The Devil's Elixir

by Raymond Khoury

  I had to find El Brujo.

  Little did I know that he’d find me first.

  61

  I didn’t hear them come in.

  It was late. Really late, or really early, depending on which way you look at it. I wasn’t sleeping, but I guess my senses were so numb I couldn’t say I was awake either. I was physically and mentally trashed, and sleep would have been very welcome. I did get some, initially. Maybe a couple of hours. Then somewhere around four thirty in the morning, my eyes flickered awake, and that was it.

  Jules and Cal, the new guy, were alternating two-hour shifts on watch, but I’d offered to share the roster with them. My shift, though, wasn’t till six. And yet, here I was, staring at the ceiling. Maybe I couldn’t rest until I’d found a hole, some way of sinking Tess’s theory. Or maybe it was something inside me—acutely sensitive hearing or some kind of ESP, depending on whether we’re going for a strictly scientific explanation or, given where my head was at, a more esoteric one—that shook me awake because of the imminent danger. Either way, I was awake, just barely, lying there in bed with Tess next to me, trapped in that really irritating zone where you’re too tired to think but too wound up to sleep.

  I thought I heard a faint creak, like from a plank of flooring or a door frame. Could be Jules getting herself a cup of coffee from the kitchen—or was it Cal’s shift? I wasn’t sure. Jules, I think. The house was silent again for a moment. Then I heard another creak, followed by a metallic snap.

  That one slapped me awake, but by then it was too late. I was halfway out of bed and reaching for my gun when the door to our bedroom flew open and two dark silhouettes swarmed in. My fingers never made it to the Browning’s grip. I felt the hard, deep sting in my chest before I realized one of them had targeted me with his gun, but it didn’t sound like a normal gun and what hit me wasn’t a bullet. It came out with a whoosh, like you got from a compressed air cartridge, and what I had in my chest wasn’t a gaping bullet wound. It was a three-inch-long syringe dart with a black tip at its back end.

  I kept going for the gun, but one of the intruders was already on me and kicked my arm away from the night table before throwing me against the wall. I glimpsed Tess barely sitting up in the bed before she yelped as she was hit with another dart. I pushed myself off the wall to hit back at the intruder, but in mid-stride, my muscles turned to jelly and I just crumpled down to the floor like a rag doll.

  I couldn’t lift a finger.

  I could only watch, a prisoner of my own body, as they walked around me like I wasn’t even there. From the corner of my eye, I could see them lifting Tess off the bed and carrying her out of the room, and a rage like I’d never felt flared through me. My thoughts rocketed to Alex, and I hoped they’d used something else to drug him, something that didn’t keep him conscious like I was, something that would spare him the horror of witnessing this. I thought of Jules and Cal, too, hoping they weren’t deemed expendable, hoping they’d been spared. Then a face loomed into my frame of vision, upside down, from behind me. A new face, one I’d never seen before, but I knew it was him.

  Right there, inches away from me. And I couldn’t lay a finger on him or rip his damn heart out. Assuming he had one.

  I just stared up at him, lost in my silent fury, screaming my lungs out in total silence, and I thought of spiders and lizards and what my tox report would look like when they did my postmortem.

  THURSDAY

  62

  “Hey, come on, wake up. Please.”

  The words woke me up with a start.

  It took a few seconds for my eyes to focus, but I already knew I wasn’t going to like what they showed me. My head felt woolly, not quite like a hangover. More like my skull had been caught in a vise that was just loosened by half a turn.

  I was lying on a thin cot and the first thing I noticed was that my hands weren’t bound. The cot squeaked as I bent up, and I saw that my legs weren’t tied either. I glanced around. My surroundings were spartan to a fault. I was in a windowless room, about fifteen-foot square. Its walls were old and made of stone that rose up into a low barrel vault. There was literally nothing else in the room apart from me and the cot and a guy who was just standing there, staring across at me like I was a stranded alien. Which, in a sense, I realized I probably was.

  “Who are you?” he asked, his voice wobbly and bristling with racked nerves.

  I looked at him, and clarity started to seep back into my brain. “You’re Stephenson.”

  Surprise flushed through his face. “How’d you know? Who are you?”

  I sat up, slid my feet to the floor, and rubbed some life into my thighs and arms as I looked around our cell.

  “I’m Sean Reilly. FBI.” My mouth felt like it was lined with sandpaper.

  “What the hell’s happening?” he asked. “Where are we?”

  The air was cool, but there was a latent humidity in the room, like it was seeping in through the walls.

  “I’d say we’re somewhere in Mexico.”

  His jaw dropped, and he had trouble mouthing his next question. “Mexico? What? Why? Do you know what the hell’s going on? I’m a college professor, for God’s sake. They must have the wrong guy.”

  He told me they came for him one morning, early. He couldn’t remember exactly how long ago this was. The days since had blended into each other. They’d made him call his secretary, then they’d gagged and blindfolded him and stuffed him into the trunk of a car. From there, he’d been driven somewhere, led down some stairs, and tied to a wall. He’d been held there by some bikers who hadn’t bothered to keep his blindfold on, then he’d been taken by others—Spanish-speaking Latino types who, now that I’d mentioned it, were most likely Mexican. He’d seen the dead bikers littering the place where he’d been held.

  Then it was my turn to explain. “I’m Alex Martinez’s father,” I told him. “And no, they don’t have the wrong guy. You’re here—we’re all here—because of Alex.”

  His jaw dropped even further.

  It didn’t look like we were going anywhere for a while. So I told him what I knew.

  And then I let him return the favor.

  Tess woke up in a rather different setting.

  Her room had vintage mahogany furniture, exposed timber beams, muslin curtains, and tall windows that bathed the room in streams of golden-yellow light. With the birdsong wafting in from the lush trees outside, she could have fooled herself into thinking she was in some sleepy boutique hotel if it wasn’t for the man who was sitting in an armchair across from her bed and watching her with an unreadable frown on his face.

  “Where am I?” she asked, though she already knew the answer to that.

  “You’re my guests.” Then, pointedly, with the thinnest of smiles. “All of you.”

  She sat forward, ramrod straight. “Where’s Alex? And Sean?”

  “Alex is fine. He’s still sleeping. I’ll make sure you’re with him when he wakes up.”

  She dreaded the next question. “What about Sean?”

  He paused, as if thinking of how to answer that one—or maybe he was just letting her anxiety worm its way a bit deeper. “He’s here,” he finally confirmed. “He’s fine.”

  She relaxed slightly.

  His eyes narrowed as he studied her. “You know why you’re here, don’t you?”

  Tess wasn’t sure what to say. “I think so,” she finally replied, “though I’m not sure I believe it.”

  “Oh, believe it, Tess. Trust me on this. It’s all real. I know.” His face relaxed into a hint of a smile. “I’ve been there. I’ve seen it. It’s all very, very real.”

  Tess felt her nerves sizzle. “How do you know?”

  He waved it off as he stood up and walked across to the window. “You’ll understand. With time.” With his back to her, he added, “The more relevant question you need to be asking yourself is, why are you still alive? And the answer to that is simple. You’re here because I need Alex to feel relaxed and comfortable so
that Doctor Stephenson can work his magic and get me what I need from the boy.” He turned to face her, his face not betraying a hint of emotion. “That’s your only value to me here, do you understand?”

  Tess stared at him and, knowing everything she did about him, she just nodded.

  “Good. So I strongly suggest that you help me. Not just for your sake. For Alex’s. I’d prefer it if Stephenson can get the information out of him himself, without complications. If it proves difficult, there are other things I can do to jog Alex’s memory. Things that might not be particularly pleasant for a four-year-old boy. So I would really urge you to help Stephenson and help Alex remember.”

  “And then?” she asked, again knowing what the answer—the honest answer—would be.

  The slit of a smile came back. “We’ll see. Help me get what I want, and who knows how things will turn out. Cross me . . . and the heroin-addict whore-hell I’ll send you to will be worse than anything you can possibly imagine.”

  He kept his stare on her as the words shuddered in. Then he walked out, leaving her to stew in his turbulent wake.

  63

  Stephenson confirmed what Tess had sussed out.

  The things he told me about other cases, the level of authority he conveyed about a subject he probably knew better than anyone on the planet—it was all staggering and shook me to my core. Despite the state we were in, he spoke with a calm eloquence and a coherence that commanded attention, and I couldn’t imagine anyone, least of all well-educated academics, would doubt him. More troubling was the fact that every detail I gave him about what I knew about McKinnon, including his death, tallied with what he’d heard from Alex about his past life experiences, right down to the headgear I was wearing on that hellish night.

  I couldn’t see how this could be anything else than what still felt impossible to me.

  I fell silent for a long moment, processing everything I’d heard. After a while, I asked, “How come people don’t talk about this more? Why don’t more people know about your work?”

  He let out a small scoff. “You’re saying you’re surprised?”

  From the look on his face, it was evidently a long-festering frustration for him.

  “I can show you all kinds of polls that show that one in four Americans believe in reincarnation,” he added, “but that’s just an easy answer to a casual question. Dig into it a bit deeper and even the ones who say they do get uncomfortable. And that’s really why my work is considered fringe science. No one wants to have to think about it. Not seriously. Our political, academic, and religious leadership—they all have a built-in resistance to it. It goes against the grain of too many sacred tenets. Medical researchers won’t consider it since they have this fundamental, nonnegotiable belief that consciousness can’t possibly exist outside the brain. And for people of faith whose upbringing can’t accommodate something that different than what they’ve been taught all their lives, this idea that there’s an afterlife, but it doesn’t involve heaven or hell, is blasphemous. But it’s not what the whole world thinks. Buddhists and Hindus have believed in reincarnation from day one. And they’re almost a quarter of the population of this planet.

  “This is a new paradigm we’re talking about,” he continued. “And it makes a lot of people very uncomfortable. Especially—and this always surprises me—my peers. Academics who are supposed to have an appetite to explore new ground and uncover the secrets of this universe we live in. But despite all our credentials and all the care we put into our research, most of my peers wouldn’t be seen dead agreeing with me in public. The problem is, even if we have a mountain of evidence that it does happen, we don’t have any proof, and we don’t have any way of explaining how it happens. There’s no biological explanation, not even a tangible theory, for what we call ‘ensoulment’—the moment when a soul roots itself into a fetus or an embryo, or even earlier.” He shook his head with a pained, rueful smile. “But then, that’s a whole other can of worms.”

  I thought back to all the IVF sessions I’d gone through with Tess, and dredged up everything that had been explained to us. “Well we know it can’t happen in the first fourteen days after conception, right?’Cause up until then, the zygote is still just a cluster of cells that can still split into two and give you two identical twins. If there was already a soul in there before that, how would that split work?”

  Stephenson seemed impressed by this. “Scientifically, you’re right, of course,” he told me. “But a lot of people believe otherwise, as I’m sure you know. Still, the issue of how and when and where a soul embeds itself in that cluster of cells you’re talking about—that’s a question that’s baffled the greatest minds in history. And the simple answer is, no one knows. The Japanese believe the soul is in one’s stomach—that’s why when they commit suicide by seppuku, they stab themselves there. Descartes and most scientists since his day believe the soul lives in the brain—that’s why head injuries can cause personality changes. But where exactly, and what does that mean? We don’t really know. Da Vinci ran experiments on frogs and concluded that the soul resided at the spot where the spinal column meets the brain. Some scientists have even tried monitoring dying patients’ body weight at the exact time of death, claiming that there’s an infinitesimal but observable weight loss upon death that they explain as being the weight of the soul that’s leaving its dead host.”

  “Twenty-one grams?” I offered with a slight snort, citing the meme I’d heard time and again.

  “More like twenty-one nanograms, if that.” Stephenson shrugged. “The main question, though, is this. Can a soul live outside the body? Can consciousness survive outside the brain? Out-of-body experiences—for which we have a lot of evidence—would suggest that the answer is yes. Did you know that there are plenty of documented cases out there where transplant patients took on some of the personality traits and memories of their organs’ donors? How’s that possible? And what’s consciousness if not memories and personality traits? But we still have a lot of work to do before we prove it—if that’s even possible. And it’s harder since, academically, this is a taboo subject in our country. They just think it’s the stuff of horror movies and TV shows. But in many other cultures, reincarnation isn’t taboo. It’s part of the culture, part of their religion. It’s just not in ours. People here—well, people back home,” he corrected himself somberly, “they’re just not predisposed to take claims like that seriously or investigate them. If a kid starts saying weird things, the parents’ first instinct is to think that it’s coming from their imagination, that they saw it on TV or something—or they’d just think their kid is abnormal and discourage him from voicing any more ‘nonsense.’ In other cultures, the parents’ starting point would be to encourage the kid to tell them more about what he knows, and they’d be asking themselves if these are signs of a reincarnated soul. They’d look into that. And that’s another issue I’ve tried to address in my work. Does this cultural appetite for the concept of reincarnation mean these people come up with links and explanations to fit their theory, or are they really solving something that needed to be solved?”

  “I’m amazed you stayed with it all this time,” I told him. “Given all the flak you’ve had to deal with.”

  He let out a long sigh, and his expression turned doleful. “It’s just a shame, really. That we can be so prejudiced and closed-minded about what I think is the biggest question facing us. But that’s the way it’s always been, especially about anything having to do with the nonphysical world. That’s why we don’t know much about it. But then again, we didn’t know much about the subatomic world not too long ago either. And just imagine, for a second . . . if we could prove it. If we had proof that reincarnation was real, beyond a doubt. It would change everything. A lot of people would fight it, of course. Bitterly. Angrily. But after it all sinks in, it would make us better. All the great revolutions in human thought did that. They made us more humble and more humane by giving us a better understanding of what we are,
of our place in the universe. Copernicus took us out of this delusion that we were the center of the universe. Darwin showed us that we’re only one small part of a big evolutionary system. Freud showed that there’s more to us than an ego and showed us that we have unconscious impulses influencing us, and that pushed us to try and understand ourselves better. This would be another huge step in that tradition. Death is the biggest mystery we face. And if reincarnation were ever proven to be real, it could open the door to a whole new exploration of . . . everything.”

  I scoffed. “Not gonna happen though, is it? No matter what proof you might come up with, people will always find a way to shoot it down and say you’re wrong.”

  He shrugged. “Doesn’t mean I won’t keep trying.” He looked around the walls. “Assuming we ever make it out of here.”

  I left that hanging and came back to the most pressing question on my mind. “How’d Michelle take it? When you told her?”

  “It troubled her. It always does, when it’s not part of one’s culture. But it didn’t take her long to accept it. She was very open-minded.”

  That didn’t surprise me at all. “And you think Alex’s case stacks up?”

  Stephenson didn’t hesitate. “I do. And it’s a really interesting case for me. It’s a more or less immediate rebirth—a soul finding a new home shortly after losing its old host. He was born, what, just under a year after McKinnon was killed? It doesn’t happen that often. There’s usually a gap—weeks, months, years even—which opens up a whole other question.”