My footsteps crackled with each one I took. I looked down.

Oh yes, they’d laid down clear plastic over the floor, I assumed they’d already taken plenty of shots of this place earlier in the morning to reach a point where they’d invited civilian, regardless of whether or not he was the manager of the building into the place. Damn, Billingsly had done the tiles as well.

Certainly, if there was anything dangerous about it, that would have been discovered a few hours before and removed.

But I stepped gingerly, nonetheless.

Fingers, as it turned out was not in the master bedroom anymore, he’d moved on into the living room, his people around filling up the space more than expected. Maybe I took too long actually entering the apartment. While, I grant you, this was a fairly small apartment for 23 Pangbourne, certainly not comparable to the three-bedroom suites we have on higher floors, but it still was a pre-nineteen sixties layout, so the rooms were fairly large compared to the more modern closet spaces that are more common these days, certainly enough to accommodate what looked like half a division’s worth of police officers. It should have still felt spacious, with only a few remaining crime scene people, a tall and broad shouldered detective, and very disturbed building manager.

I could feel the walls closing in around me. Man, I hadn’t felt this kind of claustrophobia in years. I decided to focus on Fingers. He wasn’t part of this, and he was in motion., turning to talk to his officers, waving his hands with authority Life, clearly, not death. I felt a little better.

Symbols for of Basilic magic surrounded me. Spells of concealing, hiding, and removing charms circled all of us. But they were cracked, twisted, broken. And they all held a particular magic number. One that I’ve tried to avoid for, shit.

Was it thirteen years now? I think it was. I knew it was. And the anniversary was coming up. Thirteen days past All Hallows Eve. Oh God.

Fingers himself was discussing matters with a Crime Scene officer and a woman in a lab coat. And I could hear him speaking pretty distinctly even from entering the room.

There was a trick I used to play on my friends, mimicking their voices, best with Fingers because to be perfectly fair use got a pretty distinctive voice, at least in this day and age. Man it annoyed him.

I swear though, he’s got a voice that’s somewhere between Gregory Peck and Gary Cooper. Which in most circumstances and make his discussing of a police case fairly entertaining. I used to get such a kick out of going over mock police reports at the bar to our other friends. As the lead detective at a crime scene, though, Detective Speaks-With-Fingers cut an imposing figure. For one thing, compared to my rather average 5'10, the man seems as tall as a tree, looming over you in his blue police coat like a judge, jury and executioner, at least that's how I imagined he did with perps and toyed with the idea of playing it that way myself, in a way that might distract me, in a possibly entertaining way from the horror surrounding us.

I didn’t expect I was going to be entertained for long, though. I’d seen quite enough, and my stomach had gone from a sinking feeling to a definitely queasy one. It was another way to cope with long remembered terror. I think, If you have enough of these sorts of mechanisms, you can get through just about anything.

“Hey Johnny,” he said glancing in my direction, noticing me, “Glad you could finally make it all the way down from your ivory tower.”

He couldn’t have really been looking at me. Or he’d have seen my face, which must have really been white as a sheet. Or maybe not. Maybe I was still holding it together.

“I really didn’t want to,” I told him. “And now I know why.”

He gave me a wry grin, then held up his hand, and said just a moment. And then he finished up with what he was saying to the other two. And I stood in the room a surrounded by fucked up occult symbols all around me that looked more and more like they had been drawn in real blood.

There was a certain smell…

It made me think that I really shouldn’t have come in to work today, eleven floors on the elevator or not, or even had booked the day for a trip to Florida. Sure, I don’t like Florida, not at all, but it would have been better than this.

Finally, Fingers finished with his officers, turned to me, and tried a smile. I raise my eyebrows. I’d had enough time, I guess, to put up a front. You know, casual disinterest coupled with disgust. Maybe even some of that misplaced irritation that tends to put an end to relationships.

“Well, I figured that a few hours of sleep would get you ready to see this, eh? That and a couple of cups of coffee.”

“You thought, did you?” I replied. “I don’t think there’s enough sleep or coffee, even Irish coffee in the world to prepare anyone for a mess like this.”

Certainly not a full breakfast I thought to myself. Was I going to lose it? I hoped not.

He glanced around at the surrounding symbology.

“Quite a piece of work,” he offered. “See anything you recognize.”

I gave him a hard glare of the best look of astonishment I could fake..

Oh, I saw a lot of things I recognized, nothing I wanted to see, nothing I wanted to see ever again, and nothing I wanted to let anyone know at all that I recognized.

“What the hell are you talking about?” I protested instead.