Grave Peril

He was good at covering his expressions, I’ll give him that. But I’m used to watching people. I saw anger in the way he held his neck and shoulders. "I provide a legitimate service to people in need."

"No. You play on their grief to take them for all you can. You don’t believe that you’re doing right, Morty, deep down. You can justify it any way you want, but you don’t like what you’re doing. If you did, your powers wouldn’t have faded like they have."

His jaw set in a hard line, and he didn’t try to hide the anger anymore – the first honest reaction I’d seen out of him since he’d cried out in surprise. "If you’ve got a point, Dresden, get to it. I’ve got a plane to catch."

I spread my fingers over the tabletop. "In the past two weeks," I said, "the spooks have been going mad. You should see the trouble they’ve caused. That poltergeist in the Campbell house. The Basement Beast at U. of C. Agatha Hagglethorn, down at Cook County."

Morty grimaced and wiped at his face again. "Yeah. I hear things. You and the Knight of the Sword have been covering the worst of it."

"What else has been happening, Morty? I’m getting a little cranky losing sleep, so keep it short and simple."

"I don’t know," he said, sullen. "I’ve lost my powers, remember."

I narrowed my eyes. "But you hear things, Morty. You’ve still got some sources in the Nevernever. Why are you leaving town?"

He laughed, and it had a shaky edge to it. "You said you read all of my books? Did you read They Shall Rise?"

"I glanced over it. End-of-the-world-type stuff. I figured you had been talking to the wrong kind of spirits too much. They love trying to sell people on Armageddon. A lot of them are cons like you."

He ignored me. "Then you read my theory on the barrier between our world and the Nevernever. That it’s slowly being torn away."

"And you think it’s falling to pieces, now? Morty, that wall has been there since the dawn of time. I don’t think it’s going to collapse right now."

"Wall." He said the word with a sneer. "More like Saran Wrap, wizard. Like Jell-O. It bends and wiggles and stirs." He rubbed his palms on his thighs, shivering.

"And it’s falling now?"

"Look around you!" he shouted. "Good God, wizard. The past two weeks, the border’s been waggling back and forth like a hooker at a dockworker’s convention. Why the hell do you think all of these ghosts have been rising?"

I didn’t let the sudden volume of his tone make me blink. "You’re saying that this instability has been making it easier for ghosts to cross over from the Nevernever?"

"And easier to form bigger, stronger ghosts when people die," he said. "You think you’ve got some pissed-off ghosts now? Wait until some honor student on her way out of the south side with a college scholarship gets popped by accident in a gang shootout. Wait until some poor sap who got AIDS from a blood transfusion breathes his last."

"Bigger, badder ghosts," I said. "Superghosts. That’s what you’re talking about."

He laughed, a nasty little laugh. "New generation of viruses is coming, too. Things are going to hell all over. Eventually, that border’s going to get thin enough to spit through, and you’ll have more problems with demon attacks than gang violence."

I shook my head. "All right," I said. "Let’s say that I buy that the barrier is fluid rather than concrete. There’s turbulence in it, and it’s making crossing over easier, both ways. Could something be causing the turbulence?"

"How the hell should I know?" he snarled. "You don’t know what it’s like, Dresden. To speak to things that exist in the past and in the future as well as in the now. To have them walk up to you at the salad bar and start telling you how they murdered their wife in her sleep.

"I mean, you think you’ve got a hold on things, that you understand, but in the end it all falls to pieces. A con is simpler, Dresden. You make order. People don’t give a flying fuck if Uncle Jeffrey really forgives them for missing his last birthday party. They want to know that the world is a place where Uncle Jeffrey can and should forgive them." He swallowed, and looked around the room, at the fake tomes and the fake skull. "That’s what I sell them. Closure. Like on television. They want to know that it’s all going to work out in the end, and they’re happy to pay for it."

A car honked outside. Morty glared at me. "We’re through."

I nodded.

He jerked to his feet, splotches of color in his cheeks. "God, I need a drink. Get out of town, Dresden. Something came across last night like nothing I’ve ever felt."

I thought of ruined cars and rosebushes planted in consecrated ground. "Do you know what it is?"

"It’s big," Morty said. "And it’s pissed off. It’s going to start killing, Dresden. And I don’t think you or anyone else is going to be able to stop it."

"But it’s a ghost?"

He gave me a smile that showed me his canines. It was creepy on that florid, eyes-too-wide face. "It’s a nightmare." He started to turn away. I wanted to let him go, but I couldn’t. The man had become a liar, a sniveling con, but he hadn’t always been.

I rose and beat him to the door, taking his arm in one hand. He spun to face me, jerking his arm away, glaring defiantly at my eyes. I avoided locking gazes. I didn’t want to take a look at Mortimer Lindquist’s soul.

"Morty," I said, quietly. "Get away from your seances for a while. Go somewhere quiet. Read. Relax. You’re older now, stronger. If you give yourself a chance, the power will come back."

He laughed again, tired and jaded. "Sure, Dresden. Just like that."

"Morty – "

He turned away from me and stalked out the door. He didn’t bother to lock the place up behind him. I watched him head out to the cab, which waited by the curb. He lugged his bag into the backseat, and then followed it.

Before the cab pulled out, he rolled down the window. "Dresden," he called. "Under my chair there’s a drawer. My notes. If you want to kill yourself trying to stand up to this thing, you might as well know what you’re getting into."

He rolled the window back up as the cab pulled away. I watched it go, then went back inside. I found the drawer hidden in the base of the carved wooden chair, and inside I found a trio of old leather-bound journals, vellum pages covered in script that started out neat in the oldest one and became a jerky scrawl in the most recent entries. I held the books up to my mouth and inhaled the smell of leather, ink, paper; musty and genuine and real.