City of Masks

22

It was evening by the time Cree made it to the house. The air was cooling fast, and the darkening sky above the Garden District was lined with tendrils of high cloud that presaged a change in weather. She let herself in the front door, set her equipment case down to tap in the security code, and paused to allow her eyes to adjust. She faced the black hallway and the hush of the big house with a mix of reluctance and anticipation. She felt dangerously off balance and vulnerable, but the desperate thought occurred to her that maybe that was exactly the state this case required.

Yeah, she thought, the way beating a steak with a tenderizing hammer prepares it for cooking.

Whether or not Lila had intended to shore up Cree's resolve, she'd succeeded in doing so. It occurred to her that her sudden, intense desire to quit, her doubt of her own process, was just another way she'd taken on Lila's state of mind – another proof she'd taken her empathic process to an unusual extreme.

That was a cause for concern because in the rarified world of empathic parapsychology, the risks of extreme projective identification were well documented. Her process had always depended on balance. The way into the world of the ghost was through the mind of the witness, and to enter either one she had to surrender her own identity to a considerable degree. If taken too far, the process could lead to madness, but it worked for her and she'd proved she could survive it. The key was to retain a core sense of self during even the most poignant, consuming encounter. Only by keeping a sure through-line could she set either the haunt or the haunted free. On this case, that had evaded her from the start. Why? Her appropriation of Lila's ambivalences – that oscillation between fear and retreat on one hand, and defiance and determination on the other – was only one explanation. The other was Paul Fitzpatrick: Their unexpected encounter had awakened a dormant part of her. And with that unavoidably came Mike and all the emotional pain and rational confusion that had never been resolved.

After leaving Lila's house, she'd called Paul's office to report, but only the machine answered. Same at his house. The message she'd left at both places was curt and professional: "Lila agreed to go in for diagnostics tomorrow, on an outpatient basis. Best I could do. I hope it helps."

She hadn't asked for a follow-up meeting. It all left a sad ache of disappointment. But it was best to start getting over those yearnings, abort them early.

Cree sighed and picked up the equipment case again. If the vulnerability was extreme, she told herself, it would have to be matched by an equally extreme degree of determination, some equally forceful way to anchor her identity, to find a foundation of stability. It would mean, she knew, facing a lot of things she'd dodged for a long time. A daunting prospect.

She had decided earlier that the library would be her chief concern tonight, and anyway, as she'd feared, the upstairs was still too forbidding, the boar-headed man too near to nascence. Hoping again that he was indeed limited to the second floor, she passed the stairway and headed into the depths of the house. The curtains were still open in some rooms, letting in enough of the evening light to navigate by, and the kitchen was brighter still, especially the alcove where Temp Chase had died. For a moment she paused there, feeling a faint reprise of that cold breath of compressed whispers. It passed quickly.

The house was full of innumerable whispers and mutters, as any old house would be, the psychic "residuals" -just transient echoes, really – of all the experiences lived here over the years. But she instinctively felt that only the affective locus in the library had any prospect of turning out to be boar-head's perimortem component. If it was, it might well provide the handle she needed on his monstrous manifestation upstairs.

Through the kitchen, down the darker corridor to the east wing and the library. She passed the doorway to the storage room she'd glimpsed with Ron and the Historical Preservation ladies, came to the library door, then hesitated and turned back. It occurred to her the storage room was the only place in the whole house she had not yet spent any time. She tried several keys on the ring Lila had given her before she found the right one.

It was a fairly big room, perhaps twenty by thirty, mostly empty, with bare, wide-board floors. Its two windows were lined with security-system tape on the inside and barred on the outside; thick foliage pressed between the bars and against the glass, turning the dim light greenish. Only a couple of odd pieces of furniture were left: various mysterious humps under dust cloths, a little grove of ugly antique floor lamps, and a couple of oak file cabinets that hunkered against the far wall.

She pulled off one of the dust cloths to reveal what she'd expected, a hideous S-curved love seat. When she turned to sit in it, a flicker of movement across the room gave her a jolt, but she saw that it was just her own motion in a slender, full-length mirror that leaned against the wall. Looking back at her was her own face, dust muted and fractured by a single fissure. Another broken mirror.

The Cree in the glass looked alarmed and a little demented. And ghoulish, she realized. In the fading light, with the crack splitting her face into two mismatched planes, her brow naturally split with its crease of worry, and that… thing… forever in the eyes: yes, almost a mirror phantom, a ghost emerging from the mirror world's confusions and inversions.

Yes, Lila, she thought bitterly, something happened to me. And I can't talk about it. And, yes, that's probably how you let it go – sooner or later you have to face it. If you don't, you become suspended between your yearning and your fear, and you're doomed to repeat the same sad acts without end, without completion or satisfaction.

You become a ghost.

That thought struck her breathless. The face in the mirror could be nothing but a perseveration, lost and tangled, unable to fully live, afraid to fully die.

I'm becoming a ghost!

This had to end, she realized. She couldn't live locked into the constraints of emotion and memory she'd imposed on her world since Mike's death. She had to face herself. She didn't want to be a ghost, a fragment. She wanted to be alive, and whole.

She shut her eyes, took three deep breaths, then went to the mirror and turned it to the wall. It didn't help much.

She sat quietly, waiting for something to manifest, but after half an hour it became clear the only haunts here were her own. She stood, drew the dust cover over the love seat and left the room.

The library was very different. She knew it as soon as she turned into the big, dim room.

Moving in almost total darkness, she brought the equipment case to the far corner and repositioned a wingback chair so that from it she'd have a good view of the whole room and the black rectangle that was the door to the corridor. She opened the case and, working mostly by touch, set out the trifield meter, the remote temperature sensor, the ion counter, and the audio recorder.

She relaxed her hands into their mudra in her lap, listening to the almost inaudible hum of the recorder and breathing from her diaphragm. After a few moments she discovered a hard tension in her shoulders. By the time she was able to relinquish it, she'd found a deeper hitch or gathering in the center of her chest. That was emotional tension, the dam that held back the great reservoir of feelings that simply could not be allowed loose. But she did her best, relaxing around it and around it, softening its edges. So difficult. Its color was a deep rose saturated with bruise-blue diffusing to blackness. She kept her eyes open throughout, unconsciously watching the phosphene fizz in the dark, dots of pinpoint light so fine they looked like a mist. The gently glowing trifield meter read zero on all three gradients.

Time passed. The room turned black as the last light abandoned the sky outside.

Silence.

A long time later, she realized there were shapes in the mist of darkness. There was a person in the room. The person seemed made of phosphene mist and emotions. There was movement, a gesture, too: rising and falling. Rising and falling hard, cruelly hard: beating! A faint hump of light dust that had to be another person. Explosions of black crimson pain. Regret, anger. The terrible wrath was shot through with excruciating self-condemnation, and they fueled each other. The beating going on.

The hard part was not to pull away. Cree clung to her breathing, struggling to keep her eyes from trying to focus on the misty forms, to keep her heart from racing. One corner of her mind told her the trifield meter readouts were changing, but she dared not move her eyes to look.

The darkness convulsed in the beating movement, then abruptly passed into another mode, one of seeking. This part Cree had seen before on other cases: seeking, questing, asking something like forgiveness or understanding. Asking for refuge, wanting to explain. That was the opening, and Cree moved toward the desire, presenting her willingness to understand, intruding the tiniest degree on the ghost's reality. But then a sense of surprise supplanted the yearning, and another sensation, a physical pain in the middle and a sense of wrong, of desperation. A man shape fled toward the dark doorway but fell before reaching it, and the motion startled Cree so much she stood half out of the chair before she regained control of herself. The shape twisted on the floor: a man, a writhing puddle of dark and light, a man again, a cloud full of dark violet glints. In the corner of her eye she saw the flutter of the meter readout, changing rapidly as the scent of almonds – no, the sweeter, sharper odor of amaretto liqueur – became almost suffocating. At the center of the paroxysm was the seeking, the unresolved need, the need to explain or receive forgiveness or to say one more thing. And there was love, that was what needed explaining, and the love sought a little girl who went back and forth on a swing beneath sun-gilded green leaves. The love sprang from the dying man like an arrow released from a bow.

It seemed to bear directly upon Cree and everything she lacked and yearned for and regretted. She pulled away, denying it, hating it, and that strong good love spun away from the form on the floor and dissipated like gold dust in a whirlwind, unrequited. Her body convulsed with a sob of grief that caught jagged in her throat and made her cough. She sobbed and coughed wrenchingly for a full minute.

By the time she came out of it, tears were streaming from her eyes and the state of mind and the ghost were gone. The trifield meter was back at zero, the other sensors inert. In the aftermath of the piercing emotions, she felt only empty – hollow and disappointed with herself. She'd lost the ghost. She'd come so close, but she'd let her own fears intrude, she'd shied away at the crucial instant.

Swearing, she fumbled for the switches to the sensors and shut them down. When she pushed the glow button on her watch, she saw that it was almost eleven; she'd been in the chair for four hours.

She stood stiffly, stretched, and then blindly fumbled the equipment into its case. No point in trying further tonight. She'd gotten close, but she'd reacted too strongly and had put up resistance, had shut herself away from the ghost. If she'd sustained another few minutes, she might have been able to more fully enter its experience. But the sudden shift of mood and activity had caught her by surprise, and then that intolerable poignancy had struck her like an arrow aimed at her own heart and she'd reflexively protected herself.

She inventoried what new information she'd gained. There was some physical evidence, a digital record of increased electromagnetic activity from the trifield meter. But it wouldn't reveal anything about this ghost's identity or origins.

More important by far was the layered affect of the ghost. Later, this would be the crucial thing, but for now it didn't offer any clues to his identity, either. Any hopes she'd had that this presence would prove to be the perimortem dimension of the upstairs ghost were long gone. Because one thing was definitely not here: a boar-headed man and the affect of stealth, predation, sadistic glee, all the gnarled feelings scented with sweat and lust. The library manifestation carried none of those resonances. None.

He's not all bad, Lila had said.

It was true that nobody was all good or bad. But the reason the manifestations were so different was simply that there wasn't just one fully emergent, articulated revenant manifesting at Beauforte House. There were two of them.

She bumbled to the front of the house, let herself out, and locked the door behind her. When she turned around, she saw a dark figure move suddenly down in the shadows of the gallery. She dropped the equipment case with a clatter as the shape rose tall in front of her.

"Cree?" a voice said.

"Paul!"

"Didn't mean to startle you." The shadow backed toward the edge of the gallery, where in the better light it resolved into Paul Fitzpatrick. I've been out here for hours. Couldn't reach you at the hotel, so I figured you'd be here. I came by and saw your car out front, but I knew you were probably into some… procedure… and didn't want to be disturbed, so I… I waited." He chuckled humorlessly. "I kind of fell asleep. You scared me as much as I must've scared you. Jesus! My pulse is racing!"

"What's going on? Is Lila all right?"

"I talked to her. She's fine. I assume. Nothing's going on. Nothing except I really wanted to see you. As I think must be evident. Man, I'd figured out something intelligent and hip to say, but I'll be goddamned if I can remember what it was!"

Relief flooded through Cree. She retrieved the equipment case and joined him at the edge of the gallery. Closer, she could see he was dressed in jeans and a gray sweatshirt. They stared at each other in the gray-blue streetlight glow. She was close enough to catch his scent, a clean sweaty smell only very slightly augmented with cologne, and she felt the magnetism stirring between them. He looked wide-eyed and unsettled, and Cree guessed she probably looked about the same. She'd had one of the longest, strangest, most difficult days she could remember, yet the prospect of being with Paul was attractive and energizing. The memory of her own cracked face in the mirror came back to her, and the determination to become something other than a ghost. The way he looked gave her a certain courage.

"One question," she said finally.

"Anything."

"Do you know anywhere to get something to eat this late? I'm absolutely starved."

He paused for just a heartbeat. Then he said, "I know just the place."