Ghost Talkers

by Mary Robinette Kowal

  She is cold. It seems that she can never get warm in these damn tents. And stupid Cody won’t stop snoring. She reaches for her shoe to pitch at him. Outside the tent, something crackles. A light—

  “Ginger!”

  Of all the voices in the world, that one could cut through a crowd and find her. Ginger raised her head, shaking. Mr. Haden had his arm around her waist, supporting most of her weight. Turning back to the gate, she saw a bare shimmer of grey beyond the iron.

  It was only a shadow, even in the spirit realm, but the shape of Ben’s soul was still unmistakable. He pressed against the barrier. And he was trapped on the other side of the salt.

  “Ben?”

  Ginger stretched her soul out of her body, reaching for the shadow of Ben’s voice. The souls around her buffeted Ginger in a maelstrom of death and pain. The weight of her mortal form dropped away.

  Wordless, Ben shrieked, and Ginger left her body lying on the ground.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  From the spirit plane, most of the mortal world seemed grey and uninteresting. The line of salt, however, made a shimmering translucent dome over the entire grounds of the Spirit Corps. Ginger slipped through the souls of soldiers to the barrier. She could just make out Ben on the other side.

  If Ben was still here, did that mean that Merrow wasn’t the traitor? Or … he’d said that the traitor wasn’t working alone.

  Crouching, she tried to move the salt so he could come in. Her fingers burned and slid off the surface as if it were hot glass. Well … if that was what it felt like, no wonder Merrow’s modification to his uniform had been effective. Damn him.

  “What are you doing?” A soldier stood next to her in the spirit realm. More than one, actually. She seemed to have attracted a bit of notice, as the sole woman among these spirits.

  Standing, Ginger shook her head. “Nothing effective. My fiancé is on the other side of this.…”

  The man squinted at the wall. “He’s dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you aren’t.”

  “Not … no. I suppose I’m not.” She glanced back at where her body lay sprawled on the ground. Lt. Plumber was compressing her chest. Ginger had probably stopped breathing again. The rest of the circle had linked to each other and were concentrating on her.

  They had left Merrow tied on the ground. Without the weight of her physical form blocking the view, his aura stood out with a stark clarity. The fear that had been so present the entire time she had known him was gone. In hindsight, it was easy to see that he had been scared he would be caught. A dull resignation and resistance had replaced it.

  Now that he was caught … well. She would have to see if she could give him something new to be afraid of. Ginger turned to the ghosts surrounding her. “Do you see that man on the ground? He’s a traitor.”

  “Is that so?” The edges of the soldier’s spirit hardened into knives.

  “He killed my fiancé and tried to kill me.” She turned back to the wall of salt. A hazy shadow of Ben paced outside it.

  “Bastard. Oh—sorry, miss.”

  Ginger held up her hand—or rather, the memory of her hand. “Please. I have heard far worse.” He looked unconvinced. “Damn far worse.”

  The soldier broke out into a grin, and the apricot haze of amusement spread among his fellows. Ginger eyed the salt wall again and turned back to Merrow.

  She slid through the soldiers to crouch next to Merrow and ran her finger across his throat. “You can hear me, can’t you?”

  He shuddered.

  Lt. Plumber was sitting up, his head hanging. Edna patted him on his back, saying something to him. Helen was standing, her aura spread out in great steel blue wings laced with bloodred fury. Ginger’s body seemed to be breathing again, which was something.

  “All that time, pretending not to be a sensitive.” Ginger laid her hands upon his neck, and her fingers sank into his flesh. “Was that something you had to learn to do in Germany? They burn witches there, right?”

  His breathing got faster, and he closed his eyes.

  “So, I’m betting you’ve had no training. No one to teach you how to guard your mind from unwanted brushes with other souls. Have you ever felt another man’s death?” Ginger looked up at the soldiers surrounding her. “Gentlemen … may I show you how to haunt a man?”

  One of the soldiers chuckled. “I bet you’ve haunted plenty of—ow.”

  “Shut it,” another replied.

  “Thought I couldn’t feel pain once I was dead.”

  The memory of Ben jerking his hands away from Merrow bled into the group. “Oh, you can still feel pain. And you can inflict it too.”

  “Crikey.”

  Ginger bent her head and whispered into Merrow’s ear. “Just wait until you go to sleep. There are thousands of soldiers here, and we will haunt you. The ghosts of all those whose deaths you are responsible for will visit you every time you shut your eyes. Every time you open your eyes. For every moment that you live. I have no reason to wish for mercy for you, and very, very unfinished business.”

  * * *

  Ginger lost time waiting for Merrow to fall asleep. They put him in a closet with a guard outside, and the sun was shining. Then it was dark. Intellectually, Ginger was aware that it was a very bad sign that she had lost the sense of time passing. If she wanted to return to her body, that is, which was becoming increasingly unimportant.

  She drifted through the door and settled down next to Merrow.

  Ben had said that he’d entered her dreams. It hadn’t occurred to her to ask him how he did that. With regular lucid dreaming, you fell asleep, reaching for the other person. She supposed …

  Ginger reached out a tendril of her soul and pressed it into Merrow’s head, reaching for him.

  She is in a small hut, but not quite there, not really. She is watching Merrow, who is sitting at the table, picking his name into the wood with a knife. A woman stands at the sink, washing dishes. The sound makes her turn.

  “What are you doing?!”

  Merrow jumps, and the knife slices through his finger.

  Ginger snorted in satisfaction. He turned and stared at her, eyes widening. “What are you doing here?”

  “I told you I would come to haunt you.” Ginger walked closer to him, past the rows of beds in the field hospital. Outside, the crack of guns was constant. The men in the beds watched them, all with identical knitting needles jutting from their eyes.

  Merrow backed away. His finger was still bleeding, and the blood ran up his arm to soak his sleeve. “This is a dream.”

  “Yes. How does that make it better?”

  He turned, looking for the exit, but the canvas walls stretched away from Ginger in all directions. Row after row of beds surrounded them. “You can’t hurt me in a dream.”

  “I can make you remember.” Ginger put her hand on the back of his neck and gave him the memory of Capt. Norris’s death.

  A man in British Army uniform is on him. Has him by the shoulders and pushes him down under the water. He thrashes, trying to get free, but in the big tub, there is no leverage, and he is still too drunk to be coordinated. Dammit. He didn’t survive the shelling to die like this. His lungs burn, and he coughs, sucking in water.

  Merrow twisted in her grasp, but Ginger held on and leaned closer. “Every night. I have thousands of memories of death.” She pressed him into the memory of Ben’s death.

  His throat burns. He can’t breathe. Why can’t he breathe? The burning darkens into pain, and he claws at his throat. A garrote.

  He tugs at the hands holding the piece of wire around his neck and staggers, trying to throw the man off. They stumble together, and, for a moment, in the window of the cabin, there’s a distorted reflection.

  A man with light hair and a British uniform. It is himself.

  He can’t breathe. He can’t breathe. He is on his knees. He can’t stop strangling himself. Breathe. He can’t. He—

  Merrow screamed. Ginger f
lew out of his body. He was still screaming, awake and screaming, and his aura was dark with fear.

  “Stop! Stop—for the love of God! Stop. I’ll talk.” He pushed back into the corner, staring at where Ginger floated in the closet. “I was assigned to find out how the ghosts worked, because we’ve been trying to re-create it with no success. It seemed easy at first, getting placed as Capt. Harford’s batman, but he was so careful, and all I knew was that there was conditioning, but not how it worked, even though I was put through it. I remember being given tea—we even managed to steal some tea, but it was just chamomile and lavender—and I remember the lessons about how to report in and what to notice, but I couldn’t get any more than that, and I kept getting shut out of the meetings, and he always wrote his notes in code—God. Middle English. No wonder I couldn’t crack it.”

  He was trying to deflect the conversation. Ginger drifted closer. “So why did you kill him? You did kill him, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.” Merrow clutched both sides of his head. “I had to.”

  “You had to.” If she could render him unconscious and make him live that death again and again, she would. “Why?”

  “We needed him.”

  “Come now. If you want to sleep peacefully ever again, I need specifics. Who is we, and why did you need Ben?”

  “We is—we are Thackeray, Johnson, Vale, Williams, and Schmitt.”

  Interesting that Reginald and Axtell were not on the list. Thackeray … that had been the head of the prison camp. Johnson and Vale were two of Reg’s flunkies. Williams she didn’t know. Schmitt—the German medium. “So I take it Schmitt’s defection was a sham.”

  He nodded. “He doesn’t speak English, but he needed to be on this side of the line. He thought we could bomb the camp so that the massive amount of concentrated and simultaneous deaths would clog the mediums and act like a banner to try to locate the Spirit Corps.”

  “And Ben?”

  Merrow sighed, and his soul was grey-brown with resignation. “Schmitt needed a soldier who consciously knew where the Spirit Corps was located as a … a sort of homing pigeon. So I—I strangled Captain Harford. Schmitt isolated his soul and tried to follow it, but … it didn’t work.”

  That explained why Ben had been killed before the explosion, but didn’t show up until after the wave of other soldiers came in. It also explained why Ben had deteriorated so quickly. Maybe … maybe it was possible to put him back together again. “In what way didn’t it work?”

  “When they released his soul from isolation, it—it vanished, just like all the other souls. The beacon didn’t work, and we don’t know why. We … we need to know how the souls are conditioned, which Capt. Harford didn’t know.”

  Ginger straightened in understanding. There were, perhaps, a dozen people who knew how the binding worked. Ben was not one of them, not fully, but he knew who had invented the technique. He would have made notes in his book, perhaps in Middle English and under a cipher, but Merrow knew how to read that now. “That’s why you needed his notebook.”

  Merrow spread his hands with a desperate laugh. “A black woman. Why would we have thought she was important?”

  They knew about Helen.

  Ginger blew out of the tiny room and headed for the stairs to the first floor, passing ghosts who crowded the halls. One slid through the wall, and Ginger pulled to a halt. Why did she need the stairs? She sank through the floor and emerged in the hall outside Potter’s Field. Here, mediums and mundanes walked in the hall as they came off shift. They had their heads down and their arms tucked around their bodies. Every single one of them had their soul curled into a tight ball in the centre of their selves, trying to avoid contact with the ghosts that crowded the building.

  Ginger slipped through them, catching brushes of thought. What is happening? When can I leave? Why am I here? How did I die? She passed through the door and stopped. A translucent wall surrounded the room.

  “Bloody hell.” She at first thought that they had moved the salt line to surround the warehouse grounds, but there were evidently two lines. In this form, Ginger couldn’t cross it. She turned to the nearest medium. “Excuse me.”

  The woman kept her head down and continued walking. In this crowd, Ginger’s plea blended with the other soldiers.

  Ginger needed to find her body.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Ginger’s body was not difficult to find. It lay in the infirmary on the third floor of the warehouse. Three other mediums were in the room. Or rather, their bodies were, but no animating aura surrounded them. She hadn’t realized that they’d lost more souls. Each lay still and breathing, but with the lax face of the inanimate.

  Her own body had been cleaned of the dirt that had accumulated during her days at the Front, which only made the dark circles under her eyes more apparent. When had she become so alarmingly gaunt? Though, when she thought about it, Ginger could not remember the last time she had eaten. It simply had not seemed important.

  There would be time to worry about that later. She eased into her body and the flesh slid around her like scum on a pond. Ginger gritted her teeth against the stink of decay until her jaw ached. The ache distracted her from the churning nausea in her gut.

  Sandbags rested upon her lids and she strained to open them. Everything weighed on her, pressing against her soul and pinning it to the world. She blinked against the harsh light of the ward and groaned.

  Someone gasped. “Ginger?”

  Ginger turned her head, which throbbed with the movement. She knew the voice. “Aunt Edie?”

  “Oh my heavenly stars! You have no idea how worried I have been.”

  “I thought—” Her voice scratched her throat like broken glass. Ginger stopped and coughed. “I thought you were in London.”

  “London? Whatever gave you that idea?” She sniffled and wiped a finger roughly under her eyes. Her aura had relief breaking through the patches of grey.

  “Your maid said you had gone there.”

  “London branch. Oh, that stupid thing. I told her to tell you I was going to stay with the London branch. I knew I should have left a note, but then I was afraid it would fall into the wrong hands. Going gallivanting off to London after seeing you leave on a train with a gun and a ghost? I’ve never heard of such silliness. Oh—my dear, I’m so glad you’re awake. But you are absolutely forbidden from ever frightening me like that again.”

  Ginger winced. It had not occurred to her what it would do to her aunt—or to her circle, for that matter—if she didn’t come back. Foolishness. She had seen the effects of death so often that she had become inured to it. “I am sorry I frightened you.”

  She tried to push herself up on the bed, and the room spun around her. Ginger dropped back, nauseated as the pitching sensation continued.

  Worry clouded her aunt’s aura. “You should rest.”

  “Can’t.” Squeezing her eyes shut, Ginger covered her face with her hands. “Helen is in danger.”

  “Why Helen?”

  Of course … her aunt didn’t know, because she’d specifically asked not to be told any of the details. “Do you know where she is?”

  “Oh! That’s something nice. Brigadier-General Davies is apparently going to reconsider your suggestion to have her be the liaison. He just sent a man to fetch her, so she is at his house.”

  “His house. Really? He’s having a meeting with her in his home?”

  “Do you think that put her in danger? He only agreed to it today, so I hardly see how the Germans could know yet.”

  Opening her eyes, Ginger stared at her aunt. “Do you really see the brigadier-general receiving a woman of colour in his home?”

  “I—well … no. I wish I could, but no.”

  “Do you know who came for her?”

  “Oh … no, but his name was literary.”

  “Lt. Thackeray?”

  “Yes!” Her aunt tilted her head. “Which I can see by your aura is terribly bad news. My dear … I know I have to
ld you not to keep me informed, but I think I will be more helpful if I know what is going on. Why Helen?”

  “Because Helen created the process that imprints the soldiers. And Merrow had Ben’s notebook, which mentions that, and he’s told the Germans everything he knows.” Ginger reached for Aunt Edie’s hand. “Will you help me up, please?”

  “Oh, my dear…” Her aunt looked stricken, then furious.

  “I know. Honestly, I’m not sure if Davies is involved, or if the message from him was faked. We thought they were looking for the Spirit Corps, which would mean that the traitor couldn’t be Davies, because he knew where we were. But they were looking for the process to imprint the soldiers.” Ginger forced her elbow into the cot and levered herself up. She sat, clutching the edge of the bed with both hands. The swimming sensation continued. She had no idea if it was from the concussion Merrow had given her or because … because she had died. If she was being clear and honest with herself, Ginger had died for a few moments, until Lt. Plumber got her breathing again. “Now, will you please help me stop them?”

  “But you should—”

  “Rest. I know. But I have a duty, and I mean to perform it.” She looked at the other women, lying prone and nearly lifeless in the other beds. “But we need the rest of my circle. I am, as Helen puts it, rather loose in my skin.”

  * * *

  Lady Penfold’s comportment would have made many officers ashamed of their own posture. She marched down the hall, leading Ginger’s circle out of Potter’s Field. Ginger leaned on Edna as they left the warehouse.

  Her joints ached with every movement, although ached was perhaps the wrong word. Ginger was acutely aware of her physical form and the bunching of muscles, the grinding of cartilage, and the rumble of digestion. Her tongue filled her mouth with the taste of decay.

  This constant reminder of the mortality of the body was probably why those other women’s souls had not returned. The sense of rot filled her, and just there, just beyond the boundary of her skin, floated the soft currents of the spirit world.