Free Dead to Me by Anton Strout

ring of keys. He sorted out a plastic keycard and waved it in front of an electronic plate to the door’s left. The latch clicked softly and Connor pushed the door open, gesturing for Irene to enter.
     
    “Welcome to the world of weird,” Connor said.
     
    6
     
    Holding the door for a woman who could just as easily walk through it was a nice touch on Connor’s part. With five years on the job, Connor did have many of the finer points down when it came to helping the deceased cross over. Keeping me alive on a daily basis? That was a different matter.
     
    He waited for Irene to pass through the doorway before he spoke.
     
    “The dead have heap-big issues,” he told me in the worst Native American accent he could muster. He was a movie buff and always doing accents or impressions. Almost all of them were impossible to figure out. In his regular voice, he continued, “Sometimes the simple gestures we associate with being human can get an investigator through even the most difficult of spirit-handling situations. Think of the soul as shell-shocked when it’s torn from the world of the living. Spirits who can’t get past that tend to linger with the confusion of it all. That’s when it can grow restless and a haunting might commence. I’ll get reports from family members who say that they’ve started seeing dead ole’ Uncle Lou sitting on the can in the upstairs bathroom. Stuff like that.”
     
    Although I had hoped to catch up on the paperwork threatening to take over my desk, Irene had suddenly become our “heap-big” issue du jour—which meant that I would have to table two zombie infestations and an investigation of a Shambler sighting. The Department of Extraordinary Affairs was probably going to be a big shock to Irene, and that would pretty much fill up a good part of our workday.
     
    Irene looked overwhelmed by the change of pace from the mesmerizing tranquility of the theater to the red-tape office environment that spread out before her. Dozens of desks, cubicles, and a throng of pencil pushers cluttered the busy aisles of our unlikeliest of office spaces. The stucco walls gave the lengthy main room a warm, golden glow, reminiscent of California’s grand hotels from the early days of Hollywood. Irene spotted the only significant difference between those hotels and our main office at the D.E.A.—an assortment of arcane symbols carved deeply into a vast portion of the wall.
     
    “What on earth are those?” Irene asked. Her eyes were wide with wonder, everything remaining of her humanity exaggerated to cartoonish proportions.
     
    “Standard ritualistic markings, ma’am,” Connor said politely as he led her down the main aisle. “‘All operations involving the use or potential use of supernatural powers must be properly warded, glyphed, and otherwise protected by our Division of Greater & Lesser Arcana.’”
     
    “I’m afraid I don’t know what that means,” she muttered absently, too busy drinking in the flurry of activity around her.
     
    “Allow me,” I said. I wasn’t sure how much I was allowed to tell her, but I figured Connor would stop me if I overstepped my bounds.
     
    “This,” I continued, “is the heart of our organization, the Department of Extraordinary Affairs. We’re mostly a hush-hush offshoot of the Mayor’s Office that deals with paranormal matters in the Tri-State Area.” I pointed to an endless row of doors along the far wall. “See those? We’re divided up into several divisions…”
     
    “Too many divisions if you ask me,” Connor added. “Greater and Lesser Arcana, Haunts-General, Things That Go Bump in the Night…the list goes on and on.”
     
    “And which are you?” Irene asked, turning to me.
     
    “Connor and I work for Other Division,” I said, “which basically means we pick up cases that don’t pigeonhole neatly into the rest of the divisions, or that we pick up their slack when the casework builds up. I only know a handful of the