their precocious son while Mara taught full-time. Bored, Ben had started working on a field guide to ghosts, mixing the research he'd been doing for years with the proofs-through-misadventure that I'd made Greywalking for the past two years.

I thought over his suggestion and decided it seemed plausible. I'd have to give it a try. Of course, I couldn't remember the addresses of our home or Dad's office. I thanked Ben for the idea and hung up, staring at the box of junk. I stiffened my spine and wondered if I could find the addresses in there and not have to go back to my mother right away. I'd have to show up again eventually; I wanted those s.h.i.+ning boxes of photographs and I wanted to know what had actually happened to Christelle. Maybe my father had just gone crackers and only imagined the destruction of his receptionist. . . . I wanted to believe it, but I doubted it.

I scrabbled through the s.h.i.+ning pile for the appointment book, hoping someone had thought to put the office information in it. It had Dad's name and office address on the cover; it was in Glendale, a middle-cla.s.s suburb just northeast of Hollywood. Since he'd died there, the office seemed like the best place to start looking for him.

EIGHT.

Before I went anywhere, I called Quinton just to hear his voice, though all I actually got was his pager and he didn't call back, so I knew he was busy and I hoped it wasn't because of anything too creepy. Creepy was becoming the order of the day. Then I had dinner downstairs, thinking rush hour would have dissipated by the time I was done. I stopped at the concierge desk on my way back up to my room to fetch the doc.u.ments from Dad's box and asked about the best route to Glendale. The concierge printed a map for me from the computer built discreetly into his Spanish revival desk and told me traffic might still be a bit thick on the freeway until after seven p.m., but it wasn't very far away and I could take Los Feliz Boulevard instead and make about the same time if I was leaving right away.

Los Feliz was a strange street, starting out wide and smooth as it ran diagonally into the hills below Griffith Park. I glanced up at just the right time to see a few letters of the Hollywood sign with the copper dome of the observatory rising over the hilltop above. If not for the haze, the glimpse could have been mistaken for a postcard. As the street ran on, past the zoo's ma.s.sive parking lot and over the cement-bound Los Angeles River, it narrowed and grew more potholed, pa.s.sing through an industrial slum thick with old warehouses and light manufacturing that left the roads and sidewalks dusky with grime.

After a sudden turn and a cl.u.s.ter of dark-shadowed thugs on a street corner smoking cigarettes and eyeing pa.s.sing cars, the neighborhood changed. It got clean and slick, with mid-rise office cl.u.s.ters and condominiums lining the street in profusion.

I turned onto Brand, looking for the office address, shadowed by recent developments of white steel-and-gla.s.s towers. I pa.s.sed a s.h.i.+ning new shopping center with a ma.s.sive open plaza and spools of neon lighting that cast color onto the street. The effect was like the change ofThe Wizard of Oz from black and white to Technicolor. I expected Munchkins and wondered if I'd really lived here. Pa.s.sing the Alex Theatre with its old movie palace marquee under the lighted, flowerlike spire that pointed to the sky, I felt the deja vu like a blow. The farther north I went, the more familiar the scenery grew. I pa.s.sed under the Ventura Freeway and into the smaller, older neighborhood that urban sprawl hadn't overrun yet. My eyes watered, and not just from the yellow haze in the evening air. I knew I had walked along this street with my dad, hand in hand. Stopped in at that building for milkshakes (forbidden treats!) when it was a retro-fifties diner. Bought makeup and school supplies in the drugstore right there. . . . The feelings that poured over me weren't just nostalgic, though; an emotional darkness now tainted every memory and put a stone into my chest. I pulled the car into a parking s.p.a.ce at the curb and got out to walk before I hit something from my inattention.

The sidewalks were so clean they sparkled in the late sun, even through layers of ghostly pedestrians and older shadows of orange groves and rolling, empty scrub. I noticed that many of the names on the businesses ended in -ian or -ianian; what had once been a solidly WASP neighborhood was now just as solidly Armenian, and cleaner than ever. The current residents clearly didn't tolerate sloth or dirt. The shops were mostly closed-only a few restaurants were open at this time of evening-and no one, corporeal or ghostly, paid much attention to me as I went up the street, looking for the building that had once housed my father's dental office.

It was a three-story brick-and-gla.s.s building that had been brand-new when we moved into the area. It looked a little less polished and sw.a.n.ky than its newer neighbors to the south, but it was still a very respectable address for small offices. Dad's was on the second floor and the main door was locked for the day, but I walked around for a few minutes and found a smaller door at the side that was still open and sporting a sign that pointed up to BELLES SAUVAGES DANCE AND EXERCISE STUDIO. More deja vu. I'd never danced there, but as I went up the stairs, the familiar odors of sweat, old shoes, floor varnish, and rosin curdled the air. I could hear the thump of music and feet in rhythm on the wooden floor. As always, that combination of sound and smell roused mixed feelings in me: remembered anxiety and learned-or faked-happiness. I hadn't hated to dance; I'd hated the emotional freight and unending demands that went with it.

I took the second-floor exit, which should have been locked but wasn't, and went down the hallway looking for number 204. The suites had been cut up since my father's time and I discovered that his office was now split between a chiropractor and an accountant. I wasn't sure which of the new tenants occupied the room where he'd died, but I didn't think I needed to be right in the room, just near enough. I looked up and down the corridor for cameras, though I didn't think anyone observing would believe what they might see, and let go of normal.

The Grey in full flush rushed upon me, making the normal world into a dim watercolor beneath the realm of silver mist and lines of hot energy that throbbed as if alive. The layers of time were broken chunks, tumbled at all angles like striated rocks in a floodplain. The displacement of the disjointed temporaclines was much worse than I'd ever seen it in Seattle, and I wondered if it was related to Los Angeles's famous earthquakes or the near-constant state of construction and reconstruction that went on in the area. I hoped I could do this without recourse to climbing and sliding through those ragged bits of time. I glanced around and spotted the Grey outline of my father's office door, still lingering where it had stood for so long. It would be a pain to get through it; it might have been a door once, but it was a wall now. It was much harder for me to move something that had no current existence in the normal world than to utilize the momentary memories of pa.s.sages opened by ghosts. I could try to find the right stretch of time and get through the door there, but that didn't look like the safest option. Relegating the temporaclines to last resort, I paced outside the phantom door and waited for a ghost.

After ten minutes that felt like an hour, the ghost of a young woman strode down the hall and unlocked the door. She was average-pretty behind purple eyegla.s.ses and wore her long light brown hair pulled back with a clip. I wasn't sure I recognized her, but I thought she might be Christelle LaJeunesse-Dad's receptionist. I pushed through the doorway in her wake, and she stopped to stare at me. "Do you have an appointment?" she asked as we went into the ghost of the waiting room. I was a little surprised at her attempt to interact with me. I couldn't recall a ghost simply talking to me as if I were part of their context before. Usually I had to force myself upon them if they hadn't come to me first.

"Uh, no," I replied.

She went around behind the reception desk and looked back at me from her position of authority as the office gatekeeper. "Do you want to make an appointment?"

"I just want to talk to Dr. Blaine for a moment," I said, on the off chance she could summon him. "I'm sorry. Dr. Blaine's not available right now. You'll have to make an appointment." "When will he be available?"

"I don't know. He isn't in yet." She looked around the shadow form of the empty waiting room. "Actually," she added, "he hasn't been in for a while. I think there's something wrong." As she said it, her demeanor changed and she became frightened and sad, aware, perhaps, of her own disjointure from life, of something precious lost or broken.

Ghosts have a strange relations.h.i.+p to time, and this one was odd but not unheard-of: She was aware my father's absence, but she didn't know he was dead. She wasn't quite in sync with either her own time or mine. She seemed to think this was a day when Dr. Robert Blaine simply hadn't come to work, but it disturbed her, and she wasn't sure why.

"What do you think's happened to him?" I asked.

She made a sour face. "Maybe his crazy wife shot him. She thinks he's humping me. Silly woman. He's been all paranoid lately. He thinks people follow him around. I think it's her. Or maybe that creepy albino guy."