"What would you know about girls like her?" I asked scornfully, angrily. And answered my question: "Nothing. You know nothing about women like her."

Andre took one step away from his lantern, and Robert glowered at me.

Relentless, Datura said, "I've seen your picture in newspapers, Maryann. Oh, yes, I did my research before I came here. I know the faces of so many who died in this place, because if I meet them-when I meet them through my new boyfriend here, my little odd one-I want the encounters to be memorable."

The tall broad brick of a man with buzz-cut hair and deep-set bile-green eyes had appeared, but I'd been so distracted by Datura's unconscionable badgering of the cocktail waitress that I had not been aware of this spirit's belated arrival. I saw him now as he abruptly loomed closer to us.

"I've seen your picture, Maryann," Datura repeated. "You were a pretty girl but not a beauty. Just pretty enough for men to use you, but not pretty enough to be able to use them to get what you wanted."

No more than ten feet from us, the eighth spirit of the casino appeared to be as angry as he had been when I had seen him earlier. Jaws clenched. Hands fisted.

"Just pretty isn't good enough," Datura continued. "Prettiness fades quickly. If you had lived, your life would have been nothing but cocktail waitressing and disappointment."

Buzz-cut came closer, now three feet behind the stricken spirit of Maryann Morris.

"You had high hopes when you came to this job," Datura said, "but it was a dead end, and soon you knew you were already a failure. Women like you turn to their sisters, to their friends, and make a life that way. But you…you even failed your sisters, didn't you?"

One of the Coleman lanterns brightened markedly, dimmed, and brightened again, causing shadows to fly away, leap close, and fly away once more.

Andre and Robert somberly considered the lamp, looked at each other, and then surveyed the room, puzzled.

THIRTY-SEVEN

"FAILED YOUR SISTERS," DATURA REPEATED, "YOUR paralyzed, blind, disfigured sisters. And if that isn't true, if I'm full of crap, then let me see you, Maryann. Show yourself, confront me, let me see you the way the fire ruined you. Show me, and scare me off."

Although I would never have been able to conjure these spirits into a sufficiently material state for Datura to have seen them, I had hoped that Buzz-cut, with his high poltergeist potential, would provide a spectacle that would not only entertain my captors but also distract them so completely that I might get away.

The problem had been how to fuel his already simmering anger into the fiery rage needed to power poltergeist phenomena. Now it seemed that Datura would solve that problem for me.

"You weren't there for your sisters," she taunted. "Not before the quake, not during, not after, not ever."

Although the cocktail waitress only buried her face in her hands and endured the poisonous accusations, Buzz-cut glared at Datura, his expression heating from a simmering to a boiling anger.

He and Maryann Morris were bonded by untimely death as well as by their inability to move on, but I can't know that his mood grew darker because he took offense on behalf of the cocktail waitress. I don't believe these stranded spirits feel any sense of community. They see one another, but each is fundamentally alone.

More likely, Datura's viciousness resonated with this man, excited him, and amplified his existing anger.

"The fifth spirit has arrived," I told her. "Conditions are perfect now.

"Then do it," she said sharply. "Conjure them right here, right now. Let me see."

God forgive me, to save myself and Danny, I said, "What you're doing is helpful. It's…I don't know… it's emotionalizing them or something."

"I told you I always know exactly what I'm doing. Don't ever doubt me, baby."

"Just keep hammering at her, and with my help, in a few minutes, you'll not just see Maryann but all of them."

She hurled more abuse at the cocktail waitress, in language far more vile than she'd used thus far, and both of the Coleman lanterns pulsed, pulsed, as though in sympathy with the lightning that might at the same moment have been ripping through the sky outside.

Stalking, turning, stalking, circling, as if caged, as though frustrated beyond tolerance by his confinement, Buzz-cut banged his fists together hard enough to fracture knuckle against knuckle if he had been a material presence, but not even making a sound in his spirit form.

He could have swung those fists at me, but they would have had no effect. No spirit can harm a living person by direct touch. This world belongs to us, not to them.

If an earthbound soul is sufficiently debased, however, if the anger and envy and spite and stubborn rebellion that characterized him in life should ripen into blackest spiritual malignancy during the days when he lingers between worlds, he will be able to vent the power of his demonic rage on inanimate objects.

To the cocktail waitress whom she couldn't see and never would, Datura said with pitiless persistence, "You know what I think, what I'd bet, Maryann? In that shabby nursing home at night, some scummy guy on the staff sneaks in your sister's room, Bonnie's room, and rapes her."

Past rage, approaching fury, Buzz-cut threw back his head and screamed, but the sound was trapped with him in the realm between here and Elsewhere.

"She's helpless," Datura said, her voice as venomous as the contents of a rattlesnake's poison sacs. "Bonnie would be afraid to tell anyone because the rapist never talks, and she doesn't know his name, and she can't see, so she's afraid they won't believe her."

Buzz-cut tore at the air with his hands, as though trying to claw his way back through the veil that separated him from the world of the living.

"So Bonnie has to endure anything he does to her, but when she's enduring, she thinks of you, thinks because of you, she was where she was when the quake destroyed her life, and she thinks about how you, her sister, aren't there for her now, and never were."

Listening to herself, her own most appreciative audience, Datura thrived on her viciousness. After each hateful rant, she seemed to thrill to the discovery of a deeper vileness in herself.

The malignant mass beneath the mask of beauty now rose all but fully into view. Her flushed and twisted features were no longer the stuff of adolescent boys' dreams, but of madhouses and of prisons for the criminally insane.

I tensed, sensing that a forceful demonstration of the spirit's fury was almost upon us.

Inspired by Datura, energized, Buzz-cut thrashed spastically as if he were lashed by a hundred whips or tormented by jolt after jolt of electricity. He threw his arms out, palms spread, like an enraptured preacher of an expressive sect, exhorting a congregation to be penitent.

From his big hands pulsed concentric rings of power. They were visible to me, but only by their effects would they be visible to my hostess and her men.

Rattles, clicks, creaks, and pings arose from the piles of ruined slot machines, and the two blackjack-table stools began to dance in place. Here and there across the casino, small funnels of whirling ashes spun up from the floor.

"What's happening?" Datura asked.

"They're about to appear," I told her, though every spirit other than Buzz-cut had disappeared. “All of them. At last, you'll see."

Poltergeists are as impersonal as hurricanes. They cannot aim themselves or cause precise effects. They are blind, thrashing power, and can harm human beings only by indirection. If furiously flung debris brains you, however, the effect is no less devastating than a well-swung club to the head.