Deader Still

1

“Watch out for the elves, Simon,” Connor Christos said, tugging at my arm. And since I had come to trust my partner in Other Division, I didn’t resist.

He pulled me to my left, allowing me to narrowly avoid two “elves.” One wore glasses with black Buddy Holly frames, and the other couldn’t have been more than five feet tall.

“Lothlorien sure ain’t making ’em like they used to,” I said.

“Welcome to New York Comic Con, kid.”

“Nerdtacular,” I said. All walks of life crowded the hangarlike convention hall. The giant glass structure of the Javits Center on Manhattan ’s west side looked like it had been conjured straight out of a futuristic fantasy world.

“Would you rather be back at our desks at the Department of Extraordinary Affairs?” Connor asked.

“Lower your voice,” I said, looking around.

“Relax,” Connor said. “We’re the most normal-looking guys in here.”

Connor looked like the older and stranger of the two of us, with a white stripe running through his messy mop of sandy brown hair. His Bogart-style trench coat hid his rugged frame, but even that had been no match for the ghost who had streaked his hair. Comparatively, I was the picture of youth, with my own hair black, through and through, still untouched by ghostly harm. Even my knee-length black leather coat was more fashionable, and did double duty—both hiding my retractable bat and paying homage to the one the do-gooder vampire Angel always wore on television.

“Even so,” I said, “I’d prefer it if you kept it down about the D.E.A.”

Connor shook his head. “No one here’s even going to bat an eye at our supersecret government agency.” He cupped his hand over his mouth and shouted, “Paranormal investigators in the house!”

Very few people turned to look at us. A few woots rose out of the crowd, and when I turned to look we were being cheered on by a group of guys dressed as Ghostbusters, pumping the business ends of their proton packs in the air.

“See?” he said. “Now don’t tell me you’d rather be in the office . . .”

I thought of the pile of paperwork waiting for me—ghost sightings, zombie infestations, demons rollicking through hipster bars out in Williamsburg, the usual.

“Actually, this freak show is looking pretty good to me right now.” I held up my writing hand and flexed it, hearing it pop and crack as I did so. “Besides, if I have to fill out another form in triplicate, I think my hand will fall off. And not in the cool, zombie-rotting way, either . . .”

Connor shook his head. “Less than a year in the Department, and you’re already burned out on the red tape, huh?” He pointed at the crowd before us. “Then this place should take your mind off of all that for a bit. You’ve got every type of geekdom out here in full force. Your fans of everything come out for this one, dressed to the nines: superheroes, elves, robots, Jedis, Trekkies. Pirates are really big this year.”

“Great,” I said. “That should help me stay focused today.”

“Just relax,” he said. “Every agent’s been put through the Oubliette.”

“And passed it?”

“Well,” Connor said, pausing. “No . . .”

“I don’t want that to be me,” I said, feeling my nerves rising. I’d joined the New York Department of Extraordinary Affairs seven months ago. I was blessed (or cursed) with psychometry, the ability to touch an object and divine information about its past, so getting the job had turned a power that had ruined many a relationship and been a major burden into a highlight of my résumé. Connor had been assigned as my mentor for these past few months, and I appreciated that, but I wanted to pass the Oubliette and earn my stripes as his full-fledged partner. “I don’t want to wait another year to retake the test if I fail it.”

“Relax,” Connor repeated. “You’ll do fine.”

“Easy to say for someone who passed it years ago and actually got to test on the Oubliette the Department owns.”

“Owned,” Connor corrected. “With the budget cuts down at City Hall, I don’t think the Department’s going to be able to afford to fix it. And trust me, from what I’ve heard, you definitely don’t want to be going into that Oubliette. Something’s living in it now. I don’t know exactly what, but Inspectre Quimbley said it was quite unsavory.”

“Well, who am I to argue with the director of Other Division?”

“And don’t forget he’s your superior in the Fraternal Order of Goodness,” Connor added. “Not that I’m part of your precious little organization.”

I noted the hint of bitterness in Connor’s voice.

“Hey,” I said. “I was just as surprised as you were when I got their letter adopting me into their ranks. Their initiation felt like a cross between a toga party and the Skull and Bones society.”

Connor started playing the world’s tiniest violin between his fingers, so I decided it was best to avoid the subject even though it had only happened a few short months ago. It was like being in high school all over again, except I was in all the advanced-placement classes now. F.O.G. wasn’t technically part of the official New York government function of the D.E.A. anyway. I didn’t even fully understand where the line between the two was drawn, but I knew that the Fraternal Order of Goodness predated the Department by several hundred years and functioned more like the Freemasons, only they didn’t seem to issue cool swords. However, they did have resources the Department didn’t have, and they weren’t bogged down by nearly as much red tape.

“Still,” I said, trying to steer the conversation back to why we had come to Comic Con. “I wouldn’t normally think of a comic book convention as a place to rent a magical Oubliette.”

Connor shrugged. “But here we are. You’d be surprised at what can pass unnoticed in an environment like this. You ready to go all MacGyver?”

“MacGyver?”

“You know,” Connor said. “You ready to improvise on whatever harsh battle conditions the Oubliette decides to put you through?”

I shrugged. “As ready as I can be. I’ve studied as much as I could over at Tome, Sweet Tome.”

“Oh, so Jane helped?” Connor asked. At the mention of my ex-cultist girlfriend, I got a case of the warm fuzzies.

“Director Wesker’s been putting her through all this cataloging work while they try to figure out how Mandalay had the place organized before we took it over,” I said. “But even with all that busy work, she found some time to help me go over various Oubliette scenarios. We read up on the two carnival wheels that determine my fate. Then we played out the various combinations of weapons it could give to aid me and what the different challenges thrown at me might be. I’m hoping I get a good combo. I’d love it if the Oubliette gave me a silver-tipped crossbow and matched it up with a werewolf. Fingers crossed!”

“I can’t tell which is worse for Jane,” Connor said, “having worked for the forces of evil or having to work for Thaddeus Wesker in Greater and Lesser Arcana Division. Still, sounds like she’s trying to help you live through this thing. Not bad for an ex-cultist temp.”

“Watch it,” I said, not really taking him too seriously. “She worked for the Sectarian Defense League more for the benefits package than anything. I think helping me pin their leader to the wall with a sword proves she’s turned over a new leaf.”

“Fair enough,” Connor said, stopping at an intersection to look around. “I’d like to think Jane and I have softened toward each other over the past three months.”

As I waited for him to pick a direction, I couldn’t help but eye all the tables full of collectibles. I adjusted the well-worn leather gloves I had on. With my psychometric ability, it was hard to keep my hands to myself near all this geeky merchandise. Part of me would love to have touched something and read the past of the object, but now was so not the time for that kind of distraction. While I had gotten better at controlling my powers as of late, I was pretty sure going into the Oubliette after having depleted my blood sugar over a bunch of knickknacks was a surefire way to fail it outright.

“Come on,” Connor said, heading off to our right. “I think Inspectre Quimbley and Wesker said it was set up down this way.”

“So why is Wesker going to be here?” I asked. “Does the director of Greater and Lesser Arcana have nothing better to do than come ridicule me? We’re Other Division. He doesn’t even hold any jurisdiction over us.”

“But he does hold it over anything magical happening in the tristate area,” Connor said, “so Inspectre Quimbley is letting him make sure that the Oubliette rental goes smoothly.”

“So Wesker’s hope that I fail is just a bonus for him today, is it?”

“Something like that, kid,” Connor said.

The traffic of humanity thinned out a little over in this section of the Javits Center. We turned down one aisle and walked until it dead-ended at a hanging blue curtain. Connor pulled it aside.

“After you,” he said.

I stepped through into an open space about twenty feet square. The Inspectre and Director Wesker were there, and smack in the center of the curtained-off area was the Oubliette itself. I had only seen pictures of one before, but up close and in person the object that would decide my fate in the Department was a bit underwhelming. Essentially it looked like a prop from a stage show—a round stone well on a wheeled platform. It looked like the kind of well people made wishes on, complete with a little wooden roof and a winch bar running between the beams, with rope coiled around it. Although it didn’t look deep enough to even stand in, I knew that once I was lowered inside it, it would open up into the magic and dangerous well I had been studying.

As Connor and I crossed to the Inspectre, a hulking figure rose up from behind the well, a giant of a man who looked like he could be brothers with Penn Gillette.

“Don’t tell me I have to fight a giant, as well,” I whispered, hoping he couldn’t hear me.

“Heavens no,” the Inspectre chimed in. He had a booming British accent and a walruslike mustache. “Unless, I suppose, that’s one of the options on the challenge wheel for the Oubliette.” He waved the huge man over. “Julius, come here.”

The giant came over, moving much more nimbly that I would have expected for a man of his size. He held a wooden easel in his hand.

“This,” the Inspectre said, patting me on the shoulder, “is the young man who’ll be testing in the Oubliette today. Simon Canderous.”

Julius put down the easel and offered his hand. I took it. With hands that big, he easily could have palmed my entire head like a basketball.

“Julius Heron,” he said, sounding like that should mean something to me. He looked hopeful. “Of the Brothers Heron?”

I nodded uncertainly.

“Nothing?” he asked. “You’ve . . . never heard of us?”

“Sorry,” I said, “no.”

He looked disappointed. “We’re world renowned . . .”

“I’m sure you are,” I said, “but I’m kind of new to all this and I don’t get out much.”

His face brightened. “That’s probably it. Anyway, good luck,” he said, and headed back over toward the well.

Julius set up two easels and attached the Wheels of Misfortune to them, miniature versions of the one Pat Sajak uses. One Wheel listed the types of equipment I might be given to survive with, while the other listed the challenges, sporting names like Scarifying Scarabs, Sinking Sand Trap, Grievous Guillotine, Watery Grave, Leaping Lizards, and Ravenous Rats. A chill ran down my spine. Although I was a native New Yorker—and therefore rat-familiar by association—the idea of them in particular creeped me out like nobody’s business.

As I tried to shake off the heebie-jeebies, the Inspectre turned to Wesker. “Is everything about ready?”

Wesker walked around the well once and checked out the Wheels. He gave the Inspectre a nod.

“Now, then,” the Inspectre said, “all that’s left is the pat down. If you’ll permit me . . . ?”

I held my arms apart and spread my legs farther apart. This felt dangerously similar to my past brushes with the law, but I knew it was simply to make sure I wasn’t bringing anything into the Oubliette that would prove helpful in the test.

The Inspectre stopped when he felt the leather holster I usually hung my retractable bat in. It didn’t help that I had forgotten to remove the bat from it. He gave me a stern look.

“Sorry,” I said, reaching inside my coat and pulling the bat out of it. I handed it over. “Force of habit.”

“You mean being a cheater?” Wesker asked, moving closer, no doubt to keep an eye on me.

I ignored him, but after the Inspectre was done with his search, Wesker started looking me over as well.

“What’s that?” he said, pointing at a rectangular-shaped item in my front pocket.

“My cell phone,” I said, “but if I get to the point where I have to throw it at whatever challenge awaits me down there, I’ve probably already failed, right?”

“Leave the boy alone now, Thaddeus,” the Inspectre said. He turned to me. “Shall we?”

I stepped over to the well and looked down. The shaft plunged into darkness, and I got a sense of disorienting vertigo from the difference of its depth compared to the shallowness of the showroom floor. With little effort, Julius helped lift me up onto the edge of it and then handed me the winch rope to secure around my waist. I pulled off my gloves and tied the rope around myself. Julius gave it a tug.

“Too tight?” he asked.

I shook my head. “It does make me feel like a giant yo-yo, though.”

Connor laughed. “No arguments here, kid.”

“Would you rather go down there?”

“Been there,” he said, backing up, hands raised, “passed that.”

The Inspectre stepped forward. “Enough horsing around,” he said. His face was serious and he lowered his voice to a whisper. “Listen, my boy. Keep your wits about you and you’ll do fine.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But remember. While many regular Department members have washed out in the Oubliette before, no member of the Fraternal Order of Goodness ever has.”

Nothing like a little last-minute pressure to get the heart going. Before the Inspectre could say anything further to unnerve me, I pushed myself off the edge of the well and began my descent into the Oubliette.

I focused my mind on everything Jane and I had gone over together. Right now I was in the forty-foot shaft that would eventually open into a large, circular, stone-clad pit. I’d have to watch out for a central hole in the floor, a pit within this pit, the lower one traditionally used for excrement and dead prisoners—at least in nonmagical Oubliettes out there in the world.

After about twenty seconds of being winched slowly downward, I looked back up the stone-walled shaft. Three heads were peering down from above.

“What’s the matter, Simon?” Wesker sneered. “Don’t care much for small spaces?”

“Leave the kid alone, Thaddeus,” Connor said. “I bet you wet yourself when they put you through this.”

“Listen, you ungrateful toad . . .”

“Hey,” I shouted, “can I have a little quiet? Trying not to die down here!”

“Let the boy concentrate,” Inspectre Quimbley said, the ends of his mustache dropping down into the shaft like hairy little stalactites.

“Go get ’em, kid,” Connor shouted. “You’ll do fine. Besides, I don’t want to have to break in a new partner.”

“We do have safety measures in place, you know,” the Inspectre said, more to Connor than me. He sounded offended.

While the three of them continued watching and talking amongst themselves, I attempted to shut them out. I had to keep my mind focused on the test.

The chattering overhead stopped and I looked up. The Inspectre gave me a hearty thumbs-up.

“Alrighty,” he said. “We’re spinning the Wheels now.”

From the top of the shaft a click-clack-clicking began, and I could actually feel energy in the air as the magic started locking in around me. I waited with dread for whatever both Wheels stopped on. I knew I could do this. I had to do this, and I would. I was up for any of the challenges presented to me, but what I really dreaded hearing was . . .

“Ravenous Rats,” Wesker said, rolling the R’s and savoring every evil-sounding syllable of it. It was hard to believe he was one of the good guys sometimes.

“Are you kidding me?” I shouted up. “Are you fu—?”

Before I could finish my expletive, the twin blades of one of the other challenges on that Wheel—the Grievous Guillotine—shot out of the wall above me, cutting the rope and dropping me like a sack of seriously screwed Simons. As I fell, I clawed at the sides of the pit, barely slowing the last twenty feet of the fall. I hit the ground hard, but thankfully the leather of my coat cushioned a great deal of the blow. With the wind knocked out of me, lying there and not moving would have been nice. Not that I had that kind of time—the rats would be coming soon.

“What the hell’s going on?” I shouted up at them. “Why the hell did the guillotine go off? The challenge Wheel already selected the rats. One peril, that’s the rules of the test!”

“Hang on,” Connor said, his voice full of uncertainty. “We’re experiencing some kind of technical difficulty, kid.”

“You hang on!” I shouted back. “If something’s gone wrong, just get me out of here. Lower the rest of the rope.”

“That would fall under the banner of technical difficulty,” Connor said. “The winch is jammed.”

None of the Oubliette challenge was going according to what I had studied, and now I heard the sound of approaching rats. I rolled onto my side, feeling an ache in my lower back. I positioned my arm on the stone floor to push myself up, but one of my still-gloveless hands came to rest on something, and my mind automatically slipped into psychometric mode.

Given the distractions of pain and trying to orient myself, I didn’t even get a chance to think about controlling my power. Suddenly, I was sucked into the past of someone else who had been in this Oubliette. This poor guy was neck-deep in slithering snakes, and thanks to the fact that I was experiencing everything he was, I was treated to the sensation of a thousand twisting tails and flicking tongues all over my body. With desperation, I concentrated on pulling myself out of the vision, but found it near impossible with so much sensory input overwhelming me. I closed the eyes of the person I was, blocking out at least the visual of him slowly going under in a sea of snakes. That seemed to help, and as I returned to my own mind I traded the sound of incessant hissing for the squeak and chittering of the approaching rats.

As the first of them came skittering out of holes in the stonework, I quickly pulled my gloves off of my belt and slid them on just in case I came across anything else I might accidentally touch that would trigger my power. I scrambled to my feet and looked up. The opening above was a pinprick of light now, and I could no longer make out the features on the three faces looking down on me. I could, however, still make out the sound of the second Wheel still clacking away.

I yelled up to the opening of the well. “What about the other Wheel, the one that picks my survival equipment?” I asked. “When do I get my equipment?”

“That still seems to be functioning,” the Inspectre said with cheer in his voice. Finally, I heard the other Wheel slow to a stop. The Inspectre read off it. “Your equipment is . . . a wooden stake and holy water. Should be conjured up any second, my boy.”

Great. Even the equipment being provided wasn’t the proper gear for facing this challenge. A torch had been the preferred method of fighting rats that I had studied—even the club option would have been welcomed—but a stake and holy water? If I had been facing vampires, I would have been all set. I doubted either item would have much effect on the rats, unless these were some strange new breed of vampire rats. The holy water would prove useless. The stake, however, at least had a pointy, jabby end, so it still held a hint of promise.

As if on cue, an audible pop of materialization came from directly over my head, and I looked up in time to see the two items in question falling toward me. The thin metal vial of holy water fell first and I caught it deftly with one hand. The stake, however, was falling end over end, and rather than let the pointy end possibly jab into my hand, I opted to let it fall to the ground. Or rather, it would have fallen to the ground if the ground wasn’t fully covered with the growing spread of rats. Instead, the stake sank into the sea of rats and disappeared from sight.

What I wouldn’t have given to have had my retractable bat right then. I kicked at the rats, but my feet were slow to move through the growing depth of rodents and it was of little use. To find the stake, I was going to have to reach into the mass of rats, no matter how much the idea squicked me out. Thank God I at least had my gloves with me.

The circular room was now calf-deep in rats, and because of their sheer volume they could no longer avoid the guillotine blades popping in and out of the walls. Still-twitching bits of rats started flying through the air. I bent over the spot where I had last seen the stake and thrust my hand down into the writhing mass of still-living rats. As I fished around, I pulled my face as far from the rats as I could. The thought of them clawing and biting at me made me want to scream, but I kept searching. I could feel tiny teeth pulling and working their way through the thick leather of my gloves, and I stood back up.

More rats were climbing up my pant legs, nipping at the denim and digging their claws in. I tried to brush them away, but for every rat I swatted, two more appeared out of the swarm.

I looked up. “Hey, guys. Two perils. Still imperiling me! A little help here,” I shouted.

I could see the hands of Inspectre Quimbley and Connor frantically uncoiling what remained of the rope from the jammed winch. Even with the two of them working on it, the end of the rope was still well above me. By my quick calculation, I’d be three feet over my head in rats before they could lower it far enough. There was nothing I could do.

I heard a shrill squeak of pain and looked down. One of the rats had been tearing through the fabric on my jeans but reeled back when it tried to bite me and came across something hard in my pocket. My cell phone. In my panic, I had almost forgotten they had let me keep it. I batted the rodent away and tore my phone free from the gaping hole. I was thrilled to see I had service down here. Maybe it was the magical nature of the Oubliette, but right now I didn’t care. I did what I was sure any other guy would do when he was up to his knees in supernaturally generated rats—I called my girlfriend. After all, not every guy had a girlfriend who dabbled in magic.

After I dialed, the phone rang for what felt like forever before Jane answered.

“Tome, Sweet Tome,” she said. “You spell it, we sell it. This is Jane speaking.”

“Jane,” I said, thrilled to hear her voice.

“Hi, hon,” she said. “Did you like the catchphrase? I’ve been trying them out for the store. What do you think?”

“Not now,” I screamed. The bites were increasing.

“It wasn’t a very good one, was it?” she said. “How about . . . oh, my God, you have the Oubliette today, don’t you? Is it over? How did you do?”

“Later,” I shouted. “I’m in the Oubliette and kind of in a sitch right now. A knee-deep-in-rats sitch that’s about to become a neck-deep-in-rats sitch any second now. And the guillotines are going off as well. I’m fucked, hon. I thought that since you’ve been working with Arcana for a bit . . .”

That seemed to kill any chatter in her and she went silent. The rustling of paper filled the line.

“Hon . . . ?” I said. “Hello?”

“Be quiet,” she said. “I’m looking for something . . .”

“I just wanted to tell you that I love you,” I said, wading through the rats. “You know . . . if this doesn’t turn itself around fast.”

“Just shut up,” Jane said sternly this time. “I need to concentrate.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m in the Black Stacks,” she said over the sound of more page flipping. “And I’m trying to save your life, so shut it.”

“You’re in the Stacks? You think looking through Cyrus Mandalay’s prized collection of diabolical books is going to help us out?”

“It’s not his anymore,” Jane reminded me.

I thought of the last time I had seen him, the night he’d escaped from the Metropolitan Museum of Art when the Department had come down on his whole ectoplasmic Ghostsniffing ring. Being trapped down here in the Oubliette with all these rats almost made me miss that chaos-filled night.

I decided to follow Jane’s initial advice to “shut it” and I let her concentrate. If I didn’t, she might grab the wrong book off the shelves of the Black Stacks and I’d be screwed. Right now she was my only hope.

With the volume of rats reaching waist height now, I figured there had to be a way to at least get above them or on top of them, packed in as they were. I attempted to pull myself up. It felt like I was fighting my way out of a pit of quicksand, only quicksand tended to bite a lot less. At least my upper body was protected by my leather jacket, but my legs were still being scratched to hell.

The writhing rat mass shifted underneath me. My balance gave out and I toppled over. My body immediately sank into the rats, tails and claws flicking against my face as I hurriedly tried to curl myself up into a protective ball. A tail slid into my ear and I pushed it away with my phone, stifling a scream. I didn’t want to even think what would happen if I opened my mouth.

“Not to rush you,” I said through clenched teeth into the phone, “but right now would be a good time for . . . anything!”

“I’m not sure if this will work,” Jane said, “but I think I found something.”

Although magic wasn’t my thing, I was willing to give it a shot. Dire circumstances made strange bedfellows.

“Lay it on me,” I said. “Read it to me.”

“No time to explain it,” she said. “It’s not somatic. Just hold out the phone and put me on speaker.”

As much as I didn’t want to expose any part of myself, I pushed the speaker button and extended my arm. Instantly I felt tiny noses and heads trying to jam their way up the sleeve of my jacket.

“Okay,” I shouted through gritted teeth.

Sound started coming through the phone, but it wasn’t speech, or even Jane’s voice. If anything, it sounded like the first computer I had ever owned trying to dial into a network, all electronic hisses and whirs. The rats around me became frantic.

A crackle of electricity shot out through the phone and into the sea of rats. Smoke but no flame rose from the mass around me, and I felt myself slowly lowering to the floor of the room as, one by one, the rats turned into gelatinous, rust-colored goo.

Nothing beats the smell of burning rat hair, and although there had been no fire as such, the air was filled with the charred odor.

Even through my gloves, the phone became unbearably hot and it started melting in my hand like it was made of chocolate. I pulled the glove off my free hand, pried off the back of the phone, and tore my SIM card free. Near-death experience or no, there was no way I was reprogramming all the numbers I had stored.