(no subject)

Sunday, September 30, 2002
55 Central Park West
26th Floor, Corner Penthouse
Morning

There was a rapid-fire knocking at the door of Dana Barrett’s apartment, a fact which caught her by surprise. Nobody she knew would be up and about much before noon on a Sunday, except to go out to breakfast or something similar. “Who is it?” she called.

“It’s Dr. Stantz, Ms. Barrett- you remember, from the university?”

“Yes, I remember,” she said, allowing herself a smile. Really, he sounded as if he’d expected to be forgotten entirely. She straightened a few pillows on the couch as she made her way towards the door. “Be right with you-“

She opened the door to the sight of two men, one familiar, one not. “Oh! Well, hello. . .”

Ray stepped forward half a pace, gesturing to the man next to him, whose mouth twitched as if he wasn’t entirely sure how one went about performing this ‘smile’ gesture he’d heard so much about. “Miss Barrett, this is my colleague at Columbia, Dr. Egon Spengler; Spengs, this is Miss Dana Barrett, the lady I was telling you about. We’ve come to check your apartment over for any traces the problems and phenomena you reported to me might’ve left.”

“Oh, thank goodness, “ Dana said, falling back to let them in. “Nothing’s actually happened since we spoke at the hall of records, but- uh, what is he doing?“

The grim-faced scientist had produced a peculiar object from one of his coat pockets- a small black device with arms that rose out of its sides, lights flashing in green, then amber along their length. He was moving it up and down as he stalked about the apartment, periodically stopping to examine the thing closely.

“Uh, he’s measuring the ambient levels of psychokinetic energy in here,” Ray said. “That’d be the energy left by ghosts, spirits, major supernatural entities and members of dormant pantheons, you name it. Also your standard psychic phenomena, of course.”

“Of course,” said Dana, still not sure she quite liked the look of the other man. “It’s not going to damage anything, is it?”

“No-o-o,” said Ray slowly, “but we might wind up having to do something to one of your walls at some point.”

“Excuse me?”

He gestured towards the back of the apartment. “According to those plans we saw in the Hall of Records, there’s a hidden stairway behind one of your walls. We might need to get at that at some point- not that we want you to lose your security deposit or anything, so if there’s another way-“

“Ray?” said Dr. Spengler. “I think you should come have a look at this.” The lights on his device were flashing an angry red.

(no subject)

“It’s like this, Da- Miss Barr- um-“

He winced; Dana laughed, in spite of herself. “Dana, please.”

“Thank you,” he said, looking relieved. “All right, then- Dana, it’s like this. This apartment building was designed decades ago by a man named Ivo Shandor. He was, shall we say, something of a polymath- in all the wrong ways.”

“You already told me his name,” Dana said, “but other than the peculiarities in the architecture you really didn’t say much about him.”

“I know. I’m sorry.” He spread his hands a little. “I wanted to confirm a few data points first. Anyway, it’s like this-“

“The man was a genius of the first order,” Dr. Spengler interrupted, “but he put his intellect to all the wrong uses, largely because of his experiences during the First World War. His experience with the Great War and its aftermath led him to think society was too sick to survive. He started trying to take steps to correct that. Surgical ones.”

Dana felt a small shiver run up her back at the look on his face. She turned to Ray instead. It was easier.

“That plan of attack didn’t work,” Ray said, “so he turned to what he figured were better examples of how humanity ought to behave. Very big on going back to the beginning, our man Shandor- anyway, as far as he was concerned the world would be infinitely better off if all the social structures we’d built up were stripped away and replaced with the patterns of the original civilization. Which, so far as he knew, was ancient Sumer.”

“As nearly as I can tell from the cuneiform inscriptions Dr. Stantz was able to transcribe from the temple on your building’s roof, Shandor placed a temple to several of the major Sumerian gods- and their opposites- at the peak of a superconducting antenna for bringing in spiritual energy,” said Dr. Spengler. “His intention was to draw in enough energy to erode the barrier between worlds and reintroduce the old gods- beginning with, so far as we can tell, the goddess Innanna and her sister Ereshkigal.”

“We could be wrong about that, given how little I was able to write down,” Ray said, “but I really don’t think we are. It sure looks like the temple at Kuthu in the history books.”

“And that’s why all the strange things’ve been happening here?” Dana asked. “The voices, the dreams, the appliances going on and off- things moving-“

“All of it’s the result of a spiritual electromagnet that was switched on in the 1920’s and left running for eighty years or more,” Ray confirmed. “And we have no way of turning it off.”

She stared at the table, shivering more. “So what do I do now?” she asked at last.

There was silence for a bit. Then Ray said: “We have to get you out of here. You don’t need any more of this. And then we have to convince somebody about the place-“

“What we really have to do is get up on the roof,” corrected Dr. Spengler. “If we don’t get this right, it won’t matter whether Ms. Barrett is still here or not. Once the energy reaches the carrying capacity of the building, it’s going to set off a chain reaction. We have to find out the exact nature of that temple if we’re going to undo its effects before New York becomes the playground of deities who’ve had more than four thousand years to brood over old wrongs.”