The Medium

Chapter Seventeen-3

“I don’t make them,” Lenny muttered to the floor. “They just know, but Seba-… But he knows himself. He knows he d-doesn’t trust anyone, ever, so when he realized… He thought it was something I was d-doing to him, something he had to fight. He was afraid.”

He looked up, straight at Kim, eyes wide and filled with panic. “They’ll kill him. Please don’t let them k-kill him. He’s just afraid, that’s all. So afraid. It’s not his fault.” He clutched at her hands, pleading, but she slid away. Sweet or not, nonviolent or not, she doubted that panic really belonged to him.

She turned to Ainslie instead. They exchanged a significant glance, and Ainslie shrugged, the contents of her multitudinous pockets rattling.

“What do you think?” Kim asked. “Danger to society?”

Ainslie snorted. Her Einstein-hair swayed.

“Danger to me?”

Ainslie’s mouth twitched. “Eh.”

Kim nodded. “Then I think we’re good, here. Could you go find that name I gave you?”

“And leave you here with the vamedium?”

“Just until you can dig up a phone number and-or an address. Because you know, without, he’ll be staying here indefinitely.”

That got Ainslie moving. “Nothing personal,” she told Lenny, but she snatched up a huge canvas satchel and marched out the door. Kim locked it behind her.

“Gonna send you home,” she told Lenny. “Or try, anyway. Circumstances permitting.”

She crossed went to the kitchen, looking back only once to find he hadn’t moved. The mugs clattered, and the microwave whirred, and she made intensiTEA. The man in the other room said nothing. Kim concentrated, trying to see if she could catch his thoughts, but he seemed to be keeping them to himself. She decided he probably hadn’t meant to share them at all. He might not even have known he was doing it. If his feelings were in her head, it was only because Sebastian Duran had demolished all of Lenny’s mental walls.

She sugared her tea and returned. “What about Vickie?” she asked.

He looked at her blankly.

“Why do you think you lost control of… it?”

“Don’t know. He wouldn’t let me… for so long. Maybe I c-can’t, anymore.”

“Can’t what, exactly?”

“Maybe I’m not a medium.” There was something hollow and detached in that statement. It reminded Kim of the way he’d been before, when he was nothing but a thrall. She sat down beside him and hit his knee hard with hers. He startled.

“The absolute last thing I need,” she told him, as gently as she could, “is a vampire in the middle of an existential crisis. Maybe you’re just out of practice. Did you think of that? Now, what’s the matter with Vickie that you think she needs help?”

“Not for me to tell you.”

“Does it have something to do with the way she died?”

He frowned at her and opened his mouth, but she cut in.

“I moved in a couple years after, but everyone in the building knows the story. It was a brand-new building at the time. She’s the only ghost so far. Well, she was the only death so far.”

He thought about that for a second, focused so hard he almost seemed to forget he was a wreck.

“How does the story say it happened?” he asked.

“She was living here, this apartment, by herself. Folks pretty well off, so she didn’t have to have a roommate. She kind of had a little bit of a reputation. Anyway, she had a party, invited maybe ten people over, everyone got smashed, and at about three in the morning, her boyfriend dumped the hell out of her and left. She made everyone get out, and about three hours later, the truck came around to pick up the garbage, and the guys found her hanging out the kitchen window with a bed sheet around her neck. The boyfriend tried to drown his sorrows, gave himself alcohol poisoning, and wound up in rehab somewhere. It kind of peters out at that point.”

“It wasn’t because of the b-boyfriend.”

“I don’t know. Alcohol does some crazy things to people… How do you know, anyway?”

“I always know.”

“How people died?”

“No. Just what I have to know to fix the problem.”

“And what’s the problem?”

The door slammed. Kim’s heart leapt into overdrive, and she sprang to her feet, yanking her pistol out of her waistband. It took her a few moments to realize the door had never opened, and a closed door can’t slam. A moment longer, and she realized she hadn’t heard anything at all, at least not with her ears.

Something like a shadow stood pressed against the door. It gradually solidified into a freckled white body clad in cutoff shorts and a brilliant blue tank top, its bleached blond hair tied up in a ponytail. It kicked the door, and the thud bypassed the air to register in Kim’s brain.

“The problem is that she doesn’t know she killed herself. She thinks it was an accident. Watch.”

“What are you doing?”

“Showing you.” His voice resonated strangely, calmness and surety striking a weird discord with the way he’d been before. His stutter had disappeared. Kim looked down at him. He hadn’t gotten up, hadn’t even moved. His eyes didn’t reflect the light as he looked past her.

“Conscious access to memory is a unique trait of living things, but memory itself is not. It’s encoded in the minute vibrations between elementary particles. Our entire universe is built of information given shape. Part of that is its history. Its memory. Now watch.”

The memory of Vickie moved away from the door, paused in the middle of the room to mutter curses, and crossed to the kitchen. As it moved, the bubble of history seemed to move with it. Kim caught glimpses of unfamiliar furniture, the corner of a table, the arm of a chair, appearing as the memory neared and disappearing again as it moved away. The shadow-Vickie opened a shadow-refrigerator and pulled out a shadow-beer.

“She turned twenty-one just a couple of weeks before,” she whispered, as though afraid the memory would hear her.

Shadow-Vickie chugged the beer and opened another. She paced aimlessly for a few minutes, then flopped onto the floor and picked up a remote control to turn on a television outside the little sphere of history. She rolled onto her side, stretching out one arm to pull something off of an invisible table. A pile of mail appeared beneath her fingertips and spilled onto the floor. She pawed through it and went to get another beer. Her freckles stood out against flaming scarlet cheeks.

“This is after the party,” Kim whispered. “You’re showing me… the universe’s memory of what happened after she was alone.”

Lenny nodded.

“God, how many did she have before you… you tuned in?”

“A lot.”

Shadow-Vickie teetered into the wall and tripped over the carpet as she came stumbling back. Her eyes were glassy. “Wasunna dumpiz face ninnyway,” she mumbled. She sat on the remote by accident and jumped as the channel changed to something unbearably loud. She fumbled with it until it turned off again.

“This is when she realized.”

The memory was pawing through the mail again, a pile of official envelopes. Kim spotted a couple of credit card bills and something from the university.

“Realized what?”

“She wasted three years following some boy around, and came out with nothing to show for it. It wasn’t because he dumped her. It was because she didn’t dump him first.”

Kim craned her neck to read the header of the paper in shadow-Vickie’s hands. She caught the words deeply regret and scholastic dismissal. Then the paper was a wad in shadow-Vickie’s fist, and it vanished as she threw it at the wall.

“She wanted to be a lawyer.”

Shadow-Vickie knocked back half of her beer. Then she upended the bottle and watched with an expression of grim fascination as the last of it fizzed into the carpet. A telephone came into being as she approached the wall, and she picked up the receiver, only to stare at it for a long minute and finally drop it to the floor. She nodded once, as though the dial tone confirmed everything. Then she zombie-shuffled into the bedroom.

“Stop,” Kim suddenly heard herself say. Her brain caught up with her mouth a split second later, and she understood they were coming to the end. “Stop, I don’t want to see this part.”

But shadow-Vickie zombie-shuffled back out of the bedroom, dragging a flowery pink sheet behind her. “I’m makin’ my escape,” she sang tunelessly. “Gonna get out, gonna break out, gonna make my escape.”

Slowly and methodically, she cut the sheet down the middle and tied the halves together. She tried to tie one end to the handle of the oven, but it slid off, so she slid it underneath the handle and tied it back on itself over and over until the knot was big enough to catch.

“Lenny!” Kim hissed. “Leonard, quit it!”

He was watching the carpet with his oddly dull eyes, paying no obvious attention to the suicide going on in the kitchen. Kim focused on him, on his eyes and the way the shadows seemed to play across their lenses, the way he seemed to be looking through some kind of screen, a tiny veil.

The sheet pulled taut with a bass twang. The cotton fibers creaked. Kim swallowed the acid creeping up her throat.

“Why would you,” she started, and stopped. “Why did you even show me that? You said it was none of my business!”

“I wasn’t showing you,” he said softly. He looked over Kim’s shoulder. The shadows in his eyes lightened, and Kim knew if she checked the kitchen, the sheet would be gone.

She turned around instead. At first, she saw nothing, but the ghost gradually became visible. It was strange, seeing her washed-out and pale so soon after seeing her in full color for the first time.

“I don’t see why I should assume any of that was real.” Vickie’s ponytail snapped and swirled in an invisible gale. “It was a stupid accident. I was drunk. Drunk people do stupid things. I was climbing down a sheet like they do in the movies. I got tangled. I didn’t kill myself.”

But her voice wavered. Lenny got up and held out a hand. Vickie nodded wordlessly and took it. There was a flash of dark, and the room went deathly cold, and the ghost was gone.