Late Night Partners

by Fennel Steuert

“I’m alive,” Simon said. “Or, you know, something like it. There were some people screaming out there when that quake hit, but right now it’s quiet.”

  “I’m sorry it took me a minute to answer this. Things are weird here, too.”

  “You should definitely get home before dark tonight,” Simon said. “I’ll be in my room, mostly. Lately I’ve been trying to sleep when the sun goes down. You know, like a regular person.”

  Roger shook his head. “Yeah, yeah. Of course. Glad you’re okay. I’ll talk to you later.”

  He moved further down the corridor. Sometimes when he was hoping for a shortcut, he would try a door down a hall that the corridor branched off to. That door was always locked, but on the plus side the walk usually gave Roger’s coffee more time to cool off.

  Roger didn’t try it this day. He hoped to see Doris, who was supposedly very busy sleeping. Eternally busy. It was always just him and Lorraine, looking through old books about what had been the region’s hilly ranges, once upon a time.

  As Roger headed down the slope toward the elevator, the maintenance man was gingerly pushing a garbage can up the slope with wheels. Roger had only seen him a few times – the only other non-stylish black person he’d seen on the building’s premises. As they passed each other, Roger peeked inside the garbage can, and it looked emptier than empty; it looked like a void, but that was sort of the way the dark always looked when one was near-sighted.

  “Hey,” Roger said.

  “Hey, yourself,” the maintenance man said back.

  Roger stopped. He strained his eyes a bit as he looked at the guy, who didn’t seem to blink. “Some weather we’re having, huh? Or well ... the subterranean version.”

  “How is it up there?” the man said.

  “A bit chaotic,” Roger said. He shrugged. “Not as chaotic as it could be.”

  Above them, the florescent light flickered on and off. Roger figured another earthquake might be coming.

  “We should both be going,” Roger said. “This probably isn’t a good place to be when the earth is shaking.”

  “I agree,” said the man, “but it’s always shaking.”

  As Roger continued down the slope, he watched the man take a turn into the hallway with the locked door.

  When Roger got to the elevator, he pressed the button. Then he listened to the wind that seemed to blow through the corridor.

  The elevator beeped. As its door opened, Roger walked ahead and bumped into a pale man in a gray suit who was a little shorter than him. The man had a few inches of white hair that he slicked back, but otherwise looked young. He didn’t look particularly sturdy, but Roger fell backward like he had just walked into a brick wall. The man looked down at him, and with a slight stiffness, extended his hand.

  Roger took it, and the man shook it with a cold grip.

  “It’s better to be able to pick one’s self up,” he said, letting go and decidedly not helping Roger up.

  Roger looked around on the ground; he’d dropped the four-pack holder with the two coffees. The man with white hair had it in his other hand. When Roger got up, the guy handed the four-pack coffee holder over to him.

  “Thanks,” Roger said. “You can keep one of those coffees. You may need something warm a bit more than me.”

  The man looked down at the coffee. “I’m the co-chair of this company, so boss’ orders,” he said, extending it to Roger. “I don’t want anybody here to go wanting.”

  The man moved to the side, ever so slightly, as Roger nodded and made his way around him.

  “Hey,” the man said. Roger turned again, and the elevator door closed behind him. He pressed the button. “You have no idea how many colognes I smell here. What’s your brand? Smells like an older, familiar one.”

  “I don’t wear any,” Roger said.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” the man said, “but you should consider it, if only because they’re proven commodities, designed so that people have an immediate appeal. My co-chair who handles the historical side of our company – you know, all those old books down there – she tends to have these fleeting notions about building up employees who haven’t branded themselves. But everybody needs to find that space where they appeal to the right people. Life is quite lonely without it. Careers don’t go half as far as they should.”

  “Right now I think people should be more worried about earthquakes than their brands,” Roger said. He pushed the button for the elevator again.

  “Soon,” the man said, “there won’t be any more earthquakes.”

  Roger glanced behind him, and for a moment it seemed like the man’s eyes were blood red. But it was only for a split-second. He reached into his pocket for the garlic powder.

  Off in the distance, they both heard a door creak, and the other man, more so than Roger, swished his head in that direction. From the hall that lead to the locked door, the tall, tan woman turned down the corridor, as barefoot as ever. She bumped the man in his shoulder, and he flinched and was slightly pushed aside by it. Smiling now, the pupils of his eyes turned blood red and remained that way. Those red pupils seemed to glow for the effort.

  The woman works for him, Roger thought. Another one of those loose cannons that feed on flesh and can be in the sunlight. She had long black hair and was dressed in a jeans and a blue shirt. Her brown face was stoic. As she approached, she brought with her an odious smell.

  This was it, Roger thought.

  He took the cap off the garlic powder and threw it in her face. She didn’t even blink.

  “Don’t do that again,” she said, grabbing his arm and turning him around. He tried to sidestep her and get his arm back, but she was much stronger than him. She then pressed the button again, and the elevator door opened. When it did, Roger’s only other co-worker in the bibliographical department, Lorraine, walked out.

  “Oh, hey,” she said. “Roger, this is Gesine … Gesine, Roger. I don’t suppose you’ll both join me for a quick trip down this awful corridor, instead of me going by myself. I just want some coffee.”

  “No,” Gesine said. “Here, take this …” She snatched Roger’s coffee and handed it to Lorraine. Then she grabbed Lorraine’s free hand with her own free one and pulled her along with Roger into the elevator.

  Roger turned around in Gesine’s grasp. The white-haired man was still standing several feet away. His eyes had turned back to normal.

  “Hello again, Lorraine,” he said. “We miss you upstairs.”

  “I don’t miss it,” Lorraine called out.

  Still holding on to Roger and Lorraine, Gesine pressed a button with her knuckle. As the door closed and the elevator sank below, she let go of them both. With the elevator descending, flakes of garlic periodically fell from her face.

  Even though she had probably kicked through the floor on his roof, Roger felt more safe with Gesine than he did with the guy in the suit. What had he said about cologne? An older, familiar brand.

  Roger shook his head. Was he working for the thing that drained his great uncle?

  When the elevator door opened to the warehouse-like labyrinth of bookshelves, Doris was standing there before it all, looking pensive and a beat behind the world around her. She looked up at them all as the elevator door opened and they poured out.

  “It’s going to be a long night,” said Doris.

  7

  A Relationship of Convenience

  Colonial #

  A few weeks after her encounter with the servant Argall, Doris found herself alone again under a sliver of moon, sitting on on the slanted roof of a barn. To her, the moon looked much brighter than it would have in her first life, but Henry had been right about one thing: nothing in the night sky could ever drape the world in something as all-encompassing as daylight.

  Doris was sucking at the fresh carcass of another dove when Mab found her.

  “Oh, deary,” the woman said, crawling from the roof’s crest. “That’s a pittance.”

  Pittance or not, Mab’s iri
ses had turned crimson.

  Doris pushed the dove over, then she brought her legs closer to her chest and sort of hugged herself as she looked over the fields to the stable of the town’s largest house.

  Mab tore into the dove’s carcass with her teeth. The moment lasted for about as long as it would take to take a breath, then with a sigh, Mab tossed it aside. “A pittance,” she said again.

  “A pittance is all one needs, more often than not,” Doris said.

  Mab pushed her torso off from the slanted part of the roof and did a handstand. The wood creaked beneath her. Doris thought it was strange – the way she felt lighter, even though it seemed like she was physically heavier than she’d been when she was alive. Beneath her skin, the muscles had hardened more than she would have thought possible.

  Mab craned her head forward, then slowly folded her legs over until they were dangling over the roof’s edge. She pushed off with her hands and managed to snap her torso forward so that she was sitting at its edge.

  “Than why are you not satisfied with those pamphlets?” Mab said. “Why must you want to see the library of those fakers with their ridiculous seances?”

  “How do you know they’re fakers?”

  Mab shrugged. “I don’t remember anything from when I died. Do you?”

  “No, but maybe that’s because we didn’t die … Not exactly.” Doris looked up and sighed. “And anyway, periodicals have nothing about anyone like me, or like us, or all the other things there might be, like God perhaps …”

  Mab reached out and touched her shoulder, for a moment. “It’s okay, deary.”

  Doris sighed. “I do like some of the ones by the abolitionists, though.”

  Mab took back her hand to scratch her head. “It’s talking that makes words matter. It was always held over our heads back home, that some so called gentleman or lady, knew how to read their precious ordinances. And guess who benefited from those ordinances?”

  “The poor?” said Doris. “The weak, frustrated, sweet-hearted fool?”

  Mab laughed, and then Doris, who had not laughed since she was alive (and even then, there were just a few times), smiled.

  “You’ve got such pretty lips,” Mab told her.

  Doris figured whatever beauty Mab saw in her lips was because they were slightly different than what she was used to, or perhaps it was just the blood on them.

  “You’ll find someone else to while away this century with,” Mab said. “Someone stronger. You just need to start looking up.”

  Off in the distance, a carriage was making its way on the lone road to the stable owned by the spiritualists.

  Doris flung herself from the roof. She landed on her palms and heels, then straightened up and dusted herself off. Above her, Mab put her hand in front of her lips.

  Doris wiped the blood from mouth, then she took off for the stable, dashing along the paths in grassy knolls until she came along the row of trees by the road.

  The carriage had just passed her by. Doris’ intention had been to follow it, but she could smell the man with the white hair in the opposite direction. Some clouds obscured the moonlight, and the road became pitch dark. She could smell the man’s fear.

  How was one supposed to casually appear out of nowhere? To do so would mean she’d risk being called a witch, but the man was scared, and Doris knew she could lead him out of the dark, if he would let her.

  She figured it was best to keep walking along the road, like just another weary walker along it. When she found the man, he was standing in the road, looking up for the moonlight to return. His slightly bent silhouette flickered in and out existence with each heartbeat.

  “Hello,” she called out. “Is someone out there? Speak now, sir or madam, and make yourself known.”

  “Y-yes,” the man stammered back. “I work for the Haversmiths. They’re fine people, just down the road … It’s good to hear there’s another soul out here.”

  Doris walked slowly, so that the heartbeat of the man – Argall, she recalled – wasn’t too erratic. On the contrary, it had begun slowing to a calmer pace. She was thirty paces from him.

  “The Haversmiths?” Doris said. “Have we not met before? In front of the home of the businessman Mr. Rhodes?” She stopped a few feet in front of him and rustled the dirt with her boot.

  “Oh …” Argall said. “Yes, I think so … The Negress. What are you doing out here?”

  “I am running an errand for my employer.”

  “At this hour?”

  “Employers ask a lot. And my kind see quite well at night.”

  Argall nodded like one or both of these statements made perfect sense.

  “Would you like me to guide you somewhere?”

  Argall coughed. “Ah, pardon me. It’s this cold air … My employers don’t think I’ve been drumming up interest for their latest bit of dazzle.” He coughed again. “Anyway, you don’t have to guide me anywhere, but it would be good for you, as well, to wait until the clouds pass.”

  Doris nodded. After a moment, she figured she should say as much. “I am nodding.”

  Argall’s subsequent laugh quickly turned into a cough. “They’re making me walk home. But the Negro coachman, he gets to stay up right in his perch.” He scoffed.

  “Perch?” Doris said. “Most of my kind live with someone’s foot on their necks. That makes it hard to reach that high.”

  “Well, this Negro did,” Argall said. “Am I supposed to be lower than him because my back is twisted?”

  Doris closed her eyes and took a breath. With her mind’s eye, she could see a faint version of the poor fool’s heart and the way it pulsed with blood, from one moment to the next. It was in this way that she could feel the pack of horses beating their hooves on the road as they sped their way.

  Move aside, she was going to say. But Argall kept talking.

  “It’s them whose low,” he said. “Putting on their little show, pretending to talk to people’s departed loved ones.”

  Doris’ eyelids fluttered open. “Who is ‘them,’ exactly?”

  “I mean the Haversmiths, of course.”

  When she was alive, it always felt like Doris had a hole inside her – to some degree, the existential space where she was lacking was supposed to be a core principle of her life. The hole had gotten bigger since she died, but there had always been times where it seemed to give the world more depth. This was not one of those times. Another faint hope felt swallowed and gone, leaving behind less potential for some bigger meaning to all of this.

  “What …” Doris shook her head. “What about the myths and legends in their books? Are those fake, too?”

  “Plenty, ‘tis likely.”

  Above them, the clouds shifted as Doris stood there silently. She could feel the world spinning. Wait, she thought, something else was supposed to have been spinning. What had that been?

  Argall screamed and fell backward.

  The emptiness inside had shown in Doris’ eyes, which were blood red.

  “You’re a demon!” Argall yelled, then he scrambled to crawl in the other direction.

  “No,” Doris said feebly. She looked over him and saw the pack of horses quickly rearing down on them. She dove for the side of the road. Argall was caught beneath the hooves of four horses and then the wheels of the carriage.

  When everything had come to a stop, the businessman motioned for the coachman to see what they had run over.

  Holding a lantern, the coachman – a ruddy-faced man with long brown hair – walked over in the road to Argall’s twitching body. Doris watched, tucked away in the foliage, able to hear Argall’s faintly beating heart. Ready to defend herself, Doris’ instincts honed in on the aura of the businessman – but, no, she hoped it would not come to that. Whenever someone moneyed was drained, some unfortunate soul could be blamed for witchcraft and torn apart.

  The coachman stood over Argall, shaking his head. “You should have known better than to be out in the road like this, mate.” With a d
eep sigh, he grabbed Argall by the shoulders and dragged him into the bush.

  Doris could hear his heartbeat getting slower, and leaning her ear against the ground, she heard that other heartbeat again – the one that sometimes drove her mad. It resounded through the ground like a gentle quake.

  “It’s a deer,” the coachman finally yelled out.

  “Well,” said the businessman, “Off to the Haversmiths, then.”

  They left, taking away the light of two lanterns. Doris pulled herself away from the world’s heartbeat. She slowly walked over to Argall and knelt down next to him.

  “I think I can make you a better man,” she said. “Perhaps not a man exactly. But whatever you’ll be, it will be stronger. And better.”

  8

  Night Falls

  Present ^

  Roger was in a chair next to Lorraine’s as she sipped coffee and wrote over a map with a marker. Mostly, Roger’s attention was drawn to the eight-feet-high bookshelves in the warehouse-like room.

  Lit by orange-tinted lights situated in the girder that ran along the ceiling, Doris paced back and forth along the top of a nearby bookshelf.

  Gesine was sitting cross-legged on top of another one of the shelves, looking stoically at either Lorraine or him. But mostly him.

  Eventually Doris walked to the edge of the shelf and dropped the eight feet to the floor. She came to the table and looked over Lorraine’s shoulder. “This isn’t anything new.”

  “No,” Lorraine said. “This would still just be where there was one of a few land formations with a vaguely humanoid shape, but it’s also in the area that the, um, guy I used to work with patted on a map, or lack there of …”

  Roger nodded glumly. “And that’s just about where a humanoid shape’s heart would be.”

  “And also,” said Lorraine, “where that club-gallery owned by Mab is.”

  “In the last year that whole area has been acquired for such places,” Gesine said. “She has more than just the one.”

  Roger’s shoulders jumped. Gesine was a few inches behind him.

  “All right then,” Doris said. “Maybe it’s time to see my oldest acquaintance.”