Dead Matter (11 page)

I turned and left Allorah standing at my desk as I walked away. That creature from the grocery store was just one in a heaping pile of my daily nightmares and right now I was looking to get to the bottom of the one that was affecting my absent partner. I may have been a shitty friend lately, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t correct that.

 

 

I shook off my conversation with the intense Ms. Daniels as I left the offices and strolled out through the movie theater. I found Jane having coffee with Mrs. Teasley up front in the Lovecraft Café. The old woman had just finished reading Jane’s fortune in a pile of used coffee grounds, promising Jane that she was about to make an electric connection with someone. I didn’t bother to get into the crack-pot shoddiness of Mrs. T’s fortune-telling. Instead, Jane and I headed outside and I hailed a cab for us. We rode in silence for a bit, both too tired from running around the night before to say much. By the time we were heading crosstown on Fifty-ninth toward Columbus Circle, I felt myself waking up in anticipation of getting some answers at the Gibson-Case Center.

“How was the Arcana brunch meeting?” I asked.

Jane looked like she was perking up, too. “I’d say pretty poorly named since it was totally BYOB,” she said, shaking her head. “Bring Your Own Brunch.”

The cab pulled up along the circular drive in front of the Gibson-Case Center. “Well, let’s hope we can find something to eat inside,” I said. I paid the cabbie and got out.

As we approached the center, its towering structure gave me a bout of vertigo, and that was just from looking up at it. The sun was high and bright this time of morning, causing a near-blinding reflection off the polished steel and endless windows of its exterior. Being regular operating hours, the revolving doors of the public atrium were bustling with people coming and going with bags and packages of every shape and size. Stepping in through the doors myself, I felt like I was entering the Mall of the Future.

The atrium was open and huge, the sun cutting through the enormous panes of tinted glass that rose several stories straight up. It shone down onto an actual garden within the building, complete with trees that dwarfed the ones nearby in Central Park. And the stores! They stretched outward and upward in every direction.

“Wow,” Jane said. “I know I’m going to sound all country mouse here, but this place puts the Mall of America to shame.”

“It’s okay,” I said, taking her hand. “City Mouse finds this pretty damn impressive himself.”

I looked around, unsure of where to start our search. I turned to Jane, but her eyes had gone glossy. She turned to me, smiling with all her teeth showing.

“I can has shopping?” she said.

“Focus, Jane, focus.”

The light died in her eyes. “Right,” she said, trying to hide the disappointment and reluctance in her voice. “I know. I’m just … umm, getting into character.”

“If you say so,” I said. I squeezed her hand and we set off under the guise of a happy couple out for a day of touristy shopping. All in all, not a hard disguise to pull off. Feeling bad about denying Jane some retail therapy, I stopped and bought her a red resin heart on a chain with the word FOREVER across the front of it on a silver banner. I put it on her, unable to wipe the cheesy grin from my face or hers. There was no reason we couldn’t have a little fun playing our roles, after all.

After wandering the open expanse of the lower mall area for more than a half hour, we found one of the building’s touch-screen directories that was set farther away from the hustle of the shopping crowds. I immediately started tapping away at one of the display panels.

“Well, there seems to be a lot of options—residential, the shops, the restaurants, rental opportunities, co-ops …”

“Great,” Jane said, leaning up against the directory bank. “Nothing like an afternoon sifting through the mundane. Is there anything about the management company, maybe?”

I shook my head and continued scrolling through the various directories. After several minutes my eyes started to bug out. I stopped poking and rubbed my eyes.

“Maybe …” I said, but stopped myself.

“Yes?”

“Maybe
you
could tap into the building,” I suggested. “Its power supply or something?”

Jane looked hesitant. “Umm … I’m not really sure if I can do that.”

I shrugged. “Just a suggestion. I thought you might be able to make some small talk with one of their computers, kinda like you did at City Hall.”

Jane shrugged.

“Sure,” she said. “I’m not promising anything, but I’ll give it a try. Just … pull me away or something if I look a little too comatose at the console, okay?”

I kissed her forehead. “I’m sure it’ll be fine if you just ask nicely.”

Jane let her hands hover over the touch screen on the directory kiosk and let out a low whisper of her strange sort of machine language. I looked around to see if anyone was paying attention, but between our remote location and the sounds of mall life, no one was even looking in our direction.

Without warning, Jane let out a low, guttural moan and let her hands fall toward the touch screen. Instead of slamming against it, they sunk into the solidity of the screen as though she were submerging them under water.

“Jane?” I grabbed her by her arm, only to feel a harsh jolt of electricity hammer into my body, knocking me on my ass. My muscles were twitching and I had a hard time shaking it off, but taking it slow, I got back on my feet. “Jane!”

Hearing the desperation in my voice seemed to pull her out of her trance. She looked down at her hands and turned to me in a panic, her eyes bugging out.

“Help … ?” she croaked.

I started to reach for her again, and she violently shook her head no. “What if my hands come off at the wrist?”

The muscles in her arms flexed as she tried to pull herself free, but every move she made caused her to sink even farther into the screen.

“Don’t struggle,” I said. “It’s like quicksand.”

But Jane was beyond panic now and tugged wildly to free herself.

I was about to yell at her once again to stop struggling, but when I looked at her I froze. Jane was glowing. A soft white light was spreading up her arms and down her body.

I had no idea what was going on, but I had to do something, even if it meant taking another serious jolt by touching her. This time, however, I would be ready for it, and I pulled my gloves out and slipped them on. I hoped they would at least reduce the conductivity a little, but a second later, it didn’t matter.

I reached for Jane, only to be driven back as the white glow intensified into a blinding flash. Not to be deterred, I pushed toward her, but as quick as the flash had come, it was gone. And Jane with it.

“Jane?”

I felt around where Jane had just been, hoping that maybe it was some kind of optical illusion, but she was definitely gone. I stepped into the space and placed my hands on the touch screen, but it was as solid as when I had been using it before. My heart started to race as I felt my own panic setting in, and I spun around looking for her. My left foot slipped on something and I fought to keep my balance. I looked down to only see all of Jane’s clothes—her hip-huggers, the RESIDENT EVIL 4 shirt she had been wearing, and on top of the pile, the necklace I had just bought her.

I scooped up the necklace, clutching it in my hands. There was no pillar of salt or pile of dust or blood. Jane simply was gone.

“No, no, no,” I said, over and over, not sure what to do next when my cell phone went off. I pulled it out. I had a new text.

WORST. TOUCHSCREEN. EVER!

I typed back: WHERE THE HELL RU?

I slipped her necklace in my coat pocket while I waited. A minute later, my phone went off again.

NOT SUR THINK IM IN THE BUILDIN.

WHERE? I typed back. I reached for the kiosk and brought up the mall area map on the touch screen while I waited.

IN THE BUILDING ITSELF.

Did she mean inside the actual building?

RU OK?

Waiting for an answer to this question had my heart in my throat.

4 NAO. Then, HELP.

If I was going to help her, I was going to need help myself, and there was only one person close enough to give it. Connor. I only hoped his recent bout of the crazies hadn’t put him out of commission.

I started the long walk back through the maze of shops to get the hell out of the Gibson-Case Center. Panic started to set in and by the time I reached the revolving doors leading out to the streets of New York, I was running.

As I ran to Connor’s apartment farther west and two blocks down, I tried his number, but his phone went straight to voice mail. Given how close I was, I didn’t bother to leave a message.

By the time I reached his apartment, I had calmed myself a little. The fact that Jane had been able to send me messages meant she was still alive, and that gave me hope.

At Connor’s building, someone was just leaving as I arrived, and I grabbed the door before it could close behind him to let myself in. Outside Connor’s apartment upstairs, the sound of his movie sound system poured straight through the thickness of his wooden door. I hammered on it for several minutes, and when he didn’t answer I feared that maybe Jane and I had made a bad call leaving him to sleep it off the other night. Maybe whoever or
what
ever had scaled his wall had returned and taken care of him. I pounded harder.

The door flew open and a wild-eyed Connor stood there wearing the same clothes I had found him in at the graveyard. He looked ready to fight. Despite his crazed appearance, it was nice to see that the swelling had gone down around his eyes. When he saw it was me, he relaxed a little.

“Wow,” Connor said. He wandered away from the door back into his apartment. I caught it before it swung shut. “Two social calls in one week,” he said. “I’m touched.”

“I wouldn’t exactly call this social,” I said, walking in. Not much had changed in the apartment since yesterday, except up on his projection wall Fisherman Quint was being devoured by the powerful jaws of a giant great white shark. Other than that, there was maybe a fresh pizza box on top of one of the many stacks of pizza boxes … possibly a new odor or two.

“I see you’ve been working on your funk some more since we dropped you off,” I said, stopping in my tracks. “Do I detect a hint of something that died?”

“So glad you could drop by, kid,” Connor said. He plopped himself down in one of the movie-watching chairs. He went back to watching
Jaws
, but not before flipping up the top on one of the pizza boxes and pulling out a cold slice that I hoped was relatively new.

“Like I said, this isn’t really a social call,” I said, pulling the plug on his projection system. The room went dead silent. I thought he was going to kill me so before he could say anything, I blurted it all out. I spent the next few minutes telling Connor about everything that had happened since last night—from discovering that he hadn’t dreaming about having a lurker all this time, chasing the intruder back to the Gibson-Case Center—everything up to Jane’s disappearance.

“And then …” I said, hearing the catch in my own voice, but controlling it, “she just vanished into one of the information kiosks there, like she was being sucked into the Matrix.”

Connor sat in his movie-watching chair in quiet contemplation. “So about the first part of your story … You didn’t think this would be worth bringing up to me, say, last night after you chased whoever away?”

“After seeing the way you looked after we found you knocked down at Trinity Church? No.”

“Why the hell not?” Although his words were sharp, there was more desperation than anger in his voice.

“No offense, Connor, but you don’t really seem on your ‘A’ game right now,” I said.

He laughed, but it was a dark sound. “And you thought
now
might be a good time to tell me?”

“I don’t know, honestly. I don’t think there’s any good time to tell someone something as messed up as all this, but I guess you should know that you’re not having crazy dreams. Whatever is happening to you, it’s real.”

“Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t,” he said, giving an unhinged laugh and standing up. He walked over to me and poked me in the chest. “How do I know that you’re really here and really telling me all this?”

“I could kick your ass, if it would help you think I’m real,” I said.

“If you won, then I’d know this was all a hallucination,” he said. He shook his head, still crazy-eyed. “In case you haven’t noticed, Mr. Figment of my Imagination, I’m still off the company clock. I’m not running on Departmental time and …”

“Excuse me?” I said. “Listen, Connor, trust me … This is going to override your precious vacation time. Help me find Jane.”

“I don’t think so,” he said. Connor already looked distracted and headed back to the comfort of his chair again. “I’ve got to think about this visitor of mine …”

Something in me let go and I lunged for him. Connor had more fighting experience than I did, but with his mind off in its own little world, I grappled him around the shoulders with ease. Up close, the stink coming off of him was the kind you found only on the homeless in New York, but I was too pissed to back off.

“Let go of me, kid,” Connor said, struggling. “Don’t make me write you up for insubordination.”

“Oh, but you’re not
on
Departmental time, remember?” I said, tightening my grip. “You’re off the company clock.” I clamped down around Connor’s shoulders, slipping my arms up around his neck in a modified sleeper hold. “So technically I’m not strangling my work partner; I’m just strangling a friend.”

“Some friend,” Connor choked out and pushed the two of us across the room until I hit his sofa and sat down hard. Connor used the momentum and leveraged himself into a standing position, but I didn’t let go and stood up with him.