Ghost Story

Chapter Forty-three

Things were pretty much a desperate blur between the water’s edge and the cliffs. There was a lot of running and gunfire and spraying dirt and pebbles. Several more shades were destroyed by screaming skull shrapnel. My shield took one hell of a beating, and as we got closer to the machine guns, the angles of fire from either side meant that the shield could protect fewer and fewer of the shades.

There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, no direction to go but forward. It was either that or die, and I was as terrified as I had ever been in my life. Honestly, I’m glad my memories aren’t much clearer than they are.

There was a nasty bit in the middle, when I was running between two of the crouching spike beasts. I remember realizing that the things were so heavily armored in layers and layers of bony plate that they couldn’t stand up. The fire from machine guns and screaming skulls alike seemed only a minor discomfort to them. I remember a pair of reptilian eyes flicking toward me, and then dozens of the shorter spikes shot out upon greasy, living tendrils and started whipping around like a high-pressure water hose with no one holding it. One of them wrapped around my arm, and only the spell-armored sleeve of my duster kept the bladed spike from opening my flesh to the bone. Sir Stuart’s ax flashed, and the tendril, separated from the main beast, collapsed into ectoplasm.

I ordered the shades to use their blades, and dozens of swords, axes, combat knives, and bayonets appeared. We hacked our way through the spike beasts, and endured increasingly intense fire. We lost several more protector shades as we did—they were hauled into the open by tendrils and torn to pieces by machine-gun fire.

The mortar skulls stopped coming down near us about twenty yards out from the cliffs, and we finally reached the base of the first tower. The shades and I all crowded in close to its base, where the gunners couldn’t shoot us without getting out and leaning over the top or something. I reversed my shield, so that its quarter dome covered us in every direction that the cliff face or the ground didn’t, though the fire on us had lightened considerably.

“Grenades!” I ordered, in a firm and manly tone that did not sound at all like a panicked fourteen-year-old.

Sir Stuart held a pair of his black minibombs out to a Capone-era gangster, who produced a lighter and flicked it to life. Sir Stuart rose, the lit fuses trailing small sparks, took a couple of steps back from the tower, and flung the grenades swiftly upward, one at a time.

It was a little ticklish, taking the shield down in time to allow the grenades to pass by, then bringing it up again, the wizardly equivalent of interrupting a sneeze, but I pulled it off. Both of the little bombs made clinking noises as they bounced off the inner lip of the firing slits, and there were snarling sounds from above us for a second or two.

Then there was a loud whump of an explosion, and inhuman shrieks of what could only be pain. A second later, there was another whump, and clear fluid spattered out of the bunker’s firing slit and pattered down onto my shield.

“Cha-ching!” I crowed.

Sir Stuart’s shade shot me a fierce grin.

“Get ready to move to the next one!” I called. I scrambled down the cliff face to where stone gave way to sand and shale, and the steep slope swept up from the beach to whatever was above. We’d taken out the bunker on one side of the slope. We’d have to take out the one on the other side, or be riddled with fire from several directions as we made the ascent.

I brought my shield around and angled it as best I could as I stepped out into the open. Firing points at the top of the slope opened up instantly, intently, and my shield blazed into sight again as more focused enemy power came down upon it from the positions atop the slope. I crossed the thirty-foot gap to the base of the next tower, keeping ferocious will on the shield, and the spook squad came with me.

On the way, I got a glimpse of the opposition. They wore the blackand-grey uniforms of the old Waffen-SS, but they weren’t human. Their faces were stretched and distorted into the muzzle and jaws of a wolf, which looked damned peculiar without any fur covering it. Their eyes were black, empty holes—and I’m not being metaphorical when I say that. There were simply no eyes there. Just empty sockets. Machine-gun crews and riflemen—or maybe riflethings—alike poured fire into us, a panting, eager hunger to spill blood apparent on their monstrous faces.

I stopped at the other corner, holding the shield until all the spooks had made it across, then took cover myself, redirecting the shield, as I had the last time, to cover us all.

“Handsome fellows,” Sir Stuart’s shade noted cheerily. He looked less faded than he had only moments before. I had a feeling that Sir Stuart, in life, had been the sort of person who was invigorated by action—and that his shade was no different.

“We’ll send them a nice written compliment later,” I called back, and gestured up above us, at the second bunker. “Do it again.”

Stuart nodded and turned to the gangster once more. And again he made two excellent throws, pitching a pair of little bombs up the steep angle and into the bunker. Again, enemy ectoplasm sprayed, and again the tower above us went silent.

“Now the fun part,” I said. “We’re going up the slope. My shield won’t last very long—whoever is behind this is going to put everything he has into taking it down. So we close to grips with them as fast as we can.”

Sir Stuart nodded and gestured to the nearest of the mad ghosts. “Give them the order.”

I pursed my lips for a second and then nodded. “Hey, you guys,” I said, pointing at the twins.

Two little sets of dead, empty eyes turned toward me, along with dozens more, and I felt that same cold chill at the touch of their awareness.

“We’re about to go up that slope. The very instant my shield drops, I want you to close with the enemy as fast as you can and take them down. Don’t hold back. Give it to them hard. Don’t stop until they’re all down. Clear?”

More soul-empty stares. None of them moved. None of them responded.

“Sure,” I said. “You got it. If you didn’t, you’d say something, right?”

No response.

“God, it’s like Gallagher performing at the Harvard Faculty Club,” I muttered. “Here we go, folks. One! Two! Three!”

And I went around the corner again, shield held in front of me. It coalesced into a blazing blue-and-silver dome almost instantly, taking so much energy that the kinetic force began to transfer through, pushing against me like a gale-force wind. I staggered drunkenly, unable to see through the shield and anticipate my next steps up the steep slope. The footing was treacherous. Shale and sand and loose stone twisted and turned beneath me. Even with the occasional supporting shove from Sir Stuart, my forward momentum began to falter and I slipped to one knee, my bracelet getting hotter and hotter around my wrist.

I managed to lunge awkwardly forward a couple of times—and then something hit my shield like a runaway train, and silver-and-blue energy shattered into a coruscation of sound and light. I was abruptly able to see up the slope, where the enemy was momentarily reeling from the explosive feedback of the failed shield.

And the Lecter Specters went to work.

As I stared up the slope, the only thing I could think was that this must be what it looked like in the interior of a tornado. The mad ghosts of Chicago rushed forward with such speed and power that their forms blurred into elongated streaks that jostled to be the first to reach their victims, corkscrewing up the cutting. They ignored ridiculous constraints such as gravity and the solidity of matter, and as they rushed upon the enemy, they changed—and I gained fresh nightmare material.

I’m willing to share the least disturbing bits. The twins, for example, just leaned forward and seemed to slither sinuously through the air toward the foe. As they went, their bodies elongated, intertwined, and twisted into a single entity that looked like a demented artist’s rendition of a battle between a giant squid and some kind of unnamed, deep-sea horror fish with too many spines and too many fins and great, googly-moogly eyes. They reached the nearest bad guy, bobbed up, and then slammed down with so much grace that I almost missed the fact that they’d smashed the wolfwaffen so hard into the ground that he was no thicker than my old checkbook. Tentacles shot out and ripped a rifle from the wolfwaffen next to the first, then plunged forward into its mouth and throat, in through its nostrils, in through its ears. A second later, they came whipping out again—along with slime-covered chunks of whatever they’d happened to be able to grab while they were in there. They pulled the creature’s stomach out through its mouth, along with several feet of intestine—and then the tentacles whipped said loops of flesh around the wolfwaffen’s neck and strangled it.

It got considerably less cheerful and humane from there.

Snarls, then screams, filled the steep little opening in the cliff wall. Ghosts, twisted into monstrous forms by decades of hollow, mindless hunger, fell upon the wolfwaffen in our way, uttering howls and squeals and clicks and screams, filling the air with a nightmare cacophony that left me slamming my palms up over my ears and biting down on a scream of pain.

The enemy fought at first, and those who did died swiftly. As more and more hideous things dealt with the wolfwaffen, their morale faltered and they began to run. Those that did died horribly. And, toward the end, overwhelmed by terror, a handful of the enemy could only stand, staring in horror, and screaming high and piteously.

Those last few died indescribably.

Ghosts don’t get hungry, I reminded myself. Dead men don’t eat. So there was no reason whatsoever that I should throw up. The thought was hilarious for some reason, so I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. I laughed and laughed, even as I realized that I couldn’t just sit there—not having turned loose an elemental force of horror like the Lecters.

“Come on!” I said, giggling. “Come on, before they get out of earshot.” I staggered up and climbed the slope, Sir Stuart and the protector spirits following along behind me. It wasn’t an easy climb. The Lecter Specters had left a lot of the wolfwaffen partly alive, or at least had left some of their parts alive, and blood and worse fluids were everywhere. The fortunate few, the fighters who had gone down fast, had become nothing but buckets of slimy ectoplasm.

Any way you looked at it, the climb was a messy, nauseating, dangerous one. But it was a whole heck of a lot less dangerous than if we’d been getting shot at the whole way.

I reached the top of the slope and looked across the long network of trenches that ran outside the bunkers, along the top of the cliff. There was intermittent gunfire. There were intermittent screams. As I watched, I saw a frantic, panicked wolfwaffen clamber out of the trench. It got about three-quarters of the way out before what looked like a slimy yellow tongue shot out of the trench, from below my line of sight, and plunged into its back—and out its chest. The impaling tongue then wrapped around the howling wolfwaffen and pulled it back into the trench with so much force that a puff of dust and dirt billowed out from wherever he impacted.

“Hell’s bells,” I giggled. “Hell’s bells. That’s hideous.”

Sir Stuart nodded grimly. He made a gesture. Protector spirits began putting the nearby, hideously mangled wolfwaffen out of their misery.

I swatted myself firmly on the cheek and forced the laughter back. I felt myself trying to scream in horror once the laughter was damped down. The demonic servitors Evil Bob had put in position had probably been some very nasty customers. They had probably deserved a violent death.

But there are things you just don’t do, things you just can’t see, and still be both human and sane.

I forced the incipient screams away, too. It took me a minute or two to get it done. When I looked up, Sir Stuart was facing me, his eyes sad, concerned, and empathetic. He knew what I was feeling. He’d known it himself—which probably stood to reason, as the commander, more or less, of the criminal psych ward of Chicago’s ghosts.

“My fault,” I said. My voice sounded dull. My tongue felt like it had been coated in lead. “I told the Lecters not to stop until they were all down.”

The big shade nodded gravely.

“Follow them,” I said. “Make sure any of the enemy who is left is given a clean death. Then round them up and come back to me.”

Sir Stuart nodded. He looked at the protector spirits. Then they all moved out at the same time, going both directions up and down the cliff.

I leaned on my staff and rested. Holding that shield had taken a lot out of me. So much so that when I looked down at my hand, I could, just barely, see the shape of the stony ground right through it.

I was fading.

I shuddered and clutched the staff hard. It made sense, really. I’ve always believed that magic came from inside you, from who and what you were—from your mind and from your heart. Now I was all mind and heart. The shield had to be fueled by something. I hadn’t really stopped to consider where that energy would come from.

Now I knew.

I looked at my hand and the ground on the other side of it again. How much more would it take to make me disappear altogether? I had no way of knowing, no way of even making a good guess. What if I needed to use my magic again when I took up the hunt for my killer, after all of this was over? What if I blew it all here? What if I wound up like Sir Stuart—just an empty shade?

I leaned my head against the solid oak of the staff. It didn’t matter. Murphy and company—not to mention Mort—needed my help. They would get it, even if it meant I became nothing but an old, faded memory.

(Or maybe became one more insane shade drifting through Chicago’s night, causing havoc without reason, without regret, and without mercy.)

I shook my head a little and straightened my back. From the sounds of it, there couldn’t be many bad guys left for the Lecters to deal with. These were certainly the Corpsetaker’s defenses—an area of bad mojo like this would have a kind of gravity for anyone crossing over from the material world through any Way near the location to which it had been linked, sort of like a funnel spiderweb. That had been the point of building it this way: to make sure anyone who wanted in from the Nevernever side wound up on that beach.

I needed to find the Way this site was guarding, the back door to the Corpsetaker’s hideout, the one I’d seen Evil Bob and the Fomor servitor use. I closed my eyes and shut away the recent horrors. I willed away my worry and my fear. I didn’t have to breathe, but I did anyway, because that was the only way I’d ever learned to attain a state of clarity. In. Out. Slowly.

Then I carefully quested out with my senses, looking for the energy that would surround an open Way. I found it immediately, and opened my eyes. It was coming from straight ahead of me, away from the cliff and the beach, several hundred yards back up among some rolling, wooded hills. I could see the head of a footpath that led into the woods. There had been regular traffic on it, for it to be so evident, and I doubted that many hikers or Boy Scout troops had been tromping through. That was our next step.

An instant, violent instinct screamed at me without warning. I didn’t question it. I flung myself to one side, rolling in the air to bring up my shield again.

A wrecking ball of pure psychic force hit the shield, and half of the little shield charms dangling from my bracelet screamed and then shattered into tiny shards. The blow flung me a good twenty feet and I hit the ground rolling, until said ground vanished from underneath me. I dropped to the floor of one of the defensive trenches and lay there for a second, stunned at the sheer savagery of the assault.

I heard slow, heavy, confident footsteps. Clomp. Clomp. Then a pair of black jackboots appeared at the top of the trench. My gaze tracked up the SS officer’s uniform, which included a black leather trench coat not too unlike my own. It wasn’t one of the wolfwaffen. Instead of a deformed, monstrous wolf face, this being had only a bare skull sitting atop the uniform’s high collar. Blue fire glowed in its eye sockets and it regarded me with cold disdain.

“A worthy effort for a novice,” Evil Bob said. “I wish you to know that I regret your death as the loss of significant potential.” He lifted what was probably not actually a Luger pistol and aimed it calmly at my head. “Good-bye, Dresden.”