Greywalker - Kat Richardson [19]
He bit the biscuit and chewed, looking at me from under lowered brows.
It was Mara who spoke. “You do look as if someone’s smacked you about a bit.”
I took a slow breath. “Yes. A man I was investigating.”
“Investigating?”
“I’m a private investigator.”
“Damn,” Danziger muttered.
The Albert shadow slipped behind him, spangling the air around them both with snowy mist. Danziger shivered and asked, “Were you hit on the head?”
“Yes.”
“Knocked unconscious or . . . ?”
Over his shoulder, Albert became more clear. The glowering eyes began to look more like glasses. I watched the ghost evolve and the words tumbled out. “Dead. For two minutes.”
I told them about the hospital bed, the mists, the thing in the alley, maybe-ghosts, shadow-things, nausea . . . everything. By the time I was done, Albert looked almost there. “Your ghost is firming up,” I finished.
Mara chuckled. “Ah, no. That’s just you seeing him better.”
I turned to her. “What?”
She gave a small shrug. “Ghosts exist in a place between here and there. When you’re open to that world, you see them. When you’re not, you don’t.”
Albert faded back a bit as Danziger spoke up. “When you’re engaged with that world, your expectation or acceptance affects your perception and access. You’ve been fighting it, but when you talk about your experience, you accept certain facts—whether you can explain them or not—and Albert there is reinforcing proof that you’re not crazy, that what you experienced is real, so you can see him a little better.”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to see him better. I don’t want this stuff.”
Mara sighed. “I fear you’re stuck with it, since you can’t un-die.”
She must have seen me recoil. Her expression softened and she put down her glass before continuing. “That was a bit abrupt of me, but it’s plain you can see Albert. There’s a limited number of satisfactory explanations for that, plus what you’ve described. Do you think yourself mad?”
“No. I . . . don’t want to think I’m crazy.”
Danziger chimed back in. “Unless you think we all share the same delusion—which is statistically unlikely—”
“Then it must be real, or we’re all mad as hares.”
“All right,” I conceded. “Suppose we’re not all crazy and that is a ghost.” I pointed at the grim column of Albert’s ethereal form, wavering between Ben and Mara, as if it was pacing. “Why do we see it? What is happening to me?”
Danziger grinned. “Ah, now that’s where things get interesting. You see Albert for a different reason than Mara. Albert, like most ghosts, manifests by bringing an instance of his energy state with him. You’re both able to access the energy state at which things like Albert become visible, so you’re both able to see him. But you can do more than that; you can move around in that state and directly observe it, operate in it, even though you’re not normally at that energy state yourself. It’s very rare and really exciting stuff. You don’t manipulate the energy state, however—that would be magic. But it’s all energy, anyhow. So you experience the energy state of the Grey differently than Mara, but since you both have access to it, you both see Albert.” He looked pleased and expectant.
I let him down. “What are you talking about?”
Mara rolled her eyes. “Ah, Ben, jumping right to the conclusion without demonstrating the proof. You must have been the despair of your maths prof.” She turned to me. “He’ll be rabbiting on about metaphysics and energy states for hours if we let him.”
Danziger looked affronted. “I’m not that bad. But maybe we should start from a different perspective. Has anything like this happened to you before?”
I picked up the glass again and looked into the tea. “No.” Weird flights of childhood imagination and bouts of the willies weren’t relevant. Danziger nodded, but Mara narrowed her eyes at me and looked thoughtful while he went on.
“OK. So sometimes you seem to just walk in and out of these strange places, these mists, but other times, you just see some weird stuff ?”
Mara cocked her head and, before I could answer her husband, added, “Sometimes