City of Masks Page 24

  She sat quietly, waiting for something to manifest, but after half an hour it became clear the only haunts here were her own. She stood, drew the dust cover over the love seat and left the room.

  The library was very different. She knew it as soon as she turned into the big, dim room.

  Moving in almost total darkness, she brought the equipment case to the far corner and repositioned a wingback chair so that from it she'd have a good view of the whole room and the black rectangle that was the door to the corridor. She opened the case and, working mostly by touch, set out the trifield meter, the remote temperature sensor, the ion counter, and the audio recorder.

  She relaxed her hands into their mudra in her lap, listening to the almost inaudible hum of the recorder and breathing from her diaphragm. After a few moments she discovered a hard tension in her shoulders. By the time she was able to relinquish it, she'd found a deeper hitch or gathering in the center of her chest. That was emotional tension, the dam that held back the great reservoir of feelings that simply could not be allowed loose. But she did her best, relaxing around it and around it, softening its edges. So difficult. Its color was a deep rose saturated with bruise-blue diffusing to blackness. She kept her eyes open throughout, unconsciously watching the phosphene fizz in the dark, dots of pinpoint light so fine they looked like a mist. The gently glowing trifield meter read zero on all three gradients.

  Time passed. The room turned black as the last light abandoned the sky outside.

  Silence.

  A long time later, she realized there were shapes in the mist of darkness. There was a person in the room. The person seemed made of phosphene mist and emotions. There was movement, a gesture, too: rising and falling. Rising and falling hard, cruelly hard: beating! A faint hump of light dust that had to be another person. Explosions of black crimson pain. Regret, anger. The terrible wrath was shot through with excruciating self-condemnation, and they fueled each other. The beating going on.

  The hard part was not to pull away. Cree clung to her breathing, struggling to keep her eyes from trying to focus on the misty forms, to keep her heart from racing. One corner of her mind told her the trifield meter readouts were changing, but she dared not move her eyes to look.

  The darkness convulsed in the beating movement, then abruptly passed into another mode, one of seeking. This part Cree had seen before on other cases: seeking, questing, asking something like forgiveness or understanding. Asking for refuge, wanting to explain. That was the opening, and Cree moved toward the desire, presenting her willingness to understand, intruding the tiniest degree on the ghost's reality. But then a sense of surprise supplanted the yearning, and another sensation, a physical pain in the middle and a sense of wrong, of desperation. A man shape fled toward the dark doorway but fell before reaching it, and the motion startled Cree so much she stood half out of the chair before she regained control of herself. The shape twisted on the floor: a man, a writhing puddle of dark and light, a man again, a cloud full of dark violet glints. In the corner of her eye she saw the flutter of the meter readout, changing rapidly as the scent of almonds — no, the sweeter, sharper odor of amaretto liqueur - became almost suffocating. At the center of the paroxysm was the seeking, the unresolved need, the need to explain or receive forgiveness or to say one more thing. And there was love, that was what needed explaining, and the love sought a little girl who went back and forth on a swing beneath sun-gilded green leaves. The love sprang from the dying man like an arrow released from a bow.

  It seemed to bear directly upon Cree and everything she lacked and yearned for and regretted. She pulled away, denying it, hating it, and that strong good love spun away from the form on the floor and dissipated like gold dust in a whirlwind, unrequited. Her body convulsed with a sob of grief that caught jagged in her throat and made her cough. She sobbed and coughed wrenchingly for a full minute.

  By the time she came out of it, tears were streaming from her eyes and the state of mind and the ghost were gone. The trifield meter was back at zero, the other sensors inert. In the aftermath of the piercing emotions, she felt only empty - hollow and disappointed with herself. She'd lost the ghost. She'd come so close, but she'd let her own fears intrude, she'd shied away at the crucial instant.

  Swearing, she fumbled for the switches to the sensors and shut them down. When she pushed the glow button on her watch, she saw that it was almost eleven; she'd been in the chair for four hours.

  She stood stiffly, stretched, and then blindly fumbled the equipment into its case. No point in trying further tonight. She'd gotten close, but she'd reacted too strongly and had put up resistance, had shut herself away from the ghost. If she'd sustained another few minutes, she might have been able to more fully enter its experience. But the sudden shift of mood and activity had caught her by surprise, and then that intolerable poignancy had struck her like an arrow aimed at her own heart and she'd reflexively protected herself.

  She inventoried what new information she'd gained. There was some physical evidence, a digital record of increased electromagnetic activity from the trifield meter. But it wouldn't reveal anything about this ghost's identity or origins.

  More important by far was the layered affect of the ghost. Later, this would be the crucial thing, but for now it didn't offer any clues to his identity, either. Any hopes she'd had that this presence would prove to be the perimortem dimension of the upstairs ghost were long gone. Because one thing was definitely not here: a boar-headed man and the affect of stealth, predation, sadistic glee, all the gnarled feelings scented with sweat and lust. The library manifestation carried none of those resonances. None.

  He's not all bad, Lila had said.

  It was true that nobody was all good or bad. But the reason the manifestations were so different was simply that there wasn't just one fully emergent, articulated revenant manifesting at Beauforte House. There were two of them.

  She bumbled to the front of the house, let herself out, and locked the door behind her. When she turned around, she saw a dark figure move suddenly down in the shadows of the gallery. She dropped the equipment case with a clatter as the shape rose tall in front of her.

  "Cree?" a voice said.

  "Paul!"

  "Didn't mean to startle you." The shadow backed toward the edge of the gallery, where in the better light it resolved into Paul Fitzpatrick. I've been out here for hours. Couldn't reach you at the hotel, so I figured you'd be here. I came by and saw your car out front, but I knew you were probably into some . . . procedure . . . and didn't want to be disturbed, so I . . . I waited." He chuckled humorlessly. "I kind of fell asleep. You scared me as much as I must've scared you. Jesus! My pulse is racing!"

  "What's going on? Is Lila all right?"

  "I talked to her. She's fine. I assume. Nothing's going on. Nothing except I really wanted to see you. As I think must be evident. Man, I'd figured out something intelligent and hip to say, but I'll be goddamned if I can remember what it was!"

  Relief flooded through Cree. She retrieved the equipment case and joined him at the edge of the gallery. Closer, she could see he was dressed in jeans and a gray sweatshirt. They stared at each other in the gray-blue streetlight glow. She was close enough to catch his scent, a clean sweaty smell only very slightly augmented with cologne, and she felt the magnetism stirring between them. He looked wide-eyed and unsettled, and Cree guessed she probably looked about the same. She'd had one of the longest, strangest, most difficult days she could remember, yet the prospect of being with Paul was attractive and energizing. The memory of her own cracked face in the mirror came back to her, and the determination to become something other than a ghost. The way he looked gave her a certain courage.

  "One question," she said finally.

  "Anything."

  "Do you know anywhere to get something to eat this late? I'm absolutely starved."

  He paused for just a heartbeat. Then he said, "I know just the place."

  23

  PAUL'S APARTMENT W
AS ON THE third floor of a Creole-style town house on the far end of the French Quarter. Like the buildings adjoining it on either side, the tall, narrow building had a shabby-looking, flat facade that descended directly from roof to sidewalk, with wrought-iron balconies on the second and third floors. Paul opened a door on the right side and led Cree into a gangway that led straight back into the house. It ended at an interior courtyard, surrounded by high brick walls, open to the sky above and landscaped with flower beds and small trees. Exterior stairs led to galleries on the upper floors. A few scattered windows glowed and gently illuminated the greenery. It was lovely and strange, a tiny private oasis in the middle of the city.

  "It's a condo," Paul told her. "Just bought the place about four months ago, and I'm doing some fixing up — you'll have to forgive the mess. But the kitchen is done, I can make you something good."

  They went up the wooden staircase. From the third-floor gallery, Cree could look down into Paul's courtyard and the others on either side. This was the face of the French Quarter invisible from the streets, where the real lives of residents were conducted.

  Leaning over the railing, Cree noticed a statue at the center of Paul's courtyard, only vaguely visible - a woman's pale form, smooth bare limbs and draped cloth.

  "That's Psyche," Paul explained from behind her. "When the Realtor first brought me here and I saw her, I knew I had to buy this place. Given that I make my living studying her domain." She heard him unlock his apartment door.

  Psyche, personification of the soul, Cree was thinking. Also the lover of Eros, god of sexual love.

  The thought put her suddenly on edge as Paul switched on lights and stood aside to let her into the apartment.

  "These old places were mostly left to rot for a long time," Paul explained, "and back in the fifties the city was going to tear down pretty much the entire district. But then a bunch of civic-minded people began a movement to restore and preserve them. And thank God. When you get them fixed up, they're like nothing else. Let's start in front."

  He led her through the kitchen to the front by means of a hallway that ran down one side of the apartment. The living room was gorgeous. Ceiling fans spun lazily high above. The streetside wall was lined with floor-to-ceiling French doors that opened to the balcony. Paul's taste in furniture and art was mostly modern, with a few Asian curios here and there, but it went well with the high ceilings, faux-finished moldings, battered but nicely refinished wooden floors, crackled plaster walls. It all came together in a style like nothing Cree had ever seen: not quite a Parisian apartment, or a Greenwich Village loft, or an antebellum Deep South parlor, but rather a little of each.

  When Cree stopped to tap a knuckle on a xylophonelike instrument, Paul explained that it was from Bali, where he'd visited some years ago; the tarnished gong and parchment shadow puppets above the bookcase were also Balinese. They moved on into the hallway, where he opened a door to reveal a room under construction: bare split-lath walls, piles of broken plaster, sawhorses, plastic sheets, scattered tools. "The once and future master bedroom," he told her. "And here's the bathroom. And this's my office - not where I meet patients, God forbid, I run my practice from a suite downtown, this is just where I do my homework. The couch is a convertible, that's where I've been sleeping while the bedroom's a mess. I know it's not Beauforte House, but my daddy was a humble physician and he had six kids to divide his inheritance. Let's head back to the kitchen so I can make you something to eat."

  The kitchen had new appliances but cabinets and counters that were apparently original. The track lighting, fine cutlery, and built-in wine rack showed that he'd lavished some money on the remodeling here. A photo above the sink showed Paul in a some tropical-looking place, naked but for a knee-length sarong. Cree gazed at the articulation of his chest and stomach muscles before realizing what she was doing and snapped her eyes away.

  "I take it you're an accomplished cook?" she asked.

  "Huh!" he snorted. "No, it's something I keep thinking I'd like to do but never quite get around to. I'm afraid I don't have some great culinary genius to astound you with. Sorry. But I'm pretty sure I can whip up something reasonably palatable and nutritious. What're you in the mood for?"

  "Whatever's easy."

  "Wine?"

  "Wine, definitely."

  What was easy was an eclectic meal of a good baguette, pate, mustard, some leftover jamb alaya, Greek olives, several cheeses, a bunch of grapes, and a bottle of burgundy. Paul set it all out on a big tray, but instead of bringing it over to the dining area, he carried it to a door at the far corner of the kitchen. Balancing the tray on one knee, he opened it to reveal a steep staircase, almost a ladder, that led up into darkness. When Cree gave him a questioning look, he said, "The other reason I bought this place. You go first, hold the upper door for me. This is a little tricky with a tray."

  She went up. At the top of the stairs she found herself in a slope-ceilinged attic, its dimensions invisible in the dark, still stuffy from the heat of the day. A faint square of light drew her, and approaching it she entered a narrow roof dormer with a small door at its end. When she opened it she found herself outside in the city night. The dormer gave to a wooden deck built over the roof, which Paul had set up with a makeshift trellis, several planters full of growing things, and a teak table and chairs covered by a Cinzano umbrella. There were no stars visible, but the city's glow lit the hazy sky in every direction, and rows of bright windows defined several of the tall buildings downtown. Though it was Monday midnight, Cree could still hear the distant sound of a blues band from the direction of Bourbon Street. The varied peaks of nearby rooftops stretched away into darkness. The air had cooled considerably, but the roof still gave off some of the day's heat, making it perfectly comfortable.

  Paul moved past her in the dim light to set the tray down. It clattered, the wine almost toppling, and as they both moved to catch it their bodies collided. Neither backed away from the contact. Without thinking about it Cree turned toward him, bringing her body against his, her arms going around him. One of his hands went to the bare skin at the back of her neck, the other slid into the incurve at her waist and found a fit there. Against her body she felt his breathing, a little quick from the climb up the stairs.

  It happened so fast she was startled, but she just shut her eyes and felt the fascination of it. A man gave off heat, she realized, half surprised, as if she'd never known that fact. Her hands moved and found hard ridges of muscle where his back flared wide to the shoulders. The solidity of him seemed to give off gravity, too, and her body responded, falling toward him. They rocked side to side minutely as if they were dancing to each other's heartbeat. After a moment he turned his head slightly and put his lips to her ear. His warm breath tickled, and she thought he was going to whisper something, but instead he bit the rim of her ear —just with his lips, not a kiss at all but a way of tasting her or taking her a little into him.

  In the dark, she felt vertigo. With the plummeting sensation came fear.

  She pulled away, breathless. "Jeez. How much wine have I had?" she joked. "I'm dizzy already."

  "None. But I know what you mean." He chuckled with her, but he'd heard her request for some time, a little distance. He let her go.

  Cree took her arms back, though her hands were uncertain what to do.

  They sat on either side of the table. Paul lit a couple of candle lanterns, poured the wine, and they clinked glasses. The wine was smooth and smoky. In the light, she could see the question in his eyes.

  Why had she pulled away? A moment ago she was just free falling, and it was nice, it was . . .fascinating. This was what Joyce, Deirdre, anybody sane, would call a romantic situation. Soft rooftop air, the strange cityscape, good food, a handsome man, that undeniable charge of attraction and, yes, expectation. Two adults with that unspoken understanding that had been forged between them, by degrees, each time they met.

  It should've been easy. It wasn't.

  Cree found herself
increasingly at war inside, wanting somehow to tell him, warn him, explain. Explain what? How unbalanced she was right now. How at odds this simple, sweet moment with nine years of habit. How long it had been.

  "Weather's changing," Paul said, breaking what had turned into an awkward silence. "Supposed to get a couple of days of rain. This time of year, hard to believe, but it can be hot enough to boil crawfish one day, then turn truly nasty cold. I hope you brought sweaters and umbrellas with you."

  "I'm from Seattle, remember?"

  "Right. Of course. Where the biblical deluge never quite stopped." His smile flashed in the candlelight, and he tasted his wine. "You know, I've been thinking about what you do. On one level, I have this skepticism, I've told you that. But every time I think about what you've told me, I can see ways it makes sense."

  "Such as?"

  He sipped, looking over the rooftops. "In graduate school, I was fascinated with traditional healing disciplines, even wrote a paper on shamanism from a psychoanalytic perspective. I pointed out that all over the world, throughout history, healing traditions are remarkably consistent. I saw it firsthand in Bali, but you'll find the same basic ideas in Siberia or Central America or Congo. People with bad health or troubled circumstances go to the village shaman. To fix the problem, the shaman enters a special state of mind that allows him to make a journey to the underworld, where he intercedes on the patient's behalf with ghosts of the sufferer's ancestors or maybe spirits of nature. The affliction is always assumed to have a psychological as well as a physical element, and so does the cure. The shaman finds that some part of the afflicted person's soul is held hostage because he's offended some spirit by doing wrong in his life - there's some unfinished business. Say a son marries someone his mother disapproves of. Later, after the mother dies, he gets sick or his crops fail repeatedly. The shaman identifies his guilty feelings as the cause of his misfortunes, figures out an appropriate way for him to atone to her ghost. And it often works! Because the shaman allows the victim to have closure with the unfinished business. Same principle as psychoanalysis, just a different vocabulary!" He looked over the rim of his glass at Cree as if a little wary of her reaction. "But why am I telling you this? You're the modern-day shaman."