I spotted the old man I’d come to know as “Zip”—I’d returned his prized Zippo cigarette lighter to him back in October when a poltergeist snatched it to fling at me—huddling near the glass picnic house with a crowd of rough-looking younger men. They were passing a paper bag around with small, underhand gestures, sharing the bottle within but still sober enough to attempt discretion. There was the talking man who marched back and forth angrily in front of the killer whale totem, muttering in an incomprehensible language. A huge Native American woman sat at the feet of the giant carving of a female figure nearby and watched him, laughing to herself and shuffling through her bags of collected treasures before returning them to a rattletrap wire cart. A group of anonymous, mouselike people gathered in somber contemplation of their trash fire near the remaining parking lot on the east side of the park, looking as if they’d been outcast even by the outcast. Soon they’d all head for the homeless shelters and missions, hoping for food and a bed for the night. Those who couldn’t get in to the crowded facilities would try to find places out of the cold to sleep until morning, or until a cop rousted them. Thinking of what Quinton had said, I wondered how many of them might not wake up, and I shivered. In a fit of pity and guilt, I dug into my pockets and handed over my change to the first panhandler who asked.
I noticed other pedestrians avoiding the park altogether, hurrying to warmer, safer places. The presence of poverty and apparent hopelessness frightened them, or maybe they, too, sensed the disturbed and conflicting emotions that roiled in the Grey over the park in combative colors and streamers of cold. Chilled through, I started across Main and through the park, keeping to the middle where the path was the most even and the eddies of Grey tumult thinnest.
I was almost to the pair of totem poles at the north end—where the talking man was pacing—when something darted out from behind the giant bear totem on my right. It cackled and giggled and I whirled to face it: a hunched figure in clothes so ragged they looked like streamers of matted fur that flowed out from under his long hair and beard.
“Lady, lady,” the man called out, reaching for me as he darted closer. A Grey stink of sulfur and sewage and a hard, metallic tang like blood and steel swirled around me as he came within clutching distance, creating weirdly twisting vortices in the layers of Grey that blanketed the park.
I gasped and jumped back with a shock of recognition. This man—this thing—had come running for me before. In an alley nearby, he—it—had asked if I were dead and tried to drag me into the Grey, back when I didn’t know there was such a thing. The last time I’d seen the . . . whatever it was, I thought it was just a drunk in an alley, but now I knew the Grey better and I could see it wasn’t a real man at all—not a ghost but some more corporeal eldritch thing. I reached for a fold in the Grey and yanked it between us, making a shield against the creature.
Where other things would and had fallen aside, its hand pushed through my shield as if it were no more than mist. I felt its cold fingertip touch my hand. It stopped without apparent momentum and raised its head, breathing a reek of rot into my face. Beneath its dreadlocked mane, the face was now half destroyed, twisted with barely healed scars on the right side that almost hid one terrible emerald eye.
It stared at me and I stared back, unable to fight it this time as its uncanny gaze held me. It peered at me as if it could see into my soul—if I have one—sighing as though relieved of some pain.
It drew in a deep breath and said, “Dead enough, lady. Yes.” It moved its filthy hand to my chest and made a patting motion of satisfaction. I felt the touch ripple through my rib cage and down my limbs. Then it laughed and scampered away in its queer, hunched posture, showing a back as recently and horribly scarred as its face.
I stumbled back and felt the cold bricks slipping under my boots as I started to fall. A quick scramble kept me up inelegantly, and I caught a mouthful of icy air, not realizing I hadn’t breathed during the encounter. I looked around, but there were no other strange creatures lurking nearby to ambush me, and none of the pedestrians hurrying away from the cold nor the homeless people huddling over their fires had paused to stare at the scene. The only person showing me any attention at all was the massive woman under the female totem, and she merely guffawed and waved as if my near pratfall was the funniest thing she’d seen all day. In spite of her merriment, I felt shaken and had to stand still a moment before I could continue the last block to my office.
The creature hadn’t hurt me—and I had no idea what it had wanted either time we’d met—but I was still unnerved. I couldn’t imagine what its sudden appearance meant, but I was pretty sure I wouldn’t like it when I found out. I tried to put it out of my mind as I climbed the stairs to my office, wincing as my knee complained. Discomfort quickly got the upper hand on speculation, and by the time I sat down to call Will for dinner, I’d pushed the incident aside but not completely out of my thoughts.
Will answered quickly, but he sounded a bit annoyed.
“Hi. Am I calling at a bad time?” I asked.
“Harper. No.” He took an audible breath and mellowed his voice. “I’m down under Alaskan Way at an old friend’s shop. It’s just—” Something crashed, sounding like a load of timber falling on a wooden dock, and a distant voice cursed. Will muttered something away from the phone before returning to our conversation. “I think he’s just broken a vintage phone box. So. Are you free for dinner?”
“Yes, I am. How ’bout you?”
“Not only free, but eager to get out of here and meet you.”
I smiled a little in response. “How ’bout the Bookstore?”
“I thought you wanted food. . . .”
“No, silly man. It’s a bar in the Alexis Hotel lobby at First and Madison. Good pub food, lots of old books on the walls, nice old wood furniture . . .”
He made a disgusted noise. “I hate places that use books by the yard as ‘interior decoration.’ ”
“They’re real books and you can take them out and read them—they’ll even let you buy them. Phoebe told me they bought them out from under her at a liquidation sale when one of the other used bookstores went out of business.”
“Well . . .” he said, still sounding dubious about it. “OK. I guess I can try it. I’ll meet you there in . . . fifteen minutes?”
“OK,” I agreed, but I found myself frowning as I hung up and started to gather my things together.
Will and I both liked old things and I’d thought the tiny bar and restaurant full of good old wood furniture and books would be pleasant, but now I wasn’t so sure. I didn’t remember much about the decor of the first place we’d eaten together—I’d been too interested in Will and thankful for not being hit by a car to care about it. It was frustrating to be always just a bit off—had he always been so picky? I didn’t think so. . . . But maybe dining together wasn’t our best skill, considering how often our meals had coincided with various unpleasant events.
Knowing I might not find a better parking space closer to the hotel, I walked down to First and caught a bus. I saw Will going into the restaurant as I got off at Madison.
Inside, I found Will seated at a small wooden table in a nook near the back—where the heat was. Even with double glazing, the tables near the large front windows were too cold to sit next to. Will grinned at me and I smiled back on the sudden surge of remembered giddiness I’d felt when we first met. It was a sweet, warm feeling I wanted to hold on to a little longer. I shucked off my extra layers and sat down across from him as the waiter handed us menus and left us alone.
“Hi, there,” I said.
“Hello, beautiful.”
My face got hot. I’m way too tall and tomboyish for that description, but the warm setting lifted my spirits more than I’d expected and I took the compliment as a sign there might yet be hope for us.
“How did your day go?” I asked.
He smiled at my corny question. “It was pretty good. I visited a friend in the business and he asked me to look at some stuff for him. And we found this.”
He picked up a white plastic bag from the seat beside him and handed it to me. “It reminded me of you.”
I made a mock frown and took the bag, reaching inside to pull out a wooden ball about the size of a large grapefruit. Then I really did frown. There was something strange about it, but I couldn’t figure out what—it didn’t have an obvious Grey gleam or anything like that; it was just . . . odd. The surface was covered with sharply etched rectangular segments, and as I turned it over something rattled inside. I noticed a little threaded cylinder inset into the ball to screw it onto a post of some kind.
As I was staring at the ball, the waiter approached and I put it aside to order. As soon as he was gone, I picked the ball up again.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s a puzzle box,” Will replied. “Charlie found it in an old house he was taking apart up in Leavenworth. Someone had used a pair of them for decorations on the newel posts of a staircase. Neither of us had ever seen round ones like that before and it was kind of a strange way to use them, so he asked me about them. But I couldn’t tell him anything except that the wood seems to be teak and the threaded cylinders are much newer than the boxes. Charlie gave me that one for my time and I thought you might like it—kind of mysterious and pretty with some kind of secret inside.”
“What’s in it?”
“Don’t know. We couldn’t get it to open. But, you know . . .” he added, blushing a little and shifting his eyes away, “I’ve learned that not every secret has to be revealed.” He let his gaze move back to mine.
I looked back down at the round puzzle box. “So . . .” I started, “umm . . . this is the Harper box?”
He looked so nervous that I started to giggle. Then we were both laughing, and he reached across the table and took my hand and kissed the back. The gesture was so overtly romantic and so out of character for the recent state of our relationship that it startled me. The arrival of the waiter broke us apart and covered my bewilderment.
Conversation became more mundane while we tended to our food. We were almost done and waiting for coffee when curiosity got the better of him.
“So,” Will started, “what happened at the train station?” Then he added very quickly, “You don’t have to tell me. This is just like, ‘Hey, honey, how was your day?’ ”
I shook my head, still smiling a little. I didn’t mind that he was interested. I just wasn’t going to tell him the whole truth, and that I did mind. “It wasn’t too bad, so long as you don’t mind the high ick factor,” I replied. “Some homeless man turned up dead in the train tunnel. I found him while I was looking for someone else and I couldn’t leave until the police got there and we discussed it. I’m sure the railroad isn’t thrilled about it, but the SPD didn’t order me to keep it quiet, so I guess it’s just a sad accident.”
“In the tunnel.” He looked a little green.
“Yeah. I figured you didn’t need to see it.” I let the subject drop and changed direction. “I like your day better. How ’bout you tell me more about puzzle boxes?”
“That one’s really unusual,” he started, pointing at the ball on the table beside me. His eyes began to shine as he went on. Will loved these sorts of odd old objects—and it had been the more accessible mysteries of things like this that had taken him to England and away from the uncomfortable quandary of my strangeness. “Most puzzle boxes are square- or cube-shaped, and the famous Japanese ones have intricately inlaid surface patterns to obscure the moving parts. Normally, I’d call something like this one—a round one—a burr puzzle, but those aren’t hollow and puzzle boxes aren’t usually round, so this is a hybrid.”
I sank into the warm rhythm of his speech, watched his pleasure in the conversation turn the aura around his head a bright gold, and didn’t think about dead men in tunnels for a while and wished this quiet moment wasn’t doomed to end.