Jim Butcher: Ghost Story

Carmichael pushed open the door. “Don’t bother, kid. Out there’re all the buildings that coulda been, as well as the ones that are. You’ll give yourself a headache if you keep thinking at it.”

I looked around once more and got into the old Mustang. I shut the door. Carmichael pulled sedately into the empty streets.

“This isn’t Chicago,” I said.

“Genius,” he said amiably.

“Then . . . where are we?”

“Between.”

“Between what?” I asked.

“Between what?” he said. “Between who. Between where. Between when.”

I frowned at him. “You left out why .”

He shook his head and grinned. “Naw, kid. We’re real fond of why around here. We’re big fans of why .”

I frowned at that for a moment. Then I said, “Why am I here?”

“You never even heard of foreplay, didja?” Carmichael said. “Cut straight to the big stuff.”

“Why am I here as opposed to—you know—wherever it is I’m supposed to be?”

“Maybe you’re having a near-death experience,” Carmichael said. “Maybe you’re drowning, and this is the illusion your mind is creating for you, to hide you from the truth of death.”

“Being here? With you? I’ve met my subconscious, and he’s not that sick.”

Carmichael laughed. It was a warm, genuine sound. “But that could be what is happening here. And that’s the point.”

“I don’t understand. At all.”

“And that’s the point, too,” he said.

I glowered.

He kept on smiling and said, “Kid, you’re allowed to see as much as you can handle. Right now, we’re someplace that looks a lot like Chicago, driving along in the rain in my old Mustang, because that’s what your limits are. Any more would”—he paused, considering his words—“would obviate certain options, and we ain’t big on that around here.”

I thought about that for a moment. Then I said, “You just used obviate and ain’t in the same sentence.”

“I got me one of them word-a-day calendars,” he said. “Don’t be obstreperous.”

“You kidding?” I said, settling back in the seat. “I live to be obstreperous.”

Carmichael snorted, and his eyes narrowed. “Yeah, well. We’ll see.”

Carmichael stopped the Mustang in front of a building that reminded me of old episodes of Dragnet . He parked on the empty street and we walked toward the entrance.

“So, where are we going?”

“Told you. The office.”

I frowned. “Don’t suppose you could be more specific?”

He looked around, his eyes narrowed. “Not here. We aren’t in safe territory. Ears everywhere.”

I stopped on the completely empty sidewalk and looked up and down the motionless, vacant street, and saw nothing but lonely streetlamps, traffic signals, and windows unmarred by light or curtains, staring more blankly than the empty eyes of a corpse.

“Yeah,” I said. “Real hotbed of intrigue around here.”

Carmichael stopped at the door and looked over his shoulder. He didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Then he spoke quietly, without a trace of affectation in his voice. “There are Things out here, Dresden. And some Things are worse than death. It’s best if you get inside.”

I rolled my eyes at him. But . . .

Something about the emptiness around me was suddenly extremely nerve-racking.

I stuck my hands in my pockets and tried to saunter inside. The effect may have been slightly sabotaged by my desire to get some solid building between that emptiness and me. Carmichael used a key to open the door and let me in before coming in behind me, his face directed back toward the street until he had shut the door and locked it.

He nodded to a guard, a beat cop in dress uniform, who stood just to one side of an elevator, his back in an entirely rigid position of at-ease, his hands clasped behind him. The guard’s uniform was literally perfect. Perfectly clean, the creases perfectly sharp, his gloves perfectly white. He wore a silver-plated, engraved service revolver in a gleaming black holster at his hip. His features went with the uniform—utterly symmetrical, strong, steady.

I stopped for a second, frowning at the guard, and then reached for my Sight.

Professional wizards like me have access to all kinds of wild things. One of the wildest is the Sight, which has been described in various times and cultures as the second sight, the third eye, the evil eye, and a host of other things. It allows a wizard to look at the true nature of things around him, to see the unseen world of energy and power flowing around him. It’s dangerous. Once you see something with your Sight, you never forget it, and it never fades with time. Take a look at the wrong thing and you can kiss your sanity good-bye.

But this entire scene was so Rod Serling, I had to find something about it that I could pin down, something familiar, something that wasn’t being spoon-fed to me by a person who looked like a younger, thinner Carmichael. I decided to try to identify the single object that was most likely to tell me something about the people around me—a source of power.

I focused on the guard’s gun.

For a second, absolutely nothing happened. And then the black and silver of the gleaming weapon changed, shifted. The holster elongated, trailing down the length of the guard’s leg, and the pearl-handled revolver changed as well, the grip straightening. The silver of the barrel and chamber became the pommel, handle, and hilt of a cruciform sword. Light gleamed from the weapon, not reflected from the illumination in the entry hall of the building, but generated by the weapon itself.

The guard’s blue eyes shifted to me at once. He lifted a hand and said in a gentle voice, “No.”

And as suddenly as a door slamming into my face, my Sight vanished, and the weapon was just a gun again.

The guard nodded at me. “My apologies for being abrupt. You might have harmed yourself.”

I looked. His name tag read AMITIEL.

“Uh, sure,” I said quietly, lifting empty hands. “No problem, man. I’ve got no problem with you.”

Carmichael nodded respectfully to the guard and jammed a thumb down on the button to summon the elevator. It opened at once. “Come on, mister man. Time’s a-wasting.”

Officer Amitiel seemed to find the statement humorous. He smiled as he touched two fingers to the brim of his cap in a casual salute to Carmichael. Then he went back to his relaxed stance as a guardian, calmly facing the emptiness that had unnerved me.

The elevator doors closed, and the car rattled a little before it started moving. “So,” I said, “now that we’ve got at least one guardian angel between us and whatever it is you were nervous about, can you tell me where we’re going?”

Carmichael’s eyes crinkled at the corners. He grunted. “I’m pretty much a tour guide at the moment, Dresden. You need to talk to the captain.”

Carmichael took me through a precinct room, the kind with a lot of unenclosed desks as opposed to cubicles, where cops worked. It looked a lot like the Special Investigations headquarters in Chicago. There were several men and women at the desks, reading through files, talking on phones, and otherwise looking like cops at work. All of them were about Carmichael’s apparent age—right at the line where youthful energy and wisdom-creating life experience were reaching a state of balance. I didn’t recognize any of them, though Carmichael gave and received nods from a couple. He marched over to the only other door in the room, leading to a private office, and knocked.

“In,” said a clear, quiet baritone.

Carmichael opened the door and led me into the room. It was a small, well-used office. There were old filing cabinets, an old wooden desk, some battered wooden chairs. The desk had an in-box, an out-box, and a message spike, along with a rotary telephone. There was no computer. Instead, on a table next to the desk sat an old electric typewriter.