Thirdly (the other reasons were one and two, right?), I was effectively putting myself out there and trying to find ghosts. Or, to put it another way, hunting them. And if ghosts weren’t happy about being hunted over the centuries, they mightn’t like someone trying it on a less material plane, either.
Three ways that my idea was a bust – and I’d been pretending that it’d be otherwise.
I opened my eyes, ready to confess, and saw that Rani had her sword in her hands.
‘I hope that’s not because you’re mad at me,’ I said.
‘It’s not always about you, Anton.’ She was scanning the room intently. ‘Something’s close. Something bad.’
Then I felt it, a scratchy pressure on my skin, and my pendant started to hum.
Slowly, I got to my feet and did my best to mirror Rani’s wariness, while feeling just a little bit sick and more than a little bit responsible.
I mightn’t have had any luck finding access to a ghost network, but had someone used my stupid efforts to find access to me?
Something pushed straight through the wall.
Rani had her back to where a Rogue was emerging, a bald-headed guy, huge beard/moustache combo, dark suit – but at my strategic gibbering and pointing, she whirled and then it was all action. As the Rogue came out of the wall, Rani chopped. The thing didn’t back off, though – he just kept coming and getting his limbs lopped off slice by slice. Finally he stumbled over the bloodless ghost pieces that were accumulating on the floor in front of him and went sprawling. Rani dispatched him with some extra rapid slashing.
She immediately went back to scanning the room. ‘Are you okay?’
I had a book in my hands. It was the most dangerous thing I was able to grab at short notice. ‘I’m fine. Another Rogue. This whole thing has gone big time.’
‘What—’ Rani gasped, and clamped down on a cry.
Another Rogue had pushed through the door – a female this time, hair piled on top of her head and a long, dark dress, lace-collared – and had flowed into Rani’s extended sword arm.
Rani backed off, hissing, and her sword clattered to the floor. Her arm hung nervelessly at her side.
Our time sense goes whacko in stress situations. I knew that, but it was still weird the way everything slowed down. Slowly, Rani twisted away from the door and the emerging Rogue. Slowly, the Rogue drifted through the door and turned towards her. Slowly, Rani reached behind her and pulled a long dagger from where it must have been hidden in her belt. Slowly, she backed away, her right arm dangling, trying to avoid being trapped in the corner while shooting me a slow glance and calling my name so slowly that it stretched – ‘Antonnnnnnnnnn’.
The world sped up. Asking for forgiveness from the library gods, I launched the book I held at the Rogue. It hit her right on the back of the neck.
Rani slipped sideways and slashed at the Rogue with her dagger. I darted forward, behind the ghost’s back, and scooped up Rani’s sword. ‘Catch!’
It wasn’t a great throw. The sword tumbled, looped a bit, and fell a metre or so short. I thought I’d messed up enough to kill her.
Rani made it look good. She dropped her dagger, slid a foot forward, bent, and caught the hilt of the sword in her left hand.
She kept the action going, sliding forward and to one side of the groping Rogue, until she was off to the ghost’s left instead of being caught in front of it. With two slashes, the Rogue was driven back and now she was the one trapped in the corner of the room.
Rani’s right arm was still useless, but the way she wielded the sword made it look as if she was naturally left-handed. The Rogue slavered and tried to attack, but Rani was remorseless. The Rogue was a pile of pieces pronto and I was the one who was left panting. Rani wasn’t breathing hard at all.
She reached up and activated the release to the bookshelf door. It swung open. She waited a moment with her sword held at the ready before she stepped through.
Rani stalked through the shop and I nearly felt sorry for any ghosts who might have been waiting for her. The place was quiet, though, and finally we reached the front room.
Standing at the window, with her hands pressed against the glass, was Stacey Evans.
This wasn’t the happy mum of the photograph. This was someone who’d been transformed, changed by trauma. She wore a rumpled and creased trench coat, roughly tied around her waist with a mismatched belt. Her hair was tangled and wild.
She shrieked when she saw us, but with fury, not fear. She flung her head back, baring her teeth, and howled like an animal. She pounded once on the glass with a hand, and in that second I saw that all her fingernails were ragged and broken.
Then she staggered away, stiff-legged and awful.
Rani was at the door in an instant, but she swore as soon as she got there. ‘Key?’
‘Oh. Right.’
We’d come in through the back door. I’d left the front door deadlocked while I was running the busted séance, waiting for opening time.
I plucked the key from the pocket of my jeans, but by the time we had the door open, Stacey Evans was long gone.
The morning was chill, with a breeze that had made High Street its own, but I don’t think that was what made me shiver. An early tram rumbled past and whipped up enough grit and dust to make me squint. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘so we’re targets of a possibly insane phasmaturgist who can summon Rogues to do her dirty work.’ I blinked. ‘You sheathed your sword left-handed. How did you do that?’
Rani ignored my question. She was gazing down the street towards the city, and she was rubbing her right arm. ‘And don’t forget that she’s already murdered one person. She won’t feel any qualms about murdering again.’
‘Come on. Let’s see to your arm.’
I filled the sink in the kitchen with warm water. Rani stripped off her jacket.
‘How’s it feeling?’ I asked while I bathed her arm.
‘Like the worst case of pins and needles in the universe.’
‘That’s good. If you can wiggle your fingers that means there’s some feeling there, at least.’
She glared at me. ‘Don’t tell me what I already know, Anton. I’ve had battle training.’ Her fingers moved minutely. ‘I couldn’t do that a few minutes ago.’
‘That’s a relief.’
‘The way she flowed into me. I’ve never heard of that sort of thing happening before.’
‘Nor me, but that’s about the fourth “I’ve never heard of that before” that’s hit us on the head in the last few days.’
Offering what first aid I could like this, it struck me that this was what I was in, right up to my neck. Supernatural encounters, dangerous – possibly lethal – confrontations, night after night with not much reward. Just to make the outlook even less inviting, I was learning that there were a whole lot of others around the place who appeared to know much more about the business than I did – and they were definitely much better suited to it.
‘We need to know more,’ Rani said, nursing her arm. ‘Otherwise we’re going to continue to be taken by surprise.’
‘That makes good sense.’ I stared at the ceiling. ‘And I think I know who can help us there.’
Dad arrived just after nine, and he was really, really upset by what had happened. Part of it was my stupidity at trying a séance – or ‘dangerous mumbo jumbo’ as he called it – but most of it was about the Rogue attack. He was distressed, too, at Rani’s injury, even though she’d regained most of the movement in her arm by the time he walked in. It ached badly, though, even after she’d dosed up on Panadol.
‘Tanja knew more about this sort of thing,’ Dad said as he gently probed Rani’s arm. They were sitting at the kitchen table while I wandered helplessly, having reached the end of my input when I got Rani a glass of water to wash down the painkillers.
She winced as his fingers explored the site the ghost had injured. A patch between her elbow and wrist was mottled with dark bruising, as if she’d been struck by a couple of hundred
ball bearings. ‘Tanja was going to write a treatise on it before she disappeared,’ Dad added.
I know, another woman vanished from the Marin environs. What’s that say about us, right? With Aunt Tanja, though, it had been the result of an experiment in ghost interaction. After the way Mum left, a while after Carl died, it was the third blow that hit Dad hard.
He still hasn’t recovered.
‘Did she tell you anything about this?’ Rani gritted her teeth.
‘Not really,’ Dad said, ‘except that ghosts recoil from passing through living flesh. It causes them great pain.’
‘It didn’t seem to hurt this bugger,’ I said. ‘I think she did it deliberately, as a tactic.’
‘That would be unusual,’ Dad said. ‘Nothing in my rapid catching-up on the subject suggests that Rogues use anything like tactics.’
‘I think we know where the tactics were coming from.’ Rani’s words were clipped. ‘Stacey Evans.’
Dad finished his probing, then gently patted Rani’s shoulder. ‘I think you’ll recover,’ he said. ‘I can get you a sling from the chemist’s, if you like.’
Rani made a fist, clenched it, and shook her head. ‘No need, thanks.’
And that’s when the doorbell rang. I jumped, then charged to the front room in time to see Bec hurry in, grinning, wearing a ‘Say “NO!” to Phasmaturgy’ T-shirt.
‘Rani’s been hurt,’ I said, and all smugness disappeared from Bec’s face. ‘She’s in the kitchen.’
After a fair bit of backwards and forwardsing between Bec and Rani, which seemed to include far too many glances at Dad and me as representatives of something or other that was probably to blame, Bec summoned us over.
‘I’ve found something useful about our Stacey Evans.’
‘Our insane murderer Stacey Evans,’ I added.
‘Our wretched grieving Stacey Evans,’ Bec corrected. ‘I went back over newspapers, court proceedings, and I found that she has a Facebook page, full of tributes. You know, she only suffered minor injuries in the car crash that wiped out the rest of her family, but she hurt a number of people who were first on the scene.’
‘What? How?’
‘She didn’t want to be taken away from the wreck. She struggled, lashed out, broke a police officer’s nose, even.’
‘Grief, pain, loss,’ Rani said. ‘It can undo anyone.’
‘She was in hospital for some time, under sedation,’ Bec said, ‘but she went to pieces again at the funeral. She was confined after that and only got herself together for the inquest.’
‘How did the car crash?’ Dad asked. ‘Was she driving?’
Bec shook her head. ‘Her husband was driving. At the inquest, some witnesses thought that a truck clipped the car and sent it off the road, but in the court case that followed, the truck driver was cleared.’
‘Having no one to blame for a tragedy is a hard thing,’ Dad said.
‘Oh, she found someone to blame,’ Bec said. ‘She made a real scene in the court, pointing the finger at the barrister, the police, the truck driver, even the judge. She had to be restrained and sedated all over again.’
‘What a mess,’ I said.
‘She went back into hospital,’ Bec said, ‘but she disappeared two weeks later. That was a month ago.’
I did some figuring. I kept my hands below the table so no one would notice me counting on my fingers, but I think Rani saw. ‘We have a gap between then and Grender’s death. I guess that gave her time to get the hang of this phasmaturgy.’
‘It looks so,’ Dad said. ‘Although I can’t imagine where she would have learned such a thing.’
‘Come on, Dad, Grender was a mercenary. He would have known enough to get her started, at least, and he could probably have pointed her in the right direction, put her in touch with people…’ I stopped. ‘That’s why he was murdered, so he couldn’t identify her.’
‘Huh,’ Dad said. ‘Grender was no good, but no one deserves that sort of end.’
Rani pointed at me. ‘And you were nearly killed by that Rogue at Yarra Bend because she thought he’d be there, checking out that tip. But what’s she after?’
Bec tapped her eye with a fingernail. The clicking noise was her guaranteed attention-getter. ‘Revenge.’ She took some sheets from her pack and spread them on the table in front of us. Newspaper articles, complete with pics. ‘Last week – that’s before Grender was killed, kiddies – a barrister was attacked in his home by – get this – “an unseen assailant”.’
‘Not “an unknown assailant”?’ Dad asked.
‘Nope. “Unseen”.’
‘Now,’ I said, ‘I’m guessing that this barrister was the same one who represented the truck driver?’
‘You got it in one,’ Bec said.
‘But he survived,’ Rani said. ‘How?’
‘It’s hard to tell from the articles, but it looks like he ran away.’ ‘The Holy Grail method,’ I murmured.
‘That only works with rabbits,’ Rani murmured back.
Dad made an impatient gesture, a sort of air karate chop. ‘Let Rebecca finish.’
‘Thanks, Leon. This barrister guy is a serious runner. He’d been out for a late jog when this “assailant” apparently nearly tore off his ear. The barrister guy just turned and ran.’
‘And there’s something else?’ Rani asked.
‘You bet. Police are looking for a potential witness, a tall, curly-haired woman who the barrister saw just outside his flat.’
‘Tall and curly-haired, just like our photo of Stacey Evans,’ Rani said.
‘Close enough for us to get suspicious,’ Bec said.
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘look at the date. This has to be early, maybe her first attempt? Maybe she didn’t have the knack yet. Maybe she couldn’t spring a trap. Maybe she couldn’t control Rogues very well at this rookie stage of her career.’
Rani sat back in her chair. ‘You know that this means we aren’t really her targets.’
‘We’re just getting in the way,’ I said.
‘So it would seem,’ Dad said. ‘But that doesn’t make her any less dangerous.’
‘This could give us an idea of her plans, though,’ Rani said. ‘Bec, who else did you say she blamed?’
‘Whiteboard time,’ I suggested.
That’s how the ‘Specials’ whiteboard from the bookshop became an Investigation Whiteboard. I wheeled it back to the kitchen and soon I was standing in front of it after having written ‘Judge’, ‘Police’, ‘Barrister’ and ‘Truck Driver’.
‘Add “witnesses”,’ Rani suggested, and I did.
‘Can you find out more about these people?’ Dad asked Bec.
‘A bit,’ Bec said. She shrugged. ‘I’ll do what I can.’
‘Can you get the address of the barrister, the one who got attacked?’ I asked her.
‘I can get the street, at least.’
‘That’s a start. We could have a look around later, see if we can sniff out anything.’
Rani raised an eyebrow. ‘We?’
‘Your arm is better, I hope?’
She lifted her arm and flexed it. ‘Good as new.’
‘Sleep will help,’ I said. ‘Then we can chase up this barrister.’
‘I was just about to suggest that.’
Dad and Bec had been watching this carefully. Bec with amusement, Dad with some puzzlement. ‘We’ll leave you two, then,’ he said. ‘We’ll plough ahead with this information revolution. You’ll mind the shop until midday, Anton?’
‘I’ll let you know before I head off.’
Dad and Bec left for the secret room, arguing about Rogues as they went.
Rani toyed with her empty mug. ‘I suppose I should go. I’ll pop in and remind Mum and Dad who I am.’
‘They’re at home?’
‘If they’re not, I’ll leave a note.’
‘You don’t have to go. I mean, if you don’t want to. You’re welcome to hang around here.’
‘There’s ple
nty to read, at least.’
‘Help yourself. Be my guest. Take whatever you want.’
‘That’s kind.’ She stretched and yawned. ‘But I really think I should visit home.’
‘Do you think you’ll be safe?’
She raised an eyebrow again. ‘Without you, are you saying?’
‘I was talking in the most general and sincere way.’
‘Think of it the other way around. Are you safe here without me?’
‘Good point. You’d better stay.’
She laughed. ‘Text me if you need me.’
As soon as she left, I realised I wasn’t joking. I did feel less safe without her.
CHAPTER 16
I camped out in the front of the shop, yawning and trying to make sense of some of Aunt Tanja’s notes that Bec had just found. Just before midday, a woman opened the door and came straight to the counter, which was unusual. Usually people browse first, then front up. Bookshop, after all.
I took one look at her and I knew she was famous – even if I didn’t know who she was. I’d seen her face somewhere public – billboard, TV, Twitter, Facebook, maybe. Whatever, she had style, from the way her orange scarf was arranged around her neck to the way she pushed her sunglasses up and they stayed there without messing up her hair. Famous style. Celebrity style. Look-at-me style.
‘Nineteen-forties film stars,’ she said.
I handled this query with so much cool. ‘Nineteen-forties stilm fars?’
‘Film stars,’ she repeated slowly.
‘Of the nineteen-forties, got it,’ I said. ‘A terrific decade. One of my favourites, all ten years of it. As long as you overlook the war, which was bad. Really bad. Inspired a few good films, though.’
She waited and when I didn’t add anything else, she sighed. ‘And do you have any books about the stars of the forties?’
‘Books? Yeah. Hah, hah! We’re a bookshop!’
Things went downhill after that.
She did end up buying three books she found without my help, so it wasn’t total loss. She eyed me warily when she came to pay, and I was able to stop her bolting out by the simple but effective means of not saying anything at all and conducting the sale via mime.
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