by Anton Strout
“Locked,” I said, handing Jane my bat. She took it and I reached up the sleeve of my coat for the set of lock picks I kept there.
“Looks like you would have been going first anyway, kid,” Connor said, slapping me on the back. “You sure you can pick this? Looks kind of old …”
I dropped to my knees and started working on the tumblers with my assortment of picks and torsion wrenches. “I should be able to,” I said. “Pin locks go back almost four thousand years. The hardware has changed over the years, but not the theory or mechanics behind them. And you’d be surprised how many of the old art houses and antiques stores in Manhattan are still using those old locks. Made a lot of my old heists fairly easy.”
“I keep forgetting,” Jane said, mustering a false pride in her voice. “My boyfriend, the ex-thief.”
“Emphasis on the ex,” Connor added.
I went silent as I concentrated on the lock. With both my partner and my girlfriend watching, a little performance anxiety crept up on me, especially since I was using my old nefarious skills. Not being able to beat the lock would be more than embarrassing. Worse, it would give them something to bond over while picking on me.
I needn’t have worried. I expected the lock to give me some difficulty given the abandoned state of the lighthouse, and I was surprised when I heard it click open under my working it seconds later.
“You make it look so easy,” Jane said, giving me a silent golf clap.
“It was easy,” I said, still examining the mechanism itself. “I expected the hardest part of opening it would be due to corrosion given its age and with it being so close to the water, but someone’s been taking very good care of it.”
I slid my set of picks and torsion wrenches back up my sleeve before standing and took my bat back from Jane. I put my hand against the door. “Stay sharp, people,” I said and pushed it open. The door didn’t make a sound.
“Well, that’s disappointing,” I said.
“What is?” Jane asked.
“Where’s the creakiness from unoiled hinges? Maybe I watched too much Scooby-Doo as a kid, but I’m a bit disappointed that it didn’t squeak open like they always did on the show.”
“Maybe you’ll get lucky and the Gator Ghoul will be waiting on the other side,” Connor added.
I gave him a thumbs-up for the reference, and then turned my attention back to the lighthouse as we entered.
The interior of the circular part of the lighthouse was open and led off to another part made up of the long rectangular section we had seen from outside. The cylindrical part of the room was ringed along the far wall with a spiral staircase built into the curvature of the building. I wasn’t sure what I had expected to find in here. Maybe some nautical equipment—a rain slicker that belonged to the Gorton’s fisherman, perhaps. Instead, the interior of the lighthouse was littered with film equipment. Old-school cameras set up on tripods, recording equipment… even a table scattered with an odd assortment of different microphones and tape reels. One wall had a makeshift film screen tacked up and an old film projection machine faced it. A thick black reel of film still sat in it, threaded through the machine like a snake caught in a trap.
“What is this place?” Jane whispered.
“From the look of it, I’d say it was the good professor’s home away from home,” Connor said. “Unless you know of any other bridge-obsessive film teachers around town.”
Jane laughed and I shushed her.
I headed for the stairs. “Let’s see if we have any Goldilocks lurking around here before we get too carried away,” I said.
As I started up into the lighthouse, I was thankful for the solid structural integrity of the building. Sturdy old-world stonework made up the walls, and the staircase itself was cast from black iron. I did my best to move silently, going up it without making a sound. Jane followed right behind me and Connor took the rear.
The farther I went up into it, the more my nerves were on end, but other than a shoddy old mattress on the second level up, there were no signs of habitation. It still gave me the creeps, despite the spectacular view at the top of it. I couldn’t get back downstairs fast enough, Jane clutching my hand as we rushed back down.
When we reached the room full of film equipment once more, Connor spoke up, using his full voice now that we knew we were alone here. “Why the hurry, kid?”
“You don’t find this place creepy?” I asked.
Connor shrugged. “Not really,” he said. “I mean, nothing has tried to kill us in here yet.”
“Call me crazy,” I said, “but I actually take comfort when I have something tangible to deal with, something I can take a bat to. Getting a spooky feeling just gets under my skin, especially when nothing stands out.”
Connor laughed. “That is crazy,” he said.
Jane interrupted the sound of his laughter. “None of this explains why Professor Redfield was killed,” she said. “Or any of those ghosts you mentioned.”
“She’s right,” I said, “but here’s a theory: maybe he set up his crazy film studio too close to her ship-sinking business. Maybe the professor awoke her ancient spirit while making his documentary or something.”
“Maybe,” Connor said, “but if she killed him for his knowledge of her, wouldn’t she have destroyed all this, too?”
“Probably,” I said, “but let’s look around. There may be something here that’s of use to us.”
We spread out around the room, picking through the film equipment for anything that didn’t look like the professor had accumulated it from the film department of NYU. I went over to a long table along the right side of the room that was cluttered with bits and pieces of broken wood. I put on my gloves as I shifted them around. Peeking out from beneath two of the boards was a white, halfrusted plate with the letters SLO carved into it. The rest of the piece was torn away beyond the O. I pulled it out from underneath everything else and held it up for Connor to see. “This looks promising, yes?” I asked.
“We’re definitely taking that with us,” Connor said, over by the film projector set up in the center of the room. “Make sure you bring it to the boat.” He pulled out his flashlight and started examining the machine.
“What are you doing?” I said. “You want to watch movies, we’ve got stadium seating back in Manhattan.”
“I’m trying to figure out how to unthread this film reel to pack it up and take it with us,” he said. “It’s the last thing the professor was working on. Maybe it will give us some insight.”
“Thank God you don’t want to watch it here,” Jane said, nervous. She wrapped her arms around herself.
“Not here, no,” Connor confirmed. “I don’t want to hang out here any longer than we have to, especially if more of those river-bottom zombies come knocking. The professor was passionate about film. Let’s take it out of here and see where his passions really lay.”
21
The boat made it back to the docks over by Chelsea Piers even though I thought the engine and motor might have been clogged with aqua-zombie bits from earlier. Cleaning the guts and ichor off it would have to wait. After tying off, the three of us headed back and reported to the Inspectre about Mason’s secret film-production lighthouse. When we showed him the film canister, he insisted on kicking all the norms out of the Lovecraft’s theater as the credits on The Picture of Dorian Gray rolled.
A fair number of agents from a variety of divisions gathered in the theater, along with most of Other Division and some faces I recognized from some of my Fraternal Order of Goodness training sessions. The Inspectre watched the theater fill up before looking down at the film reel in his hands. Jane, looking a little more tired now that we were off the water, collapsed into one of the theater seats in the middle of a row halfway back.
“I’ll take care of loading the film,” the Inspectre said, lifting up the canister. “See to the girl.”
I nodded. “You know how to run the projector?” I asked him as I sat down next to her.
>
“Can’t be that hard, can it?” he scoffed. “I’ve solved the riddle of the cube at Astor Place, fought the Geissman Guard…”
“You also got lost in the Black Stacks at Tome, Sweet Tome for half an hour,” Connor reminded him.
The Inspectre’s face fell and he blushed. “Well, yes, you have me there, my dear boy.” He tried to shake off the sudden deflation from Connor’s words. “I still maintain that those occult books kept changing the layout back in the Black Stacks …”
“It’s possible,” I offered. “I mean, if a homicidal bookcase can come charging after me, surely the rest of them can move around.”
“Yes,” the Inspectre said, getting lost in thought. “Perhaps.” He wrapped his arms around the bulk of the film canister and walked it up the aisle toward the door leading up to the projection booth.
Connor turned to look at Jane. “She okay, kid?”
I took Jane’s hand in mine and squeezed it. There was little response at first, but then she squeezed back, her grip strong.
She nodded. “I’m fine,” she said, her voice weak. “I just need a minute to sit and catch my breath. Everything out on the water took the wind out of me.”
Connor backed down the aisle. “I’m going to sit a couple rows in front of you two lovebirds,” he said. “Give you a little breathing room.”
Connor settled down into the middle of the row three ahead of us. I tripped my way down ours as the credits wrapped up on The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Despite a small volley of swearing during the changeover of the films, the Inspectre managed to get the professor’s film up and running within a few minutes. Mason Redfield’s The Gates of Hell: Water’s End came up on the screen. The footage was documentary-style, covering the long history of the location and the years of unfortunate incidents that plagued those waters. Hundreds of ships had sunk there over the years, supposedly due to treacherous currents and rock formations that took seventy years of blasting and removal to finally clear. Professor Redfield even had a touch of the horror element in its approach, given the macabre subject matter, lending the film an eerie quality that transcended most documentaries. I found myself actually enjoying it, if enjoyment could be taken in such dark subject matter. Human suffering was always fascinating, no matter what form it came in.
The film cut abruptly to a different-looking style all together. Apparently, the professor was a better film teacher than he was an editor because he had spliced in an entire section of the wrong footage. The image on the screen looked straight out of a B-grade horror flick showing a thick, billowing fog on the edge of a graveyard at night. It was so poorly done that even the gravestones looked like they might blow away if a weak wind hit during the filming. The low, guttural sound of zombies off in the darkness came over the sound system.
“How does this tie in?” Jane asked, almost as confused as I was.
“Bad splice,” I said. “Guess the professor was a better teacher than doer.”
“I don’t think so, kid,” Connor said, turning his head back to us. “Something about this seems…deliberate.”
“How?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “Just a feeling.” He looked up to the booth over our heads and called out, “Inspectre?”
The light from the projector flickered, almost going out as the film skipped on the screen. A churning din of metal and an unhealthy grind of the film equipment filled the theater as the light from the glow off the screen began to strobe erratically.
“That doesn’t sound or look good,” Jane said, finally perking up once more. “If we had paid to see this, I’d definitely want my money back.”
“What the hell is going on?” I asked.
Connor stood. “I don’t know,” he said, “but I mean to find out.” He looked up at the projection booth. “Inspectre, shut it down!”
“I’m trying, blast it!” the Inspectre called out.
“Try harder,” Connor shouted.
A loud commotion came from the tiny open panel at the back of the theater, followed by a string of profanity that I didn’t know the Inspectre had in him. “It’s no use,” he said. “I can’t kill the power to the machine. It won’t stop running, damn it all!”
Thick smoke filled the air. At first I thought it must be coming from the machine up in the projection booth, but then I realized it wasn’t from there. In fact, it wasn’t smoke at all.
It was fog, and it was coming out of the movie screen. Jane grabbed onto my arm, squeezing.
“Connor!” I shouted, pointing down in front. “Look!”
“I see it, kid,” he said, keeping his calm. “Don’t get all freaked-out marveling at it. Just be prepared.”
“Prepared for what?” I asked, but I was already pulling out my bat. I had a pretty good idea forming in my head. If the fog from the movie could pour out into our world, I wondered what else could come through.
All three of us stood transfixed by what was happening on the screen. There was little we could do but watch as the movie flashed through several scenes in rapid sequence. Clips from a whole host of B-grade zombie flicks came up one after another. With each new one, creatures from each remained on the screen, pressing against it. Like swimmers coming to the surface, the figures pushed through the two-dimensional world and into ours.
“Did they—?” Jane started, but I cut her off.
“Yep,” I said and started off down our row to the aisle.
As the floor in front of the screen filled with cinematically manifested undead that kept pouring off the screen, the film changed images once again, this time coming to one steady setting. This time the film had more of an amateur home-video quality.
A field of green grass stretched along a horizon against a backdrop of cloudless blue sky. A lone figure came into the frame—young, dashing, and one that I had seen before thanks to my psychometry. Mason Redfield looked a lot better this way than when I had originally met him—old, dead, and filled with water.
He turned to the screen as if noticing it, and walked toward us in the type of tweed suit he had fancied in his youth. Like all the rest of the creatures manifesting in the theater, he pushed at the screen, but met more resistance from it than the others had. Mason reeled back from it, shocked, but I could tell from the expression of determination on his face that he wasn’t even close to giving up. He ran forward, slamming between film and reality like that old video for “Take on Me.” Sparks flew from the screen, raining down onto the assembled zombie army below. Several agents in the theater snapped into action and charged the horde down by the screen, but Connor, Jane, and I kept watching Mason Redfield up above.
Movement off to my left caught my eye and I looked over. Inspectre Quimbley had joined us, out of breath from running down from the projection booth. His eyes were also transfixed on the screen.
“Is that the Mason Redfield?” I asked him.
“Back from the grave, I believe,” the Inspectre said. “Trying to return to his youth, from the looks of it.”
The Inspectre’s old friend leapt at the screen, the screen erupting in sound and fury with a prismatic spray of color. The rejuvenated professor passed through it and landed along the tops of the front row of seats, very much alive and looking even younger than me. “Protect me, my beautiful monsters,” he shouted. “At all costs.” At his command, the aggression among the zombies rose, especially those who fell into a close, protective ring around the reborn professor.
The Inspectre continued down the aisle toward him. “Mason!”
Redfield was too busy staring at his own limbs to notice the Inspectre. He stood there balanced on top of the seats, flexing his arms and fingers around like they were unfamiliar to him. Eventually, he took notice of the Inspectre advancing on him and did a double take.
“Argyle?” he said with an astonished smile. “Is that you?”
“Yes, Mason.”
The Inspectre’s old partner’s eyes widened. “You’re so… old…”
&nb
sp; “I think the salient point,” the Inspectre said, “is the fact that you’re so young.”
Mason Redfield looked around. “Where are we? Where are my students? This isn’t where I was supposed to be.”
“We beat them to it, I guess,” I said.
“They were supposed to retrieve the film,” he said, angry, but then he gave a dark laugh. “Students can be so unreliable.”
“What have you done, Mason?” the Inspectre asked. “What dark bargain have you struck … and why?”
Mason turned his attention back to the Inspectre. “Why?” Mason said, scoffing at him. “Have you looked in the mirror lately? Tell me, which way would you rather be? A doddering old film professor or a man in his prime? I had to die, to be reborn.”
“What you are, what you have become, is unnatural,” the Inspectre said, “and in the name of the Fraternal Order of Goodness, I—”
“The Order?” he said, laughing. “Are you telling me that there are still living members out there, other than you?”
“The Order will still be here long after you’re gone, Mason, trust me.” The Inspectre lunged for Mason on top of the seats, but the now-young professor batted him away with an awkward swipe of his arm. Clumsy as it was, it was enough to knock the Inspectre over onto one of the theater seats. He grunted as he went down.
“Gone?” Mason said, parroting the Inspectre’s British accent. “Why, yes… I do believe it is time I was going.” At his gestures, the circle of zombies around him pressed out into the crowd.
I came out of the row and stepped down the aisle, Jane at my heels. I pulled out my bat, extended it, and slapped it down into my hand. “You’re not going anywhere,” I said.
“Oh, no?” Mason said, looking amused. “I beg to differ.” He gestured again at his assembled army, which was already squaring off against the rest of the agents. “Attack!”
“Good,” I said, charging him. “That’s what I was hoping you were going to say.”
