"You're fixated on a path to a possible solution, not on solving the problem. You're thinking of saving other people from the monster, not of getting rid of the monster for everyone's sake, including yours. That's what you need to be working for. It seems to me that you'll be able to find this ghost-thing hanging around its controller or its next victims. If you're going to keep it from being used, you need to separate the killer from control of the ghost. Once you've got the controller removed, it'll be easier to break the ghost. It's like unplugging the power before you start messing with the machinery. It may not be perfectly safe, but the other way is a lot worse.
"It's pretty obvious from what we saw on those early recordings that the ghost isn't very clever on its own and doesn't make decisions for itself. It gets a lot of its smarts from the group that contributes to it. If it's cut off from that, it'll get pretty dumb and be a lot easier to take out. If you can keep the controller distracted from the ghost, the ghost won't have that source of smarts or viciousness."
I stopped him, studying him a moment in amazement. "How do you know this?"
"Just compiling the information and following the logic thread to the end. I don't usually do it out loud, though, so I probably sound like a moron."
"You sound brilliant."
He grinned. "I like that. Tell me that again sometime."
"OK. Now, go on being brilliant a little longer. I think I'm getting this part."
"All right." Another sip of beer was required before he could continue. "If you can approach the ghost while the killer is busy, you can isolate it from the rest of the system—the others aren't going to be much trouble, since they don't use it for anything most of the time."
"They don't use it at all and they're being encouraged to forget."
"Good. Once it's isolated, I think the system will just fall apart. It may take a while, but it will. It shows all the signs of being an inherently unstable system and the laws of physics say that unstable systems degrade once the feedback that keeps them artificially stable is removed. So you isolate the entity—scoop it up like in a Leyden jar— and take away the input. The charge just sits in the jar until it is discharged or dissipates on its own."
For some reason I had a sudden vision of Chaos chasing her toys in the mayonnaise jar at home.
"Wait," I said. "A Leyden jar's a kind of… battery, right?"
"More like a capacitor. Stores the electricity in coupled plates as an electrostatic charge. There's no current flow in a capacitor, which is why the dissipation is slow but the discharge is fast. Batteries store the electricity in a chemical bond that requires a current and is constantly discharging. Doesn't matter, though—it's just an allusion. You wouldn't really use a Leyden jar to catch a ghost."
But I was thinking maybe I could. I was thinking about silvered mirrors stopping the flow of Grey energy and the slowing property of glass, and I wondered if I could find a bottle to put this particular genie into until its controller was brought to heel.
"Excuse me, Quinton—I have to make a phone call. I'll be right back."
I rushed outside, forgetting the lateness of the hour, and called the Danzigers. Mara answered, sounding out of sorts.
"It's rotten late, so this had best be good."
"Mara, it's Harper. I'm sorry for the hour."
"Oh," she answered, yawning, "I thought you were the dean—the man's useless as a chocolate teapot and an insomniac to boot. What's come up?"
I told her my idea. She made interested noises in between yawns.
"Brilliant! Come for breakfast in the morning and I'll see what Ben and I can turn up." She punctuated her good-byes with another yawn.
I returned to the table caught between the pleasure of Quinton's company mixed with the possibility of a problem solved and the sense of another still hanging like a sword. And I didn't remember that I should have called Will that night until the opportunity was past.
CHAPTER 25
Saturday began with a jerk and the clarity of knowledge that bursts to the forefront of the mind like a bubble. There was another source of information about interacting with the poltergeist. As soon as I had completed my morning routine, I made a phone call and arranged another meeting. Then I drove to the Danzigers' for breakfast.
I met Ben on the sidewalk. He was loping toward the little rose-covered arch that marked his front steps and waved to me, jogging to catch up.
"Hi," he panted. "Look what I got." He held up a large glass container that looked like a giant, old-fashioned lightbulb with a bit more neck. In his other hand he had a manila envelope.
"What is that?" I asked.
"It's an alembic. It's a distilling flask, effectively. Heatproof glass. One of the chemistry professors lives nearby and he gave it to me. It's got a chip in the top, so its not any good to him anymore—once they're chipped they tend to break or become unsterile. So I'm going to try an experiment with it and see if we can't make a genie-bottle for you."
Enlightenment at last. "Ah. Mara told you."
"Yeah," he replied, starting up the steps to the porch. I followed him. "She woke me up when she came to bed and I was thinking about it, so I called this guy and asked if he had anything like what you needed. Well, he didn't exactly, but he had this and he told me how to get a reflective coating on it—you want the reflective side pointing in, right?" he added, opening the front door.
I started to answer, but was interrupted by a squeal of laughter. While it was an improvement on some of the recent greetings from Brian, I still looked around the door with care before entering. There was no sign of the boy in the hall.
Ben took his prize into the kitchen.
Mara was lifting a waffle onto Brian's plate and waggling it on the fork so it flapped like a butterfly. Her son squealed again and raised his hands to snatch the waffle. Mara kept it just out of reach.
"Greedy. And what should you be sayin'?"
"Puh-leeeese?"
"That's better." She put the waffle on the plate with a scoop of chunky applesauce and a strip of bacon. Brian snarfed the bacon in three quick bites and washed it down with gulps of milk.
Mara noticed Ben and me in the doorway.
"Ah, is that it, then?"
Ben waved the alembic. "Yup." He held up the envelope. "John gave me some reflective coating film to put on the outside, too." He looked at me. "It won't be a beautiful job, but it should do the trick."
"Are you sure?" I asked.
"Well, the theory's sound."
Mara huffed. "Oh, sit yourselves down before you start going on and have some brekkie, or we'll be eatin' burned waffles with our soft-boiled theory."
Ben sat at the end of the table farthest from Brian and set the alembic's neck upside down in his milk glass, so it looked like a giant glass dandelion puff.
"Sarnies?" Mara asked.
"What?" I asked.
"Sandwiches," Ben answered. "In this case, bacon in waffles so you can eat the whole thing with one hand. Yes, please," he added to his wife. Receiving his sarnie, he tinkered with the flask with one hand and talked between bites.
"See," he said, "this container should work if I can get this tint material on flat. The glass could be thicker, but this should do for a while. The material is more like ceramic, really, even though it's clear, so it's very dense. The Grey energy moves through it pretty slowly and the reflective surface should stop the ghost from getting out once it's in."
"How does it get in in the first place?" I asked, managing bacon and waffle between sips of coffee.
"This is the good part. The reflective tint takes advantage of the reflective nature and density of the glass surface, so it's highly reflective in one direction and only a bit dark in the other. It's the same kind of thing they use on car windows. A form of Mylar, but very thin with some sticky stuff on the reflective side. Once it's in place, you can look in but whatever's in the flask will just see reflection and shadow. Um… what was I saying?"
"How the genie gets in t
he bottle," I reminded him.
"Oh, yeah. Well, it has two options—it can enter through the material itself, though that would be very slow, or it can go in through the opening at the neck. You just sort of scoop it up. If you face the opening toward the poltergeist and get part of it to go in, the whole thing should be drawn into the container by the conductivity of the reflective surface. Once inside, it'll be momentarily confused by the reflection. Then you stopper the bottle with something nice and dense, like rubber—which I happen to have in the envelope, thanks to John Burke—and the ghost is stuck in the vessel, since it can't disperse through the reflective surface or through the density of the material itself. If you can corner it in some dense place—somewhere there is no history, no time fragments for it to slip away on—then it will have no option but to head for you and the ghost trap. The tricky thing is going to be getting it cornered in such a place."
"Yeah, that's going to be the tricky part," I agreed with no small irony. First I'd have to stalk the wretched thing.
Mara snorted a laugh and went back to her own food. I watched Ben lay strips of reflective tint as thin as spider silk onto the glass and smooth them into place with a tongue depressor.
Brian crowed for more food and bounced in his seat.
"Oh… blast," Ben swore, wrinkling a strip of the tint. He removed it with a single-edged razor blade and for a moment I wondered where it had come from, since I couldn't imagine anyone actually shaving with one.
I turned my attention to Mara and Brian—who wore more of his breakfast than he ate, since he insisted on raising his spoon as high as possible before pouring its load of waffles and applesauce toward his mouth. I counted us all lucky his arms weren't longer.
As we observed the spectacle, I asked, "Do kids have some kind of touch with the Grey that adults don't?"
They both paused before answering. Ben looked a bit curious, while Mara seemed mildly surprised.
"But of course they do," Mara said. She glanced at Ben.
He nodded, looking back to the flask. "Definitely. Children's perceptions of the world are different than those of adults. We know that they don't have certain types of brain structures, hormones, physical and mental developments, and so on before certain ages."
"Babies don't develop depth perception until five months and more, and who knows what's going on while they learn to coordinate their eyes with their minds?" Mara added, trying to wipe her offspring down a bit. "Stop wigglin'! Are you a boy or a worm?"
"Worm!"
She raised her eyebrows. "Are ya now? Shall I put you out in the garden? Would you like a nice bit of dirt for lunch? We've some lovely fish guts for ya. Da and I shall have the fish."
"Blech!" Brian shouted.
"All right, then, boy. Sit you still while I find your face under here…" Brian squinched his eyes and pursed his mouth while his mother wiped his face clean. She took advantage of the momentary lull to talk. "Yes, children seem to see the Grey things a bit more easily than most adults."
"The theory," Ben said, "is that perception of the Grey is caused by the lack of a certain filter in the brain. The filter is something you develop partially by nature and partially by enculturation. Most people could see more if they weren't so thoroughly enculturated to ignore certain things. We learn to focus and to tune things out because our modern society offers too many stimuli for the human brain to sort efficiently otherwise. One of the first things we learn to stop seeing is the things others tell us we can't see. It takes a pretty stubborn mind— or one with a faulty filter—to persist in seeing things the rest of the world says aren't there. Now, my personal theory is that there's some other brain structure as yet unrecognized that determines the 'depth'— so to speak—of the Grey filter or if you have it at all. You see, that would explain why someone like me still can't see the Grey, even though I've been dismantling the culturally emplaced filters for years. Most people are literally Grey-blind, just as some are color-blind."
Finishing with her son, Mara offered him a bit of plain waffle. "But there are as many theories as there are stars," she warned. "Some'll say it's an early contact with the Grey that keeps your mind open to it. Others that it's passed down by heredity or teaching. Or it's something you catch, like a dose of measles, or build up from contact, like fluoride in the water. You could be after arguing for any of them or all of them. But children do seem to have an affinity for it that adults often lack. And why are you askin'?"
I sipped coffee for a moment. "I couldn't get the hang of moving around to track the thread in the Grey. The whole layers-of-time thing didn't make sense to me," I explained. "I tried asking Carlos about it."
Mara looked startled and stared at me, for a moment distracted from Brian. "Carlos? Why would you be going to him?"
"Because he has retrocognition—he can look at the past—and I thought he might see the Grey more like I do and know something more about time."
"Did he?" she asked.
"A little, though he made it clear I was wrong about any similarity in our perceptions of the Grey. He kind of gave me the creeps about it."
"More than usual?"
I remembered his hungry look and shivered. "Yeah." I shook it off. "Anyhow. I was thinking that I must just be doing it wrong and I needed some idea how. The children of one of the séance members play with the poltergeist. Like Brian seems to play with Albert. So it has to be easier than what I was doing. Or at least it has to be something a child can do. I'm going to talk to the kids' mother."
"Right now?"
"As soon as we're done here. But that brings us back to genies in bottles."
"Oh, yes. The ghost-catcher," Mara replied. "How is it?" A glob of sticky apple splattered onto her shoulder. "Oh, Brian!"
Brian's eyes got very large. "Uh-oh." He wriggled down to the floor and bolted for the hall.
Mara growled and closed her eyes. "Do you suppose he's a changeling? Because if so, I'd like a try at having him changed back. I'd walk through Galway and broken glass mother-naked if it would buy me a quiet week."
"You could just give him more whiskey," I suggested.
"Never again," she moaned, getting up to chase after him.
"You can't just… cast a spell on him to be quiet and come back?"
" 'Twouldn't be a good idea. Abuse of power and all—not to mention the side effects. I'll catch him the old-fashioned way. With guile and cunning."
She laughed, then snuck out of the room on silent feet. I turned to look at Ben. He was grinning.
"I suspect she does use a little magic," Ben said. "She's so much better with him than I am."
"You're not too bad."
He laughed. "Praising with faint damns. Anyhow. How do you like it?"
He held up the glass vessel. Most of the lower bulb was now covered in a thin, dark blue coating that raised a rainbow sheen. If I peered at it through the Grey, the covered part looked black and solid. In the normal world, I could just see through it if I squinted a bit and got my head at the right angle.
"It's great," I said, a little surprised at how good it was.
Ben smiled. "Thanks. I'm not much good at arts and crafts, so I hope I've done it right. I'll finish up the neck and you can have it."
I raised my coffee cup. "I hope it works."
Ben's laugh was a bit rueful this time. "You're not the only one." He concentrated on his work as he continued, keeping his eyes down. "I hope this is a better guess than the last time."
My heart sank at the memory of how badly I'd misjudged things on my first Grey outing, and I could almost smell the reek of burning again. I was still carrying reminders in the knot of Grey implanted in my chest and the magical resistance that kept me from speaking of certain things.
"There is no fault on your part," I said. "What went wrong at the museum was my fault—just mine. How many times have I said so? Do I need to speak another language to make you believe that? Quick crash course in Russian—teach me how to say 'mea culpa' and we can stop th
ere."
He frowned at me. "Why?"
I couldn't say. The words would not come out, corked up with guilt and magical compulsion. I just shook my head and felt heavy. "It's not you," I muttered.
Ben finished the bottle in silence, slipped the black rubber stopper into the neck, and handed the whole thing to me. We could hear Mara and Brian coming back along the hall, the floorboards singing with their steps.
"Be careful with it."
I took it with both hands. "I will." Then I smiled at him—a big, fat, footlights-to-second-balcony grin. "It'll be fine. Thanks."
I made my good-byes to Mara in the hall, thanking her for breakfast and avoiding another shin-ramming by Brian with a quick slide to the door.
"Bye-bye, rhino-boy!" I called as I slipped out.
"Graah!" roared Brian. Then I heard him laughing as the door closed between us.
Brian was starting to grow on me and I wondered if I would start to like children by the end of the day, since I was spending so much time with them.
Patricia wasn't thrilled to see me again. I kept intruding on her Saturdays—which she was quick to inform me were the only time she saw her husband.
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Railsback," I said as she let me into the play yard once again. "You do understand, though, that the poltergeist will continue to hurt you and others until it's broken down. Dr. Tuckman called you about that, right?"
She nodded.
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