Threshold

by King, R. L.

  “I’m guessing not,” Jason said, pointing at the notebook.

  “Well, clearly they were unsuccessful,” Stone reminded him. He closed the notebook with a decisive snap and glanced at his watch. “It’s almost four. I want to be out of here and on the road by six, so I’ll leave it to you: we can leave now or you can go back to bed for an hour or so.”

  “The hell?” Jason glared at him. “Al—”

  Stone’s expression hardened. “Jason, I’m sorry, but your beauty sleep is insignificant next to our need to find these portals and shut them down as soon as we can. You can sleep in the car. I’m leaving at six. If you’re not ready to go by then, I’m leaving without you.”

  “I think he’s serious, big bro,” Verity said.

  Jason redirected his glare to her and looked like he was about to say something, but then let his breath out in a loud sigh. “Fine. Fuck it. Let’s get going now, then. It’s not like I’m gonna get back to sleep any time soon.”

  They were on the road in less than an hour. After stopping only long enough to gas up the car, grab breakfast at an all-night fast food place, and procure some maps, they set off west. As Stone thought might happen, Jason was fully awake after breakfast and offered to drive. Verity stretched out across the back seat and Stone took shotgun, stacking the five notebooks on the console between himself and Jason. “Don’t bother me unless something comes after us or the road disappears,” he told Jason. “Verity can navigate.”

  “Um...Doc...I can’t navigate if I don’t know where we’re going,” Verity protested. “I’m pretty sure we’re not gonna cross the border to West Virginia and see a giant portal shining off in the distance.”

  “Bloody smartass apprentice,” Stone growled. “Just get us there. Hopefully by the time we arrive, I’ll have sorted out the location better.”

  Jason settled in to drive after consulting the map to get their initial route and handing it back to Verity. He was glad that Stone hadn’t skimped in the rental-car department: they had a big Lincoln Town Car with soft, spacious leather seats, a killer stereo system, and a large V8 engine rumbling under the hood. And best of all, a good heater. At least it wasn’t snowing—not yet, anyway. The sky was an uninviting shade of gray, though. He supposed the scenery would have been pretty if they’d been driving through in spring or summer, but now, at the leading edge of winter, everything looked forbidding and unwelcoming.

  Stone didn’t come up for air for a couple of hours, stretching out his long legs as best he could.

  “Find anything?” Verity asked from the back seat.

  Stone sighed, flipping through the top notebook until he came to a particular page. “I think they’re being deliberately evasive about exactly where the place is,” he said. “I might need to make some calls. She refers to ‘the place where Neil used to play when he was a boy,’ but aside from that being somewhere in northern West Virginia, she doesn’t provide a location. She mentions a town called Highland, but from context I don’t think it’s the same one. It might be nearby, though. It sounds like they might have used it as a staging area.”

  Verity dug out the map. “That’s in Preston County.” She pointed. “Way up there in the north central part.”

  “Who’s Neil?” Jason asked. “Is he one of the researchers?”

  Stone nodded. “Neil Hanley was my replacement.”

  “Huh?”

  “Remember I told you Daphne met someone else and we broke it off? He was the someone else. I suppose it was inevitable, really, with them working so closely together and me still based in England at that point. I met him once. Bright chap. Boring, but bright.”

  “Could his family still be in the area?” Verity asked. “Maybe if they are, we could ask them.”

  “That’s one of the calls I need to make when we stop. Nancy might know.”

  “Asking them about it will be fun if they are still here,” Jason said, rolling his eyes. “‘Excuse me, Mr. and Mrs. Hanley—it seems your son used to play somewhere where we think there’s a fucked-up extradimensional portal that’s spewing murderous evil psychic body snatchers into our world. Any idea where that might be?’ I don’t think that’s gonna go over too well.”

  Stone gave him a mock-exasperated look, but didn’t otherwise reply.

  “I have been wondering one thing, though,” Verity mused. “We kinda determined that the little Evil can’t survive long outside a human host, right? I mean, when I kick them out they just go poof and they’re gone.”

  Stone nodded. “As far as we know, that’s true.”

  “Well then—if they’re coming through this portal somewhere near here—how do they make it anywhere outside this area? I mean, if there’s one of these here and another one in Vegas, and both of them are spitting out Evil—it seems like the Evil would mostly be concentrated around those two areas, right? They could travel once they’ve got people to possess, of course, but—” She let that trail off.

  “That’s a very good question,” Stone admitted. “It also leads to another one: the more—advanced Evil, for lack of a better word—the powerful ones—seem to be directing the lower-level ones. We’re fairly sure of that. But it appears they’re directing them to two distinct purposes: possess useful long-term hosts like the DMW as foot-soldiers, or do more of a short-term and task-based occupation, such as what happened with those two security guards back in Woodwich. Not only do we have no idea how those weak Evil manage to travel as far as they do without disintegrating for lack of a host, but we also don’t know why they allow themselves to be given missions that will result in their destruction.”

  Jason mulled that over but shook his head. “Sorry, Al, that kind of speculation’s way above my pay grade. You got any ideas?”

  “Sort of...” Stone closed the notebook and put it on top of the stack. “Mind you, this is pure speculation, with nothing to back it up.”

  “Better than we have now,” Verity pointed out.

  “Well,” Stone said, “I said once that I didn’t think they were a hive mind. There’s literally no indication that they have any means of communication with each other once they’re occupying hosts—other than the normal means we humans have, of course. They can ring each other up on the phone, but they can’t send messages via brainwave—not even the powerful ones can do that, or else Gordon Lucas would have had an army of possessed club-goers waiting for us at that building.”

  “Yeah, and—?” Jason pressed.

  Stone shrugged. “We have no idea what they’re like when they’re in their home element, other than that they’re extremely dangerous and attack anything exhibiting any kind of emotional response. Which, given our knowledge of them on this side of the portal, isn’t at all surprising. But from what little we’ve observed during our trips through the Overworld, they do seem much more—coordinated—when they’re there than when they’re here on our plane. So—what I’m getting at is that perhaps they get their marching orders while they’re still on their own home plane, and they’re also given some sort of protection that allows them to exist here until such time as they commit to a host.”

  Verity nodded slowly. “But that would still mean they’d need some way of traveling as pure Evil, right? They’d need to be able to get wherever the big guys tell them to go. And we still don’t know if these portals are even still active, do we? It could be that when your friends tried their experiment, they opened up some kind of—I don’t know—big blowhole from Evil-town, that spewed out thousands of these things and then collapsed. Right?”

  “It’s possible,” Stone agreed. “Though I’m more inclined to go with my own hypothesis, which fits with my unfortunately limited understanding of what the researchers were trying to do.” He indicated the notebooks. “The formulas in here are mostly far above my area of expertise. I know how to build standard portals—which is still more than most mages can do these days. But with thes
e it’s rather like I took two years of university French and I’m trying to read Les Miserables—I can make sense of enough of it to see where they’re headed, but not enough to pick out the nuances of how they got there, or where they might have gone wrong.”

  “So what’s your hypothesis?” Jason asked.

  “That the portals do still exist, and that they’re—as Verity so charmingly put it—‘winking in and out.’”

  “You mean you think they’re unstable,” Verity began, “but when they wink in, they spit out a few more Evil and then wink back out again?”

  “Exactly.” Stone nodded. “What I have no idea about, of course, is how frequent this ‘winking’ is, or how predictable it is—or what causes it. Is it simple instability, or is it related somehow to the power required to allow the Evil to come through to our dimension? It could pop in and out at random intervals, it could belch out a few Evil and then have to recharge for some indefinite amount of time, or it could make an appearance once every three years during the first full moon. There’s no way to know that even if I could make sense of everything Daphne’s written here, because they obviously didn’t expect anything like it to happen.” He sighed. “It would make things much easier if Verity’s theory were correct, and all the Evil in our world had been spewed out at one time and then the portal collapsed. That would mean that the number of Evil in the world was finite, which would make our job much easier.”

  “How so?” Jason asked.

  “Well, for one thing I’d finally be comfortable letting some more people in on the whole story, instead of just giving them the bits and pieces they need to keep safe,” Stone said. “I’ve already proven that I can build magical items that can detect the presence of the Evil, and there are also Forgotten who can do the same thing.”

  “Like Lissy,” Verity said soberly.

  Stone nodded. “I’d be willing to bet there are probably a few Forgotten around with Verity’s ability to evict them as well, since so far the Forgotten abilities seem to be centered around similar functionality. Even the ones we know show a lot of duplication of powers, which leads me to believe that there aren’t that many distinct varieties. Some might be rarer than others, like Lamar’s healing ability, but I doubt many are unique.

  “In any case, it would be safer to give other mages more specific information about the Evil. I could teach some of them to build the detectors, and they could teach others. We could start rooting them out.”

  “Wouldn’t that take forever, though?” Jason asked. “Even if the ‘single spew theory’ was right, that could mean that thousands—or more—of these things came through at once before the portals collapsed. If they sensed something was up, they could all have been waiting around the entrance like a bunch of subway commuters at rush hour, all just waiting for the chance to shove their way out. Even if each portal was only open for a few seconds, that could mean a hell of a lot of Evil made it through. And there’s something else, too.”

  “What’s that?” Stone asked.

  Jason paused a moment to gather his thoughts, then sighed. “It’s looking a lot like the Evil and the Forgotten are connected, right? I mean, the Forgotten started turning up with their weird abilities right around the time the Evil started coming through, if we’ve got this right. So what’s the connection? If we shut down the portals, do the Forgotten lose their powers, too? Or are the powers somehow related to the Evil being here?”

  Stone looked like he hadn’t thought about that. “Hmm,” he said. “Another damn good question, and another one we can’t answer until we know more about what’s going on. But if shutting down the portals causes the Forgotten to lose their powers—I think they would agree that’s an acceptable sacrifice for getting rid of the Evil.”

  “I sure as hell would,” Verity said with feeling.

  “Al,” Jason asked, almost afraid to know the answer, “Do you even know how to shut down the portals? We have to pretty much assume that if your version of the truth is right, and the portals are still here at least some of the time, the whole area around them will be swarming with Evil—or more likely, people they’ve possessed and given the job of keeping the rest of the world away from them. But even if we can manage to get past all of that, there’s still the portal itself. Can you do it?”

  Stone sighed. “I think so,” he said at last. “I hope so, because after the four who disappeared, I think I might be one of the leading authorities left on the damned things—and that’s not saying much, believe me. Nowadays, it seems that most of the mages who use them are content to just accept them for what they are, without thinking about making improvements. I try to keep up with the magical scientific literature, such as it is, and I don’t recall seeing anything about any serious portal-based research in the last several years.”

  “Unless somebody’s doing it in their garage, like those four,” Verity pointed out.

  “Yes, well, that won’t help us at all, given that I’d have no way to identify or find them.”

  “So I guess we’re on our own, is what you’re saying,” Jason said. “Again.”

  “It would appear so,” Stone agreed, not looking happy about it. He glanced out the window—it had started to snow, and little flurries fluttered around the car. “Especially since it looks like I should be driving.”

  “I can drive,” Jason protested.

  Stone gave him a sideways look. “Remind me where you’re from again, Jason?”

  “Uh—Ventura. Why?”

  “Southern California. Have you ever even seen snow outside of a cinema or a television show?”

  “I went skiing once,” he grumbled.

  “Yes, well, you’ll forgive me if I don’t put my life in the hands of someone who ‘went skiing once,’” Stone said. “Especially since it appears the roads around here can get a bit dodgy, if the squiggly lines on that map are any indication.”

  “Hey, I’m not the one who rented the land yacht,” Jason said, forgetting how much he’d appreciated its amenities earlier. “Ever hear of a Jeep?”

  “Boys, don’t squabble,” Verity said, affecting her best—and entirely unconvincing—’motherly’ tone. “Or I’ll make you both ride in the back seat and I’ll drive.”

  After a brief break to switch drivers, they turned north toward Preston County. Jason had taken Verity’s spot in the back seat and Verity moved to the front. After fiddling with the car’s radio and determining there were no stations in the area playing anything she could stand, she settled back with the notebook Stone had been reading and attempted to make some sense of it.

  Stone glanced over at her after about half an hour. “Getting anything?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, a headache. I’m sorry, Doc—I know she was your friend, but this chick writes like she was tripping on some really good drugs.”

  “Content or handwriting?” he asked with a grin.

  “Both.” She tossed the notebook back on the console and leaned against the passenger side window, looking out into the swirling snow.

  “If this gets much worse, we might have to stop and get some warmer clothes,” Jason said. He didn’t relish the idea of getting out of the warm car into even this relatively mild snowfall.

  “You’re probably right,” Stone agreed. “If you can hold out for a while longer, I’m sure we can pick some things up somewhere in Preston County.”

  “If they even have clothing stores out here in the boonies,” Verity muttered.

  Stone chuckled. “Well, it’s a bit cold for them to go naked, so I suspect they have something suitable. Just because we’re not surrounded by fast-food restaurants and nightclubs doesn’t mean we won’t be able to find proper amenities. I hope,” he added, with a dubious glance around.

  It wasn’t long before they were forced to leave the main highway and continue on smaller roads. Though they definitely offered better scenery, they made
for much slower progress—especially since the snow was coming down harder now.

  Darkness fell quickly. The road, which had been working its way upward through the trees at a leisurely incline, began to climb more steeply and grew twistier. Stone slowed the car. He’d been looking tense for about the last hour, his eyes focused fully forward in concentration, both hands firm on the steering wheel. “We’ll need to find someplace to stop soon,” he said without looking away. “I need a rest from staring out the window, and we’re getting a bit low on gas.” Snow fell steadily; they hadn’t seen another car in half an hour or so.

  Verity looked at the map again, using a little flashlight from her bag. “It looks like there’s a town a few miles up,” she said. “I don’t think it’s very big, though.”

  “As long as it has a gas station and a place to get a cup of coffee, it’ll look like heaven,” Stone said.

  “This isn’t like driving in England, is it?” Jason asked, leaning over the back seat to get a better look out the front window. He’d die before he admitted it, but he’d realized many miles back that he was glad he hadn’t pushed Stone into letting him drive. The snowfall wasn’t heavy, but it was coming at them nearly horizontally, making it look like the Lincoln was preparing to jump to light speed.

  “It can be,” Stone said. “But it’s only a few miles to the train station. Nobody in their right mind drives into London, and I don’t remember ever going joyriding in weather like this in my youth.”

  All three of them watched the road now. Verity glanced at the map occasionally, but since she wasn’t sure exactly where they were relative to the town she had spotted, she couldn’t tell them how far it was.

  They rounded a sharp bend; the car’s headlights illuminated the leafless trees and left the road dark for the couple of seconds until they got pointed in the right direction again.