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The titles say: Part 6 - And Lay Ghost Hands on Everything

"So," Micha says, "Jacob calls Dev and Cam, says we're going on a road trip, starting wherever Alvarez ended up after the incident. Which was Payton, Arizona, some of my old stomping grounds, before the mayor decided to 'solve' the homeless 'crisis' by giving us all a choice of One-Way Bus Ticket to Seattle or Arrest. But hey, I could show the guys the tattoo parlor I used to shoplift from, that's something!"

"We track down the auto garage his family used to run." Devon leans toward the camera. "Closed down during the early stages of the pandemic. Old man sold it and retired, now half of it's a crossfit gym, the other half sells magic cards and funko pops. So we went to talk to his parents. They're pretty suspicious at first, wouldn't let us in. I think they assumed that we were like... INS or CBP, kept insisting that Leo didn't live there anymore, and anyway he was legally a citizen, he had a passport and was registered to vote. Made me feel like a real asshole."

"But," Cameron jumps in, "Micha was able to convince them that he really did used to know Leo in Echo. He mentioned details about living there that they remembered. And then Mrs. Alvarez, at least, was a little more open. Leo really didn't live there anymore. She told us that he'd moved to Colorado."

"All his dad said was that this one mechanic's garage had called him, cause Leo had mentioned Alvarez Auto on a job application."

"But," Devon looks grim, "his mom also hadn't heard from him in a while. He hadn't picked up the phone or returned messages lately, and the christmas card she sent came back with a 'Not At This Address' stamped on it. She was really worried about that last one, said she'd put a San Sebastiane medal in it, and it obviously upset her that he hadn't got that. Made us take it, promise to give it to him if we found him."

"And the tattoo place was closed down too," Micha says. "But at least we had a lead on where to go next."

"Meanwhile, back at the office, the boss is following up with the clients, taking down the accounts of the incident, and seeing if he can contact anyone else involved. Specifically this Chase. Leo's ex. The guy he's apparently still carrying enough of a torch for that he made up a, what'd they call it?" He looks off camera, apparently hears an answer the mic doesn't pic up. "Tulpa. Yeah, that. The clients might not think he's involved in Leo going missing, but, you know. Can't make any assumptions when you're a detective."

"I was also pursuing everything I could find," Jacob looks pleased with the idea of himself as the library-bound mastermind, assigning missions to his agents out in the field while putting together the puzzle pieces they unearth back in his office, "that might offer any insight on, well, anything to do with the case."

"I found three points that, it seems to me, end up mattering."

"First, there's a relatively common theory about how and why paranormal encounters happen. The world can be thought of as two parts, ordinary reality, which we're used to, and non-ordinary reality. What, exactly, non-ordinary reality is depends on who you're reading. For Plato it's the realm of the Forms, the pure ideal versions of things, of which things in the material world are inferior copies. For Jung it's the collective unconscious. For many shamanistic faiths and traditions it's the Spirit World."

"It's these last I want to highlight, because they all hold it to be possible for entities from non-ordinary reality to move into ordinary reality, and for people to move into non-ordinary reality. Think of it like, in folk tales, the drunken swineherd walks unawares counterclockwise around the wood on the fairy mound, winds up in the realm of the fey for what he thinks is one night, but when he comes back twenty years have passed? That's a survival of the kind of beliefs I'm talking about."

"Also according to those beliefs, specific places, under the right circumstances, are held to be bridges between ordinary and non-ordinary reality. Cracks, maybe, is a better word. Places you can slip through the barrier. This is what, according to the theory, entities are doing when we see them on this side."

"That's one theory for why it wasn't just a Hysteria, it was a Black Hole." The more interested in his explanation he gets, the more Cameron gestures. "Ghosts, spirits, paranormal things are all from the Spirit World. So they may not have mass, but they may have something that works like mass. If enough of that is manifesting in the same place, then the theory is that it reaches a sort of critical un-mass, and collapses like a singularity, temporarily dragging the location in our world, in ordinary reality, through the cracks and into non-ordinary reality."

"People couldn't leave Echo because, for that night, and only for them, the world outside Echo didn't exist."

"Or so the theory goes," Devon adds.

"Right." says Cameron.

"That's all easy to say," the fox looks disapproving. "I don't know if it's convincing. When Jacob first presented these... findings, I had some counterpoints, and let's say there was some discussion."

"And yes, you say, psychology, anthropology, the study of how folklore affects the mind and personality, can and does explain a lot of the things this theory explains in other ways. And, of course, they respond, but the one explanation doesn't take precedence, just cause you assume there's no such thing but science."

"And it's an argument I've had, with myself, so many times. One that's never really had an answer, one way or the other."

"The way I look at it," Cameron says, "Is like, ok. I have hallucinations. Always have. I see and hear things that aren't there. I'm also psychic, sometimes the things I see and hear are, in fact, there, it's just nobody else can see or hear them."

"So, obviously the objection is, well, those're all just hallucinations. You can't prove they're not hallucinations, so they must be."

"But that's missing the point, right?" The bear wraps an arm around the coyote's shoulders, Cameron lets Devon pull him into a hug as he continues, "If a hallucination is just, like, the neurons in your brain firing without getting a signal from your eyes, well, that's content being introduced to your mind. And if something can use that to communicate, if something can give you the hallucination it wants you to have, then that's meaningful, despite being still a hallucination. If I can make you hallucinate a sign that says 'hello' how is that different from putting up a real sign that says 'hello?'"

"Just cause it's a hallucination doesn't mean it's not, like, intentional. That'd be like saying that, oh, this so-called writing is just ink on paper, you can't prove it didn't fall into the shape of the letter A by accident, so don't act like you can read it."

"I think it comes down to, in the end," the fox sighs, "What kind of explanation do you need?"

"I need an explanation that makes all the things I used to see be something in my mind, because then it's ultimately all just me, and I can learn to control me. I need an explanation that makes the things that were done to me be choices and behaviors, and yes, illnesses, by the people who did them, because then I can hold them responsible."

"But other people need other explanations. Ones, maybe, that hold out hope for things which didn't work out in one world could still work out in another one. Do I want that for me? No. But is it any of my business if they do? Also no."

"The second point," either Jacob had nothing to say about that discussion or what he did have to say wasn't edited in. "There's a fascinating common thread in the content of many of the visions or hallucinations or encounters during the incident: that they seem to refer to events that didn't happen, but easily could have, as if they did happen. They didn't happen but were possible enough that it can still be inferred what non-events are being referred to."

"Phone calls insisting that a young man who left town years ago wants to say hello to his mother before she leaves for work: as if from an alternate timeline where he still lives here. Visions of people who died as children looking as they would if they'd grown up normally. Immersive illusions both of a life in one place and career, but also in a completely different one at the same time. Ghosts of people who aren't dead. Entities seemingly amalgamated from all the different possible versions of a person's life experience."

"Speculative quantum mechanics, maybe, touches a little on this kind of model of what an extratemporal perspective might look like. Usually when we conceive of being outside time, that time is still along a one dimensional line. But this is being outside time with time as a three-dimensional structure, able to see not only the past and future but also alternate presents, alternate pasts, as if they're all parts of the same entity." Jacob leans back in his chair, a little staggered. "I don't even know where to begin speculating what experiencing that might be like. What it would do to the mind."

"The third point is the suspiciously high correlation between significant quartz deposits in the ground and paranormal experiences. The classic example of course is the mountains of eastern Kentucky and West Virginia: the site of UFO sightings, the Hopkinsville Goblins, Mothface. Whatever those actually were--and if there's anything I absolutely don't believe in at all, it's aliens--the fact is that the incidents all occurred atop a single mass of quartz larger than the state of New Jersey."

"Roswell, New Mexico? Located in the middle of a famous source of decorative natural quartz crystal."

"The Lake Ouachita howling? A lakebed covered with quartz."

"All the weird things that get reported from rural Brazil? Supplies the majority of the world's gem-quality Amethyst."

"And Echo Arizona is built atop a massive deposit of the stuff as well. That's what the mine was digging into."

"It was long theorized that the electromagnetic properties of quartz were affecting people's minds, making them more likely to see these things, but to date no study has ever been able to find that prolonged exposure to quartz has any kind of mental effect. So, if quartz isn't affecting people's minds, what is it doing? What is it affecting? Why the correlation?"

"The three of us head to Leo's last known address, in a small city called Shadwell, in Colorado." Micha explains. "It's in the like, orbit, of Denver."

"We couldn't find the address at all. We'll be coming back to that."

"The other lead, the garage that he'd applied to work at, was harder to locate. All we had was a name, no address. But you can get a lot of info out of people if you look like a lost punk who just needs his beat up garbage heap of a car fixed, and not a cop. I ask around a bit and get pointed the right direction."

"Leo didn't work there anymore," Cameron frowns. "Probably for the best, I don't have to be psychic to know a front for running drugs when I see one."

"Lucky Micha still looks like the kinda person who'd have business talking to a front for running drugs," says Devon.

"And not a cop," Cameron finishes.

"I just have to drop the, 'Look, his Mom is real worried that she hasn't heard from him in a while. Nobody wants any cops involved, I just need to be able to tell her that he's ok so I can get paid, alright?'" Micha smirks a little, "And let them make enough assumptions to fill in the blanks. So they tell me he left to work at the city bus garage."

"Folks at the municipal garage are a lot more willing to talk." Devon says. "We can actually be fully honest about what we're looking for!"

"According to the people who met him there, he was a hard worker, and a really good mechanic, but he didn't socialize. Didn't hang out. Still had the 'immediately come out' instinct that used to get him in trouble in high school, but if anyone tried to get supportive or friendly or suggest any kind of dating or anything, he would flatly turn them down. He never said why. That was, they said, one of the reasons they still remembered him."

Devon's shoulders slump. "And this is where I'm bracing myself for the 'and one day he just didn't show up for work and we have no idea what happened to him,' right? Nope. He quit. Two weeks notice, trained his replacement, took his last paycheck, and just walked out roughly a year and a half ago. Didn't give any reason."

"I don't notice why that matters, at the time, but I see Micha's ears go all the way up at that."

"If he quit when he vanished, instead of just no-showing," Micha explains, "It means he didn't vanish cause something happened to him, it means he vanished cause he did something."

"So I call Jacob to compare notes, that night in the motel."

"I haven't had much luck turning up any new leads. Still haven't heard back from the mythical ex-boyfriend," Jacob says, "but I am able, at least, to explain why the address his parents gave--which we'd double checked with the bus garage and confirmed--didn't seem to exist. The apartment complex was condemned, empty, and due to be demolished to make way for new development."

"I'm not proud of working with the police, but when I have to, I know how to phrase things. I tell Micha I'll call back, then I get in touch with the cold case department of the Shadwell PD."

"Let me tell you," Micha shakes his head, "there's something about an abandoned apartment complex that just felt exactly like Echo. Leo must've felt right at home."

"The detective we were with said she couldn't come on the property or look at anything we find, or it might count as opening a case on this, and she didn't want that. But she was there in case anyone tried to call her on us for trespassing. That doesn't sound super legal to me, but I guess when you're the police you don't much care."

"I brought a crowbar and bolt cutters, but I don't turn out to need them. The door isn't locked."

"The apartment's a shitty one room studio." Devon explains "In the kinda bad shape you expect to see in like... documentaries about speciest city planners trying to kill affordable housing in the eighties with underfunding. No wonder it's condemned. Me and Micha search the place while Cam gets a feel for it."

"Only trace of furniture's a collapsed mattress on the floor. Judging from the way it's faded, he had a sleeping bag on it and that's it. Only window in the unit right above it. No blinds, nothing outside but weeds, dead bushes, and collapsed chain link fence."

"There's a laundry hamper of not many clothes in the closet. No hangers. There's like... one set of dishes in the cupboard. Nothing in the bathroom but a beat up scale: water and power are both shut off, of course, but he left it clean. No food, but there's some plastic wrappers of like, bulk packages of food, the kind you buy like an entire flat of sixty at Ham Panther, and they all come shrink wrapped to a cardboard tray? Instant noodles, instant mashed potatoes, instant oatmeal, canned chili. Anything dirt cheap that doesn't take more than a microwave to make."

"There was a pile of mail and papers in one corner. Mostly unopened junkmail, but also unpaid bills. Also all his paystubs were in there. Which, I guess means he either wasn't planning on needing to file taxes, or was too depressed to care. Only thing of note I found in there was a library receipt. Books on geology, mineralogy, gems and the like. Didn't find the books."

"He must've returned the books. Which, again, means wherever he went, he was planning to go." Micha says darkly. "Not a good sign, in my experience."

"The weird shit was in one of the bottom kitchen cupboards. There was a big plastic storage bin, the kind you keep your stuff in to make sure water or bugs can't get in, and it was full of chunks of crystals. Not decorative ones, just chunky and bulky. Some of them still had price stickers stuck to them."

"Stuck in one side of the bin is a spiral notebook. I'm just about to start looking through it when Cam speaks up."

"I'd just been trying to be quiet and open, to the point I can hear anything that might be there." Cameron says matter of factly. "Don't let anything hold your attention, just try to be equally aware of everything that's around you, all at once, and understand what it's like to be there. If something's gonna make contact, that's usually when."

"Nothing does, this time. I just find my attention keeps catching on the same patch of wall. It's where the TV would be, if there was a TV, which judging from how bare the place was I doubt."

"When I take a closer look, there's some kinda shape. The first thing it reminds me of is like one of those starburst sound effects bubbles in comics, when a superhero would punch someone and it would say 'pow' or something. But it's more irregular than that."

"It's subtle, just a shape on the wall that's slightly darker. Kinda like the color a room gets when somebody's been smoking in there for years. I can't see any paint, and I don't want to touch it if I can help it. But when I step closer for a closer look, something hard rolls under my foot."

"I look down, and there's this chunk of rock. It almost looks like black glass, broken glass. There's bits of it all over the carpet."

"A brief oh shit moment where I think I've cut my paw, but I'm fine. That's when I call the others over."

"Cam's got a tone of voice," Devon says, "that he only uses when he's about to ask me whether I can see something he's looking at."

"I do not!" The camera pulls out, to put the coyote next to the bear in shot as well.

"You do. I oughta know by now!" Cameron scoffs, rolls his eyes, and lets the grinning bear continue. "So I'm expecting something a little off when I turn around. But I see it too. There's like a dark, like, splash mark, sorta, on the wall, and then all these little shards of black rock."

"My first instinct is that something hit the wall and broke? Maybe the shards are from some dish he threw? And maybe the stain is something that splashed on the wall? But there's no stain on the carpet. And the more I look at it, the more I think about glass breaking, the less the shape on the wall looks like a splash and the more it looks like broken glass, like the pattern a window breaks in when you hit it with a rock."

"I put on gloves, pick up a few of the shards in sample jars. And then we take a picture of the wall." The camera dutifully shows it. "Then Micha grabs the journal and we get out of there before that cop changes her mind."