by Anton Strout
He patted the pile of papers before him. “Time bends for us differently …”
“I figured that out when I met your leader and discovered he had named himself after a character from Beverly Hills, 90210. So?”
Aidan grabbed the stack and slowly flipped down through it, page by page. “It means that I get shafted with the mundanely human task of your paperwork thanks to my role as liaison between our two people. For someone whose life is already an eternity, jumping through the hoops of an organization that will most likely wither while all of us still live on makes the task of doing this paperwork a different kind of eternity all its own.”
“Fair point,” I said. “Sorry.”
Aidan picked up a pen and started scrawling at inhuman speeds on one of the detail sheets in front of him. “It’s all right,” he said. “There is some consolation in all this.” Aidan looked up at me, grinning. “I’ll never get those bags under my eyes that you have from all this right now.”
“It’s not the job,” I said. “These are from the hangover.”
“Another thing I’m glad to not really experience,” he said, and fell to his pile of paperwork without another word, blazing through it in a way I could only dream of.
16
Despite the bustling sprawl of New York University from Greenwich Village down to Houston Street, I wasn’t too worried about just how the hell I was supposed to find any of the students I was looking for, thanks to the predictable and cliquish nature of film and theater people. Especially when it came to finding freshmen who were so new to the Big Apple that they latched onto one another like lost, lonely magnets. I started by hanging around Washington Square Park, and it didn’t take me too long to spy Trent and George making their way across the park. George’s platinum blond hair against the brown of his skin stuck out enough that I could have probably spotted him all the way from my apartment down in SoHo.
I followed the two students into one of the film studies buildings, thankful that my Department of Extraordinary Affairs ID was enough to get me in during normal school hours, unlike sneaking around the other night. I never knew when it would or wouldn’t work. It never quite held the weight that an actual police shield did around Manhattan. The two freshmen headed deep into the building’s twist of corridors. I kept losing them in my efforts to shadow them as discreetly as I could, and I had to use my psychometry a few times to flash on which way they had gone, but they were quick hits that didn’t flare up any residual anger issues. Before long, I came to a dead-end corridor with only one door marked with a sign that read EDITING SUITE—FILM & SOUND. I paused outside it to collect myself, trying to decide the best approach once I stepped through it. Last night’s conversation at Eccentric Circles had gone fairly well before they had brushed me off. Maybe the role of one of Mason Redfield’s old students would still hold up.
As I opened the door, I hoped it would, anyway. The students seemed nice enough and I wasn’t in the mood to threaten people with my bat, not unless they were something that went bump in the night, anyway.
The editing studio beyond the door was a large, dark, open space lit only by banks of computers along with various decks, boom mikes, speakers, and film equipment. Along the far side of the room was a glass-encased recording booth with a blank movie screen inside it. I thought I might be interrupting a class in session, but then I realized that the only students in the room were the group I had met the other night at the bar. At one of the computer consoles, cameraman Heavy Mike was working on film footage along side Darryl, who, even sitting, was taller than him. All I could see of Elyse was a shock of her blond hair poking above a cushion-covered acoustics screen that had a microphone hanging down into it. George had already set to work even though he had just entered and was sitting at a computer console near me. Trent had his back to me and was in the process of lugging a stack of books and binders across the floor, heading toward George.
“Hey, there,” I said to no one in particular.
Trent spun around, dropping the stack. George gave me a sleepy look from the computer at which he was working. He scratched his bleached shag of punk hair, and then waved. “Hey,” he said, and went back to watching whatever he was working on.
Trent swore under his breath.
“Nervous much?” I asked.
“You shouldn’t sneak up on people like that,” Trent said. He kneeled down and started gathering up the books and binders.
“Sorry,” I said, crossing to help him.
Elyse came into view from behind the acoustics screen in formfitting jeans and a Les Miserables T-shirt, her eyes intent on Trent and his cleanup efforts.
“Would you watch it, Trent?” she said, storming over, not even noticing me. “Some of that is all we have of the professor’s notes.”
Trent looked up at her. The young freshman looked worried. “Company,” he said, and then nodded his head toward me.
Elyse looked up, surprised to see me there, but her face shifted in an instant to something more collegial. “Oh, hello,” she said, giving me a smile. She snapped her fingers. “Simon, right?”
“Yes,” I said, squatting down to help with the books on the floor.
“You don’t have to do that,” she said, quick and abrupt.
“I’m the reason he dropped them,” I said. I didn’t bother to tell her that just hearing they were some of the professor’s personal notes was enough to have me wanting to get my hands on them. His office had been empty of anything personal, after all.
Elyse, however, moved faster than me, dropping down with the agility of a gymnast and scooping up the few books and notebooks Trent hadn’t already reclaimed. I did get a chance to brush my hand against one of the notebooks as she stood, and I pressed my power into it for just a second before she pulled herself away and placed them next to a large piece of equipment over in the center of the room. A splash of a demonic red structure filled my mind’s eye, the familiar sight of a bridge set against a dark blue blast of water. My mind focused in on a bronze nameplate attached to one of its struts.
“What’s the Hell Gate Bridge?” I asked.
Elyse turned to me, suspicion in her eyes. “Excuse me?” she said.
“One of the notebooks fluttered open when they fell and the name caught my eye,” I lied.
Elyse seemed to buy the story, and once she finished putting everything down, she wandered back over to me.
“It’s one of the more structurally sound old-world bridges around Manhattan,” she said. “Hell Gate actually refers to the strait beneath the bridge. It comes from the Dutch phrase hellegat, which means both ‘hell gate’ as well as ‘bright passage,’ which was the name originally given to the entire East River.”
“Sure you’re not a history major?” I asked. “You sure have a lot of New York knowledge.”
“I should,” she said. “Professor Redfield was making a documentary on the bridge. It was the project he was working on, before… you know.”
“Gotcha,” I said. My spider-sense started to tingle. Was there something more sinister to its history than just its name? Was the East River a portal to Hell or something along those lines? It seemed kind of ludicrous, but Other Division did deal with the ludicrous on a pretty regular basis.
“So the professor was working on a documentary?” I asked. “Seems strange, given his filmic proclivities.”
“How do you mean?” Elyse said.
“You know… with his love of old-school horror and monster movies of the Sinbad variety,” I said. “Urban architecture just seems like a strange choice, is all.”
“Not really,” Elyse said, stiffening a little. “Do you only watch one kind of movies? I mean, genre cinema was his passion, but his scope wasn’t limited to just that. You don’t teach at NYU long if you can’t reach beyond your own personal passions. I mean, for instance, I dance, sing, and act, but I wouldn’t define myself through just any one of those things. Neither would Professor Redfield. But if you’re looking for a link t
o his love of all things horror film, the name of the bridge was Hell Gate. I think that appealed to Professor Redfield’s sense of horror, the kind that exists in the real world.”
“Bridges inspire a sense of horror?” I asked.
“They hold their own dark histories, don’t they?” she asked, putting on a dark dramatic tone, setting a bit of spooky mood.
I still wasn’t getting what she was driving at. “Such as… ?”
“Hell Gate was built as a commuter bridge,” she said. “We’re talking all kinds of potential chaos with that. Train accidents, people getting run down, jumpers… you name it.”
Just her delivery of her little speech here was enough to give me the chills. Elyse would graduate and find herself a working actress for sure. I stepped away from her and headed over to the closest computer station, where George was working.
“So, what?” I asked. “You’re going to finish the documentary for the dearly departed professor?”
Elyse danced around me with a graceful twirl, cutting me off before I could get over to George and his machine. “There are several projects of his that we’re working on.”
I tried looking past her at whatever George was doing, but Elyse kept her eyes locked on mine and kept in my way. “I’d love to see it sometime,” I said.
Elyse’s face darkened. This time she didn’t look like she was acting. “I bet you would,” she said, becoming short with me. “Look. We’ve got a lot to do here, Simon, so if you don’t mind, we’d appreciate you leaving.”
“I will,” I said, “but I just thought—”
“I’m sure you think a lot of things,” Elyse said, cutting me off, “but here’s my thing. I’ve got a problem. I have to wonder how well you really knew the professor.”
I could face zombies in the street no problem, but trying to pretend like this had my heart beating out of my chest as her suspicion rose. I only hoped I could act well enough to convince her. “I told you that the other night,” I said. “I graduated a few years before most of you. He was one of my mentors.”
“That’s where my problem is,” she said. The rest of the group all stopped what they were doing and began working their way over to me. “If you claim to be so familiar with his work, then how do you not know a damn thing about this documentary?”
Crap. Maybe I did need to enroll at NYU for acting. I felt myself tensing up, but I tried to keep my cool. “As you said, it was his latest project, and as I told you, I graduated a few years back.”
Elyse snapped, darkness filling her eyes. “He’d been obsessing over Hell Gate for decades,” she said, advancing on me. “Who are you?”
Discretion was still my priority here. The girl was small in size compared to me, but there was a lot of power in her eyes. Years of acting training were to thank for that, no doubt. Still, I wasn’t about to pull my bat on someone nonparanormal. I resisted the urge to back off and held my ground. “How about you tell me what you know?” I asked.
“How about you leave?” Elyse said with a sweet smile over her bitter words.
“Or what?” I said. “You’ll stage-combat me to death? I’m not worried. After all, don’t they train you actors how to miss?”
“Funny,” Elyse said.
“Just tell me what you know,” I said again.
Elyse crossed her arms in defiance. “Or?”
“Just tell me,” I said.
Movement caught my eye from around the room. Darryl and Heavy Mike were walking over. Mike had his video camera out as he came, but it was Darryl I was worried about. He towered over me and stood protectively just over Elyse’s shoulder.
“Everything okay here, Elyse?” Darryl asked.
“Fine,” she said. “Simon was just leaving.”
Darryl looked at me, a bit of menace in his eyes as he stared me down. “Good,” he said.
“I was?” I asked, starting to get angry.
“Yes,” she said. “You were. I don’t know who you are, but you were no friend of the professor. That’s for sure.”
“Aw, come on … fight for the camera,” Mike said from behind his video camera. “This would make excellent footage. A nice scuffle … I bet it would even look good in court.”
Trent and George moved to stand with their friends, a unified front of five against one single Simon.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll go, but consider this. Someone killed the good professor and nobody seems to be as interested in that as much as I am.”
“Wait,” Elyse said, grabbing me by the arm. “How do you know he was killed? Who are you?”
“I can be secretive, too,” I said. I pushed open the door, hoping to get out while the getting was good. To my relief, no one moved to stop me, and I was glad to get away from them. I had what I needed from them—a lead. The Hell Gate Bridge. Mason Redfield’s decades-long obsession. Perhaps it would hold some answers to his death, especially with the dark, rich histories of death that bridges seemed to have.
I let the door slam shut behind me and walked away, which was probably best. If I left now, I could at least keep with my general rule about not using my bat on normal people. Not that film and theater people really counted for normal, as I was slowly learning.
17
Connor had spent his day catching up on paperwork, still nursing a hangover from last night at Eccentric Circles, and I put in a couple of hours killing some of my own paperwork after I told him about the documentary. By the time either of us had a second free and could get our asses up to the Hell Gate Bridge, it was already dark out. The best approach seemed to be coming at it from Queens through Astoria Park, but once we got there, there was still the daunting task of working our way up to the crossing. As we started up the understructure of it, I was impressed by the sheer size of it.
The Hell Gate Bridge stood against the night sky, traversing the East River where it spanned over to Wards Island. In the dark, its two stone towers rose up at either end of it and the red steel of the bridge itself stretched in a low arch across the expanse, two sets of train tracks running down the center of it. By the time we climbed all the way up to it and stood on the tracks, the September wind was whipping at Connor and me, putting a chill in my bones that was already creeping me out.
Professor Redfield had found it fascinating enough to spend great expanses of time obsessing over it. I needed to know why, and if the answers were out there, I had to find out. I stepped out onto the main section of the bridge.
Connor hesitated. I stopped and looked at him. “Coming?”
He dug his hands down into the pockets of his coat. “Probably a bad time to bring this up, but I don’t really care for bridges, kid.”
“No?” I asked. “Afraid of heights or something?”
“Not quite,” he said. “You remember why we don’t go down to Ground Zero, right?”
I nodded. “Yeah,” I said. “No one from the D.E.A. dares to step foot where World Trade Center once stood. Too much sorrow. Too many ghosts.”
“Pain sticks, kid. Before 9/11, bridges were the number-one source for sorrow around here. Despondent people love to fling themselves to their unhappy demise. A gruesome but romantically poetic way to go, if you ask me. You show me a Manhattan bridge and I’ll show you at least a handful of ghosts moping around on each of them for eternity. So, like I said—not a fan of them. Just look for yourself.”
I turned to look out onto the bridge, adjusting my eyes to really look.
I knew that most New Yorkers turned a blind eye to the stranger things they came across in Manhattan. The fragility of the human mind helped protect itself. My own mind was no exception, and even when I could focus on the hidden world around us, I was not nearly as trained as Connor at seeing the dead. I willed myself to focus on the empty spaces my conscious mind must be avoiding.
“Whoa,” I said when my mind keyed in to the entire scene before me. The bridge was covered with dozens, maybe hundreds of ghostly figures. Spirits drifted directionless across the span. I tur
ned to Connor. “Are you seeing this?”
Connor gave me a dark smile. “What do you think, kid?”
“We’re not going out there, are we?” I asked. “Think about my hair.”
“Way to focus on what’s really important,” Connor said.
I stepped closer to Connor, dropping to a whisper with the horde of apparitions so close. “I think I have a point,” I said. “A very vain but accurate point.”
“Jesus,” Connor said, agitated. “I’m sorry you’re too damn pretty to do your job.” He looked out over the bridge. “You do realize that we’re supposed to exhibit some sort of heroism, right? It is in our job description, kid.”
“Right,” I said, feeling somewhat dressed down. “Sorry.”
“Just stay close to me,” he said.
“Fine by me,” I said
Connor walked off onto the bridge. The wind picked up, joined by the sound of rushing water below that I could see through the struts as we went, giving me a bit of vertigo from all the movement. The chilling bite of the wind blew at our clothes and hair. The shapes around us were like a living fog, drifting in the wind up and down the bridge. They were slow enough that we were able to move among the spirits without running the risk of passing through any of them.
“Is this something ghosts do regularly?” I asked. “I mean, get together like this? Maybe they’re going to go bungee jumping off the bridge.”
Connor shot me a don’t-be-stupid look and continued out onto the bridge where the greater concentration of spirits were. I followed him, the ghosts drifting out of our path as we went.
Connor stopped when we were about halfway across the expanse right in the heart of the ghostly gathering. There were hundreds of them. He turned in circles, looking them over. “Interesting,” he said.
Meandering spirits swirled all around me. “Popular place,” I said. “I guess if you’re looking to off yourself, Hell Gate is the place to go.”
Connor shook his head. “I don’t think these are all suicides, kid.”
“Why not?”
