The Devil's Elixir

by Raymond Khoury

  “About where the soul goes during that gap?”

  He nodded. “Exactly. We call it the interlife. And that’s another whole can of worms.” He was now standing by the door, staring at it. Then he turned to me. “Do you think we’re ever going to get out of here alive?”

  “I don’t know.” I was being charitable.

  He seemed to read it, and his face sank. He sucked in a deep breath to calm himself and ran his hands through his hair, pulling back tightly against his scalp. “What is this drug this psychopath is after? Why is he so determined to get his hands on it?”

  I heard some shuffling outside the door, then a key rattled in the lock and the door creaked open.

  “Maybe we’re about to find out.”

  64

  The two hard-faced goons nylon-cuffed my hands behind my back before leading me and Stephenson out of our cell.

  We walked down a humid, centuries-old barrel-vaulted corridor that had a series of doors on either side. They had similar hinges and locks to the door of the cell we’d been kept in, and I suspected that’s where Navarro had been keeping the scientists he kidnapped over the months and years. I didn’t see any of them, though. The place was quiet and had an ancient solemnity to it, which, given what it was being used for, felt pretty perverse.

  We were led up a stairwell at the far end of the hall and emerged aboveground, in another long and narrow corridor. This one, however, had a flat roof raised over a row of clerestory windows. Sunlight flooded the beige stucco walls, and the heat and the smell of the air immediately reinforced my suspicions. It sure felt like we were on Navarro’s home turf. Not far from the ocean was my guess. But that was about it. Which didn’t narrow it down to anything useful, not that I knew what I could have done with that information anyway.

  We passed a room that had some antique exposed machinery in it, like mills or something from the last century. I guessed we were in some old factory or maybe what used to be an agricultural or industrial estate, which meant that wherever we were, Navarro was possibly living in plain sight among people who didn’t have a clue as to who he really was.

  We were led through a steel-edged door and into a large room with a double-height ceiling. It had small windows about fifteen feet off the ground and its walls were lined with empty, faded bookcases that gave it the air of an old library. Sitting in the lone armchair in the middle of the room was the man I’d glimpsed in the darkness and upside down back at the safe house.

  Raoul Navarro, undoubtedly.

  El Brujo.

  I was finally getting a good look at the soulless barbarian who had caused all this, and I made sure I committed every feature in his face to memory. Who knows, even if I didn’t manage to get him in this life, maybe—if all they were telling me was true—I’d get another crack at him one day. He was casually, but expensively, dressed and looked fresh and showered, the polar opposite to my current status. He was reading something before he looked up to watch us come in, and as he closed it carefully, I saw that it was the journal I’d first seen with McKinnon in his lab five years ago.

  He noticed me looking at it and said, “You remember this, eh?”

  I remembered that we brought it back with us that night. I also remembered how he got it back from Corliss. But I had something far more pressing on my mind.

  “Where are Alex and Tess?” I asked, charging at him.

  One of the goons held me back and gave my shoulder a deep pinch that sent a burning spasm searing through it and stopped me in my tracks.

  “They’re fine,” Navarro replied coolly. “Why wouldn’t they be? They’re what I was after. You should be more worried about yourself, my friend. You’re the expendable one here.”

  He studied us, then glanced at the journal again. “Funny how things never really change, even after all these years.” He held it up, waving it slightly. “This Jesuit priest, Eusebio de Salvatierra . . . he wanted to bring his discovery back to Europe and share it with the world. He wanted to let people know death wasn’t the end. But they wouldn’t let him.” He fixed me with a curious stare and asked, “Why do people always assume they have the right to dictate what others can or can’t try out for themselves?”

  I kept an intentional vacant stare on my face for a moment, then I feigned a sudden awareness. “I’m sorry, was that rhetorical, or are you expecting an answer?”

  He didn’t seem amused.

  “Eusebio ran, and he hid, and he never did spread his great discovery. All he did was keep writing in this journal until the end of his days.” He smiled. “I intend to help finish what he started.”

  “So that’s why you’re doing it? To help the rest of the world lose their minds?”

  He looked at me quizzically. “Lose their minds? Have you even read this?”

  I shook my head, and a tremor of unease rumbled somewhere deep inside me. “No. DEA had it. They said it was useless.”

  Navarro smiled. “Useless? Maybe. But interesting . . . very. The one thing it doesn’t say, though, is how to make the damn thing.”

  “What thing?” Stephenson asked. “What does this drug do anyway?”

  “Oh, I think you, more than anyone, will appreciate this, doctor. You see, this drug, this miraculous concoction that Eusebio and McKinnon stumbled upon . . . it lets you relive your past lives.”

  65

  Navarro’s words just hung there, freeze-framed in midair like bullets in a Matrix movie.

  Neither I nor Stephenson said anything.

  Navarro was more than happy to step in. “You see that? Your reaction, amigos, is exactly why this is going to be a huge hit, why everyone’s going to want to try it, even those who aren’t into drugs.’Cause that’s what it does. It’s the ultimate mind trip. It takes you back years, decades, centuries even—back to moments from lives you never knew you lived. It’s like time-traveling in your head, to real places and real memories and real feelings and real people . . . it’s like dreaming, only much clearer and more vivid—and it’s not fantasy. What you experience really happened.”

  “How do you know?” I asked. “How do you know it’s not just your imagination?”

  “Oh, I know all about cryptoamnesia,” he countered before turning to Stephenson for corroboration. “I know all the arguments against past-life regression . . . that what we remember under hypnosis is nothing more than random things we read or saw on TV or heard about and forgot, long-lost memories that regression therapy are bringing up from the deepest folds of our minds. But these aren’t fantasies. Trust me. I’ve taken it. I’ve experienced it, more than once. And I know fantasy from reality. The things this drug brings up, the things you experience . . . the emotion, the richness of the experience, the level of detail, right down to the smells. It’s beyond imagination. It’s like you’re there. And it’s tangible. It’s clear enough to give you something to research. Specific memories, names, and places. And that’s what I did. I looked into them.”

  “You researched the past lives you experienced while you were under the drug?” Stephenson asked.

  Navarro’s face beamed with palpable pride. “Of course.”

  He just looked at Stephenson, as if teasing him to ask. Which he quickly did. “And?”

  “I discovered who I’d been. Where and when I’d lived. And what I found was . . . amazing. The days of the revolution, fighting against the Rurales. And before that, right here, in this place.” He spread his arms wide, gesturing at the walls around him. “This hacienda. Why do you think I bought it? Why do you think I chose this place?” He smiled. “I was here. In this very place, over a hundred years ago. I worked like a slave in the fields out there, harvesting the henequén cactus for the hacendado, Don Francisco Mendoza. I can tell you how that shredding machine you passed on your way here worked. I can even tell you what it sounded like. And I can assure you that I knew nothing about this place or about henequén or Mendoza before I tried McKinnon’s magic potion. Nothing at all. You want to explain to me how else it c
ould have happened?”

  I felt light-headed listening to him. If this were true, it would be a game-changer in so many ways. But we weren’t there yet. The guy was a psycho, and it wouldn’t exactly be out of character for him to lie. For a true skeptic like me, it would take a lot more than the words of a crazed narco to convince me that this was all true.

  But if it were . . . the implications would be unimaginable.

  I looked across at Stephenson. His face was locked in concentration, visibly awed by what he’d just heard. I felt an unwelcome tinge of unease. Navarro had just dangled him the prize he’d been waiting for all his life. Proof of reincarnation. Vindication of his life’s whole work.

  I found myself wondering if my fellow captive was about to join the dark side.

  “Real or not,” I put in, “it’ll be hard to prove it.”

  Navarro shrugged. “When thousands of people start taking it, they’ll start asking questions about what they’ve seen, they’ll do their research and I’ll bet they’ll find a lot of evidence that what they saw really happened. Which will be a lot of fun to watch. And even if there was no way to prove it, even if some people will stubbornly insist that it’s only our imagination . . . it won’t matter. It’s still one hell of a trip. Better than anything any other pill can give you.”

  I saw the logic in what he was saying. Regardless of whether or not it gave its users a look at their actual previous lives—assuming there was such a thing—it would still be a hard drug to resist.

  Then Stephenson surprised me. He didn’t look as excited as I thought he would be.

  “And it’s basically, what, some kind of psychoactive alkaloid?”

  Navarro nodded. “Yes. But the exact composition is still a mystery.”

  Stephenson frowned.

  “What?” Navarro asked.

  “If that’s what it does,” Stephenson replied, “you can’t just unleash it like that. It has to be properly tested. A drug that can open doorways like that in the mind . . . it could be very dangerous. If it can really open up pathways to past life experiences, it could bring up suppressed memories from those lives that might be best left suppressed. Past-life memories usually come out because of some trauma, and bringing up these . . . these psycho-spiritual epiphanies could unhinge you and send your spirit spiraling into, I don’t know, some kind of primordial chaos. You could turn into someone you don’t really want to be and end up with a lifetime of hell.”

  That didn’t seem to alarm Navarro at all. “There are good trips and bad trips. A lot of people prefer that to no trip at all.”

  Stephenson looked stunned. “Yes, but this is a trip that could turn them into mental wrecks.”

  Navarro shrugged. “Life’s about choices, isn’t it?”

  “So all this,” Stephenson shot back, “Alex . . . Bringing me here. You really think he can help you recover the formula for this drug?”

  “Why not? He remembers everything else.” Navarro held up the old journal. “Eusebio’s writings are very illuminating about the whole experience, but the one thing he didn’t write in this was how to make the damn thing.”

  “But McKinnon found it,” I chimed in. “He tracked down the tribe Eusebio wrote about.”

  “Yes. He was obsessed with it. He spent years following Eusebio’s trail. And he did it.” Navarro’s gaze hardened into an icy glare. “And then you came down here and killed him and took it away from me.”

  I wasn’t moved. “So you came after Alex.”

  “I didn’t have years to waste, and McKinnon’s tribe didn’t want to be found. I knew Eusebio’s mission was in Wixáritari territory—that was in his journal, and that’s where McKinnon started following his trail. The tribe originated in the mountains around San Luis Potosí, and to escape the conquistadors, they spread west. That’s where Eusebio founded his mission, in Durango. Then the Jesuits got pulled out by the king of Spain, and the natives found themselves at the mercy of the miners who wanted to use them as slave labor. So they scattered again, ending up all over the place. There are a few of them still around. We call them Huichol now.

  “I hired some anthropologists to try and follow McKinnon’s trail,” he continued. “We went down south and talked to Huichol and Lacandon tribes in the rainforests around Chiapas, which is where McKinnon said he came across the formula. We found some tribesmen who remembered meeting him, who remembered him and his old journal and his questions. And then the trail went cold. We couldn’t find the tribe he’d ended up with or the shaman who’d shown him how to make it. Who knows? Maybe he’d lied about where he’d found it. Maybe he found it somewhere else completely. And all I had left was this,” he said, picking up a small stainless steel vial with a sealed lid, about the size of a cigar tube. “The leftovers of what McKinnon gave me.”

  “So you started kidnapping scientists to get them to recreate it for you,” I speculated.

  “They couldn’t do it,” he told me. “They couldn’t identify all the ingredients or the chemical reactions that produced it. I was losing patience. And then I heard about Alex and his sessions with you, doctor.” He swung his gaze back to me. “And when I discovered he was your son,” he said, his face lighting up, “the stars had aligned. It was perfect karma.”

  “How?” Stephenson asked. “How did you know I was treating Alex? My work isn’t public.”

  “You’re the West’s top authority on reincarnation, doctor,” Navarro said. “And I probably know more about your own work than you do.” He gave him a smug, cold smile. “College computers aren’t as safe as you think. It wasn’t hard for a hacker to get me into your hard drive. I read everything you were working on, all your emails to your inner circle of researchers.”

  I was still working through what he was telling us about the drug. It lets you relive past lives. And he was going to get hold of it through the past-life experience of someone—of my son—who was the reincarnation of the guy who’d brought it to him.

  My temples were pounding.

  Navarro stepped up to Stephenson and put his arm around him. “I need you to get me this formula from Alex, doctor. I need you to make sure all of this hasn’t been a waste of my time. I can be very generous. Or I can be unpleasant.” He moved closer to him and cupped Stephenson’s chin in one hand, squeezing it hard. “And to make sure you understand what I mean, I want you to pay careful attention.”

  He turned to me. “Sadly, for you all this will be nothing but talk, as your soul is about to take its final journey. A journey from which there is no way back.”

  Navarro opened an intricately carved wooden chest and took out a length of silicone tubing, a terracotta bowl, a carved wooden stick, and five clay vials. He crouched down and began to pour liquids from the vials into the dish. As he did so he muttered under his breath. The mixture took on a sickly mustardy color and had the consistency of sludge.

  His men positioned themselves on either side of me and began to steer me toward a heavy wooden chair. I decided to at least not make it too easy for them. I barged into one of them with my right shoulder, linebacker style, catching him off guard. My momentum carried us forward till I had him against the wall, and I kept pushing, forcing the air from his chest.

  Then a searing pain erupted in my back, where the lower spine is right up against the tissue. I spun around to see that the other goon had hit me full force with a length of metal pipe. He swung the pipe back and hit the same spot again. I tried to turn all the way, to take the next blow to my front, but the guy I had pushed against the wall grabbed my arms and was holding me firm. The goon with the pipe swung it at me one more time for good measure, and I screamed out in pain before crumpling to the floor, groaning.

  The goons lifted me up, one under each shoulder, and dragged me over to the chair, beside which Navarro was now standing. They strapped me into the chair. The fact that my now swelling back felt tender against the hardwood of the chair’s upright wasn’t helping.

  One of the goons grabbed my chin with
one hand and squeezed my nose shut with the other, forcing me to open my mouth. Navarro then expertly inserted the tube down my throat. I fought the urge to gag, but I couldn’t breathe. My throat tried unsuccessfully to eject the foreign body that was being forced into it, but to no avail. Navarro held the end of the tube in my throat till I had no other choice but to swallow. Then he continued to push the tube down into my stomach.

  The goon let go of my nose and I took a few deep breaths. Both goons moved away from the chair and Navarro stepped around to face me.

  “You’ve been a pain to me in this life, and the last thing I want is for your soul to cause me more trouble in the future. Because after you die, your soul will move from this body of yours to a new body. From one life to another. But the soul can also be annihilated completely, if it leaves the body and can’t find a path back. If it is in so much pain that its only option is to blink out, like someone has extinguished a flame.”

  He held up the bowl.

  “This will force your soul from your body. Then it will attack your soul with such brutal force that the only way to put a stop to the torment will be its own end. If your soul dies before your body, then the connection between the world of souls and the world of matter is broken forever. Your chain of birth and death will end with you. It will end now. Soon even the blackest darkness will be lost to you.”

  He began to stir the mixture inside.

  “I know you probably don’t believe a word of it. I have no way of knowing if it’s true or not myself, or if it’s just the naïve belief of the shaman who taught it to me. But all that really matters is that, either way . . . you’ll be dead. And that’s good enough for me.”

  66

  I could feel the tube pressing against my esophagus. I desperately wanted to gag, but I tried to slow my breathing, to ignore what the back of my throat was shouting at me. Navarro finished stirring the mustard-colored mixture and nodded to himself, obviously satisfied that his creation was ready. Stephenson was watching him, too, his face white and glistening with fear.