Ghost Story

“Dresden, st—!” Sir Stuart said.

Too late. I slammed my nose and face into the door and fell backward onto my ass like a perfect idiot. My face began to throb immediately, swelling with pain that felt precisely normal, identical to that of any dummy who walked into a solid oak door.

“—op,” Sir Stuart finished. He sighed, and offered me a hand up. I took it and he hauled me to my feet. “Ghost dust mixed into the paint inside the room,” he explained. “No spirit can pass through it.”

“I’m familiar with it,” I muttered, and felt annoyed that I hadn’t thought of the idea before, as an additional protection against hostile spirits at my own apartment. To the beings of the immaterial, ghost dust was incontrovertible solidity. Thrown directly at a ghost, it would cause tremendous pain and paralyze it for a little while, as if the spook had been suddenly loaded down with an incredible and unexpected weight. If I’d put it all over my walls, it would have turned them into a solid obstacle to ghosts and their ilk, shutting them out with obdurate immobility.

Of course, my recipe had used depleted uranium dust, which would have made it just a tad silly to spread around the interior of my apartment.

Not that it mattered. My apartment was gone, taken when a Molotov cocktail, hurled by a vampire assassin, had burned the boardinghouse to the ground along with most of my worldly possessions. Only a few had been left, hidden away. God knew where they were now.

I suppose I couldn’t really count that as a loss, all things considered. Material possessions aren’t much use to a dead man.

I lifted a hand to my nose, wincing and expecting to find it rebroken. No such thing had happened, though a glob of some kind of runny, transparent, gelatinous liquid smeared the back of my hand. “Hell’s bells. I’m bleeding ectoplasm?”

That drew a smile from the late marine. “Ghosts generally do. You’ll have to forgive him, Dresden. He can be very slow to understand things at times.”

“I don’t have time to wait for him to catch on,” I said. “I need his help.”

Sir Stuart grinned some more. “You aren’t going to get it by standing there repeating yourself like a broken record. Repeating yourself like a broken record. Repeating yourself like a broken—”

“Ha-ha,” I said without enthusiasm. “People who cared about me are going to get hurt if I can’t act.”

Sir Stuart pursed his lips. “It seems to me that if your demise was to leave someone vulnerable, something would have happened to them already. It’s been six months, after all.”

I felt my jaw drop open. “W-what? Six months?”

The ghost nodded. “Today is the ninth of May, to be precise.”

I stared at him, flabbergasted. Then I turned, put my back against Morty’s impenetrable door, and used it to stay upright as I sank to the ground. “Six months?”

“Yes.”

“That’s not . . .” I knew I was just gabbling my stream of thought, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself from talking. “That’s not right. It can’t be right. I was dead for less than a freaking hour. What kind of Rip van Winkle bullshit is this?”

Sir Stuart watched me, his expression serious and untroubled. “Time has little meaning to us now, Dresden, and it’s very easy to become unattached to it. I once lost five years listening to a Pink Floyd album.”

“There is snow a foot and a half deep on the ground,” I said, pointing in a random direction. “In May?”

His voice turned dry. “The television station Mortimer watches theorizes that it is due to person-made, global climate change.”

I was going to say something insulting, maybe even offensive, but just then the rippling sound of metallic wind chimes tinkled through the air. They were joined seconds later by more and more of the same, until the noise was considerable.

“What’s that?” I asked.

Sir Stuart turned and walked back the way we’d come, and I hurried to follow. In the next room over, a dozen sets of wind chimes hung from the ceiling. All of them were astir, whispering and singing even though there was no air moving through the room.

Sir Stuart’s hand went to his ax, and I suddenly understood what I was looking at.

It was an alarm system.

“What’s happening?” I asked him.

“Another assault,” he said. “We have less than thirty seconds. Come with me.”

Chapter Five

“To arms!” bellowed Sir Stuart. “They’re coming at us again, lads!”

The ringing of the alarm chimes doubled as figures immediately exploded from the very walls and floor of the ectomancer’s house, appearing as suddenly as . . . well, as ghosts. Duh.

One second, the only figures in sight were me and Sir Stuart. The next, we were striding at the head of a veritable armed mob. The figures didn’t have the same kind of sharp-edged reality that Sir Stuart did. They were wispier, foggier. Though I could see Sir Stuart with simple clarity, viewing the others was like watching someone walk by on the opposite side of the street during a particularly heavy rain.

There was no specific theme to the spirits defending Mort’s house. The appearance of each was eclectic, to such an extent that they looked like the assembled costumed staff from some kind of museum of American history.

Soldiers in the multicolored uniforms of regulars from the Revolutionary War walked beside buckskin-clad woodsmen, trappers, and Native Americans from the wars preceding the revolution. Farmers from the Civil War era stood with shopkeepers from the turn of the twentieth century. Men in suits, some armed with shotguns, others with tommy guns, moved toward the attack, the bitter divisions of the era of Prohibition apparently forgotten. Doughboys marched with a squad of buffalo soldiers, followed by half a dozen genuine, six-gun-toting cowboys in long canvas coats, and a group of grunts whose uniforms placed them as Vietnam-era U.S. Army infantry.

“Huh,” I said. “Now, there’s something you don’t see every day.”

Sir Stuart drew his gun from his belt as he strode forward, checking the old weapon. “I’ve seen a great many years in this city. Many, many nights. Until recently, I would have agreed with you.”

I looked back at Sir Stuart’s little army as we reached the front door and passed through it.

“I—glah, dammit, that feels strange—guess that means you’re seeing a pattern.”

“This is the fifth night running that they’ve come at us,” Sir Stuart replied, as we went out onto the porch. “Stay behind me, Dresden. And well clear of my ax arm.”

He came to a halt a step later, and I stood behind him a bit and on his left side. Sir Stuart, who had been a giant for his day, was only a couple of inches shorter than me. I had to strain to see over him.

The street was crowded with silent figures.

I just stared out at them for a moment, struggling to understand what I was looking at. Out on the road were scores, maybe even a couple of hundred wraiths like the one Sir Stuart had dispatched earlier. They were flabby, somehow hollow and squishy-looking, like balloons that hadn’t been filled with enough gas—sad, frightening humanoid figures, their eyes and mouths gaping too large, too dark, and too empty to seem real. But instead of advancing toward us, they simply stood there in even ranks, leaning forward slightly, their arms held vaguely upward as if yearning toward the house, though their hands seemed limp and devoid of strength, their fingers trailing into shapeless shreds. The horrible sound of hundreds of nearly silent moans of pain emanated from the block of wraiths, along with a slowly building edge of tension.

“Tell me, wizard,” Sir Stuart said. “What do you see?”

“A crap-ton of wraiths,” I breathed quietly. “Which I do not know how to fight.” None of them had the deadly, focused look of Sir Stuart and his crew, but there were a lot of them out there. “Something is getting them worked up.”

“Ah,” he said. He glanced back over his shoulder at me, his eyes narrowed. “I thought your folk had clear