"Is that why you're heading out here? I thought he went into the city?"
"He did."
He took a final pull on his cigarette. "You told Pender about him, didn't you?" When I didn't answer, he dropped the cigarette on the deck and ground it out. "Yeah, you gave him up. That was the deal you cut. And now Pender's chasing him." He smiled at me. "But it isn't him you're interested in. You want his friends."
"One of them." The Chorus hissed, a black fog in my belly rising up toward my throat, toward my head.
His eyes went to the approaching shoreline. "It happened in a barn," he said. "I have memories that aren't mine. They're like weak Polaroids, snapshots from a trip I didn't take. There's a red barn out there. It's old, hasn't been used to store anything for some time. That's where they did it."
I nodded. I had the same memories, the same trail had been left in my head by Doug's passage. Nicols didn't understand the images in his head, but I did. I knew what they had done in that barn. I knew what rituals had been conducted.
Not so different from another ceremony performed a long time ago. Unlike Doug, there had been no path for me to follow. No one to take my hand and guide me. Just an innocent child, abandoned to the darkness.
VI
A tow truck had absconded with my rental car-a reminder from Pender of his omnipresence-so we stayed with Nicols' car, tracing out routes with the Thomas Guide he had in the vehicle. He lived on the Olympic peninsula, and had a fairly detailed knowledge of the roads that were just thin lines on the pages. It still took several hours and a few false starts before we established a better sense of what we were looking for. "Police work," Nicols said after the third barn, "is all about checking every possibility. It's the drudgery that no one expects us to have the tenacity to do, but it is why we get things done. Ultimately you run out of options. You just have to be patient."
Patientia beneficium. I had never been good at waiting.
Nicols shared some of my restlessness. It was at odds with the terminal weariness soaked into the shape of his face but, as I watched the way his eyes flicked away whenever he looked at me, I realized the source of his unease. I was his occult anchor; at the same time, I was alien-bright and shiny in a way nothing ever had been before.
Shortly after sunset, we finally spotted a match for the barn we carried in our heads. A row of ragged evergreens hid the building from the highway, a natural barrier obscuring the property from casual view. We only spotted it because we were on an access road, looking for a way back to the main highway.
The barn had been red once, like all barns built as historical symbols of an anachronistic American cultural heritage. Time and the insistent Pacific Northwest weather had turned this one dull and scarred, like it was covered in old blood. It was fronted by a decrepit farmhouse, squatting like a sullen toad at the end of a woefully uneven gravel driveway.
Nicols pulled the car up to the farmhouse, headlights transmuting the cracked paint into a wrinkled layer of old skin. As he looked in the glove box for a flashlight, I got out and listened. Night was spreading fast, purple to blue-black like a bruise stretching across the skin of Heaven, and the nocturnal world was waking up.
The hiss of the highway was a distant sizzle beyond the row of evergreens. Energy flow along the ley beneath the road was a thin trickle, fading to near nothingness in the distance between cars. An owl hooted at us from the tall trees behind the barn, a solitary call that was more a querulous inquiry than a territorial warning.
Having found his flashlight, Nicols swung its beam across the front of the farmhouse. The windows were boarded over, and the front door was sealed by several clumsily nailed two-by-fours. A "No Trespassing!" sign was attached to the siding beside the door but the faded condition of the letters detracted from the bluster of the message.
The Chorus touched the ley, orienting me on the magnetic poles. The front of the house looked due north, and we walked around the left-the eastern side-of the house to the back. Just as inviting as the front. Nicols examined the slabs of wood nailed over the windows and the back door with his flashlight. I opted for a magickal examination, and let the Chorus read the dilapidated building. Nothing. It was just an abandoned farmhouse, a dead spot on the landscape.
Nicols turned his flashlight toward the nearby barn. He played his beam across the worn surface of the building for a few seconds, and then clicked off the light. In the darkness of the developing evening, a thin gleam of magick leaked through the warped walls.
Definitely the right barn.
The door was on the west side of the building, and a heavy combination lock held the rickety portal shut. Nicols tugged on the lock once, a half-hearted pull in case it hadn't been closed properly. He stepped back, and glanced at the upper floor of the barn. He was trying to think of some acceptable excuse to kick in the door.
I grabbed the lock while he was rationalizing. Elide. The movement of the Chorus in my arm made my skin tingle. The lock held; it was the screws holding the hasp to the door that came out. I tossed the whole assembly aside.
"A little breaking and entering going to bother you?" I asked as I opened the door.
Nicols looked at the lock lying on the scrub grass. "Not as much as how you just did that."
"Just a crowbar of my Will," I said. "Crude, but effective."
"Is that all?" I heard him mutter as he trailed me into the barn.
The barn had no windows on the ground floor, but the interior was illuminated by the phantasmal glow of magickal seals. The barn had been gutted to make room for a ritual platform. It was a large slab of concrete, about three inches thick. It wasn't a single piece, rather blocks about three feet wide-three by three, making it a grid of nine. The platform contained three magickal circles-the central one dominated the space, and the secondaries were laid in opposite corners. The inscriptions along the inner rims were still glowing, the phantom light of residual magick. Drifting in the center of the big circle, coiling upward like a small dust devil, was a wispy column of spirit smoke. More residual energies left behind by the attendees of the ceremony. Left behind by Doug and Katarina.
My chest ached, a chill filling my lungs like atmospheric tension caused by a pressure change. The Chorus slithered along my spine, rising into my head. They wanted that column of smoke, wanted to taste the vibrant lights that had touched each other here.
I swallowed heavily, feeling like a recovering alcoholic who had just found a forgotten bottle of vodka in the freezer. The pressure in my chest didn't lessen as I tried to breathe normally. My lungs were frozen by the resurrection of old memory. I could feel her hand in my chest again. The whispers of the Chorus slithered like poison dripped into my ear.
Nicols swung his flashlight toward my face. "Are you all right?" he asked.
I shook my head, stumbling away from the concrete platform. The Chorus erupted as I retreated from the spirit echoes of Katarina and Doug, as I fled from her. This was what they wanted. What I wanted. Why would I deny them-myself-this? Their voices, a shadow conspiracy carried so long. The taste of her soul, they hissed, after all this time. Is this not the cure? Is this not what you need?
I could taste her on my lips. I could smell her again. So close. The tear in my world was so close to being fixed. Like a chain that didn't quite reach. Just a little more, just a little closer, and I could fit the hook into the ready link. Just one more tug.