Necromanson (Beta) Chapter 8 (Patreon)

Henry met Athena at the place they had decided on, two blocks away from Zack’s office. Athena emerged from the shadows as Henry waited beside the bus stop, his collar pulled up to partially conceal his face. Henry couldn’t see her face at first, but her distinctive intimidating walk paired with a body that strained the clothes that contained it gave her away.

“Henry,” Athena called out to him as she approached. Henry stood and nodded for her to follow him. The two of them matched their pace, and began walking through the cold night air, their chins tucked into their coats.

“So where are we going?” she asked as they trod down the sidewalk, her steps echoing around them as Henry silently paced along beside her.

“The contractor has an office here,” Henry said, his eyes scanning the streets. The sky was dark, the last light of sunset clinging onto the horizon by its fingernails as they approached Zack’s office. It was a little one room office occupying an out of the way corner of a larger building. With a moment of concentration, Henry slid the bolt back, and crept into the building, gliding in like a shadow.

“You’re too big to be sneaky, it just makes you look more suspicious,” Athena whispered, ducking ahead of him, her shoes in her hand as the glided down the hall silently. Henry sighed and straightened, following behind her as she crept along.

“Having fun?” Henry whispered as he caught up with her at a T in the hallway, she flashed him a quick smile, her teeth bright in the dark building. Silently, she pointed up at the sign pointing to Landon Architecture.

“Is that it?” she asked. Henry nodded, and the two of them took the left turn, climbing up the stairs to the second floor, where Zack’s office waited. the door to his office was just another plain fake wood door in a sea of beige walls, the door had a keypad, but Henry opened it as easily as the front door, exerting force directly on the bolt mechanism.

“Does it have a security system?” Athena asked as Henry ducked his head into the office. Henry glanced around but couldn’t see any indication of an alarm.

“Doesn’t look like it, but that doesn’t mean much,” Henry said, slipping into the room, Athena behind him. “Let’s not spend any more time in here than we have to.” Henry glanced around the room. The office was a simple affair with a single pseudo-wood desk, a single filing cabinet and a plastic plant designed to calm down overstressed office workers. A glint of light caught Henry’s eye, and his heart jumped in his chest for a moment when he made out a bronze statue of a griffon in the opposite corner of the room, bathed in the light of the streetlamps outside.

Athena flicked the light on, and the statue was thrown into sudden sharp clarity. The statue, unlike the rest of the room, held an aura of weight and substance, at odds with the flimsy desk, fake plant, and worn file cabinet. The griffon stood about four feet high at the shoulder, and Henry estimated it to weigh somewhere close to a ton, maybe half that if it was hollow. Henry found his eyes lingering on the statue as Athena stepped past him and began rattling the file cabinets.

“Henry,” she whispered over at him, breaking him out of his thoughts. “It needs a key, do your thing.”

Henry nodded and stepped close to the file cabinet, putting his fingertips on the lock and reaching out with his mind, just like with the strawberries, searching for the single bar of steel between them and what they were looking for. The structure was simpler than a door, and Henry had the cabinet open in moments, revealing row after row of files.

“I think we should talk about code names,” Henry said as he opened the first file. He glanced through it, looking for the Yellow River condominium. “We can’t just have you calling me by my name when we’re on stealth missions.”

Athena chuckled, kneeling and fingering through the bottom drawer of files even as Henry looked through the top one. “Bonnie and Clyde?”

“Nah, they died,” Henry said with a scowl. “Besides, do I look like a Clyde to you?” Athena met Henry’s eyes, the angle revealing her collarbone beneath her finely framed face.

“You don’t want me to answer that,” she said, a smirk on her lips as she went back to the files. Henry scoffed. Clyde was a farmer name. Henry isn’t much better, a nagging voice whispered in his mind.

“Got it!” Athena exclaimed, drawing a file out of the cabinet and laying it down on the desk. “Yellow River condominium.” Athena opened the file, revealing the contract and copies of the building permits. Henry’s eyes swam as he tried to read the dense script.

“That’s weird,” Athena said, her brows furrowing as she scanned through the documents.

“What?” Henry asked.

“These permits were all received on the same day,” Athena said, scanning over the file. “Normally you have to go around from place to place and bend over for the bureaucracy to take turns pounding you in the ass. Normally it takes months. If Zack got all the permits in one day, it’s because he’s got some way of making it happen.”

“Guy’s got a lot of friends,” Henry said, shrugging.

“Sure,” Athena said, flipping through to another page. “But the person or company contracting the building is never mentioned in any of these. As far as I can tell, Zack owns that building.”

“So, they own it using him as a proxy?” Henry asked, his brows furrowing in confusion.

“Maybe. If they had something over him,” Athena said, flipping through to another page. Athena glanced up at Henry “Are you sure your friend is a good guy?”

Henry shrugged. “If I was sure, we probably wouldn’t be breaking in,” he said, glancing behind the desk. “Let’s check his desk and see if we can find anything damning.” Henry knelt down as Athena continued to read and reached out to the cheap drawer built into the desk, sliding it open.

The drawer pulled open, with the slightest tacky feeling, as though he had pulled it away from a magnet. Nestled at the bottom of the drawer was a book. Unthinking, Henry pulled it out into the light to see. Henry stared at the pale leather bound book, his brows furrowing in confusion. Suddenly, like an optical illusion, it came to him.

The book had a face. Scratch that, the book used to be a face. Henry flung the book away from himself reflexively with an unmanly yelp, stiff pages crackling as they fluttered in the wind. Henry gasped in shock as the book landed beside the paw of the griffon, adrenalin screaming through his veins. Henry’s gaze went from the book to the griffin, now much closer than it should have been, even in this tiny office, and he found himself momentarily paralyzed by its proximity.

The statue had slowly crept closer like a stalking cat, gaining five feet on them before Henry had noticed it. Its butt wiggled as it prepared to pounce on them. Athena’s eyes were coming up because of Henry’s panicked yelp as he threw the book, and she screamed as Henry seized her arm and hauled her behind the desk just in time to avoid the grasping claws of the bronze griffon.

The enormously heavy metal bird-lion left furrows across the desk as it scrambled over it, slamming into the filing cabinet with a screech of tortured metal, missing the two of them by a fraction of a second. Henry scrambled around the desk, fingers firmly locked around Athena’s arm, when she shook him off and dived for the book, out in the middle of the room.

The statue regained its bearings, locking onto Athena in the center of the office. As she was coming to her feet, the five-foot bronze statue flew from the corner of the room, batting her across the chest with its dull, rending bronze claws. Athena’s voice cut through the room with a grunt, and Henry watched her fly out from beyond the griffon and impact against the second story window, sending worrisome cracks spiderwebbing across its surface.

Athena’s shirt had been torn open by ragged claw marks to reveal the stiff Kevlar vest beneath. Her hair hung down across her face, and a feral snarl adorned her lips, tinted with a smile as she drew a gun from her waist. Jesus, Henry thought, amazed at Athena’s reaction to danger. Henry stood as the Griffon readied another pounce. It bounded off the floor and propelled itself straight toward Athena, the book still clutched in her arms.

Henry did the only thing he could think of, extending his left arm, and focusing, sending a tether of force to connect to her. Henry waved his hand, focusing on the sideways motion, and Athena slid to the left along the glass, her head jerking to the side as the force pulled her violently. The griffon erupted through the glass with no more resistance than the surface tension of a still lake.

The griffon tried to arrest its fall, peeling paint and steel away from the frame of the window, but it shot through all the same. It flapped its bronze wings in vain as it tumbled to the ground, the aerodynamic improbability of its shape matched by its terrible mass. Henry made it to the window in time to see the statue make contact with the pavement below. A crunch, and the griffon made a four foot pothole, sunk six inches into the pavement below.

A distant part of Henry’s mind idly calculated out the weight compared to the damage it had done to the road as he watched for signs of movement. “About twelve hundred pounds,” Henry muttered, as the thing remained still, whatever had given it the semblance of life apparently unable to survive the fall. “You okay?” Henry turned back to Athena to find her folding the file up and tucking it beneath her arm, paired with the book.

“Yeah,” Athena said, trotting for the door. “We gotta get the hell outta here, though.” Henry glanced one more time at the motionless bronze statue embedded in the pavement below them and nodded, hustling to catch up.

“Let’s go to the library, we can find out where this guy lives and pay him a visit,” Athena said, hoisting the documents under her arm with a shrug.

They ran out of the building, skirted around the motionless griffon, and trotted away until they had separated themselves from the situation, slowing to a casual walk as they heard sirens in the distance. “Why’d you go for the book?” Henry asked, glancing over at Athena.

“Seemed like a good idea at the time,” Athena replied with a shrug.

Henry shook his head. “I’m too jaded to lecture you about valuing your life,” Henry said, taking a deep breath. “But at least think about how I would feel if you got killed. I mean, where am I gonna find eye candy as fine as you that gets off on danger?”

Athena glanced at him askance, a brow raised. “Does that line ever work?” a smirk tugging at the corners of her mouth.

Henry pursed his lips in thought, his eye glancing up as he searched through his memories. After a moment, he replied with a short. “Not really.” Henry looked at Athena, feeling the powerful force around her, pulling him in. “It’s not a problem with the line, though. What I’m really looking for is someone it’d work on, not a line that works on anyone.”

“I see,” Athena said. “Library is five blocks that way.” She said, tucking her chin in against the cold night air, hiding her blush.

The two of them made it to the library without incident, shaking off the cold that seemed to cling to their coats as they came in from outside. Athena tossed her coat over the chair and sat down in front of the computer with the Yellow River file in front of her. Athena got a few strange looks on account of her torn shirt, but the Kevlar beneath it and the gun at her waist dissuaded further investigation.

Henry took the book aside and opened it gingerly, watching the mummified face turn away from him as he opened the cover. The paper itself was college ruled on the front and graph paper on the back, with modern steel three ring binder construction.

“Huh, I was half expecting skin pages too,” Henry said, flipping back to the cover and inspecting it. There was nothing to inform him one way or the other whether the mummified face on the cover was real or not. Judging by the statue that came to life and tried to kill them when he opened the drawer, Henry was willing to give the book the benefit of the doubt.

Henry turned back to the pages, and found painstaking notes written in Latin on one side, with finely detailed graphs on the other. While the Latin escaped Henry, after he flipped through a few pages, a particular graph caught his eye. It was the design he had been told to build into the floor at any cost, with notes and arrows describing the flow through the pattern. Flipping through more pages, Henry found more and more things he vaguely recalled being assigned to other members of the team. One engineer had been told he couldn’t put steel through specific spots, to allow the flow of energy to pass through unhindered, seriously hindering the building’s structural integrity, until he had found a workaround.

Henry looked at each of the patterns, assembling them in his mind, likening it to a roach motel, or fish trap, where spirits and energy could come in, but not back out, and at some critical point, it would bind to whoever filled a set of conditions. Henry found himself very desperately needing a Latin to English dictionary.

Henry tucked the book under his arm and walked over to the desk, getting the attention of the librarian, who greeted him with studied politeness. “how may I help you,” she said with a nod.

“A friend of mine in college thought it would be funny to take all of the notes in class in Latin,” Henry said, placing the book down in front of her before opening it to reveal the college ruled paper covered in finely scrawled notes. “Say’s it’ll help me with my anthropology studies. Anyway, I’m gonna need a latin to English dictionary.”

The librarian’s face lit up when she saw the cover. “He’s got a Necronomicon replica binder? Where’d he get it?” she said, leaning closer to inspect the book.

“Pretty sure he made it himself, guy thinks he’s funny.” Henry said, picking the book up to prevent the woman from touching the binding. “So, where can I find the dictionary?” he asked.

She straightened, and shook herself. “Oh, just over there,” she said, pointing. “All the dictionaries are at the beginning of that aisle, English translation dictionaries should be at the bottom row.”

“Thanks,” Henry said, turning and walking swiftly away. She waved disinterestedly, returning to her work as he left. Henry searched the shelves and finally found the book he was looking for, returning to his place across the room from Athena, facing the door.

The librarian caught his attention as he walked past. “We’ll be closing in half an hour, will you be needing to take the book home?” Henry glanced down at the books in his arms and nodded. After a few minutes, Henry found himself signed up for a library card.

Henry sat down and began translating the notebook, writing the translation in tiny script above the words themselves. After a few minutes of flipping back and forth between the pages, hunting for words, he leaned back, his eyes swimming, feeling like he was taking a test he didn’t study the vocabulary for. Henry sighed and closed both books, eyeing the clock, which said they only had ten minutes left until the library booted them.

Henry walked over and sat down beside Athena. “Whatcha got?” he asked, leaning over to look at her screen. Athena scrolled through Gmail, her eyes flickering as she skimmed the titles of her emails.

“Really?” Henry asked, a brow quirked.

“Shut up,” she said, putting a finger to the screen. “Look at this one.” Henry’s eyes had glazed over the email in question, dismissing it as spam because of its attention grabbing all-caps title.

ATHENA YOU STEPPED IN IT THIS TIME.

Athena and Henry shared a glance. “Who’s that from?” Henry asked.

“An enemy of mine, actually,” Athena said with a frown. “Real douchebag.” Athena scrolled through the list of emails. “Look, these are the emails from my friends since I saved your ass,” Henry grumbled silently, but kept listening. “Every single one is a little wrong.”

“This one here,” Athena said, pointing at a previously read one. “This one was from a friend of mine, the tone of the email is still hers, but the only problem is that she’s kind of a coward. If something like me breaking a suspect out of jail happened, she would distance herself from me, not offer support.”

“You think someone else is writing their emails?” Henry asked. Athena nodded. “Open the asshole’s email.” He said, his eyes tracing it as they scrolled down. Athena clicked her teeth and frowned, scrolling back up.

“Probably just making fun of me for eloping with a serial killer,” Athena said, grimacing.

“Just open it,” Henry sighed.

Athena clicked on the email from her mortal enemy with a distasteful expression, revealing a stunning amount of belittling comments and invectives mixed in with useful information.

Athena, You really know how to pick ‘em don’t you? For about one day after your fucking jailbreak stunt I was walking on clouds, knowing that I was never going to have to be in the same room as you again, I was even looking forward to seeing you on the other side of the stand, myself.

But then the wrath of god descended on the office. Fed looking guys came and interrogated everyone, Mr. O. crawled so far up everyone’s ass we were all walking funny.

That didn’t ruffle my feathers too bad, but then Lin came to work different the day after, then Jan and Greg. Someone messed with their heads. I was getting tired of them wheedling about you, ‘when is Athena getting back, I miss her’, etc. I didn’t see what the big deal was, beyond the T&A you bring to work every day, so I threw a rubber ball out of sight and shouted “Look, it’s Athena!” as it bounced around in the other room.

Greg ripped a leg off of a fucking chair! All three of them turned red, like they’d been turned down for a prom date, improvised weapons, and rushed into the other room. A minute later they walked back in, sat down and got back to work like that was fucking normal!

Somebody is out there trying to kill the shit out of you, and as badly as we got along, I don’t think you deserve that. Maybe slapped around a little, but not killed by a friend under some kind of mind control.

“Wow, this guy is an asshole,” Henry said, breaking away from the email to meet Athena’s eyes. She nodded, rolling her eyes.

The only reason they didn’t fuck with my head, I assume, is because we hate each other. Can’t be sure though, I felt like I woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, and I actually feel like helping you out, which is new. If you get this email, delete it, and don’t bother responding, I made a throwaway.

I’m going to act like nothing is wrong at the office. If I do something out of the ordinary like running away from this horrorshow, I’m afraid they’d get me too. Gregbot, Linbot, and Janbot all act like normal as long as you don’t flip their kill switch, so I’ll be fine, just don’t ever show your face in front of any of us again, and I think life can get back to normal.

Oh, btw, I found something that can help identify your problem: Looks like I’ll have to kill someone to get in those pants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybristophilia

Athena deleted the letter, holding a hand to her temple and sighing. “I called it. God, for every good thing that man does, he inflicts another three unbearable irritations on the world. I just want to beat the stupid out of him.”

“You don’t work there anymore, right?” Henry said with a shrug. “Nothing stopping you now.”

Athena tapped a finger on her lips thoughtfully. “Maybe when this is over, If we’re still breathing.”

“You get what we needed on Zack?” Henry asked, changing the subject.

“Yeah,” she said, opening the file folder to reveal an address written in the blank space around the official document. On the back, a little hand drawn map showed the streets they would need to follow to get there.

“There were a bunch of shady properties associated with him, but this one is the most innocuous, and therefore the most likely to be where he rests his head,” Athena said. she flipped to another page, showing a full list of Landon properties, and short descriptions scrawled in tight, neat handwriting. “How did you do?” She glanced at the face-book beside Henry.

“So-so,” Henry said, waggling his hand in the air. “It’s obviously the recipe for how to build a soul-sucking device, incorporated into a building on a massive scale, but any more than that, I have no idea. The fucking book makes reference to things like The Drenelli Effect, and Murphy’s law.”

Henry saw Athena’s raised eyebrow, and shook his head. “No, not the one you’re thinking of,” he said. “the whole thing is presupposed on formulas, effects and laws that I had no idea existed. It’s like taking a trigonometry test without knowing any vocab.”

The two of them packed up, throwing their coats on again and heading out, throwing a wave to the librarian, who raised a hand as they left, busy with cleaning for the night. Henry and Athena threw their collars up, tucking their chins in against the cold, and hiding their faces as they stepped out onto the street.