Ghost Story

Silence. Twitch.

“Great,” I muttered. “Next you’ll want me to take a pebble out of your hand.”

Twitch.

“I wasn’t being literal. . . . Okay, yeah, you and I aren’t going to communicate well this way.”

Silence. Somehow . . . emphatic.

I stopped and pondered for a moment. Then I said, “Wait. This is connected, isn’t it? With what Captain Murphy sent me to do.”

Silence.

“Find my killer?” I asked him. “I don’t get it. How does finding my killer save the world?”

The deep voice repeated earlier phrases. “You must understand your path. It is more than necessary. It is essential to survival.”

“There’s a little irony in Eternal Silence being stuck on a looping sound bite.” I sighed.

A wraith’s moan drifted into the air, and I tensed, looking around.

One of those ragged-scarecrow shapes was rising from the earth of a grave, like something being hauled up out of deep mud. It moaned in mindless hunger, its eyes vacant.

Then there was another moan. And another. And another.

Wraiths were coming up out of graves all around me.

I started breathing harder, though I didn’t need to. “Yeah, okay, brilliant idea for a safe house, Harry. It’s a freaking graveyard. Where else are ghosts going to be?”

Eternal Silence only stared at me. There was an amused quality to its silence.

“I have to go,” I said. “Is that all you had for me? Understand my path?”

Silence. It lifted a green-shrouded limb in a gesture of farewell.

The first wraith finished with what was evidently its nightly routine of slogging out of the earth and moaning. Its empty eyes turned toward me and it began to drift my way, immaterial toes dangling down through the snow.

“Screw this,” I said, and vanished. One, two, three hops, and I was to the nearest brick wall of the cemetery. I gritted my teeth and plunged into it.

And slammed my face into cold stone.

Pain lanced through my nose, and I snarled at my own stupidity. Dammit, Harry. Walls are built to keep things out—but walls around graveyards are built to keep things in. I’d known that since I was a freaking kid.

I checked behind me. The wraiths were drifting after me in a slow, graceful horde, adding members as they went. They weren’t fast, but there were dozens and dozens of them. Again I was reminded of documentaries I’d seen showing giant clouds of jellyfish.

I gritted my teeth and thought fast. When walls are built, they are intended as physical barriers. As a result of that intention, invested by dozens or scores of builders, they took on a similar solidity when it came to the spiritual, as well. It’s why they held most ghosts inside graveyards—and it probably had something to do with the way a threshold formed around a home, too.

But where human intention had created a barrier, that same intention had also created an access point.

I turned and began vanishing in a line, straight for the gates of the boneyard.

I don’t know what I would have done if they had been closed. Shut gates and shut doors carry their own investment of intention, just as the walls do. But open gates are another matter entirely, and the gates of Graceland stood wide-open. As I went through them, I looked back at what seemed like a modest-sized army of wraiths heading for the opening.

I had a lightbulb moment.

The gates of the cemetery were being left open.

And hordes of wraiths haunted the streets of Chicago by night lately.

“Aha, Morty,” I said. “And now we know where they’re coming from.”

Someone, someone alive, was opening those gates at night. That meant that we had a place to begin, a trail we could attempt to follow to find out who was stirring up the city’s spooks to use against Morty—and why.

I had information. I had something to trade Mort for his ongoing help.

I suddenly felt like an investigator again.

“Hot diggity dog,” I said, grinning. “The game’s a-freaking-foot!”

Chapter Fifteen

I revved up the memory and started jumping. It was a quick way to travel in the city—the ability to go over buildings and ignore traffic signals, one-way streets, and cars was a real plus. It didn’t take me long to get to Mortimer’s house.

It was on fire.

There were fire trucks there, lights blazing. The firemen were moving quickly, professionally, but though the house was well ablaze, they had only one hose up and running. As I stood there, staring, two more started up, but I knew it was a lost cause. Morty’s place was burning even more swiftly and brightly than mine had. Or maybe the dark was just making it look that way.

A cop or two showed up as the firemen kept the blaze from spreading to the houses around it—not hard, given the snow on the ground. Blue lights from the bubbles on the cop cars joined the red and yellow of the CFD. People stood around watching the fire—in my experience, they often do.

Of course . . . they didn’t usually do it out in the cold. And they didn’t usually do it in six inches of snow. And they tended to wander off when the fire began to subside. And talk. And blink. And their clothing is generally from the current century.

The crowd of onlooking Chicago civilians were ghosts.

I walked among them, looking at faces. They were much like any other group of folks, apart from the period outfits. I recognized a few from Sir Stuart’s home-defense brigade—but only a few, and they were the more recent shades. The rest were just . . . people. Men, women, and children.

A boy maybe ten years old was the only shade who seemed to notice me. Beside him stood a girl, who must have been about seven when she died. They were holding hands. He looked up at me as I passed by, and I stopped to stare down at him.

“Where do we go now?” he asked. “I don’t know another place to go.”

“Um,” I said. “I don’t know, either. Hey, did you see what happened?”

“It came back again tonight. Then men came with fire. They burned the house. They took the little man away.”

I stiffened. “The Grey Ghost took Mort?”

“No, men took him,” the boy said.

The girl said, in a soft little voice, “We used to play with other children by the river. But he brought us here. He was always nice to us.” Her facial expression never changed. It was flat, empty.

The boy sighed, touched the little girl’s shoulder, and turned back to stare at the dwindling flames. I stood there watching them for a moment, and could see them growing more visibly transparent. I checked the other shades. It was happening to them, too, to a greater or lesser degree.

“Hey,” I said, to the boy. “Do you know Sir Stuart?”

“The big man. The soldier,” the boy said, nodding. “He’s in the garden. Behind the house.”

“Thank you,” I said, and went to look, vanishing to the side of Mort’s house and then jumping again, to the garden.

Mort’s backyard was like his front—sculpted, carefully maintained, decorated with Japanese sensibilities, spare and elegant. There was what looked like a koi pond, now filled with snow. There were trees, and more of the little bonsai pieces, delicate and somehow vulnerable. The fire had been close enough and hot enough to melt any