14

by Peter Clines

  Tim hopped down the steps and opened the gate. “They’ll be here first thing in the morning, though,” he said. “Roger got the paint off his walls and there’s more math there. We tried to talk Mandy into it but she’s just too scared of getting evicted.”

  “Roger’s okay with it?”

  “I’ve got him wrapped around my finger,” Xela said, smiling. “I think I’m going to ask him to rob a bank for me.” She held up her camera. “I’ve already got my room photographed. Veek isn’t back from work yet. I was just going to start Tim’s and we realized it was about time for you to get home.”

  “They’re good pictures?”

  “I took triples to be safe. Already checked on my computer. High resolution, perfect detail. You can see everything.”

  “Awesome.” He hefted his pack and nodded to Tim. “Let me dump this and I’ll meet you guys in your place.”

  Xela’s camera was on a tripod when he walked next door to apartment 26. Two poster-sized pieces of white foamcore bounced extra light onto the walls. “Don’t move around too much,” she said. “Long exposures. Don’t want to shake the camera or mess up the lights.” She looked from the camera’s small screen to the wall and back, then tapped the button. A moment later the camera chirped, the electronic sound of a shutter. Xela took two more shots and moved the tripod to the next wall.

  There was a knock at the door. “Hey,” said Veek. “Looks like we dodged a bullet.”

  Xela finished the fourth wall and carried the tripod into Tim’s small living room. The others shifted back into the kitchen and helped move her bounce boards. “I’ll have to go download these when I’m done in here,” she said. “They’re really huge at this setting.”

  Nate nodded.

  Veek gazed around the apartment. “This is sort of...claustrophobic, isn’t it?” she asked Tim. “The whole space divided up like this?”

  Tim looked at the tiny kitchen they were clustered in. “Not much worse than a college dorm room,” he said.

  “It’s a lot smaller than mine was.”

  “But I’ve got four of them,” he said. “I’ve grown to like it. It appeals to my compartmentalized nature.”

  “What about downstairs?” Nate asked him. He pointed a finger at the floor. “Sixteen?”

  “Locked up tight,” said Tim. “I think Oskar made sure of that.”

  “We could ask Roger to pick the lock,” Xela called from the other room. “That’s what I figured we’d do.”

  Veek wrinkled her brow. “Do you really think he can do it?”

  Tim shrugged. “We can let him try. I think the real question is, do we need to get in there? It wasn’t math on the walls. It looked pretty simple and straightforward. ‘Stay the hell out of this room.’”

  “I think we’d rather have it than not,” said Nate.

  “If Oskar steps out, he’ll see us,” said Veek. “Straight shot down the hall.”

  “We’ll save it for last,” said Nate. “Maybe he crashes early.”

  “Second to last,” said Xela. She picked up the tripod and shuffled through into the next tiny room of the apartment. “I promised Roger I’d do his last and have a drink with him.”

  Nate gave her a look. “Are you okay with that?”

  “Don’t worry, oh-captain-my-captain. Roger’s kind of cute, but he’s not one-drink cute.”

  “Does he know that?” asked Veek.

  Xela nodded. “He’s just laying the foundation.”

  They moved to Nate’s room in time to catch the last of the sunset through his kitchen window. They held the foamcore and she got shots of the equation between the closet and the doorway to the kitchen. They shifted everything around to get the one above the desk.

  “Mind if I grab some water?” asked Xela.

  “All I’ve got is the tap,” Nate said. “Sorry.”

  “Tap’s fine,” she said. “My last place was down by the toy district. The water there always came out brown.” Xela flipped switches in the kitchen until her shirt gleamed. Her blue hair lit up under the kitchen’s unusual bulb, shimmering like a special effect.

  It looks totally different under black light.

  “Where to next?” asked Tim.

  Nate looked at Veek. “Want to get your place out of the way next?”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m going to duck down and make sure I haven’t left out a bra or anything.”

  Xela turned back to the doorway with her glass. She stopped to look at the other side of the kitchen. Her irises were black pools against the gleaming white of her eyes. “I’m guessing you want all this, too,” she said.

  They exchanged glances and she gestured at the stove.

  Nate stepped into the kitchen and followed her gaze. He’d peeled the walls in there when he did the rest of his apartment and found nothing but bare plaster. He was so used to the oddities of his home he’d just worked by the half-light from the rest of the apartment. He’d never thought of turning the kitchen light on.

  The wall above the stove was covered with phosphorescent letters. Each one was an inch tall, written in a thin, slanting hand. The letters were blurred and arranged in some sort of code.

  “Son of a bitch,” said Nate.

  Xela blinked. “You didn’t know this was here?”

  Thirty Two

  The letters aren’t blurred, Nate thought. It’s a different alphabet. Cyrillic or one of those. The text wasn’t a code, just a language he couldn’t recognize. As he examined it more closely, he could see maybe two hundred words arranged in four paragraph breaks and a header. The block of text ended with a closing of some sort, perhaps a name, and a date in Arabic numerals.

  1895

  Veek was next to him. She tilted her head to her shoulder and back. “What is that? Russian?”

  “Nope,” said Tim, shaking his head. He looked at the glowing letters through the doorway. “Not Russian.”

  “You can speak Russian?”

  He shrugged. “I can read it better than I can speak it.”

  “What sort of publishing company were you running?” asked Veek.

  “One that published some Russian stuff.” He glanced up at the light. “Must be some kind of invisible ink,” he said. “A pretty good one to have held up for a hundred and twenty five years.”

  “It was sealed under the latex,” said Xela. “Shrink-wrapped, pretty much.”

  Nate turned his head toward Xela, but his eyes stayed on the letters. “Can you get photos of this?”

  Her lips twisted. “Maybe? It’s a weird lighting set up. I’ve never done anything like this before.”

  “Please,” he said. “I think it’s important.”

  Her mouth straightened out into a faint smile. Her teeth gleamed white in the blacklight. “It might take a couple tries, but I’ll get it.”

  He looked at Tim. “You’re sure it’s not Russian?”

  “Positive.”

  “Any idea what it might be?”

  He shrugged. “There’s a couple of different languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet. Could be any of them. I just know it’s not Russian.”

  Xela shooed them out of the kitchen so she could work. She asked Tim to run to her apartment for a few sheets of foamcore they could use as reflectors to get as much of the black light on the words as possible. Once he came back she handed a white panel to each of them and posed them around the kitchen. The camera clicked again and again and she made minor adjustments each time.

  “Okay,” she said, “if I don’t have it now, I can’t get it. There’s got to be a good shot in there.”

  Nate lowered his sheet of foamcore. “Are you sure?”

  She nodded. “Sure as I can be. I can go look and give you a definite.”

  He nodded. Xela unscrewed the camera from the tripod and vanished out the door.

  Tim stepped back into the living room and studied the equation for a moment. Then he peered at the words over the stove. “Written by the same person,” he said.


  Veek tilted her head. “What makes you say that?”

  Tim pointed at the date on the Cyrillic message. “They write their numbers the same way. Whoever it is does their eights so they form a wide X at the center. They also put a seraph and a base on their ones.”

  “Doesn’t mean it’s the same person,” said Nate.

  “No,” agreed Tim. “Neither of these would count as a handwriting sample. But I don’t think it’s just a coincidence.”

  Xela knocked at the door. “We’re good,” she said. “I’ve got two usable ones. On one the top half is perfect.”

  Nate’s shoulders relaxed. “Still readable, though?”

  She shrugged. “I can make out all the letters. I can’t read it, so I guess so.”

  Nate’s stomach gave a little twitch as he shut off the kitchen light. They headed down to Veek’s apartment. Her desk still stood near the middle of the room. She’d left the computer unplugged.

  “That’s some setup,” Tim remarked while Xela set up her camera.

  “Scavenged,” Veek said. “It’s not as impressive as it looks.”

  He studied the computer. “You could’ve fooled me,” he said. “Are those Playstations hooked into the system?”

  Veek stiffened ever-so-slightly. If Nate hadn’t been looking right at her, he wouldn’t have noticed it. She didn’t look at Tim when she answered. “You know a lot about computers?”

  Tim shrugged. It was the practiced shrug of a man who didn’t care one way or the other. “I proofed a lot of technical manuals,” he said. “I know a lot more than some, but a lot less than the experts.”

  She nodded. “A friend set it up for me,” she said. “I don’t really know how they’re wired.”

  “Sure,” he said with a nod.

  Roger got home from work a little after nine-thirty and joined them. A shiny leather case rested in his hand. “How do you want to do this?”

  “Xela’s going to need to download again,” said Nate. “You open sixteen while she’s doing that. She gets back, snaps her photos, and we lock the door behind us.”

  Roger nodded.

  Veek looked at him. “You can do this?”

  “Yeah. Pretty sure.”

  “Pretty sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How is it you know how to pick locks, anyway?” asked Tim.

  “Did this show a few years back and the best boy was always losing his keys,” said Roger. “Useless guy. Had to cut the locks off the grip truck twice and I kept one of them. Just for the heck of it. Saw this movie about Houdini and it got me thinking. So I practiced on it and pretty soon I could unlock it.” He shrugged.

  Veek looked at her door and the switch on the back of the knob. “Think you can open those?”

  “Lock’s a lock,” he said. “They all open the same way.”

  Tim raised an eyebrow. “How long does it take you?”

  Roger shrugged. “Five, maybe six minutes.”

  Tim said nothing but gave a slow nod of his head.

  “Done in here,” said Xela. She twisted a knob and the camera came away from the tripod. “Give me a couple minutes to clear these out.”

  “Looks like you’re up,” Nate told Roger.

  They opened Veek’s door. The blank face of 16 stared at them from across the hall. Xela headed down toward the stairwell. Nate stood in the middle of the hall while Veek leaned in her doorway. Roger crouched in front of the door. He had a thin metal band inserted in the knob and was working a second one in. Tim stood next to him and watched.

  There was a click as the second pick slid into the lock. Roger held the knob with his left hand and worked the pick back and forth with his right. His eyes closed as he focused. The faint rasp of metal on metal whispered in the hall.

  “Use the prybar,” said Tim after a minute. “That’s what it’s for. Put pressure on it.”

  “Bro, don’t distract me,” said Roger. “I know what I’m doing.”

  Another minute slipped by. Nate crouched by Roger. “How’s it going?”

  Roger didn’t open his eyes. “Going as fast as I can,” he said. “Told you, this could take some time.”

  “It’d take less time if you used the prybar the way you’re supposed to,” said Tim.

  One eye opened for a glare, then closed to concentrate again. The pick shifted and sank a little deeper into the lock. Roger shifted his grip and tweaked the handle.

  There were footsteps in the stairwell. Xela was back, clutching the camera. “You’re not in yet?” she whispered.

  “Just give me another couple of minutes,” said Roger. “Maybe a little more.”

  Veek looked at Nate and rolled her eyes.

  “Tick-tock, tick-tock,” said Tim.

  “You think you can do better, you’re welcome to try,” muttered Roger. His hands shifted on the pick again and a minute later there was a click as the lock opened.

  “Finally,” murmured Veek.

  Roger turned the knob and pushed. The door to apartment 16 swung open. “Told you,” he said to Tim. “Just under five minutes.”

  Tim smiled and bowed his head. “I stand corrected.”

  Thirty Three

  After they finished photographing the wall in 16, Xela headed down to Roger’s apartment and promised the others she’d have all the photos set up soon. Tim announced it was too late for an old man to be up and headed back upstairs.

  “Just you and me, Velma,” Nate told Veek.

  She shook her head. “Just you, Scooby. I’m still exhausted from last night and I’ve got another project I need to work on.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yep.”

  “You must be raking in the cash with all this extra work.”

  She drummed her fingers on the door frame. “I lose a lot of it to taxes,” she said after a moment.

  Nate looked at her. “You freaked out when Tim asked about your computer. Just like you did when we first met and I asked about it.”

  “Speaking of freaking out, what happened in your kitchen?”

  He smirked. “A pathetic attempt to change the subject.”

  “Your eyes bugged when you saw those words on your wall.”

  “You didn’t think it was weird?”

  “Weird, yeah,” she said, “but in this place not weird enough to make you go all wide-eyed like Andrew.”

  Nate twisted his lips in thought. “Okay,” he said, “this is going to sound crazy, but I think I dreamed about it.”

  She smirked. “What?”

  “I had this dream with you and Xela—”

  “Typical man.”

  “Not like that.”

  “Did we have clothes on?”

  He paused and debated. “You did.”

  “Should I be relieved or insulted?”

  “Hey, if you want to hang out naked I’m sure I’ll picture you that way, too.”

  “Don’t count on it.”

  “Anyway,” he said, “Xela’s hair was green, not blue, and she told me to look at it under the black light. She said it would look different.” He shrugged. “And then I came home and we found all this stuff under the black light.”

  “Sounds sort of thin,” Veek said after a moment.

  “What?”

  She shrugged.

  “You don’t think it means something that I have a dream about how things look under black light and then six hours later we find a message that’s hidden except under black light?”

  Veek shrugged again. “You also dreamed about your hot neighbor naked. What’s the meaning there?”

  “You’re a lot more focused on that than I am.”

  “Yeah, so you say. Know what else?”

  “What?”

  “This blows your whole ‘no dreams’ idea out of the water.”

  Nate considered it. “No,” he said. “It’s just a new twist. I had the dream at work. I still haven’t had a dream here.”

  Veek rolled her tongue across her teeth. It made her lips ripple.
“You really think something about this place keeps people from dreaming?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Again, it’d have more credibility without all the skin.”

  “Are you jealous or something?”

  “You wish,” she said. “What are we doing this weekend, investigation-wise?”

  He glanced down the hall. “Maybe we should lay low this weekend. Give Oskar some time to cool down. We can all meet up to talk, but we probably shouldn’t do anything, y’know?”

  She nodded. “Sounds good. I might not have a lot of time, anyway.”

  “Okay.”

  Veek tipped her head back at her door. “I’ve got to get to work. Maybe I’ll see you on the roof tomorrow for Friday sunset.”

  “Is that what we’re calling it now?”

  “That’s what I’m calling it. G’night, Nate.”

  “Night, Veek.”

  Five minutes later, Nate was alone in his apartment. Not entirely alone. There were two big math equations on the wall. Equations he’d helped save from Oskar’s uncaring maintenance.

  He looked at the numbers painted above his computer. He still had no idea what they meant. It was like staring at a wall of Arabic or Japanese. There was something there, something people had written down for a reason. He just needed to learn what that reason was.

  He went to the kitchen and looked at the gleaming paragraphs over the sink. There was no doubt in his mind it was a message. Not necessarily for him personally, but someone like him. Someone who would unravel all the mysteries of this place.

  It had been a long time since Nate felt excited by anything. His life had been such a dull, repetitive echo of life that he’d forgotten what it was like when things were bright and interesting and new. Stupid as it sounded, he felt alive.

  Anne was making a pass at me, he realized.

  Nate stared at the glittering words in his kitchen for another moment. Four paragraphs of light, frozen on the bare plaster. Then he turned and reached for the switch.

  And froze.

  Just for a moment, on the far side of the apartment, he’d seen a flicker on the wall facing the kitchen. It was in the space next to his desk. On the wall that didn’t have any math on it.