14

by Peter Clines

  She lowered her bottle. “No, it means I was busy and didn’t have time.”

  Roger gave her a wink and nodded.

  “I have a job, y’know,” she growled.

  Someone cleared their throat. It was a prissy sound. “Pardon me.”

  Andrew stood back by the rooftop door. He was wearing his usual khakis with a polo shirt and a sweater vest. Everything the man owns must be tan or pastel, thought Nate.

  “I’ve...I’ve heard a few things,” he said. “I understand a few of you are looking at some of the oddities of our building.”

  Veek’s eyebrows went up behind her glasses. “What do you mean?”

  Andrew put his hands behind his back and scuffed at the tarpaper roof with his shoes. “I’ve lived here for almost three years,” he said. “I try not to complain, and our Lord tells us to be patient, but I can’t help but notice how many questions are never answered regarding our home.” He looked up and his lofty tone reasserted itself. “I’d like to help. I want to find what’s been hidden here.”

  Tim coughed. Roger and Veek looked at Nate.

  “Tomorrow,” Nate said. “We’re all meeting up in the lounge to talk about stuff. You’re welcome to join us.”

  “What time?”

  “Around four.”

  Andrew nodded. “I’ll be there.”

  “Bring snacks,” added Veek with a straight face.

  “Sweets encourage gluttony,” said Andrew.

  “Then you can bring chips,” she said. “Or crackers. Something crunchy.”

  He thought for a minute and gave another nod. “I will. Have a wonderful evening,” he said to them before heading back downstairs.

  They all looked at her. “What?” said Veek. “The guy’s never helped with anything and he’s lectured me half a dozen times about being a single woman living alone. And it’s Memorial Day weekend. He can bring chips.”

  Thirty Six

  The lounge was full of people by the time Nate came down the back stairwell. Debbie and Clive sat on a couch, talking with Tim. Mandy stood nearby and listened without saying much. Xela and Roger chatted by the fire door. Veek stood up front with a gleaming Toshiba laptop on top of a stack of milk crates. She double-checked a cable running from the computer to the flatscreen.

  Andrew had a plate of celery sticks. It sat on a low table and he stood next to it like a bodyguard. There was a small cup of white stuff in the middle of the plate. Nate thought it might be sour cream. Or maybe mayonnaise.

  Sitting in the center of the couch opposite Andrew was a woman with too-black hair pulled back in a tight bun. On a guess, she was pushing eighty. She had a straight back and a few spots on her thin hands. An aluminum cane lay across her lap. It stuck out just enough on either side to make it uncomfortable for anyone else to sit on the couch. Nate wasn’t sure if she’d done it deliberately or not.

  Most of them waved or greeted him on the way over to see Veek. She looked up and smiled. “Hey,” she said. “A couple of us were thinking of going over to get Thai food afterwards. You in?”

  “Ahhh,” he said, “I don’t think so. I’m kind of tight since they cut my hours.”

  Her smile shifted. Not in a bad way. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “I’ve got you.”

  “Thanks.” He twitched his head in a look-behind-me gesture. “Who’s the old woman?”

  “That’s Mrs. Knight from number four,” said Veek. “She’s the one who told me about the suicide in apartment sixteen.”

  “Right,” said Nate. “Okay.”

  “I don’t think she’s as mean as she looks. Or sounds.”

  “Great.”

  “Check this out,” she said. The computer screen had a dozen or so large thumbnails on it. “Xela’s laptop and pictures, my know-how. Just click on any picture and it’ll come up on the TV.” She slid the cursor over a few pictures of the building and they snapped up on the big flatscreen one after another.

  “Is this PowerPoint or something?”

  “Not even that complicated. It’s just a photo viewing program I ran through the television. And if you drag the mouse anywhere on this side...” She slid the little arrow to the right side of the screen and the pictures were replaced by the menu screen for a movie. It took Nate a moment to recognize The Dark Knight. “The movie plays underneath. If Oskar comes in, just act like you got up to adjust something.”

  “Aren’t you the clever one,” he said.

  “Thanks, Shaggy.”

  He smiled at her and glanced over his shoulder. The others had closed in when he moved up front. “Hey,” he said. “We must have half the building here now, yeah?”

  They all glanced around. Ten people in the lounge was impressive.

  “Mrs. Knight,” he said, “Andrew, I’m going to go ahead with new stuff and maybe we can fill you guys in afterwards. Is that okay?”

  Andrew gave a serene nod. He sat with his back straight and his fingers laced in his lap. Mrs. Knight looked less than pleased, but gave a little grunt that sounded affirmative. One of her hands settled on her cane, as if she wanted to be ready to lash out at Nate if he offended her with any other decisions.

  “So,” he said, not looking at the cane, “I think everyone’s heard about the messages we found the other night. The other nights, really.” He glanced at the computer, tapped the mousepad, and the glowing letters appeared on the flatscreen behind him. “This was in my apartment, in the kitchen. Even with the paint removed, it was only visible under the black light bulb in there.” He looked at his assembled neighbors. “I don’t suppose any of you are fluent in...whatever language this is?”

  “It looks like Russian,” said Mrs. Knight. Her voice echoed in the lounge. It sounded like her vocal cords were made from the same pale rawhide used for dog toys.

  “It’s not Russian,” Nate told her. “We know that much.”

  She put her palm on the center of her cane and rolled it back and forth on her thighs. “But it does look like Russian,” she said.

  He nodded. “I know. Same alphabet. But it’s not.” He looked at the rest of them. “I’ll take the silence as a group no,” he said. “If anybody knows anyone who speaks an eastern European language, see if they can read it, too. This is probably a name that could help us a lot.” He pointed at the cluster of words above the date.

  “Get to the blood letters,” said Roger.

  Nate slid his finger across the trackpad and tapped. The message appeared up on the flatscreen. “This was in my apartment, too,” he said. “Tim’s pretty sure it’s written in blood. From what I’ve been able to read online about UV lights, I think he’s right.”

  Mandy shivered. “Is it human blood?”

  Nate shrugged. “We don’t know for sure, but we think so.”

  Clive pointed at the screen. “Do you think ‘must hide’ means he needs to hide, or he’s telling someone else to hide?”

  “I don’t know,” said Nate.

  “I read it like they were hurt and were going to hide from whoever hurt them,” said Xela.

  Clive shrugged. “I don’t know. If you read it straight through it sounds like they’re saying to hide Kavach.”

  “And we still don’t know who that is,” said Veek.

  “What if they were talking about the building?” Roger tossed out.

  Clive smirked. “How could you hide a building?”

  “You could put sunglasses and a hat on it,” chuckled Xela.

  “In a forest,” said Mandy.

  Nate looked at her. “What?”

  “It’s something I heard once on a TV show when I was little,” she said. “Where do you hide a tree? You hide it in a forest. So where do you hide a building?”

  They all looked at her.

  “In a city,” said Tim. He rubbed his chin.

  “But how do you hide a building?” asked Veek. “It’s not like the building could go somewhere else when you’re not looking. It’s always right here.”

  “Not the bui
lding,” said Andrew. He still sat with his hands in his lap. “Something in the building.”

  “Something or someone,” said Debbie.

  “If it’s someone, I think we’re at case closed,” said Tim. “We’re talking about something that happened a hundred and twenty years ago.”

  “I have a question,” said Mrs. Knight. Nate nodded at her and she continued. “Does this have something to do with apartment sixteen?

  “How so?” asked Nate.

  She raised her eyebrow and her hand shifted on the cane. Nate took a half-step back. “You know what’s happened in there?” the old woman asked.

  “You told me about the suicide,” said Veek. “The actress who killed herself.”

  Mrs. Knight nodded. “Andrea, in August of 1987. She’d just done a bit part in a Roger Corman movie. She was the last of them. I remember she had long blonde hair. Just gorgeous. Mine was very short back then.”

  “Hold on,” said Tim. “The last of them?”

  The old woman nodded again. “The deaths. That’s why I thought your blood-words were connected. Isn’t that what this is all about?”

  An uneasy shudder passed through the room. Debbie and Clive clenched hands. Andrew threaded his fingers together and squeezed. Mrs. Knight didn’t seem to notice. If she did, her only reaction was to relax her grip on the cane.

  “Mrs. Knight,” Nate said, “what exactly happened in room sixteen?”

  She gave him a glance that made it clear her opinion of him had dropped a few notches. “The girl hung herself in the archway between the kitchen and the main room.”

  “Hanged,” said Nate.

  “I thought it was in the closet,” said Xela.

  Mrs. Knight shook her head. “The archway. I saw her up there after the police arrived, just for a moment.”

  Tim cleared his throat. “Why did you call her the last of them?” he asked again. “You said there were deaths. Plural.”

  The old woman nodded and her hands tightened on the cane again. “I was new in the building at the time, but there was all sorts of talk when it happened. Apparently the man who’d lived in the apartment before Andrea had shot himself seven months earlier. Same thing—it just came out of nowhere. A year before that another man had shot himself in there. And before him was a couple who drank poison together. That was in December of ‘84.”

  Nate blinked. “What are you saying? Everybody who lives there dies?”

  Mrs. Knight sighed and he watched her opinion drop another notch. “No,” she said. “Everyone who lives there has killed themselves. Usually in a year or less.”

  “Everyone?” asked Veek.

  The old woman nodded. “I considered myself a bit of an Angela Lansbury at the time,” she said. “I spent some time going over old crime logs one week. There’ve been twenty-six recorded suicides in this building in the space of thirty years, as far back as I checked. And all of them were in apartment sixteen.”

  Thirty Seven

  “I also have another question,” continued Mrs. Knight. “You’re saying someone wrote a message in blood and you could see it because of the black light in your kitchen.”

  “Right,” Nate said.

  “Did the person who wrote it know about the light? Is it just a coincidence they wrote it in your room and not another one or out in the hall?”

  Nate blinked. “I never thought of it that way.”

  “Damn good question,” said Tim.

  “Actually,” said Veek, staring up at the screen, “I just thought of something.”

  “Shoot,” said Nate.

  “It’s in English.”

  “They spoke English here a hundred years ago,” said Mrs. Knight.

  “Right,” Veek said, “but the other message is in Russia-stani or whatever. They might’ve been written by different people.”

  “Or,” said Tim, “maybe the same person leaving a message for different people.”

  “Say what?”

  He pointed at the image on the flatscreen. “Whoever wrote this thought it meant life or death. It was urgent their message be understood. They weren’t going to write in a language the recipient wouldn’t understand.”

  Debbie cleared her throat. It was a husky, mannish sound that seemed to catch her off-guard, too. “We’re still kind of dodging the elephant in the room, aren’t we?”

  “How so?”

  “‘Protect Kavach, protect the world.’ What’s that supposed to mean?”

  They all kept their mouths shut and stared at the flatscreen.

  Mrs. Knight let out a cough that sounded more like a snort. “I think it’s unlikely there was a threat to the world that somehow centered around this building.”

  “It could just be a figure of speech,” said Veek. “Maybe it’s just something important to whoever built this place.”

  “World’s pretty important,” said Roger.

  “And again,” said Tim, “it’s an important message. You’re not going to waste time with metaphors or figures of speech if you’re leaving messages in your own blood.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “It doesn’t say ‘save,’” Nate said, “it says ‘protect’.”

  “You’re nitpicking,” said Veek.

  He shook his head. “No, think about it. Like Tim said, whoever wrote this was delivering a specific message. If I say ‘save’ it means the problem’s already begun. You don’t need to save someone from a burning building if the building isn’t on fire yet. ‘Protect’ implies the problem, the threat, is only possible. It isn’t actually here yet.”

  “I think the dark girl is right,” said Mrs. Knight. “You’re nitpicking.”

  “Hey,” snapped Veek.

  “I don’t mean anything by it, dear,” she said. “What’s the proper term these days? Hindi?”

  Veek bristled and Debbie set a hand on her arm.

  “Anyway,” Nate said loudly, “I think we can agree there was a threat of some kind, but we don’t know enough to say who or what was being threatened.”

  “‘cept the world,” said Roger. “Sounds like the world was being threatened.”

  “Yeah,” said Nate, “except for that.”

  They all murmured and looked at the warning again. Even Andrew shifted on his chair. He looked annoyed.

  “Let me show you a few other things,” said Nate. He peered at the computer. Xela had sorted the pictures by apartment owners, so it didn’t take him long to find what he wanted. A click and one of the equations he’d uncovered filled the screen behind him. “Okay, these are some of the original things that got us peeling the paint off in the first place. A couple of us have gone over them, but they’re way too advanced for us.” He tapped the pad again and the second equation from his apartment appeared, the one with the long number at the end.

  Mandy raised her hand. “Are they written by the same person?”

  Nate looked at Tim and he nodded. “We think so,” the older man said. “It looks like two different people wrote the math. One of them makes their fours with a triangle, the other one makes them open on top.” He sketched two different fours in the air as he spoke. “The person who made the triangle fours also had eights with more of an X in the middle of them. We think that’s who left the message over Nate’s stove.”

  Mandy nodded.

  Debbie leaned forward. Her eyes flitted back and forth over the big equation. Her lips moved. Nate looked at her. “Does this mean anything to you?”

  One corner of her mouth pulled up for a minute, then relaxed. “I’m not a hundred percent sure,” she said, “but part of that looks like a population growth equation.”

  “What?”

  “Population growth,” Debbie repeated. She walked to the television and sketched circles around a few figures with her finger. “It’s more elaborate than your basic Malthusian model, but here’s your birth rate, death rate, initial population...” She shrugged. “Not really sure what the rest of this is, though.”

  Nat
e looked at the numbers. “So you think this is a population?” He reached up and tapped the big number—1,528,326,500 ± 5000. His fingers left a small smudge on the flatscreen.

  She shrugged. “Maybe. I’m just saying it looks like a growth equation.”

  Veek tilted her head. “World population?”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Mrs. Knight. “The world passed that before I was born. I remember hearing about three billion just before I turned twenty.”

  Nate frowned. He glanced over at Veek. She was tapping away at her phone. “Got anything?”

  She took in a breath. “Yeah,” she said. “The world population hit one-point-six billion a few years after this place was built.”

  A low murmur swept through the room.

  “Could be a coincidence,” said Clive. “I mean, it didn’t happen at the same time.”

  “It could also be what they were scared of,” said Xela.

  Thirty Eight

  “Nate,” said Eddie, “I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes.”

  It was Tuesday after the holiday weekend. With the new schedule, only Zack and Nate were there, but Zack was out having lunch with a friend. Nate had hoped to do some more web searching for the Kavach Building, but Eddie talking for “a few minutes” could mean half of Nate’s afternoon was about to vanish.

  “Sure,” he said. “What’s up?”

  Eddie moved into the cubicle and settled his swollen ass against the corner of Nate’s desk, filling most of the space as he did. The scent of oil and pepperoni hung around him. He’d had the two-slice special at the pizza shop down on the corner for lunch. “This is kind of off the record,” Eddie said. “Nobody knows we’re having this talk.”

  Nate didn’t let his mental groan show on his face. The only thing worse than one of Eddie’s lectures was one of his man-to-man talks. The guy didn’t even have enough empathy to realize how fake his attempts at empathy came across.

  “You know things are tight right now,” Eddie said. “They cut the hours and they’re on me to cut back even more. I’m fighting to keep everybody here. You know that, right?”