(6)
 We rode down and emerged into a concrete corridor that looked industrial and cold. We were in the Between, our true state of existence, where the shadows run from themselves. This was the downside, the underbelly, of the Compass News building, an extension into the world of ghosts. Ours is a world of those no longer quite living, yet not quite dead yet. All the spirit realms intersect here, except, I would guess, heaven and hell, but that's beyond and we know nothing about what lies beyond that grayish smoke wall that the Handlers come out of to fetch ghost spirits ready for their final journey. Like the living, we have no idea what lies beyond.
We went to a window and looked out across the Between. It is always night here. Unlike up top, where the building lies nestled among trees on a quiet street, down here it lies directly on the Shore Road (which doesn't exist up top). Across the street is a beach where sometimes mermaids in the sea, and centaurs on the beach call to each other to play. Just now, as we looked, there was no sign of Johannes Rector, or of anyone on the beach. We did hear rowdy male laughter, and saw three hairy centaurs clattering past on heavy hooves. They wore backward baseball caps and held open beer cans as they hollerd dirty jokes to each other. They were gone in a flash, maybe to some distant beach barbecue. So that's where the mermaids were tonight.
We wandered around the building but found no sign of Rector. We looked through glass doors into all the shuttered laboratories and offices, where during the work night (this was weekend) a hundred or more ghostly men and women labored over industrial or tychnical or administrative tasks. Tychnik is interesting. It is today's magic, tomorrow's science. A scientist does today's science. A tychnikalist does tomorrow's science. We are working on new ways to make sense of magic, so that it will stop being supernatural and become natural science. I learned all this from Rector, by the way.
Finally, we went outside looking for him. Outside, it is rarely very warm or very cold. It is often windy. It's the kind of wind you get in a desert city in the evening, when it's cooling and the ghosts are turbulent. It ruffles your sleeves and musses your hair. It can make your eyes teary and your nose run. It can make you feel exhilarated, or it can make you feel sad, depending on the mood of the wind spirits and the spirits of the whitecaps foaming on the night tide. Someone has theorized that emotional equilibrium in the Between or Underworld (dozens of names for the same thing) is tied to the tides and the moon. In that theory, the best emotional moments are when the tides are in equilibrium. That's halfway between low tide and high tide. They say that low tide makes you calm and contented, though I have heard of some people who get sad. High tide brings up a kind of pressure that makes one agitated, sad, or even angry, like Days of Craze.
The houses along the Shore Road are built of shadows and emotions. The houses loom in piles up the hillside, like thousands of melting black-wax candles. Their gloomy windows are filled with beads of leaded light full of pale bubbles. The beads are in stained-glass colors, predominantly blue, red, green, and yellow. Everywhere you look are shadowy Shades, ghosts, wandering, lounging, waiting to be taken by the Handlers when their jobs are done, their time is up, their hour has struck. Together, they make a low, bee-like murmur in which are many mixed emotions: lost loves, lost lives, lost treasures, shocking realizations, eager anticipation. It's in the air, along with the fragrance of pale death flowers, and night-blooming jasmin.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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