Night in Florence was a celebration of light and music. Clay had always considered it one of the most beautiful cities in the Western world. The architecture and city design made it a fairy tale place, where art and beauty were venerated above all else. True or not - and history proved it both true and not - whatever blood and intrique existed in the city's past, its beauty endured.
Clay and the ghost of Dr. Graves had visited the Pitti Palace earlier in the day and wandered the Boboli Gardens, where the symphony had been playing on that night in 1943 when Graves had been murdered. A lovely spot, the gardens held nothing else of interest. Neither of them sensed any resonance of the violence that had occurred there so long ago, and when Graves slipped into the spirit world he returned to report finding the place nearly barren of spectral activity.
They ought to have been despondent. No discussion had occurred as to what they expected to find in Florence, but both of them had arrived in this city with growing anticipation. Ever since they had begun looking into the murder of Dr. Graves, the mystery had broadened and deepened. Zarin had been savagely killed by his own pet. The FBI forensics team had revealed the connection between Graves's murder and the Whisper, and the link to the murder of Roger Alton Bennett.
After hours spent meandering about the Boboli Gardens in fruitless search of some bit of its haunted past, some echo or clue, they should have been at the least disappointed. Conversation ought to have ensued as to what their next step would be, though they were both well aware that there was no logical next step from here. If the visit to Florence turned up nothing they would have to start from scratch and come up with entirely new angles and theories regarding Graves's murder.
Yet neither Clay nor Dr. Graves mentioned the possibility of departure. There lingered in Clay a dreadful certainty that they had come to the right place. It might have been just a feeling in his own heart, but there also seemed a strange frisson in the air that had affected him the very moment they had stepped off of the plane in Florence. His skin prickled, and the small hairs on the back of his neck stood up.
After their visit to the Boboli Gardens he had stopped in an outdoor cafe for a cappuccino. A sudden shudder went through him. Clay glanced around, attempting to make the reaction appear to be natural.
The ghost of Dr. Graves had been seated in the chair beside him, and in that moment Clay was sure he saw an odd ripple pass through the ethereal substance of the specter.
"What is it?" the ghost asked.
"Do you feel it?"
Graves stared at him for a long moment before nodding. "Focus. Like someone is watching us."
Clay tapped the edge of the table. Whichever way he turned he felt the spiderlike skittering of - Graves had called it focus - up his spine. "Someone," he agreed. "Or something."
The waiter brought Clay's bill. Only after he had set it down and walked away did Clay notice that there was a folded promotional flyer beneath it. The slick, full-color piece was a tourist-targeted plug for the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, where the city's great symphony was in residence.
"Graves," Clay said, and unfolded the flyer. He almost expected to find something written inside, but there was nothing.
The ghost rose from the chair, passing right through the table as he drifted up behind Clay to read over his shoulder.
"The symphony performs tonight," Graves said.
Clay had already noticed. He pushed back his chair with a scrape of metal on stone and started after the waiter. The man was standing by another table taking an order from two elderly women whose mouths were twisted into twin permanent sour expressions.
"Scusi, signore," he said, but his grip on the waiter's arm was anything but polite.
The man flashed him a confused, angry, and somehow dismissive look. "I will come to you in a moment -"
Clay flashed the Teatro del Maggio flyer in front of his eyes. "This. Why did you give me this?"
He knew the answer before the waiter could even open his mouth. The man's eyes said it all. He had never seen the flyer before. And yet Clay had seen him set the bill down in its small leather folder himself, and the flyer had been inside.
"I did not. You are mistaken."
Clay wished he could argue, but there was no lie in the waiter's expression or his tone. Someone had either slipped the flyer in with the bill without his knowing it, or he had been compelled to do so himself by some outside force and now had no memory of it. In a world of dark magic, this latter would have been simple enough.
"I'm sorry. Excuse me," Clay said.
He returned to the table and paid the bill, tipping generously. The ghost of Dr. Graves stood behind him, watching closely but saying nothing. Only when Clay strode away from the cafe and turned into a narrow, cobblestoned street that would lead to his hotel did Graves speak up.
"Someone is playing games with us."
"No doubt."
"I take it we now have plans for this evening?"
"Yeah," Clay replied. "The symphony."
The theater resounded with rapturous applause. In the glow of the stage lights, the faces in the audience beamed, enchanted. From his seat in the box nearest to stage right, Clay could see both the orchestra and those held in their sway. The audience seemed composed both of well dressed Firenze natives in suits and gowns and tourists clad in whatever remained clean and neat from their luggage.
Golden horns gleamed in the bright lights on the stage. Violin bows glided across strings, eliciting sweet and somber notes in turn. The conductor stood before the symphony orchestra with his back to the audience, baton dancing in his grasp, guiding his musicians into Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, which had been one of Clay's favorite pieces since he had first seen it performed in 1920. The butchery done to his memory in the twentieth century made it difficult for him to recall the circumstances, but the music was a memory unto itself.
In the cacophony of applause that followed the tune, Clay clapped as loudly as anyone. As he did, he surveyed the audience again and leaned slightly to his right, to the space at the edge of the box where the ghost of Dr. Graves hovered beside him, the merest suggestion of a silhouette. The ghost's insubstantial legs passed right through the floor of the box as though he'd been severed below the torso.
"What are we looking for?" Clay muttered low, the words inaudible to anyone else, thanks to the thunderous applause.
As the clapping died down, the symphony launched into a Mozart concerto. Graves rose several inches and gusted forward so that he hung out over the audience. Just when Clay had begun to doubt that the ghost had heard him, Graves floated back toward him.
"I don't know. For the moment, I suppose we simply enjoy the music. But be on guard."
As if Clay had to be told to be wary. More than ever, his guard was up. He had rarely felt so on edge. Though he attempted to portray a sense of easy calm and he applauded in all of the right places, he could no sooner relax into the music than he could have in a viper's den. An almost tangible sense of trouble...of malice...pervaded the theater, overriding the elegance of the orchestra and the enthusiasm of the crowd.
So they waited.
Long minutes passed. Clay remained as still as possible despite the electric tension running through him. Wave of applause followed wave of applause, and soon nearly a full hour had passed. The symphony was not the best he had ever heard, but there were moments when their performance reached the sublime.
Halfway through Ravel's Alborada del Gracioso, the orchestra simply halted.
The pause took the audience by surprise, and for several awkward moments they stared and coughed and fidgeted. At last someone began to applaud, slowly at first, and was joined by an uncertain ripple of audience accord.
"What is this?" Clay whispered.
The ghost of Dr. Graves did not turn. Yet even from behind him, gazing at the orchestra through his transparent, gauzy form, Clay could hear his words.
"Perhaps it's what we've been waiting for."
As if on cue, the conductor raised his baton and the orchestra started again, launching into a piece of music unfamiliar to Clay. The melody was both sweet and sorrowful, but it was nearly ruined by the performance of the musicians. There was a jerky, stunted quality to their playing that still allowed the tune to come through but added enough discord that it was nearly wretched.
The ghost of Dr. Graves seemed to billow and flew backward as though blown by some unseen wind. Clay shifted in his seat and started to stand, brow furrowed in concern. No one in the box bothered to admonish him, so startled were they by the unpleasant turn the music had taken.
"Graves -" he whispered.
Eyes a churning gray abyss, the ghost turned to stare at him. "This is it, Joe. They were playing this song that night, when I was shot. When I died."
The lights in the theater dimmed. The musicians moved like marionettes. The cello player lost his grip on his bow and did not seem to notice, his elbow still jerking back and forth as though drawing music from his instrument.
In the midst of this, only the conductor continued to move smoothly. The music became more and more jarring, a savaged interpretation of a piece of beautiful music, the ghost sonata that Graves had so often heard when he traveled into the spirit world. What had he said, that he thought it was the spirit of his wife, letting him know that she was waiting for him.
There was nothing so romantic about this.
The conductor turned, very purposefully, and looked up at the box where Clay sat. For a moment, Clay felt certain the man's strange, silver eyes were staring straight at him. He held his breath, staring back, knowing there was little he could do in such a public place.
Then he realized the conductor's gaze was not locked on him, but on the space next to him. The man with his dancing baton and his wild gray hair was not looking at Clay, but at the spectral form of Dr. Graves hovering in the air beside him. No one else in the theater could see the ghost, but the conductor stared right at him.
And rather than reacting with fright, the conductor smiled.
"Joe," Graves began.
Clay nodded, but he could not tear his gaze away from the spectacle unfolding on the stage. Members of the audience began to boo, even as others tried to shush them.
The conductor raised his baton and pointed it at a violinist, a young, slender, olive-skinned woman. As though on an invisible string, the woman rose from her seat, playing as she walked like some country fiddler. She went to the stairs and descended toward the audience. A rotund man with wisps of white hair sat in the front row, dressed like nobility but behaving like rabble. He shouted at the woman and at the conductor.
As the violinist approached the round man, Clay saw it at last. In the dim light it had not been immediately obvious. His eyes saw the world on several spectrums, and he had not as yet been focused enough to notice the tendril of soul energy that ran back up onto the stage, a ribbon of silver mist that connected her to the conductor, even as he directed her movements.
"What the hell is this?" Clay muttered.
For it was not merely the violist who was affected. Soul tethers linked the conductor to the entire orchestra the same way he had always seen murderers linked to their victims. Yet the members of the orchestra were not dead, only under the influence of the conductor.
The lithe, beautiful violinist stopped playing. She smiled down at the confused, disapproving fat man in the front row, and then she stabbed him through the left eye with her violin bow.
"Move!" the ghost shouted at Clay.
The shapeshifter was already in motion.
People began to scream, some to get up from their seats and run toward the violinist, others to flee for the exits. Clay ignored them all. His entire focus was on the violence unfolding in the front row.
The violinist raised her instrument and brought it down with both hands, shattering it and the man's skull in a single blow.
"No!" Clay screamed as he leaped over the railing of the box. He dropped from the mezzanine down to the aisle below, perhaps forty feet from the violinist and the dying man.
A new soul tether shimmered into existence, connected the murdered man to his murderer . . . yet it did not attach the old man to the girl responsible for the violin bow jutting from his raw, red wound of an eye socket. Instead, the soul tether led back to the conductor, the one truly responsible for this horrid murder.
Clay raced toward the violinist. A woman, perhaps the dead man's daughter, attacked her and began to slap her, screaming hysterically. The violinist stabbed her in the throat with the jagged, splintered remains of her instrument. Others began to approach her now. A man grabbed hold of her, and she spun, lunged in and bit into his cheek, tearing away a ragged flap of bloody flesh.
The orchestra continued to play its hideous tune.
Clay grabbed hold of the violinist, pushing away others who might have helped. More people were screaming and heading for the exits now. The woman tried to attack him but could not escape his grasp.
Something struck him on the back of the head. Clay staggered, lost his grip on the violinist, and she was on him. He looked past her and saw a thin musician in a tuxedo wielding a bloodied trumpet. Other members of the symphony were coming down off of the stage now. The conductor's baton danced, but now it was not the music he commanded. He played the soul tethers that connected the orchestra to him as though they were puppets and that spiritual link their strings.
The trumpet crashed toward Clay's face. He reached up and stopped the blow from falling.
The conductor looked into his eyes from atop his pulpit and laughed.
Then he stopped laughing. The ghost of Dr. Graves moved through the musicians like a rolling cloud of smoke. The phantom darted across the theater and struck the conductor.
The man sagged, his baton lowering. It continued to dance, but now listlessly, as though only half of his attention was focused there. The light had gone out of the conductor's eyes, and his smile faded. He moved now only like a sleepwalker.
And the ghost of Dr. Graves was nowhere to be seen.
He had vanished inside the conductor.
Dr. Graves is lost in thick, roiling mist. Shapes move in the swirling gray, features coalesce that might be faces. He feels solid ground beneath his feet and the mist brushes damply against his face. The spirit realm, he thinks. The otherworld . . . but it's never felt like this, so substantial.
And how did he get here? He had seen a strange, doubling effect around the conductor, a kind of phantom silhouette that surrounded him, creating a ghost halo. Graves had understood immediately that whatever power the conductor held, whatever he was doing to the orchestra, it was not his own. The man had been inhabited by a ghost. Yet this is no ordinary specter. This spirit has the strength of will and the focus to slip inside a living human and take over the body. It is an ability Graves has only encountered twice before in other ghosts. He is capable of it himself, but avoids such violations at all costs.
He has entered the conductor not to control him, but to drive out the intrusive spirit. Instead, he has been dragged into the spirit world, or some semblance of it.
The mist thins, and the gray around him resolves into buildings and cars and lampposts. The soulstuff coalesces into a street corner in New York City. Across the busy square in front of him is the Flatiron Building, and he knows now that he is looking south. A car rattles by, all smoke and fog, but its shape and style makes it easily identifiable for Graves. Once, he had owned this very car. It is a 1936 Nash Ambassador with whitewall tires and a wide running board. His had been powder blue. This one is only the gray of the mists.
Its tires sluice through the soulstream, which runs shallowly along the street. Graves can feel its tug inside of him, and as he watches the Nash Ambassador disappear into the ghost buildings, he longs to be inside it, to travel into the past and join Gabriella forever.
"Beautiful automobile," says a voice.
Graves spins, hands reaching for the holsters beneath his arms. He freezes when he sees the dark figure on the opposite corner and the familiar hat and scarf of the Whisper.
"Broderick," he rasps.
The Whisper laughs, and the sound is as much a part of the past as that car and this nostalgia city, this New York, circa 1940. His pistol is already drawn and aimed at Graves.
"You're going to shoot me?" the Whisper asks as he crosses the street. An old Hudson sedan rumbles through the ghost city and passes right through him. "What good will that do?" "You might be surprised," Graves says, fingers touching the grips of his guns but not pulling them. The Whisper has the drop on him.
"Would I? I quite doubt that, Doctor Graves. What do you think I have been doing, wandering this place of lost souls all of this time? Why, the very same thing I did in life. I've been experimenting."
"So I see. Your control of the orchestra is impressive."
"I've kept busy. I couldn't spend all of eternity nursing my hatred for you. Though, and you'll have to trust me on this, it has taken up a great deal of my afterlife."
The laughter comes again, that susurrus of soft, mocking chuckles that Graves never quite understood the trick of, even in life. The effect is unsettling, a distant echo.
The Whisper comes to within ten feet - if distance can be measured here - but Graves does not move. In life, he had survived many bullet wounds, but if Broderick's pistol is anything like his own gun, it could tear at his very soul.
"Lower your hands, please, Doctor."
Graves complies.
As though bursting into instant reality, people surround them. Spirits of this era stroll along through the soulstream, across streets, and along sidewalks. Gray swathes of humanity in fedoras and suits, the women in jaunty hats and the modern dresses of prewar New York. Laughing lovers walk arm in arm. More cars growl by, convertibles with rumble seats and boxy new models. Soon, the war will stop all automobile production in America, the metal needed for tanks and airplanes.
"All of this," Graves says, forcing himself not to reveal how much this taste of the past has affected him. "This is you?" The Whisper does a curt bow, his eyes locked on Graves, the barrel of his pistol unwavering. "Practice. There are so many souls, so much spirit just lingering here. It isn't hard to shape it, if you've the will. Like sculpting with clouds.
"Here," the Whisper says, gesturing dramatically with his unfettered hand. "Let's have a look at another familiar setting. You might remember this."
A wave passes through the spirit world, rippling through this ghost New York, and the landscape changes. New York is washed away and replaced by gardens, by the milling aristocracy of Florence in the waning days of the war. The Boboli Gardens, in the shadow of the Pitti Palace.
And the music starts to play.
Graves glances at the Whisper and sees that he is bobbing his pistol along to the tune like the conductor's baton.
"Beautiful tune, isn't it?"
Graves's fingers itch to pull his guns, to jerk the triggers and fire phantom bullets into the ghost of the Whisper, the ghost of Simon Broderick.
"You recognize the place?"
He has managed to maintain a strange calm that surprises even himself, but now Graves feels a hatred rising in him unlike anything he has ever known. In the flesh-and-blood world, Clay is dealing with whatever horror the Whisper has unleashed there. But the real battle is here. He knows that. Whatever it takes, the Whisper must be stopped.
But not without answers.
"You know I do."
In life he had been disgusted by the crimes of Simon Broderick, and shamed by the way the man had tainted all of the efforts of the other heroic private adventurers of the day. He had felt disdain and pity, but never hatred.
Now it fills him like poison.
Graves glances around, taking in the lampposts, the beautiful Italian women in their gauzy gowns, the orchestra, and he turns his back on the Whisper. As he does, his right hand crosses his chest, reaching for the gun holstered under his left arm.
"Do you think I'm a fool?" the Whisper asks, and there is a click as he cocks his pistol.
Graves lowers his hands to his sides, jaw set with fury.
"I don't know what you are," he admits.
"Savage, you called me once. Madman, too, I believe."
"Those things, certainly," Graves replies. "But I won't pretend I understand any of this. You were dead. I saw you throw yourself from the cathedral roof. I saw your body strike the ground. I was there when they removed your corpse. Your skull was shattered, your organs exploded. You cannot have -"
The Whisper's laugh fills his ears, but already Graves understands.
The conductor. The weakness of certain souls, not only in the spirit world, but in the realm of flesh and blood as well. If Broderick can control the conductor . . .
"You possessed someone."
Beneath his wide-brimmed hat, the Whisper's eyes shine with glee. "Ironic, isn't it? In life, you excoriated me for my claims that I could control the minds of men, and as nothing more than a shade of life, the whisper of my former self, at last I can do precisely that.
"You have no idea how much I have enjoyed watching you torment yourself trying to unravel the mystery of your demise. But now comes the piece de resistance, my old friend. You think that this was the place, don't you? You were murdered here?"
Graves is unfazed. "I thought so for a very long time," he says, over the music from the symphony, the sweet music that had filled the air on that golden night when he had stood here in the gardens with . . .
He searches the crowd for her face, for Gabriella's face, but cannot see her in the gray, misty tableau that the Whisper has crafted around them.
"But I didn't die here," Dr. Graves continues. "I know that now. The impact must have been real. The memory is too powerful, too detailed, to be merely hypnotic suggestion or some influence of yours. Some sort of tranquilizer dart, I presume."
The Whisper nods. "Bravo." He raises the pistol; aims it directly at Graves's face. "Watch."
And now the gray mist coalesces again. The soulstream rushes around his feet, and the tug feels more powerful than before, as though they have drifted closer to the Ivory Gate. It flows past the ghosts who reenact this terrible scene, and he stands and watches himself come across the lawn of the gardens, growing anxious, then frantic as he tries to reach the conductor and the orchestra beyond.
A loud pop fills the air. Something strikes him in the back and he falls. People rush around him, kneeling by him. Gabriella is there, shrieking in anguish, dropping down beside him. She cradles his head in her lap and bends to kiss his forehead, sobbing, shoulders rocking with grief.
Graves frowns. This makes no sense. If he wasn't shot, if it truly was only a tranquilizer dart, then how is it Gabriella could be so close to him and not see that there is no bullet wound? No blood?
"This isn't the way it happened," he says. "This is nothing but theater, a fiction of your own creation."
"You'd like to think so, but ask yourself, how else could it have happened? Would anything have kept your beloved from your side when you fell?"
The Whisper strolls toward the horrid scene and the soulstream alters around him. The Boboli Gardens metamorphose once more into New York City. Cars roll by, but there are fewer people on the street. The mist swirls and roils all around them, and now the city is nearly dark, shades of black and gray, late at night.
"Walk with me," the Whisper says.
"I think not."
The muzzle of the pistol rises, gestures northward. "Walk."
Graves hesitates only a moment before he starts north. Every block is familiar, rendered in loving detail. All of this from the Whisper's mind, under his control. He sculpts the soulstuff of the wandering dead around him as they pass through the spirit world. Even though they are the wisps, not the conscious ghosts like Graves himself, it is unsettling to see the remnants of human souls used so callously.
And beautiful. He cannot deny it.
"You've figured out most of it by now, Doctor. Puppeting a weak-willed Florentine surgeon, I paid several others to rush to your aid when you fell. That soon after my own demise I had not yet built up the concentration to control more than one person at a time. But coin is the best puppeteer of all. You were brought to the surgeon's office, and there I performed upon you the same surgery I had on so many others. I altered your mind. I changed you, made you docile, and with the mesmerism I had always employed to assist in that transformation, I turned you to a task that I had set out for you."
Graves understands. He sees the truth coming before the words are spoken, and already he is shaking his head in denial.
"Oh, yes. Docile you might have been, but your skills remained. Your strength and your stealth were all I needed. The rest of you was malleable enough. I arranged a clandestine meeting for you with Mayor Bennett, the son of a bitch who'd crucified me in the newspapers. You gave him the nails, Doctor, and good old Roger hammered them home. Oh, how pleased he was when he learned you were still alive, that your death in Florence had been a ruse. You were the only man in the world Bennett would have trusted enough to let down his guard so completely."
Again the spirit world convulses around them, mist churning and choking, and the pull of the soulstream becomes even more powerful. Graves feels like simply surrendering to it. After all of this, what is the point of remaining here? Yet he finds himself unable to let go without seeing what else the Whisper has to show him.
Though he knows what is to come.
Some part of him has begun to remember. The recollection is dull and shrouded in fog even thicker than the mist of the spirit world, but it is there.
The landscape shifts. They are on the observation deck of the Empire State Building. Roger Alton Bennett gazes out across the city . . . his city. He takes out a cigarette and lights it. There is a scuffing noise behind him, and the mayor turns.
He grins. "Damn, Leonard, but it's good to see you."
The ghost of Dr. Graves watches himself step out from the shadows, face slack and expressionless, and grab hold of Mayor Bennett.
The murder is brutal and ugly and - as he hurls the man from the observation deck to twist and tumble down eighty-six stories to the street - spectacular.
The venom of hatred burns so hot in him now that Graves feels as though he will burst into flames.
"And afterward?" he asks without looking at the Whisper, staring out across the city, not looking down.
"Oh, I killed you." The words are followed by that soft, insinuating laughter. "I wasn't worried about being discovered. What could they do to a man already dead? But I so relished the pleasure of strangling you to death, just as I'd done to all of the other men whose minds I'd altered. Your bones cracked in my grasp. I chose a strong host for that. I wanted to feel your neck crack."
Graves shakes his head. "No. Something still doesn't fit." He turns to look at the Whisper. "They matched the DNA of the remains in the crypt with mine. Those were my bones. Why would you bother to put me there?"
Beneath the brim of that hat, the devil smiles. "I'm a man of my word, Doctor. When you were dead, I turned you over to Gabriella. I'd promised her, after all -"
"You're insane."
"True. But it changes nothing."
"I died in her arms. She was at the funeral. There were photographs in the newspapers, entire articles -"
The ether ripples around them, and now it is the featureless spirit realm at last. Wisps and ghosts pass around them like a thunderstorm rolling across the ground. The soulstream is deep here and its pull grips both specters with such force that they must set their feet firmly to avoid being dragged into the current.
"She was my creature by then," the Whisper says, and the pleasure he takes in those words drips from his lips. "I had haunted her for the better part of a year, whispering to her. It wouldn't be enough for me just to control her body. Vengeance demanded her mind. I was her ghost, the voice in her head, in her dreams. I went to bed with her every night, and so often you were not there -"
"I was -"
"You were a celebrity," Simon Broderick spits, and the muzzle of the pistol twitches with the word. "Do you have any idea how easy it was to convince her that you didn't love her, that you only loved the world and your ambitions for the future? That you lived not for her but for the spotlight?"
"Lies!"
"She was bitter and lonely, and she knew that eventually she would be forgotten completely, instead of merely going to bed alone. She gave you so much love, but she was so afraid that she could never be enough for you. I whispered into her mind the truth, that the only way to keep you to herself was if you died before you could alienate her completely. She wept and screamed when she held you in her arms not because you were dead, but because by then she hated you as much as she loved you."
"No -"
"The only condition she gave for helping to hide the truth was that when you died, she would claim your body and bury you in that damned crypt."
Graves shakes with hatred. He flexes his fingers. The Whisper narrows his eyes and watches his hands warily.
"You said it yourself, she was your creature. You mesmerized her. You put all of those thoughts in her mind, twisted her thinking."
"Some, perhaps," the Whisper says, with a wide, Cheshire cat grin that seems brighter than all of the gray otherworld, and darker than night. "But I only nurtured what was already there. And you'll never know how much of her betrayal was my influence, and how much your own negligence.
"One, last thing, Doctor. You should know that she was miserable forever after that day. Wracked with guilt. When she died, she took it as a mercy, and as she breathed her last, she did it wishing she had never met you."
The scream that tears its way out of Graves is pure anguish. Grief has overridden his hate.
He throws himself backward into the soulstream. Even as he falls he draws his guns.
