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Authors: Christopher Golden

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BOOK: Stones Unturned
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Clay towered over him, appearing as a nine-foot demon, a thing right from the depths of Hell, skin the color of dried blood and thick and hard as stone. Fire spilled from his mouth as he pointed again at the murderer and laughed.

"See you soon," he said.

Then he turned, hooves thumping the carpet, and as he left the room, his flesh changed, and he was himself again. Joe Clay. The human face was not the one he had begun life with, but it was the one he wore most often, the one the world saw.

The two kids in the other parlor were still playing with their GameBoys.

People were running down the corridor now, summoned by the screams. Clay ignored them, turned left, and went out the front door of the funeral parlor.

The sky was gray and drizzling rain. An unmarked police car sat at the curb across the street. When Clay started down the stairs to the sidewalk, the passenger door opened, and detective Adam Hook climbed out.

Detective Hook was forty-four, fit, and handsome in a grizzled, sad, seen-too-much-fashion way that had probably contributed a great deal to his divorce. His hair was more pepper than salt, and he walked with a brutal confidence that would intimidate most people.

He knew far too much about the things that lurked in the shadows of the world. Clay himself was partially responsible for that. It might have been the reason for the cynicism in Hook's gaze, but it was also the reason they had become friends. Hook wasn't the kind of man who would ever turn away from the truth, no matter how terrifying, no matter how deep the darkness.

"How'd it go?" the detective asked. "Was he in there?"

"Job's done," Clay replied. "Victim was sleeping with the perp's wife. Go on in. You won't be able to miss them. I suspect he may be in the mood to confess right about now, too."

Hook shook his hand. "Much appreciated. I prefer to solve them myself, but this one —"

Clay waved the words away. "Hey, any time. Guy like this, you need him off the street. If I can help, I'm glad to do it."

Hook started up the stairs. "Say hello to Doyle for me," he said over his shoulder. "Haven't heard from him in a while."

"I will. And I'm sure you'll hear from him," Clay said. "The second he needs you."

 

The ghost of Leonard Graves had haunted Conan Doyle's house for so long that he was almost immune to the absurdity of having a room there, complete with a bed and bureau, as though he had clothes and needed to sleep. Over time, Dr. Graves had come to appreciate this small space, this place where he could store the memories of his human life, now more than sixty years in the past.

A place where he could rest, and remember.

The room was on the second floor of the old townhouse. Over the years, he had allowed himself to ruminate on his life and accomplishments, so that there were shelves with souvenirs of his adventures, as well as framed newspaper stories. Here, in his room, he often felt the tug of the past. In its way, it was even more powerful than the lure of the afterlife, against which he was constantly struggling, fighting the tide that threatened to sweep him to his final rest.

But Graves had things to do before he left the physical plane, where he could join his beloved Gabriella. He had a murder to solve.

His own.

Times like these, he became lost in contemplation of the past. The bureau drawers were open, and their contents spread across the floor and bed, newspaper clippings from his exploits as an adventurer in the 1930s and 1940s, journals of his experiments and thoughts as one of the preeminent scientists of the day, and yellowed photographs of him as he was when he was alive. There were clippings full of controversy and hate — in those days, no black man could become prominent without drawing the venom of the ignorant and the cruel. Graves traced his spectral fingers over a page without touching it, a story about his capture of a killer the newspapers had called the Butcher of Brooklyn.

It had not been the first time he had captured a killer or thwarted a criminal, but it had been the most public. The New York papers had called him a hero. The mayor had offered the gratitude of the city. Even then Graves had thought it ironic, when so many in the city thought he was trash because of the color of his skin. And when his reputation became national, it had only become worse, particularly because his wife was a white woman, an Italian-American, they would call her today.

Things had improved since then, out in the world. The ranks of the ignorant and cruel had thinned, thankfully, but they were not extinct. Not yet. Of late, he'd begun to worry that they were, in fact, coming around again, their numbers growing.

He did not like to think of it.

Most of the clippings were of a different nature. Joyful. Triumphant. And those were bittersweet. The real irony was that the best of his memories were the ones that hurt the most, but he clung to them, savoring the pain.

Better to have lived, to be sure.

And oh, how he had lived.

As a young man, he had been grim and overly earnest, but what else could be expected of a boy who had spent his entire life honing his mind and body to the pinnacle of human capacity? His mother had died when Graves was quite small, and his widower father had determined that through his son he would show the world that race was something ephemeral, that discipline and determination were what made a man.

But as he had matured, Graves had discovered a passion for science that discipline could not instill. While he continued to devour up-to-date theory, and often advance theories of his own, on topics as varied as abnormal psychology, space travel, and vegetable fuels, certain subjects took up more and more of his time. He journeyed across the face of the world as an archaeologist, tropical botanist, and cryptozoologist. Whenever he was back at home in his labs in Washington Heights, New York, he was a part of a social circle that included playwrights, architects, dancers, biologists, and jazz musicians.

The ghost hovered a few inches off of the ground, barely aware that he had given up the pretense of solidity and substance for the moment. His spectral form felt heavy with melancholy as he reached out to brush phantom fingers over a photograph taken nearly seven decades before in the infamous jazz nightspot, Birdland. Graves himself was in the photo, looking smart in a tux, his arm around the trumpet player Henry Watkins. Henry, called "Blat" by his nearest and dearest, was busy lighting a cigarette, too cool to glance at the camera.

The third person in the photo was a woman who stood on the other side of Blat Watkins, hip slightly cocked, an insouciant little smile on her face. Gabriella Gnecco was confident and beautiful, her eyes alight with intelligence. At that time she had been in the United States only four years, and her accent had begun to fade. Graves had thought the petite little Italian girl charming.

That first night, dancing, he had fallen in love.

The newspapers had pounced on the story, serving the romance up to the public. Graves had not cooperated, but the reporters did not rely on cooperation to create a story about a public figure. His love for Gabriella had earned them admiration and scorn in unequal measure, with the emphasis on the latter, but it had also increased the adventurer's celebrity. He had been famous in the city of New York, and then in the northeast United States, but soon his notoriety began to spread around the world. The spotlight brought upon him because of his wedding to Gabriella meant a focus on his work as well.

So when Dr. Graves helped the police solve a series of mysterious deaths — leading them to a greenhouse where a curious sociopath had been cultivating poisonous plants — the whole world knew of it. Even now he could close his eyes and drift, touching his own spirit to the soulstream, and practically relive those moments. The triumph. The feeling that came with a job well done, and knowing he had saved lives.

The ghost opened his eyes. A newspaper clipping on the bed caught his eye. "
Nazi Science Spy Busted
!" said the headline, and beneath it, in smaller type, "
Feds Credit Dr. Graves
."

There were many others. Influential individuals at nearly every level began to seek him out. It was thrilling work. Graves had always detested crime, but never imagined that combating it would become such a focus in his life. Slowly, however, he began to realize that pursuing killers, traitors, and madmen had become more than just a public service, a favor to the world. It had become his entire life. His own research had been neglected, and so had his wife.

So he tried to withdraw, or at least, limit the amount of time he spent away from his personal pursuits. The effort was doomed. There had been other mysterious figures emerging to share the burden, to take on the cases the police could never handle, but the criminals only grew more dangerous and more ambitious.

By the time he stopped Professor Erasmus Zarin from releasing poison gas into a thunderstorm from the upper decks of the Empire State Building, he had all but surrendered to the reality that had claimed him. His life was no longer his own.

Five years passed as Dr. Graves tried to balance the various passions and obligations of his life. And then it was snuffed out with a bullet in the back.

"Dr. Graves Dead! Famed Adventurer Shot! Identity of Killer Still Unknown!"

He stared now at that headline on the newspaper clipping from October 7th, 1943, where it hung on the wall. Conan Doyle — who was unaffected by almost any degree of hideousness — thought it morbid to the point of perversity that he displayed the news of his own murder on the wall. Graves ignored him. He could not live in this room, but he could
abide
here, exist here, and the details of his death were a part of the tale of his existence.

And the mystery of his murder was the reason he had remained so long.

During his life Dr. Graves had been a vehement skeptic of all things supernatural. He was a man of science and debunked charlatanry and fraud wherever he encountered it. His discovery — upon his death — that ghosts did indeed exist, that the souls of the lost dead commonly wandered the physical world in search of some final bit of closure, had been quite a shock.

But as all good scientists do, Graves adapted. It had taken years before his consciousness had coalesced enough to regain true awareness, something he had never quite understood. But once he had realized what had happened, that he was, in fact, a ghost, he had approached his circumstances with the same intense single-mindedness with which he had lived his life.

As a specter, Graves had learned soon enough how to maneuver in the spirit world, how to navigate the soulstream, and in death he put to use the skills he had mastered in life, investigating his own murder. Yet it quickly proved a fruitless pursuit. His focus on his task kept him tethered to the fleshly world, but no matter how much effort was devoted to discovering the truth, he could find not a single clue. There was nothing at the scene, nor written in any police report, that would indicate who the killer was.

At first he had suspected Zarin of his assassination, but the ghost quickly discovered that the mad professor was in prison at the time and could not have killed him. Years of pursuing the wrong threads and intimidating Zarin's lackeys had finally led Graves to the conclusion that Zarin had neither killed him nor orchestrated his death.

Finally, at a loss, he had begun approaching the world's mediums and sorcerers, searching for someone who could help him find his murderer. During this journey, his path had crossed that of Arthur Conan Doyle, and the ageless mage had vowed to aid him in his search, to use all of his formidable abilities to solve the mystery.

The ghost of Dr. Graves had been patient . . . and then grown impatient . . . and at last become bitter. He still counted Conan Doyle as a friend and was dedicated to the man's efforts to combat the forces of darkness when they arose, but the time had come when Graves could be patient no longer.

He couldn't wait any longer for Arthur's help.

Spectral, ectoplasmic fingers traced the photograph of himself and Gabriella flanking Blat Watkins. If ghosts had tears, perhaps he would have shed them, then.

A light knock came at the door.

"Come in," the ghost said, turning as the door swung open and Clay entered the room.

"I hear you wanted to talk to me," the shapeshifter said.

The phantom studied him, always amazed at the stillness of Clay's flesh. He was entirely malleable, his substance as fluid as any ghost's, despite that it was solid. And yet he seemed so formidable, as though his brawny form occupied space on more than one level of existence.

"Thank you for coming by," the ghost said.

Clay gestured to the door. "You want it closed?"

"That's all right. I have no secrets."

The shapeshifter nodded, but there was a dark light in his eyes that seemed dubious of the claim. Graves quietly approved. Anyone who said he had no secrets was a liar. He tried to compose his thoughts, staring at Clay.

"You have . . . that is, I've seen you use a remarkable ability," the ghost said. "How does it work, the way you touch the dead and find their killers?"

Clay frowned. "You know that."

"I'm thinking," Graves replied. "Would you care to humor me?"

"All right. Well, it's simple, really. Not the mechanics but the reality of it. I touch a corpse — a recent corpse — and I can see a kind of string of ectoplasm, bits of soul that leads from the victim to the killer. See, in a murder, a trace of the ghost of the victim, or maybe even just some echo of the dead, clings to the killer, leaving a trail that I can follow.

"If I get there in time."

Graves smiled thinly. "And with older remains?"

Clay narrowed his gaze. "The more time that has passed, the less chance that there will be a soul tether to lead me to the killer."

The ghost faltered, lowering his head and nodding. He felt a ripple of despair go through his spectral form.

"What is it, Leonard?" Clay asked. "Whose death are we discussing, here?"

Graves met his gaze. "Mine, of course."

BOOK: Stones Unturned
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