Chapter Seventeen
Seventeen
As it happens, interrupting an executive ritual has its consequences.
I discovered as much the next morning when, shortly after I arrived at work, Ms. Crenshaw told me to turn right around and take the train up to the Ramble in Central Park.
I was on cleanup duty, she said, and sent me down to the second floor to pick up a disposal kit from Janitorial Services.
She didn’t say this was a punishment, but she didn’t have to.
An hour later, staring at the unsavory remnants of a diabolical orgy, I knew perfectly well why I was there.
Our clients brokered their deals with the company in a variety of ways.
Some preferred the traditional trappings of corporate power: executive boardrooms, documents filled with legal jargon, the satisfying scritch of a fountain pen nib against thick, creamy paper.
Others preserved their anonymity with layers of digital encryption, contracting with us via faceless avatars and electronic signatures.
And a select few petitioned the dark forces of the universe by taking their clothes off, drawing a massive pentagram in a secluded clearing, and having sex all over it.
Few places in Manhattan were better suited to such activities than the Ramble, a relatively untamed woodland sprawled across more than thirty acres in the southern half of Central Park.
It had a reputation for seedy and sometimes criminal activities, though during the day it also played host to more wholesome pastimes like bird-watching and hiking.
My destination was a large, irregular clearing a good distance away from the closest trail.
It was very quiet there, the ubiquitous sounds of Manhattan entirely muted by greenery and replaced instead by the tentative trills and chirps of unseen birds.
At the center of the clearing stood a dark chunk of rock, rising a foot or two from the ground, and around it someone had used a sharp blade to gouge a classic pentagram into the earth, encircled by the forty-nine names of the Lords of Sin and Vice.
It had probably taken hours of painstaking work to create, but now much of it was smudged and disturbed, presumably by the frantic movement of sweaty bodies.
The makeshift altar was covered with a sticky coating of blood, and a short distance away I spotted the crumpled plastic shape of an empty blood bag.
In the old days, of course, the sacrifice would have been a living person, but using donated blood was both more economical and easier to hide than a corpse.
I stepped gingerly into the pentagram and then halted as something squished underfoot. “Oh god,” I muttered. “Please don’t be a condom. Please don’t be a condom. Please don’t be a condom.”
It was a condom.
Shuddering, I extracted a pair of latex gloves from my supplies and snapped them on before bending down to scoop the item in question into an industrial-size garbage bag.
There was more where that came from, along with plastic cups half-filled with cheap red wine, joints smoked down to stubby roaches, and discarded items of clothing.
In the soft midmorning light, it all looked pathetically shabby.
I was shaking a pair of lacy underwear off my gloved hand and into the garbage bag when I heard someone approaching.
Who would be wandering this far from the trails that wound through the Ramble?
Not an ordinary civilian. My mind jumped immediately to the worst possible conclusion: it had to be those two agents from the Conclave.
Why hadn’t I paused to consider how vulnerable I would be out here?
I needed to remember that I was being stalked by magical terrorists.
Looking around, I started moving toward the trees, slipping on scattered detritus.
I had to get away—no one would hear me here if I called for help.
Garbage bag still clutched in one hand, I fumbled at a slender sapling and then looked over my shoulder in time to see a black-clad figure push their way through a loose mass of shrubbery and into the clearing, growling inaudibly as they batted leaves away from their mohawk.
I paused. “Lex?”
The stocky person stopped on the other side of the clearing. “Colin? Hey.”
“You scared the crap out of me,” I wheezed as I clutched at my chest.
Watching where they set their black combat boots, Lex drew closer, a duffel like mine hanging from their shoulder. “Sorry. I didn’t realize anyone else had been roped into this assignment.” They removed their aviator sunglasses and squinted at me. “What put you on orgy duty?”
“I messed up a meeting with Management,” I reported glumly. “You?”
Lex shrugged. “I tried to clean an ancient palimpsest and accidentally triggered a curse that made Clive’s extremities fall off.”
I thought about it for a moment. “All of his extremities?” I finally asked.
Lex shrugged again.
Feeling a little queasy, I gestured to the ground around me. “Well, between us we should be able to get this finished before lunch.”
With a nod, Lex tossed their duffel on the ground and extracted a garbage bag of their own. “How many condoms have you stepped on so far?”
“Four.”
“Wow. That beats my personal best. Or is it personal worst?”
With both of us working, it took surprisingly little time to dispose of the last pieces of incriminating evidence in the ritual clearing.
Lex used their combat boots to scuff out the rest of the pentagram while I spritzed the blood-covered rock with an enzymatic solution and cleaned it as best I could with a couple of small towels.
Those towels went into the garbage as well, along with my latex gloves.
Then I tied up the plastic bag before stowing it in the duffel, to be disposed of later in the company incinerators.
“Not bad,” Lex judged as we studied our handiwork. The clearing still looked a little trampled in places, but certainly no worse than anywhere else in the Ramble. You’d never know that several people had lost their souls there. “Wanna head back together?”
“Sure.” I followed them as they tromped back into the trees, and eventually we emerged south of the quaintly archaic turrets and battlements of Belvedere Castle.
Following the 79th Street Transverse, we ambled along at a moderate pace, headed for the 81st Street station and a train that would take us back to Midtown.
The city, which had seemed so distant while we were in the Ramble, gradually enfolded us once more in its comforting haze of noise, exhaust, and grime.
“Do you remember the thing we talked about?” I asked eventually.
“You mean your plan to impress your boss by saving the city?”
“Yeah.”
“But really it’s about punishing the people who’ve bullied you?”
“Right.”
“But really it’s about your pathological need for power, which is actually a desire for control over a frightening and chaotic universe?”
“Uh…”
“Sure, I remember.”
“Did you find anything that points to whatever is making people disappear?”
Lex shook their head. “Nope. There are too many possibilities, even after cross-referencing rituals involving Management.”
I sighed.
“By the way, if you’re going to save the city, you might want to hurry it up,” Lex added. “Things are getting weird.”
“How do you mean?”
They gestured at our surroundings. “Dude, look around. It’s a beautiful morning in Central Park and we’re practically the only people here.”
I blinked, head turning. Lex was right. There should have been people everywhere, jogging or cycling or riding in horse-drawn carriages while said horses pooped in front of them.
I’d been so wrapped up in my own problems that I’d failed to notice how eerily deserted the park was.
Come to think of it, the subway had been emptier than usual on my way in to work as well.
Troubled, I walked along for a few more minutes before remembering my failed attempts to see the future. Ms. Crenshaw had mentioned other ways to divine information, hadn’t she? “What about taking a shortcut?” I asked. “Seeking answers from someone who can perceive in ways that we can’t?”
Lex eyed me sidelong. “I thought you said those poor bastards in Analysis and Logistics keep dying.”
“Yeah, their brains explode or whatever. That’s why I’m wondering about other options. Like, I dunno…the Prophets of the Black Sun.”
Lex grimaced. “Fuck those jerks. The only people they let into their little cult are cis-het white dudes, and—get this—they wear socks with sandals.”
“Yeah,” I muttered, “so I’ve heard.”
“But you could try talking to the spirits of the damned. I ask them questions all the time.”
I stared at them as they loped alongside me. “Seriously?”
Lex shrugged. “Sure. I mean, what else do they have going on? They’re languishing in perpetual darkness, suffering for the rest of time. I think they appreciate it when I ask them where I left my keys or whether the latest M. Night Shyamalan movie is worth seeing. It gives them something to do.”
We walked along in silence for half a block. “Are they big fans of M. Night Shyamalan’s work?” I finally asked.
“Not really. But they keep hoping the next one won’t suck.”
The damned really are just like the rest of us, I thought.
I considered Lex’s idea all the way back to the office, and once we’d sent our orgy detritus down to the incinerators that burned somewhere deep underground, I finally said, “Okay. I want to talk to the spirits of the damned.” Then I paused. “Um. How exactly would I do that?”
Lex rolled their eyes and sighed. “Meet me in the Repository at five fifteen and I’ll hold your hand.”