“Exactly. A proto-Greek language, to be precise. Pre-Thracian, a dead-end branch of the Indo-European tree.”

“So what are they saying?”

Dr. Niles frowned and shook his head. “We brought in a team of linguists from UCLA,” he said, nodding to one of the researchers sitting at a computer workstation. “They work in shifts around the clock. We can translate the language but we can’t interpret it. It’s poetry.”

“Maybe you can’t interpret it because it’s gibberish,” I suggested.

“No, it’s poetry. It has pattern and structure. It is metaphorical language and we need observable phenomena to match it to. We need referents.”

“And you think this…intelligence…in the flow is projecting this telepathic poetry through your prisoners?”

“We’re sure of it.”

“Okay, so what is it?”

“We don’t really know what it is,” the scientist said. “We call her Hecate.”

“The goddess?”

Dr. Niles nodded. “Of magic and the crossroads. Other names are Chthonia, of the earth or underworld. Enodia, on the way, and Propulaia, before the gate. Triodia, she who visits the crossroads, and Trimorphe, three- formed.”

“Wikipedia?”

“Yeah.”

“How did you…find her?”

“By accident!” he said, and snorted charmingly. “Our working hypothesis was that we couldn’t measure ectoplasmic energy directly but we could measure its effect on the mediums. So we basically immersed them in the convergence and began monitoring their physical responses to the stimuli. We discovered Hecate even before the projections started. Think of her as a signal. She’s fragmented and lost in the background noise but every once in a while we’re able to pull a little bit of the signal out of the ectoplasmic soup.”

“She’s fragmented?”

“Yeah, but we’re putting her back together, bits and pieces of the signal at a time. Or she’s doing it herself. We’re not really sure what’s causing it.”

“You’re experimenting on something you call a god in a laboratory built on top of the San Andreas Fault and not one but two massive ley lines…and you’re not really sure what’s going on. Is that about right?”

“This is science, damn it, not a knitting circle.”

“I like your style.”

“Thanks.”

“So what do you hope to get out of this nightmarish excursion into mad-scientist territory?”

“We’re flying blind,” Dr. Niles said, nodding to Lowell and Granato. “We speculate about the events that are coming but we don’t really know. We can’t predict them. We can’t even really identify them after the fact with any precision or rigor, except by studying the shit on the fan.”

“And you think Hecate can tell you.”

“We think she already is, but we can’t understand what she’s saying.” He tapped a few more keys and the screen displayed the text the linguist was transcribing in real-time. I read some of it as it scrolled across the LCD. smoke at the green circumference the invisible man jumps and swallows nothing ripe coffins like swans on the floor a sluggish place for some to fill ants on the tongue meager hopes in glass, screaming away beneath life and leaf sallow jewels and opulent flesh bells bleed in the watchtower animal skin at canyon fields blossoms of hunger and blue falls under the tree of swords silence calling loose light in palaces of white mountains phosphorous machinery touch the gradient naked night in tiger dreams

I looked from the screen to Dr. Niles. “You’ve definitely ruled out gibberish?”

“You’re reading a fragment out of context,” he said, frowning. “It almost starts to make sense when you look at it long enough.”

“I’m sure. So can you tell me what’s causing the zombie problem?”

“Not exactly.”

I glanced at Lowell. “Remind me why I’m here again?”

“We don’t know what’s causing the Zed problem,” Dr. Niles said. “But Hecate has been talking about it.”

“How do you know? I didn’t get that from ‘phosphorous machinery touch the gradient.’ It’s not even good grammar.”

“She spiked just before we started getting reports of Zed on the loose.”

“She spiked?”

“Yeah, both the intensity of the signal and the strength of the projections. We’re pretty sure she knew what was happening before it actually happened.”

“How do you figure?”

Dr. Niles went to the keyboard again and pulled up another fragment of text. claimant and messenger, lost stone circle, grasping the harmonic motion fire-lit shell on darkened shore madness sings the red song

“We have no idea what the first two lines mean, so don’t ask. But we think the last two are about Zed.”

I squinted at the words on the screen. “‘Darkened shore’ sounds like death, if you’re in a high-school poetry class. ‘Fire-lit shell’ means the zombies?”

“Right, a corpse is a shell on the shores of death.”

“But ‘fire-lit?’ The shell’s on fire?”

The scientist shook his head. “What’s unusual about these particular shells, Ms. Riley?”

“They’re walking around trying to eat people.” I saw it as soon as the words were out of my mouth. “Wait, they’re lit from within. They’re dead, but they still have their souls…their divine spark. Fire-lit shells on the shores of death.”

“A-plus!” said Dr. Niles, grinning. “Now, this kind of interpretation isn’t exactly scientific, of course. But given the timing and the instability in the ectoplasmic flow…well, we think we may have found the first of our referents.”

“And ‘madness sings the red song’?”

“That’s the walking-around-trying-to-eat-people part. We think the ‘red song’ is a metaphor for hunting.”

“So these shells go mad and then they go hunting.”

“Yeah. We figure the first two lines might indicate a cause but we can’t decode them.”

I shook my head and chuckled. “It’s fucking obvious. The claimant and messenger is lost. When people die, they don’t just catch the next bus to the afterlife. They need psychopomps to guide them.”

Dr. Niles frowned. “What are psychopomps?”

“Reapers.”

“Oh. What about the second line?”

“I have no idea. What the hell is harmonic motion?”

“It’s a mathematical term. Simple harmonic motion is like the movement of a pendulum. Complex harmonic motion is what you get when you combine simple harmonic motions, such as in musical chords. It could describe planetary motion or the music of the spheres. Or it could just be a metaphor that has nothing to do with modern mathematics.”

“Okay, skip it. The point is, the psychopomps have stopped doing their jobs.” I felt more than a little stupid for not considering it sooner. At the club, I’d even made a comment about something putting Death out of business. Then again, I’d never actually seen a psychopomp. It’s not like there were skeletons in black robes wandering around L.A. whacking people with scythes on a typical day. Despite the world I lived in, I had a tendency to assume folklore was bullshit until proven otherwise.

“And they’re for real? Reapers, I mean?” Dr. Niles had gone a little pale.

“Apparently.”

“You don’t know anything about them?”

“Not really,” I said. “But I know someone who does.” six

My mother was a psychic. She never had quite enough juice to be a real sorcerer, but she knew her game well enough to do fortune-telling, palm reading and the occasional seance. I figured if anyone could tell me about

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