The Nimble Man m-1

by Christopher Golden

  "Hell," the goblin said, the word coming out in a harsh grunt. "All the stories say… ah, hell, Eve, all the stories say that would be a bad idea."

  Squire kept his hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road. A taxi cut in front of the limousine despite that there were only a handful of cars on Seventh Avenue. Ahead a light turned red and the goblin began to slow the limo.

  "True."

  The word came from Doyle. Eve glanced over at him and saw that his eyes were red and his face somewhat flushed. He had not slept nearly enough, but that was not unusual. Magic had suspended the aging process in him, had even partially reversed it, but there was no escaping that the man was still human. An alchemist and magician, a brilliant writer and scholar, a believer in both the goodness of the world and the darkness that tainted it, Mr. Doyle was among the most powerful magicians on Earth, but he was also just a man. Human.

  Eve envied him that. She could not even remember what it meant to be human.

  "Boss, you're awake," Squire said, turning to glance back at Doyle now that he was stopped at the red light.

  Tiredly, Mr. Doyle smoothed his jacket and ran his fingers through his silver hair to straighten it. "And you, my small friend, have a gift for stating the obvious."

  "What can I say?" Squire muttered happily. "I'm blessed."

  The light turned green but Squire was careful to look in both directions before the limousine picked up speed again. Behind him, his employer tugged out a pocket watch and clicked it open. He checked the time and then slid the watch back into his vest pocket.

  Doyle cleared his throat and glanced at Eve, then turned his attention to Squire again.

  "The warnings about what would happen to anyone who searched for Sweetblood are dire," the magician absently admitted as he began searching the inner pockets of his jacket for something. "But I suspect they were spread by Lorenzo himself in an effort to dissuade the curious."

  Eve stared at him. "And if you're wrong?"

  Doyle raised an eyebrow and stared at her, his eyes as silver as his hair. "If I'm wrong, then we handle it."

  "That's your plan?" Squire asked. "That's not much of a plan."

  "There isn't time for subtlety," Doyle replied. "My search has always been a casual one, rarely the focus of my efforts. But Dr. Graves has word that someone — someone with malevolent intentions — has indeed located Sweetblood."

  "And we need to get to him first," Squire said, nodding to himself as he turned the limousine down a side street, the rear tire bumping up over the curb.

  "Precisely."

  The goblin turned south again at the next corner and soon enough the city was changing around them. The skyscrapers had given way to brownstones and rowhouses and there were trees growing up out of the sidewalk. They passed a park that seemed remarkably free of litter and graffiti.

  "All right," Squire said. "I get it. But I was still half-asleep when you got me out of bed to drive you, so there's still one thing I'm not understanding."

  "Only one?" Eve taunted.

  Doyle frowned at her. "What's that, Squire?"

  "Where do the glass spiders come in? You said something about glass spiders, didn't you? Or was that in my dream?"

  Before the dapper magician could answer, Eve spied their destination, the address plainly exhibited on the front door of the brownstone. The sky had begun to lighten but the drenching rain and the heavy cloud cover would shield her from the sun.

  "Stop here. This is it."

  The goblin pulled the limo to the curb. Doyle leaned across the back seat to peer through Eve's rain-streaked window, eyebrows raised. Then he popped his own door open and slipped out. Eve stripped off her suede coat, folded it and left it on the seat, then followed suit. The rain began to dampen her hair immediately, streaming like tears upon her cheeks. Thunder rolled across the sky, echoing off the faces of the buildings. Lightning blinked and flickered up inside the clouds as though behind that veil the gods were at war.

  Doyle slammed his door without another word to Squire. His gaze was locked upon the brownstone and he stared up at its darkened windows as he strode around the limousine to join Eve on the sidewalk.

  Her nostrils flared and she sniffed at the air. "Does this seem too easy to you?"?"I'm not certain that's a word I would choose," Doyle replied, wiping rain from his eyes.

  Eve pushed her hair back from her face and rapped on the limo's passenger window. When Squire rolled it down she bent to peer in at him. The goblin's eyes went to her chest, where the tight cotton of her turtleneck stretched across her breasts.

  "Up here, you little shit."

  A dreamy smile spread across his features. "Sorry. What can I do for you?"

  "Open the trunk."

  He reached for the release and there was a small pop, then the trunk lid rose. The sound of the rain pelting the metal altered at this new angle. Eve went to the rear of the limo and reached into the trunk to retrieve a parcel wrapped in soft leather. She unfolded the leather and folded her fingers around the stock of the sawed-off shotgun, and she smiled as she dropped the leather wrap into the trunk and slammed it shut.

  Turning to Doyle she cocked the shotgun. "Too easy."

  "Perhaps," he replied. Then he nodded toward the brick steps in front of the brownstone. "Would you like to get the door?"

  Eve strode purposefully up the short walkway, not even bothering to check the windows of the surrounding homes for prying eyes. That sort of thing was Doyle's problem, and he dealt with it often enough. She went up the four steps and paused on the landing, then shot a kick at the front door. The blow cracked it in half and tore it from its hinges. The bottom part of the door flew across the building's foyer and shattered the legs of a small table; the top half swung like a guillotine from the security chain that still connected it to the door frame.

  With preternatural swiftness she darted inside the brownstone, swinging the gaping double barrels of the shotgun around as she scanned the parlor on her left, and then the formal living room on her right. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed.

  Doyle stepped in behind her. Eve glanced at him and saw the corona of pale blue light that encircled his eyes, the aura of that same glow surrounding his fingers. The illusion of the kindly, aging gentleman had disappeared. This was the magician. This was who Doyle was.

  "Anything?" he asked.

  Eve's eyelids fluttered as she inhaled. She glanced at the stairs that led up into darkness. "Nothing that way." Then she narrowed her eyes as she stared into the shadowed corridor that led toward the back of the brownstone. "But that way…"

  "Magic. Yes. I feel it."

  Doyle went past her, heedless of any danger. The blue light around his fingers and leaking from his eyes grew brighter and he was a beacon in the darkened corridor. Eve tried to make sense of the layout of the place in her head. Living room and parlor in front. Probably a back staircase somewhere, a pantry, big kitchen, and the sort of sprawling dining room that had been popular in the first half of the twentieth century.

  There were framed photographs on the walls that had obviously hung there for decades and wallpaper that had gone out of style before John F. Kennedy was President. Yet there was no dust. No cobwebs. No sign that time had continued to pass within that home while it went by on the outside.

  The corridor ended at a door that was likely either a closet or bathroom, but there were rooms to either side, elegant woodwork framing their entrances. Doyle did not even glance to his left, but turned into the room on the right. Eve was right behind him and nearly jammed the shotgun into his spine when he came to a sudden stop.

  She moved up beside him, staring into the dining room.

  Six figures sat in a circle around the elegant dining room table, all of them clasping hands as if joining in prayer — or a seance. There were candlesticks on the table and several on a sideboard; Doyle waved his hand and each of the wicks flickered to life, those tiny flames illuminating the room. Perhaps the old magician needed the light to see b
y, but Eve did not. She saw better in the dark.

  Of the six, five were very clearly dead, and had been so for a very long time. Though their skeletal fingers were still clasped they were withered, eyes sunken to dark sockets, only wisps of hair left upon their heads. In many places all that remained of their flesh were tattered bits clinging to bone, like parchment paper. Eve peered more closely. She had not smelled death in this place and so she wondered if it was some sort of illusion. But no. There was an earthy, rot odor that lingered in the air. It was simply that, like dust and other sediment of time, the stink of putrefying flesh seemed to have been suspended somehow.

  The five withered corpses were of indeterminate age and race but at least one of them had been female. And then there was the sixth member of this chain, a woman in a blue dress, her brown hair up in a tight bun, with small-framed glasses resting on the bridge of her nose. Her eyes were closed and her face peaceful, as though she might well have been in the midst of a natural slumber rather than eternal repose.

  "Yvette Darnall," Doyle observed.

  Eve glanced at him, saw the puzzlement on his face and knew that it matched her own. "You know her?"

  "A mystic and psychic. She disappeared in 1943."

  "Or maybe she didn't," Eve said, her gaze once more surveying the hideous gathering, the sunken faces waxy and yellow in the candlelight. "Maybe it was just that nobody knew where to look."

  Doyle frowned thoughtfully and stepped further into the room. Eve followed but her nostrils flared and the hair rose on the back of her neck. Her fingers hooked into talons. She sensed something in the room and she knew that Doyle had felt it too.

  Yvette Darnall opened her eyes.

  Eve and Doyle froze. For just a moment there was a kind of terrible awareness in the psychic woman's gaze and then her eyes rolled upward so that they seemed completely white. Her head lolled back and her jaw went slack, mouth falling open.

  One by one, the five cadavers did the same. Some of their jawbones cracked. When the most desiccated among them lay his head back it simply tore off above the jaw with a sound like snapping kindling. Upon hitting the hardwood floor his skull shattered into dust and bone fragments.

  Yvette Darnall began to moan, and so did the chorus of the dead.

  She choked as a stream of milky, opalescent mist issued from her throat, and a moment later thinner tendrils of the same substance flowed from the gaping mouths of the dead. Eve recognized the material. Ectoplasm. Malleable spirit-flesh. But she did not think it was the ghosts of these dead summoners or even of the medium herself who was manipulating the ectoplasm here.

  It coalesced in the midst of the table and as it did, Eve saw that Yvette Darnall had begun to decay. Whatever this power was, it was drawing on whatever essence remained in her; it had kept her here for more than sixty years as a spiritual battery, and now it was using her up.

  The ectoplasm churned like thick, heavy storm clouds and began to take shape. In a moment Eve could see human features forming there, a face, a man with a long, hawk nose and thin lips, with wild unkempt hair and a shaggy beard.

  The face in the pooling ectoplasm narrowed its eyes as though it had seen them and it sneered imperiously, gaze rife with disapproval. When it spoke, its lips moved without sound, yet its voice issued from the wide, gaping mouth of Yvette Darnall.

  "Doyle," the voice rasped scornfully. "You damned fool."

  CHAPTER TWO

  The ectoplasmic head of Sweetblood the Mage drifted in the air above the circular table. Tendrils of supernatural matter extended from the manifestation to anchor itself to the ceiling, the walls and the table below it. The ghost flesh moved, its lips forming words, but the voice of the world's most powerful sorcerer growled at him not from the ectoplasm but from the grotesquely open maw of the withering spiritualist, Yvette Darnall.

  "And to think I once called you 'apprentice.'"

  "I always respected you, Lorenzo," Doyle said, attempting to conceal the exhilaration he felt at moving so much closer to actually locating the arch mage. "But I never understood your decision to retreat, to hide yourself away. The world has need of you."

  Doyle recalled his first meeting with Lorenzo Sanguedolce, in Prague, during the spring of 1891, and their immediate dislike for one another. Even after the relationship shifted to that of teacher and student, their animosity stood firm. There wasn't anyone, on this plane of existence anyway, that he disliked as much, but the ways of the weird did not take into account one's personal feelings. Sweetblood was needed; it was as simple as that.

  "Do you have any idea the risk you have taken in searching for me?" the undulating spiritual mass asked, the power of its voice causing the psychic's body to visibly quake. "Do you think I have stayed away from the world all this time on a whim?"

  Eve stood beside Doyle, tensed for a fight. He could feel the aggression emanating from her lithe form, millennia of experience having taught her always to expect a fight. "I could be wrong," she said, "but I'm going to guess he isn't all that pleased to see you."

  Doyle shot her a hard look. "Your enhanced senses are absolutely uncanny," he said dryly. Then he turned his focus to Sweetblood again.

  "You must listen, Lorenzo. Damn me if you will, but others are on your scent as well. One way or another, you've been found. But the others who track you have grave intentions."

  " And you, fool that you are, you think I need your help?" Sweetblood rasped. " You may have done their work for them, Arthur."

  The disembodied head gazed down upon the grotesque gathering at the table beneath him, at the rapidly degenerating form of Yvette Darnall and the circle of desiccated corpses clutching hands, with a look of utter disdain forming upon his spectral features.

  "You're no better than this damnable woman and her band of psychics. They too attempted to locate me. Their curiosity cost them their lives," the spectral head went on, showing not the slightest hint of compassion. "Fortunately, I was able to use their folly for my own ends."

  Eve sniffed. "Nice guy."

  Doyle ignored her, focusing on Sweetblood, trying to gauge by the rate of Darnall's deterioration how much longer their connection would remain active. "Obviously," he said, gesturing toward the circle of cadavers. "You used them as an alarm to warn you when someone, or possibly something, was coming too close. The psychic residue of their search led us here, drawing us away from your true location."

  The acrid aroma of burning flesh permeated the room and Doyle frowned and glanced away from the ectoplasmic face to find that the body of Yvette Darnall had begun to smolder, the tight bun of her hair emitting a gray, oily smoke.

  "Indeed. And in this pocket of frozen time, I might work my power through these decaying idiots and destroy the interloper, the next fool. I never expected the next fool to be you."

  Doyle could not help but smile. "You have always underestimated me, Lorenzo."

  The entity appeared to seethe. Flames burst from the bodies of the other mystics, as if the very fire of its anger, their clothes and parchment-dry flesh consumed by fire. "You're a careless fool, Arthur, and this latest misstep only proves it."

  Eve stifled a laugh with a perfectly manicured hand, refusing to make eye contact with him. It was moments like this when he remembered why it was that he so often chose to work alone.

  "Cast all the aspersions you like, but they will not alter the truth. Dark powers descend upon you," Doyle declared, fingertips crackling with magickal energy leaking. "Better that I should find you than some malevolent — "

  "Imbecile!" Sweetblood bellowed, enraged, his voice erupting from the gaping lips of the medium who had become his conduit. The ectoplasmic features that loomed above the fire-engulfed cadaver contorted, and the ghostly tendrils that connected it to the dead woman writhed and pulled away to flail whip like above them. "Persist, and you may doom the world."

  The burning corpse of Yvette Darnall stood up abruptly, knocking over the flaming chair in which it had sat for the last sixty-one
years. Like some fiery marionette, embers of flesh falling from her form, the dead woman leaned across the table to point an accusatory finger at them.

  "Go home, apprentice," said Lorenzo Sanguedolce, through the charred and smoking remains of the medium. "You meddle in matters beyond your comprehension."

  And with those final words, the instrument of the mage's admonition exploded, spewing fiery chunks of flesh and bone. Doyle and Eve watched as the room was consumed by fire, the ectoplasmic manifestation of the arch mage evaporating with a sizzling hiss. The spell that had kept the room in a timeless stasis had collapsed, age rushing forward, drying the wood, speeding the fire. Time and flame sapped the moisture from the dark mahogany, reducing it to kindling. The heat seared his face, yet Doyle stared into the flames until he felt Eve's powerful grip close upon his arm.

  "I wouldn't count on the last word," she snarled over the roar of the fire as she began to pull him toward the exit.

  Doyle roughly removed her hand and ventured further into the room.

  "Have you lost your mind?" she shouted after him.

  "Go," he told her. "There's still a chance I can salvage what we came for."

  It was becoming ever more difficult to see, as well as breathe, and Doyle quickly scanned the floor for the precious item he sought. Silently he prayed to the Ancient Kings that it had remained intact.

  "Arthur, let's go!" Eve called from the doorway, as his tearing eyes fell upon his prize: Darnall's blackened, jawless skull lying upon the smoking wood floor.

  Removing a handkerchief from his pocket, Doyle folded the white silk and used it as a buffer to protect the soft flesh of his hand from the searing heat emanating from the charred skull. There was only the slimmest chance that what he was about to attempt would work, but there was far too much at stake not to at least try. He inserted his index and middle fingers into the hollow eye sockets of the medium's skull, searching for the soft gray matter of the brain beyond the missing eyes. The tips of his fingers sank into the gelatinous muscle of thought. He let slip an exultant sigh; the flames had not yet melted the woman's brain. There were still things to be learned from her.