Chapter 31

Back in Camp Hell, there was a room set aside for use as a chapel. I wasn’t a total stranger to church, I realized, though I hadn’t seen a mass since I walked through Mama Brill’s door with a battered gym bag and a bad attitude. She was convinced organized religion was crooked, and said we should each get in touch with spirituality in our own unique way. 

Still, I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with all the trappings of Catholicism: stained glass and wooden pews and the fancy cupboard where the chalice goes. The chapel at Camp Hell had none of these things. It wasn’t entirely nondenominational—there was a plain cross on the far wall—but it was so bland and empty, it looked like it had been cleared to replace the carpet and had never quite got its furniture back, other than a few stacking conference chairs and a sideboard with a box of tissues and a vase of fake flowers.

 We four mediums endured periodic visits to the chapel, though Miss Maxwell had never gone so far as to suggest we pray. Religion wasn’t exactly encouraged at Camp Hell. “Sit quietly,” she told us. “In this day and age, there’s so much stimulus, it’s important to take the time in the silence, without video games and television and everything else we use to distract ourselves.”

“How long do we have to sit here?” Richie whined.

“It’s not the length that counts,” Maxwell said. “It’s the quality.”

Darla stage-whispered, “Sure, that’s what all the boys say.”

Faun Windsong was too high and mighty for such juvenile humor, and the joke flew right over Richie’s head. 

But me? Oh, man.

If there’s anywhere a fit of the giggles will earn you the nastiest of looks, it’s church. The generic chapel was no exception. I snorfed out a laugh, buried it, and almost had it quelled. But then Darla snickered. Which set me off again. While Faun looked on with a disdainful superiority and Richie tried to figure out what was so funny, we passed this laughter back and forth like a hot potato for the next half an hour. And when we were finally allowed to file out for lunch, Maxwell held Darla back. 

Because I couldn’t resist eavesdropping, I lingered just outside the door.

“This is all a big joke to you,” Maxwell said, “but you’d better believe me when I say that your gift of being able to pierce the veil between life and death is a serious responsibility. You should be ashamed of the way you squander your time here.”

“So I can learn what? How to sit in a chair, in a room? Boy, that’s some specialized skill right there.”

“Your bad attitude will cost you. In more ways than you realize.”

Darla flounced out of the room and clucked her tongue as she swept past me. “I get in trouble while you go scot-free. Typical.”

Thinking back on it now, she was absolutely right. My attitude was no better than hers. In fact, if anything, we were frighteningly alike. But I never got dressed down for my dicking around. Not like she did.

Unfortunately, I doubted my ability to skate through my responsibilities would help me in this day and age.

The black-suited agents had made some calls and got the church unlocked for us. The place smelled disconcertingly like Still Goods—old wood and rosin with a hint of faded frankincense. Dust motes danced in the light streaming through the stained glass. It was cold and drafty and eerily empty, but it was still an active church. Announcements for prayer circles, soup suppers and a catechism class dotted the bulletin board, and a bank of lit prayer candles flickered gently beside the distant altar.

Darla took in the vestibule and said, “This’ll be fine. Carl, can you make sure no one interrupts us?” Carl set the black case he’d been carrying on a bench, nodded, and went to stand vigil by the front doors. “And turn off your ringer,” she told me. “Channeling can be tricky and I really need to focus.”

I pulled out my phone and looked at it stupidly.

“What?” she said.

“Uh…new upgrade. Can’t tell whether it’s off or on.”

She rolled her eyes and showed me how to switch on the Do Not Disturb. “Sometimes I wonder if I would’ve tested higher at Camp Hell if we had a teacher who wasn’t so churchy.”

“Probably,” I agreed. “Or even just someone who didn’t rub you so wrong.”

“True. The Nun really was uptight.”

“Think about it this way. Maybe you dodged a bullet.”

She arched a carefully penciled eyebrow at me. “How so?”

“They experimented on me, Dar.” 

My voice had been level. Mostly. But she had to drop my gaze. “Sorry. I was thinking about the early days. Before Krimski took over and fired Maxwell and all the other instructors, and locked us all in our rooms. After that I was just focused on getting out of there. Anytime I wasn’t filling out standardized tests, I was cranking out job applications.”

“How? Where?”

“I dunno,” she said, “the job office. The career placement guy.” 

I remembered no such guy. Then again, I trusted Darla’s memory of certain years much more than I did my own. 

She dropped the matter, turned toward the black case, and popped it open. I must’ve been expecting Richie’s prayer mat and white candles, because I was surprised to see a colorful spread of crystal hunks instead. Each stone was about the size of a fist, nestled in a foam compartment. Darla lifted out the tray, and beneath that were a dozen vials in their own cushy cubbies, winking like the jewels in one of her elaborate necklaces. 

She motioned to the array of glittery objects and asked, “Do you have a preference?”

“I, uh, never really had much luck with crystals.”

“Maybe you haven’t found the right one yet.” She turned back to her array and held out her hand above them, focused, like she was testing the vibrations they emitted. And maybe she was. She picked out a craggy hunk of amethyst and anointed it with one of the bottles. “Gem elixirs.”

I nodded as if I knew what that meant.

“Do you hear them?” she asked.

“No.”

“No, I didn’t think so. Even though you can talk to the dead, you seem mostly visual.”

“You can hear them? The crystals?”

“I can, when I shift my attention there. They’re kind of like background noise. The quartz on my nightstand lulls me to sleep. And the stones with veins of impurities have all kinds of funky texture to their voices.”

“Are they…alive?” When she looked at me sharply, I added, “Dumb question.”

“No, it’s not. I don’t think they’re technically alive, or sentient.” She hefted the amethyst and stared into it. “How can I put it so it makes sense to you? If they were visual, they’d be more like a series of mirrors catching a ray from the sun and bouncing it into a dark corner.”

White light. Energy.

The connection sparked between two of my most stubborn neurons, and suddenly I understood the gemstone concept neither Crash nor Miss Mattie had been able to push through my thick skull.

“I think the crystalline structure of salt does the same,” she added.

If she kept going, my brain was going to get too big for my head. It would crack open and puff out like those cans of refrigerator rolls Jacob pretends he doesn’t like. “Pretty cool.”

“Yeah, well.” She cracked a grin. “Can’t say it doesn’t feel good to have someone treat me like I know what I’m doing for a change.” 

She held up her amethyst hunk and gazed into it. If I were on psyactives or within the vicinity of a GhosTV, I’d know for sure if she was filling with white light. Even without seeing it, though, I strongly suspected she was. I triggered my own download mechanism, breathed deep, stilled myself, and pictured the beam of pure positive energy pouring in through the big target on my forehead.

Once I was topped off, I took a look around me. No ghosts. No mysterious not-quite-alive critters, either—at least, not that I could sense. Hallowed ground? I wasn’t sure whether the belief of generations of parishioners built up like a dozen coats of paint on a stuck window jamb, or if the only thing that really mattered was what went on inside my own head.

“Now tell me about the guy you want to reach,” Darla said.

“Andy Parsons. An FPMP spy who tailed me at the Fifth Precinct. Turned up in an industrial wood chipper with an agency bullet lodged in his spine.”

“Gotta hand it to Chicago. They never fail to outdo themselves in the gruesome murder department.” She sat on the bench beside her case of rocks, cradled the amethyst in her cupped hands, closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “Andy, Andy,” she muttered. “What can you tell us about your murder? Andy, Andy, Andy…I’ll bet you’re pretty pissed off about it. Andy, Andy…you gonna let somebody get away with that?

I wasn’t exactly skeptical—hell, I knew that Darla could hear ghosts—but I also knew Andy’s spirit wasn’t in proximity. I also knew that when I dealt with that esoteric membrane that separated life from death, my subtle bodies slipped apart and left my physical shell with the lights out and nobody home. So if Darla was actually able to speak, I wasn’t quite convinced of the accuracy of any messages she might receive. As if she somehow knew I was entertaining doubts, her eyes snapped open.

Milky white cataracts covered her iris and pupil. Startled, I staggered back a few steps.

Darla exhaled.

In the beam of stained light eking through the windows, her breath curled like cigarette smoke with cold.

“Nobody realizes who’s pulling the strings,” she said. In her own voice. Well, of course it was her own voice, it was coming from her vocal cords, her mouth. But still…I was never entirely sure, when push came to shove, how far the metaphysical could hijack everything we know to be true. “Laura Kim thinks she understands, but she doesn’t know the half of it.”

“FPMP national?”

When I spoke aloud, Darla’s head swiveled, and her cloudy eyes set me in their sights. “No, worse. Someone who’s not accountable to anyone because they wipe out every last trace of their activities. Before the FPMP, there was a group. I ran across them when I was studying for my assignment at the Chicago PD. No clue who they are.” Darla smiled grimly. It looked nothing like her usual impish smirk. “But they were all over you, Victor Bayne.”

My heart started pounding so hard, I could barely hear myself speak. “Why? What did they want?”

“Let me go,” Andy said. “It hurts.”

“Not until you help us. You got yourself killed and I’m trying to figure out how—you could at least do your part.”

Darla twitched as if Andy was struggling against her, but she was too strong for him, and eventually he settled down. “Fine. I figured I should know how dangerous you were if I was supposed to be shadowing you. Digital records were crap, so I took a trip to archives and went through the paper. Your files go way back. And not everything made it through the scanner.”

“What did you find?”

“You had your share of ghostly sightings. They started when you were twelve.”

That early? Damn. 

“Funny thing was, the detailed records started even earlier than that.” Andy’s words curled from Darla’s lips on tendrils of frost. “The other psychs I tracked had nothing but a history of immunizations and hospital stays before the Ganzfeld research went public. You? Since you could talk, they ran you under the microscope every single year—as if they were looking for something specific. I wonder why.”

“You don’t know?”

“Dreyfuss told me to leave it alone. And after that, your physical paperwork mysteriously disappeared.”

Fucking Dreyfuss. “You said they had me tested. Who are they?”

“According to your records, Social Services.”

I recalled the suited guy in my headshrinker’s waiting room, and my heart tripped over itself.

“Yeah,” Andy said through Darla’s mouth. “I don’t buy it either. In my experience, the real Social Services has more important things to deal with.” The sentence ended in a weird chatter, and I realized Darla’s teeth were clicking together and her nose was red. I felt an unexpected pang of non-psychic empathy for her. The bone-chilling effects of goopy ectoplasm-hand were bad enough. I couldn’t imagine holding that death chill inside me. 

As much as I wanted to know every last detail of what Andy had on me, it was obvious Darla wasn’t physically up for an extended interrogation. I cut to the chase. “So, you were the one sending accusations to the press.”

“And look where it got me. Someone had a plant with the news outlet—FPMP national? Or the group who’s been keeping an eye on you all these years?” Darla shrugged stiffly. “Even though it was anonymous, somehow they figured out it was me.”

Did they really? Or did they just know whose printer it came from? “Did you see who shot you?”

Darla jerked her head from side to side. “It was dark.” Of course it was. “But I’d bet my Sammy Sosa home run ball it was the Assassin.”

A chill raced down my spine. It had nothing to do with the deathfrost coming from Darla, and everything to do with the memory of Roger Burke planting the fear of the Assassin in my brain. Once I convinced myself Laura Kim was not the Assassin’s secret identity, I’d chalked the whole thing up to a tall tale from Burke.

And now Andy was telling me the mythical Assassin was real.

Not only that, but their bullet could’ve come from the FPMP armory.

Darla’s head started to tic, and clear snot drooled from her nose. Beneath her lip gloss, her lips had taken on a bluish tinge.

“Tell me something that’ll help me ID your killer,” I demanded. “Anything at all.”

“It was dark,” he repeated, and Darla’s voice had gone funny, clipped, like she couldn’t hold on to him much longer. “But the last thing I did was answer a summons from—”

Darla sucked in a rattling breath, then started to twitch.

“Who?” I shouted in her face. “Who?”

She spasmed a few more times, then shuddered. And when I figured it was all my own fault for questioning Andy about my own records instead of his stupid murder, Darla wheezed out the words, “Laura Kim.”

Darla seized up and went stiff, and emptied her lungs in one great, frosty gasp. And then the shivering began in earnest. “Get out of here, Andy,” I shouted. “Go.”

But her eyes were already clearing.

She sucked air, then started panting as if she’d just sprinted to the corner and back. Then she wrapped her arms around herself and rocked back and forth to try and get the shaking under control. I was right there beside her. I wrapped her in my arms and pulled her frigid face to my chest, and tried to will my body warmth into her. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

She grumbled a little. But she didn’t pull away.

“That was amazing,” I told her. “You did great.”

“So now you’ve got your shooter?”

The diplomatic reply I was searching for was too long in coming. 

She shoved off me, and snapped, “He didn’t know, did he? Damn it. Does anyone have a tissue?”

Carl edged out of the shadows, not with a gun in his hand…but a handkerchief. He was trying to play it cool, but his eyes were showing white all around. Not like he was scared of being caught—more like he was scared of the freaking dead guy talking through his office mate. His whole arm was shaking when he handed Darla the hankie. Once she took it, he abandoned all semblance of casual acceptance, and crossed himself.

I had to admit, although Darla’s performance had left me feeling somewhat inadequate, it was a big relief for someone else to be the scariest member of the team for a change.