Ghost Story (The Dresden Files 13)

they became absolutely spastic. The paper bag made a steady rattling sound. There was a creature from another world standing behind me. I could feel it, no more than seven or eight feet away from me, every bit as real as Stan, to every sense but my sight. It took a real effort to move my head enough to cast a single, hurried glance over my shoulder.

Nothing. Stan was shoveling various bills into a bag. The store was otherwise empty. The door hadn’t opened since I had come through it. There was a bell on it. It would have rung had it opened. I looked back at the reflection.

The Thing was two feet closer.

And it was smiling.

It had a head whose shape was all but obscured by growths or lumpy scales or matted fur. But beneath its eyes I could see a mouth, too wide to be real, filled with teeth too sharp and serrated and yellow to belong to anything of this earth. That was a smile from Lewis Carroll’s opiuminspired, laudanum-dosed nightmares.

My legs felt like they were going to collapse into water at any second. I couldn’t catch my breath. I couldn’t move.

Malice slithered up my spine and danced in spiteful shivers over the back of my neck. I could sense the thing’s hostility—not the mindless anger of a fellow boy I’d needled beyond self-restraint, or Justin’s cold, logical rage. This was something different, something vaster, more timeless, and deeper than any ocean. It was a poisonous hate, something so ancient, so vile, that it could almost kill without any other action or being to support it, a hate so old and so virulent that it had curdled and congealed over its surface into a stinking, staggering contempt.

This thing wanted to destroy me. It wanted to hurt me. It wanted to enjoy the process. And nothing I said, nothing I did, would ever, ever change that. I was something to be eradicated, preferably in some amusing fashion. It had no mercy. It had no fear. And it was old, old beyond my ability to comprehend. It was patient. And if I proved too disappointing to it, I would only break through the veneer of that contempt—and what lay beneath would dissolve me like the deadliest acid. I felt . . . stained, simply by feeling its presence, stained as if it had left some hideous imprint or mark upon me, one that could not be wiped away.

And then it was behind me, so close it could almost touch, its outline towering over me, huge and horrible.

And it leaned down. A forked tongue slithered out from between its horrible shark-chain-saw teeth, and it whispered, in a perfectly low, calm, British accent, “What you have just sensed is as close as your mind can come to encompassing my name. How do you do?”

I tried to talk. I couldn’t. I couldn’t make the words form in my mouth. I couldn’t get enough air to push my voice up out of my throat.

Damn it. Damn it, I was more than some terrified child. I was more than some helpless orphan preparing to endure what someone vastly older and more powerful than me was preparing to inflict. I had touched the very forces of Creation. I was a young force of nature. I had seen things no one else could see, done things no one else could do.

And in a moment like that, there was only one thing I could ask myself:

What would Jack Burton do?

“I’m f-f-f-fine,” I said in a hoarse, hardly understandable voice. “That’s a mouthful, and I’m busy. D-do you maybe have a nickname?”

Its smile widened.

“Little Morsel, among those whom I have disassembled,” it purred, its tone wrapping lovingly around the last word of the phrase, “I have several times been called by the same phrase.”

“O-oh? W-what’s that?”

“He,” purred the thing, “Who Walks Behind.”

Chapter Thirty-two

“He Who Walks Behind?” I said, fighting a losing battle to keep from trembling. “As scary names go, that one kind of isn’t. I’d stick with the first one. More evocative.”

“Be patient,” purred the creature’s disembodied voice. “You will understand it before the end.”

“Uh, dude?” Stan asked quietly. “Uh . . . Who are you talking to?”

“Oh, tell him,” the creature said. “That should be entertaining.”

“Shut up, Stan,” I said. “And get out.”

“Uh,” said Stan. “What?”

I whirled on him and pointed the paper bag at him, my arms extending through the space where He Who Walks Behind apparently both was and wasn’t. “Get the hell out