by Jim Butcher
I put my coat away, got out my nice, heavy flannel robe and slipped into it, then went over to the rug against the south wall. I dragged it away from the floor, and the hinged door there, then swung the door open. I fetched a kerosene lamp, lit it up and dialed the wick up to a bright flame, then got ready to descend the folding wooden ladder into the subbasement.
The telephone rang again.
I debated ignoring it. It rang again, insistent. I sighed, closed the door, put the rug back in place, and got to the phone on the fifth ring.
“What?” I said, uncharitably.
“I have to hand it to you, Dresden,” Susan said. “You certainly know how to charm a girl the morning after.”
I let out a long breath. “Sorry, Susan. I’ve been working and . . . it’s not going so well. Lots of questions and no answers.”
“Ouch,” she said back. Someone said something to her in the background, and she murmured a response. “I don’t want to add to your day, but do you remember the name of that guy you and Special Investigations took down a couple months ago? The ritual killer?”
“Oh, right. Him . . .” I closed my eyes, and grubbed about in my memory. “Leo something. Cravat, Camner, Conner. Kraven the Hunter. I didn’t really get his name. I tracked him down by the demon he was calling up and nailed him that way. Michael and I didn’t hang around for the paperwork afterwards, either.”
“Kravos?” Susan asked. “Leonid Kravos?”
“Yeah, that might have been it, I think.”
“Great,” she said. “Super. Thank you, Harry.” Her voice sounded a little tense, excited.
“Uh. Do you mind telling me what’s going on?” I asked her.
“It’s an angle I’m working on,” she said. “Look, all I’ve got right now are rumors. I’ll try to tell you more as soon as I’ve got something concrete.”
“Fair enough. I’m sort of focused on something else right now, anyway.”
“Anything you need help with?”
“God, I hope not,” I said. I shifted the phone a little closer to my ear. “Did you sleep all right, last night?”
“Maybe,” she teased. “It’s hard to get really relaxed, when I’m that unsatisfied, but your apartment’s so cold it’s kind of like going into hibernation.”
“Yeah, well. Next time I’ll make sure it’s a hell of a lot colder.”
“I’m shivering already,” she purred. “Call you tonight if I can?”
“Might not be here.”
She sighed. “I understand. Potluck, then. Thanks again, Harry.”
“Anytime.”
We said goodbye, hung up, and I went back to the stairs leading down into the subbasement. I uncovered the trapdoor, opened it, got my lantern, and clumped on down the steep, folding staircase.
My lab never got any less cluttered, no matter how much more organization I imposed on it. The contents only grew denser. Counters and shelves ran along three walls. A long table ran down the center of the room, with enough space for me to slip sideways down its length on either side. Next to the ladder, a kerosene heater blunted the worst of the subterranean chill. On the far side of the table, a brass ring had been set into the floor—a summoning circle. I’d had to learn the hard way to keep it clear of the other debris in the lab.
Debris. Technically, everything in the lab was useful, and served some kind of purpose. The ancient books with their faded, moldering leather covers and their all-pervasive musty smell, the plastic containers with resealable lids, the bottles, the jars, the boxes—they all had something in them I either needed or had needed at one time. Notebooks, dozens of pens and pencils, paper clips and staples, reams of paper covered in my restless, scrawling handwriting, the dried corpses of small animals, a human skull surrounded by paperback novels, candles, an ancient battle axe, they all had some significance. I just couldn’t remember what it was for most of them.
I took the cover off the lamp and used it to light up about a dozen candles around the room, and then the kerosene heater. “Bob,” I said. “Bob, wake up. Come on, we’ve got work to do.” Golden light and the smell of candle flames and hot wax filled the room. “I mean it, man. There’s not much time.”
Up on its shelf the skull quivered. Twin points of orangish flame flickered up in the empty eye sockets. The white jaws parted in a pantomime yawn, an appropriate sound coming out with it. “Stars and Stones, Harry,” the skull muttered. “You’re inhuman. It isn’t even sundown yet.”
“Stop whining, Bob. I’m not in the mood.”
“Mood. I’m exhausted. I don’t think I can help you out anymore.”
“Unacceptable,” I said.
“Even spirits get tired, Harry. I need rest.”
“Time enough for rest when I’m dead.”
“All right then,” Bob said. “You want work, we make a deal. I want to do a ridealong the next time Susan comes over.”
I snorted at him. “Hell’s bells, Bob, don’t you ever think about anything besides sex? No. I’m not letting you into my head while I’m with Susan.”
The skull spat out an oath. “There should be a union. We could renegotiate my contract.”
I snorted. “Any time you want to head back to the homeland, Bob, feel free.”
“No, no, no,” the skull muttered. “That’s all right.”
“I mean, there’s still that misunderstanding with the Winter Queen, but—”
“All right, I said.”
“You probably don’t need my protection anymore. I’m sure she’d be willing to sit down and work things out, rather than putting you in torment for the next few hundred—”
“All right, I said!” Bob’s eyelights flamed. “You can be such an asshole, Dresden, I swear.”
“Yep,” I agreed. “You awake yet?”
The skull tilted to one side in a thoughtful gesture. “You know,” it said. “I am.” The eye sockets focused on me again. “Anger really gets the old juices flowing. That was pretty sneaky.”
I got out a relatively fresh notepad and a pencil. It took me a moment to clear off a space on the central table. “I’ve run into some new stuff. Maybe you can help me out. And we’ve got a missing person I need to look for.”
“Okay, hit me.”
I took a seat on the worn wooden stool and drew my warm robe a little closer about me. Trust me, wizards don’t wear robes for the dramatic effect. They just can’t get warm enough in their labs. I knew some guys in Europe who still operated out of stone towers. I shudder to think.
“Right,” I said. “Just give me whatever you can.” And I outlined the events, starting with Agatha Hagglethorn, through Lydia and her disappearance, through my conversation with Mort Lindquist and his mention of the Nightmare, to the attack on poor Micky Malone.
Bob whistled, no mean trick for a guy with no lips. “Let me get this straight. This creature, this thing, has been torturing powerful spirits for a couple of weeks with this barbed-wire spell. It tore up a bunch of stuff on consecrated ground. Then it blew through somebody’s threshold and tore his spirit apart, and slapped a torture-spell on him?”
“You got it,” I said. “So. What kind of ghost are we dealing with, and who could have called it up? And what is this girl’s connection to it?”
“Harry,” Bob said, his tone serious. “Leave this one alone.”
I blinked at him. “What?”
“Maybe we could go on a vacation—Fort Lauderdale. They’re having this international swimsuit competition there, and we could—”
I sighed. “Bob, I don’t have time for—”
“I know a guy who’s possessed a travel agent for a few days, and he could get us tickets cut rate. What do you say?”
I peered at the skull. If I didn’t know any better, I would think that Bob sounded . . . nervous? Was that even possible? Bob wasn’t a human being. He was a spirit, a being of the Nevernever. The skull was his habitat, his home away from home. I let him stay in it, protected him, and bought him trashy romance nov
els on occasion in exchange for his help, his prodigious memory, and his affinity for the laws of magic. Bob was a records computer and personal assistant all rolled into one, provided you could keep his mind on the issue at hand. He knew thousands of beings in the Nevernever, hundreds of spell recipes, scores of formulae for potions and enchantments and magical constructions.
No spirit could have that kind of knowledge without it translating into considerable power. So why was he acting so scared?
“Bob. I don’t know why you’re so upset, but we need to stop wasting time. Sundown’s coming in a few hours, and this thing is going to be able to cross over from the Nevernever and hurt someone else. I need to know what it is, and where it might be going, and how to kick its ass.”
“You humans,” Bob said. “You’re never satisfied. You always want to find out what’s behind the next hill, open the next box. Harry, you’ve got to learn when you know too much.”
I stared up at him for a moment, then shook my head. “We’ll start with basics and work our way through this step by step.”
“Dammit, Harry.”
“Ghosts,” I said. “Ghosts are beings that live in the spirit world. They’re impressions left by a personality at the moment of death. They aren’t like people, or sentient spirits like you. They don’t change, they don’t grow—they’re just there, experiencing whatever it is they were feeling when they died. Like poor Agatha Hagglethorn. She was loopy.”
The skull turned its eye sockets away from me and said nothing.
“So, they’re spirit-beings. Usually, they aren’t visible, but they can make a body out of ectoplasm and manifest in the real world when they want to, if they’re strong enough. And sometimes, they can just barely have any physical existence at all—just kind of exist as a cold spot, or a breath of wind, or maybe a sound. Right?”
“Give it up, Harry,” Bob said. “I’m not talking.”
“They can do all kinds of things. They can throw things around and stack furniture. There have been documented incidents of ghosts blotting out the sun for a while, causing minor earthquakes, all sorts of stuff—but it isn’t ever random. There’s always some purpose to it, something related to their deaths.”
Bob quivered, about to add something, but clacked his bony teeth shut again. I ginned at him. It was a puzzle. No spirit of intellect could resist a puzzle.
“So, if someone leaves a strong enough imprint when they go, you got yourself a strong ghost. I mean, badass. Maybe like this Nightmare.”
“Maybe,” Bob admitted, grudgingly, then spun his skull to face wholly away from me. “I’m still not talking to you, Harry.”
I drummed my pencil on the blank piece of paper. “Okay. We know that this thing is stirring up the boundary between here and the Nevernever. It’s making it easier for spirits to come across, and that’s why things have been so busy, lately.”
“Not necessarily,” Bob chirped up. “Maybe you’re looking at it from the wrong angle.”
“Eh?” I asked.
He spun to face me again, eyelights glowing, voice enthusiastic. “Someone else has been stirring these spirits, Harry. Maybe they started torturing them in order to make them jump around in the pool and start causing waves.”
There was a thought. “You mean, prodding the big spirits into moving so that they create the turbulence.”
“Exactly,” Bob said, nodding. Then he caught himself, mouth still open. He turned the skull toward the wall and started banging the bony forehead against it. “I am such an idiot.”
“Stirring up the Nevernever,” I said thoughtfully. “But who would do that? And why?”
“You got me. Big mystery. We’ll never know. Time for a beer.”
“Stirring up the Nevernever makes it easier for something to cross over,” I said. “So . . . whoever laid out those torture spells must have wanted to pave the way for something.” I thought of dead animals and smashed cars. “Something big.” I thought of Micky Malone, quivering and mad. “And it’s getting stronger.”
Bob looked at me again, and then sighed. “All right,” he said. “Gods, do you ever give up, Harry?”
“Never.”
“Then I might as well help you. You don’t know what you’re dealing with, here. And if you walk into this with your eyes closed, you’re going to be dead before the sun rises.”
Chapter Fifteen
“Dead before the sun rises,” I said. “Stars, Bob, why don’t you just go all the way over the melodramatic edge and tell me that I’m going to be sleeping with the fishes?”
“I’m not sure that much of you would be left,” Bob said, seriously. “Harry, look at this thing. Look at what it’s done. It crossed a threshold.”
“So what?” I asked. “Lots of things can. Remember that toad demon? It came over my threshold and trashed my whole place.”
“In the first place, Harry,” Bob said, “you’re a bachelor. You don’t have all that much of a threshold to begin with. This Malone, though—he was a family man.”
“So?”
“So it means his home has a lot more significance. Besides which—the toad demon came in and everything after that was pure physical interaction. It smashed things, it spat out acid saliva, that kind of thing. It didn’t try to wrench your soul apart or enchant you into a magical sleep.”
“This is getting to be a pretty fine distinction, Bob.”
“It is. Did you ask for an invitation before you went into the Malone’s house?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I did. It’s polite, and—”
“And it’s harder for you to work magic in a home you haven’t been invited into. You cross the threshold without an invitation, and you leave a big chunk of your power at the door. It doesn’t affect you as much because you’re a mortal, Harry, but it still gets you in smaller ways.”
“And if I was an all-spirit creature,” I said.
Bob nodded. “It hits you harder. If this Nightmare is a ghost, like you say, then the threshold should have stopped it cold—and even if it had gone past it, then it shouldn’t have had the kind of power it takes to hurt a mortal that badly.”
I frowned, drumming my pencil some more, and made some notes on the paper, trying to keep everything straight. “And certainly not enough to lay out a spell that powerful on Malone.”
“Definitely.”
“So what could do that, Bob? What are we dealing with, here?”
Bob’s eyes shifted restlessly around the room. “It could be a couple of things from the spirit world. Are you sure you want to know?” I glared at him. “All right, all right. It could be something big enough. Something so big that even a fraction of it was enough to attack Malone and lay that spell on him. Maybe a god someone’s dug up. Hecate, Kali, or one of the Old Ones.”
“No,” I said, flatly. “Bob, if this thing was so tough, it wouldn’t be tearing up people’s cars and ripping kitty cats apart. That’s not my idea of a godlike evil. That’s just pissed off.”
“Harry, it went through the threshold,” Bob said. “Ghosts don’t do that. They can’t.”
I stood up, and started pacing back and forth on the little open space of floor of my summoning circle. “It isn’t one of the Old Ones. Guardian spells all over the world would be freaking out, alerting the Gatekeeper and the Council of something like that. No, this is local.”
“Harry, if you’re wrong—”
I jabbed a finger at Bob. “If I’m right, then there’s a monster out there messing with my town, and I’m obliged to do something about it before someone else gets hurt.”
Bob sighed. “It blew through a threshold.”
“So . . .” I said, pacing and whirling. “Maybe it had some other way to get around the threshold. What if it had an invitation?”
“How could it have gotten that?” Bob said. “Ding-dong, Soul Eater Home Delivery, may I come in?”
“Bite me,” I said. “What if it took Lydia? Once she was out of the church, she could have been vul
nerable to it.”
“Possession?” Bob said. “Possible, I guess—but she was wearing your talisman.”
“If it could get around a threshold, maybe it could get around that too. She goes to Malone’s, looks helpless, and gets an invite in.”
“Maybe.” Bob did a passable imitation of scrunching up his eyes. “But then why were all those little animals torn up outside? We are going way out on a branch here. There are a lot of maybes.”
I shook my head. “No, no. I’ve got a feeling about this.”
“You’ve said that before. You remember the time you wanted to make ‘smart dynamite’ for that mining company?”
I scowled. “I hadn’t had much sleep that week. And anyway, the sprinklers kicked in.”
Bob chortled. “Or the time you tried to enchant that broomstick so that you could fly? Remember that? I thought it would take a year to get the mud out of your eyebrows.”
“Would you focus, please,” I complained. I pushed my hands against either side of my head to keep it from exploding with theories, and whittled them down to the ones that fit the facts. “There are only a couple of possibilities. A, we’re dealing with some kind of godlike being in which case we’re screwed.”
“And the Absurd Understatement Award goes to Harry Dresden.”
I glared at him. “Or,” I said, lifting a finger, “B, this thing is a spirit, something we’ve seen before, and it’s using smoke and mirrors within the rules we already know. Either way, I think Lydia knows more than she’s admitting.”
“Gee, a woman taking advantage of Captain Chivalry. What are the odds.”
“Bah,” I said. “If I can find her and find out what she knows, I could nail it today.”
“You’re forgetting the third possibility,” Bob said amiably. “C, it’s something new that neither of us understand and you’re sailing off in ignorance to plunge into the mouth of Charybdis.”
“You’re so encouraging,” I said, fastening on the bracelet, and slipping on the ring, feeling the quiet, humming power in them both.
Bob somehow waggled his eyebrow ridges. “Hey, you never went out with Charybdis. What’s the plan?”