Alastair Stone Chronicles Box Set: Alastair Stone Chronicles, Books 1 through 4

by R. L. King

  “What do you mean?” Jason tried to remember the exact sequence of events that occurred inside the portal, but his brain stubbornly refused to serve them up. All he could remember was screaming and Lissy running off and the blood—so much blood.

  “I don’t know how much you noticed—I know it’s hard to put things together after the fact, given how horribly awry everything went, but…Lissy didn’t just stand there and scream like Verity did. She ran. And she was lucid. Didn’t you hear? She didn’t even sound like herself.”

  Jason thought about that, trying to remember. “You’re right,” he said at last. “She sounded like a—a different person, almost. Not dippy. Not confused. But she kept saying something about the Evil. What was that about?”

  Stone shook his head. “I don’t know. She said something like—” he paused, replaying the events in his mind. “Like, ‘they’re all around. They’re everywhere.’”

  “That doesn’t make any sense, though,” Verity said. “How could the Evil be in the Overworld?”

  “I don’t know,” Stone said again. “Verity, can you remember anything about your experience? Did you sense the Evil?”

  She sighed. “I don’t even remember. Aside from the feeling that my brain was being pulled out through every hole in my head, I don’t think I noticed much. It was just…pain.”

  Jason was thinking. “Al—is there any chance that…the Evil somehow followed us into the Overworld?”

  “I don’t see how,” Stone said. “How could they have done? There wasn’t anyone else in the room, and obviously none of us were possessed. Even if somehow there were free-floating Evil around, Lissy was extraordinarily sensitive to their presence. And not only was she not reacting, she was acting more lucid than usual. Even Marilee commented on it.”

  “Yeah...you’re right,” he said. “Just grasping at straws here.” He leaned forward, dropping his forehead down into his hands with a loud sigh. “It almost seems like that’s where they’re coming from in the first place. But that doesn’t make any sense. Didn’t you say the portals have been around for a long time?”

  Stone nodded. “Decades. Mages first discovered how to build them back in my grandfather’s day.”

  “Yeah. The Evil’s only been here—that we know of, anyway—for the last few years,” Verity said. “It doesn’t make sense that they’d stay quiet that long.”

  “True,” Jason said. “But it still seems weird to me, the whole thing about the Overworld and having to stay calm when you travel so you don’t attract whatever those things are, and the Evil feed on negative emotion. I still can’t help wondering if they’re related somehow.”

  Stone nodded. “The thought’s crossed my mind more than once that the two could be connected, especially given that the Evil thrives on emotion the same way the Overworld’s residents do, but—” He spread his hands. “—it just doesn’t make sense. Perhaps they’re some sort of related entity. That would be difficult to prove, but it could explain why Lissy reacted as she did.”

  Jason shrugged. “Yeah, maybe. It was just a crazy thought about the Evil. I mean, how could they be related to the Overworld, when the portals have been around as long as they have? The only way I can think of would be if normally they’re stuck in there, but something happened five years ago that—I dunno—somehow let them get out? But surely somebody would have noticed…”

  He stopped, because Stone had suddenly flung himself out of his chair and stood bolt upright, an odd and rather crazed look in his eyes. “Al?”

  “Bloody...hell,” the mage whispered.

  “What?” Verity demanded.

  “Al? What’s going on?” Jason got up too, staring at him. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”

  He looked startled, as if he had just realized they were in the room with him. “I have to go,” he said abruptly. “I’ll be back later today.”

  “What the hell—?” Jason started, but Stone had already swept out of the room.

  “Uh—” Verity said, confused, looking at the doorway through which the mage had disappeared. “What just happened?”

  “I have no idea.” He sighed. “Well, Al always did like his reveals. I guess we’ll find out when he gets back. Meantime, I have to get to work soon. You want to come along and help out, or stay here and practice levitating frogs?”

  Stone didn’t show up again until almost five o’clock. He came in through the front door of the restaurant, carrying a briefcase and looking preoccupied. “When do you get off work?” he asked Jason, who was in the middle of ringing up a takeout order for a woman with two small children in tow. His tone held a strange urgency.

  “Sec,” Jason said. He finished what he was doing and then waved Stone off toward the back. “Al, what’s going on? Where have you been? You just take off without a word and—”

  “We have a lot to discuss,” Stone interrupted. “When are you done here? And where’s Verity?”

  “Uh—back at your place, I think. Working on her—homework.”

  “All right, then. Meet me there as soon as you can.” And once again, he turned around and left without another word.

  It took Jason almost two hours to finish up at the restaurant and fight his way through traffic to Palo Alto. It wasn’t Stone who answered the door this time, but Verity. She looked impatient. “Where have you been, Jason?” she demanded.

  “Working,” he told her sourly, tired of everybody suddenly being stressed out and in a hurry. “What the hell is this about, V? Where’s Al?”

  “He’s locked up in his study. He told me not to bother him till you got here, so I’ve been pacing around trying to figure out what’s been going on.”

  “So he didn’t tell you anything either?”

  “Not a thing.”

  They heard the door to the study slam and Stone appeared in the hall. “About time,” he said. He didn’t sound impatient or angry—just distracted, like his mind was on some other planet.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Jason yelled, sounding very much like Verity had only a couple of minutes ago. “I’m not moving another step until you tell me what’s going on.”

  “I will, I will,” he said, waving the thin sheaf of papers he held in one hand. They looked like handwritten letters. “As for where I’ve been—I’ve been back home in England. Looking for something. Took me a while, but I found them up in the attic, in a box. I’ve told Aubrey a hundred times not to tidy up in my study, but—”

  “Al! You’re babbling!”

  The mage stopped, eyes wide. “You’re right. I am. Frightfully sorry. But I think you’ll forgive me when you hear what I have to say.” He pointed off toward the kitchen. “Pizza out there. Grab some and settle in—this will take some explanation.”

  Jason glared at him as something sunk in. “Wait a minute—you’re telling me that you used a portal to go back to England when you’re as freaked out as you’ve been lately? Al, are you an idiot, or just stupid? You were the one who told me it wasn’t safe to do that! You could have been killed!”

  “Yes, yes.” Stone still seemed distracted. “It wasn’t pleasant and it wasn’t something I’d have preferred to do, but it had to be done and I’m not exactly an amateur at the whole process. But that’s not the point,” he snapped. “Just go get something to eat and let me explain.”

  A confused Jason and Verity did as they were told. When they returned to the living room, Stone had taken his usual seat in the armchair. They perched on the edge of the couch and watched him expectantly.

  “Okay, out with it,” Jason said.

  Stone gestured toward the letters, which were now spread out on the table next to him. “I have you to thank for this, Jason. You were the one who finally made the connection I should have made long before this.”

  “Connection?” Jason tilted his head, then remembered. “You mean about the Evil and the Overworld? You mean there is a connection?”

  Instead of answering, Stone picked up one of the letters. “Jason
, you might not remember this, but you once asked me if there was a way to make temporary gateways.”

  “I remember,” Jason said, nodding. “You said there was, but it’s rare to do it because they’re really dangerous, right?”

  “Dangerous and unstable, yes. It requires a massive amount of skill—and more than a bit of luck—to keep one active long enough to use it. Because of that, almost all of them are one-way affairs. You use it to get where you’re going, and then you either construct another one to get back, or you use some more conventional means.”

  “Unstable?” Verity asked. “You mean—they might collapse while you’re inside?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean,” Stone said, his expression serious. “And if that happens, you’re dead for sure. There’s no going in after someone who disappears inside a collapsed gateway. That’s why that mage in San Francisco was so panicked when Jason tried to shove him into that one. The best mage on Earth wouldn’t have the time or the ability to construct another gateway before the creatures got him.”

  “Okay,” Jason said, “So temporary gateways are a bad idea. I get that. But what’s this got to do with—”

  “That in and of itself doesn’t,” Stone interrupted. “But I told you something else at the time that you probably don’t remember. It was just an offhand comment—or so I thought.” He indicated the letters again. “Do you remember me mentioning that I had a colleague who was working with a group that was trying to make temporary portals safer?”

  Jason struggled to remember the conversation. “Vaguely,” he said, shaking his head. “Not really, though. If I remember right, I was freaking out a little at the time about having to use that thing to go with you to England.”

  Stone nodded. “Well, you asked me if they succeeded, and I told you that I’d lost touch with my colleague, but that I hadn’t heard anything, so I assumed they hadn’t. You have to understand: the ability to construct stable temporary gateways is something of a holy grail in the magical world. The mundane equivalent would be—I don’t know—curing cancer. Inventing a plane that could fly across the ocean in an hour. Picture phones. It would be all over the news. You wouldn’t be able to miss it.”

  “But, you said they didn’t succeed,” Verity said.

  “I never heard anything more about it,” Stone said. “And as far as I’m aware, neither did anyone else. But—” He held up one of the letters “—it seems they were in a very early stage of their research when I found out about it.”

  “You weren’t involved, were you?” Jason asked.

  Stone shook his head. “No. The only reason I know about it at all is that my colleague was—erm—a bit more than a colleague, actually, and she let a couple of things slip one night when she’d had too much to drink.”

  “Your girlfriend got drunk and told you about a top-secret project she was working on,” Jason said, nodding. “That makes sense, I guess. But if she was your girlfriend, wouldn’t you have heard—”

  “We broke it off shortly after that. She’d met someone else, and in any case we were both involved in things that would have made moving to be closer to each other impractical. At that point we just sort of—fell out of touch.”

  “I’m confused, though,” Verity said. “If you don’t think they succeeded, then what makes you think that this has anything to do with the Evil?”

  “That’s just it—I’m not so sure they didn’t,” Stone told her. “This is where things get a bit weirder. I tracked down those letters at home today and then after reading them I came back here and did a little digging, using the few bits of information I could piece together from the letters—bits I had never made connections between before, given what she’d told me about the project. And it seems that, of the three people she mentioned as being colleagues, all three of them disappeared without a trace a bit more than five years ago.”

  Both Jason and Verity stared at him. “Disappeared?” Jason asked.

  “And nobody noticed?” Verity added. “That seems odd, that three people—three mages—would disappear all at once and nobody would go looking for them.”

  “Four,” Stone said with a sigh. “Daphne disappeared too, at the same time.”

  “I don’t get it,” Jason said. “Even nowadays with the world like it is and things like police and fire departments cut to the bone, if people disappear they at least try to look for them. Didn’t they have family? Spouses? Friends? Somebody who’d want to find them? You said your friend Daphne met somebody else—wouldn’t he have looked for her? Wouldn’t you?” He couldn’t conceive of the family and friends of missing people not moving heaven and earth to find their loved ones. How could they give up before they knew what had happened to them?

  “Well,” Stone said, “He was one of those who disappeared. And by that time I’d gone back to England for a while—I didn’t even hear about it until well after everyone had given up looking. But in any case, it sounds like this project wasn’t officially sanctioned by any proper organization. That’s another thing that’s common among mages—they often get together in small groups to experiment on their own, and only present their findings once they’ve verified them. Magical scholarship isn’t nearly as rigorously monitored as it is in the mundane academic world. There are quite a lot of…mavericks, shall we say.”

  “So you’re saying,” Jason ventured, “that it’s possible these four were working on their own and hadn’t told anybody else about what they were doing? So when they disappeared, nobody even knew where to start looking?”

  Stone nodded. “Yes, precisely.”

  “How does that help us, then?” Verity asked. “Even if they were working on this portal project, how would we find out if nobody else knew?”

  “And what exactly do you think could have happened?” Jason added. “Assuming you’re right and this does have something to do with the Evil—how would it have gone down?”

  “Again, it’s hard to say.” Stone dropped the letters back on the table. “But from what I know about portals and how to construct them, one of two things likely happened: Either they were attempting to traverse what they thought was a stable portal and it collapsed on them, or—much less likely but much more in line with my hypothesis—they managed to do more than they planned to, and constructed a portal that’s neither temporary nor permanent.”

  “English, Al,” Jason grumbled. “How can something be ‘neither temporary nor permanent’?”

  Stone took a deep breath. “You’ll have to bear with me a bit here—I’ll try to keep it as simple as I can. But it’s long been accepted that if you’re going to build a stable temporary portal, you need to look at some of the properties of a permanent portal and combine them with the faster and less precise methods for creating a fully temporary one. So it’s possible that they started there, but took a wrong turn somewhere and produced something that was neither fish nor fowl—a temporary portal that wasn’t quite temporary, or a permanent one that wasn’t completely permanent.”

  Jason stared at Stone like he’d sprouted gills, but Verity looked contemplative. “So you mean—kind of like something that winks in and out?”

  Stone nodded. “Very good, Verity. I see you’ve been doing at least some of the reading I’ve been assigning you, and applying it to other areas. That’s exactly what I mean.”

  “Wait a minute...” Jason said, speaking slowly as he tried to work it out. “So you’re saying that there might be some unstable portal somewhere that nobody knows about, and the Evil are able to bleed through from where they’re from to here?”

  “I’ve never heard of anything like that,” Stone said. “I don’t even know if it’s possible. But it would explain why the researchers disappeared: if they constructed something they thought was permanent enough to sustain itself for a while, they might have attempted a trip through and been caught by surprise when it ‘winked out,’ as Verity put it. Naturally, by the time it came back into existence, the creatures would have killed the researchers.”r />
  “One more question,” Jason asked. “I’m trying to get my mind around this, but it’s not easy. So—just assuming for a minute that the Overworld is the Evil’s home planet, or dimension, or whatever, how is it that they couldn’t get through before? And if they want to get to our world, why don’t they possess people as they go through?”

  “That’s two questions,” Stone pointed out. “But I only have a guess at the answer to one of them. They don’t possess travelers because travelers are almost invariably mages, and I still maintain that mages can’t be possessed without their consent. As for why they can’t get out—that’s the big question. If this unstable portal exists somewhere, there’s got to be something about it—some kind of doorway, or rift—that doesn’t exist in the standard portals. And it must have been something inherent in what this particular group was trying to do. Otherwise, every time someone tried to create any type of portal and failed, we’d run the risk of letting the Evil in. And as far as I know, that hasn’t happened.”

  “So how would we find out for sure?” Verity asked.

  “We’d have to either find the portal, or find the notes on the formula they used to create it, if they still exist. If I had those, I might be able to reconstruct what they did, though I’ve no idea if I can figure out what they did wrong. I know a fair bit about portals, but it’s not a speciality of mine. If a group of four researchers working on it full-time didn’t see the flaw, I don’t flatter myself to think that I will. Daphne was a damn good scientist, and clever as hell. The rest of her team probably were, too.”

  Jason was thinking again. “Sorry,” he spoke up. “I know I keep asking what are probably obvious questions, but—”

  “Please, continue,” Stone urged. “Like I said before, you seem to have a talent for pointing my thoughts in directions I wouldn’t have looked at otherwise.”

  “Well,” he said, “I was just thinking—if there was this portal, and we found it...and you were able to shut it down—does that mean that the Evil wouldn’t be able to get through anymore? So all we’d have to deal with is the Evil that were actually here already? And once they were gone—that would be it? No more Evil?” He sounded like he hardly dared to believe it could be true.