Our pasts, presents, and futures are far more important than we often choose to acknowledge… and it is critical that we pay attention to this fact lest we allow the choices of the past to color our present and mar the future.
It’s far easier said than done.
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I drove home, taking care to slip into the townhouse quietly. It was late; well past 2am by the time I got back, and I didn’t want to wake Tristan if he’d managed to sleep. Being that I wasn’t certain where he’d decided to sleep, I scanned the living room and then crept up the stairs in search of my sleeping son, coming to a stop at the top and stifling my involuntary sigh.
My son was ‘living rough’ on the floor of the second bedroom.
It looked as if he had brought a duffel of clothing with him, and was using that as a pillow, lying on his side with his back to the door. An oversized hoodie was draped over him, with the hood caught up at his shoulder and his feet hanging out at the bottom.
Christ, but I needed to buy furniture.
I stepped into the guest room and knelt to nudge him, but he was out cold, finally given to the sleep of a displaced traveler who had been fighting jetlag. I pondered for a moment, and then with a combination of air magic and force of will, I managed to carry my son into my bedroom and put him to bed, ignoring the nagging thought that he had to be in his sixties and far from a little boy before I finally had the courage to be a father.
For a moment, I thought I’d woken him, but he settled again, and I drew the covers over him and closed the door behind me as I moved back downstairs.
Outside, in the side yard, I smoked a cigarette, thinking over what I knew of the case. I wasn’t a detective; I didn’t play well with others. I went in, did a job, and left. I was lousy at paperwork, a trait that my supervisor had long despaired of, and I didn’t do missing persons. Yet somehow, I’d managed to get talked into assisting the Charleston Police Department in profiling and searching for the guy who had grabbed the little sister of the man who wanted to be the arresting officer in my own confession of crimes.
My life was stranger than fiction.
I didn’t have the time I wished I had to put things right by Tristan for the night, but I’d work on it in the morning. Right now, I wanted to go walk the park down by the coastline and see what I might be able to discern. For all I knew, there was a Gate down there, and that was how the kidnapper demon was operating. The fact that the Gate in the warehouse had been easy to claim made me think that he wasn’t a Gate Holder, able to open a Gate where-ever he wished in the city. There weren’t many of those; they were mostly Class A in powerbase, and were, at the very least half-bloods. Usually elves, sometimes selkie. I’d heard tell of a rusalka being a Gate holder once, but I wasn’t going investigating her, all things considered. Yeah, I’ll wait while you look that up.
White Point Garden is a strip of a park at the point of the Charleston Peninsula about a block wide and almost three blocks long. It is liberally decorated with trees, and during the day it is filled with tourists and Charlestonians alike, walking dogs, enjoying the sea breeze, and watching children climb amongst the cannons and other historical sculptures. At night, however, it is an entirely different place. Charleston, you see, is haunted.
What? You think ghosts don’t exist? No more so than say, elves, vampires, mages and demons? The human mind has a marvelous ability to rationalize and dismiss what it doesn’t want to accept. Trust me. I’m a master of rationalizations. But I also grew up in Ireland. I’ve spent many an hour conversing with ghosts. Most of them want purpose, a function to carry out even though the fragile mortal shell has long since passed.
Not the ghosts of White Point Garden.
There are a handful of people downtown that will tell you the place is haunted by the pirates that were hung for their crimes, and that the pirates seek those who hung them, but that’s just for tourists. The ghosts of White Point Garden were war ghosts, and most of them were from the Civil War, harking back to the days when the park was home to fortifications for the city, and for many of them, the war is still going.
I pulled into a parking space and walked around the Confederate Soldier Memorial, heading for the whitewashed gazebo in the center of the park. It took less than five minutes to make my way across the park and around up into the wooden structure, but in that time, I’d passed no fewer than ten ghosts bustling past in death as they had been in life. They carried artillery, moved past me firing memories of weapons in the last few moments of a battle that had left them nothing more than echoes, boys torn from life, for the Civil War wasn’t a man’s war. It was fought by little more than teenagers, and I should know; I’d been seventeen when I joined that war with my brother.
It rattled me, sent me hurtling back into memories that I wished I could forget, for in many ways, I was just like them, a strange survivor from a war that wasn’t mine, drifting through time.
I climbed up onto the balustrade, swinging myself around to sit with my legs on the outside of the bandstand, and looked out over the Battery and letting my thoughts swirl against the memories like the tide. There was, of course, a reason I was there, but I had to clear my thoughts and let myself find my focus before I tried to do anything magic-based with the ghostly population around me. For someone like me, encountering war worn ghosts was uncomfortable. For a thoughtmage like Suzu? It was downright horrifying.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
Most ghosts born of war come equipped with a full range of the emotions that the mortal felt at the moment of death. The stronger the emotion, the clearer the ghost became to those capable of seeing them. The flip side of that was that the strong emotions also threatened those who were capable of sensing emotion and thought. Only the most mundane of humans could walk this park at night without some sense of something clinging to them and making them look about themselves in wonder, and I was far from mundane. If you had any measure of skill and you ended up touching them… well, it was a lot like a livefeed of memory and emotion channeled straight into your head.
The gazebo was a refuge of sorts, as it was built after the Civil War, and the ghosts from the war didn’t interact with it. Occasionally one would walk through it, and it stood high enough that it was disconcerting to see an apparition of an upper torso passing through it. When I was seated on the balustrade, they couldn’t touch me, and that was how I preferred it. Under normal conditions, I’d not have been in the park at all.
It took a few tries, but eventually I managed to slip into a light meditative state and let my magesight open my eyes to the supernatural realm. A half dozen ghosts were collected to my left, another three within reach if I dropped to the ground in front of me, and there was one next to my right foot. I saw no trace of a Gate, nothing that flickered in and out of existence the way the Gate in the warehouse had. I blinked away the extra sensory sight, and dropped down off the balustrade, landing on my feet.
“You look like you’re looking for something, son.”
The voice was to my right, rich in Charleston vowels and had an eerie intangibility to it. I turned and found the ghost I’d noted earlier at my right foot was now looking at me expectantly. I didn’t quite blink at him in dumb surprise, but I took a moment to look him over. His clothing, like many of his ilk, was faded in color, but the detail of his Confederate uniform was striking. “I… sorry. Wasn’t expecting that. Not every day I meet a ghost that’s talkative.” Not many ghosts born of war were talkative, all things considered. Most war-created ghosts were simple echoes.
“Not every day I meet an Irishman,” A ghost with a sense of humor. What was the world coming to?
I felt the grin start, and I didn’t fight it. “Then I’d say we’re even.” The grin faded, as I considered why I was in the park. “I’m looking for whatever took that young lady a few months ago. I know it’s been a while, but I’m new on the case. Felt like rehashing stuff and seeing what I could see.”
“Ah.” His reply was everything I’d expected and nothing I’d hoped for. Most ghosts weren’t the type to keep a watchful eye out, but I’d secretly hoped that one or two here might have noticed a woman go astray. “We see a lot of people here, Irish. Seen a lot over the years. Most don’t see us.” I nodded; that wasn’t unusual. “Seems though, I recall a ruckus off down yonder a ways, though. Go off west towards that Columbiad, and you’ll find a Union boy who might know.” A Union boy. Almost a hundred and fifty years after the war had ended and it was still being fought by ghosts as well. Good grief.
When I got to the Columbiad, I had to admit that the Confederate ghost was right. The Union ghost was a boy. If he’d been fourteen when he’d died, I’d have been surprised. What didn’t surprise me in the slightest was his rank on his shirt, and how self-assured he seemed as he stood there. I debated with myself over how to approach him and settled on approaching him as if he and I were on the same field; I walked up and offered my old greeting from the days when I’d been in the war. “Chaplain Teimhean O’Doire of the 69th under Captain Wexforth. How’s the field?”
“Dead,” came the reply, a sardonic smirk on the youth’s face as he turned to look to me. His right eye was patched, likely the injury that lost him his life, and I gritted my teeth and nodded as he continued. “Been that way a long time, Chaplain, but I think you know that. You’re not like them,” he waved his hand to indicate the ghosts that I’d had to move around as I approached him. “But you’re not different, either.”
“No… I’m caught between, a lot like your boys out there. Only difference between them and myself is that while time stopped for me, my heart didn’t.” I replied, leaning on the Columbiad and looking out towards the water as I spoke. It was easier to not look at these war-torn ghosts and pretend that all was well. “But that just makes me something else that goes bump in the night, doesn’t it?”
It was rhetorical, but he gave a verbal grunt of agreement. “What brings you here, then, Chaplain? Seems to me a man like you wouldn’t haunt a battleground if his heart’s still beating.” I could feel his gaze on me, and I turned to see that single eye glittering at me intently. He wasn’t an average ghost, and that gave me hope.
“I’m searching for information. About a month ago, there was a young woman running through the park with her dog. She went missing, and her dog was found a few blocks away. I was hoping that someone might have seen something that might tell me what I’m looking for.” I looked away as I spoke; waving to the area that the Charleston Police Department had thought was her abduction spot.
“Dark haired thing, wearing white. Yeah, I remember her. She used to come around every night with that dog of hers.” He’d put a cigarette in his lips, and I couldn’t help staring as he struck a nearly invisible match and lit it, taking a pull off it before he turned to look at me. “You want to know what happened. Why?”
I resisted pulling a cigarette of my own out and met his odd gaze. “Because I’m working as a consultant to the police now, and there’s a girl missing. I think it’s the same kidnapper, and I think he’s demonic.”
Silence stretched between us as he smoked the memory of a cigarette, crushing it out at his feet and watching the illusion fade before returning his attention to me. “He appeared out of nowhere, grabbed her and vanished. Like they’d never existed. Some men were in the area, and they were real rattled. Never seen anything like it before, haven’t seen anything like it since. Lucky for them, they’ve forgotten it.”
I nodded. “Don’t suppose you recall what he looked like.” It was such a stretch, but I had to ask. I was, after all, asking a ghost to recall a demon he’d seen a month ago.
“He was tall, and pale compared to her, dark hair slicked back. Out of his face. Dressed like a rich man, long sleeves and good shoes.” The ghost shrugged lazily. “Didn’t have much time to see anything else.”
Tall, pale skin with dark hair… a litany of curses started in my head. Of course. The description would match Valen Ravenswing. I wasn’t going to get this easily. “Thanks. Why… why are you still here?” The words simply fell out of my mouth without checking in with my brain.
That single eye focused on me and I could see the thoughts in his translucent head. I forced myself to not look away in discomfort, and his entirely too young face cracked into a smile. “Chaplain, those men out there think the war is still on, and they need a leader. Little by little, they fade into the darkness, but as long as one is still on duty, I’ll be here. I can do no less by them.”
In that moment, he reminded me of Xelander, convinced that I still needed him, and unwilling to let me go. I shook my head and looked to the ghost for a moment before nodding. “You’re a good man, Captain. I hope one day you find peace.”
“The field is dead, the battle done, Chaplain. That’s peace enough. Maybe one day you’ll learn that.”
Before I could reply, he was gone. Magesight didn’t reveal his presence, and I moved away from the Columbiad, taking a moment to search for him while I tried to understand what he’d said to me. Shaking my head to restore my normal vision, I fished another cigarette out of my pocket, lit it with my magic, and smoked it as I walked back to my car.