“And the lights?” asked another woman. “And the hot and cold and the wind?”
“It’s a publicity stunt,” said the first, most derisively.
“At the same time all this other stuff is going on out there?” The young man’s face reddened; the whole conversation had the sound of a rerun.
“The spirits are angry.” Garrie tipped her head, eyes half-closed as she searched out the most cohesive of the ghosts around their circumference of safety. Looking for a spokes-ghost. “Hell, they’re farking furious.”
::Farking,:: Sklayne said, echoing her faintly. And then more strongly, ::Pick me up. Too many feet.::
Garrie scooped him up without looking, a bundle of fur and sinew and diffusely vibrating energy; he hooked his paws over her shoulder and tickled her cheek with his whiskers. “There,” she whispered to him. “Do you see?”
A ghost more solid than the rest, his outlines more distinct — too distinct, in fact, drawn with thick, crayon-like lines and filled with blocky, mismatched color that made him look badly colorized. Especially the part where blood trails crawled around his body like living worms, squirming in and out of the gaping wounds that must have killed him.
“Sixties?” she asked him, pretty certain the extreme bell bottoms, snap fly, and painfully tight fit couldn’t have come from any other era.
“Acid trip,” the ghost confirmed, clearly not caring. His colors intensified with accusation. “You said you’d help.”
“You said you’d behave!”
“Who the hell is she talking to?” Someone new in from the tour group, a burly dad with his hands on his pre-teen’s shoulders... Garrie saw him only vaguely, her sight attuned to the ethereal.
“Hard to say,” Drew responded. “Just marinate a moment, bro.”
The lone preschooler of the group tugged his mother’s arm for attention, his voice a stage whisper deluxe. “Mommy! Lookit! It’s Shaggy!”
“Told you,” Lucia whispered at him, clinging to her composure.
The sixties ghost scowled at Garrie alone, several blood worms gyrating with the energy of his anger — one so profoundly that it splatted to the floor, manifesting a very visible spatter from which the tourists drew back in horror. He said, “You took too long.”
“Geeze,” Garrie said. “I had things to do, so get a grip. I’m here, and we had a deal, and if you don’t cool off and leave these folks alone, I won’t be able to figure out what’s really going on.”
“Death,” intoned the medium, quite suddenly. Several members of the tour group gasped. “Darkness and death and sorrow...”
Lucia blew out a breath. “Oh, that’s really helping.”
“Down below,” the woman said, as if Lucia hadn’t spoken. “It all comes from down below. The dying. The darkness. The —”
“Sorrow,” Lucia said. “Right. Got it.”
“No, she’s right,” Garrie said, feeling it — the wildness, the fluttering... a pull from beneath them. Sklayne shuddered in her arms and hid his face against her shoulder, his earlier words an echo in her mind. Krevata. “The basement.”
The medium stood, focusing on Garrie. She moved with strong, gliding steps, parting the group on her way — her arm raising with a sepulchral motion to point straight at Sklayne. “Demon child!”
Garrie splayed a protective hand over Sklayne. “Oh, that’s just rude.”
The medium looked sullen at the lack of gasping response, and let her hand fall.
Not that Garrie had any real clue what she now held in her arms. A creature that looked like a cat and said he wasn’t, who didn’t have the energy of a cat or the intelligence of a cat and who sometimes looked like a light with claws.
A creature desperate to help Trevarr.
Trevarr, trapped somewhere in this house. Trevarr — so implacable, so strong, so full of hidden heart... hurting.
I’m coming, she told him, sending the thought out as if he could possibly hear it.
::Hurry,:: said Sklayne’s voice, smaller than usual.
Garrie closed a comforting hand around the back of his head, more alarmed than surprised when he accepted it. “Guys, I have to go find Trevarr,” she said. “He knows...”
The sixties ghost scowled. He stepped up to her, moving right through the medium — his color vibrating, and the angry swirl of energy in the room altogether too close to manifesting.
Ghost poo will be the least of it.
“Oh,” the medium said. “I... oh.” She looked down at Garrie. “You! You’ve stirred them up!”
“They’ve been stirred up!” Garrie kept her response as patient as she could, which wasn’t very. “You’ve been here all afternoon, so if you have any clue why they’re so upset, I’d appreciate a share.”
Sixties Man made a derisive noise. “We’ve been shouting at her since she got here. And you might notice that something is preying on us and we’re tired of waiting for help.” A nasty gust of ethereal rudeness caromed off her barrier, punctuating his words.
“Please,” said a wispy little girl voice from the side. “Please?” Just as wispy as the voice, the spirit hovered not far away, bits and pieces of her form coming in and out of focus. A big hair bow, here and gone; the glimpse of long hair and wayward bangs, hair escaping from the bow. Prim shoes and stockings and a pretty little dress from days gone by. “Please.”
The house shuddered. Garrie shivered and flushed at the same time; dread bound her internal hot and cold together into a painful knot. Sklayne uttered a little feline sound of distress and jumped from her arms, claws pricking her on the way. ::Treyyy!::
Dammit, why had he even come here on his own?
::Protecting,:: Sklayne said, miserable in that inner voice. ::No Krevata. No Kehar.::
Whatever that meant. Because, right. Protecting. Keeping her separate from the mystery Krevata by keeping his silence, and then by leaving her behind.
It hadn’t been about not trusting her at all.
But I didn’t need that. And look where it got us.
“Please,” said the girl, a bare whisper of sound. The rest of the spirits clamored at her, shoving up against the shields.
“Oh, screw this,” said the irate man said. “The door’s open. Honey, let’s go. We’ll find our way out of this place eventually, and then we’ll sue their asses off.”
His wife held their daughter close to her legs. “I’m not sure —”
“Sir, no —” Beth said.
There’s always gotta be one. Garrie tightened down the shields, strengthening them. “Lu, can you — ?”
“I’ll try.” But Lucia’s mouth was set to grim as she closed her eyes, taking a deep breath to trigger calm and offer it out to them all. Garrie pushed an eddy of silky smooth breezes beneath it, petting them, watching the nearest spirits relax — a little puzzlement there, as if trying to remember why they were so angry in the first place.
“Let’s go,” the irate man snarled. He stalked across the diamond-pattern floor toward the door, his complexion gone something akin to eggplant.
The lights flickered as a howl arose — so many of them, so angry. The medium cried out in alarm as the spirits converged on the man — and Garrie let it happen, because he’d earned that ire.
Denied it, the spirits might well lose complete control.
As it was, they came close — plucking at him and shoving and pinching and leaving trails of slime down his arms, face, and legs and a new spill of blood worms in his wake. Slick ghost effluvia spewed across the floor as the man lost his footing and fell heavily on his behind.
The young man pointed, his mouth moving until he found words. “Look! Look at the floor!”
For although the slick, sticky ghost effluvia had quickly spread, the gorgeous parquet floor around Garrie remained pristine.
The medium drew herself up, her eyes narrowed. “You!”
“Imagine that.” Garrie tried to keep her impatience to herself. “You people ready to listen now?”
T
he outspoken young man said, “Can you really —”
Garrie cut him short with in inarticulate snarl, flinging her arms out wide. “Aurgh!” she said again, still at a loss, and then finally, “Be quiet! All of you! Very, very quiet! Or I’ll just leave you here!”
Finally, silence.
“Good. Now suck it up and believe: you’re surrounded by furious ghosts. No, shut up!” Her instant ire shushed their reaction, and she continued with a warning glare. “Something’s messing with them, and they want it stopped. The delay here is only pissing them off, by the way.”
“Literally.” Drew gave the floor a meaningful glance.
“So,” Garrie said, looking hard at Sixties Man, “I’ll get you out of here, and then I’ll go deal with the rest of it.”
“Ohhh, no,” Sixties Man said. “You take care of us first. They can stay here until you’re done.”
“Please,” the little girl whispered, barely a presence at all.
Beneath them, the ground rumbled. The room shook; the chandelier jangled. A fierce rattly cry echoed through the room, moving so fast it left a Doppler trail of sound behind.
“They’re scared,” Lucia said, stiff and clinging to her own self-control. “They are so scared.” She didn’t mean the tour group, either, although they’d quite suddenly grabbed onto one another.
“Damned right we are,” Sixties Man said. “Something is eating us alive.”
“Eating you dead, you mean,” Garrie said. “But you’ve got to let them go —”
“Please,” said the little girl.
“Mow!” said Sklayne.
“I want out!” shrieked one of the women, and suddenly the entire room echoed with ghostly cries of out out out out! The medium ducked, appalled, and Beth gasped, shrinking in toward Garrie. Sound ratcheted through the room, discordant spider web voices tangled in a mesh of barbed wire sound.
Something twisted within Garrie. Hard. She gasped; the room folded in around her, crumpling like discarded paper before springing back to its natural shape. Sklayne caught her gaze with rich green eyes full of pain, his mouth opening on a soundless cry.
Time... running out.
“Garrie!” Lucia crouched beside her, making Garrie realize she’d folded in on herself and that unlike the room, she hadn’t sprung back into shape — and now when she tried, another wave of Daliesque surreality swept through them all. She cried out, crumpling around the lightning pain. So close to the gleaming perfection of the parquet floor that it was easy to see the ghost effluvia creep in on them as her shields wavered.
::Find Trevarr,:: Sklayne said, deep within her head. ::Now.::
Now.
~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter 29
Amidst the Furious Spirits
Helping everyone does not mean helping every one.
— Rhonda Rose
Destruction happens? What kind of motto is that?
— Lisa McGarrity
The Garrie straightened. There, amidst the furious spirits and the effluvia and the fearful tourist people, she pulled her shoulders back and put her chin in the air.
Sklayne knew the effort of it, caught here in this vulnerable body; he felt a wash of unexpected pride in the Garrie. She caught her breath and stood, the Lucia person’s hand on her arm.
She stood with such purpose that the room fell silent around her, leaving only the breathy moan of warping dimensions. The jagged motions of the spirits stilled, the energies momentarily quiescent; the noisy, clamorous tour group pulled into itself, barely breathing. The Drew person, his mouth open, closed it.
The Garrie said, “I have to go.”
“But — !” The Beth person turned to her, arms and legs full of awkward surprise. “You said — !”
“I said to be quiet. I said to let me work. And they didn’t, and now I’ve run out of time. There’s only one person who can stop this, and if I don’t find him — now — then nothing I do here matters anyway.”
Sklayne pressed against her leg, grounding himself. Trevarr’s pain clawed through him, wreaking havoc on this form. Trapping him this way.
What if..?
Then would it be forever..?
Cat forever?
“Mow!” said Sklayne, although he hadn’t meant to.
All around them, the room burst out into protest. Wailing and snarling, winds blowing up to batter everyone and form tiny rippled wavelets in the effluvia.
The Garrie ignored them, here inside her shielded space, her own steady breeze shaped and held with a control Sklayne hadn’t expected of her. Not for this long, not through the filtered agonies that had reverberated between them.
She turned to her people. “Lucia, Beth,” she said. “Stay with them. Between you, you’ll have a sense of what’s going on. Calm them if you can — they can hear you, and Lu will have a sense of them. Maybe that medium can help, if she will.” She barely waited for the two to nod. The Lucia person trembled with the emotions battering at her, her face flushed, her pulse racing visibly at her throat.
Brave, the Lucia person. Sklayne wanted to blanket himself around her and absorb the emotion energies for her.
But no. Stuck as cat.
“Drew,” the Garrie said. “I need you to come with me. I can feel where I need to go... but getting there...”
The Drew person stood straighter. “Totally doable. Real action!”
“Drew,” the Garrie said, more sharply. “I don’t know what we’ll find. I don’t know if I can protect you.”
The Drew person gave her a matter-of-fact shrug, ably ignoring the protest from the tour group. “If you can’t protect me,” he said, “then you won’t be able to protect yourself, either. It’s not like I’m taking any special risk.”
The house gave a deep groan; the world around them echoed it. They heard it — they all heard it.
::Your city,:: Sklayne said. ::It comes apart at the foundation of the world.::
The Garrie gave him the sharpest of looks. For an instant, she suddenly looked weary. “Yeah,” she muttered. “But I’m not sure I can stop it.”
Neither was Sklayne.
~~~~~
Lucia responded most sensibly to Garrie’s mutter. “If not you, then who?”
Garrie had no particular answer to that one and Lucia squeezed her arm and gave it a little pat — right before she moved out of the shielded area and into the effluvia. A clearer signal for Garrie to go, she couldn’t have given.
Especially not when she dragged Beth out with her.
“No!” cried the outspoken young man, forging toward Garrie. “Don’t leave us here!”
Sklayne sprang between them — suddenly puffed twice his normal size, suddenly scattering sparks from his coat. Teeth bared, growl loud, claws in gleaming evidence. Garrie could have sworn he’d actually gotten bigger; she could have sworn his fangs were absurdly long.
His warning stopped the man short, eyes first wide and then narrowed, gaze shifting from Sklayne to Garrie and back again.
The medium whispered, “Demon.”
“I could have fixed this,” Garrie cried, frustrated. If you’d let me. She grabbed Drew’s hand and dragged him out of the room, closing her ears to the cries of dismay and protest. The ballroom door slammed shut on ethereal winds just as Sklayne dashed clear behind her.
She stormed down the hall with Drew in tow, tugging him along as he tried to look over his shoulder. “Beth —” he said. “Lucia —”
“Totally doable!” she said, quoting him. “Real action!” But she relented long enough to look back at the ballroom herself, meeting Drew’s conflicted, ever muddy gaze. “Yeah,” she added. “I’m worried too. So let’s get this done fast.”
His determination reappeared. “Okay, then. Where do we need to go?”
“This way. For now.” Garrie resettled her hand in his, marching onward — and straight into a new gathering of spirits, ill-formed and inarticulate but full of threat. Despair tightened her throat.
“Not n
ow,” she told them, pushing her voice past the tightness of that despair. “Please, not now —”
But they didn’t give way before her, and her hand tightened down over Drew’s until he made a noise of surprise, slowing them both. Garrie sent the spirits a hard shove. “That’s your only warning,” she said, and her voice barely made it out that time. “You know what we’re doing and why. Leave us alone. We don’t have time —”
She didn’t need Lucia’s expressive face to convey the desperate nature of these particular spirits, or to warn her of their panic. They dove at her, already braiding and twining their energies to bind her.
“No!” she cried, gathering power — flinging it at them in a wild gust and scattering their very essence. “I’m sorry! Dammit, why won’t anyone listen?”
“Hey.” Drew surprised her by taking her shoulders and giving her an earnest little shake. As if he’d ever even considered doing any such thing before today. “Hey,” he said again. “You’re right. They’re not listening. None of them. They’re just wanting.”
“This isn’t —” she said, and couldn’t finish that. Tried again. “It’s not supposed to —” No, that wasn’t going anywhere, either. “I should be able to —” No. No words at all.
::Helping everyone,:: Sklayne said, deeply in her thoughts, ::does not mean helping every one. Dimensions quake. Beings die. Destruction happens.::
“Is that what this is?” Garrie turned on him, her throat still thick but already pouncing on that little slip of information. “Dimensions quaking?”
Drew’s hands fell away. “Whoa,” he said. “Dimensions?”
“Destruction happens?” Garrie repeated. “What kind of motto is that?”
“Sucks,” Drew muttered, taken aback.
Sklayne didn’t respond. Garrie smeared a hand roughly across her eyes and gave a mighty sniff. “Down, now,” she told Drew, pointing off to the side a little. “Over in that direction, but mainly down. I figure that’s what you have to know first, right?”
Back to business. Drew took it well. He also took the lead. “Don’t let me run into any pissed-off ghosts,” he told her. “Just being near all that ghost pee was enough for me.”
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