I shifted my focus. I did, too. “Imagine a stream of white light flowing into your pineal gland…your third eye.”
“I know what the pineal gland is.” I looked at Jacob—he had a mile-wide grin on. I glanced down. And a hard-on. If we came out of things in one piece, I’d be in for a wild ride once we got home.
“Picture yourself full of white light.”
“My God,” he said. “I’m really buzzing. For real.”
I touched his hand, and static electricity crackled between us, connecting us with a bright, brief, visible spark. It was real, all right.
The elevator doors whooshed open. The basement lobby was empty, except for the potted plastic tree and its wad of gum, which had been joined by a crunched-up drinking straw wrapper.
I was about to steer Jacob toward the old coal cellar, but he was a step ahead of me. I took a couple of long strides to catch up and take a good look at his face. Definitely in the zone—laser beam eyes. He was looking at the world with his perception shifted, and he made a beeline toward the supernatural activity without any help from me.
He stopped in front of the safety door and tugged on it. “Locked,” I told him. I pulled out my red security card and slid it through the card reader. The door clicked open, and Jacob shouldered me aside and went through first.
“Maybe I should go ahead,” I suggested to his back, “because you won’t be able to see it.”
“It got all up in your face, right?”
“Yeah, but—”
“Then I go first.”
He’d been listening, back in the car, when I described the fire ghost. I know he had. Because the second you say the word ghost, Jacob’s there, a hundred and ten percent—so he knew the spirit was freaky enough to send Bob Zigler packing. I was tempted to tell him that he wouldn’t be able to bench-press it into submission, but when Jacob set his sights on something, there wasn’t any talking him down. So instead I streamed some more white light into my pineal gland, and I gathered it up inside myself until my fingertips tingled, and I hoped that when the blowout came, I’d survive it.
Jacob strode by the dented steel door, and then stopped, cocked his head, turned back to the door and put his fingertips, spread wide, against it. “This is it, isn’t it?”
I nodded. “How do you know?”
“I can tell. I can feel it.”
I pulled a bundle of candles from my overcoat, and consulted a tiny compass that we’d plucked from my dashboard. I was happy to see it put to good use; it had certainly never helped me when I got lost driving somewhere. I held it up and saw a ball with lines and letters bobbing under a crosshair. “I can’t read this fucking thing.”
Jacob took it from me and studied it for a moment. “North,” he said. He pointed back in the direction we’d come from. He took a few paces and turned. “The walls run in cardinal directions.”
Walls in Chicago often did; that was the way the streets had been laid out.
“You sure you don’t want me to set the candles?”
Richie’s assistant had helped him set the candles, but I had the impression that I’d build a better ritual if I did it myself. I shook my head. “You’re here. That’s enough.”
Jacob opened the door and flipped on the light. The ductwork I’d crashed into on my way out of there had rolled out of its pile. It covered the floor now, like a galvanized steel obstacle course. Silent ghostfire licked the walls all around us. “She’s two-thirds of the way to the back wall, past that stack of boxes,” I whispered. I wasn’t sure why I was whispering. I had no doubt that fire ghost knew we were there.
Jacob took a ceramic ash tray that we’d cleaned in salt water from his pocket, put a black charcoal puck in the middle, then took a lighter to it. The ridge around the edge of the charcoal flamed briefly, then went out, sending a thin line of physical smoke up toward the ceiling. It smoldered for a moment, and then sparked bright orange. It gave a pop and sparked again, and pretty soon a web of twinkling orange sparks coursed through briquette as the saltpeter mixed in the charcoal caught and ignited. Once the ridge around the charcoal turned gray, Jacob took out our Baggie of copal.
“Activate it first,” I whispered, and placed my hand over his. I felt a jolt, and almost jerked back. I steeled myself against it—if we sent that charcoal flying into the heap of corrugated cardboard, we might burn the whole building down.
When I took my hand from the copal, the resin was glowing red. “Do you see that?”
“See what?”
“It’s glowing.”
Jacob scowled. “No. But I swear to God, it’s vibrating.”
I searched for a word. “Visual, verbal, what’s it called? The sense of movement.”
“Kinesthetic.”
“There you go. That must be how your brain interprets sixth-sensory vibes.”
Jacob stared into my eyes with a look that was full of wonder. Earlier, he’d figured out he could tell Carolyn a gigantic whopper without getting caught if he shielded from her first. But this? This was Major League Psych.
“Dump it on,” I told him, “and then we’ll do the sage.”
We activated the sage together, and now that I was ready for the jolt, it felt more controlled. When my hand touched Jacob’s, the white light around us flared bright. The sage continued to glow, even after the light around our hands faded. “It’s ready,” I said.
The makeshift censer billowed smoke that stunk to high heaven when we added the sage. I waved the smoke out of my eyes, and the fine hairs on the backs of my hands stood up. “Shit. It’s awake.” I pulled out the activated salt and scattered it in front of me.
Jacob backed away from me with the censer, and his gaze went to the boxes. “What now? The candles?”
I lit one, and held it out in front of me like a crucifix. It went out. Damn it. I started stepping over fallen ductwork and realized that my chances of getting past the wall of boxes with my candle lit had been slim to none, anyway. I jerked my head toward the boxes, and Jacob followed me there, surefooted, with the incense.
Ghost flames ringed the empty space beyond the box wall, burning low, maybe a couple of feet high. The crazy fire ghost stood in the center with her head slumped, as if she’d been a bad girl and was too ashamed to look up and meet anybody’s eyes. Her matted hair covered her face, and her hospital gown hung, stiff and still.
She moved, though, blips and stutters, now a couple inches closer, now a foot away. Now rotated so I saw her in perfect profile—knobby knees, spine slouched, pointy, upturned breasts. Now with her back to us, hospital gown tied sloppy, backs of her legs streaked with something dark, blood, or maybe feces.
Jacob grabbed me by the forearm and I got a white-light jolt. “Set the candles.”
“She’s, um….” I pointed to the general area of spots where she strobed in and out of sight.
“I know. I feel her. Set the candles.”
My hands shook as I tried to light the first candle, and my breath streamed out of me in a big, white plume. I glanced up. The ghost was still in the same general spot, maybe three yards away from us. I drew a mental circle around her, found north according to the walls, and moved to set my first lit candle on the floor. Then Faun Windsong’s voice popped into my head, unbidden, parroting back some ancient wisdom about starting your circle in the east, “like the sunrise.”
Thanks, Faun.
I set the candle.
The temperature plunged. My teeth started to chatter.
Jacob had been squinting in the direction of the ghost, but the sound of my molars knocking drew his gaze to me. “I can see your breath.”
Not his. Just mine. Cripes.
“White light, Vic. Center yourself.”
I sucked in a gout of energy just as the flames leapt high. Fire ghost started strobing faster—here, there, appearing and disappearing. Always in the same pose. Just standing, head down.
I lit the second candle from the first and set it in the south. I pulled a third candl
e from my pocket and moved to light it from the second.
Her face filled my vision—mouth gaping. I fell back, and she was on me. No sound. Just the sight of her face. And now, close, closer than ever before. Close enough to see her lips were cracked, and white gunk was built up in the corners of her mouth, and her tongue, her horrible tongue, was coated, pale and furred.
“No.” Jacob had stepped into the circle I’d been trying to create and stretched his hand toward the ghost. “Get off him.”
The lank mats of her hair flopped over her thin shoulders as she swung around to look at Jacob when she realized that he could see her, too. In a sense.
“She’s coming at you.”
Jacob closed his eyes and cocked his head, and left his hand out there as if he was asking her to dance. “She’s in pain,” he said.
“You don’t get it,” I yelled over the roar of ghostfire in my ears. And I don’t think he did. Because Jacob, fucking Jacob, he thinks he’s indestructible. I sucked white light.
The fire ghost strobed, and strobed again, and I threw a white balloon around Jacob as if it was a fastball. She slammed into my barrier and shattered. Ghostfire dropped to the floor in a shower of sparks, then coalesced again in the center of the room, in the shape of a woman, mouth open, eyes wide and jittering.
“What did you just do?” Jacob snapped.
“She was barreling toward you—”
“I know. I felt her.”
I picked up the south candle, set it right side up, and lit it. My breath vapor froze to my eyelashes, and the ice crystals acted like a dozen tiny prisms that cast sparkles around everything I saw. “But you can’t see how horrible—”
“I don’t care. Listen to me. She’s in pain.”
I glanced up. A bunch of expressions snapped over her face in rapid succession—scream, sob, rictus grin—shifting fast from one to another in stop-motion cuts. I sidled around the circle and planted a third candle at the western point. She blipped in front of me, scream-mouthed, and I dropped the candle. She flickered back again to the center.
Jacob took a couple steps forward.
“Stay out of the circle, would you?”
He planted his hands on his hips and glared. My hands were so cold it took me five tries to light the wick. His staring didn’t help. Once the flame took, I ran in a crouch to north point and set down the final candle.
The temperature dropped so low that each inhalation felt like knives in my lungs.
“Can she hear me when I talk?” Jacob said.
“I don’t know.” My eyes watered, and the tears froze to my cheeks. “Ask her.”
“Miss? Ma’am?”
Shit, he was serious.
“You need to remain calm, and listen to me. You’re in the wrong place. Do you understand me?”
She blipped and flickered like crazy, but after a few seconds, it seemed that she’d rotated to face Jacob. Mostly. Every few strobes, she faced me to make sure she kept tabs on what I was doing, too. But the majority of her appearances faced Jacob.
“The only thing here for you is suffering,” Jacob told her in his most reasonable tone of voice. “You need to pass over. Let it go.”
The ghostfire dimmed against my sacred circle, in the way stars dim when streetlights flicker on. But the ghost woman still seemed pretty damn solid.
“Can you channel any healing energy toward her?” Jacob asked.
“Do I look like a healer to you?”
“At least try. White light—whatever you want to call it.”
What did he expect from me? If he wanted a healer, he should have stuck with Crash. I drew down more white light anyway, because I suspected that if I just said I did without actually trying, Jacob would be able to feel whether I’d made the attempt or not.
Once I was topped off with white light as far as I could fill myself, I jogged the last few steps toward the east point of the circle, where Jacob faced off with the fire ghost.
“We’re here to help you,” he murmured.
“Um. Hey. I don’t exactly know how to change my settings to ‘heal.’”
Jacob clucked his tongue and grabbed me by the arm, presumably to demonstrate what I should do. Pressure changed in the room so sharply I thought I’d end up with a case of the bends, and the white light surged through me, and into him.
He let go of my arm like he’d just grabbed a live wire. He hadn’t sucked out all my juice, but he’d made off with a good portion of it. He spread his arms wide, and a benevolent glow surrounded him.
“All right,” I said. My head was spinning. I locked my knees to keep myself from kissing the concrete. “You grabbed the energy, you heal her.”
He looked at me, wide-eyed and open-armed.
I was miffed he’d taken the white light I’d been hoarding all night, accidentally or not. “Go on. Do it.”
Jacob was too far into the zone to argue with me. He turned toward the center of the circle, and he focused. The white glow that surrounded him reached out toward the fire ghost. It surrounded both of them. If the white light ran like a faucet inside me, it rose from Jacob like a gentle morning mist.
Fire ghost’s strobing slowed. She stared at Jacob with a look of both agony and bewilderment. I started to look away, but forced myself to keep my eyes on her—and when I did, when I made myself really, really look, I saw the chain around her neck.
-THIRTY TWO-
“Shit.”
Jacob’s white light wavered. “What?”
“She’s chained here.”
“Restrained? Like a straightjacket?”
“No, literally chained—like a dog. Like some sick fuck hid her down here.” For sex…or torture? Or both. “Goddammitall.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know who. She’s not talking. Wouldn’t I have said something if she was talking? Maybe she can’t talk. Maybe she never could.”
Jacob’s eyebrows drew down and the veins in his neck bulged. His white light glowed steady. The fire ghost clawed at the chain—a choke chain—and I saw the red gouge around her neck where it sat, and the fingermarks where she’d tried to pry it off. And maybe she could have. If she’d been sane, or at least mentally competent. If she’d realized that all she needed to do was stop pulling.
“Tell her to stop pulling,” I said.
“What?”
“She doesn’t like me, she likes you. She’ll listen to you. It’s a choke chain, and the harder she pulls on it, the tighter it gets.”
Jacob’s focus narrowed to a pinpoint, and he looked at her so hard, I would’ve bet money that he could see her, too. “Don’t worry, Miss. I’m here to help you. I need you to calm down.”
Fire ghost stared at Jacob, mouth open, tongue working.
“She’s listening,” I whispered.
“It’s a trick chain,” Jacob told her. “Step back and it will loosen. Stop pulling, and you can slip out.”
She flickered, doubtful. Her hands went to her throat.
I spotted a hospital band around her wrist, an old-fashioned thing that looked like it’d been through an industrial typewriter. “Jacob,” I said. His name left my mouth in a visible stream. “I think I can get an I.D.”
“Miss? My partner’s going to approach. I need you to stay calm. I’m here to help. We’re both here to help.”
I stepped inside the circle I’d created, and the spirit-cold fell away so suddenly that at first I thought it had actually plummeted more, sub-zero and capable of singeing my fingers and toes with frostbite. But no. The burn I felt was an actual burn, and smoke seared my lungs when I took a breath.
The ghostfire that looked blue from the outside glowed red from where I stood. And the scenery shifted, too. The ductwork and corrugated boxes had turned into coal bins and shovels, and big, hulking, black furnaces with fire glowing behind closed grates.
“Look, lady, it’ll all be over soon. You want me to get you out of here? Just stay still for a second. Okay?”
It cost m
e to say even that much. Tears ran down my face and I gagged on the thick, charred air. I read the bracelet, got a first initial, last name, and a date. M. Connoley — Ward 5, April 12, 1949. That narrowed things down. Under that, just before she blinked back a few steps, I caught a glimpse of a word, ...hizophren.... I’d had no idea the medical profession had even diagnosed schizophrenia way back when. But it explained a lot.
I staggered back out of the circle, choking on my own breath. “Connoley,” I told Jacob. “And Ward 5, whatever that means. Probably the psych ward.”
“Miss Connoley,” he said in his most velvety, it’s-all-gonna-be-okay voice. At the sound of her name, she stared at him like he’d just whacked her with a tire iron to get her attention. “Listen to me carefully. What I need you to do is step back two paces, then reach around to the back of the chain and loosen the part where the links pass through one another.”
Jacob sent her more white light, bathed her with it, and she stood there for a long moment, just staring at him. I figured she’d been hypnotized by his voice, his face, his smooth white light. But then her face twisted up as she struggled against herself, and she stepped back.
The last expression that flickered across her face was surprise.
And then she was gone.
The ghostfire dwindled and disappeared. The air pressure changed again, and my eardrums flexed painfully until I worked my jaw and made them pop. I swayed, and Jacob’s hand was on my shoulder.
“We did it,” he said. Pleased. Proud, even. But not surprised, not really—in the way people who think they’re capable of anything are never too shocked when it all shakes out in the end.
I swatted his hand from my shoulder. “You stole my light.”
“I didn’t mean to,” he said, totally earnest.
I picked up the candle at my feet. When I stood up, Jacob pressed into my back. I blew the candle out.
“The white light,” he said, “it felt like warmth to me. Vibration. You see it as light?”
I sighed. I wanted to snap at him, that greedy light stealer. But it was his big day, his first triumph as a non-NP. So who was I to rain on his parade? “Yeah. It’s all a big TV show for me. Sights and sounds.”
PsyCop 5: Camp Hell Page 26