Forever Odd

were already a failure. Women like you turn to their sisters, to their friends, and make a life that way. But you… you even failed your sisters, didn’t you?”
        One of the Coleman lanterns brightened markedly, dimmed, and brightened again, causing shadows to fly away, leap close, and fly away once more.
        Andre and Robert somberly considered the lamp, looked at each other, and then surveyed the room, puzzled.

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    THIRTY-SEVEN
        
        “FAILED YOUR SISTERS,” DATURA REPEATED, “YOUR paralyzed, blind, disfigured sisters. And if that isn’t true, if I’m full of crap, then let me see you, Maryann. Show yourself, confront me, let me see you the way the fire ruined you. Show me, and scare me off.”
        Although I would never have been able to conjure these spirits into a sufficiently material state for Datura to have seen them, I had hoped that Buzz-cut, with his high poltergeist potential, would provide a spectacle that would not only entertain my captors but also distract them so completely that I might get away.
        The problem had been how to fuel his already simmering anger into the fiery rage needed to power poltergeist phenomena. Now it seemed that Datura would solve that problem for me.
        “You weren’t there for your sisters,” she taunted. “Not before the quake, not during, not after, not ever.”
        Although the cocktail waitress only buried her face in her hands and endured the poisonous accusations, Buzz-cut glared at Datura, his expression heating from a simmering to a boiling anger.
        He and Maryann Morris were bonded by untimely death as well as by their inability to move on, but I can’t know that his mood grew darker because he took offense on behalf of the cocktail waitress. I don’t believe these stranded spirits feel any sense of community. They see one another, but each is fundamentally alone.
        More likely, Datura’s viciousness resonated with this man, excited him, and amplified his existing anger.
        “The fifth spirit has arrived,” I told her. “Conditions are perfect now.
        “Then do it,” she said sharply. “Conjure them right here, right now. Let me see.”
        God forgive me, to save myself and Danny, I said, “What you’re doing is helpful. It’s…I don’t know… it’s emotionalizing them or something.”
        “I told you I always know exactly what I’m doing. Don’t ever doubt me, baby.”
        “Just keep hammering at her, and with my help, in a few minutes, you’ll not just see Maryann but all of them.”
        She hurled more abuse at the cocktail waitress, in language far more vile than she’d used thus far, and both of the Coleman lanterns pulsed, pulsed, as though in sympathy with the lightning that might at the same moment have been ripping through the sky outside.
        Stalking, turning, stalking, circling, as if caged, as though frustrated beyond tolerance by his confinement, Buzz-cut banged his fists together hard enough to fracture knuckle against knuckle if he had been a material presence, but not even making a sound in his spirit form.
        He could have swung those fists at me, but they would have had no effect. No spirit can harm a living person by direct touch. This world belongs to us, not to them.
        If an earthbound soul is sufficiently debased, however, if the anger and envy and spite and stubborn rebellion that characterized him in life should ripen into blackest spiritual malignancy during the days when he lingers between worlds, he will be able to vent the power of his demonic rage on inanimate objects.
        To the cocktail waitress whom she couldn’t see and never would, Datura said with pitiless persistence, “You know what I think, what I’d bet, Maryann? In that shabby nursing home at night, some scummy guy on the staff sneaks in your sister’s room, Bonnie’s room, and rapes her.”
        Past rage, approaching fury, Buzz-cut threw back his head and screamed, but the sound was trapped with him in the realm between here and Elsewhere.
        “She’s helpless,” Datura said, her voice as venomous as the contents of a rattlesnake’s poison sacs. “Bonnie would be afraid to tell anyone because the rapist never talks, and she doesn’t know his name, and she can’t see, so she’s afraid they won’t believe her.”
        Buzz-cut tore at the air with his hands, as though trying to claw his way back through the veil that separated him from the world of