Dead Matter

10

I needed to get the hell out of the office and over to the Gibson-Case Center with Jane during public hours if we were going to check the place out. I hit my desk for a few moments to sort out all the incoming paperwork into piles ranging from most important to burn at my earliest convenience. I was grabbing up my messenger bag when I heard a female voice clearing behind me.

Allorah Daniels was standing there. She was wearing a short white lab coat over her clothes. The same silver necklace from yesterday was intertwined with the chain on a pair of safety glasses. Her hair was pulled back today and it worked on her. For an Enchancellor, she looked hot.

“Mr. Canderous,” she said, nodding.

“Enchancellor Daniels,” I said, throwing the strap of my bag over my shoulder. “Is there something I can help you with?”

She looked down at her clipboard and flipped through a few of the pages there. “Thank you for bringing those clothes in this morning,” she said. “I’ve gone over some of the tests I ran on what I found. Do you have the time to go over the results?”

“I was just on my way out,” I said.

“Well, make the time,” she said. Her voice was so stern, I took my bag off and sat back down. There were more pressing personal cases I needed to be dealing with, not something like this.

“Look,” I said. “I don’t want to make an issue out of this, but that encounter… It could have happened to anyone. It was just a monster thing, okay? I’m sure any number of divisions would love to get their hands on the follow-up for this. Perhaps Things That Go Bump in the Night would like a crack at it?”

“So you think this was a random attack?” Allorah said, scribbling on her clipboard.

“I’m usually pretty up on people trying to purposely kill me,” I said.

Allorah looked like she was holding back. “Let me be blunt,” she said. She walked around to Connor’s side of the desk and sat down, resting her clipboard on one of the stacks of paper. “Have you made any enemies lately that might set something like this on you?”

I laughed. “I don’t think so. As a matter of fact, it hasn’t even crossed my mind. Ordinarily, I’d say yes, but I haven’t been in the field to make any new mortal enemies. I haven’t had enough time away from my desk or all this paperwork to piss new people off. Which is why I think it’s okay if you want to farm this out to someone else…”

“Forgive me for pulling rank,” Allorah said, “but this creature attacked you and if you don’t mind, I’d like you in the loop on it whether it was gunning for you specifically or you were simply planning your ‘Taco Night’ at the wrong place and time. Understood?”

I nodded and remained silent.

“Good,” she said, checking her papers again. “Now, I’m analyzing some of the mucus that was all over your clothes from the attack…”

“That sounds like a fun time,” I said.

“For me?” Allorah said, giving a smile. “Yeah. It kinda was. It beats sitting in on another meeting of the Enchancellorship.”

That made me smile. Finally someone in power who held the same kind of disdain for bureaucracy that I did.

Allorah’s smile vanished as quick as it had appeared. “I think that’s all for now,” Allorah said. “I’m running a few more tests that will take a bit more time, but I trust I will have you full cooperation?”

I nodded. “If I don’t get killed first, sure.”

Allorah stood and cocked her head at me. “Why do I have the sneaking suspicion, Mr. Canderous, that you might prefer a nice death in the field instead of talking lab work?”

I laughed and stood. Allorah walked over to me and her face went grim. “Make no mistake about this,” she said. “The other Enchancellors might be slow to act, but I’m not. If I find conclusive results that we are dealing with some form of vampire, I expect you to drop everything, along with the rest of the department.”

Her tone rubbed me the wrong way and I couldn’t help but be a little short with her. “I have taken vampires seriously around here before,” I said. “Remember? But I’m not going off all Code Bela on this until you show me something that says we’re actually dealing with the undead. Until then, I’ll be busy doing my job.”

I turned and left Allorah standing at my desk as I walked away. That creature from the grocery store was just one in a heaping pile of my daily nightmares and right now I was looking to get to the bottom of the one that was affecting my absent partner. I may have been a shitty friend lately, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t correct that.

I shook off my conversation with the intense Ms. Daniels as I left the offices and strolled out through the movie theater. I found Jane having coffee with Mrs. Teasley up front in the Lovecraft Café. The old woman had just finished reading Jane’s fortune in a pile of used coffee grounds, promising Jane that she was about to make an electric connection with someone. I didn’t bother to get into the crack-pot shoddiness of Mrs. T’s fortune-telling. Instead, Jane and I headed outside and I hailed a cab for us. We rode in silence for a bit, both too tired from running around the night before to say much. By the time we were heading crosstown on Fifty-ninth toward Columbus Circle, I felt myself waking up in anticipation of getting some answers at the Gibson-Case Center.

“How was the Arcana brunch meeting?” I asked.

Jane looked like she was perking up, too. “I’d say pretty poorly named since it was totally BYOB,” she said, shaking her head. “Bring Your Own Brunch.”

The cab pulled up along the circular drive in front of the Gibson-Case Center. “Well, let’s hope we can find something to eat inside,” I said. I paid the cabbie and got out.

As we approached the center, its towering structure gave me a bout of vertigo, and that was just from looking up at it. The sun was high and bright this time of morning, causing a near-blinding reflection off the polished steel and endless windows of its exterior. Being regular operating hours, the revolving doors of the public atrium were bustling with people coming and going with bags and packages of every shape and size. Stepping in through the doors myself, I felt like I was entering the Mall of the Future.

The atrium was open and huge, the sun cutting through the enormous panes of tinted glass that rose several stories straight up. It shone down onto an actual garden within the building, complete with trees that dwarfed the ones nearby in Central Park. And the stores! They stretched outward and upward in every direction.

“Wow,” Jane said. “I know I’m going to sound all country mouse here, but this place puts the Mall of America to shame.”

“It’s okay,” I said, taking her hand. “City Mouse finds this pretty damn impressive himself.”

I looked around, unsure of where to start our search. I turned to Jane, but her eyes had gone glossy. She turned to me, smiling with all her teeth showing.

“I can has shopping?” she said.

“Focus, Jane, focus.”

The light died in her eyes. “Right,” she said, trying to hide the disappointment and reluctance in her voice. “I know. I’m just… umm, getting into character.”

“If you say so,” I said. I squeezed her hand and we set off under the guise of a happy couple out for a day of touristy shopping. All in all, not a hard disguise to pull off. Feeling bad about denying Jane some retail therapy, I stopped and bought her a red resin heart on a chain with the word FOREVER across the front of it on a silver banner. I put it on her, unable to wipe the cheesy grin from my face or hers. There was no reason we couldn’t have a little fun playing our roles, after all.

After wandering the open expanse of the lower mall area for more than a half hour, we found one of the building’s touch-screen directories that was set farther away from the hustle of the shopping crowds. I immediately started tapping away at one of the display panels.

“Well, there seems to be a lot of options-residential, the shops, the restaurants, rental opportunities, co-ops…”

“Great,” Jane said, leaning up against the directory bank. “Nothing like an afternoon sifting through the mundane. Is there anything about the management company, maybe?”

I shook my head and continued scrolling through the various directories. After several minutes my eyes started to bug out. I stopped poking and rubbed my eyes.

“Maybe…” I said, but stopped myself.

“Yes?”

“Maybe you could tap into the building,” I suggested. “Its power supply or something?”

Jane looked hesitant. “Umm… I’m not really sure if I can do that.”

I shrugged. “Just a suggestion. I thought you might be able to make some small talk with one of their computers, kinda like you did at City Hall.”

Jane shrugged.

“Sure,” she said. “I’m not promising anything, but I’ll give it a try. Just… pull me away or something if I look a little too comatose at the console, okay?”

I kissed her forehead. “I’m sure it’ll be fine if you just ask nicely.”

Jane let her hands hover over the touch screen on the directory kiosk and let out a low whisper of her strange sort of machine language. I looked around to see if anyone was paying attention, but between our remote location and the sounds of mall life, no one was even looking in our direction.

Without warning, Jane let out a low, guttural moan and let her hands fall toward the touch screen. Instead of slamming against it, they sunk into the solidity of the screen as though she were submerging them under water.

“Jane?” I grabbed her by her arm, only to feel a harsh jolt of electricity hammer into my body, knocking me on my ass. My muscles were twitching and I had a hard time shaking it off, but taking it slow, I got back on my feet. “Jane!”

Hearing the desperation in my voice seemed to pull her out of her trance. She looked down at her hands and turned to me in a panic, her eyes bugging out.

“Help…?” she croaked.

I started to reach for her again, and she violently shook her head no. “What if my hands come off at the wrist?”

The muscles in her arms flexed as she tried to pull herself free, but every move she made caused her to sink even farther into the screen.

“Don’t struggle,” I said. “It’s like quicksand.”

But Jane was beyond panic now and tugged wildly to free herself.

I was about to yell at her once again to stop struggling, but when I looked at her I froze. Jane was glowing. A soft white light was spreading up her arms and down her body.

I had no idea what was going on, but I had to do something, even if it meant taking another serious jolt by touching her. This time, however, I would be ready for it, and I pulled my gloves out and slipped them on. I hoped they would at least reduce the conductivity a little, but a second later, it didn’t matter.

I reached for Jane, only to be driven back as the white glow intensified into a blinding flash. Not to be deterred, I pushed toward her, but as quick as the flash had come, it was gone. And Jane with it.

“Jane?”

I felt around where Jane had just been, hoping that maybe it was some kind of optical illusion, but she was definitely gone. I stepped into the space and placed my hands on the touch screen, but it was as solid as when I had been using it before. My heart started to race as I felt my own panic setting in, and I spun around looking for her. My left foot slipped on something and I fought to keep my balance. I looked down to only see all of Jane’s clothes-her hip-huggers, the RESIDENT EVIL 4 shirt she had been wearing, and on top of the pile, the necklace I had just bought her.

I scooped up the necklace, clutching it in my hands. There was no pillar of salt or pile of dust or blood. Jane simply was gone.

“No, no, no,” I said, over and over, not sure what to do next when my cell phone went off. I pulled it out. I had a new text.

WORST. TOUCHSCREEN. EVER!

I typed back: WHERE THE HELL RU?

I slipped her necklace in my coat pocket while I waited. A minute later, my phone went off again.

NOT SUR THINK IM IN THE BUILDIN.

WHERE? I typed back. I reached for the kiosk and brought up the mall area map on the touch screen while I waited.

IN THE BUILDING ITSELF.

Did she mean inside the actual building?

RU OK?

Waiting for an answer to this question had my heart in my throat.

4 NAO. Then, HELP.

If I was going to help her, I was going to need help myself, and there was only one person close enough to give it. Connor. I only hoped his recent bout of the crazies hadn’t put him out of commission.

I started the long walk back through the maze of shops to get the hell out of the Gibson-Case Center. Panic started to set in and by the time I reached the revolving doors leading out to the streets of New York, I was running.