by Jim Butcher
“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 novels 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 yo
ur 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 vulnerable 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?”
“I loaned Lydia my Dead Man’s Talisman,” I said.
“I still can’t believe after all the work we did, you gave it to the first girl to wiggle by.”
I scowled at Bob. “If she’s still got it, I should be able to work up a spell to home in on it, like when I find people’s wedding rings.”
“Great,” Bob said. “Give ’em hell, Harry. Have fun storming the castle.”
“Not so fast,” I said. “She might not have it with her. If she’s in on this with the Nightmare, then she could have dumped it once she had it away from me. That’s where you come in.”
“Me?” Bob squeaked.
“Yes. You’re going to head out, hit the streets, and talk to all of your contacts, see if we can get to her before sundown. We’ve only got a couple of hours.”
“Harry,” Bob pointed out, “the sun’s up. I’m exhausted. I can’t just flit around like some kinda dewdrop fairy.”
“Take Mister,” I said. “He doesn’t mind you riding around. And he could use the exercise. Just don’t get him killed.”
“Hooboy,” Bob said. “Once more into the breach, dear friends, eh? Harry, don’t quit your job to become a motivational speaker. I have your permission to come out?”
“Yep,” I said, “for the purposes of this mission only. And don’t waste time prowling around in women’s locker rooms again.”
I put out the candles and the heater and started up the stepladder. Bob followed, drifting out of the eye sockets of the skull as a glowing, candleflame-colored cloud, and flowed up the steps past me. The cloud glided over to where Mister dozed in the warm spot near the mostly dead fire, and seeped in through the cat’s grey fur. Mister sat up and blinked his yellow-green eyes at me, stretched his back, and flicked his stump of a tail back and forth before letting out a reproachful meow.
I scowled at Mister and Bob, shrugging into my duster, gathering up my blasting rod and my exorcism bag, and old black doctor’s case full of stuff. “Come on, guys,” I said. “We’re on the trail. We have the advantage. What could possibly go wrong?”
Chapter
Sixteen
Finding people is hard, especially when they don’t want to be found. It’s so difficult, in fact, that estimates run up near seven-digit figures on how many people disappear, without a trace, every year in the United States. Most of these people aren’t ever found.
I didn’t want Lydia to become one of these statistics. Either she was one of the bad guys and had been playing me for a sucker, or she was a victim who was in need of my help. If the former, then I wanted to confront her—I have this thing about people who lie to me and try to get me into trouble. If the latter, then I was probably the only one in Chicago who could help her. She could be possessed by one very big and very brawny spirit who needed to get some, pardon the pun, exorcise.
Lydia had been on foot when she left Father Forthill, and I don’t think she’d had much cash. Assuming she hadn’t come into any more resources, she’d likely still be in the Bucktown/Wicker Park area, so I headed the Blue Beetle that way. The Beetle isn’t really blue any more. Both doors had to be replaced when they’d gotten clawed to shreds, and the hood had been slagged, with a big old hole melted in it. My mechanic, Mike, who can keep the Beetle running most days, hadn’t asked any questions. He’d just replaced the parts with pieces of other Volkswagens, so that the Blue Beetle was technically blue, red, white, and green. But my appellation stuck.
I tried to keep my cool as I drove, at least as best as I could. My wizard’s propensity for blo
wing out any kind of advanced technology seems to get worse when I’m upset, angry, or afraid. Don’t ask me why. So I did my best to Zen out until I got to my destination—parking strips alongside Wicker Park.
A brisk breeze made my duster flap as I got out. On one side of the street, tall town houses and a pair of apartment buildings gleamed as the sun began to go down over the western plains. The shadows of the trees in Wicker Park, meanwhile, stretched out like black fingers creeping toward my throat. Thank God my subconscious isn’t too symbolically aware or anything. The park had a bunch of people in it, young people, mothers with kids, while on the streets, business types began arriving in their business clothes, heading for one of the posh restaurants, pubs, or cafes that littered the area.
I got a lump of chalk and a tuning fork out of my exorcism bag. I glanced around, then squatted down on the sidewalk and drew a circle around myself, willing it closed as the chalk marks met themselves on the concrete. I felt a sensation, a crackling tension, as the circle closed, encasing the local magical energies, compressing them, stirring them.
Most magic isn’t quick and dirty. The kind of stunts you can pull off when some nasty thing is about to jump up in your face are called evocations. They’re fairly limited in what they can do, and difficult to master. I only had a couple of evocations that I could do very well, and most of the time I needed the help of artificial foci, such as my blasting rod or one of my other enchanted doodads, to make sure that I don’t lose control of the spell and blow up myself along with the slobbering monster.
Most magic is a lot of concentration and hard work. That’s where I was really good—thaumaturgy. Thaumaturgy is traditional magic, all about drawing symbolic links between items or people and then investing energy to get the effect that you want. You can do a lot with thaumaturgy, provided you have enough time to plan things out, and more time to prepare a ritual, the symbolic objects, and the magical circle.
I’ve yet to meet a slobbering monster polite enough to wait for me to finish.
I slipped my shield bracelet off of my wrist and laid it in the center of the circle—that was my channel. The talisman I’d passed off to Lydia had been constructed in a very similar manner, and the two bracelets would resonate on the same pitches. I took the tuning fork and laid it down beside the bracelet, with the two ends of the shield bracelet touching either tine, making a complete circle.