Elemental Masters - The Case of the Spellbound Child E-Book

Mercedes Lackey

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

The fourteenth novel in the magical alternate history Elemental Masters series continues the reimagined adventures of Sherlock Holmes in a richly-detailed alternate 20th-century England.While Sherlock is still officially dead, John and Mary Watson, Nan Killian, and Sarah Lyon-White are taking up some of his case-load—and some work for Lord Alderscroft, the Wizard of London.Lord Alderscroft asks them to go to Dartmoor to track down a rumor of evil magic. Not more than four hours later, a poor Dartmoor cottager arrives seeking their help. His wife, in a fit of rage over the children spilling and spoiling their only food for dinner that night, sent them out on the moors to forage for something to eat. The children are moor-wise and unlikely to get into difficulties, but this time they did not come back, and their tracks abruptly stopped. The man begs them to come help.They would say no, but there's the assignment for Alderscroft. Why not kill two birds with one stone? But the deadly bogs are not the only mires on Dartmoor. And these are not the only missing children.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Available now from Mercedes Lackey and Titan Books

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

About the Author

Also Available from Titan Books

THE CASE OF THESPELLBOUND CHILD

The

ELEMENTALMASTERS

Available now from Mercedes Lackey and Titan Books

THE COLLEGIUM CHRONICLES

Foundation

Intrigues

Changes

Redoubt

Bastion

THE ELEMENTAL MASTERS

The Serpent’s Shadow

The Gates of Sleep

Phoenix and Ashes

The Wizard of London

Reserved for the Cat

Unnatural Issue

Home from the Sea

Steadfast

Blood Red

From a High Tower

A Study in Sable

A Scandal in Battersea

The Bartered Brides

THE HERALD SPY

Closer to Home

Closer to the Heart

Closer to the Chest

FAMILY SPIES

The Hills Have Spies

Eye Spy

Spy, Spy Again (June 2020)

VALDEMAR OMNIBUSES

The Heralds of Valdemar

The Mage Winds

The Mage Storms

The Mage Wars

The Last Herald Mage

Vows & Honor

Exiles of Valdemar

THE CASE OF THESPELLBOUND CHILD

TITAN BOOKS

The Case of the Spellbound Child

Paperback edition ISBN: 9781789093735

Ebook edition ISBN: 9781789093742

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP.

First Titan edition: January 2020

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Mercedes Lackey asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Copyright © 2020 by Mercedes R. Lackey. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

To Leandro Pardini

1

Alf grinned as he pushed open the whorehouse door into the damp London night. Good pay for an easy job had brought him and Reg enough to splash out on a night of it, and he was feeling fine.

Then a blinding flash whited everything out, at the same time that Alf’s head erupted in excruciating pain.

Then flailing, then falling, falling.

Then for a moment, nothing.

And a moment later, he found himself standing in a gray fog, though there’d been no fog when he stepped out of the whorehouse. He stared straight into the eyes of his mate, good old Reg, who’d been a few steps behind him.

When had he turned? What had hit him?

Reg held a lead cosh in his right hand, and stared down at the street at his feet.

Wut? Was we. . . .

Reflexively, he stared down too—and saw his own body lying face down in the dirt in front of the whorehouse door, with Reg between the body and the temporarily empty street. Two and two added up to Reg just bashed me ’ead in. . . .

Bloody ’Ell!

And at just that moment, when he was torn between blind rage and shock, he felt something he’d never felt before: a cold chill, a graveyard chill, and a strong, almost irresistible pull at his back, as if something had just gaped open behind him and was about to suck him in.

Instinct did the rest. So instead of flying at Reg in a fury, he leapt forward, into the street, into the path of a slow-moving, transparent cart, which did not so much as pause for him as it passed right through him. Or he passed through it. . . .

That wasn’t what had his attention, as he whirled to see what had been behind him. It was a gaping, swirling hole where the whorehouse door had been, behind where he had been standing, a bottomless hole that drank in what little light there was and let none escape.

That was when he realized, somewhere in his head too deep for thoughts, that he wasn’t just hurt, he was dead, that his “mate” Reg had just murdered him, and that the hole would have sucked him down to Hell if he hadn’t jumped out of its reach. Why it couldn’t do so now, he had no idea, but he didn’t intend to stick around long enough to find out. As Reg stuffed the cosh in his back pocket and bent down to start rifling through Alf’s clothes for valuables, Alf turned and ran.

Through the pub on the other side of the street. Without opening the door.

The moving shadows, the transparent figures bellied up to the bar paid him no heed as he sprinted straight across the pub floor and out into the “area” in the back. And straight through the privy. He stopped just short of the next building, not because he was winded—he wasn’t—but because shock stopped him.

Everything past the pub wall was lost in the shadows and fog, but he still felt that hole to Hell out there. Waiting. Waiting for him to accept his fate and let it take him.

“Ye keep on waitin’!” he shouted, his voice curiously thin and reedy, scarcely more than a whistle. He looked down at himself. He looked exactly as he remembered himself when he’d left the whore’s room and come down to wait for Reg. Moleskin trousers, bracers, threadbare shirt, battered tweed jacket, boots badly in need of resoling. But . . . faded, what little color there had been all drained away, leaving everything in shades of gray. Just like everything around him. And other than emotion . . . he didn’t feel anything. Not tired. Not in pain. Not hungry, though he’d been famished a moment before, and about to suggest to Reg that they get a meal at the pub. He wasn’t cold or hot, and he couldn’t smell a thing, and he knew the “area” back here reeked of shit and urine. And he could see through everything except himself.

Instinct, which had served him well until Reg betrayed him, told him that his smartest move was to stay still and quiet until he had a better lay of the land. So wait he did, as pub patrons came and used the privy or just pissed against the nearest wall. And he never felt a moment of fatigue, for what might have been minutes, or might have been hours, until that cold, dark tugging at his insides . . . stopped.

Cautiously, he stepped through the pub wall, feeling something like resistance this time as he forced his way through it. It was—well, he wasn’t sure what it was like, only that he didn’t much like the feeling, but it was better than waiting for another drunk to come out here to piss and open the door. Through the passage he went, then passed with a shiver right through all the blokes crowded up against the bar, then caught a bit of luck and got through the front door along with a staggering drunk.

The hole in the air was gone. It felt like a victory, and he whooped and shot his fist straight up, then shook it at where the hole had been. “Yew ain’t got me, yer barsterd! Yew ain’t gonna get me neither! Oi’m too tough fer ’Eaven an’ too smart fer ’Ell!”

He stood there, rejoicing in his achievement, for quite some time, as wraiths of people and carts and the occasional cab passed through him. But eventually, as the elation wore off the thought came slowly creeping up upon him.

Now what?

* * *

After fruitlessly looking for Reg—though what he was supposed to do if he found Reg, he had no idea—he went to stand by his unmoving body and brooded down at it.

He was a ghost now, he supposed. It was clear given the way that the living passed right through him that revenge on Reg was flat out of the question. So what was he to do with himself now?

Ghosts apparently didn’t eat, drink, or need shelter; and he didn’t feel anything at all except emotion. For a very long time he stood there, staring at his body, which lay conveniently out of the way of traffic. A few other people stared at it too, and moved on, as he himself would have done had he encountered—say, good old Reg—in a similar state. Dead bodies on the pavement were not an uncommon sight at night in this part of London, and once they’d been looted were regarded more as an inconvenience than a curiosity, much less a horror.

Just as he began to wonder if anyone was going to do anything about him before dawn, the police “body wagon” showed up to collect it, the loaders picking him up by the shoulders and heels like a bit of old rubbish and unceremoniously heaving him up into the wagon-bed with three others like him, another man, a child, and an old woman.

And the wagon rolled off. He knew what came next: the morgue, someone going through his pockets in a vain attempt to find something to identify him, finding nothing because of course Reg had taken everything, maybe a day before he was either dumped in a common grave with the other unidentified stiffs or (more likely) sold off to medical students. So there was no reason whatsoever to follow that wagon.

In fact, the only thing that really mattered, the thing that made him red hot with anger, was that bloody Reg was going to get away with it all.

And even then, he couldn’t sustain the anger. It bled out of him like water in a sieve, leaving him, once again, feeling nothing, and wondering what to do with himself.

One by one he ticked off all the things that used to give him pleasure, and realized they were all things he couldn’t do now. Eat, drink, natter with the lads, gamble, whore, sleep in a good soft bed—

Did ghosts sleep? If he could pass through walls and people, a bed probably wouldn’t hold him.

He realized he’d been staring at the spot where his body had been all the time he’d been thinking, and raised his eyes as the whorehouse door opened to let out another customer.

Well . . . I can still watch.

* * *

When the madam closed the door on the last of the evening’s customers, once again, he found himself with nothing to do. Watching had been . . . exciting at first, but not for very long. He soon realized that without a body to be aroused, watching other people rut was disappointing. In fact, the only interesting thing was watching and listening to the girls when they weren’t futtering. He’d always assumed they were getting pleasure out of it all too; after all, they certainly made all the sounds and expressions of someone having a good time.

Except it turned out that they weren’t.

He’d never kept to any one house or any one girl; he’d always told himself it was no use having a favorite, because if the girl found out she was a favorite, she might start asking things of him, like presents, or for him to keep her. The one he couldn’t afford, and the other would be as bad as a wife, and more expensive, with none of the advantages, like putting her to work for him, and Hell’s own chance of getting her to take a real job after the easy work of lying on her back in bed for her money.

So he’d never caught any of the girls he used at the tricks he caught them at now.

Like, using the exact same words and actions on every single man that took them upstairs. It was like watching a play, over and over and over.

This was a house with only four girls, and he had half the night to watch ’em at it. He’d stayed with the Irish gel after she’d sent off a sailor, because he’d been curious enough about what she did between men not to leave for another room. Wash up, it turned out, and wearing an expression of utter weariness while doing so. He’d been about to leave when a second mark came pushing open the door, but her first words to him stuck him in place, because they were identical to what she’d said to the first lad he’d watched her with.

“Oh, come in, me foine boyo! Sure, and with such a foine lad as yew at me door, I’ll nivver go back to Ireland!”

And after that, every word, every action, was identical to her performance with the sailor, right down to the timing of every sigh and cry.

And when he slipped into the other rooms, he discovered it was the same with the other three girls. The only time they changed their performance—and even then, it was only the “before” and “after,” not the act itself—was with someone they’d had before.

By the time the madam closed the door on the heels of the last man, he was thoroughly disenchanted. Not that he’d been enchanted by whores before, but a man liked to think he was something special in the way of a stallion, and now he knew he was just one more broken-down old nag at the back end of the stable, getting the same perfunctory rubdown and ration of dusty old hay as the rest.

He was brooding over this as he forced his way out through the closed door and into the street.

And it felt as if he had walked into a gale.

The pressure of something like a mighty wind, but not wind, forced him into a crouch, and to his horror, he felt and saw bits of himself flaking off and floating away! It took him a moment to realize that what he was fighting was—

—the morning sunlight, pouring down the street from an unusually cloudless sky.

In a complete and mindless panic he turned and forced his way back in through the closed door of the whorehouse, where he stood just inside the front passageway. He should have been shaking. He felt—lessened, somehow, as if something was missing. Reflexively, he looked down at himself—

—he could see through himself.

Terror engulfed him.

He hadn’t just imagined that the sunlight was stripping bits of himself away. He’d been eroded. His mind went blank with shock, and he fell gratefully into the blankness, because blankness was not terror.

* * *

He was jarred out of his shock when the madam of the house walked through him to answer a summons at the door. Outside, night had fallen. The sounds of the pub across the street came to his ears as if from a vast distance. And he was no longer transparent.

A dull sense of relief came to him. So—whatever the sun had done to him, there must have been a way he had healed himself over the course of the day. Except . . . he didn’t remember anything of the day. Nothing at all. What had happened to him wasn’t like sleep, and although it had repaired him, it hadn’t refreshed him at all. It had been more like he was a kind of clockwork that had run down, and something had just set him going again.

Or actually, more like being blackout drunk, without the fun of getting to that point.

He wasn’t sure what made him more uneasy and unhappy, nearly being torn apart and scattered on the wind by sunlight, or going all blank for the day.

And now what was he going to do? The night-time hours stretched before him, and there was not one single item in the entire list of things that used to give him pleasure that he was able to do anymore.

And the one thing he could do—spy on people—wasn’t any fun if he didn’t have anyone to talk to about it. What was the good of knowing secrets about people if you couldn’t make use of those secrets?

He stood there in the passage, brooding, while customers came and went. After last night’s revelations, he really didn’t want to watch the whores anymore.

Someone walked through him on his way upstairs, whistling “You’ll Miss Lots of Fun When You’re Married,” and this time it struck him like another (but pleasant) blow to the head that now he could get into any music hall and any theater in the city for free, and stay as long as he liked. In the toff seats, too!

A surge of cheer went through him at the thought, and suddenly everything seemed brighter. Bloody hell if I can’t get into them fancy toff whorehouses too! He’d heard they had all sorts of goings-on there, music and dancing and orgies, good as a music hall or better, ’cause the girls had less on.

Without actually thinking about going anywhere, he found himself out on the street again, heading in the direction of the Old Mo. That’d be a good place to start!

And to his pleasure he discovered he could stride along as fast as he cared to without his legs tiring a bit. He increased his pace to a trot, then a run, with the same lack of fatigue, and began to laugh as he ran along. This is more like! he thought, giddy with the freedom of it.

But just as he thought that, he became aware of a tugging on his insides, as if the guts he no longer had were tethered to something behind him, or the air in front of him was solidifying like curdled milk. He slowed from a run to a trot, within a few paces more from a trot to a walk, and within a few more paces—he couldn’t move forward against the pull at all. He strained against the invisible tether to no avail; he just could not move forward another inch.

But he could move sideways.

So he did, pushing through building walls, crossing streets at a slight angle, straining as hard as he could. He felt as if he’d been harnessed to a beer-wagon and was trying to pull it. But of course, he didn’t break into a sweat. Presumably because he couldn’t sweat. He wasn’t panting, because he didn’t need to breathe.

At one point in the Herculean effort, he wondered why he was doing this. But the answer was obvious, really. He was doing it because it was something to do.

He knew this neighborhood like the back of his hand, although he’d never traversed it in quite this way before, literally cutting through shops and private spaces. That was how he recognized what was happening the moment he crossed the same street he had been on before, but facing in the opposite direction. He stopped then, and looked back over his shoulder. He couldn’t see the point from which he’d started; that gray fog that hung over everything, even indoors, obscured things beyond about fifty feet. But he knew where he was, and he knew where the whorehouse was from here, and by his best guess he was about five hundred yards from where he’d died. So he’d likely just toiled his way halfway around a circle that was about a thousand yards across, centered on the whorehouse.

Slowly, he began to understand just what this meant. He could not go more than five hundred yards from where he’d died. This, then, was going to be his world. One tiny music hall, three whorehouses, a half dozen pubs and cookshops, some goods shops.

He sat right down in the middle of the street, defeat crushing him to the ground. What was the point then, after all? He’d escaped Hell—but for what? He remained there in a dull, unthinking haze until a growing sense of sick unease roused him, and he felt, without knowing why he felt this, that the unease had a direction.

He looked up, to see that the sky was definitely lighter in the direction of his unease.

There was only one thing he could think of that would account for that. The sun was about to rise.

He got wearily to his feet, and shuffled toward the nearest building, which happened to house a cookshop whose owner was just opening up to catch the dawn risers. With the door wide open, at least he didn’t have to shove his way into the building. Without a glance at the waiting food—which he could neither smell nor taste—he passed through another doorway and found himself in the kitchen of the shop. Off to one side was a third doorway whose dark mouth beckoned to him. A cellar.

He plodded his way down into the comforting darkness, sat on the floor, and let the numb nothingness of yesterday engulf him.

* * *

When he came back to himself, it was to the sound of footsteps coming down into the cellar. The owner’s wife, lantern in hand, was halfway down the steps before he roused himself enough to stand up. He knew her of old; she went out of her way to sell him the oldest of pies, the sandwich with the rind of the cheese instead of a good slice, and the stalest bread. He’d been sick more than once after eating what he’d bought here. He’d accused her of trying to poison him. How she would laugh at him if she could see him now!

The thought made him furious, and he stood in the middle of her cellar, knee-deep in a basket of taties, and snarled at her. “And what’re yew comin’ down ’ere for, ye old sow?” he snarled. “Spoilt taties t’bake up fer t’pisen summat else?”

And to his astonishment, she looked right at him, and froze.

Her eyes widened in horror; she shook as if she had an ague. Her mouth opened, but nothing came out of it.

She can see me?

He cackled wildly, and snarled at her, making the worst face he knew how to do. Then he reached for her.

She shrieked at the top of her lungs and dropped the lantern, which shattered on the floor, the flame immediately igniting the pool of spilled oil. With another shriek, she whirled, with only purest good luck keeping her from setting her skirts on fire, and raced up the stairs, still screaming.

Leaving him laughing harder than he had ever laughed before in his entire life.

He backed up and tucked himself into a corner as the cookshop owner clattered down the stairs, more concerned about his property burning down than about the hysterics of his spouse, and stamped out the flames with a pair of sturdy hobnailed boots. Once the danger was over, the man left and came back again with a lantern of his own, cleaned up the mess, and then peered in every corner of the cellar, looking right into Alf’s eyes more than once—but he clearly saw nothing.

“Yew stupid cow!” he called up the stairs. “Yew broke th’ good lantern and spilled me good oil an’ there ain’t naught down ’ere but taties an’ turnips!”

The woman cried out something incoherent amid her sobs, which made her husband spit in disgust and stomp his way back up the stairs, shouting abuse the entire time.

Alf couldn’t contain his glee, and didn’t try. If he’d been at a loss for what to do with himself before, well, he wasn’t now! “I’ll be a ’aunt, tha’s wut!” he proclaimed out loud. “’Er an’ ’er ways kep’ me awake wit’ bellyache many a night, well, I’ll be makin’ ’er nights a misery, see if I don’!” Revenge! Now there was a pleasure he was still capable of! And if he couldn’t revenge himself on Reg, he’d take his pleasure where he could find it.

Up the stairs he went, and peeked into the kitchen. There was the hysterically weeping woman and her impatient, hectoring spouse. She’d pulled up her apron in both hands and buried her face in it. Grinning maliciously, he crept up close to her and waited for her to bring her head up to answer something her husband said.

She found herself staring directly into his eyes. He snarled at her, and made a grab for her. His hand passed right through her and she fainted on the spot.

Chuckling, he glanced out of the open back window and judged it was just past sunset. I wonder who else can see me?

No time like the present to find out.

* * *

Well, he’d wanted something to do, and haunting people was turning out to be the most entertaining thing he’d ever done in his life that didn’t involve a whore. It beat dog-and cock-fighting, that was certain.

Besides the woman at the cookshop, he had a regular little flock of those he was able to terrify on a nightly basis. There was the little Cockney whore who worked on her own and had laughed at him because he wouldn’t pay her price. He’d have knocked her sideways if she hadn’t had her man with her. Well, now she had to see him stalking her every step she took, and her man didn’t believe what she was seeing any more than the cookshop owner had believed his wife. It tickled him no end when her custom fell off because of him, and her man beat her for it.

But he didn’t spend the entire night just stalking her, oh no. He knew to the minute from the sounds of the Bow Bells just when the cookshop owner and his wife went to bed, and moments after they pulled up the covers and the old man was snoring, he was there, gobbling and grimacing at her. She’d lie there praying silently at him, shivering, tears streaming down her face. She didn’t dare wake her husband, so she had to lie there, staring at him, unable to move. Once she even brandished a cross at him, and he laughed at her and lunged for her. She fainted again.

There was a whole family of filthy Dagos living in one room above an old-clothes shop. The parents couldn’t see him, but the brats could, and he made sure the whole lot got woke just before dawn with the carrying on and caterwauling when he made his appearance. Haunting them was how he found out that even though his hands passed right through people, they weren’t immune to his touch. When he contacted them, they felt a chill. And not like a little shiver either, a deep, bone-chilling cold, icy enough that when their parents woke to their screams after he had touched them, the adults exclaimed over the shivering bodies, and chafed the nippers with their hands or wrapped them in all the meager blankets, trying to get them warm again. At least, he was fairly sure that was what was going on, since he didn’t understand their babbling.

Periodically he’d let them alone for a few nights—because there were others who might or might not be able to see him, depending on circumstances. The madam of the whorehouse liked to indulge in absinthe, and when she was in her cups, she got glimpses of him. There were other brats in the neighborhood besides the Dagos, and the littlest could reliably see him—it seemed as if nine or ten was the cutoff for being able to consistently see ghosts. Some drunks could see him, though their reactions varied—some were terrified, but some just took him as another spirit of drink, rather than an actual spirit. So every so often he’d give his regulars a respite from his presence and go haunt someone else. That only increased the terror and despair when he turned up again.

And the more he frightened people, the stronger he got. He didn’t feel thinned out anymore. He didn’t have to go into that blank state by day unless he wanted to. He even managed to cross the street just before sunset without having parts of himself evaporate.

It had been in the early spring when Reg murdered him—and Reg hadn’t been back to this neighborhood since. But now that he had his haunting and tormenting to do he found himself losing track of time, and only realized it was summer when it dawned on him that the nights were much shorter than they had been. He had decided to give his usual victims a respite, and was prowling part of his domain he usually didn’t get to, when he spotted something coming toward him that literally stunned him for a moment.

It was a young man—dressed like a toff, he would have said—but there was something wrong with him.

He was just as solid as Alf himself.

And that was impossible.

Unless—this was another ghost?

In that moment he was terribly torn between two impulses—to hide from this apparition, and to approach him. What if this bloke was hostile? What if he was stronger than Alf? What if he was something more than a ghost, what if this bloke had been sent by Something—sent to haul him through that door he’d escaped—

But on the other hand, it had been so long since he’d properly heard another human voice, so long since he’d exchanged words with anyone. . . .

Loneliness—though he would never have admitted he was lonely, even to himself—won out. “’Ere!” he called out, before he could stop himself.

The young man jumped, startled, and turned to stare at him as if surprised to see him. “What?” he replied in tones far more cultured than Alf’s. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

Alf puffed out his chest and strode toward him, sure of at least one thing: a lad this nervy was no match for him. “Name’s Alf,” he said, prepared to be friendly now. “This’s my place—leastwise—” he faltered. He couldn’t say it. “Since Oi . . . since Oi . . .”

“Since you died, you must mean,” the young man said, regaining his composure. Up close he was curiously androgynous; very well dressed for this neighborhood, with his neat suit, proper shirt and tie, and an actual hat rather than a soft cap. Alf would’ve called him a “nancy-boy” at best, and any number of obscene things at worst, and probably kicked him around back when he’d been alive, but now, well, beggars could not be choosers. This was the first time he’d seen anyone to talk to, and until this moment he hadn’t realized just how starved he was for another voice that would actually answer his. Besides, there’d be no satisfaction in kicking him about; it wasn’t as if this sort of body was able to feel or do much of anything.

The young man stuck out his hand. “The name’s Hughs. Peter Hughs. I got knocked over by a runaway cab about five years ago, six blocks that way.” He waved vaguely in the direction of the river. Hughs eyed Alf knowingly. “I’d venture to say you popped it within the last couple of months, eh?”

Alf scratched his head; he’d definitely lost all track of time, and the openness of the young man honestly caught him off-guard. “Prolly,” he admitted. “Oi’m not sure. . . .”

“It’s easy to lose touch with how time passes,” said Hughs, with a nod. “Are you keeping to the half-world, or have you gone all the way over to the spirit world yet?”

Alf shook his head. “Yew lost me, mate,” he replied, as they both ignored a beer cart that drove right through them.

“This is the half-world, or that’s what the other ghosts call it,” Hughs explained, waving his hand to indicate everything around them. “But if you let all this fade, you end up in the spirit world. You can’t see the living anymore, and the buildings are mostly shadow, though they get more solid the older they are. The spirit world is where most of the ghosts spend the day, if they’re living in a part of it that’s safe. It’s all right here, but there’s parts of London—” he shivered. “—you wouldn’t want to meet up with the things that live in the spirit world there. Fortunately they’re as stuck in their parts as we are in ours.”

But Alf had fixed on Hughs’ first statement. “Other ghosts? Yew mean there’s more’n us?”

Hughs shrugged. “Hundreds. Thousands, maybe. London’s a big place and people die all the time. A lot of them don’t want to leave.”

“’Ere,” Alf said, uncomfortably aware of the living walking all around and through them. “Le’s find someplace we ain’t got people walkin’ through us. Yew sound loike th’ kinda bloke Oi oughter know.”

“How about up there?” asked Hughs, pointing to a rooftop, and chuckled at what must have been Alf’s expression. “Don’t worry, I’ll show you how to get up there.”

And so Alf learned how to fly, as ghosts were supposed to fly in stories, just by will alone. He was still marveling over that as they settled down on the rooftree like a couple of starlings.

Hughs taught him a lot in the time between when they’d met and dawn. Why strong emotions from the living that connected to ghosts (like fear) made them stronger, how to move completely into the spirit world and out again, what the dangerous things in the spirit world were and how to avoid them, why sunlight was perilous, and who his ghostly “neighbors” besides Hughs were. There were more of them than Alf would have thought, but according to Hughs, most of them were crazed, and spent most of their time brooding in specific places wholly in the spirit world, none of which were within “his” territory.

Somewhat to his surprise, Hughs was easy to like, and Alf found himself telling the young man all about his hauntings. Hughs listened intently but without comment until he had finished. He saved the cookshop shrew for last, and actually laughed for the first time since he’d been murdered as he described how she had waved a crucifix at him. Hughs was a good listener, and Alf had always liked to talk.

“You seem to be enjoying yourself,” Hughs said, after a few moments of silence.

He shrugged, and looked down at the shadowy living passing to and fro below them. “There’s damn-all else wut makes me ’appy,” he replied, a little bitterly, then laughed again. “An’ it does make me ’appy.”

Hughs nodded, then glanced behind them. “Sun will be up soon,” he said. “I need to get back to my part of town. Would you like me to meet you again some time soon?”

Alf hesitated. What he wanted was for Hughs to come by tomorrow. And the next day. And the next. He’d had no idea he was so starved for company, but now that Hughs was about to depart, he found himself fighting the impulse to seize the young man’s arm and beg him to spend the day here.

Which . . . would make him look desperate. He didn’t want to look desperate, he wanted to look strong, like his living self, fearless and dependent on nobody. He didn’t want Hughs to get the idea that Alf needed him.

So he shrugged. “If yew ain’t got nothin’ else to do,” he replied, trying to appear indifferent.

Hughs hesitated. “I do have a lot more to tell you, but I don’t want to impose on you or be a crashing bore.”

That made Alf laugh, since the last thing Hughs was was a bore. “Termorrer then,” he said genially. “’Ang about the pub, Oi’ll meetcher there.”

And without waiting for an answer, he drifted down to the ground and sauntered off, trying not to look as if he was hurrying.

2

“...And if there’s anyone you want to send a message to, they can do it.”

Alf had only been listening to Hughs natter on about “mediums” with half his attention, but he nodded. “On’y bloke I wants ter send a message to is th’ one what did me,” he replied, a bit bitterly. “An’ that message’d be with a cosh loike ’e did me with.”

Hughs grimaced.

But Alf ignored his expression, because the idea of actually being able to communicate with the living had sparked something in Alf’s mind. “I wunner,” he mused. “Mebbe I could get ’im to go somewhere’s he’d get coshed regardless.” If he could find a medium who could somehow get a message to Reg that he’d hidden some money or valuables somewhere . . . wait, not just Reg, but Reg and a couple of other chancy blokes he knew . . . if they all converged on the same spot at the same time, someone was going to end up very dead. Granted, that would not give Alf the same satisfaction as doing the blighter in himself, but it would be revenge.

“So how d’yew find a medium?” he asked.

“Oh, if one’s anywhere about, you’ll know,” Hughs assured him. “You can feel it, here.” He tapped his head. “It’s like they’re costers, calling out in the street, but only we can hear them. There is absolutely no doubt when there’s a genuine medium somewhere near enough that you can reach her.”

Alf brightened, but only for a moment. “Ah, wut’s the chance uv that?” he asked, as his initial excitement faded into the usual dull apathy. “Nobody respek’table’d come ’ere.”

“Well, if you keep haunting that cookshop keeper’s wife, she might become desperate enough to send for one, and I expect she’d have the money for it,” Hughs pointed out, then stood up. “Keep your hopes up, Alf. I’m going to go back to my cellar for the day.”

Alf waited until Hughs was out of sight before dropping down to the ground and making his way to the pub’s cellar. It was a good place to spend the day, especially when he wanted to think. About the only time someone came down there was when one of the barrels upstairs was about to run dry. There was wine down there as well, but not a lot of call for it; beer and gin were the usual tipples in this part of town, and the barkeep liked to have the gin where he could keep an eye on it.

Alf settled down among the kegs in the corner furthest from the door. He didn’t actually need to sit, but he found sitting let him concentrate. He kept turning the idea of talking with one of those “mediums” over and over in his mind. The first problem he could see was how to get the message to Reg in the first place. He didn’t imagine that these women—Hughs had said they were mostly women—did anything out of the goodness of their hearts. So there would be the matter of finding some way to pay her to get the message to Reg. And if that could be surmounted, there was the question of how she would find Reg to deliver the message, since he hadn’t been back to this part of town since he’d murdered Alf.

Then there was the matter of getting him to believe the message. Though that was about the easiest of all the problems to solve. There were quite a number of things only he and Reg knew, not the least of which was that Reg had been his murderer. Better not bring that up, though, or Reg might get the wind up and vanish.

On further thought, he discarded the notion of getting a couple more chancy lads involved as far too complicated. How would he make sure they all arrived at the supposed cache at the same time? Obviously he couldn’t give them a time to be there!

So it would have to be a place where Reg would be sure to run into fatal opposition. Now . . . how could he manage that?

Then it struck him, and he grinned, because the idea solved all of his problems at once. He’d tell the medium to get her pay from Reg. So she had a motive to find Reg and deliver, first the bona fides, then when she’d got her pay, the message. And the message would send good old Reg after money Alf had supposedly cached—straight into the hideout of a gang that Alf had stumbled on quite by accident—and stumbled right out of again once he realized what he’d found.

Now he just had to frame the message in such a way that Reg would believe that he, Alf, had no idea it was Reg who’d done him in. That gave him something to mull over and cogitate on until sunset.

He felt so good about his plans that he took the time to waylay the cookshop woman in a particularly artistic fashion, floating up near the ceiling of the bedroom so that she didn’t spot him until she was already in bed. He’d never done that to her before, and she fainted again. Her husband took her faint as sleep, grumbled when he couldn’t rouse her, and turned his back to her, disgusted with her lack of response to his efforts at what passed with him as seduction.

And then it occurred to him—terrifying her into fainting was hilarious, but as Hughs had said, if there was anyone that would have both the “respectability” and the money to bring a real medium to this neighborhood, it would be her. So he needed to do more than just frighten her into unconsciousness. He had to frighten her into acting.

Wait . . . no, what he needed to do was convince the cookshop owner that his wife wasn’t just being hysterical. The owner was the man holding the purse strings. He was the one who had to be convinced that there was a ghost haunting the place.

Fortunately, now he thought he knew how to do just that.

Lessee . . . I gotter notion. . . .

He floated down from the ceiling and right over—and then into—both of the unconscious figures. And as he had with the Dago nippers, he concentrated on both of them, on making himself stronger at their expense.

And to his glee, it began to work. They both began to shiver, and both woke up at the same time.

And then something new happened.

As the woman stared at Alf’s face, mere inches from hers, her breath puffed out in visible clouds, and so did her husband’s. The iron bedstead rimed over with frost.

And then her husband’s eyes flew open and stared into his in horror.

“Sweet Jesus!” the man howled, starting back.

With a cackle, Alf dropped through them and came to rest just under their bed. He had never felt so strong, so powerful. It was absolutely intoxicating. He had no idea he could do anything like this!

He listened to the woman sob, but this time, the man was very nearly as hysterical, begging her forgiveness for not believing her. The bed creaked as they both sat up, and he could only imagine what was going through the man’s mind at this point.

Finally incoherent babbling on both their parts gave way to silence.

“Wut d’ye s’pose ’e wants?” the man asked, into the darkness. “’E’s gotter want something, don’t ’e?”

The wife just continued to sob, softly. The man cursed. “’Ang it all,” he said decisively. “Wutever ’tis, I’ll foind out.”

Alf smiled to himself, and sank through the floor. Now to see if the madame of the whorehouse was receptive enough to see him tonight. For tonight, he’d concentrate on the victims with money. And find out just how strong he could get.

Oi’d niver hev guessed how innerestin’ this was gonna be.

* * *

“Well, you’ve managed to raise a ruckus,” Hughs said, as they met, as usual, outside the pub about two days later.

“’Oo? Me?” Alf chuckled. “Oi dunno wutcher mean.”

“Oh, you are the talk of the supernatural neighborhood,” Hughs retorted. “You have managed some fairly clever tricks so far, and there are bets on whether you’ll learn how to become strong enough to actually affect the physical world.”

Alf had not expected that, and his jaw dropped. “Yer meanter say we c’n do that?” he gasped.

“You already are,” Hughs pointed out, lofting himself up into the air, and picking out a rooftop to settle on, as Alf followed him. “You’re pulling energy out of your victims and the air around them. That’s what’s making things cold when you touch them.”

Alf resisted the urge to blurt “I am?” and just nodded. “I didn’ know we c’ld do more’n that, though.” He sat down on the roof ledge overlooking the street where the little music hall was. Oddly, since learning how much fun it was to torment his victims, he hadn’t gone back there. Mebbe Oi should. Ain’t there s’posed to be theater ’aunts?

“The stronger you become, the more you can do, but there are limits,” Hughs said casually. “In general, you can’t fling anything heavier than a plate about. But it certainly makes a fine show when you break a teacup or two against the wall.” He raised an eyebrow at Alf, who felt a surge of great satisfaction. Now, there was a thought, indeed. What would the cookshop owner think if he flung a saucer across the room? Or better still, a knife?

Then his eyes widened at another thought. If his plot to get Reg murdered by proxy didn’t work out . . . could he possibly lure Reg here and get the job done himself?

Wait—wouldn’t that be far more satisfactory?

Well, it clearly would. And a lot less complicated. He’d still need the medium to get a message to bring Reg here, but the rest would be up to him. Much more the way he liked it.

Hughs gazed at him speculatively. Alf grinned a little. “Reckon Oi might just get things lively ’ere.”

“Well, if you want to lure people to come gawk at the spectacle, regardless of the reputation of this area, that will do it,” Hughs replied. “And one or more of them is bound to bring a medium around, if that’s what you wanted. Personally I prefer things quieter.”

“Wut fun’s quiet?” he asked rhetorically. “On’y prollem Oi c’n see’s most folks ’round ’ere ain’t got a lot uv stuff t’fling.”

Hughs laughed as if he had made the best joke in the world. He felt rather proud of his quip.

Well, if he was going to get a lot of attention, he was going to have to make a spectacle of things where more people than just one or two could see it. And the Dagos weren’t in the least interested in drawing attention to themselves. Besides, they’d probably just run off to their heathen priest if he began lobbing bits of their property about.

No, after due consideration, he decided that what he needed to do was concentrate on the cookshop. But this time, before it closed, or after it opened.

But he’d need strength, so time to draw on those Dago brats as the easiest source of it.

“Oi’m gonna cause me a bit uv ruckus,” he told Hughs, and without a farewell, headed for the Dagos’ room.

He had left them alone for quite a few nights while he concentrated on the cookshop, and he could tell by the relatively relaxed atmosphere in the room that once again they had allowed themselves to believe he was gone. He also realized, given that the parents were half clothed, and the nippers less than that, that it must be a very hot night tonight. Well then! He’d be doing them a favor. . . .

By the time he left, he was bursting with strength, and they’d thrown every stitch they owned over their bodies and were huddled in blankets while frost rimed everything metal in the room, and even some of the wood. He’d decided to let them off easy this time; he hadn’t actually shown himself. Not that this had lessened their terror. If anything, it had probably made things worse, which was good for him.

The cookshop was just about to close for the night; there was always a last-minute rush of business, as the owner sold the things he couldn’t manage to revive the next day at heavily discounted prices. So the stage was perfectly set, as he shoved his way in through the wall and surveyed the little room for things small and light.

He wasn’t quite sure where or how to start. Hughs hadn’t given him any instructions, and he was damned if he was going to ask for any. But there was a picture of the Queen on the wall, cut from an old newspaper and inexpertly framed with a few sticks of wood. It looked light enough, and hopefully it wasn’t nailed to the wall rather than hung on it. He drifted over to it, put both hands on the frame, and concentrated with all his might on pushing against it, rather than through it.

With a thrill of delight, he saw it move!

Now alight with energy and encouragement, he continued pushing at it, trying to rock it to and fro. The gargantuan effort it took made him feel as if he were trying to push an elephant uphill against its will, but not only did it move, he was able to get it swinging.

And about the time it was rocking back and forth merrily on its nail, and clattering as it did so, he heard, faintly, from the living world, words that warmed his soul.

“Bloody ’Ell—lookit thet!”

He glanced at the rest of the room. The half dozen or so shadowy customers crowded in here to bargain for sandwiches of three-day-old bread and stale cheese had turned to stare at the wildly swinging portrait of Her Majesty.

Someone screamed just as he managed to shove the picture hard enough to send it clattering to the floor.

Silence, as everyone in the cookshop froze. He took the opportunity to rush through them all, sending their temperature, and that of the shop, plummeting.

That did it. Everyone who was not behind the counter ran for the entrance, jamming it in their panic. More screams. Now bursting with energy, he tried lifting a stale bun left on the counter. And succeeded!

Now nearly blind with elation, he tried throwing it. It bounced off the back of someone’s head.