by Anton Strout
Connor waved his hand out toward the crowd. “Look at the way they’re all dressed,” he said.
I studied the crowd closely, taking note of the clothes. All of them looked to be from the same era. Tall, stiff collars on some on the men in fine tailored suits, ankle-length skirts and matching jackets on many of the women. Other, more casual women had on shirtwaist dresses and sailor hats. The rest either wore broad-brimmed hats or sported the turn-of-the-century Gibson Girl hairstyle, but the wind was already playing havoc with them.
“They all look turn of the century, 1900 more or less,” I said. “So?”
“That’s the thing,” Connor said. “If they were all suicides, they probably happened periodically through history. They should all be dressed in different styles reflecting all those times, right? But they’re not. Everyone who died here is from the same era.”
“So, something tragic happened all at once,” I said.
Connor nodded. “That would be my guess.”
“But what?” I looked down at the structure of the bridge, namely the two sets of train tracks that ran across them. “Train derailment?”
“I’m not sure,” Connor said, reaching into his coat pocket and pulling out a small stoppered vial, “but we’re going to find out.”
He walked around in the drift of souls until he narrowed his focus in on a man in his early twenties wearing a suit two sizes too big for him. Connor flipped the stopper off the top of the vial and the air immediately filled with the smell of patchouli. Tendrils of light brown vapors rose up from it and slowly snaked their way up and around the young man. When the smoke reached his nostrils, his face fell slack.
“Hey, friend,” Connor said, sounding quite collegial, “you mind telling me what you’re waiting for?”
The young man gave a slow nod as he continued to stare off along the distance of the East River. “Our steamer,” he said.
“You’re expecting a boat?” I asked.
The man nodded again, ever so slightly.
I looked over at Connor. “Are we talking metaphorically? Like a boat to the afterlife? I don’t think the East River qualifies as the River Styx, does it?”
Connor gave me a look. “Shush,” he said, turning his attention back to the ghost. “Where are you going today?”
The man smiled, a grin crossing his face from ear to ear like a cartoon character. “On a picnic.”
I had forgotten how exaggerated the features could get on a spirit when raw emotion came to the surface. Connor didn’t react; he just nodded along with him.
“Sounds nice,” he said. “When are you expecting it?”
“Soon,” the man said, but his face changed. Uncertainty crept into his eyes and his mouth twisted in concern. “But, my goodness, I thought it would certainly be here by now. You do think it’s coming, don’t you? Mr. Carter promised us and I’d hate to think that the St. Mark’s Lutherans were so unsound in their financial affairs that they had to cancel.”
Connor looked at me and gave a bitter smile. “Comforting to see that budget concerns have a long and illustrious history.”
“Do you think that the lady will know what the holdup is?” the young man asked, his voice barely an audible whisper on the wind.
“Lady?” Connor asked him.
The man looked around the expanse of the bridge through the crowd of his fellow ghosts, nervous. His face was pained. “I shouldn’t say anything more or she’ll hurt me.”
“I think I know what lady,” I said, stepping around to get in front of him. “A woman with dark hair, wearing a long green dress, yes?”
“Dark haired, yes,” he said, “and in a green dress that I daresay is a bit immodest on a woman.”
“Figures,” I said. “That dress of hers is no doubt scandalous by his standards.”
“Well, at least your little water woman is a bit of a fashion plate,” Connor said. “A killer, but still able to pull off the cover shot of Paranormal Quarterly. Nice.”
I turned back to the young man. “Why are you afraid of her?” I asked, but the look on his face was already enough to give me my answer.
The young man’s fear seemed to be agitating the rest of the ghosts around him. Like a ripple in a pond, frantic energy began to radiate outward from him until we were surrounded by a sea of nervous spirits. “Foul fortunes come on foul winds,” he said. “And together they blow twice as hard. She has risen, but the worst has yet to rise.”
“Tell me,” I begged of him, wishing I could reach out and grab him to shake him. “Who has risen? What’s her name?”
“We should probably get out of here,” Connor said. “As in, now.”
“Tell us,” I said. “Please.”
“General … Slocum,” the young man said, his fear growing. His feet left the ground as his agitation grew, swirling off into the crowd. I wasn’t sure if he was gearing up to attack or not, but it was clear that Connor’s ghostwrangling mixture had worn off. I didn’t want to see what happened next, but Connor was already one step ahead of me.
Already in motion, Connor bolted off across the bridge and I came running after him. Spirits dove and wove around us and I did my best to keep them from passing through me as I ran. By the time we passed beyond one of the stone towers at the end of the bridge, the swarm was well behind us and already settling down again. When the two of us stopped running, we both were panting pretty heavily.
“Dare I ask how my hair is?” I asked.
“Still perfect,” Connor said, “although you could maybe use some product in all this wind.”
“Smart-ass,” I said. “Can you do anything to disperse them?”
Connor shook his head as he fixed the collar of his windblown trench coat. “I don’t think so, kid,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve seen so many ghosts in one place since that night at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Besides, it’s hard to disperse them when I don’t know why they’re still here in the first place.”
“So what now?” I said, adjusting my coat. I tapped my bat. “Fat lot of good this would do.”
“Don’t get all bent out of shape,” Connor said. “I consider what we just did a win. We made it off the bridge alive, didn’t we?”
I nodded. “Yeah, that’s something.”
“But that’s not all,” he added.
“No?”
“We have a name,” he said. “I’m not sure who General Slocum is, but I aim to find out.”
“I hope Godfrey Candella’s on call, then,” I said.
Connor headed off toward the lights of Queens. “With all the cuts, everybody’s on call all the time.”
“True,” I said, yawning with fatigue, shivering, “but I think this has to wait until morning. I’m not sure if Godfrey needs his sleep, but I’m pretty sure I do.”
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.”
