"Good. I'll see you later.”
I dragged myself through a short run and a shower, followed by an argument with the ferret over the ownership of a banana she had tried to stuff into her mayonnaise jar. I always won, but the look she gave me made me feel guilty. Yet another reason not to have kids: if a two-pound ferret had me wrapped around her tiny toes, I'd be a full-time hostage to a child.
I violated the law and used the cell phone while driving. The height of living dangerously, considering the merry oblivion practiced by most Seattle drivers. You can spot a coffee mug or briefcase riding on a car roof every morning commute.
I had to leave a message for Quinton getting him up to speed on the situation and asking him to call me back soon.
He returned the call a little after ten. He agreed to do it and estimated it would take two to three hours to complete the job and document it. I suggested we meet at the Merchants Cafe for lunch at eleven and go on from there.
"I hope he's prepared to pay well for all of this," Quinton said.
"He is.”
"Good, 'cause I've never met the guy but I'm pretty sure I won't like him. Working for jerks costs extra and working for jerks on short notice is even more," he added, then yawned. "I'll see you at eleven.”
Tuckman was grading papers on the séance table when we arrived. His condescending sneer came out when Quinton walked in, but it vanished once the work began. Quinton's odd but thorough, and I had to smile a little at Tuckman's surprise over the scruffy technician's abilities. Quinton found several flaws in the installation of Tuckman's new toys and deftly rewired them as the psychologist watched. He also produced a complicated form on a clipboard and asked a bunch of questions about the previous installation, nodding and frowning and making notes.
After a while, he handed me the clipboard and asked me to fill in some blanks as he called things out. Then he stalked around the room with his tools and meters, testing the repaired circuits and running through an extended version of the same baseline performance he'd done the last time. We were done at ten to three and Quinton took the clipboard back from me to add some more notes and his signature.
Tuckman handed him an additional form and pointed to a place for another signature, saying, "You'll need to stay for the session and confirm the operation of the equipment.”
Quinton shrugged and signed without looking up. "It's your money." He handed the whole sheaf of forms to Tuckman.
Tuckman looked a bit pale when Quinton told him how much money, but he agreed. When he reached for his checkbook I said I'd add it to the bill—Quinton worked on a cash-only basis, which Tuckman found amusing.
The observation room was packed once Terry arrived. The close quarters and lack of sleep made me feel raw. In the séance room, the sitters seemed nervous and keyed up, too. Their chatter was more shrill than usual and the meters showed spikes of sound and energy as the participants moved and talked, settling themselves for whatever was going to happen. No one seemed to have any doubt that something would.
Patricia put a spray of dried flowers in the center of the table and fussed with them as the others walked around. Something Grey and powerful was visible to me in there, even though the glass made it fuzzy and ill defined. I could see the swirling yellow mass I associated with Celia and feel the surge of cold. I heard Dale Stahlqvist and Wayne Hopke on the audio monitor arguing about the possibility of Mark's ghost appearing.
"Does anything look odd to you guys?" I asked, half expecting that they could see the strong Grey activity, too.
Terry and Quinton looked down at the boards as the participants gathered around the table. "Some of these EM readings are higher than normal," Terry said. "The new room barometer is also indicating rising pressure. We'll have to compare it to the outside pressure later. Those guys are kind of wound up, though, so it could just be that.”
I nodded and looked back into the room. My earlier fatigue had revved up to nervousness, though I thought I shouldn't care.
The group had distributed themselves around the table at equal distances so their fingertips, resting lightly on the surface, never touched one another's. Ian had ended up almost sideways to the mirror between Cara and Wayne with Ana on Wayne's other side. Ken was right in front of the mirror between Ana and Patricia, who had Dale Stahlqvist on her left looking straight into the booth. Cara—the cut on her cheek still covered in a gauze patch—had the spot between Dale and Ian. Someone had turned on the stereo and it let a smoky blues guitar bleed moodily into the room.
Wayne cleared his throat and started to speak, but Dale Stahlqvist cut him off. "Good afternoon, Celia," he started, giving Wayne a sharp glare. "Are you with us?”
The table bulged upward in the middle, deforming like a balloon filling with air. Its metal-shod feet dug at the carpet and the flowers slid off onto the rug. I felt my own knot of Grey tighten in my chest and the air in the booth tasted metallic.
Terry looked up from his display of monitoring instruments. He sounded worried. "I'm seeing a static charge building up. And the temperature in the séance room is dropping.”
"What?" Tuckman demanded. "How much?”
"Five degrees in one minute," he said, shaking his head and staring back down at the panel. "Most of my electrical monitors are acting up. I'm guessing magnetic interference. . ”
"It was clear during the tests," Quinton stated. "It's not the new equipment—that's working fine.”
A thunderclap cracked the air of the experiment room.
The participants looked nervous, shooting glances at one another from the corners of their eyes. I could see the hazy yellow wad of energy was now streaked with sudden jagged welts of red. As I stared, the haze seemed to pull into pieces and draw back together, then apart, drifting from the center of the table toward the participants. The largest clouds of energy moved toward Ken, Ana, Ian, and Cara, fired with red and yellow flashes. Smaller balls like heat lightning twitched in the direction of Wayne, Patricia, and Dale.
"Celia?" Dale asked in a nervous voice.
"Maybe it's Mark…" Patricia suggested.
The table quivered, as if gathering itself.
"Nonsense—" Cara snapped.
The table sprang upward and fell back, digging its feet into the carpet. It jerked and shuddered, writhing under their fingertips like an animal in pain. Patricia yipped as it trampled her foot.
Hot light flared over the table in pure white fury and I felt a sympathetic bum along my limbs. The table spun under its brilliant Grey canopy, rising on one leg and striking Cara and Ian hard in the ribs. Cara dropped to her knees as the table knocked into Ian a second time before coming back down. Ian staggered backward, holding his side as the rest stared around.
"The pressure—" Terry started.
The stereo erupted in a burst of uncoordinated noise as the table rushed toward the glass divider, rising off the floor with a sudden bump. Alarms squealed and pinged in the observation room.
"No!" Terry shouted at his instruments. "It can't do that!”
"There's nothing wrong with the device," Quinton said, poking the monitors with his meter, but his face was pale. "But it's getting awfully hot—”
The table crashed into the glass, gouging a hole as big as a beach ball. Icy air gushed through the breach, dragging a stink of smoke and acid into the booth. I gagged on it and bent my body around a sudden punch of discomfort as the table thudded back to the floor. Unobstructed by glass, I could now see the four large power masses hovering over Cara, Ian, Ana, and Ken. Ken's Grey walls and Ian's prismatic flashes had vanished as if burned away. The four miniature storms of energy tore at the table in pulses of red and yellow.