Stones Unturned (42 page)

Gabriella.

Isn't waiting.

His eyes open, and Graves looks up through the surface of the ectoplasmic river flowing around him and over him and he sees the face of the Whisper staring down at him with those laughing, glittering eyes.

He thrusts his free hand up and clutches Broderick's throat. His legs drive downward, find solid footing, and even as he fights the current he pistons himself up out of the soulstream.

"That's right!" Broderick sneers. "Fight it, Doctor. I want to carve your soul to shreds so that you're nothing but a wisp when you finally pass through the gate."

Thrashing against one another, they stumble together, slipping deeper and deeper into the spirit world. Graves hammers the Whisper with his fist, over and over. Broderick clutches his throat, hate burning in his eyes. Any trace of sanity has departed and now he is only the lunatic Graves watched leap to his death from the roof of St. Patrick's Cathedral.

Wisps and ghosts swirl above them, the gray storm clouds of the spirit realm attracted to the furious emotion roiling between them. The soulstream rushes around them and their brawl twists them off balance. Together, they splash into the soulstream once more, and now the current has them.

Faces gaze down. As the Whisper strangles him, the ghost of Dr. Graves stares up at the specters hovering above them. He catches sight of the twin spires of the Ivory Gate, looming larger than he has ever seen them before. The sight fills him with longing, and now the soulstream tugs at his heart as much as it does the ethereal substance of his spirit. Peace awaits.

His final reward.

But the Whisper does not deserve to pass through those gates.

With his forearm, he forces Broderick back and twists around. His upper body is above the rushing stream of souls now, and he gazes at the Ivory Gate ahead and the current churning between the spires. Ghosts mass on either side of the soulstream, lingering on this side of the gate, gray mist figures, some only wisps, but some so distinct they look almost solid.

Some of them look familiar.

They are nearly at the Ivory Gate when Graves sees Hank Reinhardt's ghost standing beside the soulstream. The substance of his spirit streaks and runs in the air from the pull of the gate, but the hulking killer does not move.

"Mister Whisper!" Reinhardt shouts, pointing.

And he understands. As powerful a specter as Broderick has been, he has avoided those phantoms that would have pursued him even into the afterlife. But they have waited for him, knowing that some day he will pass through the Ivory Gate. Perhaps they sensed his nearness or perhaps they've been waiting all along. What matters is that they're here.

"Yes!" Graves calls, tearing the Whisper's hands from this throat. He drives his feet down, dragging his enemy toward the edge of the stream, fighting the current. "Take him, Reinhardt!"

"Damn you, Graves!" Broderick snarls, trying to tear at the very substance of his soul.

"It's not me that damnation awaits," Graves replies . . . Graves whispers.

He summons up all of the strength of his soul, musters the courage and endurance of his heart, and he fights the current of the soulstream. The Whisper fights him, but Graves drives them both out of the deepest, most powerful current, off to one side of the gate.

Where Reinhardt is waiting.

And the killer isn't alone.

"Simon Broderick!" Graves shouts, striking the Whisper again and again. He holds him down, twisting his ethereal substance, and now the Whisper tries to escape. Broderick's spirit grows less substantial, attempts to slip into the soulstream, to ease himself from the grip of Dr. Graves.

"I think not, Whisper," Graves says darkly. "We're all ghosts here. You've nowhere to run."

They come for him then, dread specters darting through the mists, the lost souls of every one of the criminals whose brains the Whisper had mutilated and rewired, these men whom Simon Broderick had then murdered.

They fall upon him like ravenous animals.

The Whisper screams, and all Graves can do is step back and watch as they tear his soul to shreds. In tatters, his spirit cannot hold. If there is a final rest for Simon Broderick, it will be anything but peaceful.

One by one, the ghosts of those tainted men slip into the soulstream, their spirits blurring and stretching until they merge with the current and are carried through the Ivory Gate.

Reinhardt is the last to go. He nods, clutching the Whisper's scarf in his massive fist. Graves nods in return, and then Reinhardt gives his soul over to the pull of the gate. He is lost no more. His wandering spirit is at rest. If there is a hell awaiting him on the other side of the gate, he has surrendered his soul to fate, having lingered in the world between life and death long enough to take his own vengeance.

His specter elongates until he is only a wisp, and then he too is gone.

The ghost of Dr. Graves stands alone, and he gazes down at his hands and sees that he too has begun to blur. The soulstream has him in its grasp. Peace calls to him, and he yearns to surrender.

The mystery is solved. Whatever awaits — Heaven, Nirvana, or nothing at all — surely he has earned it.

He glances up at the Ivory Gate, and between those twin spires, he sees the silhouette of a familiar figure standing on the other side.

"Gabriella?"

Clay could have transformed himself into a lion or tiger, into a bull or a stag, but in any of those forms merely fighting the possessed musicians would likely have ended up with some of them dead. His only choice was his true form, and he wore it now, the towering golem of cracked, dry clay. Musicians attacked him from all sides, now. Men in tuxedoes beat him with stools and instruments; women in elegant uniform clawed at him and stabbed him with whatever they could lay their hands on.

He shouted his frustration, and it echoed off of the perfect acoustics of the theater. He could leave. Just get the hell out of here and try to keep the musicians inside. But even as he considered this option he discarded it. Soon the police would arrive. They were probably already outside the building, trying to get through the panicked crowd. If Clay just left, the musicians would be free to go as well. They might continue their homicidal rampage outside, and surely that would end up with many of them being shot.

"Damn it!"

A tall, thin scarecrow of a man lifted the double bass above his head, face impassive, eyes dull, and prepared to bring it down on top of Clay's skull.

With a snarl, Clay reached out a massive, earthen hand and grabbed the huge instrument by the neck, snatching it away. He raised it, anger boiling over in him, and began to swing it at the man, thinking to knock him away, and broken bones be damned.

In the last instant before impact, he saw the man's eyes clear and widen with sudden awareness. The bassist saw him and screamed in terror, and then Clay hit him with the heavy double bass, unable to stop his swing. Something broke inside the man, and he was tossed into a row of seats where he struck painfully, tried to rise, and then slumped into unconsciousness.

"Shit," Clay whispered.

All of the musicians had stopped. Some of them staggered as if drunk, and others collapsed onto the ground. A woman shrieked, pointing at him and screaming in Italian. The soul tethers connecting them to the conductor evaporated, slipping away as if on an errant breeze and dissipating completely. Even the strange ghostly halo around the conductor was gone, and the man slipped from his podium and collapsed to the ground, moaning.

"Graves!" Clay called, and he started for the stage.

The musicians who were conscious and aware shouted and fled for the exits.

At any moment, others would regain consciousness even as the police arrived, and so he shifted his form again, his mercurial flesh altered in an instant, and the golem was gone. Only handsome, ordinary Joe Clay remained.

He leaped up onto the stage and ran to the conductor. The man's eyes were rolled back and the lids fluttered as he mumbled something.

"Doctor Graves," Clay said, lifting him up, talking to the conductor in a low voice. "Are you in there, Leonard? What the hell's going on?"

"I waited," Gabriella says.

Graves touches the Ivory Gate, bracing himself so that the soulstream — almost impossible to resist so close to the gate — will not drag him through. On the other side of the gate is an image of the only woman he had ever loved while he walked the Earth. She is barely a wisp, a specter haunting the afterlife, an apparition even to ghosts. But her eyes, that face . . . it can be no one else.

For the second time, he says her name.

The sorrow in her gaze tears at his heart, and she beckons to him. The soulstream does not seem to affect her, and perhaps it is because she has already passed through the gate.

"I waited here," she repeats. "At first I was so confused . . . nothing seemed real. But when I passed through the gate it was like waking up from a terrible dream, and I knew . . . I knew what I'd done. I held on. The music calls me, Leonard. My heart is torn. I should be at peace here, on this side . . . but I waited."

Graves cannot speak. How long has he waited for this moment? Eternity and more, or so it seems. His business in the world of flesh and blood is complete at last. He can rest. And here Gabriella is, awaiting him.

And yet…

"You helped him. The Whisper."

Those lovely eyes are downcast. "You don't understand."

"No."

As if struck, Gabriella's ghost flinches, and she fades ever so slightly. She lifts her gaze.

"He was there, all the time. He was with me, saying the most frightening things. I felt him in my head, don't you see?" she pleads, and her voice is wracked with anguish. "I'm so sorry, darling. So very sorry."

Graves never imagined that a dead man could feel such heartbreak, never imagined that a ghost could be torn so completely apart. The Ivory Gate feels warm to his touch, and there is comfort there. He longs to pass through, where he will never feel such sadness again.

"But you knew, didn't you, Gabriella? It wasn't all the Whisper. How much did you fight him?"

She shakes her head, this insubstantial phantom of the woman he had once loved. "I only wanted you to love me, to marry me and be the husband you always promised that you would be."

The Whisper's bullet had torn pieces of his soul away forever, fragments of his spirit lost to the ether for all eternity. The loss of his guns had done the same. But still he had felt whole and strong, had felt that he would endure. This loss is far greater. Whatever piece of his soul is ripped from him now, Dr. Graves knows he will feel its absence for as long as his consciousness endures.

"Our time is here, don't you see?" Gabriella says. "Come to me, now, Leonard. Please, my love. Our time at last, to be together the way we always dreamed."

The longing in him almost destroys him. He wishes he could surrender to her pleas and to the pull of the soulstream. Her eyes are full of guilt and repentance, but also love and hope.

Graves uses the spire of the Ivory Gate to brace himself, and he turns his back on Gabriella's ghost. Bending low to fight the current, he starts back through the soulstream, back across the spirit world. He can hear Gabriella calling to him, but her voice becomes fainter with every step, until even that is nothing but a ghost . . . and then the rush of other spirits around him takes over, and he hears only white noise.

With a thought, he manifests new phantom guns in the holsters under his arms.

Perhaps there is still business for him to tend to in the world of flesh and blood.

EPILOGUE

The fireplace in the front parlor at the brownstone in Louisburg Square crackled with dancing flames. Somehow the warmth from the blaze did not seem to reach all the way into the room. The curtains were drawn aside, but the afternoon was so gray it seemed night had arrived prematurely. A cold November rain fell.

Arthur Conan Doyle felt the chill in his bones.

He stood by the fireplace, leaning with one elbow on the mantel, his pipe held loosely in his hand. It was unlit, the tobacco tamped down inside, waiting for him to enjoy it, but for some reason he had not yet set it to burn.

Ceridwen sat on the floral loveseat with Julia Ferrick, holding the shattered woman's hand. Dark circles hung beneath Julia's eyes. Her clothes were wrinkled and her hair was tied back in a ponytail. For the past two nights she had slept — though slept little — in a guest room in Conan Doyle's home. They had all needed time to recover from the events set in motion by Baalphegor, and Julia needed to be close to Danny.

Conan Doyle had let it go on as long as he dared without interference. This morning that had changed.

He caught Ceridwen's eye. She smiled wanly at him, doing her best to comfort Julia and, somehow, to comfort Conan Doyle as well. Ceri had taken to wearing the clothes that Eve had helped her choose to blend better in the human world — the Blight. It astonished him to see how comfortable she looked in the navy skirt and light blue cashmere sweater she wore today. Even while sitting there with Julia, sharing the woman's fear and grief for her son, Ceridwen remained elegant, her presence powerful.

Conan Doyle had to tear his gaze away from her. Impatiently he withdrew his pocket watch and opened it, sighing at the time.

"Don't get your knickers in a twist. I'm here."