Mara raised her hand and started to bring it toward my chest. I shied from her, curling my shoulders forward.

"I shan't hurt you."

Wary, I let her touch me. I gasped when her fingertips pressed against me, pushing prongs of dense stillness into the center of the hard Grey knot. She looked at me a while, blank and thoughtful. When she sat back, pulling both her hands into her lap, her withdrawal left a void in the ache.

"It feels… heavy, but elastic and smooth, like some kind of muscle— a diaphragm, perhaps. It bends if I push gently, but it won't yield to me, and the harder I push, the more it resists. It seems benign, if a little weak at the moment, but who knows what it does? It doesn't like to be probed."

Ben gave us both an incredulous look. "'Doesn't like'? How can you say what it likes?"

"I don't know," Mara replied.

But I did. "It's alive in some way. I can feel it full of the things that live in the Grey."

Ben shuddered.

I shook my head. "I can't do this. I can't live with this. This is a nightmare. Cameron's case… it's only going to get worse and I am not sure I can stand it. I believed he was a good guy, in spite of this. But he's a monster. They are all monsters. Inhuman, vile…"

Ben spoke up. "Not vile. But the rest goes without saying, doesn't it? They're ghosts. They're vampires. But they look like us, so we think they are like us. And then they do something horrible, because they aren't like us. Ghosts are much closer to us, because they remember what it was like. Memory is all they are, really. And memory can hurt."

"But a vampire, I imagine, must learn to forget," Mara added. "Or surely they'll go mad. How could they live with themselves if they didn't change?"

"And Cameron is one," I said.

"Yes, but he's at the beginning," Mara reminded me. "He's still a nice boy who has a problem. You were right about that. He'll change, but you will probably never have to see it. Someday, when he's as old and twisted up with his new culture as those others, then he will be a monster. But do you want to make the decision to let him die now, confused and miserable? That's your choice."

"That's not fair," I said.

"No, it's not. You'll have to work that one out for yourself, I'm afraid. Can't put the apple back on the tree. So, what are we going to do now? That's the question."

"It's my problem," I said. "Not yours. I'm drowning. I've felt like something's sucking me dry ever since my client—ex-client, ghost, whatever—came to the office."

Ben perked up with a scholar's zeal for a puzzle. "Really? Before or after your argument?"

"After."

"Let me think, let me think…." He began shuffling through his papers and riffling books. "His attraction to the organ… physical manifestations and volition… action…. Hmm." He glanced up at me from the pages of a thick tome and cringed a bit. "I'd say this guy's some kind of high-level willful spirit—that's a ghost who has volition and exercise of will—so he must be a revenant."

I shrugged, tired and wishing I had another glass of whiskey. "You'll have to explain that."

"Well, for instance, Albert's a sort of garden-variety willful spirit— some volition, but very limited will and action. But a revenant is literally that which survives. Most ghosts are kind of like etheric recordings. They don't have any will or personality—they just keep going through the motions of their lives or their message until they are released, or run down like clockwork. They're just shadows and echoes. A lot of them are just retrocognates."

I peered at him and interrupted. "Retro whats?"

"It means to know or be aware of something from the past. A medium can also retrocognate, under the right conditions. Some of them actually retrocognate when attempting psychometry."

"Ben," Mara broke in, "I'm sure Harper'd appreciate the layman's version, if you don't mind."

He looked sheepish. "Oh. Umm… Psychometry—well, I guess I'll get to that another time. But retrocognition… if you see a ghost walking through a place that no longer exists in this time and space, you're probably retrocognating, seeing stuff from the past. Do you ever experience that?" His eyes glittered.

"Sometimes," I responded, feeling more drained every second.

He nodded, then shook himself and continued. "All right, so the right medium could study the object and attempt retrocognition to tell you exactly what the connection is between your client and the parlor organ, but it would be very dangerous if it is as powerful a dark artifact as you two think."

"It's tangled up in the Grey and it seems to be drawing energy from the nexus nearby, like a battery charging up or something."

"Yes, Mara told me about it." He stopped to look at his wife, who smiled a tight smile and nodded for him to go on. "I wonder what the things purpose was."

"Not nice," I said. "It's black and red and very unfriendly. I think it sucks the energy out of everything that comes near it."

"Couldn't have been doing that for very long. Someone would have noticed."

"I noticed it," Mara muttered.

"You didn't say anything."

She shrugged and looked unhappy.

Ben made a rueful face. "I should call some of my contacts and see if they've noticed anything else."

I shook my head. "There's no time, Ben. I'm not doing very well, my ex-client is dangerous, and Cameron's problem may not be solvable. By me. The organ is getting worse. It's been drawing on the energy below the museum for ten months. And I don't know, but things seem to be accelerating."

"Good God! If it really is a battery, it's loaded. Anyone with control of it could wreak all sorts of havoc through the Grey."

"You're scaring me, Ben. I don't need to be any more scared than am.

"I'm scaring me!" His eyes had grown wide. "Do you know anything about this ghost? Any guesses?"

"I don't know much. The last three owners of the organ, at least, are dead—all suddenly—and I suspect more. I have someone looking into its history, but…" I tossed up my hands feebly. "I don't know."

"A murderous ghost? That would require some big expenditures of energy and will."

"But with the organ acting as a collection and storage device, he'd have it, wouldn't he?" I asked. "And it seems to be getting worse since he arrived in my office. Just like I seem to be getting worse."

Mara looked between Ben and me and kept quiet, though her face was white and her eyes had turned dark.

"Presupposing he could access that power," Ben stipulated.

My brain engaged in the puzzle again, though I felt shredded. "If he could tap the power, why would he need me? Wouldn't he know where it was already?"

Ben waved his hands through the air. "Not necessarily. There are lots of cases where seeking ghosts can't locate even the most intimate items on their own. If he didn't know, was blocked from knowing, or had to establish some kind of path to the object before he could get to it, he could still benefit from its intimate connection to him, without being able to find it or go near it. But he wants it… Tell me everything you know or guess about him."

"I think he's European, judging from his speech. Russian or Slavic, if his name is any indication."

"He told you his name?" "Yes, it's—"

"No! Wait! Write it down." Ben scrabbled around the cluttered surface of his desk for paper and pencil, then pushed them across to me, sending several cataracts of books and papers tumbling to the floor. "We'll just play it safe on this one, shall we?"

I shrugged and wrote the name down. "What do you mean, 'play it safe'?"

"I'm probably being paranoid, but some ghosts are attracted to their names. I don't think we want this guy looking over our shoulders, do we?"