A Stark And Wormy Knight (10 page)

“I certainly do.”

“That was one of them, hitchhiking a ride in a living body. Nearly ripped my head off before I got away. I still have the scars…”

The night-time city waited now between waves of the storm. For a moment it was quiet enough in the room for Nightingale to hear the fan of his godfather’s ventilator.

“In any case, that smoky yellow light terrified me. The bardo says it’s temptation itself, that light, but maybe it didn’t tempt me because I wasn’t dying – instead it just made me feel frightened and sick, if you can be sick without a body. I could barely sense Geshe but I knew he was there and experiencing something very different. Instead of continuing toward the brilliant white light of compassion, as the bardo instructed, this very compassionate man seemed to hesitate. The yellow light was spreading around us like something toxic diffusing through water. Geshe seemed confused, stuck, as though he fought against a call much stronger than anything I could sense. I could feel something else, too, something alien to both of us, cold and strong and…yes, and hungry. God, I’ve never sensed hunger like that, a bottomless need like the empty chill of space sucking away all living warmth…”

Nightingale sat quietly for a long moment before he spoke again. “But then, just when I was fighting hardest to hang onto my connection to Geshe, it dissolved and he was gone. I’d lost touch with him. The yellow light was all around me, strange and greasy…repulsive, but also overwhelming…

“I fell out. No, it was more like I was shoved. I tumbled back into the real world, back into my body. I couldn’t feel Geshe any more. Joseph had stopped reading the Chakkhai Bardo and was staring in alarm. Geshe’s body, which hadn’t moved or showed any signs of life in some time, was suddenly in full-on Cheyne-Stokes respiration, chest hitching, body jerking — he almost looked like he was convulsing. But Joseph swore to me later on that Geshe had stopped breathing half an hour earlier and I believe him.

“A moment later Geshe’s eyes popped open. I’ve seen stranger things, but it still startled me. He had been dead, Uncle Edward, really dead, I swear he had. Now he was looking at me – but it wasn’t Geshe any more. I couldn’t prove it of course, but I had touched this man’s soul, traveled with him as he passed over, the most intimate thing imaginable, and this just wasn’t him.

“
No, I will not die yet,”
he said. The voice sounded like his, but strong, far too strong for someone who had been in periodic breathing only a minute earlier.
“There are still things for me to do on this earth.”
It was the eyes, though. That same cold, flat stare that I’d seen through the doorway in Minnesota, the one I’ve seen before in other possession cases, but there was none of the struggle I’d seen in classic possession, no sense of the soul and body fighting against an interloper. One moment it was Geshe, a spiritual man, an artist, the next moment it was…someone else. Someone as cold and detached as a textbook sociopath.

“He closed his eyes then and slept, or pretended to, but already he looked healthier than he had since I met him. I couldn’t tell Joseph that I thought his friend was possessed – what a horrible thing to say to someone already dealing with several kinds of trauma! – and I didn’t know what else to do, what to think. I sat there for most of an hour, unable to think of anything to do. At last, when the nurse came and began dealing with this incredible turn of medical events, I went out to get a drink. All right, I had a few, then went home and slept like a dead man myself.

“I should never have left them, Edward. When I went back the next day, the apartment was empty. A few weeks later I received an email from Joseph – or at least from Joseph’s address – saying that after his miraculous recovery Geshe wanted to travel to Tibet, the place of his heritage. I’ve never heard from either of them since…”

The lightning, absent for almost a quarter of an hour, suddenly flared, turning the room into a flat tableau of black and white shapes; the thunder that followed seemed to rock the entire building. The light on Edward Arvedson’s desk flickered once, then went out, as did the lights on his ventilator. Through the windows Nightingale could see the houses across the street had gone black as well. He jumped up, suddenly cold all over. His father’s oldest friend and his own most trusted advisor was about to die of asphyxiation while he watched helplessly.

“Good God, Edward, the electricity…!”

“Don’t…worry…” Arvedson wheezed. “I have a…standby…generator.”

A moment later Nightingale felt rather than heard something begin to rumble somewhere in the house below and the desk light flickered back on, although the houses across the street remained dark. “There,” said his godfather. “You see, young Natan? Not such an old-fashioned fool after all, eh? I am prepared for things like this. Power for the street will be back on soon – it happens a lot in this ancient neighborhood. Now, tell me what you think is happening.”

Nightingale sat back, trying to regain his train of thought. If only the old man wasn’t so stubborn about living on his own with only Jenkins – no spring lamb himself – for company.

“Right,” he said at last. “Well, I’m sure you’re thinking the same thing as me, Uncle Edward. Somehow these predatory souls or spirits have found a way to possess the bodies of the dying. Which would be bad enough, but it’s the incredible frequency with which it seems to be happening. I can’t possibly investigate them all, of course, but if even half the reports that reach me are real it’s happening all over the world, several times a day.”

The rain was back now, lashing the windows and tattooing the roof of Edward’s Victorian house. When the old man spoke, there was an unfamiliar tone in his voice. “You are…frightened, my dear Natan.”

“Yes, Uncle Edward, I am. I’ve never been this frightened, and I’ve seen a lot. It’s as if something fundamental has broken down, some wall between us and the other side, and now the living are under attack. What did the cab driver say to me on the way over, babbling about the weather – ‘the storm door is open’…? And I’m afraid the storms are just going to keep coming thicker and faster until all our houses arre blown down.”

“But why? And why now?”

“Why? Because they’ve always been there – the hungry ones, the envious things that hate us because we can still breathe and sing and love. Do they want that back, or do they just want to keep us from having it? I don’t know. And why now? I don’t know that either. Perhaps some universal safeguard has stopped working, or these entities have learned something they didn’t know before.”

“Then here is the most important question, Nate. What are you going to do about it, now you know? What can one person do?”

“Well, make sure it isn’t just one person trying to deal with it, to begin with. You and I know lots of people who don’t think I’m a charlatan – brave people who study this sort of thing, who fight the good fight and know the true danger. More than a few of us have dedicated our lives to keep the rest of humanity safe, without reward or thanks. Now I have to alert them all, if they haven’t discovered this already.” He stood and began to pace back and forth before the desk. “And to make sure the word gets out, I’ll use the very same tabloid vultures that you and I despise so much. They’ll do good without knowing it. Because for every thousand people who’ll read headlines that say things like “So-Called Demon Hunter Claims Dead are Invading the Living World” and laugh at it as nonsense, one or two will understand…and will heed the warning.” He moved to the window, looked out into the darkness. “We can only hope to hold these hungry ghosts at bay if every real paranormal researcher, exorcist, and sympathetic priest we can reach will join us — every collector you know, every student of the arcane, every adventurer behind the occult lines, all of those soldiers of the light that the rest of society dismiss as crazy. This will be our great war.”

Nightingale turned and walked back to his chair. “So there you have it, Uncle Edward. I’ll spread the word. You spread the word, too. Call in old favors. If enough of us hear the truth, we may still be able to get the storm door shut again.”

The old man was silent for a long time as thunder rolled away into the distance.

“You’re a brave young man, Nate,” he said at last. “Your parents would be proud of you. I’m going to have to think for a while about the best way to help you, and though it embarrasses me to admit it, I also need some rest. You’ll forgive me – I get tired so quickly. I’ll be all right until Jenkins comes back in a few hours. You can let yourself out, can’t you?”

“Of course, Uncle Edward.” He went to the old man and gave him a quick hug, then kissed his cool, dry cheek. He carried his empty sherry glass to the sideboard. “Now that I’m back in town, I’ll be by to see you again tomorrow. Good night.” On his way to the door Nightingale stopped and held his fingers up to catch the light from the desk lamp and saw that the darkness there was only dust.

“Tell Jenkins he’s getting sloppy,” he said. “I can’t imagine you giving him a night off in the old days without finishing the cleaning. Looks like he hasn’t dusted in weeks.”

“I’ll tell him,” said his godfather. “Go on, go on. I’ll see you very soon.”

But Nightingale did not go through the doorway. Instead, he turned and slowly walked back into the room. “Uncle Edward,” he said. “Are you certain you’re going to be all right? I mean, the power’s still off. You can’t breathe without your ventilator.”

“The generator can run for hours and hours. It’ll shut itself off when the regular power comes back.” He waved his hand testily. “Go on, Nate. I’m fine.”

“But the strange thing,” said Nightingale, “is that when the generator came on half an hour ago, the ventilator didn’t. There must be something wrong with it.”

Arvedson went very still. “What…what are you talking about?”

“Here. Look, the little lights on it never came back on, either. Your ventilator’s off.” The room suddenly seemed very quiet, nothing but the distant sound of cars splashing along out on Jones Street, distant as the moon. “What happened to Edward?”

The old man looked surprised. “I don’t…Nate, what are you saying…?”

The gun was out of Nightingale’s coat and into his hand so quickly it might have simply appeared there. He leveled it at a spot between the old man’s two bushy white eyebrows. “I asked you what happened to Edward — the real Edward Arvedson. I’m only going to ask this once more. I swear I’ll kill him before I let you have his body, and I’m betting you can’t pull your little possession trick again on a full-grown, healthy man like me – especially not before I can pull the trigger.”

Even in the half-light of the desk lamp, the change was a fearful one: Edward Arvedson’s wrinkled features did not alter in any great way, but something moved beneath the muscles and skin like a light-shunning creature burrowing through the dark earth. The eyes fixed his. Although the face was still Edward’s, somehow it no longer looked much like him. “You’re a clever boy, Nightingale,” said the stranger in his godfather’s body. “I should have noticed the ventilator never came back on, but as you’ve guessed, this sack of meat no longer has a breathing problem. In fact, it no longer needs to breathe at all.”

“What’s happened to him?” The gun stayed trained on the spot between the old man’s eyes. “Talk fast.”

A slow, cold smile stretched the lips. “That is not for me to say, but rather it is between him and his god. Perhaps he is strumming a harp with the other angels now…or writhing and shrieking in the deepest pits…”

“Bastard!” Nightingale pulled back the trigger with his thumb. “You lie! He’s in there with you. And I know a dozen people who can make you jump right the hell back out…”

The thing shook its head. “Oh, Mr. Nightingale, you’ve been playing the occult detective so long you’ve come to believe you’re really in a story – and that it will have a happy ending. We didn’t learn new ways to possess the living.” The smile returned, mocking and triumphant. “We have learned how to move into the bodies of the recently dead. Quite a breakthrough. It’s much, much easier than possession, and we cannot be evicted because the prior tenant…is gone. Your ‘Uncle Edward’ had a stroke, you see. We waited all around him as he died – oh, and believe me, we told him over and over what we would do, including this moment. Like you, he caused us a great deal of trouble over the years — and as you know, we dead have long memories. And when he was beyond our torments at last, well, this body was ours. Already my essence has strengthened it. It does not need to breathe, and as you can see…” The thing rose from the wheelchair with imperial calm and stood without wavering. Nightingale backed off a few steps, keeping the gun high. “…it no longer needs assistance to get around, either,” the thing finished. “I feel certain I’ll get years of use out of it before I have to seek another – time enough to contact and betray all of the rest of Edward Arvedson’s old friends.”

“Who are you?” Nightingale fought against a despair that buffeted him like a cold wind. “Oh, for the love of God, what do you monsters want?”

““Who am I? Just one of the hungry ones. One of the unforgiving.” It sat down again, making the wheelchair creak. “What do we want? Not to go quietly, as you would have us go – to disappear into the shadows of nonexistence and leave the rest of you to enjoy the light and warmth.” The thing lifted its knotted hands – Edward’s hands, as they had seemed such a short time ago – in a greedy gesture of seizure. “As you said, this is a war. We want what you have.” It laughed, and for the first time the voice sounded nothing at all like his godfather’s familiar tones. “And we are going take it from you. All of you.”