Ghostly Echoes

by William Ritter

  “No!” Jackaby managed to wheeze.

  “What’s that? You’d suddenly like to cooperate?” Morwen called up to him.

  Alloch loosened his grasp ever so slightly and Jackaby gasped. “Leave Charlie out of this,” he rasped. “He’s done nothing to you.”

  “That’s not how it works, Detective. You had your chance to play along. Now your friends are going to die. You can watch, if you like—before we kill you, too.”

  “I’ll do it,” Jackaby groaned. “I’ll cross over willingly. It’s the only way to do the thing cleanly. Just ask your brother. If he tries to force the sight out of me, he’ll pull me out right along with it. He’s seen what two souls can do to a body.”

  Finstern nodded, scowling. “It’s true. It is unpleasant.”

  “I’ll let him have the sight,” said Jackaby. “Just call off your elementals and let Rook and Jenny go.” The machine was still humming beneath him. “Please. They’ve been through enough.”

  Morwen scowled for a moment, and then a wicked grin spread across her face. “Rook and Jenny?”

  “The girl,” Finstern explained. “Her soul went underground, but they travel with a ghost. The dead woman has taken control of the girl’s body.”

  “Jenny Cavanaugh?” The woman’s skin glistened like rippling water, and she changed. Her blonde locks relaxed and darkened to a soft brunette, and her face transformed. She looked exactly as Jenny had in life. “Not sweet, innocent Jenny Cavanaugh?” she mocked, her voice becoming a perfect match for Jenny’s.

  She tapped my body’s frozen forehead with a fingernail. “Are you really in there? This is rich. I heard rumors, but I had no idea . . . You can’t get free of my little hex, can you? Oh, this is delicious. I’ve killed a lot of people in a lot of ways, but I’ve never had the pleasure of killing the same person twice. Did you get my little anniversary present? I carved it myself.”

  Jenny’s eyes all but screamed from within my frozen sockets.

  Morwen reached up to take my knife from my frozen hand, but the moment she touched the silver she cried out and pulled away. Her palm was blistered. It looked as if she had grabbed hold of a glowing coal.

  Morwen swore under her breath. “Awfully ostentatious, aren’t we? Who carries around a silver knife? Fine. That’s fine. If we’re going to do this again, let’s do it right, anyway.”

  With a ripple like a breeze over a still lake, her hair darkened further to a deep black and her dress became a crisp skirt and white blouse. A new face emerged, one I had seen before over the top of a clipboard. She was Mayor Poplin’s secretary. She had been there ten years ago, hiding in plain sight. She reached to her belt and drew the long dagger from its sheath. The metal was as black as midnight and curved slightly, like an Arabian scimitar. She was hardly one to complain about ostentatious weapons.

  “There we go. Remember this one? Just like old times, isn’t it?” she taunted. “Better, even. Last time I killed you I was in such a rush. I’ll be sure to savor it this time.”

  She drew the black blade down Jenny’s cheek—down my cheek. Her brother’s threats had only been for effect, but Morwen did not hold back. The edge pierced my skin and cut a line of deep crimson from the corner of my eye down toward my jaw. Jenny’s eyes screamed from within my frozen sockets. My head swam. I couldn’t watch. I felt sick and trapped and helpless.

  Abruptly, the ebony blade shot backward. It landed in the dirt behind Morwen, glowing red hot at the tip as though just plucked from a forge fire. She clutched her already injured hand and snarled with indignant rage. “What?”

  I didn’t understand it myself. Blood ran down my body’s unmoving face, but what force had stopped her blade was beyond me.

  On the other side of the clearing, Jackaby grunted. He wrenched an arm free and, with a flick of his wrist, flung a little red stone—the last of the Cherufe’s tears—toward his captor’s rocky arm. It hit the inside of Alloch’s elbow, and at once the giant’s granite flesh boiled. Alloch bellowed. The stony arm glowed red from the curve of his shoulder to the steel brace around his wrist. Great gobs of charred molten rock were sloughing off and dropping to the earth.

  “Do it now!” Morwen commanded her brother. “Turn it on!” Her secretary façade slipped away, and she was herself once more, strawberry blonde with furious panic playing across her eyes. She retrieved the black blade with her uninjured hand.

  Finstern had scrambled to the machine. “I can’t!” he said. “His soul needs to leave his body first!”

  “Alloch!” Morwen clasped the gray bead on her necklace with her free hand. “Throw him over the line! Now! Ouch!” The little stone bead was glowing like a hot coal.

  The enormous elemental moaned—a sound like the echoing rumble of a rock slide—but he obliged, his arm swinging toward the gate. At the same moment, Finstern activated the machine.

  I felt a pressure at my back, and then I was suddenly across the threshold.

  Time held still.

  An unseen force pulled me toward my body. I drifted past Jackaby, who was still pinned in the monster’s grip, unable to stop himself from plunging toward the threshold as I left it. I drifted past Finstern, lit by the unearthly glow emanating from his device, and past Morwen, her expression furious and frantic.

  I spun as I drifted into my own sorely abused body, a new perspective snapping abruptly into place before me. The world burst back to life in the same instant. The bead in Morwen’s hand exploded, fracturing in a burst of gray shards right in front of me. She cried out in alarm and nearly dropped her wicked black blade. At the same moment, Alloch’s forearm broke free from the rest of his body, carrying Jackaby with it to land with an earthshaking thud just shy of the shadow’s edge. Finstern’s machine pulsed with a blinding white-blue beam of light for several seconds, and then it sparked and went dark again. Finstern doubled over on the ground. I was looking through my own eyes again, watching the madness around me, but I could not move.

  I felt a flood of fear and fury bubbling out of control inside my skull. I could barely hear myself think. I focused. “Jenny,” I thought. “I’m here. You’re not alone.”

  The storm of emotions softened. “I’m afraid,” she thought. “I’m so sorry. I tried. I can’t move.”

  “Let’s try again,” I thought. “Together.”

  Alloch clutched the stump of his arm, which stuck out at a gruesome angle from his broad torso, charred and broken. He shook his head and roared, loud and deep. The sound echoed through the forest, and then the colossus stalked away, shaking the ground with each step.

  Owen Finstern staggered and fell sideways as he attempted to pick himself up off the ground.

  “Brother?” asked Morwen, sheathing the blade at her hip. “Did it work?”

  Owen stood. “Yes.” he said. “No!” He twitched and clutched at his temples. The inventor’s legs betrayed him and he toppled to the ground again.

  “The sight, brother—do you have the sight?” Morwen demanded.

  “No! No—he’s in my head! It hurts! Help me!” Forces within Finstern were working at cross purposes. With each frantic step he seemed to be pulling himself against his own will closer and closer to the underworld.

  With tremendous effort I felt my fingers flex. My hand clenched into a fist. I could sense the magic of the hex beginning to splinter.

  “Keep pushing.” The thought echoed in my head, though I don’t know if it was mine or Jenny’s. “Keep pushing.” I poured every ounce of will I had into the effort, and from somewhere inside me I felt Jenny’s energy building, resonating like an orchestral crescendo. And then we were suddenly pushing against nothing.

  The hex broke. We were free. I felt Jenny’s presence leave me and I fell to my knees, once more alone in my own head. The world spun and I fought against the dizziness. My eyes tried to focus on a glittering shape that lay on the ground before me. When it had slowed to a gradual spin, I reached out and picked up the silver knife.

  “Impossible!”
Morwen wrapped the fingers of her good hand around the remaining bead on her necklace. “Autoch. Get back here. Now!” From within her grasp, the second bead cracked audibly.

  I have had to piece together the events that had been taking place beyond my sight on the edge of Rosemary’s Green that day. What follows is my best interpretation of Charlie’s account of his experience, with his modesty and brevity removed.

  Charlie had maintained his position as promised, safeguarding our veil-gate atop the grassy mound. The first creature to approach him was a jackrabbit with a little pair of antlers affixed atop its head. Charlie shooed the timid creature back into the forest with little difficulty, but there were more to come. A silvery owl as tall as a man coasted down out of the leaves to investigate the portal with suspicious eyes before flapping away. Three stocky fairies with wings like moths chose that moment to make a break for it, but Charlie batted them away. Next came a sort of scaly chicken, which startled easily and hurried off, and then a tawny stag with antlers of polished gold. Charlie had stomped, snarled, and swatted back a dozen strange species by the time the forest shook and a flurry of leaves spun to the ground.

  The oreborn, Autoch, was twenty feet tall if he was an inch, his skin made of living, dusty brown rock. The boulders that made up his knee joints ground together with a rough, grating scrape as he stalked toward Charlie.

  Charlie took a deep breath. “We don’t have to do this,” he said evenly.

  “GRRAAAAAUGH!” countered Autoch with all the eloquence of an avalanche.

  “Or perhaps we do.” Charlie slipped his suspenders down from his shoulders and kicked off his shoes as the oreborn pounded closer. The window into the Annwyn filled with megalithic muscles and the forest shuddered with each heavy footfall, but by the time the behemoth was upon him, Charlie had changed. He met the rock monster in his canine form, muscles rippling beneath a coat of chocolate brown and black.

  A heavy fist slammed down where Charlie had been standing, flattening nothing but empty clothes as the hound whipped aside. Charlie’s instincts, although always keen, were sharpest when he was on all fours. He wasted no time vaulting atop the craggy arm, his eyes hunting for a weakness of any kind. He bounded to Autoch’s shoulder in one leap and went straight for the brute’s eyes, which glistened like jet marbles in the shadow of his heavy brow. Autoch did not even flinch as Charlie’s claws glanced off of the polished obsidian orbs. The attack left not so much as a scratch on the great elemental.

  Charlie hit the ground again and bounded back to place in the portal. Whatever came, he could not allow that gap to close. The veil-gate only extended as high as Autoch’s broad slab of a chest, and the giant had to stoop down to see Charlie. It made a sudden grab for him with fingers as thick as a grown man’s waist. Charlie dodged again, and the creature gave him a meaningful nod, those glistening eyes sparkling like gems.

  Charlie wasn’t sure if he had seen it correctly, but Autoch repeated the motion. It was as if the creature were trying to communicate. The hound followed the elemental’s gaze to a sturdy steel cuff affixed to Autoch’s wrist. The band was fastened by a single seam along the inside of his wrist, a long hinge with a fine silver pin holding the two sides together.

  “Now why would anyone with skin like yours need to wear something like that?” Charlie wondered. The stony creature swung again, and Charlie barely managed to duck under the quick strike. Autoch’s expression was annoyed, although his anger seemed to be directed not at Charlie but at his own hands—almost as though they were acting against the elemental’s will. “I really hope I’m right about this,” Charlie thought to himself. The hound fixed his eyes on the silver pin and pounced just as Autoch reached for him.

  Autoch moved faster. He caught Charlie in one rocky fist and pulled him off of the mound and into the Annwyn, dangling him upside down. The elemental squeezed and the air rushed out of Charlie’s lungs in a wheeze. He felt his ribs screaming in protest. As Autoch lifted him high into the air, Charlie caught a glimpse of the portal behind them. Either his vision was going dark or the window into the human world was closing. With the last of his breath leaving his body, Charlie changed.

  His muscles shuddered and his bones rearranged themselves. For a moment he wore neither one form nor the other. In that fleeting instant he slid through the creature’s stony fingers and onto its wrist. His human lungs expanded. The moment his fingers had fully formed, they began to pull at the pin, working it loose from the fixture.

  Autoch shook his heavy arm widely, and Charlie sailed through the air to land on his back in the dirt and leaves. The hulking figure plodded forward to loom over him.

  As the figure stalked up, filling Charlie’s field of vision, Charlie held up his hand. Clutched in his trembling fist was a long, thin silver rod. Autoch stopped. He held up his own hand and regarded his wrist. The bracer clinked open, loosely. The giant reached up with his other hand and ripped the metal off of his arm. He flexed his fingers experimentally and tossed the cuff away into the forest.

  Charlie stood, nervously. “Feel better?” he asked.

  Autoch turned his obsidian gaze toward the policeman for a few seconds, and then lunged forward without warning. Charlie fell backward, but the giant’s hand sailed high above his head. When Charlie looked up, it took him a few seconds to understand what he was seeing. Autoch’s outstretched arm hung perfectly still, and one stony finger seemed to end abruptly at the knuckle. A halo of light shone around the stump.

  The portal! During the scuffle Charlie had been thrown away from his post, and the veil-gate had all but sealed behind him. Autoch’s finger was all that held it open now. With his other hand, Autoch gestured Charlie forward.

  Charlie stepped cautiously up to the oreborn’s hand, which less than a minute earlier had been doing its best to crush the life out of him. Autoch removed his huge finger gently and Charlie took his place, using both hands to hold open the impossible hole in midair. The window into Rosemary’s Green was barely larger than Charlie’s head.

  He looked back over his shoulder. “Thank you,” he said to the elemental giant.

  Autoch pounded a fist against his chest with a sharp clack, and, without further explanation, plodded off into the blue-green forest.

  Concentrating hard, Charlie managed to coax the entrance to grow larger and larger until it was once more wide enough for a body to pass through. Shaken though he was, he slipped back into his clothes and resumed his place as a sentry. His heart thudded in his chest as he caught his breath.

  He was not alone. A snow-white hunting hound with ears of bright crimson stood watching him silently from the underbrush. How long it had been there by the time Charlie noticed it, he did not know. It was lean and angular like a greyhound, far smaller than his own canine stature—but something about the beast made Charlie feel as though he ought to kneel or bow or roll over and show his underbelly. He straightened up instead.

  “Hello, friend,” Charlie said.

  The dog stared deep into Charlie’s eyes, and then in a flash of milky white fur it was gone, and Charlie was alone again.

  Back beneath the towering yew tree, Morwen gasped. The little brown stone on her necklace splintered and fell apart, nothing but tan pebbles and rock dust trickling through her fingers and down the shimmering blue-green dress. “No!” she shrieked. Her hex broken and her minions free, the nixie panicked. She fumbled with the pouch at her side, pulling out a handful of acorns.

  The whole world was still spinning around me, but up close I could see that scraps of folded paper had been stuffed inside each of them. More hexes. She loosed one at me and I managed to duck away from it without falling over. Morwen snarled and let fly the whole handful. There was no chance that I could dodge them all.

  A sudden gust of wind whipped up before the projectiles could reach me, sending them tumbling harmlessly into the roots. “LEAVE MY FRIENDS ALONE.” Jenny was nowhere to be seen, but her voice was everywhere and hard as steel. Dust began to form little e
ddies as the air spun all around us.

  Morwen cursed and ran for the machine, slapping the brass fixtures into their traveling straps clumsily and folding the legs shut. Across the clearing I could see Jackaby’s body still trapped in the grip of the giant’s unyielding fingers, and Finstern still fighting his own limbs.

  “Sister!” Finstern cried. “Help me!”

  “We needed a demonstration,” she called across the windy clearing. “And you have provided that. Father will be very pleased with your efforts on our behalf, dear brother. I’ll take your little toy, but your presence”—she secured the last strap and hefted the device over her shoulder—“is not required.”

  Finstern cried out desperately, but Morwen turned her back on him and ran for the forest. I willed the world to hold still and flung the silver knife at her as hard as I could. The blade whipped through the air. It caught her leg a glancing blow, slicing a hole in her shimmering skirts and bouncing off into the roots. She glared back at me icily for just a moment, but the attack did not even slow her down. In another moment she had vanished into the woods.

  Jenny Cavanaugh materialized in the center of the clearing. Freezing wind whipped around her.

  “Jenny!” called out a familiar voice through Finstern’s mouth.

  The inventor’s foot stumbled across the threshold just as Jenny turned. She eyed Finstern angrily. “Jackaby?” she said. “Are you in there?”

  Finstern shook his head violently. “Argh! Get out! Get him out of my head!” he hollered furiously in his own Welsh accent. Then, in an American voice much softer and kinder than that of the insufferable cretin we had come to know, the man spoke again. “No. Not Jackaby. It’s me, Jennybean.”

  The wind stopped.

  I realized what had pushed me across the threshold, what was fighting Finstern in his own skin. Howard Carson. He had followed me after all, only to rush into the path of the machine and channel his own soul into the mad inventor’s body.

  Jenny’s eyes were wide. She hung motionless in the air. For several seconds the only sounds were the creaks of molten rock gradually solidifying in ashy lumps beside us. Swirling tendrils of blue-black mist were beginning to creep up out of the cave in the tree. One of the wisps of the Terminus, the End Soul, clung to Finstern’s foot and climbed his leg, winding upward like a smoky snake.