Ghost Story df-13

by Jim Butcher

  My verbal incantations have actually gotten more sophisticated and worldly over the years, not less.

  I know, right? It shocks me, too.

  The spell was just basic kinetic energy, and it didn’t really hit much harder than a baseball thrown by a high school pitcher—a regular pitcher, not like Robert Redford in The Natural. That wasn’t really enough power to threaten anyone’s life, but it was noisy and it was more than enough energy to smash a couple of bottles. They shattered with loud barking sounds and showers of glass and booze.

  “Holy crap!” shouted the cashier. I saw that his name tag read STAN. “Dude!” He flinched down, holding his arms up around his head. “Don’t shoot!”

  I pointed the paper bag at him and said, “Give me all the money, Stan!”

  “Okay, okay!” Stan said. “Oh, God. Don’t kill me!”

  “Money!” I shouted.

  He turned to the register and started fumbling at it, stabbing at the keys.

  As he did, I sensed a movement behind me, an almost subliminal presence. It’s the kind of thing you expect to experience while standing in a line—the silent pressure of another living being behind you, temporarily sharing your space. But I wasn’t standing in a line, and I whirled in panic and shouted, “Ka-bang!” again.

  There was a loud snap of sound as pure force lashed through the air and the glass door to a freezer of ice cream shattered.

  “Oh, God,” Stan moaned. “Please don’t kill me!”

  There was no one behind me. I tried to look in every direction at once and more or less succeeded.

  There was no one else in the store. . . .

  And yet the presence was still there, on the back of my neck, closer and more distinct than a moment before.

  What the hell?

  “Run!” said a resonant baritone.

  I turned and pointed the paper bag at the pair of video games.

  “Run!” said the voice on the Sinistar game. “I live! I . . . am . . . Sinistar!”

  “Don’t move,” I said to Stan. “Just put the money in a bag.”

  “Money in a bag, man,” Stan panted. He was practically sobbing. “I’m supposed to do whatever you want, right? That’s what the owners have told us cashiers, right? I’m supposed to give you the money. No argument. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, my eyes flicking nervously around the place. “It’s not worth dying for, is it, Stan?”

  “Got that right,” Stan muttered. “They’re only paying me five dollars an hour.” He finally managed to open the drawer and started fumbling bills into a plastic bag. “Okay, dude. Just a second.”

  “Run!” said the Sinistar machine. “Run!”

  Again, the insubstantial pressure against the back of my neck increased. I turned in a slow circle, but nothing was there—nothing I could see, at any rate.

  But what if there was something there? Something that couldn’t be seen? I had never actually seen something summoned from the netherworld, but Justin had described such beings repeatedly, and I didn’t think he’d been lying. Such a beast would make an ideal hunter; just the sort of thing to send out after a mouthy apprentice who refused to wear his straitjacket like a good boy.

  I took two slow steps toward the video game, staring at its screen. I didn’t pay attention to the spaceship or the asteroids or the giant, disembodied skull flying around. I didn’t care about the flickers of static that washed across the screen as I got closer, something inside its computer reacting to my presence. No. I paid attention to the glass screen and to the reflection of the store that shone dimly upon it.

  I identified my outline on it, long and thin. I could see the vague outlines of the store as more shadowy shapes—aisles and end caps, the counter and the door.

  And the Thing standing just inside the door.

  It was huge. I mean, it was taller and broader than the door was. It was more or less humanoid. The proportions were wrong. The shoulders too wide, the arms too long, the legs crooked and too thick. It was covered in fur or scales or some scabrous, fungal amalgamation of both. And its eyes were empty, angled pits of dim violet light.

  I felt my hands begin to shake. Tremble. Actually, they became absolutely spastic. The paper bag made a steady rattling sound. There was a creature from another world standing behind me. I could feel it, no more than seven or eight feet away from me, every bit as real as Stan, to every sense but my sight. It took a real effort to move my head enough to cast a single, hurried glance over my shoulder.

  Nothing. Stan was shoveling various bills into a bag. The store was otherwise empty. The door hadn’t opened since I had come through it. There was a bell on it. It would have rung had it opened. I looked back at the reflection.

  The Thing was two feet closer.

  And it was smiling.

  It had a head whose shape was all but obscured by growths or lumpy scales or matted fur. But beneath its eyes I could see a mouth, too wide to be real, filled with teeth too sharp and serrated and yellow to belong to anything of this earth. That was a smile from Lewis Carroll’s opiuminspired, laudanum-dosed nightmares.

  My legs felt like they were going to collapse into water at any second. I couldn’t catch my breath. I couldn’t move.

  Malice slithered up my spine and danced in spiteful shivers over the back of my neck. I could sense the thing’s hostility—not the mindless anger of a fellow boy I’d needled beyond self-restraint, or Justin’s cold, logical rage. This was something different, something vaster, more timeless, and deeper than any ocean. It was a poisonous hate, something so ancient, so vile, that it could almost kill without any other action or being to support it, a hate so old and so virulent that it had curdled and congealed over its surface into a stinking, staggering contempt.

  This thing wanted to destroy me. It wanted to hurt me. It wanted to enjoy the process. And nothing I said, nothing I did, would ever, ever change that. I was something to be eradicated, preferably in some amusing fashion. It had no mercy. It had no fear. And it was old, old beyond my ability to comprehend. It was patient. And if I proved too disappointing to it, I would only break through the veneer of that contempt—and what lay beneath would dissolve me like the deadliest acid. I felt . . . stained, simply by feeling its presence, stained as if it had left some hideous imprint or mark upon me, one that could not be wiped away.

  And then it was behind me, so close it could almost touch, its outline towering over me, huge and horrible.

  And it leaned down. A forked tongue slithered out from between its horrible shark-chain-saw teeth, and it whispered, in a perfectly low, calm, British accent, “What you have just sensed is as close as your mind can come to encompassing my name. How do you do?”

  I tried to talk. I couldn’t. I couldn’t make the words form in my mouth. I couldn’t get enough air to push my voice up out of my throat.

  Damn it. Damn it, I was more than some terrified child. I was more than some helpless orphan preparing to endure what someone vastly older and more powerful than me was preparing to inflict. I had touched the very forces of Creation. I was a young force of nature. I had seen things no one else could see, done things no one else could do.

  And in a moment like that, there was only one thing I could ask myself:

  What would Jack Burton do?

  “I’m f-f-f-fine,” I said in a hoarse, hardly understandable voice. “That’s a mouthful, and I’m busy. D-do you maybe have a nickname?”

  Its smile widened.

  “Little Morsel, among those whom I have disassembled,” it purred, its tone wrapping lovingly around the last word of the phrase, “I have several times been called by the same phrase.”

  “O-oh? W-what’s that?”

  “He,” purred the thing, “Who Walks Behind.”

  Chapter Thirty-two

  “He Who Walks Behind?” I said, fighting a losing battle to keep from trembling. “As scary names go, that one kind of isn’t. I’d stick with the first one. More evocative.”

  �
�Be patient,” purred the creature’s disembodied voice. “You will understand it before the end.”

  “Uh, dude?” Stan asked quietly. “Uh . . . Who are you talking to?”

  “Oh, tell him,” the creature said. “That should be entertaining.”

  “Shut up, Stan,” I said. “And get out.”

  “Uh,” said Stan. “What?”

  I whirled on him and pointed the paper bag at him, my arms extending through the space where He Who Walks Behind apparently both was and wasn’t. “Get the hell out of here!”

  Stan fell all over himself trying to comply. He literally went to the tile floor twice on his way to the door, his eyes wide, and stumbled out and into the night.

  I turned back to the reflective surface of the video game’s screen, and just as I again found the shape inside it, fire erupted along my spine. I was slammed forward into the video game, and my head hit it hard enough to send a spiderweb of cracks through the machine’s glass screen. Pain, sickening and harsh, flooded through my skull, and I staggered.

  But I didn’t fall. Justin DuMorne had been hard on me. It hadn’t ever been this bad, this scary, and it had never hurt so much—but then, it had never been for real. I grabbed the machine’s sides, forced my fingers to hold on, and kept myself from falling.

  “Run! Run!” screamed the machine again. This time, the voice was blurred and distorted, disturbingly deep and malicious. I noted blurrily that the cracked and wildly flickering screen had a terrified wizard’s blood all over it. The game’s computer was apparently failing.

  “You think that the inebriated little mortal is going to run to fetch the authorities,” purred the creature’s voice. I turned my head, looking around, and didn’t see anything. But the motion sent fire down my back, and for the first time I felt a trickling there beneath my jacket. I was bleeding.

  “You think that if they come running in their vehicles, with their lights and their symbols, that I will flee.”

  I turned and put my back to the machine. My legs felt wobbly, but I was beginning to fight through the pain. I clenched my teeth and snarled, “Get away from me.”

  “I assure you,” came the creature’s bodiless voice, “that we will not be disturbed. I have made sure of it. But it does demonstrate that you possess a certain talent for performance under pressure. Does it not?”

  “You sound like my guidance counselor,” I said, and wiped blood from one of my eyes. I took a breath and stalked forward, wobbling only a little. I grabbed the bag of money Stan had left on the counter. “I guess maybe you are a little scary.”

  “Neither fear nor pain sway you from your objective. Excellent.” This time, the thing’s voice was coming from the far side of the convenience store. “But there’s no knowing the true temper of the blade until it has been tested. Even the strongest-seeming steel may have hidden flaws. This may be interesting.”

  I paused, frowning, and looked up at my faerie godmother, who still sat at the edge of my grave, listening raptly. “I . . . Godmother, I’ve heard it said that ghosts are memories.”

  “Indeed,” Lea said, nodding.

  “Are the memories truth?”

  Lea arched a rather caustic eyebrow at my words. “You ask your first question before finishing the tale?” Her mouth twisted in distaste. “Your storytelling form leaves something to be desired, child.”

  “Yeah, I never did too well in English class. Will you answer the question?”

  Her eyes became very, very green and glittered with a wild, gleeful light. “They are the facts, the events as you experienced them.”

  I frowned. “I never really had a clear recollection of exactly what the thing said to me,” I said. “I mean, that blow to the head gave me a headache for days.”

  “Ah yes,” Lea said. “I remember your pain.”

  She would. “Yeah, uh. Anyway. I’m remembering the conversation now, word for word. Is that real? Or is it something that guy in black made up to fill in the blanks?”

  “They are your memories,” she said, “the record, the impression of what you lived. Your brain isn’t the only place they are stored—it is, in truth, often a poor facility for such a purpose.” She paused to consider her next words and then spread her hands, palms up, an odd light in her eyes. “It is the nature of the universe that things remain. Nothing ever disappears completely. The very sound of Creation still echoes throughout the vast darkness: The universe remembers. You are currently free of the shackles of mortality. Your limited brain no longer impedes access to that record. The only blocks to your memory are those you allow to be.”

  “That’s either very Zen or very . . . very crazy,” I said. “So, this memory—this is all the actual event?”

  “Did I not just say as much?” she asked crossly. “It would make a ridiculous fiction. Why would I bother listening otherwise?”

  I honestly wasn’t sure. But I decided not to push the issue. Ghost Harry, wise Harry.

  “Now,” the Leanansidhe said. “If you are quite finished holding hostage my imagination, pray continue.”

  “Get away from me,” I snarled, clutching the money. Sparks spat fitfully from the fried security camera. They were most of the light in the place. Even if the creature had been something solid and physical, it might have hidden in the stretches of shadow between the flickering motes of light. I didn’t see it anywhere.

  So it came as a shock to me when something gripped the back of my neck and effortlessly flung me into an end cap of various doughnuts and pastries.

  I went through it and hit the shelf behind. It hurt more than I could have believed. Years later, I would have considered it a minor foothill of pain, but at the time it was a mountain. The sweet smell of sugar and chocolate filled my nose. I figured my backside must be coated in about half an inch of frosting, cream filling, and powdered sugar. The scent made my stomach howl for food, gurgling loudly enough to be heard over the sound of items falling from the shelves here and there.

  Like I said. Sixteen.

  “Such a useless scrap of meat contains you,” the creature said, its voice unchanged by the violence. “It is entirely inconsequential, and yet it molds you. Your existence is a series of contradictions. But here is certainty, mortal child: This time, you cannot run.”

  The hell I couldn’t. Running had always served me fairly well, and I saw no reason to change my policy now. I scrambled to my feet and ran for the back of the store, away from the presumed direction of my attacker. I rounded the far corner of the aisle and pressed my back up against it, panting.

  Something hard and hot and slimy settled around my neck, a noose made of moist serpent, and just as strong. It jerked me up and off my feet, a bruising force that threw me into the air and released me almost instantly.

  I had an enormous flash of empathy for Jerry, facing the raw power and amused pleasure of a large, invisible Tom.

  “You cannot escape what is always behind you,” it said.

  I landed on my ass, hard, and scrambled toward the other aisle on my hands and knees, only to feel another terrible force strike me, a contemptuous kick in the seat of my pants. It flung me forward into a glass door on a wall of refrigerated cabinets holding racks and racks of cold drinks.

  I bounced off the door and landed, dazed, staring for a second at the large cracks my head had left in the glass.

  “No one will save you.”

  I tried to crawl farther away. I made it only far enough to reach the next cabinet, and then a blow struck me in the ribs and flung me into the next glass door. My shoulder hit it this time and didn’t break the glass, but I felt something go pop in my arm, and the whole limb seemed to light up with abrupt awareness of pain.

  The unseen presence of the creature came closer. Its voice lowered to a bare, pleased murmur. “Child of the stars. I will destroy you this night.”

  My head was full of pain and fear. I could sense it getting closer again, coming up behind me—always there, I somehow knew, where I was weakest, most
vulnerable. That was where it would always be.

  I had to move. I had to do something. But the terror felt like lead weights on my wrists and ankles, sapping my strength, making muscles turn to water, thoughts to noise. I tried to run, but the best I could do was a slow, slippery scramble down the aisle of cold drinks.

  “Pathetic,” said He Who Walks Behind, growing nearer with every word. “Whimpering, mewling thing. Useless.”

  Terror.

  I couldn’t think.

  I was going to die.

  I was going to die.

  And then my mouth said, in a damned passable Pee-wee Herman impersonation, “I know you are, but what am I?”

  He Who Walks Behind stopped in his tracks. There was a flickering heartbeat of uncertainty in that inevitable presence, and the creature said, “What?”

  “Ha-ha!” I said in the same voice, double-tapping my own fear with the character’s staccato laugh. A thought came shining through my head: Maybe I can’t stop this thing from coming at my back.

  But I can choose which way I turn it.

  I struggled to my feet and started town the aisle, spinning with every step, whirling-dervish style. The whole time, I heard myself spewing Pee-wee Herman’s cartoony laugh—which, in retrospect, was possibly the creepiest thing to hit my ears that night.

  I hit the door with a hip and an elbow and blew through it, still spinning, out into the parking lot. Once there, I realized that my escape plan did not have a part two. It hadn’t been concerned with getting me any farther than the doors of the store.

  I’d achieved the objective. Now what?

  The darkened parking lot was a mass of shadows. The nearest lights were a hundred yards away, and seemed somehow dimmer, more orange than they should have been. There was a heaviness in the air and a faint, faint stench of death and rot. Had that been something the creature had done? Had that been what it meant when it said it had made sure of our privacy?

  Stan was in the parking lot, out between the two islands housing the convenience store’s gas pumps. He looked like a man who was trying to run in slow motion. His arms were moving very slowly, his legs bent as if sprinting, but his pace was much slower than a walk, as if he’d been trying to run through a rice paddy filled with peanut butter. He was looking over his shoulder at me, and his face was distorted with terror, a horrible mask that hardly looked human in the shadow-haunted night.