Oh.
“You’re…especially pumped.” He looked a bit Cro-Magnon, actually.
“And you’ve got this red, uh, I guess I’d call it energy. It’s marbled all through you.”
His eyes went wide. “You can actually see it?”
“Kinda hard to miss.”
“And nobody else has…?”
“Nope. No one.”
Jacob considered his weird talent for a moment, then said, “And you?”
And me. I didn’t know what my talent looked like—and seeing as how I hadn’t been even the least bit curious, evidently I didn’t want to know. As Lyle had so recently reminded us, denial ain’t just a river in Egypt. “So far the TV’s signal’s holding up pretty good. Let’s get up to Chekotah’s room and find us a ghost.”
We trailed the students to the classroom wing of the building where the instructors lived upstairs in the more spacious single rooms. Since they had their backs to us, and since none of the talents manifested as the proverbial “eyes in the back of the head,” I didn’t notice the GhosTV’s signal decaying until I glanced at Jacob and saw his veins weren’t as disturbingly red and bulgy as they’d been back by the cafeteria. “We’re getting out of range,” I said.
Jacob paused. “Completely? Or does it fade?”
I squinted at the students as they filed into their classrooms. I caught a hint of a glow and a glimpse of muscle showing under a semi-transparent cheek. “It fades. And Chekotah’s room is just upstairs. If the blood ghost is still there, I’ll probably be able to see her just fine.” Despite the cilantro-flavored cement that was setting up in my gut.
As the creaky elevator carried us to the second floor, I watched Jacob’s reflection in the mirrored brass surface of the walls. Veins? Yep. I could still see ’em. I supposed there was no avoiding it—I looked at myself. Nothing special, other than hair that still looked pretty damn good considering I hadn’t washed or styled it recently. But I wasn’t glowing, I wasn’t see-through, and, thank God, I didn’t have a spare eyeball in the middle of my forehead. ’Cos that would’ve really sucked.
The hallway outside Chekotah’s room was clear. We approached the room. The smell of burnt sage lingered in the hall, but there was no movement, and no telltale glowing. We stopped directly in front of the door and looked at each other. Jacob shrugged, and knocked. No answer. “Bert?” Jacob called through the door. “Can we talk to you?” Had they gone somewhere, or were they still hunkered down in there, hoping we’d go away? Jacob tried the doorknob. He must have been fully expecting it to be locked. I know I was. But it turned, and the door swung open.
The part of my mind that dreaded finding them in some kind of ceremonial mating ritual recoiled from the sight of Faun Windsong on her hands and knees, but only for a split second, because the other parts of my brain were quick enough to engage and really take stock of what was going on. Her back was to us. She was alone. And clothed.
And she was scrubbing something off the pale terra cotta floor, something black that hadn’t been there on my astral fact-finding mission.
At least, I thought she was scrubbing, judging by the big, sweeping motions of her arm. I slipped past Jacob to get a look at it, whatever it was, in case she hadn’t quite managed to obliterate the evidence before I could get a look. I approached from the side. Something crunched under my shoe. Her glasses had fallen to the floor, one lens missing…now broken. The floor they lay on was covered in huge, black scrawls, and her fingers were black. It wasn’t a sponge or a scrub brush in her hand—it was a hunk of charcoal. And she wasn’t scrubbing the marks away. She was making them.
I crouched, and I looked. Not just marks. Letters. All jumbled up on top of each other, at least that’s what it looked like at first, until I stared at it long enough and words emerged.
Oh God.
I followed the thick, charcoal scrawls.
OTVNOTVNOTVNOTVNO….
No TV.
“Faun,” I said, and I touched her on the shoulder. She turned to look at me. Her mouth hung slack and her eyeballs were white, and her big, ugly necklace of rocks and hemp was glowing like a string of Christmas tree lights.
I stood and spun away so fast I ended up crashing into Jacob, who’d snuck up behind me quiet as ever. He made a grab for my arm but I dodged him and staggered out into the hall to suck air, and if those burritos and chips had been sitting bad before, now I was strongly considering having my stomach pumped.
Jacob’s voice drifted out of the awful room, low, but urgent. “Katrina, can you hear me? Katrina?” A pause. “Vic—help me out, here. Do we call an ambulance, or…?”
“How the fuck should I know?”
“Vic,” he snapped, and my brain stopped the panic loop that had been swirling around inside it like something nasty on its way down the toilet. “I need you.”
Run. My gut—what I could feel of it around the burritos—was telling me to run. Ghosts and repeaters are inconvenient and annoying and sometimes bloody, but they don’t actually frighten me because, as long as I’m not on any kind of psyactive, they can’t actually hurt me.
Not that I thought Faun Windsong could. But what about the thing that was inside her?
“Shield her,” I said—from the doorway. Faun’s arm was flapping like it was still trying to write, even though the charcoal was no longer touching the floor. A string of drool dangled from her lower lip.
“What?”
“Imagine red energy, a web, a net, that fits around you like a second skin—and then use it to shove out whatever’s in her.” Even as I said it, I realized what a flawed plan it was. Jacob’s psychic veins blew up big and red as he focused and ramped up his energy, so I knew that although he couldn’t see or feel his own power, he’d totally understood me. It wasn’t the plan’s failure I needed to worry about. It was its success—’cos if he drove some homeless ghostie out of Faun, which medium did that leave standing there like a big, inviting flesh suit?
Run. My overstuffed gut was still telling me to make tracks, more urgently now than ever. But ghosts move a hell of a lot faster than I could ever hope to run, so instead I sucked white light, hard, and threw a super-thick white balloon around myself. If you can’t outrun ’em, bounce ’em.
“Is it working?” Jacob said. He glowed red, I could see as much even through the hazy white membrane of my protective barrier, but Faun’s arm was still writing letters in the air.
“No. You’re shielded, but not her.”
He looked at her, hard, and I imagine he was struggling to wield this tool he had no way of controlling. I had some idea what he needed to do, but I was fighting with myself over whether or not I should let him in on the secret. This whole dread thing, weirdly enough, was foreign to me. It was different from the panic I’d felt at the threat of being locked in a room and strip-searched. I’d been locked up before, and come out of it more or less intact. I’d even let my late doctor play puppetmaster with me to get us both out of a bind. But the thought of a hostile spirit hijacking not only my body, but my mind—leaving me a white-eyed, drooling wreck?
I’d rather stick my gun in my mouth and swallow a bullet.
Unfortunately, as much as Faun Windsong drove me completely and utterly nuts, I couldn’t leave her that way, either.
I backed up another step, sucked even more white light, and told Jacob, “You must need physical contact to work your shield. Put your arms around her.” He did it—awkwardly, but he did it—and I winced back and poured every last bit of my white light into maintaining my own barrier. My vision went mostly white. White eyeball syndrome?
No, thank God, no. Just my own barrier so pumped-up it was as opaque as milk glass. Faun went rigid—I saw her move in silhouette—then she gasped and fell limp. I steeled myself for the rush of the displaced spirit looking for someone else to ride, but it never came.
Cautiously, bit by bit, I thinned down my white balloon until I could see clearly again.
No ghost.
Faun had dropped in Jacob’s arms like a yo-yo, then snapped back up nearly as fast—and when she did, it was as if she’d suddenly gone psychedelic, leaving a tracer of light behind her in the shape of her body. “What…how…?” She looked around at her room, at Jacob, and then at her own hands, which were black to the knuckles with charcoal—and two of her fingers were blistered as if she’d grabbed it, still smoldering, right out of the incense burner. “What happened?”
“Are you okay?” Jacob asked.
“Yes, fine.” She sounded impatient, as if the state of her physical body was hardly worth noticing. She knelt on all fours again, just as she’d done when she was scrawling the letters, and she took a closer look at what she’d written. I saw a double-image trailing a split second behind her as she knee-walked.
“I wrote this?”
“Yes.” Jacob’s voice was careful.
“I don’t get it. What’s ‘Not V’?”
I can’t imagine there was any way Jacob had missed what the letters really said, but he didn’t correct her. “Any ideas? Maybe impressions you had while you were writing?”
“That’s just it, I don’t remember any of it. I wasn’t even
trying
to go into trance.” She straightened up, cocked her head and did a sweep of the lettering, as if maybe looking at it from a different angle would illuminate the meaning, and she started retracing her steps without any prompting from Jacob. “I came in to check on Bert, and…where’s Bert?”
I stepped over a stretch of charcoal lettering and tapped on the bathroom door. No answer. I opened it. Empty. A cell phone began to ring, and I turned. The ringing was coming from the shrine corner of their room—no, not from the shrine. From a pile of clothes in front of the shrine.
Something was wrong about those clothes. I knew it, fully and completely, before I’d even analyzed why. People didn’t take off clothes like that. They throw ’em around, or they fold them. But they don’t leave them in a pile—in the exact order in which they’d been wearing them. Chekotah’s ceremonial garb was all there: turban on top of tunic, on top of pants, with a couple of sandals poking out the bottom, and a ringtone threading up from the midst of it all.
I looked back at Jacob and Faun. She had her cell phone to her ear, and she was staring at the pile of clothes like she didn’t quite know what to make of them.
Stepping around the lettering on the floor as best I could, I approached the shrine, crouched beside it, and lifted the red turban with my pen light. A mucous-like strand of slime stretched from the edge of the hat to the hollow well in the neck of the tunic, which held a mass of quivering goo like a bowl of clear gelatin. I prodded the clear gel with my penlight and then smelled the tip. Ozone.
“You might want to get a picture,” I told Jacob. “Now, before it’s gone.”
“A picture of what?” Faun said.
Jacob joined me and snapped a few shots—which probably rocked his world, seeing all that ectoplasm. And seeing that creepy pile of clothes, lined up as if Bert Chekotah had just melted right out of them and turned into ectoplasm himself. I’d been thinking that sarcastically…but actually, that was exactly what it looked like.
“What are you looking at?” Faun’s voice turned edgy, and started growing shrill as the realization that something was very wrong sank in. “Is there blood on Bert’s clothes? Oh, no. No.” She dropped her phone and barreled across the room with no concern at all about smudging the lettering on the floor, and fell to her knees in front of the slimy clothes pile.
“Faun, wait a minute,” I said, as Jacob said, “Katrina, stop,” but she wasn’t hearing either of us, or either of her names.
“What happened?” she cried, as she tore the tunic from the pile, and strands of ectoplasm stretched and snapped. “Was it Five Faith? Did they…?”
As shocked as she was, that line of logic was too bizarre for her to follow. Five Faith—abducting Chekotah, stripping off his Indian gear, filling it with slime and leaving it just so? Unlikely.
“Think back,” Jacob said. “Anything you can remember. Sounds, smells, anything. You came in to check on Bert, and what?”
“Well, I…he…he was upset about Debbie, and I was telling him it wasn’t his fault, and…” she stopped, froze, and for a second I thought maybe “trance” was catching up to her again, and she’d grab some more lit charcoal and set herself on fire. But it wasn’t trance that was washing over her. It was memory.
I waited to see if Jacob was going to prompt her again—because he was the people-person, not me—and then, all of a sudden, Faun Windsong’s face twisted up, and the waterworks began. Faun Windsong, not exactly my nemesis, but a smug and superior annoyance ever since I could remember, was crying. And I felt bad for her. I patted her on the arm, and said, “You’re okay,” which was the only thing I could think of that sounded even remotely true, and comforting at the same time—and she flung herself at me, grabbed me around the waist, buried her face in the front of my jacket, and sobbed.
When I put my arms around her, I tried not to be as obviously awkward about it as I felt…but I doubt I succeeded. I patted her back gingerly, and said, “We’re here,” which, again, was not particularly comforting, but at least it was true.
Her spiky gray hair tickled the bottom of my chin, and whatever hippy fragrance she had on smelled like herbal cough drops. She squeezed me so tightly I had a hard time taking a good, deep breath, but at least from the new overhead angle I was watching her from, I was so close I didn’t have to see those freaky light-tracers trailing from her movements anymore. She squeezed, and she cried. I patted.
Her sobs turned into wails. I looked at Jacob over the top of her head, and he gave me a “sorry, can’t help you” shrug. I patted some more, and eventually, her wails began turning into words.
“Heeeee…he…he….”
It was so not funny.
“He….” She snuffed, a few long and wet-sounding times. I imagined she was leaving her own brand of slime on the front of my jacket.
“I was talking to him, and the room went cold, and…he…he…he…. He dissolved.”
Not funny at all.
So much for my idea that Faun Windsong and her shaman boyfriend knew what was going on, since Faun was such a wreck I’d needed to spot her my last two Valiums, and Chekotah appeared to have gone the way of all his flings. So if they weren’t responsible, who was? I wanted to blame the Internet demon, but it hadn’t bibled Debbie’s email, plus Faun and Chekotah didn’t even keep a computer in their room. What about Five Faith? That’d be a pretty neat trick, to make people dissolve—if that was what had actually happened—using totally mundane, non-psychic means.