Black Wave
Page 25
“They’re perfect now,” she said as she scanned the horizon for birds. It wasn’t peak season for raptors, she knew, but if she looked hard enough, she hoped she would catch a few stragglers hopping in and out of the trees.
Just when Emily had counted her fifth gull—not exactly an exotic bird at the beach—she hit the avian jackpot. Clinging to a twisted, naked branch at the top of an evergreen was what looked like a black-and-tan cardinal. “Do you see that?” Emily asked, gently nudging Elerick. “He’s a fancy boy.”
Elerick turned his binoculars to where Emily was facing. To Emily’s surprise, he reached into his pocket and pulled out an illustrated guide for identifying different types of birds. The cover read Sibley Field Guide to Birds: Eastern North America. “It has a black mask, a crest on top, and pointed wing tips,” he said as he thumbed through the pages. “It’s a cedar waxwing.”
“Good day to you, Mr. Waxwing!” Emily exclaimed, lifting her binoculars for a second look.
Elerick set his book down and picked up his binoculars as well. “He does look pleased with himself. He’s like a cardinal’s rich cousin,” he said. “Do you see these birds around here often?”
“Not really,” Emily said. “I think my mother must have ordered this one from a catalog to match her new couches.”
Elerick laughed. He stuffed the narrow book back into his pocket and put his arm around Emily’s shoulders. “You’re fun.”
“I’m glad you can admit that,” Emily replied, nudging him with her elbow.
“I’m sorry for what happened in the spa the other day,” Elerick said. “I just wanted to spend some time with you, and things got way out of hand.”
Emily blinked. She thought he might apologize for overreacting to Wheels. “I was the one who couldn’t keep my sheet on,” she said. She hugged her knees to her chest and looked at the horizon.
“I think the massage I gave you might have changed your energy levels enough to loosen your inhibitions.”
“What are you talking about?” Emily thought about how she had felt that day on the massage table. The massage loosened something in her all right, but it wasn’t her moral standards—it was the bitterness she’d been feeling ever since her college acceptance was rescinded.
Then, almost as suddenly as the thought came, Emily thought of something else: “Elerick, I took drugs.”
“What kind of drugs?”
“An old guy at the haunted happy hour paid me for his reading with a mystery pill. I didn’t take it at the happy hour because I wanted to drink, so I kept it in my pocket and put it in my pillbox when I got home. One of the aspirin tablets you gave me that morning looked wrong. I think I took the mystery pill instead.”
“I gave you a mystery pill?” Elerick looked at her with alarm. “I thought it was aspirin. The rest were definitely aspirin.” He furrowed his brow. “Why didn’t you ask the guy what the pill was?”
“I don’t know. It was the ghost who suggested it, and the man said it wasn’t heart medication or anything serious like that.” Emily’s voice faltered. Even to a fellow psychic, she could tell that this explanation sounded crazy. “What do you think it was? Viagra? Ecstasy? Maybe I was under the influence.”
“What if it was a roofie?”
“Then I would have passed out before I even made it to the spa.”
Without saying a word, Elerick whipped his phone from his pocket and pulled up the search bar.
“I thought you were a Luddite now.”
“I’m not a fundamentalist. Now describe the pill to me in as much detail as you can.”
“Well, it was white—off-white maybe—and round and flat. It had letters on it.”
“What were the letters?” Elerick typed her description into the search engine as she told him. When the results came up, he kissed Emily on the lips with a force that made her gasp for air.
“What is it?”
“It’s a placebo,” he said with relief. “From some clinical trial.” He returned his phone to his pocket.
“So I’m not a drug fiend?”
“No. And I’m not an energy rapist?”
“No.”
“So what just happened here?”
The truth was simpler, and a lot less sinister. “I think we had a good time,” Emily said. “I like you.”
Elerick kissed her gently on the lips in response. “And I like you.”
They hugged. It wasn’t every day that two people liked each other the same amount at the same time. Emily might have been young, but she knew that much was true.
But she still didn’t understand why the old man had given her a placebo instead of a real drug. “He told me he would’ve had a good time with the pill at my age. What do you think he meant by that?”
“Well, what did you hope the pill would do?”
Emily leaned back and rested her head on the sand. She looked up at the blank canvas of a cloudless sky. “I wanted it to make me fly, so I could leave and come back whenever I wanted.”
“How would you do it? Fly, I mean. Would you flap your arms like wings? Or just stick out one arm like Superman?” Elerick smiled down at her. “I have to ask this. For medical research. It’s part of the clinical trial, you see.”
“Got it.” Emily stopped to think. “I would have to get a running start, but if I caught the wind just right, my body would unfurl like a kite.”
“That sounds beautiful. We could put ribbons on your feet.”
“And instead of airline points, I would get college credit for every mile I travel.”
“That’s a pretty generous rewards program. You would graduate before you even left New Jersey.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to do all along.” She was starting to feel better. The old man was right—when it came to prescription medication, the imagined side effects were probably better than the real ones.
“College is supposed to be a short part of your journey, anyway,” Elerick said, patting Emily on the stomach.
Emily reached up to scratch Elerick’s back in return, and as she did, she felt his phone buzzing in his pocket. “Want to get that?”
“No,” he said, ignoring the follow-up buzz about the unchecked message.
“What if it’s your aunt or something?”
Elerick fumbled in his pocket for his phone. His lips moved as he read the message on his screen. “Who is Wheels?” he asked, passing his phone to Emily.
“Wheels is the guy I was talking to yesterday when you freaked out on me. Or was the guy, I should say. He’s dead.” She read the message.
Wheels: She already told me she likes you, bro. Stop rubbing it in my face.
“What the hell does this mean?”
There was a picture attached. Emily felt her throat close when she saw what it showed: Elerick standing over Emily at her computer, kissing the top of her head. It was taken with her own webcam just moments before she started talking to Wheels. Behind them was an orb. “I didn’t take this,” Emily said to Elerick.
“Then who did?” Elerick tapped the screen to add the filter. The ghost’s face was distorted, but there was no mistaking the shape of a hand reaching around Emily’s back to use the keypad. The Gray Man had entered her room unannounced and then left without being seen. “That’s impossible,” Elerick said. “I’ve never seen a ghost use a computer like that.”
“I have,” Emily said warily. “Wheels said he could type over the auto-correct. I didn’t think he meant that literally.” Staring once more at the picture, it unnerved Emily to see her natural slouch, her blank expression, her messy hair. Elerick’s eyebrows were raised, his lips puckered against her head. This is what they looked like when no one was looking. Only someone was looking. “We need to report this.”
The hotel office was separated from the front desk by a solid oak door. Emily led Elerick a
round the counter and used her key to open it. Inside, Sadie was sitting in an office chair and laughing at the screen.
“What are you doing over here?” Emily asked, her mood lightening at the sight of Sadie swiveling precariously in her seat, not really caring that she was about to topple over.
“After Lorelei manipulated the theater promo, some of the Orbies users thought they had witnessed a miracle,” Sadie said. “I told them that it was just the ghost filter. I thought everybody would be mad that they weren’t seeing an actual saint, but they didn’t care. Lorelei directed another film, and it is amazing. You guys should take a look.”
Emily and Elerick leaned in to look at the screen. All they could see were orbs, but the orbs were shrunk down to the size of pixels and clustered in shapes ranging in complexity on a scale of Christmas light patterns to Seurat paintings. Finally, they drew together at the center of the screen to form a beautiful face with bright eyes and long lashes, an upturned nose, and lips curved like Cupid’s bow. The ghost filter alone could not have created this much detail. Emily wondered how many spirits Lorelei must have recruited to make the patterns, and what strange positions they must have held to be able to do it. “I’ve got to hand it to you, Lorelei,” Emily said. “You figured out how to work the system.”
Lorelei extracted herself from her community just long enough to accept Emily’s praise. “Technology may change, but artists will always find a way to make art,” Lorelei wrote in curly quotes, and then disappeared into the screen.
Emily looked at the film credits: someone named Clark Cummings had helped with the special effects.
“Hey, guys, this is awesome, but I need to show Emily something,” Sadie said seriously. “You should see it, too, Elerick.”
Elerick put his hand on Emily’s shoulder. There was a feedback tab on the homepage that beta testers could click on to make suggestions on how to make the site better. “Most of them so far are from this guy EDGAR, all caps,” said Sadie. “At first, the suggestions were just nitpicky things about the size of the buttons, but lately, his requests have gotten a little creepy.”
She opened up the most recent:
EDGAR: Geo-location tagging on Emily that tracks her current location and her most frequent locations. Mark them all as Hot Spots, and alert users when Emily is entering one of them.
Sadie made a face. “OK, creepy stalker. That’s enough of that. How do we block him?”
“You can flag the post, but honestly, I might just hit up one of my old coworkers and see if he’ll deal with it directly.” Elerick logged in to Skype and dialed one of his former colleagues who worked on the West Coast.
“Orbies. This is Alex speaking.”
“I thought this was Arun’s number. Sorry. Is he there?”
“Nah, he quit about a month ago. I inherited his Skype account. Can I help you with something?”
“Ask him if he’s Alex the Orb,” Emily whispered.
Elerick waved away the question. “I wanted to report a stalker who goes by the handle EDGAR. All caps. He just requested a geolocation tool for following my girl…my new employer’s daughter. Emily.”
The word he was about to say did not escape Emily’s notice, and she felt warm despite the nature of the phone call.
“He’s probably just making a joke,” Alex said. “Even if he’s serious, it’s a big compliment. She’s got a Super Fan!”
Elerick was not having it. “Marketing speak cannot hide the fact that this guy is a creep.”
Emily agreed that Alex did seem a little too excited about the prospect of giving away her location to an anonymous user. Maybe Elerick hadn’t been clear enough about how frequent and disturbing his requests had been. Not to mention the more obvious fact that Emily had already been explicitly warned against talking to Edgar.
“He’s crossed the line,” Elerick continued. “Emily’s phone never stops beeping, and even I got a threatening text today. The whole geolocation thing is a huge invasion of privacy. I mean, we don’t know who most of these people are—they could be ghosts or they could just be perverts who might actually drive out here and try to find her.”
“The chances of a cyber-stalker actually trying to track Emily down in real life are pretty minimal,” Alex scoffed. “Come on.”
“Dude!” Elerick said. “We don’t need to wait until Emily is murdered to see if the creepy guy is kidding or not. Just block him. You have plenty of other users.”
Alex gave in. “All right, all right, I’ll do it. I’ll log in to the user database to find EDGAR and any other aliases he’s set up. Hold on, this is weird,” he said as keys clacked on the far end of the phone. And then, “Oh, this is bad.”
“What’s bad?” Elerick pressed. He, Emily, and Sadie crowded around the screen to look at the site from the front end while they talked to Alex. He looked up EDGAR in the search bar. A group page appeared with a member count that was already in the thousands. In the center of the page was a map—a very detailed street-view map—of Cape May. A tiny, blinking lighthouse icon appeared right on top of the Black Wave. Below the map, a message appeared.
Emily’s Current Location: Black Wave, Office
The three friends watched the screen as thousands of orbs appeared to flow through the streets toward the gleaming beacon.
“Whoever this EDGAR person is, he’s made a tracking device using our developer tools,” Alex said. “I had no idea people would use an API for something like this.”
Emily thought she caught a shadow, but when she turned to face it, it was gone. “I can feel people here, but I can’t see them,” she said. “What do you want?” She thought of all the sitters she had seen in her dream. No wonder there were so many of them—they had found her through Orbies.
She ran to the door and opened it just wide enough to be able to peer into the lobby. At the counter, a crowd had formed. Others waited on the lobby couches, shivering and zipping up their coats. Burt worked his way to the front desk, adjusting the thermostat in the lobby before approaching the counter to address the customers.
“My room is freezing,” Emily heard a woman say. She closed the door and returned to the computer. A new message had appeared on the screen. It was from Lorelei.
“She sent us another video,” Sadie said. She leaned back to let Elerick forward it to Alex before clicking on the Play button.
Emily recognized the video immediately. It was a seven-second clip of her parents’ video tour of the gift shop that they had made for the inn’s new website. Once again, Lorelei had modified the contents. Inside the shop, tiny balls of light were glowing on the shelves of the white armoire that normally held the bath products. Outside the window, long stalks of flowers were waving in the sun. The flowers, of course, were made of hundreds of orbs. The video clip repeated itself, again and again, on a loop.
“Someday I’ll get that ghost filter up to your standards, Lorelei,” Alex promised. “Then you won’t have to do all that work.”
“I hate to break it to you, but only the Orbiters use the filter,” Lorelei said, crashing her own video in a live appearance on the screen. “The orbs don’t bother with it.”
“Why on earth not?” Alex said, stunned. “I thought you said you wanted people to see your face.”
“This is my face now,” Lorelei argued, and her orb bobbed in front of them on the screen. “This is who I really am—and you and everyone in the world; when you take off the filter, we’re nothing but glowing balls of light.”
Elerick didn’t quite know what Lorelei meant, but he knew just where to find the answers. He recognized the flowers from the video as larkspur—the scent that had connected Emily to the girl in his dream—and he knew he’d have to check out the armoire inside the gift shop in person.
“Let’s go,” he said to Emily. Sadie followed closely behind as they walked down the hallway to the gift shop. Once inside, th
ey passed racks of sweaters and display cases filled with Christmas ornaments on their way to the white armoire in the corner of the room. Lining its shelves were rows of essential oils just like the ones Elerick used at the spa. One by one, he and Emily inspected the labels on the tiny brown bottles. “I don’t get it,” he said. “All I see are names of flowers and an ingredient list.”
“The book!” Sadie exclaimed.
“What book?” Elerick had no idea what Sadie was talking about. But Emily did.
Emily leaned against the wall, stretching her feet forward until her toes bumped against Elerick’s. “Do you remember Darthilda’s flowers?” she asked him.
Elerick nodded. “Of course.”
“Do you remember their names and what she said about them?”
“Sure. She had white ro—”
“Not yet,” Emily said with a raised finger. “We’re being watched.”
Elerick inspected the room. He didn’t see anything, but then again, he hadn’t really been looking. Unlike Emily, he preferred to turn his sixth sense off when he didn’t need it, much like he had turned off his computer and phone. He observed as Emily’s attention shifted from one end of the room to the other, from the clothing racks, to the walls, to the doorway, to the ceiling. She was still leaning against the wall with her arms crossed, but Elerick could see now that her stance was not relaxed but defensive. He thought about opening up to see what she saw, reasoning that two heads would likely be better than one. But he decided against it. Whatever is making Emily this tense will probably make me lose my shit entirely, he thought. “What should we do?”
“We’ll take the bottles,” Emily instructed him. “One of each scent.” She grabbed two and three at a time, filling her own pockets before handing a few bottles to Elerick. He stuffed them in his pants and moved on to the higher shelves—the ones she couldn’t reach.
“Hey!” the cashier yelled. “You need to pay for those before you put them in your pockets.” She waved a price gun at them in a feeble effort to simultaneously stun them and scan the bottles’ bar codes from across the room.