He sat on the floor beside a heavy oak table and pulled the doll apart to show the next doll inside. "Now, if what we perceive is just a state of energy, then it follows that there may be other states we cannot perceive because we exist within a different state. Beside our 'nor-mal' world—our normal energy state—there is a parallel or 'paranormal' world where other energy states dominate, and a transition zone where the world states overlap. Like these matryoshka dolls, nesting one inside the next. This transition zone is the Grey, and it has its own special denizens, all the weird crossover manifestations of the paranormal and the normal together. Things like ghosts, vampires, elemental spirits, stuff like that. They're neither one thing nor the other. They have some kind of physical body too massy for a purely paranormal sphere of existence—or can manifest one—but they also manifest the faster, lighter energy transformations that—"
The baby snatched the dolls back and Ben looked up. "You're frowning. I'm losing you, aren't I?" "Yes."
Mara sighed and spoke up from her work by the sink. "It's not so arcane as Ben makes it sound. The world is a sea of energy and most people skim along the surface in the normal world. But when you died, you fell into the sea, and when you came back out, you had a bit of it in you, changing your knowledge and sight of the world. You may try to ignore that knowledge, but it persists."
"I 'fell in. " I gave her a skeptical look.
"As an analogy, dying is definitely the big plunge. When people say you 'pass over, they don't know half. You drop all the heavy, slow parts of yourself and zip right through the barrier to… something else. That's the paranormal. But you have to pass through the Grey first, and if you aren't quite ready for the next place, the Grey is where you stop a while, because that's where both worlds overlap."
"Purgatory," I supplied.
Mara laughed, tossing her curls aside and glancing over her shoulder. "That's a Catholic idea. This is nondenominational, and it's nothing to do with either suffering or expiation. But it is full of strange things, you've probably noticed, and it's alive with energy. You notice the house glows, I'm sure."
"Umm… yes, I did."
This house sits on a Grey power nexus—that's why we chose it— which is part of a sort of power grid, though that's a broad analogy. It's the same energy that runs everything psychic or magical. And it may seem chaotic, but it has rules. All you need do is learn the rules."
I sat down at the kitchen table. Mara turned all the way around and leaned on the counter, shaking flour off her hands.
I stared, unnerved a moment, as the flour drifted like a familiar cloud, then settled to the floor. "Why would I want to? I'm fine now. I'm all here, alive, solid. The bruises will fade and then it's over."
They both shook their heads.
"The state change happened," Ben said, "no matter what your state is now. You changed and you can't change back."
The baby flung the Russian dolls across the room, drowning my reply in clatter.
Ben got up and tucked Brian under his arm. "OK, that's enough of that. Your mom'll turn you into a frog if you don't settle down, and then you'll have to live in the yard. Hey… there's an idea!"
Mara twitched a towel at him. "Behave, y'monster, or it's you I'll be turning green and warty. And you can be sure I'll not be kissing you anytime soon for that."
Ben laughed and loped out of the kitchen with the squirming baby.
Mara bent down and picked up the matryoshka dolls, placing them on the table in front of me. "Would you reassemble the universe, please?"
She went to the counter and began rolling out pastry dough. She spoke over her shoulder. "I imagine you find this upsetting."
"Yes. Look, I don't understand this. Even if I accept that I can see a ghost, what about the rest?"
"It's all bundled up together. You see ghosts because you can see and walk into the Grey where they live. That's very rare. Most of us who can see it at all can only stand on the edge of it and cast lines, or draw up water in buckets, or shout across the water and hope someone answers. We're very limited, weak and in danger of attracting the wrong sort of attention, if you know what I mean. If we want to go in, we're leaving our bodies behind and traveling only with our minds. It's exhausting and dangerous, and few people can do it for more than minutes."
"Psychics and mediums, you mean?"
She laughed, dumping fruit into the piecrust. "Among others. But you, you see, you have the strength and safety of your body when you go there. You don't leave it behind now. You could, if you knew how, walk right through until you found what you were looking for. You wouldn't be asking for intermediaries or hoping the right thing heard you calling. You do have other problems, but the strength you have in the Grey, as a physical person among things that are mostly energy, is very powerful. There are some creatures of the Grey who do have bodies—and they can be strong—but they'll have other weaknesses in exchange."
She carried the finished pie to the oven and waved her hand over the top crust, muttering to it. Her words fell on the pie in a drift of blue.
I noticed. "What are you doing?"
She looked surprised. "Oh! Just sang it a little crusty charm against burning. I hate burned crust."
"A charm?"
She blushed. "Well, you see, I'm a witch."
I blinked at her. "Of course, an expert on the paranormal would be married to a witch."
She grinned and blushed darker. "It's not quite as easy as that. Ben and I don't always see eye to eye on theory versus practice. Fascinates him, of course, but he doesn't take in the real shape of witchcraft so well. He's more interested in ghosts and things like that. And we've had a few goes over it, I'm afraid."
She turned away and bustled for a few minutes, then went back to the stove, putting something into a pot. "Well, that's better. You see, this Grey thing isn't so awful. If you can see that little charm, and Albert, you should come along a treat in no time."
"I can see you cast a spell—a charm—because of… this?"
"Yes, of course. If you have the right skills and you can touch the grid, then you can use that energy for work. Magic is just a way of drawing up some of that energy and directing it. But it requires quite a lot of mediation, and how you have to mediate it determines the sort of magic you can do."
My skepticism deepened. "I can?"
"Oh, no! Not you, actually. As I said, you're a Greywalker. You don't manipulate the material of the Grey. You're in it. And that's a thing we should be discussing. You'll need to learn what you can do and what you can't. And how to protect yourself from the things which will be attracted to you. And there already are a few, I'm sure. Because, like this house, you glow a bit."
I was still skeptical, or perhaps I was tired of wrestling the idea, but it crept into my voice. "I glow? How do you know? Can you see that?"
"Just as you can see me work magic, yes, but as to the rest, that's a bit of guessing. I'm one of those who just stand by the edge of the water and cast lines or haul buckets. And Ben is purely a theoretician. We aren't you. We can't know what you know or experience. We know a lot, and can make best guesses, but it's not quite the same."
"If you don't know, how can you help me? I don't want to be a witch or a psychic or a medium or… whatever."
"You shan't be, for you aren't any of those. But you still need to be learning the principles. Ben and I can teach you what we know about the Grey and how it works, what lives in it, how to fend them off. You'll have to improvise here and there, but you'll have a good foundation. But you'll have to accept that this is real, that it is not going away, and that you must learn to live in it, not just with it."
"No." I stood up from the table. "My brain won't stretch to this right now. It doesn't fit!"