by Nancy Holder
“Hey!” she yelled at him. “No graffiti! I already told you!”
He looked at her and shrugged. “I’m just trying to help out.” He pointed to his latest masterpiece, the words No Graffiti. Spelled correctly this time.
Extra credit for that.
“Oh, I get it. You’re just being a nice guy, huh?” The tone of her voice said, “You are not fooling me one bit.” She craned her neck, checking out the otherwise deserted platform, and then stared into the inky darkness at the far end of it. No sign of Mr. Crazy Man.
“Just get out of here before I call this in,” she told Tubesy, and patted her radio like a sidearm for emphasis.
He sauntered off toward the stairs, aerosol can in hand, spray painting the floor as he went.
“Oh, come on, man!” Patty groused, exasperated by the younger generation. Shaking her head and blowing out a puff of air between her lips, she started walking toward the end of the platform.
As she approached it, an odd flash of light pulsed from down the tunnel, and then was gone. Patty shined her flashlight in that direction and called out a hopeful, “Hello?”
Was the blast of light from a shower of sparks? A frightening vision of Mr. Crazy Man accidentally touching the third rail blazed through her mind. Although she had never seen a crispy critter in person, there were pictures in the history books she’d read. There was no more arcing, if that’s what the flash was from. Either it was nothing or it was something, and if it was something it wasn’t moving. She walked down the steps at the end of the platform and entered the tunnel. She played the light beam over the track a few feet ahead and on the walls, which were decorated with pipes and conduit—everything was grimy black. She wasn’t too concerned about the rats—they were afraid of light and people—but she didn’t want to go in so far that she couldn’t get back out when the next train slid around the distant corner. There were emergency niches spaced along the walls a person could duck into to avoid being hit, but they were filthy with grease and soot, and she wasn’t sure they were of sufficient size to keep a large woman such as herself from getting clipped. She wasn’t about to back into one to test the fit, either.
Patty played the beam deeper in the tunnel. Mr. Crazy Man was nowhere to be seen, not standing, not curled up on the death rail in a fetal position. But something else caught her eye, something strange and definitely out of place. Attached to a pipe on the wall, it was round like a pie pan and thick like a Bundt pan, and it looked to be made of brass. There were things attached that looked like gauges and canisters. Oh, and cylinders and coiled wires. The top was domed, and it was pulsating.
Her blood ran cold. First thing she thought was: bomb. But looking closer, she realized it was some kind of electronic device, decidedly homemade and evidently not all that well put together. Sparks were shooting out of it like it had a short. She decided to take a closer look before calling it in as a suspicious package. When she pointed her light at the ground so she could see where she was stepping, she noticed something even weirder—a glowing wave of energy flowed from the device. She’d never seen anything like it.
“What the…?”
Suddenly she had serious second thoughts about it not being a bomb. If it was, she realized she was already so close she couldn’t get away if it went off. Or maybe it was intended to disrupt the electronic signals in the trains? Feeling like she had nothing to lose at this point, she moved even closer, and as she did she became aware of another glowing object, this one much bigger, not attached to anything, and moving on its own.
Squinting hard, she saw it was a man—a glowing man, walking away from her down the tunnel. He was freakishly tall and thin, and he was wearing a black-and-white-striped prison uniform. From her copious reading, Patty knew that New York State had abolished that style in 1904. He had a sparking metal object on top of his head. It looked like the skullcap placed on a condemned prisoner’s head during an old-time electrocution.
From what she’d gleaned, they hadn’t worked very well. Was the guy an escapee from some off-Broadway show? What the heck was going on?
* * *
It worked!
As Rowan watched from the deep shadows of the subway tunnel, he could barely contain his elation. The prototype worked! He had succeeded in drawing forth and freeing one of the long imprisoned—and so became his master in the present malaise and the eternal kingdom to come.
Rowan wanted to rush out and claim his first prize, but had to hang back because the happy laborer from the ticket booth would see him. Thus far, he had not taken the opportunity to send a living soul across the vast barrier to the land of the dead. No, his armies would do that for him, come the dawn of resurrection day—
He couldn’t figure out why the laborer was spending so much time snooping in the tunnel. Didn’t she have more important duties to attend to? Filing her nails? Talking on her cell phone? The device had withstood its first field test, but he didn’t want to overtax it. He was very concerned about the sparks. Perhaps a contact had been jarred loose when it flared and came online? The harmonic vibration of the waveform could be causing an intermittent short circuit. He needed to examine it and make the necessary repairs before further damage was done, but he couldn’t move from hiding until she was gone. He shifted his weight impatiently.
The device began to hum, and the hum grew louder and louder; he could hear it clearly from down the tunnel. Then without warning, it exploded in a shower of sparks. Pieces of his work of genius flew in all directions. Rowan watched in horror as they ricocheted off the walls and spanged against the metal rails. It couldn’t have been just a short. The power conversion must have been off; or the charger had been too powerful, or too weak, which allowed backwash from the other side to enter the system. He had to collect the pieces to learn what had gone awry. But how could he manage it with that stupid cow nosing around? Why hadn’t the shrapnel cut her down?
Must I kill her? If so, she brings it on herself.
* * *
The explosion caught Patty by surprise. In the millisecond between the bang and the stinging spray of fragments, she was sure she was dead. She jumped, but after the fact, and to no effect. There was some smoke and it made the tunnel smell even worse, though she would never have thought that possible. She shined her flashlight at the tall man in the costume who was still calmly walking away as if nothing had happened. Had he set off the explosion with some kind of remote detonator? Had he planted more of those things? Should she call the cops and get the heck out of there? She knew if she turned her back on him, they might never find him again in the labyrinth of tunnels.
It was all down to her. It didn’t matter that she was an unarmed ticket seller with a fantastic vocabulary. Hers were the only eyes and ears on the glow-in-the-dark weirdo.
“Hey! You can’t go down there,” she shouted at him.
He stopped. She knew that was the point, but now she wasn’t sure what to do with—
She gaped as she looked down at his feet. They were not touching the ground. He is hanging in the air like a … no, he can’t be … She couldn’t think straight. A ghost. A mother-flippin’ ghost.
In no apparent hurry, the floating man turned and seemed to study her intently. She stood her ground and studied him right back. His prominent teeth were clenched tight, mouth and cheeks frozen as if the electricity was still flowing through the cap on his head, and his eyes burned with malevolence; everything about him screamed evildoer, evildoer. What he’d done to rate a seat on Old Sparky was a mystery, but she was certain he’d earned every single volt. If he drifted toward her, oh god, if he got anywhere near her, she was going to have a heart attack. She had never seen anything so horrible.
Then he locked on to her gaze and smiled like a hungry wolf.
Which set a new benchmark in horrible.
She gasped a quick breath and shouted at him: “Go wherever you want. They don’t pay me enough for this.”
Dropping her flashlight on the track, Patty ran
for her life.
10
A couple of days had passed. Erin squinted up at the bright sunshine, feeling the warmth on her face. It was another glorious autumn day, and the leaves were even more splendid. The world was filled with hope.
And so was their rental agent. “I found a fantastic spot for your business,” she gushed.
Erin had to agree. Most definitely. She, Abby, and Holtzmann stood on the sidewalk in front of a gorgeous firehouse conversion. Erin hadn’t realized there was even such a thing, but at first glance she knew it was perfect for them, with its large double doors and towering cathedral ceilings. They could double, triple, maybe quintuple the volume of random parts, groundbreaking inventions, and ghost-catching paraphernalia they kept on the premises. There would be room for the isolation chambers vital for equipment testing and refinements. From the outside, the building actually sparkled, wood gleamed, brass fittings shone.
“This firehouse was converted to a loft in 2010,” the rental agent told them. The merry glint in her eyes made Erin think she was already planning how to spend her commission on the deal.
Abby and Holtzmann craned their necks to take in the sizable structure.
“Wow,” Holtzmann breathed, and Abby cried, “Yes!”
When the agent opened the front doors, the two of them ran inside together like excited little girls. Erin watched as Abby bounced around the cavernous room like a supercharged particle. Because she held the purse strings by default, she felt she had to maintain a façade of reserve. Sheesh, someone did.
“Look at that floor-to-ceiling height for equipment!” Abby crowed. “Okay, we’ll put the accelerator over there…”
I feel so empowered by my savings, Erin thought with no small bit of pride. She’d socked away as much of her Columbia salary as she could—but living in Manhattan as a single person was ridiculously expensive. And she made about half what a tenured professor did—she felt a sudden twinge recalling that fact. Without hesitation, Erin turned to the agent and said, “We’ll take it.”
“Great,” the woman said, giving her a big smile. “The rent is twenty-one thousand dollars a month.”
“Fuck you,” Erin blurted. Her sense of empowerment vanished as she realized her life savings translated into a mere sixty-four days of sumptuous firehouse living.
The agent blinked at her in astonishment. “Excuse me?”
Erin regrouped. “I’m sorry. That just came out.” Then she winced. “That’s the monthly rent? No one could afford that. Why are you even showing us this?” To make us suffer?
The agent shrugged. “You gave me no parameters. All your friend said was you needed a place to ‘explore the unknown.’”
Erin did not miss the sarcasm in the woman’s delivery. She said, “Well, help us explore frugally, okay?”
And you tell them we can’t stay here, she thought, looking on as Holtzmann and Abby gleefully danced and cavorted.
* * *
The real estate agent’s Operation HQ reboot was nothing like the firehouse loft. It wasn’t converted. In fact, it was condemned—a run-down, two-story, stand-alone Chinese restaurant in a part of Chinatown that made Erin clutch her purse in a death grip and mutter, “Are you sure you got the address right? Maybe we should rethink this.”
But street numbers did not lie.
Gone was the firehouse exuberance. Grim faced and silent, they filed into the dim stairway and climbed to the second floor. This was all they could afford: a wretchedly dilapidated restaurant dining room, mess and disrepair rampant. The Chinese fittings on the doors, lamps, and skylight were dusty and shopworn. The green tiled order window was cobwebbed. The red-and-white floor was sticky. That combined with Abby’s and Holtzmann’s overflowing boxes of assorted junk made Erin feel like she was breaking out in hives. She was allergic to chaos—at least, that was the theory.
A little physics humor there, to attempt to lighten the revulsion.
It failed miserably. Her allergic reaction just as easily could have been from glue residue on the peeling wallpaper or the ghosts of smoked tea ducks. The place was really gross. She was afraid to sit down or stand, for that matter.
When she looked over at the doorway, she was slammed by a wave of déjà vu. Abby was getting into it with the same Chinese deliveryman Erin had encountered on her first visit to the Kenneth T. Higgins Institute. His name was Benny, and apparently he had been delivering Abby’s Chinese food for years, and pissing her off for just as long. Why she hadn’t just picked another restaurant from the hundreds available was a puzzle too complex for Erin to unravel. As she listened in on the conversation she realized that by a strange twist of fate, they had Benny and his extended family to thank for the state of their new headquarters—having abandoned the restaurant’s upstairs dining room as a lost cause, the family had kept open the ground floor, take-out kitchen. Abby appeared as frustrated and confrontational as ever with the delivery guy.
“How does it take you an hour to walk up a flight of stairs?” Abby flung at him. “I move above you and you still can’t help me out?”
Benny didn’t answer, only watched as she pulled her carton of soup out of the bag and opened the lid. She looked first at it, and then at him. His face was a mask of disinterest.
“This is just broth and one shrimp,” she complained. “That’s not soup. That’s a pet.”
Behind her, Holtzmann plugged in her boom box and quickly got to work. She had donned a hazmat suit and her blond hair was piled atop her head. The equipment she was in such a hurry to test was sensitive and expensive, and Holtzmann was taking all reasonable precautions—by dancing to “Rhythm of the Night” by DeBarge with a small blowtorch in each hand, firing them toward the ceiling like six-shooters. As she twisted and dipped to the driving beat, one of the torches accidently swept over a paper towel dispenser and it immediately burst into flames.
Erin wildly jabbed her fingers at the fire that threatened to crawl up the flocked red wallpaper. What with the layers of ancient grease that had been allowed to congeal on every surface, the room was a fireball awaiting ignition. Unruffled, Holtzmann winked at her and danced over to the extinguisher. Busting what was by far her best move, she reverse-grooved back to the flaming dispenser, took a moment for one last spin, and with a whoosh of retardant put an end to the danger.
Jeez, Erin thought. Everything was a joke to Holtzmann—she was like a continuously charged positive ion. Erin had occasionally wondered about the “lab experiment” that had blocked her acceptance at CERN and the man whose finger had miraculously moved. That morning Holtzmann had bought him a get-well-soon card and scrawled “Happy Anniversary!” above her signature. What was that all about?
After the unrepentant Benny left, Abby’s ire evaporated. She put down her soup and carried a sheaf of brightly colored paper over to Erin.
“Okay,” Abby said, “I’ve got a Web site up. And I’ve been passing out these flyers all over town. Draw in some business.”
Business. The private sector. Money exchanged for goods or services provided, not cajoled out of foundations with grant proposals. It was a brave new world.
Erin took the flyer Abby shoved at her. Their phone number and address was printed on it under a banner headline: “IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING!”
Erin hesitated. Then she said, “‘If you see something, say something’?” That’s the antiterrorism logline.”
Abby sighed. “I thought that sounded familiar. At least we now know why people keep calling to report suspicious bags. Dang it!”
She snatched back the flyer and marched away, shaking her head.
Maybe she was hungry? Erin thought. She might think more clearly with some shrimp—correction, a shrimp—in her stomach.
Erin looked around the room, unsure what to do with herself. Abby and Holtzmann were simply continuing with what they’d been previously funded to do. They were still being funded to do the same thing. The only thing different was that Erin was now the funder. She didn�
�t really have a place in the new order of things. She supposed it was up to her to make one. Taking in the debris and disarray and general filth that surrounded her, she knew she could always start tidying it up, but, blech … a PhD in physics from MIT (she had transferred from Princeton) reduced to cleaning lady? Besides, from the look of it the job could take months. The sterilization alone …
A knock on the door broke her train of thought. As Erin turned, an insanely buff and handsome man opened it and walked across the threshold. He was tall, with exquisitely styled blond hair, and blue eyes framed with lashes. His face was a study in angles—high cheekbones, square jaw, hollows in his cheeks—and he had that sought-after man-triangle physique: broad shoulders, narrow waist, nonexistent hips. He was so impossibly stunning that for a few microseconds Erin was actually afraid that he might be another day-walking ghost, about to turn into a demon and barf ectoplasm all over her. Then as her pleasure centers became drenched with the sheer delight of his presence, her mind emptied of thought as if it had been flushed.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I’m here about the receptionist job?”
What Erin heard was this:
Nothing.
His amazing lips moved, but no sound registered in her brain. All she could do was stare at him.
He bent down and gently said, “Hello?”
His voice broke through her endorphin haze. She realized he had an accent, Australian, she guessed. And suddenly of all the accents in the world, hands down that was the one she loved most. If he asked her to do anything in that soft voice, she would have done it without a moment’s hesitation. What she said in response to his one-word question was again: nothing.
And then he repeated himself a bit more forcefully. “Hello?”
His gaze was hypnotic, but the shift in tone penetrated her consciousness and broke the spell. She said, “Of course. Let’s go to the conference room.”
Just then, Abby popped her head in.
“Are you Kevin?” she asked the man. “Fantastic. We spoke on the phone. Follow me.”