Part 9 (1/2)
skins hanging in almost perfect darkness. They hung draped on equally s.p.a.ced
racks about as tall as her shoulder. They were not uniform in shape or size but they shared a pallor so intense they were almost luminous in the dark barn. Caxton reached out toward one, wanting to know its texture. Before she could touch it, however, a shadow pa.s.sed across its surface, or rather five small, oval shadows like the tips of fingers pressing on it from behind. She gasped and yanked her hand back. Had she made contact, she knew, she would have felt a hand pressing back against hers, and yet there was no one behind the skin, no one anywhere near.
”What is this?” she demanded. Arkeley frowned. ”Teleplasm,” he told her. She didn't know what that meant. ”Go ahead, head in,” he said.
She shook her head. ”I've had about enough of weird s.h.i.+t.” But his face didn't change. He would wait there all day until she walked into the barn.
Caxton walked between two racks and stepped into darkness. The shadow inside the barn was nearly complete-after a few steps she was inching forward in almost complete blackness, the only light coming from the luminescent skins on either side. The substance drew her eyes since there was nothing else to look at. She couldn't see her own hands held out before her, fingers out-stretched, reaching for the far wall of the barn, but she could make out every tear and fold and blemish on the skins. They seemed to s.h.i.+mmer, or perhaps they were simply fluttering in a draft. They had an illusory depth, as if they were windows into some moonlit place. She felt like she could look into their textured surfaces where faces seemed to pa.s.s and vanish as fast as breath on a cold pane of gla.s.s. The only thing about them that stayed the same from one moment to the next was their color, though occasionally from the corner of her eye she would think she had caught a flash of pigment, a reddish tinge like a bloodstain fading from view.
She walked carefully so as not to trip in the darkness but also so she wouldn't touch the skins. After her first encounter with the ghostly fingers she'd had enough.
She was nearly at the far end of the barn-or so she guessed, as the racks of skins suddenly stopped and beyond lay only darkness-when something seemed to brush her hair. She spun around and heard a faint voice whisper her name. Or had she imagined it? Before she'd even really heard the voice it was gone and the barn's silence was so complete, so certain that it seemed impossible she had heard anything.
”Arkeley,” she cried out, ”what are you doing to me now?” There was no answer. She turned around and saw that the barn's doors had been shut behind her. She was shut inside with the skins, the teleplasm, whatever that was, and she wanted to scream for help, or just scream, scream for the sake of screaming- ”Laura,” someone said and this time it wasn't just in her head. But that voice-so familiar, so impossible. It was her father's voice.
He stood there. Behind her. One of the skins had lifted away from the rack, flapped away and folded itself into a mostly human shape. It had her father's voice, and his eyes. It was wrapped in chains that rattled as he glided toward her, chains that shook and dragged on the floor of the barn, holding him down, holding him back. She put out a hand, either to touch him or to push him away, she didn't know. He'd been dead for so long. She knew it wasn't really him. Was it? Was it some remnant of him, left over after his flesh had rotted away?
A smell of him, of shampoo and Old Spice, flooded the air around her. The temperature in the barn dropped twenty degrees in the s.p.a.ce of a few seconds. He was close to her, so close she could feel the roughness of his hands, she could feel the hair on the backs of his arms, though they had yet to actually touch. She had missed him so much. She had thought of him every day, she had even thought of him when the vampire had held her up in the air the night before. Nothing had been as good since he died, nothing had been right, not even when she met Deanna, it hadn't healed that wound.
”Daddy,” she breathed, stepping into his embrace. And then the lights switched on and there was just a skin, like an animal pelt, hanging on a wooden bar.
”Right you are,” someone said. A very human, very live voice. A man was standing behind the racks, a CATERPILLAR baseball cap on his head, his side burns growing down to meet each other under his chin. His eyes were soft and deep. He was staring right at her. His voice was pure Pennsyltucky, down to the throat-clearing swallow he used like audible punctuation. ”Right you are, Arkeley. They's drawn to her, ahum. She's ghost bait.”
”It's not the ghosts I'm concerned with,” Arkeley said. He was standing no more than ten feet away from her.
The other man-Urie Polder, she presumed-stepped around one of his racks and came up to her. He was tall enough to look down into her face and try to hold her eye. She broke his gaze, though, as she imagined most people did when they met him. He was missing his left arm. The sleeve of his t-s.h.i.+rt dangled over a wooden branch that he wore in the arm's place, a length of gray-barked tree limb that had a knotted elbow and even three twig-like fingers.
What really freaked her out about Urie Polder's arm wasn't that it was made of wood. It was the fact that it moved. Its thin fingers wove around his belt buckle and hitched up his pants. His wooden shoulder and his flesh shoulder shrugged at the same time. ”We oughter take her into the house, ahum. Vesta'll do it there.”
”Yes, alright,” Arkeley said. He looked worried. Caxton rubbed at her eyes with her hands. ”My father-that was my father's ghost. You showed me my father's ghost just to-just to-” She stopped. ”What the h.e.l.l is teleplasm?”
”Most folks'd say 'ectoplasm', which is all but the same, but then you might have guessed,” Polder told her. ”It's ghost skin, ahum.”
”How do you skin a ghost?” she demanded.
”Well, now,” he said, grinning sheepishly, ”not in any way the ghost might like, ahum.”
It was cold in the barn. It was cold for an autumn day outside but in the barn it was pure winter. The two men turned toward the open barn door to leave but she stood rooted to the spot. Caxton felt rage bubble and spit in her stomach.
”Hold on,” she said, and surprisingly enough they both stopped. ”That was my father. You have my father's ghost hanging on a rack.” She had no idea how it had happened, no idea at all why her father's ghost in particular was in the barn but she wasn't taking another step until she'd figured it out.
”Well now ghosts, them's tricky, ahum.” Polder scratched his chin with his wooden hand. ”It don't really come down to that.”
She shook her head angrily. ”I know his voice. I saw his eyes.”
”Yes,” Arkeley said. ”It might even have been him. His spirit, anyway-or it could have been any kind of mischievous spook who wanted to toy with you. It might not even have been a human apparition. But whoever it was isn't trapped here in one of these pelts. The teleplasms aren't ghosts themselves. They're more like clothing he can pick up and put on. It's a substance that occupies this world and the other simultaneously, that's all.”
She nodded at Arkeley. ”I can guess what this was all about, though I'm p.i.s.sed off at you all the same. If the teleplasm reacts strongly to me, that means I'm somehow open to psychic phenomenon. I'm a sensitive.”