14

by Peter Clines

  Nate stepped out of the door, but the flickering shadow didn’t return. He glanced up at the bulb—the LONG LIFE WHITE bulb—to make sure it was still working. All the words in the kitchen were still there.

  He looked at the far wall again, then drew a line back and forth with his eyes. The space where he’d seen the shadow was just too high. The bulb couldn’t shine on it. He looked around for a moment and his gaze dropped. His white shirt had acted as a reflector. A weak one, but enough for him to glimpse another secret.

  Damn lucky, he thought. The crowd in the kitchen earlier had blocked all the light. Whatever was on that wall would’ve been painted over and none of them ever would’ve known they missed a clue. He leaned back and tried to angle his stomach in a way that would bounce the ultraviolet rays across the apartment. The bare plaster shimmered. Not enough to read, but he could glimpse lines and patterns.

  Nate looked around the kitchen for something reflective to shine the light across the apartment. He checked the living room. One of Xela’s foamcore sheets leaned against a bookshelf.

  He carried it back to the kitchen and stood under the black light. He angled the white panel at the far wall. The plaster rippled as the ultraviolet rays washed over it and revealed a set of thick, messy lines. A moment later his mind turned the lines into words.

  THIRD STORY

  Thirty Four

  “It’s almost definitely blood,” said Tim. “You can tell by the color. It turns jet black under ultraviolet light.” He stepped back and looked at the full message they’d revealed with the foamcore bounce board.

  The words were low to the ground. The highest line was chest height. The bottom one was only two feet above the floor.

  Nate stood in the kitchen, staring at the letters while he held the foamcore steady. He’d woken Tim up and dragged the older man over to his apartment. “Someone wrote in blood on my wall?”

  Tim nodded. “Looks like it.”

  “Why?”

  “On a guess,” said Tim, “whoever it was knew the message would stay even if they cleaned up most of it.”

  “No, I mean why in blood?”

  The older man pointed at the word HURT. “I think it was what they had to work with.”

  A cold chill raced through Nate. He glanced back at the kitchen window to make sure it was still closed. “If it’s blood why can’t we see it?”

  Tim waved his hand in front of the wall and his shadow erased the words for a moment. “Whoever cleaned it up wasn't quick enough. A lot of it sank into the plaster. Then it got painted ten or twenty times and vanished.”

  “And it’s still there?”

  He shrugged. “Like Xela said, it was pretty much shrink-wrapped in paint. Even if most of the moisture is gone, all the key chemicals are there to set off a reaction.”

  Nate let the foamcore drop. The words vanished. “Son of a bitch.”

  Tim glanced at him. “If it’s any consolation, I think we can say this was written over a hundred years ago. Probably around the same time as the rest of this stuff.” He gestured at the math on the other walls.

  “You think someone got murdered here?”

  “If they were murdered, I don’t think they would’ve had time to write anything.” He shrugged again. “Unless maybe they murdered the other person. That doesn’t fit with writing in blood, though.”

  “You’re taking this really well,” said Nate.

  “It’s not my apartment,” said Tim. “And I’m not wigged out by the thought of someone dying over a hundred years ago.”

  Nate took a slow breath and nodded. “I should get Xela,” he said. “We need photos of this.”

  Tim glanced at his watch. “It’s past midnight. You sure she’ll be up?”

  He nodded. “She’s a night owl.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  Nate slipped down the hall to Xela’s apartment. He knocked lightly on the door twice. When he didn’t hear anything, he knocked again, harder. He paced back and forth while he waited.

  A shadow flickered in the peephole lens. “Just a minute,” called Xela.

  He paced some more and glanced out the hallway window. It looked out over the building’s front lawn and Kenmore. The street was still and silent. If the man across the street hadn’t moved, Nate wouldn’t have noticed him.

  He looked down at the man leaning against the green Taurus. The private detective hired to watch Tim. The man stared back up at him with a dead expression.

  Xela opened her door and Nate forgot the detective. “Please tell me you’re not checking up on me because of the whole Roger thing,” she said.

  He shook his head and his eyes flitted up and down her body before he could help himself. Her hair was wet, making it an even darker shade of blue. She had on an oversized t-shirt that hung off one shoulder. It was soaked through in enough places that he could tell she wasn’t wearing anything else.

  When his eyes got back to her face she was giving him a look. “I’ve got a meeting with my advisor in the morning, so what’s up?”

  “I need you to take a few more pictures. It’s important.”

  “Pictures of what?”

  “There’s more in my apartment.”

  “More words?”

  “They’re written in blood.”

  Her face went blank. “Let me grab some pants,” she said. She ducked back into her apartment and left the door open. She grabbed a pair of paint-splattered jeans and yanked them up over her legs. Nate turned away, but not before she hiked the t-shirt up to her waist and flashed her ass. A moment later the collapsed tripod was in her hand, the camera still mounted on it.

  Tim had his cheek against the wall when they entered Nate’s apartment. He was looking along the wall where the letters were. There was no sign of them without the black light. “Definitely cleaned,” he said. “You can just see the marks where they scoured it. Sloppy job. I’d say it was just as much a rush as the message was.”

  “Wow,” said Xela. “You’re a regular Sherlock, aren’t you?”

  He smiled. “Too many forensics shows,” he said.

  She glanced around the apartment. “Veek isn’t here?”

  Nate shook his head. “She’s working on another side project.”

  “And you didn’t tell her about this?”

  “I figured I’d tell her tomorrow.”

  Xela shook her head and her lips made a tight smile. “She’s going to be pissed.”

  She set up the tripod while Nate got the foamcore in position to reflect the blacklight on the wall. The shadowy letters wavered and faded like smoke.

  “Oh my God,” murmured Xela. The color drained out of her face. “That’s blood?”

  “Yeah,” said Tim.

  She looked at each of them. “What the hell’s going on here?”

  The two men shook their heads.

  “Who are ‘they’?”

  Nate shrugged. “No clue.”

  “‘Protect Kavach, protect the world,’” she recited. Her gaze flitted between them. “Protect the world?”

  He nodded. “Whoever Kavach was, somebody thought he was important.”

  “Important enough to kill for,” said Tim. “Or die for.”

  Xela took a deep breath and bent to her camera. She snapped two dozen photos before running back to download them to her computer. When she came back she gave Nate a thumbs-up. “Almost perfect,” she said. “The darker letters photograph better than the phosphorescent ones. I got three great shots. They’re even better than the glowing letters.” She jerked her thumb at the kitchen.

  Nate nodded. “Okay then.”

  She glanced at the other walls. “Are there any more?”

  He shook his head. “I tried shining the light around the room. If there’s anything else I can’t find it.”

  “Something else to share with everyone Saturday,” mused Tim.

  They headed out and left Nate with a wall covered in dried blood.

  Nate looked at the plaster. Withou
t something reflecting the light, the words were hidden. He wondered about the person who had written them. He pictured someone in old-time clothes—a pinstripe vest and a bowler hat and wingtip shoes, maybe with a wide mustache—kneeling on the floor in front of the short bookshelf. In the mental hologram he created, the mystery man had a wounded arm, although the image flickered once or twice to a bleeding leg. The man dabbed his fingers on the wound and smeared blood on the wall. Were there footsteps in the hall? Was someone pounding on the door as he wrote his message?

  Did he die writing it?

  Who was Kavach? His boss? His friend?

  Nate grabbed the bottom edge of his futon couch and flipped it flat. He spread the blanket across the mattress. Normally he set his pillow by the bookshelf, but tonight he tossed it at the other end.

  His jeans and shirt landed on the desk chair. He folded the pillow in half, leaned back, and gazed at the wall. He closed his eyes and fell into a dreamless sleep.

  He woke to someone knocking on his door. It was Oskar. And the painters.

  Thirty Five

  When Nate got home from work, a heavy smell hung in the air of his apartment. The walls were smooth and unmarked again. All the words and numbers were gone, hidden under a thick coat of paint—maybe two coats—that probably had an innocent name like Antique White or Eggshell or Birchbark.

  He looked at the blank walls and sighed. At least they’d gotten plenty of pictures. His bag landed on the futon and he spent a few minutes pulling open the windows. Competing scents of fresh air, sidewalk urine, and the bakery down at the corner all fought with the paint smell and overwhelmed it.

  After half an hour the expanse of Eggshell was too much for him. It was like a blank banner reminding him what he’d lost. He left the windows open and headed up to watch the sunset.

  He walked out onto the roof and Tim saluted him with a beer. “Did you get any sleep last night?”

  “Some,” Nate said. “Three or four hours.”

  “You look like you’re doing pretty well.”

  He shrugged. “I got some sleep at work. It’s not like I’m doing anything important there.”

  Tim grinned. “I could never sleep at work. I snore if I try to sleep upright.”

  Nate pulled a beer from the ice-filled cardboard. “You look like you’re doing pretty good, too. Did you still wake up early to run?”

  “Always.”

  “Freak.”

  “Force of habit.”

  Nate settled into the deck chair next to him. After a moment’s thought, he used his heels and toes to pry off his sneakers and let them drop to the wooden deck. He wiggled his toes inside his socks.

  “Feels good?”

  “Oh yeah,” said Nate. They clinked their bottles together.

  “Where’s Veek?”

  “She’s coming from Santa Monica.”

  Tim nodded. “That’s right.”

  They sat in silence for a few more minutes. The clouds changed from white to gold as the sun settled down toward Century City.

  “They painted my place,” Nate said.

  Tim nodded. “Mine, too.”

  “They were waiting for me when I woke up. They stood in the hall while I got dressed for work.”

  “I saw them,” Tim nodded. “They finished your place just after nine-thirty, then they came over to mine. It took them two hours. All those extra walls and not much room for their rollers.” From his position on the chair, he mimed a man trying to work with a long pole in a small space.

  “Oskar?”

  “Stood there the whole time but didn’t say anything to me. He’s calmed down a bit, but he’s still pretty angry.”

  Nate swallowed some more beer. “Joy.”

  “It’s a setback, yeah, but you’ll get past it.”

  He looked over at Tim. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “How did I become the guy in charge? Veek’s been into this for over a year now. So’s Clive. You’ve got a lot more experience being the boss. Why is everyone looking at me?”

  Tim shrugged. “Because you’re the guy in charge.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “What do you want me to say? We secretly met and pulled your name out of a hat?” He shrugged again. “Sometimes everyone just understands who’s in charge. Not often, but it happens. In business, in the military, in politics, all the people involved just get it. This is the person we all listen to. And that’s you.”

  Nate drank his beer.

  “I’m going to play grown up for a minute,” said Tim. “Do you mind?”

  “Somebody around here ought to. Might as well be the old guy.”

  “The old guy can still kick your ass,” Tim said, gesturing with the neck of his beer. “Keep that in mind.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I dealt with a ton of different professionals over the years. Big guys and little guys. Every one of them thought they were the top of the world. The best at what they did. And some of them were. You know what made the difference?”

  “Is this going to be about suits and power ties?”

  Tim pointed with the bottle again. “The only thing that really mattered to them was achieving their goals. If they were going to get something, then they got it. If they needed to eliminate the competition, they annihilated them. They’re the ones who succeeded, the ones everyone else looked to as an example.”

  Nate took a hit off his beer. “Are you telling me I have the eye of the tiger?”

  “That’s one way of looking at it, yeah. Somehow, solving the riddles of this place became important to you. And that importance—that enthusiasm—spilled over to the rest of us.”

  “Veek was interested, too. She was interested first.”

  “She was interested,” said Tim with a nod, “but you want it. Getting the answers here matters to you.”

  Nate swallowed some more beer and looked at his friend. “Was that how you did things? Annihilating the competition?”

  Tim took a hit off his beer as the sun approached the buildings of Century City. “For a while,” he said. “For a long time. Thirty years or so. And then one day I realized there was more to life than grinding your opponents into the dirt.”

  “And hearing the lamentations of their women?”

  The older man glanced at him and grinned. “Something like that.”

  “Sounds like getting out of publishing was a good move.”

  “You have no idea.”

  They heard the clomp of footfalls on the stairs. Roger stepped out into the sunlight. A six-pack of beer swung from one hand, a small bag of ice from the other. “Bro,” he said. “Told you I was buying this week.”

  “You are,” said Tim. “I figured we’d have extra people.”

  Roger nodded. “Saw Veek. Said she’ll be up in a couple minutes.” He set the six-pack down next to Tim’s case, pulled one free, and twisted the cap off.

  “Cheers,” said Tim. He held out his bottle. The glass chimed.

  Roger tapped Nate’s bottle. “My apartment got painted. Sorry, bro.”

  “Not your fault,” said Nate.

  “Learn anything about all the math?”

  Nate shook his head. “We found some other stuff, though.”

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  They told him about the words written in old blood, revealed by the black light and now hidden again under a blanket of fresh Eggshell. Roger drank half his beer while they talked. “That,” he said when they were done, “is some grade-A fucked up shit.”

  “Hey,” said Veek from the fire door. She wore an untucked blue shirt and a loose necktie. With her glasses, the look was somehow less working professional and more uniformed schoolgirl. Nate glanced over and could tell the thought had crossed Roger’s mind, too.

  “I was starting to think you weren’t going to make it,” said Tim. He turned to the west, where the sun grazed the rooftops of tall office buildings.

  She pushed Nate’s legs
off to the side and sat alongside his knees on the deck chair. The ice shifted as she grabbed a beer. She wrapped the tails of her shirt around the cap and twisted it off. It left a dark spot on her shirt. “You know,” she said, “I’ve been looking forward to this all week.”

  Nate glanced at her. “Sitting up on the roof with a beer?”

  “Sitting up here with everyone.” Veek took a long drink and they watched the sky turn orange as the sun slipped between buildings. “They painted my walls.”

  “Yeah,” said Nate, “they got everyone’s, it sounds like.”

  “We could peel them all again,” she said. “Just be more careful.”

  Tim shook his head. “No real point to it,” he said. “We’ve documented everything in all our apartments. If we were going to do it again, we’d have to do it in other apartments.”

  “So,” said Roger, “why d’you think somebody wrote in blood?”

  Veek gave him a look. “Blood?”

  “Yeah,” said Roger. He dipped his head at Nate. “The words on his wall.”

  Her mouth fell open for a moment. “They were written in blood?”

  “Not those,” said Nate. “I found more.”

  She blinked. “What did it say?”

  They told the story again.

  Veek shook her head. “Why didn’t you come get me?”

  “You said you were busy, remember? I didn’t want to bother you.”

  “You woke up Xela.”

  “I didn’t wake her up,” Nate said.

  “But you went and got her.”

  “She’s got the best camera.”

  Veek bit her lip and took a hit off her beer. “I thought we were in this together.”

  “I’m sorry,” Nate told her. “You said you didn’t have time, so I just figured it meant...well, you didn’t have time.”

  “Bro,” said Roger, cracking open a new bottle, “don’t you know anything about dealing with women? They never say what they mean. No offense,” he added to Veek.

  “No,” she muttered, “I said I didn’t have any time.”

  “Right. Which meant you wanted to spend more time with him.”