by Anton Strout
I tried looking past her at whatever George was doing, but Elyse kept her eyes locked on mine and kept in my way. “I’d love to see it sometime,” I said.
Elyse’s face darkened. This time she didn’t look like she was acting. “I bet you would,” she said, becoming short with me. “Look. We’ve got a lot to do here, Simon, so if you don’t mind, we’d appreciate you leaving.”
“I will,” I said, “but I just thought—”
“I’m sure you think a lot of things,” Elyse said, cutting me off, “but here’s my thing. I’ve got a problem. I have to wonder how well you really knew the professor.”
I could face zombies in the street no problem, but trying to pretend like this had my heart beating out of my chest as her suspicion rose. I only hoped I could act well enough to convince her. “I told you that the other night,” I said. “I graduated a few years before most of you. He was one of my mentors.”
“That’s where my problem is,” she said. The rest of the group all stopped what they were doing and began working their way over to me. “If you claim to be so familiar with his work, then how do you not know a damn thing about this documentary?”
Crap. Maybe I did need to enroll at NYU for acting. I felt myself tensing up, but I tried to keep my cool. “As you said, it was his latest project, and as I told you, I graduated a few years back.”
Elyse snapped, darkness filling her eyes. “He’d been obsessing over Hell Gate for decades,” she said, advancing on me. “Who are you?”
Discretion was still my priority here. The girl was small in size compared to me, but there was a lot of power in her eyes. Years of acting training were to thank for that, no doubt. Still, I wasn’t about to pull my bat on someone nonparanormal. I resisted the urge to back off and held my ground. “How about you tell me what you know?” I asked.
“How about you leave?” Elyse said with a sweet smile over her bitter words.
“Or what?” I said. “You’ll stage-combat me to death? I’m not worried. After all, don’t they train you actors how to miss?”
“Funny,” Elyse said.
“Just tell me what you know,” I said again.
Elyse crossed her arms in defiance. “Or?”
“Just tell me,” I said.
Movement caught my eye from around the room. Darryl and Heavy Mike were walking over. Mike had his video camera out as he came, but it was Darryl I was worried about. He towered over me and stood protectively just over Elyse’s shoulder.
“Everything okay here, Elyse?” Darryl asked.
“Fine,” she said. “Simon was just leaving.”
Darryl looked at me, a bit of menace in his eyes as he stared me down. “Good,” he said.
“I was?” I asked, starting to get angry.
“Yes,” she said. “You were. I don’t know who you are, but you were no friend of the professor. That’s for sure.”
“Aw, come on . . . fight for the camera,” Mike said from behind his video camera. “This would make excellent footage. A nice scuffle . . . I bet it would even look good in court.”
Trent and George moved to stand with their friends, a unified front of five against one single Simon.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll go, but consider this. Someone killed the good professor and nobody seems to be as interested in that as much as I am.”
“Wait,” Elyse said, grabbing me by the arm. “How do you know he was killed? Who are you?”
“I can be secretive, too,” I said. I pushed open the door, hoping to get out while the getting was good. To my relief, no one moved to stop me, and I was glad to get away from them. I had what I needed from them—a lead. The Hell Gate Bridge. Mason Redfield’s decades-long obsession. Perhaps it would hold some answers to his death, especially with the dark, rich histories of death that bridges seemed to have.
I let the door slam shut behind me and walked away, which was probably best. If I left now, I could at least keep with my general rule about not using my bat on normal people. Not that film and theater people really counted for normal, as I was slowly learning.
17
Connor had spent his day catching up on paperwork, still nursing a hangover from last night at Eccentric Circles, and I put in a couple of hours killing some of my own paperwork after I told him about the documentary. By the time either of us had a second free and could get our asses up to the Hell Gate Bridge, it was already dark out. The best approach seemed to be coming at it from Queens through Astoria Park, but once we got there, there was still the daunting task of working our way up to the crossing. As we started up the understructure of it, I was impressed by the sheer size of it.
The Hell Gate Bridge stood against the night sky, traversing the East River where it spanned over to Wards Island. In the dark, its two stone towers rose up at either end of it and the red steel of the bridge itself stretched in a low arch across the expanse, two sets of train tracks running down the center of it. By the time we climbed all the way up to it and stood on the tracks, the September wind was whipping at Connor and me, putting a chill in my bones that was already creeping me out.
Professor Redfield had found it fascinating enough to spend great expanses of time obsessing over it. I needed to know why, and if the answers were out there, I had to find out. I stepped out onto the main section of the bridge.
Connor hesitated. I stopped and looked at him. “Coming?”
He dug his hands down into the pockets of his coat. “Probably a bad time to bring this up, but I don’t really care for bridges, kid.”
“No?” I asked. “Afraid of heights or something?”
“Not quite,” he said. “You remember why we don’t go down to Ground Zero, right?”
I nodded. “Yeah,” I said. “No one from the D.E.A. dares to step foot where World Trade Center once stood. Too much sorrow. Too many ghosts.”
“Pain sticks, kid. Before 9/11, bridges were the number-one source for sorrow around here. Despondent people love to fling themselves to their unhappy demise. A gruesome but romantically poetic way to go, if you ask me. You show me a Manhattan bridge and I’ll show you at least a handful of ghosts moping around on each of them for eternity. So, like I said—not a fan of them. Just look for yourself.”
I turned to look out onto the bridge, adjusting my eyes to really look.
I knew that most New Yorkers turned a blind eye to the stranger things they came across in Manhattan. The fragility of the human mind helped protect itself. My own mind was no exception, and even when I could focus on the hidden world around us, I was not nearly as trained as Connor at seeing the dead. I willed myself to focus on the empty spaces my conscious mind must be avoiding.
“Whoa,” I said when my mind keyed in to the entire scene before me. The bridge was covered with dozens, maybe hundreds of ghostly figures. Spirits drifted directionless across the span. I turned to Connor. “Are you seeing this?”
Connor gave me a dark smile. “What do you think, kid?”
“We’re not going out there, are we?” I asked. “Think about my hair.”
“Way to focus on what’s really important,” Connor said.
I stepped closer to Connor, dropping to a whisper with the horde of apparitions so close. “I think I have a point,” I said. “A very vain but accurate point.”
“Jesus,” Connor said, agitated. “I’m sorry you’re too damn pretty to do your job.” He looked out over the bridge. “You do realize that we’re supposed to exhibit some sort of heroism, right? It is in our job description, kid.”
“Right,” I said, feeling somewhat dressed down. “Sorry.”
“Just stay close to me,” he said.
“Fine by me,” I said
Connor walked off onto the bridge. The wind picked up, joined by the sound of rushing water below that I could see through the struts as we went, giving me a bit of vertigo from all the movement. The chilling bite of the wind blew at our clothes and hair. The shapes around us were like a living fog, drifting in the wind u
p and down the bridge. They were slow enough that we were able to move among the spirits without running the risk of passing through any of them.
“Is this something ghosts do regularly?” I asked. “I mean, get together like this? Maybe they’re going to go bungee jumping off the bridge.”
Connor shot me a don’t-be-stupid look and continued out onto the bridge where the greater concentration of spirits were. I followed him, the ghosts drifting out of our path as we went.
Connor stopped when we were about halfway across the expanse right in the heart of the ghostly gathering. There were hundreds of them. He turned in circles, looking them over. “Interesting,” he said.
Meandering spirits swirled all around me. “Popular place,” I said. “I guess if you’re looking to off yourself, Hell Gate is the place to go.”
Connor shook his head. “I don’t think these are all suicides, kid.”
“Why not?”
Connor waved his hand out toward the crowd. “Look at the way they’re all dressed,” he said.
I studied the crowd closely, taking note of the clothes. All of them looked to be from the same era. Tall, stiff collars on some on the men in fine tailored suits, ankle-length skirts and matching jackets on many of the women. Other, more casual women had on shirtwaist dresses and sailor hats. The rest either wore broad-brimmed hats or sported the turn-of-the-century Gibson Girl hairstyle, but the wind was already playing havoc with them.
“They all look turn of the century, 1900 more or less,” I said. “So?”
“That’s the thing,” Connor said. “If they were all suicides, they probably happened periodically through history. They should all be dressed in different styles reflecting all those times, right? But they’re not. Everyone who died here is from the same era.”
“So, something tragic happened all at once,” I said.
Connor nodded. “That would be my guess.”
“But what?” I looked down at the structure of the bridge, namely the two sets of train tracks that ran across them. “Train derailment?”
“I’m not sure,” Connor said, reaching into his coat pocket and pulling out a small stoppered vial, “but we’re going to find out.”
He walked around in the drift of souls until he narrowed his focus in on a man in his early twenties wearing a suit two sizes too big for him. Connor flipped the stopper off the top of the vial and the air immediately filled with the smell of patchouli. Tendrils of light brown vapors rose up from it and slowly snaked their way up and around the young man. When the smoke reached his nostrils, his face fell slack.
“Hey, friend,” Connor said, sounding quite collegial, “you mind telling me what you’re waiting for?”
The young man gave a slow nod as he continued to stare off along the distance of the East River. “Our steamer,” he said.
“You’re expecting a boat?” I asked.
The man nodded again, ever so slightly.
I looked over at Connor. “Are we talking metaphorically? Like a boat to the afterlife? I don’t think the East River qualifies as the River Styx, does it?”
Connor gave me a look. “Shush,” he said, turning his attention back to the ghost. “Where are you going today?”
The man smiled, a grin crossing his face from ear to ear like a cartoon character. “On a picnic.”
I had forgotten how exaggerated the features could get on a spirit when raw emotion came to the surface. Connor didn’t react; he just nodded along with him.
“Sounds nice,” he said. “When are you expecting it?”
“Soon,” the man said, but his face changed. Uncertainty crept into his eyes and his mouth twisted in concern. “But, my goodness, I thought it would certainly be here by now. You do think it’s coming, don’t you? Mr. Carter promised us and I’d hate to think that the St. Mark’s Lutherans were so unsound in their financial affairs that they had to cancel.”
Connor looked at me and gave a bitter smile. “Comforting to see that budget concerns have a long and illustrious history.”
“Do you think that the lady will know what the holdup is?” the young man asked, his voice barely an audible whisper on the wind.
“Lady?” Connor asked him.
The man looked around the expanse of the bridge through the crowd of his fellow ghosts, nervous. His face was pained. “I shouldn’t say anything more or she’ll hurt me.”
“I think I know what lady,” I said, stepping around to get in front of him. “A woman with dark hair, wearing a long green dress, yes?”
“Dark haired, yes,” he said, “and in a green dress that I daresay is a bit immodest on a woman.”
“Figures,” I said. “That dress of hers is no doubt scandalous by his standards.”
“Well, at least your little water woman is a bit of a fashion plate,” Connor said. “A killer, but still able to pull off the cover shot of Paranormal Quarterly. Nice.”
I turned back to the young man. “Why are you afraid of her?” I asked, but the look on his face was already enough to give me my answer.
The young man’s fear seemed to be agitating the rest of the ghosts around him. Like a ripple in a pond, frantic energy began to radiate outward from him until we were surrounded by a sea of nervous spirits. “Foul fortunes come on foul winds,” he said. “And together they blow twice as hard. She has risen, but the worst has yet to rise.”
“Tell me,” I begged of him, wishing I could reach out and grab him to shake him. “Who has risen? What’s her name?”
“We should probably get out of here,” Connor said. “As in, now.”
“Tell us,” I said. “Please.”
“General . . . Slocum,” the young man said, his fear growing. His feet left the ground as his agitation grew, swirling off into the crowd. I wasn’t sure if he was gearing up to attack or not, but it was clear that Connor’s ghostwrangling mixture had worn off. I didn’t want to see what happened next, but Connor was already one step ahead of me.
Already in motion, Connor bolted off across the bridge and I came running after him. Spirits dove and wove around us and I did my best to keep them from passing through me as I ran. By the time we passed beyond one of the stone towers at the end of the bridge, the swarm was well behind us and already settling down again. When the two of us stopped running, we both were panting pretty heavily.
“Dare I ask how my hair is?” I asked.
“Still perfect,” Connor said, “although you could maybe use some product in all this wind.”
“Smart-ass,” I said. “Can you do anything to disperse them?”
Connor shook his head as he fixed the collar of his windblown trench coat. “I don’t think so, kid,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve seen so many ghosts in one place since that night at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Besides, it’s hard to disperse them when I don’t know why they’re still here in the first place.”
“So what now?” I said, adjusting my coat. I tapped my bat. “Fat lot of good this would do.”
“Don’t get all bent out of shape,” Connor said. “I consider what we just did a win. We made it off the bridge alive, didn’t we?”
I nodded. “Yeah, that’s something.”
“But that’s not all,” he added.
“No?”
“We have a name,” he said. “I’m not sure who General Slocum is, but I aim to find out.”
“I hope Godfrey Candella’s on call, then,” I said.
Connor headed off toward the lights of Queens. “With all the cuts, everybody’s on call all the time.”
“True,” I said, yawning with fatigue, shivering, “but I think this has to wait until morning. I’m not sure if Godfrey needs his sleep, but I’m pretty sure I do.”
18
Heading down to the Gauntlet always creeped me out a little. The archives were far older than the coffeehouse, movie theater, and offices above, and descending the well-worn stone stairs into the caverns that housed our gathered archival resources sometimes felt like I wa
s going on a caving expedition. I hurried all the way down until I reached the door at the bottom and swung it open to reveal the main room where overhead lights, shelves and shelves of books, and antique wooden worktables galore gave a hint of civilization that calmed me again. As luck would have it, Godfrey Candella was rushing out of one of the aisles, heading for his office off to my right. I had to jog just to intersect with him, but when I did, I almost wished I hadn’t.
“What do you want?” Godfrey said, continuing past me with his stack of books.
I followed him as he headed into his office. His large wooden desk was threatening to collapse under the weight of already accumulated books, but Godfrey seemed determined to test the limits of its structural integrity by finding room for more.
“Nice to see you, too,” I said. Godfrey shoved some papers off the top of one pile of books, letting them fall into another one, forming one super pile of loose paper chaos. Something didn’t feel quite right. It was far too quiet down here. The hustle and bustle of the usual staff was all but gone at the moment.
“Where the hell is everyone?” I asked.
“What everyone?” Godfrey asked, snapping. “This is it. Me. I’m the everyone.”
I looked around for someone else down here, anyone else. “You’re kidding,” I said.
Godfrey put the books down on his desk and pushed his horn-rims back up onto his nose. “First of all,” he said, “I rarely kid. Especially when it comes to the Gauntlet.”
“Right,” I said, wandering to take a peek out of his office door. There was an eerie stillness to the vast bookfilled cavern. “I forgot. Of course not.”
“Second of all,” Godfrey said, and then fell silent for a minute. “There is no second of all. Just me down here. So, if you need something . . .”
“Just point me in the direction of bridges and I’ll get off your back.”
Godfrey sat down at his desk and leaned back. He folded his hands across his chest. “Let me guess,” he said. “The Hell Gate Bridge.”
“Good guess,” I said, impressed. “And correct. You know it?”