Paul cursed. “I told you this was a bad idea.”
“I never said I disagreed with you.”
“Do you recognize this guy?”
He did. “It’s the guy who left me tied to that gate. Wire Ties.”
Paul leaned in for a closer look. “Oh. That guy.”
The man Eric had taken to calling “Wire Ties” appeared to have been shot several times in the chest. His shirt was soaked with blood.
He hadn’t been dead long, because it wasn’t that long ago that he left Eric for dead in the old municipal tunnels.
Did he die here? Or was he murdered elsewhere and dumped here? The steampunk monk and Mistress Janet both probably knew about this place. But how would either of them have had time?
Eric checked his watch. It was already approaching six o’clock, though he wasn’t sure how it came to be so late. Was it about two hours ago that he was left in the dark? Or was it closer to three? He wasn’t sure. It’d been such a hectic afternoon. It all seemed to run together. And that business with Steampunk Monk’s hallucinogenic squirt bottle had fouled up his sense of time.
It wasn’t impossible for the woman to have ditched the body here either before or after their obscene conversation at the bungalow. Or for Steampunk Monk to have done it after losing Paul and Kevin in that alley. But it also wasn’t impossible that there was someone else involved in all this.
The only thing he could be sure of was that this guy wasn’t going to be a problem anymore.
Almost sure… “Check and make sure he’s dead,” said Eric.
Paul took a startled step backward. “What? Uh-uh. You check.”
“Don’t be a wimp.”
“You don’t be a wimp.”
Eric sighed. “Fine.” He knelt down and pressed his fingers against the man’s throat. His flesh was cool, but not cold. He wasn’t stiff. But neither did he have a pulse. He was definitely dead, but he hadn’t been that way long. He was no forensic scientist, but it seemed possible that they may have only just missed whoever it was who left him here.
Tell Holly to keep her eyes open, he thought.
DONE, texted Isabelle.
If anyone was still around, he’d expect there to be a vehicle in the parking lot, but he knew better than to make assumptions. For all he knew, these new agents could teleport.
He searched the man’s pockets before standing up, looking for any clues about who he might have been.
“What the hell are you doing?” asked Paul, sounding revolted.
“He went through my pockets,” replied Eric. “I’m returning the favor.” On one hand, he supposed he no longer needed to know anything about the guy, being that he was dead and all, but he couldn’t leave without looking. Even a single clue could help. He had no idea where to go next.
He found Wire Ties’ gun still stuffed in the back of his jeans and tossed it aside. His Maglite was still clipped to his belt loop. In his pockets, he had a small wad of cash, some drive-through receipts, a single car key and a handful of those damn wire ties, but no wallet, no identification and no phone. The only thing that promised to be useful was a small notepad, which he took. He left everything else where he found it. Another person might’ve kept the cash and he wouldn’t necessarily blame them. It wasn’t going to do a dead man any good, after all, but there was something about the idea of taking money off a corpse that he found horrific.
He stood up and wiped his hands on his shirt. He felt dirty, although not quite as dirty as Mistress Janet made him feel, which he thought probably spoke volumes about that disgusting woman.
He glanced back in time to see Paul pick the gun up off the floor. “What’re you doing?”
“If whoever did that to him is still here somewhere, I don’t plan on ending up like him.”
“It didn’t do him much good.”
“And not having one at all isn’t going to do us any good.”
“Whatever. Do what you want.” He shined his light onto the notepad and began flipping through the pages. He hoped he’d just found a detailed journal containing the answers to all of his questions, a Rosetta Stone to help him finally understand this mystery, but the notes scrawled on these pages couldn’t have been more different from Hector’s carefully constructed, detail-rich letters. They weren’t written in complete sentences. They weren’t even complete ideas. It was just words and names, nothing more than random bits and pieces of Wire Ties’ obsession splashed haphazardly onto the pages. There were lists of places from all over the country, ranging from big cities to places Eric had never heard of to specific streets to generic places like “hotel,” “factory” and “pier.” Here and there he’d written down some person’s name. Most of it made absolutely no sense.
He’d been searching a long time for whatever it was he was looking for.
He turned the pages until he found the name “Rossetter” scribbled on a page by itself. That name again. What was so important about it? And did he mean the old psychiatric hospital Chad told him about? Or was he looking for some member of the family for which the place was named? Or was there no connection at all between the two things?
On the next page was a list of four places. Hospital, rec center, high school and tunnels. Places of interest? He assumed that he meant the hospital and high school here in Creek Bend. He’d obviously been investigating both the municipal tunnels and Goss. And something did seem to be going on at the high school. But why was the hospital on the list? Did he mean the psychiatric hospital? Rossetter? Either he wasn’t aware that it didn’t exist anymore, or he was interested in something that was connected to it.
He turned the page again and found his license plate number written there. The stranger must’ve recorded it as he stood inside Goss, watching him and Karen drive away.
The next page was written after their encounter in the tunnels. His name was scribbled here. It was circled, with a question mark beside it. Under that was his address, as the stranger had seen it on his driver’s license. Under that he’d written, “Who was the woman?”
Eric had refused to tell him about Karen. It looked as if he wasn’t willing to let the subject go. How far would he have gone to find out? What would he have done if he’d found her?
He didn’t have to worry about that anymore, but it still made him uncomfortable to think that he’d exposed his wife to any kind of danger. After all, there were always more weirdos out there somewhere, and it seemed sometimes that he was destined to meet each and every one of them.
The last words on the page were “red coat” and “monsters.” Another question mark was scrawled beside each of them. Those were the things that Eric had told him. He’d asked him if he was working with the man in the red coat and if he was responsible for the monsters at Goss. But he didn’t seem to know anything about either of those things at the time.
After that, there were no more notes. This seemed to be where his research came to an end. Eric wondered what he was looking for. Why was he so determined to find it? And what secrets might he have learned in the last moments of life, before he could jot them down in his notepad?
He tore out the pages with his name and license plate number and stuffed them into his front pocket. Then he slipped the notepad into his back pocket with his wallet and glanced one last time at Wire Ties’ body. He kept thinking about that last entry, about the man in the red coat and the monsters in Goss. Did that mean that after leaving him in the tunnels, he returned to Goss to investigate further? Was that where he met his end?
That’s what he would’ve done, he thought. If he didn’t have anything else to go on.
“We should check the next room,” he said. He gestured toward the bathroom. “There’s another hole smashed through the wall between the tubs.”
Holding the gun out in front of him, Paul crept toward the bathroom, ready to shoot anything that moved.
Eric followed him. As he entered the bathroom, his cell phone rang. It was Diane.
“Hello?”
“Are you guys staying out of trouble?” she asked.
Eric glanced back at the corpse. “Not even a little bit,” he replied. “How’s the research going?”
“Not very well. We can’t find anything on a Hector Conant. It’s like he never existed.”
That wasn’t necessarily bad news. If he’d gotten himself killed, there probably would’ve been articles about his death or disappearance. But that still left the big question of why, if he wasn’t dead, hadn’t he shown himself. “What about the girls? Sherry Jolinger and Vera Graupner?”
“Nope. Nothing. And there’s no mention at all of anything happening in 1962, either. Is that good news? Like, does it mean everything turned out okay?”
“I hope so, but I honestly don’t know.” Paul stepped into the tub and peered through the gaping hole into the next room. Eric kept his light on him, not daring to let him out of his sight. “What about Gardenhour? Anything about that?”
“Lots. Too much. I found a bunch of articles about Robert Gardenhour and how the organization got started. There’s a ton of stuff about the Louisa Holoday Foundation and Otto Goss. There’re literally hundreds of articles on the place. I don’t know where to even start. And I seriously have my doubts that anything related to an evil secret society would show up on any records anyway.”
“That’s probably true,” he admitted. “Thanks for trying. How’s Karen doing?”
“She’s no help at all. I’ve never seen her act like such a space-case before. She’s building a house out of books right now.”
Eric frowned. “That’s not really like her.”
“I know. I don’t get it.”
Paul stepped out of the tub in the adjoining bathroom and stopped. “Do you smell that?” he asked, sniffing.
He did. A sweet, earthy smell floating on the air. It was a stark contrast to the dank and moldy stench of the rest of the building. He was quite sure he didn’t smell anything like that last time he was here.
“I just called to let you know that I’m taking her back to my place to keep an eye on her,” said Diane.
“Sounds good. Let me know if anything changes.”
She promised she would and hung up.
Eric didn’t like it. Karen was still behaving strangely? What was wrong with her? Was she going to be okay? Was she ever going to be the same again?
He forced the thought from his head. He couldn’t think like that. He just couldn’t.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
I KNOW. IT DOESN’T MAKE ANY SENSE
“She was fine this morning.”
SHE DIDN’T START ACTING WEIRD UNTIL THE GALLERY
“But nothing happened to her. I was with her almost the whole time. I would’ve known. Wouldn’t I?”
MAYBE WE SHOULD LET HOLLY TAKE A LOOK AT HER
“Maybe… But Holly’s acting kind of weird today, too. I mean what’s going on? Are the agents doing something to the town? Is there something in the water?”
DIANE SEEMS FINE. SO DO YOU AND PAUL
Paul made his way through the bathroom ahead of him, following the peculiar smell. This room was considerably brighter than the last. The windows weren’t covered. The sunlight drifted through the gaps between the closed curtains. Like the last time he was here, there was no furniture. But amid the litter that was strewn about the floor was something new. A small, glass jar was sitting in the middle of the room. It was stuffed with odd-looking, smoldering leaves. A soft, white smoke was rising from it, filling the air.
Eric stopped in the doorway as Paul walked over and examined it. “It’s like incense or something. Was someone performing some sort of ritual in here?”
A ritual? Or a spell? Eric recalled Hector’s letter. The prayer and the dance. The portal. The summoning. Was this a part of all that?
He recalled what Mistress Janet told him about conducting experiments of her own. Was this one of those experiments?
He looked down at his phone again.
I’M STILL NOT SENSING ANY MAGIC
Paul coughed and stepped away from the jar. “Yuck. This stuff is foul. It’s making my head hurt.”
Eric took a couple steps back. “Why don’t you get away from that?”
Paul coughed again and nodded. “Yeah. It didn’t seem so bad at first, but—” Again he coughed.
“Come on. Let’s get out of here. We’ll go out the way we came in.”
They stepped between the two bathtubs and walked back into the darkened room. The light from their flashlights filled the space, revealing the body of the dead stranger again. But as they approached the closet on their way back to Holly and Kevin, the corpse suddenly sat up.