Dead Waters (21 page)

“Thank God you don’t want to watch it here,” Jane said, nervous. She wrapped her arms around herself.

“Not here, no,” Connor confirmed. “I don’t want to hang out here any longer than we have to, especially if more of those river-bottom zombies come knocking. The professor was passionate about film. Let’s take it out of here and see where his passions really lay.”

21

The boat made it back to the docks over by Chelsea Piers even though I thought the engine and motor might have been clogged with aqua-zombie bits from earlier. Cleaning the guts and ichor off it would have to wait. After tying off, the three of us headed back and reported to the Inspectre about Mason’s secret film-production lighthouse. When we showed him the film canister, he insisted on kicking all the norms out of the Lovecraft’s theater as the credits on
The Picture of Dorian Gray
rolled.

A fair number of agents from a variety of divisions gathered in the theater, along with most of Other Division and some faces I recognized from some of my Fraternal Order of Goodness training sessions. The Inspectre watched the theater fill up before looking down at the film reel in his hands. Jane, looking a little more tired now that we were off the water, collapsed into one of the theater seats in the middle of a row halfway back.

“I’ll take care of loading the film,” the Inspectre said, lifting up the canister. “See to the girl.”

I nodded. “You know how to run the projector?” I asked him as I sat down next to her.

“Can’t be that hard, can it?” he scoffed. “I’ve solved the riddle of the cube at Astor Place, fought the Geissman Guard. . .”

“You also got lost in the Black Stacks at Tome, Sweet Tome for half an hour,” Connor reminded him.

The Inspectre’s face fell and he blushed. “Well, yes, you have me there, my dear boy.” He tried to shake off the sudden deflation from Connor’s words. “I still maintain that those occult books kept changing the layout back in the Black Stacks . . .”

“It’s possible,” I offered. “I mean, if a homicidal bookcase can come charging after me, surely the rest of them can move around.”

“Yes,” the Inspectre said, getting lost in thought. “Perhaps.” He wrapped his arms around the bulk of the film canister and walked it up the aisle toward the door leading up to the projection booth.

Connor turned to look at Jane. “She okay, kid?”

I took Jane’s hand in mine and squeezed it. There was little response at first, but then she squeezed back, her grip strong.

She nodded. “I’m fine,” she said, her voice weak. “I just need a minute to sit and catch my breath. Everything out on the water took the wind out of me.”

Connor backed down the aisle. “I’m going to sit a couple rows in front of you two lovebirds,” he said. “Give you a little breathing room.”

Connor settled down into the middle of the row three ahead of us. I tripped my way down ours as the credits wrapped up on
The Picture of Dorian Gray
.

Despite a small volley of swearing during the changeover of the films, the Inspectre managed to get the professor’s film up and running within a few minutes. Mason Redfield’s
The Gates of Hell: Water’s End
came up on the screen. The footage was documentary-style, covering the long history of the location and the years of unfortunate incidents that plagued those waters. Hundreds of ships had sunk there over the years, supposedly due to treacherous currents and rock formations that took seventy years of blasting and removal to finally clear. Professor Redfield even had a touch of the horror element in its approach, given the macabre subject matter, lending the film an eerie quality that transcended most documentaries. I found myself actually enjoying it, if enjoyment could be taken in such dark subject matter. Human suffering was always fascinating, no matter what form it came in.

The film cut abruptly to a different-looking style all together. Apparently, the professor was a better film teacher than he was an editor because he had spliced in an entire section of the wrong footage. The image on the screen looked straight out of a B-grade horror flick showing a thick, billowing fog on the edge of a graveyard at night. It was so poorly done that even the gravestones looked like they might blow away if a weak wind hit during the filming. The low, guttural sound of zombies off in the darkness came over the sound system.

“How does this tie in?” Jane asked, almost as confused as I was.

“Bad splice,” I said. “Guess the professor was a better teacher than doer.”

“I don’t think so, kid,” Connor said, turning his head back to us. “Something about this seems. . .
deliberate
.”

“How?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “Just a feeling.” He looked up to the booth over our heads and called out, “Inspectre?”

The light from the projector flickered, almost going out as the film skipped on the screen. A churning din of metal and an unhealthy grind of the film equipment filled the theater as the light from the glow off the screen began to strobe erratically.

“That doesn’t sound
or
look good,” Jane said, finally perking up once more. “If we had paid to see this, I’d definitely want my money back.”

“What the hell is going on?” I asked.

Connor stood. “I don’t know,” he said, “but I mean to find out.” He looked up at the projection booth. “Inspectre, shut it down!”

“I’m trying, blast it!” the Inspectre called out.

“Try harder,” Connor shouted.

A loud commotion came from the tiny open panel at the back of the theater, followed by a string of profanity that I didn’t know the Inspectre had in him. “It’s no use,” he said. “I can’t kill the power to the machine. It won’t stop running, damn it all!”

Thick smoke filled the air. At first I thought it must be coming from the machine up in the projection booth, but then I realized it wasn’t from there. In fact, it wasn’t smoke at all.

It was fog, and it was coming out of the movie screen. Jane grabbed onto my arm, squeezing.

“Connor!” I shouted, pointing down in front. “Look!”

“I see it, kid,” he said, keeping his calm. “Don’t get all freaked-out marveling at it. Just be prepared.”

“Prepared for what?” I asked, but I was already pulling out my bat. I had a pretty good idea forming in my head. If the fog from the movie could pour out into our world, I wondered what else could come through.

All three of us stood transfixed by what was happening on the screen. There was little we could do but watch as the movie flashed through several scenes in rapid sequence. Clips from a whole host of B-grade zombie flicks came up one after another. With each new one, creatures from each remained on the screen, pressing against it. Like swimmers coming to the surface, the figures pushed through the two-dimensional world and into ours.

“Did they—?” Jane started, but I cut her off.

“Yep,” I said and started off down our row to the aisle.

As the floor in front of the screen filled with cinematically manifested undead that kept pouring off the screen, the film changed images once again, this time coming to one steady setting. This time the film had more of an amateur home-video quality.

A field of green grass stretched along a horizon against a backdrop of cloudless blue sky. A lone figure came into the frame—young, dashing, and one that I had seen before thanks to my psychometry. Mason Redfield looked a lot better this way than when I had originally met him—old, dead, and filled with water.

He turned to the screen as if noticing it, and walked toward us in the type of tweed suit he had fancied in his youth. Like all the rest of the creatures manifesting in the theater, he pushed at the screen, but met more resistance from it than the others had. Mason reeled back from it, shocked, but I could tell from the expression of determination on his face that he wasn’t even close to giving up. He ran forward, slamming between film and reality like that old video for “Take on Me.” Sparks flew from the screen, raining down onto the assembled zombie army below. Several agents in the theater snapped into action and charged the horde down by the screen, but Connor, Jane, and I kept watching Mason Redfield up above.

Movement off to my left caught my eye and I looked over. Inspectre Quimbley had joined us, out of breath from running down from the projection booth. His eyes were also transfixed on the screen.

“Is that
the
Mason Redfield?” I asked him.

“Back from the grave, I believe,” the Inspectre said. “Trying to return to his youth, from the looks of it.”

The Inspectre’s old friend leapt at the screen, the screen erupting in sound and fury with a prismatic spray of color. The rejuvenated professor passed through it and landed along the tops of the front row of seats, very much alive and looking even younger than me. “Protect me, my beautiful monsters,” he shouted. “At all costs.” At his command, the aggression among the zombies rose, especially those who fell into a close, protective ring around the reborn professor.

The Inspectre continued down the aisle toward him. “Mason!”

Redfield was too busy staring at his own limbs to notice the Inspectre. He stood there balanced on top of the seats, flexing his arms and fingers around like they were unfamiliar to him. Eventually, he took notice of the Inspectre advancing on him and did a double take.

“Argyle?” he said with an astonished smile. “Is that you?”

“Yes, Mason.”

The Inspectre’s old partner’s eyes widened. “You’re so. . .
old
. . .”

“I think the salient point,” the Inspectre said, “is the fact that you’re so young.”

Mason Redfield looked around. “Where are we? Where are my students? This isn’t where I was supposed to be.”

“We beat them to it, I guess,” I said.

“They were supposed to retrieve the film,” he said, angry, but then he gave a dark laugh. “Students can be so unreliable.”

“What have you done, Mason?” the Inspectre asked. “What dark bargain have you struck . . . and
why
?”

Mason turned his attention back to the Inspectre. “Why?” Mason said, scoffing at him. “Have you looked in the mirror lately? Tell me, which way would you rather be? A doddering old film professor or a man in his prime? I had to die, to be reborn.”

“What you are, what you have become, is
unnatural
,” the Inspectre said, “and in the name of the Fraternal Order of Goodness, I—”

“The Order?” he said, laughing. “Are you telling me that there are still living members out there, other than you?”

“The Order will still be here long after you’re gone, Mason, trust me.” The Inspectre lunged for Mason on top of the seats, but the now-young professor batted him away with an awkward swipe of his arm. Clumsy as it was, it was enough to knock the Inspectre over onto one of the theater seats. He grunted as he went down.

“Gone?” Mason said, parroting the Inspectre’s British accent. “Why, yes. . . I do believe it is time I was going.” At his gestures, the circle of zombies around him pressed out into the crowd.

I came out of the row and stepped down the aisle, Jane at my heels. I pulled out my bat, extended it, and slapped it down into my hand. “You’re not going anywhere,” I said.

“Oh, no?” Mason said, looking amused. “I beg to differ.” He gestured again at his assembled army, which was already squaring off against the rest of the agents. “Attack!”

“Good,” I said, charging him. “That’s what I was hoping you were going to say.”

I had seen Mason Redfield’s fighting techniques before, but that psychometric vision had been from years ago when he was still an active member of the Fraternal Order of Goodness. As I closed in on him, Mason must have noticed the intent in my eyes. He dropped down off the top of the seats, wobbling on his new legs like a newborn animal taking its first steps. A look of fear filled his bright young eyes and he pressed his way back into the sea of zombies, more of which fell from the screen every second.

“That’s right,” I said, raising my bat as I hit the first wave of the undead. “You’d better run!”

Connor fell in beside me and used the shamblers’ own slow lurching to help pull them out of my way. For every one he moved, another one fell from the screen to take its place.

“I’m going try to stop the projector,” Jane called out from somewhere behind me, her voice fading as she ran off. “I think that should kill the magic at work here.”

The door in the lower-right corner of the theater leading off to the Department opened. Wesker came walking out of it unassumingly with a coffee mug in hand, but dropped it as he took in the chaos of the room. He looked shocked and not a little pissed off. His hands flew into a series of arcane movements directed at the zombies nearest him, but nothing happened. Panic rose up in my chest, causing me to redouble my efforts. Wesker’s magic had failed against them, but I was happy to see that the blunt-force trauma my bat was delivering still worked just fine.

Connor was off holding his own nearby. Each zombie he knocked down got a quick boot stomp to its head, filling the air with a fleshy
crunch
.

“This is the most active I’ve been in a movie theater since
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
,” he said exuberantly.

“If you start singing ‘The Time Warp,’ the next notch on my bat is for you.”

“Fair enough,” he said, grabbing another of the zombies out of my path. “Just get over to Mason Redfield. . .and hurry.”