I looked around, feeling observed and started arguing with my paranoia. It was just steam. All the steam covers leaked a little wisp into the cooling air and made tiny ghosts dance a moment on the cobbled street. But this steam slunk up a shape in an alley nearby.
I gave a start. Someone was standing, shadowed, in the alley, watching me. I turned and strode toward the gleam of eyes. The shadow moved, flickering through light from a window above. A female shape and a flash of wine red hair, then she was gone around the next corner without a sound.
I started after her, pursuing the Cabernet gleam of her cropped hair. Alternating heat and cold rushed over me. I darted around the corner into indeterminate light and a deep, low thrumming. Everything was shrouded as if within a dense snow cloud, always moving, almost revealing… something, then closing up again. The light—hazy gray and impossible to look at as sun-glare in the desert—wiped out detail in a fuzz of visual noise. Shapes seemed to surge and stream just at the knife-edge of perception, flickering with black dots in the corners of my eyes.
I stopped short and whipped around. More of the same. I quailed, gripped by vertigo, and swiped at my eyes as if I could wipe my dimming vision clear and find the way out.
I turned again, but the alley had become an unending plain of cloud-stuff.
I shouted, “Where are you? Where are you!” Panic rushed my breath. I staggered backward in circles, panting and calling.
Something murmured, “Be quiet or it will hear you.”
I spun toward the whisper. A face had formed out of the thick atmosphere, glowing with a pale, internal light—a soft-edged human face, but with no defining factors and no real color, just a thicker, more luminous density of the wavering not-mist. My heart stuttered in my chest.
I shook and stammered, “Who are you?”
“I am … I. I am… he. I am she…”
I didn’t care about philosophy. I waved a shaking hand in front of the face. “Strike that. Just get me out of here.”
The face murmured and began to dissolve. “Shhhh … be patient.” The formlessness distorted and writhed as if unseen snakes rolled within it, dragging the face back into its depths. I was alone in my pocket of the haze-world.
A shriek and a moaning howl ripped the thickened light. Shudders racked my spine. Something screamed back. A shape bulged out of the mist, brushing hard against me, spinning me.
A maw of dripping teeth snapped at my head, rushing ahead of a toiling blackness that drove a wave of shock through the mist. It turned, drawing a shape to it, gathering itself—massive, dark, with a snarling, eyeless head. A mane of bone spines whipped the smoky light. It screamed, lunging.
I caught its scream and stumbled backward. Then I felt a touch on my head and another on my chest that resolved into a shove. The unseen force flung me away.
I fell hard onto the cobbled alley. Something roared, and the bright darkness vanished with the sound of a door slamming.
I thrashed around, looking for the black thing or the vile mist. Just an alley, stinking slightly of urine and garbage and spilled beer. Thin wisps of ground fog danced across the surfaces of tiny puddles between the stones, but nothing else.
A door hinge squealed, then trash cans clattered as a busboy heaved bags into a Dumpster next to Merchants Café. I swallowed the urge to heave, myself, and slowed my breath. I pulled myself up with one hand pressed on the rough brick wall of the café and brushed at my backside, shaking. Pedestrians went past the ends of the alley. There was no crowd of onlookers. No one had seen or heard what I had.
I wobbled across the alley, found my purse, and faltered away.
I quivered as I drove home across the West Seattle Bridge. Whatever had happened was not a momentary visual aberration from a head injury. What was the thing that had lunged at me? Where had I gone? The only word I had for the creature I’d spoken with was “ghost,” and I didn’t like that word at all.
At home, I scrabbled up the business card that Skelleher had given me from the bottom of my bag. It was ten o’clock, but I couldn’t wait.
A cheery male voice answered. “Danzigers’. This is Ben.”
I don’t know what I’d expected but it wasn’t this.
Shivering, I bumbled into speech. “Uh, my name is Harper Blaine. Dr. Skelleher suggested you or … Mara might be able to help me.”
“Skelly! Yeah. What kind of help do you need?”
I hesitated. “I… don’t know. He thought… you might have some ideas. Maybe I’m seeing ghosts or something…”
“Oh. I see. Yeah, they’re annoying, pesky things when you’re not sure they exist in the first place.”
“Yes! And there’s this living mist…”
“Ah. That’s interesting. This—these occurrences are new to you?” “Yes.”
“Hmm.” He turned from the phone and I heard a muffled conversation. Then he came back. “Well, I think we can help—at least a bit. Maybe we can help you figure out what’s going on, maybe make you a little more comfortable about it. Could you drop by for an hour or two?”
“Now?”
He chuckled. “No, no. Tomorrow. Could you come about… four? Mara will be home by then.”
I leapt. “Four is fine. Where?”
“Upper Queen Anne, above the Center. Let me give you directions…”
Chapter Five
As I walked toward my office the next morning, I saw the rude man in the hat who had bumped into me the night before. He paid me no attention this time and strode away toward First. Despite the sunlight diluted by a high, thin cloud cover, the day seemed shadowy and dark. I was inclined to write off the vaguely human shapes where no humans stood as an insufficiency of caffeine in my morning-shocked system. I hustled upstairs and wrapped myself in still more paperwork and phone calls, sending Cameron’s picture out to be copied.
I detected no watchers in alleys or elsewhere, but couldn’t banish the unease itching at the back of my neck. Even in my office, I felt observed.
I was interrupted when an express service messenger knocked and entered my office. She shoved a clipboard at me and I asked what it was for.
“Letter pak from a G. Sergeyev,” she answered. It was a large express envelope. Tearing it open, I found a few sheets of cheap, typed paper, and a cashier’s check drawn on a foreign bank. I looked that over carefully, but never having seen a European check before, I couldn’t tell if it was legitimate or not. The express routing slip gave a London origin, far from the origin of the check. I figured my bank would know what to do with the check, and I took a break to walk it over.
Coming out of the bank, I pulled my jacket close against a sudden bluster of wind. The air seemed to be getting darker and thicker, misting up despite the thinness of the cloud cover, and my ears were ringing a little. The wind between the buildings whispered, and my hair blew into my face, flickering in the edges of my vision. I hunched a little deeper into my jacket, tucking my chin down into the collar.
As I strode along with my head down, something smacked into my chest. The impact made me catch my breath, stumbling back a step. I stared down, trying to figure out what had hit me. There was nothing lying nearby, but the object, whatever it was, had struck with the force of a thrown ball and left a cold ache in my chest. This was no hallucination; hallucinations don’t hurt. I raised my head and felt queasy.
The cold steam-mist was back, rendering the world into pale colors and soft focus. Workers on their lunch hour bustled obliviously through the cloud-stuff, like projections on a deteriorated screen. A shadow with no object moved along the sidewalk away from me. I shook my head, but nothing changed.
A few of the passersby glanced at me, moving out of sync, as if the projectionist had several films going at different speeds. My legs went shaky and I stumbled toward a pink splash in the mist. It was a gigantic metal tulip I knew was painted bright red and green. Public art. I sat down on the granite base and stared.
Stray shapes swarmed among the passing humans. I wa
nted to jump up and run from the shadow-shapes. The dimmed world of my normal Seattle seemed as oblivious to the shadows as they were to it, plunging through each other without regard. The thin sunlight did not penetrate the mist, but still touched buildings and people, somehow. The other things felt it not at all, moving to a constant thrumming cut with clangings and distant voices.
Even as ice crawled over my skin, I berated myself. I took a deep breath, then another. That seemed to help. What was I afraid of?
Nothing was coming for me, this time. The shadows were just going about their business, whatever it was. I shook my head and glanced around A dark columnar form seemed to be watching me. I stood up and started to walk away. It turned to track me. I ran for my office.
But the historic district enclosing Pioneer Square
was thronged with shadow-things. I squeezed back against a building and vertigo shook me as I looked out at the street. Real and past traffic mingled in the misted road. Ghostly horses and motorcars moved heedlessly across the center of the Square about a foot lower than the modern pedestrians strolling there. Spectral shapes rose and sank along the sidewalks, and the shade of a giant tree that hadn’t existed in a hundred years whipped its branches a foot from the bust of Chief Sealth.
I felt ill. I needed to negotiate this maze of the solid and the incorporeal and make it to some safety—someplace they couldn’t come. Shuffling my feet along the concrete and asphalt of the real world, I crossed the street with a crowd of visitors and their tour guide. I flinched as a horse and rider passed right through the crowd with no discernible effect, then staggered as I refocused on a lamppost menacing my path. Concentrating on objects of the present helped hold the past back for a moment. I thought of lampposts and bus benches and fought my way through the insistent mist-world toward my old Rover. I scrambled into it.
Nothing touched me in the old olive green truck. I sat until I caught my breath; then I started the engine and drove. Once I was up on the freeway, the real present was in complete control.
The Bellevue Hilton was modern and bland. I approached the building with all my concentration on the normal, determined not to be swept up again by anything weird. In the lobby, a signboard directed visitors to the chamber of commerce luncheon, and small clutches of business people drifted toward the lobby doors.
I heard footsteps on the carpet, and someone called my name.
I turned and saw Colleen Shadley walking across the lobby, carrying her attaché case. She moved with a smooth grace, even on her rather tall heels. Without them she would barely break five five. Somehow I had carried away the impression that we were close to the same height. But even wearing flat-soled boots, I overtopped her by more than two inches.
“Harper,” she greeted me, extending her hand. “I’m so glad you made it. I have those papers for you.” She opened the flap on the case and offered me a plain manila envelope. “Have you been able to get started yet?”
“I’ve got a little information, but now that I have this, I should be able to get along faster.” I offered her an envelope containing the pictures of Cameron that she had lent me. “I’ll let you know as soon as something comes up.”
She gave me a cool, professional smile and wished me well, then turned away. I got out of there before someone asked her who I was.
I had almost two hours to kill. I craved a cup of coffee or anything mundane and anchoring: comfort food, bad TV, something like that. I decided to try a little shopping. Coffee and lunch and department stores in suburban Bellevue. Not a shadow-thing in sight. I was done and on my way back to Seattle by three fifteen. If I was fast enough, perhaps the strangeness couldn’t catch up to me.
I was even feeling a bit smug when I parked near the Danzigers’ house. I was ten minutes early. I locked up the Rover and walked toward the pale blue house.
It was one of those square, half-brick, half-clapboard houses from about 1900. It had a deep, railed front porch overhung by the second floor. A favorite-grandma house. A pleasant, if slightly wild, garden overran the yard above a short flight of stone steps and a vine-grown wooden arch.
Closer to, the house glowed, golden and beckoning as a cheery fire. It should have made me feel welcome, but the hair on my neck prickled.
Chapter Six
The door popped open to my knock. Ben Danziger was over six feet tall, broad-shouldered, bearded, and blue-eyed. His wavy black hair stood from his head in electrified tufts, and he looked like either a mad scientist or a terrified rabbinical student.
“Hi! You must be Harper Blaine,” he exclaimed. “Come in, come in. Excuse the way I look. I’ve been doing the laundry and the static from the dryer always makes me look like a mad poodle.” He held the door open and I stepped inside. The house did not glow as brightly inside, but it contained a low hum like the contented purring of a cat.
He turned and ducked through another doorway on the left. “Would you like a glass of tea?”
I followed him into the kitchen, dazed by his bouncing energy. “Yeah, sure.”
You could have filmed commercials for Grandma’s Old-Fashioned Something in there, among the rubbed hardwood floors and polished copper pots on racks.
Danziger excused himself to pop into the back room and toss a pile of clothing into a wicker basket. He paused and called out, “Honey, our guest’s here!”
A voice came from a bulge in his chest pocket. “Start without me, darlin’. The baby’s being stubborn.”
He bounced back in and rattled around, piling objects on a wooden tray. He swept it up, then put it back down on a huge table and looked at me.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t ask if you prefer your tea over ice. Do you?”
I was too surprised to say I had assumed that he meant iced tea when he mentioned glasses. “I don’t care one way or the other.”
“Ah. Good. I like Russian tea. Mara’ll join us in the study.”
Toting the tray, he led me up the staircase and around the landing to a small door. “Open that for me, will you?”
I opened the door and followed him up a last narrow flight of stairs into what used to be the attic. A large skylight had been installed on the southern slope of the roof, making a bright, comfortable small office—if you didn’t mind ducking a lot. Wall sconces bounced more light up against the sloping walls and ceiling. Bookshelves stood wherever the walls rose over four feet. The lower, darker corners were stacked with boxes.
Danziger’s desk was built of four wooden file cabinets and a wooden door. An old leather swivel chair stood on one side and an old leather couch on the other. He elbowed a clear space in the books on the desk and set down the tray. The soft, aged leather of the sofa squeaked and settled around me as I sat down.
Danziger began tinkering with teapots and tall, metal-caged glasses. “Water?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“Hot water in the tea? It’s really strong, otherwise,” he explained.
“Sure. Whatever you suggest.”
He frowned in concentration, poured dark tea into one of the glasses, measuring it against some spot on the filigree cage, then added hot water with equal precision.
He handed me the glass, saying, “Skelly sent you to us because you’ve been seeing strange stuff. So tell me about the strange stuff.”
I put up a hand. “Wait a minute. Let’s start with some background. I don’t know anything about you except that a doctor who seems a bit… unconventional suggested I talk to you. How can you help me? Just who or what are you?”
“Well, I’m a part-time linguistics professor at the U and I do some other research on the side—which is how I met Skelleher and my wife, Mara. I translate text to and from Russian, Czech, Polish, German, and a few other languages, and do related work in comparative religion and philosophy. I was a philosophy major once, and I got interested in comparative religion and started studying languages, met Mara, and one thing led to another… I used to teach religion and philosophy, too, but budget cuts… you know.” He shru
gged.
I looked askance at him. “And what does any of that have to do with my problem?”
Danziger gestured as he explained. “Well, when you really start to tangle with religion and philosophy, you eventually run up against all the mystical stuff about death and souls, the meaning of life, burden, responsibility, unity—all the really big, freaky topics. And then you have two choices: just jump over it and go on to the parts that don’t bend your brain, or dive into the bizarre and try to run truth to ground. I guess I just like wrestling with the weird stuff and I ended up writing a book about it. So now I’m ‘the ghost guy.’ ”
I scowled. I had no wish to be an experiment in flaky science. “So you’re some kind of parapsychologist.”
He shook his head. “I’m just a strange type of philosopher, really. I don’t know any ghosts, personally, except for Albert over there,” he added, pointing into a corner.
I looked, saw nothing, turned my head and saw a slender, weedy shadow just inside the door. It was not particularly thick, but it had baleful cat eyes that glared at me. I started.
“What is that?” I demanded.
Danziger smiled. “That’s Albert. We’re pretty sure he was a boarder in this house during Prohibition and died here from drinking doctored gin. Poor old sot.” Danziger shook his head and smoothed a hand over his hair, dispelling the last of the static so his dark hair flopped down and made him look like a half-wilted dahlia. “Anyhow, you can see him and that’s good. I can’t. I only know he’s there because I’ve figured out the cold spot. Fakers always look where I point and swear he’s right there.”
The door opened beside the ghost. A tall, slender woman with flame red hair stepped into the study. Her eyes were slanted and green as a cat’s, and she would have been stunning even if she had not gleamed from within. I doubted she’d been ill a day in her life.
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