The Book of Feasts & Seasons (7 page)

Saint Patrick’s had special crypts set aside for people like us. Sly and I and a good many people in Breezy Point in Queens, Bensonhurst in Brooklyn, and Woodlawn in the Bronx are twilight people like us. Our folks all came from Terryglass Parish in the Diocese of Killaloe, in Cashel.

Saint Columba of Terryglass, one of the Twelve Apostles of Ireland, founded the great Abbey there. The Gray Folk of the Gray Lake, Loch Riach, over which he was lord, are the ones from whom we get our sight. Back before Saint Patrick came, the daughters of Terryglass were sometimes sold into marriage and thrown in the water with weights on their ankles, because their fathers made bargains with voices that spoke out of the night, promising great things. The Bride-girls of the Gray Lake did not quite die, and sometimes they could send their babies to the shore in a coracle, for sunlight people to find and raise; and woe to him who passed the crying child by, and did not pick him up.

I remember Gramps telling how, when the storm wind was high, and the Horned Huntsman was riding with his devil dogs along the black clouds, the lake water subsided and grew strangely clear. One could see the carved columns and twisted spires of the pagan ruins, where the serpents that Saint Patrick later banished were worshiped of old, in fanes far underneath the waters of Loch Riach, and seaweed-coated temples lit by strange torches; and one could see the watching eyes that looked upward, never asleep, looking back. Gramps used to scare the piss out of me with his old stories.

Lorelei had some twilight blood, too, on her mother’s side, and she had the sight. Most of our customers do. Normal people could not even see the crimes folk hired us to solve.

“So you go to mass now?” I asked skeptically. He was not what I thought of as a praying man.

“Regular as clockwork,” he said nodding. I was afraid he was going to say
religiously
, but that might have been over his head. “Ever since you, ah–you know. Departed. We all loved you, jackass or no. The boys down at McSorley’s hoisted a cup to your loving memory.”

The thought of the old gang made me curious. I suddenly felt myself shrinking a bit, looking more human.

“Sly, I just want to know–”

“Yeah?”

I wanted to know how Lorelei was doing. If she missed me. That sort of thing. But instead I said, “Nice digs,” I said. “I wanted to know how you pay for all this stuff. Is that a
sferracavallo
on the shelf?”

“I’ve had some good cases lately. Remember the Crow murders? Turns out the Crow Cousins were Renfrews, playing footsie with the Night Folk of the Blood Feast. And then there was a whole coven of Drowned Ones cooperating with smugglers and Nicors causing all those wrecks up the coast, near the haunted lighthouse the Good Witch uses. And it turns out the Good Witch weren’t so good. We tried to take her alive, but the Gold-hoofed Snow-white Hart tore off her mask and trampled her. Just like that.”

“You got the Hart to come with you?”

“Some of the buildings in the city are old enough to come awake, and they like me, and the Commissioner likes anyone who keeps the buildings quiet, and he knows Arthegall and Calidore in the Summer Queen’s Court, so yeah. I called the Hart. After the Lighthouse Witch had her mask come off, and she was all worms inside, me and Muddy got all her files—she wrote everything down on dry autumn leaves, so she could keep track and blackmail and curse her ex-partners—and it was pretty hectic.”

Muddy was the name of a police dog in the K-9 corps. Moddey Dhoo was from the Isle of Man, and he never grew a single gray hair in his fur, never failed in his strength, and he never grew any older. Sometimes he helped us on cases. He never talked when there were normal people around, and I always found him surly and sour when he did talk. Sly was just dog people, I suppose. I could just picture them slobbering and grinning together.

“Now, with those files,” Sly was saying, breaking into just such a grin as I had imagined, “the Police Commissioner O’Hanlon believed me when I told him there was one guy behind it all, fixing everything up.”

“Not your ‘Fixer’ theory again!” I groaned. “A Napoleon of crime! A spider in maze! You read too many dime novels.”

“I don’t believe in coincidences. Who else could get half-deads of Undersea and the man-eating mermaids and human gunrunners to mesh like clockwork? Tir-fo-Thuinn and the Tir-na-Nog and great Nodens who reigns in drowned Atlantis all singing from the same sheet music? And the Lighthouse Witch? She had you fooled your whole life. Um. I mean, us. Fooled us. Someone is coordinating all this.”

“The Fixer is just another one of your dumb ideas. You’ll have this business ruined in no time, without me.”

“Actually, Harvey the Pooka believes me,” said Sly, with a bit of a smirk.

“That drunk bunny!”

“He’s got friends at Court. He knows Canacee—you know, Cambell’s sister—and she sometime lends me her ring, for shadowing jobs. And so business has been picking up.” The smirk grew more prominent. He actually was enjoying the chance that never happened in life, to tell me this. To say
I told you so
.

A kind of dull silence rested in the room. I wished he had offered me a chair. I wished I could sit down. I was beginning to resent how comfy he looked in my chair. It burned me to think that all these years, without a word, without a sign, he had been jealous of something as petty as a chair, a view through a window. I guess you never really know people.

He straightened up in my stolen chair, put his hand on the cigarette case. His voice was a little sharp now. “Nice catching up with you. Good luck in the next world and all that. Can you depart now and stay departed?”

“Why are you having nightmares about me?”

“I am not the one who killed you, Matt. I keep telling you that.”

“And I already said I know that. I know who killed me. You must know, too. You must have figured it.” I pointed at the drawer marked A, the top of the filing cabinet. I was just as surprised as he was when the drawer unlocked itself with a click and slid open.

It was not me doing it. I am not a poltergeist, just an ordinary ghost. Poltergeists are driven by anger, damned to continually visit the same few spots, over and over again, screaming in rage, throwing fits, throwing stones. They are the only ghosts so heavy with anger that they can touch the material world.

But the drawer came open and kept coming. It made a metal screech as it came. Slowly, it tilted. Sly watched it with his eye wide and wet with fear.

It fell to the ground with a clatter like a cymbal, shockingly loud. The drawer was entirely empty. There was nothing in it. The aspergillum of holy water blessed by an archbishop was gone, the one I had once used to burn an archvampire into nothingness. The bottle of pills imported from Jamaica that we use on the sunlit people if they saw something they were not supposed to see—also gone. The automatic was gone, as was the clip of silver bullets, also expensive, also gone. The relic of Saint Ailbe of Emly, which no wolf or werewolf could approach, because of one act of kindness long remembered — that was gone, and it was priceless. A was for Aspergillum, A was for Amnesia. A was for automatic. A was for Ailbe. Funny, weren’t I? My life was full of little jokes like that.

I felt a pounding sensation in my brain again, and I did not even have a brain, only a memory of a brain. “Where is all our stuff? Our gear? It is all gone?” I looked again at the new carpet, the newly etched window with the expensive lettering only dusk people can see. “What did you do with it? Sell it for money?”

“I don’t have a key to that drawer, remember?” said Sly, his voice suddenly firmer, harder and colder than I ever heard it before.

He continued: “I dropped it down a storm drain when Mayor’s Brother, wearing his rat skin, bit me. Remember? Such an expensive key, made of orichalcum from Atlantis and silver from the mines on the dark side of the moon, because you insisted on a lock made by elfs, a labyrinth lock no human could pick or force, and no gypsy could charm. There were only two keys, and mine fell down the storm drain. You never forgave me.”

I was not listening. I was too busy shouting. “Did you sell
my
relic, which
my
grandfather brought all the way from Tipperary, for money? For
daylighter
money?” My anger was palpable: I could see the papers on the desk fly into the air, the lamp fell over, the windows rattled in the panes, and a dozen little dust devils of wind starting whipping around the room. “Did you sell them all? All the tools and weapons of the work?”

“You don’t remember,” he said in that cold, hard voice of his. “You are becoming empty, Matt. Soon you will be nothing but rage and wind.”

The whirlwind screamed stronger, and the potted plant, of all things, jumped up into the air and cracked him sharply across the face. The pot broke with a bright, sharp sound like fine china breaking. Dirt sprayed across the drapes and window behind, and the shard of the pot hit the wall and ceiling. There was blood all over his face, both from cuts on his cheeks and forehead, and gushing from both nostrils.

Then, too late, I remembered where I had heard him speak that way before. He never talked to me in that tone. He only got that hard note in his voice when he was confronting something from the darker world. Something from deeper in the twilight than humans can go safely. Something nearer the night.

Suddenly, I stopped, and got hold of myself. The papers fell to the ground, and the lamp toppled, but slowed for no reason before it hit the floor, and did not break.

It was me doing it. I was the cause.

“Mary, mother of God!” I shouted. “I am not a monster! I am not haunting you! You just feel guilty because you stole Lorelei from me!”

But it was too late for talk. Not bothering to wipe his face, he held up his hand, and in it was something he had hid in the silver cigarette case. It looked like a small and delicate flower from the blackthorn tree. The little flower throbbed and vibrated with more life-heat than any living human could hold.

“Not all the weapons of the work are gone.” And he said the name of the Big Black Cat.

Of course, I knew what flowers like that could do, what they could summon up, so I spun and dove below time even before he spoke. That just barely saved my life. Or my whatever I had just now.

I struggled, diving, swimming, rushing away from mortal time as fast as my fear could carry me. The Cat was a silent black shadow, immense, powerful, dark, and he came at me silently, swift as a comet. The glinting gold eyes of the cat were behind me, growing larger, pitiless and proud, two full harvest moons.

The Cat struck once, missed, but the current stirred up by that blow sent me tumbling head over heels. Then he swelled up to twice his size like the black cloud of some explosion in a powder magazine.

As huge as a building now, he swatted at me with a paw like a black tree felled by a lumberjack, and claws like a squad of fencers swinging their sabers in unison. I felt my imaginary coat pull on me, and felt my imaginary back get ripped from my spine in long, thin slices of flesh. And the pain was not imaginary at all. Once when I was a kid, my older brother Al hit me in the back with a rake. This was not like that.

There was no blood in the water around me, or whatever the fluid of time is made of, but then, as suddenly as I realized there was not, there was. It was not colorless, but red as a Christmas berry. I screamed in pain, except this time, my imaginary voice would not work. There was no noise. I had forgotten what my own voice sounded like.

Then, just as suddenly, the Cat gave one last disdainful look over his shoulder, and was gone. Cats don’t like water in general, and this one did not like getting very far into the sea of timelessness.

I floated in the deep, deeper than I had ever been before, trying to let the panic subside.

I was very far down by the time I stopped descending. The images get more cloudy and more fragmentary the deeper you dive, but I could still see glimpses of the modern cityscape directly above me. To one side, I saw a horse and buggy passing down a cobblestone street lit by a gas lamp; and to the other, a figure in a gas-mask trudging past a fallen skyscraper lying on its side.

I did not look closely at the future shadows of the city in years to come. Somehow, I did wish I could warn the living to enjoy what they had now, to give thanks, and to cherish what they were so soon to have never again, not even as memory. The people and things living and not living in times to come would make sure no undistorted record, no uncorrupted memory, would remain. There were no steeples in that future, no church bells, just thin, wailing cries from thin, ugly minarets.

I turned my gaze to the past. How to find anything, a dream, a bloodstain, a fear or hope that would draw me to it? A ghost cannot simply step into any scene he likes, any time he likes. There has to be something like an invitation.

Then I saw it. The one building that was much the same. There! Sly said I was interred there, the Cathedral built after the Civil War. Could I not step into a place where I was buried, even if I arrived a century or so before I was?

I soared upward toward the image. Some power was helping me, because I never felt myself moving through the timelessness so effortlessly before.

I surfaced not in the crypts, as I was expecting, but in the nave of the cathedral. At first I thought I was in a crowd. But it was not the living heat from a hundred people that beat and thundered and pulsed all around me. The pews were empty. There were a few lit candles in a stand against the far wall. The heat was coming from the statues to the left and right, from the stained glass windows glinting in the moonlight, from the baptismal font, from the altar, and most of all from a locked golden box at the far end. That was hotter than the summer sun.

It was glorious, warming, making me wish I could remember how to make my dead eyes weep. But it scared me.

I slowly raised my hands, like you do when someone points a gun at your heart. I suddenly remembered that was the exact posture I was in when I died. If this furnace of living energy I had foolishly stepped into the middle of was hostile, then I would die a second time in just this same pose.