Wildest Dreams

8

A stone grunt as the trapdoor fell closed, and I stood in the bottle house with a guttering torch in my hand.

I’d save the flashlight for later. One way or another I was certain to need it, and I didn’t want to waste the batteries. In this place, the torch seemed more appropriate anyway.

After all, this was a haunted house. Lethe Whistler seemed right at home here, and she wasn’t alone. She had mentioned someone else-a man who could give her what she wanted.

I wondered who that man might be, but Lethe certainly wasn’t going to tell me. “I’ll see you again,” she said. “Soon.”

She drifted through the stone floor, ghostly remnants of tattooed skin whirling around her shoulders like leaves made of midnight neon, and then the darkness drank her in and she was gone.

I fanned the torch at arm’s length. No one waited for me in the shadows. I watched the door. Outside, the storm had diminished to a complacent drizzle. Without the wind, the bottles were silent.

Just bottles again. They couldn’t howl or scream. They couldn’t share whatever secrets they might hold. They couldn’t speak a single word-with a wind, or without a wind. They were only glass. That’s what I told myself. Or tried to, until the silence was broken by a deep, resonant voice.

“We meet again, Mr. Saunders.”

The words echoed in a hundred glass throats.

A dark figure skirted the golden edge of torchlight.

It was a man. A cloak of shadows roiled at his shoulders, wild with bristling nettles. He carried his darkness with him, and it seemed to slice the light as he approached, slashing as silently as the sharpest of razors, leaving menacing refractions that lit the shadows gathered tightly around his throat like a wreath of spikes.

Tattered ribbons of light streamed upward from the torch, revealing the man’s face-a collection of savage angles with an expression as uncompromising as a wrought iron spike.

The ghost of Diabolos Whistler nodded at me, and his barbed sneer became a smile.

I held the torch and held my ground.

“I hardly recognize you,” I said. “But then again, I’m not used to seeing you with your head on your shoulders.”

Whistler threw back his head, and for a moment I was afraid it would fall off. But the nightmarish collar held firm and he only laughed, a big booming empty sound that nearly made me reach for my knife-even thought I knew that the weapon was completely useless.

“If I had to die,” Whistler said, “I’m glad a man like you killed me.”

“I’m glad someone’s happy. As for myself, I’m still waiting to be paid for the job.”

“You’d better collect soon.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because very soon my daughter will be dead, Mr. Saunders.”

“You’re dreaming,” I said, and my words were as much for Whistler’s ears as my own. With his cloak of spiked shadows, he might look different from the other ghosts I’d encountered-but that didn’t mean he was different. No matter what he claimed in life, and death, and prophecy. If Whistler wanted to scare me, he was going to have to show me more than shadows.

I figured I’d make the first move for him. “You can’t do anything,” I said, plunging the torch through his spectral face. “You’re dead.” Amber flames flickered behind his eyes. “You’re about as dangerous as a wisp of smoke.”

“Smoke comes from fire,” Whistler said. “And fire is very dangerous, my friend. I will kill my daughter. Mark my words.”

The flames brightened, but Whistler’s eyes burned with a zealous fire all their own. Instantly, I could see what had drawn people to him, and to his pulpit. The bastard really believed his own twisted gospel.

I drew the torch from his face, fitting it in a rust-covered sconce near the doorway.

This time Whistler waited for me, but I didn’t know what to say. I’d never bargained with the dead, and the old man was shrewd. I wondered what he knew about his daughter, and how much he’d tell me, and if he’d be so foolish as to tell me the truth.

But I had no time for any of that. I had no time at all. A little girl was under the stone floor that I stood upon, held captive in a cobwebbed pit. I couldn’t leave her there for long, wrestling with the questions that were going through her head.

I didn’t want her to find the answers to those questions before I did. So it was best to face the situation straight on. “I want you to release the girl,” I said. “That’s all I want.”

Whistler smiled. “You want Circe?”

“Yes.”

“Then we want the same thing.” Whistler glanced at the stone trapdoor. “We both want Circe-only you want the girl she was, and I want the woman she has become.”

That was the way of it. Two Circes, and I’d met them both. I remembered the little girl’s blue eyes, so trusting, and the blue eyes of the woman who hired me to kill her father, so cold. I remembered the little girl who’d longed for skin that gleamed like a brave knight’s armor, and the woman who covered her body with tattooed scales. And I remembered the girl’s chill hand, a breath of nothing, and the soft warmth of Circe’s skin, the steady pounding of her heart against mine as we lay together in her father’s bed.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “How can your daughter walk in two worlds? How can she be both alive and dead at the same time?”

“Circe’s mother and I were never close,” Whistler began. “She was a disciple, a tool. Many women bore my children, but Circe stood out. She was smart, and pure, and strong. I sent for her when she was ten years old. At the time she knew nothing about me that I did not want her to know. She knew nothing of my church, or the world in which I walked, or the prophecy I was born to fulfill. But she learned soon enough. When she came to this place, her lessons began. And like all others who came to me, she gave me her soul-her immortal spirit.

“You have seen that soul with your unbeliever’s eyes, but you don’t recognize it for what it is. I do. I put my trust in Satan. He blessed me with a vision of a sanctuary made of glass and concrete. He guided my hands and the hands of my disciples as we built this place. Souls were taken here, souls I meant to keep until the glorious day of Satan’s resurrection. Each disciple bled for me on the altar below, and to each wound I touched a cork blessed by the powers of darkness, and with each cork I stoppered up a bottle, sealing a soul pledged to me.”

I remembered something the little girl had said. Something her mother had told her-that there were always people in the bottle house, even when it was empty.

“When Circe came to me,” Whistler continued, “I wanted her to know everything. Of all my children, I chose her to reign at my side. I took her soul, as I did with all the rest. I meant to protect it until the day of Satan’s arrival. But my own child betrayed me, just as she betrayed this place.”

Whistler motioned to the bottles, and for the first time I noticed that a handful of them were still corked.

He said, “When I moved to Mexico, the problems began. I left Circe in charge of the church, but she ignored my teachings. She turned mercenary, criticizing me for each dollar spent, as if destiny can be assigned a bottom line. For my part, I knew it was only a matter of time. I was getting older. Soon I would fulfill the prophecy that had brought so many to my pulpit. I knew my time was short, and my only concern was to prepare myself.”

“For your date with the devil.”

“You know of the prophecy?”

“And the ruin of Whistler’s corpse shall be Satan’s cradle, and Satan will be reborn in flesh and blood to walk the earth once more,” I quoted. “I read a pamphlet at the San Francisco Airport. That doesn’t mean I believe it.”

“Then you and my daughter are well-matched. She believes in nothing but herself. She sold my beliefs like a corner dope peddler, and she let this sacred shrine go to ruin. She abandoned it to vandals.”

“And with it, her soul.”

“Yes. That is the way of my daughter. That is what she has become.”

“I don’t care what she’s become. All I care about is what she was on the day she first came to you.”

“I will give you what she was. My daughter’s soul will be your reward when you have done my bidding.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Perhaps I should have a talk with the child myself. It might be amusing, discussing metaphysics with such a bright little girl.” He laughed. “Unless, of course, we can come to some agreement.”

I sighed, because I was one step ahead of Whistler now. “I think I know what you’re after.”

“It’s very simple-I want my head, and I want my body.”

I stared at Whistler’s neck, at the spiked black wreath that had mended a ghost. And then I stared at the broken necks of a dozen empty bottles, every one of them past mending.

The only thing that would fill those bottles again was the wind.

“Remember Mr. Saunders,” Whistler said, “I have a prophecy to fulfill. I can’t do that unless my head and body are rejoined.”

“It’s quite a concept. Hell on earth, with you the man in charge.”

“Not quite me, Mr. Saunders. I will be but a vessel for one much greater.”

“That’s pretty noble. But be honest with me-you’re hoping you’ll get to go along for the ride.”

“You’re a very bright man, Mr. Saunders.”

I smiled.

I couldn’t say the same of Diabolos Whistler.

Whistler had no further need of me. Like a true religious zealot, he’d preached a little sermon for my benefit and assigned penance for my transgressions against him and his church. Then, leaving me in the glow of his own particular brand of spiritual illumination as if I were some new convert, he’d gone wherever dead cult leaders go to ponder immortality.

For my part, I wished that Whistler’s spiritual illumination gave off a little heat. Meaning a dead thing that crawled out of a grave was warmer than me. I was wet and cold…and more than a little tired.

A stack of dry tinder was heaped by the stone fireplace-wood gathered in daylight and abandoned in darkness. I said a private thank you to the skittish trespassers as I heaped twigs and branches on the old steel andirons.

I took the torch from the wall and jammed it under the nest of dry wood. The tinder crackled alive. I sat on the hearth, as near the growing flames as I dared. There was no sense going anywhere. Not yet. I needed some time to dry out, and to warm myself, and to think.

And that was what I did. My thoughts rambled. Places they didn’t usually go. Places I wouldn’t allow them to linger.

In the end, it all came down to a question of belief.

Diabolos Whistler’s faith ran deep. There was no question about that. He saw himself as a collector of souls, a dark shepherd destined to be the devil incarnate.

His chosen successor couldn’t have been more different. Circe didn’t believe at all. Or so she claimed. But her claim rang true. For if she truly believed her father’s gospel, would she have left the bottle house unprotected?

I didn’t think so. If Circe Whistler’s soul were contained in a bottle, it was my bet that she would have guarded it as zealously as her father guarded his beliefs.

I ran it around and around in my head. Circe’s words. Her father’s words. And all of it led me nowhere. I didn’t know what or whom to believe, and I didn’t like thinking about it. Cynicism had always been my shield, but now that shield was bent and battered.

I rose from the hearth. Maybe it was time to test my cynicism…and the tenets of Diabolos Whistler’s faith.

A single test had occurred to me in light of Whistler’s sermon, and it was a test that I was peculiarly suited to perform.

Because I was alive, and I could hold a knife, and I could see the dead.

I carried the torch to the far wall. At least a hundred open bottles waited there, along with three still stoppered with corks.

I sliced the neck off one of the corked bottles-sliced it clean, the same way a saber-wielding cavalier beheads a full magnum of champagne.

I waited, but nothing poured from that severed glass neck.

Not so much as a whisper of shadow.

Not so much as a trickle of ectoplasm.

Certainly no champagne.

I tried a second bottle, and a third, with the same result.

A soft wind filled the empty throats and gave them voice. Voices that did not speak, but told a truth that Diabolos Whistler would never believe.

I smiled.

I was no longer wary of empty bottles. I had no reason to be.