Ghost Story

Andre would be a great person to have on your side in a brawl against a rowdy tavern crowd. But in a more focused situation, he would be at the mercy of professionals who, while lacking his raw power, could nonetheless apply their own strength more efficiently and effectively. Murphy was an excellent example of that kind of fighter. She wasn’t much bigger than a bread box, but I’d seen her toss around guys weighing most of three hundred pounds like they were unruly puppies.

If the Grey Ghost was responsible for that spell, then I was lucky to have survived our first meeting. The smart move would be to scamper. If it came to a fair fight, I might find myself completely outclassed.

I felt a shivering, cold presence on the back of my neck, and turned to find wraiths nearby. They drifted toward the hideout from all directions, coming in a slow, steady procession and moving in perfectly straight lines. The siren spell made sense to me now. It wasn’t a guard spell, though it could certainly have that purpose. It was also a beacon, a dinner bell being rung to signal the mindless horde now approaching.

They never sped up, never slowed. They just kept floating forward until they began to pass through the closed steel door in groups of two and three as they converged upon it.

I pursed my lips, thinking. The Grey Ghost wasn’t killing wraiths. It was using them. For the moment, at least, there wouldn’t be any kind of guard spell on the other side of the door. There couldn’t be, or the Grey Ghost would be slaughtering its own troops and wasting its own investment of time and energy to boot.

I might have an opportunity here. The inbound wraiths would almost certainly be routed by what amounted to a cattle chute. That route would most likely be clear of supernatural booby traps. It might be possible to gain entry, find a vulnerable point along the chute, and then duck out of it to run a quick reconnaissance of the Grey Ghost’s headquarters and find Mort.

It took half an hour for the procession to be complete, and the flow of wraith traffic never let up. I stopped counting them at 450 and swallowed. That wasn’t a herd of wraiths. That was a bloody horde. If one of the wraiths decided it wanted to eat me, it would have to perform a miracle to divide me into enough pieces to feed all of its dinner company.

My veil seemed to have prevented me from being noticed as they approached, but that could just as easily be the effect of the beacon spell. For all I knew, once the beacon shut off, they’d all turn around and come at me like greyhounds leaving the gate. It would require a singularly stupid man to go hang around in narrow tunnels and cramped spaces alongside a threat like that.

“And I, Harry Dresden, am that man,” I stated.

I waited for the last wraith to go in and counted to twenty. My mouth felt dry. Fear boiled in my belly and made my knees feel unsteady. My fingers trembled.

I told them all that they were just preconceived residual memories anyway and that I would tolerate no guff from them.

Then I ground my teeth and followed the horde.

Chapter Twenty-eight

I slipped through the steel door and into the blackness on the other side. I ignored the darkness until it went away, and then began to move stealthily forward.

I stopped with the Scooby-Doo action a couple of feet later and just started walking. I mean, honestly, sneaking. It wasn’t as though I could step on a twig or accidentally kick an old can and make a sound, right? Being a ghost, the problem wasn’t being sneaky—it was getting noticed in the first place.

Besides. Nobody who was concerned about detecting my presence would be using their ears to sense me coming.

I began extending my wizard’s senses out in front of me.

When I say wizard senses, I mean it in a similar fashion to spider sense. Spidey’s enhanced senses detect when he’s in danger and warn him that he’s got incoming. A wizard’s senses don’t do that (though I suppose with enough work, someone could come close). What they do sense is the presence of magic, in both its natural state and its worked forms. You don’t have to be concentrating to make it happen—it’s natural in every practitioner.

The theory I’ve heard espoused most often is that the ability to sense such energies makes it possible for a regular person to become a wizard, providing the kind of sensory feedback he needs to gradually work with more and more energy. So while a regular person who lacked the sense could, technically, learn how to use magic without it, it would be a process as difficult as someone who was born blind teaching himself to paint.

I focused on that sense in me, partially blocking out my less important, physical senses to give greater attention to the presence of magic in my surroundings. It was pretty thick in here. The door led to a concrete stairway going down into the earth, and each step bore lit candles and thickly painted magical symbols. The latent energy in the paint was almost devoid of arcane power, barely detectable, but it was there and I saw it as faint phosphorescence. The energy of the beacon spell was still going strong. Somewhere in my head I had evidently decided to interpret it as a sound, because I could hear its slow throb like a bass beat on a big woofer.

I went down the stairs, my senses attuned to the ground at my feet. What looked like one more bit of barely magical scribbling could be concealing something far more potent and dangerous—but it didn’t. I went down two flights of stairs unmolested.

The bottom of the stairway opened onto a rectangular room that had once been some sort of electrical junction. It obviously wasn’t in service anymore. Large steel boxes and glass-faced readouts were spotted with rust and dust. There was more of the occult writing down here—all of it disjointed and fantastically disconnected, as if someone had composed a poem in a foreign language by randomly stringing together words from a dictionary.

It all bore the same trace amounts of magical energy as the writing on the stairs. The Big Hoods evidently had a certain amount of latent talent, which seemed to fit together with the idea of the Grey Ghost recruiting some mortal flunkies to assist it in . . .

. . . In whatever the hell he or she was trying to do.

What was he or she trying to do?

I mean, I knew the Grey Ghost had attacked Mort’s place. But why? Why take Mort to begin with? Granted, the little ectomancer could probably be a pain in the ass to any ghost who got too ambitious in Chicago, but the Grey Ghost’s ambitions seemed to have been limited to gunning for Morty. What could he possibly have to offer as a target?

At the far end of the junction room, there was a gaping, ragged hole in the wall that looked like it had been made with sledgehammers. It opened onto a rough tunnel beyond—the beginnings of Undertown proper.

A man’s anguished scream came from the opening.

I nearly burst into a sprint but stopped myself. Unthinking sprints were a good way to get killed. Re-killed. Instead, I moved forward into the rough-hewn corridor. It was cold and damp, and slime and mold were everywhere. I unimagined the strong, musty smell that would otherwise have filled my nose and paced forward, watching for traps and working hard not to move my feet in time with the bass-drum rhythm of the beacon spell.

I passed a number of alcoves that joined the corridor. They were individual quarters for the Big Hoods, apparently. Each contained a mattress or an air mattress and something resembling bedding, only covered with mildew and mold. Each had a box or a couple of bags, containing what I presumed to be personal belongings. More arcane gibberish covered the walls, along with slogans such as THE LIZARD FOLK ARE ALREADY HERE! WATCH FOR THEIR EYES! A couple of them looked occupied, with large, bulky forms snoring under the disgusting blankets.

A minute or two later, the passage opened up into a torch-lit room about the size of a hockey rink. The entrance was high up on one wall, so that my head was level with the larger room’s ceiling. There were stairs cut into the wall beneath my feet, so that I could walk down them into the large room—which I didn’t, as it was packed full of bad guys. I swallowed and made sure my veil was still running strong.

The bass beat of the beacon hammered loudly here, coming from a pit that had been cut into the floor. It must have been at least ten feet across, and I couldn’t tell how deep it was. It was surrounded by written formulae that were far less nonsensical than the others, and they sent out flashes of dim red light in time with each pulse of