Jim Butcher - Ghost Story

“Yahhh!” I shouted in wordless defiance, even as I reached for my next spell . . .

. . . and suddenly felt very strange.

“—sden, stop!” Mort was screaming. His voice sounded very far away. “Look at yourself !”

I had the next blast of fire and energy ready in my mind, but I stopped to glance at my hands.

I could barely see them. They were faded to the point of near invisibility.

The shock drove the spell out of my head, and color and substance rushed back into my limbs. They were still translucent, but at least I could see them. I turned wide eyes to where Mort still hung over the wraith pit. His voice suddenly snapped back up in volume, becoming very clear.

“You keep throwing your memories at her,” Mort said, “but part of what you are now goes out with them—and it doesn’t come back . You’re about to destroy yourself, man! She’s luring you into it!”

Of course she was, dammit. Why stand around trying to block my attacks when she could just vanish from in front of them? Evil Bob’s fortifications, it seemed, had served a purpose other than simply barring the way—I’d used up way too much of myself on the way through them. And then here, trading punches with Corpsetaker, I’d used up a lot more, slinging out the memory of my magic left and right, when I’d seen how careful Sir Stuart was to recover such expended power practically the minute I’d gotten out of Captain Jack’s car.

I couldn’t see her without bringing up my Sight, but Corpsetaker’s mocking laugh rolled through the underground chamber from the section of wall I’d knocked her into. I stared at my hands again and clenched them in frustration. Mort was right. I’d already done too much. But how the hell else was I supposed to fight her?

I turned to Mort. He was having trouble keeping his eyes on me as he twisted slowly on the rope. He closed them. “Dresden . . . you can’t do anything more. Get out of here. I don’t want anyone else to give themselves away for me,” he said, his voice raw. “Not for me.”

Sir Stuart’s shade, floating protectively beside Mort, regarded me with sober, distant eyes.

Corpsetaker’s mad laughter mocked us all. Then she said, “If I’d known you would deliver so thoroughly, Dresden, I’d have gone looking for you ages ago. Boz. Kill the little man.”

There was a growl and the stirring of a large animal. And then a human garbage truck started climbing out of the wraith pit, emerging from the stewing broil of wraiths like Godzilla rising out of the surf. Boz had a stench to him so thick that it carried over into the realm of spirit—a psychic stink that felt like it might have choked me unconscious had I still been alive. The guy’s brain had been down there stewing in wraiths for only God knew how long, and if Morty’s reaction to exposure was any indication, Boz had to have had his sanity pureed. He was crusted over in filth so thick that I couldn’t tell where the spiritual muck left off and the physical crud began. I could see his eyes, like dull, gleaming stones underneath his hood. They were absolutely gone. This guy was only a person by legal definitions. His humanity had long since begun to fester and rot.

Boz climbed out of the pit, radiating a physical and psychic power full of rot and corruption and rage and endless hungers. He stood there blankly for a second. And then he turned and took one slow, lumbering, Voorheesian step after another, toward the apparatus from which Mort hung.

The ectomancer regarded Boz weakly and then said, “Great. This is all I need.”

“What?” I said. “Mort? What does she mean?”

“Uh, sorry. Little distracted here,” Mort said. “What?”

“The Corpsetaker! What did she mean that she doesn’t need you anymore?”

“You fed her enough power to fuel a couple of dozen Nightmares, Dresden,” Mort said. “She can do whatever she wants now.”

“What? So she gobbles a bunch of killers and she gets to be a real boy again? It can’t be that easy.”

Boz reached the basketball goal, grabbed it in his huge hands, and just turned it slowly, the hard way. Mort began to rotate toward the edge of the pit.

“Agh! Dresden! Do something!”

I glared at Morty, spreading empty hands, and then in pure frustration I tossed a punch at Boz. It was like slapping my fist through raw sewage. I didn’t hit anything solid, and my fist and arm came out covered in disgusting residue. I couldn’t act. Information was the only weapon I had. “Kind of limited here, Mort!”

Morty had begun to hyperventilate, but he clearly came to some sort of decision. He started gasping out words rapidly. “She can be real again—for a little while.”

“She can manifest,” I said.

Boz’s fingernails were spotted with dark green mold. He reached out and grabbed the rope holding Mort. He untied the rope from its stay without letting it slide and began to haul Mort toward the edge of the pit. Arms and mouths and fingers stretched up from the bubbling wraiths, trying to reach the ectomancer.

“Gah!” Mort gasped, trying to twist away. Wraith fingertips touched his face, and he winced in apparent pain. “Once she does that, she gets to be her old self for a while. She can walk, talk—whatever.”

“Use her magic for real,” I breathed. The Corpsetaker wouldn’t have to limit herself to people who could contact the dead, people from whom she could try to wrest consent, as she had done to Mort.

She could simply take someone new—and then she was back in the game, a body-switching lunatic with a hate-on for the White Council and all things decent in general. Her boss, Kemmler, had apparently slithered his way out of being dead more than once. Maybe her whole freaky-cult operation had been a page from his playbook.

I vanished to the bottom of the stairs and screamed, “Murph! Hurry!”

But I saw no one at the top of the stairs.

Sir Stuart stood in front of Boz, clenching his jaw and his ax in impotent rage, as Boz lowered Mort to the ground and then leaned over him, reaching down with his huge hands to grasp Mort on either side of his head. A twist, a snap, and it would be over for the ectomancer.

But what could I do? I had nothing more than the ghost of a decent spell in me, and then I was misty history. Morty was beat to hell, exhausted, unable to use his own magic—or he damned well would have gotten himself out of this clustergeist by now. Even if he’d let me in—which I wasn’t sure he would do in his condition, not even to save his life—I doubted the two of us had enough energy and control between us to get him free. Mort could have called Sir Stuart into him, drawn upon the marine’s experience and the memory of his strength, but the ectomancer was still tied up. And besides, Sir Stuart was in the same condition I was, only worse.

All of us were helpless to act on the physical world.

If I’d still had the Lecters, I could have ordered one of them to manifest and free Morty, which I maybe should have chanced a few minutes ago. Hindsight was blinding in its clarity. It was too late for that now—Corpsetaker had taken the Lecters out of the picture, and without the mad spirits’ ability to manifest in the physical world . . .

My thoughts sped to quicksilver flickering. Frantic memory hit me like a hammer.

“Hell’s bells. Every time I’ve run into a ghost, it’s tried to rip my lungs out! You’re telling me none of your spooks can do something?”

“They’re sane ,” Mort shouted back. “It’s crazy for a ghost to interact with the physical world. Sane ghosts don’t go around acting crazy !”

For a ghost, manifesting in the material world was an act of madness—a memory trying to enforce its will on the living, the past struggling to steer the course of the present. It was, according to everything I had learned about magic and life, an inversion of the laws of nature, a defiance of the natural order.