The Nimble Man (A Novel of the Menagerie) (20 page)

The ghost drifted away, toward the wrought-iron fence where
he could look down upon Tremont Street. Graves followed him and lingered just
at his side. A car was parked up on the sidewalk, locked and abandoned in a
hurry. Along the road were others in the same condition. Graves thought he saw
silhouettes inside one of them, people who had simply pulled over when the
chaos had begun and now were likely too afraid to venture on, no matter how
badly they wished to be home.

"Christopher?" Dr. Graves whispered, his voice a
ghost itself.

"I know," the spectral young man replied, nodding.
He glanced at Graves. "I apologize. To search for any of Eve's Children
without intending to kill them is difficult for me to grasp."

Dr. Graves had always suspected that vampires had something
to do with the boy's death, despite the story about the British soldier. Either
that or he had seen loved ones murdered by the monsters. But now was not the
time to pry.

"If it helps, I can assure you the creature will come
to no good end."

"Of course it helps," replied the ghostly boy with
a hollow laugh. "As much as anything will."

Graves waited for more, for an answer to the question he had
posed, doing his best to feign patience he did not feel. When he felt he could
not wait any longer, he spoke the ghost's name. "Christopher . . ."

"Do you know what my favorite memory is, Leonard? It
was in 1831, right here. Or, rather, there in the Evangelical Church. The
children's choir sang beautifully in those days, but on that particular day
they sang a new song, freshly written. The song had never been sung before, not
publicly. It was 'My Country, 'tis of Thee.' Do you know it?"
Startled
by this turn in the conversation, Graves frowned and stared at him. "Of
course I do."

Christopher smiled in remembrance. "Yes, yes. Of course
you do." Then he turned to Graves and there was nothing at all of the
child in his spectral features any longer. "That is my most precious
memory, Leonard. And it happened more than sixty years after my death. The
irony is painful sometimes."

He sighed and looked around the fog enshrouded cemetery
before glancing back at Dr. Graves.

"I'm told that one of Eve's Children has made its nest
in the Regency Theatre on Charles Street. There was a fire there last year, you
know. The owners have promised to rebuild, but so far nothing has been done."

"You know so much about this city, but I've never seen
you further from your grave than this gate."

"I listen," the ghostly boy said. "They walk
by, the living, and they don't know anyone's here. They talk. And I listen."

Dr. Graves was reluctant to leave. Christopher had never
been so open with him, never seemed so willing to talk about his haunting of
the burial ground. But the red mist churned around them and the sky was dark
and the dead were walking out on the streets of Boston.

"Thank you, Chris. I'm sorry I have to go. Maybe —"

"Go," the other ghost said, waving him off. "Perhaps
you and your friends can stop all of this. Come back when you can. I'm not
going anywhere."

With nothing more to say Graves began to rise, floating away
from the burial ground. He traveled quickly now, the buildings little more than
a blur around him. There were several churches nearby and it occurred to him
that the people who had abandoned their vehicles might well have fled to those
edifices of faith. Hopeful voices would be raised within. Prayers would be sung
or spoken.

Dr. Graves had wondered all his life — and thereafter
— whether anyone was listening.

He drifted through the scarlet fog, following Tremont Street
for a while and then climbing above the buildings. Graves did not like to pass
through structures unless they were his destination. There was something
unsettling about it, but also it felt to him as though he were intruding upon
the privacy of whoever might live or work within them.

Charles Street had a string of old theatres and playhouses,
some still used for traditional theatre and others as comedy stages. The
Regency had once had a beautiful façade, but it had faded over time as such
things did. Then at the twilight of the twentieth century it had been restored,
not only outside, but within. The stage and the curtains and the beautiful art
on the domed ceiling inside the theatre had all been brought back to their
original beauty and luster.

And then the blaze had ruined it all.

Firefighters had been able to stop the flames before they
had completely gutted the building, but the elegance of the place had been
eradicated, charred beyond recognition. As the weeks and months had gone by,
the hope that insurance would allow the owners to start anew began to dwindle. A
police cordon still blocked the entrance to the Regency Theatre, but such
things do not keep out homeless people searching for a place to shield them
from the elements, willing to risk the dilapidated architecture crumbling on
them.

Nor did such cautionary postings keep out vampires.

Insubstantial as the red mist — perhaps even more so
— Dr. Graves passed through a boarded-up window and was inside the
shadowy skeleton of the theatre. The place still reeked of burnt wood. Graves
drifted above the balcony and looked around at blackened remnants of a once
grand structure and he thought how fortunate it was that the place had been
empty when the fire had started.

The vampire had made its nest in the orchestra pit.

For the most part, ghosts were intangible. But Graves had
quickly learned that while it took phenomenal effort to touch a human being, he
had no difficulty laying hands on supernatural creatures.

It was a male vampire, a thin, filthy thing in stolen
clothes with long, greasy blond hair.

"Child of Eve," Graves said, floating down toward
it.

The vampire looked up quickly, startled, its jaundice yellow
eyes glowing in the dark. It tried to fight him.

Tried, and failed.

For perhaps the hundredth time since the sky had gone dark,
Katherine Matthews picked up the phone and listened to the hiss of dead air. There
was no dial tone, nor any of the other signals the phone company sent when
there was trouble on the line. No fast busy signal. Not even that annoying
beeping it made if she left it off the hook. The first few times she had picked
up the phone she had spoken up, asked if there was anyone else on the line. But
there was no one there. Just that hiss.

Yet if she listened for half a minute or so, couldn't she
make out something inside that hiss? A kind of pattern, like the gusting of the
wind. The hiss seemed tremulous, as though the dead air on her phone line was
laughing at her.

Katie Matthews had owned Lost and Found Books for seventeen
years. It was not merely her business, however. It was her home. The shop was
on the first floor of her house in Cambridge, just north of Boston, and she
lived alone in a quartet of rooms in the second story. But for now she sat
behind the checkout counter near the front door of the bookshop, where she had
been ever since the darkness had fallen and the bloody mist had rolled in.

She was used to being by herself in the store. As silly as
it sounded, she always told people she could never really be alone there, not
with all the books. Lost and Found was overflowing with hardcovers and
paperbacks, new and used, of all types of genres. In the back there was even a
section of antiquarian books. The typical customer never bothered to even
wander into the rear of the shop, but there were always those discerning
clients who knew precisely what they were looking for and would peruse those
shelves.

Katie had been tempted at first to retreat to the
antiquarian section, but the only windows were at the front of the shop and the
idea of being unable to see what was going on outside terrified her even more
than the view beyond the windows. If anything worse happened, she would be
trapped back there. From here she could at least run up the stairs to her
apartment.

Only to be trapped
there
.

She didn't want to think about it any more, but there was no
one to call, no one to talk to. The only escape she could think of was the one
she had been using her entire life. Once she had hung the phone up, she picked
up the copy of
Cold Sassy Tree
she had been delving into. It wasn't the
sort of thing she usually read, but it was the first book she had laid her hand
upon when she had reached for something to hang onto, somewhere to escape.

Outside the mosquitoes were gone. All of them, as far as she
could tell. And that was something, at least. But now . . . there were figures
moving through the red mist. At first she had thought about unlocking a window
and calling out to them, asking what was going on. The radio did not work and
neither did the small TV behind the counter.

But there was something off, something more than a little
odd, about the way those figures were walking. They moved in a kind of rhythmic
stagger that felt like a warning to Katie. So she kept the windows closed and
locked, for all the good the glass would do if someone really wanted in. And
she kept quiet, and she read, and after every few pages she glanced up and
hoped the mist would be gone and the sun returned, and she picked up the phone
and prayed for a dial tone.

Only to have the dead air laugh at her again.

Her skin prickled with awareness that all was not right and
her pulse raced, but she forced herself back into the book. She was past the
halfway mark but knew she had only registered a fraction of what she had read. Much
as she wished to get completely lost in those pages, she knew she was fooling
herself. There might not be a book in the world that was powerful enough to
help her escape from this.

Katie read a few pages further and there was a creak in the
old boards of her house. It was a familiar sound and late at night it gave her
comfort. And old house moved with the wind. But there was no comfort in it this
day. She glanced up at the sound and her eyes were drawn to the window once
more. The bloody fog rolled past the glass, thick and damp, leaving a red film
on each pane.

With a sigh she reached out and lifted up the phone again,
cursing herself for doing it even as she raised it to her ear. It was foolish
to keep doing this. Obsessive-compulsive idiocy. But she could not help
herself, though she knew what she would hear.

Nothing.

She told herself it was nothing.

Another creak drew her attention, but this one was followed
by a thump and a rustling noise, from deeper inside the shop.

Katie could not breathe. Her lungs were frozen. Her eyes
were open almost too wide as she hung up the phone and moved around the
counter. There were only dim overhead lights at the back of the store, in the
antiquarian section, but now a brighter light pulsed there, a blue-green glow
that cast the entire section in its oceanic hue.

Soft thumps issued from the antiquarian section.

Katie's chest hurt from holding her breath but she felt as
though she could draw no air. Her shoes scuffed the wooden floor as she
shuffled past shelves overflowing with books. The musty smell of old paper
filled her nostrils. That aqua glow pulsed, turning her clothes and her hands
that same color, even as she moved deeper into the store.

She paused a moment and closed her eyes. With all the
concentration she could muster she focused on taking a breath, and soon she was
shuddering as she inhaled sharply. She kept her eyes closed, trying to steady
her breathing. When she opened them she glanced at the front of the shop again,
saw that the view from her windows had not changed, and nodded to herself.

Once again she began to move toward that glow, that rustle
and thump.

Katie felt a soft breeze caress her face and she gasped
again, blinking in surprise. There was a scent on that breeze, the smell of
earth and flowers and trees ripe with fruit. She shook her head and reached up
to touch her face where the breeze had whispered past her.

She was just at the arch that led into the antiquarian
section when there came another small thump. Her gaze was drawn instantly to
the left, to the third shelf from the top, to a leather-bound book that seemed
almost not to belong here. Most of the books in this section had bindings that
were dried and cracked and faded, but the leather covering this tome was fresh
and supple so that it seemed almost new. It gleamed in that blue-green light,
and the way it sat on the shelf, it jutted from its place, as though someone
had pulled it out several inches.

And it moved. Ever so slightly, it moved.

The book seemed to jump in its slot, there on the shelf,
edging further out from the other volumes.

It tilted, and then it tumbled, end over end, and struck the
floorboards, falling open with a ruffle of pages. Katie let out a small cry and
put a hand over her heart as if to warn it to slow down.

That blue-green light flashed more brightly than ever and
she had to shield her eyes. In that moment the breeze that had caressed her swirled
around her again, tousling her hair, and the scents it carried were so
delicious she thought she had been carried away, finally given the escape that
she had longed for.

Then the light retreated and she blinked away the shadows
behind her eyelids.

Two figures stood with her in the antiquarian section of
Lost and Found Books. Once again Katie Matthews felt as though she could not
breathe. One of them was a dignified looking man with a graying mustache and a
wrinkled suit. Katie thought she recognized the man from century-old
photographs.

The other was a stunningly beautiful woman of imposing
height, clad in a cloak the color of the sea. She clutched in her hand an oaken
staff, topped by a sphere of ice with a flicker of flame inside. An elemental
staff. Her eyes were a bright violet.