The Grendel Affair: A SPI Files Novel

by Shearin, Lisa

  I reached the bottom and looked around. I was impressed, too. Impressed and intrigued. The room was twice the size of the mausoleum above it, and the floor, walls, and ceiling were concrete, like a bomb shelter or a bunker. There were sturdy metal shelves containing wooden crates and locked metal cases. Some of the crates smelled like new wood. There was a door at one end. It was steel. Serious industrial steel.

  Ian saw me looking. “Yeah, this is new. Probably within the last few years. From the looks of that door, they didn’t want anyone getting in.”

  “Or anything getting out.”

  “I’m betting one of the other keys on the ring unlocks that door.”

  I looked up at the way we’d come down. “It must. All this couldn’t have been brought here through that hole.”

  Ian continued his examination. “There’s no dust. This place almost qualifies as sterile.”

  Every crate had what looked like brown duct tape over words that had been paint stenciled onto the wood. The same tape was on the same place on every crate—possibly covering the same words. Ian peeled back the tape on one of the crates.

  “Property of U.S. Government.”

  A second and third crate said the same thing.

  “At least none of these crates are big enough to hold the Ark of the Covenant,” I said.

  “Good, because I didn’t bring my fedora and bullwhip,” Ian said, smoothing the tape back into place.

  I spotted a crate that wasn’t big enough to hold the Ark, but it was plenty large enough for a monster head. “How about this one?”

  “Looks like the most likely candidate.” He pulled out what looked like a Swiss Army knife on steroids. One of the blades wasn’t a blade at all, but a thick, flat piece of steel. He stuck it under the corner of the crate.

  I gave it a dubious look. “You’re sure that thing can—”

  Ian responded by popping the wooden corner straight up. “Easy as a bottle cap.”

  Under the obligatory packing peanuts was a wooden box, more like a chest, actually. Really old and really fancy.

  There was a word carved into the lid. At least I assumed it was one word; all of the letters were together.

  “You wouldn’t happen to read ancient whatever, would you?” I asked.

  Ian took out his phone and snapped a quick picture. “Nope. But I know a guy at headquarters who does. Two guys, actually.”

  “Bob and Rob?”

  “That’s them.” He scrolled down a list of numbers and tapped the screen once. “And . . . no signal.” He quickly climbed the ladder and stuck his hand with the phone through the hole and up into the mausoleum. From up there, it probably looked like Thing from The Addams Family was trying to make a crypt-to-headquarters call.

  Ian ended up climbing all the way up into the mausoleum. “There we go. Sending now.” Then he called Yasha and gave him a quick rundown of our situation. About a minute later, he came back down.

  “Going to wait for Bob or open it now?” I asked.

  “Now.”

  There weren’t any locks on the wooden chest, just an iron latch. I wasn’t the only one who stood as far back as I could, while still being able to get a good look at what was inside. I didn’t think standing on tiptoe and raising my eyebrows would help me stand back farther and see higher, but I did it anyway. I couldn’t imagine anything hidden in a crypt with “Property of U.S. Government” stamped on its crate being anything good.

  Ian opened the box.

  We looked inside.

  Holy Mother of God.

  The monster’s head was lying faceup, surrounded by a nest of the same matted and coiled hair that I’d found clutched in Adam Falke’s dead fist. The head was gigantic, the face easily the size of the top of a fifty-five-gallon drum. Its features were vaguely human, partially reptilian, but it was the teeth that I couldn’t look away from. The closest I’d ever seen was while watching Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. The lips had dried and pulled back from a mouthful of teeth that were triangular like a shark’s, but that went to a sharper point. Behind the first row of teeth was an equally large second row, followed by an only slightly smaller but even sharper third row. Supporting the demonic dental work were massive jaws that looked like they could easily bite a man in half. The scent coming off of it was musty like Ollie’s mummies, but there was also a hint of fishiness.

  “It’s the same smell that was in Ollie’s office.”

  Ian nodded. “And the same hair.”

  “Ollie said the arm he had came from this thing,” I said. “If the hair matches what I found with Falke, the claw found in Kanil Ghevari’s body probably does, too.”

  My left brain was working out the logical part of what that meant. My right brain had already figured it out and had started whimpering. This thing’s descendants had gutted and ripped apart Adam Falke and Kanil Ghevari.

  This thing’s descendant had been on the other side of the door from us in Ollie’s office.

  Ian’s jaw tightened. “Let’s see if the boys have anything for us. One word couldn’t take long to look up.” He climbed the ladder and his hand repeated its Thing impersonation. Almost immediately, his phone buzzed with an incoming text.

  “Shit,” Ian swore softly.

  “I take it they knew what the word was, and it wasn’t a very nice one.”

  Ian came down the ladder and showed me the screen. “Said it was Old Danish.”

  I stared in disbelief at the name glowing on the screen.

  Grendel.

  9

  “WHERE’S Beowulf when you need him?” I managed.

  “A name on a box doesn’t mean that this is the actual Grendel,” Ian said. “Or even if there was a real Grendel.”

  “It doesn’t mean it’s not—and that there wasn’t. And whoever sent the boss lady that letter mentioned monsters from literature. According to my high school English teacher, Beowulf is literature, and Grendel most definitely was—or is—a monster.”

  Ian gave me a flat look. “I’m trying to be optimistic here.”

  “My optimism went bye-bye when you opened that lid.”

  I suspected Ian’s had at least taken a brief sabbatical, but since he didn’t say anything else, neither did I.

  “How we going to get it out of here?” I asked.

  “Certainly not the way we came in. Which leaves whatever’s behind Door Number Two back there. It’s wide enough for every crate in here.”

  I threw a wary glance in the door’s direction. “Whoever made this room didn’t want what was behind that door getting in here. And considering what’s in here, that doesn’t say good things about what’s out there.”

  Ian crossed the room and lifted the bar. “Only one way to find out.”

  I had the urge to have my gun out and leveled at that door when it opened, but since Ian didn’t seem to feel the need, I squelched mine. I didn’t want another gun-related screwup today.

  It was a narrow room. Ian’s flashlight showed it to be arched, bricked, and old. Cobwebby old.

  “There’s your cobwebs,” he said. “Happy?”

  “Thrilled.”

  There was a switch on the wall inside the vault next to the door. Ian flipped it. A long line of bare lightbulbs hanging from a single cable stretched as far as I could see.

  It wasn’t a room. It was a tunnel.

  “Interesting,” was all Ian had to say.

  “At least there’s cobwebs,” I said. “It means nothing’s been down here in a long time.”

  “We are under a cemetery,” he replied. “Not everything moves cobwebs.”

  “Funny.”

  “Not funny. Accurate. Not everything we hunt moves cobwebs.”

  I stood absolutely still. “That wasn’t in the company manual.”

  “Not everything is.” He pocketed his
flashlight. “Let’s see where this goes, then I’ll get Yasha and Calvin to help move the head.”

  We left the door open behind us and I counted the paces as we went. It gave me some idea of how long the tunnel was, but it did an even better job of helping me focus on something besides being in a narrow, decrepit tunnel that ran under a nearly two-hundred-year-old cemetery. I walked in the exact center of the tunnel, and if I could have pulled in my shoulders, I would have. The hair on my arms knew without a doubt that there were bodies buried on both sides of us.

  “Are we going away from the cemetery or deeper into it?” I asked.

  “Actually we should be almost out by now.”

  Another fifty-seven steps put us at the end of the tunnel—and in front of another door, if you could call it that. It looked more like a hatch on an old battleship. It was metal, the rust blending in with the surrounding brick wall. Instead of a knob, there was a latch that looked like it’d snap in half if you tried to use it.

  A low rumble shook the walls around us, followed by dust falling from the brick above our heads.

  “Subway,” Ian said. He carefully gripped the latch and turned it. The door opened with a pop and a hiss of air—air that in comparison made the monster head smell like the roses I’d carried around Green-Wood.

  “Dang.” I wrinkled up my nose and tried to breathe through my mouth.

  Ian stopped. Being directly behind him, I had no choice. Then he stepped aside, giving me a view that I could have done without.

  “Looks as bad as it smells,” he said.

  A men’s room.

  At least it used to be. The urinals were still on the walls, but the rest of the space appeared to have been converted to a storage room. It didn’t look like it’d been used for its original purpose for years, but apparently some smells never completely go away.

  Ian noted my confusion. “Not many public restrooms in subway stations anymore.”

  “Too gross?”

  “That and too little funding and too much crime.”

  The other side of the hatchway we’d come through was basically a door-sized section of tiled wall, the grout perfectly aligned with the edges, so that when it was closed, no one would ever know that there even was an opening there.

  Ian was doing an up close and personal examination of the door, lightly rapping on the tiles with his knuckles.

  “What are you doing?”

  “There’s got to be a lock or latch on this side,” Ian said. “I can’t see someone going to all the trouble to put an exit here that they couldn’t get in through as well.”

  A couple more knocks revealed what sounded like a hollow tile. Ian used his fingertips to press around the tile’s outer edge. He found the magic spot, and the tile popped open on silent hinges revealing a keyhole and a small door handle.

  “Clever,” I said. “Think the key that opened the door on the other end will fit?”

  “Don’t see why not.” Ian gave it a try. It was a perfect fit.

  He closed the door in the wall, locked it, and clicked the tile back into place. “That’ll do until we can get back here with Yasha and Calvin to do a pickup.”

  I made my way across the former restroom/present storage room, and pulled on the exit door handle.

  Locked.

  That wasn’t good.

  Then I saw the dead bolt. Ian came up behind me, key ring dangling from his fingers. “We’ve got one more key that has yet to have a lock.”

  I stepped aside to let him try. “Here’s hoping . . .”

  It took a little key wiggling and maneuvering, but the dead bolt reluctantly slid aside. Ian opened the door just enough to see out, and apparently didn’t object to what he saw and pulled it the rest of the way open.

  The subway station was full of people bundled up against the weather topside. Across the platform was an orange-tiled section of wall that said “25th Street.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Ian said. “We’re a block from Green-Wood’s main entrance.” He inclined his head in greeting to a woman with an appalled expression who’d just seen the two of us come out of what had once been a subway men’s room. The station was busy, but no one else even batted an eye—at least the other women didn’t.

  “How convenient,” I said, catching the knowing smirks of several men, whom I proceeded to stare down. “Yet, creepy and disgusting.”

  “There has to be another exit from that tunnel,” Ian said. “There’s no way those crates and cases were hauled through one of Brooklyn’s busiest subway stations and into a locked storage room.”

  Even the most jaded New Yorkers would notice that.

  Ian took out his phone, looked down at it, and blew out his breath in annoyance. “When are they gonna make a phone that can get a signal in a subway?” He crossed the platform to a pay phone, and I stuck close. Ian quickly made the call, and I recognized Yasha’s mobile number. I was standing right next to him and I still could make out only a word or two over all the noise around us.

  “Was he surprised when you told him where we were?” I asked Ian when he’d hung up.

  “Yasha’s not the surprised type.”

  We waited, and it said a lot about Yasha’s creative parking skills that we didn’t have to wait long. He and Calvin came down the stairs into the station carrying tool boxes and wearing a pair of navy coveralls like our agents at Green-Wood had worn, but instead of the cemetery’s logo, the patch on the left side of his chest said “Sarkowski Plumbing.”

  Matching outfits. Cute.

  “Aren’t those the same coveralls our guys were wearing in Green-Wood?” I asked.

  Ian nodded. “We keep coveralls and a selection of company patches in all of our vehicles,” he said. “Velcro. Tear one off, slap another one on. Quick and virtually unquestioned access.”

  “Uh, but the restroom is closed,” I said. “Storage rooms don’t need plumbers.”

  Ian indicated the men’s room door. The sign over the door said Men; there was nothing to indicate it was anything else. “Some are still open; most aren’t, and a lot of the time, they don’t have signs saying otherwise.”

  “Mean trick to play on someone who has to go.”

  “Other than the one we just came out of, have you ever been in a subway bathroom?”

  “No.”

  “Trust me; the mean part would be having to use them.”

  Yasha and Calvin ignored us completely, but as they passed us, Yasha said, “Half block west,” and headed straight for the men’s room. Calvin hung a Closed for Maintenance sign on the door, and both men disappeared inside.

  “What the hell was that?” I asked.

  Ian pressed something into my hand. “Here’s a key to the SUV. Yasha parked half a block west. I want you to get in and lock the doors. We’ll be there within twenty minutes.”

  “You don’t have a uniform.”

  “I will when we come out. Right now, I’m just a guy who needs to take a leak and thinks signs don’t apply to him.”

  “How are you going to haul a monster head in a crate out of there?”

  “Tell anyone who gets in our way that it’s a busted toilet.”

  “That’d stop my questions.”

  “And anyone else’s. Always does.” His expression turned doubly serious. “Go directly to the SUV and don’t stop for anyone.”

  Ian turned on his heel and headed purposefully toward the men’s room, a man on a mission.

  This was one time when I was perfectly fine waiting in the car. I had no desire to go back through a claustrophobic tunnel that went under a cemetery. Also I’d be sharing the backseat with a monster head in a box soon enough; I didn’t feel the need to rush it.

  While sitting would be more than welcome, I’d really rather do it someplace other than an SUV parked in subfreezing temperatures. I hadn’t eaten
since the pre-dawn stale doughnuts at headquarters, so just the thought of food set my mouth to watering. Even Kenji’s wasabi peas would be manna from heaven right now. Note to self: fighting ghouls and running down a little old lady killer with a tractor really takes it out of a girl.

  I went through the turnstile and up the stairs to the street in search of hot food and even hotter coffee. I knew I wouldn’t have to go far to find either one. New Yorkers liked their coffee, and they liked having places to get it close by, regardless of where they happened to be at any given moment in their day or night. Before I even got to the top of the stairs, my nose told me that coffee was close; and where there was coffee, there were baked goods. Since this was Brooklyn, those baked goods were sure to include bagels. Though at this point, I wasn’t going to be picky. I’d eat cardboard if someone smeared cream cheese on it.

  It wasn’t hard to spot the behemoth black SUV. Yasha had parked it almost on top of a pile of snow left at the curb from the latest plowing, and it had one of those magnetic signs on the driver’s side door that said “Sarkowski Plumbing.” Unfortunately it was in the opposite direction from where my nose insisted that there was coffee. The SUV wasn’t going anywhere, but I was making a detour.

  The line at the coffee shop wasn’t long, and soon I was headed back to the pile of snow with the giant SUV perched on top with a mega grande mocha latte in one hand and a hot, whole grain bagel packed with honey walnut cream cheese eagerly clutched in the other.

  I climbed the mini mountain, got into the SUV, locked the doors, and happily hunkered down to do some serious eating, but not before burning my tongue on the nuclear-hot coffee.

  I glanced over at a newsstand and saw it.

  Oh no.

  Today’s issue of the Informer.

  The headline screamed at me and anyone else with working eyeballs and a taste for the bizarre.

  SoHo Sasquatch!

  To make it even worse—if that was remotely possible—there was a photo of the monster in all its grainy glory. Apparently SPI wasn’t the only one with cameras around Ollie’s shop. The resolution wasn’t the best, but it was good enough for a front page, smack-you-in-the-face headline. And if the Informer had it on their front page, it’d be only a matter of time until someone got themselves slaughtered in front of witnesses, any or all of whom could be taking pictures or video and instantly uploading them to Twitter or YouTube. If they hadn’t already . . .