Ghost Story (36 page)

It was something subliminal, sending out a kind of beckoning energy that I wouldn't have noticed had I not been specifically looking for something like it. It would otherwise have been buried in the background energy of the city and its inhabitants. I stretched out a hand to touch the stream of energy flowing steadily outward. It oozed over the surface of my skin, a crawling sensation that made me shudder.

It's smarter not to play around with unfamiliar magic. Besides, I had other things to do. I lowered my hand and stepped toward the source of the music I'd begun hearing in my head at some point. There was little sense wasting more time up on the surface. And I hadn't heard that song in forever, but I could still sing along. I started humming and—

—and stopped myself with my nose about half an inch from the steel door.

I broke out into a cold sweat.

Hell's bells. That magic hadn't been heavy-duty, but it had been puissant. A few seconds after touching it, I had almost walked blindly and mindlessly through the door and into whatever reception was prepared for intruders on the other side. I couldn't know exactly what was over there without getting a look, but it sure as hell wasn't a gift basket and a bottle of wine.

I stepped back from the door and the siren spell with what I felt was a properly Darwinian appreciation of the danger it represented. Oh, it might not blow you up like the defensive wards I'd had on my apartment, but a scalpel can open up your arteries just as readily as a sword. In some cases, more so. I shivered and clutched my arms to my belly.

That spell wasn't the work of a novice or marauding sorcerer experimenting with magic he'd found in the metaphysical section of a bookstore. Whoever had put that thing together had been a true professional, one with centuries of experience.

One who was probably more capable than I when it came to magic.

Don't get me wrong: I'm hoss. When the spells start flying, mine are some of the flashiest, most violent on the planet. I'm like the Andre the Giant of the supernatural world. I've got a lot of power and mass to throw around.

Andre would be a great person to have on your side in a brawl against a rowdy tavern crowd. But in a more focused situation, he would be at the mercy of professionals who, while lacking his raw power, could nonetheless apply their own strength more efficiently and effectively. Murphy was an excellent example of that kind of fighter. She wasn't much bigger than a bread box, but I'd seen her toss around guys weighing most of three hundred pounds like they were unruly puppies.

If the Grey Ghost was responsible for that spell, then I was lucky to have survived our first meeting. The smart move would be to scamper. If it came to a fair fight, I might find myself completely outclassed.

I felt a shivering, cold presence on the back of my neck, and turned to find wraiths nearby. They drifted toward the hideout from all directions, coming in a slow, steady procession and moving in perfectly straight lines. The siren spell made sense to me now. It wasn't a guard spell, though it could certainly have that purpose. It was also a beacon, a dinner bell being rung to signal the mindless horde now approaching.

They never sped up, never slowed. They just kept floating forward until they began to pass through the closed steel door in groups of two and three as they converged upon it.

I pursed my lips, thinking. The Grey Ghost wasn't killing wraiths. It was using them. For the moment, at least, there wouldn't be any kind of guard spell on the other side of the door. There couldn't be, or the Grey Ghost would be slaughtering its own troops and wasting its own investment of time and energy to boot.

I might have an opportunity here. The inbound wraiths would almost certainly be routed by what amounted to a cattle chute. That route would most likely be clear of supernatural booby traps. It might be possible to gain entry, find a vulnerable point along the chute, and then duck out of it to run a quick reconnaissance of the Grey Ghost's headquarters and find Mort.

It took half an hour for the procession to be complete, and the flow of wraith traffic never let up. I stopped counting them at 450 and swallowed. That wasn't a herd of wraiths. That was a bloody
horde
. If one of the wraiths decided it wanted to eat me, it would have to perform a miracle to divide me into enough pieces to feed all of its dinner company.

My veil seemed to have prevented me from being noticed as they approached, but that could just as easily be the effect of the beacon spell. For all I knew, once the beacon shut off, they'd all turn around and come at me like greyhounds leaving the gate. It would require a singularly stupid man to go hang around in narrow tunnels and cramped spaces alongside a threat like
that
.

“And I, Harry Dresden, am that man,” I stated.

I waited for the last wraith to go in and counted to twenty. My mouth felt dry. Fear boiled in my belly and made my knees feel unsteady. My fingers trembled.

I told them all that they were just preconceived residual memories anyway and that I would tolerate no guff from them.

Then I ground my teeth and followed the horde.

I
slipped through the steel door and into the blackness on the other side. I ignored the darkness until it went away, and then began to move stealthily forward.

I stopped with the Scooby-Doo action a couple of feet later and just started walking. I mean, honestly, sneaking. It wasn't as though I could step on a twig or accidentally kick an old can and make a sound, right? Being a ghost, the problem wasn't being sneaky—it was getting noticed in the first place.

Besides. Nobody who was concerned about detecting my presence would be using their ears to sense me coming.

I began extending my wizard's senses out in front of me.

When I say
wizard senses
, I mean it in a similar fashion to
spider sense
. Spidey's enhanced senses detect when he's in danger and warn him that he's got incoming. A wizard's senses don't do that (though I suppose with enough work, someone could come close). What they do sense is the presence of magic, in both its natural state and its worked forms. You don't have to be concentrating to make it happen—it's natural in every practitioner.

The theory I've heard espoused most often is that the ability to sense such energies makes it possible for a regular person to become a wizard, providing the kind of sensory feedback he needs to gradually work with more and more energy. So while a regular person who lacked the sense could, technically, learn how to use magic without it, it would be a process as difficult as someone who was born blind teaching himself to paint.

I focused on that sense in me, partially blocking out my less important, physical senses to give greater attention to the presence of magic in my surroundings. It was pretty thick in here. The door led to a concrete stairway going down into the earth, and each step bore lit candles and thickly painted magical symbols. The latent energy in the paint was almost devoid of arcane power, barely detectable, but it was there and I saw it as faint phosphorescence. The energy of the beacon spell was still going strong. Somewhere in my head I had evidently decided to interpret it as a sound, because I could hear its slow throb like a bass beat on a big woofer.

I went down the stairs, my senses attuned to the ground at my feet. What looked like one more bit of barely magical scribbling could be concealing something far more potent and dangerous—but it didn't. I went down two flights of stairs unmolested.

The bottom of the stairway opened onto a rectangular room that had once been some sort of electrical junction. It obviously wasn't in service anymore. Large steel boxes and glass-faced readouts were spotted with rust and dust. There was more of the occult writing down here—all of it disjointed and fantastically disconnected, as if someone had composed a poem in a foreign language by randomly stringing together words from a dictionary.

It all bore the same trace amounts of magical energy as the writing on the stairs. The Big Hoods evidently had a certain amount of latent talent, which seemed to fit together with the idea of the Grey Ghost recruiting some mortal flunkies to assist it in . . .

. . . In whatever the hell he or she was trying to do.

What
was
he or she trying to do?

I mean, I knew the Grey Ghost had attacked Mort's place. But why? Why take Mort to begin with? Granted, the little ectomancer could probably be a pain in the ass to any ghost who got too ambitious in Chicago, but the Grey Ghost's ambitions seemed to have been limited to gunning for Morty. What could he possibly have to offer as a target?

At the far end of the junction room, there was a gaping, ragged hole in the wall that looked like it had been made with sledgehammers. It opened onto a rough tunnel beyond—the beginnings of Undertown proper.

A man's anguished scream came from the opening.

I nearly burst into a sprint but stopped myself. Unthinking sprints were a good way to get killed. Re-killed. Instead, I moved forward into the rough-hewn corridor. It was cold and damp, and slime and mold were everywhere. I unimagined the strong, musty smell that would otherwise have filled my nose and paced forward, watching for traps and working hard not to move my feet in time with the bass-drum rhythm of the beacon spell.

I passed a number of alcoves that joined the corridor. They were individual quarters for the Big Hoods, apparently. Each contained a mattress or an air mattress and something resembling bedding, only covered with mildew and mold. Each had a box or a couple of bags, containing what I presumed to be personal belongings. More arcane gibberish covered the walls, along with slogans such as THE LIZARD FOLK ARE ALREADY HERE! WATCH FOR THEIR EYES! A couple of them looked occupied, with large, bulky forms snoring under the disgusting blankets.

A minute or two later, the passage opened up into a torch-lit room about the size of a hockey rink. The entrance was high up on one wall, so that my head was level with the larger room's ceiling. There were stairs cut into the wall beneath my feet, so that I could walk down them into the large room—which I didn't, as it was packed full of bad guys. I swallowed and made sure my veil was still running strong.

The bass beat of the beacon hammered loudly here, coming from a pit that had been cut into the floor. It must have been at least ten feet across, and I couldn't tell how deep it was. It was surrounded by written formulae that were far less nonsensical than the others, and they sent out flashes of dim red light in time with each pulse of the beacon.

The pit was full of wraiths.

They swirled round and round in steady, mindless motion, each of them overlapping with dozens of others, so that it looked less like a group of beings moving in a circle than some bizarre stew with the occasional recognizable portion of human anatomy appearing above the mix. The hollow not-scream of the empty-eyed wraiths was a huge and hideous sound, one that surged in time with the beacon.

Maybe two dozen lemurs were scattered around the room. They'd lowered their hoods, and without their faceless menace to back them up, they just looked like people. Some were standing. Some were sitting. Another group was playing cards. Still others just stared at nothing, bemused.

A group of Big Hoods was gathered around the pit, all but two of them on their knees and chanting. They bowed at regular intervals and clapped their hands together at others. A gallows that looked like it had been constructed out of a driveway basketball goal hung over the pit, with a pair of Big Hoods holding one end of the rope.

Morty dangled from the other end, trussed up from his hips to his neck. He was swinging back and forth on the end of the line and slowly spinning. Gasps and broken sobbing sounds came from him.

Standing in empty air directly before him, moving as he did, was the Grey Ghost. The figure looked at least as menacing as it had the first time around. When it spoke, its voice was liquid, calm—and feminine.

“You need not do this to yourself, Mortimer,” the Grey Ghost said. “I take no pleasure in inflicting pain. Yield. You will do it in the end. Save yourself the agony.”

Mort opened his eyes. He licked his lips and said in a cracked, thick voice, “G-g-go fuck yourself.”

The Grey Ghost murmured, “Tsk.” Then nodded and said, “Again.”

“N-no,” Morty choked out, beginning to twist against his bonds. He accomplished nothing other than to start spinning more rapidly. “No!”

The two Big Hoods holding the rope calmly lowered Mort down into the swirling pit of insanely hungry wraiths. They collapsed in on Morty, as if the surf could choose where it wished to crash—and it all wished to crash on the little ectomancer. The cauldron of mad ghosts boiled and congealed onto him, all but hiding him from sight.

Mort began to scream again, a horrible, humiliated sound.

“One,” counted the Grey Ghost. “Two. Three. Four.”

At the last number, the flunkies hauled him up out of the pool of wraiths, and Morty hung there, swinging back and forth and sobbing again, gasping for breath.

“Each time you refuse me, Mortimer, I will add another second to the count,” said the Grey Ghost. “I know what you're thinking. How many seconds will it take to drive you mad?”

Mort tried to regain control of his breathing, but it was a futile effort. Tears marked his face. His nose had begun to run. He opened his eyes, his jaw clenched, his bald pate scarlet, and said, his voice cracking, “Go watch the sunrise.”

“Again,” said the Grey Ghost.

The Big Hoods lowered Morty into the pit once more. I didn't know what happened to a living mortal attacked by a wraith, but if Morty's reaction was any indicator, it wasn't good. Again he screamed. It was higher pitched than a moment before, more raw. The screams all but drowned out the calm, monotonous count of the Grey Ghost. She went to five, and then the Big Hoods hauled him up again. He twitched in spasmodic motion, as if he'd developed a simultaneous charley horse in every muscle and sinew. It took his screams at least ten seconds to die away.