The Nimble Man

CHAPTER NINE

Graves needed perspective.

Insubstantial, he nevertheless felt some resistance as he floated high above the city of Boston. The unnatural darkness caught at his ectoplasmic form with a million tiny claws, and the red fog seemed to slow him. From high above he tried to peer through the mist and he knew he had to get closer to the ground.

It took a moment for him to make sense of the city's topography, only the shapes of the buildings visible to him from this height. He had fled from Conan Doyle's Beacon Hill home, but not gone very far. As he descended he could make out Boston Common below and, turning, he saw the Massachusetts State House, a grand old building capped by a massive golden dome; the beacon of Beacon Hill. Graves chose that as his destination.

In a handful of seconds, no time at all for the dead, he alighted upon the State House's golden dome and steadied himself. All of that was illusion, of course, solidity imagined into reality by his own desire, but it was comforting to him to hold onto the tangibility of the world that had been lost to him for more than half a century. Others could not feel his presence, but he could touch them.

Leonard Graves could still feel.

Atop the golden dome he paused to collect his thoughts and he gazed at the city that spread out from the base of Beacon Hill. In the decades since his death he had been witness to three other uprisings of the dead, none of them on a scale even close to this one. Dr. Graves was an analytical man. His mind had made the connections between Morrigan, the strange red mist, and the resurrected dead immediately.

Now, as he peered through nightmare of darkness and bloody fog, he could see a number of forms shambling across Boston Common and others on Tremont Street. Though it was impossible to know for sure in the fog and the dark, logic dictated that they must be the dead. No sane, living human being would be out on the streets now.

The dead were walking south.

Graves frowned, wondering why, and then he pushed the question aside. He was not going to have an answer quickly, and there were other priorities. He had to locate Conan Doyle and the others. Eve and Clay had been sent off on some errand or another, but he did not know to where. That was his only lead.

Another question lingered in his mind.

Why not me?

The spirits of the dead were being drawn back into their bodies, but Dr. Graves was a specter himself. A ghost. Some terrible power was dragging those souls who were still floating in the ether back to their rotting corpses, even to their moldering bones. He had seen some torn from the river of souls itself. And yet he did not feel the slightest tug upon his spirit.

Why? The red mist is expanding, ballooning outward. Perhaps only those who died here, upon the grounds touched by the mist, are affected. Or perhaps wandering ghosts, the restless dead, those like me who refuse to be drawn into the soulstream, are not affected. Or perhaps there is simply not enough left of my body, now, for even magick to put into motion.

Graves did not know what, precisely, was going on. He did not have answers to these questions. But he would find them. And to begin, he knew there were places he might investigate that might lead him further along both of his lines of inquiry.

He pushed himself off the State House dome, its golden surface a dark, hellish orange as it took what little light was available and reflected the red mist. As he passed over Boston Common, drifting just above the trees now, he confirmed one of his suspicions. He was not the only ghost unaffected. The lonely shades of several homeless men wandered the park, resting on park benches and picking imaginary garbage out of trash cans, acting out the routines of their lives.

They had died there on the Common, these men. Unless they had been cremated, it had been recently enough that there would certainly have been enough left of their remains to make an effective zombie. That was possible, but the more he considered, the more he began to think that one of his other theories was more likely. These homeless men had been lost souls long before they were dead. As ghosts, they walked the paths that had been familiar in life and seemed not to feel the pull of the river of souls at all. They were kept here by the infirmity of their minds, even as Graves himself was anchored to the mortal plane by his obsession with the mystery of his own murder. He felt certain his theory was correct, that ghosts who still haunted this world were immune to this magick as long as they remained here and did not slip into the soulstream.

Dr. Graves left the Common and propelled his spectral form along Tremont Street past the Park Street Church. Tucked in amongst buildings to the left and right, and abutting it to the rear was the Old Granary Burial Ground. It was a strange cemetery, located in what some might have taken to be an empty building lot left behind by a demolition crew if not for the low wrought iron fence. The burial ground was a tiny plot of land where eighteenth century headstones thrust from the ground, and a recitation of their names read like a litany of American history.

Paul Revere was buried there. A short way further along a narrow path that weaved beneath shade trees was the grave of John Hancock. Samuel Adams had been interred at the Old Granary as well, along with all of the victims of the Boston Massacre and the parents of Benjamin Franklin. It was a quiet place of reflection in the center of the city, a piece of its history. Graves always thought it shameful that it was the edifices left behind by the great hearts and minds of any generation that were visited by throngs of admirers, and rarely their graves.

It was no wonder that none of their ghosts had lingered on this plane.

That did not mean the Old Granary Burial Ground was devoid of ghosts, however.

Dr. Graves passed through the black wrought-iron fence and alighted upon the ragged lawn, pretending to himself that he could feel the ground beneath his shoes. The walls of the buildings that rose up to block in the other three sides of the burial ground were imposing, but with the red-black sky and the scarlet fog, they lent a sense of security as well. He glanced up, and then over his shoulder, but he was alone.

"Christopher?" Graves ventured, his voice drifting amongst the headstones with the fog.

"Hello, Leonard."

The voice was close by, almost in his ear, and Graves darted away even as he spun around in surprise. Decades of phantom life ought to have made him immune to being startled in such fashion, but clearly they had not. And the ghost of Christopher Snider knew it.

"This is hardly the time for games, Chris," Dr. Graves chided him.

The spectral boy was lanky, yet handsome, his appearance precisely the same as it had been on that day in late February of 1770, when he had been shot by a British soldier, just eleven days before the Boston Massacre. The wry grin on the ghost's face, though, revealed that though his shade mimicked the body he'd had in life, his mind had continued to grow. He was no boy. He was a specter. Centuries old. And yet there was still something of the child in him. An enigma, then, this phantom boy. Graves had never been able to discover just what anchored Christopher Snider to the mortal plane. Perhaps one day, he thought, the boy would feel enough at ease with him to tell him. For now, if not friends, they were at least allies in the battle against the despair that threatened all the lingering, wandering dead.

"My apologies, sir," Christopher said, giving Dr. Graves a small bow. The ghostly boy was grimly serious now. "You are right, of course. It was only that I was pleased to see you. I know of your penchant for involving yourself in calamitous situations. I was certain you would be at the center of whatever is causing this horror."

Graves nodded, glancing toward the street. "I plan to be. But to do that, I need to find Eve. And to find Eve, I need your help."

A ripple went through the ectoplasm that made up the shade of Christopher Snider. His upper lip curled back in distaste. The ghostly boy seemed to withdraw but he did not actually retreat from Graves. Rather, his spirit thinned and became less defined, so that the red mist flowed through him and nearly obscured his features.

"You know my feelings about the Children of Eve," Christopher said.

"I do," Graves confirmed. "That's why I ask. You hate them. But you always know when there are vampires in the city. You've got some sort of ethereal grapevine going, tracking them. I know you've helped Eve with her hunt in the past.

"Look around, Chris," Graves said, gesturing with translucent hands toward the city around and above them. "It's safe to say there's no time to waste. I need to know if there are any of them in the city right now. And where."

The ghost drifted away, toward the wrought-iron fence where he could look down upon Tremont Street. Graves followed him and lingered just at his side. A car was parked up on the sidewalk, locked and abandoned in a hurry. Along the road were others in the same condition. Graves thought he saw silhouettes inside one of them, people who had simply pulled over when the chaos had begun and now were likely too afraid to venture on, no matter how badly they wished to be home.

"Christopher?" Dr. Graves whispered, his voice a ghost itself.

"I know," the spectral young man replied, nodding. He glanced at Graves. "I apologize. To search for any of Eve's Children without intending to kill them is difficult for me to grasp."

Dr. Graves had always suspected that vampires had something to do with the boy's death, despite the story about the British soldier. Either that or he had seen loved ones murdered by the monsters. But now was not the time to pry.

"If it helps, I can assure you the creature will come to no good end."

"Of course it helps," replied the ghostly boy with a hollow laugh. "As much as anything will."

Graves waited for more, for an answer to the question he had posed, doing his best to feign patience he did not feel. When he felt he could not wait any longer, he spoke the ghost's name. "Christopher

…"

"Do you know what my favorite memory is, Leonard? It was in 1831, right here. Or, rather, there in the Evangelical Church. The children's choir sang beautifully in those days, but on that particular day they sang a new song, freshly written. The song had never been sung before, not publicly. It was 'My Country, 'tis of Thee.' Do you know it?"?Startled by this turn in the conversation, Graves frowned and stared at him. "Of course I do."

Christopher smiled in remembrance. "Yes, yes. Of course you do." Then he turned to Graves and there was nothing at all of the child in his spectral features any longer. "That is my most precious memory, Leonard. And it happened more than sixty years after my death. The irony is painful sometimes."

He sighed and looked around the fog enshrouded cemetery before glancing back at Dr. Graves.

"I'm told that one of Eve's Children has made its nest in the Regency Theatre on Charles Street. There was a fire there last year, you know. The owners have promised to rebuild, but so far nothing has been done."

"You know so much about this city, but I've never seen you further from your grave than this gate."

"I listen," the ghostly boy said. "They walk by, the living, and they don't know anyone's here. They talk. And I listen."

Dr. Graves was reluctant to leave. Christopher had never been so open with him, never seemed so willing to talk about his haunting of the burial ground. But the red mist churned around them and the sky was dark and the dead were walking out on the streets of Boston.

"Thank you, Chris. I'm sorry I have to go. Maybe — "

"Go," the other ghost said, waving him off. "Perhaps you and your friends can stop all of this. Come back when you can. I'm not going anywhere."

With nothing more to say Graves began to rise, floating away from the burial ground. He traveled quickly now, the buildings little more than a blur around him. There were several churches nearby and it occurred to him that the people who had abandoned their vehicles might well have fled to those edifices of faith. Hopeful voices would be raised within. Prayers would be sung or spoken.

Dr. Graves had wondered all his life — and thereafter — whether anyone was listening.

He drifted through the scarlet fog, following Tremont Street for a while and then climbing above the buildings. Graves did not like to pass through structures unless they were his destination. There was something unsettling about it, but also it felt to him as though he were intruding upon the privacy of whoever might live or work within them.

Charles Street had a string of old theatres and playhouses, some still used for traditional theatre and others as comedy stages. The Regency had once had a beautiful facade, but it had faded over time as such things did. Then at the twilight of the twentieth century it had been restored, not only outside, but within. The stage and the curtains and the beautiful art on the domed ceiling inside the theatre had all been brought back to their original beauty and luster.

And then the blaze had ruined it all.

Firefighters had been able to stop the flames before they had completely gutted the building, but the elegance of the place had been eradicated, charred beyond recognition. As the weeks and months had gone by, the hope that insurance would allow the owners to start anew began to dwindle. A police cordon still blocked the entrance to the Regency Theatre, but such things do not keep out homeless people searching for a place to shield them from the elements, willing to risk the dilapidated architecture crumbling on them.

Nor did such cautionary postings keep out vampires.

Insubstantial as the red mist — perhaps even more so — Dr. Graves passed through a boarded-up window and was inside the shadowy skeleton of the theatre. The place still reeked of burnt wood. Graves drifted above the balcony and looked around at blackened remnants of a once grand structure and he thought how fortunate it was that the place had been empty when the fire had started.

The vampire had made its nest in the orchestra pit.

For the most part, ghosts were intangible. But Graves had quickly learned that while it took phenomenal effort to touch a human being, he had no difficulty laying hands on supernatural creatures.

It was a male vampire, a thin, filthy thing in stolen clothes with long, greasy blond hair.

"Child of Eve," Graves said, floating down toward it.

The vampire looked up quickly, startled, its jaundice yellow eyes glowing in the dark. It tried to fight him.

Tried, and failed.

For perhaps the hundredth time since the sky had gone dark, Katherine Matthews picked up the phone and listened to the hiss of dead air. There was no dial tone, nor any of the other signals the phone company sent when there was trouble on the line. No fast busy signal. Not even that annoying beeping it made if she left it off the hook. The first few times she had picked up the phone she had spoken up, asked if there was anyone else on the line. But there was no one there. Just that hiss.

Yet if she listened for half a minute or so, couldn't she make out something inside that hiss? A kind of pattern, like the gusting of the wind. The hiss seemed tremulous, as though the dead air on her phone line was laughing at her.

Katie Matthews had owned Lost and Found Books for seventeen years. It was not merely her business, however. It was her home. The shop was on the first floor of her house in Cambridge, just north of Boston, and she lived alone in a quartet of rooms in the second story. But for now she sat behind the checkout counter near the front door of the bookshop, where she had been ever since the darkness had fallen and the bloody mist had rolled in.

She was used to being by herself in the store. As silly as it sounded, she always told people she could never really be alone there, not with all the books. Lost and Found was overflowing with hardcovers and paperbacks, new and used, of all types of genres. In the back there was even a section of antiquarian books. The typical customer never bothered to even wander into the rear of the shop, but there were always those discerning clients who knew precisely what they were looking for and would peruse those shelves.

Katie had been tempted at first to retreat to the antiquarian section, but the only windows were at the front of the shop and the idea of being unable to see what was going on outside terrified her even more than the view beyond the windows. If anything worse happened, she would be trapped back there. From here she could at least run up the stairs to her apartment.

Only to be trapped there.

She didn't want to think about it any more, but there was no one to call, no one to talk to. The only escape she could think of was the one she had been using her entire life. Once she had hung the phone up, she picked up the copy of Cold Sassy Tree she had been delving into. It wasn't the sort of thing she usually read, but it was the first book she had laid her hand upon when she had reached for something to hang onto, somewhere to escape.

Outside the mosquitoes were gone. All of them, as far as she could tell. And that was something, at least. But now… there were figures moving through the red mist. At first she had thought about unlocking a window and calling out to them, asking what was going on. The radio did not work and neither did the small TV behind the counter.

But there was something off, something more than a little odd, about the way those figures were walking. They moved in a kind of rhythmic stagger that felt like a warning to Katie. So she kept the windows closed and locked, for all the good the glass would do if someone really wanted in. And she kept quiet, and she read, and after every few pages she glanced up and hoped the mist would be gone and the sun returned, and she picked up the phone and prayed for a dial tone.

Only to have the dead air laugh at her again.

Her skin prickled with awareness that all was not right and her pulse raced, but she forced herself back into the book. She was past the halfway mark but knew she had only registered a fraction of what she had read. Much as she wished to get completely lost in those pages, she knew she was fooling herself. There might not be a book in the world that was powerful enough to help her escape from this.

Katie read a few pages further and there was a creak in the old boards of her house. It was a familiar sound and late at night it gave her comfort. And old house moved with the wind. But there was no comfort in it this day. She glanced up at the sound and her eyes were drawn to the window once more. The bloody fog rolled past the glass, thick and damp, leaving a red film on each pane.

With a sigh she reached out and lifted up the phone again, cursing herself for doing it even as she raised it to her ear. It was foolish to keep doing this. Obsessive-compulsive idiocy. But she could not help herself, though she knew what she would hear.

Nothing.

She told herself it was nothing.

Another creak drew her attention, but this one was followed by a thump and a rustling noise, from deeper inside the shop.

Katie could not breathe. Her lungs were frozen. Her eyes were open almost too wide as she hung up the phone and moved around the counter. There were only dim overhead lights at the back of the store, in the antiquarian section, but now a brighter light pulsed there, a blue-green glow that cast the entire section in its oceanic hue.

Soft thumps issued from the antiquarian section.

Katie's chest hurt from holding her breath but she felt as though she could draw no air. Her shoes scuffed the wooden floor as she shuffled past shelves overflowing with books. The musty smell of old paper filled her nostrils. That aqua glow pulsed, turning her clothes and her hands that same color, even as she moved deeper into the store.

She paused a moment and closed her eyes. With all the concentration she could muster she focused on taking a breath, and soon she was shuddering as she inhaled sharply. She kept her eyes closed, trying to steady her breathing. When she opened them she glanced at the front of the shop again, saw that the view from her windows had not changed, and nodded to herself.

Once again she began to move toward that glow, that rustle and thump.

Katie felt a soft breeze caress her face and she gasped again, blinking in surprise. There was a scent on that breeze, the smell of earth and flowers and trees ripe with fruit. She shook her head and reached up to touch her face where the breeze had whispered past her.

She was just at the arch that led into the antiquarian section when there came another small thump. Her gaze was drawn instantly to the left, to the third shelf from the top, to a leather-bound book that seemed almost not to belong here. Most of the books in this section had bindings that were dried and cracked and faded, but the leather covering this tome was fresh and supple so that it seemed almost new. It gleamed in that blue-green light, and the way it sat on the shelf, it jutted from its place, as though someone had pulled it out several inches.

And it moved. Ever so slightly, it moved.

The book seemed to jump in its slot, there on the shelf, edging further out from the other volumes.

It tilted, and then it tumbled, end over end, and struck the floorboards, falling open with a ruffle of pages. Katie let out a small cry and put a hand over her heart as if to warn it to slow down.

That blue-green light flashed more brightly than ever and she had to shield her eyes. In that moment the breeze that had caressed her swirled around her again, tousling her hair, and the scents it carried were so delicious she thought she had been carried away, finally given the escape that she had longed for.

Then the light retreated and she blinked away the shadows behind her eyelids.

Two figures stood with her in the antiquarian section of Lost and Found Books. Once again Katie Matthews felt as though she could not breathe. One of them was a dignified looking man with a graying mustache and a wrinkled suit. Katie thought she recognized the man from century-old photographs.

The other was a stunningly beautiful woman of imposing height, clad in a cloak the color of the sea. She clutched in her hand an oaken staff, topped by a sphere of ice with a flicker of flame inside. An elemental staff. Her eyes were a bright violet.

Katie's hands fluttered as though she had forgotten what to do with them, and a lightness came over her heart that nearly made her faint. Almost giddy, she went down on one knee and lowered her head. Once upon a time, years before, she had read the wrong book and opened the wrong door, and it had been Ceridwen who had closed it for her. She had pledged her loyalty to the Fey on that day, like a handful of others she had met in the ages since. But she had never seen Ceridwen in the flesh again.

Until today.

"My Lady Ceridwen," she said, her voice cracking, shaking with emotion.

Ceridwen touched her head.

"You've done well, Katherine. You are our loyal friend."

Katie took a deep breath and looked up at Ceridwen, at the razor cut of her hair and the power in those eyes. This woman was everything she had ever wished to be, and yet rather than making Katie feel small, somehow Ceridwen lifted her up, gave her pride in herself.

"Something terrible is happening outside," Katie said, forcing her voice not to tremble.

"We know," Ceridwen replied, already striding toward the front of the shop, her companion hard on her heels. "Do not worry yourself, Katherine. You have done just as we asked, for so very long, kept that book safe and our secret in your own heart. I can do no less than keep you safe in return."

At the door, Ceridwen turned and stared at her, and Katie felt blessed.

"We will weave protections around the house. Do not step outside this door until the sun returns to the sky."

Then Ceridwen and her companion went out the door, closing it tightly behind them, leaving Katie with only the delightful scents of Faerie floating in the air to mark their passing. After a moment she sighed happily and picked up the book from the floor. Its leather was not scuffed at all from the fall. She held it in her hands and then allowed herself a bittersweet smile before sliding it back onto the shelf.

She would have given anything to reverse Ceridwen's trip, to travel through the pages of that book through to the other side, to Faerie. One day, she prayed that Ceridwen would grant her that wish. And she knew that if that day ever came, she would never want to come back.