Chapter 34

If I thought I’d felt naked when I realized I couldn’t get my sidearm back, it was nothing compared to being drained of white light and locked in a room with a freaking poltergeist. The smart thing to do would be to put Jacob between me and the threat. But this ghost was literally everywhere.

“Red energy,” I hollered through the spinning morass. “Do your base chakra!”

But Jacob had been locked in this basement without food or sleep just as long as me. And he’d been flexing his telekinetic muscles the whole damn time.

Which meant we were both running on empty.

Was there anything else in my kit I could use? I couldn’t light any candles—not unless I wanted all the flying crap to turn into flying flaming crap—but there must be something. I spied the little exorcism case flattened against the far wall, shielded my eyes with my forearm, and set off through the whirlwind…only to stagger sideways as a ping pong ball rolled directly under my foot.

I flailed and knocked into one of the crates, tipping the whole thing over. More office junk spilled out: yellowed phone books, a box of adding machine tape, the cardboard banker’s box labeled Samples—the lid of which flew off and smacked me in the head. I peeled it off and released it into the cyclone.

But the contents of the box stayed right where they were.

That couldn’t be random.

Gingerly, I knelt. The box was musty and frayed, with one corner held together by a cockeyed strip of duct tape that likely came later, as things got moved around in storage. Inside was a jumble of stuff, all of it vacuum sealed in big squares of plastic. I pulled one out. A yellowed handkerchief. Innocuous enough. Then another—a lock of hair. I pulled out one more….

A tooth.

Well, shit.

I stuck my hand down to the bottom and the temperature in the room plummeted. Jacob dove toward the box, breath streaming out behind him. “Don’t touch that!” he barked out, but it was already too late. A shock raced up my arm, and I thought I’d end up electrocuted like Darnell. But it wasn’t a physical shock, and instead of being thrown back, I felt my crispy etheric channels blow open wide.

The room flashed white. It left me uselessly blinking away afterimages that weren’t on my retinas. I was clutching a hefty vacuum-sealed packet, and when I tried to let go…

I couldn’t.

Those bricks of ground coffee you get at the store, the ones that are hard as a rock, at least until you break the package seal? That’s what it felt like.

Only, it wasn’t coffee inside.

It was ash.

“Give me that!” Jacob demanded, and yanked it from my grasp. My arm went dead, dangling uselessly as I swayed on my knees, fighting a looming blackout. The Telekometer, still in my pocket, was ticking away as Jacob focused so hard on the brick that the veins in his temples pulsed.

And the cyclone of rage whirling around us kept right on spinning.

Desperate, I reached for white light and got nothing. Nothing at all.

Then, in the grayness of my imminent collapse, I knew exactly what we needed to do. “Open it,” I called out into the gale. Jacob glanced up sharply as a pair of surgical scissors skittered across the floor and came to rest against his knee. “Open it,” I repeated—and before he could second-guess himself, he grabbed the scissors and plunged the point through the plastic.

I covered my eyes, fully expecting to get a reprise of the Florida Water blowback. But this wasn’t just any mindless wind surging around us. It had purpose.

Like a nest of angry hornets blasting out of a hive, the ashes formed a single coherent stream. They didn’t spiral around the room like everything else….

They flowed into the shape of a man.

My vision doubled. My physical eyes saw a spinning cloud of chunky ash in a vaguely human shape, but my etheric eyes saw something else: a kid. Okay, a guy in his mid-twenties. But, still, the lank hair to his shoulders, the wispy beard, the tortured expression. This wasn’t a vicious killer. It was just a damaged young man.

And he couldn’t have reminded me more of the sleep deprived twenty-something who kept returning the dead woman’s wig. Trade that long hair for a flopped over mohawk and we could’ve practically been twins.

As we sustained our eye contact, the cyclone ebbed, and bit by bit, all the various stuff that had been pelting me dropped to the floor. Only the dust devil—the cloud of ash—stayed in the air. “Gordon Tertz?” I ventured, and the ghost’s anguished eyes locked onto mine. What could I tell him, that he was okay? That hardly seemed right.

“Are those humanremains?” Jacob demanded.

I motioned for him to sit tight. “Listen to me, Gordon. You’re dead—”

“And Luther Hinman needs to answer for what he’s done.” Tertz’s voice had that spectral, faraway sound to it, but it broke just as if it had come from a flesh-and-blood throat.

At least he knew he was dead…I guess a half century in a banker’s box will do that. But convincing him about Hinman might be tricky. “About that. Hinman’s dead, too.”

The air around me crackled and small bits of stuff—pushpins, shards of glass, a granola bar wrapper—hovered off the ground.

“He’s dead,” I added hastily, “but I do think he got what he deserved.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well…he never really made a name for himself. His theories weren’t proven. In fact, all his theories were chalked up to pseudoscience—”

“But I was a huge part of those studies! They were my theories, too!”

The whirlwind started up again. It sent a sheaf of old papers pinwheeling around the room.

“We can give him a proper burial,” Jacob piped in, and the stream of office supplies eddied.

“We can absolutely do that,” I assured the ghost. “And we’ll set the record straight.”

Tertz gave me a cautious look. “How?”

“I can hear you, can’t I? Anything you need to say, say it. I’m listening.”

And so, haltingly, he began to speak.

“It all started with an ad in the paper….”

I’d like to say I was surprised by Tertz’s story, but it was way too much like mine. Where I’d gone through a stint in the mental health machine, he’d gone through Nam—and both of us came out without a shred of hope for a decent future. Since Tertz was way more book-smart than me, he should’ve had more options. But the country was flooded with vets looking for work, so many of them coping with addiction and PTSD with no social safety net to catch them.

At first glance, he’d thought the Argus Institute was a joke.

Just like I’d initially thought Heliotrope Station was a bunch of suckers for paying me to sit on my ass.

Hinman wasn’t paying much, but it was better than nothing, and since he let Tertz set up a cot in a back room of the office, it was a better deal than he could expect anywhere else. (The fact that three squares a day and a bed were a big factor in me signing up for my own slice of hell was not lost on me.)

The experiments started off benign. Staring at stuff. Writing things down. But when the ping pong ball claw-drop showed readings way out of average range…things got intense.

“I should’ve left. I don’t know why I didn’t. I don’t know why I cared so much. But Dr. Hinman would tell me I was amazing, and significant, and that together, him and me—we were gonna change the world. And the way he said it…” the ghost shrugged helplessly. “I believed him.”

It was no surprise he got caught up in Hinman’s pipe dreams. Father figure, Stockholm syndrome, who’s to say? But when the rest of the world insists you’re worthless, you lap up whatever scraps of praise come your way.

Tertz was just glad to matter to someone, even if that someone was encouraging him to electrocute himself. He let Hinman push him past any sane limit because it beat feeling like a nobody.

I said, “I don’t know Hinman—but it’s possible he wasn’t just blowing smoke. Maybe he really did think you’d change the world.”

The whole room went still….

And then a shockwave of telekinetic energy blew through it like a hand grenade. “He knew the charge was too high—and he dialed it in anyway!”

I shielded my eyes. “Hinman was wrong—he was so desperate to prove himself, he’d do anything it took!”

“But was it all Hinman’s doing?” Jacob interjected.

Don’t get me wrong. I’d known Jacob was opinionated from the moment he shoved his tongue in my mouth and challenged me for using Auracel—and for some screwed-up reason, I liked that about him. But he could only hear half the conversation.

“Jacob—”

“I get it,” he called out to the man-shaped cloud of cremains over the rattle and whoosh of stuff swirling around us. “I get what it’s like to have a talent that no one else knows about. Something that’s so hard to measure that you wonder if it even exists at all. To wonder if you’re deluding yourself into thinking you’re something you’re not. And then the chance comes along to unlock it—to really prove you’re special—not just to the world, not even to the person whose opinion matters most…but to yourself.”

I’d been so busy seeing myself in the poltergeist, it didn’t occur to me that Jacob was doing the same damn thing.

“I would have done the same, Gordon,” he told the ghost. “I would have done the same.”

Despite the fact that my psychic channels felt scoured out and spent, they still pricked up when the ethers shifted, and the glimmers of the veil took shape. I hadn’t called it forth, and I don’t think Jacob had, either. It was Tertz, knowing that finally, after all these years, he was understood.

But the sensation of the veil’s arrival wasn’t just registering on my sixth sense. With all the telekinetic energy flying around, I felt it with my physical body, too. Namely, in the slide rule that fell on my head and the binder clips bouncing off my shoes—and the sound that it made as a whole roomful of crap started dropping, piece by piece, from the air. Anything landing on the stainless steel work tables made a showy clang, while whatever hit the concrete floor gave off either a muffled thud, or the distinct clatter of something breaking.

And punctuating the whole thing was the plink-plink-plink of a half dozen ping pong balls dropping in their final trajectories.

I could’ve told Gordon Tertz to go to the light…but I didn’t need to. It had been calling to him for decades. And for a telekinetic, the sensation would be really hard to ignore. Time doesn’t pass for ghosts the same way it does to us folks in the physical plane, but even so, being bricked all those years and stuffed in a box must’ve been a fresh level of hell.

“Thanks,” he said—not to me, but to Jacob. “I can tell you really dig where I’m coming from.”

“He says thanks,” I translated, although I probably didn’t need to. Jacob can’t see ghosts. But with Tertz being a TK—with him whipping his own ashes into a semblance of a body—Jacob finally got the visual he’d been so desperately wanting. Now Jacob could definitively verify that, no, what he sensed wasn’t all in his head. And when he thought he felt something, it was because there was something there to feel.

The etheric body of Gordon Tertz began to shimmer. As it faded, his temporary physical form broke down. Its edges lost their shape as bits of ash fell away, until finally, like an hourglass emptying its final seconds of sand, the physical construct sifted to the floor….

And the spirit was gone.