by Jim Butcher
She arched an eyebrow at me.
“There’s at least a fair chance that, if someone is late to what is perceived as an important appointment, that car trouble is to blame, particularly if they show up in a rental car. Most people who hadn’t grown up around a town named Peculiar would think the name was odd.” I grinned at her. “And gosh. A lot of professional investigators are just a tad cynical.”
Her expression broke and she laughed. “Apparently.” She turned from me and kissed her brother on the cheek.
“Ben.”
“Meg.”
“Child services was here again today,” she said, her tone neutral.
“Dammit,” Yardly said. “How’s Kat?”
She waggled a hand in the air, but her face suddenly aged ten years. “The same.”
“Meg, the doctors—”
“Not again, Ben,” she said, closing her eyes briefly. She shook her head once, and Yardly shut his jaws with an audible click. Megan looked down at the ground for a moment and then up at me. “So. Harry Dresden. High Mucketymuck of the White Council.”
“Actually,” I said, “I’m a fairly low mucketymuck. Or maybe a mucketymuck militant. High mucketymucks—”
“Wouldn’t come to Peculiar?”
“You’re really into interruption, aren’t you?” I said, smiling. “I was going to say, they wouldn’t have a problem with their car.”
“Oh, God,” she said. “I think I like you.”
“Give it time,” I said.
She nodded slowly. Then she said, with gentle emphasis, “Please come into my home.” She stepped back, and I came into the little house, crossing over the threshold, the curtain of gentle, powerful energy that surrounds every home. Her invitation meant that the curtain parted for me, letting me bring my power with me. I exhaled slowly, tightening my metaphysical muscles and feeling my power put a silent, invisible strain on the air around me. Megan inhaled suddenly, sharply, and took a step back from me.
“Ah,” I said. “You are a sensitive.”
She shook her head once, and then held up her hand to forestall her brother. “Ben, it’s fine. He’s …” She looked at me again, her expression pensive, fragile. “He’s the real deal.”
We sat down in the little living room. It was littered with children’s toys. The place didn’t look like an animal pit—just busy and well-loved. I sat in a comfy chair. Megan perched at the edge of her couch. Yardly hovered, evidently unable to bring himself to sit.
“So,” I said quietly. “You think something is tormenting your daughters.”
She nodded.
“How old are they?”
“Kat is twelve. Tamara is four.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Tell me about what happens.”
Sometimes I seem to have the damnedest sense of timing. No sooner had I asked the question than a high-pitched scream cut the air, joined an instant later by another one.
“Oh, God,” Megan said, and flew up to her feet and out of the room.
I followed her, but more slowly, as the screaming continued. She hurried down a short hallway to a room with a trio of large cartoon girl figures I didn’t recognize. They had freaking huge eyes, though. Megan emerged a moment later, carrying a dark-haired moppet in pink-and-white-striped footie pajamas. The little girl was clinging to her mother with all four limbs and kept screaming, her eyes squeezed tight shut.
The sound was heart wrenching. She was terrified. I had to stop short as Megan immediately took two quick steps toward me and plunged through the next doorway. This one had a poster of a band of young men on it I didn’t recognize. One looked rebellious and sullen, one wacky and lighthearted, one sober and stable, and one handsomely vogue. Another Monkees reincarnation, basically.
I went to the door and saw Megan, with her clinging moppet, sit down on the bed and start gently shaking the shoulder of a girl with hair like her mother’s—presumably Kat. She was screaming, too, but she broke out of it a moment later, the instant her eyes fluttered open.
The moppet, presumably Tamara, stopped screaming, too, and at exactly the same time. Then they both burst into less-hysterical tears and clung to their mother.
Megan’s face was anguished, but her voice and her hands were gentle as she touched them, spoke to them, reassured them. If she was an empath as sensitive as her file and her reaction to my test suggested, then she had to be in terrible psychic pain. She pushed enough of it aside to be there for her kids, though.
“Dammit,” I heard Yardly breathe from the hall behind me. It was a tired oath.
“Interesting,” I said. “Excuse me.”
I turned and paced down the hallway to the younger child’s room, and nearly tripped over a dark-haired child, a boy who might have been eight. He was wearing underwear and a T-shirt with a cartoon Jedi Knight on it, which raised my opinion of his mother immediately. The kid’s eyes weren’t even open, and he raised his arms blindly. I picked him up and carried him with me into the little bedroom.
It wasn’t large—nothing about Megan’s house was. One of the beds was pink and festooned with the same three big-eyed girls. The other was surrounded in the plastic shell of a Star Wars landspeeder. I plopped the young Jedi back into it, and he promptly curled into a ball and went to sleep.
I covered him up with a blanket and turned to examine the rest of the room. Not much to it. A lot of toys, most of them more or less put away; a dresser the two younger kids evidently shared; a little table and chairs; and a closet.
A nice, shadowy closet.
I grunted and got on the floor to peer beneath the little pink bed. Then I squinted at the closet. If I were four and lying on the girl’s bed, the closet would be looming right past the ends of my toes.
I closed my eyes for a moment and reached out with my wizard’s senses, feeling the flow and ebb of energy through the house. Within the defensive wall of the threshold, other energy pulsed and moved—emotions from the house’s inhabitants, random energies sifting in from outdoors—the usual.
But not in the closet. There wasn’t anything at all in that closet.
“Aha,” I said.
“THIRD A,” I said, writing on the board. “Assemble.”
“Avengers,” said McKenzie.
“Assemble!” crowed the young Wardens in unison. They’re good kids.
“That is, in fact, one potential part of this phase of the investigation,” I said, taking the conversation back in hand as I nodded my approval. “Sometimes, once you’ve figured out what’s going on, you go and round up reinforcements. But what assembling really means, for our purposes, is putting everything together. You’ve got your information. Now you need to decide what to do with it. You plan what steps you need to take. You work out the possible consequences of your actions.”
“Here’s where you use your brain. If the foe has a weakness, you figure out how to exploit it. If you’ve got an advantage of terrain, you figure out how to use it. If you need specialized gear or equipment to help, here’s where you get it.” I started passing a stack of papers around the room. “There’s recipes on these handouts for a couple of the most common things you’ll use: an antidote for Red Court venom, which you’re familiar with, and an ointment for your eyes that’ll let you see through most faerie glamour, which you may not know about. Get used to making these.”
I took a deep breath. “This is also the stage where sometimes you do some math.”
The room was very quiet for a moment.
“Yeah,” I said. “Here’s where you decide whose life to risk, or whose isn’t worth risking. Here’s where you decide who you can save and who is already gone past saving. I’ve been doing this sort of thing for a while. Some of my seniors in the Council would call me foolish or arrogant, and they could be right—but I’ve never met anyone who was breathing who I thought was too far gone to help.”
“YOU’VE GOT A boogeyman,” I told Megan an hour later.
Megan frowned at me. “A-a … ?”
&n
bsp; “A boogeyman,” I said. “Sometimes known as a boggle or a boggart. It’s a weak form of phobophage—a fear-eater, mostly insubstantial. This one is pretty common. Feeds on a child’s fear.”
Yardly’s eyebrows tried to climb into his hair.
“That isn’t possible,” Megan said. “I’d … I’d sense something like that. I’d feel it. I’ve felt things like that before. Several ghosts. Once, a poltergeist.”
“Not this one,” I said. “You’re too old.”
She cocked an eyebrow at me. “Excuse me?”
“Ahem. I mean, you’re an adult.”
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“Only kids can sense them,” I said. “Part of their nature conceals them from older awarenesses.”
“The threshold,” Meg said. “It should keep such things out.”
“Sometimes they ride in with someone in the family. Sometimes if a child has a vivid enough dream, it can open up a window in the Nevernever that the boggart uses to skip in. They can use mirrors sometimes, too.”
“Nevernever?” Yardly asked.
“The spirit world,” I clarified.
“Oh, what bullshit, Meg—” Yardly said.
Megan stood up, her eyes blazing. “Benjamin.” The tension between them crackled silently in the air for several seconds.
“Crap,” he snarled finally, and stalked out the front door. He let it slam behind him.
Megan stared at the door, her lips tight. Then she turned back to me. “If what you say is true, then how can you sense it?” she asked.
“I can’t,” I said. “That was the giveaway. The rest of your house feels normal. The closet in the younger kids’ room is a black hole.”
“Jesus,” Megan said, turning. “Tamara and Joey are asleep in there.”
“Relax,” I said. “They’re safe for now. It already ate tonight. It isn’t going to do it again. And it can’t physically hurt them. All it can do is scare them.”
“All it can do?” Megan asked. “Do you have any idea what they’ve gone through? She says she never even remembers waking up screaming, but Kat’s grades are down from straight As to Cs. She hasn’t slept a solid night in six months. Tamara has stopped talking. She doesn’t say more than a dozen words a day.” Her eyes shone, but she was too proud to let me see tears fall. “Don’t tell me that my children aren’t being hurt.”
I winced and held up my hands placatingly. “You’re right. Okay? I’m sorry. I picked the wrong words.” I took a deep breath and exhaled. “The point is that now that we know about it, we can do something.”
“We?”
“It will be better if someone in the family helps with the exorcism, yeah.”
“Exorcism?” she asked. She stared at the doorway Yardly had gone out.
“Sure,” I said. “It’s your house, not the boogeyman’s. If I show you how, are you willing to kick that thing’s ass?”
“Yes,” she said. Her voice was hard.
“Might be dangerous,” I said. “I’ve got your back, but there’s always a risk. You sure?”
Megan turned to face me and her eyes blazed.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what I thought.”
“LAST A,” I said, writing. “Act.”
“That seems obvious,” Ilyana said.
“Sure,” I said. “But it’s where everything gets decided. And it’s always a gamble. You’re betting that you’ve seen everything clearly, that you know everything that’s going on.”
“Yes,” Ilyana said, her tone somewhat exasperated. “That is the purpose of the first three ahs.”
“Ays,” McKenzie corrected her absently. “Eh?”
Ilyana speared him with an icy gaze. “Whatever. Already we are discovering what is happening. That was the point of the methodology.”
“Ah,” I said, lifting a finger. “But do you know everything? Are you so sure you know exactly what’s happening? Especially when you’re about to put the safety of yourself or others on the line?”
Ilyana looked confused. “Why would I not be sure?”
I smiled faintly.
THE NEXT EVENING, the children went to bed at nine. They stopped asking for drinks, searching for the next day’s clothing, waving glow-in-the-dark light sabers in the air, and otherwise acting like children by nine thirty. They were all sleeping by nine thirty-five.
Megan, a surly Yardly, and I immediately got ready to ambush the boogeyman.
While Megan collected clipped hairs from her childrens’ heads, Yardly and I cleared off enough carpet for me to take a container of salt and pour it out into a circle. You can use just about anything to make a magic circle, but salt is often the most practical. It’s a symbol of the earth and of purity, and it doesn’t draw ants. You use sugar to make a circle on the carpet only once. Let me tell you.
Meg returned and I nodded toward the circle. “In there.”
She went over to the circle, being careful not to disturb it, and dropped the locks of hair from her children, bound together by long strands of her own coppery curls, into the center. “Right,” I said. “Meg, stand in the circle with them.” She took a deep breath and then did it, turning to face the open, darkened closet. Her breathing was slow but not steady. She was smart enough to be scared. “Remember what I said,” I told her quietly. “When you feel it on you, close that circle and think of your children.” She nodded tightly.
“I’m right here,” I told her. “It gets bad, I’ll step in. You can do this.”
“Right,” she said, in a very thin voice.
I nodded to her, trying to look calm and confident. She needed that. Then I stepped back out into the hallway. Yardly came with me and closed the door behind him, leaving Megan and her children in the dark.
“I don’t get it,” he said in a low, quiet voice. “How’s it supposed to help the kids if they’re asleep?”
I gave him a look. “By destroying the creature that’s attacking them?”
His lips twisted sourly. “It’s a prophylactic-effect thing, right?”
“Placebo effect,” I sighed. “And no, it isn’t.”
“Because there’s a real monster,” he said.
I nodded. “Sure.”
He eyed me for a while. “You’re serious. You believe it.”
“Yep.”
Yardly looked like he wanted to sidle a few more feet away from me. He didn’t.
“How’s this supposed to work?” he asked.
“The kids’ hair is going to substitute for them,” I said. “As far as the boogeyman is concerned, the hairs are the children. Like using a set of clothes you’ve worn to leave a false trail for something following your scent.”
Yardly frowned. “Okay.”
“Your sister’s hair is bound around them,” I said. “Binding her to the kids. She’s close to them, obviously loves them. That’s got a kind of power in it. She’s going to be indistinguishable from the children to the boogeyman.”
“She’s a decoy?”
“She’s a damned land mine,” I said. “Boogeymen go after children because they’re weak. Too weak to stand up to an adult mind and will. So once this thing gets into the circle, she closes it and tears it to shreds.”
“Then why is she afraid?” he asked.
“Because the boogeyman has power. It’s going to tear at her mind. It’ll hurt. If she falters, it might be able to hurt her bad.”
Yardly just stared at me for a long, silent moment. Then he said, “You aren’t a con man. You believe it.”
“Yeah,” I said, and leaned back against the wall. It might be a long wait.
“I don’t know what’s scarier,” Yardly said. “If you’re crazy. Or if you’re not.”
“Kids are sensitive,” I said. “They’ll take the lead from their mom. If Mom is scared and worried, they will be, too. If it helps, think of this as my way of giving the kids a magic feather.”
Yardly frowned and then nodded. “Like Dumbo.”
“Yep,”
I said. “Couple months from now, that will be the easiest way to understand it.”
He let out a short, bitter bark of laughter. “Yeah?”
“Definitely.”
“You do this a lot.”
“Yep.”
We waited in silence for about half an hour. Then Yardly said, “I work violent crimes.”
I turned my head to look at him.
“I helped my sister set up out here in Peculiar to get her away from the city. Make sure her kids are safe. You know?”
“I hear you.”
“I’ve seen bad things,” Yardly said quietly. “I don’t … It scares the hell out of me to think of my nieces, my nephew, becoming another one of the pictures in my head.”
I nodded and listened.
“I worked this case last week,” Yardly said a moment later. “Wife and kids got beaten a lot. Our hands were tied. Couldn’t put this guy away. One night he goes too far with a knife. Kills the wife, one of the kids. Leaves the other one with scars all over her face …” His own face turned pale. “And now this is happening. The kids are falling apart. Child Protective Services is going to take them away if something doesn’t change.”
I grunted. “I grew up in the system,” I said. “Orphan.”
He nodded.
“Something’s going to change,” I said.
He nodded again, and we went silent once more. Sometime between eleven thirty and midnight, a scream erupted from the older child’s room. Yardly and I both looked up, blinking.
“Kat,” he said.
“What the hell,” I muttered.
A few seconds later, the little girl started screaming, that same painfully high-pitched tone I’d heard the night before.
And then Megan started screaming, too.
“Dammit!” Yardly said. He drew his gun and was a step behind me as I pushed open the door to Joey and Tamara’s room.
Megan was crouched in the circle of salt, swaying. The lights were flickering on and off. As I came in, Joey sat up with a wail, obviously tired and frightened.
I could see something in the circle with Megan, a shadow that fled an instant after the lights came up, slower than the rest. It was about the size of a chimpanzee and it clung to her shoulders and waist with indistinct limbs, its head moving as if ripping with fangs at her face.