Ghost Dance (7 page)

"What do you make of it?" Phil said as he returned, following the sweep of her eyes around the room.

"I don't know
what
to make of it. What exactly is going on here?"

He rested his hands on the table between them and she saw that it too was covered in fake Native American artefacts: beads, obsidian arrow heads and what might have been intended as a peace pipe.

"Have you heard of the Croatoans?" he asked.

She widened her eyes in mock surprise. "So you're
those
guys."

"I guess you've heard some pretty disparaging things about us, huh?"

"Oh well... I've kind of heard you called a cult."

"A cult's just what people call a religion they don't understand. The Romans said Christianity was a cult when it first started."

"Well, I guess that's true," she said, smiling coyly at him. She was surprised how easy she found it pretending to be something she wasn't. She'd never considered herself much of an actress, but maybe she'd been playing a part for longer than she realised.

Phil leaned back, his expression and tone softening. "Don't worry, we're not here to convert you. In fact, we don't want anything from you at all - unlike some other groups that get called cults, we just want to help you."

"Help me do what? I have to tell you, my life's pretty good right now."

"I'm glad to hear that, Alex. But don't you sometimes feel - I don't know, like there might be more to life, if only you could figure out what it was."

"Sure. But doesn't everyone feel that way?"
Make them work for it
, PD had told her.
Just enough so they don't get suspicious
.

Phil didn't seem put off. "You know what, Alex - everyone does feel that way. And that's because there
is
something missing from pretty much everyone's lives."

"And you think you know what that something is."

"I know I do. Because I've seen it and I'm here to tell you, Alex, it's the most incredible thing there is."

She leaned forward, as if he'd hooked her and was just beginning to draw her in. "Seen what?"

He lifted the elegant black and white curve of an eagle feather from the table. "The flesh is earthbound, Alex, but the spirit flies - or it can if we let it. There's a whole world out there, behind the world we see with our eyes, and I can tell you how to explore it."

For the first time, she felt a genuine flash of interest, and a beat of apprehension. There
was
a world behind the world, and she understood why Hammond thought people like this shouldn't have access to it.

"Do you want to see that world?" Phil asked. "We can show it to you, if you want."

"I do. But is it dangerous?"

"It doesn't need to be, if you find the right guide. Would you like to find yours?"

She heard the flap of raven wings and swallowed before she answered. "I'd like that very much."

He led her deeper inside the building, down a corridor lined with doors until they reached the furthest. The room inside was small and dark. There were no candles here, only an oil lamp flickering on the table.

He gestured her to a seat, but this time drew out the one beside her. She could smell the faint odour of his sweat and the masking scent of his cologne. It was expensive, she could tell, subtle and complex. Before he sat, he put his hands together and bowed towards the opposite wall. She realised that a painting hung there, veiled in shadow. It showed the back of a man dressed in a white robe, his curly brown hair falling over its collar. Two coyotes threaded themselves between his legs.

"Our leader," Phil said. "Laughing Wolf."

"Is he here? Can I meet him?"

Phil shook his head. "The Grand Shaman is only an occasional visitor to this plane of existence."

It was absurd and yet she couldn't find it funny. Her eyes returned to the painting and she knew she didn't like it. There was something about that hidden face which troubled her. She remembered the figure she'd seen in the spirit world in the Eastern European prison and, though she didn't know why, she was suddenly certain it was the same man.

Phil seemed to sense her unease. Maybe it was a common reaction in people coming here. But Alex wasn't afraid of the unknown. It was what she knew that terrified her.

"Don't worry, this is painless," he said. "It's not a full spirit journey - you'll have to study with us for a while before you're ready for that. This is more like looking at a map to plan your route than going on the actual journey."

"What map?" she said, looking again at the painting. She knew she didn't want to follow where that figure led.

Phil laughed. "I guess that was kind of a metaphor. I'm going to help you get to the edge of the spirit world, but we'll stop there, and then we'll wait for your spirit guide to find you."

"Oh." There was no sign of any peyote, not even any weed to help her get in the right state of mind. Maybe they weren't needed. Maybe they were like training wheels, something you could manage without once you knew what you were doing.

Phil put a finger under her chin, the touch curiously asexual, and turned her head until she was looking at the oil lamp. "Just gaze into the flame," he said. "Don't look at it - look through it, into the world beyond."

She tried. The flame danced, a tantalizing randomness that felt as if it might reveal itself as patterned if she only looked long enough. Her eyes began to water and when she blinked them the tears blurred the flame to a soft glow. She let herself sink into it, no longer straining for meaning but letting it come.

There were shapes in there, she could see them if she didn't look for them: a curve that might have been a petal and an oval that could have been an eye. Was this really a way into the spirit realm? It was gentler than the path she'd used but who said the journey had to be a painful one?

"Tell me what you see," Phil said.

"I can see... it's not clear, but I think there's an eye, a flower..."

"That's good, Alex, that's very good. And what else?"

She had to fight to keep her eyes unfocused, to let the flame dictate what it wanted to be. "There's an apple," she said. "And something that looks kinda like a map of Manhattan."

"OK then." There was a slight catch in his voice, a note of what might have been impatience. "And how about any animals? Can you see any of those?"

She squinted her eyes until the lines of her lashes strobed across the yellow flames. "There might be, I don't know, maybe a cat's face."

"Awesome!" Phil said. "The lynx. There's your spirit guide."

"And if you believe that," a voice croaked in her ear, "you'll believe anything."

Her head spun so quickly she felt her neck click, but she saw only the shadow of black wings fading into the distance. Then there was just Phil, staring at her with an expression of alarm which he quickly schooled into concern.

He put a hand on her arm, meant to comfort and also, she thought, to restrain. "It's OK, Alex. He's your guide, he isn't going to hurt you - he's on your side."

"My guide?" she said. "A lynx?"

Phil's grip on her arm loosened a little and she pulled it free with a jerk.

"That's what you saw," he said. "The flame doesn't lie."

Lies hurt the liar here
, Raven had said.

"No," Alex said, "but you obviously do. Thanks for your time, Phil. I've seen enough."

He didn't try to stop her as she slammed the door and hurried from the recruitment centre.

CHAPTER FIVE

Morgan woke with the idea of using the university's resources to find out a little more about Dr John Dee before returning to Kate in London. He wanted to prove his worth, he supposed, prove that he could do more than just use this unwanted gift his father had bequeathed him.

The university library was easy to find. It loomed over the nearby college quad, its centre topped by a tower that looked more industrial than academic. Morgan wasn't sure what he'd imagined the place might look like, but it definitely wasn't this. The building reminded him of Battersea Power Station, and it was dauntingly huge.

The elderly man guarding the entrance waved Morgan through when he showed his police ID, not offering to help him find his way. Even at this time of year, with the students absent, the place was packed. There were a dozen people Morgan could have asked for directions, but he took one look at their smooth, confident faces and walked on. He stumbled on the catalogue room by pure chance and sat at an unoccupied computer, glad he'd found something he knew how to handle.

A search for John Dee yielded hundreds of results, but when he paired it with other search terms - alchemy, philosopher's stone, eternal life - he narrowed down the list. He scribbled the titles on a scrap of paper, his handwriting cramped and awkward, an atrophied skill. Beside each title he wrote the library code, a collection of numbers and letters.

Then he sat and stared at them.

"Took me weeks to figure out the system here," a quiet voice said behind him.

He snapped his head round. The young woman standing by his shoulder pulled back and smiled, her sunny expression framed by spiky blonde hair.

"I'm getting the hang of it," he told her.

She nodded, but he could see she didn't believe him. "You're that policeman, aren't you? The one who's looking into Dr Granger's murder?"

"How the hell did you know that?"

She rested a hand against the back of his chair. Her fingers were delicate, but he saw that the nails were bitten to the quick. "Don't worry, I haven't been stalking you. Coby told me about you. His description was spot on."

Morgan leaned back, elbows against the desk. "Oh yeah?"

She nodded but didn't elaborate and he wondered just what Coby had said. Nothing flattering, he was sure.

She squinted at the list of books he'd noted. "You're researching John Dee? Coby said you were asking about Dr Granger's research."

"Just getting some background detail."

"Want some help? It's just I'm going up there myself, so we could find the books together. Though I've got to warn you, most of them are as dull as dried dog shit. Actually, I could just précis them for you. No reason both of us should suffer through it, is there?"

Her eyes sparkled into his and he found himself nodding.

"I'm Julie, by the way. I'm Dr Granger's other PhD student. God, sorry, I should have said that straight off." She scratched her short nails against the back of her neck, frowning.

"OK Julie," he said, "show me the way."

She led him up a long flight of stairs. Her gait was fast and relaxed, the material of her jeans pulling tight across her arse with each stride. He alternated between enjoying that and studying the view from the windows. As they climbed he saw aerial snapshots of the town, odd, mismatched angles on trees and buildings which made it seem as if the library was moving location as he climbed.

She finally left the stairwell at what must have been the sixth or seventh floor, plunging into a maze of rooms. The bookshelves were packed so tightly they were concertinaed together. Morgan couldn't figure out how anyone reached them, until he saw a gangly young man push two shelves aside to create a space between them and he realised they must be fixed on rollers.

He'd been told this was a copyright library and that it received one of every single book published in the world, but he hadn't really thought what that meant. He was used to the internet, data without form or location. It was odd to think of all this knowledge having a physical presence, solid and destructible.

The room they ended in was unoccupied. Julie perched on the end of a wooden table, her legs crossed at the ankle.

"Welcome to my home from home," she said. "It's OK for the psychologists and the chemists, all the stuff they need is in journals, they can do their research online. Us historians still need to look at primary sources and out-of-print editions of books no one's ever heard of. I've spent more time in this place than in my own room."

Morgan perched on the other side of the table, the shape of his body a mirror of hers. "I can think of worse places to be."

She looked uncomfortable, scratching at her neck again in what he realised must be a habitual gesture. "Yeah, sorry. I know I'm lucky to be here."

"Bet you worked your arse off for it, though."

She grinned and he felt himself flush. He realised he'd started running his own hand across his cornrows and he brought it to his side. "So tell me about your research. That guy - Coby - he said Dr Dee's big thing was immortality."

She laughed and he watched her T-shirt ride up her abdomen to reveal an inch of thin, pale stomach. "Yeah, he would say that, it's what his PhD's all about. But Dr Dee had his finger in a lot more pies than that. Back then it wasn't like it is now. These days I start out in humanities and then I specialise in history, I narrow that down to the Tudors and now I'm just researching one man's life. Not even all of it, just a tiny corner. There's so much knowledge in the world, no one can know very much of it.

"But back then, humanity knew less and individuals knew more. A man - and it was always a man - could be an expert in
everything
. People who called themselves natural historians saw the whole of existence as their field of study. And they didn't see the world the way we do now. They made no distinction between the natural and supernatural. Astronomy and astrology were viewed as part of the same discipline, the position of the stars being related to their predictive powers. The same methods could be applied to discover the distance of the earth from the moon, the secret of immorality, or the exact date of Noah's flood."

"And is that what your PhD's about?" Morgan said. "Noah's flood?"

"No, that wasn't actually Dr Dee's thing. His central obsession - even beyond the search for immortality, or maybe as a route to it - was figuring out a way to make contact with the spirit world. He had a... well, not really a friend. These days we'd probably call Edward Kelly a con man. Even back then, he'd had his ears cropped for forgery. But Kelly convinced Dee he was a medium and that he could train Dee to be one too. They used crystal balls and later scrying mirrors - there's one in the British Museum made from obsidian. It's kind of beautiful."