I pulled my tongue back in. “Nut,” I said.

“Don’t think you can butter me up with endearments,” he replied, wagging a finger in the air. “I’ve heard that one before. Just before the guys with the straitjackets showed up.”

We both broke up, stumbling a little on the icy sidewalk as we ascended the hill. We must have seemed drunk, giggling like children with me favoring my aching knee so I skipped and staggered unevenly, but we got to the library about an hour before closing time.

CHAPTER 11

Quinton knew his way around the library better than anyone other than an employee—and possibly better than some of them. I wasn’t entirely thrilled with the Koolhaas building but I didn’t think it an eyesore. No, the eyesore was the screaming-yellow escalator enclosure with its strange display of two faces and a giant eyeball projected on mostly spherical blobs that were seen through rough holes in the escalator’s interior wall. Shafts of light seemed to transfix the misshapen faces and eye, making them look like alien trophies as they writhed, mouthing silent words and blinking with disembodied lids. I couldn’t look at it for long. The wiggling, flickering faces reminded me too much of things out of my earliest Grey nightmares.

Quinton caught me turning away. “Disconcerting.” “That’s a word for it.”

He smiled and we came out of the escalator tunnel into the “mixing chamber”—a huge room that took up the whole floor with clusters of worktables, chairs, standing carrels, shelves, and counters where patrons and librarians were supposed to “mix” to find information. Mostly people seemed to gather in clumps and chatter among themselves, so the room had a constant low din like a tropical jungle. Quinton sought out one of the librarians who was wearing a wireless mic headset like a stagehand in a large, professional theater. After a moments conversation the librarian shook his head.

“Sorry, can’t put you on the staff computer right now. Leslie’s got it. The regular computers are open and they’re pretty fast. Here, let me grab you one.”

He darted across the chamber to a computer in a standing carrel. I thought it was a good thing we wouldn’t be using it very long, since the stand-up desk height was well designed to discourage lingering. In spite of the proximity to closing time, most of the computers in the room—and there were a lot—were in use. Many of the patrons looked high school or college age, and I guessed from the fevered looks on some of their faces that they were racing to find materials for papers due the next day. A lot of the library branches weren’t open on Sundays, so this was the natural place to come if you were running late and didn’t have Internet access at home. I wondered how many papers were being plagiarized outright in the last-minute panic.

Quinton ran a quick search and we made a list of newspaper archive dates and issues, which I carried back to the librarian with the headset. He called to someone using the device, and a stack of bound journals and microfiche cards was delivered to me in a few minutes. I put them on a table near Quinton and went to look at his progress before I dove into them.

He was glaring at a page full of prompts and code strings on the computer screen and typing with angry slashing strokes.

I put a hand on his shoulder. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

He turned his eyes up to look at me. “I wanted to check some other sources—in case there’s been anything like this elsewhere.” He looked back to the screen and frowned. “This archive is being coy—it wants a bunch of login passwords it never asked for before. Someone thinks they’re being secure but it’s just a pain in the butt. I’ll back-door it…” He patted my hand and drew his away to return to the keyboard.

“OK. I’ve got a pile of stuff from the newspaper archive. Have you found any information about the Sistu yet?”

“Not yet… I’ll finish this and get to the folklore section…” His concentration was on the screen and the task of getting around the system’s security. He didn’t see me nod, didn’t notice the withdrawal of my hand, so focused was his attention. I couldn’t begrudge that—I was the same way on a case sometimes. But I wondered what archive he was getting into that fascinated him so, since I couldn’t imagine anything in the library that would have that sort of security—or anything we were looking for that would need it. Quinton intrigued me, but it wasn’t for his transparency or simple life.

I skimmed through the old Post-Intelligencer issues, taking notes on all the deaths or other strange occurrences that seemed to fit our pattern in the right date ranges.

The records before the fire didn’t show anything that was a match—even a rough match. The first odd death happened in April of 1890, during the rebuilding, when the Kline and Rosenberg building on Washington between Commercial and Second collapsed during construction. One of the workmen had been buried under the falling bricks and was found dead and missing an arm and a leg once the bricks were shifted out of the hole. The missing limbs were never recovered and the collapse was blamed on piers that hadn’t been sunk deep enough into the mud and sawdust landfill that made up that part of town.

I had to find a map of the original plat to realize that the site in question was now the northwest corner of Occidental Park—Washington Street was still the same, but at the time Oxy had been called Second Avenue and First Avenue was called Commercial Street. The same location where I’d seen the tumbledown building in the city’s memory of 1949. I wondered if it could have been the replacement Kline and Rosenberg building.

Another project on Washington—the Brodeck and Schlesinger building between Third and Fourth—fell down a month later while its second floor was under construction. It was no wonder they’d turned the area into a park, since it seemed to be bad luck for buildings. Between the two events I spotted records of several more deaths with the same hallmarks. After the second building went down, though, the deaths had stopped. I didn’t know what had put an end to them—the reason for the collapse was again given as unstable piers—but I knew from experience that it was possible for magic to bring down a building and wondered if that was the real cause of the second building’s fall.

As I read forward, that period of Seattle’s history was full of freakish events, from the city’s project to raise the streets—but not the sidewalks—that had resulted in the deep corridors I’d visited, to the “inadvertent suicide” of an unlucky pedestrian who fell from the streets above. There were other odd deaths, but I didn’t find another death by monster until that of a transient named Charles Olander in 1949. I assumed this was Chuck-o, and I felt pretty sure I was right when I read that his body had been found at the other end of Occidental, near the current football stadium, where some pipes had broken in the street during the quake. That would have been a block or less from the old Duncan and Sons shop with its life-size plaster horse standing on a platform over the sidewalk.

Quinton sat down next to me, brushing a hand down my back and jarring me out of my thoughts about whatever was feeding on people beneath the streets.

“Not much on the Sistu,” he said. “A lot of the Native American and local legend books are at the Ballard branch. And the other archives didn’t turn up anything like it outside the Seattle area for any time period, so it’s not a moving phenomenon—nor is it government related or monitored that I could discover. It’s localized.”

“Why would the government—” I started.

A voice came from overhead, telling us the library would be closing in five minutes. I tried my question again, but Quinton shook me off. I picked up my notes and got ready to go back out into the cold.