14

by Peter Clines

  “What a bitch,” said Roger.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “Anyway, just ignore the guy. I’m hoping he’ll hurry up and get lost sometime soon. And no random displays of affection, please. That’s all I need is for her to pull out pictures of me getting hugged by a sexy young thing. They’d have a field day with that.”

  “Our love will remain a secret,” Xela promised. “And I’ll stop hanging my underwear in your window.” She blew him a big kiss across the room.

  “Well,” said Nate, “that’s solved. Next?”

  “I can tell you two things I noticed, once Nate got me looking,” said Tim.

  “Yeah?”

  He nodded. “There’s a subsonic hum in my apartment.”

  Veek raised her eyebrows. “And you know this how?”

  “I’ve got some recording equipment. It messes up the microphones. Makes their diaphragms vibrate all the time, like a white noise generator.”

  Nate scribbled it down on the legal pad. “Is recording another hobby of yours?”

  He smiled. “I play some guitar now and then.”

  “What’s number two?”

  Tim pushed his hips into the air and pulled something out of his pocket. It looked like a credit card made of clear plastic. When he held it up to the light Nate could see some concentric circles and dozens of fine lines. The inside of the circles blurred in the light like a cheap hologram effect.

  “I found this in the back of my briefcase,” he said. “I used to go hiking a lot when I lived back east, when I was younger. Ended up carrying it with me when I started spending more time at the office.”

  He handed it off to Veek. She set it flat on her palm and Nate realized it was a compass. Her eyes went wide. So did Clive’s. “Holy crap,” he said.

  Veek handed it to Xela. Debbie and Roger leaned in to get a look. Nate stepped forward and looked over her shoulder. The blur wasn’t a hologram.

  The needle of the compass spun. It wasn’t moving at Cuisinart speeds, but it wasn’t slow. Xela tilted it while he watched. The needle showed no sign of slowing down.

  “It stops spinning if you move it outside,” said Tim. “You can just hold it out a window and it stops.”

  Xela dashed for the window on the other side of the lounge. Roger went with her.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” said Veek. “If there was a magnetic field that strong here, half our electronics wouldn’t work.

  “Would it need to be that strong, though?” asked Clive. “It doesn’t take much to move a compass needle.”

  “Not much when you’re close to it,” Tim said. “The whole reason compasses work is because the entire planet’s one big magnet. Compared to that, see how close you need to get to a fridge magnet to do anything.”

  “It stopped,” called Xela from the window. “Works fine outside.”

  “Anything else?” Nate looked at them.

  “Mutant cockroaches,” said Debbie.

  “Noted,” said Nate. “If you have green cockroaches, count their legs. We’ve got a weird mutation here.”

  “Actually,” said Debbie, “has anyone ever seen a normal cockroach in their apartment? Or anywhere in the building?”

  They shook their heads. Debbie’s lip twisted. She looked at Nate and shrugged.

  “Okay,” said Nate, “I guess the only other question is...who wants to help us figure all this stuff out?”

  Tim’s hand went up. So did Xela’s. Roger raised two fingers as soon as he saw Xela’s go up. “I’ve got a gig starting this week,” he said, “but I’ll help where I can.”

  “You know we’re in,” said Debbie. She and Clive smiled.

  Nate looked at Mandy. She shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I won’t tell on all y’all or anything, but I can’t get evicted. I’ll never get another place.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Believe me, I get it.”

  “I like hanging out and talking about all this, but I just can’t do anything else.”

  “So,” said Roger, “we got a couple weird rooms, mutant bugs in the walls, and our power’s coming out of the air or something.”

  “That’s about it, yeah,” said Nate.

  Roger nodded. “Cool. Anyone want to get a pizza or three? I’m starved.”

  “If you get pizza,” said Tim, “I’ll buy the beer.”

  “I’m in,” said Xela. “Can we get one with no meat?”

  Roger raised his eyebrow. “You a vegan?”

  “Vegetarian,” she said. “Don’t worry. Order your burnt cow and pig, I won’t give you a hard time about it.”

  Clive grabbed the remote for the BluRay player and restarted the film. He glanced at Veek. “Really think this film’s as bad as the Ang Lee one?”

  She shrugged. “I never saw it, to be honest. I just heard a lot of people didn’t like this one, either.”

  “Yeah, well, a lot of people are stupid. This movie’s just action and fun.”

  Twenty Eight

  Monday, Nate tried to concentrate on returned mail and addresses. His work dragged until he realized he was comparing the name on each form to the monograms on the cornerstone. He tried to focus and got two bundles done by the end of the day. It was slightly more than the days when he’d completely blown off work.

  On Tuesday he got two bundles of returns sorted, cross-referenced, and updated before lunch. He felt so productive he spent the first hour of the afternoon sending follow-up emails to the office of Public Works. He also scribbled down the address in case he decided to go look things up in person. After that he plowed through a stack of returned issues of the magazine. Then he spent half an hour Googling his home address, looking at more old pictures of the neighborhood. The Kavach Building was in all of them. It looked the same.

  At 4:35 Nate accepted he wasn’t going to get anything else done before the end of the day, which meant he was done until Thursday morning. He shifted the bundles left in the mail tote and tried to make it look like as much work had been done as possible. He added to the illusion by moving a bundle into each of the other return crates. He adjusted the pens and loose return slips on his desk to maximize the appearance of work in progress.

  While killing the last ten minutes of the work day, he found a pack of index cards in the top drawer of his desk. The plastic wrap was still sealed and a generic price tag was stamped onto it. The tag was crooked, and one corner hung over the edge just enough to collect dust and hair on its sticky backside. The cards came in an assortment of colors, divided between white, blue, yellow, pale green, and pink. The colored cards struck a chord.

  Nate had listened to Jimmy talk about screenwriting dozens of times. It was a topic that came up at least every other week since the intern was one of Hollywood’s great unsung geniuses. Jimmy read two different screenwriting magazines, frequented several websites, and had spent hundreds of dollars on books and seminars. He read at least two screenplays a week by people with names like Haggis, Black, Payne, and a pair named Kurtzman and something—all of whom were apparently hacks of the highest order, even though Jimmy was always eager to read their stuff. One wall of his apartment, he claimed, was covered with colored note cards representing character elements, story beats, redemptive moments, and other terms that meant nothing to Nate.

  To the best of Nate’s knowledge, the only thing Jimmy hadn’t done was actually write something.

  The idea of color-coded note cards stuck with Nate, though, when all the other talk of changing how Hollywood worked had faded into a pleasant background hum. It was a visual way to organize information. A cheap, easy way to do it, too.

  He slipped the cards into his backpack, then added a roll of tape and a pair of Sharpie markers. When he waved goodbye to Eddie in the hall he found he felt remarkably good about stealing office supplies.

  Nate spent most of Wednesday afternoon scribbling on index cards. Yellow cards would be for history-related mysteries, he decided, while pink ones would be for modern ones like Oskar and Toni
-Kathy. Blue would be unexplained phenomena like the lack of power lines, the magnetic field, and apartment 14 with all its padlocks. Things that were just odd about the construction would go on white cards.

  Green he saved for a class of mystery they hadn’t discovered yet.

  Nate stood by the window and used the entertainment center as his tabletop. He wrote out phrases like COLD WALL, SUICIDE ROOM, SUB-BASEMENT, and NO ONE DREAMS. In an hour he’d burned through half the blue cards. An hour after that half the package was gone.

  It was after sundown when he started taping them to the wall. The only area big enough to work on was the section between the kitchen and his closet door. The paint felt tacky in the early-summer heat. The cards almost stuck without tape.

  It was random at first. He just slapped them on the wall with loops of scotch tape. Then he gathered them by color. When 14 PADLOCKED 4X ended up next to SUICIDE ROOM he rearranged them all in the same layout as the apartments. He wrote up six more blue cards marked MUTANT GREEN COCKROACH and stuck them everywhere he’d seen one of the bugs.

  There was a pattern here. He was sure there was.

  He wanted to show the index card array to Veek, but it was after midnight. She was probably asleep. He should be getting to bed, too.

  He also knew he couldn’t risk leaving it up for Oskar to see. If I was smart, he thought, I wouldn’t’ve done it on the wall in front of the door. Of course, there wasn’t much other wall space in his apartment with furniture in there.

  His phone didn’t have a great camera, but it was good enough. He turned on all the lights and took a dozen photos of the arranged cards. Once he felt safe, he pulled them down.

  He pulled at the blue card marked MYSTERIOUS HUM and it clung to the wall. The tape had bonded with the latex. He gave it a jerk and the card released its grip with a pop. Then he frowned.

  Where the card had been, the paint had stretched out and formed a bubble the size of a grape. It was like a blister on the wall. Nate looked around and realized he’d made four or five puckers in the paint while he pulled cards off the wall.

  Nate poked at a bubble. It sank back into the wall but left a circle of wrinkles in its place. He tried to press them flat against the underlying plaster. Some of them faded into the texture of the wall, others got even more prominent. He rubbed his finger back and forth to see if he could smooth out the larger wrinkles.

  One of the folds tore and rolled up under his finger. He bit back a swear. The blister of paint became a loose triangle surrounded by a saggy circle. There were so many layers of paint in the triangle he could feel the thickness to it, like a heavy trash bag. Beneath it was raw plaster, like a wall of chalk.

  He tugged at the triangle. Rather than breaking off, it grew. The rubbery paint peeled away and the patch of plaster doubled in size. It was the size of his palm.

  Nate was split between panic and the fascination of watching the paint come away in such a perfect sheet of latex. He gave a gentle pull and the triangle of plaster grew again. It was four inches on each side now. He shifted the tension and tried to guide the tearing edges back in on themselves. Instead, the gap in the paint curved in a wide arc to swallow up one of the other blisters. He now held a piece of latex the size of a phone book. The edges left on the wall had pulled up, too.

  “Shit,” he said.

  He pressed his hand against the wall and pulled the triangle up. Most of it tore off against the edge of his palm. One strip, almost three inches wide, peeled away up along the wall. He was taking in a breath to swear again when he saw what was on the plaster.

  ______

  1,528,

  It was written in paint, or maybe ink. Whatever it was, it was thick enough he could see the edge of it raised ever-so-slightly above the surface of the plaster. Where the latex had stretched up he could see the edge of another number, just past the eight.

  The numbers were on the plaster. Under fifty or sixty years of paint. Maybe more. They could’ve been written when the building was still under construction.

  Nate looked at the jagged hole in the paint. There was still a chance he could fix it if he stopped now. At least one of the paint cans he’d seen down under the cellar stairs would have some of the beige that coated every room. Enough to patch a hole a little bigger than a phone book, at least.

  Probably not enough to do half a wall.

  He pinched the loose edge of paint by the last number. It eased away from the wall. He pressed his head close to the gap.

  Past the comma was what looked like another two, or maybe a three.

  Nate’s fingers closed on the flap and pulled. The latex came away with a faint sucking sound as air rushed in between the plaster and paint. The first piece was the size of a t-shirt when it broke away under its own weight. He grabbed at the loose edges on the wall and the paint peeled away in a wide arc. The gap opened up until the leading edge hit the door frame for the closet. Then it followed the boards down to the molding. This piece was the size and shape of his leg. He pulled in the other direction and the paint came off the wall in a wide swath.

  It took him twenty minutes to tear all the paint off the wall between the kitchen and the closet. One strip had curved up toward the front door. There were some odd shapes left around the power outlet. He’d been surprised when some of the paint had come away to reveal the plate around the outlet was made of wood.

  From three feet up the wall was covered with numbers.

  It looked like one big equation. Not a particularly complex one, from Nate’s limited knowledge of mathematics, although there were a few symbols he didn’t recognize. It was all large numbers, though. He followed it as best he could down to the final figure.

  1,528,326,500 ± 5000

  Twenty Nine

  Veek answered her door with a plaid robe wrapped over her sweatpants. Her glasses were on, but her eyes blinked away sleep behind them. “What do you want?”

  “You have to come see this,” Nate told her.

  “See what? It’s two in the morning.”

  “You won’t believe me if I just tell you.”

  She scowled. “Just tell me.”

  He took a breath. “You know what you said about the power lines? How I just needed to see it for myself?”

  Her face softened. A little. “Yeah.”

  “You have to come see this.”

  Nate had peeled the rest of the paint off his studio walls. He’d dragged his shelves into the center of the room to expose as much wall as possible. His trashcan stood near them, filled with scraps of old latex. In a few places the plaster had fallen away, too, to show wooden planks or bricks.

  “Oh my God,” she said. Her voice was half amazement, half sadness. “What did you do?”

  He set his hand on her shoulder and turned her to the wall of numbers. Her eyes widened. “Oh my God,” she said again. The tone was different this time. “What is this?”

  “It was under the paint,” he said. “Look over here.”

  There was another equation on the wall above his desk. This one had more symbols in it and fewer numbers. Veek stared at it. “What does it mean?”

  “Not a clue,” he said, “except I’m pretty sure it doesn’t have to do with bricks or plumbing.”

  She stepped closer and pointed at one symbol, an upside-down y. “I’ve seen that before, I think.” She tilted her head. “Damn, I wish I’d paid more attention in math class.”

  “I don’t think this is math,” said Nate. “I mean, it’s math, yeah, but I think this is all physics or something. I’m just not sure what it is. I remember some basic stuff. Mass times velocity equals force, that kind of stuff.”

  “It’s mass times acceleration.”

  “Same thing, right?”

  “Yeah, you’ve proved your point. This is way beyond us.” She frowned.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She looked at the walls again, then looked at him. “What are the odds of this?”

  “What do you mean?”


  “I mean, think about it. Isn’t it sort of stupid-convenient that Scooby’s looking for weird stuff about the building, peels the paint off his walls, and finds weird stuff?”

  He blinked. “You think they’re fake?”

  “No,” she said. “No, I believe you. Doesn’t it just strike you as a crazy coincidence, though? It’s like...it’s like reaching into a jar of marbles and pulling out the one blue one without even looking.”

  “Ahhh. Yeah, I see what you’re getting at.” They studied the walls for a moment and Nate’s mouth opened. “Unless...”

  “Unless what?”

  He rolled his hand in front of him. “That’s assuming there’s only one blue marble,” he said. “If all the marbles are blue, then it’s not a coincidence at all.”

  She looked at the walls. “You think?”

  “Only one way to know for sure.”

  A few minutes later they were in Veek’s apartment, attacking the wall across from her massive computer. Nate slit the paint across the wall with a kitchen knife. They worked the gash with their fingernails until the latex came up and they could pull it away. The paint was more brittle in her apartment because of the cool air, and they couldn’t peel off a piece larger than a paperback before it snapped off in their hands. Veek grabbed her kitchen trashcan and they started to fill it.

  They tore at the wall’s skin for twenty minutes. More than half the paint was gone. There was nothing but bare plaster.

  “Damn it,” said Veek.

  “Hold on,” he said. “There was only stuff on two of my walls.”

  “Yeah.” She looked at the wall by her door. “I guess I can kiss my security deposit goodbye.”

  Nate carved a large X into the wall and they peeled the paint away. A circle of plaster grew. It was the size of her computer monitor when she gasped.