Shifting Shadows

Rick sat her down on the top step on the porch and forced her head between her knees. When she could focus on what he was saying, she heard, “Tell me, damn it. You saw that. You did. You saw.”

She blinked a couple of times and pushed against his hands. He let her sit up.

“What the freak was that?” she asked him. “Rick? Do you have aspirations of being the next George Lucas or David Cronenberg or something? I’ve got to tell you, it really had me going until the head started talking.”

He sat down beside her and looked up at the sky and gave a funny half laugh. “You saw that.”

“The body in the hot-tub room? Yes, of course I saw it. It was brilliant.” She reconsidered. “Sadistic and horrible. But brilliant.”

He rubbed his face, then rubbed his hair and laughed again. “I thought I was crazy,” he whispered. “Fourteen years. No one ever sees it.”

Lisa just stared at him.

“It won’t be there now,” he told her. “You can go look. But she never stays for long.”

“She?”

“My wife,” he told her, and he put his head in his hands. “She’s dead. She’s dead, and she won’t leave me alone. No one sees her, no one ever sees her, but me.”

“You mean,” said Lisa, suddenly understanding what had happened. “You mean that was a ghost?” She blinked at him. “You see that all the time?”

•   •   •

My half brother Gary answered the phone on the fifth ring. “Wait just a minute,” he said, sounding a little breathless.

I waited, listening to a few grunts and my brother’s croons. I had an unsettled thought that there was a woman involved in this wait, just as he came back on the phone—though it wasn’t quite the right grunts.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m training horses. Right now I’m on a two-year-old who objected to my cell phone’s ringing.”

My brother had left the state of Washington with prejudice. He’d found a job at a horse ranch in Montana where they raised quarter horses, a few Appaloosas, and cattle.

“Isn’t two a little young?” I asked. I didn’t know a lot about horses, but I’d grown up around people who did.

“Yep,” he agreed. “This one will be three next week, but still young. Driven by the market, Mercy. There isn’t a lot of profit in breeding horses anymore, and the ranch has no choice but to listen to market forces if they want to survive. It’s not like we take them out for fifty-mile trips.” Then, presumably to the horse, “You can just settle your butt down, sweetheart. Get used to it now, my friend. Life for you is going to be all about hurry up and wait.”

“I need to know how to exorcise a ghost,” I said to Gary.

Lisa abruptly looked a lot less confident in me. I hadn’t told her why I was calling Gary. I held up one finger when it looked like she was going to speak. My brother has good ears; he didn’t need to get distracted by a pretty voice.

“You just tell them to move on,” he said.

“Just tell them?” I was doubtful, and I let him hear it. When I was a kid, I’d screamed “go away” at a lot of ghosts to not much effect.

“Tell them,” he said with exaggerated patience, “the way your Alpha werewolf husband would tell one of his wolves when they get pushy.”

“Okay,” I said. I almost thanked him and hung up—but there was something in his voice. He was a son of Coyote, as much as he hated it. And that made him a little tricksy. “Where do they go?”

He laughed, and I knew I’d been right. “Somewhere else. Usually not too far away. One of our distant nephews, back in the Victorian Age, had a grand con. He found a haunted house and drove the ghost—a nasty moaning type—out. They paid him for it, then he waited a week and went to the house next door and did the same. If he’d stopped at the fifth house, he’d have made a tidy profit. But he’d forgotten that neighbors talk to each other. He knocked on the door of the sixth, and the man of the house tried to hold him for the authorities. Sadly for both of them, the young entrepreneur was killed in the struggle.”

I waited, but he wasn’t going to continue until I asked. “Why for both of them?”

“Because when our budding con artist nephew died, the man in the sixth house was left with a very nasty ghost that no one could send on. I hear that it is still there today.”

“Why couldn’t someone else send it on?” I asked.

“Didn’t they teach you anything?” Gary exclaimed, then in a softer voice, he said, “No, I suppose not. The werewolves wouldn’t know, and our dear papa couldn’t be bothered. A ghost, my dear sister, gains power when it is seen. When it is recognized by one of our kind, it gains a firmer hold on the world. There is a reason you shouldn’t speak the name of the dead.”

“I see,” I said. “So how do I get rid of a ghost permanently?”

He sighed. “You don’t read ghost stories, either, do you? You have to find out why it is lingering—confront it and take away its reason for being there. That only works with the ones who are intelligent, though. Convincing them that they really are dead is also supposed to be useful. Most ghosts usually fade away, given time. Why are you asking me about ghosts?”

“Because someone came to me for help.” And I explained the situation to him in a somewhat more condensed version

There was a little pause. “Well, good luck with that, then,” he said doubtfully. “Call me if you get into trouble. Not that I can help you, but maybe I can learn something to pass on to the next walker who calls to ask me for help.”

I think he was teasing, but I wasn’t sure enough to call him on it. “Will do,” I said instead. “It has always been an ambition of mine to serve as an object lesson for others.”

“Nice to have ambitions,” he said. “A ghost that has been following a person around for fourteen years . . . that’s not normal.”

“I do know that,” I told him.

“Might not be a ghost at all,” he said as if thinking aloud. “A witch could do something similar.”

“I’ve thought about that,” I told him. The gruesome talking head was very Hollywood, I thought. Not something I’d ever seen a ghost do. Not that it wasn’t possible, just that I’d never seen it.

“Take backup,” he told me.