Dead Waters

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 was 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?”

“Not too well,” he said, “but yeah. With a name like that, we get a couple of requests every few months on it from agents.”

“I bet,” I said. “Well, listen. We found a menagerie of lingering ghosts out that way. I thought it might be a Hell Mouth or something. You know, an actual gate to hell.”

Godfrey smiled and waggled a finger at me. “You’ve been watching too many Buffy reruns.”

“Only for fighting techniques,” I said. “I swear.”

“Don’t worry,” Godfrey said. “It’s not a Hell Mouth.”

“You sure about that?”

“Pretty sure,” he said, getting up. He headed for his door. “It’s named from the Dutch hellegat, which means . . .”

“ ‘Bright passage,’ I know.”

Godfrey stopped and looked at me. “Impressive.”

“Some NYU students told me,” I said. “Don’t worry. You’re in no danger of losing your spot as head nerd around here. I just need to know about the bridge and a general who may be connected to it.”

“Follow me,” Godfrey said and started walking. “You said there were ghosts out there?”

“Yeah, literally hundreds of them.”

“Interesting,” Godfrey said. He headed off toward a section filled with large empty tables surrounded by banks of old wooden drawers.

“How’s Jane?” he asked as we walked over to one of the drawers. “I haven’t seen her since they announced the cuts a few weeks back. Is she. . . ?” Godfrey couldn’t even finish his question.

“Yeah,” I said. “She’s still here.”

“Good, good,” he said, but he looked a little distracted.

“What about that girl you were seeing?” I asked. “The one who helped take down that bookwyrm . . . ?”

“Chloe,” he reminded me. “She, like all the rest of my staff, is on a reduced schedule. She helps out with some of the work I’ve been bringing home on the side, but I can’t show her preferential treatment, now, can I?”

“Look at the plus side—at least your girlfriend isn’t infected with a mutant strain of sea slime from some aquatic she-bitch.”

Godfrey looked up from the drawer he had pulled open. “That’s a strange plus side,” he said. “What does that even mean?”

“Oh, right,” I said. “That’s the more personal reason I came down here.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out a few shots Allorah had taken of the mark on Jane’s back. “I was wondering if you could look into this for me. This symbol is bonded onto Jane’s skin and I need to know what it is.” I recapped the drama of the water woman diving through my girlfriend and the strange mark she had left on Jane. When I was done, Godfrey let out a long, slow breath.

Godfrey looked it over. “Doesn’t seem familiar,” he said, slipping it into the inside pocket of his coat. “Sorry. I hadn’t even heard about the incident yet. It’s probably in my backlog of case files that are slowly taking over my entire office. I’ll look into it. I just thought you were talking about your drawer incident.”

My face went flush. “God! Does everyone here know about that?”

“We have to take our gossip where we can get it around here,” Godfrey said, suddenly unwilling to catch my eye. He turned back to the set of drawers, closed the one he was looking in, and ran his hands farther down the case.

“Do you have a section on coping with parapsychological misadventures?” I asked. “Maybe that would help me out.”

“Nope,” Godfrey said, stopping his hand on the handle of another drawer. “Sorry.” Godfrey pulled the drawer open and lifted out an oversized binder the size of a small suitcase. He laid it on the nearest table and flipped through it until I saw a familiar-looking sight—the Hell Gate Bridge. I slammed my hand down on the page to stop him.

“That’s the one,” I said, recognizing the two stone towers at either end. “You know, it looks so familiar.”

“It should,” Godfrey said. “It’s the base design for the Sydney Harbour Bridge in Australia.”

“That’s where I’ve seen it before,” I said. “I was starting to wonder if I was having déjà vu or some kind of past-life regression.”

Godfrey looked up at me, his face serious. “Sure, we can look into past lives as a possibility.”

“No, I’m good,” I said. “I have enough trouble living the life I have, thanks, let alone needing to start worrying how I’ve screwed things up in past ones.”

Godfrey nodded, and then went back to the schematics. He checked a few notes written in the margins alongside the drawing. “The Department has sent several teams out there to investigate it for an actual hell gate over the years, to insure the bridge was safe. Nothing paranormal has been reported there.”

“Does that mean that something not paranormal has been reported? One of the spirits talked about a General Slocum. Maybe he was a commander back in the day?”

“Slocum isn’t a ‘he,’ ” Godfrey said.

“No?”

Godfrey shook his head. “No,” he continued. “It’s a boat, so it’s technically a ‘she.’ A passenger ship, to be exact.”

Godfrey ran his finger down the side of the schematic until they came to rest on a set of reference numbers that didn’t make a lick of sense to me. He looked off toward one of the other aisles and hurried off.

“Follow me,” he said, almost as an afterthought. The head archivist was in his own little zone now. I ran after him as he headed off down an aisle that had books from floor to ceiling on either side.

While a bit of claustrophobia set in, Godfrey stopped, stood on his tiptoes to reach a book high above him, and came down with it. He flipped it open and started looking through it. I stood there in silence, waiting, letting my mind wander back to some of my personal issues, namely my situation with Jane.

“So, things are going good with Chloe?” I asked. “Other than being cut by the budget?”

Godfrey took his head out of the book and smiled. It was the first time he had truly looked neither pissed off nor businesslike the entire time I had been down here.

“Excellent,” he said.

“Have you two had the ‘drawer’ conversation yet as well?”

“Oh, she has more than a drawer,” he said. “I gave her half of my space. Gave up a good percent of my closet as well.”

“So soon?” I asked. “Weren’t you the one dating a supermodel just a few short months ago?”

“Actually, a string of them,” he said with a blush of red spreading over his face. “Was on a bit of a lucky streak, I guess.”

I bit my tongue. Half the Department knew about Godfrey’s streak. . . an almost preternatural ability that was like a luck field radiating from him. We had been instructed to never talk about it directly with him, and I still felt horrible for using him once for this ability when I tracked down the cultist Cyrus Mandalay. “You poor guy,” I said. “Dating models. Rough life.”

“Actually,” he said. “It was.”

“How so?” I asked, not quite believing what I was hearing out of him. The worst I could imagine from dating a string of supermodels was that my body would cramp up from a lifetime of pleasurable delights.

“I’m not going to whine about dating a bunch of gorgeous women,” Godfrey said, “but look at me. I’m pasty white, I wear glasses. I have a hard time relaxing or cutting loose. I get worried that my tie isn’t always straight. I’m a poster child for book nerdery.”

“You’re being a bit hard on yourself, don’t you think?”

“That wasn’t my point,” he said, continuing. “I’m just saying that I know how lucky I was that these out-of-my-league women seemed fascinated with me for a while. I relished it, but to be honest—and I don’t mean to stereotype them—it was all a little vacuous. Chloe, on the other hand, she’s the right mix for me. The perfect mix, I should say. I know how fortunate I am to have her in my life. I don’t want to screw that up.”

“You make it sound so simple,” I said.

“It is that simple,” Godfrey said. He turned back to his book, flipping through the pages once again. “The question should be why isn’t it simple for you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve been having these. . . flare-ups, with my powers. I’ve actually felt what can happen with that deep kind of love, the anger and rage it can turn into. I’ve been in the mind of a person crazed by that level of closeness. You got the incident report I filed on the ghost tattooist at the Gibson-Case Center, right?”

Godfrey nodded without looking up. “Last I checked,” he said, lost in the book, “you weren’t a ghost tattooist. Why should her choices affect how you react?”

I went to speak, but he had me there. I couldn’t explain the intangible mental blurring of the lines between my emotions and hers to someone who hadn’t experienced it himself. Instead, I shut my mouth and waited for him to find what he was looking for.

“Here we go,” he said, tapping at the page. “June fifteenth, 1904. The General Slocum was a steamship that was chartered for a yearly church trip. More than thirteen hundred people were on that ship, and most of them went down with it.”

“It sank?”

Godfrey flipped ahead in the book. “It’s attributed to a fire that started on board,” he said. “That, and there was little in the way of working lifeboats or flotation equipment at the time. Most everyone either burned or drowned.”

“That seems like the kind of life trauma that could leave a lot of spirits roaming the material plane,” I said. “Is there any mention of a woman in green?”

Godfrey read on, and then after a moment shook his head. “Nothing in here,” he said. “It could be possible that she was one of the leaders of the St. Mark’s Lutherans who arranged the outing, but she wasn’t on board.”

“I’ve encountered that woman,” I said, “and she’s no Lutheran. She struck me as something much older than that.”

“Which would make sense,” said Godfrey, tapping the page where he was reading. “The Slocum wasn’t the first ship to go down there. Hundreds had sunk well into the latter half of the nineteenth century, all blamed on the harsh currents and dangerous rocks below. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers started blasting away what lay beneath the surface in the mid-eighteen hundreds. Looks like it has clearance now, but I don’t think anyone has messed with the area since the 1920s.”

“A dangerous place with a dangerous name, it seems,” I said.

“So it appears,” Godfrey said. “But let me make this clear. This stuff I’m looking up is just regular plain ole New York history. There’s nothing paranormal associated with it in our records . . .”

I turned around and started heading back through the stacks to the stairs leading up to the offices above. “Those hundreds of ghosts didn’t get there themselves, Godfrey,” I said. “And they’re afraid of a woman in green who I think is responsible for Mason Redfield’s death. There’s more to the Hell Gate Bridge than what is in your history books.”

“Where are you going?” Godfrey said, but I didn’t hear him following. He was probably taking the time to put the book back using a little caution.

“I need to know more about what’s happened at the Hell Gate Bridge, the stuff that’s not in the history books, and for that I’ll need to find something from one of those sunken ships,” I said. I could already feel the electric tingle of my powers inside my gloves. “Something I can get my hands on. Hopefully the F.O.G.gie boat’s ready, or else it’s going to be a long swim.”