I couldn't—and didn't wish to—imagine what Carlos considered strange. "No doubt. Give me a direct number to call you when things are ready—telephone tag through Cameron is annoying.”
Another seismic chuckle moved the room and he handed me a card from the pocket of his leather jacket. I refused his offered hand and got out of the chair myself. I had no wish to visit hell, and touching his hand would have been the express route for me. He found that amusing, too, but he walked me to the door and let me out.
"I look forward to tomorrow.”
"I'll bet," I replied.
His mouth quirked, and he plucked the bright strand of Grey that linked me to Celia. "Take care, Blaine." Then he turned away and returned to the home of live girls and undead clerks.
CHAPTER 31
The PNU campus had an eerie quiet on a Sunday morning, a wrong sort of emptiness, as if even the ghosts had gone to chapel and the buildings held their breath. Frankie was more punctual for subterfuge than work and we were in room twelve of St. John Hall on the dot often with an equipment cart standing in the corridor. We disturbed the breathless stillness with directed intensity.
Frankie—almost unrecognizable without makeup and wearing plain brown jeans—stood in the room and surveyed it with expert speed. "OK. Table first. It doesn't fit through the door, so we'll have to take off the legs. Luckily, I have tools.”
She darted to the cart and snatched a pair of large screwdrivers that she stuffed into her back pockets. Then we flipped the table onto its back on the rug, crushing a thin, pulsing wad of energy lingering there. For a while, we struggled with the legs until Frankie lost her temper.
"You are a very bad table," she muttered, standing up. Then she heel-kicked the nearest leg with a blow that knocked the wooden piece right off its bracket. Wires and bits of twisted metal bracket trailed from the break like entrails. "Ha! So much for you, table!" she crowed. She proceeded to kick the rest of the legs off with vicious glee. We carted the parts down to the back door and loaded them into the bed of a borrowed pickup truck.
Back upstairs, Frankie unloaded the bookshelves and sorted the contents into two piles. PNU property went on the cart; the rest went into Dumpsters in the parking lot or into either the pickup or my Rover. The end tables by the sofa met the same fate as the table legs— kicked to splinters and carried away.
"You're enjoying this a lot," I observed as we puffed back upstairs again. My knee was still a bit out of sorts and I was noticing the exertion more than usual.
"You bet! I feel like I'm finally freeing myself of Tuck. It feels great, tearing up this stuff.”
"How's Tuckman going to take it when he finds out?”
"Oh, he can French-kiss a whale for all I care. I'll tell him the dean ordered it and he can go argue with old baggy-pants himself. That'll win him all kinds of points." She cackled. "He is so on thin ice since his last evaluation. He said something snippy to the dean's wife at the psych association dinner the other night, too, I hear. I am reveling in his imminent downfall.”
A prime example of a woman scorned. Frankie had never said what Tuckman had done to lose her respect, but it sounded like he was going to regret it.
We tore the electronics out of the rug, hauled away the couch, and redistributed the chairs to needy rooms. Frankie hauled the monitors and machines out of the observation room and stacked them on the cart. At last we were down to the photos and posters on the wall and Ken's portrait of Celia. I collected them and put them into a metal trash can.
"Do you have a cigarette lighter?" I asked.
"No," she replied. "That's a bad habit I don't have. Besides, you don't want to burn those here. It'll set off the smoke alarm. There's probably some matches in the kitchen, though.”
We carried the rug and the trash can downstairs to the parking lot.
While Frankie wrestled the partially shredded rug into the truck bed, I snooped through the kitchen.
I returned with a couple of strike-anywhere wooden matches. I picked up the portrait and gave it one last look. It was remarkable how much life Ken had put into the picture. Celia looked vibrant. I set the corner of the portrait on fire, muttering a few words Carlos had written down for me.
The paper wouldn't catch fire at first; then flame leapt bright onto the inks and smoked, sending tendrils into the air that were not entirely normal, glimmering with sparks of uncanny light.
I dropped the page into the can and the fire flared higher, catching on the other papers with a gasping sound. Then something wailed, a high-pitched keening that spiraled upward into pain. A shaft of yellow shot from the burning pages, smoky and tortured, writhing. I recoiled in unpleasant surprise. A figure flickered in the burst of eldritch illumination, screaming in horror and pain, twisted in panic as the flames ate at it—a young blond woman, dressed in a uniform, her hair rolled back off her face. The fire roared and burned red, then subsided, taking the terrible vision with it.
Frankie gaped at me over the thin curls of subsiding smoke. I thought I looked the same. We both turned away from the trash can. Frankie returned to the building to fetch the equipment cart. I picked up the can and walked to the far side of the parking lot to empty the ashes into a different Dumpster. I carried the can back up to the room.
Frankie had just picked up the potted plant from the windowsill when I walked in. She brushed past me awkwardly, avoiding my gaze, and went into the hall. I looked around the empty room. Only dust and a faint, fading trail of yellow energy remained. Deeper, I could just glimpse the regular blue and yellow power lines of the grid, subsiding at Nature's pace into their normal shapes, pulling back from their unwonted displacement.
Frankie preceded me downstairs with the keys and the potted plant in her hands. Once back in the lot, she started loading the equipment from the cart into the cab of the truck.
"OK," she said at last. "I'm going to take the equipment to Tuck's office and stack it there so he can't say his data was destroyed. Then I'm going to dump this stuff in a couple different places, right?”
"Right. At least two, as far apart as possible, more if you can.”
"Got it." She started to get up into the truck, then swung back down. "Hey, what was that thing in the fire?”
I felt an involuntary shiver. "I. . guess it was Celia.”
She looked young. "Is she gone, then?”
"I think she will be soon," I answered.
Frankie nodded. "Good. I definitely don't approve of Stygian nightmares. And hey—I'll call you and let you know what happens with Tuck, OK?”
"OK. Be careful, Frankie.”
"I'm the invincible queen of the coffeepot," she said, climbing behind the wheel of the borrowed pickup. "I can't be routed by a ham-fisted Narcissus of a psychologist—or his fakey poltergeist. Sterner men than Gartner Tuckman tremble at the thought of my wrath—or they ought to." She slammed the door and started up the engine. A wave, a manic grin, and she was gone.
I drove the Rover to two different transfer stations to get rid of the detritus of the séance room. Then I went home and put some ice on my knee and let the ferret out for a romp. Satisfied tiredness settled on me—a pleasant change from the slightly drained and weighted feeling I'd been having since I'd gotten tangled up in Celia.
It seemed as if the first half of Carlos's instructions had worked as described. Now I only had to find Ian so Carlos could distract him while I tore apart the remains of the entity.
I was cozily snuggled into one of the sofas in the Danzigers' living room a few hours later while Ben lay on the floor in front of the mantel with his feet up in the air. Brian was «flying» by lying on his fathers upraised soles and making whooshing noises, interspersed with giggles.