We passed through a spectral wall—the memory of the wall that had once divided my father’s office from his neighbor’s. I felt cold sweep over me as we stepped through and then a blast of heat as we stopped at the current door marked “2.” Paul glanced at me and then at the door.
“This is it. Are you sure you want to go in at night like this?” He glanced around and hunched his shoulders as if he were cold. “I never thought this was a spooky place before, but now it does seem haunted. I guess it’s just the light. ”
I shivered, feeling something tremble at the edge of the Grey, sending ripples through the thin, silvery world. I hoped that wasn’t what I thought. I looked at Paul and he seemed very far away, as if the mist of the Grey was a concave lens. Sweat formed in the small of my back from the strange heat coming out of the room.
“You might not want to go in with me. It might mess up the feel of the room to have two of us in there at once.”
“I’d feel funny about that. Can you leave the door open?”
What a pain. “Sure.” I’d have to maneuver into a place he couldn’t observe from the doorway before I tried to get into the layers of history. I took my phone out of my pocket and started into the room.
“What’s that for?”
“The cell phone antenna sometimes picks up electrical anomalies caused by ghosts. If I have the phone in the right mode, it will make noise when I’m near one.” Not entirely untrue but generally useless. Ditto using the tiny camera to catch the lingering Grey impressions of ghosts passing through the glass; the rice-grain-sized lens was too low-quality to capture any images worth the effort. I didn’t have any other props for my role as ghost hunter, but the phone would do if my line of fast talk was good enough.
Apparently it was, since Arkmanian nodded and stood back from the door to let me into the room. I stepped into my father’s old office and halted with a jerk as the heat hit in earnest—it was like being swatted with a flaming bat. Then I heard the noise, like a runaway train rushing toward me. The layers of time heaved and rippled, a storm-racked sea of history battering the walls of the room as the screeching sound of something huge bearing down grew louder and closer.
“That’s it! That’s the sound!” Paul cried out, twitching back a couple of steps.
I bolted sideways into the blind side of the doorway, putting out my hand for the cold, slicing edges of the temporaclines. One of them stabbed at my fingers with fiery knives. I was shocked: Usually temporaclines feel cold as sheets of ice to me. I reached for it and shoved the layers open, sliding into the slice of history.
The room—Dad’s personal office—hit me hard. It was a disaster of splattered blood and frenzy. Papers were thrown on the desk and strewn on the floor. Books, houseplants, furniture were all tossed about as if the room had been shaken by a giant hand and then drizzled with gore. The center of the room was nothing: a black void surrounded by a fence of flaming energy. Stars and lightning bolts of power shot through the space around the hole in history. Queasy and frightened, I walked toward it.
Hot knots of energy battered me back and the roaring noise rose to a hurricane shriek that ripped open the writhing mist of the Grey. A snarling monstrosity of spiderweb and bone poured out of the hole, snapping its dripping jaws at me and at the black void, flinching back as its fangs bit into the blazing energy around the nothingness. Bone spines rattled in the uncanny world as the creature shook its head in fury and screamed again.
I flinched away from its impossible mouthful of teeth. I’d run into the guardian beast before and still had the bite scars two years later. It turned its attention away from me as soon as I backed from the hole where the rest of the room’s past should have been. Every time I moved toward it, trying to see any glimpse of my father, the beast snapped at me and drove me back. The beast’s job was to keep non-Grey things out and protect the Grey from threats. It didn’t like the thing that had blotted out or cordoned off this chunk of Grey. There would be no getting past the monster to get to my father, even if I could have gotten into the infernal void that seemed to have swallowed up all Grey trace of him.
I tried circling the hole in time, but there was nothing to see and nothing to touch when I beat the guardian’s snapping jaws to the edge of the darkness where my father should have been. He was simply not there. Or not accessible even from the Grey. Whatever was causing that infuriated the beast.
Defeated, I fell back, sliding back into the normal, and sidling along the walls of the treatment room to the door. I checked the phone’s clock and saw I’d been missing from the normal world for only a few minutes. Paul Arkmanian was peering into the room with his eyes wide.
“Did you hear it?” he demanded. “Where did you go?”
“I was right there, behind the door. And, yeah, I heard that noise. Is that the way it always sounds?”
“It was louder than usual this time.”
“Huh,” I grunted, closing my phone and putting it back into my pocket. There was a message icon on the screen, but I’d get to that later. “I guess I’ve upset your ghost.”
“So. do you think the place is really haunted?”
“Yes. You have a ghost all right.”
“Yeah?” He looked wary.
I nodded. “Yeah.” The ghost of a ghost, I thought.
I excused myself from Paul Arkmanian as soon as I could without being suspiciously rude. He didn’t say anything about my trip sideways. He might not have allowed himself to notice it—most people didn’t. I told him I’d be back in touch with him, though I privately doubted it would be soon and I felt a bit bad about the deception. He and his dad were friendly and deserved better than what I was serving them. I would be back, but not where normal people could see me. My dad’s ghost seemed to be missing, but I wanted another shot at Christelle and what she might tell me about that hole and what had happened to her.
CHAPTER 11
I parted company from Paul Arkmanian outside and pretended to go on my way, waiting until he was out of sight before I ducked back into the building with the help of a pencil stub I’d jammed in the lock earlier. I made my way back up to the office and settled in to wait for another chance to talk to Christelle. I only hoped the security guard wouldn’t come along while I was skulking in the corridor.
About ten o’clock I saw the slim shade of Christelle walking down the hall again, and I slipped deeper into the Grey to talk to her. She wasn’t as friendly this time.
As I drew closer, she muttered something under her breath that I couldn’t catch. Then she pasted on a fake smile and opened the phantom door to the waiting room. “Hi. Are you here for an appointment? You know Dr. Blaine isn’t in, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I replied, following her into the ghost of the old office. “I wanted to talk to you.”
She looked surprised as she sat behind her desk. “Me? Why?”
I stared at her, trying to catch her skittish gaze with mine. I knew she was capable of responding, of disengaging from the endless loop of memory in however fractured a fashion, and I needed her to speak outside the moment of history. “Do you know who I am?” I asked.
She peered back at me, pushing her glasses higher on her nose, her face pinched with suspicion. “No.”
“I’m Harper. I’m Rob’s daughter. Look close.” I hoped the resemblance would be strong enough.
Christelle’s ghost gazed hard at my face, her eyes flicking back and forth in restless study. Then she drew back. “Oh. Oh. It is Harper. I—But. ”