Vanished Read online

  The entries went on for a while about his frustrations with my mother and increasing references to “they” and “the watchers.” A little over a year later, the tone changed and the entries rarely spoke of business or even my mother and me.

  It’s the nightmares. They’ve crept out into the daylight. How could I have missed that for so long? Maybe because they changed shape? They invade everything, infest everything. They’re like weevils, burrowing into the heart of everything and chewing it up from the inside out. They don’t even leave my wife and kid alone now. I see them trailing after Veronica and Harper when they leave for class. I have to make them stop.

  He rambled on for a couple more years, trying to put his mysterious watchers off the scent, having nightmares both sleeping and awake. Then someone had come to see him—or that’s what he said, but I wasn’t sure if it had been a real person, a ghost, or some figment of his increasingly fractured imagination.

  He’s not like the rest. He bends them and they sway to his will. White, white, white, pale and ghastly. God help me, I can’t think of anything but that horrible film about the worm-man. Or did I dream that? I don’t know. I just don’t. I can barely work some days, they’re so close. But I have to work. I have to! The patients, the singing of the drill, the routine suck them in and push them away at the same time. And this man—but he can’t possibly be a man—he knows everything they see. They’re his rotten little spies.

  He drifts in on a red tide, saying he owns me and taking what he wants. He took Christelle. He lured her away somehow, and she came back changed into one of them and now she’s watching all the time, too. I tried to make her leave. I tried to fire her but she came back and I can’t make her go. Veronica’s furious. She thinks I’m screwing Christelle, but I could never touch that thing that’s hiding in there. I know she’s one, too. . . .

  What had my father thought was hiding in his receptionist? An alien? A demon? Had there been anything at all or was he really, as my mother claimed, losing his mind? I’d thought I was losing mine when I first became a Greywalker. If Dad had also been in touch with the Grey in some fashion, but without the help I’d gotten from the Danzigers and others, maybe he had been going crazy. Or maybe not. Maybe he had seen things that watched him.

  He might have been some kind of psychic or medium; he didn’t seem to be a Greywalker. He wasn’t describing the same kind of experiences I’d gone through: He didn’t speak of another world or the mist or the power grid; he never mentioned ghosts or vampires or any other monster I knew; he only wrote of the watchers and the white man-worm thing that threatened and cajoled him by turns, and some creature he called “the Thousand Eyes.”

  Whatever was going on with him, he’d been alone with it and it had been driving him insane, whether it was real or all in his head. The thought brought a fresh wave of grief for my crazy father in his solitary battle. Picking up this diary again was difficult. I saw the dates, and the horror of what I now knew and what I was seeing in his writing only grew with each word.

  He’d finally lost his grip completely about three months before he killed himself.

  Christelle won’t come back this time. I killed the thing in her, but there wasn’t any Christelle left once it was gone. There was just black stuff, like cremated remains. Poor Christelle. How long had she been gone? I thought I’d see her for a moment or two sometimes, but I was wrong. There was no Christelle in that thing I killed no matter what the worm-man said. But if Christelle was gone, when did she go? Did he kill her back at the beginning? Or did I? And he’s so happy about it! He’s happy, the monster!

  I can’t believe what I did. Or how. I just reached, somehow, with my mind, not with my hands, and something came out of me and ripped her into bits. Oh, God, I’m sick. I can’t stop throwing up. It’s just blood and bile now and I feel like I’m going to die from the rot in me.

  He’s pleased. But not all the watchers are. The Thousand Eyes doesn’t like it. It hates me now as much as it hates him. I can feel its loathing like radiation from a nuclear bomb that strips my skin and burns me alive. I won’t do whatever it is the worm-man wants. I’d rather be eaten by the Thousand Eyes and burn in its gullet forever than let the other one win. He’s evil. And I’m evil just by being near him.

  He didn’t write much after that, except taunting notes to the watchers he now assumed read his journal and reported all to the worm-man: “I have a way to stop you” and “I know how to get help you can’t kill, even if I told you who.”

  The last entry was the worst.

  There were more. Like me. Before. But not like me. No, he says I’m special and he won’t let me slip away from him, not even if I die. But I think he can’t stop me. Veronica won’t care—she’s got everything she wanted. But Harper I feel bad about. She’s so sweet, my little girl. I don’t want her to have a monster for a father. I will stop it. There must be no more of this. No more of me, of things like me. I hope she’ll understand it’s not her dad who’s done bad things, but a grown-up man who has to do something awful to keep what he loves safe.

  The bottom of the page was torn out raggedly, and I didn’t have to fetch the thing to know the texture and shape of the missing page would match that of his final note. A note meant for me.

  I felt sick and I covered my face, but tears didn’t come this time, only the black sensation of horror and pity.

  SEVEN

  I needed to talk to my dad, however dead he was. Whether he’d been crazy, or paranoid, or dead-on truthful, he’d been connected to Grey things. I’d have to go for a walk in the Grey and see if I could find him. The problem was I’d never done that, and though I thought I could, I wasn’t sure how to find a specific ghost in the roiling, uncertain mist-world between the normal and the paranormal. I wasn’t a medium or a necromancer; I couldn’t just call to the spirit I wanted and expect it to show up. At least I didn’t think I could, since that wasn’t how my abilities worked for anything else—I’d gotten lucky with Cary showing up since he’d been trying to reach me as much as I’d been trying to find him.

  There was also a practical limit to how long I could spend wandering around in the Grey. It was exhausting to move through fully immersed, and it was just as big—in some places bigger—than the normal world. The Grey was filled with the sinkholes and rifts of time layers I called temporaclines, which stopped and started and broke or rose as they pleased. There were lots of places in the Grey where something in the normal or paranormal created a barrier that could only be negotiated by emerging back into the normal and going around the ordinary way.

  It was almost dinnertime—I’d missed both breakfast and lunch—but I put off eating a little longer to pick up the phone and call the Danzigers. Sometimes they don’t know the answer to my questions, and sometimes they had an answer that was wrong, but they at least had more experience with the bizarre than I did, even after two years more than knee-deep in it.

  The phone rang longer than usual before Ben answered.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, Ben. It’s Harper.” Background noise at the other end washed the emotions out of my voice.

  “Oh, hi, Harper! How’s Los Angeles?”

  “Like the antechamber to hell. I have a question.”

  “All right.”

  “Any ideas on how I can find a specific ghost? I need to talk to a particular individual who’s been dead for about twenty-two years.”

  “Well, you could—Oh, no . . . you can’t call them. Hrm . . . Hang on. . . .” I could hear him cover the mouthpiece with his hand as he turned to call for Mara.

  I could barely hear some mumbling on the other side. Then a thump as the phone fell out of Ben’s hand and dropped onto the floor.

  A very young voice cackled into the phone. “Harper! Hahahaha! Come play with me!”

  “I can’t today, Brian. I’m way far away.”

  “Are not! You’re in the phone!”

  A few more noises preceded the return of Ben’s voice, alth
ough his son’s carried on in the background. I figured he was probably holding on to the kid while he talked. “I’m sorry. . . .”

  “That’s OK. So what do you two think?”

  “Well . . . we’re agreed that you’ll have the best luck looking in the places strongly associated with the person who died. Like their home or office or the place they died. You know a ghost can haunt several places simultaneously, but they manifest intelligence in only one at a time.”

  “Yeah, that’s kind of what I thought. I know I can’t always get the attention of a repeater.”

  “And if that’s the only manifestation they have, it’s going to be hard to get any information out of them.”

  “Nearly impossible, actually.”

  “Really? I should write that down. . . .”

  Ever since he’d been mauled by a legendary monster on Marsh Island, Ben had been on disability, staying home with their precocious son while Mara taught full-time. Bored, Ben had started working on a field guide to ghosts, mixing the research he’d been doing for years with the proofs-through-misadventure that I’d made Greywalking for the past two years.

  I thought over his suggestion and decided it seemed plausible. I’d have to give it a try. Of course, I couldn’t remember the addresses of our home or Dad’s office. I thanked Ben for the idea and hung up, staring at the box of junk. I stiffened my spine and wondered if I could find the addresses in there and not have to go back to my mother right away. I’d have to show up again eventually; I wanted those shining boxes of photographs and I wanted to know what had actually happened to Christelle. Maybe my father had just gone crackers and only imagined the destruction of his receptionist. . . . I wanted to believe it, but I doubted it.

  I scrabbled through the shining pile for the appointment book, hoping someone had thought to put the office information in it. It had Dad’s name and office address on the cover; it was in Glendale, a middle-class suburb just northeast of Hollywood. Since he’d died there, the office seemed like the best place to start looking for him.

  EIGHT

  Before I went anywhere, I called Quinton just to hear his voice, though all I actually got was his pager and he didn’t call back, so I knew he was busy and I hoped it wasn’t because of anything too creepy. Creepy was becoming the order of the day. Then I had dinner downstairs, thinking rush hour would have dissipated by the time I was done. I stopped at the concierge desk on my way back up to my room to fetch the documents from Dad’s box and asked about the best route to Glendale. The concierge printed a map for me from the computer built discreetly into his Spanish revival desk and told me traffic might still be a bit thick on the freeway until after seven p.m., but it wasn’t very far away and I could take Los Feliz Boulevard instead and make about the same time if I was leaving right away.

  Los Feliz was a strange street, starting out wide and smooth as it ran diagonally into the hills below Griffith Park. I glanced up at just the right time to see a few letters of the Hollywood sign with the copper dome of the observatory rising over the hilltop above. If not for the haze, the glimpse could have been mistaken for a postcard. As the street ran on, past the zoo’s massive parking lot and over the cement-bound Los Angeles River, it narrowed and grew more potholed, passing through an industrial slum thick with old warehouses and light manufacturing that left the roads and sidewalks dusky with grime.

  After a sudden turn and a cluster of dark-shadowed thugs on a street corner smoking cigarettes and eyeing passing cars, the neighborhood changed. It got clean and slick, with mid-rise office clusters and condominiums lining the street in profusion.

  I turned onto Brand, looking for the office address, shadowed by recent developments of white steel-and-glass towers. I passed a shining new shopping center with a massive open plaza and spools of neon lighting that cast color onto the street. The effect was like the change of The Wizard of Oz from black and white to Technicolor. I expected Munchkins and wondered if I’d really lived here.

  Passing the Alex Theatre with its old movie palace marquee under the lighted, flowerlike spire that pointed to the sky, I felt the déjà vu like a blow. The farther north I went, the more familiar the scenery grew. I passed under the Ventura Freeway and into the smaller, older neighborhood that urban sprawl hadn’t overrun yet. My eyes watered, and not just from the yellow haze in the evening air. I knew I had walked along this street with my dad, hand in hand. Stopped in at that building for milkshakes (forbidden treats!) when it was a retro-fifties diner. Bought makeup and school supplies in the drugstore right there. . . . The feelings that poured over me weren’t just nostalgic, though; an emotional darkness now tainted every memory and put a stone into my chest. I pulled the car into a parking space at the curb and got out to walk before I hit something from my inattention.

  The sidewalks were so clean they sparkled in the late sun, even through layers of ghostly pedestrians and older shadows of orange groves and rolling, empty scrub. I noticed that many of the names on the businesses ended in -ian or -ianian; what had once been a solidly WASP neighborhood was now just as solidly Armenian, and cleaner than ever. The current residents clearly didn’t tolerate sloth or dirt. The shops were mostly closed—only a few restaurants were open at this time of evening—and no one, corporeal or ghostly, paid much attention to me as I went up the street, looking for the building that had once housed my father’s dental office.

  It was a three-story brick-and-glass building that had been brand-new when we moved into the area. It looked a little less polished and swanky than its newer neighbors to the south, but it was still a very respectable address for small offices. Dad’s was on the second floor and the main door was locked for the day, but I walked around for a few minutes and found a smaller door at the side that was still open and sporting a sign that pointed up to BELLES SAUVAGES DANCE AND EXERCISE STUDIO.

  More déjà vu. I’d never danced there, but as I went up the stairs, the familiar odors of sweat, old shoes, floor varnish, and rosin curdled the air. I could hear the thump of music and feet in rhythm on the wooden floor. As always, that combination of sound and smell roused mixed feelings in me: remembered anxiety and learned—or faked—happiness. I hadn’t hated to dance; I’d hated the emotional freight and unending demands that went with it.

  I took the second-floor exit, which should have been locked but wasn’t, and went down the hallway looking for number 204. The suites had been cut up since my father’s time and I discovered that his office was now split between a chiropractor and an accountant. I wasn’t sure which of the new tenants occupied the room where he’d died, but I didn’t think I needed to be right in the room, just near enough. I looked up and down the corridor for cameras, though I didn’t think anyone observing would believe what they might see, and let go of normal.

  The Grey in full flush rushed upon me, making the normal world into a dim watercolor beneath the realm of silver mist and lines of hot energy that throbbed as if alive. The layers of time were broken chunks, tumbled at all angles like striated rocks in a floodplain. The displacement of the disjointed temporaclines was much worse than I’d ever seen it in Seattle, and I wondered if it was related to Los Angeles’s famous earthquakes or the near-constant state of construction and reconstruction that went on in the area. I hoped I could do this without recourse to climbing and sliding through those ragged bits of time.

  I glanced around and spotted the Grey outline of my father’s office door, still lingering where it had stood for so long. It would be a pain to get through it; it might have been a door once, but it was a wall now. It was much harder for me to move something that had no current existence in the normal world than to utilize the momentary memories of passages opened by ghosts. I could try to find the right stretch of time and get through the door there, but that didn’t look like the safest option. Relegating the temporaclines to last resort, I paced outside the phantom door and waited for a ghost.

  After ten minutes that felt like an hour, the ghost of a young woman strode d
own the hall and unlocked the door. She was average-pretty behind purple eyeglasses and wore her long light brown hair pulled back with a clip. I wasn’t sure I recognized her, but I thought she might be Christelle LaJeunesse—Dad’s receptionist. I pushed through the doorway in her wake, and she stopped to stare at me.

  “Do you have an appointment?” she asked as we went into the ghost of the waiting room.

  I was a little surprised at her attempt to interact with me. I couldn’t recall a ghost simply talking to me as if I were part of their context before. Usually I had to force myself upon them if they hadn’t come to me first.

  “Uh, no,” I replied.

  She went around behind the reception desk and looked back at me from her position of authority as the office gatekeeper. “Do you want to make an appointment?”

  “I just want to talk to Dr. Blaine for a moment,” I said, on the off chance she could summon him.

  “I’m sorry. Dr. Blaine’s not available right now. You’ll have to make an appointment.”

  “When will he be available?”

  “I don’t know. He isn’t in yet.” She looked around the shadow form of the empty waiting room. “Actually,” she added, “he hasn’t been in for a while. I think there’s something wrong.” As she said it, her demeanor changed and she became frightened and sad, aware, perhaps, of her own disjointure from life, of something precious lost or broken.

  Ghosts have a strange relationship to time, and this one was odd but not unheard-of: She was aware my father’s absence, but she didn’t know he was dead. She wasn’t quite in sync with either her own time or mine. She seemed to think this was a day when Dr. Robert Blaine simply hadn’t come to work, but it disturbed her, and she wasn’t sure why.