Quinton hooked his arm around me against my will and hauled me upward, the dog dancing alongside us. I braced for another blast of uncanny sound, but it didn’t come as he moved me along. “Are you all right? Can you breathe now?”
I sucked in air, stunned to realize I was almost faint from lack of oxygen. I’d blown out my breath when the sound hit, as if I had, indeed, been physically struck in the gut. I nodded and settled my breathing into a normal rhythm, pulling out of his arm to walk on my own. But I stayed close. “I don’t know what happened. Did you hear anything?” I asked.
“No. What did you hear? I mean, that is what happened, isn’t it? You heard something . . . weird?”
“More like I got hit by the sound, but it doesn’t make any sense. What I heard doesn’t mean anything to me. It was just . . . words and noise....” I had a feeling, a certainty. . . . “We have to go back and get into that building. There’s some . . . information there.”
“How do you know?” he asked, but he turned around with me and started walking back to the brewery office with Grendel’s leash in one hand and the ferret peeking out of his pocket under the other hand.
“I just do. It’s . . . like the sound told me something I know but can’t understand in words. It makes my head ache, though.” I rubbed at my right temple, feeling a low throb in my skull like a migraine coming on. Was there something dire about Simondson? Was his ghost some kind of trap set by Wygan and his minions? It didn’t seem that way, but . . . the discomfort, the creeping sense of hidden knowledge ticking like a bomb at the back of my mind gave me pause. Not enough pause to stop my progress to the office, but enough that I frowned over it all the way back.
The cops hadn’t come back around on their beat yet so we had some time, though we didn’t know how much. I took a moment to steady myself, get my mind back on the task at hand and not on the freakishness of what had happened a few minutes earlier. Then I turned to Quinton. “You should go on without me.” He started to object but I cut him off and continued. “If the cops come back, you shouldn’t be here. They’ll recognize you and Grendel. I’ll be inside, and while they might recognize me, they’d have to get close first. I can meet you back at the truck.”
“What if something else happens to you? I don’t like leaving you without backup. Things seem a bit off the rails, here.”
I waved his last comment off and addressed the rest. “I still have my cell phone, and if I don’t call or turn up at the truck within thirty minutes, you come looking for me. But you won’t be any help if you get arrested for trespassing or run off for loitering.” Then, just because she’d been so jumpy about it, I put out my hand for the ferret. “I’ll keep Chaos with me. She can raise the ghost alarm if something’s too close.” I didn’t like endangering the little animal, but I needed any edge I could get and she’d reacted faster to the presence of whatever was ringing my ears than I did. Without Quinton around to spot for me, I’d have to rely on Chaos and my own skills—which weren’t inconsiderable but currently left me a little confused.
Since London, I’d noticed subtle changes to what I could do in the Grey and with what ease. I’d flicked a ghost away like it was no more than a wisp of smoke and torn a piece from Simondson’s substance without stopping to think if I could. Wygan’s goal was to make me into something new, and it seemed that, even without his hands-on interference, I was changing whether I liked it or not. I’d learned that I couldn’t fight being part of the Grey, but I still didn’t like these new powers—they worried me when I thought of what they might mean to Wygan’s plan. Didn’t mean I wasn’t going to use them, for now at least.
I checked the area for anyone who might be freaked out by what I was about to do and then watched Quinton start away. He moved reluctantly, looking back over his shoulder twice before Grendel decided to bolt after a rat that had scuttled out of a brush of wild fennel growing from the packed dirt of an alley.
Chaos had been into the Grey once before, so I thought she’d be all right to come along, so long as she was all the way inside my clothes. I tucked her into my shirt as I went up the office steps on the darkest side. I slid into the Grey and felt my way through the layers of time until I found one in which the office was occupied and its doors stood open to a long-ago afternoon’s hop-scented breeze.
Once inside, I checked for the ferret and she chuckled at me, apparently feeling no ill effects of passing through a physical barrier. Well, at least I now knew it worked, though not the parameters and limits. I let her crawl up and poke her head out of my collar. I began walking around the shadowy edges of the first room, looking for signs, either normal or paranormal, of what had happened to Simondson.
The main floor was broken into two unevenly sized rooms with a small atrium and staircase between them. There were more rooms upstairs and at the back, I assumed, but the ground floor was what interested me at the moment. The more northerly downstairs room was open all the way to the second-floor ceiling with an open gallery around the back and inside wall. It was this room we’d looked into from outside, where we’d seen the marks of industrial glue on the floor. Nothing seemed to excite the ferret and I wasn’t getting much of an indication of activity, except in a vague way as the ghosts of a generation or two of clerks went about their business without a care for us. The other room, the southerly one, was slightly smaller and completely closed up with blinds and white paper on the windows, hiding any activity within. Chaos wriggled and made her angry chuckle, wanting down onto the floor to explore for herself. I kept a tight hold on her as I looked around.
Here the carpet had been pulled up as well, leaving the same sort of mess: loops of glue marks on the floor, gummy with dirt and something like sawdust; broom marks in the detritus; and snakes’ nests of black electrical cable connected to nothing. I looked at the mess through the Grey, hoping for something more useful and trying not to leave any fingerprints or other evidence that might link me to the scene whenever the cops got in—as I was sure they would eventually. Ferret footprints might be a little less conspicuous than human fingerprints, so long as the forensic technicians thought it was just the track of a rat or two, but I was still reluctant to let Chaos down, just in case.
The cold washed over me and with it the strange chorus of babbling and shrieks that had plagued me since I’d returned from London. I tuned it out as best I could and looked around. Near the interior wall, farthest from the windows, I spotted a formation in the Grey, like a field of broken stone thrusting up through age-old peat and fog. I moved closer to it, keeping to the upper levels of the Grey, wary of being sucked into anything before I knew what it was. Chaos let out a fierce chitter as we advanced, just as intrigued as I was.
Drawing near, the cold of the misty world between the worlds fell away and a tingling heat bled out from the strange structure. It looked like . . . no, it was a ring of shattered temporaclines, shards like mirrored glass tipped and ruptured from their proper places. Rifts of motion and memory skittered across the ghostly surfaces of the broken layers of time. As I got closer, the temperature rose and Chaos seemed to pull away from it, sniffing and going still. It reminded me of what I’d seen at my father’s old office, a ring of unearthly fire standing around the place his ghost should have been, an impenetrable darkness at its center and a fury circling its edge.