The Nimble Man m-1

by Christopher Golden

  "Blast!" Conan Doyle bellowed above the shrieking winds that had abruptly torn through the quiet of the forest. He planted his feet firmly upon the moss-covered ground, fighting the sucking void that attempted to pull him in. He had been trying to re-open the doorway from Faerie to his home, but it was no longer there. In its place was a swirling vortex, a churning vacuum that tugged at him, a magickal trap that would consume him and anything else within the reaches of its voracious hunger.

  Fighting the pull of the maelstrom, he threw himself backward, landing hard on the forest floor.

  "Arthur!" Ceridwen screamed, her voice barely audible over the mournful wail of the vortex.

  Struggling against the pull of the current, Conan Doyle turned onto his stomach and sunk his fingers into the soft earth, trying to drag himself away from that sucking hole in the fabric of Faerie. He saw Ceridwen now, anchored to a nearby tree with one hand. In the other, she still held her elemental staff. The flame within the sphere of ice that capped that length of wood glowed like a miniature sun, aroused by the presence of dangerous magicks.

  The strength of the maelstrom increased, and for every inch of progress he made toward Ceridwen, he felt himself pulled back by three. The two sentries that had escorted him earlier cowered nearby, holding onto one another for dear life. One had managed to grab hold of an ancient vine beneath a cover of loose dirt and leaves, and was using it to secure them against the inexorable pull.

  It had happened so quickly. They had decided to return to his townhouse in the world of Blight, and had used the magick of the ancients to open the door. He had not even considered the possibility that a threat might be present, not even taken basic precautions. Arrogant fool! Bloody amateur, he fumed, even as the screaming void dragged him closer. Walked right into that one like some novice.

  The sentries cried out in fear and Conan Doyle lifted his gaze to see them sail above his head, still clinging to one another, broken vine trailing behind them like the tail of a kite, as they were consumed by the hungry whirlpool. Spells and incantations flooded Conan Doyle's mind, but he could not concentrate long enough to cast one. Then, as if some powerful beast had grabbed hold of him, he was violently torn from his purchase upon the ground, and he knew that his time was up.

  He thought he heard the voice of Sanguedolce mocking him for his arrogance, but realized that it wasn't the voice of the arch mage that he heard at all, but that of his former lover.

  "Is being sucked into the abyss part of your plan, good sir?" Ceridwen called to him over the din that filled the wood.

  A tether of magickal force engulfed his body, suspending him in the air before the hungry void. His body crackled with an icy blue corona of supernatural energy.

  "If it be so, I question the soundness of your judgment," the Fey sorceress yelled, as she emerged from her place of safety behind the great tree, her staff extended. She had changed clothes for traveling to the human world and now wore a hooded blue-green cloak and hand-woven trousers the color of sand. In the swirl of the vortex, her cloak fluttered and the effect created in her attire the illusion of the ocean crashing on the shore. The sphere of power at the staff's end glowed once more, ice and flame combined by Faerie magic into a cold blue fire, providing him his lifeline. She fought the pull of the trap, struggling to keep her footing.

  The maelstrom increased its pull upon the forest, and he listened to the creaking moans of the trees as their tenacity was tested. Ceridwen fell to her knees, sliding across the forest floor, but still she held her elemental staff high, maintaining her concentration and preventing him from being drawn into the spiraling hole.

  Conan Doyle cleared his head and found the invocation that would suit his needs. He spun around to face the insatiable gyre and uttered a string of powerful words. The mage extended his arms and felt the might of the ancients flow through him. The countering magick streamed from the tips of his fingers, and his spell began to knit closed the rip that had been torn in time and space.

  The portal to chaos fought him, screaming and howling, but his magick was stronger. Sensing imminent victory, he roared the last of the incantation. The swirling maelstrom imploded with a thunderous clap of sound that knocked him and Ceridwen through the air, back across the ravaged clearing.

  An eerie stillness came over the forest and Conan Doyle slowly rose, checking for breaks and injuries. He glanced up to find Ceridwen standing where the vortex had been, passing her staff through the air, verifying that the rift had indeed been closed completely.

  "I'm fine," he said.

  She turned and narrowed her gaze, looking at him coldly. "Plead your pardon?" she asked, confused.

  "I said I'm fine." Conan Doyle brushed dirt and debris from his clothing. "Just in case you were concerned with my well-being." He knew he was being curt, but at the moment, her total disregard for his welfare was maddening.

  "I see," she said, expressionless. Emotionless. She turned her attentions back to the spot where the maelstrom had been. "All trace of the entryway to your home, to your world, is gone. The last of the known gateways between Faerie and the world of Blight is no more."

  Conan Doyle felt a tremor of something akin to fear in his heart. If Morrigan had been inside his home, the situation in his world had become most dire indeed.

  "We shall have to build a new one," he said. The process was time-consuming, but there was simply no choice. "We'll return to the kingdom immediately and — "

  "No," Ceridwen interrupted. "There is no time for that."

  Conan Doyle glared at her. "What else do you suggest? If that was the last entryway, then we have to conjure another."

  Ceridwen turned her back to him and began to walk away. "It was the last of the known entrances," she said, striding deeper into the dark wood.

  "But I know of another."

  CHAPTER NINE

  Graves needed perspective.

  Insubstantial, he nevertheless felt some resistance as he floated high above the city of Boston. The unnatural darkness caught at his ectoplasmic form with a million tiny claws, and the red fog seemed to slow him. From high above he tried to peer through the mist and he knew he had to get closer to the ground.

  It took a moment for him to make sense of the city's topography, only the shapes of the buildings visible to him from this height. He had fled from Conan Doyle's Beacon Hill home, but not gone very far. As he descended he could make out Boston Common below and, turning, he saw the Massachusetts State House, a grand old building capped by a massive golden dome; the beacon of Beacon Hill. Graves chose that as his destination.

  In a handful of seconds, no time at all for the dead, he alighted upon the State House's golden dome and steadied himself. All of that was illusion, of course, solidity imagined into reality by his own desire, but it was comforting to him to hold onto the tangibility of the world that had been lost to him for more than half a century. Others could not feel his presence, but he could touch them.

  Leonard Graves could still feel.

  Atop the golden dome he paused to collect his thoughts and he gazed at the city that spread out from the base of Beacon Hill. In the decades since his death he had been witness to three other uprisings of the dead, none of them on a scale even close to this one. Dr. Graves was an analytical man. His mind had made the connections between Morrigan, the strange red mist, and the resurrected dead immediately.

  Now, as he peered through nightmare of darkness and bloody fog, he could see a number of forms shambling across Boston Common and others on Tremont Street. Though it was impossible to know for sure in the fog and the dark, logic dictated that they must be the dead. No sane, living human being would be out on the streets now.

  The dead were walking south.

  Graves frowned, wondering why, and then he pushed the question aside. He was not going to have an answer quickly, and there were other priorities. He had to locate Conan Doyle and the others. Eve and Clay had been sent off on some errand or another, but he did not know to where. Th
at was his only lead.

  Another question lingered in his mind.

  Why not me?

  The spirits of the dead were being drawn back into their bodies, but Dr. Graves was a specter himself. A ghost. Some terrible power was dragging those souls who were still floating in the ether back to their rotting corpses, even to their moldering bones. He had seen some torn from the river of souls itself. And yet he did not feel the slightest tug upon his spirit.

  Why? The red mist is expanding, ballooning outward. Perhaps only those who died here, upon the grounds touched by the mist, are affected. Or perhaps wandering ghosts, the restless dead, those like me who refuse to be drawn into the soulstream, are not affected. Or perhaps there is simply not enough left of my body, now, for even magick to put into motion.

  Graves did not know what, precisely, was going on. He did not have answers to these questions. But he would find them. And to begin, he knew there were places he might investigate that might lead him further along both of his lines of inquiry.

  He pushed himself off the State House dome, its golden surface a dark, hellish orange as it took what little light was available and reflected the red mist. As he passed over Boston Common, drifting just above the trees now, he confirmed one of his suspicions. He was not the only ghost unaffected. The lonely shades of several homeless men wandered the park, resting on park benches and picking imaginary garbage out of trash cans, acting out the routines of their lives.

  They had died there on the Common, these men. Unless they had been cremated, it had been recently enough that there would certainly have been enough left of their remains to make an effective zombie. That was possible, but the more he considered, the more he began to think that one of his other theories was more likely. These homeless men had been lost souls long before they were dead. As ghosts, they walked the paths that had been familiar in life and seemed not to feel the pull of the river of souls at all. They were kept here by the infirmity of their minds, even as Graves himself was anchored to the mortal plane by his obsession with the mystery of his own murder. He felt certain his theory was correct, that ghosts who still haunted this world were immune to this magick as long as they remained here and did not slip into the soulstream.

  Dr. Graves left the Common and propelled his spectral form along Tremont Street past the Park Street Church. Tucked in amongst buildings to the left and right, and abutting it to the rear was the Old Granary Burial Ground. It was a strange cemetery, located in what some might have taken to be an empty building lot left behind by a demolition crew if not for the low wrought iron fence. The burial ground was a tiny plot of land where eighteenth century headstones thrust from the ground, and a recitation of their names read like a litany of American history.

  Paul Revere was buried there. A short way further along a narrow path that weaved beneath shade trees was the grave of John Hancock. Samuel Adams had been interred at the Old Granary as well, along with all of the victims of the Boston Massacre and the parents of Benjamin Franklin. It was a quiet place of reflection in the center of the city, a piece of its history. Graves always thought it shameful that it was the edifices left behind by the great hearts and minds of any generation that were visited by throngs of admirers, and rarely their graves.

  It was no wonder that none of their ghosts had lingered on this plane.

  That did not mean the Old Granary Burial Ground was devoid of ghosts, however.

  Dr. Graves passed through the black wrought-iron fence and alighted upon the ragged lawn, pretending to himself that he could feel the ground beneath his shoes. The walls of the buildings that rose up to block in the other three sides of the burial ground were imposing, but with the red-black sky and the scarlet fog, they lent a sense of security as well. He glanced up, and then over his shoulder, but he was alone.

  "Christopher?" Graves ventured, his voice drifting amongst the headstones with the fog.

  "Hello, Leonard."

  The voice was close by, almost in his ear, and Graves darted away even as he spun around in surprise. Decades of phantom life ought to have made him immune to being startled in such fashion, but clearly they had not. And the ghost of Christopher Snider knew it.

  "This is hardly the time for games, Chris," Dr. Graves chided him.

  The spectral boy was lanky, yet handsome, his appearance precisely the same as it had been on that day in late February of 1770, when he had been shot by a British soldier, just eleven days before the Boston Massacre. The wry grin on the ghost's face, though, revealed that though his shade mimicked the body he'd had in life, his mind had continued to grow. He was no boy. He was a specter. Centuries old. And yet there was still something of the child in him. An enigma, then, this phantom boy. Graves had never been able to discover just what anchored Christopher Snider to the mortal plane. Perhaps one day, he thought, the boy would feel enough at ease with him to tell him. For now, if not friends, they were at least allies in the battle against the despair that threatened all the lingering, wandering dead.

  "My apologies, sir," Christopher said, giving Dr. Graves a small bow. The ghostly boy was grimly serious now. "You are right, of course. It was only that I was pleased to see you. I know of your penchant for involving yourself in calamitous situations. I was certain you would be at the center of whatever is causing this horror."

  Graves nodded, glancing toward the street. "I plan to be. But to do that, I need to find Eve. And to find Eve, I need your help."

  A ripple went through the ectoplasm that made up the shade of Christopher Snider. His upper lip curled back in distaste. The ghostly boy seemed to withdraw but he did not actually retreat from Graves. Rather, his spirit thinned and became less defined, so that the red mist flowed through him and nearly obscured his features.

  "You know my feelings about the Children of Eve," Christopher said.

  "I do," Graves confirmed. "That's why I ask. You hate them. But you always know when there are vampires in the city. You've got some sort of ethereal grapevine going, tracking them. I know you've helped Eve with her hunt in the past.

  "Look around, Chris," Graves said, gesturing with translucent hands toward the city around and above them. "It's safe to say there's no time to waste. I need to know if there are any of them in the city right now. And where."

  The ghost drifted away, toward the wrought-iron fence where he could look down upon Tremont Street. Graves followed him and lingered just at his side. A car was parked up on the sidewalk, locked and abandoned in a hurry. Along the road were others in the same condition. Graves thought he saw silhouettes inside one of them, people who had simply pulled over when the chaos had begun and now were likely too afraid to venture on, no matter how badly they wished to be home.

  "Christopher?" Dr. Graves whispered, his voice a ghost itself.

  "I know," the spectral young man replied, nodding. He glanced at Graves. "I apologize. To search for any of Eve's Children without intending to kill them is difficult for me to grasp."

  Dr. Graves had always suspected that vampires had something to do with the boy's death, despite the story about the British soldier. Either that or he had seen loved ones murdered by the monsters. But now was not the time to pry.

  "If it helps, I can assure you the creature will come to no good end."

  "Of course it helps," replied the ghostly boy with a hollow laugh. "As much as anything will."

  Graves waited for more, for an answer to the question he had posed, doing his best to feign patience he did not feel. When he felt he could not wait any longer, he spoke the ghost's name. "Christopher

  …"

  "Do you know what my favorite memory is, Leonard? It was in 1831, right here. Or, rather, there in the Evangelical Church. The children's choir sang beautifully in those days, but on that particular day they sang a new song, freshly written. The song had never been sung before, not publicly. It was 'My Country, 'tis of Thee.' Do you know it?"?Startled by this turn in the conversation, Graves frowned and stared at him. "Of course I do."


  Christopher smiled in remembrance. "Yes, yes. Of course you do." Then he turned to Graves and there was nothing at all of the child in his spectral features any longer. "That is my most precious memory, Leonard. And it happened more than sixty years after my death. The irony is painful sometimes."

  He sighed and looked around the fog enshrouded cemetery before glancing back at Dr. Graves.

  "I'm told that one of Eve's Children has made its nest in the Regency Theatre on Charles Street. There was a fire there last year, you know. The owners have promised to rebuild, but so far nothing has been done."

  "You know so much about this city, but I've never seen you further from your grave than this gate."

  "I listen," the ghostly boy said. "They walk by, the living, and they don't know anyone's here. They talk. And I listen."

  Dr. Graves was reluctant to leave. Christopher had never been so open with him, never seemed so willing to talk about his haunting of the burial ground. But the red mist churned around them and the sky was dark and the dead were walking out on the streets of Boston.

  "Thank you, Chris. I'm sorry I have to go. Maybe — "

  "Go," the other ghost said, waving him off. "Perhaps you and your friends can stop all of this. Come back when you can. I'm not going anywhere."

  With nothing more to say Graves began to rise, floating away from the burial ground. He traveled quickly now, the buildings little more than a blur around him. There were several churches nearby and it occurred to him that the people who had abandoned their vehicles might well have fled to those edifices of faith. Hopeful voices would be raised within. Prayers would be sung or spoken.

  Dr. Graves had wondered all his life — and thereafter — whether anyone was listening.

  He drifted through the scarlet fog, following Tremont Street for a while and then climbing above the buildings. Graves did not like to pass through structures unless they were his destination. There was something unsettling about it, but also it felt to him as though he were intruding upon the privacy of whoever might live or work within them.