I knew that the same way I knew I'd been set up at Circe Whistler's mansion. But I just couldn't leave. Not until I knew what had happened to the little girl. She was seared in my memory. There was no escaping the look of horror I'd seen in her eyes when Circe Whistler's shade grabbed her. At that moment, fear had stilled the little girl's tongue. But she didn't have to speak. Her eyes said everything for her.

"Save me, Clay," they said. "Please, please save me."

I couldn't forget that. I couldn't forget those pleading blue eyes staring at me as the little girl vanished in a whirlwind of blood and shadow, kicking and screaming against a flayed embrace.

I'd never seen anything like that in my life.

Oh, I'd seen plenty of ghosts. Since I was a little boy, I'd seen them. Probably from the day I was born, when the doctor tore the caul from my face. I'd studied the spirits of the dead. Most of them were sleepwalkers, completely unaware of the living. Some were trapped so deep in pits of pain that the only thing they could do was suffer. And others were like the deputy I'd murdered at Circe's mansion-aware of their surroundings, alert to the presence of the living, but unwilling to accept the simple fact that they were dead.

The way I saw it, the dead weren't much different from the living. They could hate just as deeply. I knew that, just as I knew that hate was what had driven Circe's shade when she attacked the little girl. I'd smelled it in the air-that miasma born of murder and blood and the rot of an early grave-and both my gut and my heart recognized it for what it was.

But why would Circe Whistler hate a little girl? And why was the child powerless in Circe's presence? Why didn't she try to escape?

Why did she turn to me?

Why did she plead for help with those innocent blue eyes?

I didn't know the answer to those questions any more than I knew how to help her. Me, a guy who killed for a living, a guy who made ghosts with the sharpened blade of a K-bar knife. The living feared me, but I was powerless against the dead. I hadn't done a thing while a skinned specter kidnapped a dead little girl.

She'd said we were like Hansel and Gretel. Lost and alone, just the two of us. But now she was gone and she hadn't left anything behind, not even a trail of bread crumbs.

I didn't know how to find her. I didn't know how to save her. But I hoped there was someone, or something, that could do what I couldn't. And I hoped that the girl would return to this spot, the place where she spent her days, and show me that there was a reason to have faith in something intangible, something I couldn't see or hear. Something I had to feel.

I waited on the bridge for a long time. It was dark. A full moon hung somewhere overhead, but it could no more penetrate the redwood shroud that covered the bridge than could the suns.h.i.+ne of the previous day.

The darkness didn't matter. If the little girl was here, she'd find me, no matter how dark it was. The night gathered close. I tried to be patient, as patient as the girl had been all the years she'd spent on this bridge.

But I wasn't a patient man. I started thinking about other things. Circe Whistler, in particular. The way she'd looked coming out of that swimming pool, the way her muscles moved under her tattooed flesh, the way her skin brought the ink alive.

And then I remembered the wall of the guest room, papered with b.l.o.o.d.y tattoos. So much blood, but more hate. It was a rage killing. I'd seen a few. I knew what one looked like.

Soon enough the rest of it clamped down on me like a guard dog's bite.

I wondered who had set me up.

Janice Ravenwood? Spider Ripley?

Those were the obvious suspects, but I imagined that there was one other I could add to the list.

A fellow named Diabolos Whistler.

I nearly laughed out loud. The idea reflected my desperation, and I discarded it. I wasn't ready to start jumping at shadows. Not just yet.

My thoughts, as they always did, turned to more conventional matters. Matters I could understand. I started thinking about all the money I was due. Money for cutting off an old man's head. Money I would never collect with Circe Whistler dead.

But I didn't like thinking that way. Not here. Not in this place under the redwoods where a creek whispered as it rushed to the sea.

I'll admit that my feelings surprised me. I thought about the little girl instead, remembering the things she'd said. The things she'd done, too.

She took me to the bottle house, even though the place scared her. And she followed me to Circe's mansion, too. She came because she was worried about me.

She wanted to protect me.

The little girl was willing to do that.

Just because I talked to her.

Just because I sat by her side, watching a steelhead swim upstream.

Just because I tried to hold her hand.

I swallowed hard and closed my eyes. Another kind of man would have said a prayer, but I wasn't another kind of man. I was the same man I'd always been. A man who killed for money. A man who saw ghosts.

With my own eyes, I had watched men and women die. I saw what death held for them. I stared down while they surrendered their souls in the bright light of day and the black shadows of night. I watched them face that light, and cower in those shadows, and go on the same way they had when they'd drawn breath.

But never once did I see an angel come for one of my victims. Never once did I hear pearly gates swing open to the strains of a heavenly choir. Never once did I scent brimstone on the wind, or watch as a ghost took the cold hand of Charon.

Sometimes I saw nothing at all. Only an empty corpse. Another kind of man might take that as a sign of a greater power beyond mortal comprehension, but I couldn't do that.

It was beyond me. I was a man who couldn't even conjure up a prayer. The thoughts in my head flowed on tides of memory, cold waters filled with sights and sounds I couldn't escape or forget.

The music of the ocean, and the haunting melody of a spectral wind fluting through a house made of bottles, and the hungry buzzing of a hundred flies. An old man mewling as he died alone in Mexico, and the cries of a deputy who didn't realize that I had stabbed him in the heart. I listened to all of it. And when those sounds were swept away I was left with the midnight wail of a scarlet whirlwind that gathered together the ghosts of a vengeful woman and a terrified girl and took them to a place I'd never been.

I wondered about that place.

There was no way I could imagine it.

It, or any other place I'd never visited.

One thing was certain. If it existed, that place of a thousand dark imaginings, then I was bound for it.

It was only a matter of time before I'd get there.

There was no use in a man like me praying. But there were other things I could do. Things that other men couldn't. Maybe, if I did them right, the little girl would return to this place. Maybe, if I did them right, she'd sit with me again.

Maybe I could try, one more time, to hold her hand.

I wanted that more than anything.

I opened my eyes.

Dawn was coming on fast.

I had work to do.

PART TWO:.

SeANCE ON A WET AFTERNOON.

What may this mean, That thou, dead corpse, again in complete steel Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon Making night hideous, and we fools of nature So horridly to shake our disposition With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?

-Shakespeare.

Hamlet.

Act I, Scene IV.

1.

Cliffside, California was alive, and I didn't need a medium to tell me that was an unusual occurrence for a tourist town in the middle of the off-season.

But I did need a medium.

A woman of energies named Janice Ravenwood. She was the reason I'd come to Cliffside. I parked the Toyota at a coastal access lot hidden from the main drag, an eight-block strip of tourist traps called Gull Lane. There wasn't any parking to be had in town anyway. Cliffside's two motels were quickly filling with a.s.sorted rubberneckers, freaks, and reporters in the wake of the grisly events at Circe Whistler's estate.

Today I planned to keep a lower profile. Completely subterranean was the way I planned to play it. I couldn't afford to attract the wrong kind of attention, i.e. the attention of p.i.s.sed off individuals who wore badges and carried guns.

I jammed the dead cop's pistol under my belt and slipped on a flannel s.h.i.+rt. I left the tail untucked to cover the gun. The K-bar went under my belt on the other side. The other pistol stayed under the seat, but I didn't lock the truck. If I had to make a quick exit, I didn't want to be fumbling for my keys while some cop shot me in the back.

The day was overcast. Clouds pumped in from the west, heavy clouds the color of the K-bar blade. A little rain wouldn't bother me, though. Bad weather would make it tougher on anyone trying to track me down. It's harder to do anything in the rain.

Walking into town, I only saw one deputy-a young kid. He was talking to a vanload of CNN guys who had parked in a red zone. They were spoon-feeding him a load of s.h.i.+t about freedom of the press and the people's right to know, and the poor kid was actually going along with it like he figured he'd better be polite or they'd point a camera in his face and make him look like Barney Fife on the evening news.

The deputy didn't give me a second look as I pa.s.sed him by. That didn't surprise me. But the CNN guys didn't check me out either, and that was a surprise.

I breathed a sigh of relief. Pa.s.sing muster with CNN's hounds meant one thing-the odds were good that there wasn't a description of a suspect in Circe Whistler's murder.

Not yet, anyway. But life could be fluid, like Janice Whistler said. Circ.u.mstances could change awfully quickly. Whether they would or not depended on the real ident.i.ty of Circe Whistler's killer. I knew that the killer had tipped off the cops once already. Their appearance at the scene of the crime proved that.

I amused myself by imagining Diabolos Whistler's head calling 911 and doing the deed. Not f.u.c.king likely. Janice Ravenwood and Spider Ripley were another story. If either or both of them wanted to frame me for murder, their silence after the fact would be a surprise.

Not that I couldn't explain it. If Spider was indeed in San Francisco with Diabolos Whistler's head, I doubted he'd had an opportunity to talk to the local cops. Then again, I had no real guarantee that Ripley had gone anywhere. The same with the medium-I didn't have any idea where she might be or who she might be talking to.

There might be other suspects, of course. People I didn't know. Circe had mentioned a sister, Lethe. But if I remembered Circe's story correctly, her sister lived the life of a San Francisco club rat. Sure, that was all I knew about Lethe Whistler. Apart from that, the information was secondhand and from an obviously biased source. But if Circe's description of her sister was accurate, Lethe wouldn't be my first choice for the brains behind a murder/frame-up scheme.

There was no sense chasing my tail. After all, Circe was a high-ranking priestess in a satanic cult. Who knew what kind of maggots were crawling around under the floorboards of her church.

Still, I couldn't stop thinking about it. I wasn't the only one. The first newspaper rack I pa.s.sed flashed a bold headline: SLAUGHTER AT WHISTLER ESTATE. I glanced through the gla.s.s at the first four paragraphs of the article, reading down to the fold.

Those paragraphs convinced me of one thing-the writer of the article owned a thesaurus. That was the only way to explain the six variants of "b.l.o.o.d.y" in the lurid come-on. I figured the meat of the piece had to be on the bottom half of the page, so I dropped a couple of quarters into the machine and bought a paper.

I leaned against a lamppost and read the rest of it. Minus the hyperbole, the story went like this: at present, Circe Whistler was "an unidentified female" and there were "no known suspects." Police were following "a number of leads" ...yadda, yadda, yadda...I'd just blown fifty cents.

I'd have to look elsewhere if I wanted more information. The sound of simmering rumor drifted from the open door of a crowded diner, but I already had my eye on a guy with a pay phone growing out of his ear.

He wore earth tones, the kinds of colors that show up best on television. Nothing else about him was particularly photogenic. His skin was fishbelly white, and a cigarette dangled from his lips, and his expression seemed terminally pinched-as if he'd got his nose stuck in a book about ten years ago and had only just managed to extract it.

In other words, the guy practically reeked "media leech." A couple more sentences out of his mouth and I figured out that he was a writer, one of those guys who hacks out those true crime paperbacks you find at the grocery store just down the aisle from the Kellogg's Cornflakes.

I eavesdropped while the reporter lied outrageously to his editor, saying that it was raining buckets and he couldn't get a room at the local Holiday Inn. Then he started b.i.t.c.hing about the town's other motel. "For G.o.d's sake, Simon," he whined, "it's a roach's nest called the Cliffside Motor Court. It's not even in the AAA book. The place actually advertises waterbeds...and you know how bad my back is!"

He huffed and puffed while Simon gave him some obviously bad news. Then he played his trump card.

"Simon, you're my editor, and I like to think that you're also my friend. But if I don't have my rest, I can't possibly do Larry King tonight."

I could almost hear good old Simon hyperventilating on the other end of the line. As for the writer, he knew he had the upper hand at last and moved in for the kill. "What happened, Simon, is that I ran into a CNN crew at breakfast. I told their producer that I was doing a book on the Whistler murders for you, and that I'd already created a profile of Whistler's killer. She called King's producer, and we're booked for a remote on tonight's broadcast."

He sighed while the editor wedged in a few words. "Of course I lied about the profile. This is CNN, Simon! Imagine the advance orders we'll get! Only this time I want a hardcover. No more paperbacks. I want a jacket photo that I don't have to pay for and cover approval and a book tour. Get my agent on the phone and hammer out a deal before airtime, and-"

He broke off laughing. "No no no. The profile won't be a problem at all. These idiots are all the same. This one is a cla.s.sic publicity hound. He takes too many wild chances. He's the kind who wants to be caught so he can bask in the media spotlight.

"Anyway, once they get him, I'll have a book for you in a month. Maybe less. You'll pay for it, sure. You'll pay for my trip to the maniac's home town, and you'll pay for my lunch with his third-grade teacher, and you'll pay for the photos I swipe from his first girlfriend's photo alb.u.m...just like you'll pay for a f.u.c.king chiropractor if I have to sleep on a waterbed in this miserable little s.h.i.+tsplat of a town-"

I'd heard more than enough.

I invaded the writer's s.p.a.ce and glared at him.

He glared back.

I tapped the disconnect and hung him up. As wild chances go, it wasn't much of one, but it was the best I could do to match my profile on such short notice.

And it did the trick. The guy looked like he was ready to go postal. "Find your own phone, d.i.c.khead!" he said. "This one's going to be tied up for quite a while."

"I don't think so." I smiled. "In fact, I think you'd better get moving, and you'd better do it right now."

"What are you talking about?"

"I just left the Cliffside Motor Court. They only had two rooms left. I got the one without the waterbed."

The guy slammed the handset into the cradle, nearly severing a couple of my fingers. He tried to rush past me but I played it slow as mola.s.ses, like I couldn't figure out which way he was going. I stepped in his way and let him eat my shoulder. Then he moved the other way and so did I, stepping on his right foot, and not at all softly.

I apologized, of course. The writer swore magnificently and hurried off.

I watched him go. He was limping a little bit. He brushed one hand through his hair and swore some more, oblivious to the fact that he'd lost something he was going to miss.

His wallet.

I flipped it open and checked it out.