Whatever had caused the intestinal distress in the sewers passed quickly. The waters receded, the manhole covers drifted back into place, and the underworld labyrinth became quiet and peaceful again.
Nevertheless, I decided to postpone my expedition to the underworld to find Jody Caligari’s lab and speak with his intractable tentacle-faced landlord. I wanted to give the effluent a little time to settle.
Back in the offices, Robin was queasy as we worked to clean up the mess. The toilet had finally backed down, and the water running out of the sink faucet returned to its usual murky color. Even so, it was going to take a long time and a lot of Evergreen Fresh to get back to normal. We opened all the windows, but the rotten smell of the outside air seemed even worse, yielding a net loss in freshness.
After hours of scrubbing stains out of the carpet, and a fresh downpour washed down the streets (for once I didn’t complain about the vagaries of the weather), I decided we had to go. “It’s time for an expedition down where the sun don’t shine.”
Robin gathered some documents and placed them in a manila folder. “If we’re going to confront Ah’Chulhu, I want to let him know personally that his case has no chance of winning—especially not when he’s up against me.”
After the recent upheavals, however, I wanted to pay attention to the grim warnings Edgar Allan the troll had given me. I said, “Robin, you’re an impressive attorney, and I wouldn’t want you anywhere but on my side and at my side—but this is not a job for a human. The sewers are growing restless, and there’s no telling what’s lurking down there.”
“Jody had his lab down there,” she pointed out. “He’s just a boy, and he commuted to work every day.”
“True, but that kid is an evil genius supervillain in training. You’re just a lawyer.”
“Some people might say there’s not much difference,” Robin said, but I could tell from the tone of her voice that she was having second thoughts.
Sheyenne offered, “I’ll go with Beaux. Nothing sticks to me.”
That seemed the best solution. Sheyenne followed me down to the basement level. The downstairs tenants were all still closed in their apartments, but I went straight to the sewer entrance. “Did you bring the address for Jody’s lab?”
“Of course.” She waved a sheet of paper. “I even downloaded directions in case we get lost. We can take the main sewer thoroughfares or, if there’s a clog, I have an alternate route through the subsurface streets.”
Through the door and down into the tunnels. I stepped into the gently flowing water, took care to find solid footing, and waded along while Sheyenne drifted ahead of me. I had to squint in the dim greenish glow of the tunnels. My eyesight hasn’t been the best since I rose from the dead; I think the bullet hole through my skull affected my vision, but I hoped I didn’t need glasses.
As we passed under drainage openings from the streets above, rivulets of water splashed down; one culvert let in a wide, gushing flow. Sheyenne proved she could find beauty in even mundane things. “Look, a waterfall!”
Nothing gets Sheyenne down. She sees the bright side of life, and afterlife, even though she’s been through enormous difficulties—having to support herself after her parents died, taking care of a younger brother who turned out to be a genuine dick (and no thunder about it), trying to make it through med school, supporting herself by singing in a monster nightclub, where she’d been poisoned.
Our time together as humans had been all too brief, but it was good, a solid relationship with a lot of potential. I should have spent more time with Sheyenne, but there’d been no more time to spend. . . .
Now her ghost led the way, assessing the tunnel intersections, flitting ahead to double-check. Many of the catacombs didn’t have street signs, making navigation difficult. I plodded along, refusing to ask for directions. Far off, I heard the warbling notes of a pipe organ, but distances were deceptive in the labyrinth.
We were lost for a while, but at an open sewer pipe Sheyenne found a family of mutant brown rats—a single mother and five children. The rats explained where we had gone wrong, and we set off again in search of the laboratory district.
“If the lab doors are locked, I’m willing to break them open and retrieve Jody’s stuff,” I said. Another reason to do this without Robin, because she sometimes has inconvenient ethical objections to straightforward solutions. “Depending on how heavy the equipment is,” I added, picturing giant turbine engines, Van de Graaff generators, specimen tanks, chemical supplies, toxic waste barrels. “We’ll get the kid’s possessions back, one way or another.”
Sheyenne had a wistful tone in her voice. “I still remember when you went to my old apartment to box up my belongings after I died. How sweet.”
“That was a hard day for me, Spooky.”
She had died of toadstool poisoning. I’d remained in the hospital room with her because she had no one else. In her painful glimmers of fading life, she made me promise to find out who had murdered her—and I wanted to kill the bastard for taking away this woman who meant so much to me.
After she was gone, I went to her apartment to gather up her few things—sadly few, for she had collected very little in her life. But I wanted to keep every speck that was left of Sheyenne. Afterward, I went hunting for her killer—and ended up dead myself. Funny how things don’t turn out the way you expect them to. . . .
We finally found the right address after crossing a side channel and reaching a raised section of the sewers. It had vaulted ceilings, nice stone walls, and occasional graffiti, which I couldn’t read because it was written in ancient arcane languages.
We found the entrance to Jody’s old lab. I could still see the large hand-painted letters of Jody Caligari on the door, but they had been covered over with masking tape, beneath which was a new neatly stenciled name, Neumann Wenkmann, M.a.D.
“Looks like Ah’Chulhu’s already rented out the space,” Sheyenne said.
“Never too late to be just in time,” I said. “Maybe Jody’s possessions were put into storage. We can worry about finding him a new lab after we get everything back.”
I knocked on the door, pounded louder, but heard no answer. Buzzing, clacking sounds came from inside, along with electrical discharges and bubbling, foaming bursts. Sheyenne drifted through the door and opened it from inside. “He can’t hear you knock,” she said. “The experiments are too loud.”
The new tenant had set up an ambitious mad scientist lab, a forest of beakers and connected glass tubing, fractionation tubes over Bunsen burners. Pumping bladders were connected to motors; crackling lightning bursts traveled up the prongs of a Jacob’s ladder. Boxy computer banks displayed multicolored lights blinking in a chaotic order; oscilloscope screens plotted sine waves and double sine waves. (They might have been arc-tangent waves, for all I knew; I was never good at trigonometry.) The bleeping, humming equipment spat out an endless curl of punched paper tape.
The units were so new that some of the cellophane wrapping remained in place. Sales tags and price stickers were affixed to the sides, many components not even installed. Neumann Wenkmann, M.a.D., must have bought the whole modular setup like a man with too much money and a sudden passion for a new hobby. Deluxe laboratory kits like this were available from Lab Depot warehouse stores.
Wenkmann bent over one of the modules with a screwdriver, adjusting a pair of fittings, taking readings, and frowning at the screen. He slapped at the side of the unit, grumbling in frustration.
Sheyenne flitted up to him and said, “Boo!” Although it’s what ghosts are expected to do, I had never seen Sheyenne play such a dirty trick before.
Wenkmann nearly jumped out of his skin. He whirled, holding the screwdriver as a weapon. He wore spectacles and a bleached white lab coat that didn’t have a single fresh stain on it. His plastic pocket protector held six neatly spaced retractable pens. “Who are you? How did you get in here? Are you from the cable company?”
“We’re here on behalf of the former tenant of this lab,” I said. “Jody Caligari.”
“Oh, he’s not here anymore.” He set the screwdriver down. “I was expecting the new cable installation service—and my phone. Do you do installations?”
“Afraid not,” I said.
Wenkmann looked disgusted. His thick brown hair stood up in unruly shocks, as if he had discharged his new electrical apparatus without properly grounding it first. “They said they’d be here between noon and five, but they’re late. I can’t wait here all day.”
“How long have you occupied this lab space, sir?” I asked.
“Just moved in yesterday morning, and I’ve barely had time to unpack. I’m expanding from my home laboratory, since my wife says the workbench clutters up too much of the basement. This is my new secret lair.”
“Secret lair with a lease.” I raised my eyebrows.
“My man cave. And it’s better than the garage.”
“When you leased the place, did the former tenant leave any of his possessions?” I pressed. “We believe our client’s research was unlawfully confiscated, and he hired us to retrieve it.”
Wenkmann shook his head, looking around the laboratory. “No, it was perfectly empty, everything clean and tidy, scrubbed down with bleach. It could have been the site of a mass murder.”
“Our client’s not a serial killer,” I said, “just a supervillain in training.” I hadn’t really expected to solve the case so easily. “We’ll have to speak with Ah’Chulhu ourselves, then.”
Wenkmann looked disturbed. “Good luck. I’ve only met him once, when I signed the lease. He offered me an End of Days Days special, first and last month’s rent covered—but he didn’t say covered in what—and for the term of the lease he wrote ‘Imminent.’”
He went over to another box, removed the lid, and lifted out a detached hard drive and a computer monitor. “But I was happy to get it. Good sewer lab space is at a premium—and expensive.” He sighed. “Still, moving is an awful lot of work. I really need to get some minions. Say, do either of you know how to hook up a computer system? I’ve got my stereo, too.”
Sheyenne and I politely bowed out. We had other demons to face: We were going to have to find and confront Ah’Chulhu.