Dead Matter

by Anton Strout

  “No fair!” I shouted at the gargoyles.

  My words had no effect. It did nothing to slow their pace as they started across the graveyard, their thick stone legs leaving several of the ancient grave markers toppled over in their wake as they advanced on me.

  Still, as imposing as they were, I actually preferred them in this form than as ghosts. Solid creatures could be beaten on. I readied myself, hefting my bat up into swinging position. I only hoped that years of acid rain in New York City had taken its toll on the stonework to soften them up a bit for me. Either my bat would give or they would.

  The creatures were huge, but their sheer weight slowed them considerably. I was able to run up on one of them, taking a few shots, then circling out of its reach while it swiped at me. With each swing I gave it my all, and with each swing I connected. Chips and shards of stone flew off the creatures, but they kept on advancing.

  At this rate it would take me a solid week of fighting them to make any headway. There had to be another way. Backing away, I put as many gravestones between myself and them as I could. As impressive as they were in size, they had a hard time maneuvering around the sturdier gravestones. This didn’t matter much as they pushed their way past, crumbling most of them eventually, but it did slow them up a bit. That was something I could use to my advantage, if the ten minutes I had spent reading the departmental memo “Fight Training 301: The Bigger They Are” had taught me anything.

  I ran to the far side of one the stone Goliaths, causing both of them to turn and give chase. I channeled them between two sets of gravestones and looked back over my shoulder to make sure I was leading them to the end of the row. When I reached it, I turned around the last stone and started down the next aisle. To follow, the first gargoyle compensated by angling itself around the last stone as well. Seeing an opportunity to use momentum against the creature, I lunged forward and shoved my bat lengthwise between its ankles. The lumbering stone monstrosity couldn’t stop itself. Its legs fumbled over each other and the gargoyle started to topple . . . right toward me. I dove to my right to avoid it. It crashed down on top of several other gravestones, crumbling some of them and snapping off bits of itself at the same time. One of its heavy stone hands bounced into my lap, causing a charley horse in my leg with the impact. Using both hands, I quickly pushed it off of me and limped myself up to a standing position. One down, one to go . . .

  The other gargoyle was already tripping over the first one, causing a domino effect. A very weighty domino effect. Before I could move, the gargoyle crashed down right on top of me, pinning me under it with my back splayed across the top of one of the gravestones. This creature, unlike the other one, did not shatter into pieces, remaining animated as it pressed down on me. Hard.

  To the ghost inside, the living stone was like armor protecting it from my various talismans now crushed up against it. A genius move on its part, one which left me slowly being crushed to death.

  Its stony head craned to face me, its glowing red eyes staring deep into mine. “Why are you defending him?” the gargoyle said. “This living man disturbed us.”

  “What?” I croaked out from underneath it.

  Before it could speak again, a blinding sear of light arced past me, taking the creature’s head clean off and launching it across the graveyard. The same bolt of light arced back through the figure, this time taking its legs off at the knees. The living stone crumbled apart on top of me and fell to the ground, leaving a large assortment of shattered pieces.

  Once the weight was off me, I scrambled down the back side of the gravestone I had been lying on and landed with a thud on the pile of broken stone. My back cried out in pain. I took my time standing up, and turned to look at where the energy had come from. It was pretty easy to spot, actually.

  Jane was practically glowing, standing with one hand on a nearby lamppost to leech its power and the other one pointed straight toward me. Her hair was a little frazzled, her body still charged with electricity as little drifts of smoke wafted off her fingers. Before I could think of anything to say to her, I remembered I wasn’t alone in the graveyard. I turned my attention back to my immediate surroundings. The rest of the swirling ghosts were still in here with me. I knelt down to dig my bat out from where it had been buried in the stony remains. Once I had it free, I stood up and started tapping it on one of the still-intact gravestones.

  “Listen up, you unliving sons of bitches,” I said, trying to sound as commanding as Connor when he dealt with spirits. “Everyone back to your resting place . . . now.”

  I hoped it would work, but I honestly wasn’t sure it would. I pressed on. “Look what happened to your two friends here. You looking to step up and take a shot? It’s just the two of us against all of you. The little lady packs just as good—if not better—a wallop as I do, and I’m pretty sure you don’t want to mess with her. So here’s what I’m going to do.” I pointed at the body slumped by the base of the mausoleum. “I’m going to remove this intruder now, okay? Once he’s gone, you can all rest in peace. This ends here, tonight. I’m taking care of this.”

  My body ached and my nerves were shot. If the spirits didn’t obey, I was probably going to collapse soon. The apparitions paused in their tornado of activity, then ever so slowly one by one began heading back into their specific graves. A sense of momentary relief washed over me.

  Now there was only the intruder to think about. I went to him as Jane threw open the gates of the graveyard and ran toward us. When I reached the figure, he was face-down next to a gravestone that was splattered with flecks of blood.

  Please don’t let him be dead, whoever he is. I need answers.

  I reached for the figure, but an overwhelming smell rose from him and I gagged. Patchouli, just like the scent we used to trap and control ghosts for the Department of Extraordinary Affairs. The only person I knew who carried that much on him was . . .

  “Connor?” I said, rolling the figure over.

  4

  It was Connor, not that I would have recognized him at first glance. He had a thick, unkempt beard now and his hair was a gnarled, matted mess, even the signature white stripes running through it. Blood covered his face.

  “Oh, my God,” Jane said. “Is he alive?”

  “I think so,” I said. “Give me a hand.”

  Jane joined me and we sat Connor up until he was able to rest his back against the wall of the mausoleum. Every move caused him to groan and hiss out in pain. But even though most of his face and his eyes were swollen shut, he was smiling. He was barely able to open them, but when he did, there was madness in them.

  “I had ’em on the ropes, kid,” he croaked out. His voice sounded tired, his words thick, as if he were speaking through a mouthful of blood.

  “Uh-huh,” I said, taking a closer look at his face. Once I got past the blood, the damage looked like it might just be a few scrapes, cuts, and swelling. “Forgive my skepticism, Connor, but what ropes did you have him up against? The soft, fluffy kind? It looks like you’re the one crumpled on the ground. I’d say the spirits had the upper hand.”

  Jane and I each grabbed an arm and stood Connor up. He winced. “Matter of perspective, I suppose,” he said, fighting to keep his balance.

  I looked around the graveyard. Already the limited power of my commands was wearing on the ghosts, and all around us the ethereal figures of the long-dead began to once again crawl their way out of their graves.

  “Let’s move him,” I said to Jane. “Now.”

  She hesitated, uncertainty showing in her eyes. “Aren’t you supposed to not move someone this badly injured? He’s really hurt, Simon.”

  “Look around us,” I said. “I’ll take my chances with whatever injuries he has over what this crowd will cook up for vengeance if we don’t get out of here stat.”

  Jane gave a pained smile. “Fair point, sweetie.” She put one of Connor’s arms over her shoulder and started carrying him out with me.

  “Thank you,” I said. Ou
r group limp toward the open gates was maddeningly slow. “Besides, he’s my partner. If I let him die here, I’ll be the only one left to finish all that paperwork and I’ll be damned if I let that happen.”

  “Yer all heart, kid,” Connor said, laughing through gritted teeth. It sounded like the rattling of bones.

  Rule one while hailing a cab with a bloodied man? Let the woman stand alone at the curb to flag one down. Connor and I waited in the shadow of the church. As soon as a cab pulled over, Jane got in as Connor and I scrambled out of the shadows toward it. I helped the barely conscious Connor get in, then jumped in after him, slamming the door shut behind me.

  The driver looked back at the three of us with skepticism on his face, but when I shoved a fifty through the partition at him, he was happy to take us up the West Side Highway to Connor’s apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. As soon as the cab started moving, Connor passed out and we rode in silence until the driver turned onto Fifty-fourth and pulled up in front of Connor’s apartment building between Tenth and Ninth avenues.

  I found Connor’s keys in the pocket of his blood-covered trench coat and cycled through them until one of them unlocked the door leading into his empty lobby. We leaned him against the elevator wall as we rode up, thankful that no one was around. When we reached Connor’s floor, Jane and I helped him out of the elevator, but by the time we reached his apartment door, Jane looked ready to drop.

  “Oh, my God,” Jane said, straining under Connor’s deadweight. “It’s like having a two-hundred-pound baby. I’m so not changing his diaper.”

  I propped Connor against the wall as I determined which key would unlock the door.

  “At his age, they’re called Depends,” I said, finally finding the right key.

  Jane laughed, and Connor’s head stirred.

  “I can still hear, you know,” he muttered. “And when I’m feeling better, I’ve got an ass kicking ready just for you, kid.”

  “You’ve had enough ass kicking for today,” I said, “most of it on the receiving end.” I turned the lock and the door swung open. “Let’s get you inside and sit you down.”

  I reached just inside the door and felt around, flicking the switch I found to light up Connor’s living room. The room lit up. All along the exposed-brick walls of the main room were vintage movie posters, many of them featuring Connor’s fave, Humphrey Bogart. Another wall was completely white, doubling as a built-in movie screen with a set of four deluxe theater seats right in front of it. Jane looked impressed.

  “This is better than the IMAX at Lincoln Center,” she said. Jane stepped into the room but stopped immediately. I wondered why, but a second later, I knew.

  Something sour filled the air, like milk or cheese gone bad. Half-empty pizza boxes were stacked everywhere like a creepy game of trash-inspired Jenga. This level of disarray was a total departure from Connor’s anally organized desk back at the office.

  “Sorry ’bout the mess,” he said. “If I had known I was having company, I would have bulldozed.”

  A lone leather couch ran along the opposite wall and we deposited Connor down onto it. I clicked on a lamp next to it, angling it to look at his face. Apart from the eyes swollen shut, it looked like there was more blood than actual damage, which was good. I looked up at Jane.

  “You wanna check his bathroom for some kind of first-aid supplies? Gauze, bandages, anything . . .”

  “Is that part of your nurse fantasy?” she said, but headed off into the apartment to find the bathroom.

  “Ix-nay on the urse-nay in front of our work colleague, hon,” I called out after her.

  “Seriously,” Connor muttered. “I’d hate to add vomit to all this mess just because of your cutesiness.”

  I pulled off my coat and laid it over one of the theater chairs before kneeling down next to Connor.

  “So, I said, looking for further signs of damage. “Is that the sort of thing you’ve been doing with your time off?”

  “What the hell do you care?” Connor said. The sudden venom in his voice made me pull back. It was quite unlike the Connor I was used to. “How I spend my vacation time from work is my business. Hell, I’ve accrued more than enough time off in the past five years.”

  “That’s the thing, Connor,” I said. I looked him dead in the eye. “You don’t really take vacation . . . like, ever. And then you take almost a whole month at once? I mean, look at your place. This isn’t like you at all.”

  Connor looked away. I wanted answers, but that didn’t seem to matter to him. Instead, he sat there in silence as we waited for Jane. She returned with an armful of plastic bottles, a few tubes of ointment, and a few boxes of gauze pads and Band-Aids.

  “Will this do?” she asked, dropping it all on the couch next to Connor.

  I nodded. “Thanks.”

  I grabbed the bottle of hydrogen peroxide, poured it onto one of the larger gauze pads, and used it to wipe away some of the blood on Connor’s face. Little pockets of bubbles arose to show where the skin was broken. Connor let out a slow deep breath.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “No worries,” Connor said. “It’s all my own doing.”

  “Yeah, about that,” I said, switching to a fresh pad of gauze. “Just what the hell was all that about in the graveyard, anyway? Were you trying to get yourself killed?”

  Connor shook his head and I had to adjust my dabbing before more blood could run into his scruffy beard. “It’s not a death wish, kid. I was Knocking.”

  Jane had also taken up some gauze and dabbed at one of the cuts on Connor’s left hand. “Knocking?” she asked.

  Connor turned to look at her through the tiny gaps of his puffed-up eyes. “Drawing spirits back to their grave,” he explained. “And then out of them.”

  Jane looked horrified. Her eyes crunched up with distaste. “Why on earth would you do something like that? Why would anybody?”

  She poured hydrogen peroxide into one of the deeper cuts across his knuckles. Connor hissed and laid his head back against the arm of his couch. “Ask your boyfriend about that. He’s been on the job long enough now. Should be able to Poirot it out for himself.”

  Jane turned to me and I felt the sudden pressure to perform like a trained animal, but I needed to know, too. What had brought Connor to this point? Why this whole disconnect from the world for the past month? What had happened? Then it hit me.

  “This is about your brother, isn’t it?”

  Connor’s silence was confirmation enough.

  After a few moments, he finally spoke up. “We had Aidan’s address . . .”

  “No,” I said, interrupting. “We had an envelope we found in the madness that was Cyrus Mandalay’s messed-up art show invitations.” Aidan had disappeared twenty-two years ago at the beach, and no one had ever been able to turn up a lead . . . until we’d found that envelope.

  “We had an address,” he repeated, almost as if he wasn’t hearing me. His eyes looked frantic, mad.

  I grabbed Connor by the shoulders and forced him to look at me. “You know what we found there,” I said. “Nothing. That building had been torn down years ago. All that we found was some half-constructed eyesore on the Manhattan skyline that took up most of the city block.”

  Connor looked into my eyes, then closed his, not wanting to look at me. Tears rolled down his face. Gone was the man I called my mentor.

  “I don’t get it,” I said, standing up. I turned to Jane. “He’s always been stronger than this. Why now? His brother was already missing for twenty-two years. I can’t believe that one piece of false hope now has driven him to all this.”

  Seeing my frustration, Jane put her hand on my shoulder and squeezed. We stood there listening to the sound of Connor’s hitched breathing for several moments until he spoke again.

  “The dreams . . .” he said, wiping at his eyes.

  Jane and I looked at each other, then down at Connor. He pulled his ruined trench coat around himself like a blanket and curled up on the couc
h.

  “What was that?” I said, leaning closer. He started to shake a little, making him look like a junkie just about ready to crawl out of his skin. “Hey, easy, now . . . What did you just say?”

  Connor ran his hand through his beard as he attempted to compose himself a little. Jane sat down on the couch next to him and ran her hand over his head. This seemed to calm him long enough so he could speak.

  “I’ve been having the same dream lately,” he said. “I don’t know if we’re talking prophecy or what, but it just keeps happening over and over.”

  I let out a sigh of frustration. Dreams were a huge source of interpretable material. According to one of the Departmental pamphlets I had read, “Honk-shus & Hibernation: A Guide to Interpretation,” they could mean any number of things. And sometimes they meant nothing at all.

  Jane continued to soothe Connor. “Why don’t you tell us about it?” Jane suggested.

  Connor looked calmer. He took a moment to compose himself and then sat up.

  “You remember that book with the vampires taking over that small New England town?” he asked. “They did, like, two different movies of it.”

  Although I wasn’t half the movie buff Connor was, I had seen them both and I nodded. “Salem’s Lot. I think I may even have a copy back at the apartment in the stacks of psychometric collectibles that I still need to sort out. What about it?”

  “The dream is kind of like that,” he said, “only it doesn’t take place in rural Maine. It happens here at my apartment. In the dream, I wake up in my bed to a tapping against the glass of my window, and I look over, and it’s like the movie. There’s a kid floating outside my window only it’s not the one from the movie; it’s my brother, Aidan . . . He’s whispering and begging me to let him in. Only I won’t. Something in my brain won’t let me . . .”

  “That’s your training in Other Division,” I offered. “Even in dreams, your subconscious mind has a resistance to such a suggestion.”