Threshold

by King, R. L.

  She sighed. “I don’t know. I wish I had better control over the eviction thing—like, I could do it from farther away, or didn’t need to feel like the Evil was in my face before I could kick it out.”

  “Yeah, that’d be nice, but unless you think you can learn to do it now, I don’t think it’ll do us much good to worry about it. We need to come up with something we can do, and fast. I don’t know how long they’re gonna be patient with Al before they decide he’s not gonna be able to help them.”

  Verity got up and splashed her face with water from the sink. “I wish there was something we could do that they don’t know about. Something we could surprise them with. Somehow I doubt we’ll be able to fool them with the ‘pretend to be sick’ thing. If they were that stupid they’d be dead already. They—Jason?”

  Jason barely heard her. Instead, he gazed out the tiny window in a passable imitation of Stone’s thousand-yard stare.

  “Jason?” she said again. “What are you thinking about?”

  He crossed the room quickly and looked out through the bars to make sure no one lurked in the hallway, then turned toward her, an odd look on his face. Moving in close, he spoke softly, almost whispering. “V—think hard. Do you remember ever doing any magic where an Evil could see it?”

  “Huh?”

  “Just think. Did you?”

  “Uh...” She paused, then also answered in a whisper: “Well, I levitated that guy Dr. Stone hit with the stun spell outside the cave—if there were any others around, they might have seen that.”

  “But Al was with us then. It could just as easily have been him that did that, since we were hiding in the trees in the dark. Anything else?”

  Again she thought. “I—don’t think so. I levitated that guy at the storage building, but none of those were Evil. And I don’t think anybody saw me drop that cheeseburger in your lap. Why?”

  “Because,” he said slowly, “I’m not sure they know you can do magic. And that might be a huge advantage for us.”

  She stared at him. “You know—” she said after a pause, “you might be right about that. The guy last night said something about being aware of what I’m capable of, but I think he was just talking about the eviction thing. That’s scary to them, we know that. But I couldn’t do any magic the last time we fought the Evil, remember? So how could they know? I guess they could have found out from the mages they have, but why would they even bother asking? And Dr. Stone said the black and white mages don’t talk much normally, so unless they’ve got some kind of…mage newsletter or something, I don’t think it’s common knowledge that he’s got me as his apprentice.”

  Jason nodded. “I don’t see how they could know that.” He still spoke under his breath, keeping an eye on the corridor outside the cell for any sign of visitors.

  She paused again, then spoke as if she couldn’t bring herself to have any hope: “But—even if they don’t know I’m a mage, what good will it do? I don’t know that much magic. I can levitate things for a little while, but I don’t have enough control yet to slam things hard into walls, and this hallway isn’t high enough to really hurt them if I picked them up and dropped them. I can do that confusion thing, but I doubt I could get it off before they got suspicious. It would look an awful lot like I was trying to evict them, and they’d probably shoot you or me or both of us before I could finish. Plus, they always seem to send in two at once. There’s no way I could hit them both with either of those two spells.”

  “Yeah...” Jason sighed. “Well, keep thinking. That might be our only way out of here, and you’re right: we’re gonna have to do it fast.”

  Stone awakened to somebody shaking him hard. “Wake up, Sleeping Beauty. Naptime’s over. Work to do.”

  He mumbled something incoherent and swiped a hand across his face, trying to remember where he was. It didn’t take long for it all to come back to him: he lay on one of the church pews, where he vaguely remembered wandering at some point, announcing that he couldn’t do any more calculations until he’d had a chance to get some sleep. He’d shown Dobbs and Sherman a path that looked extremely promising and only headed in the wrong direction slightly—enough to make the calculations useless, but hopefully not enough for them to notice—and told them to wake him in an hour. Despite the hard wood of the pew and the stressful situation in general, he’d fallen asleep almost instantly; he wasn’t at all happy about being awakened already. Blinking a couple of times, he regarded the two mages. “Get anywhere, then?”

  “Take a look,” Sherman said, pointing at a new series of sheets of paper tacked to another wall.

  Stone dragged himself off the pew, cursing every aching muscle, and shuffled over for a closer look. He turned away from the others so they didn’t see his slight smile. Oh, they’d gotten somewhere all right—considerably further along the path he’d set them on. Further, in fact, than he thought they’d get. But the fact remained that it was still the wrong path. “Good, good,” he murmured. “Excellent progress. At this rate we might get done this week.”

  He looked around. “Is there room—er—church service? Surely they don’t expect us to work on an empty stomach, do they?” He glanced over at the two guys with rifles, one of whom had nodded off. “You with the guns! Got any coffee, at least?”

  The sleeping guard jerked awake. The other one glared at Stone. “Shut up and keep working,” he growled.

  Stone sighed. “Fine. But don’t blame me if I bugger up an equation due to lack of proper caffeination.” He picked up a pencil and got back to work, wondering if Jason and Verity were still alive, and if the Harmony group had gotten away and assumed all three of them were dead.

  “They’ll bring us something in a little while,” Sherman said. “Let’s get going.”

  “And a happy Christmas to you too,” Stone said sourly. “But then, I suppose extradimensional bodysnatchers don’t celebrate Earth holidays, do they?”

  He stopped and turned back to the two other mages. “Do you mind if I ask you two a serious question? Since I suspect they’re planning to kill me after I finish helping you anyway, it can’t hurt, right?”

  Dobbs eyed him with suspicion. “What question?”

  “Well—why?” Stone said. “What did they offer you to make you go along with allowing them a timeshare in your brain? I can’t possibly imagine a worse fate than having some alien thing wandering around inside my head like some kind of foul stowaway. And since I’m reasonably sure mages aren’t possessable without permission—do feel free to set me straight on that bit if I’ve got it wrong, by the way—then obviously they must have offered you something fairly compelling to get you to go along with it. Satisfy my curiosity: what was it? Is that even still you in there?”

  Sherman and Dobbs exchanged glances as if trying to determine whether Stone had ulterior motives, and whether they should answer at all. Finally, Dobbs shrugged. “That’s more than one question, you know. But I’ll answer them anyway, at least for me. Yes, it’s still me in here. I still have all my thoughts and memories and abilities. It’s not really all that different. It doesn’t force me to do anything. It’s more of a—symbiotic relationship. I give it a means for getting around in our world and help it reach its goals, and it gives me knowledge.”

  “What knowledge, though?” Stone asked. “You don’t have to be specific if you don’t want to—I doubt it’s teaching you anything I’d want to be dabbling in anyway—but just in a general sense. What could it possibly share with you that would convince you to allow this?”

  “You wouldn’t understand,” Sherman said, more than a touch of contempt in his voice. “You’re not willing to do what’s necessary to gain real knowledge.”

  “Oh?”

  Sherman nodded. “I know about you. You’re a powerful mage—maybe one of the best. But you’re limited. You limit yourself by some outdated moral code. There’s no right or wrong when you’re
pursuing knowledge. There’s only the knowledge, and what it takes to get it. So what if you have to inconvenience a few people along the way? They’ll get over it. It’s not like we’re killing anybody.”

  “Really,” Stone said. It wasn’t a question. “So you’ve never killed anyone in your—pursuit of knowledge? Not even after you sublet your brain to the Creature from the Great Beyond?”

  “That’s none of your business,” Sherman said. “Technically, none of this is any of your business. You’re here to help us, not to ask questions.”

  Stone shrugged. “Like I said, just asking.” He looked at Dobbs, who seemed more willing to share his experiences. “One more question, if I may, and then I’ll see how much I can pummel my non-caffeinated brain into making some sense out of what you’ve done while I was asleep.”

  Dobbs made a go on gesture.

  “What happens after you’ve helped it achieve its goal? Once the portal is stable and they’re able to pour through it to Earth like a bunch of tourists at Disneyland? Are they just planning to take over everyone? I assume what they want is emotions, since that’s what they feed on. But once it gets what it wants, what then? Can it leave you voluntarily, or are you two and your Evil chums stuck together until you die?”

  For the barest fraction of a second, an odd look passed over Dobbs’s face. Then both his and Sherman’s expressions hardened. “Enough questions,” Dobbs said, and Sherman nodded. “Let’s get back to work. That’s what you’re here for, not to ask questions.”

  Stone shrugged. “Fair enough, then. After you.”

  Verity’s stomach rumbled.

  It was late morning, and no one had showed up yet, let alone brought them anything to eat. Jason sighed. “I’m starting to wonder if they’re even coming back.”

  She nodded. “I wonder what Dr. Stone’s doing.” She sat on the bed, her back against the wall and her hands clasped around her drawn-up knees. Jason paced back and forth like a caged animal. “At least we’ve got water—that’s something, I guess.”

  Jason checked his pockets again for any stray energy bars or other edibles, but found nothing, just has he had the last few times he’d checked. “I sure could use that power of Marilee’s right now,” he said, sighing. “Being able to pull useful things out of my pockets would be great right about now.”

  “What I could use is some more spells.” Verity said. “Maybe if I’d studied those books he gave me better...asked him for some other ones...”

  “V, you’ve been at this for what, less than a month? I think you’re doing pretty well, all things considered. Going from barely being able to lift a pencil to lifting a full-grown man? I’m impressed. And a little jealous, if you want to know the truth.”

  “Jealous? You want to be a mage?” She cocked an eyebrow at him and couldn’t suppress a small grin. “You’ve always been the most down-to-earth person I know, Jason. I wouldn’t think you’d want to be levitating stuff and scrambling people’s minds and making yourself disappear—”

  They got it at the same instant. Both of them went stiff for a moment as the realization hit them, and then matching wolfish, triumphant grins lit their faces.

  Stone was getting tired again. The hour’s sleep they’d allowed him had done nearly nothing to alleviate his multi-day sleep debt, but he couldn’t afford to nod off halfway through a calculation. At least they’d brought him some coffee, and an inadequate breakfast of instant oatmeal and water.

  “How do you lot stand the food up here?” he asked after he’d finished his scant meal. “You don’t get down for supplies very often, do you? I’m amazed you’ve still got the electricity on.”

  “Why?” Sherman asked. “We’ve got people who take care of paying the bills. As far as the utility companies go, we’re still a normal little town.”

  “And when people come up here to investigate why things are so quiet, you have one of your little friends hop into their head and take over, right?”

  “The leaders instruct a few to remain around the area for that purpose, yes,” Dobbs said.

  “So they can hang about indefinitely, then? They don’t simply go up in a puff of smoke when they hit our atmosphere?”

  Sherman barked a nasty little laugh. “That wouldn’t be very efficient, would it? If they did, then we’d have a whole lot of concentration around the portals and very little out any further. You know as well as I do that’s not the way it is.”

  “Yes, I’ve worked that one out on my own,” Stone admitted. “I’ve got this mad vision of the ones on the other side stuffing the travelers into little protective capsules before they shove them out like baby birds to seek their fortunes in the big bad world on the Other Side.”

  Dobbs glared at him and pointed at the sheet of calculations. “Less talk, more work.”

  Stone shrugged. “It’s your show.” He picked up a pen and returned to his task.

  The two men who came into the police station weren’t the same ones who had come with Stone before, and they weren’t coming to deliver meals to the prisoners. One carried a rifle casually over his arm, while the other held a pistol. The one with the rifle also held a paper bag that might have been full of food, but wasn’t. They had been given their orders, and they intended to carry them out quickly and efficiently. Several of their brethren had already gathered in the schoolhouse where the event would take place; all that was left now was to gather up the main participants and bring them along.

  Outside the locked door to the cell area, the man with the pistol paused and fished in his pocket for the keys. The other man watched silently as he opened the door, then followed him down the short corridor to the single cell’s door.

  “Wake up and go to the back of the cell,” ordered the one with the pistol. “We’ve got your lunch here. You—”

  He stopped. Behind him, the man with the rifle stopped too. Both of them stared.

  The cell was empty.

  “What the—?” began the rifleman, dropping the bag.

  “How—?” said the man with the pistol. “How the hell did they—” Frantically he searched through the keys on the ring for the one that would open the cell. “There’s no way they could have gotten out!”

  “We’d better find ’em,” said the rifleman. “They aren’t gonna be happy at the school if we lose the stars of the show.”

  The man with the pistol found the right key and inserted it into the lock with a trembling hand. “I don’t understand this,” he said, shaking his head as he pushed the door open. “Keep that rifle ready.” He crouched down as if to peer under the bed, the only place in the cell where it was even remotely possible to hide.

  Simultaneously, something jerked the rifle out of the rifleman’s hands before he could even get a good grip on it, and something else shoved the man with the pistol so hard in the back that he pitched forward out of his precariously-balanced crouch, headfirst into the mattress.

  Verity and Jason shifted into view as Jason swung the butt of the rifle at the ex-rifleman’s head like a baseball player letting loose on a home-run pitch, and was rewarded with a meaty thud as wood met bone. The ex-rifleman dropped with a grunt.

  The man with the pistol, unhurt from his impact with the mattress, whirled around and found himself facing his two prisoners, one of whom had just neatly dispatched his friend. Roaring with rage, he pointed the pistol at Jason.

  “NO!” Verity yelled. She lunged forward, grabbing the guy’s arm and pushing hard with her mind. The man dropped the pistol and clamped his hands to his head as a puff of a grayish-white, foglike substance flew out of his head and immediately dissipated into nothingness. The man reeled, and Verity stepped back so he could fall on to the bed.

  Jason snatched up the pistol, engaged the safety, and stuck the gun in the waistband of his jeans. “Great job with that spell, V. C’mon, let’s get out of here before they figure out we’re gone.�
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  Verity, puffing with exertion from maintaining the spell, grabbed the keys off the floor. “Shall we lock ’em in?”

  “Yeah. I’m guessing the one I smacked won’t wake up any time soon, if he does at all.” He didn’t sound sorry about that. “The other one—you evicted him for now, but those things are buzzing like flies around this place, especially with that portal being open recently. He’ll probably get re-possessed soon. Which reminds me—” He picked up the second man by the scruff of his shirt, cocked his fist, and let the man have it on the chin. “There. At least they won’t have anything to possess for a while. Check their pockets, but do it quick.”

  Verity did as instructed. The man on the bed had a spare magazine for the pistol, which she tossed to Jason. The other man had nothing useful.

  Jason was already outside the cell, keeping a close watch on the door. “Hurry up. I don’t like the sound of what that one guy was saying about people waiting at the school. If they came to get us for something going on over there, they’ll miss these guys soon.”

  Verity hurried out of the cell and Jason locked it behind them. They headed down the corridor and out through the end door, which Jason then also locked. “They might miss ’em, but it’s gonna take ’em awhile to get to ’em, unless they got another set of keys,” he said, satisfied. “Let’s go.”

  Stone ran his hand through his hair. He lay on the pew again, watching Dobbs and Sherman across the church from him on two more pews, grabbing what was turning into extended catnaps. Apparently being possessed by the Evil didn’t make one any more resistant to fatigue than normal, and the two men had been up all night, working their brains hard doing something that Stone was convinced they didn’t even understand half as well as they pretended they did. He wasn’t surprised that their “few minutes of sleep” had thus far turned into almost an hour. He didn’t mind—the longer they slept, the longer he didn’t have to keep working to stay at least one step ahead of them so they didn’t figure out what he was up to.