by T. A. Pratt
When I opened the box later, I found my framed picture of Richard with a star-shaped crack in the glass. I’d taken the picture on our first trip together to Hawaii, after calling in a favor from an old college friend—one who’d stayed in astronomy instead of dropping out to make money working with numbers—and getting us a tour of the observatory on Mauna Kea. A dome holding a telescope loomed behind Richard in the photo, a ragged gash in the image, his face scratched by the broken glass.
My idiot boss had treated my life like meaningless trash, and for a while, I’d believed him.
With a spear in my hand, all such existential problems suddenly had such obvious solutions.
I sat staring at the doors to the building’s lobby. There was a security guard behind the desk, and I knew there was at least one more roaming the ground floor hallways. I knew the names of those men; I knew the names of their children.
I knew if I walked in carrying an enormous spear, they would try to stop me.
The firm was on the fourth, fifth, and sixth floors of the building. I couldn’t conceive of any way to get there, and reach my boss, without causing a great deal of trouble along the way. “I should wait,” I said slowly. “Find out where he lives, prepare for him—”
“Bor-ing,” Elsie singsonged. “I’ll get fidgety and take the spear away long before that.”
I blinked. “You mean... you’re going to take it away from me?”
“Only if you run out of people you want to murder,” Elsie said. “What, did you think I was here because I think you’re cute?”
“What are you?” Dana said. “Some kind of demon?”
“You’re just racist against redheads,” Elsie said. “I’m no demon, devil, or monster—just an ordinary gal who feeds on chaos and disaster, who happens to own a magical spear. What I am is an enabler. So what’s it going to be? Go make with the revenging, or give me back my spear and sit around with ghost-girl here forever?”
I wasn’t ready to let go of the feeling of power—or of cool detachment—that holding Ghostreaper afforded me. I climbed out of the car, and Elsie followed, along with Dana’s ghost. We all stood on the sidewalk. “The spear,” I said, trying to hide its length against the side of the car. “Does it have any other powers? Can it make people go to sleep, or—”
Elsie laughed. “You can’t set that phaser on stun, son. It’s only got one mode of attack: soul-ripping.”
“Those guards never did anything to me.”
“Oh, they will in a minute,” Elsie said breezily. “They’ll draw guns on you, probably, and maybe try to shoot you.”
I was invulnerable while I held the spear. Perhaps I could simply walk past the guards, brush off their attacks. I reached back into the car and took the roll of duct tape I’d found in Dana’s house, and began to wind the tape around my right hand and the shaft of Ghostreaper, binding the weapon to my flesh, leaving my fingers free, but the spear strapped to my palm.
“Good thinking,” Elsie said. “If you tripped and dropped the spear you’d be dead in a hot second once the bullets started flying.”
“This is insane,” Dana said. “I don’t believe this—”
“Believe it,” I said, not really thinking of it as a command, but then Dana began to whimper.
“I do,” she murmured. “I do believe it. All of it.”
I glanced at Elsie, who shrugged. “Ghosts are very literal. If you told her to go fuck herself the results would be pretty dramatic, is what I’m trying to say.”
I pushed open the door to the lobby and stepped inside. The guard behind the desk, a huge and affable man named Latu, rose from his chair, eyes wide. “Mr. Whitaker, you can’t—I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
I ignored him, walking toward the bank of elevators. I had a vision of Latu drawing his gun, firing into my chest, bullets bouncing off like Superman—but instead he simply walked around the desk and grabbed my right arm, the one holding the spear. His grip didn’t hurt, but it was like iron, unshakeable. He was built like a sumo wrestler. “You’ll have to leave,” he said. “Don’t make me call the police. I always liked you—”
“Oh, just spear him,” Elsie said.
“No.” I gritted my teeth. “He’s innocent.”
She cocked her head. “Huh. More or less true, actually.” She sighed. “This is boring. Tell Dana to stick her head into his head.”
“I—what?”
“Mr. Whitaker, who are you talking to?” Latu said. “Are you hearing voices?”
I realized he couldn’t see Elsie. Was she always invisible, or just when it suited her? I suddenly wondered if she was real at all. The possibility of carbon monoxide hallucination arose in my mind again, but somehow seemed less plausible this time.
“Her head, his head,” Elsie reiterated. “She’s your ghost, you have to tell her what to do, they lack initiative.”
“Dana, ah—put your head into his head.”
Dana rolled her eyes, stepped forward, and seemed to head-butt Latu... except her head didn’t strike his, it simply submerged into it, disappearing. Latu twitched and shivered and dropped to the floor, spasming and drooling.
“Don’t worry, he’s fine,” Elsie said. “Just a little seizure. Your ghost-slaves can actually possess people—clumsily, moving their bodies around about as elegantly as novice stilt-walkers, but still. Dana just jostled his life force a little and make him pass out.”
“I was in his head.” Dana hugged herself and shuddered. “My head was in his head—”
“Or maybe she disrupted the electro-chemical processes of his brain,” Elsie said, scratching her chin. “I never entirely understood the mechanism.”
“I can taste the inside of his brain.” Dana bent over, retching and spitting.
“Ha. No stomach, but she still gets nauseated, you’ve got to love it.” Elsie smiled. “Elevators now?”
I stared at her. “You won’t tell me what you are, where you come from. But where did this spear come from?”
She shrugged. “Another place. Where screaming hordes descend from fortresses made of acid clouds. Where leviathans the size of moons splash in seas that are literally bottomless. Where warriors receive guidance from living books, and go on quests set by mad seers. Where the sky is the belly of a goddess, and the triple suns are just jewels in her navel. Where marsh witches whisper to their children, who are living axes.” She smiled hideously, and the phrase that leapt into my mind was “baby-eating grin.” “I didn’t see any reason why they should get to have all the best toys, so I stole a couple.” The grin abruptly vanished. “Don’t make me regret letting you play with one of them.”
I turned and marched for the elevators, then spun, swinging the spear toward Elsie.
She leapt several feet straight up, and came down to land in a crouch, balanced on the shaft of the spear, like something from a wire-fu martial arts movie. “Do you think I’d give you a weapon that could hurt me? But it was amusing of you to try.”
I shook the spear, and she hopped off, like a bird flitting from a perch.
“There’s no going back for me, is there?” I said. “And this isn’t a hallucination, is it?”
“No, and no. But look at it this way: this morning you expected to be dead by now. There’s pretty much nowhere your day can go from there except up.” She paused. “Or on to fates worse than death, I guess. Like the one poor Dana here got. No eternal oblivion, no afterlife—if they have those in this world, I can’t recall—no rest at all.”
I turned to the elevators. There was nowhere to go now but onward.
We rode uneventfully to the sixth floor, and I stepped out, unnoticed at first. Reception and conference rooms were on the fourth floor, and higher up it was mostly offices for HR and some of the more senior members of the staff—and my boss, of course, the idiot. I walked down the hallway, dragging the butt of the spear along behind me, like a kid drawing lines in the dirt with a stick.
A security guard I didn’t recognize st
epped out of an office in the corridor, holding a weapon that I thought at first was a gun and then realized was a taser. Latu must have called in the arrival of a man with a spear before Dana zapped his brain, or else he’d awakened since then and summoned assistance.
“The police are on the way,” the guard said. He was young, freckled, and jittery. “Put down the, ah... spear.” He shook his head. “I’ve heard of disgruntled employees coming back with a gun, but what do you think you’re going to do with a pointy stick?”
I stepped toward him, and he fired the taser. The contacts struck my chest, and I felt nothing, not even the tingle I’d experienced when I first grasped Ghostreaper. “Get out of my way,” I said. “I’m not here for you.”
The guard dropped the taser and fumbled for his gun.
“Dana?” I said. “Stop him.”
She sighed, and swept her hand through his chest, and the guard fell back, clutching at his ribs, sliding down the wall. His eyes closed.
“I didn’t say kill him!”
“I didn’t.” Dana’s sulky tone was grating. “I just made his heart skip a little, I knocked him out, god.”
Somewhere someone screamed, and I heard the thud of running feet.
More people would be calling the police soon. I hurried down the familiar corridors, past glassed-in offices and the occasional sad cubicle where contract workers and temps were consigned. My boss, the idiot, had a corner office, of course. His secretary’s desk was deserted, his door closed, and for a moment I thought I’d messed up, that he was gone, out of town on a meeting, or just having one of his famous three-hour lunches.
Then his door banged open, and he stuck his head out, scowling. He wasn’t yet thirty, and had a very expensive ugly suit and a very expensive stupid haircut. “Where the fuck is—” he began. His eyes widened when he saw me. “Whitaker?” I was stunned when he began to laugh at me. “What the hell is that taped to your hand? Your toy spear from Halloween? Did you go as a Zulu warrior or something? I figured you for the kind of guy who’d dress in drag, or maybe just put on a leather vest and call it a—”
He gasped as the point of the spear entered his belly, then slid up through his chest, and out through his throat. I was watching for it this time, and saw the gossamer substance of his soul caught on the end of Ghostreaper’s spearhead. It fluttered away, taking on definition as it fell, until it was recognizably the idiot’s ghost, hovering just above the ground on all fours, shaking his head in confusion.
“That’s good,” I said. “Stay like that. Crawl on hands and knees. You don’t get to stand up.”
He lifted his stupid face, squinting at me. “Whitaker? I don’t—”
“Understand what’s happening to you,” I ordered. “And then shut the fuck up.”
His eyes widened, but he didn’t speak. I saw Dana in my peripheral vision, desperately trying not to be noticed, doubtless afraid I’d turn my wrath on her.
But the wrath was running out of me like water from a cracked cup. Where would this end? I’d had legitimate grievances against these two, but what would Elsie want me to do next? What offenses were worthy of Ghostreaper’s touch? Should I go back to my hometown in Idaho and take revenge on the aging upperclassmen who’d played “smear the queer” with me in high school? Track down the guy I’d had a one-night-stand with, who’d stolen my TV while I slept hungover in the bed we’d shared?
There’s an old saying, that “he who seeks revenge should dig two graves.” It’s meant to be a warning about the dark consequences of taking a vengeful path, but I think it’s just good advice. Because I was having a hard time imagining life after revenge.
“Elsie,” I said. “I don’t know if I can—”
“Don’t worry, sweetie.” She patted my shoulder. “Things are progressing nicely. These little grudges are fun, but they’re so petty. We’ve moved beyond that now. Let’s go to the roof.”
I followed her, because I could hear sirens, and knew going downstairs wouldn’t end well.
I let the idiot crawl up a flight of stairs—never quite touching the stairs, mind you—before becoming ashamed of my own pettiness and telling him to walk like a man. Now he and Dana hovered near one of the big air conditioners on the roof, while Elsie and I looked down at the chaos below.
There were police cars, lots of them, parked at crazy angles in the street, the area blocked off by sawhorses. Crowds of bystanders were taking advantage of their lunch breaks to see what all the commotion was about. A man with a megaphone stood below, shouting something I couldn’t hear from ten stories above.
“Ha,” Elsie said. “I’m at full visibility, and I bet they think I’m a hostage. This is great.” She glanced around at the taller buildings surrounding us. “Pretty soon sniper bullets are going to be bouncing off you left and right. There are lots of great perches for gunmen around here.”
“Where am I supposed to do now?” I was not expecting good advice. But I wasn’t expecting what she actually said, either.
“What any animal does when it’s cornered, Dave. You’re going to fight. But unlike the noble but helpless, I don’t know, vole or whatever, when you’re set upon by badgers—let’s say—you’re going to surprise the hell out of them by actually winning.”
I shook my head. Ghostreaper suddenly felt heavy in my hand, and if not for the duct tape binding it to my palm, it might have fallen from my grasp. “But what’s the point? There’s just—there’s no good outcome here.”
“Here’s what I’d like to see happen.” Elsie touched her chest modestly. “You go on a complete rampage. You stroll down there, or better yet, leap right off the roof, fall ten stories, land in a crouch, and stand up unharmed, swinging the spear like a badass. The cops open fire, bullets bounce off. They try to swarm you, bury you in bodies, and you swing the spear a time or two. Pretty soon your sad little ghost pity party back there becomes a ghost army, and they clear you a path. The cops call in reinforcements. Air support. The National Guard. All kinds of tactical backup. You just walk right through them all. The cops crash cars into you, they shoot missiles at you, I’m talking full-on action movie video game shit.”
Her eyes were shining. I don’t mean in some metaphorical sense; I mean they were actually shining, radiating white light as she contemplated that imagined destruction. “Picture it, Dave. A trail of fire and disaster follows you wherever you go. The military steps in, and you brush off their tanks and bombs too, because while you hold the spear, you’re a creature made of iron in a world made of tapioca pudding. Eventually you become a warlord, because there’s pretty much nothing else you can do. You become a conqueror because there’s no other way you can get any rest. You sit on a throne atop a mountain of skulls. I don’t know how that works logistically, I guess you epoxy the skulls together or something. The world changes, and it can never change back.” She grinned again, and there was blood on her teeth, either from biting her own lip or from some more mysterious source. “Then, when you’re all settled in as king of the world, maybe I find some lowly fucker and give him one of the other toys I’ve come across in my travels. A sword, maybe, that sings notes that can shatter buildings. Or a horn that calls forth the spirits of dead monsters, or an axe forged from the last fragment of a broken alien moon. Something along those lines. And then we have some real fun.”
I barked a laugh. “And what if that doesn’t sound like fun to me? What if I won’t fight?”
She shrugged. “I’ll take the spear away. You’ll get caught by the cops and go to jail. Even if they can’t pin any murders on you, you came to work and took hostages with a big spear—you’ll get stuck in a psych ward at the very least. Where you’ll be stuck in a cell with your two ghosts, by the way. Maybe you can use the ghosts to escape, and then you’ll get to be an aging fugitive—goodie for you. As for me? I’ll just have to overcome my sadness at your failure and try again with someone else. Ghostreaper is a gift that keeps on giving. You won’t all be such horrible disappointments.”
But being forced to spend the rest of my life with the ghosts of people I despised was a cruel sort of victory, even if they were puppets I could order to dance. Nor did I relish the prospect of death in a hail of bullets, or conscious suffering in a prison under suicide watch.
Or the thought of Elsie laughing at whatever misfortune befell me, growing fat on the chaos I’d created.
So I tore away the tape from my wrist, and propped the base of the spear against the low wall that ran around the perimeter of the roof. I positioned the spearhead over my heart, leaning gently against it. I felt no pain... until I took my hands away from the shaft, and lost my invulnerability to the weapon, and the point of the spear passed through my body. I didn’t expect it to hurt, but it did, like my body was a sheet of paper being torn in half.
My vision blurred, and I gasped, and when my eyes cleared, I saw my own crumpled body lying on the roof.
Elsie whistled. “You reaped yourself? I have to say I didn’t see that coming. I usually I like surprises, but this one, not so much.”
I looked around. Dana and the idiot were nowhere to be seen.
