F. Paul Wilson - Haunted Air

... the wound...

Yes, the wound. There lay the wellspring of his doubts. He shouldn't have been wounded at all. That was the legacy of the Ceremony-life and personal impregnability. It didn't make an adept invulnerable to petty injuries like papercuts and such. But a stab wound... the blade was supposed to glance off the skin.

Unless it was wielded by another adept.

Uneasy, Eli took out the number Strauss had given him last night and tapped it into the phone. And just like last night, his attacker was "not available at this time."

Eli broke the connection and simmered. He would put the number into speed dial and keep calling. The man had to turn his phone on sometime, and one of those times Eli would connect. And then they'd talk, and Eli would learn about his attacker, induce him into a slip of the tongue, and then he'd have him.

3

Lyle suppressed a yawn as he went through the preliminaries with a new sitter. Not that he was bored talking about his spirit guide-how could Ifasen feel anything but excitement about communing with his ancient mentor Ogunfiditimi? Lyle was dead tired. He felt as if he'd spent the night completing an ironman triathlon.

Tara Portman or whatever it was had rested easy last night after the spirit-writing display. No noises, no blood, no breakage. Still sleep had eluded Lyle. The mere expectation of noise, blood, or breakage had turned his mattress into a bed of nails.

Charlie, on the other hand, looked fresh and fully rested this morning. That Bible of his, no doubt.

But Lyle's malaise went beyond fatigue. He couldn't pin it down. Not so much a matter of feeling bad as not feeling right. He felt... changed. The world looked and felt different. Shadows seemed deeper, lights brighter, sharper, the air felt charged, as if something momentous was in the offing.

He shook it off. He had work to do.

With the Channeling Room repaired, they'd begun rescheduling sittings. Lyle had adjusted the day's appointments to leave room for the meeting with Konstantin Kristadoulou. He'd called the old real estate agent first thing this morning and set up a meeting at one o'clock. He'd left a message for Jack about the time and place.

But that would be this afternoon. This was now, and Lyle wasn't happy with now. Melba Toomey was a far-from-ideal sitter. Lyle blamed his distracted state for allowing her to slip past the screening process. She would not be a good subject at any time, but especially not as the first of the day.

But she'd paid her money for a private sitting and now faced him across the table in her housedress and flower-decked straw hat, dark eyes bright with expectation in her black face.

According to the information on her questionnaire, Melba was fifty-three and cleaned houses for a living. Not at all typical of Ifasen's clientele, and certainly not the social class he was courting.

Lyle cringed at the thought of how long it must have taken her to save enough for a private sitting. But she'd said on her questionnaire that she'd come to him because he was black-didn't say African-American. Black.

Melba Toomey wanted to know if her husband Clarence was alive or dead; and if he was dead, she wanted to speak to him.

Lyle did his utmost to avoid the class of sitter whose concerns deprived him of precious wiggle room. Melba was the worst of that class: Alive or dead... was there a more black-or-white, yes-or-no proposition than that? It left him zero wiggle.

He'd have to do a cold reading on Clarence through Melba to try and get a grip on what kind of man Clarence was so as to make a roughly educated guess on whether he might be alive or dead.

I'm going to be sweating for my daily bread this round, he thought.

Lyle had placed two potato-size stones on the table, telling her that they were from Ogunfiditimi's birth place and, because Ogunfiditimi hadn't met her before, it enhanced first-time contact if she kept a good grip on those stones. It also kept her hands where Lyle could see them.

To set the mood-and kill some time-Lyle treated Melba to the histrionics, the table and chair tipping, then settled down to business.

Lyle came out of his pseudo trance and stared at her, watching closely. Her features were slightly fuzzy in the dim red light from overhead, but clear enough to pick up what he needed. Body language, visual cues in a blink of the eyes, a twist of the mouth, a twitch of a cheek... Lyle could read them like an old salt reads the sea.

First, some try-ons. She'd mentioned on her questionnaire that Clarence had been missing since June second. He'd start there.

"I'm getting a sense of a state of absence... of separation since... why does early June keep popping into my head?"

"The second of June!" Melba cried. "That's when I last saw Clarence! He went off to work in the morning and never came home. I haven't seen or heard from him since." She worked a used tissue out of her housedress pocket and dabbed her eyes. "Oh, Lord, you do have the gift, don't you."

Oh, yes, Lyle thought. The gift of remembering what you've forgotten you've told me.

"Please keep your hands on the stones, Melba," he reminded her. "It weakens contact when you remove them."

"Oh, sorry." She placed her hands back on the stones.

Good. Keep them there, he thought.

The last thing he wanted her to do was reach for her pocketbook. Because Charlie, covered head to toe in black, should have crept out of his command center by now and be ready to grab it from where it sat on the floor next to her chair.

"I told the police but I don't think they's doing much to find him. They don't seem the least bit interested."

"They're very busy, Melba," he told her.

Her distress sent a shot of guilt through Lyle. He wasn't going to do any more for her than the cops.

Value for value...

He shook it off and formulated another try-on. The first had been just an easy warm-up, to break the ice and gain a smidgen of her confidence. From here it got a little tougher.

Look at her: cleans houses, bargain-rack clothing; he couldn't see Clarence as a corporate exec. She mentioned him going off to work as if it were a routine thing. Good chance he had a steady blue-collar job, maybe union.

Try-on number two...

"Why do I want to say he worked in a trade?"

"He was an electrician!"

"A loyal union man."

She frowned. "No. He was never in a union."

Whoops, but easy enough to save. "But I get the feeling he wanted to be in the union."

"Yes! How did you know! That poor man. He tried so many times but never qualified. He was always talking about how much more money he could be making if he was in the union."

Lyle nodded sagely. "Ah, that was what I was picking up."

Let's see... blue-collar, frustrated... maybe Clarence liked to knock back a few after work? And even if he was a teetotaler or an ex-drinker, the temptation to drink offered a ready fallback.

"I'm getting the impression of a dimly lit place, the smell of smoke, the clink of glassware..."

"Leon's! That awful place! He'd go there after work and come home reeking of beer. Sometimes he wouldn't come home till after midnight. We had such terrible fights over it."

Drunk... frustrated... go for it, but keep it vague.

"I'm led to say that some harm was done?"

Melba looked away. "He never meant to hurt me. It's just that sometimes, when I got him real mad after he came home late, he'd take a swing. He didn't mean nothin' by it. But now that he's gone..." She sobbed and grabbed the tissue to dab at her eyes again. "I'd rather have him home late than not at all."

"I'm losing contact!" Lyle said. "The hands! The stones. Please stay in contact with the stones."

Melba grabbed them again. "I'm sorry. It's just-"

"I understand, but you must hold the stones."