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Rose stood outside the Empire State Building entrance on West 34th Street enjoying the live action show of humanity cruising past. New York City was vibrant, unlike any other place in the world. She’d been to plenty of big cities, densely populated in so many different ways. Trips to Guangzhou and her mother’s birthplace outdid NYC when it came to people crammed into urban spaces, after all. But nothing had the feel of this place. She had long ago decided that cities had personalities, whether the people made the city or the city made the people she had yet to determine. But nowhere else on Earth was like New York, just like nowhere else was like Guangzhou or London or Paris.
Jake came along the sidewalk, waving to catch her attention. They hugged and kissed, and she was pleased to feel genuine warmth there. The tension from earlier, his jealousy over Jazz and her concerns about Price, had maybe eased, at least a little.
“How was lunch?”
He smiled. “It was really good. Nice food, I’ll take you there before we leave, I think you’ll like it.”
“You and Price best buds now?”
“Yeah, we’re like brothers. We sliced our palms and made a blood pact.”
She slapped his arm. “You’re an idiot.”
“That’s why you love me.”
She looked at him for a moment, eyebrows raised. For all their intimacy now, neither of them had yet said I love you to the other and they were swimming in that shallow water where it had to happen soon. Was Jake fishing? She decided to let it pass this time. “Seriously, though,” she pressed. “He was okay? You still think he’s a good guy?”
Jake smiled crookedly. “He’s a weird one, I’ll grant you that. But so far he seems decent enough. I’m not foolish enough to just instantly trust anyone, and my aunt’s best interests are my first concern. So I’ll proceed with caution. But so far, I think he’s okay.”
Rose was slightly annoyed by that, still inclined to trust her own assessment, but she needed to respect Crowley’s feelings too. Despite her words moments ago, he wasn’t an idiot. Not that kind of idiot anyway. “Fair enough,” she said. “Wanna go up?”
“For sure.”
They made their way in and lined up with all the other tourists to buy a ticket, then lined up again for the elevator.
“Holidays seem to be ninety percent standing in queues,” Rose said, smiling.
Crowley looked around them. “Isn’t it weird? The way we all want this experience, we all go to the same places and see the same sights, take the same photos. I mean, there’s a million pictures online, from every possible angle, of all there is to see from the top of this building. And yet there’s still a compelling urge to experience it ourselves directly, to feel it, smell it, know we’ve actually done it rather than simply see a picture.”
“Your lunch was very philosophical, was it?”
Crowley laughed. “Not especially! But there is something about Price that brings out the... I don’t know, the contemplative in me. He gives me pause for thought.”
Rose considered that for a moment, recognizing a deep truth to it. “Perhaps that’s why I don’t trust him,” she said. “He puts me on edge for some reason, and I can’t define why.”
“And I don’t deny that.” Crowley squeezed her hand and then relaxed his grip but didn’t let go. She enjoyed the warmth of his touch. “I trust your instincts, and I am on my guard. But I like the guy. I don’t get the same discomfort.”
Rose shrugged. She appreciated his honesty. “I hope I don’t have to tell you I told you so at some future point.”
“I hope so too!”
The took their turn in the elevator, packed in like sardines, watching the information movie it played on the ceiling as the car shot swiftly up through the middle of New York’s most iconic skyscraper. When they reached the top, they walked around the balcony in bright sunshine, the views across the city truly breathtaking. All the way across Central Park, the Hudson, the Statue of Liberty tiny in the distance just off the tip of Manhattan. Crowley pointed out Ground Zero.
“It is something else to be here, huh?” Rose said, looking down on the forest of buildings crammed shoulder to shoulder that from street level would have towered over them.
“Perspective is a trippy thing,” Crowley agreed. Leaning on their elbows side by side, mesmerized by the bird’s eye vista south across the city, Crowley said, “So did you meet Jazz for lunch?”
He was casual enough, but Rose caught the hint of discomfort in the question. She sighed but couldn’t resist a slight smile. Men could be so fragile sometimes. “No, she was busy, I guess. Didn’t answer my call. But I did make myself useful. I went to the library, which is amazing enough in itself!”
Crowley nodded. “Yes, I’ve been there before. Incredible place.”
“Well, I lost myself for a few hours falling into a research rabbit hole.” She told him all about the myriad dead at Washington State Park, the whole concept of a potter’s field, and how the park paled into almost insignificance next to Hart Island, still filling up with corpses every day. “But then I started looking into other details, trying to think laterally. I was thinking about the holes in the skulls, you know? All so uniform? You know what trepanning is?”
Crowley looked at her with a slight frown. “Drilling a hole in the skull to let the demons out?”
“Partly, yeah. It’s a weird thing, it’s been going on forever. They found a burial site dated about 6,500 BCE with evidence of trepanning. The medieval thinking is that it was done to let out bad spirits, but a slightly more evidence-based practice was to reduce pressure from a blood build-up in the skull, sometimes from blunt weapon trauma, that sort of thing. Sometimes people would subsequently wear the disc of removed skull as a ward against evil, which is a pretty bizarre concept.”
“That would be a strange one to explain,” Crowley said. “Kind of cool though, if you think about it. But where are you going with this? I can see that all those bodies were possibly trepanned, but as you’ve said, it could be for any number of reasons.”
“Don’t forget how recent some of them were though. Not just the two fresh ones, but others there from recent years, not hundreds of years ago, or even decades. Anyway, to answer your question, I learned that certain witch covens used to cut holes in skulls.”
“Witches? Really?”
“It’s as much a possibility as anything else you and I have encountered recently. But here’s the thing, check this out.” She took out her phone and pulled a picture she’d taken of a book in the New York library. “This is from a very old book on witchcraft, and how it pervades modern society. Obviously, this book is a bit sensationalist, and modern society, according to this book, was back in the nineteen fifties. But look at this.” She handed over the phone and watched as Crowley zoomed in the image of the grainy photograph she’d snapped.
“It’s not very clear,” he said, frowning.
“The picture in the book is pretty grainy. But why have you zoomed in on that particular bit?”
He grinned crookedly and handed the phone back. “You know why.”
“Well?” She really wanted him to agree with her, but the implications were too much to consider possible. “It looks just like Matthew Price, doesn’t it?”
Crowley nodded, lips pursed. “It really does. But it looks like Price now, and that photo is more than sixty years old if it’s from the fifties. I guess it could be a distant relative or something.”
“Jake, it looks just like him!”
“Nah, Price isn’t that blurry in real life.”
She gave him a withering look and decided to let it drop. Give him time to ruminate on what she’d shown him and see if he came around at all. And besides, it was a grainy photo, and the likeness could easily be entirely coincidental. But it only added to her underlying concerns about the enigmatic old man. To change the subject, she said, “I learned other stuff too, and this might be worth following up. I copied the relevant sections you can read later, but in short, there was a scandalous experiment conducted at Bellevue Hospital back in the early 1900s. Bellevue is the oldest hospital in NYC. Anyway, a doctor was fired for conducting experiments on patients and covering up several deaths. There weren’t a lot of details on the crimes, but the term “trepanning” came up quite a few times.”
Crowley turned to look at her again, the constant breeze this high up riffling through his hair. “Really? Okay, now you’ve got my interest. But you’re talking about more than a hundred years ago.”
“Yes, but what if the hospital, or people associated with that doctor, might have secretly continued the experiments? And the mass grave at Washington State Park was a secret dumping ground for the corpses? They might have a means of ingress to that area that is otherwise unknown, so those water workers assumed they had uncovered a new, previously undisturbed crypt. But what if it has actually been in use fairly consistently since the early 1900s, or even before? It would explain the layer upon layer of increasingly recent bodies in there, all with signs of trepanation.”
Crowley’s expression was skeptical. “You’re drawing a long bow here.”
“Sure, but it would be fun to dig around a bit, wouldn’t it?”
“Sounds to me like you’ve got the amateur sleuth bug after our recent adventures.”
“Maybe. Haven’t you?”
Crowley laughed. “I’ve always had it! But aren’t we supposed to be on holiday?”
“Sure, but weren’t you only just saying about how it’s strange that everyone on holiday always lines up for the same things. This would make for a pretty unique New York City experience.”
“And you can maybe help your mate Jazz out with her story along the way?”
Rose watched Crowley’s eyes closely as he said that, but she saw no malice or real jealousy there. Maybe a touch of amusement was all. Perhaps he was finally getting over himself. “Sure,” she said. “It would be kind of cool to be an investigative journalist for a while too.”
Crowley rolled his eyes, but his smile was genuine. “All right then, Sherlette Holmes. Where to?”