Carlos shook his head. “You can’t be like them—you’re alive. Hazzard said, ‘You should be mine for all I’ve done.’ She thinks you should be her prize once their plan is successful. A victim to torment and starve forever.”
I shivered. “I really don’t like that idea, but it implies that there’s some plan between Hazzard and this Limos to ‘sate the damned,’” I said.
Carlos nodded.
Stymak watched our conversation with horror clearly writ on his face. “Who or what is ‘the damned’?”
“It must be Hazzard herself,” Carlos said, looking not quite convinced of his own argument. “The ghosts are not damned, merely unable to leave this place. The other entity is not human—it cannot be damned, but it can be fed.”
“Damned or not, it can’t—” Carlos shot me the coldest glare I’d ever seen, cutting me short. He gave the tiniest shake of his head, warning me off what I’d been about to say. I reformed my idea before I spoke again. “Tribute cannot feed the hungry. . . .” I said, thinking aloud. “Hazzard already brought souls as tribute to Limos. So Limos owes her something in return that they plan to get by turning the Wheel . . . ?”
“The fat ones!” the recorder blared.
Stymak hit it on the tabletop. “Stop that! I know you’re only trying to help, but this is just not the time.”
“The disturbed spirits—that’s the extra energy in the system,” I said.
Carlos got it, but Stymak was lost. “What are you talking about?”
“Never mind, Stymak, just a tangent. Don’t worry about it. Just hold on to the idea that ghosts or death represents energy.”
“I know that.”
“Someone wants more energy, more food, more tribute. They plan to get it from ghosts, and if you don’t have enough ghosts to go around, you make them.”
Stymak was shaken. “Jesus!”
“Exactly. There’s another phrase that keeps coming up in the transcripts—‘beach to bluff and back’—and Julianne keeps painting pictures of the bluffs and the beach in the area that’s now the waterfront and Pike Place Market. It’s all along the State Route Ninety-nine tunnel route, and the Great Wheel makes a very convenient central point to push energy from once it’s been gathered there. All the patients had contact with the tunnel and that contact made them ideal conduits for the ghosts once the patients were injured enough to become comatose.”
“So . . . Julianne’s persistent vegetative state isn’t natural?” Stymak asked.
“I don’t think so. I never did—did you?”
He shook his head, but it was a weak movement.
I went on. “The ghosts are forcing it to linger so they can scream for help, not just for themselves but for the people who’ll be riding the Great Wheel when Hazzard and Limos put their plan into motion. Hazzard doesn’t have any corporeal power to do anything to the Great Wheel, so she has to get someone to help her topple the Wheel and take the lives of the tourists on it.”
“Limos,” Carlos supplied. “It is no ghost. It has power of its own as well as that of the ghosts gathered by Hazzard.”
I felt sick and put my hand over my mouth. Stymak had turned the color of parchment, appalled by only half the knowledge Carlos and I had.
Carlos gazed at me with eyes that smoldered with pain and death. “Very clever, isn’t it? Hazzard and Limos will upset the Wheel and dine on their share of the souls drowned in the ever-hungry sea.”
“We have to figure out what they’re going to do and when,” I said. “It must be soon, because once the patients’ souls have faded out, I suspect their bodies will die too and we can’t let that happen.”
TWENTY
I was impatient to talk to Carlos without Stymak around, but I needed the medium’s help first, so I reined myself in.
“Given to Limos . . .” The recorder had played that segment again and although I wasn’t very comfortable with it, I’d produced the photos of my dermographia. Stymak had looked them over and passed them on to Carlos by putting the phone on the table and pushing it toward him. He wouldn’t touch the vampire even through the intermediary of the device.
“Did you ever listen to those recordings I sent?” Stymak asked me.
“I couldn’t get more than the one phrase I mentioned. I was going to have my . . . someone try translating them or running them through various decryption and filter programs, but he hasn’t been available.”
“I don’t think it’s that complicated, now that we’ve done this. I think it’s just backward. Because you remember the first time we heard this—at the Goss house—there was that phrase, umm. . . .” He searched through his pockets until he found a memory card, which he swapped into the recorder.
He pushed the button and the speaker squealed a bit before it let out the words “. . . Slows row someel vague rot codeth—” He clicked it off and looked up, accidentally catching Carlos’s eyes, and then shifting his gaze to mine. “Makes no sense, does it?”
I shook my head. I’d had the same problem with some of the written pieces I’d seen at Sterling’s house and the dermographia that afflicted Jordan Delamar.
“But if it’s just backward, ‘slows’ could be . . .” He wrote the word on one of his notebooks and then wrote another under it. “That could be ‘souls’ and ‘row’ could be . . . ‘oowwrr’ . . . ‘our’ and then comes ‘someel’ . . . which could be . . . ‘leemos’ . . . that’s got to be Limos—the hunger-monster thing, right?”
“Yes. The ghosts also said ‘Given to Limos,’ and there it is again,” I said, retrieving my phone from Carlos and looking through photos for what I wanted. “Here. The message on Jordan Delamar’s skin.”
I handed the phone to Stymak, who read it aloud. “Given as Limos tribute, those who wasted away. Given to the wheel of death and birth, to break the wheel we are driven.” Stymak put my notebook down and listened to his recording again, writing the message down phonetically and then writing under it, “Souls, our, Limos, gave, tor thedock . . .” He stared at it. “No . . . that’s not right. That’s got to be ‘the doctor,’ so the whole thing is perfectly backward.”
He rewrote the sentence forward: “The doctor gave Limos our souls.”
“They’ve been saying the same thing over and over—we just didn’t get it,” Stymak said. “God, how could I have missed that? Backmasking! It’s the oldest trick in the book!” Then the color rushed out of his face and he stood up, looking more than queasy. “Holy Jesus.” He dashed out of the room.
I glanced at Carlos.
He cocked an eyebrow at me and I took that as permission to pick up the conversation we hadn’t had earlier. “I think the ghosts given in tribute account for the extra energy in the system we were discussing last night,” I said.
He gave it some thought and nodded. “They could. A few recent cases of starvation might have been required to start the cycle, however.”
“At least two homeless people—one of them a contact of mine—died of starvation near the end of last year or the beginning of this one. That’s right in the time zone. There could be other deaths that didn’t come to my attention, or anyone else’s, especially if there was a more obvious cause of death, like cancer or HIV. And here’s another thing—Quinton mentioned a box that sounds like it might be some kind of portable shrine his father brought from Europe for this project of his. He says it contained something when Purlis arrived, but was empty when he got a look at it himself. But it had dirt from the tunnel project on it. I’ve seen Purlis around the square off and on for about a year now, so I think he hid the shrine in some segment of the construction near or in Pioneer Square for a while—probably in one of the monitoring wells—because the area has a high homeless population. There are always a few who don’t or won’t get enough to eat, so they’d be a nice attraction for this hungry monstrosity. And his presence in the area might help explain how he caught on to your people, too.”
“The disruption of the soil accounts for the initial upwelling of ghosts and magic, but the continued presence of Limos would explain why the rise continued, rather than falling back. With Limos loose and fed, she could have
