Poltergeist

I stopped him, studying him a moment in amazement. "How do you know this?”

"Just compiling the information and following the logic thread to the end. I don't usually do it out loud, though, so I probably sound like a moron.”

"You sound brilliant.”

He gri

"OK. Now, go on being brilliant a little longer. I think I'm getting this part.”

"All right." Another sip of beer was required before he could continue. "If you can approach the ghost while the killer is busy, you can isolate it from the rest of the system—the others aren't going to be much trouble, since they don't use it for anything most of the time.”

"They don't use it at all and they're being encouraged to forget.”

"Good. Once it's isolated, I think the system will just fall apart. It may take a while, but it will. It shows all the signs of being an inherently unstable system and the laws of physics say that unstable systems degrade once the feedback that keeps them artificially stable is removed. So you isolate the entity—scoop it up like in a Leyden jar— and take away the input. The charge just sits in the jar until it is discharged or dissipates on its own.”

For some reason I had a sudden vision of Chaos chasing her toys in the mayo

"Wait," I said. "A Leyden jar's a kind of. . battery, right?”

"More like a capacitor. Stores the electricity in coupled plates as an electrostatic charge. There's no current flow in a capacitor, which is why the dissipation is slow but the discharge is fast. Batteries store the electricity in a chemical bond that requires a current and is constantly discharging. Doesn't matter, though—it's just an allusion. You wouldn't really use a Leyden jar to catch a ghost.”

But I was thinking maybe I could. I was thinking about silvered mirrors stopping the flow of Grey energy and the slowing property of glass, and I wondered if I could find a bottle to put this particular genie into until its controller was brought to heel.

"Excuse me, Quinton—I have to make a phone call. I'll be right back.”

I rushed outside, forgetting the lateness of the hour, and called the Danzigers. Mara answered, sounding out of sorts.

"It's rotten late, so this had best be good.”

"Mara, it's Harper. I'm sorry for the hour.”

"Oh," she answered, yawning, "I thought you were the dean—the mans useless as a chocolate teapot and an insomniac to boot. What's come up?”

I told her my idea. She made interested noises in between yawns.

"Brilliant! Come for breakfast in the morning and I'll see what Ben and I can turn up." She punctuated her good-byes with another yawn.

I returned to the table caught between the pleasure of Quinton's company mixed with the possibility of a problem solved and the sense of another still hanging like a sword. And I didn't remember that I should have called Will that night until the opportunity was past.

CHAPTER 25

Saturday began with a jerk and the clarity of knowledge that bursts to the forefront of the mind like a bubble. There was another source of information about interacting with the poltergeist. As soon as I had completed my morning routine, I made a phone call and arranged another meeting. Then I drove to the Danzigers' for breakfast.

I met Ben on the sidewalk. He was loping toward the little rose-covered arch that marked his front steps and waved to me, jogging to catch up.

"Hi," he panted. "Look what I got." He held up a large glass container that looked like a giant, old-fashioned lightbulb with a bit more neck. In his other hand he had a manila envelope.

"What is that?" I asked.

"It's an alembic. It's a distilling flask, effectively. Heatproof glass. One of the chemistry professors lives nearby and he gave it to me. It's got a chip in the top, so its not any good to him anymore—once they're chipped they tend to break or become unsterile. So I'm going to try an experiment with it and see if we can't make a genie-bottle for you.”

Enlightenment at last. "Ah. Mara told you.”

"Yeah," he replied, starting up the steps to the porch. I followed him. "She woke me up when she came to bed and I was thinking about it, so I called this guy and asked if he had anything like what you needed. Well, he didn't exactly, but he had this and he told me how to get a reflective coating on it—you want the reflective side pointing in, right?" he added, opening the front door.

I started to answer, but was interrupted by a squeal of laughter. While it was an improvement on some of the recent greetings from Brian, I still looked around the door with care before entering. There was no sign of the boy in the hall.

Ben took his prize into the kitchen.

Mara was lifting a waffle onto Brian's plate and waggling it on the fork so it flapped like a butterfly. Her son squealed again and raised his hands to snatch the waffle. Mara kept it just out of reach.

"Greedy. And what should you be sayin'?”

"Puh-leeeese?”

"That's better." She put the waffle on the plate with a scoop of chunky applesauce and a strip of bacon. Brian snarfed the bacon in three quick bites and washed it down with gulps of milk.

Mara noticed Ben and me in the doorway.

"Ah, is that it, then?”

Ben waved the alembic. "Yup." He held up the envelope. "John gave me some reflective coating film to put on the outside, too." He looked at me. "It won't be a beautiful job, but it should do the trick.”

"Are you sure?" I asked.

"Well, the theory's sound.”

Mara huffed. "Oh, sit yourselves down before you start going on and have some brekkie, or we'll be eatin' burned waffles with our soft-boiled theory.”

Ben sat at the end of the table farthest from Brian and set the alembic's neck upside down in his milk glass, so it looked like a giant glass dandelion puff.

"Sarnies?" Mara asked.

"What?" I asked.

"Sandwiches," Ben answered. "In this case, bacon in waffles so you can eat the whole thing with one hand. Yes, please," he added to his wife. Receiving his sarnie, he tinkered with the flask with one hand and talked between bites.

"See," he said, "this container should work if I can get this tint material on flat. The glass could be thicker, but this should do for a while. The material is more like ceramic, really, even though it's clear, so it's very dense. The Grey energy moves through it pretty slowly and the reflective surface should stop the ghost from getting out once it's in.”

"How does it get in in the first place?" I asked, managing bacon and waffle between sips of coffee.

"This is the good part. The reflective tint takes advantage of the reflective nature and density of the glass surface, so it's highly reflective in one direction and only a bit dark in the other. It's the same kind of thing they use on car windows. A form of Mylar, but very thin with some sticky stuff on the reflective side. Once it's in place, you can look in but whatever's in the flask will just see reflection and shadow. Um. . what was I saying?”

"How the genie gets in the bottle," I reminded him.

"Oh, yeah. Well, it has two options—it can enter through the material itself, though that would be very slow, or it can go in through the opening at the neck. You just sort of scoop it up. If you face the opening toward the poltergeist and get part of it to go in, the whole thing should be drawn into the container by the conductivity of the reflective surface. Once inside, it'll be momentarily confused by the reflection. Then you stopper the bottle with something nice and dense, like rubber—which I happen to have in the envelope, thanks to John Burke—and the ghost is stuck in the vessel, since it can't disperse through the reflective surface or through the density of the material itself. If you can corner it in some dense place—somewhere there is no history, no time fragments for it to slip away on—then it will have no option but to head for you and the ghost trap. The tricky thing is going to be getting it cornered in such a place.”