“Rock, Paper, Scissors?” I said.
“Now, why would I do that?” Connor asked. “I already don’t have to go down. What’s in it for me?”
“If I win,” I said, “you go down there. If I lose, I’ll do all your case paperwork for you for two weeks.”
Connor stood there, thinking about it. He didn’t look quite convinced. My partner knew he had the upper hand.
“Gentlemen,” the Inspectre interrupted. “Sometime today . . .”
I had to close the deal. “I’ll even file everything for you.”
Connor’s face lit up. “Deal,” he said. “One throw, on three. One, two, three!”
I threw out my right hand, flat as could be. I looked at Connor’s hand, two fingers held apart in a V formation.
“Scissors,” I said. “Son of a bitch.”
“Sorry, kid,” Connor said. He clicked his fingers against my hand like he was actually cutting it.
I looked down into the hole before pulling out my flashlight. “I thought for sure you were going to throw rock.”
“Not when I knew you were going to throw down paper,” he said.
“You got lucky,” I said. “You didn’t know I was going to throw paper.”
“I did too,” he said. “You are such a paper. You’re such a paper it hurts.”
I was going to ask what Connor even meant by that, but seeing the look on the Inspectre’s face shut me down. Instead, I turned my flashlight on the opening itself. An iron-rung ladder was built into the side of a stone chimney leading down to the sound of churning water far below. Without another word, I lowered myself down to the floor, slid over the edge of the trapdoor, and grabbed onto the top rung. Once I was certain I had a good grip and wasn’t about to fall to my death, I began my descent, the tiny flashlight gripped in my right palm leaving my fingers free to hold on to the rungs.
“If at any moment you feel compelled to lower a basket with lotion in it,” I said, making my way down the wet ladder set in the stone, “feel compelled to also drop dead.”
“Don’t make me get the hose, kid,” Connor said and waved at me.
The Inspectre shushed him, and I turned my attention back to my descent. The well was deeper than I had imagined, but soon enough I got to the bottom of the ladder where it met the water. It rolled and splashed up the sides of the shaft, leaving me to think it must lead out to the river surrounding the island we were on.
“Anything, my boy?” the Inspectre called down.
I snaked my arm through one of the rungs and used my now-free hand to move the light around. The walls were covered with a mix of dark green slime, white foam, blood, and bits of decaying organic material I feared was human flesh.
“This isn’t a well,” I said. “I think it’s a feeding pit.”
“Feeding pit?” the Inspectre called out, puzzlement in his voice. “For what?”
“I don’t know,” I said, passing my light over the churning water. “Maybe that creepy green woman. Maybe Mason Redfield unearthed her from a tomb and he was taking care of her, like a twisted pet of some kind, and she eventually turned on him.” My light caught something dark and solid bobbing in the churn of tiny waves. “Hold on a second. I see something.”
I stuck my legs through part of the ladder, and stretched myself out over the water, reaching out. My only thought was, Please don’t let it be a head. My fingers caught a bit of it for a second before it bobbed away. It was cloth, but it had some thickness to it. I leaned out a little farther and grabbed again, this time finding purchase. The electric shock of my psychometry flashed on the bag and I was whisked away into the past before I could control it or stop it from happening. The vision was dark with the sound of water all around. I couldn’t see, but I was sure I was at the bottom of the pit. I pressed my mind around to figure out who I was, and in a heartbeat I knew. George, the blondhaired Hispanic punk kid who palled around with the other disciples of Mason Redfield. His mind was a confused mix, overrun by pain from having been bled out, then tossed down here. Weak and enfeebled, he struggled to get hold of the ladder but his body had not the strength. He slipped below the surface of the water as something cold and slimy wrapped around his body, crushing in. He panicked at the sensation and I did, too, forcing my mind’s eye to pull itself back out of the vision.
Thankfully, my one arm was still locked in the ladder and I gasped a shocked breath from the surprise of the vision. My arm ached as I pulled the bag over to me, thankful that the water still bore much of the weight of the floating object until I could get a better grip. I fished it out of the water. George’s messenger bag, the same kind I used.
I threw its strap over my shoulder and started back up the ladder. There was a bit of weight to it, making my climb a little more strained than I would have preferred, and when I reached the top of the ladder, it took both Connor and the Inspectre to hoist me up before closing the trapdoor back over the pit.
I pulled off the bag and laid it down on an empty desk off to my left along the wall. The bag was decorated with an assortment of stitched-on band names and dozens of tiny safety pins everywhere.
“What do we have here?” the Inspectre said, coming over to it.
“It was at the bottom of the well,” I said. “It belonged to that blond kid George, one of Mason’s students. The professor brought him here against his will. He threw him down into the pit after he got what he needed. Blood. But that’s not all.”
“What else?” the Inspectre asked.
“There was something down there with him,” I said. “Couldn’t see anything. It was too dark down there, but it was like a big fish or a snake. It. . . it finished him off.”
Connor undid the short tongue holding the bag closed and flipped the flap open. Using caution, he reached in the bag and started pulled out its contents.
“Books,” he said, laying them down one by one.
The Inspectre spun them so he could read them, adjusting his glasses. “Introduction to Modern Cinema, Principles of Editing . . . The Monster Maker’s Handbook.”
Connor ran his hand over a tear in the outer material of the bag. Something solid and shiny poked through the spot. Connor stuck his hand in the hole and pushed the object out. Its metallic case was crushed in the middle, but there was no mistaking the object. “One laptop,” he said. “Only partially damaged.”
“It must have gotten banged up on the fall,” the Inspectre said.
“No,” I said, “not banged up. Crushed.”
“Crushed?”
“By whatever killed George down there,” I said.
“We need to be talking to living people on this one if we’re going to figure this out,” Connor said. “Think about what we know. The professor was working on a film. What does it take to make a movie?”
The Inspectre’s face lit up. “It takes a village,” he said.
“Exactly,” Connor said. “It takes cast and crew. Lighting, sound, editors . . .”
“And Professor Mason Redfield certainly had some dedicated students out there,” I said. “Wasn’t he expecting them when he was reborn?”
I started gathering up the contents of the bag, readying them to take back to the Lovecraft Café. The Inspectre looked angry.
“Then it’s time to put the screws to the professor’s living students,” he said. “It’s time to stop wasting our resources and get some real answers. We need to figure out why Mason Redfield did all this and what his plans are.”
“We’ll find out,” Connor said, “even if we have to beat it out of them.”
I reached for the bat at my side, patting it in its holster. “Have bat, will travel.”
23
Connor, the Inspectre, and I stopped back at the Department long enough to visit Allorah Daniels. We found the youngest Enchancellor back in her office-slash-lab, where I was surprised to also find Jane with her. I walked over to the two of them with the tattered shoulder bag held up in my right hand. Jane grabbed for it like a kid hungry for presents on Christmas morning.