by Anton Strout
“Aren’t you a regular albino Martha Stewart!” she said and attempted to touch my face with the palm of her hand. I felt a mild sensation, like the shock from shag carpeting. This time, however, the small burst of energy wasn’t the same as before. This one felt mildly pleasurable and far less jarring. I let the moment stretch out as long as I could before I felt self-conscious. I stood and moved toward the door.
“I should probably show you your room now,” I said. “Your right room, that is.”
I laughed, hating how forced it sounded. I put on my best stern face and pointed my finger. “You follow me this time.”
I felt like a total dork. Why was I rambling around her? I am not falling for her, I told myself. Dead girl walking.
As I debated the finer points of what branch of necroeroticism this would fall under, I locked the door behind us. I pocketed the keys as I felt a crackle of electricity on my arm. Irene’s hand was on it, sending another shiver through my body, one I was sure had nothing to do with the simple shock.
“Are you going to be all right, Simon?” she asked.
I nodded. “I will be. Thanks. But listen…”
She waited silently as I collected my thoughts.
“You can’t tell anyone about the White Room,” I continued. “Please. I hate even having to mention it, but it’s extremely important to me.”
“You don’t have to worry,” she said. Her voice sounded reassuring, but then she smirked. “Why would I tell anyone about that, my intrepid young gumshoe, when there are all those juicy homoerotic visions of yours to tell your fellow employees about?”
She floated off, laughing, and in that moment, I desperately wished that Irene were alive. Not because of my strange attraction to her, or that she was someone I could picture myself dating, but because it would be easier to strangle her smart ass that way.
11
Since I wasn’t used to having guests in my loft, I spent the rest of my night staring at my ceiling, tossing, turning, and wondering if Irene was also lying awake off in my guest room. Exhaustion eventually washed over me, though, and before I knew it, I awoke to the shrill cry of the alarm going off. I crept to the open door of the guest room, where I could make out the curled-up shape of Irene. I wasn’t sure what the cosmic rules were concerning the sleeping habits of ghosts, but Irene was resting peacefully on top of the sheets, hovering over them slightly. I didn’t have the heart to wake her before I left. What was she going to do with herself if I did wake her anyway? Float around the office until I had figured out what exactly to do with her? She was better off hidden here in my apartment.
When I caught up with Connor over coffee at the Lovecraft, I purposefully neglected telling him that Irene had stayed at my apartment, even though the subject of Irene and her apartment were on the table.
We jumped a cab on Eleventh Street and rode uptown to Columbus Circle. Although Irene’s building was in the Seventies, we got out near Trump’s latest eyesore and walked along the tree-lined length of Central Park West until we came across her building, which was a far better architectural wonder. The Westmore looked as if it were straight out of a Tim Burton movie. Gothic-era gargoyles with their mouths agape laughed at some sinister secret.
We entered the Westmore’s red and gold lobby and were confronted with an elderly doorman whose dusty jacket looked like it had seen better days. A button was missing from the front of it, and judging by the size of his pot belly, I could imagine it had flown across the room whenever it had popped. We didn’t have a game plan for getting past him, but Connor patted me on the back.
“All yours, kid,” he said, and leaned against the wall with his arms folded.
I stepped forward to the tiny counter the man stood behind. His hand moved automatically for the house phone.
“Whose apartment may I ring for you, sir?”
“Irene Blatt, please,” I said. It killed me just saying her last name.
A look crossed the old man’s face and he lowered the phone back to its cradle. “I’m sorry, but I’m not sure if Ms. Blatt is in right now.”
Since we knew that the lady of the house was dead, and I knew her spirit was holed up in my apartment, I was pretty sure that Irene wouldn’t be answering her phone.
Connor stepped up to the doorman’s desk and nudged me out of the way.
“Excuse us a moment, won’t you, Simon?” he said. I moved away from the reception area, and Connor lowered his voice to the point where I could no longer hear. Whether he used some form of mind trick or simply slipped the codger a hundred, I didn’t know, but suddenly the doorman was hurrying us into one of the mahogany-lined elevators. He pressed the button, tipped his hat, and we were on our way.
“Sorry ’bout that, kid,” Connor said. “I could already tell he was suspicious. We should be quick about this, though, just in case.”
“What the hell did you do to him down there?” I asked.
“Sorry, kid. Classified.”
I was hoping for more of a clue as to what had just transpired, but the look on his face told me it wasn’t up for discussion.
After several silent floors, he changed the subject. “The view of Central Park must be spectacular.”
“For what it probably costs to live here, the view better be,” I said.
The elevator slowed and the doors slid open with a gentle bing onto an enormous hallway that could have easily held my whole apartment. There were only three doors. One was marked STAIRS, and the other two were set on either side of the elevator. When we stepped out, Connor walked to the one on our right. I reached for the doorbell, but he grabbed me by the wrist and shook his head.
“Let me handle this, kid,” Connor said.
I pulled my arm away. I was pissed at him for taking charge again. How was I supposed to learn anything with him always taking the lead? I could have handled anyone who answered the door, dammit.
Connor put on his best game face as he prepared to greet whoever might answer. It was the one he put on to look as mundane as a door-to-door insurance salesman. He rang the bell and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” I said after the first minute had passed, and pushed Connor out of the way. I dropped to my knees directly in front of the door, took off my gloves, and pulled several thin metal strips from the cuff of my jacket.
I slid two of the strips into the keyhole and flexed my fingers slightly as I felt around for the tumblers. Connor gave me a look of disapproval.
“What?” I said. “Clearly no one’s home and I don’t think Irene would mind if we had a look around.”
“Did you requisition those from the supply room?” Connor asked, peeved.
“No,” I said testily. “They’re mine. Holdovers from my days as a petty thief.”
“Did they get rid of the screening process in HR?”
“Can I help it that some of my criminal skills come in handy every so often? Besides, breaking and entering in the name of Good feels a whole lot better.”
“May I remind you that it’s still breaking and entering?”
“Not if we’ve got permission from the owner!” I fired back. “And we’ve got it.”
“I’d love to see you explain it to the cops,” Connor said. “It doesn’t matter if she gave us her permission, kid, since she’s dead.”
There was no love lost between the Department of Extraordinary Affairs and the NYPD. The NYPD resented us because they had been told countless times by David Davidson at the Office of Plausible Deniability that we didn’t even exist, and yet they were still supposed to cooperate with us.
“Irene’s not totally dead,” I reminded Connor.
I continued searching for the right combination of positions within the lock, but I was rusty with the whole lock-picking thing.
“She seems pretty dead to me, kid,” he said, leaning against the wall as I worked. “We’ll probably find pictures of her husband and kids in here, too. One big happ
y family. One big happy family who’ll come home in the middle of our breaking and entering, and demand an explanation as to why we’re in their apartment.”
“She’s not married,” I said, wishing I didn’t sound so defensive.
“How do you know that?” Connor asked, but I met him with silence, under the pretense of being too busy working the lock. He wasn’t falling for it. “I knew it! You are interested in her.”
I tried to ignore him and threw all my concentration into picking the lock—and was rewarded when the tumblers finally clicked. I hadn’t picked a lock in forever, wasn’t even sure I’d be able to until it happened just now, but I felt a little swell of pride at the familiar sound of a door giving way.
“I’m shocked,” Connor said with mock sincerity. He stepped back to allow room for me to stand up and swing the door fully open. “Does anyone at the Department know about your little transgressive skills?”
I nodded. “I think so. I bet the F.O.G.ies have already blacklisted me because of it.”
“You’ve only been with the D.E.A. a few months,” Connor replied. He pushed his way forward, crowding me. “Wait until you’ve been working there a couple of years. Even then, the F.O.G.ies are secretive and it’s almost impossible to guess who they’ll choose.”
“Well,” I said as I motioned for Connor to follow me through the door into the darkness of the apartment, “I doubt my criminal past would pass muster at the Fraternal Order of Goodness’s membership drive.”
“They took Inspectre Quimbley, kid, so I’m not so sure about that.”
I rolled my eyes, but the effect was lost on Connor in the darkened room. The Inspectre a troublemaker? He had been my How to Distinguish an East Villager from a Satanist instructor during my initial three weeks of evening classes, and he didn’t seem the badass type despite the legends of his past honors. The Inspectre, an old-school rapscallion? I couldn’t imagine it.
“I don’t think that our befuddled Inspectre has any dark secrets to hide, Connor.”
As we moved farther into the apartment, the sounds of Connor fumbling in the dark came from off to my left somewhere, sounding not unlike a herd of elephants.
“Those old boys all have dark secrets to hide,” he said. “That’s probably half the reason F.O.G. exists, so they can have one collective burial ground for all their bad mojo.”
I shook my head, another gesture wasted in the darkness.
My arm bumped into something tall, slender, and lamp-like, and I groped around it until I found a switch. With the tiniest of clicks, a Tiffany floor lamp—much like the one sitting half unpacked back home—sprang to life, its stained glass dragonflies sparkling with color. Both of us gasped as the small pool of light lit up a section of the large room. We had expected spacious, which it was. I had expected elegant, which it was. Neither of us had expected for the place to be thoroughly and abusively trashed from floor to ceiling, which sadly, it was.
I felt like someone had sucker punched me in the stomach. The similarity to my place was so striking that it was like seeing my own apartment ransacked. Tasteful antiques littered the floor, many of them now broken or overturned. Irene’s tastes definitely ran in the same circles as mine. Seeing a broken Venini bowl, a midcentury George III card table missing a leg, countless scattered books, and a shredded seat cushion on a late-eighteenth-century Highback—it all drove the pain home.
Irene Blatt might have been struck down by a cab yesterday morning, but someone had gone just as medieval on her apartment. It would be foolish to assume that the two were not connected. “My God…”
Connor whistled, and stepped carefully through the disarray as he looked around. “I know. D.E.A.’s not going to like the overtime on this one.” We started poking through all the destruction. I was a bit confused about what I was supposed to be looking for, but when I asked Connor, he just said, “You’ll know it when you find it, kid,” so I didn’t feel too bad.
“And remember, even though we got in a little practice with your powers at the Antiques Annex, use them sparingly if you have to, got it? This clutter could probably overwhelm you psychometrically.”
I nodded, slipped my gloves back on, and started poring over the scattered books, smashed relics, and broken antiques in the living room before venturing farther back into the apartment. I slowly waded through the knee-deep clutter of books, papers, and boxes, looking for any kind of sign. Most of Irene’s possessions, although broken, gave me greater insight into the living person she had been. I found myself liking her more and more, especially when I unearthed the worn-out box cover of an old board game. Hungry Hungry Hippos. A woman after my own juvenile heart.
I couldn’t resist pushing my power into it. I took my gloves off and placed a tentative finger on the head of the yellow hippo. I tried to envision Irene as a child playing the game—or maybe I’d see that she had kids or a family that she played the game with. Either way, it might offer a clue to our case. Instead, my psychometry skipped all that and jumped straight to showing me the last person who had handled it.
In my mind’s eye, the apartment was only partly trashed, but a figure in a dark robe opened the game box warily looking for something—but what? He tore the contents of the box out, smashing the plastic tray and sending the four rainbow-colored plastic hippos flying. The bottom of the box held nothing and the figure threw the whole game against the wall in frustration before heading farther down the hall, which was where I intended to go as well.
I pulled out of the vision—slightly weary—and helped myself to more of my Life Savers before wading down the hall to the first room on my left. I could probably read half the apartment with my power, but all I’d get was mental footage of that figure trashing it. I decided to conserve my power for now and entered the room on my left.
Irene had definitely been a packrat in life. The room was filled with overturned boxes, and every last article, book, or meticulously catalogued item she had ever come across was stored in them. There were other doors farther along the back hall of the massive apartment, and I imagined more of the same behind them. Whatever manner these items had originally been organized in was now lost to reckless vandalism.
A cracked frame showed a picture of Irene against a background of Italian architecture. In it, she wore a thick cable knit turtleneck sweater. The photo, at last, confirmed for us that my ghostly friend was indeed Irene Blatt, and that this trashed mess had once been her apartment. I slipped the picture from the frame and slid it into my jacket pocket, wondering who had snapped the shot. A boyfriend or maybe just a passerby. This didn’t count as stealing, I told myself, but checked the door guiltily anyway.
I was relieved to find the next room empty, and I heard the sounds of Connor searching another room close by. I turned my focus back to my immediate surroundings. There were two closets at the far end of the room I had to check out. Simply moving was a distraction, so much so that when I finally reached the closets, I didn’t even register the fact that the dark-robed figure from my vision was hiding in there—until he sprang out at me. He pushed me down in his effort to escape, and as I fell, I winced painfully as the pointy corner of a book jabbed into my lower back.
“Connor!” I shouted. “There’s someone here!”
I floundered for several seconds in the sea of scattered books and crumpled papers. The dark-robed figure rushed nimbly across the top of the debris without sinking in before racing out of the room. I hoped Connor was having better luck navigating the apartment than I was.
Clumsily, I got back on my feet and waded as quickly as I could out into the main hall. The sound of a struggle came from the direction of the living room. As the hall opened up onto the main room, I saw Connor and his assailant grappling as the two of them toppled over onto an overturned couch. When they regained their footing, I noticed two things—one strange and one dangerous. The strange thing was a large, dark wooden fish that the intruder clutched close to his body. The dangerous thing was a heavy, curved dagger h
e held in his other hand. I had seen its kind before, unique in that its sharpened edge was along the inside of the weapon’s curve.
A kukri, I thought. It was the calling card for someone prepared to perform ritualistic sacrifice. That’s a cultist if I ever saw one.
“Knife!” I shouted to Connor, who looked down at the blade for the first time. He moved to pry the wooden fish from the cultist’s hand. When the figure flicked the blade at Connor, he moved back to avoid its swinging arc. The blade ripped through the fabric of his shirt. Thanks to Connor’s awkward positioning, he stumbled out of reach, but not before the backs of his knees hit the couch. His arms spun out of control with the momentum and his legs flew up in the air, toppling him over once again, but saving him from his attacker’s next swipe.
For a second, the madman lifted the blade high overhead and I thought he was going to finish Connor off, so I shouted unintelligibly. It sounded ridiculous, but it did the trick and the robed figure paused and turned from the couch. I pulled my retractable bat from inside my coat and extended it, daring him to come after me.
Instead of attacking, however, the cultist flicked his wrist, and with a barely audible click, the blade disappeared up one of his voluminous sleeves. Connor reached up from behind the couch and made a grab for him, but he kicked Connor’s hand away, turned, and dashed out the apartment door.
Connor groaned as he lifted himself slowly up from behind the couch. His free hand rubbed the back of his head. He seemed on the verge of falling over again, but he grabbed the edge of the couch and steadied himself.
“After him,” Connor said and stumbled across the room. I ran for the door and together we burst into the hallway outside the apartment…to emptiness. I looked up at the elevator indicator, but neither car was even remotely close to our floor. I caught movement in the corner of my eye, though, and turned to see the door to the stairwell slowly closing. I rushed through it and looked down into the opening between the stairs going down. Catching a glimpse of robe several floors below, I hesitated a moment to check on Connor.