Dead to Me

26

On the way back to my apartment, I started to cool down. Looking back, I knew that Jane wasn’t the only one who had ever made the wrong choices in life. I knew Jane had been displaced from her apartment, her life. Sure, she’d held a little information back, but she’d come clean and it was no reason for me to have gone off on her. I planned on calling her once I got back home, but all that flew out the door when I stepped off the elevator and headed down the hallway to my apartment.

The lock on my door was busted.

I reached inside my coat, pulled the retractable bat out, and pressed the button. It extended to its full length, and I held it at the ready as I eased my front door open with my foot. My living room was trashed. It had been messy before with all the crates in it, but now everything had been displaced and everything that had been on my shelves had been thrown to the ground. A lot of it looked broken. It was like being in Irene’s apartment all over again and my heart sank.

Knowing my apartment as well as I did, I crept soundlessly across the floor toward the hall, hoping I could sneak up on anyone who might still be here. My plan for silence fell apart when I noticed the door to the White Room was also smashed in.

“No no no no no,” I said as I rushed to it. Everything in the room was overturned or broken, which meant the worst had happened—my inner sanctum had been contaminated by someone else’s memories, corrupting the one place in the world I could turn to as my safety zone. My heart raced and my head swam. I used the bat as a walking stick to steady myself rather than touch anything in the room for balance.

I had never felt so violated, but then I realized that I could find out exactly who had done this. All I had to do was touch anything in the room, use my psychometry, and I would know. I stepped slowly toward the chair on its side in the center of the room and moved my hand to grab it.

“Simon,” a woman said, stopping me. I looked around the room, but there was no one there.

“Irene?” I asked hesitantly.

The plain white of the wall right in front of me crackled with a blue flash of electricity and Irene phased out of it. She was dressed the same as always—the curse of the dead—but her face was a mask of worry.

“Are you all right?” I said. “Where have you been? What the hell happened here?”

Irene flickered. “I don’t know where I’ve been! Some force keeps pulling me away from here. All I remember was those men from your office coming in here and being upset…the kindly older one and the creepy one. Then there was nothing except flashes of that wooden fish you talked about, and a hazy mist, like the one your friend used on me that first time we met in the café. It’s all so unclear.”

“Nothing else?” I asked. She shook her head and started to flicker again. “Stay with me, Irene…calm down or you’ll disappear again. I just have to do something. I’ll be gone, well, mentally gone, for a minute or so. I have to know who did this.” I reached toward one of the shards of the Tiffany Lamp.

“You don’t have to do that!” she shouted, her humanity stretched to its limit with that cartoonish exaggeration I had seen her exhibit before. In a flash, she was back to herself, but the burst seemed to take a lot out of her and she started to fade. “I know who it was,” she said. “I heard him say his name. He was on the phone…”

“Who?” I said.

Irene’s voice faded as her body did, but I heard part of what she said before she blinked out completely.

“Jason…” she whispered, and was gone.

Charles, my mind completed. Faisal Bane’s corporate headhunter. It made sense. He must have come here looking for Jane when he couldn’t find her anywhere else. Bane must have set him on the trail to my apartment, the one Jane herself had originally been following. And now it was trashed.

The phone rang in the living room and I worked my way toward it through the mess. I couldn’t find it in the chaos of the room. Why wasn’t the machine picking up?

I found the phone cord sticking out of a stack of books and traced along to the phone, dug it out, and answered it.

“Canderous,” I said.

There was laughter on the other end. “I was wondering when you might pick up,” Jason Charles said. “I’ve been trying all day.”

“What the hell have you done?” I asked.

“You don’t like the way I redecorated?”

“Fuck you,” I said.

“Just tell me where Jane is, and I’ll leave you alone.”

“I have no idea,” I said.

“Fine, don’t cooperate,” he said. “I’ll find her on my own.”

“Good luck with that,” I said. “Good-bye.”

As I went to hang up, Faisal’s corporate headhunter shouted into the phone. “Wait. One more thing…”

“What?” I said. “I really need to be assessing the damage to my property. I’ll be billing the Sectarians.”

“I sent you a little present at work,” he said. “I suggest you check it out.”

The line fell dead.

What the hell was he up to? As I returned the phone to its cradle, it hit me. The reason the answering machine hadn’t picked up was because it was no longer connected to the phone. I dug around where I had found the phone in the first place, but the machine wasn’t there. After several more minutes of searching, I found the answering machine sitting neatly on the kitchen counter. Jason Charles had definitely been listening to it, checking my old messages. I plugged it back in and flipped back through several of the calls. If he had checked the caller ID on any of the last fifty or so messages, there was going to be trouble. They were all from Tamara’s number.

I threw down the phone and ran for the door, heading for the Department of Extraordinary Affairs, but not before dialing Tamara’s number for the first time since our breakup.

By the time I reached the Lovecraft Café, I still hadn’t been able to get Tamara on the phone. I raced through the coffee shop, down the aisle of the theater, and back into the offices. Connor was at his desk, making a tiny dent in his paperwork. He stood as he saw me running toward him.

“Kid, what’s wrong?” he said.

“Did we get any packages from a messenger?” I asked, breathless. I started picking my way through my in-box.

“Yeah,” he said. “One came earlier. Why?”

“I just got a call from Faisal’s corporate headhunter,” I said, throwing aside two boxes on which I recognized the return addresses. “He said there’s something here.”

“Faisal’s what?” Connor said. I forgot I hadn’t mentioned any part of this to him.

“I’ll explain later,” I said, still frantically searching.

“Try that one,” Connor said, pointing toward a box about the size of a watch case. I grabbed it and pulled it free, knocking over the rest of the pile.

There was no return address on the box and I cautiously slit open the tape across the top of it with a letter opener. I used the tip of the opener to flip open the sides of the box and looked inside. A letter was folded neatly across the top of whatever was in the box and I pulled it out to read it.

I looked down into the box and my face went white.

“What’s in it, kid?” Connor said.

“It’s a clay pot,” I said. “Like the ones we found in the back of Cyrus’s shop. It’s got Tamara’s name on it.”

There was a prolonged moment of silence as we stood there.

“You okay, kid?” Connor said finally.

“He killed her,” I said, stunned. “They killed her.”

“Yeah,” Connor said, trying to comfort me. “Well, they wouldn’t be evil if they did nice things, would they?”