Poltergeist g-2

by Kat Richardson

  I was also bothered by the apparent movement of the Grey power line out of its alignment with the rest of the grid. Normally lines of that size lay near the ground, and I couldn't see any reason for it to be where it was. It seemed likely that the grid link was providing additional power to the phenomena. If the group had moved it, that, of itself, was extraordinary, though I doubted I could explain that to Tuckman.

  None of this had shed any light on Mark Lupoldi's death. It wasn't my case and Solis wouldn't appreciate me poking around in it, but I couldn't help wondering about the connection. Mark was deeply involved in Tuckman's project and it seemed from what Phoebe had said that the project had begun to affect his life outside the lab, too— he'd been the focus of the paranormal, duppy or poltergeist, before his death. The manner of that death, from what I had seen, was weird enough to disconcert even Solis—who had seen much worse before he left Colombia than Seattle's criminals could dish out.

  I trudged up the stairs to my condo, still thinking and frowning, and opened the door on an epic wreck. Every book had been tipped off the shelves, the fluffy innards of a disemboweled pillow had been strewn to the four corners of the living room, and most of my shoes had been dragged out of the bedroom and left anywhere the culprit pleased. One blue running shoe—much chewed around the padded ankle bit—had become a nifty cot for the perpetrator, who was uttering little ferrety snores from within it. I just stared into the room with my mouth open, amazed at the destruction two pounds of frustrated mustelid could make.

  I didn't have the energy to swear. I just plucked Chaos out of the shoe and tucked her into her cage. Either I hadn't latched it right or she'd grown thumbs while I was out. She snuffled and went back to sleep, leaving me to clean up. It was my own fault, but it still took a couple of hours to put the place back together. I was too tired to face the mound of laundry that had collected all week, and threw myself into bed thinking it could wait for morning—or at least later in the morning.

  CHAPTER 8

  The phone rang at five a.m. and kept on ringing until I groped around in the autumnal predawn darkness and answered it. "What?" My civility doesn't function well before nine.

  "Harper?"

  I knew the voice but couldn't connect it to a name in my half-asleep state. I grunted. "Who's this?"

  "It's Cameron. Cameron Shadley."

  That woke me. Cameron had been my first vampire client, and I thought we'd solved his problems, but he sounded scared. "Cam? What's wrong?"

  "I am in big trouble and I need some help. Carlos thought you'd be the best person to call." Carlos was helping Cameron learn the ropes of vampirism after a rather bad start and he was one of the few vampires I respected for something more than their ability to kill. He was a scary bastard even as vampires went and not particularly friendly to "daylighters," though he seemed to find me interesting. I wasn't sure what sort of interest he had, however.

  I turned on the bedside lamp and snatched a shirt off the floor and yanked it on. Even with a phone line between us, I felt vulnerable and nervous talking to a vampire while undressed.

  "What's wrong?" I asked when I had my shirt on. I clamped the phone between my shoulder and cheek as I struggled into the nearest pair of pants.

  "I don't have a lot of time to explain. The sun's coming up soon."

  "Then talk fast."

  "Someone died and I need you to go to the morgue and make sure he's truly dead."

  "What kind of someone? Your kind of someone or my kind?"

  "It was an old man. Just an ordinary old guy. He wasn't supposed to die, but I made a mistake and—"

  "You killed him?" My voice had gone cold with disgust. I'd liked Cameron, even when I realized the nature and necessities of a vampire's existence. I'd hoped he wasn't going to be like the rest, somehow, though that wasn't possible.

  "No!" Cam protested. His voice swooped with emotions—at least he still had that bit of humanity. "He just died. He had a heart condition. I didn't know. Carlos was trying to teach me… something. I miscalculated and the guy was too weak and he died. I didn't know what to do and while I was trying to figure it out, someone found the body and the cops took it to the morgue. I can't get to him before the sun comes up. I need you to go and find out if the guys going to rise or not."

  "What?"

  "Rise. You know—come back as a vampire. Or something… else. Carlos is furious with me about this."

  "Why are you asking me to do this? I know Carlos must have someone he can send."

  "I made the mistake. I have to fix it. I can't let my mistake cause Carlos problems with Edward. If Carlos sends someone to fix it, the word will get out and things could get pretty nasty."

  "I thought Carlos and Edward were getting along these days." Edward was top dog in the local vampire pack. He and Carlos had reconciled some of the bitterness that had simmered for over a century between them when I had stepped in to help Cameron with his problems.

  "It's more like detente, really," Cameron said. "Man, Harper, I'm running out of time here. Please say yes. I'll pay you whatever you want and I'll owe you a favor—we both will. All you have to do is go to the morgue this morning, look at the guy and see if he's dead. Then call me first thing tomorrow night and let me know. Please."

  I sighed. "How am I supposed to tell?"

  "You know what a vampire looks like in the Grey. He might look dead to the ME, but he won't to you. If he's dead—true death, that is—he'll just be cold, like any other dead body."

  "Any chance he's still alive?"

  Cameron went quiet a moment. "Trust me, Harper. He's dead. The only question is if he's going to sit up and scare the hell out of someone or not."

  Oh, goody. I sighed again and got a description of the man. I hoped that he was dead and staying that way. I had no idea how to put a vampire down for good and I doubted the pathologists would be enthusiastic about experimenting. I said good-bye to Cameron and figured I might as well go to the morgue before the day got too much further advanced. I wanted to arrive at the end of the night shift, when the small staff was least likely to be on the ball.

  I looked down and realized the clothes I was wearing were filthy and I didn't have time to wash anything. I couldn't find a clean pair of jeans in the place.

  Muttering, I rushed through a shower, then dragged from my closet a pair of wool slacks I'd bought in a fit of incomplete wardrobe overhaul and put them on with a cashmere sweater foisted upon me by my mother one Christmas. It was a nice outfit, but I always cringed at the dry-cleaning bill. I prayed the corpse was clean and not inclined to get up and lead me on a merry chase into filth-laden alleys. It would be just my luck to get covered in gore or garbage the one day I wore something that couldn't take the strain. Well, at least I looked good.

  Chaos yawned at me and stretched luxuriously when I checked the cage latch on my way out. She didn't even protest the lack of playtime, still sated with her condo-wrecking exertions of the night before.

  Traffic was light when I got onto the West Seattle bridge, and the sun hadn't yet risen high enough to pierce the cloud cover and stab into my eyes as I headed east.

  Harborview Medical Center perched on the edge of First Hill—Pill Hill to the locals—and loomed over the freeway like a stone vulture waiting for something to die. It seemed appropriate that the county morgue was located in the basement of this Topsy-like maze of extensions, wings, annexes, and walkways that had "just growed" from the original core over seven decades. I parked on the administrative side of the hospital to avoid the busy trauma center and made my way down.

  I walked through dim images of the buildings that had once flanked the hospital and crossed through the memories of sickness and health, birth and death. Ghostly accident victims lined the halls, lying on misty gurneys. The odors of illness and the sounds of newborn babies pushed on my attention and I moved aside without thinking for the shades of long-ago nurses bustling past me. The boring elevator was a small relief, though even it had a few linger
ing shadows that defied the lights. The doors opened on a throng of ghosts.

  The morgue had been in the basement for a long time, collecting Grey, dead things. I'd been down there before—missing persons, insurance, and pretrial investigations sometimes led to the deceased— but I'd never before been able to see what everyone always imagines: the spirits that never leave the place. There were plenty of them, though as I stared, I realized there were fewer than I would have thought. Most were oblivious to me, but some had gathered around the elevator door, making the apparent crowd. Two or three looked at me as if they expected something.

  "I don't have time for you right now," I muttered. "Go away."

  A few of them backed away or faded as I stepped out of the lift. Something whispered, "We don't know the way." I wondered if that was literal truth or something more spiritual in nature.

  I thought I might regret it, but I murmured, "You can follow me out when I leave. But after that, you're on your own." The rest of the ghosts that could, moved aside and let me through, though I still had to step through a couple to get to the desk. Each phantom I touched had a different icy feel as they slid through me. I shivered and was glad of the cashmere sweater.

  The sleepy clerk at the desk wasn't someone I knew, but she was a type I was familiar with—college student working an undemanding job late at night so she could make money and do homework at the same time. Since Harborview was the county hospital and administered by the University of Washington's medical center, the chances were good the clerk was a UW med student doing work study. She didn't even close her textbook when she looked up at me, a little puzzled by my natty appearance in such a place.

  "Can I help you?"

  "I hope so." I showed her my license. "I'm checking for a missing person and I wondered if you had any unidentified males who matched his description." I rattled off the information Cameron had given me, and tried to ignore the cold presence of the dead around me. It occurred to me that Mark Lupoldi's body was somewhere nearby, but I didn't want to see it again and didn't mention it.

  It took some scuffling with papers and phones first, but I was escorted back to the cooler by a young man who called himself Fish and looked like a badger in blue scrubs. A small cortege followed me down the narrow hall. Most visitors saw the deceased on a monitor in a viewing room, but there wasn't time or personnel to set that up before the shift changed and everyone just wanted to get this over with, which I had counted on. I saw the body in person, my retinue of ghosts spreading around to look at him, maybe wondering why he was so important.

  He didn't look like much lying on his metal tray. Just an old man, white-haired, dressed in ragged clothes, and dead. Just plain dead. I peered at him from several angles, but couldn't see anything, not even a mark of whatever Cameron had done to him. I sank as far into the Grey as I dared, but he had no gleam of living power to him at all and certainly nothing like the dark red coronas I'd seen around most of the vampires I'd met. I closed my eyes and thanked every god who might have an interest that he was only a cold husk of empty flesh with nothing Grey to him, not even a ghost.

  I shook my head. "Not my guy."

  "You sure?" Fish asked. "You were looking pretty hard…"

  "He's similar. The beard threw me a bit. But it's not him. I'm sorry for the trouble."

  He shrugged. "No biggie. At least someone's looking for someone. Makes me hope someone'll come looking for him, too."

  I glanced at Fish as he pushed the corpse back into the chilled drawer. "You care about these guys?"

  He nodded. "Yeah. No one should have to stay in a drawer forever. Couple of these bodies have been unidentified for more than ten years. That's just wrong."

  I nodded, disturbed by the thoughts he'd started in my head, and took my leave. I was followed by a macabre parade, like the Pied Piper of the dead.

  The ghosts trailed me all the way out the parking lot door, where they dispersed with a sigh. I looked back over my shoulder, but couldn't see a single one. They'd just wanted out of the morgue, I guessed, out of the hospital where some of them must have died. They had escaped at last. My good deed for the day, like the Girl Scout I'd never been. I wondered about the bodies that had lain so long unidentified and hoped the old man wouldn't be joining them.

  CHAPTER 9

  I drove down the hill to Pioneer Square and buried myself in work. I made phone calls, managing the usual cases that paid the rent and bills and hoped to forget about ghosts trapped in the morgue and unnamed corpses in cold steel drawers. I turned my mind to other problems and called the Danzigers. The phone rang twice and Mara answered.

  "And how are you, Harper?" she asked, her Irish accent tumbling over the words like brook water on smooth stones. "We've not seen you in awhile."

  "I've been pretty busy," I hedged. I'd found their child a little harder to take lately and had, I admit, avoided them as a result. "I wanted to talk to Ben about an old ghost project and a few other things. Is he free today?"

  "I'll ask him, shall I." She muffled the phone for a few moments before returning. Something was making a thumping and growling sound in the background. I had to concentrate to hear her. "Ben'll be here all day, he says. He's taking this term off to manage Brian while I've got the unholy course schedule, though how he'll survive it, I'm sure I don't know. Will you be dropping by, then?"

  "I will. When's good?"

  She snorted. "As well ask the wind. Come by if you like and if you hear pounding and screaming, walk on by and return later. I swear some wag had the right of it when he said boys should be put into barrels at birth and fed through the bunghole."

  My eyebrows went up. Voluntarily and adamantly childless, I'd always assumed that most parents were blissfully unaware of the horrors their little darlings could be. I would have to apologize to a few parents, though not my own—we'd burdened each other with enough mutual horror to call the deal even, by now.

  "Okaaaaay…," I drawled.

  Mara sighed. "Never mind me. Come when you can. You know you're always welcome and Ben'll relish a chance to chat up an adult who's not as shell-shocked as himself. I must fly—department meeting today with the head fossil, himself."

  "Thanks, Mara. Good luck with the fossil."

  She laughed her sudden whoop. "I'll need it!"

  I'd put myself on the hook, but I'd manage. After all, I could leave anytime I wanted and not be arrested for child abandonment—Brian wasn't my kid.

  Putting down the phone, I spent some time online trying to find information on faking a séance, but found little. I'd have to add that to my list of questions for Ben. I managed a few other details, then headed to the Danzigers' to get some background information on the Philip experiment that Tuckman had based his experiment on.

  The Danzigers' house was in upper Queen Anne, just a short trip up the hill that looms over Seattle's famous Space Needle. In spite of the competition for parking spaces, there always seemed to be an empty one within twenty feet of the pale blue clapboard house. I wondered if Mara had put some kind of spell on the street or if it was just magic parking karma associated with the gentle glow of the Grey power nexus beneath the house. Whatever. I managed to park right in front.

  I trotted up the steep stairs to the porch, where the door was flung open and a black-haired juggernaut ran full tilt into my knees, butting me with a head as hard as a meteorite while giggling and shrieking with glee.

  "Whoa!" I staggered backward, hooking my elbow around a porch column so I wouldn't go cannoning off the platform and tumble into the rosebushes below. The grab converted my backward momentum to a turn and I pivoted against the stair rail as Brian Danziger tripped and flopped down onto his belly at the top of the steps.

  I caught a glimmer of a ghost near the open door and jerked my head up. Albert. The resident specter had materialized in a thin, incomplete column just inside the house. One corner of his mouth twitched in what I took to be a smile; then he vanished as Brian began to howl. Having no siblings, Brian appear
ed to have found a substitute tormentor/punching bag in the incorporeal person of the dead guy in the attic.

  Quick, heavy footfalls preceded the appearance of Ben Danziger. "Brian! Mein Gott, was jetzt?"

  "Papa!" the little boy yodeled, rolling onto his back and holding out his arms.

  Ben stopped on the porch and blinked at me. "Oh. Hi, Harper. Did Brian butt you?"

  I steadied myself and dusted at my trouser legs. "Nothing so soft as a butt. Call it a full-on ram."

  Ben folded his six-foot-plus frame, scooped up his son, and set him on his feet again. He held on to the collar of the two-year-old's shirt as Brian squirmed about and attempted to bolt off again. Ben fixed the boy with a blue stare that contained all the menace of a cotton ball.

  "Brian, why did you butt Harper?"

  "Is a rhinerosserous!" shouted Brian, bouncing up and down and clapping his hands. "Graaaah! Graaaaaah!"

  Ben sighed. "Not Ts, Brian. 'I am.' 'I am a rhineross'— I mean, 'I am a rhinoceros.'"

  Brian looked at his father with wide eyes and an open mouth; then he shouted again. "Yay, yay, yay! Daddy's a rhinerosserous, too!" Then he lowered his head and smacked it into Ben's shins.

  Ben rolled his eyes. "Oh, Lord… No more Animal Planet for you. Now, let's go back inside."

  Brian scowled. "Donwanna!"

  "But it's feeding time. There's cheese sandwiches for the rhinos today."

  The boy looked skeptical. "Wif pickles?"

  "Yes, with pickles, and tomato soup."

  " 'Mato soup!" Brian cried, and charged into the house.

  Ben watched him go, then looked at me. His black hair was wilder than ever, his face wan and thin under his curly beard, and the sockets of his eyes were drilled deeper into his skull than I remembered. "Welcome to the zoo," Ben said, waving me inside.