Stones Unturned (40 page)

Clay raced toward the violinist. A woman, perhaps the dead man's daughter, attacked her and began to slap her, screaming hysterically. The violinist stabbed her in the throat with the jagged, splintered remains of her instrument. Others began to approach her now. A man grabbed hold of her, and she spun, lunged in and bit into his cheek, tearing away a ragged flap of bloody flesh.

The orchestra continued to play its hideous tune.

Clay grabbed hold of the violinist, pushing away others who might have helped. More people were screaming and heading for the exits now. The woman tried to attack him but could not escape his grasp.

Something struck him on the back of the head. Clay staggered, lost his grip on the violinist, and she was on him. He looked past her and saw a thin musician in a tuxedo wielding a bloodied trumpet. Other members of the symphony were coming down off of the stage now. The conductor's baton danced, but now it was not the music he commanded. He played the soul tethers that connected the orchestra to him as though they were puppets and that spiritual link their strings.

The trumpet crashed toward Clay's face. He reached up and stopped the blow from falling.

The conductor looked into his eyes from atop his pulpit and laughed.

Then he stopped laughing. The ghost of Dr. Graves moved through the musicians like a rolling cloud of smoke. The phantom darted across the theater and struck the conductor.

The man sagged, his baton lowering. It continued to dance, but now listlessly, as though only half of his attention was focused there. The light had gone out of the conductor's eyes, and his smile faded. He moved now only like a sleepwalker.

And the ghost of Dr. Graves was nowhere to be seen.

He had
vanished
inside the conductor.

Dr. Graves is lost in thick, roiling mist. Shapes move in the swirling gray, features coalesce that might be faces. He feels solid ground beneath his feet and the mist brushes damply against his face.
The spirit realm
, he thinks.
The otherworld . . . but it's never felt like this, so substantial.

And how did he get here? He had seen a strange, doubling effect around the conductor, a kind of phantom silhouette that surrounded him, creating a ghost halo. Graves had understood immediately that whatever power the conductor held, whatever he was doing to the orchestra, it was not his own. The man had been inhabited by a ghost. Yet this is no ordinary specter. This spirit has the strength of will and the focus to slip inside a living human and take over the body. It is an ability Graves has only encountered twice before in other ghosts. He is capable of it himself, but avoids such violations at all costs.

He has entered the conductor not to control him, but to drive out the intrusive spirit. Instead, he has been dragged into the spirit world, or some semblance of it.

The mist thins, and the gray around him resolves into buildings and cars and lampposts. The soulstuff coalesces into a street corner in New York City. Across the busy square in front of him is the Flatiron Building, and he knows now that he is looking south. A car rattles by, all smoke and fog, but its shape and style makes it easily identifiable for Graves. Once, he had owned this very car. It is a 1936 Nash Ambassador with whitewall tires and a wide running board. His had been powder blue. This one is only the gray of the mists.

Its tires sluice through the soulstream, which runs shallowly along the street. Graves can feel its tug inside of him, and as he watches the Nash Ambassador disappear into the ghost buildings, he longs to be inside it, to travel into the past and join Gabriella forever.

"Beautiful automobile," says a voice.

Graves spins, hands reaching for the holsters beneath his arms. He freezes when he sees the dark figure on the opposite corner and the familiar hat and scarf of the Whisper.

"Broderick," he rasps.

The Whisper laughs, and the sound is as much a part of the past as that car and this nostalgia city, this New York, circa 1940. His pistol is already drawn and aimed at Graves.

"You're going to shoot me?" the Whisper asks as he crosses the street. An old Hudson sedan rumbles through the ghost city and passes right through him. "What good will that do?"
"You might be surprised," Graves says, fingers touching the grips of his guns but not pulling them. The Whisper has the drop on him.

"Would I? I quite doubt that, Doctor Graves. What do you think I have been doing, wandering this place of lost souls all of this time? Why, the very same thing I did in life. I've been experimenting."

"So I see. Your control of the orchestra is impressive."

"I've kept busy. I couldn't spend all of eternity nursing my hatred for you. Though, and you'll have to trust me on this, it has taken up a great deal of my afterlife."

The laughter comes again, that susurrus of soft, mocking chuckles that Graves never quite understood the trick of, even in life. The effect is unsettling, a distant echo.

The Whisper comes to within ten feet — if distance can be measured here — but Graves does not move. In life, he had survived many bullet wounds, but if Broderick's pistol is anything like his own gun, it could tear at his very soul.

"Lower your hands, please, Doctor."

Graves complies.

As though bursting into instant reality, people surround them. Spirits of this era stroll along through the soulstream, across streets, and along sidewalks. Gray swathes of humanity in fedoras and suits, the women in jaunty hats and the modern dresses of prewar New York. Laughing lovers walk arm in arm. More cars growl by, convertibles with rumble seats and boxy new models. Soon, the war will stop all automobile production in America, the metal needed for tanks and airplanes.

"All of this," Graves says, forcing himself not to reveal how much this taste of the past has affected him. "This is you?"
The Whisper does a curt bow, his eyes locked on Graves, the barrel of his pistol unwavering. "Practice. There are so many souls, so much spirit just lingering here. It isn't hard to shape it, if you've the will. Like sculpting with clouds.

"Here," the Whisper says, gesturing dramatically with his unfettered hand. "Let's have a look at another familiar setting. You might remember this."

A wave passes through the spirit world, rippling through this ghost New York, and the landscape changes. New York is washed away and replaced by gardens, by the milling aristocracy of Florence in the waning days of the war. The Boboli Gardens, in the shadow of the Pitti Palace.

And the music starts to play.

Graves glances at the Whisper and sees that he is bobbing his pistol along to the tune like the conductor's baton.

"Beautiful tune, isn't it?"

Graves's fingers itch to pull his guns, to jerk the triggers and fire phantom bullets into the ghost of the Whisper, the ghost of Simon Broderick.

"You recognize the place?"

He has managed to maintain a strange calm that surprises even himself, but now Graves feels a hatred rising in him unlike anything he has ever known. In the flesh-and-blood world, Clay is dealing with whatever horror the Whisper has unleashed there. But the real battle is here. He knows that. Whatever it takes, the Whisper must be stopped.

But not without answers.

"You know I do."

In life he had been disgusted by the crimes of Simon Broderick, and shamed by the way the man had tainted all of the efforts of the other heroic private adventurers of the day. He had felt disdain and pity, but never hatred.

Now it fills him like poison.

Graves glances around, taking in the lampposts, the beautiful Italian women in their gauzy gowns, the orchestra, and he turns his back on the Whisper. As he does, his right hand crosses his chest, reaching for the gun holstered under his left arm.

"Do you think I'm a fool?" the Whisper asks, and there is a click as he cocks his pistol.

Graves lowers his hands to his sides, jaw set with fury.

"I don't know what you are," he admits.

"Savage, you called me once. Madman, too, I believe."

"Those things, certainly," Graves replies. "But I won't pretend I understand any of this. You were dead. I saw you throw yourself from the cathedral roof. I saw your body strike the ground. I was there when they removed your corpse. Your skull was shattered, your organs exploded. You cannot have —"

The Whisper's laugh fills his ears, but already Graves understands.

The conductor. The weakness of certain souls, not only in the spirit world, but in the realm of flesh and blood as well. If Broderick can control the conductor . . .

"You possessed someone."

Beneath his wide-brimmed hat, the Whisper's eyes shine with glee. "Ironic, isn't it? In life, you excoriated me for my claims that I could control the minds of men, and as nothing more than a shade of life, the whisper of my former self, at last I can do precisely that.

"You have no idea how much I have enjoyed watching you torment yourself trying to unravel the mystery of your demise. But now comes the pièce de résistance, my old friend. You think that this was the place, don't you? You were murdered here?"

Graves is unfazed. "I thought so for a very long time," he says, over the music from the symphony, the sweet music that had filled the air on that golden night when he had stood here in the gardens with . . .

He searches the crowd for her face, for Gabriella's face, but cannot see her in the gray, misty tableau that the Whisper has crafted around them.

"But I didn't die here," Dr. Graves continues. "I know that now. The impact must have been real. The memory is too powerful, too detailed, to be merely hypnotic suggestion or some influence of yours. Some sort of tranquilizer dart, I presume."

The Whisper nods. "Bravo." He raises the pistol; aims it directly at Graves's face. "Watch."

And now the gray mist coalesces again. The soulstream rushes around his feet, and the tug feels more powerful than before, as though they have drifted closer to the Ivory Gate. It flows past the ghosts who reenact this terrible scene, and he stands and watches himself come across the lawn of the gardens, growing anxious, then frantic as he tries to reach the conductor and the orchestra beyond.

A loud pop fills the air. Something strikes him in the back and he falls. People rush around him, kneeling by him. Gabriella is there, shrieking in anguish, dropping down beside him. She cradles his head in her lap and bends to kiss his forehead, sobbing, shoulders rocking with grief.

Graves frowns. This makes no sense. If he wasn't shot, if it truly was only a tranquilizer dart, then how is it Gabriella could be so close to him and not see that there is no bullet wound? No blood?

"This isn't the way it happened," he says. "This is nothing but theater, a fiction of your own creation."

"You'd like to think so, but ask yourself, how else could it have happened? Would anything have kept your beloved from your side when you fell?"

The Whisper strolls toward the horrid scene and the soulstream alters around him. The Boboli Gardens metamorphose once more into New York City. Cars roll by, but there are fewer people on the street. The mist swirls and roils all around them, and now the city is nearly dark, shades of black and gray, late at night.

"Walk with me," the Whisper says.

"I think not."

The muzzle of the pistol rises, gestures northward. "Walk."

Graves hesitates only a moment before he starts north. Every block is familiar, rendered in loving detail. All of this from the Whisper's mind, under his control. He sculpts the soulstuff of the wandering dead around him as they pass through the spirit world. Even though they are the wisps, not the conscious ghosts like Graves himself, it is unsettling to see the remnants of human souls used so callously.

And beautiful. He cannot deny it.

"You've figured out most of it by now, Doctor. Puppeting a weak-willed Florentine surgeon, I paid several others to rush to your aid when you fell. That soon after my own demise I had not yet built up the concentration to control more than one person at a time. But coin is the best puppeteer of all. You were brought to the surgeon's office, and there I performed upon you the same surgery I had on so many others. I altered your mind. I changed you, made you docile, and with the mesmerism I had always employed to assist in that transformation, I turned you to a task that I had set out for you."

Graves understands. He sees the truth coming before the words are spoken, and already he is shaking his head in denial.

"Oh, yes. Docile you might have been, but your skills remained. Your strength and your stealth were all I needed. The rest of you was malleable enough. I arranged a clandestine meeting for you with Mayor Bennett, the son of a bitch who'd crucified me in the newspapers. You gave him the nails, Doctor, and good old Roger hammered them home. Oh, how pleased he was when he learned you were still alive, that your death in Florence had been a ruse. You were the only man in the world Bennett would have trusted enough to let down his guard so completely."

Again the spirit world convulses around them, mist churning and choking, and the pull of the soulstream becomes even more powerful. Graves feels like simply surrendering to it. After all of this, what is the point of remaining here? Yet he finds himself unable to let go without seeing what else the Whisper has to show him.