Ghost Story

sight.”

I frowned at him and then out at the small sea of wraiths. I stared and stared, bringing the focus of concentration I’d learned over endless hours of practice in my studies—and suddenly saw them. Dark, slithering shapes, moving up and down the ranks of wraiths at the backs of their lines. They looked vaguely like folk covered in dark, enveloping cloaks and robes, but they glided through the air with a silent, effortless grace that made me think of sharks who had scented blood in the water and were closing in to feed.

“Four . . . five, six of them,” I said. “In the back ranks.”

“Good,” said Sir Stuart, nodding his approval. “That’s the real foe, lad. These poor wraiths are just their dogs.”

It had been a long, long time since I’d felt quite this lost. “Uh. What are they?”

“Lemurs,” he said, with the Latin pronunciation: Lay-moors. “Shades who have set themselves against Providence and have given themselves over to malice and rage. They do not know pity, nor restraint, nor . . .”

“Fear?” I guessed. “They always never know fear.”

Sir Stuart glanced over his shoulder and bounced his long-handled ax against his palm, his mouth turned up into an edged, wolfish grin. “Nay, lad. Perhaps they were innocent of it once. But they proved quick learners when they raised their hands against this house.” He turned back to face the street and called out, “Positions!”

The spirits who had come along behind us flowed around and over us and—though I twitched when I saw it —beneath us. Within seconds, they were spread into a defensive line in the shape of a half dome between the house and the gathered wraiths and lemurs. Then those silent forms stood steady, whether their feet were planted on the ground or in thin air or somewhere just below the ground, and faced the small horde with their weapons in hand.

The tension continued to build, and the seething, agonized gasps of the wraiths grew louder.

“Um,” I said, as my heart started picking up the pace. “What do I do?”

“Nothing,” Sir Stuart replied, his attention now focused forward. “Just stay near me and out of my way.”

“But—”

“I can see you were a fighter, boy,” Stuart said, his voice harsh. “But now you’re a child. You’ve neither the knowledge nor the tools you need to survive.” He turned and gave me a ferocious glare, and an unseen force literally pushed my feet back across five or six inches of porch. Holy crap. Stuart might not be a wizard, but obviously I had a thing or two to learn about how a formidable will translated to power on the spooky side of the street.

“Stay close to me,” the marine said. “And shut it.”

I swallowed, and Sir Stuart turned back to the front.

“You don’t have to be a dick about it,” I muttered. Very quietly.

It bothered me that he was right. Without Sir Stuart’s intervention, I’d have been dead again already.

That’s right—you heard me: dead again already.

I mean, come on. How screwed up is your life (after- or otherwise) when you find yourself needing phrases like that?

I indulged myself in half a second of disgust that once again the universe seemed to be making an extraspecial effort to align itself against me, but it was my pride that was in critical condition. I was accustomed to being the guy who did the fighting and protecting. Fear had been fuel for the fire, meat and potatoes, when I was the one calling the shots. But now . . .

This was terror of an alien vintage: I was helpless.

Without warning, the air filled with whistling and ear-slashing shrieks, and the horde of wraiths washed toward us in a flash flood of strangled moans.

“Give it to them, lads!” Sir Stuart bellowed, his voice rising above the cacophony of screams with the silvery clarity of a trumpet.

Spectral gunfire roared out at once from the weapons of the hovering defenders. Again, clouds of powder smoke were replaced with bursts of colored mist. Bullets had been switched out for streaking spheres of violent radiance. Instead of the explosions of propellant and projectiles breaking the sound barrier, hammering bass-note thrums filled the air and echoed on long after a gunshot would have faded.

A tide of destruction swept over the assaulting wraiths, distorted light and sound tearing great, ragged holes in them, filling the air with faded, warped shadow-images as their feeble memories bled into wisps of cloud that were swallowed by the night. They fell by the dozens—and there were still plenty more wraiths left to go around. Wraiths closed in with the Lindquist Historical Home Defense Society—and it still wasn’t fair.

Sir Stuart’s troops reacted like the fighting men they had once been. Swords and sabers appeared, along with stilettos and brass knuckles and bowie knives. The wraiths came at them with a slow, graceful, terrible momentum and were hacked, stabbed, punched, clubbed, and otherwise broken—but there were a lot of wraiths.

I heard a hollow scream that sounded as if it had come from a couple of blocks away, and lifted my eyes to see half a dozen wraiths who had all attacked together swarm over a phantom doughboy, a scrawny young man in a baggy uniform. Though one of the things was literally opened from one side to the other by a slash of the ghost soldier’s bayonet, the other five just fastened onto him, first by a single fingertip, which was then blindly followed by others. Another wraith expired when the young soldier drew his knife. But then all those tattered fingers began winding and winding around him, lengthening impossibly, until within a few seconds he looked like nothing so much as a massive burn victim covered in heavy, dirty bandages.

The wraiths pressed closer and closer, their flabby bodies compressing until they hardly resembled human forms at all, and then with a sudden scream, they darted away in four different directions as more solid, lethal- looking shapes, leaving behind the translucent outline of a young man screaming in agony.

I watched, my stomach twisting, as even that image faded. Within seconds, it was gone.

“Damn their empty eyes,” Sir Stuart said, his teeth clenched. “Damn them.”

“Hell’s bells,” I breathed. “Why didn’t . . . Couldn’t you have stopped them?”

“The lemurs,” he spat. “I can’t give them the chance to get by me into the house.”

I blinked. “But . . . the threshold . . . They can’t.”

“They did the first night,” he said. “Still don’t know how. I can’t leave the porch or they’ll get through. Now be quiet.” His fingers flexed and settled on the haft of his ax. “Here’s where we come to it.”

As the wraiths continued to assault and entangle the house’s defenders, Sir Stuart moved to the top of the little stairs leading up to the porch and planted his feet. Out at the street, the shadowy forms of the lemurs had all gone still, each of them hunched down in a crouch, predators preparing to spring.

When it came, it came fast. Not fast like the rush of a mountain lion upon a deer, and not even fast like a runaway automobile. They were fast like bullets. One second, the lemurs were at the street, and the next they were in the air before the porch, seemingly without crossing the space between. I didn’t have time to do more than yelp and go into a full-body twitch of pure, startled reaction.

But Sir Stuart was faster.

The first lemur to charge met the butt of Sir Stuart’s ax, a blow that sent it into a fluttering, backward tailspin. The second and third lemurs charged at almost exactly the same moment, and Sir Stuart’s ax swept out in a scything arc, slashing them both and sending them reeling with high-pitched, horrible screams. The fourth lemur drove a bony-wristed punch across Sir Stuart’s jaw, staggering the marine and driving him to one knee. But when the lemur tried to follow up the attack, Stuart produced a gleaming knife from his belt, and it flashed in opalescent colors as he swept it in a treacherous diagonal slash over the thing’s midsection.

The fifth lemur hesitated, seeming to abort its instantaneous rush about halfway across the yard. Stuart let out a bellow and threw the knife. It struck home, and the lemur frantically twisted in upon itself, howling like the others, until the knife tumbled free of its ghostly flesh and fell to the snowy ground.

Five wounded lemurs fled from Sir Stuart, screaming. The sixth crouched on the sidewalk, frozen in indecision.

“Coward,” Stuart snarled. “If you can’t finish, don’t start.”

All things considered, I thought Stuart might be being a little hard on the thing. It wasn’t cowardly to not rush a juggernaut when you’d just seen your buddies get thrashed by it. Maybe the thing was just smarter than the others.