Walking Dead

by C. E. Murphy

  An image formed within the shape of the doorway I was trying to make for Billy. It wasn’t him: it was slighter and somehow more ethereal or feminine, though it shared the same general sense of gentle kindness I thought of being an inextricable aspect of my partner. I blinked, but it was gone before I’d even completed the action, so barely there I wasn’t sure I’d seen it at all. I looked around, trying to find it again, and didn’t notice Billy walking in. My first clue I had a visitor was his, “Huh,” as he looked around.

  Presumably “huh” wasn’t supposed to get my back up, but it did. “What’s that mean?”

  “Tidier than I expected, that’s all.” He gave me a quick smile, and I blinked a few times, adjusting my mental picture of Billy to match his own.

  They weren’t violently different. He looked younger and slimmer in his astral projection, but I thought most people did. He also looked more delicate. Not fragile by any stretch of the imagination, but less burly than the guy I saw every day, and not in a way that a lower body weight accounted for. It was a more feminine aspect than I’d expected, despite knowing he often wore women’s clothes off duty. He wasn’t now, but his clothes were soft: a silk shirt with discreet poet’s ruffles, and pants loose enough to flow with his movements. My long-standing theory had always been that Billy cross-dressed to exact revenge against parents who gave him the unfortunate nickname of Billy when their last name was Holliday, but seeing his mental image told me just what a jerk I was for being a smart-ass, even if I’d kept it to myself. I wondered briefly what I looked like to him, and decided not to ask. People contained multitudes. Apparently I contained multitudes of buttheads. I didn’t want to know what that looked like.

  “It’s messier than it used to be.” I got up and gestured toward the far end of the garden. “The door’s down there. If I’ve got ghost riders, would they be hanging around the gate to death’s country?”

  “They’d probably be trying to get away from it.” Billy slid his hands into his pockets and wandered down one of the pathways. My shoes vanished, leaving me to wiggle my toes in fresh grass as I walked beside him. “There were some things I wanted to tell you before Morrison drummed you under. Do you always go under that fast?”

  “No.” I left it at that. Anything more invited too many questions. They were probably all being asked anyway, what with Morrison volunteering to play little drummer boy, but at least I could pretend that wasn’t beyond the norm.

  Billy arched an eyebrow, then visibly put curiosity aside. “Right. Okay. My window for seeing ghosts is forty-eight hours, maximum. The gift doesn’t run deep enough to see beyond that.”

  “Except your sister.”

  He gave me a sharp look. Not disapproving, just sharp. “Yeah. But blood’s thicker than water, and Caroline and I were close.” The air cooled, thin fog pooling around us as we walked down to the foot of my garden. This was my favorite part of it, new and full of promise. Ivy hung over the walls, making it look much lusher than the northern end, and I hoped the walls would keep fading farther and farther back, giving me more to explore. “My point,” Billy said, “is that the cauldron ghosts were all older than that, so we’re dealing with something I don’t have much experience with.”

  “When you say ‘much’ you mean ‘any,’ right?”

  He gave me that look again, though it was softened by the fog. “No, I mean ‘much’ because Caro is—was—an exception. If it turns out you’ve got a rider, I want you to step back and let me deal with it. Get out of here if I tell you to.”

  “Are you nuts?”

  Billy stopped and looked down at me. Even with the delicacy added to his makeup, he was still bigger than I was. I quelled the urge to make myself a little taller in the garden of my mind, so I could measure up to the visitors. “If you’ve got a rider, it’s someone or something strong enough to get a toehold in somebody brimming with shamanic magic. With life magic, Joanne. Of the two of us, if one is going to be possessed, it’s a lot less dangerous for everybody if it’s me.”

  There was a certain irrefutable logic to that. “What if you do get possessed? What do I do?”

  “Get a priest and perform an exorcism.” Amusement creased Billy’s face at my expression. “I mean it. It’s a violent way to send them over, and it’d be my last choice, but—well, you could say if it does happen, it is my last choice. Don’t worry. It’s not likely to happen.”

  “That doesn’t reassure me at all.” I forged ahead and crouched to pull the door key out from a little hole dug in the earth. A robin cheeped and I smiled, happy it was there. My garden wasn’t exactly overflowing with wildlife, but there ought to be a robin to go with the hidden key to a secret door. “If we open the door and there’s nothing there, I’m in the clear, right? I mean, if I’ve got a door between life and death, and that’s where ghosts stay, then they should be here if they’re here at all.”

  “Right.” Billy took the key and I lifted ivy away from the door, sending a cool green scent across us. He fit the key into the lock and I held my breath.

  “You said there were a couple of things you wanted to tell me. Did we cover them all?” Billy nodded and pushed the door open. It rasped with the sound of reluctant-to-move stone, and I turned on the Sight, more than half-fearful of what I’d see.

  Nothing lay beyond the door except the enormous crater that had always been there. I exhaled noisily and shot a grateful look toward the crater’s far-off rim. “Are we good?”

  “No.” Billy’s voice sounded worse than the scraping door. I jerked to see his face graying and his jaw tense with concentration. He whispered, “Close the door,” and I yanked it shut, but the tension didn’t leave his face. He bared his teeth in a grimace of apology, and breathed, “Sorry, Joanie. I think I’m out of my league.”

  His eyes flooded black, then went hollow and gray, and the thing looking out at me was suddenly no longer Billy Holliday.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Too many late-night horror movies, or maybe just a sudden overweening burst of confidence made me leap forward. I clapped my hand to Billy’s forehead, and, with all the conviction of a revival-tent preacher, shrieked, “Demon of hell, I abjure thee!”

  It would’ve been very dramatic if it had worked.

  Sadly for all involved—except, I supposed, the unabjured demon of hell—Billy’s jaw dropped and he let out a dry horrible laugh that sounded like a windup doll’s little windup gears sheering out. It wasn’t a human sound at all, and shouldn’t have been able to come from his throat.

  I was pretty sure this was the point at which Billy would be telling me to run, if he were in a position to do so. That left me with a conundrum: do what I knew he’d tell me to, or stay and fight for my friend.

  Okay, it wasn’t really much of a conundrum at all. I reached deep and seized hold of my magic as solidly as I knew how. It flared through me, and even here in my garden—maybe especially here in my garden—I felt myself go all see-through and powered up, magic flowing in my veins like blood. The light mist that covered this end of the garden burned away in blue heat, and sunlight flooded down on me and the thing that wasn’t Billy.

  It was trying to re-form his idea of himself. His skin bulged and split and came together again, mutating grotesquely. Brief glimpses of cadaverous faces melted into view, then snapped back again. His body weight changed, always turning emaciated before he pulled it toward his own more solid shape. Either the dead didn’t have great body images or I was dealing with a supermodel’s ghost. The second idea was more entertaining, but I’d put money on the former.

  My fingertips were actually digging into his skull, like I was grabbing Play-Doh that’d been left out in the air too long. Flesh rupturing and reshaping under my palm felt like giant boils being lanced and rebuilding with living intent. It was utterly disgusting.

  It was also, in those terms, a sickness, and sickness, I could deal with. Boils were poison, poison was something that didn’t belong in the system…in vehicle terms, that mea
nt water in the gas tank.

  I’d used the idea before to drive venom from a thunderbird’s veins. Water was heavier than gas, but in my analogy the healthy material was the weightier, mostly because it was easier to visualize pushing scuzz off the top than off the bottom. I wasn’t, after all, actually draining a gas tank.

  I dug my fingers deeper into Billy’s squishy skull and poured silver-blue magic into him through those indentations. To my surprise, he acquiesced, ceasing his fight and permitting me to take it up. For an eternal instant he folded himself away, leaving nothing but my magic and the ghost rider in an echo of Billy’s thought of himself.

  The ghost scrabbled, fingertips scraping off my magic like it was made of glass, impenetrable to its touch. With Billy, it had been able to sink through, permeating all the parts of him. But magic became the water in the tank, too heavy for it to invade. Fear and fury whipped it around, but it didn’t dare leave the sanctuary of Billy’s thought-form; without it, the ghost had nothing, no shape, no hope of surviving, and it wanted to live more than anything.

  Me, I wanted Billy to live.

  My imagery seemed juvenile, and I was glad nobody else could see it. Blue magic filled Billy’s lower half, just like he really was a gas tank, and the raging ghost swirled around his torso, a corrosive material that didn’t belong. All I did, really, was let the magic rise, giving the ghost nowhere it could fit, and it spilled out with a scream.

  I clawed my free hand into the mist that poured free, holding it with magic that I retracted, carefully, from Billy. It felt slow, because I was reluctant to abandon his thought-self until I knew he still had enough handle on himself to re-form properly. If he lost his sense of self I had a much bigger problem on my hands than what to do with a temperamental ghost. But he unfolded from whatever pocket he’d retreated to when I took over, and the idea of him stabilized with relieving rapidity. None of it took as long as an indrawn breath, but it seemed like much longer. Things that were important usually did.

  As the magic spilled out of him, it wrapped around my captive ghost in a kind of safety net. It couldn’t get into me, but I figured it couldn’t dissipate, either, if I held it within a bubble of magic, and if it wanted to live, then within my power was better than nothing. And if I was going to find out what else it wanted, then it needed a voice, and neither nets nor bubbles could give it one.

  I entirely blamed my subconscious for what happened next.

  Magic took shape low to the ground, coalescing what I recognized far too early as a 1982 Pontiac Trans Am. The color was wrong, of course, because while my subconscious was a smart-ass, my magic was apparently content with remaining silver-blue. The ghost’s dark gray roiled beneath the car’s surface, making the “paint” seem changeable, even more so than Petite’s carefully crafted purple. I put a hand over my face and dared a glance at Billy through my fingers. He was still pale, which was understandable: I doubted being possessed was a nice experience. But he’d fit back into his image of himself solidly enough, and looked, perhaps, a little more burly now, as though he’d beefed up the mental image to fight all comers. I didn’t blame him.

  He was also staring at the translucent car in my garden with a fair degree of disbelief while the corner of his mouth quirked. “So,” he said in a voice so very neutral it didn’t hide a bit of his amusement. “Was Michael Knight your first crush?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” The car had been my first crush, but I was hardly about to admit that out loud. I was never, ever going to live this down as it was. I dropped my hand to the Trans Am’s roof, rallied myself to magnificently ignore Billy and said, “You can speak now.”

  “S-s-speeaaaak!” Rage and desperation filled the drawn-out plea, spoken as though the thing had long since forgotten words and was drawing their shape from, oh, say, a logic-module voice synthesizer. Or maybe it was just echoing me.

  “Who are you? What do you want? Why’d you fight against crossing over? I—”

  “Joanie.” Billy sounded tired but droll. “Maybe I should conduct the interview.” He crouched in front of the Trans Am’s hood and put his hands on it, evidently trusting that the magic I’d called up was going to prevent a second round of Billy Becomes Lunch. “There are at least three of you,” he murmured. His self-image softened again, which I thought was fascinating. Next thing I knew I’d be wearing that leather getup when I wanted to be a tough girl on the psychic level.

  “Three? How do you know? I—”

  He gave me a quelling look. “The color, for one thing. Individual spirits turn pale gray as they fade away. Age doesn’t blacken them. They have to be united somehow, to get that dark.”

  “Evil spirits aren’t automatically black?”

  He gave me another look. “This isn’t the best time for a crash course in ghost identification.”

  I thought it was the perfect time, but I also saw his point. I bit my tongue against asking more questions, and he added, “Besides, I had them in me for a minute there. I might be out of my league, but at least I can tell when I’m dealing with more than one ghost.”

  I unbit my tongue. “If you’re out of your league shouldn’t I—” He didn’t have to say anything this time. I bit my tongue again and Billy turned his attention back to the Trans Am. All the color had pressed up against the vehicle’s nose, under his hands, like it was trying to get out. In fact, I could feel it trying to get to him, but it was a minor nuisance, like a dull itch. I’d have to be rendered unconscious to loosen the hold I had on the ghosts, and I wasn’t sure even that would do it.

  “Something’s holding you,” Billy murmured. “Something strong enough to tie you all together. Family?”

  “N-n-n-noooo.” The cry sounded like a wailing child, angry and full of uncertainty. Unexpected sympathy lurched in my heart. Things trying to take over my friends were inherently bad, but lost things trying to find a way home were merely pathetic. I liked the idea of helping a lot more than banishing.

  “The way you died, then.” There was sorrow and certainty in Billy’s gentle voice, like he was trying not to upset the already unhappy child. He whispered, “Shh, shh,” to the uprise of misery that vibrated through the car, and I winced on behalf of the Trans Am’s windows. It was magical, and the windows would hold because I wanted them to, but Ella Fitzgerald had nothing on the pitch the ghosts reached. “Violent death,” Billy guessed softly and, this time to me, said, “It’s what holds most spirits beyond their time.”

  Nervously, because I wasn’t certain I was allowed to say anything, I asked, “How long would they usually stay? You see them all the time….”

  “Not all the time. Just with murders. With an ordinary death, illness or age, they fade away as soon as the body dies unless they have some need for closure that’s not related to their deaths. If they’re victims of abuse, for example, or once in a while if they feel someone they love is in need of help or comfort they’ll stay. There are people who say they feel the dead with them, even years after they’ve crossed over.” He glanced at me. “Most of them are kooks, but some of them really do have spirits who stay with them, like Caroline did with me. There are mediums who can communicate with the long-dead, but my ability is shorter-term.”

  Beneath his quiet speech, the ghosts in the car twisted and howled, clearly too agitated by his question to give a straight answer. He ran his hand over the car’s hood, soothing motion, but they still screamed and battered themselves against the cage my magic made. Billy ignored them, giving me more of that crash course in ghost investigations after all. I thought it gave the spirits something audibly soothing to latch on to as much as it educated me. “Even with a lot of violent death, like car wrecks, the spirit usually only takes a few hours, a couple of days at most, before it lets go. They usually have a sense of self still when that happens. Forms that you’d recognize as human, the ability to communicate.”

  He turned his attention back to the car. “These ones are old, Joanne. There’s almost nothing left to them than
the need to survive and earn vengeance. It’s all right,” he murmured, clearly no longer talking to me. Compassion deepened his voice, turning him into a gentle bear of a man, and tears stung my nose. I didn’t think I had that depth of kindness in me. “I’m here to listen and to help. When you’re ready you can tell me what you have to say.”

  Maybe it was worse for them to fear they might lose Billy’s attention than to contemplate their stories, because despite his assurance he’d stay, their cries stopped and their halting, miserable voice searched for words. “S-s-s-sown, all s-sown.”

  “What,” I said, “you reap what you sow? Does that mean you were murdered because you’d been murderers yourselves?”

  Billy, over outraged spiritual screams, said, “You’re really not helping,” and I had the grace to feel a little abashed, especially since I’d just been admiring his compassion. “She won’t say anything else,” he told the Trans Am, and the steely note in his voice suggested to me that I’d really better not. I had vulnerable points Billy didn’t know about, but he had enough of a grip on some that I probably didn’t want to get in a fight with him, not even when I theoretically had the home-team advantage. He said, “Sown,” when the ghosts had quieted and it seemed likely I wasn’t going to open my mouth again. I could almost hear the gears grinding in his head as he worked through the possibilities of that word: “Buried in fields, or dismembered and scattered across fields? I wonder what was beneath that party hall fifty or a hundred years ago.”

  Frustrated rage gave the ghostly shrieks a new edge: “S-s-sown! All sown!” They swirled away from Billy’s hands, filling the Trans Am with agitated gray, and beat at its windows and roof with blows that felt, to me, like human hands. I shuddered and told myself I was anthropomorphizing. These things hadn’t been human in a long time.

  They came back to Billy, and this time I could see I wasn’t forcing human aspects onto nebulous bits of ether. Bony hands spread against the inside of the hood, matching Billy’s, pressing like they’d reach through and slide their fingers through his. Their screams faded, turning into desperate intensity as they tried for words that had faded from their consciousness a long time ago. “Sown d-d-dead. Dead.”