Dead Matter (6 page)

“Yeah, about that,” I said, switching to a fresh pad of gauze. “Just what the hell was all that about in the graveyard, anyway? Were you trying to get yourself killed?”

Connor shook his head and I had to adjust my dabbing before more blood could run into his scruffy beard. “It’s not a death wish, kid. I was Knocking.”

Jane had also taken up some gauze and dabbed at one of the cuts on Connor’s left hand. “Knocking?” she asked.

Connor turned to look at her through the tiny gaps of his puffed-up eyes. “Drawing spirits back to their grave,” he explained. “And then out of them.”

Jane looked horrified. Her eyes crunched up with distaste. “Why on earth would you do something like that? Why would anybody?”

She poured hydrogen peroxide into one of the deeper cuts across his knuckles. Connor hissed and laid his head back against the arm of his couch. “Ask your boyfriend about that. He’s been on the job long enough now. Should be able to Poirot it out for himself.”

Jane turned to me and I felt the sudden pressure to perform like a trained animal, but I needed to know, too. What
had
brought Connor to this point? Why this whole disconnect from the world for the past month? What had happened? Then it hit me.

“This is about your brother, isn’t it?”

Connor’s silence was confirmation enough.

After a few moments, he finally spoke up. “We had Aidan’s address …”

“No,” I said, interrupting. “We had an envelope we found in the madness that was Cyrus Mandalay’s messed-up art show invitations.” Aidan had disappeared twenty-two years ago at the beach, and no one had ever been able to turn up a lead … until we’d found that envelope.

“We had an address,” he repeated, almost as if he wasn’t hearing me. His eyes looked frantic, mad.

I grabbed Connor by the shoulders and forced him to look at me. “You
know
what we found there,” I said. “Nothing. That building had been torn down years ago. All that we found was some half-constructed eyesore on the Manhattan skyline that took up most of the city block.”

Connor looked into my eyes, then closed his, not wanting to look at me. Tears rolled down his face. Gone was the man I called my mentor.

“I don’t get it,” I said, standing up. I turned to Jane. “He’s always been stronger than this. Why now? His brother was already missing for twenty-two years. I can’t believe that one piece of false hope now has driven him to all this.”

Seeing my frustration, Jane put her hand on my shoulder and squeezed. We stood there listening to the sound of Connor’s hitched breathing for several moments until he spoke again.

“The dreams …” he said, wiping at his eyes.

Jane and I looked at each other, then down at Connor. He pulled his ruined trench coat around himself like a blanket and curled up on the couch.

“What was that?” I said, leaning closer. He started to shake a little, making him look like a junkie just about ready to crawl out of his skin. “Hey, easy, now … What did you just say?”

Connor ran his hand through his beard as he attempted to compose himself a little. Jane sat down on the couch next to him and ran her hand over his head. This seemed to calm him long enough so he could speak.

“I’ve been having the same dream lately,” he said. “I don’t know if we’re talking prophecy or what, but it just keeps happening over and over.”

I let out a sigh of frustration. Dreams were a huge source of interpretable material. According to one of the Departmental pamphlets I had read, “Honk-shus & Hibernation: A Guide to Interpretation,” they could mean any number of things. And sometimes they meant nothing at all.

Jane continued to soothe Connor. “Why don’t you tell us about it?” Jane suggested.

Connor looked calmer. He took a moment to compose himself and then sat up.

“You remember that book with the vampires taking over that small New England town?” he asked. “They did, like, two different movies of it.”

Although I wasn’t half the movie buff Connor was, I had seen them both and I nodded. “
Salem’s Lot.
I think I may even have a copy back at the apartment in the stacks of psychometric collectibles that I still need to sort out. What about it?”

“The dream is kind of like that,” he said, “only it doesn’t take place in rural Maine. It happens here at my apartment. In the dream, I wake up in my bed to a tapping against the glass of my window, and I look over, and it’s like the movie. There’s a kid floating outside my window only it’s not the one from the movie; it’s my brother, Aidan … He’s whispering and begging me to let him in. Only I won’t. Something in my brain won’t let me …”

“That’s your training in Other Division,” I offered. “Even in dreams, your subconscious mind has a resistance to such a suggestion.”

I breathed an inner sigh of relief. At least Connor’s subconscious was capable of stepping in line with Department policy. There was hope the rest of him could be brought back in line as well.

“Maybe that’s it.” Connor nodded, looking a bit better for having confessed all this to us. “When I wake up in the morning, I’m exhausted … but I find myself compelled by the dreams. So I’ve been searching him out in the spirit world, hoping I could find something out on him one way or another. I have to know if he’s dead or not or if I’m just going crazy.”

“And that’s why you’ve been Knocking,” Jane said, her voice soft and reassuring. “You’re hoping that maybe the lingering dead have news of him passing over.”

Connor nodded again. He looked drained still, but at least a little more at peace for confessing to us. He lay back down on the couch. Within seconds his breath slowed and he was deep asleep.

“Should we move him?” I whispered to Jane.

Jane tucked his trench coat up around his neck and stood up from the couch. “I don’t think I can lift him again, Simon, and frankly I don’t think we should wake him.”

“Fair point,” I said. I checked his face. “I think most of the bleeding has stopped anyway. I say we let him sleep it off. In the meantime, I really think we need to get some sleep of our own. I’ll talk to the Inspectre about this tomorrow. Do you mind if we scrap date night and turn in early? I’m not sure I can feel my spine right now.”

Jane looked a little sad, but managed a wan smile. She nodded.

“It’s okay,” she said. “All the ghosts, gargoyles, and blood were enough theatrics for one night. And probably more entertaining than
Mamma Mia
would have been anyway.”

The next morning I got up early and headed to the East Village and the Department of Extraordinary Affairs while Jane headed to Tome, Sweet Tome. At this time of morning, the Lovecraft Café was already filled with hipsters and wannabe writers all searching for inspiration. I was still groggy and a bit beat-up from last night so I grabbed a frozen iced coffee in the café section before heading back to the offices.

The Silence of the Lambs
had already moved on from the theater. This morning a few patrons were scattered around the theater watching
The Lost Boys
up on the big screen. Kiefer Sutherland was playing mind games with the lead character, making him eat a rice container full of maggots, which always turned my stomach. I looked away and kept walking until I was back in the offices

Thankfully, they were quiet this time of the morning. It was easier to concentrate that way and I welcomed the silence as I filled out yet
another
incident report for the Inspectre to look over when he got in.

My brain was numb after a half hour of writing the incident out and documenting it on several sub forms. Even though it was early, I already felt a little slaphappy. In the “Special Notes” section of the form, I couldn’t help but add:

Well, not
quite
like the animated series, I thought as I headed upstairs to drop the report off outside the Inspectre’s office.

I slid the report under the Inspectre’s door. This was the second time in two days that I had done so and a strange sense of déjà vu washed over me. I felt like I was turning a college paper in late, but all thoughts of gargoyles left my brain when the Inspectre’s door creaked slowly open on its own.

When I stood up and looked in, I saw that Inspectre Quimbley was already in his office, leaning against his desk. And he was not alone. A vaguely familiar dark-skinned woman with black shoulder-length hair was leaning on the desk next to him, in a modern tan pantsuit that sat well on her slim frame. She was in her late thirties, early forties tops, but her eyes looked a thousand years old, and she wore a silver necklace stamped with a circular pattern on its pendant. The two of them had been reading a file together when they noticed me and stopped.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t expect anyone up and about this early. Well, aside from the graveyard shift wrapping some things up …”

“Haroom,” the Inspectre said, looking a little flustered. He fussed with his mustache, brushing it between his thumb and forefinger. “Yes, well, no doubt most of them are freshly returned from actual graveyards …”

I stifled a groan at his attempt at humor, and the woman next to him didn’t even react to it. She just kept on staring at me.

“I don’t believe we’ve officially met,” I said. I pulled one of my gloves off, crossed to the woman, and took her hand in mine. “I’m Simon Canderous, Other Division.” Her grip was strong but warm.

She looked at me with a gentle smile and deep brown eyes. “I’m Allorah Daniels,” she said. “We’ve met.”

I cocked my head at her. “We have?”

The woman nodded. “We have,” she said. “I remember you. You’re the one who captured Faisal Bane and brought him back here.”

For a brief moment, I felt a little like a rock star for having captured the head of the Sectarian Defense League. First the ghosts had heard of me; now this. “Ah,” I said, “I see my reputation precedes me.”

Allorah lowered her hand and leaned back against the Inspectre’s desk. “I seem to recall that when the Enchancellors were questioning Mr. Bane, you … tackled him. Yes?”

My momentary swell of pride disappeared in an instant. “Rumors of my football prowess in the workplace are greatly exaggerated,” I said.

Allorah smiled again, this time looking a bit less gentle than before. “I wasn’t talking about rumors here, Mr. Canderous. I was
there
.”

“You saw the actual incident?” I repeated. A realization hit me. “Then that means you’re …”

“Yes,” she said, nodding. “I’m one of the Enchancellors.”

I looked to the Inspectre, but he was shaking his head and trying to suppress a laugh.

“You’re so … young,” I said, fumbling, “To be fair, it wasn’t so much of a tackle … More of a man hug, really.”

“And why on earth did you do that?” she asked. All of a sudden I felt like I was on the spot, giving testimonial in front of the Enchancellorship again.

“I’m psychometric,” I said, “and Faisal Bane wasn’t willing to share his knowledge, but there were just some things I needed to know.”

“Fascinating,” she said, but I couldn’t read anything in her tone this time.

I turned to the Inspectre, feeling a little jumpy and still a bit slaphappy from earlier. “I’m not in some kind of trouble, am I? Because if I am, you’d better just set fire to all that paperwork I still have to do and light the rest of the place ablaze if you expect me to …”

Inspectre Quimbley put his hand on my arm, giving me a sense of instant reassurance. “Relax, my boy,” he said. “You’re not in any kind of trouble. This is about the report you turned in last night before heading out.”

I relaxed a little. “About the incident at the grocery store,” I said.

“Yes.” The Inspectre nodded. “I was just consulting with Enchancellor Daniels on it.”

Allorah looked back down at the file in her hands and flipped through it. “When going over case files, I like to keep my eyes out for certain watchwords. I especially take an interest when I see words like ‘garlic’ and ‘fangs’ popping up in an incident report.”

“Vampires?” I asked. I shook my head. “Look, I know I’ve never seen or encountered one before, but if you’re thinking this thing is a vampire, let me stop you. By no definition was this thing that attacked us remotely the living dead. I get that vampires don’t run around wearing capes and making quips about not drinking wine at dinner parties, but this thing wasn’t even close to human like they are.”

Allorah looked up from the file. “I
can
read, you know. I see your description of the creature here.”

“Look,” I said, frustrated. “No offense, but I’m a bit hesitant to call something vampiric these days. I was the guy who called ‘vampires’ a few months back, remember? If I seem a bit wary, it’s because I haven’t really finished wiping the egg off my face over that yet. And while it was my bad call, the Enchancellors took their sweet time trying to ramp themselves up to action. You’ll forgive me if I’m a bit skeptical about them making a good call on this.”

“Mr. Canderous,” Allorah said, sharpness thick in her tone this time. “I’m not here as an Enchancellor.”

“Oh, no?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Not at this time, anyway. I’m here because Argyle asked me to look at this. I’m here because I’m the resident vampire-hunting expert.”

I went to speak, but realized I had nothing to actually say. I was taken aback. After a moment, by way of apology, I said, “I didn’t even know we had one of those. Sorry.”

Allorah gave me a thin-lipped smile. “I’d thank you to leave any deducing about what is and isn’t a vampire up to me, then,” she said. “Or would you rather I rely on the judgment of a man who can’t tell the difference between a chupacabra and the living dead?”

I held up my hands. “Hey, all yours,” I said. “Contrary to what you may have heard, I’m not interested in hogging all the fame and glory around here. I just want to get that thing that attacked me and my fellow agent off the street.”