Dead Matter

by Anton Strout

  “That’s better,” Davidson said, leaning back in his chair, “but the answer is no.”

  “Why not?”

  Davidson shrugged. “It’s a big city. Do you know how much of this town is under special permit for one thing or another? There’s a lot of things I’m not privy to, okay? And I get to keep my job if I keep my nose out of things that aren’t my business. So a new building goes up! Emeril Lagasse wants to put a restaurant in! You think I need to sound the alarms? There are projects here that are not my bailiwick, so when you ask if I can tell you what’s going on, the answer is truthfully no.”

  “Great,” I said. I leapt to my feet, slamming my hands down on his desk. “What’s the point of having a liaison with the Mayor’s Office? I thought you’re supposed to help us.”

  Davidson narrowed his eyes at us. “Calm down,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me what exactly happened? Are you implying there’s a paranormal element to something going on at the Gibson-Case Center?”

  “Pretty sure,” I said. “Connor Christos has been off duty for a little over a month and he’s being haunted, so we checked it out, found some creepy crawler staking out his apartment. Traced it back to the Gibson-Case Center, only to be turned away with some ‘sovereign land’ bull. Something that’s literally driving Connor mad is in that building, but it sounds like you’d rather feign ignorance and hide behind your office. C’mon, Jane . . .”

  Jane stood to join me and we both turned toward the door.

  “Look,” Davidson called out. “Zoning isn’t even my department. And even it if was, I couldn’t tell you the first thing about the Gibson-Case Center. Like I told you, that matter hasn’t been discussed with me. I know of it, but that’s all. I can’t tell you anything.”

  I turned back with pure annoyance in my voice. “Just like when you couldn’t tell us about the Sectarian Defense League?”

  “Easy, now,” Jane chimed in. “Evil or not, that’s my alma mater.”

  Davidson rubbed his eyes, giving a weary sigh. When he pulled his hand away, he looked tired. “Look, I can’t investigate this without raising all kinds of alarms around here,” he said. “I like my job, and I’d like to keep it. There are rules, procedures . . . I have to follow them.”

  I felt for him. I knew how hard it was to work among all the red tape and still try to get a job done.

  I went to speak, but Jane squeezed my arm and gave Davidson that Midwestern smile of hers. “Can’t you bend those rules, just a little? You really should see Connor, Mr. Davidson. He’s in a bad way. Someone or some thing in the Gibson-Case Center is doing this to him. It’s torturing him.” Of course, Connor didn’t know that quite yet. After seeing how strung out he was, Jane and I had decided to follow up this lead further before we told him that yes, his crazy-making dreams were actually real.

  “I’m sorry,” Davidson said, sighing. His face went dead serious, and then he looked the two of us in the eyes. There was a hint of mischief behind them. “I have to follow the rules. Like the fact that I can’t tell you that the answers you’re looking for are probably hidden in the Department of Records just down the hall or the fact that it’s abandoned this time of morning.”

  I was on the verge of launching into him, but stopped when I realized what he had just said. “I see,” I said, choosing my own words very carefully. “What else can’t you tell us?”

  Davidson hesitated. Turmoil creased his normally smooth brow as he debated what he could and couldn’t say.

  “Well,” he said, after a moment, “I really can’t tell you that there are keys somewhere in here that open that door.”

  “Where?”

  Dave Davidson waggled his finger at me. “I can’t tell you.” He looked down at my gloved hands. “But you’re . . . handy. I’m sure you’ll figure something out.”

  Jane and I looked at each other as Dave Davidson stood up and walked around his desk toward his office door.

  “Now, if you’ll excuse me,” he said, “I’m heading out to one of our hopefully rat hair-free vendor carts for my morning coffee and a French cruller. I have an early-morning meeting with His Honor and I want to be able to tell him with a clean conscience that I didn’t tell you anything . . . technically speaking.”

  He smiled and this time it was that of the polished politician. “I trust you can show yourselves out,” he said and was out the door before we could say anything, leaving the two of us alone.

  I was around Davidson’s desk in seconds, pulling off my gloves. I slammed my ungloved hands flat down on the desk and pushed my power into it with one word in my head.

  Keys.

  My mind’s eye opened up and prodded into the past, focusing on anything that had to do with keys. Visions of Davidson changing his computer passwords flipped by, a key of a different sort, I supposed. I pulled the mental rewind of the past back until I saw something that caught my eye. Davidson was removing the lower right-hand drawer of his desk and fiddling at the back of it as he put a set of keys back there. I pulled out of the vision, downed a few Life Savers to compensate for the glycemic drain my power hit me with, then dropped to my knees, tearing out the lower drawer.

  I looked inside the empty space but there was nothing.

  “Dammit!”

  “What is it?” Jane said.

  “They’re not here,” I said. “They should be, but they’re not.”

  Jane came over and looked at the space, then stepped back and eyed the desk with suspicion. “Something’s off,” she said.

  “How can you tell?”

  Jane blushed, dropping to her knees and reaching into the drawer hole. “I don’t really want to get into it, but I spent some time as a magician’s assistant at the state fair back in Kansas. You learn a thing or two about depth perception, false bottoms, secret doors . . .”

  She fished around inside until I heard her fingers catch on something. “Aha! Got it. There’s a tiny lip I can get my finger on along the top.” She pulled her hand out, holding the false back of the drawer space. She dropped it, then reached back in and produced a set of keys. “Ta-da!”

  “For our next trick,” I said, grabbing the keys. “Let’s vanish.”

  Jane started to pick things up, but I grabbed her hand, helping her up. “Just leave it,” I said. “If we get caught down in Records, I don’t want Davidson getting in trouble. If we leave a mess here, it will at least look like we stole the keys from him.”

  Jane rounded the desk and slipped out the door before I could say anything. There was nothing left to do but follow her. Now that we were opting for stealth, the sound of our footfalls seemed to betray us with every step in the echoing halls of the government office. Despite that, we moved down to the door Davidson had mentioned, keyed it open, and stepped inside. I shut the door behind me as quietly as I could.

  The immediate area was a tiny room with a small reception desk that was unoccupied and a set of stairs just past it leading down. Jane and I headed down the stairs, and found ourselves in a room full of filing cabinets with dozens of short, wide drawers in each of them. There were more of them than I could count.

  “Thank God there isn’t an early-morning shift down here,” I said. “It may take us a while just to figure out where they’ve got this Gibson-Case Center cataloged.”

  I stood there, taking in the eerie quiet of the surrounding area.

  “We should hurry, though,” Jane said. “I’ve got an Arcana brunch meeting later this morning.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “It’s bring-your-own brunch.”

  Jane wrinkled her nose and nodded. I shook my head, then looked around the expanse of the room.

  “Any ideas where to start?” I asked.

  Jane nodded. “At the beginning. A very good place to start.”

  I winced at the Sound of Music reference, but double winced at myself for recognizing it. “We could use all the members of the Von Trapp family right about now to help us search.”

  Jane was silent. I tur
ned to her and she was looking off in one direction. I noticed another desk with a computer at it.

  “Or we could try looking it up first,” she said.

  “Technology to the rescue!”

  Jane headed straight for the computer while I started checking the drawers closest to me. They were full of laid-out blueprints, with occasional sheets of white mixed in with them. I hoped to make some sense of how they were ordered, but they definitely weren’t alphabetical by building name or even by area of town. The only markings that seemed to make any sense were numerical sequences attached to the corner sections of them all. I tried to make heads or tails of it, but it was no use and I had to give up after several frustrating minutes.

  I slammed one of the drawers shut.

  “Easy, hon,” Jane said from over by the computer. Her hands were poised over the keyboard, not touching it. “No luck?”

  “They’re all coded,” I said, “and silly me, I forgot to bring my Enigma machine. Not to mention that math’s not really my strong suit. Unless we’re talking about pricing antiques.”

  Jane sat motionless at the computer for a moment or two longer before standing up. “Okay,” she said. “I think I know where to find them.”

  She started off down one of the aisles.

  “You didn’t even type anything in,” I said, following her.

  “I know,” she said. “One of the perks of speaking machine, I guess.”

  Jane started looking through the tabs on each of the drawers, going down the line.

  “So what happened?” I asked.

  “I think I communed with it when I touched it. They don’t turn off the machines down here, so when I went to bump it out of sleep mode, it just sort of spoke to me. I know it’s just circuits and boards and electricity, but it seemed . . . well, annoyed at being woken up. So I apologized and said I’d let it get back to sleep if it could tell me where to find the designs for the Gibson-Case Center.”

  “So . . .” I said. “You just asked nicely?”

  Jane nodded with a smile. “Pretty much, yeah. It was neat. I’ve never done something quite like that before.”

  “You find that ‘neat’?” I repeated. “Why does you communing with computers make me feel we’re one step away from cyborgs from the future popping out of a time portal to destroy humanity?”

  “Relax,” she said. “It seemed friendly enough.”

  I gave her a look of skepticism. “Make sure to thank it for me later.”

  Jane reached into the drawer she had just pulled open. The top layers of the designs inside it were mostly white sheets with dark blue mechanical drawings on them. Farther down were the blue sheets I was more familiar with. She pulled out a mixed stack of both of them. “And here we go!”

  We walked to a table at the front of the archive created solely to spread the designs out on. Jane laid the papers down and we both started poring over them. There were so many lines and labels that my head felt like it was spinning.

  “Wow,” I said. “You know, one of my psychometric finds last year were blueprints of the Starship Enterprise from the Next Generation series . . . part of an old box set that a fanboy had lost. I sold them back to their original owner for a nice profit. These schematics are ten times more technologically advanced-looking than that. We’re talking at least Death Star design scheme advanced.”

  I noticed something on the first page, and flipped down through the stack of designs that showed several different levels and cross sections of the building. Each of them had the same thing I had noticed on the first page.

  “This doesn’t make any sense.” I flipped back to the first page and pointed toward the center of the main floor. It was a solid empty block labeled ADVENI LATERIS. “Whatever that is . . .”

  “I think it means ‘to arrive later,’ ” Jane offered. I turned to look at her. “What? What can I say? We had a good school system back in Kansas. My English teacher used flash cards to teach us Latin roots words.”

  “I’m not complaining,” I said. “Just surprised. What’s it doing here? I’m not up on blueprints—”

  “Clearly,” Jane interrupted. “White prints. These are whiteprints.”

  “Well, the ink is blue,” I said in a huff, hating to be corrected. “Anyway, I’m no architect, but I imagine the city is rather strict about showing what is actually being built here. I’m pretty sure you can’t just say you’re going to put something there later and not declare what it is, especially when it takes up almost a city block. Yet this one’s got a huge area that’s totally undocumented for the construction.”

  Jane looked concerned, but also exhausted. “Please tell me we’re not going to tackle this right now . . .”

  “I’ll check on these while you go off to your Arcana meeting,” I said, pulling out my camera phone. I started snapping shots of the whiteprints. “I think I’ll see if the Gauntlet has anything historical on this location in the archives.”

  “And after that?” Jane asked. “Then what?”

  “Once we get some more information on the Gibson-Case Center,” I said, “we shop.”

  Jane gave me a smile.

  “I know you’re trying to appeal to the stereotypical girl in me,” Jane said, “but I’m too modern to fall for that.”

  “Sorry,” I said, forcing an innocent, wide-eyed expression onto my face.

  “Oh, don’t be,” Jane said, heading for the door. “I can be bought into servitude. I just wanted you to know that I knew what you were up to.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell her the shopping would be more of a recon mission than anything.

  9

  As we left the offices on Centre Street, I e-mailed my secret spy photos to Godfrey Candella down at the Gauntlet, the D.E.A.’s sprawling archive, as Jane and I walked our way up to the Lovecraft Café on Eleventh Street.

  I grabbed a quick kiss from her and an iced coffee from the bar before heading back into the offices. First I dropped off my ruined clothing with Allorah Daniels’s assistant and then headed down to the subterranean labyrinth that made up the Departmental archives known as the Gauntlet. I was surprised to see the modernized caves-turned-offices already abuzz with activity this early. When I finally spied Godfrey hiding in his cluttered office, I saw he was talking in an animated fashion to a cute Asian woman with long black hair. I almost fell over when king bookworm Godfrey leaned over and kissed her. She mussed his near-bowl-cut straight black hair before she smiled and walked out of his office into the stacks. I waited several seconds before walking in on him and stepping over to his desk, which was covered with piles of books, maps, and an assortment of folders.

  “Hello, Godfrey.”

  Godfrey Candella was busy fixing his mussed-up hair in the reflection of an empty terrarium on the corner of his desk. He barely noticed me when I had walked in, but he jumped at the sound of my voice.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Hello, Simon,” he said. He had a grin on his face that would have made the Cheshire Cat jealous. “How long have you been down here?”

  “Long enough,” I said, smiling. Godfrey turned bright red and he redoubled his effort to suppress his smile, failing miserably to do so. “It’s okay,” I continued. “I approve, and besides . . . she’s hot.”

  This seemed to bring him to his senses a little. His smile went away and he pulled off his black horn-rimmed glasses. “I hate when Chloe musses my hair. It gets my glasses all cloudy.” He fussed with them, wiping them down, and then looked at me. “I’m sorry. I’m certain you didn’t come down here to check out the social lives of the archivists. I trust you’re here for something?”

  “Um, yeah,” I said, still trying to get over the idea of Godfrey with a social life. Usually he had a serious case of bookwormius maximus. “I e-mailed you some pictures from my phone . . . ?”

  “Oh!” he said, his eyes brightening. “Of course.” He moved behind his desk and sat down at one of the biggest flat-screen monitors I had ever seen. He start
ed clacking away at the keyboard. “Let’s see what we can see.”

  The first shot came up on the screen.

  “Sorry about the crappy quality,” I said. “We were breaking and entering . . . Well, technically, keying in and entering.”

  “Not a problem,” he said, adjusting the brightness of the images on the screen. The dark edges of my photos lightened, showing a greater amount of detail within the blueprints. “Ahh . . . schematics.”

  I tapped at the screen. “If you zoom in there . . .”

  Godfrey’s hand shot out and grabbed mine, pulling it away from the monitor.

  “Please don’t touch it,” he said. “I brought it in from home.”

  I looked at him, perplexed. “This isn’t Department issued?”

  Godfrey let out a bitter laugh. “Are you kidding me? With the budget cuts around here from downtown? No. This is mine. It fell off of a truck that almost hit me and it survived so . . . I helped myself.”

  I knew all too well the strange knack Godfrey experienced that made him a divining rod for luck. I also knew the guilt I still felt for having used him for it in the past, so

  I remained silent on it.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  Godfrey shook it off and turned back to the monitor. “So what are we looking at?”

  “It’s the blueprints for the Gibson-Case Center,” I said. “It’s that new place that’s been going up on Columbus Circle. Jane and I chased a guy right up to the doors and got turned away like we were trying to gain entry into a foreign consulate.”

  “These look like whiteprints to me,” Godfrey said, and I cringed. Was he channeling her?

  “Whatever they are,” I said, “there’s a problem.” I pointed toward the empty block of space at the center of the whiteprint, this time making sure not to touch the monitor. “It appears that there’s a dead zone that can’t be accounted for.”

  Godfrey flipped to the next picture and then the next.

  “They’re all the same,” I said.

  Godfrey cocked his head and continued flipping over and over through them all.