Her face hit the wood, the impact on her nose bringing tears to her eyes. "Christ," she said, turning to Raven. "I thought you told me it wasn't there?"
"It
isn't
there," he said. "But you're not there either. You're here."
She bit back a tart retort. Raven was infuriating, but nothing he'd told her was a lie. He must mean that she herself wasn't in the spirit realm. So how could she make herself travel there?
"Travel? Travel indeed!" Raven said. "And where exactly is this distant place you're going to be travelling to?"
She sighed. "It's right here." So travelling was the wrong metaphor. And, she realised, metaphor was as powerful as truth in that world.
"I don't need to go there," she said. "I need to see myself there."
He grinned. "Give the woman a prize!"
Now she'd said it, she understood why she'd been reluctant to understand it. Because to see herself in the spirit realm, she'd have the see the
real
her. She'd been born pretty and her parents had been rich enough to help her get prettier: tooth whitening, regular manicures and pedicures and facial scrubs; a nose job when she was sixteen. But that was nothing, just a disguise overlaying the truth of her. To enter the spirit realm, she'd have to see herself stripped bare.
She thought instantly of PD, who'd seen her bare - and not just physically. She'd been an easy mark for him. She'd so wanted to believe he really cared for her, that anyone did. Just like he'd said, poor little rich girl, mom and dad giving her everything except love. He and Hammond had stolen so much from her - her freedom, every future she'd every imagined for herself. And what he hadn't taken by theft, she'd just
given
him. No wonder he treated her with contempt. She was pitiful.
In the spirit world, all those truths would be evident. She had to see herself, but she was afraid that what she'd see would be too painful to face.
"I never promised it would be easy," Raven said. "If it was easy, everyone would do it."
"I need a mirror," she said. "Something to see myself."
"But you already have. The way's open."
He was right. She looked around on a different world. Only the burning city remained, the part of San Francisco's past that the spirit world remembered and preserved. She felt a sudden stinging on her shoulder and slapped her hand against it, only to feel a fluttering beneath her palm. When she raised it, there was a butterfly underneath - a living creature where before there'd only been a tattoo. She watched it drift away on the breeze, mesmerised.
"Hurry," Raven said. "You won't be able to stay here long - not your first time."
She felt only a faint stirring of air across her eyeballs as they passed through where the fence both was and wasn't. For a moment the world was painted the same green as the wood, and then she was through. There was a jolt when her foot hit the ground and she felt a less physical jarring as she fell back into the mundane world.
She glanced at her shoulder, expecting the tattoo to be a tattoo again, but it was still gone. Her skin was raw where the butterfly had torn away from it.
"What happens there is real," Raven said. "It can hurt you. Truth does."
She nodded as she studied the yard she'd found herself in. It was decorated with crumbling, fake-antique statues and artfully overgrown potted plants. Above them she saw a camera swivelling towards her and hurriedly tapped the mic on her throat. "Curtis - I'm through the back. Surveillance camera will be on me in seconds unless you do something."
There was a tense space of silence during which she could feel her pulse throbbing in her ears. Finally Curtis said, "You're covered, Keve. Guards are one floor down and the door's unlocked. Go on in."
She felt horribly visible as she walked the length of the patio to the basement entrance. The camera's red eye winked at her but no alarm sounded and when she put a tentative hand on the door handle it opened easily.
The room beyond looked like a child's playroom, long-abandoned. The ping-pong table was thick with dust and the rubber surface of the paddles was decaying, coming away from the wood in diseased-looking lumps. A spider scurried away from her as she moved across the floor and she hopped back.
Raven laughed softly beside her. "No harm in him, he's an old friend of mine. Or am I another version of him?"
"Oh god, will you shut up?" Alex muttered.
"Say again?" Curtis said.
Alex flushed. "Nothing. Just - thinking aloud. Sorry. I'm in the basement, it's pretty much empty. There's a door at the far end that I'm guessing leads up."
"Copy that. I'll clear ahead of you. Stop for instructions when you reach the top of the stairs. There's a security guard up there. I can blind the cameras, but if he sees you it's game over."
There was a narrow corridor beyond the basement room then, as Curtis had said, a staircase leading up. The steps were stone, grey and a little damp. Alex felt the cold of them seep through the thin soles of her sandals as she climbed.
Another door barred the exit at the top. "I'm there," she told Curtis. "What now?"
"Through, left, left again," Curtis said. "And hurry it up, Keve. You've got less than a minute till the guard comes past.
Alex cursed and wrenched the door open. It squealed alarmingly and she cringed as she eased it shut behind her, reducing the sound to a soft groan. She was moving as it faded, left and left again as instructed. The house up here was far grander, with wooden floorboards below and chandeliers above. Works of art flashed by on the walls as she hurried past them. She thought she recognised some - a minor impressionist, what might have been a Hopper - but she didn't linger to check.
The second left turn took her into a small study. There was a polished wooden desk with a blotter, a modern filing cabinet looking crass and out of keeping next to the upholstered leather armchair and bookcases filled with what she was sure were first editions.
There was also a key in the door, solid and brass. Her hand shook as she pocketed it.
"Keve?" Curtis barked in her ear. "Report!"
"I'm in the study," Alex said. "I don't think I've been seen."
"You're safe there. Give the guard thirty seconds to move back to the kitchen, and then your path's clear to the front door. You'll need to continue down the corridor, first right then second left. I've picked the electronic lock already. You just need to handle the chain and the bolts and PD's in. I'll tell him when he can approach."
Alex's whole body shook as she followed the path Curtis had laid out. She wanted to throw up and she was sure her fear was visible on her face, but she hoped PD would put it down to the mission itself. She ended up in a large entrance hall with a marble staircase curving from the centre of the floor to the upper storeys. Slick with sweat, her fingers fumbled with the bolts as she opened the door.
"Nicely done," PD whispered as he entered.
She nodded, swallowing guilt, and closed the door behind him.
"You need to get upstairs, stat," Curtis said.
PD strode across the black and white chequered floor of the lobby, pressing Alex ahead of him. His hand rested in the small of her back, an oddly courtly gesture. Their footsteps rang on the marble and Alex winced as Curtis said, "Guard's less than 30 seconds away. Hurry it up, guys,"
The security guard appeared as Alex put her foot on the first step. Only the fact that he had his head down saved her. She sucked back her gasp of surprise, but the man must have heard something because his head jerked up and any second now he was going to see her. His face swung towards her, nose flaring like a bloodhound on scent.
She gasped again as PD grabbed her collar, the sound stifled behind the hand he clamped over her mouth. Her shirt bunched painfully around her neck as he dragged her up the stairs. As soon as they were round the first curve, he pressed her body to the stairs beneath his.
The sharp corners of the marble dug into her back and hip hard enough to bruise. She felt PD's heart thundering against hers, their breaths mingling in the air between them as they waited. There was no sound below, and the guard was as invisible to them as they were to him. But if he followed his instincts. If he climbed the stairs...
If he did, at least the discomfort of this unsought embrace would end. Something in her ached to pull PD closer, to surrender to the illusion of caring he offered. His face was only inches from hers and his expression was deceptively vulnerable.
Then she heard the sound of footsteps - moving
away
from them.
When a door slammed at the far side of the entrance hall, PD took his hand from her mouth.
"FYI, Keve," Curtis said. "I can hear you cursing under your breath when you're wearing a throat mic. Are you guys OK?"
PD helped Alex to her feet, releasing her as soon as she was able to stand unassisted. "Still undetected," he said.
"You'd better keep going up," Curtis said. "The cook's heading your way too. Maybe she and the guard are getting together for a nooner."
The landing was less grand than the hall, wooden floorboards replacing the marble once again. The smell of polish flavoured the air with a hint of lemon.
"Well?" PD whispered to her. "What do you see? Which way should we go?"
Alex had forgotten she had a genuine job to do. And she'd almost forgotten the spirit world - or ceased to notice it. Raven had gone, but she sensed him hovering over her shoulder, a whisper of wings and human laughter. The house itself seemed solid, a single not a double image. She took a second to think what that might mean.
"This has always been a home," she told PD as she led him down the left-hand branch of the corridor, following nothing more concrete than a whim.
He gave her a
so fucking what?
look and she shrugged. "You wanted to know what I see. I can tell you this place didn't burn down in the earthquake. And I think it might always have belonged to one family. It feels... stable."
The corridor ended at an open door. Alex poked her head around and saw that it was a bathroom. The smell of lavender displaced the scent of wax as she inspected the claw-foot tub.
"Anything?" PD asked.
Alex turned away. "Well, they don't shop at Ikea. Let's try the bedrooms."
The first two were guest rooms, neatly made-up but characterless. Alex shook her head at PD when he raised an enquiring eyebrow in each. Then she opened the door to the third and stopped, breath caught in her lungs.
PD put a hand on her shoulder. "Bad?" he asked.
She didn't want to think there was sympathy in his voice. She didn't want to recognise that he might be trying to apologise. She shrugged off his hand and went in, forcing her legs to take her towards the bed. It was impossible to look at the figure on it for long. It flickered and shifted, leaving no clear picture, only a blur of pink flesh and an impression of terrible, unremitting suffering. She closed her eyes and looked away, but it didn't really matter. She knew this was an image she would never forget.
"Tell me what you see," PD said.
"It's..." She closed her mouth, swallowing bile convulsively before she was able to carry on. "I think it's someone dying. Whatever killed them was slow and very, very painful."
PD nodded. She focused intently on the well-known planes of his face, while in the periphery of her vision the figure on the bed flickered and changed and suffered and screamed.
"It could be Marriott's wife," PD said. "This looks like the master bedroom, and Curtis said bone cancer. That's not a good way to go."
Alex looked quickly at the apparition then away again. "I think you're right. Whoever that was, they
mattered
to this house. That must be why it's held on to them, to what happened to them."
PD strode to the mantelpiece and ran his hands over a series of framed photos, each showing the same couple at different stages of their life. "Look at this. It must be the pair of them."
Alex stared at them. "They look happy. Normal, too. But there must have been something missing for them, or why would they join a cult?"
PD's sharp brown eyes met hers. "Same reason anyone does. They wanted the things money can't buy."
"Or in their case, that a great deal of money
can
buy," she said, intrigued despite herself. "Wonder what it was and why they couldn't get it elsewhere. And look - over there in the corner. There's a bunch of medical equipment, heart monitor, the whole nine yards. People like the Marriotts could afford 24-hour care. They must have brought her back here once they knew it was terminal so she could die in her own home. Except I don't think she died here. If she had there'd be an end to the suffering. But all this room remembers is the pain."
"There could have been complications or she might have needed surgery. It doesn't have to mean anything - not every twitch is a tell."
"I know. The spirit world doesn't always show you what's important, just what's true." She looked at the machines more closely and realised that she recognised the dress tossed casually over one of them. "Wait a minute - that's an Oscar de la Renta."
"If you say so."
"It's a one of a kind. Maria was wearing it last night."
He frowned. "So she is screwing him. If she's part of a scam, it's a way to get his trust."
"Yeah," she said. "Sleeping with him in the room where the wife he loved spent her last, painful days. Whatever Maria's selling must be pretty damn special." Their eyes met and held and Alex felt a moment of...
something
. An image of the partnership they might have had - could still have, if she made a different choice.
"You reading me, guys?" Curtis's voice said sharply in her ear.
"Yeah," PD said. "What's up?"
"The guard and the cook have gone out to the yard. Downstairs is clear for the moment - you probably won't get a better opportunity."
Alex grimaced at the unmeant truth. This was it, her chance to break free. She thought about the way PD had touched and spoken to her and almost didn't do it. But then she thought about this morning, the way he's pulled away from her as if she was an embarrassment to him. And she thought about the figure on the bed, the form she could still see writhing and which she knew was destined to haunt her dreams. If she didn't escape, there'd be more sights like that, day after day, until she became so hardened to them she stopped caring. Or until they broke her mind entirely.