Labyrinth

by Kat Richardson

  “I will let you go,” I said between clenched teeth. The red storm of his emotions was tearing across my nerves. “I swear. But you’ll have to come with me. I swear it,” I repeated, feeling my legs tremble with the effort of remaining upright.

  He eased back, the ire of his presence draining away. I crouched down, putting my hands to the ground as I slipped back toward the normal. I clenched the bloody sand beneath my palms into my fists, feeling Simondson’s presence as a dull heat in the compressed grains.

  As soon as I was back in a more visible state, Quinton and the animals converged on me. “Stop!” I yelled. “Don’t touch me yet. I need a metallic container, a shiny one. Any size.”

  Quinton scrabbled through his pockets, displacing the ferret, and dumping a handful of mints out of an Altoids tin. He buffed the interior quickly with a handkerchief and held the tin out to me, open.

  I dumped the handful of stained sand into the tin. Then I reached back into Simondson’s tangled, dim form, and twisted off a thread of his energy, which I shut into the tin with the sand. As long as it stayed closed, I should have a way to call on Simondson’s spirit for a little while at least. Simondson and I both breathed easier then. I slipped the tin into my pocket, careful to keep it closed.

  Quinton helped me to my feet. I shook my head before he could start asking questions. I still had a few things to do while we were here. The rest could wait, but not this.

  “Simondson,” I started, “show me where you died.” He grew hotter and the humming pain around him increased. “No. No, don’t think of it. Just go there. Go slow enough for me to follow. Don’t think, don’t remember, just move.”

  The ghost drifted back the way he had come originally, south, across the parking lot that was now pitch-black between the scattered bars of light falling from the freeway and the cones from rare streetlamps. His color flushed and faded again and again as he moved, as if he couldn’t stop the sparks of memory that haunted him with pain. Stumbling a little on my still-trembling legs, I followed him. Quinton and Grendel stayed by my side while Chaos crawled up into my collar, as if she meant to comfort me by her presence. Or just lick the sweat off my neck—who knows?

  At last, Simondson stopped and flared bloody red before his shape darted through the brick and glass of the nearest building. I could see that he’d stopped inside, but he was fading now, his energy ebbing. Even ghosts need rest. “All right,” I murmured to his thin shade. “I’ll take it from here.” He dimmed into the raw sparkle of the Grey.

  As soon as he was gone, I plopped down onto the steps of the building he’d led us to. It had a covered porch with a short set of marble stairs on each side. The brick-and-stone porch led to three arched windows with French doors in two of them. I wasn’t quite high enough up the steps to look through the glass. I hung my head a moment while I caught my breath.

  Quinton must have been studying the building. “It’s the old brewery office.”

  I raised my head, shaking it a little to dispel the tinnitus that had started up—my descent into the Grey after Simondson seemed to have muffled my hearing, as if I’d gone swimming and now had water stuck in my ears. Quinton was looking past me into the darkened building.

  “Looks like the tenant left in a hurry; the carpet’s been torn out. I don’t think that’s the latest in corporate decor, though it looks like someone’s been using it for something.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Footprints in the dust and lots of power cables on the floor.”

  I put one hand on the brick wall beside me so I could stand up and then jerked away from the building as the energy streams running through it snapped at me like static. I peered at it, glancing sideways into the Grey to see what was going on.

  Coils of red power encircled the base of the building, crosshatched in blue, as if someone had erected a kind of magical insulation between the interior and the rest of the world. I couldn’t be sure of the magical nature of whatever had been going on without more information, but the gory crimson lines gave me the impression vampires had been involved. Not too surprising, since Simondson had died inside. Taking care not to touch the walls again, I walked up the short flight of steps and looked through the glass panes of the nearest window.

  Squiggles of industrial glue and motes of sand and sawdust defaced the once-gleaming marble floor. Black and orange snakes of electrical cable ran across the mess, disappearing through the doorways in the white-plastered walls. Glancing up, I could see a chandelier that had captured shreds of translucent plastic and white gauze on its curled arms. I would have bet the missing carpet had a hell of a bloodstain on it and more than minor traces of Simondson’s DNA. Solis hadn’t mentioned the office building. I guessed the police were still trying to get a search warrant, even though an office wouldn’t seem much like the site of a hit-and-run, and Solis hadn’t been entirely sold on that idea anyhow. The right kind of beating might look a lot like a car accident until the autopsy report was in. . . .

  A year or two earlier, I might have been perversely mollified by the manner of Simondson’s death, if my idea was correct. Back when the damage he’d inflicted on me was still fresh and seemed to be nothing but mindless fury unleashed on my undeserving self, it might have seemed poetic justice. Now it left me stunned and angry. Yeah, he’d killed me, but he hadn’t done it strictly from his own desire; he’d been led to it, tricked and used like everyone else Wygan had touched in his scheme. Not that I was feeling sorry for Simondson; I just didn’t feel the need to cause him any additional hurt anymore.

  “I should go in there,” I mumbled, trying to convince myself.

  Grendel whined and shifted to stare toward the street. The ferret was more interested in the building as she wormed her way back up to my shoulder. The scrape of footsteps on the gritty sidewalk pulled my attention around in the same direction as the dog’s.

  A police officer on foot, his light-blue uniform shirt glowing under a moving shaft of light from the freeway, strolled toward us. He checked his radio on his shoulder and I spotted his partner coming across the street from the direction of Nine-pound Hammer. Both cops kept their hands in sight, not worried about us, just keeping an eye on things.

  The first one called out as he came close. “Evening, folks. How y’doing?” He might have thought we were drunks who’d left the club to get some air, except for the dog. Quinton twitched the leash and the dog sat down to his whispered command as the two cops got within talking range.

  I knew Quinton didn’t want to chat with them. I didn’t either, but chances were good they’d make a note of our presence and Solis would see it, so I leaned out the nearest arch in the front of the dark office porch and returned the greeting.

  “Hi, guys.” I didn’t recognize either of them and they didn’t seem to know me, which was fine.

  The first cop noticed Grendel, who was cocking his head and looking at the dark legs of his uniform trousers with some speculation. “Nice dog.”

  “Yeah, except for all the peeing,” I replied. “I swear he has to sniff everything and leave a puddle every fifty feet.”

  The second cop laughed, casually hitching his thumbs into his equipment belt. “Mine’s the same way. Gotta read his pee-mail and leave a reply, I guess.”

  The first officer was looking us over but seemed satisfied we were just a couple out walking their dog. I was grateful Chaos was keeping still in the darkness under my collar—no one would believe we were out walking the ferret. We needed to keep up the illusion and negate their interest by moving along. Investigating the site of Simondson’s death would have to wait.

  I glanced at Quinton as if I were irritated by the delay. “Is he ready to go?”

  “I think he’s done for now.”

  I nodded and walked down the other set of steps, the one farthest from the cops and more shadowed by the freeway ramp overhead. “All right, then. Let’s go.”

  Quinton shrugged and twitched the leash again. Grendel stood up, waggi
ng his tail at the prospect of moving; his doggy grin broke out and he panted in excitement. Quinton just nodded to the cops and walked past to catch up to me, the dog trotting alongside. We strolled off under the freeway as the patrolmen gave us one last look and dismissed us from their minds to go back to their beat.

  EIGHT

  As we walked away from the policemen, I felt the hot/cold presence of Simondson’s ghost in my pocket, thrumming in the metal box. Grey things whispered in my ear, not quite comprehended, not quite ignored. “Are we clear?” I asked Quinton.

  He bent down and adjusted the dog’s leash, shooting a look back toward the old brewery under the cover of his long coat. “Yup. They’re checking out the bar up the street.”

  I lifted the ferret out of my collar and she made a disgusted chittering sound. “Don’t give me that, you furry knee sock. You almost got us in trouble.”

  “How?” Quinton asked. “I didn’t see her doing anything.”

  “She was wiggling down my back trying to get into my pocket with the box full of ghost.” I put my free hand into the pocket in question. As my fingers brushed the metal surface, an electric shock ran up my arm and with it came a shriek of sound. Chaos made a high-pitched bark and twisted in my hand as I jerked, consumed in the moment of noise.

  My grip failed and Quinton grabbed the ferret, tucking her into one of his own pockets before reaching to catch me as my knees buckled. I pushed him away, afraid the shattering noise in my head would envelop him, too. The shouting, muttering cacophony meant nothing, a jumble of sounds and words running over one another, breaking apart in my mind like exploding fireworks. I pulled my hand out of my pocket, clasping both of them together at my chest, bending as if I’d been punched by a heavy fist. The sound fell away slowly, leaving a single word in its fading echo in my mind: “maiandros.”

  Quinton hooked his arm around me against my will and hauled me upward, the dog dancing alongside us. I braced for another blast of uncanny sound, but it didn’t come as he moved me along. “Are you all right? Can you breathe now?”

  I sucked in air, stunned to realize I was almost faint from lack of oxygen. I’d blown out my breath when the sound hit, as if I had, indeed, been physically struck in the gut. I nodded and settled my breathing into a normal rhythm, pulling out of his arm to walk on my own. But I stayed close. “I don’t know what happened. Did you hear anything?” I asked.

  “No. What did you hear? I mean, that is what happened, isn’t it? You heard something . . . weird?”

  “More like I got hit by the sound, but it doesn’t make any sense. What I heard doesn’t mean anything to me. It was just . . . words and noise....” I had a feeling, a certainty. . . . “We have to go back and get into that building. There’s some . . . information there.”

  “How do you know?” he asked, but he turned around with me and started walking back to the brewery office with Grendel’s leash in one hand and the ferret peeking out of his pocket under the other hand.

  “I just do. It’s . . . like the sound told me something I know but can’t understand in words. It makes my head ache, though.” I rubbed at my right temple, feeling a low throb in my skull like a migraine coming on. Was there something dire about Simondson? Was his ghost some kind of trap set by Wygan and his minions? It didn’t seem that way, but . . . the discomfort, the creeping sense of hidden knowledge ticking like a bomb at the back of my mind gave me pause. Not enough pause to stop my progress to the office, but enough that I frowned over it all the way back.

  The cops hadn’t come back around on their beat yet so we had some time, though we didn’t know how much. I took a moment to steady myself, get my mind back on the task at hand and not on the freakishness of what had happened a few minutes earlier. Then I turned to Quinton. “You should go on without me.” He started to object but I cut him off and continued. “If the cops come back, you shouldn’t be here. They’ll recognize you and Grendel. I’ll be inside, and while they might recognize me, they’d have to get close first. I can meet you back at the truck.”

  “What if something else happens to you? I don’t like leaving you without backup. Things seem a bit off the rails, here.”

  I waved his last comment off and addressed the rest. “I still have my cell phone, and if I don’t call or turn up at the truck within thirty minutes, you come looking for me. But you won’t be any help if you get arrested for trespassing or run off for loitering.” Then, just because she’d been so jumpy about it, I put out my hand for the ferret. “I’ll keep Chaos with me. She can raise the ghost alarm if something’s too close.” I didn’t like endangering the little animal, but I needed any edge I could get and she’d reacted faster to the presence of whatever was ringing my ears than I did. Without Quinton around to spot for me, I’d have to rely on Chaos and my own skills—which weren’t inconsiderable but currently left me a little confused.

  Since London, I’d noticed subtle changes to what I could do in the Grey and with what ease. I’d flicked a ghost away like it was no more than a wisp of smoke and torn a piece from Simondson’s substance without stopping to think if I could. Wygan’s goal was to make me into something new, and it seemed that, even without his hands-on interference, I was changing whether I liked it or not. I’d learned that I couldn’t fight being part of the Grey, but I still didn’t like these new powers—they worried me when I thought of what they might mean to Wygan’s plan. Didn’t mean I wasn’t going to use them, for now at least.

  I checked the area for anyone who might be freaked out by what I was about to do and then watched Quinton start away. He moved reluctantly, looking back over his shoulder twice before Grendel decided to bolt after a rat that had scuttled out of a brush of wild fennel growing from the packed dirt of an alley.

  Chaos had been into the Grey once before, so I thought she’d be all right to come along, so long as she was all the way inside my clothes. I tucked her into my shirt as I went up the office steps on the darkest side. I slid into the Grey and felt my way through the layers of time until I found one in which the office was occupied and its doors stood open to a long-ago afternoon’s hop-scented breeze.

  Once inside, I checked for the ferret and she chuckled at me, apparently feeling no ill effects of passing through a physical barrier. Well, at least I now knew it worked, though not the parameters and limits. I let her crawl up and poke her head out of my collar. I began walking around the shadowy edges of the first room, looking for signs, either normal or paranormal, of what had happened to Simondson.

  The main floor was broken into two unevenly sized rooms with a small atrium and staircase between them. There were more rooms upstairs and at the back, I assumed, but the ground floor was what interested me at the moment. The more northerly downstairs room was open all the way to the second-floor ceiling with an open gallery around the back and inside wall. It was this room we’d looked into from outside, where we’d seen the marks of industrial glue on the floor. Nothing seemed to excite the ferret and I wasn’t getting much of an indication of activity, except in a vague way as the ghosts of a generation or two of clerks went about their business without a care for us. The other room, the southerly one, was slightly smaller and completely closed up with blinds and white paper on the windows, hiding any activity within. Chaos wriggled and made her angry chuckle, wanting down onto the floor to explore for herself. I kept a tight hold on her as I looked around.

  Here the carpet had been pulled up as well, leaving the same sort of mess: loops of glue marks on the floor, gummy with dirt and something like sawdust; broom marks in the detritus; and snakes’ nests of black electrical cable connected to nothing. I looked at the mess through the Grey, hoping for something more useful and trying not to leave any fingerprints or other evidence that might link me to the scene whenever the cops got in—as I was sure they would eventually. Ferret footprints might be a little less conspicuous than human fingerprints, so long as the forensic technicians thought it was just the track of a rat or two, but I was still r
eluctant to let Chaos down, just in case.

  The cold washed over me and with it the strange chorus of babbling and shrieks that had plagued me since I’d returned from London. I tuned it out as best I could and looked around. Near the interior wall, farthest from the windows, I spotted a formation in the Grey, like a field of broken stone thrusting up through age-old peat and fog. I moved closer to it, keeping to the upper levels of the Grey, wary of being sucked into anything before I knew what it was. Chaos let out a fierce chitter as we advanced, just as intrigued as I was.

  Drawing near, the cold of the misty world between the worlds fell away and a tingling heat bled out from the strange structure. It looked like . . . no, it was a ring of shattered temporaclines, shards like mirrored glass tipped and ruptured from their proper places. Rifts of motion and memory skittered across the ghostly surfaces of the broken layers of time. As I got closer, the temperature rose and Chaos seemed to pull away from it, sniffing and going still. It reminded me of what I’d seen at my father’s old office, a ring of unearthly fire standing around the place his ghost should have been, an impenetrable darkness at its center and a fury circling its edge.

  I turned my head, searching for any sign of the Guardian Beast. It had rushed to harry me at the border of the zone in Dad’s office, but here there was no sign of it. Whatever had happened here didn’t seem to threaten the Grey directly as the other incident had. I reached for one of the broken shards of time and felt a jolt of electricity at my fingertips as I touched it and it came away in my hand.