Poltergeist

I made my good-byes to Mara in the hall, thanking her for breakfast and avoiding another shin-ramming by Brian with a quick slide to the door.

"Bye-bye, rhino-boy!" I called as I slipped out.

"Graah!" roared Brian. Then I heard him laughing as the door closed between us.

Brian was starting to grow on me and I wondered if I would start to like children by the end of the day, since I was spending so much time with them.

Patricia wasn't thrilled to see me again. I kept intruding on her Saturdays—which she was quick to inform me were the only time she saw her husband.

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Railsback," I said as she let me into the play yard once again. "You do understand, though, that the poltergeist will continue to hurt you and others until it's broken down. Dr. Tuckman called you about that, right?”

She nodded.

"I'm trying to help and I need your kids' help to do that. I'm only asking for a few minutes of their time.”

"I still don't understand how my babies can help you," she whined.

"They play with Celia. They know how to interact with it in ways we don't.”

"I still think it's Mark's ghost—”

"That may be, but it's Celia that killed Mark and it's Celia we have to get rid of.”

She gaped. "Celia killed Mark?”

I looked her in the eye and let the worst moments of this investigation well back up through me, every instant of understanding regarding Celia and what it was. Something of knowledge and horror arced across our shared glance and she recoiled, murmuring, "Oh, no. Did she really?”

"I believe it did.”

She backed away a step. "That's terrible. Terrible." She shook her head, but she seemed to be trying to shake the monstrous images her mind conjured, not to deny their possibility. "All right. You can talk to the kids, but only for a while—they have to get ready for lunch with their daddy.”

"Thank you.”

She called them over.

"OK, you guys, this is Harper and she wants to talk to you for a bit. Are you OK with that?”

They looked at her, squirming with impatience, and nodded. "Uh-huh," they chorused.

"Okey-dokey. Harper, this is Ethan, Ha

"Hi," I started, bending down to their level. I felt like an awkward giant in their presence, since none of them was even five feet tall yet.

They seemed like miniatures to me—I was sure they'd seem bigger up close. "Umm… I know you have a friend—a special friend—that other people can't see, and I wanted to ask you about her.”

"Him!" Ethan insisted.

"Is not!" Ha

"Is not!" Ethan fired back. "He's a boy.”

"Oh, boy," I sighed. "Hey, can we go sit down on the swings? I feel like a frog bent over like this.”

Dylan laughed. "You don't look like a froggy. You look like a monkey.”

"Well, then. . maybe we should sit on the monkey bars," I suggested.

"Not monkey bars. It's a jungle gym," Ethan corrected. The pontificator of the family.

I straightened up. "Jungle's a good place for a monkey, too, I guess. How 'bout we go there?”

I glanced at Patricia for approval. She shrugged and made a bitter smile. "All yours, lady.”

Ha

Once we were at the jungle gym things changed fast.

Ha

"Celia is so a girl," she whispered to me. "Stupid Ethan.”

"How do you know?”

"I can see her. She's right over there, right now." She pointed to the shadowed end of the yard where a cataract of greenery hung down near the ground. As I tracked her finger, the haze of threads firmed and grew into a column of pale yellow, pierced with bright shards of time. It had come to her call, though it was only a very small version of the thing that had stormed through room twelve on Wednesday. I'd guessed right: it was diminished by use and probably recharging, since it made no move against me.

"OK, I see her, but she just looks like a blob to me," I admitted.

"It's hard to tell. She's kind of shy." Ha

The boys came down the slide with a ruckus and tumbled into the bark chips at our feet.

"Hey," I said. "Can you see your friend and show her—him—to me:

Both the boys pointed to the same yellow haze. "There," said Ethan.

"OK. When you play with your friend, do you have to do anything special?" I prayed they were articulate children and could explain their games.

Ethan snorted. "Duh! You have to open the doors. Then you can go in the ghost land.”

I felt dizzy and was glad I was sitting. The ghost land. They didn't really… go into the Grey, did they? "Oh. I'm sorry. I don't understand. I don't see any doors. Can you show me how to open the doors? I'd like to talk to your friend, too." It was hard not to sound like a moron and talk down to them. I was sure I wasn't doing this right, but I was trying. And hating it.

Ethan made a dramatic shrug of disgust and turned toward Celia.

"Come on," I urged the other kids, "you guys, too. Ha

Dylan giggled. Ha

The shifting cloud-world of the Grey was unca

I sank down lower, to where the hot grid of the Grey became visible through the mist. The children looked like dark blotches now, standing on a tilting floor of mist.

As I stared at the structures around them, I saw that the Grey was full of layers just as the Danzigers had said, fluid things, like thermo-clines in the ocean, yet cutting through one another like rock strata. The kids were standing on one and Celia's weird yellow tangle on another. They moved toward the poltergeist, edging sideways, pushing with their hands and shoulders, slipping in between the layers and sliding on to new ones. I was dismayed at their approach—not much different than what I'd tried to do with Mara. But it didn't seem so hard for them. What were they doing that was different than what I'd done at the Danzigers'? They seemed to slip right onto the layers. .

Slipping. Moving sideways. It was always easier to see the Grey sideways. Mara had always referred to my sudden unexpected jolts into the Grey as "slipping" — a sort of sideways movement. That's what I'd done wrong: I'd tried to go at it forward, straight on. And the time layers had been there, but they'd been stiff and heavy. But I didn't need to move them. I just needed to slide onto them. Sideways!