Ghost Story

Chapter Thirty-five

There was a very, very odd swirling sensation as my spirit-self leapt forward, and then I was standing . . .

. . . In an apartment.

Okay, when I say apartment, I don’t mean it like my old place. I lived in a mostly buried box that was maybe twenty by thirty total, not including the subbasement where my lab had been. Apartment Dresden had been full of paperback books on scarred wooden shelves, and comfortable secondhand furniture.

This was more like . . . Apartment Bond, James Apartment Bond. Penthouse Bond, really. There was a lot of black marble and mahogany. There was a fireplace the size of a carport, complete with a modest—relatively modest—blaze going in it. The furniture all matched. The rich hardwoods from which it had been made were hand-carved in intricate designs. It wasn’t until the second glance that I saw some of the same rune and sigil work I’d used on my own staff and blasting rod. The cushions on the couches (plural, couches) and recliners and sedans and chaises (plural, chaises), were made of rich fabric I couldn’t identify, maybe some kind of raw silk, and embroidered with more of the same symbols in gold and silver thread. A nearby table boasted what looked like a freshly roasted turkey, along with a spread of fruits and vegetables and side dishes of every kind.

It was sort of ridiculous, really. There was enough food there to feed a small nation. But there weren’t any plates to fill up, and there weren’t any utensils to eat it with. It looked gorgeous and it smelled incredible, but . . . there was something inert about it, something lifeless. There was no nourishment on that table, not for the body or for the spirit.

One wall was covered in a curtain. I started to pull it aside and found it responding to the touch, spreading open of its own accord to reveal a television the size of billboard, a high-tech stereo system, and an entire shelf lined with one kind of video-game console after another, complicated little controls sitting neatly next to each one. I can’t tell a PlayBox from an X-Station, but who can keep track of all of them? There are, like, a thousand different kinds of machines to play video games on. I mean, honestly.

“Um,” I said. “Hello?” My voice echoed quite distinctly—more than it should have, huge marble cavern or not. “Anybody home?”

There was, I kid you not, a drumroll.

Then, from a curtained archway there appeared a young man. He looked . . . quite ordinary, really. Tall, but not outrageously so; slender without being rail thin. He had decent shoulders and looked sort of familiar. He was dressed like James Dean—jeans, a white shirt, a leather biker’s jacket. The outfit looked a little odd on him, somehow forced, except for a little skull embroidered in white thread on the jacket, just over the young man’s heart.

Cymbals crashed and he spread his arms. “Ta-da.”

“Bob,” I said. I felt one side of my mouth curling up in amusement. “This? This is the place you always wanted me to let you out of? You could fit five or six of mine in here.”

His face spread into a wide grin. “Well, I admit, my crib is pretty sweet. But a gold cage is still a cage, Harry.”

“A gold fallout shelter, more like.”

“Either way, you get stir-crazy every few decades,” he said, and flopped down onto a chaise. “You get that this isn’t literally what the inside of the skull is like, right?”

“It’s my head interpreting what I see into familiar things, yeah,” I said. “It’s getting to be kind of common.”

“Welcome to the world of spirit,” Bob said.

“What’s with the food?”

“Butters’s mom is some kind of food goddess,” Bob said, his eyes widening. “That’s the spread she’s put out over the last few holidays. Or, um, Butters’s sensory memories of it, anyway—he let me do a ride-along, and then I made this facsimile of what we experienced.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “He let you do a ride-along? In his head?” Bob . . . was not well-known for his restraint, in my experience, when he got to go on one of his excursions.

“There was a contract first,” Bob said. “A limiting document about twenty pages long. He covered his bases.”

“Huh,” I said. I nodded at the food. “And you just . . . remade it?”

“Oh, sure,” Bob said. “I can remake whatever in here.” He waggled his eyebrows. “You want to see a replay of that time Molly got the acid all over her clothes in the lab and had to strip?”

“Um. Pass,” I said. I sat down gingerly on a chair, making sure I wasn’t going to sink through it or something. It seemed to behave like a normal chair. “TV and stuff, too?”

“I am kinda made out of energy, man,” Bob said. He pointed at the wall of media equipment. “You remember me broadcasting to your spirit radio, right? I’m, like, totally tapped in now. Television, satellite imagery, broadband Internet—you name it; I can do it. How do you think I know so much?”

“Hundreds of years of assisting wizards,” I said.

He waved a hand. “That, too. But I got this whole huge Internet thing to play on now. Butters showed me.” His grin turned into a leer. “And it’s, like, ninety percent porn!”

“There’s the Bob I know and love,” I said.

“Love, ick,” he replied. “And I am and I’m not. I mean, you get that I change based on who possesses the skull, right?”

“Sure,” I said.

“So I’m a lot like I was with you, even though I’m with Butters, because he met me back then. First impression and whatnot, highly important.”

I grunted. “How long do we have to talk?”

“Not as simple to answer as you’d think,” Bob said. “But . . . you’re still pretty cherry, so let’s keep it simple. A few minutes, speaking linearly—but I can stretch it out for a while, subjectively.”

“Huh,” I said. “Neat.”

“Nah, just sort of the way we roll on this side of the street,” he said. “What do you want to know?”

“Who killed me?” I replied.

“Oooh, sorry. Can’t help you with that, except as a sounding board.”

“Okay,” I said. “Lemme catch you up on what I know.”

I filled Bob in on everything since the train tunnel. I didn’t hold back much of anything. Bob was smart enough to fill in the vast majority of gaps if I left anything out anyway, and he could compile information and deduce coherent facts as well as any mind I had ever known.

And besides . . . he was my oldest friend.

He listened, his gold brown eyes intent, completely focused on me.

“Wow,” he said when I’d finished. “You are so completely fucked.”

I arched an eyebrow at him and said, “How do you figure?”

He rolled his eyes. “Oh, where do I start? How about with the obvious? Uriel.”

“Uriel,” I said. “What?”

“A wizard tied in with a bunch of really elemental sources of power dies, right after signing off on some deals that guarantee he’s about to become a whole Hell of a lot darker—capital letter intended—and there’s this sudden”—he made air quotes with his fingers—“ ‘irregularity’ about his death. He gets sent back to the mortal coil to get involved again. And you think an angel isn’t involved somewhere? Remember. Uriel is the black-ops guy of the archangels. He’s conned the Father of Lies, for crying out loud. You think he wouldn’t scam you?”

“Uh,” I said.

I felt a little thick.

“See?” Bob said. “Your first tiny piece of flesh-free existence, and already you’re lost without me.”

I shook my head. “Look, man, I’m just . . . just a spirit now. This is just, like, paperwork I’m getting filled out before I catch the train to Wherever.”

Bob rolled his eyes again and snorted. “Oh, sure it is. You get sent back here just as the freaking Corpsetaker is setting herself up as Queen of Chicago, getting ready to wipe out the defenders of humanity—such as they are—here in town, and it’s just a coincidence, business as usual.” He sniffed. “They’re totally playing you.”

“They?” I said.

“Think about it,” Bob said. “I mean, stop for a minute and actually think. I know it’s been a while.”

“Winter,” I said. “Snow a foot deep at the end of spring. Queen Mab.”

“Obviously,” Bob said. “She’s here. In Chicago. Somewhere. And because, duh, she’s the Winter Queen, she brought winter with her.” He pursed his lips. “For a few more days anyway.”

Bob was right. Mab might flaunt her power in the face of the oncoming season, but if she didn’t back down, her opposite number, Titania, would come for her—at the height of summer’s power, the solstice, if previous patterns held true.

“Harry, I don’t want to comment about your new girlfriend, but she’s still here six months after you got shot? Seems kind of clingy.”

“Wait,” I said. “You’re saying that Mab and Uriel are in on something. Together. The Queen of Air and Darkness, and a flipping archangel.”

“We live in strange times,” Bob said philosophically. “They’re peers, of a sort, Harry. Hey, word is that even the Almighty and Lucifer worked a deal on Job. Spider-Man has teamed up with the Sandman before. Luke and Vader did the Emperor. It happens.”

“Spider-Man is pretend and doesn’t count,” I said.

“You start drawing distinctions like this now?” Bob asked. “Besides, he’s real. Like, somewhere.”

I blinked. “Um. What?”

“You think your universe is the only universe? Harry, come on. Creation, totally freaking huge. Room enough for you and Spider-Man both.” He spread his hands. “Look, I’m not a faith guy. I don’t know what happens on the other side, or if you wind up going to a Heaven or Hell or something reasonably close to them. That isn’t my bag. But I know a shell game when I see one.”

I swallowed and pushed a hand back through my hair. “The Fomor’s servitors. Corpsetaker and her gang. Even Aristedes and his little crew. They’re pieces on the board.”

“Just like you,” Bob agreed cheerfully. “Notice anyone else who pushed you a space or two recently? By which I mean that you only recently noticed.”

I scowled. “Other than everyone around me?”

“I was sort of thinking about the one behind you,” Bob said. His expression grew suddenly serious. “The Walker.”

I took a slow breath. He Who Walks Behind.

It was only now, looking back at my crystalline memories and applying what I’d learned during my adult lifetime since they happened, that I could really appreciate what had gone on that night.

The Walker had never been trying to kill me. If it had wanted to do that, it didn’t need to play with me. It could simply have appeared and executed me, the way it had poor Stan at the gas station. It had been trying to push me, to shape me into something dangerous—like maybe a weapon.

Like maybe the same way Justin had.

I had always assumed that Justin had controlled He Who Walks Behind, that my old master had sent him after me when I fled. But what if I’d been a flipping idiot? What if their relationship had worked the other way around? What if Justin, who had betrayed me, had similarly been backstabbed by his own inhuman mentor, when the creature had, in essence, prepared me to destroy Justin?

“Lotta really scary symmetry there,” I whispered.

“Yeah,” Bob said, still serious. “You are in a scary place, Harry.” He took a deep breath. “And . . . it gets worse.”

“Worse? How?”

“It’s just a theory,” he said, “because this isn’t my bag. But look. There’s flesh and there’s spirit, right?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Mortals have both, right there together, along with the soul.”

“I thought it was the same thing. Soul, spirit.”

“Um,” Bob said. “Complicated. Think of your spirit-self as a seed. Your soul is the earth it grows in. You need both when you die. The way I’ve heard it . . . they sort of blend together to become something new. It’s a caterpillar-butterfly thing.”

“Okay,” I said. “How does that make it worse?”

“You, here, now, aren’t a spirit,” Bob said. “You aren’t a real ghost. You . . . You’re just running around in your freaking soul, man. I mean, for practical purposes, it’s the same thing, but . . .”

“But what?”

“But if something happens to you here, now . . . it’s for keeps. I mean . . . forever. You could capital-E End, man. Spin right off the wheel altogether. Or worse.”

I swallowed. I mean, I realized that I’d been in a serious situation all the way down the line, but not one that could potentially be described using words like eternal. Joy.

Bob shook his head. “I didn’t think it was possible for them to do that to you. According to what I’ve heard, your soul’s your own. I’d have thought you would have to walk into something like this willingly, but . . .”

I held up the heel of my hand and butted my forehead against it in steady rhythm.

“Oh, Harry,” Bob said, his voice profoundly disappointed. “You didn’t.”

“They didn’t explain it exactly the way you did,” I said. “Not in so many words.”

“But they gave you a choice?”

Captain Murphy had done exactly that. It had been phrased in such a way that I hadn’t really had much of a choice, but I’d had a choice. “Yeah.”

“And you chose to hazard your eternal soul? Even though you get all worked up about that sort of thing.”

“It . . . wasn’t phrased quite like that . . .” I began. Only it really had been. Jack had warned me that I might be trapped forever, hadn’t he? “Or . . . well. Um. Yeah. I guess technically I did.”

“Well,” Bob said. He cleared his throat. “You idiot.”

“Argh,” I said. “My head hurts.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Bob said scornfully. “You just think it should.”

I paused and reflected and saw that Bob was right. And I decided that my head hurt anyway, dammit. Just because I was a spirit or a naked soul or whatever didn’t mean I needed to start ignoring who I had been.

“Bob,” I said, lifting my head suddenly. “What does this mean? I mean, why not just let me die and move along like normal?”

Bob pursed his lips. “Um. Yeah. No clue.”

“What if . . . ?” I felt short of breath. I hardly wanted to say it. “What if I’m not . . . ?”

Bob’s eyes widened. “Oh. Oooooohhhhhhhh. Uriel’s people—Murphy’s dad and so on—did they say anything about your body?”

“That it wasn’t available,” I said.

“But not that it was gone?” Bob pressed.

“No,” I said. “They . . . they didn’t say that.”

“Wow,” Bob said, eyes wide.

Mine probably were, too. “What do I do?”

“How the hell should I know, man?” Bob asked. “I’ve never had a soul or a body. What did they tell you to do?”

“Find my killer,” I said. “But . . . that means I’m dead, right?”

Bob waved a hand. “Harry. Dead isn’t . . . Look, even by terms of the nonsupernatural, dead is a really fuzzy area. Even mortal medicine regards death as a kind of process more than a state of being—a reversible process, in some circumstances.”

“What are you getting at?” I asked.

“There’s a difference between dead and . . . and gone.”

I swallowed. “So . . . what do I do?”

Bob lunged to his feet. “What do you do?” He pointed at the table of Mother Butters’s feast food. “You’ve got that to maybe get back to, and you’re asking me what to do? You find your freaking killer! We’ll both do it! I’ll totally help!”

The light in the room suddenly turned red. A red-alert sound I remembered from old episodes of Star Trek buzzed through the air.

“Uh,” I said, “what the hell is that?”

“Butters calling me,” Bob said, leaping to his feet. The form of the young man, who I now realized must have looked a lot like Butters when he was a kid, only taller, started coming apart into the sparks of a wood fire. “Come on,” Bob said. “Let’s go.”