Christopher Golden - The Nimble Man

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.