We followed him north, through a hole in the wall, to where a sudden burst of light came down from work lights strung near the ceiling. A lot of broken furniture, pipes, cans, and other strange objects leaned in the far corner. We took a dogleg turn and came out into an L-shaped room with a door into a building on the inside corner. Flickering light came in through the ceiling and a once-fancy sign with lightbulb sockets and blue and white enamel stood canted in a corner spelling out “SAM’S____________________” something; the second half was missing. The guide stood in the middle of the room under the odd light.
I felt much colder in that area and got an unpleasant sensation of something crawling on my skin. I edged a little farther into the room, putting my back to the stone wall near the door in the corner, but couldn’t escape from the feeling of dread. The room was fairly boiling with Grey and bright with blazing energy lines in hot yellow and blue, but I couldn’t see an immediate source for my discomfort.
“We’re now directly under the corner of Yesler and First,” the guide began.
So this was the “worst corner” in the underground according to the Indians, where a native shaman had driven away a pack of ghosts. Maybe that was an explanation for the energy levels and my disquiet.
“You’re standing now at the original street level of Seattle. Now, back in the 1860s through 1880s this was all mudflats, and as we told you upstairs, it got a little wet at high tide. So after the fire, the city had a great opportunity to raise the streets up from the tide line and make downtown safe, dry, and sewage free. But raising the streets was a huge undertaking—and undertaking is the right word here because although no one died during the fire, a few people did die in the streets and especially the sidewalks afterward.”
He pointed up to the modern sidewalk above us. “This was all open for several years while the streets went up. So the people who wanted to get into the buildings to shop or do business would come down a ladder or stair at the end of the block and walk along the sidewalks down here. Unfortunately, they occasionally missed the ladders and fell to their deaths. This was about the same time miners on the way to the Klondike were pouring into Seattle. Heavy merchandise from the shops often ended up stacked on the streets and sometimes a box or barrel would fall into the open sidewalks and kill a pedestrian here below. So you can see it was a real adventure going shopping downtown in those days.”
He smiled and the tourists smiled back until he continued, “Now, I hope none of you folks are afraid of ghosts, because this corner is reputed to be the most haunted part of the underground we’re going to walk through today. But don’t worry, we’ve never lost a guest. No matter how hard we try.”
A few of our fellow tourists glanced at each other with shaky bravado and I, of course, didn’t say they’d been shoulders-deep in phantoms since they’d parked their cars.
As he went on about the bank that had originally occupied the building, I found myself peering around with trepidation, staring more sharply at shapes and shadows than I might have.
“Now, I’ve never seen it,” the guide continued, “but several of the other tour guides and the crew of a TV show that filmed down here say they’ve seen the ghost of a young man at this corner. He is thought to have been a bank teller who worked in this bank right here. The story goes that he was killed by a miner in a dispute over a… lady of negotiable affection.”
The crowd tittered, but I recoiled as something that was definitely not a young man dead or alive loomed up in the icy cold, malforming the lines of energy that strung through the space like a net.
“Bitch,” someone whispered in the silvered gloom of the Grey. I looked for the speaker but could only spot a moving columnar disturbance in the thin mist and bright lines. Whoever or whatever it was didn’t have enough power to come any further out of the paranormal, and I was just as glad of that, considering the vicious tone of its voice.
Unaware of the uncanny member of our group, the tour guide was explaining the glass prisms embedded in the sidewalks above that cast light down into the buried level. As he talked about the manganese that turned the prisms purple over time, I felt the unseen thing halt in front of me, twined in lines of energy like an insect in a carnivorous vine.
“Don’t interfere with me,” it murmured.
Startled, I jerked back. “What?” I hadn’t expected something so barely present to be aware of me, much less so angry.
“Meddler, busybody…” the thing whispered. The lines flared as it surged toward me, and fell back, restrained by whatever spell those strands of elemental energy wove. I racked my brain. I knew what this thing was if I could just recall…
“Do I know you?” I asked. The woman on one side of me glanced my way then back to the tour guide when she realized I wasn’t talking to her. Quinton touched his hand to mine but didn’t make a bigger move—he knew I faced something he couldn’t see or hurt.
“No,” the whisper replied—I could hardly think of it as more—and the connection was made. It was a discarnate revenant. I’d met a manifest revenant before and not enjoyed the experience, but never a discarnate. Powerful in life and aware in death but entirely incorporeal, they were generally angry, frustrated, and malevolent. They’re the things that whisper madness and suicide into the ears of the receptive and depressed. A shred of some powerful thing that had died or been exorcised incompletely, this one must have been the remains of something the native medicine man had tried to remove but could only weaken enough to bind it to this place. Nasty bits of psychic personality, all revenants were aware of everything around them, even if they couldn’t affect it, and that made for a vicious and tricky ghost. Since this one knew who I was, it probably knew what I was looking for.
I edged away from my corporeal neighbors and muttered, “Tell you what, I’ll leave you alone if you tell me where to find the Sistu.”
I felt it laugh more than heard it. “Find death where there is no light, no comfort, between the tides, in a pool that is not a pool.” It laughed again and faded away, letting the energy of the Indians magic slide back into its warding shape.
Well, I thought, it had been worth a try. And at least the nasty thing was gone, I added with a shudder. Whatever it had been in life, it was one unpleasant customer in the afterlife. The unsettling feeling of the room eased when the invisible creature left.
Quinton shot me a questioning glance and wrapped my hand in his but I shook my head and mouthed, “Later.”
Our guide was asking for questions and almost ready to move on. I put my hand in the air.
“Yes. The lady in the back,” he acknowledged, pointing at me from his height over the heads of the tourists.
I put my hand down. “You mentioned the ghost of the bank teller. Are there other ghosts associated with this corner?”
“Well, not anymore,” he replied, “although there are reportedly other ghosts in the underground. A lot of tour guests used to report seeing or hearing the ghosts of Native Americans here.
It was so disturbing and frequent that a shaman was called in around… 1997, if I remember correctly, to clear the place and send the ghosts away. It must have worked, because it’s been pretty quiet since then.”
The old man we’d talked to Saturday night had been right about the ghosts, but wrong about the dates. I wondered what the Indian ghosts had been doing down here, since Fish had said that the living and the dead didn’t mix. What would have made them linger and why had they associated with the revenant? Did they have anything to do with the Sistu—if that was the monster we were chasing—or with putting it back in its box in the past?