He paused, thinking again.
"I suppose the worst-case scenario is that I'd be dead," I muttered.
Carlos grinned a wolf's smile of white daggers. "Merely and simply dead might be preferable. But this course is the only chance you have. You can step out of the structure at any time while the charm still works, but once it burns out, the entity will close and return to its master. It will be much wilier the next time you meet—unless you can break its master's control. Then it will be ignorant and easily tricked. But I doubt you'll have another opportunity to take it. Better to attack it now, while it's stupid.”
He finished scribbling and handed me the sheets he'd filled with long, spiked script.
"How am I supposed to dismantle it? I don't see anything about tools here," I said, glancing through his instructions.
He scowled. "With your hands.”
"Grab onto those power strands and just. . pull them apart?" I didn't like that idea. "I'm not even sure I can.”
"You can do more than you realize," Carlos stated.
But did I want to? I had a bad feeling that touching the power lines of the Grey—let alone manhandling them—would effect yet more changes, and I'd never been happy with any change the Grey served up to me. A dozen other thoughts occurred to me about the possible repercussions of trailing through the Grey, looking for a place to trap Celia long enough to break it down to its constituent parts.
"I've been ducking in and out of the Grey all week and it's not entirely inconspicuous," I objected. "This may draw a little attention, even if I can find a quiet place with the right kind of Grey landscape to do it in.”
He looked amused. "Tomorrow is All Hallows Eve. No one will find your actions so strange on that date.”
"All right," I acknowledged. "But there is one more problem. Even if I dismantle this one, what's to stop this young psychopath from building up another, or co-opting some loose entity if he runs across one? The Grey's a free-for-all of monstrosities for anyone who knows how to reach in and grab one. And if he doesn't know now, he'll figure it out damned quick.”
Carlos inclined his head and the desk lamp's sickly glow unveiled the monster's mask. And then he smiled one of his ice-light-on-steel smiles. "He'll have to be broken of the habit.”
I shuddered at the sound of that. I might have no choice but to let Carlos at Ian, but I had to try to maintain control. Starting now. "He'll have to be distracted first," I reminded. "Once the genie is out of the bottle, he'll know and he'll try to use it.”
Carlos had narrowed his eyes and acquired an unpleasant Mona Lisa quality. "I'd like to meet this young man. . ”
"That doesn't surprise me. If you can get to him, you're welcome to try.”
He chuckled and the room rolled. "Show me where he is." He stood up, expectant and looming over me like a storm.
I kept my seat. "I don't know that yet. And I am too tired to fight this thing again tonight. You may have just crawled out of the crypt at sundown, but I've been up to my ass in alligators for twelve hours. Besides, there are other things to do first.”
He lowered his unpleasant gaze. "True. Tomorrow will be. . strange.”
I couldn't—and didn't wish to—imagine what Carlos considered strange. "No doubt. Give me a direct number to call you when things are ready—telephone tag through Cameron is annoying.”
Another seismic chuckle moved the room and he handed me a card from the pocket of his leather jacket. I refused his offered hand and got out of the chair myself. I had no wish to visit hell, and touching his hand would have been the express route for me. He found that amusing, too, but he walked me to the door and let me out.
"I look forward to tomorrow.”
"I'll bet," I replied.
His mouth quirked, and he plucked the bright strand of Grey that linked me to Celia. "Take care, Blaine." Then he turned away and returned to the home of live girls and undead clerks.
CHAPTER 31
The PNU campus had an eerie quiet on a Sunday morning, a wrong sort of emptiness, as if even the ghosts had gone to chapel and the buildings held their breath. Frankie was more punctual for subterfuge than work and we were in room twelve of St. John Hall on the dot often with an equipment cart standing in the corridor. We disturbed the breathless stillness with directed intensity.
Frankie—almost unrecognizable without makeup and wearing plain brown jeans—stood in the room and surveyed it with expert speed. "OK. Table first. It doesn't fit through the door, so we'll have to take off the legs. Luckily, I have tools.”
She darted to the cart and snatched a pair of large screwdrivers that she stuffed into her back pockets. Then we flipped the table onto its back on the rug, crushing a thin, pulsing wad of energy lingering there. For a while, we struggled with the legs until Frankie lost her temper.
"You are a very bad table," she muttered, standing up. Then she heel-kicked the nearest leg with a blow that knocked the wooden piece right off its bracket. Wires and bits of twisted metal bracket trailed from the break like entrails. "Ha! So much for you, table!" she crowed. She proceeded to kick the rest of the legs off with vicious glee. We carted the parts down to the back door and loaded them into the bed of a borrowed pickup truck.
Back upstairs, Frankie unloaded the bookshelves and sorted the contents into two piles. PNU property went on the cart; the rest went into Dumpsters in the parking lot or into either the pickup or my Rover. The end tables by the sofa met the same fate as the table legs— kicked to splinters and carried away.
"You're enjoying this a lot," I observed as we puffed back upstairs again. My knee was still a bit out of sorts and I was noticing the exertion more than usual.
"You bet! I feel like I'm finally freeing myself of Tuck. It feels great, tearing up this stuff.”
"How's Tuckman going to take it when he finds out?”
"Oh, he can French-kiss a whale for all I care. I'll tell him the dean ordered it and he can go argue with old baggy-pants himself. That'll win him all kinds of points." She cackled. "He is so on thin ice since his last evaluation. He said something snippy to the dean's wife at the psych association dinner the other night, too, I hear. I am reveling in his imminent downfall.”
A prime example of a woman scorned. Frankie had never said what Tuckman had done to lose her respect, but it sounded like he was going to regret it.
We tore the electronics out of the rug, hauled away the couch, and redistributed the chairs to needy rooms. Frankie hauled the monitors and machines out of the observation room and stacked them on the cart. At last we were down to the photos and posters on the wall and Ken's portrait of Celia. I collected them and put them into a metal trash can.
"Do you have a cigarette lighter?" I asked.
"No," she replied. "That's a bad habit I don't have. Besides, you don't want to burn those here. It'll set off the smoke alarm. There's probably some matches in the kitchen, though.”
We carried the rug and the trash can downstairs to the parking lot.
While Frankie wrestled the partially shredded rug into the truck bed, I snooped through the kitchen.
I returned with a couple of strike-anywhere wooden matches. I picked up the portrait and gave it one last look. It was remarkable how much life Ken had put into the picture. Celia looked vibrant. I set the corner of the portrait on fire, muttering a few words Carlos had written down for me.