Hellsinger 01 - Fish and Ghosts (P) (MM) by Rhys Ford Page A

thought about the why of ghosts’ existence. Other than from a haunting aspect.”
    “Ghosts are… smaller echoes than the living. They have no form. It’s harder to exist that way,” the other man replied. “I know it sounds simplistic, but wouldn’t it be hard to exist if someone’s always pushing into where you are? Not having equal mass means you can’t take up equal space.”
    “So you don’t think they’re just memories? Imprints? That’s the popular theory.”
    “I’ve never been popular.” Tristan’s laugh was bitter. “Maybe that’s how it works in other places. Here, they’re… people.”
    “People you see walking around you? Talking? Having scones on the patio?” Wolf scoffed. “Convenient that there are always rooms for them. No overflow. No lost luggage.”
    “I didn’t make the rules.” The man shrugged off Wolf’s skepticism. “I’m not sure who did. Maybe Uncle Mortimer? Hell, maybe even someone before him? All I know is what I’ve been taught. Open the doors, sign them in, hire Cook on Tuesday mornings, and be polite whenever one of them comes out of the silence to speak to me. I don’t see them all the time. Sometimes the only time I see one is when they check in. Other times, I walk into the ballroom and they’re all I see, but they don’t see me.”
    “And you’ve never once wondered if they’re really there?” Wolf probed gently.
    “No, not after I came here.” Tristan shook his head, a fall of gold-and-dun hair bleached out to floss and smoke. “Before, yeah. When I was a kid, I was afraid to fall asleep because there were see-through Chinese prostitutes being herded through my room by a large man with a gun. He would shoot one, maybe two. Every night. And she would die… she would take a long time to die, but I wouldn’t always hear them screaming. Sometimes they just lay on the ground, kicking their feet and twisting around until they turned to smoke. Then the next time, new women… young girls, really. And I would go through it all over again.”
    “Did you tell your parents?” He could only imagine what a rational person would think if their son came to them with a tale of dying ghostly whores.
    “I saw every psychiatrist ever to work in San Francisco.” Tristan sighed. “No school for me. Tutors. Because I couldn’t be trusted not to suddenly ‘see’ something and get crazy. After a while, I just didn’t say anything anymore. Not about the prostitutes. Not about the cowboys riding up Stockton. Not even about the little boy getting thrown into the water by the pier. They thought it all went away. It didn’t. I just shut up about it.”
    “Until Uncle Mortimer.”
    “Yeah, until… Hoxne Grange.” His face grew wistful, and he took another sip at the cooling coffee. “Uncle Mortimer told my parents to leave me here during the summers. The summers became all the holidays. Then one day, I just never went home. The tutors came here, and I could be as crazy as I needed to be without anyone trying to measure me for a wraparound jacket.”
    “They still might,” Wolf murmured and took the nudge to his ribs from Tristan’s elbow with a grin. “Especially since you’re out here looking for fireflies in San Francisco. They don’t glow out here. That only happens east of the Rockies.”
    “What are you talking about?” Tristan frowned at him. “We have glowing fireflies. I’ve been watching them at the Grange since I was a little kid.”
    “I don’t know what you’re watching, but it sure as hell’s not fireflies.”
    “They’re here,” Tristan insisted. “They’re all sparkly, and they hover out there by the waters. We get a few that come in closer, but they’re usually over there. They’re little dots… like yellow-green with some white. Sometimes there’re so many it looks like the stars have fallen down. And when they’re in the fog, they light up the whole bank from underneath. It looks like one of the leong —the long