Raining Gods

Where winter has gripped the rest of the county, driving rain has pounded down on the town of Hornbay for four days. The sky is thick with clouds, the thunder rumbling with laughter as I walk into town. The rain doesn’t touch me, which tells me enough about it to make me worried. The ghosts that called me here told me more but I’ve been travelling with the wandering magician long enough to like confirmation when I can get it.

Besides, I have no idea how accurate the ghosts of gods are. Or what they could be forced to say.

“You murdered eleven other gods; there are easier ways to get my attention,” I say, not raising my voice. I can’t do what the magician or Jay can, but I can put power into my voice when I have to. I don’t bother; the wind about me has died, the thunder rumbling overhead like vast stones grinding together. I don’t even flinch at the lightning that arcs down from the sky and splits before touching me. I’m a god-eater and the powers of gods cannot touch me like they do others.

“They call you Charlie, and claim you are the last god-eater in the world,” the god inside the thunder rumbles.

“I am,” I say, not bothering to claim I’m only responding to the first: other species have god-eaters still, and the order of god-eaters may be training other human ones; I’ve no desire to reveal that. “Your point?”

“We are not afraid of you; you have neglected your duties,” the god who calls itself Ibraxis says.

“God-eaters are meant to police gods; we can help as well as harm.”

“That is not your function.”

I smile at that. The god inside me stirs, anger mirroring my own. “You don’t get to decide that, Ibraxis. Few gods have true power in this age: that you subsumed so many others means you have done that, and nothing more.”

“You have allies: the magician and a boy.”

Jay is far more than ‘a boy’ but I nod. “I do; you will notice that they aren’t here.”

“Their power makes you weak!”

I blink as thunder rolls through the sky. “Having allies doesn’t make one weak, though I can see where you’d understand that.” And I let the god within me out, a thing of nightmare claws, blood-tinged fur. Under every bed, in every closet – not all gods are nice, and the one that terrified my childhood not kind at all. But the wandering magician had bound us together – for reasons I think not even his magic understands – and it had been months since I let the god out.

“This isn’t an ally,” I say, the god’s voice rumbling with my own, and we reach up and tear the entire storm apart and yank the god down to the earth.

Gods of rain are common, and this flows in the air like a living puddle, something more elemental than humanoid at all. “You dare? You dare,” it shrieks.

I reach out, god-eater to god, and it whimpers in agony as my power brushes the edges of its own. “I could eat you now, Ibraxis. You devoured other gods for power, but that’s nothing next to my own. Which I think you must have known, so why this?”

“A test; there are others who think you weak. Old gods who think you do not stir yourself often enough.”

“Murdering gods isn’t strength,” I say, stepping back. I speak five words, a reverse exorcism, and the ghosts of the murdered gods tear into Ibraxis. “But I can be an agent for justice.”

I turn and walk away as the god tries not to beg for aid. There were gods trying to test me, and I had no idea why – or what they thought they could gain at all. I wonder how many elementals existed that are gods, or had been gods, and how they’ve managed to hide from me. I travel with a magician, but I have duties of my own and sometimes I forget them.

This was a reminder. I make a mental note to never need one again and head back toward the hotel the magician and Jay are in. Anger is easy, but the god within me can be far more than that. If he wishes to be, and if I allow it. I consider options as I walk, the sky behind me changing as it begins to snow on the town, and I find myself wondering just how terrified gods are of me, and if there is anything I can ever do to truly change that.

Wanting Needs

“But I don’t wanna!”

“You don’t want to,” I say. I’m patient. Clenched teeth is patient.

“I said – I thaid I don’t want to,” Jay snaps. I’ve managed to drag him into the clothing store, but he’s drawing attention. He never does that. “I don’t need them, I don’t want them and I’m not getting them!”

“You aren’t actually ten,” I growl. “Pretend that.”

He says nothing that, lips tight together, hands balled in trembling fury.

I step to the side slowly, then flick him sharp in the left ear with a finger. He spins with a help, glaring up at me. Flecks of light glitter through his pale eyes, shards of colours flicking and vanishing like falling stars.

“Fine, I’ll get new clothing and strip naked in the middle of the – I’ll thtrip –.”

I reach out and put a hand over his mouth. “Jay. Stop it. You can’t keep forcing yourself to lisp. It’s mostly gone; it’s going away. None of us survived Joey and the Emissaries unchanged.” I lett go.

“Honcho went away,” he whispers, the words so soft I almost don’t catch them. I don’t think he meant for me to hear them.

I don’t say I was there, I don’t tell him I know. I just watch and wait.

“People are staring at me?” he says, only a little louder.

“You did just have a screaming fit,” I say as dryly as I can.

For a second he almost grins, almost looks proud, but just says: “Can we go elsewhere? Please?”

I snag his left hand and he follows me into another store of the mall. Malls are big, loud. Probably safe. “You could suck on your thumb,” I say, and it says too much that I’m suggesting it.

Jay just shakes his head. “Honcho went away. It’s too big a hurt to – it’th too big.” He stops at that. “I lisped!”

“You did.”

“I want –,” he begins, then: “Charlie?”

“Kidlet?”

He hesitates, licking his lips, then: “Clothing?”

I take him into a second kids store, get clothing, nudge him into the dressing room. He comes out after in clothing that isn’t torn or ripped, face clean of dirt – I didn’t give him wipes, but he probably unbound the dirt from himself without thinking. He trembles a little, then walks to the mirror and shoves his face against it, draws back and raises his hands to his face, then touches the mirror with them. “Oh.” His gulp his louder than the word as he turns toward me. “Charlie?”

I hand him a pair of dark sunglasses; he relaxes visibly once he puts them on. “People are going to notice your eyes: this will help stop it a little.”

“My head isn’t hurting as much,” he offers after a bit, then goes still, eyes widening. “Charlie?”

“I’m right here.” I don’t move.

“But – but I broke bindings. Between us,” Jay says, and bites hard onto his lower lip, looking small and terrified.

“I know. You’re mad at the magician. You’re mad at me,” I add before he can claim he’s not mad at the magician, “and you’re mad at you.” I poke him in the nose with a finger. “You can still be Jay without the lisp, kiddo.”

“I can?” he asks, and it hurts so hard I’m glad he’s broken bindings with me; I don’t want him to feel that.

“Of courthe,” I say, and he starts at that, then flings himself at me into a hug. ‘

I hold him until he pulls away. “Fixing bindings?”

“A little? If that’s okay? If you – if you want me to stay?”

“I do.” Nothing else, but he stares up for a long moment in silence. “Jay?”

“Really?”

“I really do. It’s definitely not safe to have you wandering around on your own.”

He lets out a giggle at that that is almost not forced. “Okay. We can get food, and – and talk. I’m going to need help.”

“Help?”

Jay nods. “My eyes hurt; they’re not – not working well. Everything is blurry,” waving a hand in front of his eyes, “but he said I’d heal, tho it will be okay and I can still see bindings, but there’s so much. I have to learn how to see just surface ones so I can see more around me.”

“And you need help with that?”

Jay shakes his head and pulls out his phone carefully. “I need you go find lots of games I can play with sound alone.”

I stare at him. “You know,” I say finally as he fights back a grin; it’s not his grin, but it’s a grin and that’s worth this entire day, “it’s probably going to be a lot easier for me to smack you upside the head now.”

I do so. He yelps, then grabs my hand, pulling me toward the counter. “Come on. We can get food and you wanted to get a van for us and we can travel!”

I almost say, ‘I don’t wanna’ but he’s trying so hard not to be scared that I just let myself get pulled and pay for the clothing, trying to figure out how we’re even going to get money – and how on earth I’m going to get any peace if Jay can talk without a lisp about games now.

The Secret of Red Gate Farm

It takes so little to become a god that it terrifies me to know it. Enough will, enough thoughts directed on you. Enough focus, sometimes. Enough sacrifices, if one walks stranger paths. It’s easier to be a god than it is be to be a person. I think that’s part of why it’s so easy for me to eat them. My name’s Charlie and I’m a god-eater. I don’t know how many others exist – I’ve been told by a god that there used to be an entire order devoted to finding and training my kind. Perhaps they missed me. It’s probably for the best, since my first attempt to eat a god ended up with the monster in my closet inside me.

Travelling with a magician does things like that. I did that for a time, until things got too hard. Until choices were made I couldn’t deal with. Now I’m travelling with a ghost who is a ghost-eater, and employed by the department of education. CASPER’s mandate is to show people that ghosts are just spooky noises and damaged pipes, and make sure that is all that’s left behind at any place we’re sent.

Dyer is good at dealing with ghosts. I deal with everything else, near enough, because there is far worse than ghosts in the world. Right now far worse is a twelve-year old boy named Stefan who is determined to join us in exploring the loft of his grandmother’s old farmhouse. Dyer is talking to the grandmother, making soothing noises and calming her, gently convincing her that she didn’t see a spirit appear in the middle of the living room who looked like her dead husband and screamed, ‘For God’s sake, I’m burning! Hell burns!’ Even if the ghost had done that, because being dead doesn’t stop some people from being dicks.

Dyer is thin and frail, looking exactly as he did when he died. He’s also as solid as the living and denied entrance to the ghost lands because of his nature. And he’s nice, possibly because he can afford to be or because being dead over a century has given him a certain perspective on things. I have no idea, and he seems in no hurry to talk about it. Thin doesn’t fit me and I’ve never been frail at all. Thin doesn’t fit Stefan at all; the kid wheezes as he walks and is definitely more at home on a couch or in front of a computer than exploring the disused upper floors of a house for ghosts.

“Grandma said I could come,” he says in the tone of someone who has rarely been told no and has the waistline to prove it.

“And I’m saying no,” I said for the third time, letting the god inside me leak into my eyes. Hint of dark red, the suggestion of claws to my fingers. He’s not scared, not of that, but does take a wary step back anyway. I ate the monster that lived under my bed and kids know that somehow, on some level of instinct that leads them to trust me. I’d worry more about what that says about kids if I didn’t remember being one.

“Grandma wants me to exercise more, and this is that,” he says, crossing his arms as best he can and glaring at me. “Everyone knows ghosts aren’t real.”

I want to ask why they all know that if so many people claim to have seen them, but CASPER is about keeping people skeptical. Damned if I know why. I reach out a hand and raise his chins, and tell myself to stop being a jerk. Dyer might, if he was here. It’s hard to know with him. Jay would; the magician would. I let out a breath, let go. “You’ve seen it, then.”

“I saw something; I’ve seen better CGI in movies,” he snaps.

“Someone told me once that half the time it feels like reality is a cheap substitute for fiction.” I head up the stairs to the attic at the pace Stefan sets. He’s drenched in sweat by the time we reach the attic door, though most of that is probably fear. I give the door a shove but it remains locked; I could force me way through, but not without breaking it and causing more hassle for Dyer; that he hasn’t joined me yet means he’s having trouble convincing Stefan’s grandmother she saw nothing.

I give the lock another rattle. “You know how to pick these?”

Stefan starts, then nods and pulls a paper clip from his wallet, making short work of the older door. “How did you know?”

“Anyone who spends a lot of time on the internet learns odd things.” I wait for him to step back and push the door open. The attic is cramped and musty but devoid of any dust at all. “You loved him?”

“Grandpa told the best bedtime stories.” Nothing more, but Stefan crowded up behind me.

“Right.” I take a breath, let it out, getting a feel for the attic, for the air. “What stories did you like best?”

“The ones he told me about coyote, stories his dad told him. And about raven, too, but I liked the coyote ones the most.”

“Kids tend to.” I crack my knuckles. “Thing is, not all tricksters are nice. Most are at least malicious, and pretending to be someone’s grandfather, telling someone who loved him that you were burning in hell: that counts.” I threat power into my voice, as close as I can do what magicians do, and snarl: “Come out now!”

What appears in the middle of the attic comes from somewhere else: some place twisted and strange, with colours and shapes I don’t know, and the figure is thin and looks like a man, a woman, a crow: all of that and none of it as well.

“That’s not Grandpa,” Stefan says, and it laughs at how his voice shakes, draws power from his fear.

“I am no mere god,” it says, soft and deadly.

“Yeah? This is me not giving a shit,” and I grab its energy and yank it inside, eating it in a single gulp. It goes down badly, but the god inside me tears what tries to survive of it apart.

Stefan’s face is the colour of dough as I turn back to him. “What are you?” the boy whispers.

“That’s classified. We’re with the government.”

“But you helped us.”

“The government does that sometimes.” I push. He doesn’t flinch from me as if I was a monster, makes his way down the stairs to his grandmother. I walk out via a side door to where Dyer is waiting by our RV.

“I don’t think she believed me,” he says in his soft voice. “She was too scared to believe and anything I could have done to force it would have damaged her. Whatever was up there was not just a ghost, was it?”

“Nope. It’s gone anyway, though.”

“Good.” He says nothing else. I close the red gate of the old farmhouse behind me and wonder why a trickster manifested here, but we have a limited mandate, too much to do and not enough time to do it all in. I flag the file, and text Jay in case the magician wants to wander this way.

We leave, but we leave behind people a little less afraid behind us.  

strengths

Dyer is doing a conference call with the people who run CASPER. The kind of people who say ‘ghosts are real, but convince everyone they aren’t’ and can’t explain who figured that was the best solution to the problem or even why the Department of Education is funding it. Government people, in other words. He’s been working with them for years, and he has a lot more patience than I do. Being a ghost for a hundred years does that, even if he isn’t like any other ghost in the world. For one, he can eat them. For another, he’s been banned from the grey lands where ghosts reside. Without ever having been there or done anything to it, probably proof they have a government as well.

I’ve gone for a walk, because that is better than listening to suits talk about stuff they don’t know squat about. Some of them even refuse to admit I exist, so I’m not quite sure what they budget me under for the pittance CASPER pays us. I’m not a ghost or ghost-eater. My names Charlie, and I’m a god-eater with a god inside me. Because that sort of things happens when you run into magicians and because if there is anything better to do with the monster that lived under your bed and in your closet than to become part of it, I don’t know what that is.

Dyer is – nice. It’s probably on his tombstone somewhere. ‘Died of wasting sickness, nice boy. Didn’t complain as his body ate itself from the inside out. Which was nice.’ I’m not nice, but I get the job done when he can’t. Make the kinds of choices he’s not good at making, or that CASPER doesn’t actually allow us to make. I’ve been working with them for a few months, and I’m pretty sure my life is at least five times as boy as Dyer’s, if not more. Rules are good, up until they let monsters get away with terrible things or let people be monsters. At which point I step in and deal with shit. Hard. Doesn’t mean I don’t have regrets, just means I find there’s other things a lot more important than that.

I’m on my second coffee, wondering if every city is the same once you remove the tourist traps when my phone rings, playing the theme from Jaws. I answer without even looking. “What?”

“Honcho ith buthy,” Jay says on the other end, “Doing some magic in dreamth. I thought we could vithit?”

“Did it occur to you that I might be busy?”

“Yeth, but you’re not,” he says firmly.

“And you know this how?”

“Becauthe I’m right here,” he says. Behind me.

I pause, then turn my phone off and turn. Jay grins, beaming with pride. He looks human, a pale kid of about ten but he’s really from far Outside the universe, bound into the service of the wandering magician. They’re friends, in the complicated senses of the word. You can only travel with a magician for so long before it’s just too much. He hurt Jay, and Jay refused to blame him for it.

“Where are you and the magician right now?”

“Over there,” he says, waving a hand westward. “I ran, becauthe Honcho wanth me to practithe moving fatht and thought we could catch up on thingth!”

“And you want me to buy you food.”

“Running far ith hard,” he says shamelessly.

I buy the kid three subs and he wolfs them down, finishing with pop and sits back in the cheap subway chairs with a happy sigh. “So. In the months we’ve been away, we have talked –.”

“Once you unblocked me on your phone,” he mutters.

“And caught up on things.” I let the god inside me leak into my eyes, hints of red flickering. “You’ve never ran across at least one entire state for a visit, Jay. So talk.”

“I am talking. That’th what we’re doing right now!”

“Jay.”

I don’t raise my voice, but he flinches back and bites into his lower lip. His body is tough enough that he can’t break skin, but he does try anyway. “I want to know why you hate me,” he says finally.

“Pardon me?”

“Why you hate me. I didn’t have a thingle eth at all.”

“I don’t hate you.”

“Then you’d be travelling with uth,” he says.

“It didn’t occur to you that I might hate the magician?”

“You don’t; you’ve talked to Honcho a lot and you’re hith friend.”

“And we’re not friends?” I say slowly.

Jay’s eyes widen at that and he says: “I didn’t mean – I meant –.” And then he shoves his right thumb into his mouth and begins sucking on it.

I force myself not to look away. “Jay. Stop that.”

He shakes his head, not looking away. “It helpth me when I’m thcared.”

“I haven’t done anything for you to be scared of,” I snap.

“You’re breaking bindingth with me and you don’t thee them and it hurtth,” he says. “Thith is part of me and Honcho did it but he didn’t know it would happen and it’th not hith fault and you don’t like me and we were friendth!” The last word is flung out like an insult and he’s trembling in the seat as he stares at me, tears streaming down his gace.

“We’re still friends, Jay.” I keep my voice calm with an effort.

He shakes his head. “You don’t even want to look at me. I can thee bindingth, Charlie, all the time and you keep breathing them with me right now and – and it’th painful and I want to make it right and I don’t know how!”

People are staring; Jay ignores them, eyes locked on me with frantic desperation.

I reach over and pull his thumb out of his mouth. “You’re not a little kid.”

“I’m not even a kid,” he snaps, trying to yank his hand free. I don’t let go, and then a moment later my fingers open, pulled by unseen force as he shoves his thumb back into his mouth and glowers up at me. “And I can undo bindingth too! You care about thith and it’th not important, Charlie. It’th thomething I am doing, but it’th not me.”

“You were damaged; that’s why you’re doing that and I don’t like it and I don’t like that it was done to you. That’s it.”

“You were damaged too when Honcho put a god inthide you,” Jay says.

“You’re claiming this is good for you, that he did this to you?”

The sarcasm misses him entirely. “It’th letting me bind mythelf, tho I am learning to do that and it maketh people underethtimate me even more and that ith always good. I could get mad at Honcho but he’th my friend and you don’t hurt your friendth for real and I’m uthing it to be thtrong!”

I take a few breaths, pull the god back entirely inside me; Jay relaxes a little at that. “You mean that?”

He nods.

I stand, and head out of the Subway. Jay follows, still suckong on his thumb as we walk down the street. “You’re just doing this to bug me right now, aren’t you?”

“Yeth.” He grins, and removes his thumb. “You can thcare me a lot, with being you and having a god in you and thith ith the betht I can do to thcare you in turn.”

I stare down at him. “All right, see it like this: if you’re strong, you can use that strength against your enemies. Sucking on your thumb isn’t going to scare anyone.”

“I can’t not do it,” he says. “If I’m thcared, it – it happenth and not doing it ith really hard and Honcho is okay with that and you’re not and it hurtth, Charlie.”

“Friends hurt each other; everyone does that.”

“Not alwayth, not over a thmall thingtlike a thumb,” he says. “Pleathe?”

I let out a breath. “I’ll try. Okay?”

He nods, and then is simply gone a moment later, probably returning to the magician. I keep walking. I would tell him how far my mom went to stop me from sucking my fingers when I was four, but it’s not that. It’s that the magician hurt Jay and Jay can’t see that, refuses to see that. Refuses to let it be that, and I find myself wondering, slowly, if that is a kind of strength even if it isn’t a human kind. To make his own truth, to refuse to hate his friends for hurting him. To keep the bindings between us whole. I’m not a nice person, but sometimes – just sometimes – I’m like that because it’s the easy option. And Dyer has pointed that out in his diffident way a few times.

I text him, just one line: ‘It takes a lot of strength to not hate someone you possibly should hate.’ I don’t get a reply; Dyer is probably busy with the government-types still, or thinks it is my version of a pep talk. Maybe it is. I don’t know.

I just know Jay has dealt with this change to himself far better than I could, and maybe that makes him stronger than I am in a lot of ways. If a magician made me suck my thumb in stress, I definitely wouldn’t try and make it a way to be strong or refuse to hide it. I think about strength, about my kind and his, and figure I’ll wait at least two weeks before bringing any of this up, in the hopes he won’t realize he won.

bluffing

It is night when we reach Raven’s Bluff. The town is lit up by ice-pale searchlights and people walk it in dark suits, faces cold and grim as they hunt the ruins of the town for secrets about its doom. The CIA, FBI, NSA: they’ve sent a few people for appearances sake, but they’re not part of the real game. The Black Chamber has operatives in dark leather and sunglasses making casual jokes and walking about easily as if they saw things like this every day. The Institute has a dozen scientists using technology that looks to have too many crystals in it to be real and the Border Patrol walk the edges where Raven’s Bluff meets the world. They’re armed, weapons levelled at us even as Dyer walks up and hands over our IDs.

Dyer died a hundred years ago. He’s all thin and frail, the kind of build that makes people go ‘d’aaaw’ and old ladies want to put him on shelves. It had no effect on the men of the Patrol, each boating dark hair and pale blue eyes. Clones grown somewhere, I’d heard, bound by terrible oaths to maker sure no one normal became aware of the weirdness only slightly to the side of the world they’d always known. The Black Chamber butchers monsters; the Border Patrol had a body count that made them seem like Quakers.

They accept the IDs, read them over, study us. CASPER is a secret agency, and there could be ghosts here. Raven’s Bluff isn’t outside our remit but we are pushing the limits of it. Questions will be asked eventually, but right now I don’t much care. They let us pass; I offer up a cheerful wave that has Dyer wincing but he doesn’t say a thing as we keep walking.

“Ghosts?”

“None.”

The town was home to over two thousand people. Almost every building is shattered, streets torn apart like a child digging fingers through a sandbox. There are no bodies. There are no stains. But not a single bird is flying over the town and it sounds empty save for the secret agencies moving through it in search of answers. I am a god-eater, among other things, but walking here feels wrong, as if we are disturbing things best unknown. And I once left Jay unsupervised with youtube for four hours.

“Charlie,” Dyer says in his soft whisper of a voice.

“Yeah.” I reach over, take his hand and squeeze it. Any other time I’d laugh at his shock. This isn’t a place for that. I’m not an expert on weird shit: I don’t think anyone is, but magicians are good at faking it. But I do know that seriously damaging the walls of the world is what makes bad places. We know what happened here, but it still just feels empty. It should feel bruised, damaged. Wrong more than just still. That it doesn’t makes it feel wrong in itself.

I let the go inside me out, turning in a slow circle. No gods here at all. I can eat other things, if I want to. I sense nothing at all, flex unseen claws slowly. The god inside me isn’t worried by this place, but it was a monster under my bed. Monsters probably feel at home here. It’s probably a good sign I don’t.

“Anything?” Dyer asks, his arms wrapped tight about himself.

“Nothing. Maybe whatever this town ran into ate everything: gods, people, emotions, memories. But –.” I trail off.

“Yeah. No ghosts, but no sign of exorcisms at all. Even if people die outside the world, their ghosts often show up in it. Or even echoes of the ghost.”

“Ghosts can have ghosts?”

“Sometimes. If it’s bad enough, and this must have been.” Dyer unwraps his arms self-consciously, trying not to look scared. “Someone covered up whatever happened here, Charlie. And they did it so well that the echo of their doing so is all we’re getting. Could a magician do that?”

“I think it might be harder to list stuff a magician couldn’t do.” I’m sure we’re being listened in on, if only by generic means. “Let’s say someone uses magic and sends a town somewhere Other. And come back. If they’re hiding it, why bring the town back with them?”

Dyer scratches his scalp. “So something else did the hiding?”

“Maybe.” I shake my head. “No ghosts, no gods. We got nothing.” We walk a little more, but get nothing at all. I give it half an hour before I turn and walk out of the town.

I pull the god back inside me. The Border Guard let us leave. Things work out.

I wait until we reach the RV and toss Dyer the keys. “Exorcism and drive.”

He nods, whispers an exorcism under his breath: he can take out cameras and spy-wards with an exorcism. I’m pretty sure that isn’t normally possible, but I’m not either so I don’t let it worry me.

“Two,” he says as he pulls onto the highway. “One normal, one not. The Institute tried something as well, but the wards CASPER provided stopped that.”

“Huh.” I spend half an hour browsing the internet. There isn’t even a wikipedia entry on the town, and not a single conspiracy forum has a thread about it, not even one giving it some code name to try and hide what they’re doing from the Authorities. Which is the final clue I need.

I gesture for Dyer to pull over after two state lines, put my phone on speaker and make the call.

“Charlie?” Jay says when he picks up, sounding sleepy.

“Me, and Dyer is with me. No one else. Is this connnection secure?”

The kid pauses, then: “Yup! I got rid of two lithening bugth.”

“Okay. And the magician?”

“Honcho is athleep,” Jay says. “I wath too, you know.”

“Yes. You might want to take this call outside.”

There is a pause. We can hear Jay dressing, grumbling under his breath as he leaves some motel room, and then: “Okay?”

Jay isn’t human, from far Outside the universe and bound into the magician’s service. It’s easy to forget he’s not human, even if you know better. I take a breath, let it out. “Stone Ridge. What did you do?”

“I couldn’t help Honcho. He – he tried to get me to come Outthide the univerthe and it wath –. I couldn’t,” Jay says, his voice cracking wildly.

“Okay. Okay. It’s okay,” I say, threading power from the god inside me into my voice. “We know that and it’s okay, Jay. What I want to know is what you did when the magician got back?”

“I didn’t do anything,” he protests.

Dyer’s eyes widen beside me as he begins to put things together; I’ve told him enough about Jay, and how the kid is better at bindings and unbindings than even magicians are at times.

“Jay. This is me you’re talking to.”

There is a huge sigh. “Fine. Honcho wath thcared a lot and I didn’t know why tho I thought I’d help and no one would blame him if the town wath hidden, okay?”

“You bound the town against being a stain on the world, a hole between here and Outside?”

“Yeth.”

“And from appearing anywhere on the Internet?”

“I did?”

“Google it.”

There is a tapping, then: “Oh,” in a small voice.

“You meant well, but that binding was more than overkill, Jay. People will figure out what we did in time, and those that know about you and the magician will blame him for Raven’s Bluff. So far they don’t have proof. Suspicons, yes, but even secret government agencies don’t act on those alone.”

“I don’t know how to fix thith,” Jay mumbles, his voice indistinct.

He’s probably sucking on his thumb in stress. I take a deep breath, and Dyer touches my hand with his, light and firm.

“You’ll need to talk to him,” Dyer says. “He might know how to alter what you did. You were trying to help, Jay, and that’s admirable. He’ll understand that.”

“I’m thcared,” Jay mumbles.

“Yes. And imagine how people are the world over who can’t find anything out about the town town. Or who might even have trouble thinking about it. You acted; now you need to think about your actions.”

“Oh. Thankth,” he says, sounding a little more clear. “For calling? And thorry?”

“We know you’re sorry,” I said. “Just make it right.”

I end the call and sit back in the seat. Dyer tears his gaze from the phone and up to me. “Did you know Jay could do something like that?”

“I don’t think Jay did. We’ll see what Nathen can do to fix it.” I give him a shove, and he gets out of the driver’s seat and gives me the keys. “You work on the report to CASPER. I’ll wait on a phone call.”

I head north, toward Washington. CASPER is likely going to demand answers and we’ll need to figure out what to tell them. And I can’t help thinking about magic like this, bindings this powerful to hide a place from the world. I wonder if magicians hide smaller things from the world, if there are entire homes that no longer exists, streets people can no longer find just to cover up some mistake or transgression.

I put on music. It helps drown out the thoughts, if only a little bit.

Haunting of the Forgotten Road

(Image source: mojo5050)

"The haunting of the forgotten road," Dyer murmured, staring about at the scattering of trees and mist.

Charlie did not hit him: partially because Dyer was a ghost made solid and because he knew far more than she did about actual ghosts. He tended to come up with tag-lines for missions CASPER directed them to — hauntings and apparitions that came across their desk — while she just thought up jokes like ‘a god-eater and a ghost-eater walk into a bar’.

"You’re saying this place is haunted."

He blinked. “Say, rather, that my feeling is that it is too empty to be haunted.”

"Uh huh. No cell phone reception out here. That could be considered a type of haunting." Charlie wrapped her coat tighter about herself; Dyer wasn’t bothered with the chill in the air, what with being dead. "And it’s not forgotten."

"Charlie, it didn’t appear on GPS or any conventional map."

"Yeah? Last road I ended up on like that was claimed by a unicorn." Dyer paused, as he often did when she casually mentioned such things, expecting a punchline that never came. "Look," she continued, "there are tracks. It was used, and that they haven’t entirely vanished means they remember being used. No place likes to be forgot, Dyer."

"So if we bulldozed the forest down it would be happy it was being used?"

"Call it my feeling then," she said, but leavened the words with a brief smile and turned back toward their RV. "We can reach the next assignment by dawn if we take turns driving."

Dyer was quiet until they were almost at the RV. “You know the road was haunting itself, don’t you?”

"Way I see it, we’re all doing that," she said, and he he just nodded slowly as they got back into the RV and left the road, knowing the file he would write up would mean it was not quite so forgotten.

Signs of the Twisted Times

At the other end of the RV, Dyer is typing up what he is calling the mystery of the not-mysterious letter, which turned out to be an assignment from CASPER that wasn’t about ghosts at all but a woman wanting some more excitement in the bedroom with her wife and faking a ghostly haunting to accomplish it. Some days I really do understand why we’re not paid much at all to deal with incidents of weird. Dyer’s been dead a hundred years, so not sleeping means he has a lot of time to make reports poets would weep to read.

I don’t do reports. Too much like school. Besides, if anyone asks me, I just smile and let the god inside me leak into my eyes and most government bureaucrats decide not to ask anything else. We get the job done: even they have to admit that. I eat gods, Dyer eats ghosts, and between us we can deal with most problems in one way or another. He’s as solid as human flesh but doesn’t have any of the crap humans do so I not only have a partner for missions but the entire bathroom to myself. On the flip side, he doesn’t chip in for groceries he doesn’t eat but I figure it balances out.

I stare at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, considering what to attempt to my hair that would make Dyer gape in shock when my reflection is no longer mine. Sometimes the god inside me, the monster that lived under my head, manifests like this when it wants to be let out for fun. This time the face that stares at me is a few years older than mine and secret-agent bland if secret agents were bland, the kind no one would notice until they realized they should have in the first place. He’s the one who put the god inside me, possibly by accident. A friend, but sometimes other things as well.

“Jay has a phone. You could have used his phone to call me,” I snap.

“He would have listened in; I bought him three games to make sure he probably isn’t right now,” the magician says, but his smile doesn’t quite touch his eyes. He looks tired, the wandering magician, more than usual. He’s definitely thinner, hasn’t shaved in at least three days. Worn out, almost.

“Okay. You want to step out of the mirror and actually talk to me?”

“No. I’m trying to rest right now. I don’t have the energy to spare for that.” He runs a hand through his hair, hesitates, then says: “You’ve heard about Raven’s Bluff.”

I nod. “Small town, two thousand and change people. No one’s there now. Just broken buildings and not a single sign of life. CASPER wants us to look into it, but secret agency or not we’re based out of the department of education and all the big alphabet soup groups are swarming it right now. Way I see it, the bosses just don’t want to see me or Dyer get poached by some other agency. Why?”

“I was there.”

And that’s all I need to hear to put a few pieces together. I’ve seen him like this before, when he murdered some minor magician for being a psychopath. “Talk to me, Nathen.”

He actually flinches at my using his name, but does. How he and Jay tricked the Bank into taking his account and giving it to some kid named Lucas, how they got pissy and the end result was dumping the magician and the entire town Outside the universe. And Jay was too terrified to go outside; not that it would have helped, but it took longer to get the town back. So you end up with a town where everyone died and it looks as if some terrorist secret weapon went off, none of which is good for anything.

“Shit.”

“Yes. I am good, but – what the Bank did shouldn’t have been possible. Banishing Outsiders back where they came from is easy for magicians to do. Perhaps banishing a magician could be as well, because we come into contact with so much from Outside, but an entire town?” He shakes his head. “I need you to look into that whenever you are there, Charlie. Please.”

“Okay. We can do that. Jay can call me about it after. How is he?”

“Rough. The nightmares are getting worse. I can protect him, perhaps, but if I don’t made it he will seek you out after.”

“Fuck off. Where are you? Dyer and I will be there.”

He actually smiles at that. “Even after everything?”

“You’re my friend. Despite everything.”

“The nightmares are not about Raven’s Bluff. It just made him less able to avoid having them again, dreams of something out beyond the darkness. Something even the magic is afraid of.” He pauses. “The universe as well. Something is coming that has the universe afraid, and I think that somehow – someway – Jay and I seem to be involved in that, at least on Earth.”

“How the hell do you make a universe afraid?”

“I don’t know. It’s not about dying; the universe was made from the wild madness of the places Outside. Some day it will be unmade, and it knows that. Not accepts it, of course, but no one does.”

“So you’re the universe’s shrink?” I snap. I can count on three fingers the number of times I’ve seen him genuinely uncertain about things; magicians know things, or they wouldn’t last as magicians.

“I don’t know what it will be. Something to alter the very fabric of the universe, if it succeeds. Or make it so the universe never existed at all. These are just guesses. I don’t know. I don’t even know how to know. But if I die and Jay survives, he will need you.”

“And if he dies, you’re going to need me.”

“I might, at that.” He lets out a low sigh. “If more things are getting in and out of the universe, that might explain Raven’s Bluff. It’s a given that satellites and eye witnesses have put me near it for certain agencies by now, enough that I can’t simply show up and expect to investigate it without problems. Find out what you can.”

“We’ll try. And tell Jay that if he is having nightmares, they should be about me.”

He laughs softly at that. “I will,” he promises and is gone from the mirror.

I stare at my reflection, then fight my hair to make it long, straight and boring, and head to Dyer’s room to knock on the door. I have no idea if we’ll be breaking rules by going to Raven’s Bluff, but I’m not in the mood to care about any of that at all.  

Secret of the New Clock

He is here, and so this home has no other ghosts beside him. He pulls silence about himself as he walks between rooms, making no noises and giving none in turn. He calls himself Dyer, though he has other names, and he is the only ghost barred from the grey lands, the only one able to be solid as the living in the waking worlds. And all it cost him is their hatred, for a ghost who is a ghost-eater is not like other ghost at all.

But he is still dead for all of that, for all that he is, and the dead do not sleep. So he walks in a bid to outpace memory, building traps inside his head. He loved once – he is not sure when, quite, and all he remembers is her name. It is a price, to guard against the memories of other deeds he has done. There are things other than ghosts that haunt the world between words, and he has faced down and destroyed many things in his time. Often, they deserved it. Sometimes they did not.

There was a ghost here, but it fled at his arrival and will not return again. The dead fear him in ways the living do not fear death, and sometimes it seems too much to bear. But he bears it even so. There is a reason – his love, answers to some question – but he has buried it deep inside. It is a hard thing, to be a ghost and not hate the living, so he eats his own hates as if they were ghosts, remembers his duty, moves on.

His fellow CASPER agent sleeps in a spare bed, guarded by a god that lives inside her. That Dyer still finds this odd gives him small comfort, that in a hundred years he has not lost that much of himself. Even dead, he can be surprised. Even being the death of ghosts – not a title he claims, but one he knows he is sometimes given, like the Grand Exorcist and other foolish terms – has not removed all that he was when alive.

There is a new clock in the living room, a restored grandfather clock. Dyer reaches a hand into it, find gears, twists them a little. In the morning they will tell Mrs. Bunwether that the odd noises she heard were just her new clock and nothing more. And she, not wanting to see her house devalued by rumours of ghosts, will never think to disagree.