Threshold

by King, R. L.

  “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.”

  “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.

  Stone raised his hands in a ‘stop’ gesture. “Hold on, Jason. You’re making a lot of assumptions, and building yourself quite the house of cards. Even allowing that such a portal exists, we have no way to know if the Evil are still getting through, or if a whole assortment of them just came through all at once when the portal first opened.”

  “Either way,” Jason said stubbornly, “If we can shut down the portal, the number of Evil still around is finite, right?”

  “If they can’t reproduce,” Verity said.

  Her brother glared at her. “One problem at a time. I really don’t want to think about those things reproducing right now, if you don’t mind.” He turned back to Stone. “But what I’m saying is—I know it’s a long shot, but if you’re right, this might actually be the way to get rid of the Evil once and for all, yes?”

  Stone shrugged. “Anything’s possible,” he said. “But I wouldn’t get my hopes up. Since we have no idea where the portal might be, our best bet is probably trying to find the notes. Fortunately for us, we might have a bit of luck on our side. One thing I remember about Daphne is that she was fanatical about documenting her work. And since this was a secret project, she probably didn’t have them out where just anyone could find them. So it’s possible that they still exist, and that we just have to figure out where she hid them.”

  “That’s luck?” Verity asked.

  “Well, it’s better than nothing,” Stone said. “And given that I did attend a holiday party with Daphne’s family one weekend several years ago, there’s even a chance they might remember me.”

  “That still doesn’t answer the other big question,” Jason said.

  Stone raised a questioning eyebrow and made a ‘go on’ gesture.

  “Why are they killing mages all of a sudden?”

  “Why are they killing mages that won’t join them?” Verity corrected, leaning forward. “It almost sounds like they’re trying to gather up mages for something, and killing the ones who won’t go along with them.”

  Stone sighed. “Why don’t we focus on the portal question first? I have no idea if the two are related, but if they are and we make progress on the first one, I have no doubt the second one will come back to bite us in short order.”

  “Great,” Jason said with a frown. “Because I can’t think of anything else I’d rather do than be a tasty snack.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Daphne’s mother, it turned out, still lived at the same place near San Luis Obispo where Stone had met her before, a three-hour drive south of Palo Alto. She remembered him and was pleased to hear from him, though surprised when he told her he wanted to talk with her about something, but wanted to do it in person.

  Jason and Verity decided to go along just in case there was any trouble. “Besides, I know you,” Jason said. “If she has the notes, you’ll probably take off after wherever they point you and forget all about calling us.”

  Daphne�
��s mother looked very much like Stone remembered her: compact, dark-haired, cheerful. She had a few more lines on her face and a bit more gray in her hair, and the ever-present twinkle in her dark eyes seemed permanently dimmed, but aside from that she could have been the same woman who had plied Stone with her “secret home recipes” at the family outing he’d attended with Daphne a few years back.

  “It’s good to see you, Alastair,” she said, briefly taking his hand in hers and squeezing it before they sat down at a table near the little bistro’s front window. “How have you been?”

  “I’ve been well,” he told her. “Busy.”

  “Busy is good.” She looked down at her hands, then back up at him.

  “I suppose I should get right to it. I’m sure you’re wondering why I’ve contacted you after all these years—”

  She gave him a faint smile. “I thought it was because you missed me.” She chuckled, just a little. “You always were my favorite, you know. I was so disappointed when you and Daphne—didn’t work out.”

  “Daphne was a lovely person and a good friend,” he said. “We never stopped being friends. It just—wasn’t meant to be. We both knew that.”

  She nodded. “It happens, I know.” She took a deep breath. “So—why now? It must be pretty important, or you’d have told me over the phone instead of driving down here in person.”

  Not sure how to start, Stone just dived in. “As you might have suspected, it’s about Daphne.”

  Nancy looked down. “Yes, I assumed it was.” Meeting his eyes, she asked, “Alastair—you don’t have any idea what happened to her, do you? If you do, please tell me.”

  “Nancy—”

  “Do you?” she pressed. Her eyes were full of hope and desperation, grasping at her last chance.

  He shook his head. “I don’t. I’m sorry, Nancy.”

  “She never told us anything about what she was doing—I didn’t even know what she did for a living, not really. Some kind of scientific research, she said. I think she might have worked for the government.” As was often the case with mages these days, Daphne’s Talent had skipped at least one generation, so Nancy had no knowledge of the magical world. Daphne had once told Stone that her grandmother had arranged her apprenticeship.