Ghosts of Manhattan

by George Mann

  The Ghost sensed movement out of the corner of his eye. Donovan was trying to get his attention. He met the other man's gaze, saw he was pointing toward the prone bodies of two further museum guards. Both of them had been shot, one in the belly, one in the throat. Blood still gurgled from the latter wound, but the man's chest had long since ceased to rise and fall with life.

  Donovan raised his gun. "Do that exploding thing," he hissed beneath his breath, just loud enough for the Ghost to hear. The Ghost offered him a stern look in reply. But Donovan was right. It would certainly give them something to think about ...

  He surveyed the scene once more. Where the hell would he start? Slowly, cautiously, trying desperately not to make a sound, he reached down beneath his right arm and eased the barrel of the flechette gun around on its ratcheting gears, wincing as they groaned in quiet protest. It locked into place.

  The two mobsters nearest to them were standing beside a glass case, lost in conversation. They seemed in jocular mood, discussing their latest conquests, the club they had visited, the men they had killed. The Ghost had no qualms about ending their miserable lives. The city would be a better place because of it. But he could not kill in cold blood. He would take the moss men first, eliminate the most dangerous elements. That would give the goons a chance to fight back, too, a chance to be the first to aim their guns at him, to show their hands. That was the way it had to be, the salve he needed for his conscience.

  He straightened his arm, leveling the barrel. Donovan was watching him from across the hall. The policeman was holding his body taught, ready to respond to whatever came next. The Ghost breathed deeply. He could sense the adrenaline as it coursed into his veins. His pulse began to race, harder, faster. He was coiled like a spring, ready for the inevitable battle to come.

  The Ghost squeezed the trigger, feeling the soft rubber give in the palm of his hand. A spray of tiny, glittering flechettes sighed from the end of his gun, whistling through the air, embedding themselves indiscriminately in the torso of one of the two moss men handling the marble wheel. For a second nothing happened. The Ghost could see the sweat standing out on Donovan's forehead.

  And then chaos erupted.

  The moss man detonated in a spray of brass and clay, the top half of it disappearing entirely, leaving just the stumps of its legs, still shambling awkwardly, bereft of any controlling apparatus. The marble wheel lurched dangerously, the remaining moss man struggling to keep it upright. The mobsters raised their voices in confusion, trying to work out from where this terrible, sudden threat had originated. And then Donovan opened fire, answering the question. The two men nearest to them dropped heavily, their bodies crumpling to the floor, one of them falling against the glass cabinet, his face and hands slapping the reinforced panels as he slid to the ground, a deadweight. Others replied with the chatter of their tommy guns. A glass case shattered, bursting in a spray of shimmering fragments.

  The Ghost waved his arm in a wide arc, spraying a hail of the tiny metal explosives into the air. Howls of pain followed, and then worse, as four of the men exploded. One lost his head in a splash of crimson mist, another his heart and lungs as his rib cage cracked open, a third his left leg, causing him to collapse to the floor, shuddering in a fit as the shock took hold. The other the Ghost didn't see, save for the shadow of red gore he left on the white wall behind him, and on the white marble statues close to where he had been standing. Donovan and the Ghost rushed forward, fanning out, Donovan left, the Ghost right. He slid behind an ornate marble coffin just in time to hear bullets ricocheting off its surface, sending plumes of dust into the air, chunks of the ancient stone crumbling to the floor. Arthur was going to kill him.

  The Ghost glanced around, trying to get a sense of what was happening. Another of the moss men had moved in to replace the one he had destroyed, helping the first with its large burden. They had resumed the slow, steady march toward the exit with the marble wheel. One of the mobsters, the man who appeared to be in charge, was shouting to the others to protect the artifact at all costs, to prevent it from getting damaged. Perhaps that was something the Ghost could play for? Get himself near enough to the marble relic that they had to stop shooting at him or risk destroying it. But he would have to wait until the moss men were closer to the exit before he could make that move. At the moment there was a field of statues between him and them, and an army of gunmen behind him, waiting for him to show himself.

  He could see Donovan, partly obscured behind a glass case containing a display of ancient weaponry. The policeman had given up shooting with his left arm, switching the gun to his preferred right. He was grimacing in agony with every shot, but it was clear he intended to stick with the fight, and his aim was true; he had felled a number of the goons.

  As if to prove the point another man dropped, one of Donovan's bullets buried between his eyes. More of them rushed forward to fill the ranks of the dead, however, in a seemingly endless onslaught. Their weapons barked furiously, bullets filling the air, as they tried to weed out the two interlopers who had so suddenly introduced such chaos and death into their lives. The goons showed a blatant disregard for the ancient exhibits, hammering them indiscriminately with their ammunition, much as they showed a similar disregard for the deaths of their own compatriots. The Ghost couldn't believe they could be so cold. Perhaps they had learned to save their mourning for a more appropriate time, for the small hours of the night when they were alone with their thoughts? Or perhaps he was crediting them with too much humanity. It mattered little. It made them easier to kill.

  Peering around the edge of the coffin, the Ghost could see one of the moss men lumbering through the forest of statues, knocking them aside like bowling pins, fragile marble arms, heads, and other appendages sent skittering away into the corners of the room as the sculptures shattered on the hard floor. The moss man continued on, crushing the tumbledown sculptures beneath its heavy mechanical feet.

  The Ghost heard Donovan cry out as the glass case beside him shattered, showering him with fragments. The Ghost needed to get to him. He leapt up, loosing another spray of flechettes, catching a man in the arm, taking down the other moss man, and inadvertently blowing the head clean off a statue of Nero in the process. Bullets hailed around him in reply and he dove sideways, cartwheeling across the marble floor, his trench coat billowing with the sudden motion. He heard a bullet whistle past his head, inches from his skull; felt another narrowly miss his chest, opening a rent in the fabric of his black suit and scorching the flesh beneath. Pain bloomed, but he fought it down, sliding across the slick marble toward his friend, his nostrils filled with the cloying scent of cordite.

  Donovan had shaken off the majority of the glass, and save for a small shard that had buried itself in his thigh and a few scratches across his right cheek, he seemed relatively unharmed. Together, the two men returned fire tit-for-tat with the mobsters. The Ghost was painfully aware that all the while, the two moss men were rolling the marble relic away toward the exit. If he wanted to stop them, he'd have to make a move soon. He glanced back. They were nowhere to be seen. Hell! They'd already made it to the great hall. He'd have to go after them while Donovan held their position, take them down, and then get back to help the policeman with the mopping up. He stood and turned quickly, directly into the swinging fist of another of the moss men. The blow caught him hard across the jaw, snapping his head back and lifting him three feet into the air, sending him sprawling backward, careening into another glass display case that shattered beneath the impact.

  The Ghost fell to the floor amongst a shower of shimmering fragments. Bleeding and almost senseless from the blow, he spat blood, shook his head to try to clear the fogginess. The huge golem was looming over him again, raising its fist. He rolled, just in time, as the fist slammed down against the marble floor, narrowly missing his head. Three inches closer and his face would have been a bloody pulp, spread across the floor.

  The Ghost kicked out his legs, flicking himself up onto h
is feet. The other fist came around, lower this time, catching him in the guts, causing him to double over. Blood and vomit spewed involuntarily from his lips. He couldn't breathe, but was aware of the sound of bullets yipping all around him as the firefight continued unabated. He toppled sideways. Stars were dancing before his eyes. No. No! He couldn't stop now. He wouldn't give in. It wouldn't end here. He gasped for air, steadied himself.

  More gunfire. He looked up. Donovan was standing beside him, his arms fully outstretched, firing shot after shot into the moss man's blank, green face. The only effect was to momentarily distract the lumbering monster, but it was long enough for the Ghost to raise his arm and squeeze the trigger of his flechette gun.

  The moss man barely seemed to register the tiny, dull thuds of the explosive shots as they buried themselves in its waist. The Ghost didn't have time to get out of the way, but he called out to Donovan: "Get down!"

  The golem exploded in close proximity to the Ghost, its midriff blowing open, scattering its mechanical innards all around him, pattering down on him as he covered his face in the crook of his arm. The massive body fell backward, crunching the last remains of the glass cabinet as it collapsed to the floor, a heap of damp clay and mangled skeletal frame.

  The Ghost didn't have time to breathe a sigh of relief. The remaining mobsters were circling closer, readying their guns. Donovan was still taking potshots at them, causing them to duck behind the nearby cover. But they both knew they were running out of time.

  The Ghost looked up. High above, the plaster ceiling was molded into thick, white ribs of architrave. He took a measure of the remaining mobsters: four of them, one to the left, three in a huddle behind the ruins of a display case. He hefted the barrel of his flechette gun, pointing it toward the ceiling. Then he squeezed the trigger, closing his eyes, hoping beyond hope that he was within range. He waited for the sound of the tiny blades striking home in the plasterwork, but it never came, lost beneath the sounds of tommy guns chattering and bullets clanging off the walls. He rolled, throwing himself out of the way of the mobsters' deadly projectiles.

  Seconds later, just as the goons were preparing to take another shot at him and Donovan, there was a huge explosion from above. The Ghost watched, awestruck, as a massive chunk of ceiling plaster broke loose, surrounded by dark clouds of plaster dust and smoke. His aim had been precise. Particles of the stuff rained down from above, but the boulder-sized lump dropped like a stone, turning over and over in midair, landing squarely atop the cluster of three men with a sickening crunch. All he could see from where he was crouched was a shattered leg, protruding from behind the remains of the broken glass case.

  Shocked, the remaining mobster lowered the barrel of his gun, his mouth agape in mute horror, and it was only a moment's work for Donovan to put a bullet in his temple before the man regained his senses and started shooting at them again. The man dropped where he stood, his dead finger nervously depressing the trigger of his gun as he fell, scattering hot lead over the marble floor for a handful of seconds. Then silence. Nothing but death, dust, and silence.

  The Ghost peered around. There was no further movement, except the settling plaster dust and the slow swinging of a damaged chandelier. The hall had taken on the aspect of a grim charnel house, filled with exploded body parts, dark smears of stinky blood and spilled viscera, and the passive, blank faces of the funereal statues, mourning for their lost kin.

  He got to his feet. "Donovan?" He looked at the policeman, who was on his knees, staring wide-eyed at the scene of devastation. "Can you walk?"

  Donovan nodded. "Yes. I can walk. I'm fine." But it was clear that he wasn't.

  The Ghost crossed the floor, his feet crunching on the debris, and hooked a hand beneath the policeman's arm, hauling him to his feet. "Come on! We're not finished yet." They didn't have time now for Donovan to revel in his shock.

  The Ghost left the exhibition hall at a run, his coattails flapping behind him, Donovan at his heels as he crossed the great hall in pursuit of the two moss men and their heavy burden.

  There was no sign of them. He pressed on, retracing his steps from earlier, not caring now whether he brought attention to himself, whether anyone would hear him coming. He ran along the imperious Byzantine corridor, across the medieval hall, but still there was no sign of the lumbering golems. Unconcerned as they were with subtlety, the moss men had clearly made good progress in their escape whilst the Ghost and Donovan had been fighting for their lives in the other hall.

  The Ghost reached the fire escape in the American Wing and ducked out through the door, sliding on the slick snow, just in time to see the large truck swerve away from the building. One of the rear doors was clanging open as it weaved away down the path toward the road, its wheels leaving a spray of watery slush in its wake. Through the sliver of the open door, the Ghost could see the two moss men propping the marble wheel against the inside of the truck. He raised his arm, let off a hail of shots, but to no avail. The driver was too quick, and the Ghost was too late. The flechettes skipped harmlessly across the surface of the road, fizzing and popping in the pale snow.

  Donovan appeared in the doorway behind him, gasping for breath. "We lost them?"

  It was a rhetorical question, but the Ghost nodded and answered regardless, his voice grim. "Yes. We lost them."

  The roar of another engine sounded as one of the four parked cars up ahead suddenly screamed to life, peeling away from the museum and shooting off toward the road in the wake of the truck. Black smoke curled from its exhaust funnels. The Ghost thought about going after it, but then, as if the thought had entered his mind unbidden, he remembered his friend. He looked at Donovan. "Arthur! He's still in there, somewhere."

  He charged back into the museum, nearly bowling the policeman over in the process. He leapt over the remains of the dead guard, nearly missing his footing and sliding in a puddle of greasy blood. He tried not to think about it as he ran on through the great hall, up the flight of steps, and along corridors until finally, out of breath, he came to the door to Arthur's office. He seized the handle and flung the door open. Inside it was dark. All the lights had been extinguished.

  "Arthur?" No response. "Arthur, are you there?" He heard a whimpering from over by the desk. He crossed the room and found the curator cowering there, curled up, fetal, beneath the desk, his knees drawn up under his chin. The Ghost dropped into a squat. "Arthur, it's me. Gabriel."

  Arthur turned his head to look at him, and for a moment there was no sign of recognition in his terrified eyes. The man was visibly shaking, frightened out of his wits. But something seemed to register in his brain: the sound of the Ghost's voice, or the appearance of the vigilante's disheveled face. He focused, and his eyes regained their usual luster. "Gabriel?" he whispered. "You came."

  "Of course I came."

  "They ... they're here for the marble wheel."

  "Yes, Arthur." The Ghost's voice was low and soft, calming. "I'm afraid they got away with it, too. There were too many of them."

  Arthur looked pained. "Was it Mr. Gardici?"

  The Ghost smiled sadly. "I don't think your Mr. Gardici was quite who he claimed to be, Arthur. I suspect the man you were really dealing with was the person I know as the Roman."

  Arthur's shoulders fell. "I wish I'd known, Gabriel. I would have done something. I would have tried to stop him." He was crestfallen, accepting the burden without question. As if he could somehow have prevented it all. This was the greater tragedy, the Ghost reflected, not the lost antiquities or the money it would take to repair the damage to the museum, but the impact it would have on Arthur. He would never forgive himself for failing to predict what had happened that night. He would blame himself for the deaths of the museum guards. He would be irrevocably altered by it. The Ghost knew this without question; he had seen it in fellow soldiers during the war, seen it even in himself. That perpetual, haunting question: What if? What if I had done something different?

  The Ghost reached under
the desk and clasped Arthur by the wrist. "I know, Arthur. I know." He pulled the curator out from the small, confined space into which he had forced himself. "Come on, Arthur. We need to get you home."

  Arthur looked unsure. "What about the exhibits, the collection? Did they touch anything else?"

  The Ghost hardly knew how to break the news to his old friend, especially given his fragile mental condition. "It's a bit of a mess down there, Arthur. Probably best if you leave it for the morning. We'll get it cleaned up. I have a policeman with me."

  Arthur nodded. "Very well." He leaned on the Ghost, and then, as if seeing him properly for the first time, he looked the vigilante up and down appraisingly. "You're a mess, Gabriel."

  The Ghost couldn't hold back his laughter as, together, the two men set off in search of Donovan, and home.

  he next morning, the Ghost woke feeling already tired. He was in his apartment on Fifth Avenue. He'd given Donovan the bed, deferring to the wounded man, and consequently he'd slept only fitfully in an armchair, waking almost hourly to find himself staring out of the window at the sleeping city below.

  His thoughts were filled with Celeste. He kept replaying their conversation of the previous day over and over in his mind. He didn't know how he'd left things between them, didn't know how he'd be able to put things right. And in the small hours of the morning, sloshing bourbon into a glass tumbler and staring out at the distant stars, he admitted to himself how much she had hurt him by clinging on to her secrets, by not opening up to him with her concerns. He knew then, too, what he had done to her, and wondered if she was punishing him for that misdemeanor, causing him to feel that same sense of helplessness, of abandonment, a sickness in the pit of his stomach. It had started at the very moment he'd discovered she would not confide in him, and it had not yet abated. He closed his eyes and breathed out, slowly, fighting the nausea. All he had wanted to do was keep her safe.