She cocked her head as if to listen to the dark shape, then gave a rueful smile and shook her head. She spoke in a fluting Irish voice. “That’s lovely, Albert, but you’re blocking the door, aren’t ya? Now, shoo.” She flipped her hands at the shadowy form and it wafted away.
She turned to look at me and her eyes sparkled. “You must be Harper. I’m Mara. I see you’ve met Albert, our polygraph.” She walked across to the desk and leaned down to kiss Danziger on the cheek. “Hello, love. Sorry I’m late. Brian was being obstinate. Would you pour me some tea?”
She plumped down onto the other end of the sofa with a biscuit and a glass of tea.
Danziger pointed at my own glass. “You should drink your tea while it’s still hot, and try the biscuits and jam. The jam goes in the tea, not on the biscuits.”
I mucked about with my tea while Danziger picked up a biscuit and studied it, frowning, as he spoke. “I did some reading this morning based on what you told me last night, and Mara and I discussed it. Have you been in some kind of accident recently?”
Startled, I put down my tea, untouched. “Yes. Do I still look that bad?”
He bit the biscuit and chewed, looking at me from under lowered brows.
It was Mara who spoke. “You do look as if someone’s smacked you about a bit.”
I took a slow breath. “Yes. A man I was investigating.”
“Investigating?”
“I’m a private investigator.”
“Damn,” Danziger muttered.
The Albert shadow slipped behind him, spangling the air around them both with snowy mist. Danziger shivered and asked, “Were you hit on the head?”
“Yes.”
“Knocked unconscious or…?”
Over his shoulder, Albert became more clear. The glowering eyes began to look more like glasses. I watched the ghost evolve and the words tumbled out. “Dead. For two minutes.”
I told them about the hospital bed, the mists, the thing in the alley, maybe-ghosts, shadow-things, nausea… everything. By the time I was done, Albert looked almost there. “Your ghost is firming up,” I finished.
Mara chuckled. “Ah, no. That’s just you seeing him better.”
I turned to her. “What?”
She gave a small shrug. “Ghosts exist in a place between here and there. When you’re open to that world, you see them. When you’re not, you don’t.”
Albert faded back a bit as Danziger spoke up. “When you’re engaged with that world, your expectation or acceptance affects your perception and access. You’ve been fighting it, but when you talk about your experience, you accept certain facts—whether you can explain them or not—and Albert there is reinforcing proof that you’re not crazy, that what you experienced is real, so you can see him a little better.”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to see him better. I don’t want this stuff.”
Mara sighed. “I fear you’re stuck with it, since you can’t un-die.”
She must have seen me recoil. Her expression softened and she put down her glass before continuing. “That was a bit abrupt of me, but it’s plain you can see Albert. There’s a limited number of satisfactory explanations for that, plus what you’ve described. Do you think yourself mad?”
“No I… don’t want to think I’m crazy.”
Danziger chimed back in. “Unless you think we all share the same delusion—which is statistically unlikely—”
“Then it must be real, or we’re all mad as hares.”
“All right,” I conceded. “Suppose we’re not all crazy and that is a ghost.” I pointed at the grim column of Albert’s ethereal form, wavering between Ben and Mara, as if it was pacing. “Why do we see it? What is happening to me?”
Danziger grinned. “Ah, now that’s where things get interesting. You see Albert for a different reason than Mara. Albert, like most ghosts, manifests by bringing an instance of his energy state with him. You’re both able to access the energy state at which things like Albert become visible, so you’re both able to see him. But you can do more than that; you can move around in that state and directly observe it, operate in it, even though you’re not normally at that energy state yourself. It’s very rare and really exciting stuff. You don’t manipulate the energy state, however—that would be magic. But it’s all energy, anyhow. So you experience the energy state of the Grey differently than Mara, but since you both have access to it, you both see Albert.” He looked pleased and expectant.
I let him down. “What are you talking about?”
Mara rolled her eyes. “Ah, Ben, jumping right to the conclusion without demonstrating the proof. You must have been the despair of your Math prof.” She turned to me. “He’ll be rabbiting on about metaphysics and energy states for hours if we let him.”
Danziger looked affronted. “I’m not that bad. But maybe we should start from a different perspective. Has anything like this happened to you before?”
I picked up the glass again and looked into the tea. “No.” Weird flights of childhood imagination and bouts of the willies weren’t relevant. Danziger nodded, but Mara narrowed her eyes at me and looked thoughtful while he went on.
“OK. So sometimes you seem to just walk in and out of these strange places, these mists, but other times, you just see some weird stuff?”
Mara cocked her head and, before I could answer her husband, added, “Sometimes you seem to hold it off and sometimes you don’t?”
I glanced from one to the other. “That’s exactly it.”
Danziger picked up a book and began flipping the pages with a swift finger.
Mara carried on. “You’ve talked to a creature in the mist, been pushed on by one, but have you pushed anything around yet? Pushed the mist aside or away from you?” “No.”
“You have no control over the coming and going?”
“Not really.”
“And all of this has been growing more frequent and intense since you woke in hospital?”
“That’s why I went to Dr. Skelleher. I thought there was something wrong. He says there isn’t.”
She sat back. “It’s not wrong. It’s just quite rare and hardly what they’re teaching in medical schools these days.”
I clenched eyes and fists. “What is it, damn it?”
Danziger had been running his finger down the pages as she questioned me. Now he paused and answered, “It’s the Grey.”
“What the hell is that?”
He pointed at my hands. “Don’t squeeze so hard on the glass. They really hurt when they break.”
I put the glass down with exaggerated care and glared at him. I’d have started screaming if someone else hadn’t beaten me to it.
“Oh, God. The baby.” Danziger pulled a baby monitor from his chest pocket. “We’d better go downstairs and continue where Brian can join in.”
Shaking my head, I trailed behind Mara Danziger and the flickering shape of Albert. Ben brought up the rear, peeling away at the landing as Mara and I continued down the stairs.
“Are you confused yet?” she asked.
“Frustrated. Neither of you has answered my question.”
“No, we haven’t, have we. The why is, you’re a Greywalker. Which means exactly nothing to you, yet.”
“Not a thing.”
“Stay for dinner and I’ll try to explain while I’m cooking. Ben’ll be right down, I’m sure, to help out.”
Chapter Seven
I wasn’t so sure this was wise, but I followed as Mara led me into the kitchen and began organizing dinner preparations. Albert shimmered in over her shoulder as she talked. “There’s a bit of a place between our world and the next. That’s what Ben calls the Grey.”
Ben Danziger walked in, carrying a black-haired toddler who was gnawing on the head of a large Russian nesting doll. “Are we ready to talk about Grey stuff now?” he asked. “We’d started on it,” Mara replied.
“Aha! I have visual aids to make this easier. If I can just get them away from Brian.”
Ben put the baby down and wrestled the doll from him. “OK. First, you have to have an overview. Matter, as we know it, is simply a state of energy. Particle physics and so on. It’s all just energetic states and interactions. When you strip out the fancy terms, many philosophical and religious beliefs come down to essentially the same thing: being, existence, and consciousness are basically energy states.”
He sat on the floor beside a heavy oak table and pulled the doll apart to show the next doll inside. “Now, if what we perceive is just a state of energy, then it follows that there may be other states we cannot perceive because we exist within a different state. Beside our ‘normal’ world—our normal energy state—there is a parallel or ‘paranormal’ world where other energy states dominate, and a transition zone where the world states overlap. Like these matryoshka dolls, nesting one inside the next. This transition zone is the Grey, and it has its own special denizens, all the weird crossover manifestations of the paranormal and the normal together. Things like ghosts, vampires, elemental spirits, stuff like that. They’re neither one thing nor the other. They have some kind of physical body too massy for a purely paranormal sphere of existence—or can manifest one—but they also manifest the faster, lighter energy transformations that—”
The baby snatched the dolls back and Ben looked up. “You’re frowning. I’m losing you, aren’t I?” “Yes.”
Mara sighed and spoke up from her work by the sink. “It’s not so arcane as Ben makes it sound. The world is a sea of energy and most people skim along the surface in the normal world. But when you died, you fell into the sea, and when you came back out, you had a bit of it in you, changing your knowledge and sight of the world. You may try to ignore that knowledge, but it persists.”
“I ‘fell in.’ ” I gave her a skeptical look.
“As an analogy, dying is definitely the big plunge. When people say you ‘pass over,’ they don’t know half. You drop all the heavy, slow parts of yourself and zip right through the barrier to… something else. That’s the paranormal. But you have to pass through the Grey first, and if you aren’t quite ready for the next place, the Grey is where you stop a while, because that’s where both worlds overlap.”
“Purgatory,” I supplied.
Mara laughed, tossing her curls aside and glancing over her shoulder. “That’s a Catholic idea. This is nondenominational, and it’s nothing to do with either suffering or expiation. But it is full of strange things, you’ve probably noticed, and it’s alive with energy. You notice the house glows, I’m sure.”
“Umm… yes, I did.”
“This house sits on a Grey power nexus—that’s why we chose it—which is part of a sort of power grid, though that’s a broad analogy. It’s the same energy that runs everything psychic or magical. And it may seem chaotic, but it has rules. All you need do is learn the rules.”
I sat down at the kitchen table. Mara turned all the way around and leaned on the counter, shaking flour off her hands.
I stared, unnerved a moment, as the flour drifted like a familiar cloud, then settled to the floor. “Why would I want to? I’m fine now. I’m all here, alive, solid. The bruises will fade and then it’s over.”
They both shook their heads.
“The state change happened,” Ben said, “no matter what your state is now. You changed and you can’t change back.”
The baby flung the Russian dolls across the room, drowning my reply in clatter.
Ben got up and tucked Brian under his arm. “OK, that’s enough of that. Your mom’ll turn you into a frog if you don’t settle down, and then you’ll have to live in the yard. Hey… there’s an idea!”
Mara twitched a towel at him. “Behave, y’monster, or it’s you I’ll be turning green and warty. And you can be sure I’ll not be kissing you anytime soon for that.”
Ben laughed and loped out of the kitchen with the squirming baby.
Mara bent down and picked up the matryoshka dolls, placing them on the table in front of me. “Would you reassemble the universe, please?”
She went to the counter and began rolling out pastry dough. She spoke over her shoulder. “I imagine you find this upsetting.”
“Yes. Look, I don’t understand this. Even if I accept that I can see a ghost, what about the rest?”
“It’s all bundled up together. You see ghosts because you can see and walk into the Grey where they live. That’s very rare. Most of us who can see it at all can only stand on the edge of it and cast lines, or draw up water in buckets, or shout across the water and hope someone answers. We’re very limited, weak and in danger of attracting the wrong sort of attention, if you know what I mean. If we want to go in, we’re leaving our bodies behind and traveling only with our minds. It’s exhausting and dangerous, and few people can do it for more than minutes.”
“Psychics and mediums, you mean?”
She laughed, dumping fruit into the piecrust. “Among others. But you, you see, you have the strength and safety of your body when you go there. You don’t leave it behind now. You could, if you knew how, walk right through until you found what you were looking for. You wouldn’t be asking for intermediaries or hoping the right thing heard you calling. You do have other problems, but the strength you have in the Grey, as a physical person among things that are mostly energy, is very powerful. There are some creatures of the Grey who do have bodies—and they can be strong—but they’ll have other weaknesses in exchange.”
She carried the finished pie to the oven and waved her hand over the top crust, muttering to it. Her words fell on the pie in a drift of blue.
I noticed. “What are you doing?”
She looked surprised. “Oh! Just sang it a little crusty charm against burning. I hate burned crust.”
“A charm?”
She blushed. “Well, you see, I’m a witch.”
I blinked at her. “Of course, an expert on the paranormal would be married to a witch.”
She grinned and blushed darker. “It’s not quite as easy as that. Ben and I don’t always see eye to eye on theory versus practice. Fascinates him, of course, but he doesn’t take in the real shape of witchcraft so well. He’s more interested in ghosts and things like that. And we’ve had a few goes over it, I’m afraid.”
She turned away and bustled for a few minutes, then went back to the stove, putting something into a pot. “Well, that’s better. You see, this Grey thing isn’t so awful. If you can see that little charm, and Albert, you should come along a treat in no time.”
“I can see you cast a spell—a charm—because of… this?”
“Yes, of course. If you have the right skills and you can touch the grid, then you can use that energy for work. Magic is just a way of drawing up some of that energy and directing it. But it requires quite a lot of mediation, and how you have to mediate it determines the sort of magic you can do.”
My skepticism deepened. “I can?”
“Oh, no! Not you, actually. As I said, you’re a Greywalker. You don’t manipulate the material of the Grey. You’re in it. And that’s a thing we should be discussing. You’ll need to learn what you can do and what you can’t. And how to protect yourself from the things which will be attracted to you. And there already are a few, I’m sure. Because, like this house, you glow a bit.”
I was still skeptical, or perhaps I was tired of wrestling the idea, but it crept into my voice. “I glow? How do you know? Can you see that?”
“Just as you can see me work magic, yes, but as to the rest, that’s a bit of guessing. I’m one of those who just stand by the edge of the water and cast lines or haul buckets. And Ben is purely a theoretician. We aren’t you. We can’t know what you know or experience. We know a lot, and can make best guesses, but it’s not quite the same.”
“If you don’t know, how can you help me? I don’t want to be a witch or a psychic or a medium or… whatever.”
“You shan’t be, for you aren’t any of those. But you still need to be learning the principles. Ben and I
can teach you what we know about the Grey and how it works, what lives in it, how to fend them off. You’ll have to improvise here and there, but you’ll have a good foundation. But you’ll have to accept that this is real, that it is not going away, and that you must learn to live in it, not just with it.”
“No.” I stood up from the table. “My brain won’t stretch to this right now. It doesn’t fit!”
Mara’s shoulders slumped a bit. “It does fit. No luck getting out of it. But I will help you, if you let me.”
I shook my head hard enough to hurt. “Not today. I need to think. I won’t make a leap of faith when I don’t have any. And this is still—this is too strange for me to swallow.”
I picked up my bag and walked out of the kitchen and met Ben coming in.
“You’re not staying for dinner? Mara makes great food.”
“I don’t think I could digest it. I need to digest something else first.”
“Oh. Well. We’ll be here if you need us. I know this is a lot of crazy stuff to try and chew up all in one shot.”
I looked him hard in the eye. “What if I don’t?”
“Then you’ll laugh me off as a kook. You won’t be the first. I don’t think I’m nuts, though, and I don’t think you do, either, but you have to make up your own mind. Nothing works if you don’t start there. I hope I’ll hear from you, though. You seem… nice.”
I snorted. “Haven’t heard that in a while. Thanks.”
Albert trailed after me to the gate and hung in the arch, fading and flickering, until I drove away.
Chapter Eight
Friday morning I put the strange conversations of the night before out of my head, choosing to concentrate, instead, on my work. I had no doubt about how to do my job, and if I did it with all my concentration, I would not be spontaneously transported to uncanny realms… I hoped. The lurking shadows didn’t disappear, but they stayed on the edges and were easier to ignore.
Colleen’s list was mostly a bust. When I could reach anyone, the response to my questions about Cameron’s whereabouts met with universal ignorance. Most of his friends and relatives had not seen him in an even longer time than his mother. Whatever events had caused him to vanish must have started a lot earlier than the first of March.