Dead Waters

by Anton Strout

  “Well, now,” the Inspectre said, walking around. “This seems more like the Mason Redfield that he always feared becoming.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” I said.

  “Nonsense, my boy,” he said. “It’s hardly your doing.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” I said. “It’s just that I saw who he was back when I read part of your past psychometrically. I saw the promise and potential of who he could have been before he became. . . this.”

  “I never would have expected this of him and I knew the man. I haven’t the faintest idea why he would become so corrupt as all this, but I must find out.”

  “Check this out,” Connor said from where he stood in the center of the hidden room.

  The Inspectre started walking over toward him, and then stopped in his tracks. I followed his gaze to a spot on a table in the center of the room. It was slick with blood.

  “Whose is it?” I asked.

  The Inspectre walked over to the table, looking it over. He grabbed the edge and lifted up one side of it.

  “Sir?” I asked, unsure of what he was doing.

  He let go of the table with one of his hands and indicated the surface where all the blood was.

  “See how the blood flows when I tilt it?” he asked. “It hasn’t coagulated yet. It’s still fairly fresh. If this had happened before Mason’s death, it would by dried by now or tacky to the touch.”

  “I’d say it’s pretty tacky, not cleaning it up,” Connor said. “It ruins the décor.”

  I turned and shot him a look.

  “What?” he said. “Is cracking wise only your domain or something? I was just trying to ease the tension.”

  “Not helping,” I said. “Still feeling tense, but that’s probably just because we know the professor’s alive again.”

  “Then maybe we should get to work, gentlemen,” the Inspectre interrupted.

  I didn’t need to be told twice. “Fine,” I said, not bothering to banter any further. I turned my attention to taking in as much as I could of the whole hidden room. It wasn’t until I was focusing on the floor that I felt something click.

  “Inspectre,” I said, noting the legs of the table, “you didn’t slide the table when you lifted up the one side, did you?”

  He thought for a second before answering. “I don’t believe so, no. Why?”

  “I didn’t think you had,” I said. “I don’t remember hearing a scraping sound.” I knelt down next to the table, mindful not to kneel in the blood underneath it. “Then why are there drag marks, here. . . and here?” I pointed at two sets of marks next to each pair of legs.

  “Someone must have moved it aside before,” I said, and then stood back up. “Help me with this.”

  The three of us grabbed the dry spots along the edge of the table and lifted it, moving it away from the center of the room. No longer in the shadow of the table, a definite difference in the flooring was evident.

  “A trapdoor,” the Inspectre said.

  Connor leaned down and felt around in the drying blood before finding a ring and pulling the door up until it was standing open resting on its hinge. The sound of running water rose up from the darkness below.

  “What the hell?” I asked.

  “After you, kid,” Connor said, waving me toward the open hole.

  “Me?” I croaked out. “Why do I have to go first?”

  Connor smiled. “I walked in through the secret door first, so it’s your turn now.”

  “Screw that,” I said. “The last time I went down in something like this it was that Oubliette the Department had me test in. I nearly died when it malfunctioned. You’ll excuse me if I’m a bit reluctant to go jumping into another dank, dark hole.”

  “Don’t worry,” Connor said. “You’ll be fine. Besides, it builds character.”

  “Maybe you should try building a little character, then.”

  “I’m full up,” he said, shrugging.

  “Rock, Paper, Scissors?” I said.

  “Now, why would I do that?” Connor asked. “I already don’t have to go down. What’s in it for me?”

  “If I win,” I said, “you go down there. If I lose, I’ll do all your case paperwork for you for two weeks.”

  Connor stood there, thinking about it. He didn’t look quite convinced. My partner knew he had the upper hand.

  “Gentlemen,” the Inspectre interrupted. “Sometime today . . .”

  I had to close the deal. “I’ll even file everything for you.”

  Connor’s face lit up. “Deal,” he said. “One throw, on three. One, two, three!”

  I threw out my right hand, flat as could be. I looked at Connor’s hand, two fingers held apart in a V formation.

  “Scissors,” I said. “Son of a bitch.”

  “Sorry, kid,” Connor said. He clicked his fingers against my hand like he was actually cutting it.

  I looked down into the hole before pulling out my flashlight. “I thought for sure you were going to throw rock.”

  “Not when I knew you were going to throw down paper,” he said.

  “You got lucky,” I said. “You didn’t know I was going to throw paper.”

  “I did too,” he said. “You are such a paper. You’re such a paper it hurts.”

  I was going to ask what Connor even meant by that, but seeing the look on the Inspectre’s face shut me down. Instead, I turned my flashlight on the opening itself. An iron-rung ladder was built into the side of a stone chimney leading down to the sound of churning water far below. Without another word, I lowered myself down to the floor, slid over the edge of the trapdoor, and grabbed onto the top rung. Once I was certain I had a good grip and wasn’t about to fall to my death, I began my descent, the tiny flashlight gripped in my right palm leaving my fingers free to hold on to the rungs.

  “If at any moment you feel compelled to lower a basket with lotion in it,” I said, making my way down the wet ladder set in the stone, “feel compelled to also drop dead.”

  “Don’t make me get the hose, kid,” Connor said and waved at me.

  The Inspectre shushed him, and I turned my attention back to my descent. The well was deeper than I had imagined, but soon enough I got to the bottom of the ladder where it met the water. It rolled and splashed up the sides of the shaft, leaving me to think it must lead out to the river surrounding the island we were on.

  “Anything, my boy?” the Inspectre called down.

  I snaked my arm through one of the rungs and used my now-free hand to move the light around. The walls were covered with a mix of dark green slime, white foam, blood, and bits of decaying organic material I feared was human flesh.

  “This isn’t a well,” I said. “I think it’s a feeding pit.”

  “Feeding pit?” the Inspectre called out, puzzlement in his voice. “For what?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, passing my light over the churning water. “Maybe that creepy green woman. Maybe Mason Redfield unearthed her from a tomb and he was taking care of her, like a twisted pet of some kind, and she eventually turned on him.” My light caught something dark and solid bobbing in the churn of tiny waves. “Hold on a second. I see something.”

  I stuck my legs through part of the ladder, and stretched myself out over the water, reaching out. My only thought was, Please don’t let it be a head. My fingers caught a bit of it for a second before it bobbed away. It was cloth, but it had some thickness to it. I leaned out a little farther and grabbed again, this time finding purchase. The electric shock of my psychometry flashed on the bag and I was whisked away into the past before I could control it or stop it from happening. The vision was dark with the sound of water all around. I couldn’t see, but I was sure I was at the bottom of the pit. I pressed my mind around to figure out who I was, and in a heartbeat I knew. George, the blondhaired Hispanic punk kid who palled around with the other disciples of Mason Redfield. His mind was a confused mix, overrun by pain from having been bled out, then tossed down here. Weak and enfeebled
, he struggled to get hold of the ladder but his body had not the strength. He slipped below the surface of the water as something cold and slimy wrapped around his body, crushing in. He panicked at the sensation and I did, too, forcing my mind’s eye to pull itself back out of the vision.

  Thankfully, my one arm was still locked in the ladder and I gasped a shocked breath from the surprise of the vision. My arm ached as I pulled the bag over to me, thankful that the water still bore much of the weight of the floating object until I could get a better grip. I fished it out of the water. George’s messenger bag, the same kind I used.

  I threw its strap over my shoulder and started back up the ladder. There was a bit of weight to it, making my climb a little more strained than I would have preferred, and when I reached the top of the ladder, it took both Connor and the Inspectre to hoist me up before closing the trapdoor back over the pit.

  I pulled off the bag and laid it down on an empty desk off to my left along the wall. The bag was decorated with an assortment of stitched-on band names and dozens of tiny safety pins everywhere.

  “What do we have here?” the Inspectre said, coming over to it.

  “It was at the bottom of the well,” I said. “It belonged to that blond kid George, one of Mason’s students. The professor brought him here against his will. He threw him down into the pit after he got what he needed. Blood. But that’s not all.”

  “What else?” the Inspectre asked.

  “There was something down there with him,” I said. “Couldn’t see anything. It was too dark down there, but it was like a big fish or a snake. It. . . it finished him off.”

  Connor undid the short tongue holding the bag closed and flipped the flap open. Using caution, he reached in the bag and started pulled out its contents.

  “Books,” he said, laying them down one by one.

  The Inspectre spun them so he could read them, adjusting his glasses. “Introduction to Modern Cinema, Principles of Editing . . . The Monster Maker’s Handbook.”

  Connor ran his hand over a tear in the outer material of the bag. Something solid and shiny poked through the spot. Connor stuck his hand in the hole and pushed the object out. Its metallic case was crushed in the middle, but there was no mistaking the object. “One laptop,” he said. “Only partially damaged.”

  “It must have gotten banged up on the fall,” the Inspectre said.

  “No,” I said, “not banged up. Crushed.”

  “Crushed?”

  “By whatever killed George down there,” I said.

  “We need to be talking to living people on this one if we’re going to figure this out,” Connor said. “Think about what we know. The professor was working on a film. What does it take to make a movie?”

  The Inspectre’s face lit up. “It takes a village,” he said.

  “Exactly,” Connor said. “It takes cast and crew. Lighting, sound, editors . . .”

  “And Professor Mason Redfield certainly had some dedicated students out there,” I said. “Wasn’t he expecting them when he was reborn?”

  I started gathering up the contents of the bag, readying them to take back to the Lovecraft Café. The Inspectre looked angry.

  “Then it’s time to put the screws to the professor’s living students,” he said. “It’s time to stop wasting our resources and get some real answers. We need to figure out why Mason Redfield did all this and what his plans are.”

  “We’ll find out,” Connor said, “even if we have to beat it out of them.”

  I reached for the bat at my side, patting it in its holster. “Have bat, will travel.”

  23

  Connor, the Inspectre, and I stopped back at the Department long enough to visit Allorah Daniels. We found the youngest Enchancellor back in her office-slash-lab, where I was surprised to also find Jane with her. I walked over to the two of them with the tattered shoulder bag held up in my right hand. Jane grabbed for it like a kid hungry for presents on Christmas morning.

  “Sorry, doll,” I said. “This is going on our lovely Enchancellor’s dance card.”

  Allorah looked up from the pile of books in front of her. She did not look happy. “Oh, is it, now?” she asked. “What about Jane’s health? She keeps wanting to go home and shower, but I convinced her that’s not a good idea right now.”

  Jane nodded, then scooped up a large glass from the lab table. “I’ve traded up,” she said. “I’ve switched to drinking water, which helps kill the craving to shower.”

  “That’s good,” I said.

  “Not really,” Allorah said. “That’s her twenty-eighth glass.”

  “Twenty-eighth?” I repeated.

  Jane put her hand on my arm. “It’s okay. I feel fine.”

  “That’s what worries me,” I said. “That would kill a normal person.”

  Jane gave a grim smile. “As the mark indicates, I’m not normal.”

  A moment of awkward silence passed, before the Inspectre cleared his throat. I snapped out of my fog and held the shoulder bag out to Allorah. “This is for you,” I said.

  “Do I not seem busy enough trying to save your girlfriend’s life here? I would think you’d show some appreciation for that.”

  The Inspectre stepped forward into the room. “Please, Allorah. As a personal favor to me.”

  Something in the seriousness of his tone softened her in an instant. “Of course, Argyle. For you, anything.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “I owe you.”

  Allorah waved his words away and rose up from her desk. She took the bag from me and brought it over to her workbench, emptying its contents out onto it. “What are we looking at here?”

  “We found this,” I said, “in the same lighthouse that Professor Redfield converted into his impromptu workshop. It belonged to one of his students, but he bled him out to barely living and then fed him to. . . something. I’m not sure what. There was a sort of disposal-pit-well thingie underneath a hidden room where he had been keeping all this arcane paraphernalia. It was too dark for me to see when I flashed on it.” I stepped over to the workbench. “Let me get one last read off of it now that I’m not at the bottom of a feed pit.”

  I pulled off my gloves and slapped my hands down on the bag, pressing my power into it. I feared seeing any of the gory details of Professor Redfield’s actual carving up of George so instead focused my energy on pulling a location on the rest of the students from it. A dorm room at New York University and a slew of classrooms flew by my mind’s eye as I went back in time. Through all the flashes, one location stood out among the more mundane ones. It was a poorly lit section of the university where George skulked along, hoping that no one was following him as he slipped into a room marked 247. When I pressed my vision for further details it blanked out and I was forced to bring myself back to reality.

  Hungry from the rush of low blood sugar, I went for the Life Savers in my jacket pocket.

  “Anything, kid?” Connor asked, coming over to no doubt make sure I didn’t pass out on anything expensive near the lab equipment.

  I nodded as I stuffed my mouth full of rainbow-colored salvation. “I think I’ve got an address.”

  “Excellent,” the Inspectre said. “We should get moving.”

  I held up a finger. “In a minute,” I said. I turned to Jane. “You might want to take a look through his computer as well.”

  “Me?” she said, surprised. “What for exactly?”

  “We found this in the water below the lighthouse,” I said. “That place may be connected to that she-bitch. It might help out with your. . . situation.”

  Jane’s face was a little sad, but she nodded. “Okay,” she said. “Can I consider that a prezzie from you, then?”

  I kissed her on the cheek, then joined the Inspectre and Connor by the door leading out of Allorah’s office.

  “Be careful,” Jane called out.

  “Why start now?” Connor darkly added.

  “Don’t be so pessimistic,” the Inspectre said, twi
rling his sword cane around in his hand with a bit of a flourish. “Not everyone gets to spend field time with a member of the old guard.”

  “No offense, boss,” Connor said, heading out the door, “but I’m going to stick with my pessimism. It’s served me well.”

  Connor walked out the door, leaving the two of us standing there. I looked over at the Inspectre and he looked hurt. Even his mustache seemed a little sadder.

  “Don’t worry, sir,” I said, gesturing him politely to go next. “Beating up some college students should improve his mood.”

  I was weirdly glad to see that my powers were still keeping us on track and that the greater traumas of people dying seemed to suppress any flare-ups of the tattooist’s emotion. It was a shame that it took panicked flashes of someone dying to trump my other issues, but at least my powers were focused on the case at hand now.

  I found the old hallways of the unused theater space in one of the New York University buildings along the east side of Washington Square. Room 247 was exactly as I had seen it, with the exception that it had been closed off by copious amounts of yellow caution tape.

  I reached for the door with one hand while unhooking my bat from its holster with the other.

  Connor stopped the hand I was reaching with and used his other to point at the strip of yellow NYU caution tape across the door. It was split where the door met its frame.

  “Guess they probably aren’t expecting company,” he whispered.

  I pulled out my bat, extending it. “Too bad for them,” I said.

  My blood was up after what we had found earlier. On a silent count of three, Connor kicked the door in. I ran in first, bat at the ready. We were in a dark, cluttered space filled with stored bits of classrooms past. The only light in the room came from far off in the middle of it through a maze of desks, chairs, and old-style chalkboards. Three of Professor Redfield’s favorite students—Elyse, Darryl, and Heavy Mike—were sitting around a circle of desks, each with a laptop open in front of them. All three heads popped up from their screens and turned our way.