mirroring an image, it imprints one. Records it, basically. This is what gives you your stereotypical ‘ghost.’ It’s simply a recording.”
“Yeah, that’s fucking fascinating,” I interjected, “but I’m still waiting to hear what it has to do with Charlie.”
The skin next to Thackery’s mouth whitened, but he deigned to explain. “The reason is twofold. First, these areas are weakened. Apparently, Charles senses this, and these are the places through which he’s trying to find his way back. Second, when this happens, the ether begins to rip. And when it does, those so-called recordings go from passive to active.”
Confused, I turned to Hector. “Plain talk, Hector. Tell me.”
Expression weary, he sighed and folded his arms. “Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her father forty whacks, right?”
Okay. Simple enough. “Gotcha.”
“Suppose you went to her house and saw something. Maybe she was in the bedroom doing away with her mother or in the parlor with her father. You might actually see that if the place fit all the requirements of a true recording, but you would only see it. But if Charlie tries to come through…” He shifted his shoulders in discomfort but went on. “That recording goes from television to virtual reality. You wouldn’t be watching Lizzie. You would be the violence trigger. You would be Lizzie, or someone else in the house would. Charlie rips the ether, twists it. Your normal rules of physics and metaphysics go tumbling out the window, and the recording shifts to not-so-glorious three-D.”
“Normal and metaphysics, not sure I’ve heard those two in the same sentence before.” The floor was cold, even through the socks considerately left on my feet. Now it seemed even colder. “You’re saying that Charlie has tried to come home via a few haunted houses and caused past murders to be reenacted? That’s… hell, that’s crazy.”
“I know,” he said simply. “Here.” He lifted his lab coat and pulled a rolled-up folder out of an inner pocket.
And what he gave me made for interesting reading, if you were into slasher gore, which I wasn’t. Three houses, the sites of past brutal murders, were hit with copycat killings all within the past eight months. Two cases had been murder-suicides, and in the third, the poor bastard responsible for the new killings was rotting in a mental institute, claiming he’d been possessed. I wondered if the “almighty project” had any plans to help him out in the same fashion as Glory. Why did I have my doubts?
All three of the original murders had taken place before 1950 and had been brutal as hell. Their encores weren’t any less bloody. There were pictures. I closed the folder, dropped it onto the bed, and restrained the desire to rub my hand on my scrub pants. Gloves or not, those glossy papers had felt dirty to the touch.
“And you want me to find Charlie before he causes something like this again?” I shook my head, noticing that Thackery had disappeared while I had been looking at the files. “I can’t do that. Charlie’s not here. Wherever he is… whatever he is, I’m all about reality, okay? I know that sounds pretty fucking ridiculous, considering what I do, but hell…” I rubbed my forehead. The headache had subsided minutely, but it remained. “There it is.”
“He might not be here now.” Going by the brackets of pain beside his mouth, Hector’s own headache wasn’t much better than mine. “But he will be trying again, and soon. When he comes through, you should know. We can pinpoint the time extrapolated from his past visits to predict future ones to nearly the hour. You could take something of his then, read it, and get a lock on his location.” He must have seen my automatic shudder of revulsion at the statement. “Something old,” he hastily revised. “Not the transplanar-interlink cuff. Something older wouldn’t have Charlie’s death imprinted on it, would it?”
As much as I wanted to lie, I didn’t. Why? Because Charlie would’ve thought less of me. And while up to yesterday that wouldn’t have affected me in the slightest, it did now. It was as if he stood at my shoulder, his pale eyes bright and expectant, thinking only the best of me, thinking I was still a scared kid who’d do anything to prove that I wasn’t. He would fade; the Charlie presence/feeling would slowly melt away. I’d come across this in the past. Not often, thank God. But it had happened, and the odd sensation of knowing someone, of sharing their memories along with your own, didn’t last. A silent Charlie wouldn’t judge me forever. He wouldn’t try to make me a better person for too much longer. And I wouldn’t have to see his brother or his lover Meleah through his eyes anymore, either.
That was one reason not to lie. The other reason was Glory. I was still her ticket to ride. Lastly, the one that really tipped the scales? It wouldn’t have done me any good. Hector wouldn’t have believed it. An easy out like that for me-he wouldn’t have bought it for a second. I gave a silent noncommittal shrug.
Hector took it for what it was. The tight stretch of his mouth relaxed slightly. “You can also help us map which places could be genuine targets for Charlie to try to come through. Most locations we can verify ourselves through old police reports and newspapers, but there are older houses where the information is sketchy. We were hoping you could perform readings on those to see if they had violent histories that might have imprinted on the ether.”
He was right. Georgia was full of them. Supposedly haunted plantations restored to their former glory, others that were no more than tumbled stones and bones. “What about battlefields?” I asked. Georgia was full of them, too. I knew the location of every major one and avoided them like the plague if possible. You would think Atlanta itself would be unbearable, what with the burning and sacking and all, but so many people had lived there since then, it was like thousands upon thousands of woolen blankets muffling the long-ago terror. If you kept your gloves on, cities were fine. A stretch of field soaked by blood-that was a different story. If I tripped and fell out there, if I touched bare skin to the ground, I’d never get back up again.
“No. A battlefield is too large. For Charlie to come through, he needs a smaller, hence very concentrated area of violence. One as massive as the Battle of Chickamauga or Kennesaw Mountain would likely splinter him into multiple threads of energy. Virtually destroy him. On an instinctual level, he must know that. He hasn’t tried a single one of them.”
I folded my hands across my stomach. I was stuck. Well and truly stuck. But the sooner this whole Charlie fuckup was resolved, the sooner I could get on with my life. And I really wanted it back, my life. As for Charlie’s murder, Christ, I had to think about that. Getting involved in that could get me killed just as quickly as Charlie had died. And justice, that was only a word… wasn’t it?
“So.” I exhaled. “How do we get started?”
I can’t say the tired face of Hector brightened; there wasn’t much in his own life that was too goddamn bright at the moment. But he did look relieved.
“We take a field trip,” he answered, standing. “I’ll grab you some clothes.”
Field trips. They hadn’t been all that much fun in school.
I was betting the same held true now.
10
“If we do find Charlie, or wherever Charlie’s trying to get through…” Could this be more bizarre? And if I, the resident psychic, thought it was bizarre, then bizarre wasn’t even the word. “What do you plan on doing? I mean, seriously, Hector, that movie wasn’t real, you know. No such thing as proton packs. So who you gonna call?”
Behind the wheel of the generic Ford, Hector snorted, and it was despite himself, I knew. Dead brother aside, the guy was one serious and somber son of a bitch. I’d have labeled him responsible and deadly dull if it weren’t for the occasional flicker of wry humor I saw behind the stoicism. And if not for pieces of Charlie whispering in the back of my thoughts, telling me what Hector had gotten up to in his younger days. Taking out the entire back of their parents’ house with a microwave jury-rigged for a moon flight? Hell, that was truly inspired, if unintentional, destruction right there.
“I don’t think it’ll come to that,” he said dryly. “The team has been working on a way to pull Charlie entirely back to this plane. It’s what he’s attempting now but can’t accomplish. He needs more power. If we can feed it to him on his precise personal energy signature, if we can do that for him, he’ll come through and…” His mouth flattened, and the glint of amusement was gone. “Dissipate,” he finished abruptly. “This level of physical existence can’t support him.”
