by Guy Riessen
Two graduate students Derrick recognized from a class he taught two years ago in Applied Game Theory in Physics were waiting to get on.
“Jenny and Cameron! Nice to see you. Cabs full though.” Derrick was pressing the 3rd floor button over and over and nodding.
“I can see that,” Jenny said, “We were just heading up to see what the noise was all about. Quite a racket from offices just above ours I think.”
Derrick’s mouth twisted slightly as he tried to come up with something to dissuade them.
The elevator cab lurched and started up again.
As the cab began its slow rise, Mary blurted, “Uhm ... yeah, that’s Professor Strauss’ office. He’s putting in some of them new fixtures they put in the Makers Lab over the summer break—we’re bringing up some extra lights, so we can finish tonight.”
“Oh OK. No worries, then. Must be quite the job, eh? It’s pretty loud up there. Maybe we’ll stop by next week and check it out,” Cameron called up as the elevator rose.
“I’m sure he’d love to show it off,” Mary said, just before the floor cut off further conversation.
Derrick said, “Quick thinking.”
“Seemed like they were wondering what was going on, and y’know what they say about curiosity.”
“Curiosity summons the dark ones to crush your body and steal your soul?”
“Nailed it.”
Derrick yanked the elevator gates open and stumped his way out, wrangling Petey’s cage and the light stand. The late-afternoon light was drifting in through the window at the end of the hallway. It was cranked open to let in some fresh air. The leaves at the top of the maple tree outside were dancing in the blowing wind, rustling like dry finger bones in a mojo bag.
All the doors in the hall were closed, except Howard’s. This was late for typical office hours.
Howard’s door was partially open, and light was spilling out in a bright skewed rhombus across the hallway floor and partway up the opposite wall. As Mary exited the elevator cab, there was a loud crash and shuffling sounds from Howard’s office. The sound of a bookshelf being tipped over and dozens of books tumbling to the floor.
Mary jogged ahead while Derrick hobbled as quick as he could. She ducked through the door. There were shouts, then the light falling through the doorway visibly brightened as they hooked up Mary’s lights.
Derrick reached the door and set Petey against the outside wall. Vertigo wracked his sense of balance, and he leaned against the wall. Something was not right here. A wave of nausea swept through his gut and he tasted bile at the back of his throat. He took some deep breaths, pushed the door open and staggered inside.
Howard’s office was a mess. A mass of jumbled stuff—books and papers strewn across the floor. A bookshelf had been pulled from the wall, its anchor screws ripped from the wall leaving small powdery craters in the plaster.
Sarah stood next to the wall. She was pulling and pushing her light stand around, trying to force the light in between a shelf still attached to the wall, and a tall bookcase that was rocking back and forth.
Sarah shouted, “We need your light, Derrick. Get it on the desk and cut those shadows down on the floor. Howard’s got the thing tied up.”
Howard was keeping the shadowy form occupied with his neck—the Black Djinn’s hands were wrapped around Howard’s throat. Howard jammed his thumbs under the Djinn’s fingers, trying to keep his carotid artery from being compressed. Bending his knees, he threw his weight backwards, slamming the dark figure into the wall.
Mary had her lights up on top of the long table under the window. She plugged the power cord into the wall socket and Derrick blinked in the sudden brightness.
Mary squinted, pushed her glasses up, and adjusted the two halogen lights to point toward the wall where Howard was struggling. It lit up the bookcase rocking between Howard and Mary. She angled the second light on her stand down to light the floor as well.
Derrick looked around for the artifacts that had been on the table as he dragged his stand into the middle of the room and up onto Howard’s desk. The table had been swept clean.
‘Derrick, toss me your light cord!” Sarah said.
Howard pushed up and back trying to crush the Djinn through the plaster wall. His thumbs broke through the thing’s grip, and he was suddenly gasping for breath. Two elbow strikes to Shadow’s stomach and Howard spun, dropped, and smashed a perfect palm strike to the thing’s kneecap.
Howard’s voice was a scratchy growl. “Watch it! We’ve got a gate behind that tipped bookcase.” The three-dimensional shadow appeared to fold and collapse in on itself. Howard struck it again and it pulled back into the shadows between the wood and the wall.
A gate ... Derrick felt the room sway. Sinewy claws flashed through his memory, but he tossed the cord to Sarah. She caught it and pulled it toward the wall socket. The light stand skittered across the desktop. “Shit, Derrick. Cord’s too short!”
Derrick looked around, then his eyes found the desk lamp. Derrick ducked under his stand’s cord and used the desk edge to pull himself over. He turned on the desk lamp. It wasn’t much, but he spun it around to light up more of the floor. He looked under the desk, fearing the impenetrable blackness of a rip through reality. But it was just the floor, so he eased himself down, his bad leg sticking out straight. His fingers followed the desk lamp cord down to the two floor sockets. The desk lamp was plugged into one socket. He tugged the light stand cord back from Sarah, flipped the metal cover up and rammed the plug down into the socket.
The two halogen lights snapped on, bathing the area with brilliant light. Howard rolled away as the Shadow was pinned into the darkness directly behind the side of the bookcase that abutted the wall.
Howard rubbed at red marks on his throat and said, “Damn that was close. Now what?”
“We got it trapped—there’s no contiguous shadow between it and the gate,” Mary said. “Is there a way to catch it?”
“My research says you can use torches to shrink the Shadow and force it into an opaque black bottle.” Howard paused for a moment, then added, “Before you ask, no, I don’t have an opaque black bottle.”
“Trapped in a bottle, man, just like a proper djinn.” Derrick used the edge of the desk to pull himself back up and used his crutch to lever the fallen bookshelf over, pushing it away from the table by the window.
“The artifacts were gone when I got here. The Black Djinn was dropping the last tome into it when I kicked the door open,” Howard said.
“The gate is on the floor?” Derrick asked, looking around, his eyes wide.
Sarah spoke up, “Yeah, it’s oval, a little less than a meter wide. Opaque black with multi-colored electric-worm edges—you know, flickering, unstable. It’s gotta be a dimension gate of some sort.”
Derrick shoved the bookcase a little more to the side, and the edge of the gate came into view. Although the edges and colors were bright, they cast no light of their own.
Derrick staggered back, bumping his hip against the desk. His skin went clammy, and he dragged his sleeve across his forehead, mopping cold sweat from his brow.
His foot kicked some pens spilled on the floor, and one skittered and spun across the tile. It slipped through the gate, slower than he expected, like it was sinking through thin pudding cooling on a stovetop.
The standing bookcase suddenly rocked violently left then right. It overbalanced then arced toward the floor.
“Watch it! Djinn’s going for the gate!” Sarah shouted.
For just a moment, Derrick saw the cross section of a skull rocking its brain-filled bowl next to the yawning blackness. He looked away, tears shimmering his vision.
“I gotcha now, ya shadowy motherfucker!” Mary reached over and pushed at the nearest halogen head on her stand. ‘Ow! Shit! Hot!” She smacked it with the edge of her palm a couple times and the light tipped down enough to illuminate the whole gate just as the freestanding shelf crashed down, scattering books, a few of which dropped through the p
ortal.
There was a loud screeching wail as the black Shadow was suddenly without the darkness behind bookshelf wood, and the floor at its feet was illuminated. The air filled with dull slapping sounds, like a dozen water balloons dropped on the pavement. The outline of the Shadow crumbled like the ash-end of a cigarette that was too long for gravity to ignore.
Derrick picked at the edge of his watch as he slumped against the edge of the desk.
“Derrick?” Mary’s voice sounded distant, but he felt her cool touch on his wrist and saw her pull a thin white cord from the edge of his watch and shake it out. He felt her other hand on the back of his neck. “Focus, D. Y’all got this.”
He nodded and looked down, typing something on the watch’s keypad, then hobbled over toward the gate. Its blackness swallowed the light, like a drain sucking down the souls of kids he could not save. “Dang guys ... help me get the cord into ... that ... that ...”
Derrick felt himself suddenly overbalance. He watched the floor start to tip away, but the yawning gate was tilting up toward him, waiting to snap shut when he was halfway through. Derrick spun his arms, as he fell forward, toward the infinite black.
Sarah spun away from the bookshelves and was suddenly ducking under Derrick’s flailing arms. She caught his weight and eased him to the floor, using her other hand to scoop up the white cord and drop the end into the blackness. Derrick didn’t look at the white wire that suddenly ended in shadow, instead he stared at the face of the watch, watching numbers scroll by.
“What is that, D?” Sarah asked.
“Casio ...” Derrick mumbled. His shirt was damp and clinging to his skin. He felt sweat trickle down his lower back. His eyes were unfocused. “Uhm, calculator watch.”
“That’s cool, Derrick. Hang in there. Can you tell me what’re you doing with it?” Sarah’s voice sounded calm, like she always did—something for his mind to grab onto.
“The gate ... cut her head in half.”
“Talk to me, Derrick. What’s your calculator watch do?”
Derrick shook his head. The room spun faster, then settled. “I’m the operator ...”
“Oh god, Derrick, if you sing that Kraftwerk song, I’m going to slug you,” Howard said, moving closer to the gate. He could see where the cord seemed to simply pass into the flat black spot on the marble tile floor.
“The song’s ‘Pocket Calculator’ not ‘calculator watch’.” Derrick cleared his throat. He could feel his thinking sharpening back to normal. He tapped a couple more tiny keys then continued, “I’m taking readings, Sarah. Bunch of data points. Wish I had a GPS on the end of the cord ... noted for my to-do list.”
“Uhm, right on. That a new gizmo?” Sarah asked.
“Calculator watches have been around since the eighties.”
Howard sighed. “Few things are more obtuse than a ‘working-Derrick.’”
Derrick shrugged, his back facing the open portal in the floor, his eyes glued to his watch face.
Suddenly, Howard jumped back as, with a thunderous crack, the gate ceased to exist.
The cord from Derrick’s phone was laying on the floor tile, its ends cleanly severed. Cut through like flesh that ran out of time partway through a portal. Derrick shouted and threw out his hand to catch the edge of the desk as the room seemed to shudder and tilt.
Sarah put her hand on Derrick’s shoulder, looking him in the eye. “I’m OK,” he said, still breathing a little heavily.
Sarah turned her head back toward the group. “But the question is, did that thing find what it was looking for?”
“It’ll take time for me to catalog what’s missing, but the Djinn scored big on artifacts and tomes,” Howard said, pointing over to the table by the window.
Sarah gave Derrick’s shoulder a pat and moved over to the fallen shelves and began stacking books.
“Weird.” Mary sniffed. “Why do I smell tacos?” She looked around the office. “Is anyone else smelling tacos?”
Howard and Derrick glanced at each other. The guilt was palpable.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
THE NEXT WEEK, DERRICK stood at the door to the Basement’s Ready Room, entering his code and allowing his biometrics to be scanned by the door lock. It buzzed and clicked open, he walked in, leaning on his cane. He carried his tablet and a sheaf of papers tucked under his arm.
“What up, my peeps?” he said as the door swung shut and the lock reengaged. Sarah, Mary, and Howard sat at the large mahogany table. He limped over, pulled a chair out and sat, hanging his cane on the edge of the table. “Sorry I’m late. New leg should be here any day now. Apparently, my physical therapist is using pain as a summoning agent ... or something?”
Howard cleared his throat and said, “Yes, well.” He typed on the tablet in front of him and everyone looked at their own screens. “I’ve got almost everything cataloged and cross-checked. I think we can assume that what these people were looking for are unique items, I’ve eliminated all the readily available books.”
“See those books there,” Howard circled several titles with his tablet-pen, “we can pretty much assume they just dropped through the gate during the scuffle and weren’t specifically targeted.”
“And,” Howard looked at Derrick, circling the ballpoint pen on the list. “Some things may have been tossed through the gate intentionally by one of us.”
“Scientific inquiry must inexorably advance! Sometimes innocent pens must be sacrificed in the name of the greater good,” Derrick said, jabbing his pointer finger toward the ceiling.
Howard ignored Derrick and continued, “Eliminating the obviously erroneous, the missing potential power-items are as follows. The two tomes, Grimoire of Cthagau and De Mysteriis Chaatan, one of our museum’s iwisa which I had out on loan, and the other carved rod from the Sobek temple dig in Egypt last year.”
“What about the dagger from your Black Nile expedition, you had that in your office as well, right?” Sarah asked.
“Yes and no, we may have dodged a bullet because I’m beginning to see a possible link between these stone artifacts. After collecting a slew of blood samples from the dagger for Mary, I had the dagger 3D scanned and printed, so I had a copy of it. But I had moved the real dagger to the Vault a week ago. The djinn took the printed dagger—even though it wasn’t the real thing. It must have been specifically after the dagger as well—the fake dagger would have seemed as unrelated as the lamp on the table if there weren’t specific instructions to take it. That seems to verify my suspicions that we’ve got related artifacts.”
“You thought they were related before the dagger was taken?” Sarah asked.
Howard nodded, pointed to Derrick, and said, “When Derrick dropped by my office after he was out of the hospital, he was looking at the bleeding dagger.”
“It’s gross ... I like the printed copy much better,” Derrick said.
“Derrick noticed that the runic carving on the dagger was identical to carvings on an iwisa that he remembered was on display in our own Natural History Museum.”
Derrick flicked across his tablet, sending the museum website to the overhead screen. He scrolled through some images from the South African exhibit, stopping at a display of southern Nguni tribal weapons. He clicked the “explore in-depth” button and the first image that came up was a close-up of something that looked like a green stone staff with intricate carvings on the knobbed head.
Derek said, “Primarily a traditional Zulu club weapon, this ‘iwisa’ was unusual. It was carved of stone, and normally they are made of wood. It also seemed to be ceremonial in nature.” He flicked through some more images of iwisa. “Unlike all these others, which are a simple staff with a ball-like striking end, the one from our museum has an elaborate carved figure at the striking end and it has sharply defined angular runes on the staff itself. I recognized the runes immediately, and showed Howard the website image.”
“I had it pulled from the exhibit with a departmental loan, so I could try and use it
to help me unravel the meanings of the symbols themselves,” Howard said.
“Do we have intel on where the MU museum got the iwisa?” Sarah asked.
Derrick flicked his tablet and projected a printed document. “The museum documents listed it as donated. But it was travelling on a Norwegian expedition ship bound from Mozambique to Antarctica in two thousand eight. That ship was blown off course in the Indian Ocean, and the ship ran aground on an uncharted island about a third of the way to Australia.”
“That’s quite a ways off course.”
“Yeah, man. And the island hasn’t been found again, since. Not that anyone has received any grants or funding money to look. The ship’s navigation instruments were fried during the storm, when the ship was struck by lightning—no GPS, radar, nothing. The log books state that the island was entirely flat, just above sea level, with no vegetation, and no reefs of any kind surrounding it. The only thing on the island was the green stone staff, and it was extremely obvious on the white sand that made up the entirety of the tiny island. The crew was able to get the iwisa before the tide came up again. Once the tide came in, they were able to reverse off the island sand without assistance.”
“Isn’t there satellite imagery?”
“Not even military satellites, man. No photos are showing anything near where the ship’s captain thought they were, based on very rough celestial navigation measurements. They don’t really teach noninstrumental navigation anymore, so the location is approximate at best.”
Sarah took notes on her tablet and then looked up. “Between Mozambique and Antarctica seems like a long way from the two artifacts found in Egypt.”
“Yeah, no kidding,” Howard said. “If Derrick hadn’t identified the runes from memory, I’m not sure how I would’ve put it together.”
“Probably wouldn’t have,” Derrick said, smiling and nodding at the rest of the team who were pointedly ignoring him.
“And what about the rod?” Sarah asked.
Mary slid her finger across her own tablet and said, “Well, for one thing, we had it in the geology lab for right near three months last year after it was couriered to us from Université de Versailles. They were unable to identify the type of stone it was carved from, but we came up empty-handed too. The green stone has a strange crystalline structure that frankly just hasn’t been identified before.” Mary projected several images of the rod up on the screen for everyone to see.
