Kat Richardson - Vanished

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.

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, although 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.”