Kat Richardson: Poltergeist

My knee ached with a low throb, demanding rest and ice. I headed back to my truck.

I looked up the Wah Mee when I got back to my office—I had several hours to kill until dark—and recoiled from the information.

There was a lot of history to the Wah Mee. It had started out as a speakeasy, then been a swanky nightspot when the International District swung all night and hosted some of the biggest names in jazz. By 1983 it had become a little seedier, and was then a private gambling club for local Chinese business owners. The night of February 18, 1983, three young Chinese men had taken fourteen of their neighbors prisoner in the club and robbed and shot them all. Only one survived. "The Wah Mee Massacre" remained the worst mass murder in Washington history. But most people didn't remember it had happened and some, like the pet shop owner, didn't want to be reminded of the community's betrayal by three of its own.

"The bottle is broken and the genie is loosed," Carlos rumbled. His disquiet was infectious, hitting me in cold, black waves. "Unfortunate." I'd brought him up to speed as I drove toward Chinatown.

"Yes, it is," I agreed, refusing to apologize. "We'll have to adapt. The good news is that I found Ian—or at least where he's holed up. He's just outside the police surveillance zone, but there are patrols both on foot and in cars. We'll have to move in from the east with care and get through the door fast. There are two doors on the alley. Both are padlocked, but Ian must have gotten through one of them. There used to be a door on King Street, but that area's an import shop now and cut off from the old club. I think I could make my way in, but it's not a route you can take and I'd rather stick together, if we can."

He continued to growl in the back of his throat for a few moments. "All right. Since you cannot simply decant the entity onto your trap, you'll have to lay the trap and lure it in."

"This isn't going to be easy, is it?"

"It never was. But this will be riskier initially and our time will be shorter. The police will be curious if we give them cause."

"Yeah. And the detective in charge knows me on sight."

"Complicated."

"We'll just stay out of his sight until we're done. Then you leave and I'll take the fall for the break-in."

Carlos fell silent for the rest of the drive.

I parked the Rover under the freeway and stopped Carlos before he got out. I handed him a package I'd picked up.

"It's a cape," I said.

He raised an eyebrow at me.

"We have about three blocks to go down a major street with cops patrolling it," I explained. "It's Halloween, so we're going in costume—no one will notice—so I figured, why not dress the part?" I was going out on a rickety limb, but it had seemed like good camouflage at the time.

"I see. And what are you?"

I held up die fluffy ears on their headband. "I'm a cat burglar." I already had the all-black outfit on. I got out of the Rover and put the ears on, then clipped the tail to my belt. I hoped it wouldn't foul my pistol if I needed it. I stowed the spare clip and my cell phone in my jacket pockets and locked the truck.

Carlos's natural menace was not diminished by the cheap polyester cape. Six feet plus of Iberian glower and a palpable badass aura went a long way. I pulled on gloves as we strode down the street toward Ian's hiding place.

Small monsters were parading on the streets amid an upwelling of the unseen. The wet air boiled with ghosts and the world felt slippery beneath my feet. We came to the corner and I stopped, glancing down to be sure the thin yellow strand still pointed into the alley.

"It hasn't moved yet," I muttered to Carlos.

"It will soon. Something is shifting toward death."

Maybe it was the suggestion, or maybe I caught it, too, but a frisson ran up my spine and the street seemed to ripple. My bones itched. I cast my gaze around, looking for cops, and led the way down the alley when I saw none. Their attention was in front of them, not behind.

We drifted down the darkness to the chained doors. Carlos started to reach for the lock, then drew back. "This is the Wah Mee."

"Yes," I answered. "You know about it?"

"It drew me here. I can feel them still. The thirteen."

"And Ian?"

His brows drew down. "Yes. Beyond this wall. He revels in it. He doesn't know what drew him here, but he feels the bloody carnage. He is feeding the entity on the death within."

His frown became a black storm of anger. I pulled a small fold of the Grey between us, pushing the horror of him back.

"Carlos," I begged in a whisper. "We have to move."

He touched the chain, sliding his hands down to the crusted padlock. His fingers found a broken link and he lifted the lock away. The defaced and weathered mahogany door pulled open with a thin sigh, as if relieved by our presence.

We eased into the vestibule. The door swung shut. Before us was another pair of doors. Red doors and a sea of heaving Grey. I saw the phantom portal swing open and three shapes rushed out into the night, laughing. Carlos pulled open the real door and we walked into the empty bar, into a maelstrom of unhealed pain and memory.

The curving question-mark bar and dining area were thronged with ghosts. They packed the space, layer upon layer, moving through each other, coming and going up the stairs at the back, through the door behind us. Laughing, talking, the calling of a dealer from the other room, the TV behind the bar flickering images of ancient shows and forgotten news. Then shouting, the sudden screams of a woman. The ghosts thinned, some going on, oblivious, as a confusion of robbery and death played out in front of us through their heedless, vaporous bodies.

"What the hell—?"

I backed away from the consuming images in which I'd been lost and felt a padded rail at my back. I'd wandered into the bar without knowing I'd moved. Through the boil of Grey I saw Ian in the gambling room a step below, through an arch of lucky-red pillars, the floor still stained with twenty-year-old blood where fourteen people had been shot in the head and left to die.

Carlos grinned at him, shedding his cape. "I want to speak to you, boy."

"Miss Clever Dick and her cop friend," Ian said. "Fuck you."

Carlos laughed and the world shuddered as he started toward Ian.

The sudden reek of rot and the whirling knives and hot light of the phantasm shot down toward Carlos. He batted it aside and continued, grinning, fangs bared, the whirl of his own bleak darkness spreading like ink in water.

Ian jumped back in the face of the impossible, implacable thing bearing down on him.

I brushed off the cat ears and started in, tripping over a spectral corpse that stared with horrified eyes from a spreading pool of silver blood.

The thing that had been Celia dashed me into one of the pillars. I rolled to the floor, feeling the hot flow of phantom gore over me. I pulled the tangle from my pocket, its thorns prickling into my still-sore hand through my glove.

The entity dove again, blazing bloodred: pure fury and hate now. I slid across the dust-thick floor and tumbled to my feet through an oblivious pair of dancing ghosts, swaying together in incongruous romance among the bleeding images of the dead.

I dropped the tangle onto the dancing ghosts, who swirled into sudden stillness—a faded photograph superimposed on the memory of the night three young men robbed and shot fourteen of their neighbors.

I heard Ian scream and started to look, catching a movement of black out of the corner of my eye.

Then the dervish of hate swept down on me again, howling. And froze in the shade of the dancers buried knee-deep in the horror of murdered bodies.

I wavered.

Carlos roared. "Now, Blaine!"