“Wait,” Quinton interrupted me. “A male medium? Isn’t that a bit unusual?”
“I don’t know. As far as I’ve ever seen, mediums are universally charlatans, regardless of gender.”
“Do you really have room to make that accusation, Harper?”
I pressed my lips hard together and didn’t say anything until I’d thought about it first. “I’m not a medium. I don’t act as an intermediary to spirits or wandering souls—which is what a medium supposedly does. I don’t act as a conduit for their voices or actions, either. I don’t even talk to them in that context. So, no. I’m not a medium. But you’re right. My experience isn’t everyone’s and it’s unfair of me to assume that there aren’t people with other skills related to the Grey. I know witches, shape-shifters, necromancers, sorcerers, vampires, shamans, and plenty of others who have some touch with the Grey that is unlike mine. So I should keep an open mind about whether there might be such a thing as a legitimate medium or channeler.” I opened one eye and peered at him. “And that being the case, you should be equally open-minded about the gender of any mediums that might be running around this case. This one is male and blond and a bit on the pudgy side, none of which is part of the stereotype, anyhow.” I closed my eye again.
“And he uses a digital recorder?”
“Even TV ghost hunters have moved on to high technology.”
“Yeah, but they aren’t likely to be hanging around you while I’m distracted by ruining my dad’s career.”
“Is that your latest project?” I asked.
“It’s a frequent enough accusation that I’ve decided to make it my life’s work, if I have to.” He didn’t sound at all jocular about it. Quinton’s relationship with his father was even uglier than mine had been with my mother until a couple of years ago. James Purlis was an unrepentant manipulator and a professional liar—he was a spy, after all. He worked for some covert branch of the government, running the sort of bizarre and creepy projects featuring alien autopsies or psychics attempting to kill goats with the power of their minds that you usually see only on cheesy documentaries running on late-night TV. Except, in his case, the “Ghost Division” wasn’t a scam or a joke and he was deadly serious about it—whatever it was. He had also seemed set on sucking Quinton back into the espionage business ever since he had confirmed that his son wasn’t dead.
That was my fault. If I hadn’t gone off to get myself killed, Quinton wouldn’t have broken his cover and ended up asking his father for help. I tried not to feel bad about it, not because I wasn’t guilty but because Quinton didn’t like it and tended to tell me off. Aren’t we a fun couple? Though I will admit to a certain degree of sinful glee anytime a wrench was thrown into the elder Purlis’s works—more so if I got to throw the wrench, since I’d disliked him from the first moment we met and he knocked me down.
“Your dad’s a jerk,” I said. “And I promise not to fall in love with any pudgy blond mediums or their digital recorders while you’re busy reminding him of that.”
“All right, then.”
“Hey,” I added, peeling open my eyes again and looking at him. “Can I get a promise from you, too?”
His slightly stiff expression broke and he smiled. “Sure. I’d promise you anything.”
“I only want small things. Don’t let him snatch you and if you have to run, let me know you’re not dead. Oh, and that, too.”
“What too?”
“Don’t get dead. I’m the only one in this family who’s allowed to play that game.”
He leaned over and pulled me into his arms. As he spoke, his voice trembled just a little. “That’s a lousy game. Let’s not play it at all.” He squeezed me and I squeezed back, breathless. “And . . . uh . . . what do you mean ‘family’?” he asked. “Is there something I don’t know?”
I puzzled that one for a moment and gasped once I got it. “Oh. No. No imminent pitter-patter of little geek-feet. Just you, me, and about three million ghosts.”
He laughed and I thought he sounded relieved. “Damn, this town’s got more dead people than live ones.”
“Most do.”
“Then we shouldn’t add to the population.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
He kissed me. “You never do.”
“Hey, the last guy I shot was already dead.”
“Come to think of it, the last guy I shot was, too. Although he was a zombie, so does that really count?”
“I vote no. Doesn’t count.”
“I vote for dinner.”
I wriggled a bit in his arms, but didn’t have the energy to push away and look at him—I couldn’t even get my eyes to open properly. “Dinner? How romantic after zombies.”
“I was thinking more of the fact that you sound like you’re about to fall asleep and food might be a good idea.”
I gave up resisting and put my head on his chest. “OK. It is a good idea. Whiskey was probably not. But I still appreciated it. You’re my knight in silicon armor.”
“I think I’d rather be the frisky rogue in stealth motley.”
“How can motley be stealthy?”
“How is a hipster like a cheap hot pad?”
“What?” I asked, not sure I’d heard that correctly. I felt very sleepy. . . .
“I asked you how a hipster is like a hot pad.”
“Umm . . . they both look ridiculous with a mustache?”
“No. They both only think they’re cool.”
“I’m not sure that explains how motley can be stealthy.”
“It doesn’t, but I need to get up and find some food for you. If you’re laughing, it’s easier to change the subject.”
“Oh. I hear there’s some food hiding in the fridge.”
“Was it Chinese food? Because if so, its hiding place was discovered and ravaged by terrorists.”
“Terrorist forks, I presume.”
“Chopsticks. I would never send a lone fork against Chinese leftovers. Totally against all conventions of food warfare.”
I started giggling and could barely say, “So you’re the food terrorist.”
“I admit it. And I’d do it again—for Queen and Country. Or at least for lunch.”
I kept giggling and Quinton let me slump back into my corner of the couch with my eyes still closed while he picked up my whiskey glass and returned to the kitchen. I could follow his movement through the Grey fog version of the room and was content with that, not even sure I was going to be awake whenever food was ready to eat, and pretty sure I wasn’t going to care.
The smell of food perked me up a bit. Quinton persuaded me to move to the kitchen table instead of trying to eat while sitting on the couch on the supposition that I was less likely to suffocate in my dish if I was upright. The ferret was not invited to join us for dinner and she snubbed us by sleeping in her cage the whole time instead.
Quinton brought the case up again once I’d gotten a few bites down. “Do you think your case is a legitimate haunting?”
“Not a haunting, a possession. Although they do fall into the general category of hauntings, in this particular situation the possession doesn’t appear to be related to the location or to an object—which is usually the case with classical hauntings. I’m not that familiar with haunted houses, since I’ve only seen a few personally, but this doesn’t have the same feel at all.”
“Is that why you want to talk to the other patients you heard about? After all, they aren’t your clients.”
“That’s exactly why. If the cases are significantly similar, then I’ll have more information to give my client. It’s really weird that there are so many to begin with and that these are all demonstrating aberrant behavior. Skelly said even one normal PVS case in an area the size of Seattle is rare. So this is freakishly beyond statistical probability. I’m not sure how I’ll find the other patients, though. Skelly had no idea and warned me off of asking anyone to violate patient confidentiality. Which is fine, but it does leave me unsure how to
get the info I need.”
“Can you ask the ghosts?”
“Which ghosts? I’m not sure who or what is controlling my client’s sister and I wasn’t able to make any contact in the time I had in the room. They seem very concentrated on the patient. That may be the same problem Stymak—the medium—is having. He may not be able to break into their communication with the patient long enough to get any useful information and has to try to pick through the bits that he can capture on the recordings.”
“Yeah, but he’s at least getting that much. You could try working with him to get the ghosts’ attention and find out who the other patients are. As you pointed out, it’s unlikely that the cases are unrelated, so there should be information about the other patients in the collective knowledge of the ghosts hanging out around your client’s sister.”
“Interesting idea. Can’t hurt.”
I finished up my dinner and felt much better, if still a bit blind. While I was doing dishes, Quinton checked something on the tiny palmtop computer he’d started carrying around and began packing up his things.
“Hey,” I said, “you going somewhere?”
“Yeah. I have to get out and rattle some cages, create some uncertainty, undermine some progress. . . . I may need your help later, but for now I’d better get to it.”
“Will you be back later tonight?” I hoped I didn’t sound too wistful.
“Not tonight. If you get any odd phone calls, act normal and pretend you’ve never heard of me.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Okaayy . . . I can do that, stranger.”
He put on his jacket and slung his backpack onto his shoulders. “Thanks, beautiful.” Then he kissed me and hurried off to wreak some havoc, I supposed. I hoped it wouldn’t come home with him, whatever it was.
It was still light outside, so once I was done with the dishes and had let the ferret out again, I went ahead and called Richard Stymak, who seemed less surprised to hear from me than I might have liked. He offered to meet me at the Goss house the next morning, saying Julianne tended to be less dramatically active in the mornings than she had been today. I decided I’d keep a much closer eye on her nonetheless. Ghosts are unpredictable and I didn’t want to end up with something worse than paint flung at me.
THREE
As he’d expected, Quinton had not come home and I slept alone and got up in a strange mood, as if I’d been emotionally disconnected from the world and was floating along waiting for some feeling to rush into the void. Outside, Seattle was experiencing the usual “June gloom” of weird overcast that would give way late in the day to cool sunshine until the clouds slid back in for the night, the pattern seeming unbreakable even on the last day of the month. It made my city seem a little detached from the rest of the country, as if it just couldn’t make up its mind about summer.
When I reached the Goss house and Lily had escorted me back up to the former master bedroom, I saw that, once again, Julianne was painting. Lily left me to go and sit by her side. She seemed to have as little interest in Stymak and me as Julianne did at that moment. Stymak was doing something with his digital recorder at the white table again and no nurse was in evidence. I’d been left momentarily alone just inside the room’s double doors. I took the chance to look the room over, since there seemed to be no threat of flying blobs at the moment, and see what I’d missed the first time.
I started with Julianne’s latest painting on the easel—a rough cliff with some kind of low, rambling building along the top. The strokes were soft and yet precise, in spite of the speed with which they were being made. I almost recognized the place, but not quite. It didn’t look like a modern location; it looked more like something old and almost forgotten. I turned aside and surveyed the next piece, which was leaning against the wall nearby: a huge, rugged mountain of sharp sandstone-colored bluffs and smoky shadows rearing up against a lowering charcoal sky—draped in soft white scarves of cloud—from a foggy forest of tiny pines that clustered at its foot like anxious pets. My breath caught in my throat as I studied it. I didn’t exactly recognize this scene, either, but for a different reason—this one didn’t seem to be a real place so much as one that recalled real Washington places; it was strange and familiar and powerful, glistening with paint still wet a day later and the threads of some passing ghost form that had caught and lingered in the moisture. I turned slowly around to look at the other paintings in the room—most hung on the walls around the main doors and leading toward the bathroom, others just leaned against the wall. Dozens of paintings.
They were not the same. Some shared a similar style, but the rest varied as widely as an art school exhibition. There were some with strong colors and blocky forms; others were almost photo-realistic in their detail, picked out in clear shafts of sunlight and minuscule brushwork. Still others were more like sketches, lines of color roughly brushed to create just a shape or suggestion of a scene. This could not be the work of a single person—certainly not a bedridden, nonresponsive woman with the muscle tone of a limp towel. And over and over, the same scenes: the cliff, the mountain, a long beach of rock-strewn sand bordered by soaring pines in shades of green and gray marching up steep slopes to higher ground.
And all around the bed pressed a susurrant surge of spirits, like flotsam circling round and round the center of a maelstrom, drawn to the way out but unable to escape. I’d seen ghosts pulled to an object before, but I’d never seen this sort of expression. If I stared very hard, making my injured eye water, I could perceive among the dark shapes and writhing scribbles of energy individual ghosts reaching toward Julianne, or bending down to whisper into her ears and being swept aside again as the next moved closer. They kept circling, whispering, reaching. . . .
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” I said.
“Automatic painting,” Stymak said. “Like automatic writing. The spirit is channeled through the subject’s body and produces the work independent of the channel’s abilities, often while they are unconscious or in a trance state. Though I’ve never heard of anything on this scale.”
His voice jarred me out of my staring and I turned to him, letting my gaze pull back toward normal, though the Grey vision lingered, shading the room in silver and smoke. “Nor have I, though I do know what automatic painting is, Stymak—but you knew that, since you say you talk to ghosts.”
Stymak glanced away for a moment before he looked straight into my eyes. “I don’t quite hear the dead—I certainly don’t talk to them. I feel them, really. I can’t say I see them so much as I experience their presence. They whisper to me and I know they’re here.”
“You can get information from ghosts that aren’t in your immediate area?” I had a rusty memory of being told that mediums somehow talked to ghosts in the Grey in such a way that they didn’t have to be in the same literal space, unlike me.
Stymak nodded. “They compelled me here a few weeks ago and I met Lily and I saw Julianne and I knew the ghosts were here, that they are trying to tell us something through Julianne, but I can’t understand what it is they’re trying to communicate this time.”
“Why not?”
He shook his head. “It’s too loud. It’s like . . . there are a hundred people in a tiny room, all shouting different things at the same time. They press in and they recede again like a furious tide, but I can’t sort them out. It’s like trying to catch a fistful of seawater and separate a single molecule of salt. It’s an allegory, but it’s real. I can’t make it any more clear than that. Not to myself, and probably not to you, either. But you know what I mean. They indicate you do.”
“They? The ghosts?” I cast a glance back at them, clustering around the bed, but they didn’t seem to pay us any attention.
“Well, the ones that can hold a thought together at least. Your identity is like a thin, clear current in the river of their babble. It was hard to pick out at first, but I finally got it and when I got here and experienced the turmoil around Julianne, I thought I should mention you to Lily.
”
“You mentioned me to Lily? She said she heard about me through Phoebe Mason.”
“The owner of Old Possum’s?” Stymak asked. “Yes. See, I didn’t have your name or know where to find you. I only knew who you were to the ghosts. They knew that you and Lily both knew this bookstore owner—”
“Phoebe.”
Stymak nodded. “All right: Phoebe. They let me know the connection, so I told Lily to ask Phoebe about you. And that’s how it works for me—strings of connections and associations and ideas, but not anything as easy as a voice saying ‘Hey, stupid, go talk to this lady at this address.’ Ghosts are kind of slippery and obscure most of the time, but I’ve learned how to be patient and put it together. Sort of decode them, I guess you could say.”
“But you haven’t decoded what’s going on with Julianne.”
“Oh, I have. But I don’t know why, or what they’re trying to tell us.”
“Have they let you know there are others?”
“Others like Julianne? Unconscious channels? I’m not sure. . . . The information I’ve been gifted with is confusing at best and . . . very noisy.”
“I’m given to believe it’s true. Can you confirm it with your ghosts?”
“Can’t you?”
“I haven’t tried yet.”
“You haven’t tried,” Stymak echoed, incredulous and staring as if he’d never seen so odd a fish as me. “What sort of medium are you? I mean, I don’t have a choice about hearing them. They’re in my head, like pieces of my own mind. I can’t not try because I don’t try to begin with.”
I had experienced the inability to tune out Grey voices for a while and it had nearly driven me insane, but I’d died again and the phenomenon had ceased—I was grateful for that, especially since the voices I’d heard had been part of the Grey itself, not just ghosts. “I’m not a medium,” I said, shivering at the idea of going through that all the time. “I’m more of a . . . fixer. I work out problems between the normal and the paranormal.” Stymak nodded while frowning as if he wasn’t sure he saw the distinction. “My contact with the paranormal is less mental and more physical than yours,” I explained, but I had the impression he didn’t understand that any better.