Christopher Golden - The Nimble Man

"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."

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 facade, 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.