David Nickle - The 'Geisters

One blessing: the washroom was empty but for her. She made her way to a sink, spared herself a glance in the tall, gilt-framed mirror. Her makeup was holding. That was something.

Ann fumbled with her phone.

It was a new one, and she hadn’t had time to program her numbers into it. Not a catastrophe—she knew the number she had to call now like she knew her own name—but speed dial would have helped.

Finally, a signal. One ring .

Would the glasses still be on the rack now, or sliding, one by one, along the rails, crashing into the plate glass windows overlooking Bay Street?

Two rings.

Would frost be forming around the edges of those windows, irising a circle of white, evil crystals to block out the sun?

Three.

Would one of the traders hold up his hand, wonderingly, examining the steak knife that had penetrated the back of it as he sat, turning it this way and that while his mind processed the impossibility of it, and itself began to unravel?

Four.

The first might be dead—the only question would be who… who it would choose. Not the waiter! Not Michael Voors—

Oh God…

“Come on, Eva,” Ann said to the empty washroom. “I need you.”

And click: and five . And…

“Hello?”

“Eva!”

“Ann?” Eva Fenshaw was on her own cell phone—she’d obviously figured out the intricacies of call-forwarding since last they spoke—and her voice crackled. She sounded as though she might be in some large space—maybe the Wal-Mart where she liked to spend hot afternoons before her consultations started in the early evening. Ann should have remembered, and called the cell phone first. “Ann, how nice to hear from you!”

“Not so nice, Eva,” said Ann.

“Are you all right?” Pause. “Ann, dear?”

“It’s coming,” said Ann.

“Oh oh. The Insect.”

“The Insect.”

“Oh.”

The acoustics shifted—maybe as Eva moved down an aisle, someplace more private. “All right, Ann. It’s all right.”

“It’s not all right. It’s back, it’s coming out, I can feel it.”

“Where are you? At work?”

“At lunch. With a date.”

“With that Michael?”

“Michael Voors.”

“Dear Creator,” Eva whispered. She had, of course, warned Ann about Michael; Eva Fenshaw had a lifelong distrust of lawyers, born of the needless troubles in her divorce thirty years ago. When Ann told her about Michael’s interest in her, Eva had had some unkind things to say.

She didn’t repeat them in the Wal-Mart. “All right, Ann. Were you drinking?”

“God no.”

“Good. Now. How did it manifest?”

“The saltshaker,” said Ann. “Moved on its own. That’s for sure.”

“In the restaurant.”

“In the restaurant!”

“Telekinetically.”

“Yes!”

“Don’t shout,” said Eva. “Stay calm. We’re going to visualize the safe place.”

Eva gave a yogic huff, and Ann drew a deep breath.

“It hates him,” she said. “It’s the same as before.”

“Ann!” Her voice was sharp this time. “Visualize the safe place, Ann. It can’t harm you there. And if it can’t harm you…”

“I can control it. All right.” She shut her eyes.

“Good, dear,” said Eva, in a voice that seemed to recede down the long corridor that was the first part—the gateway to Ann’s safe place. Eva had helped her construct it— how long ago ? Not important. Ten years ago. At the hospital. You remember the hospital, don’t you, little Annie? I know I do—

Ann concentrated on opening herself up, seeing the hallway, walls made of cut stone with bright, leaded glass windows along both sides. There was a sunrise—Ann was always happier with the onset of light than she was the spread of darkness—and it manifested in pinkish rectangles along the flagstone floor.

The safe room was at the far end of the corridor. It would take a moment to walk, but by the time she had made the journey, she would have shed the tension that had brought her here. That was how Eva had explained it, all those years ago as they sat together in the lounge in Fenlan, waiting for word of her brother, of Philip after the crash.

“You’re going to walk as slowly as you need to, and at each window, you can pause and throw any worry you have out there into the light.”

“Light of the rising sun?” young Ann had asked, and Eva had replied: “Just the light.” And she had held Ann as Ann described how that hallway would be: like the hallway between high towers in a wizard’s castle.

The wizard wasn’t there, because she was the wizard.

This was Ann’s castle.

She stopped at the first window. Ann always had a leather satchel with her when she walked the Hall of Light, and she reached into it this time. She found a small parcel, wrapped in a dark, oily cloth. It was warm to the touch.

It wasn’t important—it might even be counterproductive—to try and determine what worry, exactly, was contained in this package. Whatever it was, it was heavy, and warm, and alive. She pushed open the first window, and threw the package out. It fell into the hot sunlight, down the mountainside, and disappeared.

She was inclined to hurry, to the thick oak door at the far end of the hallway. She certainly could do so; the castle existed only in her imagination, as guided by Eva’s own counsel. She could simply imagine herself all the way down, in the tower room, her fears cast from windows in retrospect. She could simply say to herself that she had unlocked the twelve sturdy locks, and removed the bar, and raised the miniature portcullis that led to the tower chamber, where it—the Insect—was contained.

And I could , she told herself, watch as the whole, fragile construct collapses to dust. While God—excuse me, Creator knows—what havoc the Insect is wreaking in the restaurant.

So, meticulously, Ann went window to window, tossing cloth packages and poisonous apples and broken daggers and twisted candles from her bag, until it was empty, and then removed the key ring, and set to work on the door. And then, free of all burdens, she stepped inside—to the tower room.

“Do you see it there?”

“I don’t.” The chamber was a circular tower room, with a single window overlooking a bright kingdom, far, far below. There was a chair. A table. A little flask of iced mint tea (in the past, matters had gotten uncontrollable when there was wine in the room). It was otherwise a bit of a cliché: but what was to be done about it? They’d devised it during the depths of Ann’s teenaged Dungeons & Dragons obsession. And circular tower rooms in wizards’ castles, as Ann had explained seriously at the time, were both pretty comfortable safe places, and made awfully good prisons.

Good, but obviously not perfect.

“It’s gone. It’s escaped.”

“Look up, dear.”

“Of course.” She looked up, into the rafters of this room—where just a few years ago, during the big blackout, when she was sure the thing had gotten out again, running amok in the dark corridors of her residence, flinging knives, she’d found it hanging like a great chrysalis, grinning down at her, long hair dangling like the tentacles of a man-o-war.

Not this time, though.

“Not this time,” said Ann.

“Keep at peace,” said Eva. “All right dear, let me tune in.”

Ann couldn’t help imagining Eva in the Wal-Mart, moving her hands so they hovered inches apart from one another, eyelids fluttering… the little rituals that she invoked, to tune in to Ann, and her safe place, and the prisoner that she kept there.

Imagining Eva in Wal-Mart, or indeed anywhere but in the circular tower room, was of course exactly the wrong thing to do. The safe place was an unreliable construct… a lie, really, although best not to think of it in those terms. Hurrying would knock it over, and so would distraction. Start thinking of some other place, particularly a real place (like the Wal-Mart) and that place intrudes.