Anton Strout - Dead Matter

“Great,” I said. I leapt to my feet, slamming my hands down on his desk. “What’s the point of having a liaison with the Mayor’s Office? I thought you’re supposed to help us.”

Davidson narrowed his eyes at us. “Calm down,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me what exactly happened? Are you implying there’s a paranormal element to something going on at the Gibson-Case Center?”

“Pretty sure,” I said. “Connor Christos has been off duty for a little over a month and he’s being haunted, so we checked it out, found some creepy crawler staking out his apartment. Traced it back to the Gibson-Case Center, only to be turned away with some ‘sovereign land’ bull. Something that’s literally driving Connor mad is in that building, but it sounds like you’d rather feign ignorance and hide behind your office. C’mon, Jane…”

Jane stood to join me and we both turned toward the door.

“Look,” Davidson called out. “Zoning isn’t even my department. And even it if was, I couldn’t tell you the first thing about the Gibson-Case Center. Like I told you, that matter hasn’t been discussed with me. I know of it, but that’s all. I can’t tell you anything.”

I turned back with pure annoyance in my voice. “Just like when you couldn’t tell us about the Sectarian Defense League?”

“Easy, now,” Jane chimed in. “Evil or not, that’s my alma mater.”

Davidson rubbed his eyes, giving a weary sigh. When he pulled his hand away, he looked tired. “Look, I can’t investigate this without raising all kinds of alarms around here,” he said. “I like my job, and I’d like to keep it. There are rules, procedures… I have to follow them.”

I felt for him. I knew how hard it was to work among all the red tape and still try to get a job done.

I went to speak, but Jane squeezed my arm and gave Davidson that Midwestern smile of hers. “Can’t you bend those rules, just a little? You really should see Connor, Mr. Davidson. He’s in a bad way. Someone or some thing in the Gibson-Case Center is doing this to him. It’s torturing him.” Of course, Connor didn’t know that quite yet. After seeing how strung out he was, Jane and I had decided to follow up this lead further before we told him that yes, his crazy-making dreams were actually real.

“I’m sorry,” Davidson said, sighing. His face went dead serious, and then he looked the two of us in the eyes. There was a hint of mischief behind them. “I have to follow the rules. Like the fact that I can’t tell you that the answers you’re looking for are probably hidden in the Department of Records just down the hall or the fact that it’s abandoned this time of morning.”

I was on the verge of launching into him, but stopped when I realized what he had just said. “I see,” I said, choosing my own words very carefully. “What else can’t you tell us?”

Davidson hesitated. Turmoil creased his normally smooth brow as he debated what he could and couldn’t say.

“Well,” he said, after a moment, “I really can’t tell you that there are keys somewhere in here that open that door.”

“Where?”

Dave Davidson waggled his finger at me. “I can’t tell you.” He looked down at my gloved hands. “But you’re… handy. I’m sure you’ll figure something out.”

Jane and I looked at each other as Dave Davidson stood up and walked around his desk toward his office door.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me,” he said, “I’m heading out to one of our hopefully rat hair-free vendor carts for my morning coffee and a French cruller. I have an early-morning meeting with His Honor and I want to be able to tell him with a clean conscience that I didn’t tell you anything… technically speaking.”

He smiled and this time it was that of the polished politician. “I trust you can show yourselves out,” he said and was out the door before we could say anything, leaving the two of us alone.

I was around Davidson’s desk in seconds, pulling off my gloves. I slammed my ungloved hands flat down on the desk and pushed my power into it with one word in my head.

Keys.

My mind’s eye opened up and prodded into the past, focusing on anything that had to do with keys. Visions of Davidson changing his computer passwords flipped by, a key of a different sort, I supposed. I pulled the mental rewind of the past back until I saw something that caught my eye. Davidson was removing the lower right-hand drawer of his desk and fiddling at the back of it as he put a set of keys back there. I pulled out of the vision, downed a few Life Savers to compensate for the glycemic drain my power hit me with, then dropped to my knees, tearing out the lower drawer.

I looked inside the empty space but there was nothing.

“Dammit!”

“What is it?” Jane said.

“They’re not here,” I said. “They should be, but they’re not.”

Jane came over and looked at the space, then stepped back and eyed the desk with suspicion. “Something’s off,” she said.

“How can you tell?”

Jane blushed, dropping to her knees and reaching into the drawer hole. “I don’t really want to get into it, but I spent some time as a magician’s assistant at the state fair back in Kansas. You learn a thing or two about depth perception, false bottoms, secret doors…”

She fished around inside until I heard her fingers catch on something. “Aha! Got it. There’s a tiny lip I can get my finger on along the top.” She pulled her hand out, holding the false back of the drawer space. She dropped it, then reached back in and produced a set of keys. “Ta-da!”

“For our next trick,” I said, grabbing the keys. “Let’s vanish.”

Jane started to pick things up, but I grabbed her hand, helping her up. “Just leave it,” I said. “If we get caught down in Records, I don’t want Davidson getting in trouble. If we leave a mess here, it will at least look like we stole the keys from him.”

Jane rounded the desk and slipped out the door before I could say anything. There was nothing left to do but follow her. Now that we were opting for stealth, the sound of our footfalls seemed to betray us with every step in the echoing halls of the government office. Despite that, we moved down to the door Davidson had mentioned, keyed it open, and stepped inside. I shut the door behind me as quietly as I could.

The immediate area was a tiny room with a small reception desk that was unoccupied and a set of stairs just past it leading down. Jane and I headed down the stairs, and found ourselves in a room full of filing cabinets with dozens of short, wide drawers in each of them. There were more of them than I could count.

“Thank God there isn’t an early-morning shift down here,” I said. “It may take us a while just to figure out where they’ve got this Gibson-Case Center cataloged.”

I stood there, taking in the eerie quiet of the surrounding area.

“We should hurry, though,” Jane said. “I’ve got an Arcana brunch meeting later this morning.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “It’s bring-your-own brunch.”

Jane wrinkled her nose and nodded. I shook my head, then looked around the expanse of the room.

“Any ideas where to start?” I asked.

Jane nodded. “At the beginning. A very good place to start.”

I winced at the Sound of Music reference, but double winced at myself for recognizing it. “We could use all the members of the Von Trapp family right about now to help us search.”

Jane was silent. I turned to her and she was looking off in one direction. I noticed another desk with a computer at it.

“Or we could try looking it up first,” she said.

“Technology to the rescue!”

Jane headed straight for the computer while I started checking the drawers closest to me. They were full of laid-out blueprints, with occasional sheets of white mixed in with them. I hoped to make some sense of how they were ordered, but they definitely weren’t alphabetical by building name or even by area of town. The only markings that seemed to make any sense were numerical sequences attached to the corner sections of them all. I tried to make heads or tails of it, but it was no use and I had to give up after several frustrating minutes.