“You had a skeleton in your closet?” grinned Xela.
Andrew raised his hand. “Pardon me for asking, but why are you so sure it’s him?”
Nate shrugged. “We don’t know for sure, but everything fits,” he said. “We know Koturovic was stabbed and got away. We know he’d want to warn everyone else working here about the Family of the Red Death. We know he was never found. I’m no expert, but that body’d been in the wall for at least seventy or eighty years. And the clothes looked old, style-wise. It had a bow tie.”
“Hey,” Clive said, “bow ties are cool.”
“So there’s a dead body in your wall,” said Xela, “and control panels in Debbie and Clive’s. I’d hate to think what’s in mine.”
Mandy scratched the side of her head and ended up twirling her blonde curls. “Control panels?”
Nate nodded and Debbie cleared her throat. “Our apartment’s the control room for the whole building,” she said. “The walls fold away and there’s switches and levers and gauges and all that kind of stuff.”
Clive nodded. “It’s very steampunk,” he said.
“I’m sorry.” Andrew had his hand up again, like a confused schoolboy. “Pardon me. I don’t understand.”
Nate looked at him. “Don’t understand what?”
Andrew’s mouth opened three or four times without making any noise. It made him look like a fish drowning in the air. “You’re saying the building itself is the machine?” he got out. “There’s not something hidden inside the building?”
“Right,” said Veek. She tapped her foot on the wooden deck. “If you peeled off all the paint and plaster you’d see cables and frameworks and electrical stuff.”
“Again,” said Clive, “all very steampunk. Built by Tesla from Koturovic’s theories.”
“I also found out that Whippy’s grandson was H. P. Lovecraft, the horror writer,” said Veek.
“No way,” said Clive and Xela at the same time.
Veek swallowed a mouthful of beer and nodded.
“So,” said Nate, “we’ve got a years-ahead-of-his-time scientist who discovered a great interdimensional threat to Earth. He tells his theories to Whipple and convinces him to give them a ton of money to build this place, with help from Tesla. Whipple then goes and tells all these theories and stories to little Lovecraft, who writes it all up as his Cthulhu stories.”
“Why?” said Debbie. “Do you think the stories were supposed to be some kind of warning? A way to prepare people?”
Tim shook his head. “They probably weren’t anything. I think Whip just needed to get stuff off his chest and his overly-bright grandson seemed like a good target.”
Nate nodded. “Smart enough to talk to, but he wouldn’t tell people Whipple was mad. He’d just assume it was all stories.”
“So would everyone else,” said Xela.
“What about 14?” asked Clive. “Do we know anything else about that?”
Nate shook his head. “Right now Roger’s idea, that it’s a counterweight of sorts, is our best theory.”
Debbie coughed. “What about Mrs. Knight?”
“I checked in her apartment last night,” said Tim. “There’s no messages on her machine. From a few things I saw, I don’t think she had a job or any immediate family. No one’s missing her. I don’t want to sound harsh but...that’s good for us.”
Debbie studied a board near her feet.
“I also found a big bag of dry cat food and slashed it up with a knife. It looks like the cats got hungry and ripped into it. For the record,” Tim said to Debbie, “those cats were
not
going to starve. They’re both almost round, they’re so fat.”
She glanced up and smiled at him, but it looked forced. “Thank you,” she said.
Veek tilted her head. “Are you worried about leaving fingerprints or DNA or something in there?”
“No. Even if I had, which I didn’t, they won’t be looking for anything like that. It’s not a crime scene, just an abandoned apartment.”
“Did something happen to Mrs. Knight?” asked Mandy.
Debbie looked at the board again. Tim gave Nate a small shake of the head.
“It’s complicated,” said Nate. “She went away for a while.”
Mandy rolled the answer around in her head. “Because of what y’all were doing?”
“Yes,” said Debbie. The edge on her voice was a razor now. “Because of what we were doing.”
Mandy flinched a bit, but nodded. Nate got the impression she accepted the story
because
Debbie had been a little too mean with her answer. He looked over at Andrew to see if he accepted it, too.
Andrew didn’t look like he’d even heard them. He was fondling his water bottle and blinking out Morse code gibberish. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Pardon me again. I just want to be sure I understand you.” He looked down at the planks of the sun deck and then at the oversized machine room for the elevator. “You’re saying this
entire building
is Koturovic’s machine? We’re
living
in the machine?”
“That’s right,” said Tim. “It’s one big machine that they disguised as a building. Renting it out to people like us is part of the trick.”
“And Clive and Deborah’s apartment is the control center for this machine?”
Clive nodded.
Andrew’s head tipped side to side. “Fascinating,” he said.
Tim smiled at this and raised his bottle. “To Aleksander Koturovic,” he said. “He saved the world and no one ever knew.”
“To Aleksander,” said Nate.
They echoed the toast, even Debbie. Andrew looked confused for a moment and then raised his water with a wide smile.
The sky turned orange and they watched the sunset together.
The man named Carmichael had been watching Tim Farr for close to two months at this point. He had the three-month mark clear in sight. Hopefully they wouldn’t keep him on for two pulls. Once or thrice a week it crept into his mind that Farr could be his assignment for the foreseeable future. Which could suck on a number of levels. The man was flagged for eighteen months of observation and five years of monitoring.
Some people thought observation was a sweet gig, but not Carmichael. A full year in the car would drive him nuts. He hadn’t signed up to keep eyes on retired clerks and analysts who got sacked. Granted, they didn’t put clerks and analysts under observation. There was a reason men like Farr rated so much attention.
Carmichael was jotting notes in the logbook when he noticed the group on the far side of the street. After six weeks, he knew all the residents of this stretch of road. He’d never seen any of the people in this group before. Four men. He could see them from across the street. They were nondescript, Mediterranean or eastern European from what he could see. One of them was a bruiser dressed in a gym-gray hoodie, pulled low enough to shadow his face. Heavy clothes for June, but he might be a tagger. There were more than a couple of them in this neighborhood.
The group stopped outside the Kavach building. A moment later two more men and two women walked down the hill and joined them. They had the same pale, vaguely Slavic look to them.
He switched to the laptop and typed in some quick notes about the group. Real-time analysts waited on the other end of the encrypted link, even at eight-forty-seven on a Friday. Anything even slightly suspicious went straight to them.
Carmichael glanced up from the computer. Someone had come out of the building. Andrew Waite, the Bible-thumper. His background check was so clean it was creepy. He waved to the group at the bottom of the steps—a group that had grown to over a dozen while Carmichael typed—and they waved back. One of them called him by name and he walked down to open the gate.
The other thing Carmichael saw was the old woman working her way around the front of his Taurus. Her round body was draped in a sun dress and oversized cardigan, and she wore a wide hat that could’ve been made from a small umbrella. She squeezed between his car and the truck in front of him and waddled up toward the driver’s window.
He had to deal with the locals at least once a week. The old woman would ask for directions or ask him to move or offer to sell him something. Fruit or pirated movies or bedroom comforters. It was some cultural thing he couldn’t wrap his head around. He set the computer down on the passenger seat and prepared to receive her.
The old woman cleared her throat. It was a wet, phlegmy sound. “Excuse me,” she said in accented English. “I’m so sorry, but could I bother you for directions? I seem to be lost.”
“I don’t live around here,” he said. He made sure the laptop was steady and then gave the woman a lazy glance. “I wish I could help you out, but you’re better off asking over at the corner...”
The old woman wore a Halloween mask. Then she blinked and Carmichael thought it had to be prosthetics. By the time he admitted her face was real and fumbled for his sidearm she’d already reached in through the open window and crushed his windpipe. He struggled for a moment, got the pistol up, and she slammed his head into the steering wheel. She slammed it three more times before the airbag went off in an explosion of white streaked with bright red. It pinned Carmichael’s body in place against the driver’s seat.
“Auntie,” called Andrew from across the street. “Are you all done? We don’t want to be late.”
“Coming, dearest,” said the old woman. She tugged her hand free and gave it a delicate shake. “Just tidying up a bit first.”
* * *
“Maybe we should move,” said Debbie.
Clive found himself craving a drink. He’d wanted one since the day they opened apartment 14. To be honest, he wanted to get sloppy drunk like the good old days, before he’d met Debbie, when he could forget whole weekends.
But those days hadn’t been all that good.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
Debbie shrugged. “Move. Find another place. We always wanted to someday.”
“Someday when you were done with school or I had a steady gig on a show,” he said. “We can’t afford it right now.”
“We could make it work.”
Clive shook his head. “Where would we find another place like this, at this price? We’d be lucky to get a little studio, and it’d probably be way out in the valley.”
“The valley’s not so bad.”
“You’d spend an extra two hours every day on the bus. You hate the ride as it is.”
She crossed her arms. After five years together, Clive knew that wasn’t a good sign. He reached out and took her hand. His fingers slipped between hers. “Come on,” he said. “What’s going on?”
She glared at him.
He nodded. “Mrs. Knight?”
“Mrs. Knight, the thing in our walls, the thing across the hall. All of it.” She waved her hand out toward room 14 and at their loft. Everyone had helped Clive move it away from the swiveling planks and closer to the coffin-lock. He’d added a handful of new diagonals to steady it now that it was free-standing.
He rubbed her fingers with his thumb and eased her arms open. “Still,” he said, “it’s better than what Nate found in his walls.” He gave her a little smile.
“See,” she said, “that’s what I’m worried about. Everyone’s just making jokes about death. There’s all this death here and we’re all pretending it’s not.” A wet spot formed in the corner of her eye and threatened to become a tear. “What if it had been you?”
“Ahhh,” he said.
“You reached
into
it.”
He nodded. “To save our friends.”
“But you could’ve died,” said Debbie. Her grip on his hand tightened and a matching wet spot swelled by her other eye. “You could’ve been sucked in like she was. And if you were gone they’d all just try to hide it. They wouldn’t even care.”
“Hey,” he said. “That’s not true. You know they’d care.”
“They don’t care about Mrs. Knight.”
He reached up and dabbed at the wet spots with his thumb, then wiped them on her nose. Her mouth formed a weak smile. “They do care,” said Clive. He kissed her knuckles and looked her straight in the eyes. “I’ve got to say something, and it’s going to sound mean, but I want you to hear me out. Okay?”
She nodded.
“We didn’t know Mrs. Knight,” he said. “She lived here. She wanted to learn about the place. But she was just a lady who lived down the hall.”
“That doesn’t mean we should—”
He set a gentle finger against her lips. “It doesn’t make it any less sad. But she wasn’t one of our friends and we didn’t know her. None of us did. Most of us just thought she was a nasty old woman with a racist streak. So did you.”
Debbie looked at the table top.
“We’re all upset about what happened to her. We all wish it hadn’t happened. But she was almost a stranger.” He paused. “They wouldn’t be like this if it had been me. They wouldn’t leave you alone like her cats. They’d be here. Nate would be making a play for you because you’re just too damned beautiful.”
She looked up. The wet spots were back. “Language.”
“Sorry.”
“Nate’s with Veek.”
“Well, yeah. No doubt about that after this week.”
She snorted out a laugh. Her free hand came up to wipe her eyes. “I love you, you know that?”