The Nimble Man (A Novel of the Menagerie) (19 page)

The strength of the maelstrom increased, and for every inch
of progress he made toward Ceridwen, he felt himself pulled back by three. The
two sentries that had escorted him earlier cowered nearby, holding onto one
another for dear life. One had managed to grab hold of an ancient vine beneath
a cover of loose dirt and leaves, and was using it to secure them against the
inexorable pull.

It had happened so quickly. They had decided to return to
his townhouse in the world of Blight, and had used the magick of the ancients
to open the door. He had not even considered the possibility that a threat
might be present, not even taken basic precautions.
Arrogant fool! Bloody
amateur
, he fumed, even as the screaming void dragged him closer.
Walked
right into that one like some novice
.

The sentries cried out in fear and Conan Doyle lifted his
gaze to see them sail above his head, still clinging to one another, broken
vine trailing behind them like the tail of a kite, as they were consumed by the
hungry whirlpool. Spells and incantations flooded Conan Doyle's mind, but he
could not concentrate long enough to cast one. Then, as if some powerful beast
had grabbed hold of him, he was violently torn from his purchase upon the
ground, and he knew that his time was up.

He thought he heard the voice of Sanguedolce mocking him for
his arrogance, but realized that it wasn't the voice of the arch mage that he
heard at all, but that of his former lover.

"Is being sucked into the abyss part of your plan, good
sir?" Ceridwen called to him over the din that filled the wood.

A tether of magickal force engulfed his body, suspending him
in the air before the hungry void. His body crackled with an icy blue corona of
supernatural energy.

"If it be so, I question the soundness of your
judgment," the Fey sorceress yelled, as she emerged from her place of
safety behind the great tree, her staff extended. She had changed clothes for
traveling to the human world and now wore a hooded blue-green cloak and
hand-woven trousers the color of sand. In the swirl of the vortex, her cloak
fluttered and the effect created in her attire the illusion of the ocean
crashing on the shore. The sphere of power at the staff's end glowed once more,
ice and flame combined by Faerie magic into a cold blue fire, providing him his
lifeline. She fought the pull of the trap, struggling to keep her footing.

The maelstrom increased its pull upon the forest, and he
listened to the creaking moans of the trees as their tenacity was tested. Ceridwen
fell to her knees, sliding across the forest floor, but still she held her
elemental staff high, maintaining her concentration and preventing him from
being drawn into the spiraling hole.

Conan Doyle cleared his head and found the invocation that
would suit his needs. He spun around to face the insatiable gyre and uttered a
string of powerful words. The mage extended his arms and felt the might of the
ancients flow through him. The countering magick streamed from the tips of his
fingers, and his spell began to knit closed the rip that had been torn in time
and space.

The portal to chaos fought him, screaming and howling, but
his magick was stronger. Sensing imminent victory, he roared the last of the
incantation. The swirling maelstrom imploded with a thunderous clap of sound
that knocked him and Ceridwen through the air, back across the ravaged
clearing.

An eerie stillness came over the forest and Conan Doyle
slowly rose, checking for breaks and injuries. He glanced up to find Ceridwen
standing where the vortex had been, passing her staff through the air,
verifying that the rift had indeed been closed completely.

"I'm fine," he said.

She turned and narrowed her gaze, looking at him coldly. "Plead
your pardon?" she asked, confused.

"I said I'm fine." Conan Doyle brushed dirt and
debris from his clothing. "Just in case you were concerned with my
well-being." He knew he was being curt, but at the moment, her total
disregard for his welfare was maddening.

"I see," she said, expressionless. Emotionless. She
turned her attentions back to the spot where the maelstrom had been. "All
trace of the entryway to your home, to your world, is gone. The last of the
known gateways between Faerie and the world of Blight is no more."

Conan Doyle felt a tremor of something akin to fear in his
heart. If Morrigan had been inside his home, the situation in his world had
become most dire indeed.

"We shall have to build a new one," he said. The
process was time-consuming, but there was simply no choice. "We'll return
to the kingdom immediately and —"

"No," Ceridwen interrupted. "There is no time
for that."

Conan Doyle glared at her. "What else do you suggest? If
that was the last entryway, then we have to conjure another."

Ceridwen turned her back to him and began to walk away. "It
was the last of the
known
entrances," she said, striding deeper
into the dark wood.

"But I know of another."

Graves needed perspective.

Insubstantial, he nevertheless felt some resistance as he
floated high above the city of Boston. The unnatural darkness caught at his
ectoplasmic form with a million tiny claws, and the red fog seemed to slow him.
From high above he tried to peer through the mist and he knew he had to get closer
to the ground.

It took a moment for him to make sense of the city's
topography, only the shapes of the buildings visible to him from this height. He
had fled from Conan Doyle's Beacon Hill home, but not gone very far. As he
descended he could make out Boston Common below and, turning, he saw the
Massachusetts State House, a grand old building capped by a massive golden
dome; the beacon of Beacon Hill. Graves chose that as his destination.

In a handful of seconds, no time at all for the dead, he
alighted upon the State House's golden dome and steadied himself. All of that
was illusion, of course, solidity imagined into reality by his own desire, but
it was comforting to him to hold onto the tangibility of the world that had
been lost to him for more than half a century. Others could not feel his
presence, but he could touch them.

Leonard Graves could still feel.

Atop the golden dome he paused to collect his thoughts and
he gazed at the city that spread out from the base of Beacon Hill. In the
decades since his death he had been witness to three other uprisings of the
dead, none of them on a scale even close to this one. Dr. Graves was an
analytical man. His mind had made the connections between Morrigan, the strange
red mist, and the resurrected dead immediately.

Now, as he peered through nightmare of darkness and bloody
fog, he could see a number of forms shambling across Boston Common and others
on Tremont Street. Though it was impossible to know for sure in the fog and the
dark, logic dictated that they must be the dead. No sane, living human being
would be out on the streets now.

The dead were walking south.

Graves frowned, wondering why, and then he pushed the
question aside. He was not going to have an answer quickly, and there were
other priorities. He had to locate Conan Doyle and the others. Eve and Clay had
been sent off on some errand or another, but he did not know to where. That was
his only lead.

Another question lingered in his mind.

Why not me?

The spirits of the dead were being drawn back into their
bodies, but Dr. Graves was a specter himself. A ghost. Some terrible power was
dragging those souls who were still floating in the ether back to their rotting
corpses, even to their moldering bones. He had seen some torn from the river of
souls itself. And yet he did not feel the slightest tug upon his spirit.

Why? The red mist is expanding, ballooning outward. Perhaps
only those who died here, upon the grounds touched by the mist, are affected. Or
perhaps wandering ghosts, the restless dead, those like me who refuse to be
drawn into the soulstream, are not affected. Or perhaps there is simply not
enough left of my body, now, for even magick to put into motion.

Graves did not know what, precisely, was going on. He did
not have answers to these questions. But he would find them. And to begin, he
knew there were places he might investigate that might lead him further along
both of his lines of inquiry.

He pushed himself off the State House dome, its golden
surface a dark, hellish orange as it took what little light was available and
reflected the red mist. As he passed over Boston Common, drifting just above
the trees now, he confirmed one of his suspicions. He was not the only ghost
unaffected. The lonely shades of several homeless men wandered the park,
resting on park benches and picking imaginary garbage out of trash cans, acting
out the routines of their lives.

They had died there on the Common, these men. Unless they
had been cremated, it had been recently enough that there would certainly have
been enough left of their remains to make an effective zombie. That was
possible, but the more he considered, the more he began to think that one of
his other theories was more likely. These homeless men had been lost souls long
before they were dead. As ghosts, they walked the paths that had been familiar
in life and seemed not to feel the pull of the river of souls at all. They were
kept here by the infirmity of their minds, even as Graves himself was anchored
to the mortal plane by his obsession with the mystery of his own murder. He
felt certain his theory was correct, that ghosts who still haunted this world
were immune to this magick as long as they remained here and did not slip into
the soulstream.

Dr. Graves left the Common and propelled his spectral form
along Tremont Street past the Park Street Church. Tucked in amongst buildings
to the left and right, and abutting it to the rear was the Old Granary Burial
Ground. It was a strange cemetery, located in what some might have taken to be
an empty building lot left behind by a demolition crew if not for the low
wrought iron fence. The burial ground was a tiny plot of land where eighteenth
century headstones thrust from the ground, and a recitation of their names read
like a litany of American history.

Paul Revere was buried there. A short way further along a
narrow path that weaved beneath shade trees was the grave of John Hancock. Samuel
Adams had been interred at the Old Granary as well, along with all of the
victims of the Boston Massacre and the parents of Benjamin Franklin. It was a
quiet place of reflection in the center of the city, a piece of its history. Graves
always thought it shameful that it was the edifices left behind by the great
hearts and minds of any generation that were visited by throngs of admirers,
and rarely their graves.

It was no wonder that none of their ghosts had lingered on
this plane.

That did not mean the Old Granary Burial Ground was devoid
of ghosts, however.

Dr. Graves passed through the black wrought-iron fence and
alighted upon the ragged lawn, pretending to himself that he could feel the
ground beneath his shoes. The walls of the buildings that rose up to block in
the other three sides of the burial ground were imposing, but with the
red-black sky and the scarlet fog, they lent a sense of security as well. He
glanced up, and then over his shoulder, but he was alone.

"Christopher?" Graves ventured, his voice drifting
amongst the headstones with the fog.

"Hello, Leonard."

The voice was close by, almost in his ear, and Graves darted
away even as he spun around in surprise. Decades of phantom life ought to have
made him immune to being startled in such fashion, but clearly they had not. And
the ghost of Christopher Snider knew it.

"This is hardly the time for games, Chris," Dr. Graves
chided him.

The spectral boy was lanky, yet handsome, his appearance
precisely the same as it had been on that day in late February of 1770, when he
had been shot by a British soldier, just eleven days before the Boston
Massacre. The wry grin on the ghost's face, though, revealed that though his
shade mimicked the body he'd had in life, his mind had continued to grow. He
was no boy. He was a specter. Centuries old. And yet there was still something
of the child in him. An enigma, then, this phantom boy. Graves had never been
able to discover just what anchored Christopher Snider to the mortal plane. Perhaps
one day, he thought, the boy would feel enough at ease with him to tell him. For
now, if not friends, they were at least allies in the battle against the
despair that threatened all the lingering, wandering dead.

"My apologies, sir," Christopher said, giving Dr.
Graves a small bow. The ghostly boy was grimly serious now. "You are
right, of course. It was only that I was pleased to see you. I know of your
penchant for involving yourself in calamitous situations. I was certain you
would be at the center of whatever is causing this horror."

Graves nodded, glancing toward the street. "I plan to
be. But to do that, I need to find Eve. And to find Eve, I need your help."

A ripple went through the ectoplasm that made up the shade
of Christopher Snider. His upper lip curled back in distaste. The ghostly boy
seemed to withdraw but he did not actually retreat from Graves. Rather, his
spirit thinned and became less defined, so that the red mist flowed through him
and nearly obscured his features.

"You know my feelings about the Children of Eve,"
Christopher said.

"I do," Graves confirmed. "That's why I ask. You
hate them. But you always know when there are vampires in the city. You've got
some sort of ethereal grapevine going, tracking them. I know you've helped Eve
with her hunt in the past.

"Look around, Chris," Graves said, gesturing with
translucent hands toward the city around and above them. "It's safe to say
there's no time to waste. I need to know if there are any of them in the city
right now. And where."