She eyed him quite dubiously. “Rita. Are you dead?”

“Only partly. Why are you here?”

She looked around, blinking at the surroundings as if she’d never quite seen them before. “I was killed, I guess. I don’t know where I am, though. I wasn’t here when … well, last I remember.”

“What do you remember?”

“I was punched in the head. Or it felt like a punch in the head. I was driving …” She looked around anew. “Where’s the car? Mom’s gonna be so mad at me.”

He tried to put that together into a coherent narrative, but wasn’t sure he could. There were too many pieces missing. “Were you in a car accident?” But why would she be so far off the road? And where was her car? He didn’t see how any car could have traveled so far within the trees.

She stared at him, as if he were the one not making sense. “I … I don’t know.”

She’s a vegetable, Ruby said. Let’s move on.

“Vegetable” was the term they used for people who didn’t remember their own deaths clearly; those who had passed into this shadow existence in an incomplete way. Either their death was too sudden for them to grasp, or too traumatic, or some combination of the two; it was a shock that it didn’t happen more often. He only encountered them at a rate of about one in sixty.

“You know you’re dead,” Gryphon prompted. “You can’t recall how you ended up that way?”

She shook her head, making her dark hair swing, and he thought she looked all of fifteen, not at all driving age. Maybe she was sixteen. “No. The others told me.”

That’s when Gryphon felt his stomach sink all the way down to his feet. Really, he could feel it dropping down, but lost all sensation of it once it was beyond his testicles. The rain was ice cold, chilling him to the marrow. “Others? What others?”

She looked around for a moment, again as if lost, and pointed roughly behind her. “They’re back here. I don’t even know why I came out here, I just felt I should. I haven’t heard anyone else in so long …” She turned and headed back into the thick brush, and he stumbled, following her, not wanting to but unable to stop himself.

She didn’t walk through trees more than they seemed to miraculously avoid her, while he bumbled into them even while doing his best to avoid them. Tree limbs slapped his face and hit his chest as if trying to push him away, and he could taste rain and pitch.

First he heard the noise, a familiar burbling that it took him a moment to recognize - running water; a creek, a river - and then the smell hit him. It was awful, a smell like rot with something else, something musky and nearly floral, something animal but also meaty and almost chemical. It was a hideous smell, not quite death. Skunk cabbage, Sylvio volunteered. They grow around every creek and river around here. Also there might have been actual skunk around here recently.

An excellent place to dump a body, Hugh noted. You couldn’t even smell the rot.

The terrain started to shift a bit under his feet too, the dirt becoming a slimy muck that wasn’t quite mud, the undergrowth finally thinning out and the trees growing farther apart, allowing him to move a bit easier. The water came into view as glimpse of silver between the trees, a moving inconstant light that could have been a hallucination. Rita seemed more solid and real than anything else, and yet he knew she wasn’t here at all, or at least not in a way that anyone else could perceive. Still, the interloper was him, and he didn’t forget it. How could he when he was walking the fringes of a world of the dead?

He slipped in the slimy dirt but managed to keep his balance as Rita stopped beneath a gnarled knotty pine that grew in a tiny muddy alcove beside the rushing stream (it seemed too narrow to be a river). She gestured out towards the silvery ribbon of water, and he saw another woman standing on the opposite bank.

And then he saw another woman. And then another. And another. Oh shit.

Another one, Ruby snarled. I hate these fuckers.

By “these” she meant serial killers, and since he looked to be facing five dead women, it was hard not to draw that conclusion. He turned towards the nearest one who wasn’t Rita, a hard faced bleach blonde with black roots, wearing a red halter top and a tight black skirt. “Did the same man kill all of you?”

She gave him a skeptical and somewhat derisive look, like he was the earwig she discovered in her corn flakes, but she finally said, “As far as we can tell. He gave us all different names - Henry, Frank, Chuck, Bill - but it sounds like the same guy. Except for the ditz here, we don’t know what her deal is.” The woman gestured at Rita, who didn’t seem to be offended; she hardly noticed.

“Somebody show me,” he urged. “I need to see his face.”

“And how do we do that?”

“I don’t know. Somehow being close to you guys I can usually pick up these kinds of things.”

The woman - Sheila? He got the impression her name was Sheila, although she rarely went by it - kept giving him a look that bordered on rude.

Tell that bitch to take a picture, Ruby snapped. It’ll last longer than she will.

Sheila walked towards him hesitantly, and then paused. “What do I do? Hold your hand or something?”

“Please don’t; they don’t make spectral rubber gloves.”

She glared at him. “Are you dead? ‘Cause I’ll kill you for free.”

He heard a faint noise, like some far off echo, and realized it was someone shouting “Ashmore”. Oh, right, he had a job here. “Are any of you Juliet Saltzman?” he asked, looking at all the women. All of their expressions were equally blank.

“Who?” Sheila asked.

Well, fuck. How could he find all these bodies and not find the one he was looking for?

Now he could hear O’Leary stumbling through the brush, as quiet and graceful as a horny, spastic water buffalo, and Rita looked beyond him, through him, to the tangled growth beyond. “Is he dead too?”

“No.”

“Are you sure? He seems touched by death.”

“What?”

But O’Leary had emerged and the slender, fragile line of communication severed as if it had been lopped with an axe. It also stopped raining suddenly, as if someone had flipped an off switch. He looked up to find infant stars starting to emerge in the dark blue sky. Where did the clouds go?

O’Leary finally came up to him, flashlight in his hand, panting as if he’d run a marathon. “What the fuck, kid? Don’t ya know you could get lost in these woods? “ He then looked at him, scanning him up and down with the flashlight, a look of genuine distress forming on his big, meaty cop face, which was florid with exertion. “Jesus fucking Christ, what’dya do, fall in the river? Why are you all wet?”

He was all wet. He’d been soaked by the rain, the rain which apparently hadn’t happened. What was that all about?

Maybe it was Rita, Hugh said. The fact that it was raining was one of the last certain things she remembered. So she thought it was, and you thought it was, but it wasn’t.

“But how did I get wet?” Gryphon asked. That still made no sense at all.

O’Leary was still giving him a funny look. “You don’t know?”

“No, I don’t.” He was shivering violently now, making his teeth chatter, and he wrapped his arms around himself to try and help himself warm up. It didn’t help at all. “Look, there are bodies all around here, up and down the river. Five of them, although not whole; pieces, I think, fragments.”

“Are you serious?”

“Sheila, Rita, Vanessa, Amber, Jessica,” he said, suddenly aware of all their names. He also had this image in his mind of a man with a face so incredibly oval it was almost egg shaped. It was also tan, verging on sunburnt, the pale eyes small and wide set, gleaming like rhinestones, a fringe of brown hair ringing his head like a laurel wreath. He was maybe forty or so, but he had one of those perfect middle aged faces, where he could have been slightly younger or a bit older than he actually was. He looked like a real estate agent or a cubicle farmer; he could have been anyone. He was a serial killer? He looked like someone’s slightly embarrassing middle aged dad. How was he supposed to find him? “But Rita may not have been killed by the same man. She wasn’t really clear on that.”

O’Leary was staring at him, shaking his head slightly, mouth slightly agape. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Juliet is not here, but these women are. They scattered all along the river.”

“You can’t be serious. It’s easy to find a body in the river. If -”

“Not if they’re chopped into pieces!” Gryphon exclaimed, and suddenly wondered why he said that. Was that true? Had they been dismembered? Was that why he thought there were only pieces here?

Suddenly he felt very dizzy and very cold, and he pressed the palms of his hands into his eyes. You need to go back to the truck, Hugh insisted. Now.

That was excellent advice. He needed to turn the heater on full blast.

“You’re serious? You’re genuinely serious about this?”

He glared at him. “Do you think I’d make this up? That I’d stand out here in the middle of nowhere and get rained on and claim there’s bodies that aren’t here, and aren’t the girl you’re looking for? You certainly are paying me a shitload for this, aren’t you? If you think I’m a fucking fraud, then why the fuck did you -” his sentence broke off in a deep, hearty cough that wracked his whole body and made him double over as he gagged, tasting something in the back of his throat that could have been blood or bile, or both.

O’Leary tentatively patted him on the back, and said, “Maybe you shouldn’t have gone for a dip.”

When Gryphon could breathe again, he straightened up and leaned against a nearby tree. He heard a fluttering of wings overhead, and figured he’d scared an owl. “I didn’t. Are you gonna call your cop buddies or not?” There was a tickle in the back of his throat, one that made him want to cough, but he forced down the urge. If he started up again, he might actually cough until he barfed. God, he was so fucking cold. He wanted to go home and soak in a warm bath until he didn’t feel the cold anymore.

Home. What a weird thought. He had a home again?

O’Leary continued to look really dubious. “And tell them what? Tell them a psychic placed body parts at the river?”

“What were you going to tell them if I found Juliet? Tell them that. And stop calling me a psychic.” He wandered back out into the woods, headed back for the truck. He wasn’t sure he knew the way, but O’Leary had left a big ass trail in his wake, so that was easy to follow. He stumbled and tripped on the way back, almost face planting a couple of times, but he managed to grab on to the encroaching trees. He felt really weird, like someone was pumping his head full of helium, and it wasn’t totally uncomfortable. It was almost kind of nice.

You need a doctor, Mr. Aronofsky insisted. It’s probably your meningitis again. You never got that properly treated.

“Just start the truck. I need heat.”

By the time he opened the passenger side door and stepped up into the cab, the engine coughed to life, and by the time he settled in the seat, leaning up against the window, heat was starting to pour out of the vents. “Thank you.”

You know, this is pretty cool, Ray noted. We can steal any damn car we want.

But we’re not going to, Mr. Aronofsky warned him. Ever.

Ray groaned. What if it’s an emergency?

Don’t go to sleep, Hugh told him sternly. You know what happens when you sleep after encountering a bunch of dead people.

“I know, but maybe it’ll help me figure out what the fuck is going on.”

What the fuck is going on? We found another fucking serial killer, that’s what, Ruby snapped. We need to find this dicktard. Once we do, leave him to me.

You’re turning into a serial killer, Ray said, not wisely.

Wanna see if I can kill the dead? She threatened.

“Would you two just knock it off?” He rubbed his forehead, although he didn’t know why. Their arguments were more psychically distressing than physically distressing.

Was it just coincidence or his shitty luck that O’Leary dragged him out to a place where multiple bodies laid in wait? And what did Rita mean by saying O’Leary was touched by death? Was there a reason he was so eager to nail Wax beyond the obvious?

O’Leary gave him an uncomfortable glare, crossing his arms over his broad chest. “I’m completely fucking desperate, okay? Does that explain things for you?”

Gryphon shrugged, sitting back down on the edge of his bed and gesturing for O’Leary to take the chair. He shook his head, turning down the offer to sit. “It helps. So who is it you’re looking for?”

He sighed heavily, shoulders sagging. “Approximately ten years ago, a fifteen year old girl, Juliet Saltzman, disappeared while walking home from school. Her backpack was found in a ditch not far from where she was last seen. There was a convicted sex offender in the area, Clifford Wax, who was known to have a thing for underage girls, and had no alibi for the time of the crime. But we never found Juliet’s body, and we never found any evidence tying him to her or the scene. For ten years, this case has been unsolved, and for ten years we’ve been unable to touch that bastard.”

“And you think I can help somehow?”

“I want you to find Juliet Saltzman. I don’t really care if we can nail Wax or not at this point, just find her, let’s give the family some peace after all these years.”

And here’s the case that’s haunted him into retirement, Hugh said. He thinks he’s failed.

He did, Taneesha replied. He can’t even find her fucking body.

Maybe he ate her, Ray said.

What a disgusting thought, Mr. Aronofsky replied, horrified.

Well, it’d explain why they can’t find her, Ray claimed.

“I have to have some idea where to look,” Gryphon told him. “I can’t just wander around and hope to get a hit.”

O’Leary nodded, his expression one of fighting disbelief and disgust in tandem. His ego was taking quite a blow just talking to him, a cheap psychic or whatever he assumed he was.

Carrie, Hugh said unhelpfully.

“I’m willing to take you around to the abduction scene, Wax’s old place, his current place, and a place in the woods where he once molested a girl. I’m hoping maybe you can pick up something there.”

“He’s moved since the crime?”

“His mother died three years ago, and as her only surviving relative he got the house. It’s nothing special, an old A frame out in Arlen.”

Who? Taneesha asked.

“I assume you’ve searched these areas and turned up nothing.”

The look he gave him was sarcastic and full of genuine menace, but he bit back whatever evil thing he was going to say. “Yeah, we did. We got search warrants, went over the areas with dogs … nothing.”

“So he dumped her elsewhere. Or he had nothing to do with this at all.”

“Oh, he had something to do with this, all right. I’d bet my left nut he’s our guy.”

“You just can’t prove it.”

“Nope. And that bastard knows it. You should have seen how smug he was when we were questioning him. He knew he was untouchable.” O’Leary’s left eyelid twitched, and a muscle jumped in his jaw as he ground his teeth. Not only did this case bother him, but he hated Wax as well.

Can’t blame him, Hugh said. I’m not sure child molesters have a huge fan club.

If I made a Michael Jackson joke, would someone hit me? Sylvio asked.

Only a lawyer, Mr. Aronofsky replied.

“Are you sure that’s all you want?” Gryphon asked him directly. “Just to bring peace to the family? Are you sure you don’t want to take some revenge on Wax?”

O’Leary’s pale eyes narrowed, nearly disappearing in the wrinkles and crow’s feet surrounding them. “Do you think I’m that petty?”

Interesting. That wasn’t actually an answer at all. “If it means anything to you - whether you believe me or not - you won’t have to worry about Wax if we find Juliet.”

“We?”

“Me and my passengers. We don’t like child killers. Leave the revenge for the dead.”

He grunted, a noise that was almost a scoff. “I don’t know how to take a statement like that.”

“That’s probably for the best.”

He studied him with a jaundiced eye, scrutinizing him like a blood sample under a microscope. “Have you ever been seen by a psychiatrist?”

Gryphon smirked. “I’m not crazy. Well, not in that way. I thought I was for a while, but too much has happened and been witnessed by others to be just my problem. How did I break everything in the interview room? How did I find the bodies of the Stanhopes and know not only their names but how exactly each had been killed? I may have some form of mental illness, but none explains any of that. And if you didn’t believe so as well, you’d never have come here.”

You’re starting to scare me kid, Hugh said. You’re starting to sound like you’re a million years old. Creepy and a million years old.

He felt a million years old, but then again, he’d died a million times, hadn’t he? And lived a million different lives, been killed a million different ways. It was hard not to age.

O’Leary kept his stare up for almost a full minute, then grunted and looked away. It made Gryphon sorry there wasn’t anything more interesting than a Far Side calendar on the wall. “I still don’t know what happened there, and I wouldn’t hazard a guess. All I know is no one can explain it. So you’re either the greatest fraud that’s ever existed, or you do have some sort of insight the rest of us don’t. I’m so desperate for anything I can use either.”

At least he was honest - he had to give him that. “So when do we take this trip?”

He glanced back at him, trying very hard not to let hope or relief color his expression. “I’d like to do it as soon as possible.”

“As far as I know, we don’t have a gig tonight. I suppose you could pick me up at eight or something.”

“Gig?”

Gryphon waved his hand dismissively. “Haunted house, the stuff I do for Spirit Guides.”

He looked a bit skeptical. “That pay well?”

He chuckled at that, but quickly ran out of breath, and had to swallow back the urge to cough. He knew if he got started now, he might not stop for a while. “Fuck no. Believe me, if I could do anything else, I’d be doing it instead.”

Gain some weight, and you’d be a fabulous male stripper, Hugh said.

Don’t even joke, Mr. Aronofsky snapped.

With all this power, it’d be nothing to knock over a bank and get away clean, Ray interjected. Or fuck, just empty an ATM. Should be easy enough to do.

That stripper idea sounds good now, Mr. Aronofsky commented.

O’Leary still seemed skeptical. “So just like that? I pick you up tonight?”

“Why not? What did you think was gonna happpen?”

That left him slightly nonplussed. He shrugged, and then admitted, “I dunno. I thought you were gonna turn me down or demand payment or something.”

Gryphon shook his head, smirking at his continued disbelief. This actually made for a refreshing change of pace. “I don’t do this for the money; I don’t even do this because I want to. I do this because the dead make me. They saved my life once, and I’ve never stopped paying for it.”

He eyed him like he was going to snap off another evil comment, perhaps another suggestion that he see a psychiatrist. But finally he decided to say, “You know how spooky and nuts that sounds, right?”

“Yeah. There’s no help for it.”

“I guess not.” He stalked back to the door, and paused when he opened it. “Eight o’clock?”

“Eight-ish. Whatever. I have no plans.”

He nodded and ducked out the door, as if he had to leave before he changed his mind about all of this. Maybe he had to.

Why do I have a bad feeling about all of this? Hugh wondered.

It was a fair sense and a fair question, but Gryphon couldn’t answer either.

****

He laid down to take a nap, mainly because he was tired a lot lately - maybe it had something to do with the fact that sleeping in his own bed remained a novelty - but he was asleep for long before he found himself sitting at a small table scarred with cigarette burns and sticky with spilled soda. “So how does this all work again?” Ray asked. He was sitting across the table from him in all his New Wave haircut glory, rather fresh faced for a man whose brief life had been devoted to thuggery, his slightly Satanic looking proto-goatee the only hint of the darkness underneath.

“What?” Gryphon wondered, looking at their surroundings. It was an insanely dark club, one of the dirtier variety, lit here and there with colored spotlights - cotton candy pink, sunlamp yellow, neon blue. The stage with the big pole in the center indicated this was a strip club, although it was currently empty save for them.

“Movin’ on. That whole thing.”

He sighed, sure this was not a conversation he wanted to be having. “Usually, if you can resolve whatever issues are holding you back from accepting death, or take the revenge that’s been sticking in your throat, you can move on.”

Ray nodded, tugging at the spiked dog collar around his throat. He didn’t always wear it in these mindscapes, but he was wearing it the day of the robbery, the day that everything went so horribly wrong. “Yeah, well, I want to ice the fucker who killed me, Stan.”

“He’s serving a life sentence in a maximum security penitentiary for the robbery and subsequent deaths, you know that. We’ve been over this.”

Ray looked at him sharply, his normally sly eyes now glittering like broken glass on the side of the highway. “With your powers, you can kill him without gettin’ in.”

“I have no powers. It’s the others - it’s you - who have the powers. I’m a vessel, nothing more.”

“Ain’t cha splittin’ hairs here?”

“No. I can’t control the PK. That’s up to all of you.”

He slumped back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest, looking for all the world like he was sulking. “If I got this PK, why can’t I use it?”

Gryphon shook his head. “I’m the last person to ask about how all of this works. I don’t know. I’m learning as I bumble along.”

“But you’ve been at this a while, yeah? So you gotta know something.”

“Nothing I want to know, Ray. Nothing that can help you. Ruby’s in the same boat, you know - she wants Dougherty, the guy who killed her. But he’s doing about two hundred years in a Detroit prison. There’s no getting him.”

Ray didn’t look especially pleased with this information. “So what? Are we stuck with you the rest of your life?”

Gryphon could only shrug. “I have no idea.”

“What happens to us if you die?” He demanded. “Do you join us? Do we have to wait until another vessel comes along? Is this over? What?”

Those were all spectacularly good questions, but all he could do was shrug and shake his head. “Ray, I don’t know. I’m as lost as you.”

He rolled his eyes and shook his head, looking at the empty stage. “Sometimes I wonder what you’re good for, ya know?”

He did. He often wondered the same thing himself.

****

Clay made dinner, as he occasionally sometimes did, and Gryphon tried to remember if he ever had pot roast before. Mr. Aronofsky had, so had Hugh, and Ruby had had it in diner form, but Gryphon was sure he hadn’t had it before. His mother wasn’t big on stuff like that.

It boggled his mind that Clay would make something like this for himself, complete with baby potatoes and steamed carrots. Hugh kept insisting “Gay” in his head, and this time Ruby, Ray, and Taneesha joined in. Mr. Aronofsky told them to hush.

Over dinner - which was good, he had to admit - he told Clay what O’Leary had wanted. He listened, but by degrees his expression turned worried, his brow furrowing in concern. “You sure you’re up to that, Gryph? You’re not looking well.”

“I’m fine, I’m just tired.”

You are the worst fucking liar on the planet, Taneesha insisted.

Clay may have thought so too, but he let it go. It wasn’t like he could tell him not to do it.

O’Leary showed up at eight precisely, still looking uncertain about all of this. He drove a battered looking Chevy truck that had probably seen better years, but in the back of the tailgate a tarp covered a shovel and a couple of similar tools, supposedly in case he found a body. But weren’t they supposed to leave that to the forensics team? Maybe he just wanted to make sure there was a body first, and that he wasn’t lying. The interior cabin smelled of stale cigarette smoke, spilled coffee, and a cheap vanilla air freshener.

As they drove to the location of the supposed abduction, they didn’t talk much. Gryphon had asked if they considered the possibility that Juliet was a runaway, and he said yes, they had, but she was a straight A student who didn’t seem unhappy, and her boyfriend was still around, still as stunned as anyone. They’d checked him out too, but as it turned out he was in after-school detention that day, still on school grounds when Juliet went missing. All the standard possibilities had been looked at, and turned up nothing. He noticed O’Leary glance at his watch and scowl, deep enough to carve furrows in his face. “It’ll start working again as soon as I leave.”

He gave him a skeptical sidelong glance. “You do that on purpose?”

“No, I can’t control it. Time just seems to stop around me.”

And that doesn’t sound at all mental, Hugh said.

O’Leary stared at him askance for a very long time, then returned his full attention to the road without saying anything. Sometimes there just wasn’t anything to say.

The site of the abduction was a rural road that seemed to stretch along forever, lined on either side with thick growths of trees and weedy lots. It was the perfect place to disappear. He got out and walked along the edge of a ditch partially full of dirty water, looking up at the sky, which was a deep navy blue - the stars hadn’t quite come out yet. The moon was a sliver of a fingernail hanging in the far corner of the sky, pale enough to be almost translucent.

O’Leary stood beside his parked truck, watching him with a combination of curiosity and skepticism. “Got anything?” he asked.

Gryphon shook his head. “Something happened here, but I don’t know what or when. If she was killed, it wasn’t here.”

Or she’s really shy, Hugh said sarcastically. Speaking of which … Hey, Julie, you still here?

Yes, Julie replied meekly (as if she could reply in any other way). Where would I go?

Julie almost never said a word. Hugh and Ruby could talk him to death, but he sometimes forgot he had Julie with him. Beaten down in life, she remained beaten down in death, and Gryphon had no idea why. She could rage and scream now, no one would stop her, but she sat in the corner and never made a sound.

O’Leary grunted in annoyance and got back in the truck, as Gryphon followed, feeling like he was floating in the air like a kite. Illness was of course a horrible thing, but Gryphon did like these moments when he felt lighter than air, lighter than his flesh and his own personal gravity.

O’Leary drove them deeper into this nowhere location, until tree branches made up a canopy over the road, and it became a dream area to dump a body. Gryphon had a bad feeling in his gut as O’Leary pulled the truck over. ”Wax used to go mushroom hunting in these woods. Him and a bunch of hippies … or whatever the fuck they’re called nowadays, I dunno. Anyways, he - hey, where are you going?”

Gryphon had opened the passenger side door and gotten out while he talked, drifting like a leaf on the wind, feeling himself almost being pulled into the darkness between the trees. There was a small slope, and he slipped on leaf mold, but then he was in the suffocating silence of the woods. There was rustling overhead, the whispers of wings, and vines in the underbrush clung to his ankles, trying to trip him and pull him down. Kid, I don’t like this, Hugh said, as Gryphon distantly heard O’Leary shouting his name. He didn’t call him Gryphon, he called him Ashmore, which seemed really police officer of him.

He drifted past the huge towering hulks of trunks, tree limbs hitting him like they were patting his back in encouragement as he went deeper into the woods. Something was compelling him, although he wasn’t yet sure what or why. He wasn’t alone, though - that much he knew.

Rain started to patter down, making soft noises in the greenery as it struggled to filter down to him, mainly rendered an air clearing mist. The cool water felt good on his face, tickled as it ran through his hair and down his neck. He felt strangely at home here in the overwhelming dark, where the smell of decay was sweet and earthy, and trapped heat radiated up from the mud.

He was attempting to blink away the drops beading in his eyelashes when he found himself face to face with a girl.

She was a little slip of a thing, under five five and probably not even a hundred pounds; it looked like he could break her in half just by squeezing her. She was wearing a half shirt that showed a pale strip of belly and a fake leather miniskirt that hit mid-thigh, revealing stocky legs as slender as reeds. She should have been shivering, but seemed impervious to the cold rain. Her hair was a straight fall of shadows to her bony shoulders, and her eyes were like black holes in a round, ashen face. “Juliet?” he asked, noticing that she had mud caked up to her shins.

“Who?” she asked.

What? Seriously? Hugh said in his head. Okay, kid, either you haven’t been paying attention, or you’ve lived the most sheltered life in existence, pre-us.

I’m votin’ for sheltered, Taneesha said.

Me too, Ray agreed.

“Would you all stop dog piling on me?” Gryphon snapped, looking out the window at his view. Now there was another concept that would take some getting used to.

The whole “ghost hunting” thing with Shane and Clay had been working out surprisingly well. They got some local publicity for the thing they did for the Oregon Historical Society, and there was some attempt to do some filming of them, first for local news and then some occult show on one of the public channels decided to follow Spirit Guides as they worked. Gryph warned them he couldn’t be filmed and that some of their cameras might burst into flame around him, but they seemed to think he was just being a drama queen. Until the tattooed, pierced camera guy’s DVR camera started smoking. Then they kept their distance.

He wasn’t sure about any of this, but Clay and Shane had been good to him - hell, he was living in the room over Clay’s garage, which had been set up as a kind of loft, with its own bathroom and outer staircase, so he could come and go as he pleased. He hadn’t lived in a single place for a while now, and it was still weird to him. It was like a motel room he didn’t have to pay for. (Clay owned the house, an inheritance from some dead family member or another. He wasn’t asking for rent. Hugh insisted Clay was closeted gay - or possibly asexual - and crushing on him big time, but Gryphon was of the opinion Hugh was projecting. Clay was just a true believer, and was endlessly fascinated by his ability to talk to the dead.)

“Were you just talking to them?” Seth asked warily.

Gryphon nodded. “Sorry. I’m used to talking back to them. I forget other people can’t hear them.”

“What did they say?”

“Nothing worth printing.” He turned back to face the slight man sitting in the room’s sole armchair, a tattered tan velvet thing that looked like it had come with the dead relative’s house. The man was slightly less tattered, but not for lack of trying - it seemed he hadn’t gotten the notice that grunge was dead. He had long brown hair, apparently meant to be worn in a faux-hawk because the sides of his head were shaved, and he wore a laundry worn Rise Against t-shirt and khaki board shorts that were frayed at the ends, dangling over bony knees. He wore black and white Vans whose heels were starting to wear through. He also had several visible tattoos on his arms and legs and a piercing through his lip, eyebrow, and nose.

This was Seth Weller, a college journalism student who also worked with that local occult show. They wanted Gryphon’s story, but they could neither film nor tape it, so Seth had come down here on a slow Sunday afternoon to transcribe it. He scribbled notes on a legal p ad in a scrawl that must have been some kind of personal shorthand, as they didn’t exactly look like words. Seth and the rest of the “culties” (as he, Clay, and Shane had taken to calling them behind their backs) knew Gryphon only by his first name, and he wanted to keep it that way so they could never track down his family. This visibly disappointed Seth, who wanted a scoop. Gryphon sat down on the edge of the bed, and asked, “Where were we?”

“Um, you were gonna tell me about your, uh, “passengers”.”

He nodded, rubbing his forehead, and looking for where he put his soda. He really didn’t want to do this interview, but Clay and Shane had been good to him, so he didn’t see why he couldn’t just talk to this guy. It still seemed very weird. “Ruby’s been with me the longest now; she was a prostitute murdered by a serial killer. Then there’s Ben, a man killed in a violent car crash. And Hugh, a firefighter killed while fighting a fire. Taneesha, a girl accidentally killed in a drive by shooting. Ray, a bank robber killed by his fellow robbers. Sylvio, a college student killed in a hit and run. And Julie, a battered wife murdered by her husband.”

Does anyone else ever feel like we’re on the Mickey Mouse Club? Mr. Aronofsky - Ben - wondered.

What’s the Mickey Mouse Club? Taneesha asked.

It was that thing Britney Spears was on, Sylvio said dismissively.

There had been others - Omar, Molly, Julio - but they almost seemed to be in an extra hurry to leave after meeting his group. It was like they didn’t want to take part in this McLaughlin Group of the damned if at all possible. He couldn’t blame them. He wouldn’t be here if he had any alternative. Seth looked at him warily. “They’re all poltergeists?”

“Of one sort or another, yes.”

“How did you … meet them? I mean, have you always been able to talk to the dead?”

“I don’t talk to the dead, they talk to me. And no, I haven’t. I wasn’t quite eighteen yet when some freak tried to kill me. I was bleeding to death in a cemetery, and it just sorta … happened.”

Seth sat forward in the chair, as if this was the truly interesting bit. “What?”

He shrugged, taking a swig of his warm cherry Dr Pepper. This story actually bored him now, how he almost died, how his life slid sideways and ended in one form, and began anew in another strange form that he couldn’t quite identify as life. “The dead started talking to me. They were previous victims of the killer, and they wanted revenge. They were my first passengers, although they weren’t with me for long.” There was that whole thing with a leftover ritual by would be Goths or witches or whatever that may have caused all this madness in the first place, but he didn’t know for sure, and the culties really didn’t need to know it anyways.

“Why not?”

“They got what they wanted.”

Seth’s face clouded over as he looked confused. “What?”

“They got their revenge. Don’t ask me for details, I’ll have to take the Fifth.” He leaned down to put the can of soda back on the floor, and just that slight bend forward made him start to cough. He’d had a cough lately, along with an almost constant low level fever. He was pretty sure the meningitis was gone, but he didn’t go back to the hospital because it wasn’t like they could tell him much he didn’t know. Being a conduit for the dead was killing him? If they were going to rob him of a hundred bucks, they could at least tell him something he didn’t know.

You can feel it ‘cause you’ve always been an airhead, Ruby shot back.

Hugh just made a kissy noise at her, and Ray complained, Do you two ever just shut the fuck up?

Seth was giving him a wary look again. He had eyes like a fawn just before a semi hits it. “Are you okay?”

He waved his hand dismissively. “Fine. Bit of a cold.”

Cold my ass, Taneesha snapped.

Seth glanced anxiously down at his notes, and took a moment to gather his courage. “Um, about the guy …”

“I can’t talk about it. In fact, I won’t. So just leave it.”

That unsettled him, as he figured it might. “Are, um … are you saying that most of the dead you … who talk to you want revenge?”

“Many do, or they want justice, which is almost the same thing when you’ve been killed. It’s all kind of nebulous.”

“Death is nebulous?”

“It must be. Why else do I have passengers?”

You know, that almost made sense, Hugh commented.

From the look on Seth’s face, he agreed with him. He scribbled it down, and then came at it from another angle. “Is there an afterlife?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Where do your passengers go when they move on?”

“I don’t know. They’re just gone, They could get lifted to heaven on pearly white wings, or simply cease to exist. I don’t know, as I’ve never really died and saw for myself.”

“But they’re here in ghost form. Doesn’t that suggest an afterlife?”

He shrugged again. “It only suggests that there might be something to all that soul nonsense. It’s not mutually exclusive with an afterlife.”

I love the way you split hairs, Mr. Aronofsky said. You missed your calling as a lawyer.

He does have a point, Hugh argued. The only bright light I saw while dying was my suit burning up.

I didn’t see shit, Taneesha said. One second I was alive, and then I wasn’t. It sucked donkey dicks.

Yeah, that was my experience too, Ray commented, oddly subdued.

I’m still not sure I’m dead, Sylvio said. Maybe I’m in a coma and this is all a dream or something.

I’m nobody’s fucking hallucination, Ruby replied archly.

Seth scribbled it down, the corner of his mouth tugging up briefly in a sort of pained grimace. “You didn’t like my answer,” Gryphon noted, finding it kind of funny. The true believers were always funny. They thought the “spirits of the departed” were wise beyond measure, or hinted at some sort of divinity, when they were just people - unhappy dead people. “What did you expect?”

He shook his head, but his denial was on the weak side. “I didn’t …” He sighed heavily and looked up from his notebook. “I just thought that maybe they … had some words for us.”

I got some words for you, Taneesha chimed in. Fuck you, asshat. Get a decent haircut.

It’s like a mullet gone horribly wrong, Hugh said.

I’m wondering how he gets through airport detectors with all that metal in his face, Mr. Aronofsky commented.

“Not words you would like,” Gryphon told him, trying not to smile. He would never guess his crew was more bitchy than the guys on Queer Eye For The Straight Guy. “What I can tell you is all those zombie films did get one thing right: you don’t ever want to piss off the dead. The dead are ruthless; they have no mercy and nothing to lose. Killing you is only the first thing they‘ll do to you.”

Seth just stared at him a moment, not writing, pen frozen on the notepad. Twenty bucks says he just shit himself, Ray cracked.

You are in a particularly scary mood today, Hugh agreed. What’s up, Gryph?

He’s being passive aggressive, Sylvio said. He hates being interviewed, so he’s just freaking the interviewer out.

There was a knock on the door, which made Seth jump and almost lose his notebook, which made Gryphon smirk. Yeah, he had freaked him out. But it was the truth, as well as fair warning. “Yeah, come in.”

Clay peeked inside the barely open door before proceeding. He was still a man of incredible personal intensity, a natural ball of energy that just might explode if ever exposed to cocaine. He still had a strange affinity for plaid shirts, and combined with his odd mustache - which Hugh insisted was a ‘70’s porn star ‘stache (and proof he was gay) - made him look a bit like a lost little lumberjack. “Uh, sorry to interrupt, but you’ve got a visitor, Gryph. He said he couldn’t wait.”

Gryphon eyed him suspiciously. “Since when do I have visitors?”

Of the non-dead variety, Hugh added.

Clay knew better than to let a cultie or some sad looking seeker wanting to talk to her dead grandmother even know he lived here, so this was automatically weird. He looked a bit uncomfortable too, so that wasn’t a good sign. “It’s kinda important,” Clay said, stepping into the room, hands shoved nervously in the front pockets of his jeans. Today’s choice of shirt was blue plaid.

Behind him, a man of late middle age stepped in. He had a big Irish head - why he thought it was Irish he had no idea, except Hugh and Ruby both thought it was, Hugh having worked with Irish firefighters, and Ruby being from a big Irish family - with a lantern jaw and a broad forehead, his black hair combed back and revealing grey at the temples. His eyes had a watery, rheumy quality to them, eyes so pale blue they were almost not a color at all, his nose showing the telltale bump of a past break and the broken blood vessel flush of a heavy drinker. He was neither handsome nor ugly, but he did cut a striking figure, six feet tall with broad shoulders and the rest of his body thick but in a solid - not flabby - way. He may have been nearing sixty, but he looked like he could still take as well as throw a punch. If he’d been wearing a fedora and an overcoat, he could have been a heavy stepped out of the frame from any film noir.

I smell bacon, Ruby snapped.

“Sorry to bother you,” the man said. “I’ll try not to take up too much of your time.” His voice rumbled like a semi-truck’s engine.

Seth stood and looked between them nervously, but Clay gestured to him. “C’mon, you can wait downstairs.”

“Yeah, okay,” Seth said, with an almost absurd amount of gratitude. True believer or not, Gryphon had unsettled him.

The man waited until they left and shut the door before introducing himself. “I’m Calvin O’Leary, a recently retired detective from the Portland PD.”

What did I tell you? Ruby bragged.

He held out his hand, a big meaty paw that looked like it could cover more than half of Gryphon’s face, and with great reluctance, he shook it. O’Leary tried hard not to crush his engulfed hand, but it was clear he could have at any time. “Am I in trouble?” he asked, the merest tinge of humor in the question. It was unlikely they’d send a retired cop to arrest him, but after what happened in the police station when they brought him in over the Stanhope thing, maybe they wanted to try a new approach.

He stepped back, looking desperately uncomfortable, his gaze sliding over the austere room and noting all the objects in it, or he should say lack of same. If he was looking for some clue about him, he was looking in the wrong place. “I want you to know that I really don’t believe in this shit,” he said, with no preamble. “This psychic shit, talking to dead people shit.”

“I’ve never claimed to be psychic,” he pointed out.

O’Leary grunted, and Gryphon would have told him to take a seat, but he looked like he didn’t want one. “But I know what happened with the Stanhope case, and afterwards. That shit at the police station, stuff breaking around you, your voice changing. They call you Carrie.”

“I was afraid of that. But I didn’t do it.”

Oh sure, blame me, Ruby complained.

Only ‘cause you did it, Hugh countered.

“What can I do for you, Detective?”