different things at the same time. They press in and they recede again like a furious tide, but I can’t sort them out. It’s like trying to catch a fistful of seawater and separate a single molecule of salt. It’s an allegory, but it’s real. I can’t make it any more clear than that. Not to myself, and probably not to you, either. But you know what I mean. They indicate you do.”
“They? The ghosts?” I cast a glance back at them, clustering around the bed, but they didn’t seem to pay us any attention.
“Well, the ones that can hold a thought together at least. Your identity is like a thin, clear current in the river of their babble. It was hard to pick out at first, but I finally got it and when I got here and experienced the turmoil around Julianne, I thought I should mention you to Lily.”
“
“The owner of Old Possum’s?” Stymak asked. “Yes. See, I didn’t have your name or know where to find you. I only knew who you were to the ghosts. They knew that you and Lily both knew this bookstore owner—”
“Phoebe.”
Stymak nodded. “All right: Phoebe. They let me know the connection, so I told Lily to ask Phoebe about you. And that’s how it works for me—strings of connections and associations and ideas, but not anything as easy as a voice saying ‘Hey, stupid, go talk to this lady at this address.’ Ghosts are kind of slippery and obscure most of the time, but I’ve learned how to be patient and put it together. Sort of decode them, I guess you could say.”
“But you haven’t decoded what’s going on with Julianne.”
“Oh, I have. But I don’t know
“Have they let you know there are others?”
“Others like Julianne? Unconscious channels? I’m not sure. . . . The information I’ve been gifted with is confusing at best and . . . very noisy.”
“I’m given to believe it’s true. Can you confirm it with your ghosts?”
“Can’t you?”
“I haven’t tried yet.”
“You haven’t tried,” Stymak echoed, incredulous and staring as if he’d never seen so odd a fish as me. “What sort of medium are you? I mean, I don’t have a choice about hearing them. They’re in my head, like pieces of my own mind. I can’t not try because I don’t try to begin with.”
I had experienced the inability to tune out Grey voices for a while and it had nearly driven me insane, but I’d died again and the phenomenon had ceased—I was grateful for that, especially since the voices I’d heard had been part of the Grey itself, not just ghosts. “I’m not a medium,” I said, shivering at the idea of going through that all the time. “I’m more of a . . . fixer. I work out problems between the normal and the paranormal.” Stymak nodded while frowning as if he wasn’t sure he saw the distinction. “My contact with the paranormal is less mental and more physical than yours,” I explained, but I had the impression he didn’t understand that any better.
“I’m sure we all experience it differently,” he said.
Of that I was certain, but there was no point in saying so. I glanced around and noticed that Lily was watching our conversation from the corner of her eye as she looked after Julianne—who had stopped painting once again and lain back down. The ghosts had ceased circling the bed and seemed to be moving back, separating, and loosening their bonds to float out and fill the whole room in drifting clouds.
“There,” Stymak said. “The ghosts are moving. It’s like their attention is changing. Now might be a good time to try and talk to them, before they wander off.”
A dark form pushed forward to hover over Julianne, cutting off most of the other spirits. A few of the more self-aware ghosts did seem to be drifting away, as if they were tired of waiting and had decided to go elsewhere, but the repeaters and the barely-there lingered, stuck or unable to leave and moving neither toward the bed nor away from it. They wouldn’t be much help.
“Do you want to give it a go together?” Stymak asked.
I was eager to see how Stymak operated—and if he was for real or was just jerking my chain. Not to mention, we’d get more information from the stronger ghosts, who were now starting to pull away. “Sure,” I said. “How do you do this?”
“I usually just close my eyes and concentrate on drawing them to me and when they get close enough, I guess we ‘talk,’ though it’s not talking really. What do you do?”
“Kind of similar, except I go to them.”
“I’m not sure how that would work.”
“How ’bout you take my hand and we’ll see what we can do.”
Stymak frowned as if he wasn’t sure of my sincerity, but he moved closer and put out his right hand. I gave him my left and took a deep breath, waiting for him to close his eyes and do whatever he did.
I let the Grey sight flood over my normal vision as I slipped a bit closer to the land of ghosts, watching Stymak. The distant buzzing, muttering sound of the Grey swelled and, with a jolt of unpleasant surprise, I could hear voices. I hadn’t heard voices in the Grey in quite a while and I didn’t like the episode they reminded me of, but these weren’t quite the same and after a moment’s panic I settled myself down and let whatever was happening come to us.
Which was just what it did. The ghosts gathered around Julianne’s bed and some of the stronger ones that had started drifting away turned toward Stymak, fixing us in dead gazes. The voices grew louder.
I slid down lower into the Grey, looking for the brightness of the energy grid of magic and finding it suddenly in a swarm of color and silver ghostlight. A bright rope of twined blue and gold energy spun out from Richard Stymak’s bright white shape beside me. I’d never seen a living person with a pure white aura before and I wasn’t sure what it meant. I watched the rope weave and wave, luring the ghosts toward it, toward Stymak, while a crystalline voice nearest me—Stymak’s, I realized, though it sounded different here—called softly, “Hello, hello, I’m here. Come here. Hello . . .”
Three ghosts moved toward him, slowly at first, then rushing as if each wanted to be the first to arrive. Far away I heard a strained voice whispering, “Go away,” and the rattling, distant roar of the Guardian Beast. That particular monster that patrolled the borders of the Grey wasn’t coming closer, but I suspected it knew we were here. It’s an uncanny and unpredictable beast and, for lack of a better description, it’s my boss in the Grey, so I wasn’t sure if its attentive distance gave me comfort or scared the hell out of me.
The first of the ghosts, a coal gray form with a midnight face, its energy a tangle of fading blue light and dim red points, pushed against Stymak, brushing against me and leaving a scent of burned flesh in its wake. I shuddered at the smell and the strange sensation of jagged bones poking into my skin as if I’d embraced a fractured skeleton. It made a keening sound as the other two rushed up, pressing close to Stymak and jostling for his attention.
The three ghosts babbled in a squealing cacophony that set the rest of the ghosts to howling and jabbering like a mad chorus behind them. I tried to listen, but the words were a jumble, diced into useless sounds.
“One at a time, please,” Stymak said, panting. That at least was understandable, though I still wasn’t used to the violin-sharp clarity of his Grey voice.
The ghosts didn’t listen but continued to push and shove to get his attention, chattering incomprehensibly. I heard Stymak grunt as the darkest one of them shoved unusually hard, rocking him. Stymak’s energy dimmed and took on a greenish tone. “Stop! One at a time!” he said, sounding distressed.
I snatched at the pushing spirit and crooked my fingers in its tangled energy, pulling it away from Stymak. “Back off, jerk,” I hissed at it, giving it a shake. Flame flashed up my arm and I felt a jolt as the ghost fought back, then faded to a dim shape.
“Someel otsu vagueish . . .” it muttered, crumbling into black ash and blowing away in the swirling of the Grey, not destroyed but exhausted for the time being.
“What?”
But that ghost was gone and another one had pushed itself up to Stymak, talking so low and fast I could barely hear it as more than a chatter of teeth and a clatter of consonants. The last of the three ghosts had something more like a recognizable human face and form over the knot of pale blue energy at its core. It whispered and hissed with the other, the sounds of their voices harmonizing with each other and mixing with the background chorus of ghosts in a quavering dissonance that almost brought sense to the noise, but not quite. I
