Daniel Hecht - City of Masks

Cree forestalled Joyce's questioning look with a raised finger and went to call Edgar. It was only four o'clock, but it would be seven back east, and she wanted to catch him before he went to do any night fieldwork. She went to his room so she could use the videophone and get a look at his face, which she missed whenever they worked independently.

Edgar's room was three times the size of Cree's, with naked brick walls and a pair of tall windows facing the building across the alley. His desk and file cabinets occupied only one corner of the room; the middle was taken up by the counters, computers, and rack-mounted electronics of the lab he used for processing physical evidence gathered at field sites. The remainder of the room served as storage for the equipment Edgar used for his end of their work. He had taken the minimal kit needed for a preliminary review to the Massachusetts job, leaving the bulky stuff behind, a mix of off-the-shelf, high-end high-tech and Edgar's own adaptations of various technologies: infrared cameras, radar motion detectors, ambient-light night-vision photographic equipment, sound recorders, visible-light video and film cameras, air-pressure- and temperature-monitoring equipment, seismic vibration sensors, ion counters, electromagnetic-field-measuring devices, a forensic gas chromatograph, microscopes, skin galvanometers, voice-stress analyzers, the electroencephalographs, tripods, toolboxes, and bulky aluminum travel cases.

Edgar's playground. More than three hundred thousand dollars' worth of equipment. They'd gotten some of it used from various donors, received some grants from the Society for Psychical Research and the odd eccentric millionaire, including Ed's uncle, but the outlay had left them with some hefty debts. One big reason for Ed's concern for revenue.

And so far, it had produced very little in the way of empirical evidence.

But you had to try. Credibility ultimately rested on scientific evidence, — some hard physical proof. Something that all of Cree's emphatic talents couldn't provide.

Cree sat at Edgar's desk and used his videophone to dial the number Joyce had given her. Within seconds, the screen bleeped and there was Ed's familiar face. Cree looked into the little ball-shaped camera on top of the monitor and waved.

"I thought it might be you," he said. "Hey — you look different. You got your hair cut."

"Just a trim. I'm surprised you noticed."

"Are you kidding? It looks terrific." Edgar smiled, a grin that crept up the right side of his face. Cree had always liked that smile, the touch of irony in it.

Ed was into technology, but he was not at all the proverbial nerd. He was too handsome, in a long-faced way, and his intelligence was by no means confined to machines. The tilt of his smile gave it away: the streak of sadness or resignation that came with knowing the human condition only too well. His lanky body, long face, and sandy hair gave him the look of a minor member of the British royal family, which he exploited to do an outrageous impersonation of Prince Charles.

"How did the meeting with Beauforte go?"

"He's sort of a smug son of a bitch. But I think there might be something for us there. I agreed to do a preliminary, got a retainer check. Full fee, you'll be happy to hear."

"Great! Well, I should be done here in a week. I can go down there if you'd like, or we could both go — "

"I thought maybe I'd get down there later this week," Cree said."Maybe before you return. I can clear the time." Edgar looked disappointed, so she explained: "He says his sister — she's the main witness — is very disturbed. I got the sense the family's only coming to us because they'll do anything to calm her down, she's really going pieces. Plus, I was thinking, here's the paying customer you said we needed, so it would be good to follow up right away…"

Edgar nodded, unconvinced.

"Okay," Cree admitted, "I got a feeling that we should move on this. A buzz. I don't know why." Still Ed said nothing, but a little ripple of concern passed over his forehead, and Cree decided to change the subject. "How about your end? What're you getting?"

His face brightened, sheer enthusiasm for the hunt replacing his doubtfulness. "Multiple occurrences, multiple witnesses with excellent credibility. The entity appears to be a perseverating fragmentary, displaying both visual and auditory. A couple of reports of tactile, but those're from my least reliable witnesses."

Cree nodded, and Edgar went on, using a shorthand vocabulary that in all the world only Cree would understand. A perseverating fragmentary was an entity with a limited repertoire of activities, an apparition appearing in the same place and doing the same motions again and again. They called it fragmentary because the entity was not a complete human personality, but a lingering, very limited mental construct. Such a manifestation was almost more the experience itself than a being — a disconnected mental and emotional matrix that somehow repetitively played out independently of a corporeal body or much of a self-aware consciousness. What people referred to as "ghosts" could range from merest shards, no more than a roaming impulse or hunger, to virtually complete personalities.

That Ed's entity had been seen, heard, and maybe felt on several occasions by more than one person did suggest it would be a promising study. If it were perceivable by several senses, and was robust enough to be witnessed by several people, it would give Cree more to work with and possibly allow Edgar's equipment to register verifiable physical phenomena.

"So what's on for tonight?" Cree asked.

"Well, I'm going back to the site. I'll do some infrared and visible-light work. One of the witnesses has agreed to come with me and wear the polygraph setup, too."

"She good-looking?"

Edgar rolled his eyes, and the grin appeared. "She is, very definitely. But she's also thirty years older than me and happily married." Then his smile evaporated. "Actually, I'm not looking forward to it. The place bugs me. Creeps me out."

"Any reason in particular?"

Edgar's eyes moved to one side. "Just the feeling of the house. I'm not in your league, Cree, but I do have a couple of functional nerve endings."

"I've noticed. I rely on it daily, Ed. Tell me about the feeling."

A kink of trouble had formed between his eyebrows, and Edgar rubbed at it with both big hands as he tried to put words to the feeling."This… loneliness, I guess. Something very… stark there."

Oh, yes, Cree thought. That.

When she'd first started spending time in haunted places, she'd been as frightened as anyone else by the fear of scary things, the dark, the unknown — grisly deaths, nightmarish visions, awful secrets, moving shadows. That unrelenting sense of imminent danger. But you got a grip on that after a while. What you didn't get used to was the existential stuff: The scary things might spring out and hurt you or make you crazy, but the maw of loneliness Ed spoke of, that abyss of emptiness, could swallow your soul.

They both came back from that. They talked some more about the Massachusetts entity and then about the equipment she'd need to take with her to New Orleans. Cree got on the radiophone and Ed walked her back into the storage area, showing her where to find everything. But he seemed increasingly reluctant, and at last she pointed it out to him.

"You're not too happy with me going down there on my own, are you?"

"I'm just thinking… why don't you come out here first? Help me finish this preliminary. I could use your insight. Maybe we could take an extra day to see the sights of Boston, then both go to New Orleans — "

"I don't think the client can wait. Anyway, we'll have plenty of time to work on these together if we end up taking either case."