haunting?”
“Not a haunting, a possession. Although they do fall into the general category of hauntings, in this particular situation the possession doesn’t appear to be related to the location or to an object—which is usually the case with classical hauntings. I’m not that familiar with haunted houses, since I’ve only seen a few personally, but this doesn’t have the same feel at all.”
“Is that why you want to talk to the other patients you heard about? After all, they aren’t your clients.”
“That’s exactly why. If the cases are significantly similar, then I’ll have more information to give my client. It’s really weird that there are so many to begin with and that these are all demonstrating aberrant behavior. Skelly said even one normal PVS case in an area the size of Seattle is rare. So this is freakishly beyond statistical probability. I’m not sure how I’ll find the other patients, though. Skelly had no idea and warned me off of asking anyone to violate patient confidentiality. Which is fine, but it does leave me unsure how to get the info I need.”
“Can you ask the ghosts?”
“Which ghosts? I’m not sure who or what is controlling my client’s sister and I wasn’t able to make any contact in the time I had in the room. They seem very concentrated on the patient. That may be the same problem Stymak—the medium—is having. He may not be able to break into their communication with the patient long enough to get any useful information and has to try to pick through the bits that he can capture on the recordings.”
“Yeah, but he’s at least getting that much. You could try working with him to get the ghosts’ attention and find out who the other patients are. As you pointed out, it’s unlikely that the cases are unrelated, so there should be information about the other patients in the collective knowledge of the ghosts hanging out around your client’s sister.”
“Interesting idea. Can’t hurt.”
I finished up my dinner and felt much better, if still a bit blind. While I was doing dishes, Quinton checked something on the tiny palmtop computer he’d started carrying around and began packing up his things.
“Hey,” I said, “you going somewhere?”
“Yeah. I have to get out and rattle some cages, create some uncertainty, undermine some progress. . . . I may need your help later, but for now I’d better get to it.”
“Will you be back later tonight?” I hoped I didn’t sound too wistful.
“Not tonight. If you get any odd phone calls, act normal and pretend you’ve never heard of me.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Okaayy . . . I can do that, stranger.”
He put on his jacket and slung his backpack onto his shoulders. “Thanks, beautiful.” Then he kissed me and hurried off to wreak some havoc, I supposed. I hoped it wouldn’t come home with him, whatever it was.
It was still light outside, so once I was done with the dishes and had let the ferret out again, I went ahead and called Richard Stymak, who seemed less surprised to hear from me than I might have liked. He offered to meet me at the Goss house the next morning, saying Julianne tended to be less dramatically active in the mornings than she had been today. I decided I’d keep a much closer eye on her nonetheless. Ghosts are unpredictable and I didn’t want to end up with something worse than paint flung at me.
THREE
As he’d expected, Quinton had not come home and I slept alone and got up in a strange mood, as if I’d been emotionally disconnected from the world and was floating along waiting for some feeling to rush into the void. Outside, Seattle was experiencing the usual “June gloom” of weird overcast that would give way late in the day to cool sunshine until the clouds slid back in for the night, the pattern seeming unbreakable even on the last day of the month. It made my city seem a little detached from the rest of the country, as if it just couldn’t make up its mind about summer.
When I reached the Goss house and Lily had escorted me back up to the former master bedroom, I saw that, once again, Julianne was painting. Lily left me to go and sit by her side. She seemed to have as little interest in Stymak and me as Julianne did at that moment. Stymak was doing something with his digital recorder at the white table again and no nurse was in evidence. I’d been left momentarily alone just inside the room’s double doors. I took the chance to look the room over, since there seemed to be no threat of flying blobs at the moment, and see what I’d missed the first time.
I started with Julianne’s latest painting on the easel—a rough cliff with some kind of low, rambling building along the top. The strokes were soft and yet precise, in spite of the speed with which they were being made. I almost recognized the place, but not quite. It didn’t look like a modern location; it looked more like something old and almost forgotten. I turned aside and surveyed the next piece, which was leaning against the wall nearby: a huge, rugged mountain of sharp sandstone-colored bluffs and smoky shadows rearing up against a lowering charcoal sky—draped in soft white scarves of cloud—from a foggy forest of tiny pines that clustered at its foot like anxious pets. My breath caught in my throat as I studied it. I didn’t exactly recognize this scene, either, but for a different reason—this one didn’t seem to be a real place so much as one that recalled real Washington places; it was strange and familiar and powerful, glistening with paint still wet a day later and the threads of some passing ghost form that had caught and lingered in the moisture. I turned slowly around to look at the other paintings in the room—most hung on the walls around the main doors and leading toward the bathroom, others just leaned against the wall. Dozens of paintings.
They were not the same. Some shared a similar style, but the rest varied as widely as an art school exhibition. There were some with strong colors and blocky forms; others were almost photo-realistic in their detail, picked out in clear shafts of sunlight and minuscule brushwork. Still others were more like sketches, lines of color roughly brushed to create just a shape or suggestion of a scene. This could not be the work of a single person—certainly not a bedridden, nonresponsive woman with the muscle tone of a limp towel. And over and over, the same scenes: the cliff, the mountain, a long beach of rock-strewn sand bordered by soaring pines in shades of green and gray marching up steep slopes to higher ground.
And all around the bed pressed a susurrant surge of spirits, like flotsam circling round and round the center of a maelstrom, drawn to the way out but unable to escape. I’d seen ghosts pulled to an object before, but I’d never seen this sort of expression. If I stared very hard, making my injured eye water, I could perceive among the dark shapes and writhing scribbles of energy individual ghosts reaching toward Julianne, or bending down to whisper into her ears and being swept aside again as the next moved closer. They kept circling, whispering, reaching. . . .
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” I said.
“Automatic painting,” Stymak said. “Like automatic writing. The spirit is channeled through the subject’s body and produces the work independent of the channel’s abilities, often while they are unconscious or in a trance state. Though I’ve never heard of anything on this scale.”
His voice jarred me out of my staring and I turned to him, letting my gaze pull back toward normal, though the Grey vision lingered, shading the room in silver and smoke. “Nor have I, though I do know what automatic painting is, Stymak—but you knew that, since you say you talk to ghosts.”
Stymak glanced away for a moment before he looked straight into my eyes. “I don’t quite
“You can get information from ghosts that aren’t in your immediate area?” I had a rusty memory of being told that mediums somehow talked to ghosts in the Grey in such a way that they didn’t have to be in the same literal space, unlike me.
Stymak nodded. “They compelled me here a few weeks ago and I met Lily and I saw Julianne and I knew the ghosts were here, that they are trying to tell us something through Julianne, but I can’t understand what it is they’re trying to communicate this time.”
“Why not?”
He shook his head. “It’s too loud. It’s like . . . there are a hundred people in a tiny room, all shouting
