Stones Unturned (11 page)

Danny vaulted over the edge of the roof and dropped all the way to the ground, the air whistling past his face as he fell. He landed on all fours with nary a sound, right in front of Conan Doyle's brownstone, then bounded across the street. Using the guy's car for cover, he peered around the BMW. The bastard was trying to haul the girl to her feet, half carrying her and half dragging her toward the stairs of her apartment building.

And that was where he dumped her, looking around to see if anyone had seen what he had done.

The prick wiped blood from his lip where she had slapped him and pulled the keys from the pocket of his sport coat.

Danny emerged from the shadows in front of the car. When the guy spotted him, his eyes narrowed for just a second with annoyance, and then widened in confusion and fear. The stink of fear suddenly filled the air.

"What the fuck?" the guy said, as Danny sprang at him.

The rage cheered him on, telling him that what he was doing was right — that people like this deserved everything they got.

"You like to hit girls, huh, asshole?" Danny growled, snatching up a fistful of the guy's jacket.

The guy threw a feeble punch, striking Danny on the chin, but he barely felt it. He rammed his horned head forward in a savage head butt. His horns sliced the asshole's forehead, and Danny shoved him up against the car. The guy was dazed, blood running down his face in streams from a pair of nasty gashes in his forehead.

"Tough guy," Danny spat, running his clawed hands along the side of the gray sports car, digging furrows into the expensive paint job. "You got your car, your looks, your money. You think you can do anything you want."

He grabbed the guy by the throat and hauled him off his feet. Expensive shoes dangled inches above the pavement.

"But you can't," Danny sneered, looking into the guy's bloody face. "And I'm here to remind you of that."

He slammed the guy down atop the roof of the car, and he bounced, rolling down across the windshield to lay moaning on top of the hood.

Danny laughed, a short, nasty barking sound. This was the best he'd felt in weeks.

He grabbed the guy again, dragging him across the hood. One of the guy's eyes was starting to swell, and Danny reached down with a claw and raked the swollen flesh, tearing open the skin. Blood spurted from the wound.

The guy screamed. It was the greatest sound Danny had ever heard. All of the fear he'd had of himself was gone, now. By knocking his girlfriend around — knocking her unconscious — this guy had bought himself a world of hurt. He deserved whatever he got.

Son of a bitch did me a favor.

Danny covered the guy's mouth with a hand.

"Shhhhhh," he hissed, bringing his demonic features closer. "Don't want to wake up the neighborhood, do we?" His tongue flicked out, licking away some of the man's blood.

It tasted like honey.

That was when he realized that his skin didn't itch anymore, his bones didn't ache, and he felt as though he could take on the world single-handedly.

All it took was blood.

He grabbed hold of the guy's neck, beginning to sink his curved, black claws into the soft flesh, eager to get to the blood.

When a voice stopped him.

"Hey, kid," said the gravelly voice. "You really want to be doin' that?"

Danny watched as Squire emerged from a patch of shadow thrown by a window box on the front of one of the other buildings that lined Mount Vernon Street. He was smoking a cigar and stank of booze.

The goblin just stood there, staring at him with red, yellow-flecked eyes, and Danny felt his rage begin to subside.

"He would have deserved it," Danny said, tossing the unconscious boy back atop the hood and stepping away.

"You goin' in?" Squire asked, motioning toward the house with his large, potato-shaped head.

"Yeah," Danny said. "Yeah, I think I should."

"Good answer." Squire took a puff from the foul-smelling cigar and the two of them walked side by side to the steps leading into Conan Doyle's home.

Whenever Clay drove, he had to force himself not to check the rearview mirror incessantly. The eyes drew him. In an ordinary mirror he could see his entire face, and though his appearance often intrigued him, he had grown accustomed over his long life to seeing a different face and shape in the mirror. The human features he most frequently wore — the identity he called Joseph Clay — was familiar, but no less a mask than all of the others. Monsters and dead men, the faces were never consistent, and so nothing he saw in a full-size mirror could surprise or distract him.

But in the car, the rearview mirror only showed his eyes, and over the centuries it had become far too tempting for him to search those eyes for some semblance of sameness. Large or small, blue or brown or hideous red, he stared into his own eyes for a sense of himself. If he could find it there, some commonality that existed in each of the forms he took, he might begin to believe he had a soul.

The rented Jeep Grand Cherokee thrummed as he drove south on interstate, keeping his eyes on the road. His iPod lay on the console, set on shuffle, playing a truly eclectic selection of music. Eclectic tastes were inevitable for someone who had been alive in a time when the only musical instrument in the world was the human voice.

The ghost of Doctor Graves shimmed beside him in a rough approximation of sitting in the passenger's seat. Of course, Graves could not feel the seat or make any real contact with it, but Clay had long since found that ghosts took comfort in the ability to mimic ordinary activities.

Graves had been careful only to partially manifest. With the morning sun streaming through the windows of the Cherokee, there would be no way for him to appear alive. Passing motorists would take a glance and see a transparent man, the trace of a person riding in the passenger seat, and there would have been staring and shouting and possibly accidents leading to twisted automotive wreckage and loss of life.

Instead, Graves manifested in a state between the ethereal realm and the physical world. The specter would be visible to supernatural beings such as Clay, but the only humans driving by who would be able to see him would be the rare medium or psychic sensitive. That could still lead to a car accident, but Clay figured such people would be less likely to react to seeing a ghost.

"You've been awfully quiet," he said.

At first the ghost did not respond, as though he hadn't heard. Graves stared straight ahead like the road before them was the most fascinating thing he had ever seen. Though handsome, his features had a natural stoicism about them that lent a grimness to his aspect, even when his mood was light. This made him difficult to read.

The ghost wavered in the sunlight, an insubstantial gauze, like heat haze on summer blacktop.

"Leonard —"

"I don't like to go home," Graves interrupted. The ghost glanced at him. Clay kept his hands on the wheel. "Even before my death, I spent little time in Swansea. To be going home now just to disinter my bones…"

The smile that crossed the specter's face sent a chill through Clay. He had seen death a million times, but could never know what it felt like from the other side, from the afterlife.

"I'd tell you we could turn around," Clay said, "but the answers might be waiting in your grave."

The ghost of Dr. Graves shook his head. "No turning back. If I gave up trying to solve this mystery, I'd only be haunting myself. I'd be in Hell. I've been wandering long enough. It's time for the truth."

Graves seemed more ephemeral than ever, the sunlight threatening to wash him away completely. He stared out at the road again, and Clay decided perhaps that was best for now.

The minutes passed in silence, and eventually he lost track of the time and the miles. Not too far north of the New York border he got off of Route 95, following a winding road right into the heart of Swansea, Connecticut. What surprised Clay immediately was the aura of money that emanated from every structure, every person, every car. The lawns were perfectly manicured, the school a brand-new sprawling brick monster, the awnings in front of the shops immaculate.

Graves directed him up a wide avenue with a beautifully landscaped island running down its center. The homes began with stunning and moved on to astonishing, mostly Federal Colonials and Victorians built at the tail end of the nineteenth century or the dawning days of the twentieth. Closer to the center of town houses were right on the edge of the road, and Clay knew some of them had been taverns and the like at one time. These were the oldest. As they moved away from downtown Swansea, the homes became more stately, set back farther from the road. There were sprawling estates with black wrought iron gates and trees older than the nation.

"You grew up here?"

The ghost's ethereal substance rippled with pique. "You're surprised? I would not have expected racial presumptions from a creature as old as you."

Clay smirked. "I have no race, my friend. But if nothing else, I'm a student of history. You were born, when, 1910?"

"Oh-nine."

"Very few black Americans could have lived like this in those days."

The ghost gestured with a spectral hand. "Park at the curb."

Clay pulled over and killed the ignition. He glanced at Graves, who rose up, passing through the car roof as though it were as insubstantial as he. Brow creased in a frown, Clay popped open the door, locked up the Cherokee, and shut the door.

The ghost drifted toward the wrought iron fence, going through the motions of walking, though it could not precisely have been called that. Graves's spectral form had altered. He had a long coat on now, the sort of greatcoat that had been commonplace in the nineteen forties, the era of his murder. When he passed through the iron bars he turned to glance back, and Clay saw the straps across his chest that indicated he was wearing the holsters for the phantom guns he sometimes carried.

Not carried. Manifested
, Clay thought. They're ectoplasm, just like Graves.

"What are the guns for?"

"Just in case," Graves replied. He stood on the other side of the fence, waiting.

Clay glanced around. A black Mercedes went by. The moment it had passed him, he
changed
, his form shifting, bones popping, flesh flowing and diminishing until where he had stood a moment earlier there was now only an ordinary squirrel.

The squirrel darted through the black, wrought-iron bars and started across the grounds of an enormous estate. For long minutes the squirrel followed the ghost up a hill, through a screen of massive oaks and pines, and soon enough they came within sight of a mansion on the hill. It had a circular driveway and columns in the front. There were several smaller buildings to the south of the main house, and a carriage house with a stone driveway and a sign in front.

There were too many cars, and Clay realized this was not a house. Like many such properties whose upkeep was so expensive, it had been altered into something else. From its appearance and the ambulance in front, he presumed it was an assisted-living residence for senior citizens, and the carriage house some kind of administration building.

The ghost of Dr. Graves swept on across the groomed lawn, beneath the trees, and spared nary a glance for the home where he had been raised.

The squirrel followed, not understanding the nature of their destination until they made their way around behind the main building and he saw, down a hill cut by a winding gravel drive, an old cemetery. It, too, was well kept, though perhaps only for appearances. None of the headstones appeared to be new, or even recent. Some were so old that the elements had eroded all but the suggestion of names and dates.

At the back of the small cemetery were two family crypts. The larger and more ornate of the two, a pristine marble thing worthy of Athens, bore the name WILLIAMS. The other, smaller and set back toward the woods at the rear of the property, had the word GRAVES emblazoned above the iron door.

"Morbid, isn't it?" the ghost said. "Or perhaps ironic. Graves. What else would be in a crypt? A child's humor."

Yet he laughed softly and shook his head.

"My mother always thought it amusing. But she had a dark humor." The ghost glanced over at the squirrel. "You're going to be little help in that form."

Clay hesitated a moment, concerned about prying eyes from the retirement home. But there was little to be done about it. With no more effort than standing, he transformed again, flesh flowing in the space between heartbeats, and he wore the skin of a man again. Better to be caught out here with the face of Joseph Clay than with the inhuman features of his natural form.

"You grew up in that house?" he asked.

The ghost of Dr. Graves allowed himself a quick look at the massive mansion, but quickly turned his eyes away.

"Not precisely. My family lived in the carriage house. They were servants to Stewart and Annabel Williams for decades. My father was their butler."

The ghost drifted as though moved by unseen wind. He stared at the crypt where his parents' remains had been put to rest, where his own bones lay even now, and spoke as though in the grip of a dream. Yet it was no dream, only memory.

"You can see the wealth that is here even now. Imagine its opulence in those days. The Williamses were extraordinarily kind and seemed genuinely unaffected by differences of race. Class, certainly. As kind as they were, they were still the wealthy, and my parents their servants. But perhaps that puts an ugly face on something that was simply symptomatic of the age.

"My father liked to say that being rich had stolen their imagination. That they had all of that money but did not know what to do with it. Many times he said if that money was his that he could change the world, that he would make people's lives better. He dreamed about having the money to travel and educate himself.

"The Williamses had one son, Peter, but he died in the battle of the Somme during the Great War. They never had any other children. Annabel and Stewart died in 'twenty-six. He had a heart attack in the fall, and by Christmas, she was dead. By then, with Peter dead, they'd changed their wills. I inherited it all. The property. The architectural firm. Every penny."