Modern Rituals (11 page)

“What are you doing? How can you be so…nonchalant?” James said, crinkling his nose.
 

“Oh hush—it’s just a corpse. It might have something useful on it,” Olivia said.
 

“Have fun with that,” James said and crawled to where they had fallen.

He prodded the wall and ceiling, finding no apparent seam or indentation, as if the chute they’d fallen through had magically sealed itself.
 

He swept the floor with his hands, stirring up a cloud of dust that yielded no information. He widened the sweep until his forearm struck an object: the statue. He picked it up—it felt warm. A slight tingle ran through his fingers as he placed it in his pocket.
 

Odd.

His queries left little to investigate, so James started tapping on the walls, moving along the room’s edge.
 

“James, I found another card.”

“Nice! Anything else?”
 

He resumed his fruitless journey around the room.

“Well, I think this was a man, though it’s difficult to say. Both his femurs were shattered. I doubt he could move very far.”
 

“Lovely.”

He quickened his knocks, performing his best woodpecker imitation.
Tap. Tap. Tap.

“What are you doing?” Olivia said.

“Trying to find a way out of here. Whatever we fell through is sealed shut.”

“Let me help, then.”

Olivia crawled to the wall opposite James and reproduced his effort.
Tap. Tap. Tap.

They examined both sides of the room until they found themselves almost arm to arm. He looked into her wide eyes—she must have been as anxious as he was to find an exit. Their hands nearly collided as James’ fist knocked against the wall again. This time, instead of the familiar, thick
thud
, there came a hollow
thock
.
 

“What do we have here?” James said.

He knocked again.

An empty echo indicated an open space behind the wall.

They kept tapping, listening like bats, forming in their mind’s eye how large the extent of this new space might be.

“This is wide! It sounds thin… I bet I can kick through—” James said.

Before he could position himself, Olivia’s foot kicked through the wall with a strength that surprised and intimidated him.
 

This girl—yikes…

She removed her foot and tore away chunks of drywall with her hands. James joined her, and before long, they’d made an opening large enough to squeeze through. James peered into the opening.

“What the hell?” he said. A metal duct ended in a dead end ten or so feet from them. “Are you seeing this?”
 

Olivia nodded, her face lit by a soft, violet glow.

The rectangular passage reminded James of an air conditioning conduit. This, however, is where the similarity ended. Written in ultraviolet, glowing ink, hundreds of scrawls and symbols covered the duct’s interior. Among them:

BEWARE THE TRICKSTER

KEEP CLOSE THE MATERNAL

THE COUNTERFEIT SURROUNDS

THREE ARE NOW UNITED

EVERYWHERE THEY SEE

SHE LURKS

“This looks like the writings of a mad man,” Olivia said.

“I was thinking the same. I wonder if it was our dead friend over there.”

“I doubt he could have written all of this in his condition. Perhaps this was sealed after he died?”

“Not sure. Regardless, it’s creepy as hell. Let’s get a move on.”

James crawled into the cryptic passage, which permitted ample clearance, and as he proceeded, he felt something that betrayed common sense: a fleeting hope. While his situation was dire, a calm within the storm, a stalwart resolve concentrated deep in his chest that urged him to help not only himself, but those he now found himself with.
 

Olivia crawled after him, keeping close.

“Hey now, try not to stare too much,” James said.

“James, shut up.”

That was that.

They’d ventured halfway down the conduit, metal creaking under their weight, when the passage began to sway. The rocking cadence increased. James heard Olivia gasp and he torqued his upper body to look back at her, and in doing so, disrupted the pendulum-like swing, which settled with an unnerving groan.
 

As he watched, an explosive rattle beneath Olivia opened wide a hole that sucked her into an inky void. She vanished.
 

“Olivia!”
 

A white-knuckled hand gripped the edge. He reached down to grab Olivia’s forearm, sprawling his legs to anchor himself. The vantage into the bottomless pit overwhelmed him with vertigo.

It did not end.

Olivia swung silent, awestruck—her gaze directed downward.

“I’ve got you!” James said.

She slowly drew her eyes up toward James. They held neither fear nor excitement—only an unfocused dullness.

James struggled to pull her up.

“Your other hand,” James said. “Give it to me!”
 

Olivia was a limp, swinging thing.

“Olivia!”

Self-preservation registered in her vacant eyes, and she let out a guttural howl then threw her free hand up, snapping it onto James’ arm.

He pulled hard, and after several protracted seconds, Olivia sat inside the conduit, chest heaving.
 

“There…there’s no bottom…” Olivia said.

“What the hell is this place?”

James bent over Olivia to steal another look into the abyss. A faint light—it looked like miles below—twinkled inside a massive cavern. Perhaps his senses betrayed him, but a presence—or rather, an energy—emanated from the chasm.
 

Olivia took his hand.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Don’t mention it. You would have done the same, right?” James said with a mild chuckle.

“Let’s get out of here before this falls apart,” she said.

Olivia led, and they synchronized their movements so as to not disturb the conduit. They reached a dead end and found that the path continued above them in an adjacent duct, forcing them into the unknown.

9

“You all are telling me that we have absolutely no signal in the underground compartment of Shrine Room One?” Theo said.

“No sir,” a young officer seated near Susan said. “All feeds are offline.”
 

“You and I both know. No, all of us—everyone in this entire facility knows that the chances of us losing a feed are nearly nil.
 

“Can anyone explain this—wait. Forget it, don’t explain it. Each camera costs more than a respectably sized
yacht,
which must mean either we have the worst luck known to humankind, or someone tampered with the cameras. Pull the logs for the last maintenance check!”

“Already on it,” Susan said.

“Are you Susan? Are you—as you say—
already on it
?” Theo said, sniffed and wiped away a wet warmth from his nose.
 

Susan’s shoulders slumped.
 

“Maintenance logs are clear. Facility 7’s cleaning routine went as planned. All checks were registered by supervising officials. Checking on Shrine Room One… Nothing unusual, standard cleanup. Cameras were in working order at the start of the ritual.”

“Scan the visual logs for Shrine Room One.”

Susan placed the fast-forwarded video on HULK and scrubbed through it until the feed ended. The logs showed none other than the seven participants visiting the room.

“Well this is just fucking unbelievable. I don’t buy it—something’s up,” Theo said.

“Theo, I can’t ignore this,” a voice beside him said.

Theo winced as General Holmes’ words shot through his ears and into a shoulder spasm.

General Holmes continued. “This makes me anxious. Super-814N’s irregular attack pattern and now a broken camera feed. I’m authorizing a security sweep of all Magnus employees related to this project dating back six months. All members of Una Corda are now under my radar… Theo, that includes you.”

I’ve got nothing to hide, you arrogant nimwit.

“Understood, sir,” Theo said.

“Expect intermittent, random interviews, as well as deep personnel interrogations. We’re going to know how and when you wiped your asses while inside these walls.”

Did they install those ass-wiping sensors in the company toilet paper yet?
 

Theo nodded, cracking his signature
fuck you
smile and then thought on Trevor, who had been dispatched for specter cleanup.

“General, what is Trevor’s status?” Theo said.
 

“He’s with Clayton, reviewing the spectral cleanup procedure. He should arrive at Facility 7 within the quarter hour,” Holmes said.
 

Good.

Trevor worked miracles—he’d get the spectral cleanup job done. Then Theo would have one less worry—one less variable to consider. This ritual showed signs of failure—the worst Una Corda had seen in thirty-seven years. It had latched onto an uncomfortable 91.37% success rate and didn’t have any intention of letting go. A drastic turn needed to take place. Theo’s subconscious churned through scenario upon scenario.
 

Then an epiphany struck him square in the cerebellum.
 

“Susan, get Trevor on the line.”

She did.

Theo and Trevor spoke briefly—Theo whispered and avoided the general’s eyes, but Holmes’ arrow gaze fell upon him. Before he could interrupt, Theo ended the conversation and faced the front of the room as if nothing had happened.

“I hope all is in order?” Holmes said.

“All is well, General,” Theo said.

As the doors closed behind General Holmes, Theo let out a tense breath. Game on.

10

Trevor leaned his shoulder well into Clayton’s comfort zone, nearly atop Clayton’s desk, and awaited an answer.

“We ready?” Trevor said.
 

Rigid silence.

He tapped his fingers and played with Clayton’s fancy staple-less stapler.
 

“You know, I never could figure these things out. I just take two pieces of paper like this,” he reached for a couple Post-It notes, “and slide them through the slot. Voilá! Together forever, no staple. Amazing.”

A bead of sweat glistened on Clayton’s brow, traversing furrowed creases in his forehead’s contours. His eyes bulged, burrowing into the console before him. The vessels near his nose and cheekbones clogged with blood sent from the straining jugulars bursting on his neck. Magnus employees referred to this expression as the
Clayton Glower
.
 

On Clayton’s first day of work, a jokester had asked him to find the ID for creature SKF-412—a silly trick since that happened to
be
the ID. Clayton, unable to detect sarcasm, eager to bolster his reputation, offered to help and pursued the assignment with wild abandon. Two days later, he provided a seventy-two page document detailing the creature (a Class 4 Gremlin) and actually went and met with SKF-412 to run a full psychiatric profile. Prior to this document, no one knew that Class 4 Gremlins could communicate, nor that they had highly reactive psychic properties, and if provoked, could foretell distant, future events. This little incident eventually led to the creation of an entirely new department dedicated to Gremlin research and outreach. And all the while, any time someone attempted to interrupt him during his Gremlin tirade, he would just
glower
at them as if they were a piece of shit on the bottom of his shoe. Thus, the
Clayton Glower
was born.

And Trevor loved it.

“Clayton…how’d the specters get in anyway?” he said.

Clayton broke eye contact from the screen and turned his glower on Trevor. A hair or two on the back of Trevor’s neck made feeble efforts to tremble in fear, or perhaps cautious curiosity—not a small reaction given Trevor’s stalwart resolve.

“Whoa there, Clayton, I was just asking how some specters could get into Facility 7, given your track record. There’s no blame to pass around. You keep all the gobbly ghouls in check! I don’t envy you,” Trevor said.
 

He caught a glimpse of the containment doors behind Clayton’s desk. There existed every manner of horrifying monster beyond that thin threshold. That, and an isolation hallway nearly a mile long.
 

Clayton inhaled, swelling his chest, froze, then permitted the air to escape through his nostrils.

“That’s just it, Trevor—I haven’t the slightest idea. I recently installed an optimized spectral fence in F7’s perimeter security system. It quite literally reduces the chance of this level of infestation to less than a tenth of a percent. That, coupled with no leaks from our containment facility, should make
any
unauthorized specter presence impossible,
anywhere.
It’s as if they materialized from within Facility 7.

“I want you to be especially careful with the Spectral Securer—I’m not quite sure what we’re dealing with. Their readings appear within presumed standards, but their origin is far outside assessable risk.”

Trevor smiled and said, “They’re dirty little things and love your vacuum. I’m sure they will dive at the chance of getting sucked off.”

Clayton’s focus changed to his monitor before Trevor’s comment had a chance to bypass Clayton’s humor filters. He made a series of gentle taps on the screen and in an almost cartoonish arc, swung his index finger down, engaging the monitor with a satisfying thud. Behind him a door swung open adjacent to the containment facility.

“Come with me—it’s time to suit up,” Clayton said.

“I love suit and tie occasions.”

Clayton stepped away from his standing desk and checked various parts of his maintenance uniform, from the crisp, long-sleeved cuffs to the single piece of pocketed coverall that swaddled his dress shirt and slacks. He exhibited an executive janitorial quality, befitting, Trevor supposed, Clayton’s unusual position as Chief Paranormal Officer.
 

Trevor followed Clayton into a lengthy, narrow storage room lined with shelved contraptions and lockers and file cabinets. Clayton stopped before a pod unit about his height that held an eye-level viewing window. Inside, lit by a nauseating yellow light, a suit stared back at them. Its mask suggested it had been designed for hazmat workers. Sewn throughout the arms and legs, flexible, mechanical tubes—inlaid with knobs, buttons and various control devices—wound like an infectious disease.