Selected Short Stories Featuring Ghost Dust

by Nicolas Wilson

not the showman you are.”

  “Who could be?” Mr. Houdini asked, with a twinkle in his eye.

  Roberts was not, for a moment, an impressive man. Bespectacled, balding, and with a thin beard and a thinner frame, he looked as an aging spinster beside Mr. Houdini’s rather rugged and muscular build- an old maid, to you youngins. But he had enough pride to him that he rose up from his seat and put out his hand to be shaken. “I understand your hostility to spiritualists; and I admire your skepticism. Those who would abuse innocent pain deserve the damnation of more than a fiery tongue. While enough of them are likely themselves innocent and convinced, I’d prefer to know myself, if I am genuine or merely insane.”

  Mr. Houdini sat on Roberts’ right, his dominant side, holding onto his hand and wrist, while Doyle did the same on his left. At Houdini’s insistence, both he and Doyle placed a foot over each of the mystic’s feet.

  The lights were low, lit only by a single candle in the center of the table, already burnt through most of the wax. As the candlelight waned, the room became chilled, and all the men felt a breeze.

  Suddenly there was light, not so much that you could see clearly, but enough to see what was making the light: a face, the face of a woman, a woman Mr. Houdini hadn’t seen in a very long time, and his mouth opened and couldn’t be shut.

  She spoke to him. My Yiddish is, well, I’ve been warned off the language, as I have a tendency to mistakenly mutter curses rather than proper phrasing, but she said in his mother’s tongue, “My little boy.”

  “Momma,” he said, and a tear went down his face.

  “It’s my birthday. Did you remember?” She asked, her voice wavering upon the final word.

  He turned out his collar and produced a flower he’d tacked to the inside of his lapel- a black Hungarian flower, specifically. He released it from the pin, set it down on the table and pushed it forward, in the direction of the face. She breathed it in, and when she exhaled the smell of it filled the room. Then her expression changed. She shimmered, and when she spoke, her voice was stern. “You must stop this, Eric. Your crusade… the powers you’ve angered are a gathering shadow over you. You will lose your life, and death will be most unkind to you.”

  “Enough.” Mr. Houdini said, and every muscle in his body tensed at once; his hand squeezed down so tightly that Roberts’ hand emitted a series of painful pops, and the mystic’s face contorted.

  Mr. Houdini released his hand and rose, his entire body balled as if in a fist. “Stop this.” Small though he might have been, nobody in a right mind would have denied his request. But at a minimum, the medium was not in a right mind, and despite some lingering pain, he appeared distant. Mr. Houdini appeared about to belt Roberts in the mouth, when the latter started to vomit. He vomited enough that there shouldn’t have been anything left of the man but a husk, yet he kept at it, a frothy slime that covered the floor by an inch.

  Mr. Houdini walked hurriedly from the room, and Doyle followed. He’d badly misread Mr. Houdini, and believed the man’s distress came from disappointment at being wrong. Doyle couldn’t help himself, and there was a pinch of triumph in his rounded boy’s cheeks when he asked, “Well?”

  “Yet another medium requesting I cease my investigations to his own benefit. My only surprise is how long it’s taken one to find a photograph of my mother and to learn Yiddish.”

  “I assure you the man speaks not a word.”

  “And you know this how? By his admission? I’m sorry. No amount of ectoplasm, or of visual or auditory trickery, is enough.”

  Wounded, and perhaps sensing that he may not have another opportunity, Doyle hurriedly blurted, “You must by now know how many spiritualists have predicted your death. I worry over those dangerous stunts of yours.”

  “I defy Death daily- and predict my demise every morning. Sir Arthur,” he said with a light smile and a shallow bow, and took his leave. Those were the last words spoken between them; no extant letters seem to have passed, either, as both men seemed wary of misuse of their words.

  “And maybe it’s just a ghost story. After all, Mr. Houdini never spoke on it, and Doyle, prolific as he was, never wrote it down. But there are times, especially at night walking these halls in the dark, surrounded by so many of the things that tried so desperately to take away Mr. Houdini’s life- only to see his body do the work itself- that I feel his breath on the nape of my neck, or see a shadow that shouldn’t be on the floor, or what I think’s a reflection for a moment, that when stared at disappears.”

  “But Mr. Houdini left instructions with Bess. If ever he got a message across, if ever he spoke to her from beyond the grave, there was a phrase he was to speak to her. She gave an annual séance for him for ten long years and not a peep- and declared ten years was too long to wait for any man- even Mr. Houdini.”

  “Now, unfortunately, the gift shop’s closed; we usually end the tour there, but they cash out before dark, safety concerns. If any of the children saw something they simply must have, perhaps we could do something for it, but- no? All right. I have to ask, because I hate the thought of sending away some imp with a twinkle in his eye. You folks have an excellent night, and drive carefully home. I can’t guarantee what manner of afterlife you might experience, or if there is one.”

  I let the last of them out the old door, which latched with a familiarity that felt like a hand on my shoulder, and I realized I felt warmth, too; I couldn’t be certain if I heard the words, or felt them ask, “Rosabelle believes?”

  “I believe she does, Mr. Houdini,” I said with a shiver. “The good Lord knows I do.”

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  Suicide Spear

  Time was, we called these ships tin cans. But this generation, the one the new pilots come up out of, don’t understand the reference. And nothing makes you feel quite so old as having to explain ancient food storage to a bunch of twenty year olds.

  Officially, these ships are called Vengeance class, but for a long time the Navy’s called them the “Tip of the Spear,” the first point in their defensive strategy; they even look like spearheads. Those of us unfortunate enough to fly them know them as suicide spears.

  They were originally designed as drones, until the Hack War, when every piece of remote operated military equipment changed hands roughly every 15 minutes. So they gutted the spears to hollow out a little hole for a human pilot.

  There have been a lot of birds nicknamed “Widowmaker” over the years, but since this isn’t an aviation history class, I won’t bore you with their titles or respective failure rates. The spears are deadlier than all of them; the Navy was worried enough about the moniker that regs state to fly a spear you can’t be married, can’t have dependents.

  Not that I blame the designers. The spear was meant to be cutting edge tech. Nations were increasingly building mobile space stations, and sending them into far-flung corners of the known galaxies. The spears were supposed to use some of the most advanced avionics ever designed to navigate through the mapped wormholes, to counter rogue or hostile stations- then had the space for all that computing power halved to shove a shaved chimp failsafe inside.

  But what makes them truly dangerous is the way they attack. They really are designed like spearheads- they’re meant to punch holes through the inferior armor of space stations. I don’t understand physics well enough to understand what the hell the crap about diamond alloys and atoms arranged in cubes and triangular designs actually does, but functionally, when flown right, you could shoot a spear through the heart of a planet and come out the other side fine- that is, if you get the angles right. And if you don't, well, I at least plan on leaving a pretty smear across the broadside of a ship.

  The problem is that those advanced systems that were meant to coordinate these finicky flight patterns were crippled, and the ones that stayed are buggy as all hell, so it takes a combination of skill, luck, and intuition not to kill yourself your first flight out. The spears have a first mission death ra
te of 70%; lifetime rate, assuming twenty years’ service, bumps it up to 90%. Of course, that would be in peacetime, and this is anything but.

  The aliens (and I’m using the term here for simplicity, not because I’m making an assertion or assumption) made first contact over England. Their ship landed in the mouth of the Thames, and it was an oddly calm day for wind and sea both, so naturally the Brits named them the Halcyon. Now apparently the Halcyon were operating on some old news, and still thought the Brits were the dominant power in the world, so they wanted a meeting with the Brit higher-ups.

  A group of them, including the Prime Minister and secretaries from the regular and shadow cabinets, entered the ship, leaving a Social Democrat in charge of the country (God save the queen). A week passed, without word from the diplomatic mission, until one of them “escaped.” He was a Box operative masquerading as an MP.

  He claimed the Halcyon were feigning peaceful operations, and had even greeted the mission with a decadent feast and festivities. He said the Halcyon looked as human as you and me, but that they wanted to take the Earth for themselves. There was some other stuff about thinking he’d seen his dead father, but no one really paid it much mind- he’d obviously had an ordeal, and didn’t even return to Military Intelligence for