by Anton Strout
Of course, it would only take touching something of Jane’s that had been with her all day to find out the truth, if I really wanted to know. But I resisted. I hadn’t learned to control the very type of incident that had led to every ugly breakup of my adult life only to turn around and use it now simply because it was the easy way. Instead, I dove into my food.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” Jane said, her eyes lighting up. She turned to her shoulder bag on the seat beside her. “I brought this for you.” Jane produced a book and put it on the table, sliding it across to me. The Rough Guide to Supernatural New York City. “This is the book you came for, isn’t it?”
“Jane,” I whispered, pulling the book off the table and out of sight in a flash. “I thought the Stacks were a no-lending area?”
“They are,” she said, giving me a devilish grin, “but who says I can’t use my occasional evil tendencies to benefit my man every once in a while?”
It was a tiny bit wicked, but who was I to lecture her on flouting Departmental rules? Besides, I was the one who was about to by involved in an art heist. “Thank you,” I said. “I’m hoping I can figure out just what the hell the significance of Cleopatra’s Needle is, if any, before I meet up with Connor in Central Park at three a.m. I appreciate it, but no more evil on my behalf, okay?”
“Sure thing, cutie,” she said, her grin still in place. I felt her foot start to trace its way up my calf under the table. “Sure I can’t coax you into a little more evil?”
Oh, I could definitely have gone for some of the horizontal evil Jane was hinting at. Then I remembered that Mina was staying at my apartment, and even though she was out making preparations for our heist tomorrow night, she could come back at any time. “Can we make it your place?” I said. Jane’s eyes narrowed.
I slid the book into my own bag.
“I’ve got to meet Connor in a few hours,” I said, skirting the issue of my houseguest, “and Chelsea’s a little closer to Central Park. It’ll give me more time to cuddle … ?”
“Cuddle?” she said. “Honey, when I’m done with you, you’ll be lucky if you can even move.”
I’d worry later about the delicious damage Jane might do to me and how I was going to be able to walk to meet Connor afterward. This was certainly a much better distraction than irrational jealousy, psychotic ex-cons, and vampires.
18
When I met Connor at the base of Cleopatra’s Needle, it was three a.m. and I was too exhausted to even speak. Aside from the mind-blowing sex, my body had already been pushed to its limit today—physically from the chase Connor and I had engaged in with the ghost, and emotionally from trying to deal with both Mina and Jane.
Just being in the silent darkness of the park after hours was clearly freaking Connor out. This was on top of whatever had spooked him in that letter I had seen in my psychometric vision—or rather hadn’t been able to see. There was no way in hell I could ask him about it directly, though, so for now I was happy to meet Connor’s silence with my own. My brain was thinked out.
I took a seat on the steps of the white pedestal supporting Cleopatra’s Needle. I stared up at one of the four bronze crabs standing guard at each corner. Connor paced back and forth. Curiosity eventually got the better of me and I spoke up.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “You think the jogger or maybe the vampires might return to the scene of the crime?”
Connor shook his head. “Not the vamps. Just the jogger hopefully,” he said, and went silent again.
I became bored and stood on the top edge of the white base, reaching up to grasp my gloved hands onto one of the metallic crab claws. I hung my full weight from it, letting my feet dangle, feeling a bit like a prize from one of those arcade claw vending-machine games. The mental image caused me to laugh out loud.
Connor twirled around, full of nerves.
“Jesus, kid,” he said. “How can you laugh at a time like this?”
“It probably helps that I’m dangling from this here crab,” I said, but Connor wouldn’t even smile at that. “My arms are numb, but it’s a nice, cooling sensation.”
“Just keep sharp,” he said, and resumed his pacing. “That’s gotta be nine hundred pounds’ worth of bronze crabs yer dangling from.”
“I’m not sure how important this is,” I said, dropping down, “but it would help if I knew what I was staying sharp for. Or rather, what we plan to do should anything show up here tonight.”
“Huh?” Connor said, looking up from his pacing. “Oh, right. Sorry, kid.”
Connor’s bag sat on one of the benches and he went to it. He pulled two shapes from it, but I could barely make them out in the pervading darkness.
“Are those … hair dryers?”
“Close, kid,” he said, “but no cigar.”
Connor stepped closer. In each hand he held identical hair-dryer-shaped devices. Both were bright yellow with red stripes down the sides.
“Bubble blasters?” I asked, and Connor nodded. “I don’t get it.”
“What’s not to get?” he said. “They blast bubbles.”
“Yeah, I gathered that.”
He handed me one. “Go on, give it a try.”
As if things couldn’t get more surreal, I pulled the trigger. Bubbles filled the air—but they weren’t ordinary bubbles. The smell of patchouli rose from the gun. I popped one of the bubbles and it splashed onto my face. “Great,” I said. “I smell like one of the squatters in the East Village now.”
“Look, kid. These vampires, or whatever it is we’re hunting, might not return to the scene of the crime, but the jogger might. A free-floating ghost almost invariably repeats the patterns it formed in life, like jogging this path. It’s just a matter of time.”
I held up my bubble blaster, waving it at Connor. “I thought mentors were supposed to be older and wiser. You’ve got the older part down.”
Connor stared at me. “Just get away from the crab and get on the other side of the path, will you? When we see the guy coming, we get the blasters going and create a wall of this stuff.”
My memories of the foul-smelling scent were always intertwined with the night we defeated the Sectarians at the Museum of Modern Art. Hundreds of ghosts, including my then-ghost-crush Irene, had been trapped by barrels filled with the stuff. I shook it off, heading down to the path at the bottom of the steps that led up to the Needle. I crossed to the far side of the path and waited for Connor to join me.
“We don’t have anything more high-tech?” I asked hopefully. I didn’t want to bet my life on something from the summer clearance bin at Toys ‘R’ Us.
“After you just did all that paperwork to requisition a new phone from Supply?” Connor asked. “We’d do double that to get any gear for an op like this, and then add a two-week wait for signatures, plus possible back-order time. It was just easier using these.”
I flexed my finger against the trigger of the gun. It felt plastic and flimsy, like it was just waiting to snap off at a crucial moment.
“And if this doesn’t work?” I asked.
“It’ll work,” Connor said, offended.
I looked at the white streak in Connor’s otherwise sandy brown mop of hair. “I don’t want to become part of your Hair Club for Men,” I said, using my favorite name for the White Stripes.
“It’ll work,” Connor said, and huffed. “And if it doesn’t, we’ll at least have had a fun time in Central Park blowing bubbles together.”
“You really need to work on your deadside manner,” I said.
“You really need to shut up and get ready,” Connor said, looking down the path. “It’s Don Ho time.”
“Eh?” I said, cocking my head.
Connor looked at me, exasperated. “‘Tiny Bubbles’? Get with the program, kid. Jesus, you’re making me feel old.”
“That would be your white hair talking,” I said, “and midthirties is old.”
I shifted my focus down the path. I could barely see anything through the mist cover
ing the pathway … until I realized the mist was actually the see-through body of the dead jogger coming toward us. He looked exactly as we had seen him the other day in his “Sherlock Ohms” T-shirt. He appeared to be oblivious to our presence.
“Start your engines,” Connor said, pulling the trigger on his blaster. I did the same. The tiny whirr of the fans felt anticlimactic considering what we were doing here, but the bubbles started flowing freely back and forth across the pathway. If only there were a mirror ball present, we’d have had a full-on disco.
Onward ran the jogger, still not noticing us, until he hit the first of the bubbles. He stopped abruptly, like he’d been shot. One of the bubbles hit his arm and popped, and he looked down as he hissed in pain. A sticky-looking patch formed on his translucent arm. Connor frantically waved his blaster up and down around the ghost in an attempt to contain him.
“Get around the back, kid,” he said. “We’ve got to encircle him before he makes a break for …”
Connor’s words were cut short as the spirit shot backward. Connor and I jockeyed for position to get around him, but that was when the jogger finally seemed to take notice of us. The ghost’s eyes widened in cartoonish horror, and his face distorted beyond the way a normal human’s could.
“N-n-no!” the spirit stammered. He turned and shot up the stairs toward the needle.
“Crap,” Connor said. “Looks like were gonna have to Scoob and Shag it, kid.”
“Scoob and Shag … ?”
“Improvise,” he said, and dashed off up the stone steps after it. I fell in behind him, my legs already aching. The spirit limped in a circle around the base of the needle, trying to shake free of a few of the bubbles that had popped on his leg. When he saw us coming, he circled around to the far side of the needle.
“Don’t hurt me,” the jogger shouted.
“We’re not here to hurt you,” Connor said, trying to calm him. The spirit gave Connor a look of doubt.
While the two of them continued their exchange, I crept around to the jogger’s side of the needle. Connor kept talking while I snuck up on him.
“We just need to know a few things,” Connor said. He checked my position by stealing a glance at me, but the spirit noticed and twisted around. His face was a contorted mask of inhuman rage. His sudden ferocity scared the crap out of me. I pulled the blaster’s trigger, and the bubbles started blowing. The jogger stumbled back in terror to avoid them.
“Nooo,” he screamed again, and cowered toward the needle, backing through the railing that surrounded it. Although the jogger was immaterial, he fell back like he had tripped on something, and phased into the base of the monolith, disappearing altogether. The park fell silent around us. Connor hurried over.
“That could have gone better,” he said, looking around with caution on his face.
“Better how?”
“We could have not failed completely,” he said with optimism.
“That’s not terribly mentor-y,” I said, turning to head back down the stairs. “I’m going to …”
I was interrupted by something akin to the screech of Godzilla coming from behind Connor. I looked at Cleopatra’s Needle. It took me a moment to identify the sound, but then it struck me—the sound of wrenching metal, coming from the pedestal at the base of the monolith. Not one, but all four of the bronze crabs were pulling free from their moorings, the sound becoming overpowering and painful to listen to. Connor covered his ears.
I shoved the blaster into my coat pocket, threw back the other side of my coat, and pulled out my retractable bat. I thumbed the switch and the bat jumped to full size.
Connor was still facing me, clutching his ears, stunned by the sound.
Not sure of what the hell they were or what to call them, I screamed over the sound of the crabs tearing free. “Umm … mecha-crabs behind you …”
Connor narrowed his eyes at me as he tried to figure out what I was saying, but seeing the bat in my hand was enough to get him to turn and face our foes.
The crabs hit the ground with an immensely solid clang.
“What was it you said?” I asked. “Nine hundred pounds of bronze? That makes each of the crabs roughly two hundred pounds!”
I looked at the thinness of my hollow bat and collapsed it back down, resheathing it.
“I say we err on the side of actually living and run,” I said. “Not that I’m ordering you.”
“No, that’s an order I can take,” Connor said, and ran for the stairs. “C’mon!”
The tiny legs of the bronze crabs clacked across the cobblestones while their claws snapped like sharp, tiny vises. That was all I needed to get running.
Connor was already down the steps and turning south along the path. I skipped the steps entirely and jumped straight to the ground in two bounds, catching up to him.
Even with my eyes somewhat adjusted to the light, it was tough following Connor through the darkness. The path led under a footbridge, the sound of rapid crab claws echoing against the tunnel walls. On this side of the bridge the path began to wind in and out of trees and my pace slowed a little as I fought to keep from losing an eye to low-hanging branches.
“Don’t slow down, kid,” Connor yelled, and then I heard him begin a low litany of “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit …”
I wanted to go faster, but all I could think of was a jagged branch skewering my eyeball or that, like in some movie cliché, I’d trip on an unearthed root that would be my undoing. I shielded my eyes, picked my feet up high, and ran faster. Off to either side of the path, I noticed thousands of tiny lights flickering off in the trees like I was running past a Fourth of July display.
“What the hell are those?” I shouted.
Connor slowed a little as he looked, but he didn’t slow much.
“Beats me, kid. Probably one of the million reasons I hate fucking being in the park at night.”
For a short while they brightened, and I swore I could see a city among them, one much different from Manhattan. It looked part Blade Runner, mixed with a dash of Tolkien, both gorgeous and terrifying to see out here in the middle of the night. I was determined not to fall and returned my eyes to the path. The lights faded away and the darkness of the woods returned. The sight of the speck that was Connor receding up ahead urged me to sprint even harder.
I caught up with him as he came to a stop, wrapped his arms around a tree, and shimmied up it.
I had no idea why Connor had opted to climb a tree at this point in our escape. Surely the crabs could wait around the base until he tried to come down. I congratulated myself for keeping moving and staying on the ground.
Until I saw nothing but lake spread out before me.
19
“Dive in, kid,” Connor shouted from up in the tree.
I dove.
As the ice-cold water nearly sent my body into shock, I propelled myself underwater and out across the lake. When I surfaced, I twisted myself around and looked back to shore. The crabs had left Connor alone up in the tree, having preferred to continue after me as the grounded target. All four charged into the water, clicking their claws as they came. I was thrilled, however, to see that, despite chasing me into the lake, the one thing the vicious little crabs couldn’t do was float. They used their back legs to try to propel themselves as a regular crab would, but the weight of their bronze bodies dragged them to the bottom of the lake. As long I kept myself floating at the surface, I should be fine. I watched as each of them sank into the mud of the lake bed below, their claws frantically clicking toward the surface.
I swam back to shore. When I crawled back onto dry land, Connor was just coming down from his tree. I slowly peeled off my coat. It weighed a ton.
“Son of a bitch,” I said, trying to wring it out as best I could. “What the hell just happened?”
I looked at Connor, but his concentration was mostly focused on the lake behind me.
“Kolb,” he said, “just possessed those things. And here he comes again �
��”
I stood there soaking wet, shivering, and turned myself around. Beneath the water, a faint white light started to form, growing like a searchlight rising to the surface. The water bubbled like it was a giant stew pot of WTF, and out of it rose glowing bubbles full of swirling mist, some as large as basketballs. With an alarming pop, the mist broke free and swirled together until I recognized a distinct shape forming. It was the jogger, gasping for air and clawing his way toward the shore. He still acted like he was human and that breathing was an issue for him.
The jogger pulled himself up onto shore and collapsed. His dark wreath of hair was wet, hanging down on one side at least half a foot from a bad comb-over. Everything else on him was wet, too—running shorts, track shoes, and his “Sherlock Ohms” T-shirt. He lay there, sputtering and catching his breath.
“Why is he wet?” I whispered to Connor. “He’s dead. Doesn’t that mean he’s immaterial?”
Connor shook his head.
“I don’t think he understands that he’s dead,” he said. “Mr. Kolb here thinks he’s alive so his spirit is reacting somewhat accordingly. He expected to get wet being in a lake, therefore he’s wet. Didn’t they teach you anything as a F.O.G.gie yet?”
“I am too alive,” the jogger said, forcing himself up onto his knees, “and it’s Doctor Kolb to you. I didn’t go to MIT just for the parties, I’ll have you know.”
He snickered at what he must have thought was some great private joke, then stood up. With care, he scooped the hanging section of his comb-over back onto the top of his head and arranged it. It was a futile attempt at best, looking nothing more than someone with a wet cat sitting up there, but he looked happy with it.
“Sorry, about that, Dr. Kolb,” I said. Politeness was the cornerstone of the D.E.A.’s training manual Deadside Manner … or what I had read of it, anyway.