In spite of the development, the parking lot had a fair number of ghost images, flickering like film projected on smoke. Several of the spirits, both human and animal—and some were a bit of both—turned their night-sky eyes on us as we passed and watched us with curious expressions.
Quinton and I followed Fish into the building, through a soaring lobby of stone and murals and colored lights where the hotel’s reception desk would someday greet guests. Then down a wide corridor and into the gaming rooms with a ceiling of twinkling stars and sudden simulated thunderstorms. Circular banks of slot machines stood in treelike groves around the periphery, raising neon branches into stylized Art Deco canopies. The walls swam with murals of salmon, orca, otter, and trout, and the carpet was patterned with water currents and stones.
The space felt disorientingly like a drowned forest in which the patrons floated in a watery twilight. The building itself was so new it hardly had a ghost, but a few were there, as were the silvery striations of time and the blue and yellow lines of the Grey’s power grid. A pair of sly eyes in a vague, misty shape kept a close watch on us from beside a tree of nickel slots as Fish led us over to a small gift shop against one of the river walls.
A burly man in a three-piece suit rearranged a group of expensive watches under the glass countertop. He looked up as we entered and grinned, his eyes taking in everything in quick twitches. He had the hot, gold-sparked aura of a man with boundless energy. “Hey, Fishkiller!” he cried, closing up the case and dropping the keys into his vest pocket.
“Heya, Willet.”
“So, what is it?” Russell Willet asked. “Your mom’s birthday or something?”
“Nah. Taking these white eyes out to see Grandma Ella.”
“Whoa!” Willet peered at us as if we were exotic beasts. “What do you want to see Grandma Ella for—No, wait. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
“Nope, y’don’t,” Fish said.
“But I bet I know what you want.” Willet turned and ducked down under the counter, rummaging through a cabinet. He brought out a wooden box a little larger and flatter than a shoe box. When he opened it, the smell of tobacco, cocoa, dark soil, and pepper floated up into the air. A red triangle around a little gold crown adorned the white label inside the lid, with the word “Montecristo” under it. Neat rows of cigars about as thick as my thumb and twice as long nearly filled the box. Willet carefully removed two of the cigars, which made an oily crackling sound as he touched them, and slipped them into a bag before he put the box away again.
He handed the bag over to Fish and admonished him with a raised finger and a twinkle in his eye, “All right, then. Those are for Grandma Ella—because I swear she’d put a curse on me or something if she knew I didn’t hand them over.
That is my personal high roller stash for buttering up the big winners. If you want your own, there’s plenty to choose from,” Willet added, pointing to a humidor cabinet on the back wall of the tiny shop.
“I don’t smoke,” Fish objected.
Willet looked at Quinton and me again; we both shook our heads. “Too bad,” he muttered. I started to reach for my wallet, but he put up his hands. “No, no. Can’t accept payment for a gift to Grandma Ella. Just tell her I sent them. I want to start off the year on her good side.”
Willet shooed us off to deal with a couple of other customers and we continued on our way.
Back in the Rover, Fish directed me deeper into the reservation. We headed down toward the water, into an area called Priest Point, where the Snohomish River emptied into Puget Sound. The building I parked near, at Fish’s command, was quietly lunatic—a collection of additions and repairs under which the original building couldn’t be detected, the whole perfectly painted and clean in the midst of its frost-withered yard and a fog of spirits. A narrow dock stuck out into the water a few dozen yards behind the house. I could make out a trail of Grey habit worn down to the end of the dock where generations of fishermen must have sat or stood to cast their lines.
The path to the door looked odd—frosted with Grey and wandering through sudden dislocations of time that looked like fence posts of neon yellow and sparkly blue. As I stepped forward, the smells of brackish water, cedar smoke, and some kind of hot fat sizzling over flame wafted over me in alternating waves. The short walk felt like miles across one of those fun house floors of sliding planks and bouncing, slipping slabs. I was grateful Fish was in front and couldn’t see how hard I concentrated on every footstep. Quinton stayed just behind me and when we reached the comparative stability of the front stoop, he touched the small of my back and caught my eye, giving me a questioning look.
I felt a little dizzy, but I murmured, “It’s all right. There’s just a lot of ghost stuff here.”
He nodded and redirected his immediate attention to the house, though he left his hand a moment longer on my back and a little spark of orange leapt from him in my direction and tingled a second on my skin like the brush of a blackberry leaf.
The front door lay up some steps and behind an enclosed porch with a deep overhang. Inside the porch, several sets of fishermen’s bright yellow foulweather gear hung on pegs above a bench with two pairs of muck boots under it.
Next to the foulies someone had hung a basket that looked like the oversized bell of a French horn and a shaggy cape of some kind with bits of shell sewn on in patterns obscured by the folds. Fish saw me studying the hairy garment.
“That’s a cedar cloak—it’s made of shredded cedar bark. I’m not sure anyone wears it anymore, but I don’t want to ask.”
I nodded, sure it would be a bad idea to remove the cloak and basket while their ghostly owner was standing and glowering beside them. The specter was clothed in the memory of the cape and wore the basket on his head, which made him look remarkably like the shaggy creature who’d brought me the zombie Friday night—if the shaggyman had been wearing a truncated cone for a hat.
Fish knocked on the door.
A voice like a chorus of seagulls called out in incomprehensible syllables. Fish called back and waited.
“Let yourself in!” the seagull voice screeched. “I’m an old woman, you young fool!”
Fish sighed and opened the door, waving us through ahead of him. The interior was bakery-hot and smelled of sage. Another row of hooks waited for our dry coats and we were glad to use them.
Fish pointed to a slatted wooden tray on the floor. “Take off your shoes and leave them there—she’ll rant for hours if we track mud on the floor.”
I was relieved to sit down to remove my boots—it gave me a moment to get used to the tumbling, twisted state of the Grey inside the house. Planes of time and ghosts of trees stuck up or out at tilted angles and a flight of salmon swam past, disrupted by the jerking loop of an owl that swooped through them in multiple exposure. Bits of people appeared, moved, and vanished as if seen in shattered shards of mirror hanging in the air or scattered across the discontinuous floors of every version of the house and land that had ever existed. Animate sparks of colorful energy broke from the grid and scampered loose through the chaos like animals and mythical sprites. I could barely separate the real house from the illusions, so odd was the construction ahead.
Finally, sock-footed and undressed of outer layers, we trooped through a pair of offset doorways, down a hall, and into a sudden calm—the energy within the Grey snapped into a grid of gleaming threads and all the riotous dislocation and overlapping phantasms vanished, leaving only a thin silver sheen to everything.
The nearly bare living room we entered must have been as large as the original house and a wall of windows faced south to show the Sound outside. There was a stone fireplace on each end of the room and both of them contained blazing logs of cedar and fir that perfumed the air and lent momentary shape to swirls of cold memory. Rugs covered the wooden floor that supported a couple of low, heavy chairs, a rocker, one sofa at one end of the room, and a scattered herd of red-and-black wool hassocks at the other.