by Chris Vola
“What is this?” he asked, a little taken aback by the sudden presence of the strange technology.
“It’s like a no-touch cavity search,” she said impatiently, scanning the street to see if anyone was watching them. “Come on, you won’t feel anything. It’s too late to wuss out now. They don’t like you to leave the door open for more than a couple seconds.”
“Seems like an awful lot of radiation.”
“Probably, but it’s not like it’ll do anything worse than what your body’s already done to you.”
He couldn’t argue with that.
Ryan walked into the building and was assaulted by a thick wall of cigarette fumes. As his lungs barked out their discomfort, he squinted through the haze and saw a man in a tattered gray T-shirt, athletic shorts, and Birkenstock sandals sitting on a stool in front of a stainless-steel elevator door, smoking rapidly. He had a sallow complexion, long stringy hair that looked like it hadn’t been properly washed or cut in a long time, and a grizzled beard similarly in need of attention.
“Jesus, Sean!” Vanessa exclaimed when she made it to the end of the hallway, stopping a couple of feet from the elevator.
The man scowled and let out a gasoline-soaked grunt. “What?” he muttered. “Ain’t like any of it’s getting down there.” He nodded at the elevator door. “Not like there’s anything else to do in here.”
Vanessa groaned. “Read a book or something,” she said. “Are you going to let us in or what? He’s expecting me.”
The man looked at Ryan, who was trying (and failing) to wave the smoke away from his face, to hold in the contents of his stomach.
“He your plus one?” the man asked.
“Yeah.”
The man shrugged and flicked his cigarette onto the floor. He picked up a phone that had been resting on his lap and swiped at the screen. The elevator door opened. Vanessa gave the man one last disgusted grimace and walked inside. Ryan followed.
There was a loud vacuum hiss and the smoke-tainted air was sucked out through an unseen vent, much to Ryan’s relief. Inside the elevator, there were no push buttons or screens to determine which floor they were on or where they were going. The walls, ceiling, and floor were made of an opaque, off-white material that glowed as if there were a powerful lighting system operating within it. The door shut behind Ryan and Vanessa and the car moved quickly downward.
“I’m surprised Van Pelt has a human watching the door,” Ryan said after his chest had stopped heaving.
Vanessa laughed. “Sean? He’s been around for almost two hundred years. And he’s probably been an asshole for all of them.”
“Then why does he smoke so much? I mean, I understand the whole oral fixation thing, but it’s got to get old after a while.”
“It’s probably just some obtuse way of getting back at Conrad for making him sit there every day. A few decades ago he apparently got in trouble with the Committee, something about his side gig as a freak show performer. He was starting to get a lot of publicity for his seemingly impossible talents and he was told to stop, to disappear. He didn’t want to, there was a squabble, and long story short, he’s been sitting at that door ever since. I guess I’d be a grumpy old fuck, too.”
The elevator door opened and they stepped into a long hallway that looked exactly like the elevator, its walls covered in the same kind of glowing tiles. Ryan scanned the expansive corridor for any signs of activity, but there were none. No people, and no visible cameras, even though it was certain that they were being watched. As Vanessa took a right and Ryan followed, the sound of their steps was almost totally muffled, dispersed by the floor’s impressive insulating properties. The air was thick with a chemical sweetness, some kind of sterilizing agent, and cold, barely above freezing. The temperature wouldn’t bother Vanessa, but Ryan was already shivering, his breath appearing in irregular bursts of steam when a sliding door opened in the wall about twenty yards away in the direction they were heading.
A man appeared in the entrance. He was tall, maybe six-four or six-five, with olive-colored skin and close-cropped black hair, built like a tight end. His thick shoulders and thicker biceps seemed like they were on the verge of busting through the black compression shirt he was wearing. When Vanessa approached him, he smiled and shook hands with her before stepping aside to let her pass through the opening. Ryan followed. The man briefly analyzed him without a trace of emotion, sniffed a little in Ryan’s direction, scrunched his nose, and, satisfied, moved a few feet away from the door. He positioned himself against the wall, crossed his arms, and stared into space like a dead-eyed security guard.
The room that Ryan entered was slightly bigger than his last apartment, a frigid, undecorated cube that looked like a larger version of the hallway and the elevator. At the far end was a massive glass box containing a stainless-steel desk and a man sitting behind it, with no discernible entrance or exit hatch. Two smaller glass chambers had been installed a few yards away from the box, each one containing a stainless-steel chair.
The man in the box was eggshell-pale, clean-shaven with long dirty-blond hair that looked like it had been enhanced with plugs or extensions. He was wearing a black mock turtleneck that failed to fully cover two significant scars that ran horizontally below both sides of his jaw. His face had a stretched-out, rubbery appearance, unnaturally arched eyebrows, and a frozen-smooth forehead, and the same pinched nose as Vanessa.
Despite the modifications, Ryan recognized him immediately. It was Conrad Van Pelt.
As Vanessa moved toward the box, Van Pelt smiled at her. His lips began to move and a thin, saccharine voice boomed out from an invisible speaker somewhere in the ceiling. “Marvelous to see you again, Vanessa,” he said. He spoke slowly, extending each syllable. His accent sounded vaguely British, but it was more likely indicative of the mid-nineteenth-century upper-crust society to which he had belonged. He looked at Ryan and nodded. “Please, both of you, would you be so kind as to take a seat?”
Vanessa approached one of the smaller chambers. When she was standing a foot away from it, the section in front of her slid down into the floor, allowing her to enter. She sat in the chair, facing Van Pelt, and the wall slid back up, trapping her inside. She motioned for Ryan to do the same. Ryan walked up to the other chamber, heard a faint hydraulic hiss, watched the glass disappear, and followed Vanessa’s lead.
The temperature inside the chamber, once he was shut inside, was pleasant, maybe seventy degrees, and the chair was surprisingly comfortable. But the sudden and intense claustrophobia, the sensation of being helpless and caged, was more than enough to cancel out any positive emotions Ryan might have been able to extract from his current situation. He could feel the cold sweat dripping from his temples as his grip tightened on the chair’s arms.
Van Pelt seemed to sense Ryan’s unease. “I am truly sorry for the precautions,” he said, his voice now emanating from a small speaker hidden somewhere in the chamber, “but I try to avoid all direct contact with, ah, humans, as well as any of my own people who may have had contact with them.”
“No offense taken,” Ryan said in a low, deadpan voice, assuming the speaker worked both ways. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.” He tried to remain calm, tried to silence the nervous twitching that seemed to stretch from his legs to his neck.
“A pleasure to finally meet you as well,” Van Pelt said, “though I wish the circumstances were a bit different.”
Finally? Ryan thought. So had the Committee—not just Xansati—known about him before he’d been reunited with Vanessa? Or was the word just a cloying exaggeration? Ryan looked over at Vanessa for a brief moment. She was stone-faced, staring straight ahead, barely blinking, giving away nothing in terms of her mental state or how she was going to spin her side of how she and Ryan had met.
“Vanessa has told me a bit about your unfortunate situation,” Van Pelt continued, as if the three of them were having a relaxed chat on a café patio somewhere in Cobble Hill. “Unfortunate, and yet admirabl
e. I can only imagine the courage it must have taken for you to give up the greatest gift any of us could ever hope to receive, to be forced to greet Death after being free from his grasp for so many years. All because of one antiquated fool’s quest for another untamable relic.”
Ryan assumed that Van Pelt was talking about Xansati and the jaguar statue that Arthur had buried. He also assumed that Vanessa hadn’t told her boss about saving Derrick’s papers and flash drive instead of destroying them like she’d been ordered to do. If that was the case, then Ryan could play ignorant, using Van Pelt’s death-related paranoia and fear of contamination as a shield. With a pair of airtight glass walls separating them, Van Pelt would be unable to detect the obvious changes in Ryan’s heart rate and the subtler changes in the scent of Ryan’s sweat to determine whether he was lying.
Or so Ryan hoped.
“What fool would that be?” Ryan asked. “All I know is that I came to Manhattan because I received a series of messages leading me to believe that my … a human that was important to me was being tortured by members of your tribe, as I’m sure Vanessa told you. I was attacked, as were several others in my tribe, by humans who were operating on orders from someone in Manhattan. I was contacted by a woman who claimed to be working for the same employer, though she didn’t say who it was, who told me that my human friend whom they’d taken would be killed unless I provided them with something, an artifact that had apparently been in the possession of my maker, whose name must have rung some kind of a bell because you decided to see me today.”
“Not wasting any time with idle banter,” Van Pelt said, his thin lips curling into a smile. “I like that. Did you give the woman what she wanted?” he asked.
“No,” Ryan said, trying to remain calm. “I had no idea what she was talking about, which is why I ended up here. I felt like I had no other options if I wanted to make sure that my friend stayed alive. I tracked the woman across the river and eventually followed her to a building on the Upper East Side.”
“East 80th Street,” Vanessa interjected. “I noticed him outside the building while I was doing my regular surveillance.”
Van Pelt nodded at her, his android-frozen features giving nothing away. “A happy coincidence,” he said. “That must have been an interesting reunion.” He turned his attention back to Ryan. “When Vanessa called and told me about what happened to you, I contacted the other board members, the elders who are responsible for the governing of our people, and I can tell you without any uncertainty that none of them had anything to do with it. Quite frankly, we’ve had our fill of artifacts, especially ones like what you were asked to procure.”
“Then who’s responsible?” Ryan asked, sharply. He didn’t need to look at Vanessa to know that she was probably squirming in her seat.
“He calls himself our older brother, Xansati in the language of his people. He was part of the original tribe, the tribe whose chief and medicine men had the good foresight to realize that when the Dutch came, their time in Manhattan was over. Before they left, they gave the blood gift to a handful of Dutch settlers who they thought would be worthy of it, as a way to ensure that a part of the memory of the tribe would endure indefinitely. I am sure something similar took place in Brooklyn?”
“More or less, I suppose,” Ryan said, “from what I’ve been told.”
Van Pelt reached under the desk. He lifted the end of what looked like a clear plastic tube and placed it between his lips. The tube turned red as it filled with liquid from an unseen source. Van Pelt took a few sips and placed the tube back under the desk. He wiped his mouth with a white handkerchief that he had been holding in his other hand. He sighed audibly with pleasure. Even though Ryan could relate to the feeling, the cessation of hunger and the almost sensual thrill that went along with it, he hoped to never experience it firsthand again. The sound filled him with disgust.
“Xansati didn’t want to leave,” Van Pelt said. “He told his chief that he would stay behind, that he would help the colonists who had been turned, guide them through the transition and teach them how to live with the gift that they’d been given. But that wasn’t quite how it panned out. Yes, he made himself available to those that sought him out, and would offer advice if it suited him, but he was no brother to any of us. He has never been concerned about the future, about the directions we have chosen to take as a business organization and as a species. His mind remains firmly entrenched in the past, clinging to the false possibilities of a six-hundred-year-old obsession.”
“He’s been searching for the statue,” Ryan said. “The one he thinks I have.”
“Statues,” Van Pelt replied with disdain, spitting the word out. “There are eight that we know of, perhaps dozens more. He was entrusted with the two that had belonged to the Indians who once lived here, and he’s been trying to collect the rest of them for a long time, since they started resurfacing. They’re small, carved from stone and covered in painted patterns, or what’s left of them. You might think they were toys or board game pieces if you didn’t know what you were looking at. According to the indigenous traditions, they’re supposed to resemble jaguars, but to me they look otherworldly, ghoulish, like the imps and goblins in the fairy tales my Austrian governess would read to me as a small child. But what they look like is irrelevant. It is what they do, or what we think they do, that makes them fascinating and ultimately quite deadly. Are you familiar with the theory that there once existed a technologically advanced society that flourished before the last ice age, a society that was virtually wiped out by a cataclysm that came to be known as the Great Flood?”
“You mean like Atlantis?” Ryan asked. “Sure, I’ve been known to go on some Ancient Aliens binges every now and then.” He snickered, looked over at Vanessa for her reaction to what was suddenly turning into the weirdest history lesson he’d ever had. She was staring at him, her eyes burning into his, looking even more serious than she had when she’d sat down, if that was possible.
“Atlantis,” Van Pelt repeated. “Yes, that is a small part of it. There are also the remains of pyramids found on every continent, the interstellar flying machines mentioned numerous times in the ancient Hindu scriptures, the Ark of the Covenant, countless other mythological objects and enigmatic structures that were said to have been built by or were conduits for an unbelievably powerful energy, an energy whose origins predate the oldest sources, maybe even humanity itself.
“I can tell by both of your expressions that you’re wondering where I’m going with this,” he said. “You’re thinking it sounds insane, and until recently I would have agreed with you. But I have seen how the statues function. Well, not the statues themselves. They are only vessels, carved in the Yucatán Peninsula by a culture whose name no longer exists, a culture who, for some reason, dispersed the objects across North America. The older magnetic properties inside of them are what react with the blood-eater virus, keeping the virus alive even when blood-eaters travel outside their infection zone. Xansati claimed to have journeyed several times in the past, though it has never been verified. He also claimed that the energy in the statues could be combined and harnessed to create a weapon with nuclear strength and the ability to be condensed and directed in a single, controllable beam, though he had never witnessed it during his own lifetime.”
“You mean you can use one these things to cross the boundaries and still keep your, uh, gift?” Ryan asked, trying to subdue the surprise in his voice.
“According to Xansati. The rest of the tribe had always dismissed his ramblings as folklore, until early in the last century when Europe went to hell and it behooved us, from a business perspective, to do what we could to help the war effort. We were willing to test Xansati’s hypotheses. He lent us the statues to conduct some trials, many of which ended rather unfortunately. We learned that the only people who could handle the statues directly, when they were activated, were those who possessed the blood of the original tribe, or those who had been turned by them. That meant Xansati and
the two oldest members of the Committee at the time, Jan Aertson—the great-great-grandfather of Cornelius Vanderbilt—and Bram van den Berg, who is no longer with us. Any other human or blood-eater would not survive direct contact. We hired teams of scientists, soldiers, doctors, and none of them made progress. They couldn’t figure out the activation protocols, how to turn the statues off once they had been activated. The technology was beyond anything they had seen. It still is. We stopped the trials, ended the pointless deaths and our fascination with a substance we couldn’t ever hope to control.”
Ryan thought back to Arthur’s jaguar, glowing and vibrating in the Urban Outfitters bag. It had been activated. If Van Pelt was telling the truth, maybe he’d been able to hold it because Arthur had been turned by a Lenape warrior. Ryan was only one generation removed from the original tribe.
“But Xansati wasn’t done,” Van Pelt continued. “He took back the statues. He and Arthur Harker—who brought a statue with him when he left Brooklyn and gifted it to Xansati—made it their primary objective to find the rest of them, to collect them for a purpose only they knew. Harker willingly gave up his gift and traveled across the continent for decades. He found an additional three statues and brought them to Manhattan. When Xansati lost contact with Arthur, he locked the statues in his personal vault at the Cloisters, where they’ve been for more than fifty years. When the seventh statue resurfaced at the Brooklyn Museum earlier this year, we asked Xansati to ignore it, to remember what had happened in the past, to think about the difficulties we face in trying to remain hidden from the technologically enhanced eye of the modern public, to understand the kind of nightmare cover-up we would have to undertake if the statue decided to activate. Instead of disregarding us, as I thought he would, he said he would leave the statue alone, under several conditions. He told us he wanted to surrender his seat on the board of elders, to effectively cut himself off from the rest of the tribe. He asked to be granted complete control of several sections of northern Manhattan, including everything above 150th Street, and to allow anyone in the tribe who wished to follow him to be able to do so. We agreed without much deliberation. The museum contains a few heirlooms from my family and the families of my fellow elders, but really, in the scheme of things, the loss was not particularly great.”
