Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 10

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Morty's house is this inexplicably So-Cal style stucco...thing, with a wrought iron gate, an overgrown
lawn, and fake gargoyles. It's clearly meant to be ominous, and failing catastrophically. Mortimer Lindquist actually walks out past Harry, carrying a suitcase, so Harry goes inside to wait for him. The interior is done up in much the same way as the yard. Plastic skull, red and black candles, a full set of the Encyclopedia Britannica with the titles scraped off the spines, to make them look like spooky tomes. The details each, inside and out, except for the hand-carved monsters on the wooden dining chairs, which are minor foreshadowing for a thing later in this chapter. Not even foreshadowing, really. Setup. 

Mort comes back in, Harry says they need to talk, and Mort immediately denies any involvement in what's been going on. Which is, you know, kind of suspicious, since Harry didn't say anything yet other than "we need to talk". Mort insists that he doesn't know what's going on, that he's leaving town, to look after his sister, who's sick. This is a pretty transparent lie, but rather than pressing the issue directly, Harry starts talking about Mort's books, how he used to be a pretty good ectomancer, but now he has to fake it most of the time. Mort says he provides a legitimate services, and Harry counters that if he really believed that, his powers wouldn't have dwindled. That's interesting, because it means he started holding fake seances while his powers were still intact. Either he was deliberately giving up his magic (although this idea will not be introduced for another five books), or people weren't reacting well to what their dead loved ones really had to say. The second thing seems a bit more supported, since he seems upset by talking about the loss of his abilities. I haven't seen many other indicators that Jim Butcher read the Young Wizard series, but he was about the right age for the first ones when they were coming out (for those who haven't looked it up in a while, and vaguely remember Young Wizards as a mid-90s series, So You Wanna Be a Wizard came out in 1983), and this idea that pretending to use your magic (or using it to make it look like you're faking it) is like, bad for your powers, is very much in there. As, it occurs to me, is the fundamental idea that magic is about life. So I guess we'll add influences from Young Wizards to the list of things to keep an eye out for.

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Mort knows about what's been going on, even without his magic, he still has contacts even in places that other practitioners don't. He refers to one of his books, which Harry only skimmed, They Shall Rise, which describes how the barrier between worlds is gradually wearing away. This extremely interesting theory has been neither confirmed nor denied as of the most recent book in the series. He doesn't, as Harry initially assumes, claim that the barrier is failing now, after all this time. Instead, he explains that it's not really a wall - it's squishy and flexible, and something has made it go extra wiggly of late, leading to more spirit activity, and those more powerful. Newly created ghosts, especially angry ones, are gonna be stronger too. Harry asks if Mort knows what could be causing it, and Mort goes on an apparently unrelated rant about how hard it is, living with his particular abilities, having ghosts come bother you when you're minding your own business, and how how what people want isn't actually to know whether their dead relatives forgive them or whatever, they want confirmation that they live in a world where their dead relatives can and should forgive them. 

Last night, apparently, something big came across. Mort won't commit to whether it's a ghost or a demon or what - he says it's a nightmare, but since Harry doesn't consider the possibility that it's literally a creature out of dreams, presumably the reader isn't meant to either. 

Morty's ride to the airport is here, but Harry can't let him go without trying to help. He advises Mort to take a break from fake seances, read and relax, that his power will come back, and he'll be better able to handle it now. Mort acts dismissive, but at the last minute, literally yelling out the window of the cab, he tells Harry that there's a drawer in one of those carved chairs, and in the drawer are his notes, which may be of some use if Harry really wants to go up against this thing. 

The journals are leather-bound, and smell inexplicably of paper, even though they're made of vellum. The handwriting starts out neat, but becomes scribbly later as the stress of Mort's abilities started to get to him. Butcher's is really bringing his detail game on this chapter. Harry doesn't dive into them right away, he calls a cab of his own so he can study them at home. While he's waiting for it, he considers whether Mort is right, about the barrier. This is the first time we encounter the phrase "power has a purpose", although I'm not actually sure we see it again between here and Cold Days. Harry's intuition is that this "nightmare" is here for a reason, maybe was created for a reason, and that he's unlikely to enjoy finding out what it is.