Jim Butcher: Ghost Story

“I am sorry, sir,” Stu said. “But the standing order regarding the visit of any uninvited ghosts is to deny them entry.”

“And you have to follow Mort’s orders?”

“It isn’t as though you could cross his threshold uninvited in any case, man,” he said.

“Right,” I said. “You have to follow his orders.”

“We are not compelled,” Stu said at once, and severely. “We aid him out of friendship and respect and . . .” He sighed and added, “And boredom. Ye gods, but this city pales after but half a century, and I’ve lingered here more than four times that.”

I found myself grinning at the ghost. “Stu, let me make you a promise. Maybe even an oath. I come to ask Mort’s help, not to harm him—and I’m reasonably sure my presence will not contribute to your ongoing sense of ennui.”

Stu let out a rolling belly laugh and began to speak, but the sound died off, and he stared at me thoughtfully, tapping a fingertip against the pistol.

“If it makes any difference,” I said, “Jack Murphy was the one who dropped me off here. Told me to mention his name.”

Stu’s eyebrows shot up. I could see the thoughts racing behind his eyes. They weren’t going to win any sprints, but they seemed good for the long haul. “Aye?” He pursed his lips. “A good fellow. For an Irishman.”

I snorted. “If he’s ever around, you’d better smile when you say—”

A flood of intangible cold pressed against my back, as suddenly as if I’d been standing in front of an industrial freezer door when it opened.

I turned to see a humanoid, grey form floating just above the ground maybe five yards away from me and drifting closer. The details were obscure, the proportions slightly off, as if I were looking at a badly molded plastic doll. There were no real features on it, just hollow, gaping eye sockets within a sunken, nearly skull-like face, and a wide, empty mouth that hung open as if the tendons attaching the lower jaw had stretched out like old elastic bands.

It moved with a kind of shuffling grace, as if it had no real weight and needed only to touch the ground to propel itself forward with its toes. It made a sound as it came, a hollow, rattling, muted gasp. It was the sound of an agonized scream that had long since run out of breath to propel it—but tried to continue anyway.

It got closer to me, and I felt colder as it did.

“Get back,” I snapped. “I mean it.”

The creature came forward with another little touch of its toes to the earth, as mindless and graceful as a hungry jellyfish, and a hell of a lot creepier.

I took a pair of quick steps back and said, “Fine. Be that way.” I lifted my right hand, drew in my will, and snarled, “Fuego.”

And nothing—nothing at all —happened.

There was no stirring of forces deep inside me. There was no current of equal parts giddy excitement, vibrating tension, and raw lightning flashing through my thoughts. There was no flash of white-hot flame that would have incinerated the apparition coming toward me.

There was no magic.

There was no magic.

“Oh, crap,” I choked and reeled back as the thing’s fingers raked at me with deathly grace, the sound of its strangled scream growing higher pitched. Its fingers didn’t end in nails. They just sort of trailed off into drifting shreds that were surrounded by deadly cold.

Behind me, there was a mechanical sound, click-clack , of a large, halfcocked trigger being pulled fully back and ready to fire.

I whirled my head around in time to see Stu’s enormous old gun snap up to aim directly at the end of my nose. I’m sure its barrel wasn’t actually as big as a train tunnel, but at the moment it sure as hell looked like it.

I felt the wave of cold intensify against my back, and by the time Stu shouted, “Get down!” I was already halfway to the ground.

I hit hard—apparently being insubstantial didn’t free me from the laws of gravity or the discomfort of its unwavering enforcement—at the same time that Stu’s pistol went off.

Everything happened in dreamtime, slowly enough for me to see every detail, but so swiftly that I felt that no matter how fast I moved, I would not be able to keep up. I was expecting the crack of a pistol round, or even the hollow whump of a large-bore black-powder weapon. What I got was a roar that sounded like it had been distorted by a dozen different DJs and a mile of train tunnel. The standard plume of black-powder smoke didn’t emerge from the barrel. Instead, expanding concentric rings of pastel mist puffed out, swirling at their center as if pulled into following the contrail of the bullet.

The bullet itself was no lump of lead. It was a sphere of multicolored light that looked nearly big enough to be a golf ball. It went by a couple of feet over my head, and I swear it felt like I’d gotten a mild sunburn just from being close to it. A deep tone, like the thrumming of an amplified bass-guitar string, emanated from the sphere, vibrating through my flesh and against my bones.

I turned my head in time to see the sphere smash against the chest of the attacking apparition. The not-bullet plunged into its body, tearing a hole the size of my fist in its chest. A cloud of something that looked like steam poured out of the creature. Light kindled within it, almost like an old movie projector playing upon the vapor, and I suddenly saw a flicker of shadowy images, all of them dim, warped, twisted, as if someone had made a clips reel from the random strips of celluloid from the cuttingroom floor.

The images grew steadily dimmer, until there was nothing left but a thinning cloud of mist. It wasn’t until then that I saw that the grey form was gradually sagging, like a waterskin being slowly emptied.

The mists vanished. All that was left of the grey creature was an ugly, colorless lump on the ground.

Firm bootsteps came down the walkway from the porch, and Stu placed himself between me and the thing, whatever it had been. Though his hands were reloading the pistol, complete with powder horn and a short ramrod, his eyes swept up and down the street around us.

“What the hell was that?” I asked.

“Wraith,” he said quietly, with a certain professional detachment in his voice. “A ghost, like you or me, who gave in to despair and gave up his sense of self-reason.”

“Dangerous?”

“Extremely so,” Stu said. He turned to look down at me. “Especially to someone like you.”

“Like me?”

“A fresh shade. You’ve a paucity of experience in learning to defend yourself here. And it is all but impossible for a fresh shade such as yourself to hide: There is a sense of life that clings to you.” He frowned. “To you especially.”

“Because I’m a wizard, maybe.”

Stu nodded. “Likely, likely.”

“What would have happened if . . . ?” I gestured at the wraith’s remains.

“It would have devoured your memories,” Stu said calmly.

I considered that for a moment and studied the remains almost wistfully. “I don’t know. I’ve got some I wouldn’t mind losing.”

Stu slid his readied pistol back into his belt. “For shades, memories are life, sustenance, and power. We are memories now, wizard.”

“The images in the mist,” I said. “When it was . . . was dying. They were its memories?”

“Aye. What was left of them.” Stu moved forward and crouched over the remains. He held out his hand, palm down over them, and took a deep breath. After a few heartbeats, glowing mist began to rise from the wraith’s remains. It snaked through the air and into Stu’s chest, flowing into him like water into a pool. When it was complete, he stood again and let out a sigh.

Whatever had struck the wraith, it had evidently been made of the same substance as Sir Stuart. If ghosts, then, were memories . . . “The bullet,” I said. “You made it out of a memory?”