Jim Butcher - Ghost Story

“Ha-ha,” Molly said, and thumped her cane gently on the ground. “I’m not. What if I can’t keep up?”

I pressed my lips together and tried to keep from wincing.

Her mouth tightened. “You don’t want me to go with you.”

“It isn’t about what I want,” I said. “They’ll need you on this side. If Murphy tries to go in before the wards are down, people are going to die. Horribly. You’re the only one who can tell when the wards fall. So you stay.”

Molly looked away again. She swallowed. Then she nodded. “Okay.”

I looked at her for a moment. She was clearly hurting in all kinds of ways. She was just as clearly in control of herself. She didn’t like the role I’d asked her to play, but she had accepted its necessity.

“You’re one hell of a woman, Molly,” I said. “Thank you.”

She flinched as if she’d just been shot. Her eyes widened as she jerked her head back to me, and her face went entirely bloodless. She stared at me for a moment. Her mouth started working soundlessly. Her eyes overflowed with tears. It took her several seconds to let out a little choking sound.

Then she shuddered and turned away from me. She lifted her arm and wiped her eyes on her coat sleeve. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I said, trying to keep my voice gentle. “I know . . . I know things haven’t been easy for you lately. Bound to bring on the waterworks once in a while.”

“God,” she said, both bitterness and amusement in her voice. “Harry. How can you be so completely clueless and still be you?” She took a deep breath, then straightened her back and squared her shoulders. “Okay. We’re burning time.”

“Yeah,” I said.

She walked toward the door to the Big Hoods’ hideout. She planted her feet firmly, withdrew the amethyst-tipped wand from her belt, and held it firmly in her right hand. I saw her gather her focus and do it rapidly. She was very nearly operating on the level of a full member of the White Council. After less than five seconds, she looked up, lifted the wand, drew it in a long, vertical line through the air and murmured, “Rokotsu.”

For a second, nothing happened. Then the air seemed to split and fall open, as if reality had been nothing more than a curtain suddenly stirred by an outside breeze. The opening widened until it was the size of the front door of a home, and odd, aqua green light poured out from the other side.

Molly rolled her neck a little, as if the effort had pained her. It probably had. Opening a Way takes a serious energy investment, and Molly had never been a high-horsepower practitioner. She stepped back and said, “All yours, boss.”

“Thanks, grasshopper,” I said quietly. Then I turned to the spook squad and said, “All right, everybody. Let’s go knock some heads together.”

I turned and plunged through the Way into the Nevernever, and the deadliest spirit-predators of the concrete jungle came with me.

Before I died, I went to a lot of movies.

Movie theaters were totally useless for me, especially as more and more of them went with increasingly advanced technology for their sound and projection systems. The way I tended to foul up technology, especially electronics, just by standing around meant that it was tough to see a movie all the way through without something going horribly wrong with the sound, the picture, or both. Magic draws a lot of its power from emotion, and at the movies that meant that things would tend to go bad at the parts of the movie that were the most gripping and interesting.

So I could see a movie that sucked at a theater. Usually. But if I wanted to see a good movie, there was only one solution: a drive-in.

There are still a few of them up and running. I went down to the one in Aurora. There, I could be far enough from the projector not to interfere with it. The sound system of the movie consisted of hundreds of little car speakers and car radios, mostly turned up loud. Yeah, the place was full of kids who were basically at the drive-in in order to make out, wander around in giggling groups, sneak friends in for free in their trunks, and drink smuggled alcohol. That never bothered me. I could park up front, sit on the hood of my car with my back leaning against the windshield, my hands behind my head, and enjoy the whole movie all the way through.

(I usually took Bob along. He sat on the dashboard. I always thought I’d been doing him a favor, although when I thought back, it made me think he’d been doing it for the sake of shared experience. For company.)

Anyway, the point is, I’ve seen a lot of movies. So I know whereof I speak when I say that I went through the Way my apprentice opened and landed in the first act of a movie.

Cold water engulfed the lower half of my body, and a second later a wave slapped me in the middle of the back, nearly throwing me off my feet. After the past days of muted physical stimuli, I staggered and gasped against the sudden shock of pure sensation. Salt spray filled my mouth.

I should have expected that. This was the spirit world, where the immaterial wasn’t. Gravity, heat, cold, light—they were all just as real as I was now. I was a civilian again. There wouldn’t be any fun ghost tricks like vanishing out of the cold water.

I spat, regained my balance, and got my bearings. I was maybe ten yards away from a pebble beach. The light was grey and somehow oppressive. The beach rose a couple of feet from the water across maybe two or three hundred yards, then ran right up onto the feet of a granite cliff.

There were . . . things, littering the beach. Imagine a jack from the children’s game. Now imagine it had babies with a porcupine the size of a dump truck. That was what lurked there: some kind of massive, lethargic-looking beasts, their bodies mostly dug into the ground. Each projected several enormous, bladelike spines seven or eight feet long in several directions from its hump of a body—along with hundreds of other spines about a quarter that size. They were scattered in a vaguely ordered pattern all across the beach between us and the cliffs, their sides heaving gently as they breathed.

My eyes tracked on the cliffs, to squat, ugly, blocky-looking structures at their summit. There were narrow slits carved in their fronts. In a couple of spots along the cliff face, the stone had collapsed into a very steep gradient. A particularly agile monkey might be able to make his way up to the top. All of those spots were covered in razor wire and surrounded by fortified positions that would make an ascension a particularly nerve-racking form of suicide.

A cool wind that smelled of rotten meat fluttered across the pebbles and sand, and it carried a bloodred banner mounted above the structures out to the side, displaying a black swastika within a white circle. I stared at it blankly for half a second while another wave hit me in the back and threatened my balance. Then it struck me where I’d seen this before: the first act of Saving Private Ryan .

“Oh, crap,” I breathed.

This was the Nevernever, the spirit world, and beings of powerful mind and will could reshape the world to their liking. Evil Bob had been the part of Bob the Skull, which had been in the service of this jerk named Kemmler, who had apparently been killed for good sometime during World War II. Evil Bob had been working with a theme when he designed defenses to his patron’s base of operations.

There were flashes of light from the firing slits in the bunkers at the top of the cliffs. Bullets that shone faintly scarlet hammered into the beach at the water’s edge and then tracked toward us. The hiss-splat of impact got to us a second before the chattering thump of the guns.