Possession (25 page)

I wanted it back—wanted my whole self—and I pushed with the only weapon I still controlled. I vaulted back toward the shape of me, thrusting with my mind against temporaclines and shadow shapes of things gone or yet to come, climbing back to it by will to drive the ghost shapes away. I could not grip them, but in this deep plane of the Grey I could exert myself as force, drive them out, thrust against their incorporeal weight with the vigor of being alive. I had so much more to lose than they did and though I was rough with them, I didn’t hesitate any longer. I pulled the burning flow of the grid into my mind, feeling it swell and howl through me, and then propelled it out and up to sweep them away on the gust of power. The ghosts scattered like autumn leaves before wind and I rushed back toward the gleaming shape of my self, passing again into darkness as I went.

I sat up with a gasp, dizzy from the transition back to normal. A young Chinese American woman jumped back from me and I thought she must have been bending over me as I’d lain across the tabletop. She was usually behind the cash register and I hadn’t seen her come over.

“You OK?” she asked, quivering a little from surprise. “I thought you fainted.” She looked frightened.

I shook myself, settling back into the feel of my own body. “I’m fine.”

I’m a good liar, but she wasn’t convinced. She stared at me with wide eyes and raised one hand to her cheek. “Your face . . .”

I touched my own face and recognized the stinging heat I’d felt the night before at Cameron’s house. This time the dermographia had scrolled up my neck and onto the side of my face, just in front of my ear, then vanished again under my hair. I could sense the burning tracery running down my back as well, like a trail of fire ants.

I pawed my brown locks down over my cheek. “Cat scratch,” I said, then stopped to stare at the tablecloth, scrawled with a soy-sauce-and-chopstick sketch of the same cliff I’d seen in Julianne Goss’s paintings. Beside it were the barely legible words “beach to bluff and back.” I dropped the stained chopstick from my left hand as if it were hot.

The young woman’s fear wasn’t appeased. “Are you sick?”

I forced myself up from the table, containing my rising panic for the moment. “No. No, I’m just very tired. Didn’t get any sleep last night. I’m so sorry I disturbed you,” I added, digging money out of my pockets and dropping it on the table so I could run away without feeling quite so guilty for disrupting the place.

And run I did. Frightened and adrenaline-fueled, I darted out of the deli as fast as I could without causing any more upset and hurried back toward my office, feeling horribly conspicuous, branded, pursued, and under threat. A cloudburst dampened my escape, rain erupting from the sky just long enough to wet everything and soothe the acid-burned sensation on my flesh. Though I felt oppressed by watching eyes, no one stared at me as I darted along Western toward Pioneer Square; they were all doing the same thing—running for cover.

I bolted into my building and up the stairs to my office, locking the door behind me as I looked around, just in case there were any little friends of Purlis’s—or anyone else’s—lurking about. All clear.

I’d thrown off the worst of my horror and panic, though I was still breathing too hard and quivering. I forced myself to calm down, breathe in mindful cycles, clear my mind before I did anything else. I knew I was safe enough here and that panic was unhelpful. I wasn’t vulnerable and helpless like Goss, Sterling, and Delamar—I knew what was happening and I could do something about it. This time I made myself undress enough to photograph the writing that had appeared on my skin, since there was no one to see but a handful of ghosts too remote from life to stare at me. I almost wished I’d stopped to photograph the drawing on the table, but I didn’t think I could have managed it. I could always see it again in Julianne’s room.

Standing in my tiny office, shirtless and chilly in spite of the season, I followed Levi Westman’s example and took photos of the dermographia with my cell phone’s camera. Photographing my back was difficult and I hoped I’d not ended up taking out-of-focus snaps of my butt. I hustled back into my clothes the moment I was done and sat down to examine the photos, hoping to decipher the text that had appeared on my skin. Naturally, some of the images were useless and others out of focus or not very good in other ways, but I could read parts of the text. I’d be able to see more when I looked at them at home, with the more powerful software that Quinton had loaded onto my home computer—I didn’t see any point in keeping a high-end machine in my office, since the building was more than a hundred years old and far too easy to break into.

My phone rang as I was trying to decide if I should send the photos to myself or keep them where they were on the off chance that Purlis Senior was monitoring my e-mail. “Harper Blaine,” I answered.

“Hey, girl. I got some books for you.”

“Hi, Phoebe. Thanks. That was fast.”

“I know what I got in stock. I’d have called you sooner, but I got to reading one of them and forgot the time. Anyhow, you going to come up and get these?”

“I am. In fact, right away.” I couldn’t think of anything less likely to interest Quinton’s father than Phoebe and the cat-house-that-books-built.

“Good. I’ll make you some coffee.”

Phoebe knows all about my coffee addiction. I thanked her and hung up, repacking the phone into my pocket after sending the photos to myself. It was a risk, but I hoped Purlis was too busy to be interested in an e-mail I’d labeled with the name of a well-known auto insurance company and a long case number.

SIXTEEN

_O
ld Possum’s seems never to change. Phoebe occasionally rearranges the shelves and reorganizes the stock, but the air of everything having been, forever, as it is right now and always shall be is as permanent as the musical wooden floors and the cat hair on the doormat. The sign over the coatrack still read
HE WHO STEALS MY COAT GETS TRASHED
, and there were still fake dinosaur skulls on the walls, as there had been since I first arrived. One of Phoebe’s employees—eternally referred to as “the minions”—stood behind the cash desk, folding hardcover books into plastic covers, while Beenie, the dumbest of the shop cats, supervised. If Beenie stayed true to form, he would end up half-wrapped in plastic before the books were done and wandering through the shop in a daze, unable to fathom how to get it off. The shop wasn’t busy at this early-afternoon hour, so I just waved to the minion as I passed and headed toward the back, drawn by the scent of coffee.

Phoebe was waiting for me in the coffee alcove where I’d first talked to Lily Goss, cups of coffee—hers iced, mine hot—sitting on the painted table between the comfortable chairs. Simba, the giant cat, was curled on top of an ancient unabridged dictionary and overflowing the sides. They both looked up at me as I walked over to the unoccupied chair. Simba stared hard and I wondered if he could smell the ferret’s recent presence in my bag.

I fixed the cat’s defiant stare with one of my own. “This is not a large snack,” I said. “So don’t get any ideas, because next time I’ll bring Chaos with me and the tube rat will kick your furry butt.”

Simba put on a haughty expression and turned his head away as if he couldn’t be bothered with peasants or ferrets. Phoebe snorted. I just sat down.

“Hi, Phoebe,” I said as I reached for the coffee cup. “Thank you for the coffee. And the books.”

“You haven’t even seen them yet. How are you so sure you need to thank me for them?”

“You have never given me a useless book. A few weird ones, but never useless.”

“What was so weird?”

“That Christopher Priest book was pretty strange.”

“Oh, you haven’t seen weird if you think Priest is it.”

“Please don’t attempt to prove that to me. At least not today.”

“I just try to broaden your horizons, girl. You always reading those mystery novels. Don’t you get tired of that? It’s like reading about work.”

“No it’s not. Real detective work is never that interesting or exciting.”

She snorted again. “So you say, Miss I-Talk-to-Ghosts.”

I glanced down, a little put off and still a bit worried about her reaction to what I was going to tell her. “Usually I’d say that’s not how it works—they come to me—but in this case I
have
been talking to ghosts. A couple of them, at least.”

I glanced at Phoebe sideways to see how she was taking it. She was staring at me and nibbling on her lip. “Do you truly?” she whispered. “The things that happened, they seemed like . . . just bad people doing bad things.”

“Do you remember when Mark died?”

“I’ll never forget that.”

“That experiment was all about creating a ghost. Which they did.”

“It was a fake ghost.”

This had become so ordinary to me over time that explaining it was hard. Getting my understanding of the what and why of the Grey, ghosts, and monsters into the air on a stream of words was like trying to sculpt smoke. “The ghost existed, even if it wasn’t the revenant of a human who’d really lived. What we call ghosts aren’t always the lingering spirits of people. Some of them are more like a memory that won’t fade or a habit that’s so much a part of a place that it keeps on repeating even when the people who performed it are gone. And some are things we make out of our own minds.”

“You mean they’re our imagination.”

“Not quite that. More like the animation of things we believe.”

“If that’s the truth, then why don’t we see angels and devils all the time?”

I looked her in the eye. “Do you really believe in imps from hell who cause all our misfortunes, who torment and tease us constantly? Or do you only want to? To have something to blame. Do you believe an angel stands watch over you night and day, to guide you through life, even when things go to hell in a handbasket?”

Phoebe bit her lip again. “I did when I was a child. I believed in all the spirits, devils, and angels Poppy told me about. I told you about the duppy, remember?”

“I do. But now . . . ?”

“I don’t.”

“Why not?”

“I never saw them. And why didn’t I? You say I just need to believe—”

“That’s not quite what I said. It’s not just the things you accept and it’s not just you. And even when the idea has form, it may not be revealed, or it may not come to us in a way we can see or understand. Some things that we believe are, when we face them, too horrible or too awesome or too large to take in. And so we just don’t see them. Most of us adults filter them out so we can keep on going ahead with our lives without losing our minds. Can you imagine the impact—the disorienting mental shock—of actually seeing God or an angel in our world full of science and machines and humans who believe bone-deep in self-determination? We may claim something is fate or destiny, but we almost never truly believe it—not Americans. If we did, how could we run around feeling so . . . guilty all the time? If we didn’t believe that we caused the worst things that happen to us and our world—that it’s all our fault—we couldn’t also believe that we could fix it. We’re so arrogant, so filled with hubris that if there were any gods still paying any attention to us, they’d have to wipe us out like so many fleas for our presumption. We have to believe that we are ultimately in control of the earth, of our destinies, of our lives, and that makes it very hard for any god to speak to us. It’s a little easier for ghosts—we only have to remember them or something of them.”

Phoebe sat still, watching me and thinking, the energy around her flaring and shifting. This idea I’d just planted in her mind made her mad and sad and thrilled and it made her curious and frightened all at once, to judge by the colors that burned and sparked around her. I wondered which emotion was going to win.

Simba screeched and whipped himself into a puff-furred arch, batting at something on the floor. Phoebe and I both jerked out of our fugue to stare at him.

One of the other cats was crouched on the carpet in front of the dictionary with a guilty paw in the air. Simba swiped at it, issuing a guttural, gurgling moan. Then he spun around and crouched to leap away, but the attempt was ruined by the sudden pounce of his adversary.

Simba shook the other cat off and turned back around to slap the miscreant on the head. Then he gave a snarky-sounding yawp and bounded away to the top of the fake fireplace, nudging a small gargoyle so it rocked for a moment on its chipped base. The other cat hopped onto the vacated dictionary and huddled into a self-satisfied loaf, with its tail wrapped around its feet and a tiny cat smile on its furry face.

Phoebe sighed. “Troublemaker.” Then she looked at me, quirking her head to the side and studying me as if I’d suddenly changed in front of her eyes.

“What’s that on your cheek?” she asked.

I was puzzled and frowned over her question. “My cheek . . . ?”

She pointed at the same bit of my face that the woman at the Chinese deli had. “You got a scratch or something. You been in a scrap?”

“No,” I said, shoving my hair back. “It’s something a ghost wrote on me today. Can you read it? I can’t.”

She was taken aback and gasped a little before she leaned in and stared at the curling letters on my skin. “It’s so fancy. . . . It looks like a tattoo, but I know you better than that.”

“You don’t think I’d get a tattoo?”

“I know you wouldn’t—you don’t like to be noticed. Don’t get a lot more noticeable than tattoos on the face.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I could pierce my nose. . . .”

She gave me a mocking slap on the arm. “Oh, girl! You would look like a skinny rhino!”

“Why? My nose isn’t big.”

“No, but on you a pierced nose would stand out like a big ol’ horn. You got that kind of face that says ‘You don’t really see me’ to everyone.”

“Bland.”

“White. You are
so
white, girl.”

I looked down at my hands, the marks of the dermographia fading to pale pink scratches. “White. Like bread. Like a mid-America, middle-class, WASP. Which I am.”