Ghost Story

Chapter Forty

I vanished from inside the factory the second I felt sundown shudder through reality. The jumps were longer now, almost double what I’d managed the night before, and it took less time to orient myself between them. I guess practice makes perfect, even if you’re dead. Or whatever I was.

It took me less than two minutes to get to the burnt remains of Morty’s place.

On the way, I could see that southern winds were blowing, and they must have brought a springtime warmth with them. All of the city’s snow was melting, and the combination of the two with the oncoming night meant that a misty fog hung in the air, cutting visibility down to maybe fifty or sixty feet. Fog in Chicago isn’t terribly unusual, but never that thick. Streetlights were ringed with blurred, luminous halos. Traffic signals were soft blurs of changing color. Cars moved slowly, cautiously, and the thick mist laid a rare hush over the city, strangling its usual voice.

I stopped about a hundred yards away from Morty’s house. There I felt it: a trace of the summoning energy that had been built into his former home, drawing me forward with the same gentle beckoning as might the scent of a hot meal after a long day. It was like the Corpsetaker’s summons, but of a magic far less coarse, far more gentle. The necromancer’s magic was like the suction of a vacuum cleaner. Mort’s magic had been more like the gravity of the earth—less overtly powerful, but utterly pervasive.

Hell. Mort’s magic had probably had some kind of effect on me all the way over in Chicago Between. His house was the first place I’d come to, after all, and though I had a logical reason to go there, it was entirely possible that my reasoning had been influenced. It was magic, after all, intended to attract the attention of dangerous spirits.

At that very moment, in her moldy old lair, the Corpsetaker was torturing Morty and planning to murder my friends—so the remnants of the spell were definitely getting my attention.

I went closer to Morty’s house and felt that same pull get a little stronger. The spell had been broken when Mort’s house had burned down, and it was fading. The morning’s sunrise had almost wiped it away. It wouldn’t survive another dawn—but with a little help, it might serve its purpose one more time.

From the voluminous pocket of my duster, I withdrew Sir Stuart’s pistol. I fiddled with the gun until the gleaming silver sphere of the bullet rolled out into my hand, along with a sparkling cloud of flickering light. As each mote touched my skin, I heard the faint echo of a shot cracking out—the gunfire of Sir Stuart’s memory. Hundreds of shots crackled in my ears, distant and faint: the ghostly memory equivalent of gunpowder. Sir Stuart had heard a lot of it.

But what I needed wasn’t firepower, not for this. I took up the shining silver sphere, the memory of Sir Stuart’s home and family, and regarded it with my full attention. Once again the scene of the small family farm seemed to swell in my vision, until it surrounded me in a faint, translucent landscape that quivered and throbbed with power all its own. For a second, I could hear the wind rustling through the fields of grain and smell the sharp, honest scents of animals drifting to me from the barn, mixing with the aroma of fresh-baked bread coming from the house. The shouts and cries of children playing some sort of game hung in the air.

They weren’t my memories, but I felt something beneath their surface, something powerful and achingly familiar. I reached into my own thoughts and produced the memories of my own home, casting them up to merge with Sir Stuart’s cherished vision. I remembered the smell of wood and ink and paper, of all the shelves of secondhand books that had lined the walls of my old apartment, with their ramshackle double- and triple-stacked layers of paperbacks. I remembered the scent of woodsmoke from my fireplace, blending with the aroma of fresh coffee in a cup. I threw in the taste of Campbell’s chicken soup in a steaming mug on a cold day, when my clothes had been soaked with rain and snow and I had gotten out of them and huddled beneath a blanket near the fire, sipping soup and feeling the warmth sink into me.

I remembered the solid warmth of my dog, Mouse, his heavy head pillowed on my leg while I read a book, and the softness of Mister’s fur as he came by and gently batted my book away with his paw until I paused to give him his due share of attention. I remembered my apprentice, Molly, diligently studying and reading, remembered us having hours and hours of conversation as I taught her the basics of magic, of how to use it responsibly and wisely—or, at least, as responsibly and wisely as I knew how. They weren’t necessarily the same thing.

I remembered the feeling of pulling warm covers up over me as I went to bed. Of listening to thunderstorms, complete with flickering lightning, pounding rain, and howling wind, and of the simple, secure pleasure of knowing that I was safe and warm while the elements raged outside. I remembered walking with confidence in pitch darkness, because I knew every step that would take me safely through my rooms.

Home.

I invoked the memory of home.

I don’t know at what point the bullet dissolved into raw potential, but its power blended with my memories, humming a powerful harmonic chord with the emotions behind those memories—emotions common to all of us, a need for a place that is our own. Security. Safety. Comfort.

Home.

“Home,” I breathed aloud. I found the tatters of Mort’s gathering spell, and in my thoughts began to knit the edges of the memories together with the frayed magic. “Home,” I breathed again, gathering my will, fusing it with memory, and sending it out into the nighttime air. “Come home,” I said, and my voice carried into the night, reverberating through the mist, borne by the energy of my spell into a night-shivering, encompassing music as I released that power and memory into the night. “Come home. Come home.”

It all flowed out of me in a steady, deliberate rush, leaving me with unhurried purpose. I felt the magic rush out in a steadily growing circle. And then it was gone, except for the faintest whisper of an echo.

Come home. Come home. Come home.

I opened my eyes slowly.

There had been no sound, no stirring of energies, no warning of any kind.

I stood in a circle of silent, staring, hollow-eyed spirits.

Now that I knew what they were—the insane, dangerous ghosts of Chicago, the ones that killed people—they looked different. Those two little kids? My goodness, spooky now, a little too much darkness in their sunken eyes, expressions that wouldn’t change if they were watching a car go by or pushing a toddler’s head under the surface of the water. A businessman, apparently from the late-nineteenth century, I recognized as the shade of Herman Webster Mudgett, an American trailblazer in the field of entrepreneurial serial murder. I spotted another shade from a century earlier who could only have been Captain William Wells, a cold and palpable fury radiating from him still.

There were more—many more. Chicago has an intense history of violence, tragedy, and sheer weirdness that really can’t be topped this side of the Atlantic. I couldn’t put names to a third of them, but I knew now, looking at them, exactly what they were—lives that had ended in misery, in fury, in pain, or in madness. They were pure energy of destruction given human form, smoldering like coals that could still sear flesh long after they ceased to give off light.

They were a loaded gun.

Standing behind them, patient and calm, like sheepdogs around their flock, were the guardian spirits of Mort’s house. I had assumed them to be his spiritual soldiers, but I could see now what their main purpose had been. They, the ghosts of duty and obligation unfulfilled, had remained behind in an attempt to see their tasks to completion. They, the shades of faith, of love, of duty, had been a balancing energy with the dark power of the violent spirits. They had grounded the savagery and madness with their sheer, steady, simple existence—and the faded shade of Sir Stuart stood tall and calm among them.

I held Sir Stuart’s weapon in my right hand and half wished I could go back in time and rap my twenty-four-hours-younger self on the head with it. The fading spirit hadn’t been trying to hand me a weapon at all. He’d been giving me something far more dangerous than that.

I thought he’d handed me potent but limited power, a single deadly shot. I’d been thinking in mortal terms, from a mortal perspective.

Stuart hadn’t given me a gun. He’d given me a symbol.

He’d given me authority.

I held the gun in my right hand and closed my eyes for a moment, focusing on it, concentrating on not merely holding it, but taking it into me, making it my own. I opened my eyes, looked at the tall, brawny shade, and said, “Thank you, Sir Stuart.”

As I spoke, the gun shifted and changed, elongating abruptly. The wood of its grip and stock swelled out, becoming knife-planed oak and, as it did, I reached into my memory. Runes and sigils carved themselves in a tight spiral down the length of the staff. I took a deep breath and once more felt the solid power of my wizard’s staff, six feet of oak as big around as my own circled thumb and finger, the foremost symbol of my power, gripped steadily in my hand.

I bowed my head, focusing intently, drawing on the memories of the hundreds of spells and dozens of conflicts of my life, and as I did the symbols on the staff pulsed with opalescent energy that reminded me of Sir Stuart’s bullets in flight. Power hummed through the spectral wood so that it shook in my hand and flickered sharply, sending pulses of weirdly colored light, light I sensed would be visible even to mortal eyes, surging through the mist. There was a rushing sound, something almost like a sudden strike upon an unimaginably large and deep drum, an impact that rippled out from me and passed throughout the city and the surrounding lands. It sent a shiver of energy through me, and for an instant I felt the warmth of the southern wind, the close, muggy dampness of the air, the wet, slushy cold of the snow beneath my insubstantial feet. I smelled the stench of Morty’s burned home on the air, and for a single instant, for the first time since the tunnel, I felt the rumble of hunger in my belly.

Then dozens of spectral gazes simultaneously shifted, focusing exclusively on me, and their weight hit me like a sudden cold wind.

“Good evening, everyone,” I said quietly, turning to address the circle of raw fury and devotion that surrounded me. “Our friend Mortimer is in trouble. And we don’t have much time. . . .”