by Anton Strout
As one unit, the entire table stiffened, which was the opposite of what I wanted.
“NYU, right?” I asked.
The only one to relax was the youngest-looking kid sandwiched in at the back of the booth. “Oh, yeah,” he said, a little too eager, I thought. The tall guy with the ear gauging shot him a look that said he thought so, too.
“I graduated a year ago,” I said, starting in with my lie. “You probably wouldn’t remember me. I did a lot of geeky stuff for one of my mentors in the film department.”
“Who?” the girl asked, still wary.
“A bit of an eccentric,” I said. “Mason Redfield.”
The girl raised an eye at me. “Oh, really?” she asked. “Well, I knew the professor pretty well and I don’t remember you.”
I kept my eyes on her. “I kept to myself mostly. I did a lot of . . . special project work for him.”
“Really,” she said, her voice flat. “What classes did you take?”
There were some things I could bluff my way past and some things I definitely couldn’t. This was one of them. What classes? Specifically? I had no idea. My heart leapt into my throat as I thought about my options. I had to come up with something or they were about to learn how full of shit I was. I pointed at an extra seat at the end of their booth where most of the book bags were gathered on the table.
“May I?”
“Be our guest,” the girl said. I took my time sitting, but she didn’t stop staring at me. “So. . . what did you say you took with Professor Redfield?”
As I sat, I pulled off my gloves and set my hands down on the table, purposefully brushing my left one against her shoulder bag lying there. I had avoided using my powers, but I had to chance a flare-up now to get a quick reading. I pushed those worries to the side and pressed my power into the shoulder bag with one thought in my mind.
Schedule.
My mind’s eye opened up on Elyse taking out her printout of classes. I watched her as she programmed it into the calendar on her iPhone. I scanned them quickly, looking for signs in the class codes for something with a three or higher in it. Some of these students might have taken the advanced course load that a graduate like I was pretending to be had already, but I doubted all of them had. I needed enough information to sound credible.
Finding what I needed gave me an ounce of hope and I let down the guard I had put up against my worries of another flare-up. The second I did, the screen of the iPhone in the vision flickered like old-time television static, the face of the tattooist pressing forward out of it. My heart froze for a second, but rather than get caught up in the building rush of anger and jealousy that always accompanied her, I remained calm. I pulled out of the vision before it could fully take hold and shook off the disorientation. When I opened my eyes, the entire group of students was staring at me.
“You okay?” the heavy guy asked me.
I nodded, brushing it off. “Just a little drunk,” I said. “No worries.”
This seemed to satisfy everyone except the girl. “Your classes. . . ?” she asked, waiting.
“Let’s see,” I said. “Mason gave me a pass on the remedial levels of Monster Craft and bumped me up to his Harryhausen and Hollywood. Still made me take Bela, Lon, and Boris, though. Said I had a lot to learn about makeup still.”
The girl stared at me a moment longer before her face shifted to a welcoming smile. “Yeah, BL and B is a real bitch,” she said. “I was ready to give myself real facial scars instead of makeup by the time we got to finals.”
“I hear that,” I said, signaling for the guy working the bar. “You mind if I buy a round for the table?”
Elyse smiled. “We don’t mind at all, do we, boys?” she asked, offering me her hand. “I’m Elyse. Acting track.” As I expected, she had a strong, firm handshake but still kept it dainty enough. “Mr. Tall across from me there is Darryl. He edits things to make me look good in front of the camera. Chunky Monkey back there is Mike, who is the camera on the cinematography track. The chatty one at the back is Trent, and his fellow frosh with the soul patch and bleached-blond hair is George, the one crowding Darryl. We’re trying to paper-train those two. They’re undeclared still.”
I waved to the group of them, nodding as I looked them over. “I’m Simon,” I said.
Darryl was clacking away on his netbook in front of him on the table. “Do you have a last name?” he asked.
“Why? Are you taking notes?”
The big guy stopped typing and lowered the screen until it closed shut against the keyboard. “No,” he said, folding his hands over it.
“I thought maybe you were the party stenographer,” I said.
“Don’t mind Darryl,” Elyse said. “He’s our resident tech geek–slash–editing maven. A bit OCD, but otherwise socially functional.”
“Barely,” Mike said.
Darryl flipped him the bird in retaliation, and then turned to me. “I just wondered what your full name was, to see if I could recall you.”
“Oh, right,” I said, not really ready for the question. My brain froze and I went with the first thing that came to mind. “It’s Vanderous. Simon Vanderous.”
“Is that Dutch?” George asked, running one hand through his blond shock of punked-out hair.
“Only half,” I said, wondering if I was turning red. “Don’t ask me what the other half is. I’m a bit of a mutt.”
“Could you say that again for the camera?” Mike asked, and I looked over at him. Sure enough, his enormous hands were cradling a digital video camera.
“Are you. . . taping me?”
Mike looked at me from behind the camera like I was stupid. “We are film students,” he said, “and what better way to pay tribute to our recently deceased prof than by taping our mourning?”
“So, you’re here for the memorial?” I asked, wondering how they had gotten wind of it.
Elyse scrunched her face up. “Huh?” she asked. “What, now?”
“Never mind,” I said as the beer arrived. I set to pouring their five glasses before filling one of my own. “I just meant we’re all in mourning for Professor Redfield, aren’t we? I was wondering: why are you here, though?”
“Eccentric Circles?” Elyse asked. I nodded. “The professor used to wax nostalgic about this place, when he wasn’t waxing nostalgic about the gory glory days of monster movies and the film industry, that is. Said this bar used to remind him of his misspent youth, so I dunno. Seemed like an appropriate place for a send-off.”
Maybe Professor Redfield had been just as nostalgic for the old days as the Inspectre was. For a man who had supposedly turned his back on the Fraternal Order of Goodness and the D.E.A., he certainly spent enough time hitting their favorite watering hole. And for what?
A glimpse of the world usually unseen by the average New Yorker? A world he knew existed, but had turned away from when his own life had almost been cut short at the edge of a ghoul-filled fissure? The temptation of the paranormal must have been too great to turn away from it completely. That which had been seen could not be unseen and all that.
Mike panned his camera around the bar, taking it in. “I dunno,” he said. “I think the place is kind of creepy.”
“True,” I said.
“Well,” Darryl said with a chuckle, “that’s Professor Redfield for you.”
“I have to ask,” I said. “Do you think the university is going to throw any kind of memorial service?”
“Doubtful,” Elyse said. “I don’t think a lot of the other professors really understood Redfield, you know?”
“How do you mean?”
She gave a dark smile. “He’s an acquired taste, now, isn’t he?” she said. “Not everyone got his fascination with his particular brand of cinema. Most people look down on the horror genre with elitist disdain. It doesn’t usually win awards; the Times won’t touch them with reviews. . . If you ask me, it’s snobbery in its basest form.”
The entire table nodded in agreement and took
a few angry swigs of their drinks. I joined them, admiring their passion for the professor’s type of films and his enthusiasm for them. He had already won high regard in my mind due to the Inspectre’s memories of their long-past friendship, but to see these young people so jacked up about his field of study was doubly encouraging.
“Does anyone know how he died?” I asked, doing my best to seem like I had no idea about it.
The group fell silent, either looking down at their drinks in discomfort or looking to Elyse for an answer.
“I read somewhere he was found in his new apartment,” Elyse said. “I hadn’t even known he was moving.”
I leaned in, pressing the issue a bit. “But, like, was it natural causes?”
Elyse looked at me. Her face flashed with a moment of concern, and then she went back to her somber look. “Don’t know,” she said. “Don’t really care. I mean, the man’s dead. Dead’s dead, Simon.”
Although her face didn’t show it, Elyse sounded a little pissed off by the bluntness of her statement.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean anything by it . . .”
“What does that even mean?” George asked, speaking up from Darryl’s left. He sounded agitated, too. “Natural causes. . . as opposed to what? Unnatural causes. . . ?”
“Georgey,” Elyse said. “Shush. Freshman are better seen than heard. . . although with that punk blond hair of yours, maybe you shouldn’t be seen, either.”
“Hey!” George said, running his hands up into his wild tangle of bleached blond again. He looked genuinely hurt. “Watch it, chica . . .”
I needed to calm them and quick. “I just meant that I hadn’t heard what happened,” I said. “If he had died in his sleep or maybe it was a mugging gone wrong . . .”
Elyse threw back her glass and drained it before slamming it down on the table. “Wrap it up, boys,” she said.
“You’re leaving?” I asked. Elyse nodded. “But I just joined you . . .”
“We’d love to chat,” she said, short, “but unlike you, we’ve still got class stuff to attend to, Mr. Already Graduated.”
The rest of the group finished up their drinks, gathered up their things, and started sliding their way out of the booth one by one.
“Maybe we could get together and swap stories about the professor sometime,” I said.
Elyse gave me a smile, but her eyes were dead to me. “Thanks for the beer,” she said, “but something tells me you didn’t know the professor in quite the same way we did.”
Mike slid out of the booth next, his camera pointing at me still. “Say good-bye to the camera, Vanderous.”
I gave a wave before standing up myself and walking after Elyse, wanting to keep them here. “Wait,” I said, reaching for her.
Darryl’s hand came down on my shoulder, hard. He pulled me aside.
“I think my girl said all she’s going to be saying to you,” he said. “Maybe the beer’s making you a little braver than usual, but trust me when I say you don’t want to press your luck with her.”
“Right,” I said, not wanting to start anything in the middle of Eccentric Circles. I had the feeling it might go against the subtlety the Inspectre had asked me to go for.
“And I know you don’t want to press your luck with me,” Darryl added.
I stayed still, and after a moment, Darryl slapped me hard on the shoulder, and then turned with his computer bag over his shoulder and headed up to the front of the bar toward the doors. I waited until all of them were gone before I headed back across the bar toward the Inspectre, Aidan, and Connor.
Aidan grinned at me from where he sat. “How’d it go, boy detective?”
“Shush,” I said, sitting back down.
“Well, kid?” Connor asked. “What did you find out?”
“They loved Mason Redfield,” I said. “They were gaga over him.”
The Inspectre smiled. “That is of some comfort to hear.”
“Great,” Connor said, perturbed. “So he was well loved. That really doesn’t help narrow or expand our field of investigation into his murder, now, does it? At least if he had made some enemies . . .”
“The only enemies he seems to have had outside of the water woman are all those fake movie monsters in his office,” I said, “and I doubt they could do anything other than fetch a nice price on eBay. We’ll keep on it, Inspectre, but that group was a creepy little Mason Redfield cheer squad. Still, I think they may not be giving me the whole picture yet.”
“Really?” the Inspectre asked. “Why not, my boy?”
“When I tried to head the conversation into the paranormal, they didn’t pick up on any of my cues. Then when the guy with the blond punk hair made a joke that might have suggested something paranormal, Elyse clammed him up. . . fast. They left before I could press them any further, but I bet they know something about the professor and the water woman who killed him.”
“Maybe we should work on that kid, then,” Connor suggested. “The punk one. I’m sure if we press hard enough, we can find the weak link in their chain.”
“Carefully,” the Inspectre added. “We don’t want them to bolt.”
“Understood,” I said, nodding. “I’ll track them down on campus tomorrow. Maybe they’ll feel less threatened there during the daytime. If I’m lucky, I can single one of them out.”
“Daytime,” Aidan said, drawing it out like it was a dirty word. “Well, that leaves me out, then.”
“It’ll leave all of you out,” I said. “I’ll handle this myself.”
“Excellent,” the Inspectre said, raising his glass with a bit of drunken unsteadiness, “but for now, we drink.”
“Fine by me,” I said, reaching for my glass. “As long as the Department lets me expense it.”
The Inspectre cleared his throat. “Actually, about that . . .”
I held my hand up to stop him. I raised my glass to my lips and pounded it. “Don’t tell me,” I said. “Save it for the office tomorrow. Tonight, like you said, we drink.”
15
There was nothing I hated more than the sound of construction in New York City, but it was even worse when it was happening in my own damned head thanks to a hangover the next morning. Somehow I managed to get myself up to the Department, but made sure I loaded up on four cups of high-octane caffeine in the Lovecraft Café first.
My blurriness began to fade about two cups in, but even then, I found myself just staring at piles of paperwork for at least the first forty minutes I was in without having actually done anything with them. As I rallied my brain back to functionality, the sneaking suspicion I was forgetting something important began to creep over me. I almost had it when a shadow at the entrance to my cube reminded me what it was.
“Jane,” I muttered. “Good morning.”
“Is it?” she said, and by the tone of her voice, she wasn’t pleased. A bunch of books and papers were cradled in her arms.
“Honestly?” I asked. “No. My ass is dragging. The ‘memorial’ got a little more indulgent as the night went on.”
“I’ve seen the results already,” she said. “Connor and the Inspectre both look a little rough around the edges.”
“Were you awake when I came in last night?”
“You aren’t sure?” Jane asked, setting down the pile of books and papers in her arms.
I shook my head. “I don’t recall much of anything once I got home. Where were you?”
“I stayed at my place,” she said. “I figured it might be best. . . between you going out and with you having issue with all this emotion tied to using your powers.”
“Sure,” I said, feeling a weird energy between the two of us. “I can understand that.” I patted her pile of books. “What do we have here?”
Jane looked like she was about to say something more regarding us, but turned to the books instead. “I pulled some more materials. Books on water and water-based spells and mythos. I figured they might do some double duty, helping the Inspectre out and
maybe me at the same time.”
“Any new developments?” I asked. “With the mark, I mean.”
“My showers are getting longer,” she said, and then gave me a weak smile. “I find myself craving them. I took two last night while you were out, then another one once I went home, and then I got up earlier than I usually do feeling the need to take one more. The longer I go without one, the more lethargic I feel.”
“I think you should come back over to my place tonight,” I said. “I don’t like the idea of you being home alone in this condition.”
Jane stiffened. “You didn’t seem to mind last night,” she said.
“That’s not fair,” I said. “I was mourning with the Inspectre and, well. . . things got out of hand. I’m sorry for that. I guess with all the pressure and my powers acting up, I just needed to cut loose with the guys.”
“I get that,” she said, putting her hand on my head and stroking my hair. “I really do, but it really seemed to freak you out with this whole drawer thing and I don’t want to crowd you while you’re working through your issues. Besides, I can feel this mark making me irritable.”
“Don’t worry about my strange flares,” I said. “I’m working to repress them. I’m more concerned about keeping an eye on you until Allorah Daniels can get us some answers on that mark. I want you over.”
“If you’re sure. . .” Jane reached into her bag and pulled out a package covered in Spider-Man wrapping paper. She laid it down in front of me on my desk.
“What’s this?”
“Open it,” she said.
I grabbed the lunch-box-sized package, unwrapped it, and to my surprise it actually was a lunch box. The sides of it were adorned with familiar faces: Egon, Ray, Winston, Peter, and Slimer.
“Vintage Ghostbusters,” I said. “Keen. But why?”
“I thought I could start making us lunch,” she said. “Bringing it instead of buying it right now.”
Something about the look on her face made me wary. “Okay,” I said. “Sure, but what brought this on?”
“I just thought that with all the budget cuts at the Department, it might be a good idea.”
