liquid mercury. His investigation has begun to point back at members of the government himself, and so this meeting must be clandestine.
'Excuse me,' a voice says, and he is startled to hear the words in English.
Dr. Graves glances over and sees an unfamiliar woman making her way into his aisle, people standing or shifting aside to let her move down the row toward the empty seat beside him. He frowns. If she is his contact, the woman knows little about remaining inconspicuous. Speaking English like that had been foolish.
She is too pale, this woman, and her hair is pulled back from her face so tightly that it lends a cruel severity to features that might otherwise have been attractive.
She slips into the seat beside him and makes no attempt to focus on the movie screen. Dr. Graves attempts to keep some semblance of secrecy but it quickly becomes obvious she has no intention of being subtle.
'You're Leonard Graves,' she says, as though this should be news to him.
He nods.
'Look at me, Dr. Graves.'
Exasperated, he glances around to be sure he has not been followed, but in the darkened theater he can see only phantom faces, flickering silver in the light from the screen. At length he turns to her.
'You might be a bit more — '
'You're dead, Dr. Graves.'
Anger rises in him. His whisper is a harsh rasp. 'Are you threatening me, ma'am?'
The woman's eyelids flutter with frustration and she sighs. 'Simply stating a fact. Trying to remind you. You've been dead half a century. Think. Remember the bullet. You're here for a reason.'
Graves begins to shudder and he feels a terrible pain in his heart.
Phantom pain.
For he has no heart.
Grief swells within him and he turns away from her, only to see the faces of the other theater goers again. The flickering light upon the screen is not what has made them look spectral. Rather, it is the fact that they are specters. Ghosts of the dead.
The silver light from the screen passes through them, their bodies having little more substance than dust motes swirling in shafts of sunlight. Their faces are etched with fear.
He turns back to the woman and sees that she too is transparent. Dr. Graves does not look down at his own body, at his hands. He does not like to look at his hands.
'Who are you?' he asks, the illusion of the Parisian movie palace becoming wispy around them, a ghost all its own.
'My name is Yvette Darnall. I am… I was a medium.'
And he watches her blue eyes, ghosts in and of themselves, as she tells the tale of her own death, of her efforts to locate Sweetblood the Mage, of the trap that he laid for any who would dare to search for him.
'The bastard,' Graves whispers, trying not to see that the theatre is gone now, completely disappeared, and there is only a kind of river flowing at their feet, a rushing, turbulent stream of souls. Some of them fly past above and around him, but all of them in the same direction, with a fierce momentum, as though drawn on by some inexorable force.
'Oh, yes, he always was,' Miss Darnall says. 'But I see it now. I understand.'
For a moment Graves does not hear her. He is distracted by a tugging at his arms and the current that drags at his ankles, the stream trying to pull him in, to pull him on… and he will not look to see what has such power over him. He frowns as her words finally settle into his mind.
'Understand what? Why he murdered you?'
She shudders and glances away in shame, and now she does not seem quite so severe. 'I cannot see it all, of course. Only the silhouette of what may be, not the fine details. But this is why I came to find you the moment I sensed you had moved further into the river of souls. Someone has located Sanguedolce.'
'We know,' Graves says, nodding, feeling the tug of the soulstream on his body now, and shuddering at its touch. It has been so long since anyone has been able to touch him. He feels the urge to sink into the river, to flow with it. 'Doyle was there. One of the Old Races, the Night People, have Sweetblood. He's in some sort of protective — '
'They're trying to open it,' whispers the ghost of Yvette Darnall, her face thinning strangely. Her hair begins to come undone and her long tresses flutter in the invisible breeze of the soulstream, reaching away from her as though it yearns to join the others.
But her eyes are firm and dark. 'Sanguedolce has hidden within a magical shell. It must not be opened.'
Dr. Graves stands a bit straighter, drags his feet toward her in the soulstream, fighting its pull upon him. 'Why? You know something. I don't spend a lot of time here, in the otherworld, but enough to know that a lot of the spirits who linger around the area where all of these omens and strange phenomena are occurring… they've retreated. They're hiding deeper here, or slipping into the soulstream and letting go. Why? Is this what they're afraid of? What will happen if Sweetblood is freed? What is he going to do? Why do they want to break him out in the first place?'
Miss Darnall looks terribly sad, now. She reaches out toward him but her form is blurring. Her body is succumbing to the pull of the soulstream, streaks of ectoplasm stretching off her, fluttering just as the tendrils of her hair are doing. Bits of her slipping away. Her face grows thinner, becomes warped.
'I don't know what they want him for. Nor what this cataclysm is that will result from his being freed. But when I searched for him, when I found him I touched his mind and for just a moment before his spell froze my heart I saw inside him and I realized that he was frightened. Sweetblood felt utter dread and sheer terror at the thought of being released. Beyond that, I know nothing. Only that if it can frighten the world's most powerful sorcerer, it must be terrifying indeed. But that is not what the ghosts are retreating from.'
'Then what — ' Graves begins, reaching out to touch her as the soulstream is touching him, thinking perhaps he might hold her here with him a little longer. But his fingers pass through her as though he is solid and she nothing but spectral mist. 'What are they running from?'
'Another power,' says Miss Darnall, her body tearing itself apart, pieces of her whipping away into the stream, or streaking the air, her face pulled taut, warped, mouth twisted. 'Something calls to them, trying to drag them back.'
'Back to what?'
With a flap like a flag furling in the breeze the rest of her gives way, the ghost surrendering to the river of souls, carried away from him. But as she sails along the stream Yvette Darnall looks back at him.
'To their bodies,' she calls, a thin, reedy voice that disappears after a moment, swallowed in the stream.
For long moments Graves stares after her. There are lights swirling in the stream and flashing past him in the air. The theatre has disappeared, the Parisian movie palace had never been there, unless it had been constructed of ectoplasm, or whatever the substance of this realm is. Now, as he narrows his gaze, he sees in the distance two towering objects that thrust themselves up from the stream. To Graves they seem like the tusks of some impossibly huge elephant, ivory spires a hundred feet high.
But he knows what they were.
The gate.
Though he hates to do it he glances down at his fingers. They blur and stretch and he sees that his own form has begun to run, to streak, tugged along the soulstream, toward the gate.
He grits his teeth.
Leonard Graves is not ready to let the river of souls take him. Not yet. Not until he knows who took his life, who destroyed him. And if that means he must haunt the world for all eternity, so be it. Though he feels the bliss of the soulstream, the peace of surrender a temptation, he turns his back on the gate and begins to trudge back upstream.
CHAPTER SIX
