Vanished (7 page)

After a sudden turn and a cluster of dark-shadowed thugs on a street corner smoking cigarettes and eyeing passing cars, the neighborhood changed. It got clean and slick, with mid-rise office clusters and condominiums lining the street in profusion.

I turned onto Brand, looking for the office address, shadowed by recent developments of white steel-and-glass towers. I passed a shining new shopping center with a massive open plaza and spools of neon lighting that cast color onto the street. The effect was like the change of
The Wizard of Oz
from black and white to Technicolor. I expected Munchkins and wondered if I’d really lived here.

Passing the Alex Theatre with its old movie palace marquee under the lighted, flowerlike spire that pointed to the sky, I felt the déjà vu like a blow. The farther north I went, the more familiar the scenery grew. I passed under the Ventura Freeway and into the smaller, older neighborhood that urban sprawl hadn’t overrun yet. My eyes watered, and not just from the yellow haze in the evening air. I knew I had walked along this street with my dad, hand in hand. Stopped in at that building for milkshakes (forbidden treats!) when it was a retro-fifties diner. Bought makeup and school supplies in the drugstore right there. . . . The feelings that poured over me weren’t just nostalgic, though; an emotional darkness now tainted every memory and put a stone into my chest. I pulled the car into a parking space at the curb and got out to walk before I hit something from my inattention.

The sidewalks were so clean they sparkled in the late sun, even through layers of ghostly pedestrians and older shadows of orange groves and rolling, empty scrub. I noticed that many of the names on the businesses ended in -ian or -ianian; what had once been a solidly WASP neighborhood was now just as solidly Armenian, and cleaner than ever. The current residents clearly didn’t tolerate sloth or dirt. The shops were mostly closed—only a few restaurants were open at this time of evening—and no one, corporeal or ghostly, paid much attention to me as I went up the street, looking for the building that had once housed my father’s dental office.

It was a three-story brick-and-glass building that had been brand-new when we moved into the area. It looked a little less polished and swanky than its newer neighbors to the south, but it was still a very respectable address for small offices. Dad’s was on the second floor and the main door was locked for the day, but I walked around for a few minutes and found a smaller door at the side that was still open and sporting a sign that pointed up to BELLES SAUVAGES DANCE AND EXERCISE STUDIO.

More déjà vu. I’d never danced there, but as I went up the stairs, the familiar odors of sweat, old shoes, floor varnish, and rosin curdled the air. I could hear the thump of music and feet in rhythm on the wooden floor. As always, that combination of sound and smell roused mixed feelings in me: remembered anxiety and learned—or faked—happiness. I hadn’t hated to dance; I’d hated the emotional freight and unending demands that went with it.

I took the second-floor exit, which should have been locked but wasn’t, and went down the hallway looking for number 204. The suites had been cut up since my father’s time and I discovered that his office was now split between a chiropractor and an accountant. I wasn’t sure which of the new tenants occupied the room where he’d died, but I didn’t think I needed to be right in the room, just near enough. I looked up and down the corridor for cameras, though I didn’t think anyone observing would believe what they might see, and let go of normal.

The Grey in full flush rushed upon me, making the normal world into a dim watercolor beneath the realm of silver mist and lines of hot energy that throbbed as if alive. The layers of time were broken chunks, tumbled at all angles like striated rocks in a floodplain. The displacement of the disjointed temporaclines was much worse than I’d ever seen it in Seattle, and I wondered if it was related to Los Angeles’s famous earthquakes or the near-constant state of construction and reconstruction that went on in the area. I hoped I could do this without recourse to climbing and sliding through those ragged bits of time.

I glanced around and spotted the Grey outline of my father’s office door, still lingering where it had stood for so long. It would be a pain to get through it; it might have been a door once, but it was a wall now. It was much harder for me to move something that had no current existence in the normal world than to utilize the momentary memories of passages opened by ghosts. I could try to find the right stretch of time and get through the door there, but that didn’t look like the safest option. Relegating the temporaclines to last resort, I paced outside the phantom door and waited for a ghost.

After ten minutes that felt like an hour, the ghost of a young woman strode down the hall and unlocked the door. She was average-pretty behind purple eyeglasses and wore her long light brown hair pulled back with a clip. I wasn’t sure I recognized her, but I thought she might be Christelle LaJeunesse—Dad’s receptionist. I pushed through the doorway in her wake, and she stopped to stare at me.

“Do you have an appointment?” she asked as we went into the ghost of the waiting room.

I was a little surprised at her attempt to interact with me. I couldn’t recall a ghost simply talking to me as if I were part of their context before. Usually I had to force myself upon them if they hadn’t come to me first.

“Uh, no,” I replied.

She went around behind the reception desk and looked back at me from her position of authority as the office gatekeeper. “Do you want to make an appointment?”

“I just want to talk to Dr. Blaine for a moment,” I said, on the off chance she could summon him.

“I’m sorry. Dr. Blaine’s not available right now. You’ll have to make an appointment.”

“When will he be available?”

“I don’t know. He isn’t in yet.” She looked around the shadow form of the empty waiting room. “Actually,” she added, “he hasn’t been in for a while. I think there’s something wrong.” As she said it, her demeanor changed and she became frightened and sad, aware, perhaps, of her own disjointure from life, of something precious lost or broken.

Ghosts have a strange relationship to time, and this one was odd but not unheard-of: She was aware my father’s absence, but she didn’t know he was dead. She wasn’t quite in sync with either her own time or mine. She seemed to think this was a day when Dr. Robert Blaine simply hadn’t come to work, but it disturbed her, and she wasn’t sure why.

“What do you think’s happened to him?” I asked.

She made a sour face. “Maybe his crazy wife shot him. She thinks he’s humping me. Silly woman. He’s been all paranoid lately. He thinks people follow him around. I think it’s her. Or maybe that creepy albino guy.”

That was interesting. “Albino guy?” I asked. “Who’s he?”

“He won’t give a name and I don’t know what he wants,” the ghost of Christelle replied. “He comes by once in a while, says, ‘Tell him I’m here,’ and Rob gets kind of freaked out. It’s like he knows when the guy’s here before I say anything. And he always tries to ditch him and slip out somehow or not go home until he’s sure the guy’s gone.”

“Tell me about this guy,” I said. “Do you still see him around?” I needed to look for Dad and I was possibly wasting time, but I’d be willing to bet this “creepy guy” was the same one my dad had called the “white worm-man.” So he wasn’t a figment of Dad’s imagination, but what had he been? He wasn’t a ghost if Christelle had seen him. A vampire? Just a disturbing man who happened to be albino? What had he wanted with my father?

Christelle shook her head as if she were trying to shake her thoughts into place. “Well . . . I haven’t seen him in a while. Like . . . about as long as I haven’t seen Rob. As to his appearance . . . he’s really pale and he gives me the willies but it’s not just the way he looks. He’s got those scary kind of washed-out eyes that kind of stare through you. And . . . he wears eyeliner. Somehow it just makes him creepier.” She shuddered and then her face went blank and she returned to the repetitive track of her remnant existence.

“Did you want to make an appointment?” she asked again, forgetting our prior conversation. “I’m afraid Dr. Blaine isn’t in today. . . .”

I tried to get her back, but her attention faded from me and she started going through her daily routine, oblivious of my presence now. I wanted to ask her if she knew what had happened to her, even if she didn’t know what had happened to my dad, but I couldn’t get her off her loop again.

Disappointed, I set myself back to my original task. I had no idea which part of the suite Dad’s body had been found in, but I guessed that his personal office was most likely to hold some shade of him, even if it was just a loop of time playing over and over.

As I made my way through the glimmering fog-forms of corridors and treatment rooms, bright shapes darted past me, trailing blazing threads in every color. They weren’t ghosts as I knew them, just bits of energy and not quite like anything I’d seen before. They moved erratically and one or two hit me, zipping through my body with a sizzling, burning sensation and leaving a short-lived tremor in my limbs and a touch of nausea in my belly, as if I’d been mildly shocked. I couldn’t find a source for them. And I couldn’t find my dad.

I searched the office, increasingly tired and frustrated and dragging myself through the thickening Grey. The harsh little energy bolts took a greater toll on me with each strike until I was shaking constantly. I sat down on the shimmering floor, panting.

“Dad,” I called out. “Dad . . . are you here?” I wasn’t sure it would have any effect, but I was getting desperate. There was no trace at all, not a shadow, not a loop, not a glimmer that was Robert J. Blaine shaped, not a voice or a reflection. I even tried stepping out of the Grey and back in with a piece of mirror in my hand to try to catch any image of him that might be lingering around. I almost didn’t make it out, much less back in to look for him.

The ghost of Christelle drifted into his office, unaware of me, and bent over the desk, talking as if he was there, but he wasn’t. He should have been, since her lack of reaction to me this time indicated I was seeing a memory loop, and there was no reason he shouldn’t have shown up in it. I was feeling sick, and my whole body was quivering with fatigue and the effects of the energy blobs that zipped about like drunken insects.

I struggled out to the hall and collapsed onto the floor, gathering the normal back and rolling onto the ordinary wood of the corridor. The thumping from Belles Sauvages was still going on. What had felt like hours wandering in the memory of my father’s office had been about forty minutes of normal time, and I felt starved and sick, as if I hadn’t eaten in days. I levered myself up enough to prop my back against the nearest wall, panting and shaking.

“Hey,” came a voice from the stairwell end of the corridor. “Hey, you’re not supposed to be down here.”

I could see a dark-skinned man in a uniform coming toward me with care. He held a flashlight in his hand, not a gun, so I guessed he was a security guard.

“Sorry,” I croaked back. “I wasn’t feeling well, and I took the wrong door. Is there a restroom . . . ?”

“There’s one upstairs in the studio,” he said, drawing near. He stopped and peered at me. “You don’t look good.”

“I feel awful.” I could tell he was debating whether I was dangerous, drunk, or just ill. I tried to smile and I knew it was pathetic. “I just want to get some fresh air,” I added.

He grunted and made up his mind, putting out his free hand. “C’mon, I’ll get you out of here.”

I accepted his help getting to my feet and made my way out of the building under his aegis. It was frustrating to have nothing after looking so hard but I wasn’t sure there was anything to find. I might come back in the daylight and see if I could get at Christelle or the temporaclines, but I wasn’t convinced the result would be any better. There was something wrong with the space my father had once occupied, and the hole frightened me and left me with more questions than ever and a feeling of loss more profound than any I could remember.

I didn’t know what the energetic balls of light were, but I was pretty sure they were connected to whatever strangeness was going on in the office. As disturbing as it was, I thought I’d like to see if they appeared again in the temporaclines. Not that I’d know what that meant if they did, but it was information, and with so little else to go on, I’d grab for whatever data I could get. I walked slowly down the spanking clean street to a small coffee shop, sad and exhausted.

I bought hot chocolate and a sandwich, feeling the need to raise my blood sugar fast and bask in the warmth and life of the busy little restaurant. The shaking in my limbs was visible to anyone who cared to look and my hands trembled so hard I had difficulty holding the cup at first.

The waitress, a large woman in a bright blue dress and frilly apron with the name LILA embroidered on it, paused to watch me. “You all right, miss?”