“Oh, my. It wasn’t going to eat you. It just wanted to push you out of its territory. Look, you’d better stop by tomorrow and we can discuss this. We’ll need to be working out a way for you to protect yourself.”
“What is that thing?”
“A guardian beast. But never mind it now. It’s gone. You’re OK. You got distracted and things went to Halifax, but you did well. Really. You did marvelous. Are you hurt any? Is your pet all right?”
I looked down at myself, feeling weak and stupid. My torso was covered in slime. I crawled to the cage and checked on the ferret. She gave me a dirty look and then snuggled down deeper in her nest of old T-shirts, not deigning to spare me another glance. Fine. I closed the cage door and crawled back to the phone.
“Some kind of slime all over me…”
“Heavens! That’s unusual.”
“I didn’t want to hear that.”
“Come for breakfast tomorrow. We’ll have to talk. Now you need to rest. Sleep is the best cure.”
“All right. All right.” I hung up. Shaking, I crept to the bathroom. I loathed the feel of my skin where the slime touched me. Even exhausted, I couldn’t face sleeping in that feeling. I peeled off my gooey shirt.
As I turned my back to the mirror, I noticed the redness: a large semicircle of small punctures, starting into shallow scrapes across my right side. It looked like an unsuccessful bite by a very large animal with needle teeth. I shuddered at the thought of legions of hungry Grey things, waiting to rend me. Tears of frustration and fear scalded under my eyelids. I wanted to give up and hide.
“Stop that,” I gulped. I glared at myself in the mirror. “You can’t quit,” I hissed. “You can’t quit.” A lot of ugly memories crashed past my mental eye. I had no choices and no place to retreat to. There was no place to hide from a creature who stalked the edges of death itself. I would have to learn my way around it, and I would have to watch my back.
Chapter Eleven
I slept in fits and woke to a Saturday morning clear and blue and mild. I argued with myself all the way up to Queen Anne. What was I doing? Did I really believe in ghosts now? Monsters, witches? It was nuts. But the bite on my side itched and even the hottest shower had not washed the eerie marks off my skin.
I parked in the same place and stared at the Danzigers’ house. Ben came out onto the porch with the baby in a backpack and trotted down the steps. The baby squealed in ear-piercing delight.
Ben spotted me and waved, shouting, “Brian and I are going to the park for a while.”
I gave a token wave back. Couldn’t get out of this now. I forced myself out and up the steps to the door. Mara let me in.
We went into the living room, a bright, warm space lit by a bank of windows, and sat on matching sofas facing each other across a low table. A tang of lemon oil and recent baking floated on the pale green light filtering through the spring leaves outside. Mara tucked her feet up under her skirts and looked at me, biting her lower lip a bit. “Last night wasn’t such a grand success, was it?” “No.”
“Still. Not a complete disaster.”
“I don’t see it that way. I got attacked by some… thing and chewed on like a rawhide bone. I don’t even know what happened. Or how.”
“You got stuck because you lost your concentration. You were fine up till then. You found the Grey on your own, instead of slipping, and you pushed it back, as well. It was the second time things went badly.”
I snorted. “Tell me something new.”
Mara narrowed her eyes at me. The air felt a touch chillier. “That is part of the problem.”
I looked askance. “What is?”
Mara shook her head and made a motion with her hand. Albert filtered into view. He almost looked like a whole person this time, wrapped in a buffer of swirling mist, like a cloud of impending snow. “You’re looking at a ghost. And you know it’s as real as… as that sofa. But you’ve closed your mind to it, telling yourself you’ll not believe it. When you dig in your mental heels, that’s when things go bad. Ceasing to believe and panicking when you’re in the thick of it, that’s dire. You lose control, for how can you control something you’ll not believe in? And so long as you’re fighting it, you’ll not be able to protect yourself or control your slipping.”
“Slipping?”
She nodded. “Moving in and out of a magical field, rather side-ways, without meaning to. I used to know a young fella at home who did it all the time he was thirteen. Disconcerting, seeing him popping about. People made up all sorts of explanations for themselves, claiming he was just so quiet you’d not hear him sneak up on you, or he was so quick, you’d not see him go. But they didn’t like it.”
“He was a Greywalker?”
She laughed, an unexpected whoop of laughter. “My, no! He was just a witch like me.”
I leaned forward, bemused. “But he stopped slipping eventually, didn’t he?”
Her face blanked and she looked down. “Yeah. He slipped in front of a lorry on the N59.” She squeezed her eyes shut, swallowed. “So. You see why I’d not like you to keep on slipping.”
Slipping away from a car, slipping into the path of a truck—all the same thing as far as the Grey was concerned.
I nodded. “Yes, I do.”
“All right then. Shall we try that exercise again? Albert and I will be here to help you.”
I bridled. “Albert?”
She grinned. “Of course. You see him and he can go into the Grey, just like you. He’ll be your spotter, so to speak.”
I started to object. “But—”
“You’ll see. We’ll not let anything harm you.” She tilted her head, raising her brows. “Give it a go?”
Self-conscious, I sat back into the couch and closed my eyes, breathing carefully until I relaxed and felt quiet.
“Open your eyes,” Mara murmured.
I lifted my eyelids. A man in a plain, dark suit stood in the table. His hair was parted in the center, slicked back on each side around his long, angular face, and a pair of small wire-rimmed spectacles teetered on his nose. I could almost see through him. A snowfall of Grey hung around him and spread as I stared.
“Close your eyes. Push it back, and come back here.”
And that’s what I did.
Mara was grinning at me when I opened my eyes again. “That was grand!”
Albert was still standing in the table. I shuddered. “That’s disturbing.”
“Is it?”
“Albert looks like he’s been cut off at the knee and is standing on the table on stumps. You can’t see that?”
“No. He’s quite a bit less corporeal to me. I imagine you see him better than almost anyone. When you’re in better touch with the Grey, ghosts and some of the other things may look quite normal and solid to you. You’ll be seeing them both here and there at the same time. Two partial images superimposed. The farther you are from the Grey, the thinner they’ll look. Try it again, but keep your eyes open as you get near this time.”
I felt a little dizzy and tired, but I tried.
As I slid closer to the familiar cold queasiness of the Grey, Albert looked more and more present. The details of his face and clothing grew surreally clear as the hungry pall of cloud-stuff around him expanded. I cringed from it. The Danzigers’ living room shifted and faded to pale smears of gold and sage in the thick, desert-cold haze. A sharp whiff of alcohol and organic rot bloomed in the air.
Distantly, I heard Mara. “You’ve slipped. You’d better come back now.”
Albert moved and I jerked to watch him. My head spun from the motion in the directionless roil of the Grey. I flailed out a hand to catch my balance. I didn’t recall standing up. My fingers dug through Albert, a shock bolting up my arm to ring my skull with a stench of raw chemicals. I pulled my arm back against my chest, appalled.
Albert blinked at his arm, then knitted puzzled brows at me. He mouthed a word and patted the mist between us. I could no longer hear Mara. I stared at Alber
t, my eyes wide and too afraid to blink.
The word was “sit.” He made it again and again, until my ears caught the faint sound in the roar of my fear. I sat. He motioned me to be quiet and close my eyes. Cold electricity tapped my shoulder. My stomach lurched.
But I could hear Mara now, far away. “Just breathe and balance. Then push it away. Just breathe…”
Her voice got stronger and I felt the queasy chill and smell slide away. Then a little push…
I felt as if I had plunged from the ceiling into the couch and I lurched back, panting, opening my eyes.
Mara looked flustered, her hair a bit disheveled and her face white. I “That was a mite rough. Do you feel all right?”
I swallowed bile and croaked, “I’m OK.” I swallowed again. “I think.”
“You look flah’ed out.”
I shook it off. “I’m fine.” I got to my feet and looked at my watch. “But I have to go.”
Mara gave me a shrewd look. “Don’t push yourself. And please be careful. You know how to come and go now, but you’re not strong or steady at it yet. You need practice.”
I nodded and started for the door. “I know. Trust me. I won’t be bungee jumping off any Grey cliffs, if I can help it.” A flurry of shivers scurried over my skin and I kept my eyes turned away from Albert.
Mara followed me and caught me at the door. She gave me a hard, sober look. “Be sure you don’t. Lorry grilles are unforgiving.”
I returned a wan smile and said I’d be careful, then hurried away, cursing myself.
Immersion in the Grey induced a panic in me I hadn’t experienced since grade school. I just had to get far away from it, into the comfort of the familiar, for a while. The longer the better, though I doubted it would be long.
I got to the Ingstrom warehouse after the auction had started. Michael grinned at me and waved as he registered new bidders. I headed for the sound of Will’s amplified voice, breathing normal dust and dirt and feeling relieved.
Bidders’ paddles flapped in the air as Will spieled on. He knew how to gauge a crowd. In minutes, he’d closed a set of wooden file cabinets at seven hundred dollars. It was still early in the day and already the crowd was catching bidding fever.
The buyers were the usual assortment of shop owners and auction addicts. But there was a knot of blank-faced men and women huddled in depressed passivity near the back wall. I guessed they were former Ingstrom employees gathered to watch the carrion birds fight for the bones their livelihood. The buyers pressed forward, ignoring them, impatient for the choice lots.
A box full of glass gewgaws came up and an intense bidding war developed between a thin, blond woman and a pudgy man with bad hair transplants. I couldn’t recall names, but they were familiar to me from other auctions. Rival antiques dealers. She, I remembered, was unpopular with some of the other dealers for her sharp ways. I wondered if the man bidding against her merely wanted to drive the price up—he didn’t look like the glass curio type.
The price had risen to ridiculous when I saw her hesitate. Will called for another ten dollars. Both bidders looked around. The man grimaced.
Will leaned into the microphone slightly and scanned the crowd. “Antique deck prisms in perfect condition. Highly collectible in today’s market,” he stated, letting his eye rest on her. “Last chance. Do I hear any more?”
Biting her lip, the woman flicked her paddle up. Will’s gavel came down so fast you’d have thought the building was collapsing, though there was no chance of anyone taking pity on her and making a last-minute bid. A sigh and a ripple moved over the crowd as the lot closed. Will moved on to the next one. I could see a scowl spread across the woman’s face as she began to suspect she’d been cooked. Then she turned and pushed through the crowd to the door.
About a dozen lots later, Will declared a forty-five-minute break for lunch. I followed him to the back of the warehouse and caught up to him at the registration table in a clutch of the grim men and women.
He looked down at me and beamed. “Hi! Nice to see you again.” He slipped his arm around a deflated-looking woman of sixty-and-some and drew her forward. “This is Ann Ingstrom—the senior Mrs. Ingstrom. Mrs. Ingstrom, this is Ms. Blaine, the investigator I mentioned this morning.”
She was wearing a well-made navy wool suit that hung on her as if she had lost twenty pounds overnight. Mrs. Ingstrom looked at me with watery eyes, but said nothing. I offered her my hand and she folded her own around it with a stiff, jerking motion. Her touch felt like fine sandpaper.
“I’m pleased to meet you, Mrs. Ingstrom. I want to ask a few questions. Maybe we could get some lunch and chat?” I suggested.
She answered very softly. “Oh. Yes. That would be pleasant. All right. There’s a… a sandwich shop just down the road…”
I glanced at Will. He shook his head. “They’re going to be very crowded. People from the auction, you know. Why don’t you two go up to Speedy’s? It’s only a couple of blocks away and you can have a table, if you hurry.”
She looked blank, but nodded. I got directions from Will and drove the two of us in my Rover.
Speedy’s was the sort of workingman’s café that could easily have been called a diner or a dive. We did manage a table near the back and got some coffee while we waited for our food. Ann Ingstrom looked a bit better after a few sips of very sweet, white coffee.
“That William is a very nice man, isn’t he?” she offered in her thin voice.
“Yes. He’s very nice. I hope I’m not disturbing your day by taking you away like this.”
“Oh, no. I… it’s good to get away. I’ve been practically living at warehouse since all this happened.” Her voice wavered, but held. “Since… since Chet and Tommy were drowned. There. I’ve said it, haven’t I?
“Yes, ma’am. I’m so sorry,” I murmured. No matter how much of I’ve seen, other people’s grief leaves me feeling embarrassed, as if I’ve peeked through their bedroom windows.
“Well,” she said, sitting back to let the waitress slide plates onto the table, “fishermen and sailors. The sea takes them away. They don’t come back. You just… you know, you don’t expect it to happen to you.”
“It’s terribly sad,” I offered.
She nodded. “It stinks. But you wanted some help. What was it wanted to ask?” “I’m trying to find a parlor organ the company might have salvaged from a damaged ship in the late seventies or early eighties. Do you remember anything like that?”
She chewed slowly and swallowed, chasing the mouthful down with a gulp of coffee. “A parlor organ. I think—well, I’m not sure how we got it, but we had one in the house for a while. I hated it. We finally got rid of the nasty thing when we redecorated. In 1986, I think. I’m not sure of the date, exactly. But it’s long gone now.”
“What did you do with it?” I asked.
“Oh, I’m not really sure. Chet took care of it. I was just glad to see it go. It always made me feel… unsettled. Isn’t that funny?” she asked. “It worked all right. Chet played it a couple of times.” She shuddered. “But it always sounded to me like the old thing was screaming and crying.” Then she coughed out a laugh. “Silly of me, wasn’t it? To be afraid of a piece of furniture? So I never asked him what he did with it.”
“Could you find out?”
“Well… there must be some papers, so I suppose so. It will give me something to do. Shall I call you when I find out?”
“I’d appreciate that.” I found one of my business cards and scribbled my home number on it as well before handing it to her. “You can call me anytime.”
She tucked it into her jacket pocket. “Thank you, dear. I’ll let you know what I find.”
We finished our lunch and drove back to the warehouse.
I offered her my hand before leaving her in the care of Michael and the mourners. “Thank you again for your help, Mrs. Ingstrom.”
This time, she squeezed my hand as if we were conspiring together. She smiled a bit, her face pl
eating suddenly into once-familiar lines. “I’ll do my best,” she whispered.
I returned to the auction floor. A different man was at the podium. He was older than Will, sleek as a salmon-gorged sea lion, but not much fun. He took himself too seriously to get the crowd whipped up and his performance was distracted and sloppy, closing a beautiful mahogany console far too fast. He shrugged the grumbles off, then turned the microphone and gavel back over to Will. The paddles began to fly again.
Will took another short break just before the surgeon’s cabinet came up and resumed the podium a couple of lots afterward. No one was interested in the crusty thing but me, and I got it for twenty dollars.
About six thirty, the final gavel rang down on a massive bronze propeller and the auction was over. I’d acquired a client’s chair with rotted upholstery as well as the surgeon’s cabinet. I wandered over to the table at the back to pay for my lots and wait for a word with Will. A man in a raincoat got into line behind me.
Will had just stopped by the table when the lady who’d bought the deck prisms stormed up and shoved her way to him.
Her voice was carbide-tipped. “I’d like a word with you, Mr. Novak!”
Michael took my check and looked up at her. “Which word would you like?”
She shot him a withering look. “Not you! That one!” she spat, jabbing a red-tipped finger at Will.
Will stepped forward but kept the table between them. “Is there a problem, Mrs. Fell?”
“You know there is, William Novak! You know I was tricked into overbidding on that glass,” she shouted. “And you did it! You—you massaged me into going that last bid!”
The raincoated man tried to butt in. “Excuse me, I think I’m next…”
Will shot him a pleading look but stayed with the woman. “Mrs. Fell, no one forced you to bid. You know it’s part of my job as the auctioneer to get the best price I can for the client, and encouraging faltering bidders is part of that job. If you felt the bid was too high, you should have dropped out whenever you wanted. Now, we have other customers to—”
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