Shadow Memories: A Novel (The Singularity Conspiracy Book 1)

by Nicholas Erik

  Seaside Heights isn’t big, so I wasn’t curious for very long. About ten minutes later, we pulled into the beachside parking lot. A few people shimmied along the edge of the Pacific, as if curious whether they should test the waters.

  “I didn’t bring my suit,” I said as we got out.

  “You’ll be all right,” she said, “just follow me.”

  I tagged along behind her, shaking sand from my sneakers every few steps. Should have packed some sandals. It was like sinking into a swamp. The beach was one of the few good things about Seaside Heights. A couple tourists came by during the summer, braving the slums for the pure coastline. And it stretched on for a while. Still, couldn’t imagine us getting any recommendations from guidebooks. The town looked about ready to fall down and be reclaimed by the sea.

  That lengthy coastline was starting to give me fits by the time Cassie stopped. Rocks barred our progress up ahead.

  “Over,” she said, and started climbing.

  “Hell no,” I said, “that’s dangerous. You could slip, cut something. I haven’t had a tetanus shot.”

  “You get tetanus from rusty metal, you idiot,” she said, “stop being a pussy.”

  “It was an expression,” I said to myself, but I scrambled up the slippery rocks anyway. They’d be pretty, all covered in rich green moss, worn smooth by the flow of the tides—if they weren’t trying to kill me. I about bought it jumping from a large stone to a small, shifty one.

  I held my arms out, balancing like a kid walking along the edge of the sidewalk. I looked over, and Cassie was gone, up onto the natural pathway above.

  I grappled over the remaining rocks, dragging myself onto the thin ledge with my elbows. I needed to hit the gym, but I still made it, chest sagging from the exhaustion. Edging along the narrow path, the ocean stirring below—it wasn’t a high drop, otherwise I would have been doubled over in fear—I snaked towards what I hoped would be our destination.

  Ahead, I heard a rumbling, like rocks were shifting.

  And then, going around a corner, I almost fell backwards into a grotto. More than that; it was a goddamn spacious cave.

  “Cass,” I ventured, lest I awoke all the ghosts and demons sure to be haunting a place like this, “you in here?”

  A bright light, coming from a smartphone’s flash, shined in my face.

  “Turn that down,” I said, “it’s killing my eyes.”

  “Quit being a pussy and check this out,” she said, and turned the bright light away from me and onto the walls. “I think we found what we’re looking for.”

  Yeah. Except there wasn’t one wall full of symbols. They covered the place, floor to ceiling, even coming with pictures.

  Some messed up pictures.

  12

  The Light

  It was some real Old Testament shit, like a bad show you might catch on premium cable. People twisted together, throats getting cut, babies being sacrificed, the whole circle of human existence.

  Except it was beyond old. The colors were faded, nature eroding the vibrant hues over the millennia. Some scenes were missing or destroyed beyond recognition. I looked over the thing, like some sort of 10,000 year old comic strip, from the ceiling to the wall in front of me.

  I took a glance at the symbols after that, but I never professed to be much of a reader, and I didn’t think their meaning was all that necessary to interpret what was going on.

  The dawn of civilization. His vices. Sins. Triumphs. Wars, beliefs, loves. All there, in crumbling stick figure glory. A snake eating its own tail. Endless cycles of people living, people dying.

  Cassie took a digital camera from her pocket and shoved the lit smartphone into my hand.

  “Keep this right…here,” she said as she directed me towards a place that threw ample illumination throughout the cave. Then she set to snapping pictures.

  “Well, this was the easiest forty grand we’ve ever made,” I said, not adding the obvious: it was the only forty grand we’d ever made. We hadn’t made that much in the past two years combined. Lucky for us, the cost of living in Seaside Heights was what one might term affordable.

  A little too easy, in fact. Cassie hadn’t even needed an hour to find this thing, let alone a week.

  Like she knew something about this place I didn’t.

  Then something caught my eye.

  English writing, on the wall. I forgot my task and darted over to it, Cassie letting loose a string of expletives as I threw much of the cave into shadowy dimness. I held it up to the wall. It wasn’t the only English word.

  They were interspersed between the ancient symbols.

  At first, I thought that some sixteen year old jerk-off had written his name on the wall to give the ancients the finger. No—it wasn’t like that. For one, the paint was old—just as old as everything else on the wall. Same color, same consistency, same height.

  And there were other languages: Spanish, French. I’d have recognized more, I guess, if I was a learned man, but my knowledge of the finer points in life was limited to the Surgeon General’s warning on the smokes I snuck when Cassie wasn’t looking.

  All of these were locked in with the rest of the text—the whole story written in a hundred different languages, like some sort of crazy Rosetta Stone.

  I regained my ability to speak.

  “Hey, you seeing this?” No response. “Pretty crazy, right? What’d Otto say—that this guy was some sort of art collector?”

  “I didn’t say,” came Otto’s voice, and I dropped the phone. I’d been in such rapt concentration that I hadn’t sensed the presence of anyone else in the room. “Good job, Mr. Desmond and Ms. Atwood. Splendid, I must say.”

  “You didn’t have to deliver us the money all the way up here,” I said, throat dry, “but that’s nice of you.”

  Otto let out a short laugh. “Funny, Mr. Desmond. A real jokester, aren’t you?”

  “Drives her nuts. She’s too wound up, I think.”

  “Shut up, Kurt,” Cassie managed to get in.

  Otto flashed on a high-powered searchlight. And now I could see the entire scene: two guys in the cave’s entrance armed with guns that you wouldn’t find at your local Wal*Mart, and Otto, inside the cave. They had us pretty much dead to rights. I didn’t imagine that the ancients had thought to build an emergency exit.

  Otto pulled his blazer tight and walked along the edge of the walls, marveling at the wonders.

  “Yes, yes,” he said, mumbling to himself, “this is it. The Shrine. I can’t believe I’ve found one, me…” And he was off for a second lap, stroking various parts of the work as he went, putting his eye up within an inch of some of the drawings. I was expecting him to lick it, when he stopped, like a man exiting a trance, and walked to the center of the room.

  “Now, Ms. Atwood,” he said, “thank you for leading us here. We’ve been watching you the whole way.”

  I wanted to shout that I deserved partial credit, but if I was being honest, that would have been a dubious claim at best.

  “Fuck you,” she said through clenched teeth, “and your ugly friends.”

  He looked hurt, but he managed to keep his composure. Considering he was going to be the winning horse, it would’ve been unprofessional to flip out.

  “Quite the mouth on you,” he said, “Shadow mentioned that.”

  “Shadow?” she said.

  “Oh yes, you’re quite the firecracker.

  She spit, and he backed up just in time. “You don’t know anything about me.”

  “Oh, but that’s where you’re wrong, Ms. Atwood,” he said, coming closer, like a panther stalking its prey, “I know all about you.”

  “What’s he talking about, Cass?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she replied, “he’s just a half-wit color-blind—” Cassie let out an oomph as Otto punched her in the
stomach, which sent her crumpling to the ground. I started forward, but one of his boys flashed a rifle my way.

  I put my hands up. Not that I could’ve taken Otto anyway. He’d have crushed me, but, you know, chivalry. Dignity. Man stuff.

  Otto shot his cuffs and then looked my way, plucking the camera from Cassie’s pocket. She reached out, fingertips flailing at the air, but he placed her hand on the ground.

  “There, there,” he said, “it’s all right. You won’t remember a thing.”

  He exited the cave, giving his men a nod before rappelling down a rope hooked to the side of the cliff. They advanced on us and shoved us up against the wall, patting us down for any other goodies we might be carrying. Satisfied that there was no information—or valuables—they readied their guns and pressed them into the back of our skulls.

  I wondered if I would hear the click of the trigger before I died.

  13

  Impact

  It wasn’t my day to die. Because, right as I felt that cold steel against the back of my scalp, the air filled with a flash of light—bright as a million bulbs illuminating at once. The gun at my head lowered for just a split second, the gunner pausing to reach up at his eyes in surprise.

  I fought the same urge. Beside me, I heard Cassie scream, “Run!”

  I did as I was told, leaning back, dropping a shoulder through my would-be executioner, the force sending a spray of bullets careening about the tight quarters. Everything happened at light speed, but my mind told me I hadn’t been shot. I wasn’t sure if I believed it, but I believed that I would be if I didn’t keep moving.

  I ricocheted forward, making my way towards the sea breeze, the blue sky. I could hear Cassie darting towards the same destination, two steps behind, two steps in front; I didn’t know which, just that it was her, and then she was there, right next to me.

  “Jump,” she said as we reached the edge, and I didn’t stop.

  I just leapt, arms flailing at the sky, praying on the brief way down that these weren’t shallows filled with man eating rocks.

  Hitting the water isn’t like you see in the movies, where you just hop thirty feet down and you feel nothing. This impact hurt like being hit by a linebacker, and it didn’t help that I’d landed half on my damn side. My lungs tried to fill with air, but all I got was a breathful of seawater.

  The light dimmed, and the edges of my vision became murkier, clouded by shadows. I wretched underwater and reached for the top of the surface, but the fall had sent me some ways down, and my legs weren’t working the way I wanted. I drifted towards freedom, upwards, but not at a pace that I was too happy with.

  Just as my brain was thinking about giving up the ghost, an arm reached down and about dislocated my shoulder.

  “There you are,” Cassie said, swimming me over to shore, “I thought you were dead.” I seized up and then puked on her, as if to confirm that I wasn’t. “Good to see you, too. Should have let you die.”

  “Yeah, but it looks like you might need some help on this one,” I rasped out, mouth like sandpaper, “so I might be worth keeping around.” I closed my eyes. The sun had never felt so good.

  She thought about it for a moment, flinging vomit from her lap with disgusted flicks of her hand.

  “Maybe.”

  Hell, I’d take that.

  14

  Splinters

  On top of everything, the truck was missing from the lot when we finished the trek back over the endless sand. Otto and his goons must have figured there was something of value in it. Besides their upfront payment of twenty grand, they’d be disappointed in whatever they found in that old rust bucket. But maybe it would give them something to do for a while.

  It felt like a long walk back to the office—even though it wasn’t that far—and by the time we reached the front door, I’d about had it. The sun was broiling my back, and my clothes, stiff with saltwater, felt like over-starched dress shirts.

  Not that I’d know much about fancy clothes.

  I was looking forward to a nice shower and a long nap, but no such luck. The lock was in splinters, kicked in by an aggressive booted heel. Slivers of wood littered the entrance; the door was ajar, but not wide open. Cassie reached down and extracted a long, curved blade from a sheath on her boot.

  Chasing down dogs and snapping pics of fat, pasty husbands, we hadn’t needed any sort of muscle to scare people off for some time. But now, I wished I had a Gatling gun. Even with the knife, I didn’t feel good about going in blind.

  “Maybe we should call the cops or something.” I tried to bend my vision around the corner, but had little luck. “We don’t know what’s inside.”

  “That’s half the fun.” If I didn’t know better, I’d think that she was salivating at the opportunity for some payback. I was a less vengeful type—more live and let live—so I didn’t share her almost-frothing enthusiasm.

  “You got anything for me,” I said, “feeling kind of naked over here.”

  “Just stay close.”

  That seemed like a terrible plan, but I dropped in behind her and waited.

  With a sharp, waist-level kick, Cassie popped the door open. That was it; the poor thing had had enough. It flew from the hinges, heaving under the force, demolishing a side table in our living room.

  I stared into the gaping abyss. Besides the wrecked door, it looked like our place had been hit by a tsunami. Everything was either broken or on the floor. I lamented the loss of my flat screen as I followed Cassie into the bedroom.

  “Shit,” she said, sitting down on the bed, running the knife’s tip along the rustled sheets.

  “I know, right,” I said, “they didn’t have to get the television. That thing didn’t have any case files on it.”

  I felt underneath the bed frame for Cassie’s secret stash drawer that she thought I didn’t know about. It opened with a click. The money looked like it had been disturbed, but the seven hundred sixty-eight bucks—minus whatever she’d spent—was still there.

  The twenty grand, though, that had been in the truck. I shook my head; if only we’d hidden it. Could have all sorts of options. How far were we going to lam it with seven hundred bucks?

  Cassie started rifling through the dressers, looking underneath furniture. I had no idea what she was looking for. There was nothing of value within this whole crap heap, except the scattered case files we had about the cave. Those were gone, of course, but we wouldn’t be needing them. Whoever this art collector or obsessive linguist was, it seemed doubtful that he’d require any follow-up services.

  “Look, Cass,” I said, putting my hand on her shoulder, trying to get her stop, “I think we gotta start thinking about getting out of here. These guys are serious.”

  She brushed my arm away and kept looking. “We’re not going. We can’t go.”

  I didn’t think that an explanation would be forthcoming, so I dropped the matter. Without a television, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. Reading seemed out of the question. Then I heard a bark.

  Fox.

  We hadn’t checked in the bathroom yet. I flung open the door and his big hairy muzzle shot out, rubbing against my leg.

  “Some guard dog you are,” I said, and saw that in the bathtub was the center bone of a rib-eye. “You can be bought pretty easy.”

  He barked again and didn’t look sorry for it. I couldn’t stay mad at him. It wasn’t like we’d bought him for protection—or bought him at all. At least those dicks hadn’t shot him in the head. That would have been depressing for everyone.

  Especially Fox.

  I went back on the couch, and he joined me, placing his head in my lap.

  Our office phone started ringing and I just about leapt out of my seat. I grumbled something about not being able to get any rest, then picked up the handset.

  “Atwood and Desmond, affordable priva
te detective services.”

  “I think my wife is cheating on me,” the voice on the other end said, “what do you charge to find that out?”

  “It depends,” I said, and then paused, thinking on my feet, “what about three hundred to start?” I heard the words come out of my mouth before my mind could stop them. So much for leaving.

  “That’s pretty pricey—”

  “Two hundred, plus expenses at the end. You want to know if your wife is slobbing his knob, right?”

  There was silence on the other end. The voice that followed sounded defeated. “Can you start today? I’ll drop the money off.”

  “How ‘bout I come to you? No, it’s just that we’re, ah, renovating at the moment and things around here are a little messy. Where are you? Okay, sounds good.” The guy mumbled something about how he was impressed with the door-to-door service and hung up.

  I went back in the bedroom, where Cassie was still rooting around.

  “I got a case.”

  “Fuck a case.”

  “It doesn’t involve any Satanic messages or ancient cult symbols. Guy wants to know if someone is laying pipe into his wife.”

  “How much,” she said, without looking up.

  “Two hundred.”

  She thought about it, and by the look on her face I could tell she was unimpressed with my bargaining skills. But she bit her tongue. “Good. Where you headed?”

  “To his place to pick up the cash. Then to Manny’s,” I said, “he thinks Manny’s the guy. Saw her go in the hardware store.”

  “Sure she wasn’t just buying some pipe?”

  “Funny.”

  “So Manny, huh?”

  “I don’t want to see him again either, but the money’ll spend.”

  “Yeah, well, stick it to that old Hitler loving bastard,” she said, “I still need to find something.”