Apart from brushes with malignant spirits who tried to block her path, she had never encountered real danger on her journeys. But she did know of the terrible threat she faced. If she ever lost her way back, her soul could be forever separated from her life, from her living body. She would know manic terror while she searched for a way to return. If she failed, she would forever toss free, carried by the demanding currents of those on the edge of death and begging her to save them.
During each of her earlier travels she had done good things, brought about rescues for people who would never even know her name—until her most recent transfer through a parallel space, the one she had not mentioned to her uncle.
She had lied by not talking about it, and guilt didn’t make a comfy companion.
Despite the cry she had heard only moments ago, Marley believed that someone in New Orleans, a woman she had been called to help, must be prematurely dead by now. Without knowing who the victim had been or exactly what happened to her, Marley was convinced she had kept company with a victim’s final heartbeats, seen through her now-dead eyes.
At her feet, satiny black-and-white and giving off waves of displeasure, Winnie snuffled irritably. The dog was a barometer of Marley’s moods and objected to these moments when she sensed she was not uppermost in her favorite person’s mind. Winnie was ignoring her constant companion, a huge plastic bone, and this was a sure sign that she wasn’t happy.
Absently, Marley used her bare toes to squeeze one of Winnie’s feet.
What if the woman hadn’t died? What if she was still alive and reaching out one last time for help?
Marley switched off the lights over her bench and reluctantly made her way between aged pieces of furniture and objets d’art awaiting her attention. She was known as one of the best restorers of antique lacquer and gold leaf in the city.
Her door onto a tiny landing outside was shut. Stained-glass panels, richly emerald, ruby, sapphire and amethyst, glowed, dappled faint colors on the dusty wooden floors in the dim workroom.
For some seconds, Marley rested her hand on the latch. Then she turned it, thumped the heavy bolt home. Anyone trying the handle from the outside would know to leave her alone.
She retraced her steps and stood in front of her bench again. All around her, the air buzzed and popped. Here and there she caught sight of partly formed faces, their mouths open as if calling out.
Slowly, her feet and legs heavy, Marley stepped backward, once, twice, three times until her calves bumped into her cracked brown leather wing chair, and she sank onto the seat.
“Don’t go,” she told herself aloud.
Too late. The separation had already begun. Luminous green brushed the funnel, spun quickly and turned the vapor to shimmering water. Inviting. Marley felt its warmth, its temptation. She touched it with her fingertips, drew it open wider. Its matter adhered to her skin. Her own weight slipped away and she was free, gliding through the iridescent tunnel toward a pulsing black membrane.
The membrane opened, slid apart like the aperture in a camera lens. Scents of age and dampness rushed at her.
Wetness shone in grimy rivulets on the concrete walls of an empty room. This was the room she had been in last time. Ahead of her the door to some sort of compartment—or locker—stood wide-open, a thick, heavy door with no handle on the inside.
In the opening a woman in red gradually appeared from clouds of icy mist.
Not the same woman as the last time.
Dark haired as the other had been, rather than being striking and voluptuous with a single black birthmark above her mouth, this time the facial features were pointed, the eyes large beneath thickly painted lashes. Behind her thin figure, the mist hovered around hooks hung from a slowly revolving rod, and billowed over white, rectangular boxes placed in a precise row.
Shapes, indistinct, swung heavily just out of clear sight. Marley thought they were suspended from the hooks.
She shivered. Cold struck painfully into her brain. She should go back, but she could not look away from the woman, from her pale, pleading face.
Then the woman smiled. She cocked her head to one side, listening to a deep voice as mellifluous as warm honey falling from a crystal spoon into a golden bowl. The voice said, “Come to me, child.”
Nodding, the woman appeared in a trance.
The voice darkened, caressed, but with force. “Join me, child. Now. Come to me, now.”
And she began to drift away, back into the space behind the heavy door.
“Wait!” Panicked, Marley moved her presence forward. “Let me help you. Come with me.” From experience, she knew she couldn’t be heard and that only if she managed to bring help from the real world to this place would there be any help for the woman.
But there were no clues as to where she was.
The door began to close and Marley could scarcely breathe. She thrust herself forward, clawing at air as if it would help her move faster, and she collided with the creature in red. Instantly she felt consumed into rigid flesh, bone-cold flesh, and she cried out, “I must go back.”
The wrench to separate again sapped her consciousness. She could not slip into sleep here, must not. The Ushers mumbled very close and Marley focused on their sounds. She gathered strength and once more she heard the thump, thump, thump of a heartbeat that was not her own, and saw through eyes that didn’t belong to her. This woman wasn’t yet dead.
She struggled, staring ahead, willing herself to break free. And as she did she cried out to the woman, “Hold my hand. Come with me now.” While she talked, she searched around for any clues to her location. Nothing.
Her fingers, repeatedly reaching for the woman, came back empty each time.
A man stood with his back to her, a tall, dark-haired man, with wide shoulders and a straight, unyielding spine. He had a different substance and dimension from both the woman and their surroundings.
Marley had started to shift. Faint warmth entered her, and she caught sight of the funnel regenerating, its direction switched so that the large opening faced her again. Still vaporous, it took on the green tint.
Thrusting forward like a swimmer with the pool wall in sight, she made to pass the man and he looked at her over his shoulder. For one instant she cringed at the directness of his gaze, the hardness of a mouth that should be beautiful, despite a thin white scar through both lips and upward across one cheek in several slashes.
But he couldn’t see her, could he? She must be imagining that he was staring at her.
Marley gave a last, horrified look to where the woman had stood, only she had disappeared. A last thought as she felt a familiar, dragging pull, was that she knew why the man seemed out of place: She saw him not in color as she did the rest of her surroundings, but in the gray shades of a black-and-white photograph. And as she stared at him his face changed again. The corners of his mouth tilted up and the scars faded.
Chapter 2
As soon as she felt steady enough, Marley ran down three flights of stairs and left the shop through French doors that led to an enclosed courtyard behind the building.
Gray-tinged light creeping between the fronds of palms and oversize ferns shouldn’t have bothered her. This afternoon it burned her eyes. Wet heat dampened her skin.
Her experience with the woman in red had deeply shaken her. Each breath she took barely touched her lungs and came out in jagged puffs. She hugged herself tightly and tried to hurry toward her apartment on the far side of the courtyard.
She couldn’t hurry. Her legs were still heavy and cold. Tremors racked her in waves. This was the first time she had returned from a disembodied journey and not stayed in her workroom until she had eaten, usually voraciously, and rested in her chair. But this had also been the first time she had been truly afraid for her life. If she had not been strong, she would never have shaken herself free of the icy body she had unwittingly entered.