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.
