Ghost Story (5 page)

“Naturally,” he said. His expression filled with a gentle, distant sorrow. “A strong one. I'll make it into another bullet at some point.”

“Thank you,” I said. “For helping me.”

“I must admit, I did not put the poor brute down exclusively for your sake, wizard. You represent a feast for any wraith. Fresh from the world of the living, still with a touch of vitality upon you, and full to bursting with fresh, unfaded memories. The wraith that ate you would become powerful—a dire, fell creature indeed. One that could threaten the world of the living as easily as it could the world of spirit. I won't have that.”

“Oh,” I said. “Thanks anyway.”

Stu nodded and offered me his hand. I took it, rose, and said, “I need to talk to Mort.”

Even as I spoke, I saw two more wraiths appear from the darkness. I checked behind me and saw more coming, drifting with effortless motions and deceptive speed.

“If you get me inside Mort's threshold, I'll be safe from them,” I said, nodding to the wraiths. “I don't know how to defend myself against them. They'll kill me. And if that happens, you'll have that monster wraith on your hands.”

“Not if I kill you first,” Stu said calmly, tapping a finger on the handle of his pistol.

I turned my head slightly to one side, eyeing him, studying his face. “Nah,” I said. “Won't happen.”

“How would you know, spook?” he asked in a flat voice. But he couldn't keep the smile out of his eyes.

“I'm a wizard,” I said, infusing my voice with portentous undertones. “We have our ways.”

He remained silent, expression stern, but his eyes danced.

I sobered. “And those wraiths are getting closer, man.”

Stu snorted and said, “The wraiths are always getting closer.” Then he drew his pistol and pointed it at my chest. “I hereby take you prisoner, late wizard. Keep your hands in plain sight, follow all my verbal instructions, and we'll do splendidly.”

I showed him my hands. “Oh. Uh. Okay.”

Stu nodded sharply. “About face, then. Let's go talk to the little bald man.”

I
followed Stu through the front door (dammit, tingle, ouch), and paused on the other side to consider that fact for a moment. Only a member of the household's family could issue an invitation that would let an immaterial entity past the home's threshold.

So. Sir Stuart was practically family around Mort's place. Unless he was literal family. Hauntings, after all, have historically been known to remain with a specific family lineage. Could Stu be one of Mort's ancestors, here to watch out for his familial posterity? Or had the little ectomancer always possessed an odd sort of family, one I had never known about?

Interesting. It would be wise to keep my eyes open.

The house looked much different. What had been a cheesily staged séance room had become a living room with a sofa, love seat, and comfortable chairs. I'd seen only part of the rest of the house, but as I walked with Sir Stuart, I could see that the dismal little den of a house had been renovated, redecorated, and otherwise made more beautiful. Stu guided me to a room that was part library, part office, with a fire crackling in the fireplace.

Mortimer Lindquist seemed to have finally given in to the inevitable. I'd seen him with a bad toupee, and with an even worse comb-over, but this was the first time I'd seen him sporting a full-on Charles Xavier. The unbroken shine of his pate looked a lot better than the partial coverage. He'd lost weight, too, since last I'd seen him. I mean, he wasn't going to be modeling for Abercrombie & Fitch or anything, but he'd definitely dropped from self-destructively obese down to merely stout. He was in his early fifties, under five and a half feet tall, and dressed in black slacks and a grey silk shirt, and he wore little square-rimmed spectacles.

He sat at his table, a deck of playing cards spread out in front of him in what could be either a fortune-telling through the cards or a game of solitaire—they tended to have about the same amount of significance, in my experience.

“Did I hear a shot, Sir Stuart?” Mort asked absently, staring intently at the cards. Then his hands froze in the act of dealing another, and he shot to his feet, whirling to face me. “Oh,
perfect
.”

“Hiya, Morty,” I said.

“This is not happening,” Mort said, promptly getting up from the table and walking quickly toward another room. “This just can't be happening. No one is
this
unlucky.”

I hurried forward, trying to keep up, and followed him into a hallway. “I need to talk to—”

“I don't
care
,” Mort said, his arms crossing each other in a slashing, pushing-away gesture, never stopping. “I do
not
see you. I am
not
listening to you, Dresden. It's not enough that you have to keep dragging me into things in life. So now your stupid ghost shows up to do it, too? No. Whatever it is, no.”

We entered a kitchen, where I found Sir Stuart already present, his arms folded, leaning back against a wall with a quiet smile as he watched. Mort went to a large cookie jar, opened it, and took out a single Oreo before replacing the lid.

“Morty, come on, it's never been like that,” I said. “I've come to ask your help a couple of times because you're a capable professional and—”

“Bullshit,” Mort snapped, spinning to face me, his eyes flashing. “Dresden came to me when he was so desperate he might as well try any old loser.”

I winced. His summation of our relationship was partially true. But not entirely. “Morty, please.”

“Morty,
what
?” he snapped back. “You've got to be kidding me. I am
not
getting involved in whatever international crisis you mean to perpetrate next.”

“It's not like I've got a lot of choice in the matter, man. It's you or no one. Please. Just hear me out.”

He barked out an incredulous little laugh. “No, you hear
me
out, shade.
No
means ‘no.' It isn't happening. It isn't ever going to happen. I said
no
!” And then he slammed the door to the next room in my face.

“Dammit, Morty,” I snarled, and braced myself for the plunge through his door after him.

“Dresden, st—!” Sir Stuart said.

Too late. I slammed my nose and face into the door and fell backward onto my ass like a perfect idiot. My face began to throb immediately, swelling with pain that felt precisely normal, identical to that of any dummy who walked into a solid oak door.

“—op,” Sir Stuart finished. He sighed, and offered me a hand up. I took it and he hauled me to my feet. “Ghost dust mixed into the paint inside the room,” he explained. “No spirit can pass through it.”

“I'm familiar with it,” I muttered, and felt annoyed that I hadn't thought of the idea before, as an additional protection against hostile spirits at my own apartment. To the beings of the immaterial, ghost dust was incontrovertible solidity. Thrown directly at a ghost, it would cause tremendous pain and paralyze it for a little while, as if the spook had been suddenly loaded down with an incredible and unexpected weight. If I'd put it all over my walls, it would have turned them into a solid obstacle to ghosts and their ilk, shutting them out with obdurate immobility.

Of course, my recipe had used depleted uranium dust, which would have made it just a tad silly to spread around the interior of my apartment.

Not that it mattered. My apartment was gone, taken when a Molotov cocktail, hurled by a vampire assassin, had burned the boardinghouse to the ground along with most of my worldly possessions. Only a few had been left, hidden away. God knew where they were now.

I suppose I couldn't really count that as a loss, all things considered. Material possessions aren't much use to a dead man.

I lifted a hand to my nose, wincing and expecting to find it rebroken. No such thing had happened, though a glob of some kind of runny, transparent, gelatinous liquid smeared the back of my hand. “Hell's bells. I'm bleeding ectoplasm?”

That drew a smile from the late marine. “Ghosts generally do. You'll have to forgive him, Dresden. He can be very slow to understand things at times.”

“I don't have time to wait for him to catch on,” I said. “I need his help.”

Sir Stuart grinned some more. “You aren't going to get it by standing there repeating yourself like a broken record. Repeating yourself like a broken record. Repeating yourself like a broken—”

“Ha-ha,” I said without enthusiasm. “People who cared about me are going to get hurt if I can't act.”

Sir Stuart pursed his lips. “It seems to me that if your demise was to leave someone vulnerable, something would have happened to them already. It's been six months, after all.”

I felt my jaw drop open. “W-what? Six
months
?”

The ghost nodded. “Today is the ninth of May, to be precise.”

I stared at him, flabbergasted. Then I turned, put my back against Morty's impenetrable door, and used it to stay upright as I sank to the ground. “Six
months
?”

“Yes.”

“That's not . . .” I knew I was just gabbling my stream of thought, but I couldn't seem to stop myself from talking. “That's not right. It can't be right. I was
dead
for less than a freaking
hour
. What kind of Rip van Winkle bullshit is
this
?”

Sir Stuart watched me, his expression serious and untroubled. “Time has little meaning to us now, Dresden, and it's very easy to become unattached to it. I once lost five years listening to a Pink Floyd album.”

“There is
snow
a foot and a half
deep
on the
ground
,” I said, pointing in a random direction. “In
May
?”

His voice turned dry. “The television station Mortimer watches theorizes that it is due to person-made, global climate change.”

I was going to say something insulting, maybe even offensive, but just then the rippling sound of metallic wind chimes tinkled through the air. They were joined seconds later by more and more of the same, until the noise was considerable.

“What's that?” I asked.

Sir Stuart turned and walked back the way we'd come, and I hurried to follow. In the next room over, a dozen sets of wind chimes hung from the ceiling. All of them were astir, whispering and singing even though there was no air moving through the room.

Sir Stuart's hand went to his ax, and I suddenly understood what I was looking at.

It was an alarm system.

“What's happening?” I asked him.

“Another assault,” he said. “We have less than thirty seconds. Come with me.”

“To
arms!” bellowed Sir Stuart. “They're coming at us again, lads!”

The ringing of the alarm chimes doubled as figures immediately exploded from the very walls and floor of the ectomancer's house, appearing as suddenly as . . . well,
as ghosts
. Duh.

One second, the only figures in sight were me and Sir Stuart. The next, we were striding at the head of a veritable armed mob. The figures didn't have the same kind of sharp-edged reality that Sir Stuart did. They were wispier, foggier. Though I could see Sir Stuart with simple clarity, viewing the others was like watching someone walk by on the opposite side of the street during a particularly heavy rain.

There was no specific theme to the spirits defending Mort's house. The appearance of each was eclectic, to such an extent that they looked like the assembled costumed staff from some kind of museum of American history.

Soldiers in the multicolored uniforms of regulars from the Revolutionary War walked beside buckskin-clad woodsmen, trappers, and Native Americans from the wars preceding the revolution. Farmers from the Civil War era stood with shopkeepers from the turn of the twentieth century. Men in suits, some armed with shotguns, others with tommy guns, moved toward the attack, the bitter divisions of the era of Prohibition apparently forgotten. Doughboys marched with a squad of buffalo soldiers, followed by half a dozen genuine, six-gun-toting cowboys in long canvas coats, and a group of grunts whose uniforms placed them as Vietnam-era U.S. Army infantry.

“Huh,” I said. “Now, there's something you don't see every day.”

Sir Stuart drew his gun from his belt as he strode forward, checking the old weapon. “I've seen a great many years in this city. Many, many nights. Until recently, I would have agreed with you.”

I looked back at Sir Stuart's little army as we reached the front door and passed through it.

“I—glah, dammit, that feels strange—guess that means you're seeing a pattern.”

“This is the fifth night running that they've come at us,” Sir Stuart replied, as we went out onto the porch. “Stay behind me, Dresden. And well clear of my ax arm.”

He came to a halt a step later, and I stood behind him a bit and on his left side. Sir Stuart, who had been a giant for his day, was only a couple of inches shorter than me. I had to strain to see over him.

The street was crowded with silent figures.

I just stared out at them for a moment, struggling to understand what I was looking at. Out on the road were scores, maybe even a couple of hundred wraiths like the one Sir Stuart had dispatched earlier. They were flabby, somehow hollow and squishy-looking, like balloons that hadn't been filled with enough gas—sad, frightening humanoid figures, their eyes and mouths gaping too large, too dark, and too empty to seem real. But instead of advancing toward us, they simply stood there in even ranks, leaning forward slightly, their arms held vaguely upward as if yearning toward the house, though their hands seemed limp and devoid of strength, their fingers trailing into shapeless shreds. The horrible sound of hundreds of nearly silent moans of pain emanated from the block of wraiths, along with a slowly building edge of tension.