away.
I wanted to cry or scream, but I wasn’t going to. Sometimes you have to let your other half be a stubborn fool. He’d let me do it often enough.
I shook my head with disgust all the way back to the Land Rover—weaving a little as the Grey flitted in and out of my vision—and decided I was too keyed up to go home yet. Work was about all I had to distract myself and since it was night, now might be the time to visit a haunted bar. . . .
THIRTEEN
Pike Place Market is creepier at night. Even if you can’t see the shades of the dead among the wiry lines of energy that rush off the bluff like a waterfall, the buildings and arcades take on a menacing air when empty. Sounds echo across the road and along the alleys. Awnings flap in a breeze that is always cold, raising monstrous crow shadows lit by the neon clock over the main entrance. Clouds had begun to roll in again, covering the stars and drowning the moon. The bars and restaurants attract just enough people to emphasize the emptiness rather than fill it and I found the sound of my rubber-heeled boots too loud as I walked along the tilted streets toward Post Alley. It didn’t take long to realize someone was following me.
For a moment, I thought it might be Quinton, keeping an eye on me in case his patriotic psychotic father was stalking me, but a quick check of the Grey revealed nothing like either man’s energy signature. Instead, something tangled in red and black with trailing tentacles of cold white light lurked just beyond any easy view, as if it knew exactly how to stay out of my normal sight. Not quite vampire-like, but not something I knew. It plainly wasn’t normal, whatever it was, and I hoped it wasn’t part of the conspiracy of ghosts that were plaguing my client’s sister and the other patients I’d seen. If it were somehow connected to Purlis, well . . . that was a different problem altogether. It couldn’t keep tabs on me without showing itself once I went into Post Alley, however, since there were no cross alleys in the stretch where Kells Irish Pub was. And it couldn’t assume my destination, since two other bars or restaurants had doors onto the alley, too. It would have to close up a bit. . . .
I got all the way to the tavern’s door before I caught a fleeting glimpse of something human-shaped beneath the distinctive aura. I paused and considered trying to catch the tail, but a small band of pub crawlers came noisily around the corner and sent my observer back into deeper shadow. I hoped I’d have another chance to “chat” with it when I came out. For the time being, I was going inside to see what ghostly things might be lurking about in the former mortuary.
The first room was the classic low-ceilinged pub with dark wood and tiled floors. The tiles might well have been original, since my Grey-adjusted vision saw the room as it must once have been—filled with cold slabs on which the bodies of Seattle’s dead were embalmed. I shuddered and passed through a short doorway to the other half of the bar, where the ceilings were higher and the decor more modern. The paranormal setting, however, was much worse: I’d found the former crematory.
To me the room was uncomfortably warm and a storm of spirits rushed through it, swirling like ash toward the back of the space, where a storage room or refrigerator now occupied what had been the oven. I cringed and turned aside, stumbling into the edge of the bar that was hidden by my Grey vision on that side.
The bartender looked up at me with a touch of alarm. “You all right?” he asked.
“Just dizzy,” I croaked back, fighting to put the sight into literal perspective and shut down the double image of the past and the present.
“It takes some people that way,” he said.
I got myself onto a barstool. “What does?”
“This room. Some people find it uncomfortable. Even frightening.”
“Former funeral home. Yeah, I suppose they might.”
“You know the story, then?”
“No, but I have heard the general outline.”
“Do you like ghost stories, then?”
My desire was to say “not particularly” but I would never get any information if I did that, so I said, “Maybe. Are they true stories or just hogwash and hokum?”
The bartender laughed. “It’s hard to say sometimes, but this being a former funeral home, some of ’em are probably true. They say the original owner used to have hearse races so he could beat the other mortuaries to dead people. Might even be true.”
“I heard this place was connected to a certain doctor. . . .”
“Dr. Hazzard? Oh yes. She used to have her patients cremated here and the owner would give her somebody else’s diseased organs to show to the distraught relatives to prove the patient had died of something other than starvation. Quite a racket, eh?”
Judging from the phantoms of the emaciated dead rushing through the room, it wasn’t just a racket, it was an industry. I nodded, still a bit queasy.
“And there’s the little girl some people claim to see here. She stays near the back and she likes the dancing. The theory is that she died of influenza and was cremated here. It’s quite likely true. When they were renovating, they found shelves full of tiny urns with no names on ’em, just numbers. Child-sized urns.”
“Down here?”
“No. Upstairs. The bar’s owners are turning it into a space for catering parties. Used to be the sales room and the chapel.”
“What is the attraction of bars in former funerary chapels?” I asked.
“Not sure. Spitting in the face of death, maybe?”
Something tinkled and scraped and the bartender spun around just in time for a bottle to launch itself off the shelf behind him and crash to the floor. “Ah, Christ. There they go again.” He glared at the back bar and whispered at the bottles, “Didn’t I tell you you could help yourself so long as you didn’t break anything? Now, was that nice?”
The mist-shape of a woman oozed out of the racks of liquor and wafted through him to me. She put her incorporeal hand on the bar beside me and then dissolved into the howling storm of other spirits. A small button remained on the bar where her hand had been. As I stared at it, an old-fashioned key dropped onto the bar beside it as if it had fallen from the ceiling. And then the stub of a pencil. Each object was shrouded in trailing blackness. Another phantom woman came toward me from the outside door. She glared at me and her face flickered from fully fleshed to a naked skull. It was the woman who’d lingered in the market office earlier in the day and she exuded malicious intent. All the other ghosts in the room seemed to pull back from her, leaving a clearing around the two of us.
Her face seemed to melt, as if she, too, were starving into a living skeleton before my eyes. For a moment, what stood before me, clothed in only the raging energy of hunger and fury, was nothing that had ever been human. It glared at me and then seemed to turn that baleful expression inward. Then the moment’s horrible vision faded.
I felt a burning pain running up my arms where I thought the woman’s ghost had touched me earlier in the day and I winced, looking down to see if some creature had snuck up onto the bar to bite me. But what I saw was blood.
I gasped and yanked at my sleeve, but the narrow cuff hitched up and stopped me. I got to my feet and whirled, heading back into the short hallway between the two bars to get to the washroom. Inside a narrow stall, I yanked off my jacket and pulled off my shirt, expecting my clothes to be ruined, but the blood was an illusion. The words burning onto my arms were not. “Tribute does not feed the servant. Leave us be, until your time.”
I’d never been warned off with tricks of this sort before. Most ghosts who wanted me gone were more direct, though the phrase “until your time” made me think they had some plan for me I hadn’t sussed out. I stared at the words and saw more slowly crawling across my belly. I felt each letter forming as if pushed up from inside my skin. The sensation sent me retching to the toilet.
I got hold of myself eventually and put my shirt back on. I was rinsing my face with cold water when the hostess from the first section of the pub came into the restroom. “Are you all right?”
I nodded. “I’m fine.”
