attacked by lemurs

I am also, apparently, no wizard when it comes to simple mathematics: While I was Will Smithing, lemur number three appeared out of nowhere and smashed a baseball bat against the side of my neck.
The pain was something incredible—more than merely the reaction of physical trauma that I would have expected from such a blow. It also encompassed an almost Olympian sense of nausea combined with a force-five storm of whirling confusion. I felt myself note idly that I guessed egos literally could be bruised. It took me another second or two after that to realize that I was floating, drifting sideways and slightly upward, my body at a forty-five-degree diagonal to the ground. There was a roaring sound in my head. An eerie cry of triumph and hunger pealed through the night.
Then the lemurs came for me.
I felt bitterly cold fingers seize me, clamping down like steel claws. I was hauled out to horizontal by frigid, steely hands. I was still disoriented—I was barely able to turn my head enough to see the third lemur approach.
Her hood had fallen back. She was a young woman of unexceptional appearance, neither beautiful nor displeasing. Her eyes, though, were dark and hollow, and a hideous emptiness lay behind them. She stared intently at me for a long beat, her body quivering in some kind of dark rapture.
Then she let out a slow hiss, sank her fingers into the flesh of my left biceps, and ripped off a handful of meat.
Ectoplasmic blood flew. My blood. It scattered through the air in lazy globules that, once they were a few feet from me, fell like raindrops to the surface of the snow.
It hurt. I screamed.
All three lemurs screamed with me, as if triggered into a response by my own cries. The female lemur lifted the gobbet of flesh aloft in triumph, then held it over her open mouth and squeezed. More blood pattered out onto her lips and tongue, and she let out a gasp of unadulterated ecstasy before shoving the raw flesh into her mouth as though she hadn’t eaten in weeks.
Her eyes rolled back into her head. She shuddered. “Oh,” she breathed. “Pain. He’s felt so much pain. And rage. And joy. Oh, this one lived.”
“Here,” said the second lemur. “Come take his legs. My turn.”
The female bared her bloodied teeth at him and tore another, smaller piece from my arm. She snapped it up and then leaned on my legs, pinning them. The second lemur looked me over like a man perusing a side of beef. Then he ripped a handful of flesh from my right thigh.
It went like that for several minutes, with the three of them taking turns ripping meat from my body.
I won’t bore you with the details. I don’t like to think about it. They were stronger than me, better than me, more experienced than me when it came to spiritual conflict.
They got me. The monsters got me. And it hurt.
Until footsteps crunched toward us through the snow.
The lemurs never took notice. I was in too much agony to care very much, but I wasn’t exactly busy, either. I looked up and saw a lone figure slogging my way through the thick snow. He wasn’t very big, and he was dressed in a white parka and white ski pants, with one of those ninja capmask things, also white, covering his face. In his right hand he carried a big, old-style, heavy, portable spotlight, the kind with a plastic carrying handle on top. Its twin incandescent bulbs shone a garish orange over the snow.
I sniggered to myself. He was a person. He sank into the snow with every step. He wouldn’t be able to see what was happening right in front of him. No wonder the lemurs paid him no mind.
But ten feet away from me, he abruptly froze in his tracks and blurted, “Holy crap!”
He reached up and ripped off the ninja hood, revealing the thin, fine features of a man of somewhere near forty. His hair was dark, curly, and mussed from the hood; he had glasses perched askew on his beak of a nose; and his dark eyes were wide with shock. “Harry!”
I stared at him and said, through the blood, “Butters?”
“Stop them,” Butters hissed. “Save him! I release you for this task!”
“On it, sahib!” shouted another voice.
A cloud of campfire sparks poured out of the two sources of light in the spotlight, rushing out by the millions, and congealed into a massive, manlike shape. It let out a lion’s roar and blurred toward the lemurs.
Two of them were sharp enough to realize something dangerous was coming, and they promptly vanished. The third, the young woman, was in the middle of another bite—and she didn’t look up until it was too late.


Ghost Story Chapter 16, Page 179-181


“Yeah, yeah,” Butters said. “But he’s safe now?”
“For now,” the being said, “and as far as I know.”
Butters crunched through the snow and stared down at me. The little guy was one of Chicago’s small number of medical examiners, a forensic investigator who analyzed corpses and found out all sorts of details about them. A few years ago, he’d analyzed corpses of vampires that had burned to death in a big fire someone started. He’d asserted that they obviously were not human. He’d been packed off to an institution for half a year in response. Now he treaded carefully in his career—or at least he had when I was last alive.
“Is it really him?” Butters asked.
The being of light scanned me with unseen eyes. “I can’t spot anything that would suggest he was anything else,” he said cautiously. “Which ain’t the same as saying it’s Harry’s ghost. It has . . . more something than other ghosts I’ve encountered.”
Butters frowned. “More what?”
“Something,” the being said. “Meaning I’m not sure what. Something I’m not expert in, clearly.”
“The, uh, the ghost,” Butters said. “It’s hurt?”
“Quite severely,” the being said. “But it’s easily mended—if you wish to do it.”
Butters blinked at him. “What? Yes, yes, of course I wish it.”
“Very good, sahib,” the being said. And then it whipped and darted through the night air, gathering up all the floating, glittering gems from the vanishing remains of the lemurs. It brought them together into a single mass and then knelt down next to my head.
“Bob,” I said quietly.
Bob the Skull, formerly my personal assistant and confidant, hesitated beside me as I said his name. Once again, I became aware of his intense regard, but if he saw anything, it didn’t register on his featureless face.
“Harry,” he said. “Open up. You need to restore these memories to your essence.”
“Restore what?” I asked.
“Eat ’em,” Bob said firmly. “Open your mouth.”
I was tired and confused, so it was easier to just do as he said. I closed my eyes as he dropped the mass of gems into my open mouth. But instead of feeling hard gems, fresh, cool water flowed into my mouth, swirling over my parched tongue and throat as I eagerly swallowed it down.
Pain vanished instantly. The disorientation began to fade and disappear. My confusion and weariness followed those others within a moment, and a deep breath later, I was sitting up in place, feeling more or less as sane and together as I had been when I had woken up that evening.


Ghost Story Chapter 16, Page 182-184