08 – Unpressed Charges

“Yep… dragged us off to the station and read us our rights,” Rick grumbled as he sat in the back room of Varn’s, typing away on his laptop. “Good thing Leslie wasn’t there. He’s got a family to worry about.”

“Excuse me?” Anna said, narrowing her eyes. “I have a mother to take care of. Leslie’s family can take care of themselves—”

“It isn’t a competition, Anna. And you know Leslie would help your mom out if something happened to you.”

Anna stared at the back of Rick’s head for a brief moment before turning away without another word. She walked over to the opposite side of the office, where a series of jars had been set up on some shelves. Some of the jars held nothing but black tar—ectoplasm—while a few of the most recent additions had little bits of creature floating in formaldehyde.

Erika was glad she hadn’t been around when Anna put those pieces into the jars. She could handle bashing apart maggots and monsters all day long, but her one experience in school with formaldehyde, during a cow eye dissection in science class, nearly ended with her fainting from lightheadedness. No one else seemed to have quite such a visceral reaction to the smell—plenty had been uneasy with the cow eyes, though.

Feeling a bit of nausea at the reminder of the event, Erika quickly turned back to Rick. “You guys aren’t in jail though, so… bail?”

“They didn’t hold us. No charges pressed, no court dates set, not even an overnight stay.”

“For impersonating government officials? You got nothing at all?”

“Maybe saving that cop bought us some brownie points,” Sofia said, head down against the same table that Rick was using for his laptop. Erika had thought she was asleep. Now, her eyes were open as she stared straight ahead at the wall. After a moment, she flicked her gaze to Erika without moving her head. “You aren’t in jail either.”

Erika shifted. “That creep who picked me up didn’t actually take me to the cops. I don’t even think he was a cop. I just followed him to his car like some kind of idiot. Kemper would have loved me…” she muttered off to the side.

Rick looked up from his laptop. Sofia sat upright. Anna ceased fiddling with one of the jars and turned around, crossing her arms as she raised an eyebrow.

“I got dragged off to the Old St. Patrick’s Church,” Erika admitted with a sigh. “That guy was after my bounty.”

“Bounty?” Rick said, jumping slightly. The movement knocked the cardboard tube holding his sword over, forcing him to scramble to right it.

“Did I forget to mention it?” Erika scratched the side of her head. “Basically, The Church really didn’t like that I broke into the place. Turns out, that guy we met,” Erika said, motioning toward Sofia, “was part of a group that was after that bounty.” She proceeded to launch into a slightly more detailed depiction of what happened.

From getting kidnapped by The Hanged Man to being interrogated by The Banker and The Analyst. She left out the part about her parental unit showing up. That was just embarrassing.

Throughout it all, Rick paid the most attention, especially once she started talking about the members of The Church. He held tight to his cardboard tube as he asked several questions about The Banker—and very few about The Analyst. Unfortunately, Erika wasn’t much more informed than she had been the first time she met Rick. It wasn’t like the interrogation with The Church had much time for idle chatter or getting to know one another.

It had been strictly business. Everything Erika knew about The Mummy, plus any future information she gathered on the subject, in exchange for no further action taken against her.

A fair enough trade, if she were being honest.

“I still don’t know how they knew about me,” Erika grumbled to herself, feeling the line of her wallet in her pocket. Had she not cut up enough ID cards? Had that helped at all? The Church said they knew it wasn’t The Fixer asking about The Stalker’s contact information, so she hadn’t fooled them for a moment with that little stunt.

Had they simply asked The Stalker? Or had they just gathered enough information to feed off to The Hanged Man that, when he saw her, he immediately hatched his plan to capture her?

And she stupidly walked into it. That could have turned out far, far worse. Young-Erika should have paid a lot more attention to stranger-danger lessons.

With a sigh, she looked around the room. With her tale at its end, Rick had gone back to typing far more than he had been earlier. Sofia was eying her a little, head back down against the desk, though she closed her eyes when Erika met her gaze.

“How could we not have known about all this before?” Anna muttered, running her finger along the rims of one of her jars. She stared deep into it like it was a crystal ball that held all the answers to her questions. “This whole secret society running amok without anyone knowing…”

“I think the secret part of the secret society answers your question,” Sofia quipped. “I didn’t even know about ghosts before a few months ago.”

“Weren’t you sensitive to ghosts your whole life or something?” Erika asked. As far as she gathered, that was what led Sofia and Anna to that bar where Erika had her first ghost encounter. And it was what led Sofia to the group after her apartment got haunted.

“Yes… But I didn’t know what they were.”

“How’d you miss a bunch of ghosts?

Her lip curled back in a scowl as she finally sat upright, glaring. Erika immediately realized that she had stepped on the wrong landmine, but before she could say anything, Sofia leaned toward her, poking a finger into her chest.

“You touched that bottle at the bar, you know what it’s like. Except that was just once.” Sofia waved her hand around her face. “You never came home from school, leaking ectoplasm from your ears because some janitor committed suicide back in the seventies and left a ghost behind. You never saw the shapes in the glass reflections, staring at you every night while you hid under your bedcovers. Your parents never threw you at a therapist to try to get you back to normal.

“But it keeps happening.” She got to her feet and started pacing back and forth, no longer looking at Erika. It felt less like she was talking to her now and more like she was just verbalizing years’ worth of pent-up frustrations. “You stumble across some murder weapon like you’re a magnet for these things, and all of a sudden you’re spewing ectoplasm from every orifice. Your parents are getting more and more concerned and nervous. They start searching broader and wider for what is wrong with you, throwing you at quack physicians and physicists alike, eventually meeting exorcists who tie you to chairs and… None of it sticks. It keeps happening, but you start trying to keep it quiet because you know what will happen if you don’t.

“Then, one day, you meet some people who do understand,” Sofia said, her seething coming to a gradual halt as her voice lost some of its tension. “They let you in, kindly and patiently explain what has been fucking your life over. And they offer to help. It’s a release you couldn’t imagine…” She trailed off, glancing upward.

Anna swiftly stepped past Erika and pulled Sofia into a hug, lightly patting her back. Sofia didn’t move, keeping her hands down at her sides.

“Sorry,” Sofia said after a long moment of awkward silence. “I just… owe them a lot.”

“You don’t owe us a thing,” Anna said, releasing Sofia from her hold.

Erika licked her lips. “Sorry as well,” she said honestly. “Didn’t mean to bring up bad memories.”

“Whatever. We’ve all got to do what we’ve got to do,” Sofia said, shrugging Anna fully off. She didn’t look at Erika as she spoke. If anything, Erika got the impression that she was still talking more to herself than anyone else.

Deciding to not stumble across any other triggers for the traumatized woman by asking about it, Erika moved over to the wall behind Rick, leaning up against it as she peered over his shoulder.

He was expanding the stub of an article he previously had on The Church, adding details on The Banker and The Analyst. He hadn’t paid much attention to Sofia’s rant, barely slowing his typing. He only stopped as he reached the end of The Banker’s entry; the last line read: Curse breaker?

Erika’s eyes flicked over to the cardboard tube that leaned against his side and almost blurted out a question of whether or not it was cursed. A glance at Sofia—currently engaged in a quiet conversation with Anna—stalled her tongue. Rick didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would get triggered like that, but at the same time, Rick had a deadly sword that he definitely knew how to use.

Instead, she said, “As part of my agreement with The Church, the restitution for breaking and entering, that is, I’m supposed to meet with them anytime something significant happens involving The Mummy. Do you want to come along next time? I don’t know that they would be happy about that, but maybe I can claim that you’re guardians or chaperons or whatever.”

Rick stilled, not turning in his seat.

Anna answered instead. “I’d sure like to ask a few questions myself.”

“Keep in mind that they seem to be information brokers. I doubt they’ll answer questions for free.”

“Maybe they would trade for some of my research…” Anna said, humming as she glanced back at the shelves of jars.

Erika honestly doubted that The Analyst didn’t already know anything some random human could have learned about ghosts by stumbling about with a high school-level chemistry set. However, she didn’t say anything to discourage the idea since she didn’t know for sure.

It was good that they were still active. Though Sofia seemed especially depressed, having since slunk back to her seat now that her rant was over, they weren’t throwing in the towel. Erika worried about that when she heard they all got arrested.

She wanted to tell them that she told them so. Using those fake IDs was… insane, frankly, and Erika was no stranger to using false ID cards. She had said so when they first tried to use them.

They had worked, though, getting them into that subway right at the start of the event.

Thanks to that, Erika now had contact details for The Butler. Erika wasn’t sure how that was going to go down, but where The Fixer chose isolation, Erika couldn’t see any possibility in taking down The Mummy—fixing whatever it was that she had broken—without the help of others. The Stalker, The Butler, The Hunters… maybe not The Eclipse—those bastards kidnapped her. She was a tad bit pissed with them over that, even if her capture by The Church hadn’t ended in disaster.

It also got her some new information. Intel on a new monster type, those little humanoid things.

Speaking of…

“That’s about it for my report,” Erika said. Rick had asked her to come down and elaborate a bit on some of what Sofia said regarding their monster encounter in the Pedway. With that done, and seeing that none of the others had much to add since their investigations were derailed after finding that injured cop, Erika grabbed her keys. “I’m going to head out. Got some research to take care of.”

“Research?” Anna asked, looking Erika up and down. There was some hint of judgment in her eyes, like the idea of Erika sitting down with a book just didn’t mesh. It felt a little offensive.

“The Fixer told me about a library that he found mostly reliable. I’m going to check it out and see if I can’t dig up what these things are.”

“The Analyst didn’t tell you when you were being interrogated?”

Erika shook her head. “If they know, they didn’t say. That was more of a one-way transaction.”

Anna let out a long hum, nodding to show she understood. “What library?”

“Some place called The H. Finch Bibliotheca.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Me neither,” Erika said with a shrug. Despite the minor offense taken from Anna’s look, Erika really wasn’t one for libraries. She wasn’t even sure if she had ever been in her school’s library. “The Fixer gave me the address. I think they hope I’ll get in less trouble if I’m reading books versus running around the city. They implied that I might be able to dig up something on these monsters that have been causing the ‘gas leaks’ around town.”

“Mind if I tag along?”

Erika shrugged, not caring. She honestly expected Rick to be the one to volunteer for research duty. He barely glanced up from his typing.

“It isn’t far,” Erika said, having looked up the place before leaving home. “You following on your bike or want a ride?”

“I’ll follow,” Anna said, moving about the room to grab her heavy leather biker jacket and helmet.

From Varn’s, it took only ten minutes to reach the library. It was an older building made of brownstone bricks with large white Roman-style columns propping up its entrance. Despite its opulent entrance, it looked somehow… haunting. Not literal ghost haunted, but just aged out of use and ready for permanent retirement. The windows were darkened, the brickwork was worn and weathered, and the trees planted out front were gnarled and twisted—and lacking in leaves, but it was the middle of November.

The air inside smelled stale and old. It had that tang of dusty books that Erika could almost taste, and was almost unnaturally still, like the bustle of Chicago right on the other side of the heavy doors simply didn’t exist. The large chandelier over the entry was dimmed to the point where it might as well not have been on. The wooden shelves lining either side of the entrance were monolithic to the point where Erika felt a little intimidated by the size.

“Charming place,” Anna said, stepping into the library alongside Erika.

“Yeah,” Erika said, looking around. “So… how do we use this place?”

“What?”

“Like…” Erika trailed off, frowning to herself as she looked around for a computer. “I guess the Mother of Maggots would be a good place to start. That’s what the cultist guy called the thing that probably spawns all the monsters that are running around. But… how do we find what books to read—”

Anna started laughing. Laughing. The loud noise ruined the silent atmosphere entirely, not that there looked to be any other people around. Even still, Erika felt a need to shush her, if only to preserve her own dignity.

It didn’t help.

“God, I forgot you’re a zoomer. Need a search bar? That’s a good one,” she said, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye. After getting herself under control, she looked around once before motioning off to one side of the room. “Come, young one, and I shall teach you how to use a card catalog, an ancient device from back in the days when it took longer to find a book than to read it. Do you know about the Dewey Decimal System?”

“Of course I do…” Erika said as she followed along. “I mean… I’ve heard of it. I’ve never interacted with it.”

That got another, albeit smaller, laugh out of Anna.

Which just rankled. “You aren’t that much older than me. Quit acting like you’re some ancient crone.”

“I was born in that sweet spot just before technology really took over everything,” Anna said as she approached a few large wooden cabinets filled with several dozen little wooden drawers. “Now… Mother of Maggots,” she hummed as she ran her finger over the drawer covers. “We might be able to find a book dedicated to that creature. Otherwise, we’ll hit general mythology books and search through them until we get some more details to hopefully find a more specific book.”

“That sounds like a lot of work to even start the researching,” Erika muttered as she pulled out her phone.

“Not done many research papers, have you?”

Erika waved the woman off as she tried to search about online. Wikipedia didn’t have any references to the Mother of Maggots; she had already checked that, but if she could find any reference anywhere to maybe a specific mythology or region, it sounded like it might cut down on a whole lot of searching.

A loud throat-clearing behind Erika startled her, making both her and Anna spin around.

A man stood, tall and gaunt. He was bald and his skin tone was somewhat odd, like he might have had darker skin in the past but had since suffered an affliction that rendered it… gray. Combined with his bright red suit, amber circular glasses, and the way he simply stared for a moment too long after Erika turned around, Erika was left disturbed.

“Greetings,” he said. Whatever illness he suffered had not affected his deep, silky voice. “I saw you struggling with the card catalog and, as the Bibliotheca’s curator, am here to offer assistance.”

Erika glanced back to find Anna had several of the little drawers out and more than a handful of cards in her hands. All that talk, and she didn’t know how to use the dumb card system any better?

“My friend and I are writing a report on mythology,” Erika said with a nudge toward Anna. Despite the curator’s creepy appearance, this was a social situation, and she felt far more at home in a conversation than she did in a library. “Have you heard of a being called the Mother of Magots?”

“Ah. Second floor, west side, shelf twelve,” he said immediately, pointing upward and to one side with a long, bony finger. “Look for a book by Naskrecki.”

Erika’s eyebrows popped up at the quick response.

“You knew that off the top of your head?” Anna asked before Erika could.

“No, actually,” the man said, clasping his hands together behind his back. “But you are the second to come searching for the topic today. Curious, most curious.” He shook his head. “If you require additional assistance, please ring the bell at the front desk.”

With that, he started walking back across the entryway, pushing a large cart filled with books that rattled so loudly that Erika couldn’t believe that he sneaked up on them.

“If that guy isn’t a vampire, I’ll eat my baseball bat,” she muttered to Anna.

“Seems like a fool’s bet,” Anna said, quickly replacing the cards she had taken. “Come on.”

They hurried up the large, grand staircase and quickly found the shelf the curator mentioned. Just looking down it, Erika immediately spotted one large vacancy right in the middle of the shelf. She groaned, fully expecting that to be the book they were after.

Sure enough, as Anna skimmed the spines of the books on either side of the vacancy, she turned with a shrug. “Not here.”

“Figures,” Erika said. “I bet whoever was looking for it other than us checked it out. Think we could get their name off old creepy downstairs?”

“Vampires probably have supernatural hearing.”

“I was half joking when I called him that,” Erika muttered. “Who else would be looking for a book on this thing?”

“Could be The Butler,” Anna said. “You said she and her organization were looking into the subject as well, right?”

“Yeah… I could—”

“Ah hem. Excuse me,” a woman said from behind them.

Erika jolted, startled by someone walking up to her for the second time in as many minutes.

This woman was… elegant. An Asian woman wearing an extravagant kimono gripped a book in lithe fingers. Long violet fingernails tapped against its cover as both Anna and Erika moved aside. She slid it into place, index finger trailing down the spine as she pressed it flush against the shelf, filling the vacancy. She then turned without another word.

Erika stared for a long moment, watching almost entranced by the way her hips swayed as she walked. It wasn’t until the woman’s tall wooden sandals disappeared around the side of the shelves that she blinked and realized what it meant that someone was here.

While Anna immediately went for the book, Erika rushed after the person.

As soon as she rounded the shelves, a call out right on the tip of her tongue, she stopped.

The woman wasn’t there.

Erika ran forward for a moment, checking between the shelves in case the woman simply went to find another book, but each was just as empty as the last.

Dejected and somewhat upset at being denied a chance to talk to another strange person who had to live on the other side of the coin, she slunk back to the shelf where Anna stood, flipping through pages.

“Find anything?”

“I only just started reading, Erika,” Anna said in an absent tone of voice, like she wasn’t paying full attention to anything but the words on the pages. “The book was written in 1874 by Bazyli Naskrecki, apparently a researcher of death cults. The Mother of Maggots is the patron deity of one ancient cult with no surviving members—”

Erika scoffed at that one.

“They venerated decay, viewing death as some kind of blessing, creating a seedbed for maggots to spawn apropos of nothing. Let’s see… Flesh is temporary… ritual consumption of corpses—human and otherwise… opposition to preservation. Basically, they were a bunch of weirdos who liked death and maggots and not much else.”

“Any word on how to stop them?” Erika asked.

“I only just started reading,” Anna said again. “But I doubt it. This book was barely written a hundred and fifty years ago about some cult that died off a long, long time ago. There was nothing to stop at the time of writing.”

“Great—”

“But,” Anna interrupted. “It might have other, older references that we can look up that might lead to other, even older references. Eventually, we might uncover something useful. But it isn’t going to be a short project.”

“The longer it takes, the more people are likely to die from these things.”

“Yes, but rushing into things before we’re ready might end up with us dead, then everyone else has to rely on monsters to save the day,” Anna said, her tone saying everything about what she thought about that idea.

“Guess we better get started,” Erika said with a sigh.

“Quite.” Anna handed the book over. “I’ll call up Rick and see if he can’t dig up any more books by this Naskrecki person. I can check the card catalogue—or ask the vampire—as well. You get to reading.”

Erika stared at the thick book, flicked it open to a random page, sighed, and nodded her head.

This was what she had come here for, after all. Reading. Lots and lots of reading.

Somehow, movie montages made it seem so fun, but looking at the book now, it was like it was barely written in English.

“I’ll find a table.”