14

by Peter Clines

  They’d dragged the couches into a rough circle. More of a triangle, really, thought Nate. He leaned on the arm of one couch, where Veek sat with Debbie and Tim. She was next to Nate, but still a bit cool toward him. Mrs. Knight dominated her couch, her cane ready to strike. Roger and Xela sprawled together on another couch, and her laptop covered her lap.

  “I finally heard back from Public Works the other day,” Nate said. “They’re supposed to have all the building plans on file. The only things they don’t keep are residences, which get tossed, and historical documents. Those go off to libraries or museums.

  “The guy was pretty helpful. A bunch of stuff from the late 1800s had all been moved to the Getty a while back, and he’d assumed the Kavach plans, if they still existed, would’ve gone with it.”

  “And now they’re missing from the Getty?” guessed Mrs. Knight.

  He shook his head. “No, they never went. He checked and it turns out the Kavach plans are still considered active material and are still on file at Public Works.”

  “Fantastic,” said Xela. “So we can go see them.”

  Nate shook his head. “Nope. That’s where it ends. They’re sealed records.”

  Tim’s eyebrows went up. “Sealed?”

  “Yep. The same way they seal plans for things like the Federal Building or parts of the state capitol or embassies. The guy emailed me to explain why he couldn’t tell me anything. He even said he has to make a note in the file that I asked about them because of some Patriot Act thing.”

  “The Patriot Act?” coughed Veek.

  Nate nodded.

  Tim set his jaw. “So this isn’t just something that happened a hundred and twenty years ago,” he said.

  Nate nodded again. “It might just be bureaucracy, but yeah. I think somebody’s still trying to keep this place a secret.”

  “So...what’s that all mean?” asked Roger. “Are we terrorists now or something?”

  Tim shook his head. “Persons of interest at best.”

  “What’s that get us?”

  “Fifty years at Guantanamo Bay,” scoffed Veek.

  “Well, hang on,” said Nate. “Debbie’s got the really big stuff.”

  He slid off the arm and onto the couch. Veek shuffled down and Debbie stood up. She held a thin deck of index cards that she massaged with the other hand. They were bright white, but halfway through she’d marked the edges with black magic marker. She’d gone over most of them with Nate the night before. Debbie smiled nervously and then slipped a pair of reading glasses from her pocket. She skimmed the first few cards and then smiled again.

  “Okay,” said Debbie, “everyone ready for history 101?”

  “Would’ve brought an apple if I’d known teacher was going to be hot,” grinned Roger. Xela reached over the laptop to whack him in the arm.

  Debbie blushed and massaged her cards again. “I spent the past three days at the school library looking for Aleksander Koturovic.”

  “I could’ve done that,” said Veek. She shot a glance at Nate. “How long could a few web searches take?”

  “I didn’t use the web, though,” said Debbie. “There’s still a lot of older stuff that hasn’t made it to the internet, so we figured it might be better to go old-school. I checked card catalogs, encyclopedias, and some newspapers and magazines on microfiche.”

  “Stop keeping us in suspense, dear,” said Mrs. Knight. “What did you find?”

  “Sorry,” Debbie said. “I’m not good with public speaking.”

  “It’s just us,” said Tim. “We’re not grading you.” He gave a pointed look at the others. Even Mrs. Knight shifted on her couch.

  Debbie glanced at her cards. “Okay,” she said, “Aleksander Koturovic was a Serbian biochemist and neurophysiologist before people used those words. He also did a lot of research into evolution and wrote a few papers on Neanderthal man and extinctions. He was the Walter Bishop of his time, and most of his ideas got him labeled as a quack.” She gave a little smile as she flipped an index card to the back of the pile. “To be honest, half his ideas would still get him labeled as a quack.

  “This makes it tough to find a lot of solid material on him because so much of his work got discounted as irrelevant. Most of it just ends up buried in pseudo-science books. Pretty much the only place you can find him is lumped in with guys like Edgar Cayce or Immanuel Velikovsky. He believed in telepathy, shared dreaming, race memories, all that kind of stuff. The idea that people’s minds can all connect on some extra-sensory level.”

  “So he was a nut,” said Tim.

  “Maybe.” She flipped over another card. “At the time people thought this was real science. H. G. Wells edited this huge book, The Science of Life, and there’s a whole section about telepathy in it. He even mentions Koturovic in passing.

  “Now, this is all a bit sketchy,” Debbie said. She looked up from the cards and gave an apologetic frown. “I had to piece stuff together from a few different sources and they didn’t all agree. I didn’t have time to cross-check all of it, so I don’t know how much of this is accurate.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Xela.

  “Okay. So, Koturovic studied the structure of the brain and how much bio-electricity it put out and what frequencies that electricity was on. He moved to London and in 1877 he attended a lecture given by a mathematician named William Clifford who was one of the first people to propose the idea of other dimensions. He noticed—”

  “Wait,” said Tim. “Other dimensions?”

  She nodded. “I looked him up. Clifford did a lot of work with concepts like curved space and there being more to the world than just the standard three dimensions. At least a fourth, mathematically speaking, and probably a fifth, sixth, seventh, and so on.”

  Tim raised an eyebrow but said nothing else.

  She glanced at her cards to find her place. “So, Koturovic noticed a lot of similarities between Clifford’s math involving higher dimensions and his own calculations about telepathy. There were places where the numbers lined up, and he decided there might be a connection.”

  “I remember something like that in an astronomy course I took in college,” said Nate. “There was one class where the professor showed us how geometry and trigonometry tie directly to relativity. It really blew me away.”

  Debbie nodded. “Right. Same idea. So this became the focus of Koturovic’s research for the next ten years. He didn’t write much, but he did note that he’d gotten confirmation of the ‘telepathic vibrations’ from a friend. He tried to present his work to the University College board in 1887 and got kicked out. It was another year before he published anything else, and even then it was more of this fringe science stuff that’s gotten twisted and become unreliable.”

  “Just a moment,” said Mrs. Knight. “First you were saying all of this was considered acceptable science. Now you’re saying they called him a nut because of it.”

  “It’s because of where he was going with it,” said Debbie. “It’s like people today who try to use math to prove the moon landings were faked or aliens built the pyramids. He was an embarrassment to the university, so they got rid of him.”

  “So what got him fired?” Roger asked.

  Debbie tapped her cards. “He thought the world was going to end.”

  “No way,” said Xela.

  “Yep. He claimed there was a kind of psychic critical mass, and when it was reached...that was it.”

  Veek tilted her head. “Critical mass?”

  Debbie nodded again and shuffled another card to the back. “Okay, remember how Koturovic was studying telepathy and got obsessed with dimensional mathematics?” She waited for enough of them to nod. “Okay, so he was convinced that once there were enough people in the world—when the population passed a key point—their combined brainwaves would sync up and achieve a sort of harmonic frequency that would break down certain dimensional barriers, like how a tuning fork can break glass.”

  “Let me guess,” said Tim.
He glanced at Nate. “Would that population be somewhere around one and a half billion?”

  “One-point-five-two, according to the article I found,” said Debbie. “But I think we’ve got the refined number.”

  Veek looked at Nate. “Why didn’t you tell me all this?”

  “I tried last night,” he said. “You weren’t talking to me, remember?”

  She smacked his arm.

  Roger frowned. “So this was gonna destroy the world? The tuning fork thing?”

  Debbie shook her head. “Nope,” she said. “What was in the other dimension would.”

  Nate blinked. “What?”

  “I have no idea where this next bit comes from,” said Debbie. “This is just how all the stories and articles I found go, and it’s almost definitely what made University College get rid of him.

  “Koturovic somehow came up with the idea there were some kind of creatures—big, smart, scary alpha predators—living in these higher dimensions. Telepathically-sensitive people sensed them all through history and that’s where all our myths about demons and monsters come from. It’s their presence leaking through. When the dimensional barriers were shattered, according to him, these things would come through and eat everything they could until the barriers reasserted themselves. Kind of the universe’s method of population control.”

  Nate glanced at the sky through the lounge’s big windows.

  “Creepy,” said Veek.

  “It gets creepier,” said Debbie.

  “It sounds silly to me,” said Mrs. Knight.

  “You didn’t tell me any of this the other night,” Nate said to Debbie.

  “I just gave you the highlights,” she said. “Sorry.”

  “Sucks to be left out, doesn’t it?” said Veek. She smacked Nate in the arm again, but it wasn’t as hard this time.

  “So what were these things supposed to be?” asked Tim.

  “I don’t know,” said Debbie with a tiny shrug. “He falls back on a lot of the fancy descriptions they used back then that say a lot without saying anything. Again, he doesn’t even explain how he figured this part out. He just says they’re really big and really nasty.”

  “I’d’ve fired his ass, too,” said Roger. “And it still doesn’t tell us what all this shit is.” He waved his arms around at the building.

  “Seems pretty straightforward to me,” Nate said. “He predicted the end of the world. Then he built this place to stop it.”

  Fifty Four

  They gazed at the blank walls of the lounge for a few moments.

  Xela spoke first. “So this is...what, the anti-apocalypse machine?”

  Mrs. Knight sniffed hard through her nose. It was a very dismissive sniff. “If this is supposed to stop the end of the world,” she said, “why does it cause earthquakes?”

  “It doesn’t cause them,” said Nate. “It’s preventing them.”

  Roger nodded at Nate. “Like we were saying the other night. That’s normal. That’s what things are like if the machine stops working. If the needles aren’t at zero.”

  Veek nodded. “Makes sense. If doomsday works off the population, it’s not like the problem’s gone away. If anything, it’s gotten worse.”

  “So you think this is still going on?” Xela’s eyes were wide. “The end of the world is, well, still happening?”

  Nate shrugged. “It makes sense,” he said.

  “Not necessarily,” said Tim. “If you stick with that tuning fork analogy, it only works at one pitch. If you go higher or lower, it won’t work. Maybe once the population passed the critical mark it moved back into a safe zone.”

  “Bro, maybe you didn’t notice when I flipped that switch the other day,” said Roger, “but there was an earthquake.”

  “And the sun went out,” added Veek with a nod to Nate.

  “See, that doesn’t make sense either,” said Tim. “I felt that. I saw the shadows. But no one else did. We’re in California. There’s a dozen earthquake sensors in Los Angeles alone. You can’t drop a barbell in this state without it registering somewhere. How did we have a five-point-something earthquake in our building that nobody else noticed?”

  Nate and Veek exchanged a glance. She shrugged. “Beats me.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Tim said, “there’s definitely something going on here. I just think we need to get a better grip on things before we leap to any conclusions.”

  Veek looked at Debbie. “You said it got creepier. So what’s the creepy bit?”

  “Well, Koturovic emigrated to the United States and moved here to Los Angeles,” she said. “And he died here. At least, that’s the official story.”

  Tim raised his brows again. “The official story?”

  “They never found a body,” said Debbie, “which apparently wasn’t that rare back then. Lots of people went missing and got reported dead. He was out having dinner with two co-workers on New Year’s Eve, 1898. When they left the restaurant they were attacked by a group of people with knives. The other two were killed, witnesses said Koturovic was stabbed but got away. The mob went after him and he was never seen again. The authorities declared him dead a week later.”

  Xela shifted on the couch. “I thought it took years to do that?”

  “Depends on the circumstances,” said Tim. “Even back then they could do it quick if they had good reason.” He looked at Debbie. “Who were the attackers?”

  She shook her head. “The main suspects were a doomsday cult that had been active in Los Angeles at the time, but the police couldn’t prove it. From what I’ve been reading, they probably got paid off. The police, that is.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “Guessing everyone else is thinking this,” said Roger, “but I’ll say it out loud. Guy predicts the end of the world, builds a machine to stop the end of the world, and then gets killed by a group worshipping the end of the world.”

  “A doomsday cult?” said Mrs. Knight. She rapped her bony knuckles on her cane and shook her head. “This whole thing sounds more and more ridiculous.”

  “There were a lot of them back in the 1880s and ‘90s,” said Debbie. “The same way we had people freaking out over Y2K, there were a lot of people back then who were convinced the world was going to end in 1900.” She held up her index cards. “This group was called the Family of the Red Death. I don’t have much on them because I didn’t want to get too far off-track, but I could look on Monday.”

  “They have found us,” said Nate.

  Veek gave him a look. “What?”

  “That’s what it said on my wall. ‘They have found us.’” He nodded as he considered the words. “‘They’ were the cult. It was his blood.”

  “Oh, shit,” she said.

  Tim’s chin went up and down. “That fits,” he said. “But if they were chasing him here you’d think they’d’ve found all this.”

  “That’s the big trick, though, isn’t it?” said Xela. “If they were looking for a machine, they’d search the building. But it probably wouldn’t occur to them the machine was the building.”

  Nate nodded. “What was it Mandy said? If you want to hide a tree, you hide it in a forest. It’s the best camouflage you could have.”

  Tim snapped his fingers. “Which is why they rent it out. A building that stands empty poses questions, but a building with a bunch of unconnected tenants is just another building.”

  “And why they screen us,” said Veek. “They don’t want comfortable people. They want tenants with something to lose, ones who won’t ask questions or complain about some of the weirdness they come across.”

  “Well, I’ve got more on the building, too, sort of,” Debbie said. A new card switched to the front. “Once I had Koturovic I could do some cross-referencing and found out a bit more about this plot of land.”

  “What?” said Veek. “You found more?”

  Her face shifted. “I’m sorry. It’s just the research bug, y’know? Once I find something I just keep going.”
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br />   “I should’ve had you helping me a year ago,” sighed Veek.

  Nate waved Debbie on. “So, what’ve you got?”

  “Okay, she said, “the land the Kavach Building is on was bought in October of 1890 by a group called the Owyhee Land and Irrigation Company. Like you were saying the other day,” she said to Nate, “it was out in the middle of nowhere. A few months later, they filed permits to start construction.”

  She switched cards again. “Now, about a year after this the company started work on a dam out in Idaho, on a branch of the Snake River called the Bruneau. The story was that this dam was going to replace one they’d built a few years earlier which had collapsed.”

  “What were they really doing?” asked Tim.

  Debbie smiled. “This is where it gets clever. They were building a dam. They’d been planning to for about four years. The president of the company was some kind of early entrepreneur-land baron. He wanted to build a town on a lake, so he needed to make a lake.”

  “But...?” asked Nate.

  “But,” she said, “there’s no actual evidence of the company building the first dam. The one they said they were replacing. There are stories about its collapse and a few news articles about the replacement. Even some photos of it. But it’s all kind of thin and there’s nothing dated before 1890.”

  Roger frowned. “Somebody run off with the money?”

  “I think we’re living in the money,” said Veek. “It all went here.”

  Debbie nodded. “I can’t find anything certain, but reading between the lines it sure seems like the first dam was just a story they made up so they could funnel a ton of money out here to make the Kavach Building.”

  “Just like Locke Management,” said Nate. “They didn’t want anyone to know they were connected to this place.”

  “Who owned the company?” asked Tim.

  Debbie shuffled back through her notes. “The president of the Owyhee Land and Irrigation Company was Whipple Phillips.”