Anton Strout - Deader Still

I dropped the bat and started slamming the book against the floor. It didn’t release, but it did increase its pressure on my hands. My fingers were screaming with pain now. Movement at the end of the aisle struck panic into my heart. I prayed it wasn’t another bookcase coming to kill me. I looked up and saw Director Wesker running down the aisle toward me. It wasn’t a vision that inspired much relief.

He shouted something I stood no chance of understanding, and instantly the book let go and fell to the floor, harmless.

I flexed my hands, checking my purple little fingers for any breaks in the skin. Luckily there were none, but both hands now felt like they were asleep with pins and needles.

“What the hell was that?” I said, hissing with pain.

“That,” Wesker said with disdain in his voice, “would be just another reason green agents should never be left alone in the Black Stacks.”

“You left Jane back here,” I reminded him.

“While she may be new,” he said, “she’s a quick study, unlike some people. Besides, I wasn’t very far away. I would never leave her unattended back here.”

“I bet you wouldn’t.”

“Do I detect something accusatory in your voice, Agent Canderous?” he said. “If so, let’s hear it.”

“Funny,” I said, “I don’t hear you laughing it up and having a grand old time when it’s just you and me back here in the Stacks.”

“That’s because Jane doesn’t do ridiculous, dangerous things,” he said. He bent over and picked up the book, closing it and placing it back on the shelf. He pointed to the title on the spine on the book. “It’s called a ‘Rough Guide’ for a reason, nitwit.”

I left Tome, Sweet Tome in a state of complete frustration, without even saying good-bye to Jane. Empty-handed, I stormed out of the bookstore past her and headed back downtown to the Department. I had another option for answers. I’d seen him sitting in the Lovecraft Café a few hours ago.

Godfrey Candella was exactly where I had left him, with his head down in one of his notebooks, scribbling away.

“Busy day?” I asked. Godfrey finished the line he was writing before he looked up.

“Actually,” he said, pushing his horn-rims back into place on the bridge of his nose. “It’s a slow business day. I’m catching up on my records for the Gauntlet.”

“Slow day, huh? I wish someone had told me,” I said, and recounted the story of the dead jogger we’d found in the park as well as our failed chase after his ghost. When I was done, I pulled out the printouts of Cleopatra’s Needle and showed them to Godfrey. He looked through them carefully.

“We should bring these down to the Gauntlet,” he said, standing up. I didn’t move. “Have you ever been?”

I shook my head.

“Come with me,” he said. We headed back through the movie theater and straight to the D.E.A. offices. Past the cubicles and beyond the red velvet curtain that separated the front office from the back, he led me down a set of stairs that I had never noticed before. They went down forever and my knees actually started to hurt from the walk. At the bottom was an office door much older than the ones I was used to upstairs. Godfrey swiped a different colored keycard than the one I had against an electronic plate and the heavy door swung open. Immediately, a wave of musty air hit my face and I coughed.

“It’s a little bit stuffy down here,” he said, giving a small cough of his own, “but you get used to it.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” I said, but followed him anyway . . . down more stairs. These were far older than anything in the building above and were actually carved into the very rock itself. “We’re off the grid, aren’t we?”

Godfrey gave a little laugh. “Yes, I suppose so. The Gauntlet predates the construction of the Department of Extraordinary Affairs by a few hundred years or so.” He pointed up at a line of cables hanging from hooks along the chiseled ceiling. “We’ve slowly been bringing computers into the picture and backup systems for archiving purposes, but it will take years to deal with all the historical data. The team and I are up to the year 1820 right now. Did you know that Benjamin Franklin was a necromancer?”

“I think I read something about that somewhere,” I said.

“Fascinating stuff,” Godfrey said, excited.

We entered a natural cavern lit from high above by electric lights that had been hung from a precariously mounted iron grid. The room itself was full of activity. The trappings of an office were scattered throughout, including some ancient-looking file cabinets that lined the walls and several dozen wooden tables stained with ink from ages gone by. A half dozen of Godfrey’s fellow archivists were busy at several of the desks—writing, filing, and even a few working with computers.

Godfrey pointed to one of the desks with two empty chairs. I walked over to it while he stared at a section containing several of the old filing cabinets.

“Give me a few minutes to pull some records on Cleopatra’s Needle. I think I’ll start with Egypt, Monuments, Central Park, and, on a long shot, Sewing.”

Godfrey disappeared into the darkness of a nearby row of cabinets, leaving me to watch the rest of the Gauntlet in action. All the scurrying around reminded me of that old kids’ game Mouse Trap. Every movement of Godfrey’s coworkers seemed like part of a well-oiled machine. When one got up from a workstation, another took his or her place. One woman’s sole purpose seemed to be working the room and handing books to various employees in a pattern that looked random but definitely had a rhyme and reason all its own.

Several minutes later Godfrey returned with a stack of books and file folders that were piled up to just below his eyes. He let them loose on top of our table and they scattered across it.

“Well, this should be a start,” he said, sitting down next to me. He scooped up several folders and quickly started flipping through file after file, scanning them like lightning. He had a researcher’s prowess that I was pretty sure I could never equal.

After watching Godfrey in action for a bit, I said, “Well?”

“Well,” he said, shaking his head like he was pulling out of a trance. “Like you said Dave Davidson mentioned to you, there are three of these needles. The second is in London and the third in Paris, but all three of them originally hail from the city of Heliopolis in Egypt.”

He paused as his brain accessed another mental file.

“I’m unfamiliar with that city,” he continued. Godfrey pulled out his personal notebook and scribbled down Heliopolis, Egypt . “I’ll have to check it out later.”

He started to zone out again, but I tapped the folder he was holding.

“Is there anything about the markings on the obelisk?” I asked.

“Do you know how to read hieroglyphs, Simon?” Godfrey asked, snapping out of it. I looked to see if he was being a smart-ass, but he was dead serious.

I shook my head no.

“Sorry,” I said. “I took Spanish. They didn’t offer Ancient Egyptian at my high school. Can you imagine?”

Godfrey didn’t even crack a smile.

“The school systems these days,” he said with a shake of his head.

I hoped they had a section on Humor down here. Perhaps I could go find a few books for him.

Godfrey turned back to the file he had opened and scanned the page. “It looks like the monoliths were cut from Aswan quarries circa 1450 B.c. under the orders of Thutmose the Third, but the inscriptions are far more recent. They weren’t added until two hundred years later.”

“By who?” I asked, feeling a little excited now that we were getting somewhere. “Please tell me it was some kind of vampire lord or something, because that would so jive with what I’m chasing.”