by Anton Strout
“I bet you wouldn’t.”
“Do I detect something accusatory in your voice, Agent Canderous?” he said. “If so, let’s hear it.”
“Funny,” I said, “I don’t hear you laughing it up and having a grand old time when it’s just you and me back here in the Stacks.”
“That’s because Jane doesn’t do ridiculous, dangerous things,” he said. He bent over and picked up the book, closing it and placing it back on the shelf. He pointed to the title on the spine on the book. “It’s called a ‘Rough Guide’ for a reason, nitwit.”
15
I left Tome, Sweet Tome in a state of complete frustration, without even saying good-bye to Jane. Empty-handed, I stormed out of the bookstore past her and headed back downtown to the Department. I had another option for answers. I’d seen him sitting in the Lovecraft Café a few hours ago.
Godfrey Candella was exactly where I had left him, with his head down in one of his notebooks, scribbling away.
“Busy day?” I asked. Godfrey finished the line he was writing before he looked up.
“Actually,” he said, pushing his horn-rims back into place on the bridge of his nose. “It’s a slow business day. I’m catching up on my records for the Gauntlet.”
“Slow day, huh? I wish someone had told me,” I said, and recounted the story of the dead jogger we’d found in the park as well as our failed chase after his ghost. When I was done, I pulled out the printouts of Cleopatra’s Needle and showed them to Godfrey. He looked through them carefully.
“We should bring these down to the Gauntlet,” he said, standing up. I didn’t move. “Have you ever been?”
I shook my head.
“Come with me,” he said. We headed back through the movie theater and straight to the D.E.A. offices. Past the cubicles and beyond the red velvet curtain that separated the front office from the back, he led me down a set of stairs that I had never noticed before. They went down forever and my knees actually started to hurt from the walk. At the bottom was an office door much older than the ones I was used to upstairs. Godfrey swiped a different colored keycard than the one I had against an electronic plate and the heavy door swung open. Immediately, a wave of musty air hit my face and I coughed.
“It’s a little bit stuffy down here,” he said, giving a small cough of his own, “but you get used to it.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” I said, but followed him anyway . . . down more stairs. These were far older than anything in the building above and were actually carved into the very rock itself. “We’re off the grid, aren’t we?”
Godfrey gave a little laugh. “Yes, I suppose so. The Gauntlet predates the construction of the Department of Extraordinary Affairs by a few hundred years or so.” He pointed up at a line of cables hanging from hooks along the chiseled ceiling. “We’ve slowly been bringing computers into the picture and backup systems for archiving purposes, but it will take years to deal with all the historical data. The team and I are up to the year 1820 right now. Did you know that Benjamin Franklin was a necromancer?”
“I think I read something about that somewhere,” I said.
“Fascinating stuff,” Godfrey said, excited.
We entered a natural cavern lit from high above by electric lights that had been hung from a precariously mounted iron grid. The room itself was full of activity. The trappings of an office were scattered throughout, including some ancient-looking file cabinets that lined the walls and several dozen wooden tables stained with ink from ages gone by. A half dozen of Godfrey’s fellow archivists were busy at several of the desks—writing, filing, and even a few working with computers.
Godfrey pointed to one of the desks with two empty chairs. I walked over to it while he stared at a section containing several of the old filing cabinets.
“Give me a few minutes to pull some records on Cleopatra’s Needle. I think I’ll start with Egypt, Monuments, Central Park, and, on a long shot, Sewing.”
Godfrey disappeared into the darkness of a nearby row of cabinets, leaving me to watch the rest of the Gauntlet in action. All the scurrying around reminded me of that old kids’ game Mouse Trap. Every movement of Godfrey’s coworkers seemed like part of a well-oiled machine. When one got up from a workstation, another took his or her place. One woman’s sole purpose seemed to be working the room and handing books to various employees in a pattern that looked random but definitely had a rhyme and reason all its own.
Several minutes later Godfrey returned with a stack of books and file folders that were piled up to just below his eyes. He let them loose on top of our table and they scattered across it.
“Well, this should be a start,” he said, sitting down next to me. He scooped up several folders and quickly started flipping through file after file, scanning them like lightning. He had a researcher’s prowess that I was pretty sure I could never equal.
After watching Godfrey in action for a bit, I said, “Well?”
“Well,” he said, shaking his head like he was pulling out of a trance. “Like you said Dave Davidson mentioned to you, there are three of these needles. The second is in London and the third in Paris, but all three of them originally hail from the city of Heliopolis in Egypt.”
He paused as his brain accessed another mental file.
“I’m unfamiliar with that city,” he continued. Godfrey pulled out his personal notebook and scribbled down Heliopolis, Egypt. “I’ll have to check it out later.”
He started to zone out again, but I tapped the folder he was holding.
“Is there anything about the markings on the obelisk?” I asked.
“Do you know how to read hieroglyphs, Simon?” Godfrey asked, snapping out of it. I looked to see if he was being a smart-ass, but he was dead serious.
I shook my head no.
“Sorry,” I said. “I took Spanish. They didn’t offer Ancient Egyptian at my high school. Can you imagine?”
Godfrey didn’t even crack a smile.
“The school systems these days,” he said with a shake of his head.
I hoped they had a section on Humor down here. Perhaps I could go find a few books for him.
Godfrey turned back to the file he had opened and scanned the page. “It looks like the monoliths were cut from Aswan quarries circa 1450 B.c. under the orders of Thutmose the Third, but the inscriptions are far more recent. They weren’t added until two hundred years later.”
“By who?” I asked, feeling a little excited now that we were getting somewhere. “Please tell me it was some kind of vampire lord or something, because that would so jive with what I’m chasing.”
Godfrey checked the page and shook his head. “Not unless there’s something seriously paranormal about Ramses the Second that we don’t know about. It’s only in truly bad fantasy books that popular historical figures ever turn out to be supernatural or dabbling in the dark arts.”
He scanned the page with his finger. “Sadly,” he continued, “the monolith needles were erected in celebration of Ramses’s military victories, not to celebrate a dark covenant or anything like that. You know, I’m starting to think this Cleopatra’s Needle might not be as evil as you think it is. After all, I doubt Egypt would have gifted it to America if it was a lightning rod for collecting evil. Don’t you think?”
I couldn’t argue with him.
“You talk sense,” I said. He saw the look on my face and gave my shoulder a collegial pat. It felt awkward and forced, as if Godfrey didn’t often have much contact with other people.
“I can work on the hieroglyphs,” Godfrey said with a spark in his voice, “but that’s going to take a while. It’s also going to take some time to go through all the cross references too, but on the surface I don’t see anything terribly supernatural about this needle of yours. Sorry.”
I stood up and gave him a reciprocal pat on the back. When I was done, Godfrey pulled at his lapels to smooth out his coat where my hand had touched him.
“Well, thanks for trying,” I sa
id.
Without another word, Godfrey shoved his face back into the pile of reading on the table and was once again off in his private mental world. I slowly backed away so as not to disturb him and headed back to the stairs, alone.
I had to figure out how to best utilize what remained of my day. I checked my watch as I climbed back up to the Department’s office level. I could go to the Javits Center, but by the time I got there most of the day on the show floor would be over. Perhaps I could serve the Department better by staying at the office and working on my backlog of paperwork. Having a break from Connor would be nice, too. I’m sure we’d have a jolly old time later staking out Central Park for the jogger’s ghost at the crack of “Oh God” o’clock, but for now, some mindless office work seemed the perfect remedy.
Once I was back at my desk, I started sorting through my mountain of paperwork, looking for anything to fill out in conjunction with the vampire case. There had to be something I could do to help move things along while the office bureaucrats flowed with their molasseslike efficiency. Ever since the Inspectre had secretly put me in charge of the investigation, I had felt like a bossy ass, but at least I had some time alone for now to get some paperwork out of the way.
Not that I was able to get anything started. After looking through the first few inches of paper, I realized I was fresh out of Form SSO—Shufflers, Shamblers, & Others, where the vampire qualified under Other. Filling it out would speed up the Enchancellors, and without it I was screwed. Connor, seasoned pro of pencils and papers, probably had it, though. I snuck over to his desk to snag a few. Connor’s desk was locked this time. I thought back to when I had been looking for the Spidey PEZ Dispenser but found his folder of clippings about me instead. Maybe he thought I might accidentally find it—like I had—and decided to lock it away just in case.
Without being able to check the drawers for the form, I hoped he had some of them in the shuffle of paperwork on top of it. Psychometry was a great tool when it came to playing lost and found.
I sat down at his desk and placed my hands flat across the top of it and paused before throwing my power into it. The electric connection was instantaneous and I set my mind to finding the forms I needed.
The world in my mind’s eye switched to some time yesterday, the only indicator being the slightly smaller piles of paperwork on both of our desks. It was disorienting being Connor, because I was staring across the desk at yesterday Simon filling out the incident report on the party boat massacre. At that moment, that version of me wasn’t paying attention to Connor at all.
Connor, however, was focused on a single sheet of paper, which I assumed was the form I was looking for, but something was wrong. I tried to change my focus to the paper itself . . . only to find it blank. I could feel Connor’s eyes moving. He was definitely reading something on the page, but I couldn’t see it, even though I was staring straight at it.
I threw all of my concentration into it, pressed my power into reading the paper. Something that felt like a sinus headache started to throb, but I pushed even harder in my attempt to read the letter. The world went black.
When I woke up, I found myself lying on the floor, tipped over in Connor’s chair. Luckily, since I had fallen over behind both our desks, I was blocked from the view of anyone who would have been passing down the aisle. The back of my head hurt like crazy, and when I felt it, there was a painful lump just above the base of my skull from where I had hit the floor.
I stood up, shaking worse than I usually did after a psychometric episode. I stumbled over to my desk and fished around in my drawer for a roll of Life Savers. Erring on the side of caution, I grabbed two of them. This wasn’t normal. Usually I felt a little drained from using my power, but it shouldn’t have been this bad.
Someone or something had blocked me from reading Connor’s letter.
16
I headed home nursing the goose egg on the back of my head. I was all prepared for a good sulky walk and then a few hours of sleep before meeting up with Connor at Central Park again, but sadly, what I wanted didn’t seem to matter much to the universe at large. When I parted the curtains of the movie theater, there was Mina, sitting in one of the coffee shop’s comfy chairs, waiting for me. Her back was pressed into one corner of the chair, and her legs were thrown in irreverence over the opposite arm of it, showing off her evil little curves. She was still dressed as if she had come from watching The Matrix one too many times.
“What are you doing here?” I said. I quickly closed the curtain behind me, not really sure what I was trying to hide. The offices were well obscured behind the door at the very back of the theater, so all I really ended up hiding was the movie theater itself. I quickly looked around the coffee shop. At this time of night there weren’t too many people I knew from the D.E.A. in there. More important, I was glad to see that Jane wasn’t there. Her running into Mina right now was the last thing I wanted.
Mina swung her legs off the arm of the chair and crossed them at the ankle as she sank farther back into the cushions, giving a catlike stretch that accentuated every curve of her body. I tried not to notice, but failed miserably.
“You must really like vampires, huh?” she said when she settled down.
I wasn’t following. “I’m sorry . . . ?”
Mina looked at me like I was thick in the head. “I’ve been sitting here for hours,” she said. “You must have sat in there and watched Nosferatu a million times today.”
Right, Nosferatu. It all came clear. For a moment I’d forgotten that Mina didn’t know what I really did for a living, so she assumed I had been sitting in the movie theater all day.
Still, what was she doing here at all?
I sat down across from her and leaned in close, whispering. “Have you been following me, Mina?”
She laughed, a little bit of that old-school crazy lighting up in her eyes. “God, that sounds so stalkery . . .”
“And yet here we are.”
“I didn’t follow you the whole day,” she said, as if that somehow excused following me at all. Her face turned to a mask that was a combination of disgust and disdain.
“Okay, look, yes, I followed you,” she continued, “but I didn’t want to pay to get into the Javits Center, not with all those comic nerds there. They kept approaching me outside of the place, getting their skeevies all over me, asking if I had come as Trinity or some chick from BloodRayne, whatever the hell that is. Creeps. Anyway, I just had to wait you out. I lost you for a few hours after that, but caught up with you again. When you came into this coffee shop, I followed you in, but man, you and your vampires.”
“I’m sorry,” I fired back. “Are you giving me shit over vampires?” I laughed. “Yeah, I’m the one who loves vampires, Mina. Me. Yep. Pot, have you met Kettle?”
I stood up, fuming. “Look,” I said, staring down into her eyes with the darkest, most serious look I could muster. “You can’t follow me like this, Mina. So knock it off.”
I tried to walk away, but she grabbed my sleeve. She tugged it much harder than I thought her capable of, and I fell off balance into the same chair she sat in. Mina wrapped her arms around me to hold me in place, cradling me on her lap. Before I could wriggle free, her voice was in my ear.
“I can follow you, and I will,” she said with commanding sharpness. “You forget. I don’t have a ‘day job’ to go to, and who’d hire an ex-con, anyway? An ex-con, by the way, who ended up in jail in the first place because someone—and I’m not naming names here, Simon—didn’t have my back. I’ve got all the time in the world to follow you around, thanks to that. Until you agree to help me, I’ve got nowhere else to go. So stop hanging out at comic conventions and watching movies all day, and say you’ll do what I’m asking you to. I need to get my hands on The Scream.”
Despite her obvious delight in torturing me, there was also that note of desperation in her voice again.
“Don’t you think need is a little strong, Mina?” I said, trying to twist out
of her hold on me. To anyone watching it might have looked like we were a frisky new couple fooling around. That would turn a few heads around here, since everybody knew I was with Jane. I wanted to break free, but Mina was even stronger than I remembered. “You don’t need that painting; you want it.”
“That’s really none of your concern,” Mina said, finally pushing me away. I slid onto the coffee table and across several open magazines before falling to the floor, but not before slamming my hip bone on one of the corners of the table.
Pain shot down my leg in tiny needles.
“The only thing you should be concerned with,” Mina continued, “is what I’ll do to your precious little Janey if you don’t go along with my plan. Help me out and we part ways, no harm done. I’m out of your life forever.” She stood up, not even bothering to give me a hand from where I was on the floor. The look on her face was one of disbelief as she shook her head at me. “God, how can you stand it? Doesn’t living an upright life just drive you nuts? Going shopping instead of taking what you want, having a happy little girlfriend, going to the movies all day? You used to do bold, beautiful, brash things. You used to be somebody worth knowing. If I lived your life now, I’d die of boredom.”