Jim Butcher - Ghost Story

I had a lightbulb moment.

The gates of the cemetery were being left open.

And hordes of wraiths haunted the streets of Chicago by night lately.

“Aha, Morty,” I said. “And now we know where they’re coming from.”

Someone, someone alive , was opening those gates at night. That meant that we had a place to begin, a trail we could attempt to follow to find out who was stirring up the city’s spooks to use against Morty—and why.

I had information. I had something to trade Mort for his ongoing help.

I suddenly felt like an investigator again.

“Hot diggity dog,” I said, grinning. “The game’s a-freaking-foot!”

Irevved up the memory and started jumping. It was a quick way to travel in the city—the ability to go over buildings and ignore traffic signals, one-way streets, and cars was a real plus. It didn’t take me long to get to Mortimer’s house.

It was on fire.

There were fire trucks there, lights blazing. The firemen were moving quickly, professionally, but though the house was well ablaze, they had only one hose up and running. As I stood there, staring, two more started up, but I knew it was a lost cause. Morty’s place was burning even more swiftly and brightly than mine had. Or maybe the dark was just making it look that way.

A cop or two showed up as the firemen kept the blaze from spreading to the houses around it—not hard, given the snow on the ground. Blue lights from the bubbles on the cop cars joined the red and yellow of the CFD. People stood around watching the fire—in my experience, they often do.

Of course . . . they didn’t usually do it out in the cold. And they didn’t usually do it in six inches of snow. And they tended to wander off when the fire began to subside. And talk. And blink. And their clothing is generally from the current century.

The crowd of onlooking Chicago civilians were ghosts.

I walked among them, looking at faces. They were much like any other group of folks, apart from the period outfits. I recognized a few from Sir Stuart’s home-defense brigade—but only a few, and they were the more recent shades. The rest were just . . . people. Men, women, and children.

A boy maybe ten years old was the only shade who seemed to notice me. Beside him stood a girl, who must have been about seven when she died. They were holding hands. He looked up at me as I passed by, and I stopped to stare down at him.

“Where do we go now?” he asked. “I don’t know another place to go.”

“Um,” I said. “I don’t know, either. Hey, did you see what happened?”

“It came back again tonight. Then men came with fire. They burned the house. They took the little man away.”

I stiffened. “The Grey Ghost took Mort?”

“No, men took him,” the boy said.

The girl said, in a soft little voice, “We used to play with other children by the river. But he brought us here. He was always nice to us.” Her facial expression never changed. It was flat, empty.

The boy sighed, touched the little girl’s shoulder, and turned back to stare at the dwindling flames. I stood there watching them for a moment, and could see them growing more visibly transparent. I checked the other shades. It was happening to them, too, to a greater or lesser degree.

“Hey,” I said, to the boy. “Do you know Sir Stuart?”

“The big man. The soldier,” the boy said, nodding. “He’s in the garden. Behind the house.”

“Thank you,” I said, and went to look, vanishing to the side of Mort’s house and then jumping again, to the garden.

Mort’s backyard was like his front—sculpted, carefully maintained, decorated with Japanese sensibilities, spare and elegant. There was what looked like a koi pond, now filled with snow. There were trees, and more of the little bonsai pieces, delicate and somehow vulnerable. The fire had been close enough and hot enough to melt any coating of snow from their little branches.

What was left of Sir Stuart lay in a circle in the snow.

They’d used fire.

A perfect circle was melted in the show, out toward the back of the yard. They’d used gasoline, it looked like—the snow was melted down all the way to the scorched grass. Alcohol burns about three times as hot as gas, and faster, and it melts the snow fast enough for water to drown the flame. Someone had used the fire as part of a circle trap—pretty standard for dealing with spirits and other heavily supernatural entities. Once trapped in a circle, a spirit was effectively helpless; unable to leave, and unable to exercise power through its barrier.

The devilish part of the trap was the fire. Fire’s real, even to spirits, and brings pain to the immaterial as fast as it does to flesh-and-blood creatures. That’s one huge reason I always used fire in my mortal career. Fire burns, period. Even practically invulnerable things don’t like dealing with fire.

There was maybe half of Sir Stuart left. Most of his upper body was there and part of his right arm. His legs were mostly gone. There wasn’t any blood. What was left of him looked like a roll of papers rescued from a fire. The edges were blackened and crumbling slowly away.

The horrible part was that I knew he was still alive, or what passed for being alive among ghosts. Otherwise, he would simply be gone.

Did he feel pain? I knew that if I were in his condition, I would. Sure, maybe I knew that there was no spoon, but when it came down to it, I wasn’t sure I could deny that much apparent reality. Or maybe the memory of pain wasn’t an issue. Maybe the weird form of pain Eternal Silence had showed me had some sort of spiritual analogue. Or maybe, fire being fire, he was just in very real, very familiar agony.

I shuddered. Not that I could do anything about it. The circle that trapped him would keep me out as easily as it kept him in. In theory, I could take it down, but only if I could physically move something across it to break its continuity. I looked around quickly and spotted a twig standing out of the snow a few feet away. All I would need to do was move it about three feet.

It was like trying to eat broth with a fork. I just couldn’t get hold of the stick. My hand went through it time and time again, no matter what I tried. I couldn’t even get the damned thing to wiggle.

I wasn’t ghost enough to help Sir Stuart. Not like that, anyway.

“Sir Stuart?” I asked quietly.

I could see only one of his eyes. It half opened. “Hmmmm?”

I squatted down on my heels next to the circle. “It’s Harry Dresden.”

“Dresden,” he slurred, and his mouth turned up in a faint smile. “Pardon me if I don’t rise. Perhaps it was something I ate.”

“Of course,” I said. “What happened?”

“I was a fool,” he said. “Our attacker came at the same time every night. I made the mistake of assuming that was true because it was as soon as the attacker could assemble his forces.”

“The Grey Ghost,” I said.

Sir Stuart grunted. “Arrived at dusk, sooner than I would have dared the open air. No mob of spirits this time. It came with half a dozen mortals and they set the house on fire. I was able to get Mortimer out of the house in time, but they’d set a trap for me in the backyard.” One hand gestured at the circle within which he lay. “He was taken at the command of the Grey Ghost.”

I frowned. “These mortals. They could hear the Grey Ghost?”

“Aye,” Sir Stuart said.

“Stars and stones,” I growled. “I could barely get two people in Chicago to hear me. This joker has half a dozen? How?”

Sir Stuart shook his head faintly. “Would that I knew.”

“We’ll find Morty,” I said. “Let me figure out how to get you out of there, and then we’ll go find him.”