Carter & Lovecraft (20 page)

Fine
, thought Carter.
Let’s see how you like it, fucker.

*   *   *

Carter had learned Colt’s home address when he did the follow-up research after his investigations at Clave College, but had had neither the opportunity nor the necessity to check it out firsthand. He’d been expecting a small apartment in a block or even a shared house, but what he found surprised him. Colt had a good, three-bedroom house all to himself on a residential street. It sat alone, the lawn out front well tended, the boards of the house pristine white. Not for the first time, Carter wondered how it was that Colt just seemed to blunder into money. It didn’t seem to matter enormously to him—the choice of the practical, unostentatious home and car showed that—but the stuff just stuck to him. Carter had seen his credit ratings and at least gotten an idea of his bank balance, and the man was making math look lucrative.

The business in Atlantic City was perhaps an insight; Colt was very good at squeezing cash out of coincidence. Carter had a feeling Colt could be a millionaire or more easily enough by playing the markets, but that would be time-consuming and time was more precious to him than money. He made enough so he didn’t have to think about it, and that was enough.

Carter had to admit the world would be a saner place if people shared Colt’s cool view toward the pursuit of money, but that left another question to be answered. If money wasn’t Colt’s primary motivation, what was?

If Belasco and Hayesman were any indication, and if Colt was actually involved in their deaths, then revenge seemed pretty important to him. He certainly seemed to be on a hair trigger when it came to taking offense. Belasco had slapped his wrist for not focusing on his thesis and general jackassery, and Hayesman had barred him from the Oceanic for suspected cheating. He’d even let Colt keep his winnings, but that hadn’t saved him from a grotesque death. It was all pretty thin for killing, but Colt had done it anyway.

Seemed
to have done it anyway, Carter had to remind himself. There still wasn’t a scrap of real evidence. Just coincidence and intuition.
Synchronicity
and intuition.

There was nobody around, and Colt hadn’t troubled to put an alarm on the place. Two minutes’ work with lockpicks at the rear door and Carter was in.

*   *   *

Carter’s first impression was that he’d wandered into a show home. The place was unnervingly clean and tidy. A note from Colt’s cleaner and the hum of a Roomba making the rounds of the den showed he was very keen on keeping his home fastidiously dust-free.

Carter wondered if he was bacteriophobic or just thoroughly anal-retentive, as room after room showed the same sterility. Books shelved in perfect order suggested the latter.

There were some oddities. Everything was in its place except for a boxed set of Blu-rays lying by the TV, the individual discs left carelessly on top of the box. Carter didn’t examine them closely, but just read
The Meaning of Life
from the uppermost.

In another room, he found a shelf of board games that, upon closer examination, were all playable solo. He could draw two conclusions from that, both equally likely and probably both correct: that Colt had no friends, and that he was more interested in the idea of playing against blind chance than against other people. If he could beat a randomly shuffled deck of cards or the roll of a die, then that was enough.

More than enough, to judge by the room of discarded technology Carter found. A utility shelving unit was half filled with cardboard storage boxes, each containing superannuated or broken laptops, tablets, phones, and desktop computer components, mainly hard drives, although he also found one with RAM strips and CPUs. Each was in an antistatic bag, labeled with exactly what it was and the reason for its abandonment. The vast majority said
Obsolete
, even if only a year old, sometimes even less.

Carter reluctantly put a perfectly operational third-generation iPad back into its box. According to the dates on the label, Colt had bought it on its first day of release, then wiped and stored it the very day the fourth-gen version came out six months later. Carter didn’t have a tablet at all, useful as it might be. He stepped back from the shelves and regarded them with truculent envy. It just wasn’t right, a man sitting on a treasure trove of usable gear like that. He hoped a burglar would come along and rip the whole lot off one of these days. He even knew a few who’d be glad of the tip.

Clearing his mind of pettiness, Carter continued the search for anything useful. It went quickly; the lack of clutter meant he could clear a room rapidly. He’d been involved in detailed searches of suspects’ apartments in the past, and wished they’d been even half as Spartan and organized as Colt’s. Everything was in its place and there was a place for everything. The very formality of the house meant that anything out of the ordinary would have advertised itself. There was nothing. If Colt had anything to hide, it would either require a structural search of the house that Carter simply didn’t have the time for, or he had it stowed somewhere else. A mental image of the house at the end of Waite Road appeared sharply in Carter’s mind, and he shoved it to one side. He didn’t even want to think of his experiences on Waite’s Bill, never mind contemplate breaking into one of the houses.

He finally found one single oddity amid the tidy files, folders, boxes, and drawers. A bill from the college’s Material Sciences unit for materials, workshop time, and staff help in a project that involved “rapid prototyping” puzzled Carter. What did a mathematician want that needed something called “DMLS” and four kilos of aluminum? He took a picture of the bill and put it back where he found it.

Carter checked his watch. He’d been in Colt’s home for almost half an hour, and that was probably too long. He carried out a last sweep of the house to ensure he’d left no traces before leaving.

He was in Colt’s bedroom at the front of the second story, staying back from the window but still with a view of the street, when he saw the red Mazda3. It was parked directly across the street, not in the house’s driveway.

Colt was leaning against it, arms crossed casually, watching his own house. He saw Carter and waved. He was smiling.

Carter froze.

Colt’s smile grew into a grin. He blew out his cheeks and held his nose, a pantomime of somebody holding his breath. He dropped his hand and started laughing. Carter watched as Colt got back into his car. For a moment he thought Colt was going to park on his own property, but no. He drove off.

Carter got the bad feeling to end all bad feelings. He’d walked into a trap, but exactly what kind of trap, he couldn’t tell. Whatever Colt had arranged, standing around in his house was not going to improve Carter’s situation. He would get out immediately, downstairs, back to the kitchen, out of the door—and fuck relocking it—over the backyard fence, and away.

Carter headed for the stairs. He was only a few steps down when he wondered if he was suffering a migraine. He hadn’t suffered one since his teen years, but he couldn’t think of any other way to account for the flickering light he could see in the stairwell, dashes and motes. As he descended, they seemed to grow larger, and he found it more difficult to move. The carpet on the stair seemed sodden, sluggish with extra mass in among the strands, yet when he looked at it, it was perfectly dry.

Belasco.

He remembered Belasco, how he had died, drowning on dry land with no water closer than his car’s radiator.

Colt was going to drown Carter in exactly the same way, while he was elsewhere. Then he’d come back in a few hours, probably with a witness, and—
Oh, my. Criminy, whatever has happened here?
—discover Carter’s corpse.

Why, no, officer. I can’t imagine what happened here. I’ve never met this man before
.

*   *   *

Carter waded through dense air. He could feel the pressure of nothing in particular making his pant legs cling close to the skin, but only a ghost of a sensation of cool wetness anywhere around him.

He had a sudden memory of one of his teachers at school inviting questions about anything, and some smart-ass trying to stump him with “Why is water wet?” The teacher’s answer seemed just sophistry at the time, like he was dodging the fact that he didn’t know, but in later years when Carter remembered that afternoon, he realized his teacher had been dead right. “Wetness, not in the technical sense of viscosity but as a sensory perception, is not inherent in water. Rather, it’s our perception of water, and how we react to its physical properties. You’re talking in a subjective rather than a scientifically objective sense. You want to know why water’s wet? Because we sense it as wet. We
make
it wet.”

The water that was up to Carter’s chest in the stairwell didn’t come close to ticking all the boxes that made him define it as “wet.” He couldn’t see it, except for the ripples of a nonexistent liquid surface catching light he wasn’t convinced came from anywhere in the world he’d been pretty sure was the only Earth up until that minute. It didn’t move against his skin in any way he could feel except for a sense of resistance, more like a steady wind blowing when he tried to move rather than a liquid. It didn’t make his skin cool when it was exposed to air. If anything, there was just a distant impression of coolness below the surface.

Experimentally, he lowered his head below the “surface” and opened his mouth. There was an oppressive pressure against his tongue as something with the mass but not the substance of water rolled in. Carter knew he didn’t want to try to breathe it in. He’d seen Belasco’s postmortem report. The non-water might not make good drinking, but it would drown him as certainly as a lake of the real thing.

He could feel himself growing buoyant the farther he moved into the layer. He could also see that the layer was rising rapidly up the stairwell; it wouldn’t be long before it reached the ceiling of the upper floor, and then it would be all over for him. Carter took a deep breath, and dived.

If his life hadn’t been in immediate danger, Carter might have taken a moment to enjoy the sensation of flying. It was not as effortless or as swift as the average superhero made it look, but there was still wonder to be had in making steady progress through the air of the front room and back toward the kitchen using a breaststroke. The time limit imposed by his lungs took almost all the pleasure from it, though.

He reached the kitchen doorway, grabbed the frame, and drew himself through, driving himself to the rear door. He grabbed the handle, wondering if the non-water would surge out in an invisible flood when he opened it. Then he remembered that the door would, of course, open inward. If this was normal water, the weight of it would be too much for him to pull against. He had made a mistake going forward; he should have tried to escape from the first story. It was too late to berate himself for the error. If he got out alive, there would be time then.

The handle wouldn’t move at all. It wasn’t that it was locked—he knew he’d left it unlocked—but that it simply wouldn’t move at all, as if the handle had been welded to the mounting plate. There was no sense that it was made up of separate parts, only that the handle, lock, and bolt had become a single immovable unit.

Carter didn’t know how that was possible, but he didn’t know how the non-water was possible, either, and that didn’t stop him from floating in it. He could see clearly in it; there was no sense of pressure on his eyeballs, or the prickling of an alien medium against the cornea. The water wasn’t wet. Cool. That meant it wouldn’t fuck up his pistol.

He drew his Glock, sighted on the glass panel making up the top half of the door, and fired.

The gun fired perfectly, the sound of the detonation only slightly muffled by the strange environment. The good news stopped there. The shot ricocheted off the glass to lodge somewhere in the kitchen wall. There wasn’t even a mark to show where the bullet had struck it.

Carter fired again, but more as an experiment than in any real hope of shattering the glass. Again the bullet struck the target and again it ricocheted off, causing no apparent damage. Carter knew that even bullet-resistant glass would have shown a mark. Whatever Colt had done to seal the glass belonged to the same school of fucked-up physics as the non-water. Carter suspected he could empty the magazine and there’d be nothing to show for it except a few random holes in cereal boxes and the walls.

He reholstered his pistol and turned to go. As he did, he noticed the spent brass from the shots lying on the floor and, on an impulse, gathered them up. There was nothing he could do about the slugs, but he was damned if he was going to leave evidence of his last frantic attempts to escape for Colt to gloat over.

His lungs were starting to labor as he made the bottom of the stairwell and pushed himself up it. The layer had completely flooded the stairs, and he didn’t find breathable air until he broke the glittering surface a foot above the floor of the upper hallway. He hungrily dragged in deep breaths as he waded through the deepening flood, heading for the rear bedroom where Colt kept his old technology. In the corner was a steel-framed chair. Carter picked it up and without hesitation swung it at the rear window.

It was like hitting a concrete wall. There was no reverberation in the glass, no sound beyond the metallic tone of the tubular steel form striking something at least as strong as itself.

Carter went back out onto the landing, taking the chair with him. There was a hatchway into the roof space in the ceiling, the hinged trapdoor bearing a simple ring at one end to allow it to be pulled down with a hook. He used the chair as a step stool, standing on it to reach the hatch. He hooked his finger through the ring and pulled. The trapdoor refused to move an inch, or even a millimeter. It was as solid as if it were just a detail carved from a single great sheet of marble.

Carter stood on the chair, considering his options, the glittering surface of the water that wasn’t there already rising rapidly up his thighs. Colt had created a killing cube within his house, marked out as an area circumscribed by the outer walls, and becoming a greater volume as its height increased toward the first-story ceiling.