She crushed the second plastic cup, sending a gout of water into her lap. She jumped up with a sob and I think she would have bolted if I hadn’t caught her shoulders and steadied her. She felt like a bundle of dry twigs barely held together by her rumpled clothes, and I was too conscious that I loomed over her, but there was little I could do to make myself smaller. I braced her and held her still, saying, “Miss Goss, I didn’t say I wouldn’t help. I said I might not be able to.”
She looked back up at me, her lip trembling and her jaw twitching as if she wanted to say something but couldn’t remember the words.
“It’s all right. I’m not saying no. I’m saying let’s go see.”
“Right now?”
“If you’re comfortable with it, sure.”
She didn’t hesitate. “Yes. I live just up the street and we can walk it in a few minutes.”
I convinced her to ride with me in the Land Rover—I didn’t want to have to walk back to the bookstore later in the chancy weather we’d been having.
Fremont has a lot of condos these days, but there are still plenty of single-family dwellings on the narrow streets of Seattle’s former homegrown Haight-Ashbury. Lily Goss lived in a freestanding house that was tall and narrow and very, very modern with a lot of steel, glass, and bright red exterior panels mixed with sections of horizontal wood strips that sported big black bolts holding them to the structure’s surface. Somehow neither the wood nor the red panels made the house look warm; it just looked expensive.
The interior was stark and seemed empty—as if things were missing. I glanced quickly at the entry and the living room as we passed through them. Goss caught me at it as she stopped in front of a tall wall of frosted glass and steel. “My ex-husband took half of the furniture and I had to sell the remaining art,” she said.
Part of the frosted wall slid aside, revealing a surprisingly large elevator. “So, you’re divorced,” I said, following her into the glass-and-chrome box.
Goss heaved a sigh and looked embarrassed, pushing the top button of four on the control panel. “Yes. The church frowns on it, but they don’t prohibit it anymore and I . . . I’m glad Teddy left. He didn’t have a generous nature and he wouldn’t have coped well with my sister living here, dependent on us for everything.”
“How long have you been on your own?”
“A little over a year. I hadn’t been . . . alone for very long before Julianne got sick.”
The elevator came to a smooth, quiet stop and we stepped out onto a wide, wood-floored landing at the top of a staircase, with three doors facing us. Goss stood still for a moment and I could hear a susurrous, mechanical mumble coming quietly from our left. Grey mist boiled out from under the double doors on that side.
“I had the master bedroom converted for Julianne. I wasn’t sleeping in it anyway.”
She opened the door that leaked ghost-stuff and showed me in.
I could tell it had been a sumptuous suite originally, but it now more resembled a hospital room. The thick white carpet was covered with heavy, flexible plastic like the material used for floor protectors under office desks. The primrose yellow walls on two sides were almost hidden behind various pieces of medical equipment and monitors. All that remained of the original furniture were a white table—stained with paint and spilled brush cleaner—and a couple of yellow armchairs, one of which was pulled up next to the hospital-style bed near the far wall. A bed table with art supplies and a stretched white canvas standing on a small easel had been placed nearby. A stocky middle-aged woman in nurse’s scrubs and practical shoes occupied the chair, but she jumped up when we came in.
“It’s all right, Eva,” Lily Goss said, waving her back. “Sit down. If Julie doesn’t need anything, you might as well rest.” Goss looked at me. “This is one of Julianne’s nurses, Eva Wrothen. She was kind enough to come early today so I could go out for a while. And that is Richard Stymak. He’s a medium.”
I turned my head to look down the table at the man who had just come out of what I guessed was the bathroom. He was a burly, bearded guy with a geeky air to him, wavy red-blond hair brushing his collar, and a T-shirt with a logo I couldn’t identify peeping out from under his unbuttoned dress shirt.
He raised a hand in a token wave, seeming a bit embarrassed to have shown evidence of bodily functions—as if those who commune with spirits don’t do that sort of thing. “Hi. Um . . . I’ve been monitoring and recording Julianne’s activities for Lily and trying to contact whoever or whatever is doing this.”
“Any luck?” I asked, hearing Wrothen snort in derision behind me.
“Depends on how you define that. Lots of ghosts around, but they aren’t talking to me.” Then he drew an excited breath and perked up, staring over my shoulder toward the bed. “Oh! She’s up!”
“No, she’s not,” the nurse snapped, looking at the monitors and making rapid notes on an electronic clipboard. “Her blood pressure is up, and she’s upright, but she’s not awake.”
“I didn’t say she was awake,” Stymak objected.
Ignoring the argument, Goss rushed toward the bed and I followed her.
The patient—sickeningly thin, her dark hair hanging limp around her head—was sitting rigidly upright in the bed and staring straight ahead as her left hand groped across the bedspread for something.
Goss snatched a flat paintbrush from a jar on the nearby table and put it next to her sister’s seeking hand. Julianne grabbed it, but nothing else in her body or face seemed to react. I could see the silvery mist of the Grey coiling around her in a thick, moving mass. A clutter of shadows pushed and boiled near the bed, then began to draw aside as the patient started painting on the bedspread.
Goss pushed the table with the easel over to the bed and into place in front of Julianne, who transferred the brush to the canvas. The patient daubed at the canvas with the empty brush for a moment before she swung her arm suddenly to swirl it in paint from the art supply table. She moved no more of her body than her arm, not turning or looking at what she was doing. Then she went back to the canvas, painting with rapid movements.
I drew closer, peering at her. Her aura hadn’t changed since I’d entered the room, but something opaque and dark now hung over her left arm and side, wrapping around her back. Her half-open eyes were focused not on the canvas or the supplies near her, but slightly upward and far away. Her mouth was slack. Goss and Wrothen stood on either side of the head of the bed while I moved closer and then past the foot of the bed, more interested in watching Julianne than seeing what she was painting. Stymak was somewhere behind and to my right, but I didn’t spare any attention for him.
The unconscious woman hit me in the face with the paintbrush. No one really expects a vegetative patient to flip a brush loaded with sage green paint into their eye from six feet away, but I suppose I should have seen it coming—I’m a ghost magnet. I wasn’t sure who or what might be in charge of Julianne Goss’s body at the moment, but it seemed to have a juvenile sense of humor; right after the paint came the babbling.
I reeled back a few steps.
“Turn on the recorder!” Stymak yelled.
“I can’t see it! You turn it on!” I shouted back, swiping thick, sticky oil paint off my face and hoping nothing else was winging my way while I was temporarily blind. You wouldn’t think oil and pigment would sting so much. . . .
I could hear Stymak and Goss scrambling around me to get to the table where the digital recorder lay. An alarm was going off from one of the machines monitoring Julianne’s bodily functions. I held still in spite of an urge to help—which in my state would be no help at all; I didn’t want to blunder into the machines by mistake and I could feel the paint starting to burn my eye. I really needed to get to the sink without falling into anyone’s path or crashing into anything vital, but I couldn’t find the bathroom without aid. I cursed my inability to get out of my own damned way, much less get a look at what was happening to Julianne Goss. I squeezed my eyes closed and t
ook a deep breath, shutting out the distractions in the room as I sank into the Grey.
Even with my eyes closed, the ghost world lay bright before me, all white fog and colored light reflecting on clouds of lucid steam. I wound around the churning movement of people and the bright tangles that were ghosts in the room, heading toward the dull heaviness of man-made walls, searching for a sink. The uproar and activity distracted me a little, so I stumbled a bit, hearing the bustle and chatter of the people behind me as I searched for the bathroom. Julianne Goss continued to speak flowing, foreign-sounding words while her sister and the medium argued with the nurse.
I bumped through a doorway into a room that felt much colder and harder than the bedroom, found a sink by feel, and washed off as much of the oily goop as I could, wiping more of it away with a towel. I blinked and looked up into the bathroom mirror, seeing moth-wing streaks on my cheekbones that my swiping with the towel had left behind. My eyes were watering and I blinked some more to clear my vision. It didn’t help much, but I could at least see somewhat more normally. I’d still have to rely on my Grey sight to see any details, though, and that wasn’t usually an accurate view of the world. But it might be helpful, since, after all, it was ghosts I was here to see.
When I got back to the bedroom, the hubbub had died away. The alarm was no longer squealing and no one was shouting. Julianne had flopped back into her bed, silent and sleeping, the paintbrush she’d wielded now dropped to the floor, leaving a new blob of color among the others on the plastic sheeting under her bed. Lily was hovering close to the bed as the nurse took Julianne’s temperature. Stymak leaned against a table nearby, wearing headphones and poking at his digital recorder. Between and around them all lay a swarming sea of ghost-stuff boiling with faces that appeared and dissolved again, and sudden extrusions of body parts that fell away into silver mist after a moment’s manifestation. I wanted to see the people in the room better as well, but my left eye stung too badly to make the strain of peering at them seem fun, so I resigned myself to looking primarily at the ghosts.
There were quite a few, mostly the sort of thin, colorless things that haven’t much will of their own left, if any—repeaters, I call them—who continue to go through the same loop of memory over and over endlessly. I was surprised to see so many of them, since they aren’t the sort to go wandering around looking for someone to talk to; usually they just sit in the place their memory loop had lodged and run through the motions until something wipes them away. These had moved from wherever they were usually stuck and clustered around Julianne Goss, continuing their endless loops—walking, talking, and gesturing out of context. There were a few brighter, more colorful ghosts in the misty sea of spirits and I knew they were more likely to have some information I could use—if I could get them to talk to me. So far none of them had turned any attention my way, which was unusual, since specters are usually attracted to me. But these just pressed close to Julianne.
“Someel vague . . .” the ghosts muttered.
“What?” I asked.
Someone touched my shoulder and I jumped, turning away from the voice and squinting to see who in the normal world had grabbed me. The nurse peered at my face from a few inches away, her breath smelling of lemon-flavored candies and the glimmer of a gold chain peeping from under her collar. “What happened?” she demanded. “Your eye is red and irritated and it looks like some swelling is coming on.” She hesitated before she asked, “Did Julianne hit you with something?”
“The paintbrush,” I said.
“Eyewash.”
“No, really, the paintbrush,” I repeated.
Wrothen gave an irritated sigh. “Back you go to the bathroom. You need to rinse that eye properly or it’ll get worse. You have any idea what nasty chemicals are in paint? Come on.”
She wasn’t anywhere near my height, but we probably weighed about the same, and she had no difficulty turning me around and dragging me back to the sink. Stocky, bossy women have a towing advantage over bemused beanpole chicks like me. I also couldn’t get over feeling it’s just wrong to belt a nurse in the chops.
Wrothen pushed me down to sit on the edge of the bathtub, draped a towel around my shoulders, and did mildly uncomfortable things to my eye involving a lot of liquid that managed to dribble into my ears, the corners of my mouth, and down onto my shirt and jeans in spite of precautions. But it did take the worst of the sting away.
“Well,” she huffed as she puttered around me, “at least we don’t have to listen to Mr. Stymak’s ‘ghost recording’ while we’re in here.”
“You don’t want to hear it?” I asked.
“I do not. I hear quite enough from him and his digital recorder as it is.”
“So you don’t believe Miss Goss is, umm . . .”
“Possessed? Frankly, I don’t know what’s going on and I certainly won’t go flinging words like that around in a sickroom. It only makes people upset. There’s plenty of things to worry about here without adding demons into the mix.”
“What do you think is causing Miss Goss’s unexpected activity?” I had to splutter around a fall of bitter liquid.
“Sorry,” Wrothen said, patting some of the eyewash off my face. “I said I don’t know and I don’t. If I had any idea what’s going on with any of the patients that are experiencing this, I’d do something about it. But you see I’m not able to. In Miss Goss’s state she shouldn’t be able to sit up and start painting or babble crazy words that mean nothing.”
Was she implying there were more PVS patients like Julianne? I wanted to ask, but I didn’t want to shut down her current chattiness on the case at hand. “How long has this been going on?” I asked as she poured more liquid over my eyes. I couldn’t decide if it was terrifying or just creepy.
“I can’t discuss it.”
“I’m not interested in the case details, just how long she’s been doing odd things.”
“I’m not sure. I haven’t been here the whole time. She was already painting when I started on the case.”
“What about the other patients?”
“What other patients?” she replied, sounding defensive.
“You said other patients are experiencing this. What other patients? How many?”
She hesitated, scowling.
“I’m not asking for names or details, but surely the fact there are other patients going through what Miss Goss is experiencing is unusual. How many are there?”
Wrothen looked stormy, but a tiny spark leapt off her aura. “I’ve only heard of two.” She gave me a quelling look so pointed I could see it even in my bleary state. “And it’s not something I’ll discuss further.”
Chastened, I changed tack. “Well, then, how long have you worked for Ms. Goss—for the patient’s sister?”
Wrothen patted at my face again, wiping off excess eyewash. “A little more than three months. Blink, please. How does that feel?”
I blinked and my vision cleared a bit, but it was still a little blurry and some of the irritation remained. I told her so.
“You need to see your doctor. He might want to give you something in case there’s some damage.” She whisked off the towel and started to shoo me back into the other room.
I stopped and turned back. “Wait,” I said. “These other patients—”
Wrothen gave me a hard look. “I can’t give you any information about that.”
“I just think it’s interesting that there are others. I thought this sort of thing wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“It doesn’t happen. Vegetative patients don’t just sit up and start . . . painting pictures, or writing nonsense, or speaking in tongues. Or talking. Now excuse me. I have to mark up the chart and send a note to the doctor about this incident. Don’t put too much store by what that ‘medium’ says—or Ms. Goss. She’s under his spell and I think it’s terrible the way he’s preying on her fears.” She brushed past me, leaving me in the bathroom with a wet face, stinging eyes, and a host of questions.
In a moment I returned to the bedroom. Things were still a little blurry and the Grey persisted more than I liked, but I could see the living people in the room a bit more clearly. Wrothen had gone to a small desk on wheels near the monitors and was working at a computer keyboard. Lillian Goss and Richard Stymak were bending over the white table, listening to the digital recorder through small headphones. I wondered why they weren’t using earbuds, but I suppose some people don’t care for sticking things in their ears—or they’d been intimidated out of doing so by Wrothen, who I imagined wouldn’t approve of earbuds just on principle.
I went to the table and loomed until they noticed me and looked up from their concentrated staring at the recorder—the way one does when there’s nothing to look at and too much to hear. Lily Goss glanced up first and motioned at Stymak to stop the playback. Then they both pulled off their headphones and blinked at me.
“Have you . . . got any idea what’s happening to my sister?” Goss asked.
“Well, not really. Not yet. I need to know more—to observe more—which is not possible at the moment. The paint that got into my eye seems to have messed up my vision. I’d like to come back after I’ve seen a doctor and discuss this with you both. And I’d like to hear that recording.” I doubted it was going to be case-breaking—since that kind of thing only happens in TV shows—but I wanted all the data I could get.
“I can make you a copy,” Stymak offered.
“Could you e-mail the file?”
He nodded. “I sure can. It’s large, but if I can’t e-mail it, I’ll send you a secure link you can use to download it. I’ve got more if you want them.”
Yep, he was definitely a geek. My turn to nod. “All right. But let’s start with just the one, thanks.” I turned back to Lily. “I’ll call you to coordinate a time to return, if that’s OK with you.”
“Oh. Yes. Of course. I . . . I’m the only one here from four to midnight. . . .”
“I understand. I’ll be in touch, but probably not tonight. Get some rest, Ms. Goss.” I found myself patting her shoulder—a ridiculous gesture I didn’t usually indulge in—and turning away to let myself out, but she rushed to walk with me.