Secondhand Sorcery

The fear started around the 20,000 foot mark, while they were still gaining altitude, on their way across the ocean. Long before they even started to think about landing in Germany, long before any actual threat. It was humiliating, and asinine, but he couldn’t deny it: he was a fifty-two-year-old man, a veteran with thirty years’ experience gained around the world, about to fall apart from terror while sitting safely in a C-40 Clipper.

He made it through boarding fine, by keeping his mind in the moment. He bitched more than he needed to about the change in schedule, and he knew the girl and the old man saw right through it. But that was fine. Everybody got tense sometimes, and he was the token mortal on the team. No shame. But then he looked around at the mess of kids they were sharing the plane with.

And they were definitely kids. Infantry, as far as he could tell, or MPs. Maybe a mix, he hadn’t asked. They’d already shipped over their extra eyes, days ago. These were boys in their teens and twenties, for pure brute-force support. Maybe to beef up American base security. Maybe in case Teutonic civilization abruptly collapsed. Whatever it was about, the boys had faces like they were going to be dropping out the plane into battle at the other end. And they’d displaced three people at the last minute, because their job would be even worse; they’d be hunting the monster itself.

No, not itself. Herself. Everyone said the Ghost of Leipzig was female. As of twelve hours ago, anyway, assuming you could believe the stories. God only knew what they’d be saying about it by the time they landed. Everything was changing, and frankly David Hampton had no idea what they expected him to do about it except be part of the chain of command. That damn Dawes had ordered him to do this. Why? Because he was part of the team that handled this shit. Mr. President didn’t need or want to know the details. And that was why he was traveling four thousand miles to babysit a warrant and a civilian.

“Hamp?” Her hand touched his, on the armrest. Had it been trembling? “Are you okay?”

“A little tense,” he said back, and despised how weak his voice came out.

“If you stick close to me, it should be fine,” she reminded him, keeping her voice low. “Whatever this is—“

“Yeah, I know,” he said. He hadn’t meant to interrupt. Whatever this is, we don’t have any theoretical reason to think I can’t drive it away in a second by pulling out my own monster. Which would be reassuring if she hadn’t told him, the day they met, that Marshall’s familiar was theoretically impossible, a little before that impossible thing treated his brain like a chew toy. And then they’d been sitting down in the Red Room when the good Doctor told everybody that the Ghost was theoretically impossible too. More specifically, it was one of three different theoretically impossible things. So no, Chief Graham, this old soldier was not especially comforted by your reassurance.

To her credit, she seemed to figure that out, and gave him a sideways smile. “C’mon, it’s a free trip to Europe, boss! You get to see all the sights. Aren’t you grateful?”

“Thrilled,” he said, and left it at that. She kept looking at him for a second, then turned back to talk to Dr. Gus. He thought about it a moment, and got out the little brown vial. Two down the hatch. He might feel better in a few minutes, and supposedly they weren’t addictive and didn’t get you high. The doctor said so. Which probably meant they wouldn’t work; probably he should have tested them before he got on the damn plane, but he hadn’t been feeling that bad before, and anyway it wasn’t like he wanted to depend on pills. He just didn’t see himself making it across the ocean without them.

And when they landed? One problem at a time.

They didn’t kill him, as it turned out, but they took a damn long time to kick in. He started shaking hard at one point, and Chief Graham very kindly pretended not to notice, and even shooed away the attendant for him when she got concerned. Eventually he got real sleepy, and drowsed for a bit, until he had a dream about Marshall’s castle, and came awake yelling and scared the kids across the aisle. Nothing, gentlemen, sorry for disturbing you. Just a bad dream. Not feeling good.

He didn’t take any more of the pills. He got out the lousy novel he’d picked up at the airport, and skimmed along for a bit. Blah blah corruption blah blah idealistic young JAG attorney frustrated by the limitations of the system blah blah and he was just getting into it when god DAMN it the plot twist was about emissants. He put the paperback away with three hundred pages left to go, and suddenly noticed that his hands looked like an old man’s.

To hell with it. If he was going to be terrified—if he couldn’t stop thinking about how screwed he was—he could pretend to be productive about it. He got the thick yellow mailer envelope out of his carry-on, and started digging through the latest output from the military-industrial rumor mill. Probably the other passengers weren’t cleared for the stuff in there, but whatever. A court martial didn’t sound that bad right now.

Leipzig, Hanover, now Cologne. It made a chevron across the country. Over five days, she’d settled into the basic pattern of attacking a major metropolitan area, raising hell, then moving on. If she stuck to her previous timetable (which was far from guaranteed), they’d land in Cologne around the time she decided to bail on the city and terrorize somewhere else. That was encouraging.

Tactics? Variable and apparently evolving. In Leipzig she’d just started panics and riots, Chariot-style. One paper speculated that the Russians were using a variant Chariot protocol, real back-to-basics. But that was outdated now—there was a note on it that said so—and that kind of analysis was more in Dr. Gus’s line anyway. He leafed past it.

More recent attacks were much subtler. By Hanover she’d moved on to provoking individual murders and suicides. Now, in Cologne, she was really getting ambitious; she was recruiting whole movements. Cults and conspiracies, springing up overnight. None of them stayed secret for long, because the members were all insane or close to it, but that was still good from Ivan’s perspective. Some previously-stable man with a wife, a job, and three kids starts babbling about the apocalypse at the water cooler?.

Social Contagion and the Leipzig Phenomenon: a Multi-Dimensional Analysis. That was a thick one, and loaded down with math, all translated from German or something in a hurry. Still interesting stuff, and as long as he was thinking abstractly about the problem he could stay chill. But it wasn’t good news. Apparently this thing was famous enough now that they were seeing independent false positives, where suggestible or disturbed people were simply imagining they saw her, and talking themselves into doing something awful, even when they were hundreds of miles away from her last confirmed appearance.

That was their conclusion, anyway. The next brief disagreed; it thought the Ghost was mutating, or maybe just fragmenting, spreading bits of itself that could replicate like a virus. They had math to back it here, too. Nationwide clairvoyant surveillance had turned up less than fifty manifestations over the last three days, most of them brief, but the total number of attacks or incidents was growing geometrically at best. The best explanation the author could come up with was that the parts an esper could spot weren’t really necessary for this thing to act—it was changing to spread like the flu, and most of the damage was done subliminally when it was latent inside you, and nobody could even tell ‘she’ was there …

“Hamp! Hey! Jesus, what are you doing? Put all that away before you kill yourself!”

He suddenly realized he was breathing like he’d just run a marathon. Damn it. He tried to put the papers back in the envelope, fumbled, and spilled half of them over his lap and the cabin floor. She leaned over to help him pick them up, and it was so humiliating he could feel the tears in his eyes. One of the kids saw he was sweating, and started yelling about a heart attack. Perfect.

“Cologne has more than a million people,” the Chief told him, once all the noise had settled down and everybody was reasonably confident he wasn’t going to keel over and die like a geezer. “And this thing, whatever it is, doesn’t stay in one place. We’ll have our work cut out just to keep up with it.”

“Let’s not talk about it,” he snapped. The boys across the aisle were still curious.

They made it to Germany without any further disgrace. The kids got out of the plane like so many two-hundred-pound Labrador puppies, and the three of them left more sedately as they were receding across the airstrip. He watched them unload the cargo from the back—it was all in sealed crates, he didn’t want to know—and even kept his cool for the twenty-eight minutes it took for their official handler from the German government to show up.

Her name was Anneliese Troester from the Militärischer Abschirmdienst, military counterintelligence. She was fortyish, blonde, in a blue pantsuit, with a build that said she maybe liked the beer and chocolate a little too much. It was perversely comforting to see that she looked about as unsettled as he felt.

“I am so terribly sorry,” she said, in an accent that mixed German and Brit. “Everything is chaos here. The person who was supposed to meet you here is being debriefed as part of an investigation. Two hours before you landed, Ernst Köhler was shot and killed by one of his subordinates. There is talk of a nationwide lockdown.”

“Pardon me,” said Doctor Gus, “but I am not familiar with this Mr. Kohler.”

“He’d be with the BfV,” David told him. “Domestic intelligence. He got promoted up after a decade in the eastern border. Didn’t know he’d wound up here.” He might not be a real wizard, but he could remember anyone he met once, even after ten years. And just watching the Troester woman wring her hands let him feel a sick kind of magnanimous pity, mixed with empathy. It was good not to be the only victim—and good to be with the cavalry, even if he personally was useless. Maybe the Ghost wouldn’t know that.

“Yes. Oh, this way, please.” She got them out to their ride, babbling the whole way. David gave her half an ear, and directed the rest of his attention out the window. Cologne looked to be functioning well, for a city under siege. Maybe it helped that there was really nowhere to run and nothing visible to run from. Traffic was light. Everybody would be sheltering in place, waiting out the storm away from public places. About all they could do, he guessed. It made him sick to think that this was what the world had come to. But that was an old anger, and he was too wrung out to get carried away. Mostly he wanted to get to the hotel and pass out.

The Chief was relaxed, or looked it. Why shouldn’t she? She was one of maybe ten people in a hundred-mile radius who could fight back. He only wished he could help her. Even if he did know Ernst Köhler, there wasn’t much he could do. Dr. Gus was already in trance before the car left the airport, hunting for the enemy.

He was bone tired when they actually got to the hotel to drop off their luggage. He had to work to lever himself out onto the curb with his cane, and snapped at their hostess when she offered to help. Check-in was easy—no line—and they had a nice suite to themselves. No competition for those either, even though they’d changed their whole trip less than two hours before the plane took off, when they got word she’d shown up here.

He wasn’t actually aware of deciding to lie down for a bit. It just happened, and nobody said anything about it. They kept on with their conversation in the other room, and he tried to keep listening, his eyes drifting in and out of focus on the ceiling and his brain going the same way.

“Yes, it was a terrible shock. Herr Frieden was thirty-seven, very reliable, and good friends with his superior and coworkers. Not at all quarrelsome. We don’t think he’d ever even owned or fired a gun. He sent everyone a simply unhinged … manifesto, I don’t know what to call it, to the whole building, minutes before opening fire. He shot himself last.” Common enough story, in the past few days.

A phone chirped. A pause. “Our best and brightest have determined, after much examination, that the Ghost of Leipzig and the Kuban Incident are both entirely psychic in nature, with no physical effects. They therefore speculate that they are related, perhaps part of the same general research program.” Dr. Gus’s tone was dry. “We are asked to investigate a link. How? Unclear.”

“So, the last sighting—the last confirmed esper contact—was six hours ago.” That was the Chief; he must have dozed and missed part of the conversation.

“Yes. Bonn, southeast of here. Too brief to even begin to send officers to investigate. We have learned not to try. Three times we have shot people who turned out to be innocent. We have no idea what she was doing in Bonn. There have been no associated attacks or reports of sightings.”

“But she cannot be linked to a single host or master?” Dr. Gus again, sounding resigned. He knew the answer.

“No. With every new attack we grow more certain of that. We have people working round the clock, doing statistical analysis and investigating every possible person. No leads. Besides, there is the matter of the Tetzloff Field—when she produces one. She does not always do so.”

David opened his eyes, and so realized they’d been closed, and that the room was much darker. The rest of the suite was silent; he’d been left behind, abandoned. His head was full of cobwebby memories of another unpleasant dream, though he couldn’t recall the details. He groaned and stretched until he was sitting on the edge of the bed. It was after nightfall, and he was wide awake now. How long had they let him sleep? Had it been morning when they landed? He couldn’t even remember now.

He found his cane—not much longer, they said, till he wouldn’t need it anymore—and got moving toward the window. At least he didn’t have to clear his schedule for the week to get to a different part of the same room, the way he used to. Some time later he was looking down at the headlights wiggling around the streets like ants, busy on errands he’d never know.

Something about it was like staring into space. Not just the lights against the darkness, but the remoteness of it. A million people, maybe more, and he’d never met a one of them, and they’d never met him and didn’t care. He was alone in a black void, isolated, beyond any help he could call for.

He heard movement in the room behind him, and twisted around to look. Nothing to see. Just the bed, the desk, the closet, and the shifting shadows from city lights at night. But the room didn’t feel empty. Something was there, even if he couldn’t tell what or where. A primitive man, peering out of his hut, spear in hand, sees the night wind rustling in the tall grass. There could be a leopard in that rustling, and he would not know until it was too late even to scream …

David felt something on his cheek, a fluttering of warm air like an exhaled breath. He turned back around to look. Nothing, still. And yet not nothing. He was not alone, and couldn’t be alone, even if he wanted to be. The warmth was on his other cheek now. No point turning to look. It could keep up this game all night. Better to wait, frozen in place, and perhaps it would move along. He had no other hope.

Even as he thought it, a gentle weight came to rest on his shoulder. It, unlike the breath, remained insistently in place. He smelled a whiff of something unpleasant, a mix of blood and smoke, with maybe a touch of burnt meat. He shut his eyes and turned his face the other way, trying to breathe through his mouth. That did nothing for the weight on his shoulder, though. It shifted, flexed, like a living thing, as if to say, who are you fooling? It wasn’t going to go away.

So he opened his eyes, and turned to look. He could just see it out of the corner of his eye if he strained: a dark mass, hairy, like the paw of a beast. He tried to turn further, to get a proper look, and with careless ease the thing shoved him back, knocking him against the window so his head smacked hard on the glass.

He still hadn’t made a noise. Why was that? Because it wouldn’t help, of course. But nothing would. So why not scream? There was nothing left to lose by trying. He was just opening his mouth, just thinking about drawing in breath to resist, when the full weight of the beast fell on him, and he found himself screaming without even trying.

The first attack by itself was enough to break him; there was no sport in pushing further. No fun in spreading the debris of David Ulysses Hampton into a slightly more scattered cloud. So instead she charitably let him pull himself back together, just a little, while his sweating hands clattered against the glass. After a minute he was calm enough to understand a message, whispered in black ink at the back of his mind: Been a while, lover.