Greywalker - Kat Richardson [21]
“I ‘fell in.’ ” I gave her a skeptical look.
“As an analogy, dying is definitely the big plunge. When people say you ‘pass over,’ they don’t know half. You drop all the heavy, slow parts of yourself and zip right through the barrier to . . . something else. That’s the paranormal. But you have to pass through the Grey first, and if you aren’t quite ready for the next place, the Grey is where you stop a while, because that’s where both worlds overlap.”
“Purgatory,” I supplied.
Mara laughed, tossing her curls aside and glancing over her shoulder. “That’s a Catholic idea. This is non-denominational, and it’s nothing to do with either suffering or expiation. But it is full of strange things, you’ve probably noticed, and it’s alive with energy. You notice the house glows, I’m sure.”
“Umm . . . yes, I did.”
“This house sits on a Grey power nexus—that’s why we chose it—which is part of a sort of power grid, though that’s a broad analogy. It’s the same energy that runs everything psychic or magical. And it may seem chaotic, but it has rules. All you need do is learn the rules.”
I sat down at the kitchen table. Mara turned all the way around and leaned on the counter, shaking flour off her hands.
I stared, unnerved a moment, as the flour drifted like a familiar cloud, then settled to the floor. “Why would I want to? I’m fine now. I’m all here, alive, solid. The bruises will fade and then it’s over.”
They both shook their heads.
“The state change happened,” Ben said, “no matter what your state is now. You changed and you can’t change back.”
The baby flung the Russian dolls across the room, drowning my reply in clatter.
Ben got up and tucked Brian under his arm. “OK, that’s enough of that. Your mom’ll turn you into a frog if you don’t settle down, and then you’ll have to live in the yard. Hey . . . there’s an idea!”
Mara twitched a towel at him. “Behave, y’monster, or it’s you I’ll be turning green and warty. And you can be sure I’ll not be kissing you anytime soon for that.”
Ben laughed and loped out of the kitchen with the squirming baby.
Mara bent down and picked up the matryoshka dolls, placing them on the table in front of me. “Would you reassemble the universe, please?”
She went to the counter and began rolling out pastry dough. She spoke over her shoulder. “I imagine you find this upsetting.”
“Yes. Look, I don’t understand this. Even if I accept that I can see a ghost, what about the rest?”
“It’s all bundled up together. You see ghosts because you can see and walk into the Grey where they live. That’s very rare. Most of us who can see it at all can only stand on the edge of it and cast lines, or draw up water in buckets, or shout across the water and hope someone answers. We’re very limited, weak and in danger of attracting the wrong sort of attention, if you know what I mean. If we want to go in, we’re leaving our bodies behind and traveling only with our minds. It’s exhausting and dangerous, and few people can do it for more than minutes.”
“Psychics and mediums, you mean?”
She laughed, dumping fruit into the piecrust. “Among others. But you, you see, you have the strength and safety of your body when you go there. You don’t leave it behind now. You could, if you knew how, walk right through until you found what you were looking for. You wouldn’t be asking for intermediaries or hoping the right thing heard you calling. You do have other problems, but the strength you have in the Grey, as a physical person among things that are mostly energy, is very powerful. There are some creatures of the Grey who do have bodies—and they can be strong—but they’ll have other weaknesses in exchange.”
She carried the finished pie to the oven and waved her hand over the top crust, muttering to it. Her words fell on the pie in a drift of blue.
I noticed. “What are you doing?”
She looked surprised. “Oh! Just sang it a little crusty charm against burning. I hate burned crust.”
“A charm?”
She blushed.