Chapter Text
As soon as the door opened, the body dropped forward from its position propped against it, head hitting the hardwood floor with a loud, hollow thunk, the rest crumpling forward after it with a noise like a dropped pile of books.
She stood there with her hand still on the doorknob, frozen in shock. He, meanwhile, leapt backwards, eyes wide with horror.
“Shit, shit, shit...” He threw his hands up and turned away. “Nope. I am not taking the blame for a fucking dead body. I’m a lotta things, but a murderer ain’t one of them.”
She did not respond, instead kneeling next to the body with worry in her eyes, struggling to move it so it was lying on its back. The body seemed to belong to an old man with a severe case of male-pattern baldness, the remaining hair he had tinted dusty gray. A small pair of reading glasses perched crookedly on the very edge of his nose, looking as if they would fall at any moment. He was dressed in a snappy vest and button-down, as if he were going to a meeting rather than lying in a heap on his own floor.
The woman leaned over him, pressing her ear to his chest, then taking his wrist in her hands, then pressing her fingertips to his throat, and finally resting her hand just in front of his nose and mouth. A frown found her pursed lips, and she tilted her head in slight puzzlement.
“...This isn’t a dead body.”
Her impromptu companion glanced over his shoulder, grimacing. “How would you know?”
“I know because I’m a medical student, I have seen a lot of things, now would you shut up?”
He grunted, clearly frustrated, and she ignored him as she’d been doing for most of their forced interaction. She attempted to grab the body by the underarms and pull it into a position where she could carry it, but it was far too heavy - she must’ve gotten out of shape in the years since she’d been in the lacrosse team. But she was stubborn, and continued trying to pick the old man up for at least a solid minute before slumping and admitting defeat.
“You. Help me get him to the couch.”
He’d been pacing around the basement while she’d been working, and now froze and looked at her dumbfounded. “Really? Is that really going to help?”
“Do you really want me to call the cops and tell them about your attempted burglary?”
He had no response, and so grudgingly stormed over and grabbed the old man’s legs, coordinating with the woman to lift him off the ground, both of them straining. He began backing them towards the stairs they’d come from, a thoroughly irritated look on his face.
“Look, you were breaking and entering, too,” he snapped, “You found a missing old guy’s key in a plant and snuck into his house at two in the morning. Isn’t that weird at all?”
She shrugged, looking down to her feet to make sure she didn’t fall down the stairs while they were ascending. “He told me where the key was back in sophomore year. I knew something was going on, they didn’t search his place well enough, I wanted answers, so I got them. And I managed to catch you before you stole any of the Professor’s things, so that’s a plus.”
“I can’t help it if this lunatic’s got a lot of stuff that’s weirdly valuable.” He made a noise of effort as he adjusted his grip and backed out of the door to the stairwell, heading for the shag-carpeted living room and the incredibly tacky flower-patterned couch therein. “I’m just tryin’ to make a buck, here. Can’t a guy catch a damn break in this place?”
She rolled her eyes, not wanting to dignify him with a response. People like this never learned.
With a bit of maneuvering, the two managed to get the old man’s body onto the couch, his feet barely sticking over one of the arms. The woman huffed and slumped into a well-worn recliner on the other side of the coffee table, and responded to his condescending smirk with a death glare.
He threw his hands up again, looking between her and the old man. “Okay. If he ain’t dead, what is he? I’m pretty sure nobody’s home in there.”
“I don’t know...” She looked uncertain, for the first time during this encounter, and quickly glanced away as if his collection of vaguely psychedelic paintings on the wall was suddenly very interesting. “His heart’s still going, but it’s very slow. He’s barely breathing...”
“Old man had a heart attack. Stop the presses.”
She shook her head vehemently, “No, that’s definitely not it. Why would he be in the closet, anyway?”
“...What, exactly, are you expectin’ me to say to that. You just left yourself wide open, y'know.”
“This is serious.” She ground her teeth, her fingers restlessly tapping the slippery fake leather of the chair arms. “He’s been out of it for the past two months...I know he said he was researching astral projection for the purposes of interdimensional travel, but - ”
His face went utterly deadpan, and he held up a hand. “Wait. Are you tryin’ to say his soul flew the coop? You believe in that shit?”
“I’ve done ‘that shit’,” she replied, annoyed, “It’s real, all right, but it’s usually not like this. He told me about some kind of deathlike state that could be achieved, that’d let us transcend this place of existence...I think I need to call an ambulance...”
He leaned on the coffee table, a distasteful frown tugging at his lips. “I’m not dealin’ with ‘em.”
“You don’t have to. You can go and I’ll tell them I broke the window. I don’t really care, just as long as you get out and don’t touch his stuff.”
“Aren’t you a med student, know-it-all?” He rolled his eyes, “How do you know the guy didn’t just have a stroke?”
“If he’d had a stroke, he’d be dead already. It’s been three weeks since I’ve heard a word from him, and I’m willing to bet he’s been like this the whole time.” She glanced over at the old man on the couch, nervously twirling a strand of mousy brown hair around one finger. “This isn’t normal, but I’m not sure what to do about it. Most doctors don’t accept the pseudosciences, but maybe they can at least figure out how to wake him up. He could be anywhere, he’s probably lost.”
“Okay, I’m out.” He smacked the coffee table with a fist and stood to his full height, stretching his arms over his head. “I’m too tired for this. If I’d known shit was gonna get existential, I’d have just mugged somebody back at the campus. Those preps are easy pickings.”
“That’s the entire nature of Professor Elinberg’s work, though,” she insisted, standing and crossing her arms.
“He’s a physicist, ain’t he?”
“A theoretical physicist, but that isn't all he's done. He’s done a lot of work in places where science and theology overlap, in the spiritual and transcendent. He’s done a bit of everything - quantum theory, alternate dimensions, the astral plane? The nature of life?”
“He’s got a lot of fancy gizmos I don’t understand that’ll sell for a ton.”
She groaned, her patience reaching its limit. “Okay, whatever, you wouldn’t get it anyway. Just get out the way you came in. You’ve got five minutes before I call the ambulance.”
“Well gee, I didn’t know you were a hippie freak and a bitch.”
He shoved her sideways on his way past, and she glared at the back of his head, following after and watching him suspiciously as he headed back to the window in the kitchen he’d climbed through. He jumped up on the counter, casually knocking over a mug of extremely cold coffee into the mess that was the already-overflowing sink, and shot her an exasperated look as he attempted to maneuver the broken glass in the windowframe.
He gave her a clearly-fake wink. The faint light from outside allowed her to notice that there was a long scar running down the right side of his face.
“Well, it’s been fun. See ya never.”
She watched as he jumped from the window out into the rain, waiting until she heard the smacking of his boots on the wet grass outside getting further and further away. Once she was satisfied the thug was actually leaving, she turned and headed for the living room, dropping herself back into the recliner and pulling her phone out of her pocket.
She kept her word - five minutes passed before she called 911. She knew she was going to have to stay and answer a ton of questions when they arrived, something she wasn’t looking forward to - especially considering she couldn’t exactly tell them her theories about her elderly mentor’s predicament. They wouldn’t go down the routes of inquiry they needed to for this kind of thing. To them, those routes didn’t exist.
As soon as she hung up, she set her phone on the coffee table, stood up, and began to search the house. No one else was going to look the way they needed to, so she would have to find some kind of lead on her own.
Thomas Elinberg’s house was more of a single-story cabin, tucked into the woods a few miles off the highway. He lived alone - he’d never married and he was estranged from his family - though he’d never seemed to mind the solitude, as it was all the better for his odd sorts of experiments. And he was only about an hour’s drive away from his place of work, as a professor teaching various topics relating to theoretical physics at the not-so-prestigious Miskatonic University.
He'd worked there for some time - in fact, from the time she was in high school, where she'd first met him. He'd come to the school as part of a college fair for the seniors, and she'd stumbled upon him in the hallway, where they'd had a lively discussion of the Schrodinger's cat thought experiment and the nature of observation. They'd spoken more through high school, and he'd written a recommendation letter for her university application. She’d gone into the medical program mostly because she’d been told to, though she had a special fascination regarding the strange and eerie and not-well-understood side of science, and he specialized in such things, offering to teach her what he knew. And she’d learned eagerly, even now a year into her master’s program.
Until he’d gone missing three weeks ago.
His house was full of oddities - the friends he made tended to be in more obscure areas of their fields. There was the collection of psychedelic art, including a few bizarre-looking sculptures above his fireplace, and a few images of optical illusions. From his friends in archaeology, he had various artifacts that had apparently come from lost civilizations that history had never acknowledged. Inventors would send him prototypes of projects that they knew no one else would take seriously. He had a collection of rare crystals from a geologist he’d worked with back in the day. He had a multitude of strange and rare books.
Of course, it was all scattered about and cluttered and often disappeared under his bold style of decorating things, but she’d been here enough times to know where to look. She’d already checked the basement before she’d heard the uninvited guest, so the next logical place to look for clues would be his office.
It was an odd room, large and lined with shelves, all dark wood aside from a glaringly pale wood desk with feet carved in the shape of dragon heads, and a desk light in the form of a simple cube that lit up if you touched it. Feeling a bit guilty for going through his things, she began trying to sort through the disaster zone that was his desk, skimming the texts of papers and forms and his own notes...
There. There was that word again.
She pulled one of his notebooks out from under a stack of tests he hadn’t bothered to grade, giving the page she’d caught sight of a closer look. It was all written in his messy, cramped handwriting that the entire quantum theory class liked to make a running joke out of, though it seemed a little more frantic and rushed than usual.
“The secrets of the Deathstate are within my grasp,” she read, frowning, “I have found means to transcend existence itself, but it requires a two-step process. It is, to my surprise, physical as much as it is mental, though I would like to attempt to travel with mind alone if I can. Perhaps I can access the machine in the astral plane.”
The notes just became scribbles from there, and below the paragraph was a doodle of something strange. A set of what looked almost like two brackets faced each other, connected by a faint line at the top and what looked to be a panel on the bottom. In the center were scribbled lines probably representing lightning, enclosed by an odd diamond shape.
The distant sound of a siren made her drop the notebook, sighing in defeat and turning to head for the front door to let the emergency medics in. This all had to have something to do with the Deathstate, but he’d refused to explain any of that to her, which was very uncharacteristic of him. He’d told her he wanted to wait until it was ‘ready’ to give her the details.
And now, she got the strong feeling he’d gotten himself into a mess because of it. If he’d actually told her, she might be able to help.
As it was, she was going to have to find the answers herself.