Poltergeist (32 page)

Maybe it was the suggestion, or maybe I caught it, too, but a frisson ran up my spine and the street seemed to ripple. My bones itched. I cast my gaze around, looking for cops, and led the way down the alley when I saw none. Their attention was in front of them, not behind.

We drifted down the darkness to the chained doors. Carlos started to reach for the lock, then drew back. "This is the Wah Mee.”

"Yes," I answered. "You know about it?”

"It drew me here. I can feel them still. The thirteen.”

"And Ian?”

His brows drew down. "Yes. Beyond this wall. He revels in it. He doesn't know what drew him here, but he feels the bloody carnage. He is feeding the entity on the death within.”

His frown became a black storm of anger. I pulled a small fold of the Grey between us, pushing the horror of him back.

"Carlos," I begged in a whisper. "We have to move.”

He touched the chain, sliding his hands down to the crusted padlock. His fingers found a broken link and he lifted the lock away. The defaced and weathered mahogany door pulled open with a thin sigh, as if relieved by our presence.

We eased into the vestibule. The door swung shut. Before us was another pair of doors. Red doors and a sea of heaving Grey. I saw the phantom portal swing open and three shapes rushed out into the night, laughing. Carlos pulled open the real door and we walked into the empty bar, into a maelstrom of unhealed pain and memory.

The curving question-mark bar and dining area were thronged with ghosts. They packed the space, layer upon layer, moving through each other, coming and going up the stairs at the back, through the door behind us. Laughing, talking, the calling of a dealer from the other room, the TV behind the bar flickering images of ancient shows and forgotten news. Then shouting, the sudden screams of a woman. The ghosts thinned, some going on, oblivious, as a confusion of robbery and death played out in front of us through their heedless, vaporous bodies.

"What the hell—?”

I backed away from the consuming images in which I'd been lost and felt a padded rail at my back. I'd wandered into the bar without knowing I'd moved. Through the boil of Grey I saw Ian in the gambling room a step below, through an arch of lucky-red pillars, the floor still stained with twenty-year-old blood where fourteen people had been shot in the head and left to die.

Carlos grinned at him, shedding his cape. "I want to speak to you, boy.”

"Miss Clever Dick and her cop friend," Ian said. "Fuck you.”

Carlos laughed and the world shuddered as he started toward Ian.

The sudden reek of rot and the whirling knives and hot light of the phantasm shot down toward Carlos. He batted it aside and continued, grinning, fangs bared, the whirl of his own bleak darkness spreading like ink in water.

Ian jumped back in the face of the impossible, implacable thing bearing down on him.

I brushed off the cat ears and started in, tripping over a spectral corpse that stared with horrified eyes from a spreading pool of silver blood.

The thing that had been Celia dashed me into one of the pillars. I rolled to the floor, feeling the hot flow of phantom gore over me. I pulled the tangle from my pocket, its thorns prickling into my still-sore hand through my glove.

The entity dove again, blazing bloodred: pure fury and hate now. I slid across the dust-thick floor and tumbled to my feet through an oblivious pair of dancing ghosts, swaying together in incongruous romance among the bleeding images of the dead.

I dropped the tangle onto the dancing ghosts, who swirled into sudden stillness—a faded photograph superimposed on the memory of the night three young men robbed and shot fourteen of their neighbors.

I heard Ian scream and started to look, catching a movement of black out of the corner of my eye.

Then the dervish of hate swept down on me again, howling. And froze in the shade of the dancers buried knee-deep in the horror of murdered bodies.

I wavered.

Carlos roared. "Now, Blaine!”

I dove into the entity, into the knives of time and the barbed wire of Ian's fury woven into it. I slipped and twisted my way through the tesseract of what had been Celia, just as I had run through time and space to elude and capture it, feeling blood in the palm of my glove where the thorns of the tangle had ripped my hand. I slid over frozen lakes of memory and crashed deeper into the structure of power and madness, seeking the center, where the control must lie.

Something was muttering, crooning images of terror. "… in the fire, limbs crisped and split… own living eyes …”

The entity's tectonic plates of memory shifted, sliding and buckling under me, throwing me against the agony of a shred of Mark's death, hanging in the frozen storm like a drop of crystal. The dancers had stopped but the other ghosts had not and they brushed through the suspended entity, disturbing chimes of memory and pain that rang on my own bones.

"… implacable. They crawl beneath your skin …”

That voice; part Ian, part Carlos, speaking nightmares. I shook the sound from my ears, staggering back into the depth of the thing I hoped to destroy.

"… dolls of flesh …”

I buried my hands in the tangle of energy and memory, wrenched at the structure that resisted me, fought as if alive, pulsing in my grip and burning over my nerves. Nausea swamped me as I felt I was tearing some live thing to shreds. I gagged and clutched for support, reeling in the swamp of remembered blood rising from the floor on the tide of unwholesome light. I was lost in the maze of knotted rage that had been Celia, unable to find the core and open it up to be destroyed.

"… drinks your soul and will…”

Desperate, I clutched at my own thin thread and followed it down into the clenched bud of the monster's core. Coiled tight, the heart of the entity looked like a pulsing spiral-rose of blood and fire. Wincing with fear, I clutched the thing and twisted it backward, unwinding the spiral through a writhing curtain of time.

"… eternal…" No, not Ian. Carlos, turning Ian's horrors back on him!

Then the core opened and I stared down into the web of human desire that had formed it. Four broken threads, one more frayed almost through, my own a pale golden color against the yellow and blue weave, shot with ashen gray and warped with Pyrrhic red. The red lines pulsed like arteries, feeding on something, swelling toward an overload of corrupted power as something else fed on the brightness of the life that bound the entity together. White flashes of memory seared my eyes and I tried to turn away.

Images and sensations erupted in my mind: a book tumbled from on high and struck my chest; a whirling brooch sliced into my cheek; a wooden slab rammed into my thigh; a shocked instant—

I tried to rip myself out of the fully flowered heart of the thing— out of the boomerang memories of Ian's cruelty pouring from the collective memory of the entity. I struggled in the net of flooding madness.

A tide of specters washed around the room, crashing against the corner where Carlos stood, muttering over Ian. Nightmares and memories, every eternal terror that ever crawled or clawed through the thoughts of men, he poured into the gaping mind of the young man who shuddered and dwindled at his feet.

"What are you doing?" I gasped. "Stop it!”

Carlos turned a vicious face to mine. "Is he worth your life? Look to the charm!”

I shot a glance down and saw below the shape of murder that the tangle was burning to a circle of ash. Only a small fragment of thorn and vine remained. I threw myself back into the construct’s core.

My heart racking, trepid, against my ribs, I grabbed for the blazing center of the vile red core, for Ian's control line. My bleeding hand closed on the power line and the agony of the inferno roared up my arm, spreading through my body. A sad sigh of smoke coiled up and the splayed layers of the entity shrieked as they rushed inward.

I bit down, tasting blood, yanking with all my might as the dancers lurched. Time and memory crashed in and I yelled, plummeting backward, shredded by the flying knives of history whirling outward.

The stained floor slammed into my back, ramming my pistol into my kidney, my shoulder making a grinding sound as I hit. Reality swam in the mist of Grey and near-unconsciousness.

Carlos bent over me. "You're not done." He hauled me to my feet, his touch stabbing me with horrors, and set me before a tangled skein of yellow and blue threads that hung pathetically in the air, wafting in an unfelt breeze as the shooting played out again around us. "Finish the job," he added. "Pluck it out.”

My left arm hung limp from a misshapen shoulder. With my right hand, I pulled the frayed strand of Celia's tether from around my own head and tore it from me. It felt like some horrible weed was drawn from my flesh, its spreading, spidery roots gone deep into my limbs. I stumbled and shied from another touch of Carlos's hands.

I panted and blinked, finding the last pathetic shred of the entity turning in the air as from a gallows. I stuck my good hand into it, pushed, and it fell to pieces. The shower of yellow and blue threads glittered and vanished.

I sank to my knees, looking toward Ian. He was huddled in the corner against a broken table, staring, cloaked in a strange, black haze. His lips moved, but he didn't see anything normal people would see and the words were a gabble of broken thoughts. I hadn't pulled the plug fast enough to save him from the memories of his own actions, the torments he had inflicted on the helpless filtered through Carlos's necromancy and poured back into his mind like poison. He seemed smaller, burned hollow, and I knew I hadn't imagined that Carlos had somehow drawn the living power of the entity through Ian into himself as he drove him mad.

"You bastard," I muttered. My shoulder and knee were throbbing and I had no more energy to express my fury, revulsion, and despair.

He chuckled, the burn scars on his face fading as I watched. "I am. He was not so very hard to break—his mind already teetered on the edge. I only made sure he would fall into chaos, not into power. It's best.”

"When I believe you, I'll let you know," I whispered, swaying. My back blazed pain, my tongue was clumsy in my mouth and I tasted blood from biting it. The world swam in blazing colors and restless silver ghosts.

"Even in victory, you spit like a cat." I felt the rolling disturbance of his amusement. "Formidable creature. Assure yourself this was necessary. It was what had to be for everyone's sake.”

There was some noise from outside. Carlos glanced over his shoulder. "Do you wish to leave here?”

"No," I gasped, falling against the wall and sliding down. "The cops—”

"Are coming." He stood and melted into the darkness.

I was alone with the ghosts. The twenty-year-old memory of robbery and murder played again before my eyes. I waited for the police as I watched the shade of the lone survivor of that bloody night crawl from the room.

Solis found only me and Ian.

No one would have been believed and judged competent to stand trial when they raved about ghosts and vampires, sex and death, and women who danced in curtains of blood and fire. During his hearing, Ian's sudden fits of screaming, swearing, and sobbing did nothing to advance a finding for sanity, even though the things he said were true. I would not have called what I had done in the dread light of the entity dancing, however.

Ian had been quiet at first, sitting still and calm beside his lawyer. His demeanor and responses had been almost childlike in simplicity and lack of focus. Then he had burst into profanity and screaming. Guards removed him from the room after the second rage of hysteria, when he had raised his hands to his face, shrieking and gouging at his own eyes. He was committed to WesternStateHospital, confessing to Mark's murder over and over in gruesome detail. I knew he'd never be coming out; Carlos had deranged his mind too far for hope of recovery.

While he wasn't sane enough to stand trial after the fact, the summary hearing found Ian sane at the time of Mark's murder. Ian had been a diarist. In the office of the Wah Mee, Solis discovered a notebook in which Ian had written everything he'd thought, felt, and planned. His intended actions through Celia, coldly detailed, were perverse and violent, written in a neat draftsmanly hand, between precise margins.

My name was included in his list of those he'd meant to have Celia "remove," just below Ana's, Ken's, and Cara's. The testifying psychologist believed that Celia was Ian's own disassociated personality and that everything he attributed to Celia was something he had done—or wished to do—himself, deluded that he had some kind of magical powers. I wouldn't have argued with that concept. With his increasing skill, Ian might have been able to do what he'd written. I was glad not to have tested the hypothesis, though.

Solis was never happy with my story of being spotted by Ian and of a phone call that had brought me to the Wah Mee, but I refused to change it and there was nothing he could do. My office was six blocks from Uwajimaya and my claim to have been shopping in the neighborhood was attested by his own observers.

The Lupoldi family accepted the official finding and Amanda Leaman confirmed that it was Ian who'd argued with Mark the Monday before the murder. No mechanism for Mark's death was ever found, since no one but Ian and I accepted the notion of killer ghosts.

The lack of a weapon made the case quite unsatisfactory to Solis, but the rest of the evidence was strong enough to close the file. His colleagues consoled him that his clearance record remained unblotted by the mystery, but he turned a chilling silence on them and further discussion died.

Frankie called to tell me Gartner Tuckman hadn't dodged the grant review or the specter of having unleashed a psychopathic killer, and his credibility fell apart. He was dismissed and a fraud investigation was initiated. Terry was left scrambling to find a new thesis reviewer. I figured he'd do better without Tuck.

Frankie also informed me that Ken and Ana had both changed their address cards and were cohabiting. "I wouldn't call it an engagement," she said, "but they look like they're headed that way." I guessed family objections meant less when life seemed shorter.

Of the Stahlqvists, only the business news had word and that mostly bland. Patricia Railsback and Wayne Hopke dropped from my radar like stones in water. I tried to settle back into normal cases—or as normal as they get when some of the clients start out dead—but grasping the burning lines of energy in dismantling Celia had seared the Grey deeper into me and it was harder than ever to shake it off. Most of the time, I no longer bothered.

The knee and shoulder I'd landed on were injured worse than I'd imagined, and I replaced my morning jog with time at the gym, working them back into shape.

On the Monday before Thanksgiving, with no phone call to warn me, Will Novak came through my office doorway. Tall—almost gangly—with prematurely silver hair glinting from the hall light, he leaned on the doorpost and smiled at me, glimmering pink sparks like I'd seen around Ken and Ana.

"Hi, Harper.”

"Hi, yourself, stranger.”

"Got any plans for the national holiday?”

"Yeah.”

"Oh?”

I nodded. "I thought I'd rent a pile of DVDs and gorge on old black-and-white movies and turkey potpie. Want to join me?”

"Are you coming apart?”

"Yup. Wanna try to stick me back together?" Well, I hoped he could, but I wasn't sure we'd still get pink sparks.

He came in and kissed me and grinned and said, "Think we can find
Suspicion?”

Cary Grant as a man who might be a psychopathic killer…My stomach pitched and I felt cold. "I'd rather not," I said. "Maybe we could find something a little lighter.”

In quiet moments, guilt, anger, and regret found me and I didn't want to see a film that would remind me of Ian and of what I hadn't stopped Carlos from doing to him. Ian wouldn't kill anyone else, but he lived in endless nightmares. I didn't know that I could have changed that; I only knew that I hadn't.