Ghost Story

Chapter Thirty-two

“He Who Walks Behind?” I said, fighting a losing battle to keep from trembling. “As scary names go, that one kind of isn’t. I’d stick with the first one. More evocative.”

“Be patient,” purred the creature’s disembodied voice. “You will understand it before the end.”

“Uh, dude?” Stan asked quietly. “Uh . . . Who are you talking to?”

“Oh, tell him,” the creature said. “That should be entertaining.”

“Shut up, Stan,” I said. “And get out.”

“Uh,” said Stan. “What?”

I whirled on him and pointed the paper bag at him, my arms extending through the space where He Who Walks Behind apparently both was and wasn’t. “Get the hell out of here!”

Stan fell all over himself trying to comply. He literally went to the tile floor twice on his way to the door, his eyes wide, and stumbled out and into the night.

I turned back to the reflective surface of the video game’s screen, and just as I again found the shape inside it, fire erupted along my spine. I was slammed forward into the video game, and my head hit it hard enough to send a spiderweb of cracks through the machine’s glass screen. Pain, sickening and harsh, flooded through my skull, and I staggered.

But I didn’t fall. Justin DuMorne had been hard on me. It hadn’t ever been this bad, this scary, and it had never hurt so much—but then, it had never been for real. I grabbed the machine’s sides, forced my fingers to hold on, and kept myself from falling.

“Run! Run!” screamed the machine again. This time, the voice was blurred and distorted, disturbingly deep and malicious. I noted blurrily that the cracked and wildly flickering screen had a terrified wizard’s blood all over it. The game’s computer was apparently failing.

“You think that the inebriated little mortal is going to run to fetch the authorities,” purred the creature’s voice. I turned my head, looking around, and didn’t see anything. But the motion sent fire down my back, and for the first time I felt a trickling there beneath my jacket. I was bleeding.

“You think that if they come running in their vehicles, with their lights and their symbols, that I will flee.”

I turned and put my back to the machine. My legs felt wobbly, but I was beginning to fight through the pain. I clenched my teeth and snarled, “Get away from me.”

“I assure you,” came the creature’s bodiless voice, “that we will not be disturbed. I have made sure of it. But it does demonstrate that you possess a certain talent for performance under pressure. Does it not?”

“You sound like my guidance counselor,” I said, and wiped blood from one of my eyes. I took a breath and stalked forward, wobbling only a little. I grabbed the bag of money Stan had left on the counter. “I guess maybe you are a little scary.”

“Neither fear nor pain sway you from your objective. Excellent.” This time, the thing’s voice was coming from the far side of the convenience store. “But there’s no knowing the true temper of the blade until it has been tested. Even the strongest-seeming steel may have hidden flaws. This may be interesting.”

I paused, frowning, and looked up at my faerie godmother, who still sat at the edge of my grave, listening raptly. “I . . . Godmother, I’ve heard it said that ghosts are memories.”

“Indeed,” Lea said, nodding.

“Are the memories truth?”

Lea arched a rather caustic eyebrow at my words. “You ask your first question before finishing the tale?” Her mouth twisted in distaste. “Your storytelling form leaves something to be desired, child.”

“Yeah, I never did too well in English class. Will you answer the question?”

Her eyes became very, very green and glittered with a wild, gleeful light. “They are the facts, the events as you experienced them.”

I frowned. “I never really had a clear recollection of exactly what the thing said to me,” I said. “I mean, that blow to the head gave me a headache for days.”

“Ah yes,” Lea said. “I remember your pain.”

She would. “Yeah, uh. Anyway. I’m remembering the conversation now, word for word. Is that real? Or is it something that guy in black made up to fill in the blanks?”

“They are your memories,” she said, “the record, the impression of what you lived. Your brain isn’t the only place they are stored—it is, in truth, often a poor facility for such a purpose.” She paused to consider her next words and then spread her hands, palms up, an odd light in her eyes. “It is the nature of the universe that things remain. Nothing ever disappears completely. The very sound of Creation still echoes throughout the vast darkness: The universe remembers. You are currently free of the shackles of mortality. Your limited brain no longer impedes access to that record. The only blocks to your memory are those you allow to be.”

“That’s either very Zen or very . . . very crazy,” I said. “So, this memory—this is all the actual event?”

“Did I not just say as much?” she asked crossly. “It would make a ridiculous fiction. Why would I bother listening otherwise?”

I honestly wasn’t sure. But I decided not to push the issue. Ghost Harry, wise Harry.

“Now,” the Leanansidhe said. “If you are quite finished holding hostage my imagination, pray continue.”

“Get away from me,” I snarled, clutching the money. Sparks spat fitfully from the fried security camera. They were most of the light in the place. Even if the creature had been something solid and physical, it might have hidden in the stretches of shadow between the flickering motes of light. I didn’t see it anywhere.

So it came as a shock to me when something gripped the back of my neck and effortlessly flung me into an end cap of various doughnuts and pastries.

I went through it and hit the shelf behind. It hurt more than I could have believed. Years later, I would have considered it a minor foothill of pain, but at the time it was a mountain. The sweet smell of sugar and chocolate filled my nose. I figured my backside must be coated in about half an inch of frosting, cream filling, and powdered sugar. The scent made my stomach howl for food, gurgling loudly enough to be heard over the sound of items falling from the shelves here and there.

Like I said. Sixteen.

“Such a useless scrap of meat contains you,” the creature said, its voice unchanged by the violence. “It is entirely inconsequential, and yet it molds you. Your existence is a series of contradictions. But here is certainty, mortal child: This time, you cannot run.”

The hell I couldn’t. Running had always served me fairly well, and I saw no reason to change my policy now. I scrambled to my feet and ran for the back of the store, away from the presumed direction of my attacker. I rounded the far corner of the aisle and pressed my back up against it, panting.

Something hard and hot and slimy settled around my neck, a noose made of moist serpent, and just as strong. It jerked me up and off my feet, a bruising force that threw me into the air and released me almost instantly.

I had an enormous flash of empathy for Jerry, facing the raw power and amused pleasure of a large, invisible Tom.

“You cannot escape what is always behind you,” it said.

I landed on my ass, hard, and scrambled toward the other aisle on my hands and knees, only to feel another terrible force strike me, a contemptuous kick in the seat of my pants. It flung me forward into a glass door on a wall of refrigerated cabinets holding racks and racks of cold drinks.

I bounced off the door and landed, dazed, staring for a second at the large cracks my head had left in the glass.

“No one will save you.”

I tried to crawl farther away. I made it only far enough to reach the next cabinet, and then a blow struck me in the ribs and flung me into the next glass door. My shoulder hit it this time and didn’t break the glass, but I felt something go pop in my arm, and the whole limb seemed to light up with abrupt awareness of pain.

The unseen presence of the creature came closer. Its voice lowered to a bare, pleased murmur. “Child of the stars. I will destroy you this night.”

My head was full of pain and fear. I could sense it getting closer again, coming up behind me—always there, I somehow knew, where I was weakest, most vulnerable. That was where it would always be.

I had to move. I had to do something. But the terror felt like lead weights on my wrists and ankles, sapping my strength, making muscles turn to water, thoughts to noise. I tried to run, but the best I could do was a slow, slippery scramble down the aisle of cold drinks.

“Pathetic,” said He Who Walks Behind, growing nearer with every word. “Whimpering, mewling thing. Useless.”

Terror.

I couldn’t think.

I was going to die.

I was going to die.

And then my mouth said, in a damned passable Pee-wee Herman impersonation, “I know you are, but what am I?”

He Who Walks Behind stopped in his tracks. There was a flickering heartbeat of uncertainty in that inevitable presence, and the creature said, “What?”

“Ha-ha!” I said in the same voice, double-tapping my own fear with the character’s staccato laugh. A thought came shining through my head: Maybe I can’t stop this thing from coming at my back.

But I can choose which way I turn it.

I struggled to my feet and started town the aisle, spinning with every step, whirling-dervish style. The whole time, I heard myself spewing Pee-wee Herman’s cartoony laugh—which, in retrospect, was possibly the creepiest thing to hit my ears that night.

I hit the door with a hip and an elbow and blew through it, still spinning, out into the parking lot. Once there, I realized that my escape plan did not have a part two. It hadn’t been concerned with getting me any farther than the doors of the store.

I’d achieved the objective. Now what?

The darkened parking lot was a mass of shadows. The nearest lights were a hundred yards away, and seemed somehow dimmer, more orange than they should have been. There was a heaviness in the air and a faint, faint stench of death and rot. Had that been something the creature had done? Had that been what it meant when it said it had made sure of our privacy?

Stan was in the parking lot, out between the two islands housing the convenience store’s gas pumps. He looked like a man who was trying to run in slow motion. His arms were moving very slowly, his legs bent as if sprinting, but his pace was much slower than a walk, as if he’d been trying to run through a rice paddy filled with peanut butter. He was looking over his shoulder at me, and his face was distorted with terror, a horrible mask that hardly looked human in the shadow-haunted night.

I began to run toward him on pure instinct. Herd instinct, really, operating on the assumption that there was greater safety in numbers. My feet pounded the parking lot’s asphalt at normal speed, and his eyes widened with almost comical slowness and amazement as I ran toward him.

“Is that what you are?” came the creature’s voice, from no direction and from all of them. “One of them? One of the swarm that infests this world?” The origin point of the voice changed, and I suddenly felt hot, stinking breath right on the back of my neck. “I expected better of a pupil of DuMorne.”

I whirled, throwing my arms up defensively. I had time to see everything in the reflection of the convenience store’s broad front windows.

He Who Walks Behind emerged from the shadows in front of the terrified Stan. Broad, horrible arms wrapped around him, crushing him as easily as a man picking up a child. Another limb, maybe a tail or some kind of tentacle, covered in the same growth-fur-scales as the rest of the creature, joined the two arms, so that Stan was wrapped at the shoulders, at the bottom of the ribs, and at the hips.

And then with a slow smile and a simple, savage twisting motion, He Who Walks Behind tore Stan the convenience store clerk into three pieces.

I’d seen death before, but not like that. Not terrible and swift and bloody. I spun back to Stan in time to see the three pieces fall to the ground. Blood went everywhere. One of his arms waved in frantic windmills, and his mouth opened as if to scream, but nothing came out except a vomiting gurgle and a gout of blood. Wide, terrified eyes stared at mine for a second, and I jerked my gaze away, desperate to avoid seeing Stan’s soul as he died.

Then he just sort of . . . changed. From a person in hideous pain and fear to an empty pile of . . . of meat. Parts. Soiled cloth.

I had never seen death come like that. As a humiliation, a reduction of a unique soul to nothing more than constituent matter. When the creature killed Stan, it didn’t simply end his life. It underscored the underlying futility, the ultimate insignificance of that life. It made a man, albeit a fairly unmotivated one, into less than nothing—something that had been a waste of the resources it had consumed. Something that had never had a choice in its own fate, never had a chance to be anything more.

I had involved Stan in this struggle. It hadn’t been his fight at all.

Granted, I had never intended to hurt the guy and never would have. Nonetheless, without my decision to stick up the convenience store, he would have still been loitering behind the counter, killing time until his next joint. He had been caught up in violence that he had done nothing to earn or expect—and it had killed him.

Something in my head went click.

That wasn’t right.

Stan shouldn’t have died like that. No one should. No one—man, beast, or otherwise—should get to decide, in a moment of malicious humor, that it got to end Stan’s life, to take away everything he was and everything he might ever be.

Stan hadn’t deserved it. He hadn’t been looking for it. And that creature, that demon, had murdered him.

I felt my jaw begin to ache as it clenched harder and harder. I could feel my rapid pulse beating behind my eyes. There was a terrible pressure inside my head and inside my chest, and with it came a rising wave of anger, and something darker and deadlier than anger that came welling up like a great wave from an unlit sea.

It.

Wasn’t.

Right.

No, it wasn’t. But the world wasn’t a fair place, was it? And I had more reason to know it than most people twice my age. The world wasn’t nice, and it wasn’t fair. People who didn’t deserve it suffered and died every single day.

So what? So somebody ought to do something about it.

My right arm and shoulder burned like fire as I felt my right hand slowly form a tight fist. The knuckles popped one by one. They hadn’t ever done that before.

I turned to face the creature’s image in the reflection. It was crouched over Stan’s corpse, its talons tapping lightly on the dead man’s open eyes, its mouth still stretched into that horrible, wide smile.

And when it saw the look on my face, its smile widened and its eyes narrowed. “Ahhhh,” it said. “Ahhhhh. There you are.”

I was not a victim. I was not a powerless child. I was a wizard. I was furious. And I was finished running. “This isn’t your world,” I whispered.

“Not now,” He Who Walks Behind murmured, its smile widening. “But it will be ours again in just a little time.”

“You won’t be around to see it,” I said.

I had never used my power in anger. I had never consciously tried to harm another being with my magic.

But this thing? If anything I had ever seen had it coming, if ever a being was deserving of receiving my violence, it was the bloodstained creature crouching over Stan’s mangled body. Everything had been taken away from me in the space of a single afternoon. My home. My family. And now, it seemed, I was about to lose my life. Well, if that was how it was going to be, if I couldn’t run without getting more innocent bystanders killed, then I would make my stand here—and I had no intention of going quietly.

I reached into that deep well of anger and began drawing it together into something as hot and violent and destructive as what I was feeling inside.

“There’s something you should know,” I said. “I skipped sixth hour today. Spanish. Which I’m not very good at anyway.”

“What is that to me?” asked the creature.

“Flickum bicus just doesn’t seem appropriate,” I replied. The heat in my right arm and shoulder concentrated into my right hand. The scent of burned hairs crept up to my nose. “And you really don’t understand where you’re standing, do you?”

The creature’s reflection looked left and right at the gas pumps on either side of it.

I kept my eyes locked on its image in the windows, extended my right hand back toward it, and formed my little fire-lighting spell into something a thousand times bigger, hotter, and deadlier than anything I had ever attempted before.

I met the thing’s eyes in the reflection, reached down to the well of energy and pure will I’d built inside me, extended my hand toward the creature, and screamed, “Fuego!”

My rage and fear poured out of me. Fire lashed out from my open hand like water from a broken hydrant. It spilled all over He Who Walks Behind and over Stan’s body, and lit up the darkness with angry golden light.

The creature let out a scream, more surprise and anger than pain, clutching at its eyes with its huge hands. The light changed the reflection in the glass and I could no longer see what was behind me. I swept the torrent of fire left and right without turning away or changing the direction my back faced. I hoped it would slow He Who Walks Behind long enough for my modified fire-starting spell to do its thing.

Gasoline pumps have all kinds of safety mechanisms built into them to reduce the odds of accidentally igniting them. They’re pretty good. I mean, how many times have you touched off an explosion while filling your car? But as reliable as they are, those measures are made to stop accidents.

And no engineer in the world ever thought about building them to stop angry young wizards.

It took a couple of seconds, but then there was a screaming sound, something metallic strained past the breaking point, and the first tank went up in a bloom of spectacular fire.

The explosion flung me back, scorching my skin and burning away the hair on my eyebrows. I landed on my ass—again—and lay there, stunned, for a few seconds. Sudden weariness, deeper than anything I had ever known, flooded over me in reaction to the energy I’d expended on my economy-sized ignition spell.

And then the second tank went up.

Hot wind and pieces of smoking metal showered against the front of the convenience store. I’m glad the first blast knocked me down. If I’d been standing, the metal shrapnel that punched out the entire front wall of windows would have gone through me first.

I stared at the flames and saw a shape within it—or, rather, I saw a creature-shaped void where the smoke and fire should have been. A voice emerged from the fire, something huge and terrifying, a voice that belonged to gods and monsters of myth.

“HOW DARE YOU!” it roared. “HOW DARE YOU RAISE YOUR HAND AGAINST ME!”

Then that not-figure crashed to its knees and fell limply onto its side.

The roaring flames swept in and consumed it.

And my first true battle was over.