Chapter 25: Magnetic Declination (Part I)

Inside the closet stood a monument to Emily Early. A small tower, constructed entirely of CRT and LCD monitors dominated the center of the heap like a terrible god, each screen glowing with flickering video images replaying apparently random clips of video—all of which included Emily Early at various stages of her childhood and college career. Elaine recognized one clip from a FOX 15 News broadcast from the previous year about her meteoric rise to popularity in the local political sphere. Clips of poorly rendered, fuzzy home videos mixed themselves with recent, crystal clear surveillance-style video. About the base of the entire construction, foothills and rivers of wax formed a barrier ring with still-burning candles set into apportioned sections of the region. Wires of varying colors and configuration rose up from beneath the candles and into the central pillar.

Elaine could just make out an arcane geometry in the slowly curving spiral of the bundled wires. She would just need to get a picture and perhaps a pattern recognition program could do the job.

“Yow!” The proximity to the strange setup inside the closet become too much for the little gremlin in the coat hanger it leapt out in a shower of electricity. Suddenly in possession of a Forth of July sparkler, Frog swore loud enough to wake most of ASU’s Old Dead and dropped the hangar, sending the fleeing gremlin splashing through the carpet fibers in a twisted river of stormy light.

“But, it can’t be a stalker,” Elaine said to the closet.

“Are you okay?” Zane asked Frog.

Elaine shook her head and approached the threshold of the maintenance closet. “The effect is too broad and sustained,” she said. “I would have discovered a person before now. The actions of this effect are too unconscious; it’s acting on instinct…”

“That looked like it hurt,” Roger mused, gesturing towards his dorm room. “I can get you a Band-Aid.”

“Ow, ow, ow,” Frog said, pacing back and forth behind the group, waving her hand and sucking on her fingers like she’d accidentally touched the stove burner.

While Roger and Zane hovered over Frog—wincing over her fingers between her lips—Elaine punched some commands into her cell phone and ran it back and forth over what she saw inside the room. The computer monitors reacted to the movement of her hand by warping in multicolored bands as the cell phone screen passed near them. With her eyes adjusting to the light inside the closet, Elaine started to see more objects tethered between the cables.

“There’s a keyboard in here,” she said. “Like it was designed for a person to interact with, but there’s hundreds of overlapping fingerprints with different trace. Same with the monitors. If I saw this, I’d think it all came from a computer lab.”

Frog pulled her fingers out of her mouth. “Maybe something Emily did in the past is coming back to bite her.”

“That would certainly replace the stalker hypothesis,” Elaine said. “There are some strange events in Emily’s past that defy scrutiny. Such as the fire in her dorm that set off her winning spree. She may be politically smart, but she definitely has no aptitude for magick that I’ve seen. Tech background zero.”

“Well,” Frog said, smirking. “What are friends for?”

Elaine frowned with concentration. “I’d like to run down the angle with her chief of staff,” she said, “but whatever’s happening is coming to fruition right now. We’re going to have to head it off.”

“We could smash it,” Roger said.

“And blow up half the dorm?” Zane said. “We don’t know what this equipment is doing. Elaine and I have had some experience with things like this and, well, to put it mildly, we once almost lost Hadaly that way.” He leaned into the room only slightly over the threshold but kept his hands wide of the wires and keyboards. “If I could only get this back to my laboratory and the Faraday cage we could take a crack at it.”

A light entered Elaine’s eyes and she stalked away down the hall. Her thoughts spun in her head as she tried to recall the diagrams and blueprints she’d used to track the gremlins through the building mere days before. Even with her goggles off, she could imagine the lines and crossways of the various junctions within the vent system and the electrical wiring wrapping through the very walls. Puzzled looks followed her. Startled, Roger moved to follow her; Frog touched his shoulder and shook her head.

After moving a few steps, her eyes fixed to the ceiling, she turned and stared at her brother.

“We have a Faraday cage.”

“The building?” Zane said.

“This room is right above a major junction in the wiring. I’ve been in the vents on this level and they connect up in a grid one meter by one meter, that’s meter wavelength. Think that’s wide enough? With some metal poles we could close the sides—ten meters that way and ten meters that way—and you’d seal it in.”

“Where’d we get the poles?”

Roger raised his hand. “Ah, er, well the shower curtains have long poles, we could break them down.”

“Zane, do you have—”

Her brother produced a small pen-like device from his pocket and twirled it deftly between his fingers. “Have my heated inscribing soldering iron?”

“Yes. That.”

“Don’t leave home without it,” Zane said. “I’ll go get some of those shower curtain rods. Be back in a jiffy. Which way is the shower again?”