I had to junk the Timmy story, but it worked out.
Internet has been wonky this evening.
There is a line from the Old Americans about a magical monster, and never mind that they had none: It burbled as it came! That was the coming of Charlie. The unholy amalgamation of spirit and ghost clanged and crunched like metal smashing into metal. In this form it smelled industrial, too, like one of Greater Hershey’s machines. Rubber and metal and polish and rust, all ground in and baked until hard.
This heartened me. All of that meant that the occult lure was definitely working. To arcanely define an entity is halfway to controlling it – or, in this case, destroying it.
In theory, it would all come down to timing. According to the song, Charlie would be in this station, at this time of day, and ready to receive a crab cake from his wife. Reenacting these conditions would align us arcanely, ritually making us part of the song. From there it would follow well enough: Mistress Hawes would place the crab containing the Old American nickel on the focus, symbolically paying for Charlie’s exit fare. That tacit fulfilling of the curse would weaken the occult link between the spirit and the ghost, and Gallagher and I would exploit that weakness to hammer the two entities apart. From there we would have to improvise. This was First Age spontaneous magic, after all. If people could have planned better against its manifestation, the world might not have ended seven hundred years ago.
I am pardonably proud of this bit.
He bore up well under the strain — and, indeed, the costly spellcasting had found us a candidate. “This is Mistress Jaquelyn Hawes, Mistress Dexter,” he told me, absently wiping his face with a handkerchief before waving it at the angry-faced young woman he had in tow. “She has graciously agreed to serve her country in this ritual.”
Mistress Hawes glared in my general direction. “I had conditions. You’re not bringing that cheating bastard back to life, are you?”
“No,” I told her promptly. “That would require a body intact enough to be reinvigorated, quite a lot of magic, a decent amount of good fortune, and most importantly: any willingness on my part to resurrect the man. Sending his soul on to its presumed reward is my goal, this afternoon. I presume you and your husband are… estranged?”
“He’s not supposed to be my husband,” she ground out. “The son of a bitch skipped out on me three months ago. I’ve been trying to serve papers on him ever since. The cop said you’d maybe want them?”
I took the proffered envelope and riffed through the contents. “I might, at that. Do you mind?”
“Will it get rid of the son of a bitch, once and for all?”
“Hopefully.”
“Then no, I don’t mind. I’d say shove them down his throat, except he doesn’t have one, because he’s dead.” The smile on Hawes’ face was truly chilling to behold. “Is it gonna hurt, whatever it is you’re gonna do?”
“As little as possible,” I managed to say.
She scowled. “Well, I guess you can’t have everything.”
Academia!
Gallagher peered over the proffered sheet. “Ah. Yes. Mid-twentieth century ballad, at least by the Old American definition of ‘ballad.’ Note how the text features a spoken-word introduction, followed by verses meant to be sung. That suggests a transitional work between the old and new lyric traditions that arose in the last two centuries of the First Republic…”
“Freeman,” I interrupted, and he grinned at me.
“Sorry, Sun. Academic itches must be scratched. Anyway, yes, it looks like it’s a folk song — no idea of the tune, mind you — of some poor unfortunate, trapped forever on the… oh, of course. It’s a song about the Antiquity! That must be why our Mr. Shane had collected it. A very old song, too. It must have been made at least a century before the dawn of the First Age of Magic.” He handed me the paper. “I don’t suppose you can glean more, with psychometry or suchlike?”
“It doesn’t work that way,” I absently responded, really reading the text now. All scholars in the Second Republic may learn Old American from books, but actually encountering the language as it was spoken can sometimes be a challenge. “Would this Charlie in the song really have been forced to ride on their trains for an eternity?” I asked Gallagher. “Surely somebody else would have given him a nickel to get off.”
Getting to the big reveal!
“Direct or not, there was some link between the two.” Gallagher frowned. “I cannot imagine that either the ghost or the spirit are enjoying their inadvertent bond.”
“My sympathies would be stronger,” I retorted, “if I thought either entity fully deserved them. Our Mister David C. Shane was a thoroughly unpleasant man in life, and the spirit that has him stuck in its gullet seems little better. It took pleasure in killing the man, even if it cannot consume the soul. I would almost be willing to let the two have the joy of each other, except that their shared indigestion is troubling the rest of the city.”
“And there is the upcoming conference,” Curwin noted.
“And there is the upcoming conference. I have received word from Superintendent Marsh: his superiors would like assurances that we will not have our deliberations with our new allies interrupted by foul necromantic events. They are disquieted enough by our ethical ones.” I sighed. “That need for reassurance comes from the very top, gentlemen. Sprague House will be very concerned if things go poorly.”
“But not enough to give us actual support,” Gallagher muttered, probably out of politeness for Curwin’s and my practical inability to do the same. “The Marshes were always purse-pinchers.”
The latest Timmy story simply isn’t working out. Luckily, I have NEVER RETURN already well close to finished.
Continue reading 12/24/2024 Snippet, NEVER RETURN.I’m going to try to finish this tomorrow. Fortunately, I already did my short story for the month on Patreon, so there’s that.
The ghost screamed again, this time a howl of protest that made the air visibly shiver and smashed glass. But even as it screamed, it also receded, pulling itself into itself until it was a globe of black that imploded as I watched.
At least, I assumed it imploded. I did not see directly, as I was diving behind the sofa at the time. Judging from the sudden psychic wind that pulsed above my head, that was wise of me. The stink of curdled magic is wretchedly difficult to get out of one’s hair or clothes.
Curwin popped his head up at the same time I did (he had flipped the shoddy table in the even shoddier kitchen). “So,” he managed after a moment. “What was that, then?”
It’s getting close to being done.
The first warning I had — a faint crinkling as windows and mirrors cracked — had my fingers up in a defensive ward before I quite realized what had happened. That kept the sudden biting cold from gnawing on my brain, which would do until I could lock and reinforce the ward.
Curwin blinked, then shivered as he instinctively moved to my side. I found myself quite glad of his proximity; defensive charm or not, the windowpanes were growing hoarfrost at an alarming rate.
“How long before it happens?” Curwin’s voice was surprisingly loud in the room, and I noticed that his tonfa was glowing, again. I oddly wondered how often the Boston police replaced them.
“If it had been a spell, it’d have happened and been done by now.” I shook my head, grunting in the most ladylike manner possible as I locked the ward in place. “But this is a manifestation, so it depends on how powerful the spirit is.”
“Right, not a ghost.” Curwin sounded in good humor, thankfully, and I presumed through an enviable ignorance. “They can’t generate this kind of cold for long.”
“Well, technically it is just sucking heat out of the area — ah, perhaps later.” An entity was unfolding itself in the air above the pile of books I had turned into an impromptu focus. I frowned at the energies, which felt different somehow, and yet familiar…
This story needs more action.
A search of the room revealed quite the collection of volumes, maps, and ephemera from Boston’s millennium and more of history, including a remarkable number of pre-Discovery maps of the Antiquity. Some of those did look like they were originals, but they were in excellent condition all the same. “I assume this was what he was using for his ghost hunts,” Curwin observed, and I shrugged. It seemed reasonable.
But there were no obviously arcane artifacts, except for the ones that any educated citizen of the Republic might reasonably have. We were looking for something more powerful than charms against toothache or lost buttons, however, and it worried me that we found nothing. Why on Earth had Shane gone down there? A ghostlegger would presumably know where he could set up his traps. His murder at least suggested that he had a reason for his actions.
It was Curwin who discovered our first real clue. “Hold up,” he said after a half hour’s useless searching. “Maybe we’re looking at this wrong.”
“We are certainly not looking at this right,” I admitted. “Go ahead. Even if you’re still feeling out what is nagging at you.”
I kind of like these characters.
“I would have thought the wages of sin would have stretched farther,” I observed as Curwin and I assessed the late David Shane’s apartment. No, that is not true. I sniffed, and regretted it instantly. I have an inclination to dismiss, and I dislike that about me. It is a bad state of mind for a necromancer to fall into.
Fortunately, Curwin did not notice. Or else he agreed with me, because indeed this was not a very imposing domicile. This part of Boston was hardly fashionable; a hundred years ago it was just past the edge of the suburbian wildness that we are still clearing, seven hundred years after the end of the First Republic. Now it was a collection of badly-aging cheap apartments and stolid factories, providing shelter, wages, and nothing more. Not the sort of place I would associate with an antiquarian, however self-taught.
Curwin chuckled when I pointed that out. “Think of it this way, Mistress Dexter. For every dollar he saved on rent, he could buy another book.” He opened the door to what I thought was a bedroom, and whistled. “Many, many books.”
