Ghost Story (22 page)

I started throwing a punch, vanished again, and reappeared right behind lemur number one. My fist drove into the base of his neck just as I shouted, “BAMF!”

There isn't much honor in a rabbit punch, but it's a pretty darned good way to down an opponent. Whatever rules governed the world of spirit, there must have been some kind of analogue to a human nervous system. The lemur let out a choking gasp and fell to the ground as the other two panicked at the sudden assault and vanished. I kicked the downed guy in the head and neck a few times to help him on his way to Analogue-Concussion Land, screaming in pure and incoherent rage all the while.

I had a fraction of a second's warning, a cold breath on the back of my neck, a rippling wave of ethereal pressure against my back. I vanished, to reappear five feet behind my original position—and this time, I
meant
to be facing the same way when I arrived.

I got there in time to see one of the other lemurs swing a freaking hatchet at the space my skull had recently vacated. He stumbled, off balance from the miss, and I kicked his ass—literally. I leaned my upper body back a bit and pretended I was using my heel to stomp an aluminum can flat. It's a powerful kick, especially with my full body weight behind it, and the lemur flew forward and into the snow.

“Who's the man?!” I screamed at the sprawled lemurs, fear and anger and excitement pitching my voice about an octave higher than usual. “Who's the man?!”

The hood had fallen from the face of the second, and an unremarkable man of middle age goggled at me in complete incomprehension—which made sense. Who knew how many decades of pop culture the lemurs had missed out on. They'd probably never even heard of Will Smith.

“I am completely unappreciated in my time,” I muttered.

I am also, apparently, no wizard when it comes to simple mathematics: While I was Will Smithing, lemur number three appeared out of nowhere and smashed a baseball bat against the side of my neck.

The pain was something incredible—more than merely the reaction of physical trauma that I would have expected from such a blow. It also encompassed an almost Olympian sense of nausea combined with a force-five storm of whirling confusion. I felt myself note idly that I guessed egos literally
could
be bruised. It took me another second or two after that to realize that I was floating, drifting sideways and slightly upward, my body at a forty-five-degree diagonal to the ground. There was a roaring sound in my head. An eerie cry of triumph and hunger pealed through the night.

Then the lemurs came for me.

I felt bitterly cold fingers seize me, clamping down like steel claws. I was hauled out to horizontal by frigid, steely hands. I was still disoriented—I was barely able to turn my head enough to see the third lemur approach.

Her hood had fallen back. She was a young woman of unexceptional appearance, neither beautiful nor displeasing. Her eyes, though, were dark and hollow, and a hideous emptiness lay behind them. She stared intently at me for a long beat, her body quivering in some kind of dark rapture.

Then she let out a slow hiss, sank her fingers into the flesh of my left biceps, and ripped off a handful of meat.

Ectoplasmic blood flew. My blood. It scattered through the air in lazy globules that, once they were a few feet from me, fell like raindrops to the surface of the snow.

It hurt. I screamed.

All three lemurs screamed with me, as if triggered into a response by my own cries. The female lemur lifted the gobbet of flesh aloft in triumph, then held it over her open mouth and squeezed. More blood pattered out onto her lips and tongue, and she let out a gasp of unadulterated ecstasy before shoving the raw flesh into her mouth as though she hadn't eaten in weeks.

Her eyes rolled back into her head. She shuddered. “Oh,” she breathed. “Pain. He's felt so much
pain
. And rage. And joy. Oh, this one
lived
.”

“Here,” said the second lemur. “Come take his legs. My turn.”

The female bared her bloodied teeth at him and tore another, smaller piece from my arm. She snapped it up and then leaned on my legs, pinning them. The second lemur looked me over like a man perusing a side of beef. Then he ripped a handful of flesh from my right thigh.

It went like that for several minutes, with the three of them taking turns ripping meat from my body.

I won't bore you with the details. I don't like to think about it. They were stronger than me, better than me, more experienced than me when it came to spiritual conflict.

They got me. The monsters got me. And it hurt.

Until footsteps crunched toward us through the snow.

The lemurs never took notice. I was in too much agony to care very much, but I wasn't exactly busy, either. I looked up and saw a lone figure slogging my way through the thick snow. He wasn't very big, and he was dressed in a white parka and white ski pants, with one of those ninja capmask things, also white, covering his face. In his right hand he carried a big, old-style, heavy, portable spotlight, the kind with a plastic carrying handle on top. Its twin incandescent bulbs shone a garish orange over the snow.

I sniggered to myself. He was a person. He sank into the snow with every step. He wouldn't be able to see what was happening right in front of him. No wonder the lemurs paid him no mind.

But ten feet away from me, he abruptly froze in his tracks and blurted, “Holy crap!”

He reached up and ripped off the ninja hood, revealing the thin, fine features of a man of somewhere near forty. His hair was dark, curly, and mussed from the hood; he had glasses perched askew on his beak of a nose; and his dark eyes were wide with shock. “Harry!”

I stared at him and said, through the blood, “Butters?”

“Stop them,” Butters hissed. “Save him! I release you for this task!”

“On it, sahib!” shouted another voice.

A cloud of campfire sparks poured out of the two sources of light in the spotlight, rushing out by the millions, and congealed into a massive, manlike shape. It let out a lion's roar and blurred toward the lemurs.

Two of them were sharp enough to realize something dangerous was coming, and they promptly vanished. The third, the young woman, was in the middle of another bite—and she didn't look up until it was too late.

The light form hit the lemur and simply disintegrated it. As I watched, skin and clothing and flesh were ripped away from the evil spirit, as swiftly and savagely as if peeled off with a sandblaster. A heartbeat later, there was nothing left but a gently drifting cloud of sparks, speckled here and there with the floating shapes of somewhat larger, prismatic gemstones.

The light being looked up and then promptly split into two parts, each one becoming a comet that hurtled into the night sky. There was an explosion almost at once—and the raining bits and pieces of a second lemur came drifting lazily down through the night air, along with more multicolored gems.

There was a terrible howling sound in the night sky above. I heard the flap of heavy robes snapping with rapid motion. The second comet of light darted back and forth, evidently engaged in some kind of aerial combat, and then lemur and comet both came hurtling back down. They struck earth with a thunder that shook the ground while leaving the snow untouched.

The orange lights flowed together into a manlike shape again, this time straddling the lemur's prone form. The being of light rained blows down on the lemur's head, over and over, striking with the speed and power of a motor's pistons. Within ten or twelve seconds, the head of the lemur had been crushed into ectoplasmic guck, and his sparkles of light—his memories—and the same odd, tiny gems began to well up from his broken form.

The light being rose from the form of the fallen lemur and scanned the area around us, his featureless face turning in a slow, alert scan.

“What the hell!” Butters said, his eyes wide. “I mean, what the hell was that, man?”

“Relax, sahib,” said a young man's voice. It was coming from the fiery figure, which nodded and made hand-dusting motions of unmistakable satisfaction. “Just taking out the trash. Scum like that are all over these old mortal cities. Part of the posthuman condition, you might say.”

I just watched. I didn't feel like doing anything else.

“Yeah, yeah,” Butters said. “But he's safe now?”

“For now,” the being said, “and as far as I know.”

Butters crunched through the snow and stared down at me. The little guy was one of Chicago's small number of medical examiners, a forensic investigator who analyzed corpses and found out all sorts of details about them. A few years ago, he'd analyzed corpses of vampires that had burned to death in a big fire someone started. He'd asserted that they obviously were not human. He'd been packed off to an institution for half a year in response. Now he treaded carefully in his career—or at least he had when I was last alive.

“Is it really him?” Butters asked.

The being of light scanned me with unseen eyes. “I can't spot anything that would suggest he was anything else,” he said cautiously. “Which ain't the same as saying it's Harry's ghost. It has . . . more something than other ghosts I've encountered.”

Butters frowned. “More what?”

“Something,” the being said. “Meaning I'm not sure what. Something I'm not expert in, clearly.”

“The, uh, the ghost,” Butters said. “It's hurt?”

“Quite severely,” the being said. “But it's easily mended—if you wish to do it.”

Butters blinked at him. “What? Yes, yes, of
course
I wish it.”

“Very good, sahib,” the being said. And then it whipped and darted through the night air, gathering up all the floating, glittering gems from the vanishing remains of the lemurs. It brought them together into a single mass and then knelt down next to my head.

“Bob,” I said quietly.

Bob the Skull, formerly my personal assistant and confidant, hesitated beside me as I said his name. Once again, I became aware of his intense regard, but if he saw anything, it didn't register on his featureless face.

“Harry,” he said. “Open up. You need to restore these memories to your essence.”

“Restore what?” I asked.

“Eat 'em,” Bob said firmly. “Open your mouth.”

I was tired and confused, so it was easier to just do as he said. I closed my eyes as he dropped the mass of gems into my open mouth. But instead of feeling hard gems, fresh, cool water flowed into my mouth, swirling over my parched tongue and throat as I eagerly swallowed it down.

Pain vanished instantly. The disorientation began to fade and disappear. My confusion and weariness followed those others within a moment, and a deep breath later, I was sitting up in place, feeling more or less as sane and together as I had been when I had woken up that evening.

Bob offered me a hand and I took it. He pulled me to my feet as if I'd weighed less than nothing. “Well,” he said. “At least you don't seem to be a bad copy. I was half-afraid you'd be some kind of demented Winter Knight wannabe with an eye patch and a goatee or something.”

“Um,” I said. “Thank you?”

“De nada,”
Bob said.

“Bob,” Butters said in a firm voice. “You've fulfilled your task.” Bob the Skull sighed and turned to bow in a florid gesture of courtesy toward Butters, before dissolving into a cloud of orange sparks again and flowing back toward the flashlight. I saw then that the spotlight casing hadn't contained lightbulbs and batteries and such—just Bob's skull, a human-bone artifact of a long-dead enchanter who had built it as a haven that could harbor the essence of a spiritual being.

“Hey, Bob,” I said. “Could you relay my voice to Butters?”

“Don't have to, former boss,” Bob said cheerfully. “On account of the fact that Butters is a whole heck of a lot more talented at magical theory than you.”

I frowned. “What?”

“Oh, he doesn't have a lick of magical talent,” Bob assured me. “But he's got a
brain
, which, let's face it, hasn't always been your most salient feature.”

“Bob,” Butters said in a scolding tone. Then he fumbled in his parka's pocket and produced a small, old radio. “Here, see? I had Bob go over your notes from the Nightmare case, Harry. Bob said you created a radio that he could communicate through. So . . .”

I refrained from hitting my own head with the heel of my hand, but just barely. “So it wasn't much of a trick to turn it into a baby monitor. You just needed an old crystal radio.”

Butters listened with his head tilted toward the radio and nodded. “I explained the concept to Molly this morning and she put it together in an hour.” He waved the spotlight housing Bob's skull. “And I can see spooks by the light of the spirit's form. So I can see and hear you. Hi!”

I stared at the skinny man and didn't know if I wanted to break out into laughter or wild sobs. “Butters . . . you . . . you figured this all out on your own?”

“Well . . . no. I mean, I had a tutor.” He bobbled the spotlight meaningfully.

“Ack! Don't make me puke,” Bob warned him. “You won't like me when I puke.”

“Hush, Bob,” said Butters and I in exactly the same tone at exactly the same time.

We both turned to eye each other for a moment. He might have tucked the skull close to his side in a protective gesture of possession.

“You shouldn't stay here, with all the official types around,” I said.

“Just thinking the same thing,” Butters said. “Come with me?”

“Sure,” I said. “Uh. Where?”