Dead Waters

14

I considered spending my free afternoon going through my ever-growing catalog of antiques back at my apartment, but, afraid of triggering another messed-up vision, I instead found myself wandering alone over on Broadway in the Village. For hours I shopped up and down the stretch, with only one object in mind—a new dresser for my bedroom, without using my powers for once. My last incident hadn’t gone so well, but I was determined to work through the mental gymnastics my power was putting me through. I looked through stores that had existed for decades, but after hours of poking about, nothing felt quite right. Frustrated, I checked my watch—my hunt would have to continue later. Right now I had to get over to Eccentric Circles if I was going to catch up with the Inspectre.

I entered the old bar. It looked like a T.G.I. Friday’s designed with sort of a Harry Potter theme, oddities of the arcane world that would have given it an almost tourist-attraction hokeyness except for the fact that it was all real to those of us in the know.

The place was packed with an after-work crowd, but I didn’t think all of them hailed from the Department of Extraordinary Affairs. I crushed through the crowd at the front by the bar and found the Inspectre seated on one side of a booth out back, several pitchers and glasses of beer spread out on the table. Some of the booths held familiar faces, but it was the faces seated with the Inspectre I was surprised to see. The brothers Christos sat there opposite him.

“Oh, look,” Aidan called out, pointing at me. “Delivery!” The vampire couldn’t help but laugh at his own joke. I, however, wasn’t quite as amused.

“Funny,” I said, slipping into the booth next to the Inspectre. I turned to him. “I didn’t realize the undead were into memorial tributes, unless it’s for one of their own.”

Connor thwacked me on the arm. “Consider him my plus one, kid.”

“Besides,” Aidan said, “did you ever consider maybe that’s part of the problem between our people? You keep assuming that our kind is only interested in what is best for us.”

“Your leader sure seems to be looking out for his own interests,” I said.

Aidan shook his head. “Not true,” he said. “Don’t mistake his general desire to be left alone as a single-minded attempt to break away from humanity completely.”

“Gentlemen, please,” the Inspectre interrupted, already sounding like he had put away a few beers. “Tonight is not a night to discuss vampiric affairs. We’re here to mourn the loss of Mason Redfield.”

I grabbed a glass and poured myself a beer from one of the pitchers at the table. I raised it and the group of us toasted to the dear, departed professor. While I drank it down, I looked around the room. “Quite the turnout,” I said. “I didn’t realize so many people knew Redfield. Not bad for a guy who left the Fraternal Order of Goodness—what—thirty years ago?”

The Inspectre looked around the room, a bit melancholy. “Most of them don’t recall him,” the Inspectre said, wiping away a bit of foam that had accumulated in his mustache. “I think this crowd is mostly a mix of the usual oddities that inhabit Eccentric Circles. There are a few Departmental people here who came out on my behalf, but I really think there are few left in our ranks who actually remember Mason before he left the Order.”

“You think any of them would know anything about the case?” I asked.

The Inspectre shook his head. “Doubtful,” he said. “I don’t know of anyone who’s kept in touch.” He took a long pull on his glass, and then set it down empty. “Least of all me.”

“Don’t worry, boss,” Connor said from across the table. “We’ll find that creepy water woman who killed Mason and attacked Jane.”

I looked to Connor. “Maybe your brother has some kind of powers that can help,” I said. “Something, you know, all vampirey.”

Aidan smiled, but it was not one of confidence. “ ’Fraid not,” he said. “I’ve only been a bloodsucker with them for about twenty years. They still call me fledgling back at the Gibson-Case Center, despite my high ranking among Brandon’s core group of cronies. They’re a bit secretive about what they will and won’t teach the newer vampires about their growing powers, so I’m not even sure what will develop with me over time.”

“Great,” I said, feeling a bit defeated.

“But hey,” Aidan continued, “I’m pretty sure I could charm the truth out of some of these people. Does my natural charisma count as a supernatural ability?”

“Looking all emo in your Hot Topic hoodie doesn’t make you charismatic,” I said. “It makes you look like a tool. Especially at forty.”

“It not my fault that I look so much younger than my age,” Aidan said. “You can blame Brandon and his people for that. I’m just dressing my part. Trying to fit the fashion of the time for someone in their late teens. Otherwise, I’d probably go with Connor’s style, but I just look too fresh-faced and youthful to pull off an old man’s trench coat.”

“Hey,” Connor said. “Watch it. I’m still your younger brother.”

“You know,” the Inspectre interrupted, pointing at the brothers Christos, “that’s what I miss the most.”

I looked at him. He had filled his glass again and was halfway done with it already. “Sir?” I asked.

“That camaraderie,” he said. “That banter that comes so easily between people. Mason was a master of it.”

“If it helps, Connor and I could bicker some more,” Aidan said. “We’re still making up for lost decades of it . . .”

The Inspectre answered the vampire, but I didn’t quite catch what he said. My focus had just shifted, drawn to another table that caught my deep focus halfway across the back of the bar.

“Hold up,” I said, continuing to stare.

“What is it, kid?” Connor said.

“Those are some of his,” I said.

Connor shifted in his seat and looked off toward where I was staring. “His what?” he asked. “Whose what?”

“The professor,” I said. “Those are some of his students sitting right over there. I’m pretty sure I saw them when I was flashing on some of Redfield’s classes and lectures in one of my visions.” At least, I thought they were the professor’s from where we sat. It was hard to forget the cute blond actress with the short spiked cut, but the four other faces at their booth looked vaguely familiar as well. The girl might even make it as an actress, given how memorable her face was.

“So, those are Professor Redfield’s little doters, eh?” Connor said, also checking them out.

“You want some answers?” Aidan said, rising up, forgetting his preternatural strength and practically flipping over the table. The rest of us struggled to save the pitchers of beer and our glasses. Aidan was eyeing the group at the other booth now with a dead-eyed stare. “I’ll get you answers.”

The Inspectre stood to meet him. “No, Aidan,” he said. “Thank you. I appreciate your willingness, but as you’ve mentioned, your leader would rather your kind minimize their exposure.”

“You can consider this a freebie,” Aidan said.

“It’s all right,” I said, standing up myself. “I’ve got this. After all, I’m most likely to pass for college age, remember?”

“I could totally pass for a freshman,” Aidan said, sitting back down.

“Relax, forty-year-old,” I said. “You may look all of nineteen, but I’ve got this one.”

The Inspectre clapped me on the shoulder. “See what you can find out,” he said, looking around the bar with caution. “And remember what I told you: err on the side of discretion.”

“Don’t worry,” Connor said from behind his beer, “Simon’s a master of erring.”

“Thanks, drunkie,” I said, and headed off toward the table of students farther off across the room. The group of them was crammed into one of the deep booths, the table crowded with an assortment of pitchers, mugs, glasses, and book bags. There were five of them altogether and they were animatedly laughing and talking to one another as they drank. At the back of the booth was a young brown-haired kid sandwiched between a heavier one with greasy black hair to his left and a goateed Hispanic guy with blond punk hair to his right. More recognizable to me were the two people sitting at the outermost seats of the booth, both of whom stuck out from my visions. One end of the booth held the tall black guy with the ear gauging who was busying himself with a beer in one hand and a net book in the other. The other far end of the booth seat was occupied by the blond girl I had first recognized. She had perfect dimples and bright eyes that screamed actress in training. If there was an entry point to talking to them, it was going to be her. It didn’t matter if I went in smooth approaching her. A lifetime of not being smooth around women had prepared me to go into this with the intent of crashing and burning.

As I walked toward the bar, I passed by their table at first, ignoring it, and then I did a double take.

“Hey,” I said, stopping and turning to the blond girl, “don’t I know you?”

She turned from her conversation with her friends and rolled her eyes at me. “Oh, brother,” she said. “Are you for real? Is that seriously your ‘A’ game?”

I resisted the urge to launch into her, but it would blow my cover even before I started, so I bit my lip and gestured to everyone in the booth.

“No,” I said. “I meant all of you.”

As one unit, the entire table stiffened, which was the opposite of what I wanted.

“NYU, right?” I asked.

The only one to relax was the youngest-looking kid sandwiched in at the back of the booth. “Oh, yeah,” he said, a little too eager, I thought. The tall guy with the ear gauging shot him a look that said he thought so, too.

“I graduated a year ago,” I said, starting in with my lie. “You probably wouldn’t remember me. I did a lot of geeky stuff for one of my mentors in the film department.”

“Who?” the girl asked, still wary.

“A bit of an eccentric,” I said. “Mason Redfield.”

The girl raised an eye at me. “Oh, really?” she asked. “Well, I knew the professor pretty well and I don’t remember you.”

I kept my eyes on her. “I kept to myself mostly. I did a lot of . . . special project work for him.”

“Really,” she said, her voice flat. “What classes did you take?”

There were some things I could bluff my way past and some things I definitely couldn’t. This was one of them. What classes? Specifically? I had no idea. My heart leapt into my throat as I thought about my options. I had to come up with something or they were about to learn how full of shit I was. I pointed at an extra seat at the end of their booth where most of the book bags were gathered on the table.

“May I?”

“Be our guest,” the girl said. I took my time sitting, but she didn’t stop staring at me. “So. . . what did you say you took with Professor Redfield?”

As I sat, I pulled off my gloves and set my hands down on the table, purposefully brushing my left one against her shoulder bag lying there. I had avoided using my powers, but I had to chance a flare-up now to get a quick reading. I pushed those worries to the side and pressed my power into the shoulder bag with one thought in my mind.

Schedule.

My mind’s eye opened up on Elyse taking out her printout of classes. I watched her as she programmed it into the calendar on her iPhone. I scanned them quickly, looking for signs in the class codes for something with a three or higher in it. Some of these students might have taken the advanced course load that a graduate like I was pretending to be had already, but I doubted all of them had. I needed enough information to sound credible.

Finding what I needed gave me an ounce of hope and I let down the guard I had put up against my worries of another flare-up. The second I did, the screen of the iPhone in the vision flickered like old-time television static, the face of the tattooist pressing forward out of it. My heart froze for a second, but rather than get caught up in the building rush of anger and jealousy that always accompanied her, I remained calm. I pulled out of the vision before it could fully take hold and shook off the disorientation. When I opened my eyes, the entire group of students was staring at me.

“You okay?” the heavy guy asked me.

I nodded, brushing it off. “Just a little drunk,” I said. “No worries.”

This seemed to satisfy everyone except the girl. “Your classes. . . ?” she asked, waiting.

“Let’s see,” I said. “Mason gave me a pass on the remedial levels of Monster Craft and bumped me up to his Harryhausen and Hollywood. Still made me take Bela, Lon, and Boris, though. Said I had a lot to learn about makeup still.”

The girl stared at me a moment longer before her face shifted to a welcoming smile. “Yeah, BL and B is a real bitch,” she said. “I was ready to give myself real facial scars instead of makeup by the time we got to finals.”

“I hear that,” I said, signaling for the guy working the bar. “You mind if I buy a round for the table?”

Elyse smiled. “We don’t mind at all, do we, boys?” she asked, offering me her hand. “I’m Elyse. Acting track.” As I expected, she had a strong, firm handshake but still kept it dainty enough. “Mr. Tall across from me there is Darryl. He edits things to make me look good in front of the camera. Chunky Monkey back there is Mike, who is the camera on the cinematography track. The chatty one at the back is Trent, and his fellow frosh with the soul patch and bleached-blond hair is George, the one crowding Darryl. We’re trying to paper-train those two. They’re undeclared still.”

I waved to the group of them, nodding as I looked them over. “I’m Simon,” I said.

Darryl was clacking away on his netbook in front of him on the table. “Do you have a last name?” he asked.

“Why? Are you taking notes?”

The big guy stopped typing and lowered the screen until it closed shut against the keyboard. “No,” he said, folding his hands over it.

“I thought maybe you were the party stenographer,” I said.

“Don’t mind Darryl,” Elyse said. “He’s our resident tech geek–slash–editing maven. A bit OCD, but otherwise socially functional.”

“Barely,” Mike said.

Darryl flipped him the bird in retaliation, and then turned to me. “I just wondered what your full name was, to see if I could recall you.”

“Oh, right,” I said, not really ready for the question. My brain froze and I went with the first thing that came to mind. “It’s Vanderous. Simon Vanderous.”

“Is that Dutch?” George asked, running one hand through his blond shock of punked-out hair.

“Only half,” I said, wondering if I was turning red. “Don’t ask me what the other half is. I’m a bit of a mutt.”

“Could you say that again for the camera?” Mike asked, and I looked over at him. Sure enough, his enormous hands were cradling a digital video camera.

“Are you. . . taping me?”

Mike looked at me from behind the camera like I was stupid. “We are film students,” he said, “and what better way to pay tribute to our recently deceased prof than by taping our mourning?”

“So, you’re here for the memorial?” I asked, wondering how they had gotten wind of it.

Elyse scrunched her face up. “Huh?” she asked. “What, now?”

“Never mind,” I said as the beer arrived. I set to pouring their five glasses before filling one of my own. “I just meant we’re all in mourning for Professor Redfield, aren’t we? I was wondering: why are you here, though?”

“Eccentric Circles?” Elyse asked. I nodded. “The professor used to wax nostalgic about this place, when he wasn’t waxing nostalgic about the gory glory days of monster movies and the film industry, that is. Said this bar used to remind him of his misspent youth, so I dunno. Seemed like an appropriate place for a send-off.”

Maybe Professor Redfield had been just as nostalgic for the old days as the Inspectre was. For a man who had supposedly turned his back on the Fraternal Order of Goodness and the D.E.A., he certainly spent enough time hitting their favorite watering hole. And for what?

A glimpse of the world usually unseen by the average New Yorker? A world he knew existed, but had turned away from when his own life had almost been cut short at the edge of a ghoul-filled fissure? The temptation of the paranormal must have been too great to turn away from it completely. That which had been seen could not be unseen and all that.

Mike panned his camera around the bar, taking it in. “I dunno,” he said. “I think the place is kind of creepy.”

“True,” I said.

“Well,” Darryl said with a chuckle, “that’s Professor Redfield for you.”

“I have to ask,” I said. “Do you think the university is going to throw any kind of memorial service?”

“Doubtful,” Elyse said. “I don’t think a lot of the other professors really understood Redfield, you know?”

“How do you mean?”

She gave a dark smile. “He’s an acquired taste, now, isn’t he?” she said. “Not everyone got his fascination with his particular brand of cinema. Most people look down on the horror genre with elitist disdain. It doesn’t usually win awards; the Times won’t touch them with reviews. . . If you ask me, it’s snobbery in its basest form.”

The entire table nodded in agreement and took a few angry swigs of their drinks. I joined them, admiring their passion for the professor’s type of films and his enthusiasm for them. He had already won high regard in my mind due to the Inspectre’s memories of their long-past friendship, but to see these young people so jacked up about his field of study was doubly encouraging.

“Does anyone know how he died?” I asked, doing my best to seem like I had no idea about it.

The group fell silent, either looking down at their drinks in discomfort or looking to Elyse for an answer.

“I read somewhere he was found in his new apartment,” Elyse said. “I hadn’t even known he was moving.”

I leaned in, pressing the issue a bit. “But, like, was it natural causes?”

Elyse looked at me. Her face flashed with a moment of concern, and then she went back to her somber look. “Don’t know,” she said. “Don’t really care. I mean, the man’s dead. Dead’s dead, Simon.”

Although her face didn’t show it, Elyse sounded a little pissed off by the bluntness of her statement.

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean anything by it . . .”

“What does that even mean?” George asked, speaking up from Darryl’s left. He sounded agitated, too. “Natural causes. . . as opposed to what? Unnatural causes. . . ?”

“Georgey,” Elyse said. “Shush. Freshman are better seen than heard. . . although with that punk blond hair of yours, maybe you shouldn’t be seen, either.”

“Hey!” George said, running his hands up into his wild tangle of bleached blond again. He looked genuinely hurt. “Watch it, chica . . .”

I needed to calm them and quick. “I just meant that I hadn’t heard what happened,” I said. “If he had died in his sleep or maybe it was a mugging gone wrong . . .”

Elyse threw back her glass and drained it before slamming it down on the table. “Wrap it up, boys,” she said.

“You’re leaving?” I asked. Elyse nodded. “But I just joined you . . .”

“We’d love to chat,” she said, short, “but unlike you, we’ve still got class stuff to attend to, Mr. Already Graduated.”

The rest of the group finished up their drinks, gathered up their things, and started sliding their way out of the booth one by one.

“Maybe we could get together and swap stories about the professor sometime,” I said.

Elyse gave me a smile, but her eyes were dead to me. “Thanks for the beer,” she said, “but something tells me you didn’t know the professor in quite the same way we did.”

Mike slid out of the booth next, his camera pointing at me still. “Say good-bye to the camera, Vanderous.”

I gave a wave before standing up myself and walking after Elyse, wanting to keep them here. “Wait,” I said, reaching for her.

Darryl’s hand came down on my shoulder, hard. He pulled me aside.

“I think my girl said all she’s going to be saying to you,” he said. “Maybe the beer’s making you a little braver than usual, but trust me when I say you don’t want to press your luck with her.”

“Right,” I said, not wanting to start anything in the middle of Eccentric Circles. I had the feeling it might go against the subtlety the Inspectre had asked me to go for.

“And I know you don’t want to press your luck with me,” Darryl added.

I stayed still, and after a moment, Darryl slapped me hard on the shoulder, and then turned with his computer bag over his shoulder and headed up to the front of the bar toward the doors. I waited until all of them were gone before I headed back across the bar toward the Inspectre, Aidan, and Connor.

Aidan grinned at me from where he sat. “How’d it go, boy detective?”

“Shush,” I said, sitting back down.

“Well, kid?” Connor asked. “What did you find out?”

“They loved Mason Redfield,” I said. “They were gaga over him.”

The Inspectre smiled. “That is of some comfort to hear.”

“Great,” Connor said, perturbed. “So he was well loved. That really doesn’t help narrow or expand our field of investigation into his murder, now, does it? At least if he had made some enemies . . .”

“The only enemies he seems to have had outside of the water woman are all those fake movie monsters in his office,” I said, “and I doubt they could do anything other than fetch a nice price on eBay. We’ll keep on it, Inspectre, but that group was a creepy little Mason Redfield cheer squad. Still, I think they may not be giving me the whole picture yet.”

“Really?” the Inspectre asked. “Why not, my boy?”

“When I tried to head the conversation into the paranormal, they didn’t pick up on any of my cues. Then when the guy with the blond punk hair made a joke that might have suggested something paranormal, Elyse clammed him up. . . fast. They left before I could press them any further, but I bet they know something about the professor and the water woman who killed him.”

“Maybe we should work on that kid, then,” Connor suggested. “The punk one. I’m sure if we press hard enough, we can find the weak link in their chain.”

“Carefully,” the Inspectre added. “We don’t want them to bolt.”

“Understood,” I said, nodding. “I’ll track them down on campus tomorrow. Maybe they’ll feel less threatened there during the daytime. If I’m lucky, I can single one of them out.”

“Daytime,” Aidan said, drawing it out like it was a dirty word. “Well, that leaves me out, then.”

“It’ll leave all of you out,” I said. “I’ll handle this myself.”

“Excellent,” the Inspectre said, raising his glass with a bit of drunken unsteadiness, “but for now, we drink.”

“Fine by me,” I said, reaching for my glass. “As long as the Department lets me expense it.”

The Inspectre cleared his throat. “Actually, about that . . .”

I held my hand up to stop him. I raised my glass to my lips and pounded it. “Don’t tell me,” I said. “Save it for the office tomorrow. Tonight, like you said, we drink.”