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

by R. L. King

  “Please, Mr. Thayer, sit down.” The doctor motioned toward the room’s remaining empty guest chair, and took his own seat behind his cluttered desk.

  Jason threw himself into the chair, tossing the crutches in the general vicinity of the wall. “What happened? Why did you let him go?”

  The doctor shrugged. “He’s an adult, Mr. Thayer. We can’t hold him against his will if he wants to leave.”

  “Was he—okay?” Verity asked. “Did you see him?”

  “I did see him. He awakened last night about nine o’clock.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Apparently. The nurse on duty was quite surprised when he called out. She called me immediately; I examined him and found nothing wrong. He was quite insistent about wanting to leave.”

  “Did he say anything about us?” Verity leaned forward. “You know—are you sure he was...er...mentally okay?”

  “He knew his own name, the date—well, he was off by four days, obviously—and roughly where he was. He seemed lucid, though quite subdued, like he had a great deal on his mind. Aside from that, I saw no indication that he would be any danger to himself if we released him. I insisted that he eat something light and stay for a couple of hours to make sure he was feeling all right. He left at about eleven.”

  “And he didn’t say anything about us?” Jason asked. That wasn’t like Stone at all.

  The doctor drew a deep breath. “Actually, he did. He asked me not to call you. And—” He opened his desk drawer and withdrew a sealed envelope. “He asked me to give you this.”

  Jason and Verity both stared at it. After a few seconds, Verity reached out and took it. Jason got up, mumbling something that sounded like a thank-you, and the two of them left the office.

  They waited until they were back at their cabin at the Harmony complex before opening the letter. They spread it out on the table so they could both read it at the same time, afraid of what they might see.

  It was on a single sheet of hospital stationery, written in Stone’s usual bold but somewhat illegible hand; Verity was better at deciphering it than Jason was, so she read it aloud.

  Jason, Verity,

  I hope you’ll both forgive me for leaving like this. I know you’ll have questions, and I’ll give you what answers I can when we speak again. For now, I had to get away. I don’t want to talk about any of this for a while. I’m not sure I’ll ever want to talk about some of it. I’ve asked the doctor to give you this, and I’ve arranged a flight for both of you back to the Bay Area (see below). You’ll have to work the exact details out with the airline, but the tickets are already paid for. Please be sure to bring my notebooks with you, and don’t put them in checked baggage.

  I don’t want to say more here. I don’t know how long I’ll be away, but I’ll call you when I return. Things should be calm for a while, if I’m any judge. Just try to get back to your lives for now, and forget any of this has happened. That’s what I’ll be doing.

  If you absolutely must contact me, leave a message with Mme. H. Please thank the Harmony group for me, and relay my apologies for my abrupt departure. I understand some were lost; I’ll send my own condolences directly.

  Be well, you two. I wish I could say the worst was over, but we all know that isn’t true.

  Best regards,

  —AS

  PS: Verity, I do expect you to keep up your studies while I’m away.

  At the bottom of the note was a phone number followed by an airline confirmation number.

  Jason looked at Verity and sighed. “Well, you can’t say the guy doesn’t know how to make an exit.”

  Jason and Verity didn’t stay long with the Harmony Farms Forgotten after that. That night they met with them in the main hall and said their goodbyes, passing along Stone’s thanks along with their own. There was a small and heartfelt memorial service for the dead, attended not only by the Harmony group, but by many of the surrounding townspeople; Jason wondered if Prudence and the others would be annoyed with Stone for leaving without attending, but they seemed to understand.

  The next morning they packed up their gear (including the notebooks, which Verity carefully stowed in her personal bag), and got a ride with Sykes into Morgantown, where they were able to catch a commuter flight to Dulles. It wasn’t until they were settled on a plane bound for San Francisco and well into the flight’s duration that Jason remembered something. “V?”

  Verity put aside the trashy paperback she’d bought at the airport. “Yeah?”

  “You remember what happened in the cave, right?”

  She looked at him oddly. “What?”

  Jason shrugged. “Everything. It all happened so fast I forgot about it, but—” He shuddered a little, glancing over at their dozing aisle seat-mate and dropping his voice to a near whisper. “That thing—the Evil that came out of the guy with the beard—It...it possessed me.”

  She nodded, looking down into her lap. “I know.”

  Jason was surprised to find himself shaking. “How could I forget about that until now? It was inside me. It was in my brain. Fucking strangest feeling ever. Like it was trying to make me do things, and I almost couldn’t resist it…”

  She didn’t look up. “It wanted you to shoot me, didn’t it?”

  Long pause. “Yeah.”

  “The look in your eyes—” She did raise her head then, meeting his gaze. She looked very young. “You looked crazy, Jason. I thought you were gonna do it.”

  “I did too, for a second or two,” he admitted. He shook his head violently. “What it was saying—it seemed to almost...make sense.”

  “I couldn’t get it out. I tried. I’m not sure if it was because I was so scared, or because it was you, or—”

  “I got it out,” he cut her off. He paused a moment, thinking over the implications of that. “It wanted me to shoot you, and all of a sudden I just felt myself getting mad. Not just mad—fucking enraged. Like, how dare this thing try to make me shoot my own sister?”

  “And that drove it out?” Her eyes were big.

  “I think so. For a second it’s like it was hovering over me, and then it was gone and I was myself again.”

  “So—” she began, “—you were wrong, kinda. They can possess you. But it seems like maybe you can kick them out on your own.”

  He mulled that over for a few seconds. “I don’t think just any of them can,” he said, almost as if he were talking to himself. “That one—the one with the beard—I think he was different. Stronger. Maybe only the stronger ones even have a chance.”

  “We can ask Dr. Stone...” She trailed off, looking suddenly sad. “When we see him again. Whenever that is.”

  Jason nodded. “Until then, I guess we just do what he suggested—go back home and get on with life for a while. I know I could do with a little time to return to the land of relatively normal before we hit Vegas, and there’s no way in hell we can do it without Al.”

  They both remained silent for several minutes, Jason looking out the window and Verity staring down at her paperback. Then: “Jason?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you think we’ll be able to do it again? They know we’re coming now. They’ll be ready for us. Do you think the three of us will be able to do it?”

  He didn’t answer for a long time. “I dunno, V. I hope so. Maybe this’ll finally have to be the time when we get some more help.”

  “We had the Forgotten—we couldn’t have gotten out of there without them. Maybe we’ll find some more in Vegas.”

  “Maybe so. Probably.”

  She sighed. “I just can’t shake the feeling that this next one’s gonna be a lot harder.”

  PART 3: ODDS AND ENDINGS

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The new year arrived without any sign of Stone.

  Jason and Verity returned to their routines, working extra hours at A Passage to India to make up for the time they’d been away. Neither one went downstairs to the portal room; when Marta inquired about
Stone, they told her only that he’d been called away for a while, and that they weren’t sure where he was or when he’d be back.

  In their spare time, both found useful things to do. Verity did as Stone had directed and continued her studies, practicing the few spells she knew and devouring every book Stone had given her; it seemed to Jason that her successes in actually using her magic in a practical setting had lit a fire under her and made her realize how important it was to have a grounding in theory. She often regaled him over dinner with new magical formulas or ideas she’d picked up from her latest book—he listened with attention, though he had very little idea what she was talking about.

  Jason, meanwhile, divided his spare time between working out with the secondhand weights and bench he’d bought and installed in his bedroom, tinkering with his car, and haunting the local library for all the information he could find about Las Vegas and its surrounding areas. He figured he might as well be as prepared as he could be since he wouldn’t be any use in the magic department. To this end, he familiarized himself with the layout of the town, the locations of various landmarks including all of the major hotels and casinos, and, as much as possible, the landscape around the area in all directions. He bought a couple of large maps and borrowed several books, which he spent many of his evenings poring over; at the library, he read through issues of the Las Vegas paper, looking for any suspicious-looking incidents.

  There were many. Jason quickly got the impression that Las Vegas, even more than San Francisco had been before the destruction of Gordon Lucas’s Evil, was a dangerous place. It was obvious to him that the town tried hard to hide this fact (no doubt so they didn’t frighten off every potential tourist who planned to vacation there), but if you read between the lines of the tiny stories that appeared buried deep on obscure pages of the paper, it was easy to see that Vegas had more than its share of horrific crime. Jason began taking notes on every incident he could find along with dates: he had to make a few inferences as to the exact nature of the crimes, but he found everything from eviscerations to mob massacres to inexplicable suicides, and a lot of them. But none of these stories ever got near the front page, which was filled with accounts of new hotel construction, glitzy new shows being staged, national news, and a great deal of space given to local politics.

  He discussed this with Verity one night over dinner on one of their rare nights off. “You think there’s a big-daddy Evil in Vegas?” she asked, amusing herself by levitating the condiments and making them do an intricate dance over the middle of the table. She really was getting better at that.

  “At least one,” Jason said. “I mean, look at all these incidents. Even in today’s world this just isn’t normal. And it’s even less normal to cover them up like this. If multiple homicides are common enough in Vegas that they’re page-five news instead of the main headline, then something’s going on. Otherwise people would be leaving town in droves, and the tourists wouldn’t come near the place.”

  “So, you think people just aren’t noticing it because—why?” she asked.

  “Because they don’t want to see it,” he said. He waved his little notebook where he’d been writing down the incidents. “People don’t want to think about things that scare them, especially if they can’t find any reason for them. They can rationalize that it’s no big deal if they’re just a bunch of nothing stories on the back pages. I’ll bet you anything that at least one higher-up at the local paper is Evil—probably more than one. I’m also guessing that any time a reporter starts getting too nosey, they possess them too.”

  Verity looked dubious. “That sounds pretty tinfoil-hatty, Jason. But knowing what we do about what’s going on, I can’t say it’s not possible.” She sighed. “I wish Dr. Stone would come back. All this sitting around waiting for something to happen is getting to me. I hope he’s okay, wherever he is.”

  Jason sighed and nodded. His knee had healed about as well as it was going to, especially with the workouts he’d been doing to strengthen it. Physically he was back to normal and ready to get going. Mentally…he wasn’t so sure. Sometimes when he lay in bed late at night, unable to get to sleep, he’d think about how much his life had changed in the last few months—how strange it was, when he looked back over recent events, that he was rolling with all this magic and extradimensional horror and insanity as if dealing with it was what he’d been doing all his life. And he hadn’t even had the weirdest of it, despite his brief brush with possession. He wondered what Stone had seen inside that portal that had disturbed him so much that his mind had apparently shut down for several days rather than cope with it. He also wondered if the mage would even be able to close the second portal. Assuming they could even find it. It sounded like Vegas was practically crawling with Evil, and the three of them planned to march right in, set up camp, and start nosing around looking for potential portal locations.

  He wasn’t sure this was the best idea, but he didn’t have an alternative. All he could do was arm himself with as much knowledge as he could cram into his head, and that didn’t feel like nearly enough.

  After a few more days and still no word from Stone, Jason and Verity decided to take one of their days off to track down their Forgotten friends, since it had been quite some time since they’d seen them. Verity, who had by this time become as adept at cooking as she was getting to be with magic, whipped up a large pot of beef stew, and they set off with it the next morning in search of the Forgotten.

  It didn’t take long to find the group—it was cold in mid-January so they started by searching in their usual indoor squats, finding them in the same abandoned building in Mountain View they’d used at least once before.

  “Look who’s here!” Marilee cried happily when she saw them. They got almost all the way inside without being seen, since Hector, usually outside having a smoke, was still not with them. “We wondered where you’ve been.”

  They didn’t talk much until they’d all settled in a rough circle and everyone had complimented Verity on her stew. In addition to Lamar, Marilee, Benny, and Frank the Scribbler, Susanna had rejoined the group at some point since Jason and Verity had last seen them.

  “Still no Dr. Stone, I see,” Lamar said, shaking his head. “I hope he doesn’t still feel guilty about what happened. Please tell him we’d like to see him.”

  “We will when we talk to him,” Verity told him, then changed the subject: “How have you been? Have things been quiet around here?”

  “Fairly so,” Marilee said, offering her black kitten a piece of meat from her bowl. “We’ve even started going back to the library during the day. I don’t think the librarian is too pleased about it, but she hasn’t called the police, and we do our best not to make any trouble.”

  “What about you?” Lamar asked, with a raised eyebrow that told Verity that he hadn’t missed her abrupt attempt at a subject change. “What have you been doing these last few weeks?”

  Verity started to say something, but Jason spoke first. “We—we’ve been away,” he said. “We had to do something.”

  “Something?” Marilee frowned. “What sort of something?”

  “We can’t say,” Verity said. She sighed. “Not yet. Hopefully we’ll be able to tell you sometime soon.”

  “Something around here?” Benny asked.

  “No. Back East.”

  That earned them odd looks from everyone. “By yourselves?” Marilee asked. “Or with Dr. Stone?”

  “He was with us.”

  “But now he isn’t.” The old lady’s shrewd, watery blue eyes scanned their faces. “Did something go wrong with this—something that you had to do?”

  “No. Well, mostly no. We did what we went there to do.” Jason looked uncomfortable under her scrutiny.

  “Did this have something to do with the Evil?” Lamar asked.

  Jason paused, but figured there was no harm in admitting that. “Yeah.”

  “I see.” His tone was impossible to gauge.

  “Can we ask you
a question?” Verity spoke up into the uneasy silence. Jason looked at her sideways as if to say what are you planning? but she ignored him.

  “Of course,” Marilee said.

  She considered her words. “While we were—away, back East—we ran into some Forgotten, but they were—different.”

  “Different?” Lamar leaned forward.

  “Yeah. They were—” she shrugged. “—I’d say ‘evil,’ but I guess I can’t just toss that word around anymore, can I? They were bad. Mean. Dangerous. They kinda surprised us, because we’d never seen any Forgotten like that before. Have you?”

  Marilee and Lamar looked at each other, then both of them exchanged glances with Susanna. Lamar nodded. “We’ve seen them, yes.”

  “What’s the deal with them?” Jason asked.

  Lamar shrugged. “They’re Forgotten. And there are actually quite a few of them out there. In their way, they can sometimes be more frightening than the Evil.”

  “So they’re all over, just like you guys are? Why didn’t you tell us about them?”

  “We’ve been so focused on dealing with the Evil, it just didn’t come up,” Marilee said. “The other Forgotten—they have the same sorts of abilities we have. They can’t do things we can’t, as far as we can tell. In many ways, they’re just like us. But they’re—” she thought about it for a moment “—really, I feel sorry for them. Like most of our kind, most of them have issues and personal demons that they’re dealing with. The only difference is that their issues are more violent in nature, and many of them deal with what they don’t understand by—”