by C. E. Murphy
Patrick slapped his hand against my forehead, and against Sonata’s, and began to shout in a language I didn’t understand. Matilda laughed, a cold hard sound all wrong from a child’s throat. Under the shouting, under the flood of magic rushing out of me, I heard Billy’s voice, compassionate and stern: “Matilda, there’s a way out for you, but this isn’t it. Let us release you. We’ll take what you’ve told us and do our best to find your murderers, but you deserve to rest now.”
Her voice vaulted me out of my body, if I’d even been there anymore. I looked down at myself, feeling like I was a million miles away. A silver cord thrumming with power attached me to myself, though even as I watched, it contracted, losing cohesion as Matilda sucked magic out of me to strengthen her speech. “I don’t want to rest. I want to live.” For the first time she sounded like a child, full of desperation and fear. “I never had a chance to live.”
“And you still won’t,” Billy said calmly. “This body isn’t yours to take.”
“She gave it to me!”
“And you agreed to leave it.”
Her smile turned nasty again. “Only when she says the words, and I won’t let her. This one’s power will let me keep her voice locked inside.”
Gosh. Apparently there was a reason Billy’d told me not to let a vengeful spirit latch on to me. Patrick was still speaking, his voice gaining strength. I concentrated on that, trying to use it to get back to my body, but after a few seconds it occurred to me that I didn’t even know the guy, and there was no reason he should be my guiding light. I wrapped my hands around the cord, which felt weak and watery even in my non-corporeal grip, and started pulling myself down.
Patrick stepped back to English and murmured, “This is your final chance, Matilda. Let us guide you through your pain and anger and into what waits beyond. It will be a better place, that much I promise you.”
Sonata shuddered, as though Matilda was entrenching herself more deeply, and my body-attaching cord turned to mist. I gave a panicked yell and dived downward, slamming into my body with a sick thud. I tried shouting, “Tally ho!” because I thought it was funny, but instead I said, “Trk!” and was astonished how much effort even that much sound took.
It didn’t matter. Patrick was making sound for me, a low steady murmur: “In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti…”
Matilda arched under his hand and gave what, under normal circumstances, I would call an unholy shriek. Right now that was too accurate, and therefore seemed inappropriate. I Saw magic release from each of the child-size ghosts, and it snapped back to me with the sting of giant rubber-band guns misfiring.
Patrick’s voice rose, and then rose again, rolling over the little girl’s swearing and bellowing with infinite compassion and inexorable resolve. She bucked and twisted, and while my Latin wasn’t exactly fluent, even I could recognize that I was witnessing—hell, participating in—an exorcism in God’s name. Billy’d told me to get a priest if he was possessed. I hadn’t believed he’d really meant it until right now.
I guessed Patrick wasn’t a boytoy after all.
The children winked out, leaving cold spaces where their ghosts had been. Not the coolness of dead flesh, but the absolute nothingness I’d encountered in the Dead Zone, which was so remote from the rest of the astral planes I didn’t know if there was anything on its other side.
If there was, I didn’t think they’d passed through to it.
Matilda tore away from Sonata’s body, her aura losing the healthy color it’d stolen from me and turning discolored green again. It stretched and thinned like a snot toy flung against the wall, distorting her features until she became something alien and terrible. Her fingers turned to claws, tearing at Sonata’s flesh, and finally, howling wordlessly, she boiled out of Sonata’s body. Sonata collapsed into Patrick’s arms, the spirit quite literally no longer moving her.
The last parts of Matilda dove forward, dissipating into me.
I dove after her.
A song ran through my head: Round and round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows. I spun after Matilda without a hint of control and even less idea where we were going. If we were going anywhere: I had no sense of the dead girl’s ghost, no feeling of her presence. For all I knew, she’d launched herself at me to give me a scare, and for all I could tell, that was all that had happened.
I broke through into the cold bleak space of the Dead Zone, and hung in its infinity with every cell in my body straining to hear or see or feel an intruder. What I got, in spades, was nothing. No ghosts. No vengeance. No giant snakes or dead shamans or spirit guides, though I’d have taken the first several gladly if I could have the last one back.
This place has much in common with dreams, Coyote’d told me. I hung on a few long seconds, forgetting about Matilda and just wishing, wishing, that my friend and mentor might step through the nothingness and snap his teeth at me one more time.
After what felt like forever and still no time at all, I let go, fleeing the Dead Zone and retreating to the garden at the center of my soul.
The door to the desert was closed tight, key still in place under a lump of moss. Aware I was probably risking too much, I put the key in the lock and turned it, opening the door to a sandblast of wind that came scraping down the crater my door made the inverse apex of. Magic waited at the ready, the ridiculous Trans Am all but making tire treads in the earthy floor. But no one came screaming through the door, not from either side, and I locked it again before studying my garden.
I usually looked at it with pretty normal eyes, not calling up the Sight. This time, though, I was searching for intruders, and for once in my life, put everything into it. I could taste the waterfall with my skin, hear the recovering soil with my gaze. It flowed through me, filtered by my blood and magic, and I encountered impurities by the dozens. By the thousands, but even so, I recognized them as my own. Such overblown pride, hiding uncertainty, and the same with arrogance and smart-ass commentary. Shining confidence in a few places, strong enough to become a different kind of arrogance; those were my mechanics skills, or, of all things, the ability to deconstruct a poem. There were a hundred cracks in my armor—flaws in the windshield, when I turned my metaphor to vehicular terms—but they were mine, and not streaked with Matilda’s vitriolic hate.
Glad no one could see me, I folded my hands over my heart and knelt there at the southern end of my garden, hidden by mist, and called up the tiniest shield of magic possible, just a spark of blue-and-silver light starting in the core of me. It expanded with every heartbeat, slow deliberate press outward, until my arms were spread and the magic kept thrumming to greater and greater dimensions. I didn’t know how long it took, encompassing the whole of my garden with that new shield, but in time I felt the new one touch the old. A thrill shot back from the melding shields, zapping into my fingertips and squirreling through my body with a joie de vivre of its own. I looked up and silver-blue shimmered overhead, shields melding like a sunset of negative colors. I thought—I hoped—nothing alien could have remained within me, not when I’d begun a new shield from something so small and close, and strengthened the old with it.
Still, it wouldn’t hurt to have Sonata and Billy check me out. I stepped back into the real world.
Patrick had knelt, Sonata still cradled in his arms. My hands were fisted, something I only noticed because my nails cut into my palms. I needed to trim them. My fingernails, not my palms. I put my hands together in front of my stomach and uncurled the left with the still-knotted right hand, then made myself unfold the right fingers with my left. “What happened?”
Patrick’s aura remained serene, but tempered itself toward gold, as if that was the color of his sorrow. “They’ve been destroyed completely. It’s the worst fate I can imagine for a human soul.”
“Worse than being angry ghosts for a hundred years?” My hands were cold. I was abruptly aware of how tired I was, though Patrick had done the heavy lifting in the last few minutes.
/> “Worse than that,” he agreed quietly. “They might have found redemption, at the end, and instead chose a darker path.”
“You think there’s such a thing as redemption?” I wasn’t sure I wanted an answer, though I didn’t know what I was afraid of if he gave one. I did want an answer to, “What are you, anyway?”
“I do.” Patrick was maybe the steadiest soul I’d ever laid eyes on. His voice didn’t hold the richness that made some actors compelling, but his calm conviction had the same effect on me. I could listen to him read a phone book, as long as he did so with the resolution that he spoke with now. “I believe the worlds beyond ours are complex, and that we have almost no idea how we mortals interact with them. But I also believe the soul continues on, and that where spirit remains, hope resides.”
Then he shrugged, becoming a little more ordinary again, and said, “I suppose I’m a theologian. I went to seminary, but I was never comfortable with some of the strictures, so I left and studied comparative religion at university instead. My mother and Sonata were great friends. I’ve been coming by for years when she does a séance, in case something goes wrong.”
“Has it ever gone wrong before?”
“This is the second time.” Patrick spread his fingers over Sonata’s hair, and I finally shook myself loose from my physical stupor and came to kneel next to her. “The second I’ve been present for, at least. She’s been doing this longer than I’ve been alive. Is she all right?”
Actually, aurawise, she looked fine. Tired: the yellows and reds weren’t as bright, but they didn’t look sickly, and Matilda’s ghostly green had faded entirely. “She’s just sleeping. Billy, am I clear to…?” I glanced his way, studying his aura for shadows and finding none.
“Sonny could tell you better than I can.” Billy frowned at the sleeping medium. “I think they’re gone.”
I nodded, turning back to Sonata. Light and warmth balled in my hand, healing magic at its most simple and comforting. It dropped into Sonata’s chest, and though her breathing hadn’t been strained, it eased a little. She turned her face against Patrick’s chest and settled in, like a child seeking protection. His aura flared, white going hard and bright. The Sight winked off, sparing me a headache. “She’ll be fine. Give her a few minutes and you can wake her up.”
“Thank you.” It was effectively a dismissal. I got to my feet and went back to Billy, whose frown had deepened.
“I thought you couldn’t see them.”
“I can’t. Usually. I think it’s the cauldron.” I pinched the bridge of my nose and wished I was wearing my glasses so I could take them off and clean them; anything that would give me something to do while I tried to sort my thoughts into language. “I think Matilda might have tried jumping into me. I didn’t see her go through the Dead Zone, and I cleaned my garden as best I could and can’t see her, but…”
Sonata inhaled a soft waking-up breath. Billy and I darted to Patrick’s side, so we were all sort of hovering above Sonny when she opened her eyes. She looked from face to face, eyebrows rising. “That bad, was it?”
“Yoda she’s become. In trouble we all are.” The Sight came back on, assuring me that her colors were steady and strong. “You’ll be okay.”
“And will you?” Sonata’s eyebrows rose and she gave me a curious glance that went on to become a careful study. “She leaped for you, didn’t she? But I don’t see any traces of her riding you. The exorcism may have worked. Did you learn anything from her?”
I exhaled, glad she’d given me an all-clear. “A little. We need to be looking for a murder or missing person in the year 2000. That’ll give us…”
The truth was, I wasn’t sure what it would give us, but I hoped it would be a tie to the cauldron. I’d feel like a prize fool if this wasn’t all somehow intertwined.
“The captain’s not going to be thrilled with us digging up cold cases when we’ve got a hot one on our hands.” Billy offered Sonata a hand, but it was Patrick who helped her to her feet. She leaned on him and he kissed her temple, earning a brief, weary smile from the older woman. I re-revised my estimation of Patrick’s position in Sonata’s life. Exorcist, yes, boytoy, no, but they had something most people didn’t manage to share with people of their own generation, much less with somebody three decades their senior or junior. The two of them made my nose all stuffy and my eyes sting, and reminded me I hadn’t talked to Gary in a couple of days.
I rubbed my nose surreptitiously and cast a shrug in Billy’s direction. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll have caught the guy. Maybe all we’ll need to do is a jailhouse interview.” Because the odds of having caught somebody who’d been murdering people every fifty years for at least the last two centuries were so high. I wondered what a two-hundred-year-old killer looked like. Maybe the murders were part of a fountain-of-youth ritual, but the idea of a wrinkly bag of bones slicing people up was both funnier and scarier.
Billy gave me a look that said more or less all those things, except maybe without the bag-of-bones part, then turned his attention back to the medium and her exorcist. “Are you going to be all right?”
“I’ll be fine after a stiff drink or two.” Sonata quirked a smile and stepped out of Patrick’s embrace to give Billy a hug, then to shake my hand. “I’m sorry I wasn’t more help. That doesn’t happen very often.”
“You not being helpful, or insane ghosts taking over your body?” Sometimes my mouth said things even my brain wished it didn’t. I pulled my tongue back under control and added, “You were helpful. We know more than we did before. Thank you.”
Sonata said, “You’re welcome,” with a hint of dryness that turned considering as she went on. “Neither happens often. Even angry spirits usually want resolution more than corporeal form, and offer all the information they can. This one…”
Her gaze went to Patrick, and he said, “Matilda,” with the ease of long understanding. Sonata mouthed the name, then turned back to me.
“When the sessions are over all I remember are impressions. Usually I feel drained, like I’ve spilled my soul, and I’m left with a sense of relief and sometimes gratitude.” She pressed a hand over her stomach, eyes closed, as if she reached for the memory of a dream. “I can feel fear and rage distantly now. From the exorcism, I think, but below that, further away…Matilda didn’t have a need to share her troubles as most restless spirits do. There was too much control in her, and that…” Her eyes opened again, gaze frank and direct on mine. “That’s not usual. That may well be something beyond her, controlling her. Be careful, Detective Walker.”
I opened my mouth for a flippant “I always am,” realized that wasn’t true, and instead said, “I will be. Thanks,” more subduedly than usual. Everybody exchanged a second round of goodbyes, and I got halfway out the door before my question from earlier popped into my head. I turned back to Sonata and Patrick, earning a mutter from Billy as I did so. “Sorry. One more thing. Do you guys know if there’s such a thing as a magical-items black market?”
“Of course there is. The darker the art, the blacker the market.” Sonata frowned. “Why do you ask?”
I lifted a finger, heading off her question with another of my own. “I know you do ghosts, not auras, but can an aura lie?”
Billy shouldered back in. “Mel’d say yes. That an aura can be tricked the same way a lie detector can be. With enough physical or emotional control, everything might read positive or negative on the polygraph, but you wouldn’t be able to tell what parts of it were true or false because it all read the same. Why?”
I wiped my hand over my mouth, remembering Sandburg’s steady, calm aura. “I was just thinking that if I was looking to move a big-ticket item on a black market, one way to distract from what I was doing would be to have a couple people turn up missing or dead. Sonata, do you know anybody who might deal in…?”
The medium drew herself up primly. “I don’t associate with that kind of person.” After a moment she relented, turning a palm skyward. “I c
an ask in a few places. Probably better for me to ask than to have police nosing around.”
“Thank you.” We did another round-robin of goodbyes, and this time got the door closed behind us before Billy said, “You’re back to Sandburg, then?”
“Him or Redding, but out of the two, the cultural anthropologist fascinated by ancient legends of magic seems the more obvious option.” I climbed into the car and Billy got in the other side, both of us sitting in silence for a moment. Eventually I said, “You take me to the nicest places. Murder scenes. Séances. And without even buying me dinner first.”
He snorted and jerked a thumb over his shoulder, indicating we should get going. “I’ll stop in the station and set up a search on unsolved cases from Y2K. Maybe we’ll get a hit.”
“Yeah.” I had a thought I didn’t like. It took the whole drive to nerve myself up to speaking. Even then, when we got back to the precinct building and I’d killed the ignition, I had to lean forward and hang on to the steering wheel before I could manage words. “Mugwitch’s cauldron’s been buried somewhere in Ireland for centuries, right?”
“Matholwch.” Billy got out of the car, exasperated, and I followed him like a lonely puppy.
“Matholwch, Mugwitch, Mud-blood, whatever. The point is, it’s been buried on the other side of the world. So if I’m right about the party ghosts being woken up by Mugwi—Matholwch’s—cauldron, we might be dealing with murders that took place in Ireland over the last several centuries.”
It wasn’t fair. I knew keeping things to myself was bad. From Billy’s expression, I could tell voicing them wasn’t exactly popular, either. He kept the hard look on his face all the way through saying, “I’m going to work with the assumption that these are local ghosts stirred up by the cauldron’s presence.”