Greywalker - Kat Richardson [116]
Mara raised her hand and started to bring it toward my chest. I shied from her, curling my shoulders forward.
“I shan’t hurt you.”
Wary, I let her touch me. I gasped when her fingertips pressed against me, pushing prongs of dense stillness into the center of the hard Grey knot. She looked at me a while, blank and thoughtful. When she sat back, pulling both her hands into her lap, her withdrawal left a void in the ache.
“It feels . . . heavy, but elastic and smooth, like some kind of muscle—a diaphragm, perhaps. It bends if I push gently, but it won’t yield to me, and the harder I push, the more it resists. It seems benign, if a little weak at the moment, but who knows what it does? It doesn’t like to be probed.”
Ben gave us both an incredulous look. “‘Doesn’t like’? How can you say what it likes?”
“I don’t know,” Mara replied.
But I did. “It’s alive in some way. I can feel it full of the things that live in the Grey.”
Ben shuddered.
I shook my head. “I can’t do this. I can’t live with this. This is a nightmare. Cameron’s case . . . it’s only going to get worse and I am not sure I can stand it. I believed he was a good guy, in spite of this. But he’s a monster. They are all monsters. Inhuman, vile . . .”
Ben spoke up. “Not vile. But the rest goes without saying, doesn’t it? They’re ghosts. They’re vampires. But they look like us, so we think they are like us. And then they do something horrible, because they aren’t like us. Ghosts are much closer to us, because they remember what it was like. Memory is all they are, really. And memory can hurt.”
“But a vampire, I imagine, must learn to forget,” Mara added. “Or surely they’ll go mad. How could they live with themselves if they didn’t change?”
“And Cameron is one,” I said.
“Yes, but he’s at the beginning,” Mara reminded me. “He’s still a nice boy who has a problem. You were right about that. He’ll change, but you will probably never have to see it. Someday, when he’s as old and twisted up with his new culture as those others, then he will be a monster. But do you want to make the decision to let him die now, confused and miserable? That’s your choice.”
“That’s not fair,” I said.
“No, it’s not. You’ll have to work that one out for yourself, I’m afraid. Can’t put the apple back on the tree. So, what are we going to do now? That’s the question.”
“It’s my problem,” I said. “Not yours. I’m drowning. I’ve felt like something’s sucking me dry ever since my client—ex-client, ghost, whatever—came to the office.”
Ben perked up with a scholar’s zeal for a puzzle. “Really? Before or after your argument?”
“After.”
“Let me think, let me think. . . .” He began shuffling through his papers and riffling books. “His attraction to the organ . . . physical manifestations and volition . . . action . . . Hmm.” He glanced up at me from the pages of a thick tome and cringed a bit. “I’d say this guy’s some kind of high-level willful spirit—that’s a ghost who has volition and exercise of will—so he must be a revenant.”
I shrugged, tired and wishing I had another glass of whiskey. “You’ll have to explain that.”
“Well, for instance, Albert’s a sort of garden-variety willful spirit—some volition, but very limited will and action. But a revenant is literally that which survives. Most ghosts are kind of like etheric recordings. They don’t have any will or personality—they just keep going through the motions of their lives or their message until they are released, or run down like clockwork. They’re just shadows and echoes. A lot of them are just retro-cognates.”
I peered at him and interrupted. “Retro whats?”
“It means to know or be aware of something from the past. A medium can also retrocognate, under the right conditions. Some of them actually retrocognate when attempting psychometry.”
“Ben,” Mara broke in, “I’m sure Harper’d appreciate the layman’s version, if you don