The Nimble Man m-1

by Christopher Golden

  Julia raced around the corner into the dining room, a look of absolute terror upon her wan features.

  "Was it too much to ask that you adhere to my wishes, or is that — "

  "He's gone," she said, ignoring his reproach. "Danny's gone."

  Conan Doyle stood, wincing as the bones in his spine and popped. It wouldn't be long before he had to partake again of the Fey elixir that staved off time's ravages. "Are you certain? Where would he have gone? I forbade him from involving himself with my operatives' assignments."

  Julia laughed, a disdainful barking sound. "You forbade him," she said with a shake of her head. "Like that's going to mean anything to a fifteen year old boy. You forbid him. Give me a break."

  Conan Doyle recoiled as if slapped. "Madame, please." He knew that he now lived in an age far different from that in which he had been born, but was still taken aback when such language was unleashed by a member of the fairer sex. "Get hold of yourself."

  "You get hold of yourself!?" she screamed, starting to pace. "My son is missing, Mr. Doyle, and if you can't understand why I'm upset, I suggest you take a look outside the window."

  He considered a spell of tranquility, but decided against it, choosing instead to steady the woman's nerves with words. "Losing your wits will not help you find your son, Mrs. Ferrick."

  Conan Doyle reached out a comforting hand, and the moment he laid it upon her shoulder she seemed to collapse into him. All her fury disappeared, leaving only her fear for her son. She shuddered and began to cry.

  "When was the last time you saw Daniel?" he asked.

  Julia wiped at her leaking eyes, stifling the sobs, trying to compose herself. "It was right before you went into your trance. He said he was going up to bed."

  Conan Doyle pulled thoughtfully at his gray beard. At that point, Clay and Eve had already departed on their mission. That left only Ceridwen, but he could not imagine that she would even consider allowing an inexperienced youth to accompany her.

  "I… I know he's… different," Julia Ferrick stammered, "but he's still just a kid…" Her eyes began to tear again, and she pressed a fist to her mouth to as if she might stifle the emotions that threatened to overwhelm her.

  Conan Doyle wanted to tell her otherwise, to explain what little he knew about the creature that she had raised as her son, but he erred on the side of sensitivity. He could be a callous man, at times. He knew that. But he never meant to be.

  "Mrs. Ferrick. Julia," he began. But his words were interrupted by a sudden roar that rattled the windows in their frames, and caused the pressure in the house to change so dramatically that his ears painfully popped.

  "What the hell was that?" Julia asked, blinking, wincing as she opened and closed her mouth to relieve her own discomfort.

  Conan Doyle was already in motion. The sound was familiar to him, and he knew that it signified answers. A traveling wind had arrived, but it would never have created such a thunderous roar unless it had been conjured quickly and carelessly.

  "What was that?" Julia demanded as she pursued him from the dining room. "Doyle, answer me!"

  He did not want to get her hopes up, choosing instead to lead her to the answer, and hopefully the relief of her distress.

  Danny Ferrick knelt in the center of the living room, a puddle of vomit on the carpet before him. Conan Doyle glanced around the room, but to his dismay, Danny was alone. Ceridwen had not returned with him.

  "Danny," his mother cried, kneeling at his side, throwing her arms around him. "I was so worried! Are you all right?"

  The boy struggled from her embrace, pushing his mother away as he climbed to his feet. He lunged at Conan Doyle, gripping the man by the lapels of his jacket, starring wildly into his eyes.

  "Danny?" Julia said, her voice hollow, crushed by his rejection.

  "Ceridwen," the boy croaked, his breath stinking of spoiled milk. "She sent me away to tell you." The boy's legs were trembling, barely able to hold his weight.

  "Then tell me," Conan Doyle urged, icy dread running along his spine. "What have you learned?"

  "The Nimble Man," Danny said, wavering on his feet, a shudder passing through him. "She wanted me to tell you that Morrigan is trying to free the Nimble Man. I wanted to stay — to help her — but she made me come back to warn you."

  Conan Doyle nodded wordlessly. The boy was about to fall down, so he steered Danny to the sofa and helped him to sit.

  "Is it bad, Mr. Doyle?" Julia asked as she settled on the arm of the sofa, fussing over her son. She glanced up at him expectantly, waiting for an answer. "Is it bad?"

  He wondered what he should tell them, just how much of the truth this woman in particular could stand. But Arthur Conan Doyle was not a man who minced words.

  "Worse than you could imagine."

  The smell of decaying flesh made her angry.

  Eve wasn't sure why exactly, other than the fact that once the smell got on her clothes, it was hell to get out.

  A rotting, undead executive type in a navy blue suit hissed at her, baring jagged Jack O'Lantern teeth that jutted from blackened gums. She and Graves had cornered four of the walking dead in the museum's gift shop, but this asshole was the feistiest.

  "You can hiss all you like, Gomer," Eve snarled. "None of you are going anywhere until you tell me something useful."

  A chill washed over her as Dr. Graves moved closer. He stood with his arms crossed and she imagined how formidable he must have been when he had been a man of flesh and bone.

  "You don't think they'll just volunteer the information, do you?" Graves asked, hovering weightlessly in front of the gift shop doors.

  "Sure," Eve said with a shrug. "They look like a reasonable bunch of dead guys. Why not?"

  The executive lunged with a gurgling scream, hands hooked into claws and mouth open to bite.

  "Then again," she said, driving her fist into the cadaver's face. It felt as though she had punched through a rotting melon. The corpse danced horribly at the end of her arm, its face and skull collapsed around her hand.

  "That's just fucking gross," she spat, yanking her fist free with a wet, sucking pop. Further disgusted, she snapped a savage kick to the dead man's chest, hurling him backward into a T-shirt display. The corpse seemed to break upon impact, what was left of its head lolling obscenely to one side as it crumpled to the floor in a twisted heap.

  "Quite effective," Graves said, slowly nodding his head. "Perhaps if you were to break them up into smaller pieces."

  Eve flicked her hand at the ground, spattering the Linoleum with rotting brain as she tried to shake off the gray matter on her fist and arm. "Look, I didn't say I was an expert. I said that I've been known to be pretty good at getting information out of guys who didn't feel like talking. Obviously my technique doesn't work so well on dead folks."

  The three remaining corpses began to circle around them, as though they had gained courage — or at least motivation — from the destruction of the fourth.

  "If you'd like to give it a try, be my guest," Eve said, turning toward the shambling corpse of a woman so withered she seemed almost a scarecrow. Eve snatched her up by the front of her dress and hurled her into the others, knocking them all to the floor.

  "Perhaps I will." Graves drifted from his place at the door to levitate above the undead that thrashed upon the floor, trying to stand. "I doubt I could do any worse."

  One of the corpses untangled himself from the others. He had been a middle-aged man, obviously cut down in the prime of his life, his white shirt soiled from the grave. In his recent activity, the buttons had been lost, revealing the pale flesh of his chest and stomach. Eve noticed the serpentine stitching that writhed vertically from esophagus to navel.

  The zombie leapt up at Graves with a hungry snarl, but his fingers passed harmlessly through the substance of the ghost.

  "You'll do," Dr. Graves said.

  The specter plunged one of his hands into the corpse like a magician reaching into his magic hat. The zomb
ie froze, its decaying form snapping rigid. Graves pulled his hand free, withdrawing a white, writhing shape from inside the dead man's remains.

  Eve watched, fascinated. "What is that, its soul?"

  "Near enough," Graves replied, holding onto the squirming ectoplasm as its rotting shell collapsed like a marionette whose strings had been cut. The two other corpses grew still, staring at the ghost, as though they understood what he had done.

  Eve was not sure if they were frightened, or envious.

  The amorphous thing in the spirit's grasp writhed, vaguely taking on the shape of the man it had once been.

  "Listen to me," Graves said.

  Eve smiled. The man's voice just oozed control. It was damned impressive that even dead, the guy could still exude that much authority. She remembered how the world had been captivated by this man when he was still amongst the living, never really understanding the attraction. But as Eve watched him now, she began to see what she had not taken the time to notice before.

  The ectoplasm retained the shape of a man, reaching up to the ceiling, but Graves prevented it from flowing to where it yearned to go. The soul moaned, not so much a sound that was heard, but one that could be felt, a low bass vibration the she could feel in the center of her chest.

  "You will talk to me," Graves told it. "What was it that you sought here?"

  "The Eye," said the soul, what passed for its head staring toward the ceiling.

  "Did you find it?"

  The spirit made another futile attempt to escape Graves, but the ghost held fast. "Want to go," it pleaded. "Need to be away from this place."

  Graves yanked it down further toward him. "I asked you a question," he roared. "Did you find it?"

  "Please," the soul begged, stretching toward the ceiling.

  With a grunt of frustration, Dr. Graves drifted to the floor, pulling the ectoplasmic remains of the dead man behind like a child holding a balloon. The soul fought him, but to no avail.

  "I will put you back in here," Graves growled, forcing the soul toward the rotting husk that it had been extracted from.

  "No!" it shrieked, the intensity of its psychic cries causing Eve to wince.

  Graves would hear none of it, pushing the panicking soul stuff closer to where it had been imprisoned. "Did you find it?"

  "I searched," the man's soul answered pathetically. "But I did not find the Eye."

  Graves floated toward the ceiling, letting his prisoner have a taste of where it wanted to go. But just a taste.

  "Do you know who did?"

  "One of the others," it responded. "One of the others found the Eye."

  Graves yanked the soul down again, pointing to the restless corpses who lay on the floor below.

  "Was it one of these?" he asked.

  "No, it was not," it answered immediately, afraid of what Graves could do to it. "One of the others has the eye… one of the others out there."

  With one of its willowy appendages, the soul pointed outside the gift shop, out into the museum.

  Graves turned his attention to Eve.

  "Oooh, scary," she said. "But what the hell. It worked better than my approach."

  The ghost released that tormented soul and they both watched as it hungrily swam toward the ceiling, passing through the white tiles, and then disappeared into the ether.

  "Not really," the ghost replied despondently, drifting down toward their remaining zombie captives. "We don't know any more than we did before."

  Eve watched as the ghost tore the imprisoned souls from their cages of decaying flesh, releasing them to the ether as well.

  "We can only hope that Clay has been more successful," Graves said, drifting closer.

  "So what do you think?" she asked him. "Should we grab a couple more and hope we hit the jackpot?"

  Graves folded his arms across his chest. "I suppose it couldn't hurt," he said.

  "So many dead guys," Eve sighed, moving toward the glass doors, looking out into the museum at the straggling corpses that still meandered about outside. "So little time."

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The red mist that swirled outside the Ferrick house had its own strange luminescence. A crimson glow came in through the windows and though they were closed, from time to time the house whispered with a breeze, a draft from nowhere, and the candles in the living room flickered and threatened to go out.

  Danny did not want the candles to go out. There were very few things he was certain of this night, but that was one of them. Without the candles there would be only that red glow, and he would have to wonder a little harder what was causing it.

  He sat on the sofa in the living room with his mother beside him. She clutched his hands for comfort, but he wasn't sure which of them was comforted the most by this contact. It was weird to him. All the shit that he normally cared about — his skateboard, his tunes, his room, the latest video games, even the way he looked in the mirror — it all seemed so small now. What good was that new shirt from Atticus he'd wanted now? Little things had always been part of his mother's stress, too, but she'd always seemed to know the difference. Danny guessed they were both learning more about the big picture now than they ever wanted to.

  Together they watched Arthur Conan Doyle pacing the length of the room. The man — the mage, Danny had heard him called — barely seemed to notice them.

  From the moment Danny had returned to the house, magically transported here by Ceridwen, Mr. Doyle had been lost to them. Danny had been impressed by the guy in general, but he had not thought very much about the magic he supposedly wielded. Mr. Doyle seemed grim and courageous, but not really very intimidating.

  That had changed.

  Conan Doyle paced the room with his teeth ferociously clenched, prowling back and forth as though each step was some small victory. His eyes gleamed with dark purple light that coalesced into tears and then evaporated, trailing tendrils of lavender smoke behind him. The jacket Conan Doyle had been wearing was draped over a chair and his sleeves were rolled up. In the moments when he paused at one end of the room to turn and pace the other way, he reached up to run his fingers over his thick mustache. It was a pensive action, the unthinking gesture of a man readying himself for a fight. His whole demeanor, the marching, the rolled-up sleeves, contributed to that image.

  He looked mean.

  They weren't friends, the Ferricks and Mr. Doyle. They had not known each other long enough to be friends. But they were allies. Even so, Danny would not have interrupted him, even if the hordes of hell were crashing down the door. In the reddish glow from the mist outside and the flicker of the candles, Conan Doyle looked like a demon himself.

  But he's not the demon, is he? That'd be me. His pulse quickened.

  His mother leaned on him a little. He could sense her fear, practically taste it, and he understood. All she wanted to do was curl up with her baby boy, close her eyes, and pretend that the nightmare world that was seeping in through her windows and under the door, the monsters she had invited into her home, would just go away. But they weren't going to. And her baby boy was one of them.

  No matter how she yearned to shut her eyes to what was happening, however, Danny knew she would not. Julia Ferrick was not that kind of woman. The world had thrown some real shit in her path in the last few years, and she had never let it stop her.

  His fingers gripped her hand and he gave her a squeeze. "It's going to be all right," he whispered, his voice a rasp, almost menacing, even to his own ears. With the grotesque and malevolent atmosphere that had enveloped the city, he was becoming more of what he was. He knew he should be frightened, but it felt right to him. Even his thoughts were changing. His mind… he felt more adult, in a weird way. Smarter, even. It was more than a little fucked up.

  When she glanced at him, there was a storm in her eyes almost as intimidating as the fury in Mr. Doyle's.

  "You shouldn't have gone, Danny. You should have stayed here. When I think about where you were… the danger…"

&nb
sp; Again his fingers tightened on hers. He narrowed his gaze and cocked his head, wanting to make sure their eyes were locked, that she would not turn away.

  "No, Mom. It was the right thing to do. No matter what…" he glanced nervously at Conan Doyle, who had instructed him not to go. "It was the right thing. If I hadn't gone, Ceridwen might never have been able to tell us what Morrigan was up to. And besides…"

  He took a breath, then closed his mouth. His tongue brushed against the backs of his jagged teeth. The skin his horns had torn through still itched and flaked, but he resisted the urge to scratch it.

  "Besides what?" his mother asked warily.

  Danny let out a breath through his nostrils, plumes of hot air as though from a furnace. "It felt good. For the first time, it felt like I was part of something."

  Her expression was crestfallen, as though he had just broken her heart. But Danny could not run away from what he was, and neither could his mother.

  Mr. Doyle stopped his pacing in the precise center of the room.

  Danny and Julia Ferrick stared at him.

  "Mrs. Ferrick, I am sorry to have taken advantage of your hospitality in this way. Rest assured, Squire will make an appearance shortly, after which I and my agents will no longer be a burden to you."

  The words were simple enough, but Danny didn't like the sound of it. It sounded as though Conan Doyle was going to shut him out of it again. A flutter of anger went through him and another blast of hot air came from his nostrils. It burned coming out, as though he was some dragon-boy, but he doubted that fire-breathing was going to be one of the abilities his demonic nature was going to give him.

  "Where are you going?" Danny asked. His mother said nothing. He figured she was just relieved to be quit of Conan Doyle and all of his friends.

  Mr. Doyle rolled his sleeves back down and began to button them. He did this as though there were nothing at all in the world that ought to be worrying him at the moment. There was a fussiness about him as he smoothed the fabric and then took his jacket and slid it on again. He truly was a man of another age.