Christopher Golden - The Nimble Man

Graves glances down at the beakers on the table in front of him, at his notebook and the thick black pencil he has been writing with. A warmth spreads through him that has been rare in his life and he leans forward to shut off the burners beneath the beakers, snuffing those small flames.

When he looks up expectantly, she is gone.

The lab is gone.

The air is thick with humidity and the buzzing of flies and the heat is oppressive. Sweat drips down his back and stains his shirt at the armpits, his body so warm that the droplets of it are a cooling relief where they trace their paths on his skin.

Tangled jungle stretches as far as he can see in every direction. Things chitter and rustle in the trees but he pays them no mind. He did not hike all this way to let the wildlife drive him off. This is the Yucatan, where his next step could be into any one of a hundred agonizing deaths. There were far more ways to dive here than there were ways to live. But Dr. Graves was not returning to New York without the object of his quest.

And now he had found it. He held his breath and stared at a cluster of strange, spiny-barked trees in front of him. They twisted in upon themselves, branches intertwining as though in a dance. The Xuithla tree was dismissed by most botanists as tribal myth. Yet here it is. The rarest tree in the world, and if its legendary healing properties are more than legend…

Voices erupt around him, echoing through the trees and Dr. Graves spins in search of their origin. He blinks as the branches seem to reach for him, closes his eyes and lifts his arm to knock them away, and then the sounds of the jungle disappear.

The voices remain.

When he opens his eyes he is in a movie palace on the Boulevard St. Germain in Paris. All is dark around him save for the constant flicker of light upon the screen. The voices are speaking French, of course, and he strains to keep up with the translation, trying to make sense of the plot of the film. Even so, he can only lend a portion of his attention to it, for his focus is elsewhere.

His contact is supposed to meet him here, in the theater. The French government has suffered a terrible loss, a theft from the Louvre that seems impossible, with the only clue left behind three single drops of blood tainted with liquid mercury. His investigation has begun to point back at members of the government himself, and so this meeting must be clandestine.

"Excuse me," a voice says, and he is startled to hear the words in English.

Dr. Graves glances over and sees an unfamiliar woman making her way into his aisle, people standing or shifting aside to let her move down the row toward the empty seat beside him. He frowns. If she is his contact, the woman knows little about remaining inconspicuous. Speaking English like that had been foolish.

She is too pale, this woman, and her hair is pulled back from her face so tightly that it lends a cruel severity to features that might otherwise have been attractive.

She slips into the seat beside him and makes no attempt to focus on the movie screen. Dr. Graves attempts to keep some semblance of secrecy but it quickly becomes obvious she has no intention of being subtle.

"You're Leonard Graves," she says, as though this should be news to him.

He nods.

"Look at me, Dr. Graves."

Exasperated, he glances around to be sure he has not been followed, but in the darkened theater he can see only phantom faces, flickering silver in the light from the screen. At length he turns to her.

"You might be a bit more — "

"You're dead, Dr. Graves."

Anger rises in him. His whisper is a harsh rasp. "Are you threatening me, ma'am?"

The woman's eyelids flutter with frustration and she sighs. "Simply stating a fact. Trying to remind you. You've been dead half a century. Think. Remember the bullet. You're here for a reason."

Graves begins to shudder and he feels a terrible pain in his heart.

Phantom pain.

For he has no heart.

Grief swells within him and he turns away from her, only to see the faces of the other theater goers again. The flickering light upon the screen is not what has made them look spectral. Rather, it is the fact that they are specters. Ghosts of the dead.

The silver light from the screen passes through them, their bodies having little more substance than dust motes swirling in shafts of sunlight. Their faces are etched with fear.

He turns back to the woman and sees that she too is transparent. Dr. Graves does not look down at his own body, at his hands. He does not like to look at his hands.

"Who are you?" he asks, the illusion of the Parisian movie palace becoming wispy around them, a ghost all its own.

"My name is Yvette Darnall. I am… I was a medium."

And he watches her blue eyes, ghosts in and of themselves, as she tells the tale of her own death, of her efforts to locate Sweetblood the Mage, of the trap that he laid for any who would dare to search for him.

"The bastard," Graves whispers, trying not to see that the theatre is gone now, completely disappeared, and there is only a kind of river flowing at their feet, a rushing, turbulent stream of souls. Some of them fly past above and around him, but all of them in the same direction, with a fierce momentum, as though drawn on by some inexorable force.

"Oh, yes, he always was," Miss Darnall says. "But I see it now. I understand."

For a moment Graves does not hear her. He is distracted by a tugging at his arms and the current that drags at his ankles, the stream trying to pull him in, to pull him on… and he will not look to see what has such power over him. He frowns as her words finally settle into his mind.

"Understand what? Why he murdered you?"

She shudders and glances away in shame, and now she does not seem quite so severe. "I cannot see it all, of course. Only the silhouette of what may be, not the fine details. But this is why I came to find you the moment I sensed you had moved further into the river of souls. Someone has located Sanguedolce."

"We know," Graves says, nodding, feeling the tug of the soulstream on his body now, and shuddering at its touch. It has been so long since anyone has been able to touch him. He feels the urge to sink into the river, to flow with it. "Doyle was there. One of the Old Races, the Night People, have Sweetblood. He's in some sort of protective — "

"They're trying to open it," whispers the ghost of Yvette Darnall, her face thinning strangely. Her hair begins to come undone and her long tresses flutter in the invisible breeze of the soulstream, reaching away from her as though it yearns to join the others.

But her eyes are firm and dark. "Sanguedolce has hidden within a magical shell. It must not be opened."

Dr. Graves stands a bit straighter, drags his feet toward her in the soulstream, fighting its pull upon him. "Why? You know something. I don't spend a lot of time here, in the otherworld, but enough to know that a lot of the spirits who linger around the area where all of these omens and strange phenomena are occurring… they've retreated. They're hiding deeper here, or slipping into the soulstream and letting go. Why? Is this what they're afraid of? What will happen if Sweetblood is freed? What is he going to do? Why do they want to break him out in the first place?"

Miss Darnall looks terribly sad, now. She reaches out toward him but her form is blurring. Her body is succumbing to the pull of the soulstream, streaks of ectoplasm stretching off her, fluttering just as the tendrils of her hair are doing. Bits of her slipping away. Her face grows thinner, becomes warped.

"I don't know what they want him for. Nor what this cataclysm is that will result from his being freed. But when I searched for him, when I found him I touched his mind and for just a moment before his spell froze my heart I saw inside him and I realized that he was frightened. Sweetblood felt utter dread and sheer terror at the thought of being released. Beyond that, I know nothing. Only that if it can frighten the world's most powerful sorcerer, it must be terrifying indeed. But that is not what the ghosts are retreating from."