Jim Butcher - Ghost Story

Sir Stuart had evidently known what was coming. He reached over, grabbed me by the front of my leather duster, and unceremoniously dragged me back up into the car and sat me on the seat beside him, back in the passenger compartment. I clutched at the door handle and the seat in front of me for stability, only to have my hands go right through them. I pitched forward, spinning as if I were floating in water, and this time it was my face plunging toward the icy street.

Sir Stuart hauled me back again and said, in a faintly annoyed tone, “Mortimer.”

Mort didn’t say anything, but when I was once again sitting down, I didn’t fall right through the bottom of the car. He smirked at me in the rearview mirror.

“You don’t fall through the bottom of the car because on some deep, instinctual level, you regard it as a given of existence here,” Sir Stuart said. “You are entirely convinced that illusions such as gravity and solidity are real.”

“There is no spoon,” I said.

Sir Stuart looked at me blankly.

I sighed. “If I believe in an illusory reality so much, then how come I can walk through walls?” I asked.

“Because you are convinced, on the same level, that ghosts can do precisely that.”

I felt my eyebrows trying to meet as I frowned. “So . . . you’re saying I don’t fall through the ground because I don’t think I should?”

“Say instead that it is because you assume that you will not,” he replied. “Which is why, once you actively considered the notion, you did fall through the floor.”

I shook my head slowly. “How do I keep from doing it again?”

“Mortimer is preventing it, for the time being. My advice to you is not to think about too much,” Sir Stuart said, his tone serious. “Just go about your business.”

“You can’t not think about something,” I said. “Quick, don’t think about a purple elephant. I dare you.”

Sir Stuart let out a broad laugh, but stopped and clutched at his wounded flank. I could tell it hurt him, but he still wore the smile the laugh had brought on. “It usually takes them longer to recognize that fact,” he said. “You’re right, of course. And there will be times when you feel like you have no control whatsoever over such things.”

“Why?” I asked, feeling somewhat exasperated.

Sir Stuart wasn’t rattled by my tone. “It’s something every new shade goes through. It will pass.”

“Huh,” I said. I thought about it for a minute and said, “Well. It beats the hell out of acne.”

From the front seat, Mort let out an explosive little snicker.

Stars and stones, I hate being the new guy.

Murphy inherited her house from her grandmother, and it was at least a century old. Grandma Murphy had been a notorious rose gardener. Murphy didn’t have a green thumb herself. She hired a service to take care of her grandmother’s legacy. The flower garden in front would have fit a house four times as large, but it was a withered, dreary little place when covered in heavy snow. Bare, thorny branches, trimmed the previous fall, stood up from the blanket of white in skeletal silence.

The house itself was a compact colonial, single story, square, solid, and neat-looking. It had been built in a day when a ten-by-ten bedroom was considered a master suite, and when beds were routinely used by several children at a time. Murphy had upgraded it with vinyl siding, new windows, and a layer of modern insulation when she moved in, and the little house looked as if it could last another hundred years, no problem.

There was a sleek, expensive, black town car parked on the street outside Murphy’s home, its tires on the curbside resting in several inches of snow. It couldn’t have looked more out of place in the middle-class neighborhood if it had been a Saint Patrick’s Day Parade float, complete with prancing leprechauns.

Sir Stuart looked at me and then out at our surroundings, frowning. “What is it, Dresden?”

“That car shouldn’t be there,” I said.

Mort glanced at me and I pointed out the black town car. He studied it for a moment before he said, “Yeah. Kind of odd on a block like this.”

“Why?” asked Sir Stuart. “It is an automatic coach, is it not?”

“An expensive one,” I said. “You don’t park those on the street in weather like this. The salt-and-plow truck comes by, and you’re looking at damage to the finish and paint. Keep going by, Morty. Circle the block.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Mort said, his tone annoyed. “I’m not an idiot.”

“Stay with him,” I told Sir Stuart.

Then I took a deep breath, remembered that I was an incorporeal spirit, and put my feet down through the floorboards of the car. I dug in my heels on the snowy street as the solid matter of the vehicle passed through me in a cloud of uncomfortable tingles. I’d meant to simply remain behind, standing, when the car had passed completely through me. I hadn’t thought about things like momentum and velocity, and instead I went into a tumble that ended with me making a whump sound as I hit a soft snowbank beside the home next to Murphy’s. It hurt, and I pushed myself out of the snowbank, my teeth chattering, my body blanketed in cold.

“N-n-no, H-Harry,” I told myself firmly, squeezing my eyes shut. “Th-that’s an illusion. Your mind created it to match what it knows. But you didn’t hit the snowbank. You can’t. And you can’t be covered in snow. And therefore you can’t be wet and cold.”

I focused on the words, putting my will behind them, in the same way I would have to attract the attention of a ghost or spirit. I opened my eyes.

The snow clinging to my body and clothes was gone. I was standing, dry and wrapped in my leather duster, beside the snowbank.

“Okay,” I said. “That’s bordering on cool.”

I stuck my hands in my pockets, ignored the snow and the steady, gentle northern wind, and trudged across Grandma Murphy’s rose garden to Murphy’s door. I raised my hand and knocked as I’d done so often before.

A couple of things happened.

First, my hand stopped above the door, close enough that you could have slid one or two pieces of paper between my knuckles and the wood, but definitely not three. There was a dull, low thud of solid impact, even though I hadn’t touched the door itself. Second, light flashed, and something like a current of electricity swarmed up my arm and down my spine, throwing my body into a convulsion that left me lying on the ground, stunned.

I just lay there on the snow for a moment. I tried the whole “there is no spoon” thing again, but apparently there was perception of reality and then there was hard-core, undeniable, real reality. It took me several seconds to recover and sit up again, and several more seconds to realize that I had been hit by something specifically engineered to stop intruding spirits.

Murphy’s house had been warded, its natural defensive threshold used as a foundation for further, more aggressive defenses. And while I was only a shade of my former self, I was still wizard enough to recognize my own damned wards—or at least wards that were virtually identical to my own.

The door opened and Murphy appeared in it. She was a woman of well below average height, but built of spring steel. Her golden hair had been cut into a short brush over her scalp, and the stark style showed off the lines of muscles and tendons in her neck, and the pugnacious, stubborn set of her jawline. She wore jeans and a plaid shirt over a blue tee, and held her SIG in her right hand.

Something stabbed me in the guts and twisted upon seeing her.

A rush of memories flooded over me, starting with our first meeting, on a missing-persons case years ago, when I’d still been doing my time as an apprentice PI and Murphy had been a uniform cop working a beat. Every argument, every bit of banter and repartee, every moment of revelation and trust that had been built up between us, came hammering into me like a thousand major-league fastballs. The last memory, and the sharpest, was of facing each other in the hold of my brother’s boat, trembling on the edge of a line we hadn’t ever allowed ourselves to cross before.