C.E. Murphy - Walking Dead

“Are you nuts?”

Billy stopped and looked down at me. Even with the delicacy added to his makeup, he was still bigger than I was. I quelled the urge to make myself a little taller in the garden of my mind, so I could measure up to the visitors. “If you’ve got a rider, it’s someone or something strong enough to get a toehold in somebody brimming with shamanic magic. With life magic, Joanne. Of the two of us, if one is going to be possessed, it’s a lot less dangerous for everybody if it’s me.”

There was a certain irrefutable logic to that. “What if you do get possessed? What do I do?”

“Get a priest and perform an exorcism.” Amusement creased Billy’s face at my expression. “I mean it. It’s a violent way to send them over, and it’d be my last choice, but—well, you could say if it does happen, it is my last choice. Don’t worry. It’s not likely to happen.”

“That doesn’t reassure me at all.” I forged ahead and crouched to pull the door key out from a little hole dug in the earth. A robin cheeped and I smiled, happy it was there. My garden wasn’t exactly overflowing with wildlife, but there ought to be a robin to go with the hidden key to a secret door. “If we open the door and there’s nothing there, I’m in the clear, right? I mean, if I’ve got a door between life and death, and that’s where ghosts stay, then they should be here if they’re here at all.”

“Right.” Billy took the key and I lifted ivy away from the door, sending a cool green scent across us. He fit the key into the lock and I held my breath.

“You said there were a couple of things you wanted to tell me. Did we cover them all?” Billy nodded and pushed the door open. It rasped with the sound of reluctant-to-move stone, and I turned on the Sight, more than half-fearful of what I’d see.

Nothing lay beyond the door except the enormous crater that had always been there. I exhaled noisily and shot a grateful look toward the crater’s far-off rim. “Are we good?”

“No.” Billy’s voice sounded worse than the scraping door. I jerked to see his face graying and his jaw tense with concentration. He whispered, “Close the door,” and I yanked it shut, but the tension didn’t leave his face. He bared his teeth in a grimace of apology, and breathed, “Sorry, Joanie. I think I’m out of my league.”

His eyes flooded black, then went hollow and gray, and the thing looking out at me was suddenly no longer Billy Holliday.

Too many late-night horror movies, or maybe just a sudden overweening burst of confidence made me leap forward. I clapped my hand to Billy’s forehead, and, with all the conviction of a revival-tent preacher, shrieked, “Demon of hell, I abjure thee!”

It would’ve been very dramatic if it had worked.

Sadly for all involved—except, I supposed, the unabjured demon of hell—Billy’s jaw dropped and he let out a dry horrible laugh that sounded like a windup doll’s little windup gears sheering out. It wasn’t a human sound at all, and shouldn’t have been able to come from his throat.

I was pretty sure this was the point at which Billy would be telling me to run, if he were in a position to do so. That left me with a conundrum: do what I knew he’d tell me to, or stay and fight for my friend.

Okay, it wasn’t really much of a conundrum at all. I reached deep and seized hold of my magic as solidly as I knew how. It flared through me, and even here in my garden—maybe especially here in my garden—I felt myself go all see-through and powered up, magic flowing in my veins like blood. The light mist that covered this end of the garden burned away in blue heat, and sunlight flooded down on me and the thing that wasn’t Billy.

It was trying to re-form his idea of himself. His skin bulged and split and came together again, mutating grotesquely. Brief glimpses of cadaverous faces melted into view, then snapped back again. His body weight changed, always turning emaciated before he pulled it toward his own more solid shape. Either the dead didn’t have great body images or I was dealing with a supermodel’s ghost. The second idea was more entertaining, but I’d put money on the former.

My fingertips were actually digging into his skull, like I was grabbing Play-Doh that’d been left out in the air too long. Flesh rupturing and reshaping under my palm felt like giant boils being lanced and rebuilding with living intent. It was utterly disgusting.

It was also, in those terms, a sickness, and sickness, I could deal with. Boils were poison, poison was something that didn’t belong in the system…in vehicle terms, that meant water in the gas tank.

I’d used the idea before to drive venom from a thunderbird’s veins. Water was heavier than gas, but in my analogy the healthy material was the weightier, mostly because it was easier to visualize pushing scuzz off the top than off the bottom. I wasn’t, after all, actually draining a gas tank.

I dug my fingers deeper into Billy’s squishy skull and poured silver-blue magic into him through those indentations. To my surprise, he acquiesced, ceasing his fight and permitting me to take it up. For an eternal instant he folded himself away, leaving nothing but my magic and the ghost rider in an echo of Billy’s thought of himself.

The ghost scrabbled, fingertips scraping off my magic like it was made of glass, impenetrable to its touch. With Billy, it had been able to sink through, permeating all the parts of him. But magic became the water in the tank, too heavy for it to invade. Fear and fury whipped it around, but it didn’t dare leave the sanctuary of Billy’s thought-form; without it, the ghost had nothing, no shape, no hope of surviving, and it wanted to live more than anything.

Me, I wanted Billy to live.

My imagery seemed juvenile, and I was glad nobody else could see it. Blue magic filled Billy’s lower half, just like he really was a gas tank, and the raging ghost swirled around his torso, a corrosive material that didn’t belong. All I did, really, was let the magic rise, giving the ghost nowhere it could fit, and it spilled out with a scream.

I clawed my free hand into the mist that poured free, holding it with magic that I retracted, carefully, from Billy. It felt slow, because I was reluctant to abandon his thought-self until I knew he still had enough handle on himself to re-form properly. If he lost his sense of self I had a much bigger problem on my hands than what to do with a temperamental ghost. But he unfolded from whatever pocket he’d retreated to when I took over, and the idea of him stabilized with relieving rapidity. None of it took as long as an indrawn breath, but it seemed like much longer. Things that were important usually did.

As the magic spilled out of him, it wrapped around my captive ghost in a kind of safety net. It couldn’t get into me, but I figured it couldn’t dissipate, either, if I held it within a bubble of magic, and if it wanted to live, then within my power was better than nothing. And if I was going to find out what else it wanted, then it needed a voice, and neither nets nor bubbles could give it one.

I entirely blamed my subconscious for what happened next.

Magic took shape low to the ground, coalescing what I recognized far too early as a 1982 Pontiac Trans Am. The color was wrong, of course, because while my subconscious was a smart-ass, my magic was apparently content with remaining silver-blue. The ghost’s dark gray roiled beneath the car’s surface, making the “paint” seem changeable, even more so than Petite’s carefully crafted purple. I put a hand over my face and dared a glance at Billy through my fingers. He was still pale, which was understandable: I doubted being possessed was a nice experience. But he’d fit back into his image of himself solidly enough, and looked, perhaps, a little more burly now, as though he’d beefed up the mental image to fight all comers. I didn’t blame him.