by Butcher, Jim
“Let me tell you something, Morty. When I come into a place and don’t say a thing except, ‘Let’s talk,’ and the first thing I hear is ‘I didn’t do it,’ it makes me think that the person I’m talking to must have done something. You know what I’m saying?”
His florid face lost several shades of red. “No way, man. Look, I’ve got nothing to do with what’s been going on. Not my fault, none of my business, man.”
“With what’s been going on,” I said. I looked down at my folded hands for a moment, and then back up at him. “What’s the suitcase for, Morty? You do something that means you need to leave town for a while?”
He swallowed, thick neck working. “Look, Dresden. Mister Dresden. My sister got sick, see. I’m just going to help her out.”
“Sure you are,” I said. “That’s what you’re doing. Going out of town to help your sick sister.”
“I swear to God,” Morty said, lifting a hand, his face earnest.
I pointed at the chair across from me. “Sit down, Morty.”
“I’d like to, but I got a cab coming.” He turned toward the door.
“Ventas servitas,” I hissed, nice and dramatic, and threw some will at the door. Sudden wind slammed it shut right in front of his eyes. He squeaked, and backed up several paces, staring at the door, then whirling to face me.
I used the remnants of the same spell to push out a chair opposite me. “Sit down, Morty. I’ve got a few questions. Now, if you cut the crap, you’ll make your cab. And, if not . . .” I left the words hanging. One thing about intimidation is that people can always think up something worse that you could do to them than you can, if you leave their imagination some room to play.
He stared at me, and swallowed again, his jowls jiggling. Then he moved to the chair as though he expected chains to fly out of it and tie him down the moment he sat. He balanced his weight on the very edge of the chair, licked his lips, and watched me, probably trying to figure out the best lies for the questions he expected.
“You know,” I said. “I’ve read your books, Morty. Ghosts of Chicago. The Spook Factor. Two or three others. You did good work, there.”
His expression changed, eyes narrowing in suspicion. “Thank you.”
“I mean, twenty years ago, you were a pretty damn good investigator. Sensitivity to spiritual energies and apparitions—ghosts. What we call an ectomancer in the business.”
“Yeah,” he said. His eyes softened a little, if not his voice. He avoided looking directly in my face. Most people do. “That was a long time ago.”
I kept my voice in the same tone, the same expression. “And now what? You run séances for people. How many times do you actually get to contact a spirit? One time in ten? One in twenty? Must be a real letdown from the actual stuff. Playacting, I mean.”
He was good at covering his expressions—I’ll give him that. But I’m used to watching people. I saw anger in the way he held his neck and shoulders. “I provide a legitimate service to people in need.”
“No. You play on their grief to take them for all you can. You don’t believe that you’re doing right, Morty, deep down. You can justify it any way you want, but you don’t like what you’re doing. If you did, your powers wouldn’t have faded like they have.”
His jaw set in a hard line, and he didn’t try to hide the anger anymore—the first honest reaction I’d seen out of him since he’d cried out in surprise. “If you’ve got a point, Dresden, get to it. I’ve got a plane to catch.”
I spread my fingers over the tabletop. “In the past two weeks,” I said, “the spooks have been going mad. You should see the trouble they’ve caused. That poltergeist in the Campbell house. The Basement Beast at U. of C. Agatha Hagglethorn, down at Cook County.”
Morty grimaced and wiped at his face again. “Yeah. I hear things. You and the Knight of the Sword have been covering the worst of it.”
“What else has been happening, Morty? I’m getting a little cranky losing sleep, so keep it short and simple.”
“I don’t know,” he said, sullen. “I’ve lost my powers, remember.”
I narrowed my eyes. “But you hear things, Morty. You’ve still got some sources in the Nevernever. Why are you leaving town?”
He laughed, and it had a shaky edge to it. “You said you read all of my books? Did you read They Shall Rise?”
“I glanced over it. End-of-the-world-type stuff. I figured you had been talking to the wrong kind of spirits too much. They love trying to sell people on Armageddon. A lot of them are cons like you.”
He ignored me. “Then you read my theory on the barrier between our world and the Nevernever. That it’s slowly being torn away.”
“And you think it’s falling to pieces, now? Morty, that wall has been there since the dawn of time. I don’t think it’s going to collapse right now.”
“Wall.” He said the word with a sneer. “More like Saran Wrap, wizard. Like Jell-O. It bends and wiggles and stirs.” He rubbed his palms on his thighs, shivering.
“And it’s falling now?”
“Look around you!” he shouted. “Good God, wizard. The past two weeks, the border’s been waggling back and forth like a hooker at a dockworker’s convention. Why the hell do you think all of these ghosts have been rising?”
I didn’t let the sudden volume of his tone make me blink. “You’re saying that this instability has been making it easier for ghosts to cross over from the Nevernever?”
“And easier to form bigger, stronger ghosts when people die,” he said. “You think you’ve got some pissed-off ghosts now? Wait until some honor student on her way out of the south side with a college scholarship gets popped by accident in a gang shoot-out. Wait until some poor sap who got AIDS from a blood transfusion breathes his last.”
“Bigger, badder ghosts,” I said. “Superghosts. That’s what you’re talking about.”
He laughed, a nasty little laugh. “New generation of viruses is coming, too. Things are going to hell all over. Eventually, that border’s going to get thin enough to spit through, and you’ll have more problems with demon attacks than gang violence.”
I shook my head. “All right,” I said. “Let’s say that I buy that the barrier is fluid rather than concrete. There’s turbulence in it, and it’s making crossing over easier, both ways. Could something be causing the turbulence?”
“How the hell should I know?” he snarled. “You don’t know what it’s like, Dresden. To speak to things that exist in the past and in the future as well as in the now. To have them walk up to you at the salad bar and start telling you how they murdered their wife in her sleep.
“I mean, you think you’ve got a hold on things, that you understand, but in the end it all falls to pieces. A con is simpler, Dresden. You make order. People don’t give a flying fuck if Uncle Jeffrey really forgives them for missing his last birthday party. They want to know that the world is a place where Uncle Jeffrey can and should forgive them.” He swallowed, and looked around the room, at the fake tomes and the fake skull. “That’s what I sell them. Closure. Like on television. They want to know that it’s all going to work out in the end, and they’re happy to pay for it.”
A car honked outside. Morty glared at me. “We’re through.”
I nodded.
He jerked to his feet, splotches of color in his cheeks. “God, I need a drink. Get out of town, Dresden. Something came across last night like nothing I’ve ever felt.”
I thought of ruined cars and rosebushes planted in consecrated ground. “Do you know what it is?”
“It’s big,” Morty said. “And it’s pissed off. It’s going to start killing, Dresden. And I don’t think you or anyone else is going to be able to stop it.”
“But it’s a ghost?”
He gave me a smile that showed me his canines. It was creepy on that florid, eyes-too-wide face. “It’s a nightmare.” He started to turn away. I wanted to let him go, but I couldn’t. The man had become a liar, a sniveling con, but he hadn
’t always been.
I rose and beat him to the door, taking his arm in one hand. He spun to face me, jerking his arm away, glaring defiantly at my eyes. I avoided locking gazes. I didn’t want to take a look at Mortimer Lindquist’s soul.
“Morty,” I said, quietly. “Get away from your séances for a while. Go somewhere quiet. Read. Relax. You’re older now, stronger. If you give yourself a chance, the power will come back”
He laughed again, tired and jaded. “Sure, Dresden. Just like that.”
“Morty—”
He turned away from me and stalked out the door. He didn’t bother to lock the place up behind him. I watched him head out to the cab, which waited by the curb. He lugged his bag into the backseat, and then followed it.
Before the cab pulled out, he rolled down the window. “Dresden,” he called. “Under my chair there’s a drawer. My notes. If you want to kill yourself trying to stand up to this thing, you might as well know what you’re getting into.”
He rolled the window back up as the cab pulled away. I watched it go, then went back inside. I found the drawer hidden in the base of the carved wooden chair, and inside I found a trio of old leather-bound journals, vellum pages covered in script that started out neat in the oldest one and became a jerky scrawl in the most recent entries. I held the books up to my mouth and inhaled the smell of leather, ink, paper; musty and genuine and real.
Morty hadn’t had to give me the notes. Maybe there was some root of the person he had been, deep down somewhere, that wasn’t dead yet. Maybe I’d done him a little good with that advice. I’d like to think that.
I blew out a breath, found a phone and called a cab of my own. I needed to get the Beetle out of impound if I could. Maybe Murphy could fix it for me.
I gathered the journals and went to the porch to wait for the cab, shutting the door behind me. Something big was coming through town, Morty had said.
“A nightmare,” I said, out loud.
Could Mort be right? Could the barrier between the spirit world and our own be falling apart? The thought made me shudder. Something had been formed, something big and mean. And my gut instinct told me that it had a purpose. All power, no matter how terrible or benign, whether its wielder is aware of it or not, has a purpose.
So this Nightmare was here for something. I wondered what it wanted. Wondered what it would do.
And worried that, all too soon, I would find out.
Chapter Eleven
An unmarked car sat in my driveway with two nondescript men inside.
I got out of the taxi, paid off the cabby, and nodded at the driver of the car, Detective Rudolph. Rudy’s clean-cut good looks hadn’t faded in the year since he’d started with Special Investigations, Chicago’s unspoken answer to the officially unacknowledged world of the supernatural. But the time had hardened him a bit, made him a little less white around the eyes.
Rudolph nodded back, not even trying to hide his glower. He didn’t like me. Maybe it had something to do with the bust several months back. Rudy had cut and run, rather than stick it out next to me. Before that, I’d escaped police custody while he was supposed to be watching me. I’d had a darn good reason to escape, and it wasn’t really fair of him to hold that against me, but hey. Whatever got him through the day.
“Heya, Detective,” I said. “What’s up?”
“Get in the car,” Rudolph said.
I planted my feet and shoved my hands in my pockets with a certain nonchalance. “Am I under arrest?”
Rudolph narrowed his eyes and started to speak again, but the man in the passenger seat cut him off. “Heya, Harry,” Detective Sergeant John Stallings said, nodding at me.
“How you doing, John? What brings you out today?”
“Murph wanted us to ask you down to a scene.” He reached up and scratched at several days’ worth of unshaven beard beneath a bad haircut and intelligent dark eyes. “Hope you got the time. We tried at your office, but you haven’t been in, so she sent us down here to wait for you.”
I shifted Mort Lindquist’s books in my arms. “I’m busy today. Can it wait?”
Rudolph spat, “The lieutenant says she wants you down there now, you get your ass down there. Now.”
Stallings gave Rudolph a look, and then rolled his eyes for my benefit. “Look, Harry. Murphy told me to tell you that this one was personal.”
I frowned. “Personal, eh?”
He spread his hands. “It’s what she said.” He frowned and then added, “It’s Micky Malone.”
I got a sickly little feeling in my stomach. “Dead?”
Stallings’s jaw twitched. “You’d better come see for yourself.”
I closed my eyes and tried not to get frustrated. I didn’t have time for detours. It would take me hours to grind through Mort’s notes, and sundown, when the spirits would be able to cross over from the Nevernever, would come swiftly.
But Murphy did plenty for me. I owed her. She’d saved my life a couple of times, and vice versa. She was my main source of income, too. Karrin Murphy headed up Special Investigations, a post that had traditionally resulted in a couple of months of bumbling and then a speedy exit from the police force. Murphy hadn’t bumbled—instead, she’d hired the services of Chicago’s only professional wizard as a consultant. She was getting to where she had a pretty good grasp on the local preternatural predators, at least the most common of them, but when things got hairy she still called me in. Technically, I show up on the paperwork as an investigative consultant. I guess the computer records system doesn’t have numerical codes for demon banishment, divination spells, or exorcisms.
S.I. had gone toe to toe with one of the worst things anyone but a wizard like me was ever likely to see, only the year before—a half-ton of indestructible loup-garou. They’d taken some serious casualties. Six dead, including Murphy’s partner. Micky Malone had gotten hamstrung. He’d gone through therapy, and had come along for one last job when Michael and I took down that demon-summoning sorcerer. After that, though, he’d decided that his limp was going to keep him from being a good cop, and retired on disability.
I felt guilty for that—maybe irrational, true, but if I’d been a little smarter or a little faster, maybe I could have saved those people’s lives. And maybe I could have saved Micky’s health. No one else saw it that way, but I did.
“All right,” I said. “Give me a second to put these away.”
The ride was quiet, except for a little meaningless chatter from Stallings. Rudolph ignored me. I closed my eyes and ached along the way. Rudolph’s radio squawked and then fell abruptly silent. I could smell burnt rubber or something, and knew that it was likely my fault.
I opened one eye and saw Rudolph scowling back at me in the mirror. I half-smiled, and closed my eyes again. Jerk.
The car stopped in a residential neighborhood near West Armitage, down in Bucktown. The district had gotten its name from the number of immigrant homes once there, and the goats kept in people’s front yards. The homes had been tiny affairs, stuffed with too-large families and children.
Bucktown had been lived in for a century and it was all grown up. Literally. The houses on their tiny lots hadn’t had much room to expand out, so they’d grown up instead, giving the neighborhood a stretched, elongated look. The trees were ancient oaks and sycamores, and decorated the tiny yards in stately majesty, except where they’d been roughly hacked back from power lines and rooftops. Shadows fell in sharp slants from all the tall trees and tall houses, turning the streets and sidewalks into candy canes of light and darkness.
One of the houses, a two-story white-on-white number, had its small driveway full and another half-dozen cars parked out on the street, plus Murphy’s motorcycle leaning on its kickstand in the front yard. Rudolph pulled the car up alongside the curb across the street from that house and killed the engine. It went on rattling and coughing for a moment before it died.
I got out of the car and felt something wrong. An uneasy feeling ran over me,
prickles of sensation along the nape of my neck and against my spine.
I stood there for a minute, frowning, while Rudolph and Stallings got out of the car. I looked around the neighborhood, trying to pin down the source of the odd sensations. The leaves in the trees, all in their autumn motley, rustled and sighed in the wind, occasionally falling. Dried leaves rattled and scraped over the streets. Cars drove by in the distance. A jet rumbled overhead, a deep and distant sound.
“Dresden,” Rudolph snapped. “Let’s go.”
I lifted a hand, extending my senses out, pushing my perception out along with my will. “Hang on a second,” I said. “I need to . . .” I quit trying to speak, and searched for the source of the sensation. What the hell was it?
“Fucking showboat,” Rudolph growled. I heard him start toward me.
“Hang on, kid,” Stallings said. “Let the man work. We’ve both seen what he can do.”
“I haven’t seen shit that can’t be explained,” Rudolph growled. But he stayed put.
I drifted across the street, to the yard of the house in question, and found the first body in the fallen leaves, five feet to my left. A small, yellow-and-white-furred cat lay there, twisted so that its forelegs faced one way, its hindquarters the opposite. Something had broken its neck.
I felt a pang of nausea. Death isn’t ever pretty, really. It’s worst with people, but with the animals that are close to mankind, it seems to be a little nastier than it might be elsewhere in the wild kingdom. The cat couldn’t have reached its full growth, yet—maybe a kitten from early in the spring, roaming the neighborhood. There was no collar on its neck.
I could feel a little cloud of disturbance around it, a kind of psychic energy left by traumatic, agonizing, and torturous events. But this one little thing, one animal’s death, shouldn’t have been enough to make me aware of it all the way over from my seat in the police car.
Five feet farther on, I found a dead bird. I found its wings in two more places. Then two more birds, without heads. Then something that had been small and furry, and was now small and furry and squishy—maybe a vole or a ground squirrel. And there were more. A lot more—all in all, maybe a dozen dead animals in the front yard, a dozen little patches of violent energies still lingering. No single one of them would have been enough to disturb my wizard’s sense, but all of them together had.