At last they found themselves in a room with an open railed balcony on the fourth floor, unable to climb higher. The room was unfinished, with bare lath along one wall; an exposed brick chimney, with no fireplace, rose from the floor to the ceiling in the left corner.
Pete stepped toward the balcony, crouching to peer out over the green lawns and red rooftop peaks without being seen from below.
“It’s infinite,” he said hopelessly. “I can’t even see an end to the house, from here. You’d think I could see the freeway, or a gas-station sign, or something.”
“This place is still a supernatural maze,” said Angelica. “It’s got to be drawing ghosts like a candle draws moths, still. I swear, down in those endless galleries and halls I could feel all their half-wit attentions on us. Old lady Winchester ‘wide unclasped the table of her thoughts’—her patterns of thoughts, her accommodating masks—to every footloose ghost in the West, she was no virgin, psychically; and ‘these same thoughts people this little world: Except it doesn’t look so little, from inside.” She shook her head violently and then startled Cochran by spitting on the floor. “They’re all around us right now, like spiderwebs. These fireplaces should be running full-blast, twenty-four hours a day.”
“She probably assumed they’d be used, in the winter at least,” said Cody. “After her death.”
Cochran looked away from Angelica, toward the corner of the room.
“This chimney is like the first stairway we tried,” he said, “look. There’s no hole in the ceiling for it.”
Pete Sullivan walked over and reached up with both hands to hook his fingertips over the uneven row of bricks at the top edge of the chimney, which did end several inches short of the solid ceiling planks. “My hands are twitchy,” Pete said, “like they want to… participate with it. Did Houdini ever do an escape from a chimney?”
The white-clad-ghost strode over and, taller than Pete, was able to slide its whole hand into the drafty space between the bricks and the ceiling planks.
“Clean, uncarboned brick,” the ghost said solemnly; “and gold. I can smell gold on the draft.”
“Gold?” echoed Cochran, disappointed that they had apparently found some old treasure instead of the old woman’s ghost.
“Well now, gold would damp out her wavelengths,” said Pete, lowering his hand and brushing brick dust off on his jeans. “Ghosts are an electromagnetic agitation she’d have to be locked up in something shielding, to be hidden. People used to make coffins out of lead, to keep the ghost in, contained and undetectable. Gold’s not quite as dense as lead, but it’d certainly do.”
“And,” said Cochran, nodding, “if chimneys generally destroy ghosts, if that’s common knowledge, then you certainly wouldn’t ever look for a ghost to be hiding in one.”
“Not unless you knew it was a dummy chimney,” agreed Angelica. “And with a hundred real fireplaces and chimneys around the place, who’d notice that one was a fake?”
The ghost’s white sleeve disappeared behind the top row of bricks…and Cochran noticed that the figure was leaning braced against the chimney with one knee, for the other leg appeared now to be just a hanging, empty trouser leg, its cuff flapping over an empty white shoe.
“The chimney is like the hole Alice fell down,” said the ghost softly. “Tiny shelves all the way down, with papers and locks of hair and rings and stones and dry leaves.” After another moment, the ghost said, “Ah.”
Then the trouser leg filled out and the cuff lowered to cover the shoe, which shifted as weight visibly settled into it again.
A clunking, scraping noise at the top of the chimney made Cochran look up—and the ghost was trying to rock something out of the chimney, apparently struggling to angle it out through the narrow gap between the bricks and the ceiling planks.
The hard object was not coming out. “Break away a brick or two,” suggested Cochran, looking nervously toward the stairs. He could hear voices now, and the knocking of footsteps. ‘I think a tour’s coming.”
Pete reached his own hand in next to the ghost’s, and then shook his head. “It’s not that it won’t fit out,” he said through clenched teeth, “it’s just stopping, in mid-air, like the thin air turns rubbery, like we’re trying to push two big magnets together at their positive ends.”
Cochran could definitely hear voices mounting from below now. “What is it?” he asked anxiously. “If it’s just an old magnet or something, drop it and let’s go!”
“It’s rectangular,” gasped Pete, ‘“heavy.”
Plumtree stood by the chimney and jumped up, to peek into the gap. “You’ve got a gold box,” she said when her sneaker soles had hit the floor again.
“Dead woman’s gold,” said Angelica, “she’s probably got the geometry of the chimney-boundary magicked to not let it pass.”
“Let’s see if the chimney can tell the difference between that and a dead man’s gold,” said Plumtree. She dug the gold Dunhill lighter out of her pocket and tossed it up in a glittering arc toward the gap.
The lighter knocked against the wooden ceiling and disappeared behind the bricks, down inside the chimney, and then Pete jackknifed backward and sat down hard on the wooden floor, holding in his lap a metal box that gleamed gold under a veil of cobwebs.
Scott Crane’s ghost had leaped back, or flickered back like an image in a jolted mirror; and when Cochran heard a scuffling flutter behind him he spun around to see a white-painted canvas banner settling onto the floor. The word GARLIC was painted on it in cursive blue letters, and the king’s ghost was gone
Cochran looked back at Angelica and Plumtree, who were staring wide-eyed, at the empty canvas. Cochran shrugged at Plumtree. “You tossed his lighter,” he said.
“Good,” she said with a visible shiver.
“Is there somebody up there?” came a voice from the stairs at the back of the room.
Plumtree grabbed the dusty, cobwebby box from Pete and took a long step toward a doorway that led away from the stairs. She jerked her head for the others to follow.
Cochran helped Pete to his feet and followed Angelica and Plumtree down this unexplored hallway. Let the tour-guide explain the garlic banner, he thought: Damn ghosts!—leaving their goofy shit around everywhere.
They hurried on through a hastily glimpsed kaleidoscope of architecture, with skylights below them and stairways curling around them and interior balconies and windows receding away at every height in the patches of electric lamp-glow and lancing columns of gray daylight.
At the top of one white-painted stairway Cochran’s right hand was suddenly tugged diagonally out and down. He crouched and made a ch-ch! sound, and then started hopping down the stairs before his hand could pull him off balance and send him tumbling down them. He could hear the others following behind him, but he didn’t dare lift his eyes from the crowding-up stair-edges to look back.
The stairway continued down past the next floor, but was bevelled dark wood now, and the walls and doors and ceilings were framed in carved mahogany. Cochran’s hand was pulled out horizontally away from the landing and down a hall, and he almost thought he could feel a warm, callused hand clasping his palm and knuckles, and a deeply jarring pulse like seismic temblors.
Helplessly Cochran led his companions through a wide doorway, and his first impression was that they had come to another unfinished section—but a closer look at the walls showed him that the wide patches of exposed lath were edged with broken plaster and torn wall fabric.