04 – Tracking Down Those Who Hide

If asked to explain her thoughts, Erika wasn’t sure she would be able to say anything. This was the first look she had gotten of the ghost. Every other instance where she appeared, she vanished the moment Erika actually managed to focus on her.

The pale woman sat, hunched, with her hands in her lap. Her hair hung in long strands all around her shoulders, dangling over her chest, but Erika was more focused on her eyes. Erika could only see them while standing at an angle, peering down between the curtains of hair, but…

The ghost did not have eyes. Skin around her eyes peeled back, baring bone with no muscle or flesh to pad out the space. There were just two gaping holes, shadowed to the point where Erika found herself looking into a dark abyss. Her face was otherwise intact. With thin lips, pale skin, cheek bones protruding ever so slightly, and her stringy black hair, she looked remarkably like The Stalker. There were differences beyond the eyes, especially below the neck.

Erika’s girlfriend had a rather lithe body. The Stalker’s penchant for wearing harnesses that cinched her clothes emphasized her curves where looser clothes would have hidden her body entirely. The ghost was the opposite, wearing a loose white gown that couldn’t hide her endowments if it tried. They were like twins where one ate well and the other skipped meals.

Casting a glance up the table, Erika noted The Mind watching her with a curious expression. She had to remember that nothing in this starscape was real. Everyone looked as she expected them to look—giving The Mind the benefit of the doubt that he wasn’t sock-puppeting them all—so she presumed the same would be true here. If ever she had gotten a good look at the ghost, she would have been able to tell for sure, but…

“Do you two know each other?” Erika asked, finger dancing between The Stalker and the ghost.

It wasn’t the best thing to ask, as The Stalker’s face immediately shifted to annoyance. “Just because I died once doesn’t mean I know every dead bitch.”

“No…” Erika admitted. She wanted to protest on account of their similar facial structure alone, but with The Stalker already pissed off because of The Mind messing with her powers, Erika doubted she would get anywhere at the moment. Instead, she turned to the ghost. “Hello. I’m Erika. How come you’ve been following me around?”

The ghost lifted her head, opening her mouth. Vacant holes peered through her hair, making Erika wonder if she could see—only to remind herself again that everything here had to be translated through The Mind. She didn’t make a sound before dropping her head again.

“Can she not speak?” Erika asked, directing her question to The Mind.

“She doesn’t have a brain.”

“Rude.”

“Literally,” The Mind said with a small roll of his eyes. “She’s a psychic presence that followed you in. There are limits to how much I can process that presence. I did my best.”

Daniel leaned forward, raising a hand like a dutiful schoolboy. “Is there a difference between ‘psychic presences’ and ghosts?”

“Can’t say. We don’t get things like that around here, and I have limited experience in the outside world.” The Mind looked to The Director, as if asking confirmation.

The Director clasped his hands together, resting his wrists on the table. “Fascinating as this line of discussion is, it is not the intended route for the day’s meeting.”

Erika cocked her hip, raising an eyebrow. “And why are we here?” she asked, not returning to her seat; The Castle certainly wanted to saddle her with more problems, but she was interested in the ghost that had been haunting her for weeks now.

“Have your efforts to track and follow The Monk borne fruit?”

Erika’s gaze turned flat. Perhaps there were slightly more pressing matters than a slightly helpful ghost. With one last look at the pale woman, Erika rounded the table and took her seat. “You don’t need me to answer that, I presume.”

The Prescient lightly chuckled, shaking his head. “No need to be upset. We had a method of tracking The Monk prior to our first encounter. However, it seems as if he used his incarceration here to develop a countermeasure. Mind?”

Finding it quite annoying that The Prescient was on the opposite end of the table, Erika swung her head back to The Mind, only for the surface of the table to shimmer away. Like a sort of magical television, white lines and patterns spread out on a black background, rapidly forming a map of the greater Chicago area. Erika leaned forward with interest as a large red pin sprang up in downtown.

“Is that The Monk’s—” she started, only to stop as another pin popped up in the north end. A third appeared near the UIC campus, and a fourth, fifth, and sixth slid around in spiraling loops down at the southern border of the map. The pins doubled, then doubled again.

“These represent our attempts at locating The Monk,” The Mind said. “Following our initial encounter, there was but a single pin. After his escape…” He waved his arm out.

The Gadget bounced in his seat, pointing at a few with rapid movements of his arm. “I can tell some of them are fake from some of the pixels and having seen quite a few fakes in my time,” he said, flicking down three with his middle finger. Three more pins jutted up from the city map immediately after. “That’s all based on The Prescient’s orrery which I made and you should really come see sometime because it’s pretty cool if I can say—”

“Gadget.” The Butler nudged him with her elbow.

“Sorry!”

“While he was in our care,” The Orderly said, mouth obviously not moving behind her surgical mask, “I developed a serum to stimulate glands in the pits of the arms, overproducing a unique pheromone specifically to assist in tracking him. The Doctor confirmed it operated as intended—” She nodded toward The Doctor in acknowledgement, though he still appeared asleep in his chair. “—and The Gadget—”

“I made a sensor… I made a sniffer… I made a snifsor that could smell the scent from miles away.” A yellow line started spinning around the map of Chicago like a radar sweep, highlighting some of the pins while leaving the rest alone. But on each pass of the line, different pins lit up.

“A stoichiometric algorithm to narrow down possibilities is in development,” The Director said.

Erika waited a moment, expecting him to say something more—either explaining why his math problem wasn’t going to work or promising it would. He said neither.

The Stalker snorted. “That’s a whole lot of words you all said when you could have just told us you don’t know jack shit,” she said, roughly echoing Erika’s thoughts.

Could The Mind hear her unspoken thoughts? Erika’s eyes shifted, but The Mind made no outward indication even after she started imagining how everyone at the table would look naked. Not even a slight smirk or aghast flick of his eyes in her direction.

“True,” The Director said, giving no hint that he knew what Erika was thinking either. “However, in any data set without true quantum randomness, patterns will emerge.”

Erika stopped thinking about how flabby The Doctor’s bellybutton might be and turned her attention back to the map. A handful of city blocks highlighted themselves in green.

“Repeated visitations,” The Director said. Several more blocks turned deep violet. “Avoided areas. And, most importantly… forty-nine minutes ago:”

The entire map shifted abruptly, pins jerking from one spot to, presumably, where they had been almost an hour ago. A faint blue pulse spread out in an expanding ring, originating somewhere just outside downtown. It rippled across the table, vibrating the surface underneath Erika’s hands. Three pins, two highlighted in yellow as the sniffer line passed them, immediately popped up near the center of the ring. All other pins stopped moving for a full minute before every single pin reset to another position on the map.

Daniel’s eyes widened across from Erika. He jabbed his finger right into the epicenter of the ripples, breath caught in his throat.

“He was watching us?” Erika said, realizing what that blue ring was.

“I didn’t see shit,” The Stalker huffed, folding her arms over her chest.

“It wasn’t just this one occasion,” The Director said. “Three days ago.”

The map shifted again, pins resetting, and another blue ring rippled over the surface. Erika recognized it as the park she had tried to lure The Monk to a few days back. Four of the pins immediately snapped to the ripple location, remained there, then the entire board reshuffled.

“Five days ago.”

“I get it,” Erika said, sweeping her hand over the table’s illusion before the animation could repeat the same ripple effect. “You guys can detect when I break things just like he can.”

“The Gadget repaired your watch,” The Director said, explaining everything with only a few words.

With a sheepish smile, The Gadget waved his hand. “Hi,” he said, smiling.

“Hello, Gadget,” Erika said, withholding her sigh. There was no point getting upset with him, and at least The Castle were sharing that they had done this instead of using it against her. “But we had cameras set up, The Hunters were there on a few of the watches, and The Stalker took vantage points. We never saw any hint that anyone noticed.”

“No. They’re being careful. I do not know…” The Director sounded almost pained at the words coming from his mouth. “Their intentions remain a mystery. Given what we all know, it may be that he is checking on you, ensuring you aren’t in danger. It may be regular tab-keeping, ensuring their asset is following a known pattern. It may even be wariness, ensuring you aren’t venturing into another realm to attack more aspects of The Mummy. The possibilities are unknowable.

“What is knowable is that a pattern has emerged. Patterns,” The Director said with a glazed smile, “can be exploited.”

That, Erika liked the sound of. “So, you want me to keep breaking things. You’ll set up an ambush?”

“Rather, we need advance notice. Location, time, magnitude of your effect…”

The Director trailed off as Erika slid her gaze over to The Prescient. The neutral look he had been maintaining turned flat, then got hostile as she raised an eyebrow.

“Those ripples you make disturb my interpretation of the future,” he snapped, wiggling his fingers in the air. “The world lines feel them everywhere at once rather than in a gradual roll-out, making it difficult to trace until they actually happen.”

Although she didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, Erika nodded her head, turning back to The Director. “So I shoot you a text first. Then what?”

The Maid perked up, thunderclouds over her head dispersing with little swirls of wind. “Rematch,” she said, cracking her knuckles.

“Sedatives,” The Orderly added, miming jabbing someone with a syringe.

“You’re going to capture him again?” The Stalker laughed, loud and obviously sarcastic. “Right. That worked so well the first time around.”

“How did he escape, exactly?” Erika asked, frowning. “I broke every bone in his body. I presume The Doctor put him back together, but then what?”

All eyes turned to The Mind, who shifted in discomfort. “Our holding area contains a disposal method: large pits leading to a space between parallel planes. He was suspended over one such pit, poised to be dropped in should anything happen… but he dropped himself in. Normal people would never be able to escape, but The Mummy is far more adept at the manipulation of parallel spaces than most.”

“We knew he wouldn’t be held forever,” The Director added before Erika could complain. He gave a slight nod toward The Prescient. “A swift escape was preferable to a rampage through our facilities.”

Erika folded her arms, less enthused about this plan than she had been a few moments ago.

As far as she could see, The Monk was her main problem. The Mummy stood over The Monk, looming in the background, but without The Monk and the cults running around, it couldn’t really do anything. It had been trapped for a million years, plotting or whatever The Fixer thought it was doing, but it couldn’t act.

“I’ve been told that the tattooed cultists are immortal,” Erika said eventually. “Did you learn anything about that during his time with you?”

Erika first looked to The Director, then to The Orderly, and finally The Mind when neither of the first two answered. The Mind simply looked across the table. “Doctor.”

The heavyset man slowly stirred, wispy white hair almost moving before the rest of him as he slowly lifted his head. Mirrored glasses pinched to his nose hid his eyes, but his surgical mask hung from only one ear, giving a clear view of his wide, frog-like mouth.

“Their immortality is not a lie,” he said, deep voice rumbling from the back of his throat. “The Monk’s body is not so much a body as it is a construct, more akin to the servitors or The Mind’s prowlers.”

Erika wasn’t sure what a servitor was, but she distinctly recalled the large, lizard-like monstrosity that roamed through The Castle’s halls on her first visit. The memory made her shudder.

“Their consciousness resides elsewhere,” The Doctor continued, weaving his hands through the air. Erika wasn’t sure if he was magical or if The Mind was merely translating his intent, but ribbons began to form in the vague shape of a human. “The tattoos they possess act like antennae, reaching across time and space to grant their thoughts a physical form with which to manipulate the world. Destruction of the body does not destroy the mind.”

Daniel nodded his head eagerly. “That more or less fits with what we’ve learned,” he said firmly. “They went and bragged about being immortal to Erika, tried to get her to join them.”

“It wasn’t a convincing offer,” Erika said, arms still crossed. “But I asked because I want to know how to break that immortality. Permanently.”

The Doctor turned his mirrored lenses to The Gadget, then to The Prescient. “We aren’t wholly certain how your abilities function,” he hedged, “but I doubt there is anything you can do, if you had one of them in your possession, to break their immortality. Their immortality simply isn’t here.”

“I can break into a website from a laptop,” Erika countered. “That sounds similar.”

The Doctor turned to The Director, large fingers scratching the side of his head just above a sharp, stitched scar running above his ear.

“A laptop provides a means with which to access the website, accepting and processing input you provide. The cultists do not,” The Director said.

“That can’t be right,” Daniel said, shaking his head. “Sorry, I’m not a genius or anything, but like… they have to update their memories somehow, don’t they? If their consciousness is stored elsewhere, then there must be a means of transmitting information from their bodies to their consciousness.”

“The analogy breaks down when you begin investigating too thoroughly,” The Director said with a small smile—like an adult humoring a babbling child’s wild ideas. “The biggest difference is that this is not a server maintaining and processing structured data according to programmed rules. This is a god.”

“I can break gods too,” Erika said with a wide grin. “You follow that antenna back to its source and find me a way in. I’ll take care of everything from there.”

“We’ll handle it,” The Stalker corrected, sliding up next to Erika.

Erika nudged her in the ribs, making her jolt. “I was just boasting. If this aspect is anything like the last, I’ll obviously need help.”

“It might be possible,” The Mind said, hedging as well. “Now that we know what we’re dealing with, I might be able to detect the link and tie it to its…” He trailed off, tilting his head to one side like he was listening to something nobody else could hear. After a moment, he turned to his twin. “Director, there is a knock at the door.”

“Urgency?”

“Eh… orange?”

The Director nodded his head. “I believe we have our plan,” he said, standing. He planted his cane between his feet, resting both hands on its end. “I’m sure implementing it will be far more of an ordeal than it sounds, but—”

Erika blinked, and staggered, catching herself on a railing surrounding The Mind’s brain vat. The Stalker collapsed at her side, falling to her knees. In the background, Daniel gagged like he was about to vomit, and a similar sound came from The Prescient.

Erika gripped the railing, breathing heavily. Her eyes swept the room, darting past screens and cables and fans, searching for danger.

“Mind?” The Butler asked, sounding far more at ease. “What happened?”

Pushing herself upright, Erika sucked in a breath as some of the shadows nestled in tubes and wires overhead shifted.

Two creatures slid off the ceiling, stretching elongated limbs to the floor where they landed without a sound. Slick, green-black armor coiled and moved in time with the muscles underneath as they positioned themselves around the doors, readying themselves to pounce on any intruder.

If Erika hadn’t recently remembered The Mind’s prowlers, she might have already pulled a gun from Leslie’s safe and started shooting.

She might anyway if their glossy black eyes ever turned toward her.

“Mind?” The Butler repeated. “Are you okay?”

Erika looked up to the brain in the jar, watching as the pupils of its eyes dilated and constricted until they looked more or less normal. They slowly turned to face The Butler, then pulled back, like looking over the group for the first time.

“The intruder got in.”

The Prescient coughed a few times, looking queasy, but shock jolted him out of his nausea. “Into the asylum?”

“Yes. I felt it prudent to eject all meeting participants to avoid vulnerable bodies, although I do not believe our guest intends harm.”

“Who? What is it?”

“One of The Hunters.”