The Eternity Project

by Dean Crawford

  Donovan glanced at a nearby staircase. ‘Any staff not yet accounted for?’

  ‘Just one,’ the guard replied, ‘a junior clerk on the fourth floor. I heard screaming coming from somewhere up there.’

  Donovan nodded. ‘Stay here and cover the main doors. We’ll check it out.’

  Ethan watched as the guard jogged toward the main entrance. Lopez followed Karina and the team up the stairwell, their boots tapping softly as they hurried through the building.

  ‘They could have moved to another floor,’ Lopez whispered urgently to Karina. ‘Your team isn’t nearly large enough to cover the entire building.’

  ‘The missing clerk is our priority now,’ Donovan rumbled back. ‘If they’ve taken a hostage and the kidnappers make a run for it, they’ll still have to get past the guard downstairs. They won’t get far and we’ll have uniformed support outside within minutes.’

  Lopez glanced at Ethan, who shook his head fractionally. There was no point in arguing with Donovan right here on the stairwell of a building that may be harboring an armed criminal.

  Slowly, the team gathered in front of a door that led onto the fourth floor. Donovan gripped the handle as Glen Ryan, his rifle held before him, took up position. With practiced efficiency Donovan pulled the door open and Glen rushed silently through with Jackson right behind him. Karina followed them both as Donovan slipped into the corridor.

  Ethan grabbed the door with one hand, waited five seconds to give the team time to get clear, and then followed them in.

  The corridor was black as night, the only illumination coming from adjoining rooms with glass windows in the doors that allowed the faint glow of streetlights to permeate the gloom. Ethan could see the team making their way down the corridor, checking through the window of each room, before opening the doors and clearing each space, moving slowly and silently across the floor.

  Ethan moved along behind them, nipping forwards as they split into two groups, each checking rooms on opposite sides of the corridor. He hurried forward with Lopez alongside him and rapidly checked the windows of the remaining rooms.

  ‘Bingo,’ he whispered, waving the team forward as they emerged from a pair of rooms two rows back. He pointed to the study room.

  Donovan took the lead and the team silently entered the study, the under-slung flashlights on their rifle barrels sweeping the darkened room.

  ‘Clear,’ Jackson hissed.

  ‘Struggle?’ Karina whispered, looking at the files and sheets of paper scattered across the entire room.

  Ethan shook his head in confusion, as did Donovan. If there had been a struggle, he would have expected to see files dropped in one particular area as the person holding them, presumably the clerk, had dropped them in favour of defending herself. But the papers, thousands of them, coated the entire floor like a sea of trash.

  Donovan backed out and headed further down the corridor, with Karina alongside him. Lopez shadowed her closely as she raised her rifle, the flashlight beam slicing into the darkness ahead and reflecting off something metallic at the far end.

  Ethan, just behind the team, hesitated as something odd began nagging at him. A strange sensation washed across his skin, as though static electricity was flaring off the walls and lifting the fine hairs on his body. He felt his ears twitch involuntarily, as though he were trying to listen to something behind him as a powerful compulsion to look over his shoulder swept through his awareness.

  The corridor behind them was pitch-black, a mysterious void. Ethan was about to whisper a warning to the team when Karina’s voice called out huskily.

  ‘I can see someone.’

  The flashlight beams caught on a face at the end of the corridor, somebody kneeling on the ground. Karina broke into a run, followed quickly by the rest of her team as they dashed to the elevator, the white beams of light dancing and reflecting off the doors.

  Karina aimed her beam straight at a human face.

  ‘Jesus!’

  Karina staggered to a halt and collapsed backwards, landing hard on her butt on the carpeted floor of the corridor as her flashlight illuminated a face crushed between the warped and mangled elevator doors.

  The features of a once-pretty blonde girl of maybe twenty-five were twisted sideways, her jaw shattered and yanked up across the side of her face. One of her eyeballs had burst inside her fractured skull, an arm dangling down to brush the floor beneath her.

  ‘Goddamn,’ Donovan said.

  Glen Ryan played his beam over the elevator. The shaft itself was clearly visible around the elevator, which dangled from its cables within the shaft instead of hugging the walls. The entire car was crushed like a packet of potato chips, the metal warped and crunched as though hammered in a giant’s forge.

  ‘What happened here?’ Karina gasped.

  Ethan looked at the shattered hulk of the elevator. ‘That must have been what the guard thought was gunshots,’ he guessed. ‘Somebody must have taken power tools to it.’

  ‘Question is, who?’ Lopez said, ‘And where are they?’

  Ethan felt again the overpowering desire to look over his shoulder. On impulse, he whirled, staring into the deep blackness behind them. Karina’s flashlight beam spun to slice into the corridor, and, as Ethan glanced at it, he saw a galaxy of dust motes suddenly whorl away from them as though somebody had sprinted past.

  ‘There’s somebody behind us,’ Ethan said.

  26

  The team’s flashlights all spun and pierced the gloom back down the corridor. Ethan saw Karina point at the whirling cloud of dust motes.

  ‘There,’ she said.

  Donovan aimed his rifle down the corridor, but the beam picked up nothing except the silent and empty spaces behind them.

  ‘There’s nobody there,’ he said. ‘We don’t have time for this crap.’ He turned back to the ruined elevator and then looked at Jackson. ‘Call for back-up to sweep the rest of the building, and get forensics up here as soon as you can. We need this area sealed off until we can figure out what the hell happened.’

  Ethan heard Donovan’s words but they trailed off in his mind as he edged back down the corridor. Something in the air around him seemed off, a tension that charged his senses. He glimpsed Lopez alongside him, walking slowly and also gazing into the darkness. In the sweeping beams from the flashlights behind, he saw thin slivers of Lopez’s long black hair dancing upward.

  Ethan reached out and touched her shoulder.

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘Static electricity,’ Karina said from behind them. Ethan looked at her as she followed them, her flashlight glowing through Lopez’s hair. ‘It’s making your hair stand on end.’

  Ethan searched the gloomy shadows. ‘You can smell the charge,’ he said, sensing a stale note on the air around him.

  Karina gripped her rifle tighter. ‘What the hell is going on here?’

  Ethan shook his head as they crept forwards, sensing but not seeing. On impulse, he closed his eyes and stopped moving, just letting the strange, charged air settle around him. The darkness seethed and he felt something surge as though a live current had danced past high on his left. A brush of bitterly cold air seemed to suck the life out of the atmosphere.

  Ethan’s eyes flicked open as he turned and stared up into the corridor.

  ‘It’s up there,’ Lopez whispered, looking in the same direction.

  Ethan took a pace closer, the blackness as deep and featureless as anything he had ever known, and reached out.

  A crash reverberated through the corridor as the crushed elevator suddenly tilted wildly and smashed into the shaft wall. Ethan’s heart slammed inside his chest as he whirled to see the ruined car suddenly vanish from sight as it plunged downward through the shaft with a screech of metal scraping along metal. The elevator crashed into the basement, the sound of battered metal echoing up and down the shaft and corridor.

  Ethan saw Neville Jackson staring at the shaft in disbelief.

  ‘The cables we
re already severed,’ he said.

  ‘It must’ve been wedged in there somehow,’ Glen guessed.

  Ethan had only a moment to wonder how that was possible when the ceiling lights suddenly flickered into life and filled the corridor with blessed, warm light. Ethan looked around them as a sudden weight seemed to lift from his shoulders and the bitter chill vanished. He couldn’t explain it even to himself, but a tension vanished from his chest as though somehow with the return of the light it had become easier to breathe. He looked at Lopez, whose dark eyes were shadowed with concern.

  ‘Tell me I was just imagining all of that,’ she said.

  Ethan shook his head slowly and glanced at Karina. ‘You, too?’

  Karina nodded. ‘Felt like somebody was standing on my shoulders. What’s going on?’

  Ethan turned, as Donovan, Jackson and Glen Ryan strode past, heading for the stairwell. ‘Follow me, Karina!’ Donovan shouted.

  Ethan watched as Karina dutifully dashed away, then turned to Lopez.

  ‘Something else is going on here, Nicola,’ he said. ‘I didn’t imagine what I just saw and neither did you.’

  Lopez shook her head as she gazed around the corridor. ‘Damn straight. It’s gone now, but that wasn’t like anything I’ve felt since El Museo des las Momias back in Guanajuato.’

  ‘The what?’ Ethan asked.

  ‘It’s a museum back home in Mexico,’ she explained. ‘Whole bunch of bodies interred a couple of centuries ago in a cemetery where the families had to pay a tax to keep the bodies there. Nobody really paid, so the bodies were dug up. Some of them were mummified and were put in the museum. Point is, nobody goes in there, man, it’s like a freak show. Disembodied voices, things moving about, you name it.’

  Ethan felt a chill tingle across his shoulders.

  ‘Your hair stand on end there, too?’

  ‘No,’ Lopez said with a slight smile, ‘but myself and a few friends snuck in there one night and we snuck out again pretty damned quick. There are some things you don’t mess with, and whatever was in this corridor felt just like that museum, Ethan, something that you want to get away from.’

  Ethan turned as the lights of vehicles flooding into the plaza outside flashed against the rain-soaked windows.

  ‘There’s only one person that connects all of this,’ he said. ‘Karina.’

  Lopez’s eyes flared in alarm. ‘Are you kidding?’

  ‘No,’ Ethan insisted. ‘Think about what happened at her apartment, and now this. I’ve read before that paranormal phenomena often surround an individual. What if she’s the cause?’

  ‘You think that Karina squashed an elevator car,’ Lopez said flatly. ‘And tore a guy in half ?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ethan replied. ‘I just know that we’re going to need help with this one.’

  ‘Jarvis?’ Lopez asked as they walked toward the stairwell.

  ‘Better than nothing,’ Ethan replied. ‘He’ll be able to track down somebody who knows more about this than we do.’

  ‘The Ghostbusters?’ Lopez suggested with a twinkle in her eye. ‘Maybe we can get that team off the television down here: Ghost Hunters, isn’t it?’

  Ethan grinned as he walked onto the stairwell, and then the grin vanished. Lopez almost walked into him as he froze but, even as she opened her mouth to remonstrate, she too fell silent.

  The rain outside had stopped, the window opposite them streaked with a million droplets of water that clung to the surface of the glass and glowed in the light from the nearby street like a galaxy.

  In the random raindrops was cast a pair of gigantic, symmetrical vortexes, as though Ethan were staring at water swirling down two opposing plugholes. The vortexes were slowly vanishing as the raindrops trickled down the window, giving up their fight against gravity. Ethan couldn’t help the impression forming in his mind that something had passed through the glass.

  Lopez stared at the immense pattern outside the window. ‘Okay, I take it back. The Ghost Hunters would run like hell from this. We call Jarvis.’

  Ethan nodded and continued on down the stairwell and through the rotunda. They walked through to the elevators, where a team of forensics and CSI officers were already swarming around the crushed elevator and the gruesome corpse pinned within it.

  Beside them, being questioned by two cops, was the elderly guard who had called them in. Ethan made his way over, and, as the two cops moved off, he managed to grab the guard. The man was in his sixties and in reasonably good shape for his age. But his face seemed pale and his eyes glazed, as though he’d recently awoke from a deep but unsatisfying sleep.

  ‘NYPD,’ Ethan said, lying as though he did it every day. ‘You got a moment?’

  ‘It look like I’m going anywhere?’ the guard muttered. ‘I just finished talking to your guys, ask them.’

  Lopez stepped in. ‘Sorry, it’s a double investigation, but we won’t be more than a minute or two. You called the police after hearing gunshots, right?’

  ‘Sounded like gunshots,’ the guard replied. ‘Then a whole lot of screaming. Like I said, I wasn’t going up there with nothing more than my service pistol.’

  Ethan nodded. ‘I don’t blame you. Thing is, we didn’t find any evidence of weapons discharge up there.’

  The guard sighed. ‘Man, I heard a lot of damned loud bangs that I took to be gunshots. There ain’t much else it could have been.’

  Ethan looked at the elevator shaft down the corridor nearby and at the corridor that led to the stairwell, all the way up to the fourth floor.

  ‘You really think that you could hear gunshots from the fourth floor?’ he asked.

  The guard glanced at the corridor and seemed to hesitate. ‘Well, I guess, maybe.’

  ‘But you said that the noises were loud,’ Lopez pointed out. ‘Damned loud, you said.’

  The guard nodded but seemed confused. ‘What are you saying?’

  Ethan watched as the crushed and torn elevator car was hauled from the shaft by the police using canvass straps.

  ‘You didn’t hear gunshots,’ he said finally. ‘You heard the elevator car cables being snapped.’

  The guard frowned and shook his head. ‘Man, that thing only just came crashing down. How the hell could the cables have snapped and the safety devices failed all at the same time?’

  Lopez looked at the guard. ‘You tell us how a half-tonne elevator car can get crushed like a soda can without industrial power tools, we’ll tell you how it came crashing down. Deal?’

  ‘You notice anything strange happening while all that was going on?’ Ethan asked.

  ‘Strange how?’

  ‘Odd,’ Ethan pressed. ‘You said there were electrical disturbances, things like that?’

  ‘Sure,’ the guard replied without hesitation, ‘was bugging me for a few minutes before I heard the bangs. Lights were goin’ on and off, phone lines messing around, that kind of thing. I figured it was the gales outside causing it.’

  Ethan nodded and decided not to push any further. ‘Thanks for your time.’

  Lopez joined him as they walked toward the exit. ‘Well?’

  Ethan fished his cellphone from his pocket.

  ‘We get Jarvis in on this,’ he said.

  ‘That’s my boy,’ Lopez said. ‘Leaves us to find your little Miss Mysterious, right?’

  Ethan stepped out of the lobby and onto the steps outside, the wind tugging at his hair and carrying with it a fine dusting of moisture. He could see veils of drizzle flashing past the streetlights as he lifted the cell to his ear.

  And then he saw the man with the camera, standing this time further down the street, watching the police swarming around the entrance to the court. For a brief instant, his body primed itself automatically for flight but somehow he restrained himself and engaged his brain.

  ‘Don’t look or move,’ he said to Lopez. ‘Ten o’clock, fifty yards out.’

  Lopez pulled her collar up about her neck against the wind and rubbed her hands to
gether as she surveyed the street in a single sweep and turned to Ethan. ‘Got ’em. How do you want to do it?’

  Ethan dialed a number and put his cell to his ear.

  ‘With help,’ he said. ‘Let’s see if we can get them to make a mistake this time.’

  27

  5TH PRECINCT POLICE DEPARTMENT, NEW YORK CITY

  The dawn labored its way across the city horizon as Ethan and Lopez leaned against railings outside the 5th Precinct station in Chinatown, the street still enshrouded in shadows. The air was cold and misty, only a few cars and delivery trucks cruising the streets this early in the morning.

  Karina Thorne strode out of the station doors and jogged down the steps to meet them.

  ‘What’s the story?’ Lopez asked her friend.

  Karina rubbed her temples with one hand. ‘I don’t even know where to start,’ she replied. ‘Forensics finished with the elevator car. Fingerprints all over the inside of course, but not a single fingerprint on the outside, except a small number of residuals already matched to personnel from the company that services the elevator cars. All of them have perfect alibis.’

  ‘You’re saying nobody laid a hand on that car?’ Ethan asked. ‘What about the body of the woman?’

  ‘Assistant clerk of the court,’ Karina replied. ‘Maria Coltrane, twenty-three years old. No previous convictions, born and raised here in New York. Forensics is done with her and so far there’s nothing to show for it, but we’ll have to wait until the autopsy’s complete, which could take another day.’

  ‘I don’t think they’ll find anything new,’ Lopez said. ‘She was crushed to death. It’s what did the crushing that interests us.’

  Karina looked at them furtively. ‘This isn’t right, Nicola. Something’s going on here and it’s bigger than us. Donovan and the rest of the team aren’t listening.’

  Ethan moved closer to Karina. ‘Did the forensics guys say what happened to the elevator car cables?’

  Karina nodded. ‘They were ripped apart, not cut by a machine. One guy told us that the weight of the car isn’t nearly enough to break those cables. And as for the car being crushed, nobody’s got an answer.’