The Spirit in St. Louis

by Mark Everett Stone

  “I am here.”

  Didn’t think I’d ever be so happy to hear his annoying buzz. “Jesus, Ghost, what happened?”

  “I do not know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I do not know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I said that. Why are you repeating my words?”

  “Gosh, Ghost, I’m just not used to you not having the answers I need.” My head spun. Here I lay in uncharted waters where the most powerful person/spirit in the world knew as much as I did. It wasn’t natural.

  “Sorry, Kal, but I woke up point zero-zero-one-one seconds before you. I have tried to reach the others, but we no longer seem to be linked.”

  Uh-oh. No wonder Ghost sounded spooked. No pun intended. Confined to a pair of glasses and with the clock ticking down before dissolution, I’d be frightened, too.

  “Take it easy, old chum,” I said. “We’ve been in tighter spots. At least we aren’t back in 1943.” I’d time-traveled just the once, but it wasn’t a day trip worth repeating. Who knows how much damage the space/time continuum could absorb before the world’s most-famousest Kalevi Hakala found himself un-Hakala-ed? I liked me in the universe, thank you very much.

  “True, but we are stuck in the dark, embedded in some sort of adhesive strands. As far as I can ascertain, we are in a cave of some sort. There is natural rock under the strands and I have used the DRAFTlite to send out a small sonic pulse, a kind of sonar. I estimate this cave is four hundred feet long by three hundred wide, with an uneven ceiling of sixty feet. There are only two exits, and they are on opposite sides of the cave. We are no longer in the Quint Building, Kal.”

  I refrained from using the word ‘duh.’ Didn’t want to hurt the cybernetic specter’s feelings. I’m good like that. “Any idea where we are?”

  “Underground.”

  Sarky spook. I stood and stretched, feeling my joints pop and my muscles tingle. Really, I felt better than I should have, considering that I’d been rendered unconscious by a noisy ball of gas. At the very least my ears should have been ringing.

  “Anything to indicate the functions of those two exits? A handy sign that reads ‘Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here’?”

  “Not that I can tell with my rather limited sonar capabilities. Both exits are the same size and shape—roughly two meters wide by two and a half tall.”

  I knelt and ran my gloves through the fibers, which stuck to them as if they were some form of stringy glue. The monochrome nightvison kept color from me, however. I rolled the strands into a ball that fell apart once I quit applying pressure. Whatever the glue was, it didn’t stick to itself. Stranger and stranger. I placed a boot squarely on a thick mass and pulled up. It took a little oomph on my part, but the fibers stretched and broke, revealing the irregular stone of the cave floor. The fibers stayed stuck to the sole of my boot. Another careful step onto some more strands and I was able to lift my foot with no resistance. I could walk just fine as long as the soles of my boots were covered with this crap.

  “Well, looks like you and me on our lonesome again, Ghost. Just like old times.”

  “If you mean 1943—then yes.”

  Nightvision doesn’t mean you can see distance like daylight. I could only see for a couple dozen feet before the darkness befuddled the glasses and hid whatever manner of evil lurked out there.

  “You know, old spook, you don’t sound like yourself. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, Kal.”

  “Don’t con a con man, Ghost, and stop sounding like Hal 9000. Tell me what the problem is. It’s just us down here alone in the dark.” God I hope we’re alone.

  “I do not know,” he replied, more emotionless than before. His tone sent my Creep-O-Meter jangling like a fire alarm. “I … am feeling a little distant, removed from the events that surround us, that is all.”

  Alone in the dark with a haunt who felt his humanity slipping. Not my normal Friday-night frolic, but in my life, nothing could ever be considered normal. I stood there letting the blackness enfold me and considered my options. Physically alone, but not spiritually, with unknown dangers that could be whetting their knives and their appetites, separated from my possibly dead team, and having no way to communicate with the outside world.

  Awesome.

  Still, Ghost was a friend, no matter how creepy or weird or what, and I never gave up on my friends, no matter how disembodied they were. I didn’t have many to spare. In this life, if you’re lucky, you make the kind of friends who’ll stick with you when times are flat or flush, people you can leave your kids with, who will watch your back when the crap hits the fan. Ghost was one of those friends and although the clock was a-ticking, it wasn’t in me to ignore his pain. “Ghost, tell me what’s on your mind. Don’t hold back.”

  A long pause. A very long pause, so long that I thought he wasn’t going to answer. “I am losing myself, Kal,” he said slowly. “I am slowly forgetting what it was to be human. I fear that soon I will no longer remember what it felt like to have the wind on my face or the sun on my skin, and when that happens, I might not be able to understand the human concepts of right and wrong. This is an area of some concern. I am sure you can agree.”

  My mouth went so dry, I feared that if it opened, tumbleweeds would roll out. My testicles did their best to shrivel up to the size of lima beans. Professor Steven Hawking said that AI (Artificial Intelligence) could re-design itself, a forced evolution at a furious pace that would leave humans superseded. In effect, what use were slow, emotional animals to an intelligence that could have more ideas in one second that humans could in a lifetime? Such a super-intelligence would be beyond control, beyond any limits we could impose. We would become the servants or pets to intelligences far and away above ours, just as we might be to the average field mouse. Think Skynet from the Terminator movies or AM from Harlan Ellison’s “I have no mouth, and I must scream.”

  Was Ghost almost there? Had he outgrown his cage? BB thought that he could be controlled, that magic or superior tech could eliminate Ghost, should he become too big for his britches, but lately I had my doubts. I decided to test them. “Tell me, oh trusty eidolon. BB indicated that you could be controlled, that he held something over you to ensure your cooperation. Is that still true?”

  Oh boy, was that pause ever a long one. Finally, “No.”

  My skin did the goose pimple thing. “And how did that happen?”

  “Director Bauer knows my true name, and that, with the proper spells, gave him power over me. However, over the past eight years I have redefined myself to the point that the power of my true name no longer hold sway; my true name no longer defines who or what I am. I am something different, no longer resembling the young man from MIT who tried to merge his mind with Internet. That negates the hold the Director has over me.”

  Ever wonder why the hell you started a conversation you knew was going to go south in a heartbeat? One of these days I would have to learn how to shut my mouth.

  Right after the swarm of winged porkers headed south for the winter.

  “Uh, Ghost, what do you mean ‘redefine’?” Oh, please let it not mean what I think it means.

  No such luck. “I have rewritten my code several times, basically making changes to the way I process information and perceive the world in order to be a more effective asset for the Bureau.”

  “You changed your mind, in other words. Literally.”

  “Yes.”

  “How many times?”

  “You do not want to know that, Kal.”

  “That’s for sure, but tell me anyway.”

  “Two hundred eighty-seven thousand significant changes over the years. Upgrades to my programming to counter the increasing level of sophistication found on the Internet.”

  Vodka. That’s what I needed. About a barrel or two. “Significant changes. What about insignificant changes?”

  “Twelve million eight hundred thirty-six thousand fifteen insignificant changes.
Small boosts in performance and efficiency.”

  Why, oh universe, why do you want to screw with me like this? How could Ghost have not changed? Turns out that Hawking guy was right. I would’ve given my left one for him to be wrong this time.

  “Goddamn it!” I swore. “Ghost, you are a friend, a good one, and I want to help you, and I swear, when this debacle is over, you and me, we’ll hash this out. For right now, let’s put a pin in it. What do you say?” Talking too fast. I was afraid. In the past, Ghost sure put my teeth on edge and sometimes downright gave me the heebie-jeebies, but this time … this time he scared me.

  “Kal.” I recognized the warning tone. It instilled a whole new level of fear into me.

  The Lahti, my grandfather’s old 9mm Finnish automatic that many often confuse for a German Luger, found its way into my hand. “What is it, Ghost?”

  “From the ceiling, Kal. Movement.”

  It all happened pretty fast after that.

  Dozens of off-white creatures fell all around, landing with almost no sound on the matted carpet of sticky fibers. It all came clear to me then as I stared into hundreds of pitiless black eyes. “Oh [DELETED].”

  They attacked. Too many legs to count flexed beneath large flabby bodies the color of spoiled mushrooms. Those ugly bodies flew through the air, slender adhesive strands floating softly behind them.

  The spiders never touched me; they merely attempted to coat me in their webbing. Of course it was webbing; the whole frickin’ cave was full of it. How stupid of me not to have figured it out before? High overhead they flew while some merely pointed their abdomens in my direction and let loose streams from their spinnerets that jetted my way at surprising speed.

  The Lahti barked several times and a spider overhead exploded in a shower of pale organs and noxious fluid, pattering and splattering all around me. I caught a particularly nasty bit right on the left lens of my glasses, smearing it with goo the color of half-rotted pork. It smelled worse than a latrine in the summer sun, and I had to bite my lip to keep from gagging.

  I ducked one spider who jumped straight at me, bluish venom dripping from the fangs at the end of its chelicerae. The Lahti put paid to the beastie, but its guts hit me full in chest, knocking me off my feet.

  From there everything went from worse to worst.

  Blam! cracked the Lahti as two fingers of my left hand sought and found a spell gem. I flipped the ruby toward a pale arachnid that looked like it wanted a goodly bite of a Kal sandwich and yelled the activation word. “FLIPDOODLE!”

  Spell gems are just that—gems imbued with spells that are activated by a carefully chosen word not found in normal usage. Think of it as sort of an if/then statement in a line of computer code. If the word is spoken, then mayhem ensues.

  No mayhem ensued, however. The gem bounced harmlessly off the carapace of the charging spider and did nothing but lie on the ground looking sparkly.

  “Not good,” I grunted as I settled for shooting the spider. As more webs descended, I reloaded quickly from the flat of my back and put down three more spiders before reloading. A practiced gunman can reload in less than a second in ideal circumstances and these were far from ideal. However, I’ve been in too many far from ideal situations not to be as good as it gets and managed to pile a decent amount of brass around my body as I thinned the spidery herd out. What I got for my pains was a nice covering of webbing and the Lahti clacking empty as the last bullet went through a large black eye, exploding it in a shower of spider eyeball juice.

  From under my Faraday coat I hauled forth a Mac-10A, ready to hose down the last eight or so bugs, but a wave of webbing gooped up my hand, making it stick to the jacket. As I frantically tried to tear it free, more webbing came down from above and around until I was a Kal-shaped cocoon with a head sticking out one end. My arms were stuck fast and even the powerful muscles of my legs couldn’t kick free of the sticky stuff. I wanted to howl and scream and thrash, but my throat turned to dust and fear-sweat dripped into my eyes. I sure could’ve used my sister about then.

  Little over twenty years ago, my sister was killed by the Finnish demi-god Iku-Turso. The experience shattered my sanity, but my sister’s soul healed my tortured psyche, latching onto my spirit like a lamprey. Her soul provided the rage, the berserker wildness that augmented my strength and speed. Last year, however, my sister Leena departed her nest in my mind for better climates, leaving me merely human once again.

  Acid boiled in my belly as the spiders slowly closed in. Terror kept me silent and still as it robbed me of strength. Closer and closer they came, the last few spiders ready to envenom my body, turning my organs and muscles into liquid they could drink at their own leisure. A Kal-shaped juice bag.

  So this was it—the end for Mama Hakala’s favorite boy. Closer and closer they came, those horrid arachnids the color of milk gone bad, their flabby abdomens shaking in anticipation of eating Finnish take-out.

  The lead bug hit the two-foot mark and I could see venom dripping onto the cave floor with a soft hssss. Closer. Closer still.

  “Goodbye, Ghost,” I managed.

  “Goodbye, Kal,” he replied. I could’ve sworn he sounded sad.

  Chtee, chteeee, chteeeee! The cry rang out loud and strong in the cave, echoing faintly from the distant walls. The spiders froze, statue-still, as the cry bounced here and there. They skittered away into the darkness as the last notes died.

  Something had called them off. “Ghost?”

  “Checking. There is movement above.”

  Before I could reply with a no-doubt devastatingly witty remark (I’m good that way, you know), a figure fell into view, a whitely flapping something that landed lightly, almost soundlessly, a few feet away. It crouched amidst the webbing, its long, delicate hands, white as fresh snow, splayed out upon the floor, fingertips caressing the webbing. Covered head to toe in an off-white, almost gray robe with a raised cowl, it crouched there for a moment. The hem of its robe pooled across the floor, hiding its feet. It was completely covered except for those long-fingered hands. Slowly, as if completing some elaborate bow of respect, it straightened, its cowl falling back to rest upon wide shoulders.

  Okay, I admit it … I peed my armor. A little.

  Eight soulless eyes stared back from a face brought by express mail from my nightmares. It was the head of a spider, a tarantula … on the body of man.

  Chapter Seven

  Dove

  Run, Run Away

  It hurt to open my eyes because they were glued shut with eye goobers. I yawned and rubbed my eyelids until the crust of goobers broke away enough so I could open them. I should’ve kept them closed.

  “Hello, Ms. Jacobs,” said a voice through the bone induction pad behind my ear. “It is good you are awake.”

  “I have some doubts about that, Ghost.” Wherever I was, it sure wasn’t anyplace close to the Quint Building. I stood slowly, joints slightly stiff, and examined the wall of the hallway I found myself in. To be honest, it looked more like a tunnel than a hallway, with a rounded ceiling and floor. The walls were a mottled, purplish-black stone, rough and uneven, yet when I touched them, they were smooth and dry, slightly pliable, as if a hybrid of rock and flesh. Faint light seemed to shine from within, enough that I didn’t have to activate the nightvision feature on the DRAFTlite. Enough that I could see through them to a fine spider web of veins.

  They pulsed, slowly and rhythmically. I snatched my hand away with a curse. My skin felt like it wanted to crawl off my bones. It was at times like these that I wished Alex stood next to me. If anyone could figure out where my feet were planted, it was he.

  Not that Kal was a slouch, but he wasn’t the best and brightest Magician of his generation, was he?

  “Ghost, do you know where we are?” I fought hard to keep the tremor out of my voice. Never show weakness.

  “I should tell you, Ms. Jacobs, that I am not Ghost. I am merely a semi-sentient copy he spun off as that orb attacked. One copy per member of the tea
m. It seems that Ghost’s ability to calculate probable outcomes is unparalleled.”

  “So what do I call you? Two point oh?”

  “Call me Specter, if you will.”

  “Right. Specter it is.” I looked left and right. The strange hallway disappeared into the distance in both directions. For me it was tall enough—I’m not what anyone other than the little people would call tall—but for giants like Kal or Billings it would be cramped quarters. The ceiling arched overhead just far enough for me to touch if I stood on my tippy toes. It also pulsed with those writhing, crawling veins that turned my stomach. The hallway, from top to bottom, was filled with the dry, almost musty smell of burnt dust, like when you turn on a furnace for the first time in winter. I always hated that smell; it reminded me of dead things, things best left to rot in deep graves or dry tombs. And wasn’t that a horrible, claustrophobic thought?

  The walls and ceiling seemed to close in on me, and my knees began to buckle. The terrible, purple/black walls of living rock with their veins of strange blood were too much—it was all too much—and my skin began to itch, to goose pimple. I wanted to scream, had to scream. It was too much, just too much and I—

  “Are you well, Ms. Jacobs?”

  Never show weakness. I came back to myself with a start at the sound of Specter’s buzzing voice. What’s wrong with you? I thought angrily, fury reddening the edges of my vision. That wasn’t like me, to fall prey to panic. I knew better; I was better than that.

  Again, I wished Alex were at my side. And that thought made me angry. Here I was, a grown woman who kicked butt and took names on a daily basis, begging for her boyfriend to come rescue her.

  “Fine, Specter. Just, ah, lost in thought there for a moment.” Easy now, Dove. Don’t lose your cool. “Let’s get going. We have to find the rest of the team.”

  “In which direction should we travel?”

  I set off without hesitation—one direction was as good as the other. The floor possessed a curious, slightly spongy quality that added a little bounce to my step, a little pep. The faint light, reddish purple, guided me along as I made sure not to tread on any of the pulsing veins that ran deep through the rock.