by Peter Clines
“Hey,” Anne said, “did you want to do anything for lunch?”
Koturovic disappeared in a puff of mental smoke.
Nate looked up at her. He bit his lip and tried to make note of where his thoughts had fallen.
“Sorry,” she said. “Did I catch you in the middle of something?”
“Yeah. Don’t worry about it.”
“So,” she said, “lunch?”
“I brought a sandwich,” he said.
“We could just do cheap pizza downstairs.”
“Then I just wasted a sandwich.”
“I could get cheap pizza and you could watch me eat.”
He smiled. “So you’re offering to torture me.”
“Hey,” she grinned, “don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it.”
“Thanks, but I think I’m still going to say no. Besides, working through lunch gives me a slim chance of getting caught up by the end of the month.”
Her dark eyes fixed on him. “You know, the past couple weeks or so you’ve been a lot more focused.”
Nate chuckled. “Not according to Eddie.”
“I didn’t say focused on this. I just meant you’ve sort of...” She tapped her fingertips on her lips. “Do you mind if I say something a bit new-age sounding?”
“Are you going to read my aura or something?”
She laughed and it turned into a snort. “No,” she said. “You just seem like you finally found your purpose, y’know?”
He looked at her and thought about Aleksander Koturovic dying to protect the machine he’d helped build. The machine Nate now lived inside of. He thought of Tim, Xela and Roger, Debbie and Clive.
He thought about Mandy, too scared of the future to do anything.
He thought about Mrs. Knight, floating through space until she fell into an alien sun.
And he thought about Veek.
“I have,” he said. “I think I’ve figured out where my life is going.”
“It’s working for you, whatever it is,” she said. “Anyway, I’m dying for a break and if you’re not up for lunch what if we just—”
dying to protect the machine
“Fuck,” he said.
Anne’s brows went up. “Not quite where I thought this little chat was heading,” she said.
“Sorry. I’ve got to get out of here,” Nate said.
She smiled. It flitted across his mind that Anne had a spectacular smile. Not long ago he would’ve been thrilled to be this close to it, let alone be the one causing it. “Fantastic,” she said. “Lunch it is, then.”
“No,” he said, standing up. “I mean, I have to get out of here.”
Nate grabbed his backpack. He snatched up a few things from the desk and stowed them. He patted himself down, located his keys, and made sure his phone was still on his hip.
Eddie’s voice sounded from the door. “Everyone off to lunch?”
Anne bit back a groan and it became a quick hiss in her nose. Nate had heard it before. He’d made the same noise at least a dozen times. The dreaded Eddie’s-inviting-himself-along groan, often muted to an exhalation through the nostrils.
Nate looked at his boss. “I need to leave,” he said.
“For lunch?”
“For the afternoon. Personal matter.”
“How much have you gotten done so far today?”
“It’s a personal crisis,” emphasized Nate.
Eddie looked at the stacks of mail totes and shook his head. “I don’t know, Nate,” he said. It was the lecture tone, tinged with a hint of good-buddy tone. “You’re really far behind right now. Really far. I don’t think you can afford to take an afternoon off and expect—”
“I quit.”
The words leaped out of his mouth. For a brief moment he thought it had been Anne or someone in the hall. But Anne was behind him and she’d made a little sound that was half shock and half excitement.
Eddie blinked. His jowls flared pink and he blinked a few more times. “What?”
“I quit,” repeated Nate. The phrase threw a weight from his shoulders, and Eddie seemed to shrink as he said it. “I don’t have time for this.” He turned back to the desk and grabbed the few personal things there. His spare phone charger. A battered paperback dictionary. Some post-it notes on the monitor with important phone numbers he’d scribbled down.
“Hold on,” said Eddie. “You can’t quit.”
“No time.” Without that weight he felt strong. He stashed the items in his backpack, zipped it shut, and threw the strap over his shoulder. He locked eyes with Anne, halfway in her own cubicle. Her mouth moved silently. You rock.
Eddie was still shrinking. His shoulders slumped and he looked a bit scared. “Let’s take a minute and talk about this,” he whined as Nate stepped past him.
“There’s nothing to talk about.” He checked the hat rack to make sure there wasn’t anything he’d forgotten. He found a battered gray baseball cap and decided to leave it.
Nate turned to the big man. “Goodbye, Eddie,” he said. He held out his hand and Eddie, flustered, shook it. Nate glanced past the big man. “Bye, Anne. Say goodbye to Jimmy for me.”
She blew him a kiss. “See you around, Nate.”
His former boss followed him into the hall. “You’re not going to quit your job in this economy, are you?”
“I’ve got more important things to do.”
Sixty
He found a parking space a block away and jogged down Beverly to the intersection. A delicate framework floated in his mind, a three-dimensional outline of events. He didn’t want to focus on it and risk breaking the tenuous threads, but he was nervous about letting it out of sight.
As he crossed the street, he could see someone sitting on the second set of steps leading up to Kavach. His pace quickened as much as it could without turning into a run. He looked at Veek through the gate while he flipped through his keys. She wore a battered UCLA hoodie over a tank top. For a moment he let his mental construct slide away.
“Aren’t you supposed to be at work?” he asked after a moment.
“Aren’t you?”
“I just quit,” said Nate.
Her eyes lit up a little behind the thick frames of her glasses. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. I had an idea. Not even an idea, just...just a thought.”
“And it was worth quitting over?”
He shrugged. “Data entry seemed a little pointless after going into space.”
She smirked and nodded. “Are you going to be okay? Without a job?”
Nate shrugged again. “I’m good for a few weeks. After that...I’ll figure something out.” He opened the gate. “So what about you? Some people might think you were here waiting for me.”
She stuck her tongue out at him. “You wish. Just warming up. I called in sick again.”
“Isn’t that going to get you in trouble?”
“Maybe. I find it really hard to care, too, y’know?”
“I do.”
“So, what’s your almost-idea?”
He paused. The construct leaped back to the foreground of his thoughts and he took a moment to avert his mental eyes. “I don’t want to say yet. I’m still trying to get it right in my mind.”
Veek nodded. “As it turns out, I do have news of my own. Want to hear something sort of creepy?”
“Do I have a choice?”
She shook her head. “First off, score one for computers over books.”
“How so?”
“Debbie found so many little things, she missed one of the big ones. I found Whipple Phillips this morning. He’s on Wikipedia.”
Everything shook. It took Nate a moment to realize he’d come to a dead stop, one foot on the stairs, one on the first landing. “You’re joking.”
She shook her head.
He raised himself up to the landing. “So what’s it say?”
“Pretty much just what Debbie had. He was a businessman from New England with investments in Idaho. Spent a lot of hi
s later years taking care of his daughters and grandson. Died in 1904.”
“He had a family? Are they still around?”
She shook her head again. “All gone. But you’ve heard of his grandson.”
“Stop being melodramatic.”
“H. P. Lovecraft,” said Veek.
Nate’s mental gears spun for a moment. The fragile framework came close to being thrashed. “Wasn’t he...he’s a horror writer, right?”
“The original horror writer, if you ask some folks,” Veek said. “When H. P. was a little kid, according to several accounts, Grandpa Whippy told him all these weird stories about other worlds and monsters and stuff. When he got older, Lovecraft said those talks inspired a lot of his stories about Cthulhu and the Elder Gods and all that.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“It’s on Wikipedia, so it must be true.”
“Cthulhu’s some kind of evil god, right? The one with
tentacles
the octopus head?”
“Technically, I think he’s an immortal alien,” said Veek, “but he’s so powerful he’s a god for all intents and purposes.”
“I didn’t know you were into that stuff.”
“I’m not. Wikipedia scores again.”
Nate let it sink in. It pushed against the fragile construction and he shoved it away. He couldn’t get distracted. Not even by Veek. “Can we talk about this in a little bit? I need to...I have to get this idea worked out.”
“Go,” she said. She stood up and brushed herself off. “I’ll stop by in a while.”
* * *
Nate stared at the blank wall next to his desk. Half of his apartment was in shadow, despite the midday sun. Two of his windows had plywood over them. He was low on the list to get them fixed.
He’d been staring at the wall for ten minutes. While he did, the framework in his mind grew and became more solid. The threads spun into wires, and the wires twisted into cables. He just needed to winch the cables tight and pull the little ideas into one big one.
Underneath the paint there were words written in blood. Aleksander Koturovic’s blood. He’d been right there, in this apartment, one hundred and thirteen years ago. He ran there to make sure his friends and co-workers knew the Family of the Red Death was coming for them.
Nate played the scene in his mind again.
Koturovic had been stabbed by one of the Family members. Probably a fatal wound back then, and he would’ve been educated enough to know it. He knew he was a dead man walking. He wasn’t going to make it through the night, even if he ended up at a hospital. Definitely not if the Family got him.
Koturovic had run through the night on New Year’s Eve, bleeding the whole time, crazed doomsday cultists chasing him. He’d gotten into the building, run to the farthest apartment from the front door, and scribbled a warning that couldn’t be washed away. And then...
What happened next?
He couldn’t risk being caught. The stakes were too high. No matter how dedicated he was, there was a chance he’d talk if the Family tortured him. Especially as he got weaker from blood loss. He knew Kavach was the world’s only chance. So he wouldn’t let himself be taken prisoner.
Nate turned and examined the room. He tried to picture it when he’d first moved in. When Toni first showed it to him. An empty box. Kitchen, closet, bathroom.
MUST HIDE
The closet wasn’t big enough to hide someone, even if it was filled with clothes. The cabinets in the kitchen were too small. Granted, everyone said people were smaller back then, but Nate couldn’t even picture a child fitting inside those little boxes. The bathroom couldn’t hide a cat, let alone a person.
There was a ledge outside the big windows. It was just wide enough for someone to stand on, but they’d be exposed to anyone down on the street. And Koturovic would’ve been too weak to risk the ledge. If the scientist fell and didn’t die, the Family would have him.
There was always the chance he would’ve hidden in another room, or left the building altogether, but it didn’t feel right. He would’ve been weak. He wouldn’t have a lot of time. The Family couldn’t have been far behind him. Too close to risk leaving the room and being caught once the message was written.
Maybe there’d been furniture in the apartment. A bed to crawl under. A steamer trunk or wardrobe to hide in. But the first thing anyone did was look under the bed, and any piece of furniture in plain sight big enough to hide in would’ve been an obvious place to search.
Ahhh, something in the back of Nate’s head piped up, but Koturovic knew people would be looking for him. He would’ve been ready. He would’ve had a trap door or a bolt hole or...
Something in plain sight.
Nate walked to the closet. A sweep of his arm pushed all the clothes to one side. He dragged his laundry hamper out and kicked aside a few pairs of sneakers.
Down in the corner of the closet sat the panel he’d first seen three months ago. It was a foot tall and maybe eighteen inches across. The width made it look less like a door. He ran his fingers along the paint-covered seams and the rough stretches around it where the framing had been pulled away.
Nate bet whoever tore the framing off never even looked inside the little hatch.
He went back to the kitchen and got a knife. The blade wasn’t as sharp as the razors they’d used to open 14, and Nate found himself stretching and tearing the thick latex a lot more than cutting it. A few times the paint came away in strips and he tossed them over his shoulder into his studio.
It was hot work, made even hotter by the lack of circulation. The ceiling fan’s air patterns didn’t extend into the closet. He grabbed a shirt from the top of his hamper—the shirt he’d worn on his unexpected trip into outer space—and blotted his forehead again and again.
It took Nate half an hour to carve around the rectangle. He pried at the panel with his fingernails but couldn’t get enough leverage. After a few moments he picked up the knife and stabbed it as deep as he could into the gap. He tried to lever the little hatch open.
A tremble worked its way up through the blade. It was the slow, thick sensation of something dragged into motion after ages at rest. He felt threads of latex stretch and pop around the panel.
A line of darkness appeared at the top of the hatch. The blade slid in deeper. Nate grabbed the edge with his free hand and pulled. The smell of a hundred years rushed out to greet him in a dusty cloud.
The panel was loose, but he could feel a tug of resistance. He pulled again and something rustled behind the door. He yanked his fingers away before realizing it was his own motions making the sound. He got a grip on either side and dragged the panel away from the wall. Light spilled into the space.
The backside of the panel had a brittle loop of rope on it. The rope was attached to an elaborate lever-arm held in place with blobs of plaster. They dropped to the floor as he pulled the hatch open. The lever was wrapped in a crumbling sheath that led back to a cobweb-covered pile of dusty sticks, plaster, and fabric. A pair of neon-green roaches darted across the pile and vanished into a patch of shadows.
Nate studied the rats’ nest of odds and ends. It was crammed into the space between the walls. Most of it was wedged under the bathtub’s raised platform, which was recognizable even inside-out and from this odd angle. One length of wood and fabric hung down to balance the assembly against a thick electrical cable.
After a few moments his first impressions broke down into the truth. He saw the loose buttons on the sleeves, each hanging by just one or two threads. The blobs of plaster clinging to the rope became individual finger bones. A pattern emerged from the random shadows and he recognized the eye sockets and nose cavity of the sideways skull. One of the roaches felt Nate’s eyes on it and skittered deeper into the building.
“Aleksander Koturovic,” he murmured.
Sixty One
Oskar expressed disbelief at first, then anger at the opened panel, and shock at the sight of the skeleton. It left h
im pale and short of breath. Right then, Nate was certain Oskar didn’t know all the secrets of the Kavach Building.
An hour later six people were in Nate’s apartment with a gurney, a very expensive-looking camera, some lights on tripods, and several bright orange tackle boxes. They looked and acted like the medical examiners on countless television shows except for the distinct lack of badges on their shirts or windbreakers. He asked who they were with. One man told him “the morgue,” while the sole woman in the group said “the authorities.”
Nate waited in the doorway with Oskar. Mandy was by her apartment across the hall, looking nervous and fascinated at the same time. Veek, Tim, Xela, and Andrew stood two doors down. They couldn’t see anything, but they watched Nate and Oskar for hints or signs of what was going on.
Inside the apartment the medical examiners removed Koturovic’s body in the largest pieces they could. Each part was placed in a large container that looked like industrial-strength Tupperware. There was no discussion of cutting into the wall. None of the people mentioned the odd cables or devices inside the crawlspace.
One of them, the man who said they were from “the morgue,” asked a few questions. When had Nate found the body? Did he touch it? Did anyone else touch it? Could they contact him later for a full statement? He answered as best he could.
It was quarter after eleven when the last container was loaded onto the gurney. The woman spoke with Oskar, while the same man who’d asked the questions gave Nate a pat on the shoulder and told him not to think about it. The gurney was rolled down the hall, carried down the stairs, and slid into the back of an official-looking blue van. They drove off, and Nate knew he would never see either the people or Koturovic’s body again.
Oskar cleared his throat. “I am so sorry I doubted you,” he said for the fourth or fifth time. “It must haff been a horrible shock to discoffer that.”
“Yeah,” Nate answered for the fourth or fifth time. He looked at Oskar. “Any idea who it is?”