The Book of Feasts & Seasons

by John C. Wright

  But suddenly the ice, or whatever it was, that held me fixed at that point of time was broken. I sank like a stone beneath the surface of time, and saw the flickering shadows of events, past and future events, floating about me like fragments of dreams.

  When you are near the mortal world, it is like looking through a pane of rippling glass a few minutes before and after wherever you were laying before you died.

  Dreamers can sometime see this, if they wander away from their sleeping bodies, which is why you sometimes see a repeat of that day’s events, or a glimpse of something yet to come.

  If you dive deeper, the place gets closer to the timeless, and you can see far off events in the future or past like vast shapes on the horizon, and you can hear, dimly, the ancestral voices calling warnings, the screams of fear and shouts of joy, or catch the roar like the echoes or reflections of a world-shattering battle or glimpse the lighting-flares as if reflected from low hanging clouds, against which titanic shadows move. Visionaries, and monks in contemplative prayer, can see these things, sometimes.

  There is a light far below underfoot. It is like a maelstrom, because it sucks and pulls at you. I can fight it off. I looked through the nearby dreams and clouds, and saw something only a day or so away from the present location. Maybe the future, maybe the past. I let myself get pulled into it.

  I was standing in the office. Of course. Where else would a ghost go? There was a new carpet underfoot. New carpet. In all our years together, Sly had never sprung for a bottle of hooch, much less something to make the office look nice. Either he had money, or he was expecting some.

  I did that trick with my eyes so I could see through the carpet. There was the bloodstain. My bloodstain. Of course. Where else would a ghost be standing?

  There was the plate glass window. The full moon was bright, and it shined through the lettering on the glass so their shadows fell around me and through me.

  I did not cast a shadow, of course. Shadows don’t cast shadows. The word ‘Psychic’ was etched into the window in elf-letters, so it did not cast a shadow either. Only someone with the Second Sight could have seen the real sign. SYLVESTER STEEL, Psychic Private Investigator.

  There was also a distorted image of the office all around me, a memory. It was a memory of unlocking and opening the door just there. Reaching a hand toward the light switch, but freezing when I saw a long, black shape on the floor, the shape of a fallen body. Litter from the desk was all around it, and the window was broken with bullet holes. One of the bullets had struck just above the letter I in FLINT. Panic and fear choked me.

  I was drawn step by awful step, in the frozen way we walk in nightmares, where distances are distorted and walking three steps takes three eternities.

  I put out my hand, hoping it was not him, hoping, praying the only prayer I knew. Now I lay me down to sleep…I pray the Lord my soul to keep…If I…If I…

  The body turned over before I could touch it, flopping like a dead fish. He grinned at me, a sick, empty, skull-like grin, full of anger by no mirth.

  “Oh my God!” a human voice screamed. “It was not me, Matt! I didn’t do it!”

  That voice was in the real world. The memory that had drawn me here rippled and faded. The broken window was whole again. Sly was sleeping, no, not any more, he had been sleeping on the rollaway bed we used here in the office for late nights or stowing some client who needed a place for one night. It folded into a couch, and there was a holster on the back where we used to keep the revolver. Now he was naked, and the sheets were all twisted around him, soaked with sweat, and Sly was fumbling for the holster, finding nothing.

  “There is another gun in the top drawer,” I said, trying to light another imaginary cigarette. I could get the glow of the match reflecting off my cupped fingers correctly, but the light was pearly-white rather than red, and the taste was off. “The one marked A. A for Automatic. But we keep that filing cabinet locked, remember? So who did you give the key to? Or is it whom?”

  His eyes had trouble focusing on me. “Matt? Is that you?”

  That surprised me, so I dropped my cigarette. It did not fall, but floated near me at shoulder height like an annoying little fish. “Can you hear me?”

  He nodded. “I can hear you. Faintly.”

  “Lorelei wants me to prove I did not commit suicide, so she could get the insurance money.”

  That made him tremble. He went over to the hat rack. His hat was not on the hat rack but his clothes were. He got his pants, put them on, put on his shirt, but did not bother to button it up. I knew him pretty well, knew his little habits and ticks: this was what actors call ‘business.’ He was doing little ordinary things to give his nerves a chance to die down.

  I wondered where his hat was. It was an ugly thing with a garish hatband, but he was real attached to it. He would doff his hat with exaggerated courtesy to the maidens passing by with a flourish like a cavalier, but only to the fair ones.

  He walked slowly around me, got behind the desk, and sat in my chair. I suppose it was his chair, now. His old chair had two books and a potted plant atop it. Maybe he had always envied me my view. If so, he never mentioned it once. And why a potted plant? He did not strike me as a plant kind of guy. Maybe I did not know him so well after all.

  “Light up a cigarette,” I said, “If I smell one, maybe I can remember what they are like.”

  He chuckled without mirth. “Like that voodoo case down south. Remember that one? The Baron said that cigar smoke called the Loa. Whiskey, too.” But he did not light up.

  “I kind of liked the old sign,” I said, nodding at the window. “Thought it was kind of funny.”

  “Gave you top billing,” he said with a grimace. “So, do you have any messages for the living?”

  “Sure,” I said, swatting the pathetic, imaginary cigarette out of the air next to me. “Look for a stock market break next year, in 1954. There will be large gains for long-term equity investors.”

  “Matt,” he said sadly, “This is 1954. It’s been months since you appeared to Rory. The insurance company paid. Judge O’Keefe looked into her heart with the special way he has, and saw her memories, and he believed her, and ruled in her favor. So I know you did not commit suicide.”

  I looked around again, this time with my eyes closed. I could feel the beat of life inside him, like heat from an unseen campfire. I finally understood what drove vampires crazy: Being able to feel being alive, but not being able to truly be alive. Drinking the living blood and feeling it inside you, just for a moment. Almost like the real thing. Undead onanism.

  I opened my eyes. “You were dreaming about me. That is what called me here.”

  “Matt, I did not do it. I am not the one who killed you.”

  “Of course not!” I said harshly, letting my face look more like a skull and less like a man. “You never had the guts.”

  Hands shaking, he opened the cigarette case on the desk, the nice silver one Lorelei bought me as a present, and lit up. I did like the smell, and it did melt my face back into a more human look. Maybe that voodoo doctor had been right about tobacco and ghosts. Too bad I had not been killed in a tobacco shop.

  “So why are you haunting me?” he asked in a small voice. He did not look at me. His eyes were resting on the open cigarette case. Maybe he was counting how many smokes he had left.

  “Is that why you are here?” I looked at the safe, made the surface invisible to me, and saw some of the relics and special candles missing. “Good grief! Do you have Father Pat over at your apartment, performing an exorcism? Really? To allay me?”

  “Uh, actually, he’s at Lorelei’s house in the suburbs, along with Brother Sean and the Big Black Cat. Your house, I guess. Your name is still on the lease.”

  “You called the Big Black Cat on me? You bastard.” I wondered how much that had set the partnership back, either in money or favors owed. The Cat was expensive. And mean. He and I had not even called up the Cat for the Murderer of Saint-Marks-in-the
-Bowery.

  Then I remembered it was not a partnership any more. It was just his money.

  “Why don’t you rest in peace?” he demanded, “Why are you haunting me? You’ve got a nice crypt at Saint Patrick’s. It has not been legal to put any bones there for a hundred years. Do you know the strings I had to pull to get that, and the favors I had to call in?”

  “How many?”

  “Lots! I was up in the Catskills for two weeks with a bazooka on my shoulder, chasing a hut running on chicken legs, just to get the Great Gray Man to owe me a favor, and listen to me, which I traded to the Lady in the Well, so’s she could put me right with the Commissioner. But I did it! We got you interred, with carved stone with your name on it, and everything. LOVING HUSBAND AND FAITHFUL SOLDIER, it says. Rory and me picked the words. Father Donovan said the blessing. He is blind, but he said he could see you there, smiling. I light a candle for you every Sunday, and two during Lent.”

  I did not remember that scene. From my point of view it had not happened yet. The same way a timeless ghost can now and again tell living men their future, men can prophesize to us.

  Saint Patrick’s had special crypts set aside for people like us. Sly and I and a good many people in Breezy Point in Queens, Bensonhurst in Brooklyn, and Woodlawn in the Bronx are twilight people like us. Our folks all came from Terryglass Parish in the Diocese of Killaloe, in Cashel.

  Saint Columba of Terryglass, one of the Twelve Apostles of Ireland, founded the great Abbey there. The Gray Folk of the Gray Lake, Loch Riach, over which he was lord, are the ones from whom we get our sight. Back before Saint Patrick came, the daughters of Terryglass were sometimes sold into marriage and thrown in the water with weights on their ankles, because their fathers made bargains with voices that spoke out of the night, promising great things. The Bride-girls of the Gray Lake did not quite die, and sometimes they could send their babies to the shore in a coracle, for sunlight people to find and raise; and woe to him who passed the crying child by, and did not pick him up.

  I remember Gramps telling how, when the storm wind was high, and the Horned Huntsman was riding with his devil dogs along the black clouds, the lake water subsided and grew strangely clear. One could see the carved columns and twisted spires of the pagan ruins, where the serpents that Saint Patrick later banished were worshiped of old, in fanes far underneath the waters of Loch Riach, and seaweed-coated temples lit by strange torches; and one could see the watching eyes that looked upward, never asleep, looking back. Gramps used to scare the piss out of me with his old stories.

  Lorelei had some twilight blood, too, on her mother’s side, and she had the sight. Most of our customers do. Normal people could not even see the crimes folk hired us to solve.

  “So you go to mass now?” I asked skeptically. He was not what I thought of as a praying man.

  “Regular as clockwork,” he said nodding. I was afraid he was going to say religiously, but that might have been over his head. “Ever since you, ah–you know. Departed. We all loved you, jackass or no. The boys down at McSorley’s hoisted a cup to your loving memory.”

  The thought of the old gang made me curious. I suddenly felt myself shrinking a bit, looking more human.

  “Sly, I just want to know–”

  “Yeah?”

  I wanted to know how Lorelei was doing. If she missed me. That sort of thing. But instead I said, “Nice digs,” I said. “I wanted to know how you pay for all this stuff. Is that a sferracavallo on the shelf?”

  “I’ve had some good cases lately. Remember the Crow murders? Turns out the Crow Cousins were Renfrews, playing footsie with the Night Folk of the Blood Feast. And then there was a whole coven of Drowned Ones cooperating with smugglers and Nicors causing all those wrecks up the coast, near the haunted lighthouse the Good Witch uses. And it turns out the Good Witch weren’t so good. We tried to take her alive, but the Gold-hoofed Snow-white Hart tore off her mask and trampled her. Just like that.”

  “You got the Hart to come with you?”

  “Some of the buildings in the city are old enough to come awake, and they like me, and the Commissioner likes anyone who keeps the buildings quiet, and he knows Arthegall and Calidore in the Summer Queen’s Court, so yeah. I called the Hart. After the Lighthouse Witch had her mask come off, and she was all worms inside, me and Muddy got all her files—she wrote everything down on dry autumn leaves, so she could keep track and blackmail and curse her ex-partners—and it was pretty hectic.”

  Muddy was the name of a police dog in the K-9 corps. Moddey Dhoo was from the Isle of Man, and he never grew a single gray hair in his fur, never failed in his strength, and he never grew any older. Sometimes he helped us on cases. He never talked when there were normal people around, and I always found him surly and sour when he did talk. Sly was just dog people, I suppose. I could just picture them slobbering and grinning together.

  “Now, with those files,” Sly was saying, breaking into just such a grin as I had imagined, “the Police Commissioner O’Hanlon believed me when I told him there was one guy behind it all, fixing everything up.”

  “Not your ‘Fixer’ theory again!” I groaned. “A Napoleon of crime! A spider in maze! You read too many dime novels.”

  “I don’t believe in coincidences. Who else could get half-deads of Undersea and the man-eating mermaids and human gunrunners to mesh like clockwork? Tir-fo-Thuinn and the Tir-na-Nog and great Nodens who reigns in drowned Atlantis all singing from the same sheet music? And the Lighthouse Witch? She had you fooled your whole life. Um. I mean, us. Fooled us. Someone is coordinating all this.”

  “The Fixer is just another one of your dumb ideas. You’ll have this business ruined in no time, without me.”

  “Actually, Harvey the Pooka believes me,” said Sly, with a bit of a smirk.

  “That drunk bunny!”

  “He’s got friends at Court. He knows Canacee—you know, Cambell’s sister—and she sometime lends me her ring, for shadowing jobs. And so business has been picking up.” The smirk grew more prominent. He actually was enjoying the chance that never happened in life, to tell me this. To say I told you so.

  A kind of dull silence rested in the room. I wished he had offered me a chair. I wished I could sit down. I was beginning to resent how comfy he looked in my chair. It burned me to think that all these years, without a word, without a sign, he had been jealous of something as petty as a chair, a view through a window. I guess you never really know people.

  He straightened up in my stolen chair, put his hand on the cigarette case. His voice was a little sharp now. “Nice catching up with you. Good luck in the next world and all that. Can you depart now and stay departed?”

  “Why are you having nightmares about me?”

  “I am not the one who killed you, Matt. I keep telling you that.”

  “And I already said I know that. I know who killed me. You must know, too. You must have figured it.” I pointed at the drawer marked A, the top of the filing cabinet. I was just as surprised as he was when the drawer unlocked itself with a click and slid open.

  It was not me doing it. I am not a poltergeist, just an ordinary ghost. Poltergeists are driven by anger, damned to continually visit the same few spots, over and over again, screaming in rage, throwing fits, throwing stones. They are the only ghosts so heavy with anger that they can touch the material world.

  But the drawer came open and kept coming. It made a metal screech as it came. Slowly, it tilted. Sly watched it with his eye wide and wet with fear.

  It fell to the ground with a clatter like a cymbal, shockingly loud. The drawer was entirely empty. There was nothing in it. The aspergillum of holy water blessed by an archbishop was gone, the one I had once used to burn an archvampire into nothingness. The bottle of pills imported from Jamaica that we use on the sunlit people if they saw something they were not supposed to see—also gone. The automatic was gone, as was the clip of silver bullets, also expensive, also gone. The relic of Saint Ailbe of Emly, which
no wolf or werewolf could approach, because of one act of kindness long remembered — that was gone, and it was priceless. A was for Aspergillum, A was for Amnesia. A was for automatic. A was for Ailbe. Funny, weren’t I? My life was full of little jokes like that.

  I felt a pounding sensation in my brain again, and I did not even have a brain, only a memory of a brain. “Where is all our stuff? Our gear? It is all gone?” I looked again at the new carpet, the newly etched window with the expensive lettering only dusk people can see. “What did you do with it? Sell it for money?”

  “I don’t have a key to that drawer, remember?” said Sly, his voice suddenly firmer, harder and colder than I ever heard it before.

  He continued: “I dropped it down a storm drain when Mayor’s Brother, wearing his rat skin, bit me. Remember? Such an expensive key, made of orichalcum from Atlantis and silver from the mines on the dark side of the moon, because you insisted on a lock made by elfs, a labyrinth lock no human could pick or force, and no gypsy could charm. There were only two keys, and mine fell down the storm drain. You never forgave me.”

  I was not listening. I was too busy shouting. “Did you sell my relic, which my grandfather brought all the way from Tipperary, for money? For daylighter money?” My anger was palpable: I could see the papers on the desk fly into the air, the lamp fell over, the windows rattled in the panes, and a dozen little dust devils of wind starting whipping around the room. “Did you sell them all? All the tools and weapons of the work?”

  “You don’t remember,” he said in that cold, hard voice of his. “You are becoming empty, Matt. Soon you will be nothing but rage and wind.”

  The whirlwind screamed stronger, and the potted plant, of all things, jumped up into the air and cracked him sharply across the face. The pot broke with a bright, sharp sound like fine china breaking. Dirt sprayed across the drapes and window behind, and the shard of the pot hit the wall and ceiling. There was blood all over his face, both from cuts on his cheeks and forehead, and gushing from both nostrils.