Greywalker - Vanished Part 4

Paul put down his drink and glanced at his father. Then he looked back at me. "We can go now, if you want. I can get back to the game later-the guild can do without me for a while."

I thought Sandros's jaw would detach and thump to the carpeted floor from shock along with his eyeb.a.l.l.s, like something from a Depression-era Warner Brothers cartoon. "You want to go out? Now?" Paul's shoulders hunched a little and his eyes widened, as if he were much younger. "Yeah . . . Is that OK, Dad? It's not that late, but I don't want to leave you all by yourself if you don't want-" "No, no! I'm all right on my own. Go on, take the lady to the office." Then he caught himself and added, "But no hanky-panky, right?" He shot a look at me and nodded with his brows raised. "Right, Dad," Paul replied, laughing.

I nodded, a little surprised myself. "It's fine with me if you two don't mind."

We left our drinks on the table and headed outside again within moments. Sandros stayed behind, but he did watch us from the doorway, like a protective father.

Paul looked a little embarra.s.sed but said nothing as we headed for his haunted office.

TEN.

The real office was creepy at night, more so than its Grey counterpart. There were no windows except on the back wall that faced an alley, and the dance studio had closed for the day, leaving a hollow sound in the shadow-drenched s.p.a.ce. The Grey was still uncharacteristically silent.

Paul Arkmanian unlocked the front door and we walked into his reception area. Ghostly walls made a mist maze in the current s.p.a.ce. We walked deeper into the chiropractic office and I searched both the Grey and the normal for any helpful signs. I'd have to be alone in the treatment room long enough to slip into the right bit of the past. I began looking for opportunities to send Paul in another direction the moment we were past the front desk.

We pa.s.sed through a spectral wall-the memory of the wall that had once divided my father's office from his neighbor's. I felt cold sweep over me as we stepped through and then a blast of heat as we stopped at the current door marked "2." Paul glanced at me and then at the door.

"This is it. Are you sure you want to go in at night like this?" He glanced around and hunched his shoulders as if he were cold. "I never thought this was a spooky place before, but now it does seem haunted. I guess it's just the light. . . ."

I s.h.i.+vered, feeling something tremble at the edge of the Grey, sending ripples through the thin, silvery world. I hoped that wasn't what I thought. I looked at Paul and he seemed very far away, as if the mist of the Grey was a concave lens. Sweat formed in the small of my back from the strange heat coming out of the room.

"You might not want to go in with me. It might mess up the feel of the room to have two of us in there at once."

"I'd feel funny about that. Can you leave the door open?"

What a pain. "Sure." I'd have to maneuver into a place he couldn't observe from the doorway before I tried to get into the layers of history. I took my phone out of my pocket and started into the room. "What's that for?"

"The cell phone antenna sometimes picks up electrical anomalies caused by ghosts. If I have the phone in the right mode, it will make noise when I'm near one." Not entirely untrue but generally useless. Ditto using the tiny camera to catch the lingering Grey impressions of ghosts pa.s.sing through the gla.s.s; the rice-grain-sized lens was too low-quality to capture any images worth the effort. I didn't have any other props for my role as ghost hunter, but the phone would do if my line of fast talk was good enough. Apparently it was, since Arkmanian nodded and stood back from the door to let me into the room. I stepped into my father's old office and halted with a jerk as the heat hit in earnest-it was like being swatted with a flaming bat. Then I heard the noise, like a runaway train rus.h.i.+ng toward me. The layers of time heaved and rippled, a storm-racked sea of history battering the walls of the room as the screeching sound of something huge bearing down grew louder and closer.

"That's it! That's the sound!" Paul cried out, twitching back a couple of steps.

I bolted sideways into the blind side of the doorway, putting out my hand for the cold, slicing edges of the temporaclines. One of them stabbed at my fingers with fiery knives. I was shocked: Usually temporaclines feel cold as sheets of ice to me. I reached for it and shoved the layers open, sliding into the slice of history.

The room-Dad's personal office-hit me hard. It was a disaster of splattered blood and frenzy. Papers were thrown on the desk and strewn on the floor. Books, houseplants, furniture were all tossed about as if the room had been shaken by a giant hand and then drizzled with gore. The center of the room was nothing: a black void surrounded by a fence of flaming energy. Stars and lightning bolts of power shot through the s.p.a.ce around the hole in history. Queasy and frightened, I walked toward it. Hot knots of energy battered me back and the roaring noise rose to a hurricane shriek that ripped open the writhing mist of the Grey. A snarling monstrosity of spiderweb and bone poured out of the hole, snapping its dripping jaws at me and at the black void, flinching back as its fangs bit into the blazing energy around the nothingness. Bone spines rattled in the uncanny world as the creature shook its head in fury and screamed again.

I flinched away from its impossible mouthful of teeth. I'd run into the guardian beast before and still had the bite scars two years later. It turned its attention away from me as soon as I backed from the hole where the rest of the room's past should have been. Every time I moved toward it, trying to see any glimpse of my father, the beast snapped at me and drove me back. The beast's job was to keep non-Grey things out and protect the Grey from threats. It didn't like the thing that had blotted out or cordoned off this chunk of Grey. There would be no getting past the monster to get to my father, even if I could have gotten into the infernal void that seemed to have swallowed up all Grey trace of him. I tried circling the hole in time, but there was nothing to see and nothing to touch when I beat the guardian's snapping jaws to the edge of the darkness where my father should have been. He was simply not there. Or not accessible even from the Grey. Whatever was causing that infuriated the beast. Defeated, I fell back, sliding back into the normal, and sidling along the walls of the treatment room to the door. I checked the phone's clock and saw I'd been missing from the normal world for only a few minutes. Paul Arkmanian was peering into the room with his eyes wide.

"Did you hear it?" he demanded. "Where did you go?"

"I was right there, behind the door. And, yeah, I heard that noise. Is that the way it always sounds?" "It was louder than usual this time."

"Huh," I grunted, closing my phone and putting it back into my pocket. There was a message icon on the screen, but I'd get to that later. "I guess I've upset your ghost."

"So . . . do you think the place is really haunted?"

"Yes. You have a ghost all right."

"Yeah?" He looked wary.

I nodded. "Yeah." The ghost of a ghost, I thought.

I excused myself from Paul Arkmanian as soon as I could without being suspiciously rude. He didn't say anything about my trip sideways. He might not have allowed himself to notice it-most people didn't. I told him I'd be back in touch with him, though I privately doubted it would be soon and I felt a bit bad about the deception. He and his dad were friendly and deserved better than what I was serving them. I would be back, but not where normal people could see me. My dad's ghost seemed to be missing, but I wanted another shot at Christelle and what she might tell me about that hole and what had happened to her.

ELEVEN.

I parted company from Paul Arkmanian outside and pretended to go on my way, waiting until he was out of sight before I ducked back into the building with the help of a pencil stub I'd jammed in the lock earlier. I made my way back up to the office and settled in to wait for another chance to talk to Christelle. I only hoped the security guard wouldn't come along while I was skulking in the corridor. About ten o'clock I saw the slim shade of Christelle walking down the hall again, and I slipped deeper into the Grey to talk to her. She wasn't as friendly this time.

As I drew closer, she muttered something under her breath that I couldn't catch. Then she pasted on a fake smile and opened the phantom door to the waiting room. "Hi. Are you here for an appointment? You know Dr. Blaine isn't in, don't you?"

"Yes," I replied, following her into the ghost of the old office. "I wanted to talk to you." She looked surprised as she sat behind her desk. "Me? Why?"

I stared at her, trying to catch her skittish gaze with mine. I knew she was capable of responding, of disengaging from the endless loop of memory in however fractured a fas.h.i.+on, and I needed her to speak outside the moment of history. "Do you know who I am?" I asked.

She peered back at me, pus.h.i.+ng her gla.s.ses higher on her nose, her face pinched with suspicion. "No." "I'm Harper. I'm Rob's daughter. Look close." I hoped the resemblance would be strong enough. Christelle's ghost gazed hard at my face, her eyes flicking back and forth in restless study. Then she drew back. "Oh. Oh. It is Harper. I-But . . ."

"It's been more than twenty years since I last saw you."

"But it can't be. It's still Thursday!" she protested.

That made no sense to me at all. "Which Thursday? What's the date?" I demanded.

"September eighteenth."

"What year?"

"It's 1986. Why are you asking me such a crazy question?"

"Because it's not 1986 for me, Christelle. It's 2009."

Her expression puckered into confused fear. "I don't understand how that can be. . . ." she whispered. "That can't be right. . . ."

"I don't know, either. Christelle, is this the last date you can remember?"

"I don't know!" the spectral woman cried.

"Try to think. Just think about the appointment book. Think of each day you sat down and looked at the book. . . ."

She screwed her face up as she tried to force some kind of memory to come to her remnant mind. I wasn't sure a ghost could "remember" the way a living person did, but I hoped there was some way for her to fish up some information and give it to me. Finally she shook her head, upset and unhappy. "I can't remember anything after today. Today is all I remember!" She sounded a little panicked. I felt like a therapist trying to coax a memory from an amnesia sufferer. "What happened today? What happened to you or to Rob? What can you remember?"

Christelle tried, but the memory was fragmented and she could only bring it back in shards. "I got up, I came to the office. Rob was already here. I don't think he went home. There was something wrong with the office. There was a man here-no, two men. I'd seen them with the albino man before. They left when I came in, but Rob wouldn't talk about them. He was angry at me. He said I should stay away from them. He said I should stay away from the office. He . . . he fired me. He told me to go home. He was angry. But he was scared. He had your picture! I remember! He had your picture in his hand, like he was trying to hide it. I went home. But I didn't go home. I don't know! I think I went home, but I don't remember being home. I only remember being here. But I remember walking. I remember walking toward home and the men came to talk to me. I ran away from them. I think I did. I-I don't know! I can't remember! I remember Rob. . . . I don't know what he was doing. He-No! It's just a big jumble! No! This isn't right! Keep him away! Keep him away!" she screamed.

Her screech turned into the roar of the guardian as it rushed into the room and pounced past us toward the source of its agitation in the back room. I couldn't hear Christelle screaming over the shriek of the beast, but I saw her thras.h.i.+ng at the air as if she were being attacked by unseen things. Then she sat down in a heap, landing in her chair as if broken.

I tried to grab her, shake her, but she had no more substance than a cloud, not even the electrical tingling of an entangled soul. There was no Christelle there, just a shape.

Then she looked up, her face composed and blank. "Do you have an appointment?" she asked. "Christelle. Listen. Concentrate. Do you know what happened to you?"

"I couldn't say. Do you have an appointment?"

"No, Christelle. It's Harper. I want to talk to my dad. Do you know what happened to him? Do you know what happened toyou ?"

The bland, blank expression didn't flicker. "The doctor isn't in right now. Would you like to make an appointment?"

"No, Christelle. I want to know what happened to you."

"The doctor isn't in right now," she repeated. "Would you like-"

"No!" I shouted at her, but she didn't change her expression or her words; she just continued to ask her mindless question. I gave up, not sure if I'd destroyed whatever was left of Christelle's lingering memory or not, but quite sure she wasn't coming back for a while. Whatever intelligence had occupied the s.p.a.ce that had been my father's office had fled, at least for now, and there was nothing I could do. I left the building, taking care to restore the lock so it clicked closed behind me. A troubling weight of emotion dragged at me as I went: confusion, frustration, grief, and horror. I didn't know much more than I had when I arrived about what had befallen any of us: my father, Christelle, or me. I wasn't any closer to knowing why I was the way I was, either.

I tried to shake my mind clear and think hard as I headed back to my car and then onward to my hotel. Christelle's disconnection from events and her panic might mean she had ceased to exist-at least as a human-after that Thursday in 1986, but what had happened beyond that and who was responsible, I didn't know. The weird encapsulation of time in the office might account for the incomplete haunting phenomena and the odd silence in the Grey surrounding the time and place of my father's death. The anomalies-Christelle's shattered memory and Dad's lack of presence-had to be related, but what the relation was and how it might be connected to me and my being a Greywalker was still a mystery. Much as it might clear a few things up, it appeared that I wouldn't be talking to my dad anytime soon. The presence of the guardian beast and the way it had come rus.h.i.+ng in each time I got close through the layers of history and connection was not good. I'd have to find another route to the information I wanted and I'd have to tread with care. I might be a Grey creature as far as the beast was concerned, but I'd seen it eat Grey things that misbehaved. I didn't want to be the next meal or a mindless loop like what remained of Christelle LaJeunesse.

My thoughts left me disturbed and I, childishly, couldn't face sleep with the chill of them in my mind. Even a long, hot shower couldn't dispel them after I returned to my hotel room. I paged Quinton and left a code on his pager. Quinton had an excusable paranoia about certain bits of technology, and though I'd upgraded to a cell phone, he never would. We'd worked out a set of codes that communicated volumes in only a few digits-the shorter the burst, the harder it was to trace or crack. I left a code that required a reply. He called back within minutes.

"Hi, it's me," he said.

I recognized the voice, of course, and drawled a pleased and tired, "Hey," feeling a small warmth kindle in my chest.

"How's the dead boyfriend?"

I bit my lip for a second before answering, "He's a jerk. And things are becoming stranger than I'd expected."

"Do you have any answers yet?"

"Not many. My dad-" I choked on the words.

"Honey? Harper? Are you all right?"

His endearment melted the ice block in my throat. "I'm . . . still confused by a lot of things. I don't want to discuss them now. I just wanted to hear your voice."

"I like hearing yours, too. I've been working on a ghost detector. I'm not sure I've got it right, but I'll show it to you when you get home."

"I'd rather not talk about ghosts right now."

"All right. Chaos has been chasing things around that I can't see and she runs over and tries to steal your shoes. But she only wants your shoes. I think she misses you."

"She just loves shoes," I said, imagining the crazy little ferret running manically around the condo or Quinton's bunker, chasing ghosts and giving her wicked chuckle of glee as they fled before her. She'd dived fearlessly into the Grey when we'd first encountered it and taken on the guardian beast single-handed. I'd had a little trouble getting her back. She was fearless, but she'd learned to pick her fights better after that. You can't win against an invincible force of the Grey, even if the battle is epic, at least to a fuzz-b.u.t.t who weighed less than two pounds.

A pleasant silence fell between us and I closed my eyes, thinking I could almost see him. "She's not the only one who misses you," Quinton said.

I smiled. "I miss you, too, and I'll be home soon." The conversation wandered and drew to a soft close as I dwindled toward sleep.

"I'll see you soon," he whispered before I reluctantly hung up and turned to roll into the covers, falling asleep with the comfort of his thoughts wrapped around me.

TWELVE.

Will Novak screamed in my sleep. I jerked awake, twisting in my bed to spot the gruesome vision that had awakened me, so realistic was it that I had been sure I was present. I was sick of grim visions. First Cary, the office, Christelle, and now Will, the antiques auctioneer I'd met back when the whole Greywalking adventure started. He'd been in my nightmare of my death, too, but this was not the same dream at all. This was a hopeless, terrifying vision about Will himself.

We'd broken up over the ramifications of my incomprehensible life a year earlier, but I'd kept a soft spot for Will in my heart. He was in England now, working. And he was fine. Or he had been the last I'd heard from him. I didn't want to relive any of that, either, but it seemed my past-whether connected to my Greywalking ability or not-would not leave me alone.

To h.e.l.l with it; it wasn't late over there. It was . . . I checked the clock and did the math . . . about 3:30 in the afternoon. I picked up my cell phone and poked the b.u.t.ton for his number. In a minute, a male voice answered.

"h.e.l.lo?"

"Hi. Michael? It's Harper Blaine." Michael was Will's much-younger brother. He was attending college somewhere in London since they'd moved there more or less permanently when Will and I broke up. Will worked researching provenances-the backgrounds of antiques-for Sotheby's. It had been a dream offer just when he'd needed it most. We'd tried to keep the relations.h.i.+p going, but the distance and my bizarre job had killed it.

"Oh. Hi, Harper. Umm . . . can I . . . help you?" I hadn't called since Will and I had broken up, and Michael sounded confused to hear from me.

"I just wanted to talk to Will. Is he home?"

"No. He's at work. He'll be home in about three hours, if you want to call back."

"How are you guys doing?"

He replied cautiously. "We're fine. I'm working on a bike for a motorcycle rally this summer and Will's OK, I guess. Works a lot. You know: the big brother thing."

"Yeah, I know that thing. Is he still on your case about school?"

"I'm out for the summer hols soon. He still doesn't like the bikes, but we get along OK if I don't cut cla.s.s too much for them."

That sounded like the Novak brothers I knew. Michael plunging into his enthusiasms and Will watchd.o.g.g.i.ng him.

So my harrowing dream had been only that-a dream-however disturbing and realistic. No one had chopped off his limbs or stuffed him in a box, and Michael wasn't a burned skeleton on a garage floor, either. I was still unsettled, but I took a long breath and made myself calm down.

"OK. Well. I guess I don't need to talk to him, after all. Thanks, Michael."

"No problem."

We both hung up in an awkward silence. I must have sounded nuts. I felt a bit nuts, too, for giving in to the need to check on them. The sense of something being out of joint lingered, although there seemed to be no reason for that feeling-just the aftereffect of the dream-and I chided myself for calling. Of course, I wouldn't have forgiven myself for not checking if there had turned out to be something wrong. Still . . . crazy ex-girlfriend was not a part I liked playing.

I left a string of numbers on Quinton's pager that meant I'd been thinking of him. It made me feel a bit like a clinging girlfriend, and yes, it was mushy, but it made me smile and that was a good trick after the fright that had awakened me.

It was too early to show up at my mother's house. I had no desire to intrude on any private moments between her and Damon. The thought of observing Mother setting another matrimonial trap made me gag, and the false friendliness her current prey displayed on meeting me was just as cloying. My reaction might be due to the contrast between reality and my now-ruined fantasy of what life had been with my father, but I still found Damon and his presence repulsive. Unfair and irrational of me, maybe, but that's how I felt.

I could just guess at the sorts of heavily varnished tales about me that my mother had been laying on him. Since he hadn't thrown me out of the house, I had to a.s.sume it was the Darling Daughter version and not the Ungrateful Sp.a.w.n of Satan version-I'd been both before. Considering her performance the previous day, I figured I was probably growing horns in her mind right now. Yet another reason to hold off arriving until after the man du jour had gone and avoid any scenes.

A short workout and a shower didn't help mitigate the fact that it was the morning after a terrible day and night as much as I'd hoped. It still felt too early, and I hadn't even changed time zones. I called room service for a pot of expensive coffee and some food and sat down on the bed to prowl through my father's box again. If I couldn't talk to him or his no-doubt-dead receptionist directly, I could still try to get some sense of the real man from what he'd left behind. I knew I had romanticized him, just as I had romanticized Cary, but I needed truth now, not fantasies.

Most of the paper in the box was business files, which told me about his patients and his work habits but not much more. I noticed that his handwriting was very precise when in business mode, small and neat. The office as I'd seen it in the past had been wrecked, but the simple Grey memory of it had been squared away and orderly. The writing on his business correspondence didn't quite cross the line to fussy, but it was careful. In the journals it had been looser but still very legible, which I couldn't say for most people's casual writing.

All right: He'd been a bit type A, the sort of man who wore a b.u.t.ton-down s.h.i.+rt even on his days off. I could remember him smiling and being silly with me, so he hadn't been too stiff, but if I was being honest, he hadn't been the life of the party, either. I had idolized him and built him up as an ideal parent in contrast to my demanding, peripatetic mother. I might not have been right about her, either, but that was not the issue of the moment.

I paused to eat and pour more coffee, and then I shuffled deeper into the box. At the bottom I found a couple of paperback books:The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester and Chuck Yeager's autobiography. I'd never read either book, but I knew who Chuck Yeager was and, according to the blurb, the Bester was a sort of s.p.a.ce-faring version ofThe Count of Monte Cristo . s.p.a.ce adventures, ordinary guys rising to heroism and glamour. I hadn't pegged my dad as fanciful, but it might have explained his marriage to my mother. They had both been starry-eyed, but his romanticism had turned inward while my mother's had turned outward. If I hadn't seen the hole where the end of his life should have been, I might have thought his visions had gone as sour as my mother's and written him off as merely crazy, but that void-whether it was caused by him or something else-and the terror that had poured out of Christelle changed everything. He might have been nuts-he sounded it near the end-but he hadn't been imagining that something uncanny and terrible had surrounded him.

Melancholy seemed to ooze from the box as I piled Dad's things back inside. I set the journals on top; I'd have to ask my mother if I could keep them and the little metal puzzle, which I put into my pocket. By then it was nearly noon, so I called her.

"h.e.l.lo, Mother."

"Oh, hi, sweetie!"