I shrugged, tired and wishing I had another glass of whiskey. "You'll have to explain that."
"Well, for instance, Albert's a sort of garden-variety willful spirit— some volition, but very limited will and action. But a revenant is literally that which survives. Most ghosts are kind of like etheric recordings. They don't have any will or personality—they just keep going through the motions of their lives or their message until they are released, or run down like clockwork. They're just shadows and echoes. A lot of them are just retrocognates."
I peered at him and interrupted. "Retro whats?"
"It means to know or be aware of something from the past. A medium can also retrocognate, under the right conditions. Some of them actually retrocognate when attempting psychometry."
"Ben," Mara broke in, "I'm sure Harper'd appreciate the layman's version, if you don't mind."
He looked sheepish. "Oh. Umm… Psychometry—well, I guess I'll get to that another time. But retrocognition… if you see a ghost walking through a place that no longer exists in this time and space, you're probably retrocognating, seeing stuff from the past. Do you ever experience that?" His eyes glittered.
"Sometimes," I responded, feeling more drained every second.
He nodded, then shook himself and continued. "All right, so the right medium could study the object and attempt retrocognition to tell you exactly what the connection is between your client and the parlor organ, but it would be very dangerous if it is as powerful a dark artifact as you two think."
"It's tangled up in the Grey and it seems to be drawing energy from the nexus nearby, like a battery charging up or something."
"Yes, Mara told me about it." He stopped to look at his wife, who smiled a tight smile and nodded for him to go on. "I wonder what the things purpose was."
"Not nice," I said. "It's black and red and very unfriendly. I think it sucks the energy out of everything that comes near it."
"Couldn't have been doing that for very long. Someone would have noticed."
"I noticed it," Mara muttered.
"You didn't say anything."
She shrugged and looked unhappy.
Ben made a rueful face. "I should call some of my contacts and see if they've noticed anything else."
I shook my head. "There's no time, Ben. I'm not doing very well, my ex-client is dangerous, and Cameron's problem may not be solvable. By me. The organ is getting worse. It's been drawing on the energy below the museum for ten months. And I don't know, but things seem to be accelerating."
"Good God! If it really is a battery, it's loaded. Anyone with control of it could wreak all sorts of havoc through the Grey."
"You're scaring me, Ben. I don't need to be any more scared than am.
"I'm scaring me!" His eyes had grown wide. "Do you know anything about this ghost? Any guesses?"
"I don't know much. The last three owners of the organ, at least, are dead—all suddenly—and I suspect more. I have someone looking into its history, but…" I tossed up my hands feebly. "I don't know."
"A murderous ghost? That would require some big expenditures of energy and will."
"But with the organ acting as a collection and storage device, he'd have it, wouldn't he?" I asked. "And it seems to be getting worse since he arrived in my office. Just like I seem to be getting worse."
Mara looked between Ben and me and kept quiet, though her face was white and her eyes had turned dark.
"Presupposing he could access that power," Ben stipulated.
My brain engaged in the puzzle again, though I felt shredded. "If he could tap the power, why would he need me? Wouldn't he know where it was already?"
Ben waved his hands through the air. "Not necessarily. There are lots of cases where seeking ghosts can't locate even the most intimate items on their own. If he didn't know, was blocked from knowing, or had to establish some kind of path to the object before he could get to it, he could still benefit from its intimate connection to him, without being able to find it or go near it. But he wants it… Tell me everything you know or guess about him."
"I think he's European, judging from his speech. Russian or Slavic, if his name is any indication."
"He told you his name?" "Yes, it's—"
"No! Wait! Write it down." Ben scrabbled around the cluttered surface of his desk for paper and pencil, then pushed them across to me, sending several cataracts of books and papers tumbling to the floor. "We'll just play it safe on this one, shall we?"
I shrugged and wrote the name down. "What do you mean, 'play it safe'?"
"I'm probably being paranoid, but some ghosts are attracted to their names. I don't think we want this guy looking over our shoulders, do we?"
Chapter 27
I would have laughed at our nervous glances, if I wasn't so damned scared myself. Albert haunted the doorway, as clear and solid to my Grey-sensitive sight as Sergeyev had been. Mara looked at him and made a sparkling, circling motion with one finger. Albert vanished.
"Albert will keep an eye out for us, I'm sure." Ben coughed a tight laugh behind his books. "I hope so, but I'm afraid I'm not as convinced of our ghostly boarder's valor as you are, Mara."
"Now, be nice, Ben. You remember what happened the last time he got upset."
I looked at both of them.
"Turned Ben's desk upside down," Mara confided. "Terrible mess."
We both snorted relieved giggles.
Ben glanced at the paper I'd given him and started to chuckle. "What's funny?" I asked.
"This guy's a sly little revenant. Generic Russian name. Basically the equivalent of Greg Stevenson. Not quite Ivan Ivanovitch, but close."
My brain was running in all directions. "It's got a Swiss bank account attached. Maybe he… stole it, somehow."
Ben whistled. "Clever. Damn, I wish I knew what he had up his sleeve."
"Yeah, but we don't have time, if you're right about that thing."
"You're right. You're right. I don't have any suggestions, though. Now we're starting to tread into the realm of magic, and that's Mara's sphere."
We all got quiet for a while.
"Look," Ben started again. "We know he wants to gain control of the organ and that can't be good. He's a revenant, and although he's got access to a big store of power, he can't just go flinging it around. Every time he does anything, he draws power. If he has plans for the dark artifact, he'll want it fully charged, so he's not going to do something until he's ready to play his cards. He already blew some at your office, so I'd guess you have forty-eight to seventy-two hours before he's going to do anything more.
"In the meantime, be extremely careful, Harper. If you wear yourself down too far, you won't have reserves to oppose him with, and we don't know what the purpose of that… thing in your chest is. I'm afraid our help has been inadequate."
I put up one heavy hand. "Ben, stop. Without you and Mara, I think something would have eaten me by now. You haven't always been right, but that doesn't mean you're always wrong. But I've got a question. If the organ is drawing power from the nexus and everything else nearby, why isn't it draining this house, too? The house is as bright as ever."
"I don't know."
Mara smiled at me. "It's got its own nexus, remember? It's off the grid, so to speak. Can't get to us from there."
"The grid," I whispered. "The energy structures Wygan showed me—that I can still see—they're the power grid of the Grey. I think he… wired me into the Grey."