Jim Butcher: Odd jobs

“Oh, God,” Megan said, and flew up to her feet and out of the room.

I followed her, but more slowly, as the screaming continued. She hurried down a short hallway to a room with a trio of large cartoon girl-figures I didn’t recognize. They had freaking huge eyes, though. Megan emerged a moment later, carrying a dark-haired moppet in pink and white striped footy pajamas. The little girl was clinging to her mother with all four limbs and kept screaming, her eyes squeezed tight shut.

The sound was heart-wrenching. She was terrified.

I had to stop short as Megan immediately took two quick steps toward me and plunged through the next doorway. This one had a poster of a band of young men on it I didn’t recognize. One looked rebellious and sullen, one wacky and lighthearted, one sober and stable, and one handsomely vogue. Another Monkees reincarnation, basically.

I went to the door and saw Megan, with her clinging moppet, sit down on the bed and start gently shaking the shoulder of a girl with her mother’s hair, presumably Kat. She was screaming, too, but she broke out of it a moment later, the instant her eyes fluttered open.

The moppet, presumably Tamara, stopped screaming, too, and at exactly the same time. Then they both burst into less-hysterical tears and clung to their mother.

Megan’s face was anguished, but her voice and her hands were gentle as she touched them, spoke to them, reassured them. If she was an empath as sensitive as her file and her reaction to my test suggested, then she had to be in terrible psychic pain. She pushed enough of it aside to be there for her kids, though.

“Dammit,” I heard Yardly breathe from the hall behind me. It was a tired oath.

“Interesting,” I said. “Excuse me.”

I turned and paced down the hallway to the younger child’s room, and nearly tripped over a dark-haired child, a boy who might have been eight. He was wearing underwear and a T-shirt with a cartoon Jedi Knight on it, which raised my opinion of his mother immediately. The kid’s eyes weren’t even open, and he raised his arms blindly.

I picked him up, and carried him with me into the little bedroom.

It wasn’t large-nothing about Megan’s house was. One of the beds was pink and festooned with the same three big-eyed girls. The other was surrounded in the plastic shell of a Star Wars landspeeder. I plopped the young Jedi back into it, and he promptly curled into a ball and went to sleep.

I covered him up with a blanket and turned to examine the rest of the room. Not much to it. A lot of toys, most of them more or less put away, and a dresser which the two kids evidently shared, a little table and chairs, and a closet.

A nice, shadowy closet.

I grunted and got on the floor to peer beneath the little pink bed. Then I squinted at the closet. If I was four and lying on the girl’s bed, the closet would be looming right past the ends of my toes.

I closed my eyes for a moment and reached out with my wizard’s senses, feeling the flow and ebb of energy through the house. Within the defensive wall of the threshold, other energy pulsed and moved-emotions from the house’s inhabitants, random energies sifting in from outdoors, the usual.

But not in the closet. There wasn’t anything at all in that closet.

“Ah hah,” I said.

“Third A,” I said, writing on the board. “Assemble.”

“Avengers…” said McKenzie.

“Assemble!” crowed the young Wardens in unison.

They’re good kids.

“That is, in fact, one potential part of this phase of the investigation,” I said, taking the conversation back in hand as I nodded my approval. “Sometimes, once you’ve figured out what’s going on, you go and round up reinforcements. But what assembling really means, for our purposes, is putting everything together. You’ve got your information. Now you need to decide what to do with it. You plan what steps you need to take. You work out the possible consequences of your actions.”

“Here’s where you use your brain. If the foe has a weakness, you figure out how to exploit it. If you’ve got an advantage of terrain, you figure out how to use it. If you need specialized gear or equipment to help, here’s where you get it.” I started a stack of papers around the room. “There’s recipes on these handouts for a couple of the most common things you’ll use: an antidote for Red Court venom, which you’re familiar with, and an ointment for your eyes that’ll let you see through most faerie glamour, which you may not know about. Get used to making these.”

I took a deep breath. “This is also the stage where sometimes you do some math.”

The room was very quiet for a moment.

“Yeah,” I said. “Here’s where you decide whose life to risk, or whose isn’t worth risking. Here’s where you decide who you can save and who is already gone past saving. I’ve been doing this sort of thing for a while. Some of my seniors in the Council would call me foolish, or arrogant, and they could be right-but I’ve never met anyone who was breathing who I thought was too far gone to help.”

“You’ve got a boogeyman,” I told Megan an hour later.

Megan frowned at me. “A… a…?”

“A boogeyman,” I said. “Sometimes known as a boggle or a boggart. It’s a weak form of phobophage-a fear-eater, mostly insubstantial. This one is pretty common. Feeds on a child’s fear.”

Yardly’s eyebrows tried to climb into his hair.

“That isn’t possible,” Megan said. “I’d… I’d sense something like that. I’d feel it. I’ve felt things like that before. Several ghosts. Once, a poltergeist.”

“Not this one,” I said. “You’re too old.”

She cocked an eyebrow at me. “Excuse me?”

“Ahem. I mean, you’re an adult.”

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“Only kids can sense them,” I said. “Part of their nature conceals them from older awarenesses.”

“The threshold,” Meg said. “It should keep such things out.”

“Sometimes they ride in with someone in the family. Sometimes if a child has a vivid enough dream, it can open up a window in the Nevernever that the boggart uses to skip in. They can use mirrors, sometimes, too.”

“Nevernever?” Yardly asked.

“The spirit world,” I clarified.

“Oh, what bullshit, Meg-” Yardly said.

Megan stood up, her eyes blazing. “Benjamin.” The tension between them crackled silently in the air for several seconds.

“Crap,” he snarled, finally, and stalked out the front door. He let it slam behind him.

Megan stared at the door, her lips tight. Then she turned back to me. “If what you say is true, then how can you sense it?” she asked.

“I can’t,” I said. “That was the giveaway. The rest of your house feels normal. The closet in the younger kids’ room is a black hole.”

“Jesus,” Megan said, turning. “Tamara and Joey are asleep in there.”

“Relax,” I said. “They’re safe for now. It already ate tonight. It isn’t going to do it again. And it can’t physically hurt them. All it can do is scare them.”

“All it can do?” Megan asked. “Do you have any idea what they’ve gone through? She says she never even remembers waking up screaming, but Kat’s grades are down from straight As to Cs. She hasn’t slept a solid night in six months. Tamara has stopped talking. She doesn’t say more than a dozen words a day.” Her eyes shone, but she was too proud to let me see tears fall. “Don’t tell me that my children aren’t being hurt.”

I winced and held up my hands placatingly. “You’re right. Okay? I’m sorry, I picked the wrong words.” I took a deep breath and exhaled. “The point is that now that we know about it, we can do something.”