Possession

by Kat Richardson

  “How long?”

  “Years. Personally, I plan never to drive through this tunnel once it’s finished. Ugh. I even shudder at the idea of taking the train while they’re building this. Everything built on the fill or supported by it would be undermined by a tunnel collapse. They had to insert miles of micropiles to keep the historic buildings down here from shifting or collapsing and they’re always fighting water seepage that could interfere with the dig here.”

  “But the train tunnel isn’t in the fill, is it?” I asked. I’d been in the southern end of the tunnel and it had seemed pretty solid to me.

  “No, it’s bored through the bluff, but it’s so old that they grandfathered it out of the current inspection and maintenance standards. It’s always damp, and it doesn’t even have any lights, modern ventilation, or escape routes. You wouldn’t want to be stuck in it if the ground at either end subsided a lot.”

  “No,” I said as much to myself as to her. “I can see how that would be bad. But you guys haven’t had any problems now that the excavator is working, have you?”

  “Oh, a few hiccups, but nothing worth mentioning. They’ve hit water in a lot of places, and the investigation teams working on the early seawall part of the project found some areas we’ll have to work around in the north end where the local tribes used to camp and that kind of thing. There are always areas that will need more stabilization than originally thought, but the monitoring stations will help pinpoint those problems before they get out of hand.”

  “What monitoring stations?”

  “Technically they’re called ‘monitoring wells.’ The project group installed about seven hundred of them along the tunnel route to measure, record, and report things like subsidence and tectonic movement. The well shafts were drilled about three hundred feet deep, but you can spot the covers in the streets and sidewalks from here to Northlake—they look a bit like small manholes that are painted white and there’s a black metal seal in the middle that identifies them as monitoring wells. Take a look around and you’ll find them once you know what to look for.”

  “What would they do if you guys found something significant or the monitors showed movement?”

  “Oh, I doubt we’ll find anything much at this point, but on the subsidence issue, I’m not sure—I’m not a geologist—but I’d guess they’d try to shore things up like they did with the micropiles installed along the Alaskan Way footing. Probably they’d just throw money at it and keep on going. This is Seattle, after all—the town that graft built.”

  “Would you say, then, that whoever’s in charge of this would have no reason to delay and every reason to clear things up and pay off any claims?”

  “You mean, like the businesses that are complaining about loss of customers? Or like your client who was hurt?”

  “Either. Both.”

  “Oh, yeah. There’s going to be a lot of money to be made out of fancy condos and new hotels with waterfront views built where the viaduct is now. Personally I think the idea of a tunnel through landfill is crazy, but some people obviously want it and they have the influence to get it. If they have to pay a few claims and kiss some extra babies at election time, they’re not going to quibble. If you’re working for the family of the guy who got hurt, I don’t think they have anything to worry about on that score.”

  She pushed a lock of hair out of her face with the back of one hand. “I think I’d better get back to watching mud before someone gets pissed off. So . . . y’know . . . if there’s nothing else you want to know. . . .”

  I caught the hint. “No. I’m satisfied. Thanks for the information. I really appreciate it.”

  “No problem. Here, let me show you the easy way out.” She led me south past the pit and back to the trailer, where she reclaimed my hard hat and coat, then went around the trailer and pushed back a narrow door of plywood, revealing the exit route. “Don’t fall in front of any trucks this time, OK?”

  I smiled and chuckled. “OK. Thanks again.”

  “You’re welcome. ’Bye,” she added, closing the door.

  I looked around with care, letting the Grey side of my vision range wide, but I saw no sign of James Purlis.

  I checked my watch and figured I had enough time to snoop around the area a bit more. I started back up the street under the viaduct, keeping to the sidewalk this time, looking through the Grey for any sign of why Sterling was being badgered by ghosts. From what Held had said, there should have been plenty of spirits in the area, but I didn’t know why they would have attached themselves to Sterling—and certainly not to Julianne Goss, who had been quite a few blocks farther north when she met with a mosquito that had probably come from one of the pools of standing water Held had mentioned. Unless the sheer disturbance of the ground had caused some kind of paranormal upheaval I hadn’t detected or understood yet, the connection between the two injuries was so thin as to be useless. . . . There had to be something more. I wished again that I knew what had happened to Jordan Delamar—or even where he was right now. My sense that time was precious was strong, though I didn’t have any reason for this feeling.

  Then I saw her from the corner of my injured eye—a willowy figure in 1920s clothes standing in front of the Hanjin Shipping compound across the street—and dropped all other thoughts from my head as I turned to see what was happening in the Grey. But even when I faced her and used both eyes, the phantom woman remained clear in my vision. Her beautiful face wore a tragic expression that drew me to her. I crossed the road, dodging trucks and cars, and stepped onto the sidewalk in front of the long concrete walls of the warehouse. Giant red cranes loomed in the background, like strange metal horses waiting to feed on a few of the cargo containers stacked around their legs and on the ships moored in front of them.

  The ghost did a slow pivot to face me, her body turning without any movement of her limbs. A few strands of dark hair waved around her face and her clothes rippled as if caught in a gentle current. “I fear for them.” Her voice had the softest hint of cultured Southern accent.

  “For whom?” I asked.

  “The fat ones. I would not like more company in my watery den. My dog is somewhere near and he will suffice to chase away my loneliness.”

  I frowned in thought, tickling out something Held had said. “Are you the lady who drowned here? In the car?”

  A tiny smile flickered over her face and vanished again as she nodded. “I am Cannie Trimble. It is good of you to remember me. Few still do.”

  “The city tries to remember, but it’s not easy with so much change. Things get broken and lost.”

  “Indeed they do. I do not like these newcomers—they frighten me. They are so hungry, so greedy. . . . And they will break the new things to feed their mistresses.” Cannie shook her head, making her hair float and fan out in the unseen water. “It will be much worse than their deaths, much worse than the first time, by trickles, one by one. In the market. In the market where the ashes lay, where the player played, that’s where the truth lies. Do not let the wheel roll, do not bring me company—I want none here. I am enough.”

  Ghosts have a bad habit of speaking in riddles—their minds are focused on different things than ours are and without their context, nothing they say makes sense. The “market” reference I thought I understood—Pike Place Market—but the rest meant nothing. Wheels and ashes, players and truth that lied or lay . . . ? Maybe the wheel was something to do with her car that had rolled off the pier . . . ? “Cannie, what wheels, what ashes? Please tell me where to find them.”

  “Start in the market, end on the pier. Find the boy who played.” She turned her head aside, glancing at something I couldn’t see. “Jiggs! I’m coming.” She turned her face back to mine. “I must go. Please don’t let them roll the wheel.”

  And she vanished as if a cloud had covered the sun and blotted her out. I reached for the temporacline—the shattered planes of time that float in the Grey, recording history in place—but she wasn’t there. She was a true ap
parition, because she had never existed in exactly that state, in exactly this place. I could not reach Cannie Trimble here, I could only take what she’d offered and hope it led to something more.

  I would have to start with Pike Place Market—it was the only piece of her puzzle I understood.

  EIGHT

  It was twelve blocks to the market Hill Climb if I continued on the waterfront. I’m not usually bothered by that sort of distance, but it was nearly five o’clock and while the summer sun might linger, the vendors at the Pike Place Market didn’t. Everything but the restaurants and bars would be closed by seven and I’d burn up thirty to forty minutes if I hoofed it. Parking and traffic would both be terrible, so I took a bus. Seattle’s mass transit is adequate in downtown, so it didn’t take long and I got to the market with about two hours to spend looking for wheels or ashes or whatever Cannie Trimble had been alluding to.

  The market used to be one of my favorite parts of Seattle. The old buildings, the crooked little streets and alleys, the bustle, the people, the mix of old and new, residents and tourists, farmers and artists all charmed me—until I became a Greywalker. Now those layers of time and human occupation so densely packed make it a churning sea of Grey that I cannot ignore or travel through with alacrity. It’s about as haunted as a place can get without being a battlefield or a hospital. People have lived, died, loved, hated, and committed politics all over the area, and that sort of activity tends to leave memories that play on as ghosts. It’s also as twisty and layered as a rabbit warren, which adds to the difficulty of getting around even with the clearest of senses, and mine were currently slightly impaired. Walking into the market was, for me, like walking into the noisiest, most crowded party ever, where half the guests ignored me while stepping on my feet and shouting in my ears anyhow. The incorporeal dead and their ice shards of history pushed into me, turning summer into winter and bringing a fog of silvered vision and darting, colored light. I couldn’t sink into the Grey to avoid the worst of the mess, since I needed to talk to living people as much or more than to ghosts—not to mention that I was pretty deeply submersed anyway. I plowed deeper into the market, threading past bodies that breathed heat as well as those that didn’t, feeling them nudge and push and grasp. I kept my bag tucked tight against my side to fend off living pickpockets, and hoped nothing less human was going to run its light fingers through my stuff, either.

  Pike Place Market is actually a collection of buildings that house shops and stalls coming off Pike Avenue and turning onto Pike Place and Post Alley for several cramped and colorful blocks as dense as a box of bricks. Originally it was a true farmers’ market—a place where local farmers, ranchers, and fishermen could bring their fresh goods in the morning and go home with empty baskets and heavy wallets in the afternoon. Now it was as much a collection of permanent shops and restaurants as it was day stalls. Shop owners, day vendors, artists, craftspeople, and entertainers catered to the tourists as well as the locals in a cacophony of pitches, catcalls, and music, carried on the smell of fresh fish, hot grease, new bread, garbage, and sweat.

  I wasn’t sure where to start looking for “the boy who played,” or for ashes and wheels, but I knew I couldn’t canvass every vendor and shop clerk. There are always a few people who’ve been around forever and know everyone—local characters like Artis the Spoonman and the guys who throw fish—I just had to find one who might be able to tell me if there was a connection between the market and Jordan Delamar—which was a far more pressing problem than cryptic references uttered by a lonely spirit on the waterfront.

  I made my way toward the pig. Everyone starts at Rachel, so I figured I would, too, since metal and glass often cancel a bit of my Grey vision. The life-sized bronze piggy bank is supposedly a dead ringer for a real pig that used to live on Whidbey Island—though how that connected to the market, I’d never been sure. But there stands Rachel the Pig—steadfastly collecting money for the Pike Place Market Foundation—come hell or high water or runaway taxicabs like the one that nearly knocked the quarter-ton metal porker over a couple of years ago. Seattle’s eccentric metal structures seem to have a magnetic attraction for out-of-control vehicles. But the pig was on its hefty bronze feet as usual at the outside corner of Pike Avenue and Pike Place, in front of City Fish—home of flung fillets and slung salmon.

  I felt a little dizzy negotiating the heavy tide of Grey that my one overly sensitive eye saw slightly out of sync with the other. I stumbled a little as I reached the pig, missing the short curb in the ghostly mist around my feet. I turned, catching my balance as I took a step backward and bumped into the piggy bank.

  “Careful there, dear. You’ll give that poor piggy a bruise with that skinny butt of yours.”

  I glanced to the left and saw a stout woman in a voluminous purple skirt and a hat made from parts of beer cans crocheted together with bright red yarn. Her hair stuck out from beneath the hat in gray tufts, brushing the shoulders of her blouse, which was covered in pins bearing racy slogans such as I USED TO BE SNOW WHITE, BUT I DRIFTED. She was giving me a sly smile.

  “Early in the day for celebrating, isn’t it?” she asked.

  Seattle is known for its passive-aggressive friendliness, so I was a little taken aback. Then the woman laughed. “Oh, there, I’m just yanking your chain, girl! You looked so serious, I thought you needed a good poke in the funny bone. You only live once, you know, but if you do it right that should be more than enough. Now, what’s making you so grumpy-faced? Anything I can do to help?”

  “I’m trying to find out about a guy who might have worked around here or had some connection to the market recently. . . .”

  “There’s a lot of people working here and hanging around. What’s his name?”

  “Jordan Delamar.”

  She shook her head. “Not ringing a bell, but I haven’t been around much in a while and I don’t know all the new folks. What’s he do?”

  “I’m not sure. I think he might be ‘the boy who played’ if that means anything. . . .”

  “Played what? Because a boy who plays might be one of the kids down in the ramp, or it might be one of the buskers, or—if we’re lucky—he might be a playboy and carry us off to his Playboy Mansion. I bet you’d be quite a bunny, honey.” She laughed at her joke.

  “I don’t think I’d fit in very well,” I replied. “I’m not polite and subservient. I’m more the poking-things-with-a-stick type.”

  She laughed again. “Well, that makes two of us, sweetie! I’ll tell you what—you try the ramp, and if that doesn’t work out, try the buskers. They know everybody. You tell ’em Mae sent you,” she added with a gleeful cackle.

  I nodded, a touch overwhelmed but willing to take the suggestion, since it was all I had at the moment. “All right.”

  She grinned, but it faded quickly and she peered at me. “You do that. But just one thing, Miss Pokes-Things-with-Sticks—can you tell me what I’m doing here? I haven’t been around in such a long time and yet . . . here I am again.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know. Where have you been until now?”

  “Dead, honey. I’m plumb sure of it,” she said, turning away, cackling and fading from my sight.

  She’d seemed pretty solid for a ghost—solid enough that I hadn’t been certain right up until the end of the interview. I had a feeling I should have gotten a joke, there, but I hadn’t. I hoped I’d figure it out eventually—unresolved questions always bug me.

  * * *

  I had to ask around to find it, but it turned out “the ramp” was an actual ramp inside the area of lower shops. That section of the market starts about fifty feet below on Western Avenue across from the Pike Hill Climb and spreads up the cliff like some kind of wooden vine to the original shopping area at the top of the bluff. The market folks call that section “Down Under.” Since I was so close, I headed downstairs first, plunging through the flood of ghosts and the tipping icebergs of temporaclines.

  At the stair landing is a doorway
to the washrooms on one side and the hallways of the shops on the other, but no ramp, so I went down farther. At the bottom I came out onto an open area that connected the market buildings on my side with the former LaSalle Hotel building on the other and a staircase in between that walks down to Western Avenue. There was a large red musical note with a yellow number painted on the ground in front of a mural of the market. I’d seen these signs around the market, but wasn’t sure what they were for, and whatever this one was meant for, it wasn’t in use at the moment—at least not by anyone alive, though the red spot was so deeply awash in ghost-stuff that it was difficult to see with my left eye. Layers of memory lay over the spot, crystal-strewn with shards of temporaclines enclosed in a wide blue net of light. Peering through the Grey sideways I saw a ley line as bright as Las Vegas shooting straight through the site and arrowing for the Hill Climb below. Whatever happened on that red note, it was magical. Reluctantly, I turned away from it and headed into the building, looking for the ramp.