“This is my house,” said the head in a high and somewhat reedy voice. “And you are both trespassing! Leave my property immediately or face my terrible wrath. My righteous anger shall be unconstrained, so flee now while you still can. Or face my fury from beyond the grave!”
“How the hell is he talking like that?” said Hawk. “I mean, his voice box is still in his throat, isn’t it? And even if it isn’t, how are the lungs getting any air to it?”
“Maybe there’s some kind of ectoplasmic connection that we can’t see,” said Fisher. “That would account for the hand and the eyeballs. Then again, his chest isn’t moving, which would suggest he isn’t using his lungs—”
“What’s that?” said the head sharply. “Speak up! Don’t mumble, dammit!”
“We are not mumbling,” said Hawk. “It’s just that you have an arm covering one ear and the other is pressed against your chest. I’m surprised you can hear anything.”
“Oh. Yes. Right.” The head frowned as Appleton considered the matter. “I’m rather new at all this, actually.”
“Get away,” said Fisher.
Hartley’s body juggled his head out from under his armpit, and held it forward with both hands, like an offering. Unfortunately, the splayed fingers of the supporting hands now covered the eyes. The mouth swore indistinctly, the fingers fumbled for a better hold, and the head slipped through both hands and crashed to the floor. There was a solid-sounding thud as the head bounced, and all three of them winced. The body stumbled forward, reaching down blindly with its hands, and one foot caught the head and kicked it across the floor.
“Oh, go and help him, Hawk,” said Fisher. “We’ll be here all bloody night otherwise.”
Hawk sighed, pushed past the headless body, and strode over to the detached head. It looked up at him imploringly, and tried an ingratiating smile. Hawk sighed and picked up the head by one ear. He gave the grimacing head back to its body, which grabbed it firmly with both hands, and immediately poked itself in one eye. Hawk and Fisher looked at each other and got the giggles. Hartley’s head glared at them and stuck out its lower lip sulkily. Hawk had to bite his own lip to keep from laughing. Fisher turned away, her shoulders heaving.
“Put your head back on your neck, Hartley,” said Hawk. “Please.”
The ghost did so, head and neck rejoining with no trace of a seam. Hawk indicated to Fisher that it was safe for her to turn back, and they studied the reassembled Appleton Hartley standing somewhat uncertainly before them. He appeared to be solid enough, if you overlooked that somehow he’d managed to get his left ear on back to front. Hawk decided he wouldn’t point it out.
“Go ahead,” said the ghost. “Laugh it up. You think it’s easy being a ghost? The condition doesn’t exactly come with an instructional pamphlet, you know. I haven’t even figured out how to walk through walls yet. And you have to concentrate on your shape every minute, or you start losing track of the details. So embarrassing. It’s not easy being dead, you know. Who are you anyway, and what are you doing in my house?”
“First, we are Captains Hawk and Fisher of the city Guard,” said Hawk. “And second, this house now belongs to Leonard and Mavis Hartley. You left it to them, remember?”
“They don’t deserve my house,” said Appleton Hartley. “My lovely house. They don’t appreciate it. Have you seen what they’ve been doing? Vandals! And what do you plan to do, Captains? Arrest me? The law only applies to the living. And you can’t exorcise me, because I’m not at all religious.”
Fisher frowned. “Hold everything. You mean you don’t believe in life after death?”
The ghost hesitated. “All right, I’ll admit I’m still a little shaky on that bit—”
“What are you doing here?” asked Hawk, pulling the conversation back onto safer ground. “This was your house, but you willed it to Leonard and Mavis.”
“Only because there was no one else. Bunch of freeloaders. Never wanted to know me when I was alive. Didn’t even wait till I was cold in my coffin before they were in here tearing up the floorboards and turning the place upside down. This is my house, my home, and I’m not leaving. Don’t I have any rights?”
“Well, no, not really,” said Hawk. “You’re dead. You’re supposed to … move on, leave material things behind.”
“And leave my lovely house in the hands of these philistines? Never! If I can’t take it with me, I’m not going. Here I am and here I stay. We’ll see who weakens first.”
“Get his family in here,” said Hawk to Fisher. “Maybe we can bash out some kind of compromise.”
“I wouldn’t put money on it,” said Fisher, heading for the door. She walked right through the ghost, just to remind him who was in charge, and Appleton shuddered violently.
“You have no idea how repulsive that is,” said Appleton Hartley.
It took a lot of persuading to get Leonard and Mavis and Francis Hartley to reenter the house, but Fisher could be very persuasive with a sword in her hand, and surprisingly soon, the whole Hartley family, living and deceased, were standing in the main parlor, glaring at each other. Hawk was hard put to decide which side of the family looked more disgusted with the other.
“Some people have no sense of propriety,” said Mavis loudly. “Hanging around when it’s clear they’re no longer welcome, haunting … I don’t know what the neighbors must be thinking. We’ve never had a … revenant in the family before. And after we paid all that money for the funeral, too! Professional mourners, tears on demand, and a real oak coffin. With a velvet lining and real brass handles. Tell him, Leonard!”
“Real brass handles—”
“And the flowers! Do you realize how much wreaths cost these days? I don’t know how they can stand to ask for the money.”
“The professional mourners were good,” said Francis. “Did some lovely keening.”
“You call that racket mourning?” said Appleton heatedly. “You knew very well I wanted to be cremated, with a purely secular ceremony! You didn’t even have them sing my favorite song at the funeral.”
“Certainly not,” said Mavis primly. “It was quite unsuitable for a public ceremony. Nothing more than a drinking song, full of vulgar references to women and … body parts.”
“What’s it like being dead?” Francis asked the ghost wistfully. “I think a lot about being dead.”
“If I had your parents, so would I,” said Appleton. “And if you keep annoying me, boy, I’ll arrange a firsthand experience for you.”
“You see! You see!” Mavis went purple in the face. It suited her. “He’s threatening us now! Do something, Leonard!”
“What the hell am I supposed to do against a ghost?” said Leonard, feeling very definitely put upon.
“Don’t you dare take that tone of voice with me, Leonard Hartley!”
Leonard gave Hawk a long-suffering look, full of pleading, as one married man to another. Hawk sighed and stepped forward.
“Can we at least decide exactly what this argument is about? Why are you so determined to remain in your old house, Appleton, instead of … moving on?”
“Because I spent years getting this place just right, and they’re destroying it!”
“In search of the money you’ve selfishly hidden here!” countered Mavis. “Money that is ours by right!”
“Ah,” said Fisher, finally on familiar ground. “Every time there’s a family argument, you can bet money’s at the bottom of it.”
“When Appleton liquidated his business and took all his money out of the bank, it took two coaches to transfer all the cash here!” said Mavis. “That money is ours, and I want it!”
“You can want all you like,” said Appleton, grinning nastily. “But you won’t get it. Oh, I took hundreds of thousands of ducats out of the bank. A lifetime’s savings. But it’s all gone now. When I found out I was dying, and there was nothing magic or doctors could do to save me, I cashed in everything and spent the lot on wine, women, and song.” The ghost paused to cons
ider. “Well, wine and women, mostly. Had a hell of good time, while it lasted….”
Mavis was finally struck silent. Leonard looked like he might faint. Francis smiled for the first time.
“You crafty bastard,” he said appreciatively. “If only I’d known, I’d have joined you.”
“Francis!” said his mother.
“Should have done it years earlier,” said Appleton. “But I was always too busy running my business. Never married. Never had any fun. But when I knew I was dying, everything was suddenly very clear to me. Why spend your life making money just for some ungrateful relatives to inherit? So I spent all my money on a pre-wake and had the best time I could stand. Toward the end it was a rush as to what would kill me first, the disease or the wine and women.” Appleton sighed happily. “I had more fun dying than I ever did living my old life.”
“There’s no money?” asked Mavis in a broken whisper. “None at all?”
“Well, you might find the odd coin lost down the back of the sofa, but that’s about it. And you needn’t think about selling my house, either. Rather than see you make a penny profit out of dismantling my home, I’ll haunt it till you’re all dead and gone. Think of me as a sitting tenant with a really long lease.”
“You people don’t need an exorcist,” said Fisher. “You need family counseling. And possibly a good slap on the side of all your heads.”
“Right,” said Hawk. “This could drag on for years, except I haven’t got the patience. So this is what we’re going to do. You, Leonard and Mavis, will agree to sell this house to someone who will appreciate and look after it. And you, Appleton, will agree to this, or Fisher and I will burn the whole place down.”
“You wouldn’t!” said Leonard, Mavis, and Appleton together.
“Oh, yes, we would,” said Fisher, and everyone there believed her.
“We are now leaving,” said Hawk. “Sort out the details among yourselves. Only keep the noise down, or we’ll be back.”
“Right,” said Fisher. “And next time we’ll bring a social worker with us.”
“No need to be nasty,” said Hawk.
Sometime later, though not soon enough for either of them, Hawk and Fisher were back on their beat in the North Side. It was still the early hours of the morning, but the streets weren’t really any less crowded now than during the day. In many ways, the North Side really came alive only after all the honest, hardworking souls had turned in and gone to bed, leaving the streets to those who made the real money. You could buy anything in the North Side, if you weren’t too fussy about its provenance. Or the kind of people you had to deal with. Hawk and Fisher strolled casually along, and everyone took pains to avoid their eyes. Businessmen hustled customers into shadowy back alleys, and everyone else suddenly remembered somewhere else they had to get to in a hurry. For their own peace of mind, Hawk and Fisher tended to work on the principle that if they couldn’t see it, it wasn’t happening. Otherwise, they’d never get anything done.
The sun was just starting to rise above the horizon, splashing thick swathes of blood across the reluctantly lightening sky. The first birds were coughing on the sooty air, sewer rats were ganging up on the cats, and the latest plague was bubbling wetly in the open sewers. Just another day in Haven. Hawk and Fisher had seen entirely too many sunrises just recently. They’d been working a double shift for three weeks now, replacing a pair of Guard Captains they’d been forced to arrest. Captains Karl and Jacie Gavriel, another husband and wife team with a hard reputation, had been running their own private protection racket on their beat. Nothing new or particularly unusual about that, but these Guards became greedy, raising their price so high that even the hardened denizens of the North Side were moved to make an official complaint.
Hawk and Fisher were sent to investigate, and they wasted no time in establishing the truth and then lowering the boom on the Gavriels. However, the Gavriels refused point-blank to come quietly, and there then followed a certain amount of unpleasantness, not to mention blood loss and property damage, before Hawk and Fisher were able to subdue them. Karl and Jacie Gavriel were currently chained to their hospital beds, awaiting trial, while the same people who’d made the original complaint were now threatening to sue Hawk and Fisher over the property damage. As a reward for bringing in their crooked compatriots, Hawk and Fisher were required to cover the Gavriels’ shift in the North Side as well as their own, until replacements could be arranged.
No good deed goes unpunished in Haven.
“The Gavriels,” said Hawk, brooding. “They’re part of what I’m talking about. About what living in Haven does to you. They were clean once. Good thief-takers. Are they our future? Are they what we could become?”
“We’re nothing like the Gavriels,” said Fisher firmly. “You worry too much, Hawk.”
“One of us has to. You know, more and more it seems to me like we haven’t really accomplished anything, for all our time in Haven. Name one thing we’ve really changed for the better. Oh, we’ve caught a lot of bad guys, and killed even more. But Haven’s still Haven. The North Side’s still a cesspit of poverty and despair. The same old evils are still going on, the same poor bastards are still suffering every day. We’ve changed nothing.”
Fisher adjusted the knuckle-duster under her glove, and tried to see where Hawk was going with all this. “We’re doing well just to keep the lid on things. You can’t hope to put right centuries of ingrained evil and corruption in just a few years. We’ve made an impression. Stopped a lot of bad things, and bad people. Even saved the whole damned city more than once. We’ve done our best.”
“But who have we become in the process? Sometimes I look in the mirror and I don’t recognize the man looking back at me. This isn’t who I wanted to be. Who I meant to make of myself.”
Fisher stopped walking, and Hawk stopped with her. She looked at him directly, face to face, deep blue eyes meeting his unflinchingly. “So what do you want to do, Hawk? Just turn our backs and walk away, leaving the good people undefended? There are good people here. If we don’t protect them from scumbags like the Gavriels or villains like St. Christophe, who will? You can’t walk the straight line in Haven and expect to get anything done. We are what we have to be, to get results.”
“I used to know who I was,” said Hawk quietly. “I was an honorable man, and I led and inspired other men, through my own good example. But that was a long time ago.”
“No,” said Fisher. “That was yesterday.”
They looked at each other for a while, remembering. Finally Fisher sighed and looked away. “We were younger then. Idealistic. Maybe … we just grew up.”
At that point someone was dumb enough to try and steal Fisher’s purse. Had to be someone new to the city. He’d barely gotten his hand around her purse before Fisher punched him out without even looking around. This would-be cutpurse hit the ground hard, his eyes unfocused. Somehow he got his feet under him, and staggered away. Fisher was so surprised, she let him go.
“Damn. I must be getting old. They never used to get up after I hit them.” She shook her head then turned back to Hawk. “Look, Hawk, we do what we can. You can’t clean up the North Side with just brute force. Even I know that. The sorcerer Gaunt tried that approach with the Devil’s Hook, using his magic and the threat of his reputation, but it didn’t last. Things slipped right back to their bad old ways the moment Gaunt left the city. The nature of the North Side is mostly determined by its absentee owners, be they landlords or drug lords, and all of them are out of our reach. The law is nothing in the face of political connections. We could fight them, but we’d be on our own. No other Guard would join us. Hell, they’d probably be ordered to stop us. It would be just you and me, against impossible odds.”
Hawk smiled slightly. “That never stopped us before. When we knew we were right.”
“Perhaps not,” Fisher conceded. “But if we were going to take on established villains like St. Christophe and his army of bodyguards, I’d need a hel
l of a good motivation. I don’t think I believe in miracles anymore. This is Haven. It doesn’t want to change.”
Hawk shrugged and looked away. “Maybe I’m just feeling my age. Turning thirty-five shook me. That’s maybe half my life gone. I don’t feel old, but I don’t feel young anymore. Some days its feels like I’m on the downhill slope now, and I’m running out of time to do all the things I meant to …”
“And you’ve got a bald patch.”
“I know! Trust me, I know! I’m beginning to wonder if I should get a hat to cover it.”
“You hate hats.”
“I know!”
They continued on their way again, walking side by side in thoughtful silence. People came and went around them, saw their frowning faces, and gave them even more room than usual. Quite a few decided to call it an early night, and went home to hide until Hawk and Fisher had calmed down again.
“I find it harder to care about things these days,” Fisher said finally. “When you see the petty evils of Haven repeated over and over in front of you every day … it wears you down. Even the sharpest blade will dull if you slam it against an unyielding surface often enough.”
“There was a time when what we did mattered,” Hawk said stubbornly. “And so, we mattered. We had purpose, and ideals. And what we did changed the world for the better.”
“That was long ago,” said Fisher. “In another land. We were different people then.”
“No,” said Hawk. “That was yesterday.”
And then they both stopped in their tracks, as a call from the Guard communication sorcerer filled their ears. First a burst of pleasant flute music, to get their attention. It used to be a gong, but that rattled Hawk’s back teeth so much that he went and had a private but very forceful word with the communications sorcerer, and after that it was flute music. Hawk was very popular with the other Guards for a while.