by R. L. King
“Verity said you can’t control them,” Jason pointed out. “That they—just sort of happen when you need them.”
“Yes,” Marilee said. “It’s instinctual. It’s more a sense of—we see someone we want to help, or we pick up on something in our heads without realizing it. And it just—flows out of us.”
“And—one of you healed my wound?” Stone asked. He lifted up his overcoat to inspect the bloody aftermath of his knife wound.
“I did,” Lamar said.
“You healed it—completely? It doesn’t hurt…I don’t feel feverish—which means that you likely haven’t left any of whatever was on that knife inside of me. That’s—amazing. I can do a bit of healing magic, but nothing like this.” He shivered a bit and let the overcoat drop back down. “So—about this ‘Evil.’ What is it, exactly?”
Lamar shook his head. “Nobody knows that. Not exactly. We try to avoid it when we can—it’s dangerous and unpredictable. But it seems to be some kind of—” he struggled for the right words “—disembodied life force that seeks out humans to possess.”
“Why, though? What does it get from this possession? Does it just want a physical body?” Stone turned a little toward Lamar and paled a bit more. He seemed frustrated with the limitations of his own physical body right now—Jason could tell his mind was trying to go a mile a minute, but his body was failing him.
Marilee pushed him gently back down. “It seems to want—emotions.”
Stone looked startled. “Emotions?”
“Strong ones,” Lamar clarified. “And particularly strong negative ones. It seems to feed best off despair, depression, anger, fear—”
“—so that’s what it tries to cause,” Marilee finished. “It wants to cause trouble, to make people scared or unhappy because it seems to grow stronger when it’s near that.”
“Wait a minute—” Jason said, leaning forward. “You’re saying it—gets off on this negative emotion?” He looked at Stone, eyes wide. “You mean like those things in the Overworld?”
“I thought of that too,” Stone said. “But it’s not the same. Those seek to destroy it, not to feed on it. Lots of incorporeal things respond to emotion in one way or another. And remember, we’ve been using the Overworld for decades. Whatever these are, they’re apparently quite recent.”
“Yeah, good point,” Jason admitted.
Lamar looked perplexed by their words, but responded to the original question. “Yes, we think the Evil feed on emotion, and so far everything we’ve seen has supported it.”
“Verity said she heard you talking about—levels—of this Evil. She said she wasn’t sure what you meant, and that we should ask you about it.”
“That much we do know,” Lamar said. “Just as the power levels of our abilities vary, the power levels of the Evil vary as well. We think there are one or two very powerful ones that direct activities in this entire area, with lesser minions doing their bidding.”
“Do you know where these big ones are? Are they possessing somebody too?” Jason asked.
“Is it possible for these things to act independently of a host body?” Stone added. His voice was taking on more power now—clearly this whole business had piqued his not inconsiderable curiosity, and he was doing his best to fight his exhaustion to find out as much as he could.
Lamar and Marilee were looking a little overwhelmed under their two-pronged onslaught of questions, but they did their best to keep up. “We don’t think they can operate without bodies,” Lamar said. “You understand this is all based on observation, and not just from our own group. The various Forgotten groups compare notes when they encounter each other, but as you well know, we all—have our limitations. So some of the stories might be nothing more than the guesses of a disturbed mind.”
Stone nodded with a “go on” gesture.
Lamar shrugged. “Like I said, we don’t think they can operate without a body. What we think is that the more powerful the Evil, the longer it can exist without one. We’re not sure if it’s even possible for the weakest ones to find another body once the one they’re in is destroyed. But the strong ones—they might be able to go for a while. Days, or maybe longer. But they can’t do anything when they don’t have one.”
“Where do they go if they can’t find another body? Are they destroyed?”
Marilee looked rueful. “We don’t know. We’re not even sure if it’s different depending on how powerful they are. Maybe the weak ones just go poof, and the strong ones go back to wherever they came from. Or maybe they all just die if they don’t.”
“How do you get them out of a body? Do you have to kill the body?”
“Yes,” Lamar said. “Knocking them unconscious isn’t enough to do it, at least as far as we’ve seen. Some of us are able to see them leaving a body when it’s killed. In fact, we think that the more powerful Evil sometimes uses the weak ones as pawns—they send them off to do something suicidal, like walk in front of a train, just to generate the strong emotions that the rest of them need to thrive.”
“Or push someone in front of one…” Stone said softly. “That would explain some things I was investigating when I met Jason.”
“What about what Verity can do?” Jason asked.
All three of the others looked at him oddly. “What can Verity do?” Lamar asked.
“Oh, that’s right, she didn’t tell you. But she said—she can make them leave.”
“What?” Lamar’s eyes were wide.
Jason nodded. “She said she’s done it twice now—once at the halfway house, and once tonight, when one of those gangers was attacking me. She said she can’t control it—it just…happens.”
“She can make the Evil leave its host body without killing it?” The old man was staring at him now, and so was Marilee.
“That’s what she said.” Jason looked back and forth between them. “I take it—that’s odd?”
“I’ve never even heard of anyone who can do it,” Lamar told him.
“Bloody hell, I’m an idiot,” Stone said, looking disgusted.
“Huh?” Jason turned back to him, confused. “Why?”
“That’s it. You told me about it before. It was all right there in front of me, and it went right over my head.”
“Told you about—”
“—about your sister’s encounter with the man in the basement. How she drove the spirit out of him by ‘pushing’ with her mind.”
“Yeah, and—?”
Stone sighed. “Don’t you see? From what you’ve said, all of these people—they have these abilities with regard to the Evil. They can hide from it, detect it, do useful things that help them stay one step ahead of it. But none of the Forgotten seem to be able to fight it. Until now.”
When Jason still looked confused, Stone fixed him with a withering stare. “Honestly, Jason, I’m the one who’s supposed to be operating at diminished capacity right now. Let me spell it out for you: your sister can fight them. She can destroy them. Therefore, she’s a threat.”
“But she can’t control it,” Jason protested.
“But she has the potential to be able to control it,” Stone reminded him. “And if she does ever get that ability under control, she actually represents several kinds of threats.”
“How so? I get that she can drive them out, but—”
Stone took a deep breath. “Look around you. Look at these people. No offense intended,” he added, glancing at Lamar and Marilee. “But they’re disaffected. They’re marginalized. Most of them have mental issues that make it difficult for them to deal with the general public. They have very little contact, by choice, with the authorities. I’m correct, aren’t I?” he asked Lamar.
The old man nodded. “You are, yes. We avoid the authorities. The police and other similar agencies are prime hunting grounds for the Evil. They prefer to possess people in authorit
y when they can, because that lets them get away with causing more trouble without being caught.”
Stone nodded. “Exactly. So the fact that the Forgotten know about the Evil make them a threat, but not a large one. Certainly it sounds like they would like nothing better than to be rid of you, but they don’t consider you an imminent threat because you can’t tell anyone about them. No one would believe you. You’ve no way to prove it, and it sounds so farfetched that it comes out like the ravings of a deranged mind.”
“You’re right,” Marilee said, nodding sadly. “Every once in a while one of the younger or more idealistic Forgotten tries to tell someone about what’s happening, but it never works. We talk to each other—we know. Eventually we just stopped trying, and we concentrate on our own safety, and dealing with the Evil when we’re forced to.”
“Right,” Stone said. He struggled to a more upright position, and Jason stuffed a couple more tattered pillows under him. “But Verity—though she’s by all appearances one of the Forgotten, she’s not only lucid, but she’s got friends who will believe her about the Evil—and who have the capacity to do something about them. Jason here presumably still has contacts in the law enforcement community, and I, as they say, have quite a lot of experience with believing six impossible things before breakfast. So suddenly instead of a bunch of mentally unhinged homeless people, they’re dealing with a young girl who has the capacity to destroy them one at a time, her highly motivated brother, and a fully trained mage. That’s going to tip the odds in a direction they aren’t going to like one bit.” Exhausted from getting all that out, Stone sank back, going pale again.
Jason was finally catching on. “So—” he said, “That’s why they were after her—and after us! They didn’t want us all to meet up, because as long as they kept us separated—or better yet, made sure we were dead—then all they’d have to deal with would be the mage and the brother who were confused as hell about what was going on, and the girl who didn’t have any support system.”
“Gold star for the man in the leather jacket,” Stone said faintly, nodding.
“But the question is, how did they know all of this?” Jason asked.
“I have a theory about that,” Stone said. “It’s conjecture, but it fits.”
“Yeah?”
“Remember the story you said Verity told about driving the Evil out of the man in the basement?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t think that one was destroyed. Lamar here said that the Forgotten think that the more powerful Evil can survive outside a host body for a longer time—perhaps even days. I think the man Verity found in the basement was not one of the minions, but one of the more powerful versions. If it was able to escape and find a new host body while retaining its knowledge of what went before, then it would have very good reason to want to track her down.”
“That makes sense,” Jason admitted. “It even fits—if it took it a while to find another body, then it couldn’t be tracking V. That would have given her time to get away, and by the time it found one, she’d disappeared and hooked up with the Forgotten, who could hide her.”
“Exactly,” Stone said, nodding.
“But—” Jason’s eyes widened. “That still leaves another question.”
“And what’s that?”
“Remember what Verity said she found the guy doing? Draining that kid for power like that ganger did the night Charles died. But I thought you said that was something mages did. Black mages. Not this—Evil thing.”
Stone just stared at Jason for several long silent seconds. “Bloody hell…” he whispered.
“What?”
Stone raised up on his elbow again, heedless of what the exertion was doing to him. “Jason—you’re right. You’re…right. And that changes everything.”
Jason didn’t even think Stone was aware that Lamar and Marilee were there any longer. “I—I don’t get it. Why?”
“Because,” Stone said as if talking to a slow toddler, “It means these things can co-exist with mages. It means they can possess us. Do you realize what kind of danger that could represent?” He turned his laserlike gaze on Lamar. “When the Evil possess people—does it submerge their personality?”
“I—I don’t think so,” he said. “Not entirely, anyway.”
“And why do you think that’s true?”
“Because we don’t know where these things came from, but they’re obviously alien. And we’ve seen that they prefer people in positions of power. They would never be able to perform the sorts of jobs that they do—we think some of the stronger ones have possessed high-level police administrators, politicians, businessmen—with nothing but their own knowledge.”
“So you’re saying,” Jason put in, “that they let these things possess them? That’s pretty farfetched.”
“I agree,” Lamar said. “I don’t think they allow it, exactly. But I do think, and others agree with me, that some people are more receptive to them than others are.”
“What kind of people?”
The old man shrugged. “Weak-minded people, or people who might be more willing to do the kinds of things that the Evil want them to do. I think they seek out those kinds of people.”
“So-called ‘evil’ people,” Stone said. “Or at the very least, people whose moral compasses are a bit more shaky than the average citizen’s.”
“So, you think black mages would be more receptive because they don’t mind causing pain?” Jason asked.
“Hard to say,” Stone said, finally allowing himself to sink back down again. “Mages in general have strong minds—we’re trained for it from the time we’re apprentices. It’s very difficult to compel us to do anything against our will. I’m not sure what this Evil could offer a mage that would make him or her willing to let it in. Mental possession—” he shivered “—to have one’s mind taken over by another being—that’s something I can’t imagine any mage would ever allow. So either it’s an isolated incident, and somehow they got through to an individual mage, or I’m incorrect and there’s more going on here than I’ve begun to understand.”
“Or some of them are powerful enough that they can force their way in without permission,” Jason suggested.
“Or that,” Stone agreed.
Jason could see that despite his best efforts to continue with the discussion, the mage’s strength was failing. “Listen,” he said, “You look like you could use a good night’s sleep. Why don’t we clear out of here and let you rest, and we can talk about this some more in the morning.”
His suspicions were confirmed when Stone nodded without protest. “I hate to admit it, but you’re right. You could probably do with a bit yourself.”
“Yeah, probably. I think I’ll go talk to V some more, and then find a place to catch a few hours at least.” He nodded to Lamar and Marilee as he got up.
The two of them got slowly to their feet as well. Marilee smiled down at the kitten, who was still snuggled up next to Stone. “She can stay with you if you like. I think she likes you more than she likes me.”
Stone didn’t answer; his eyes were already closed. Jason exited the tent and waited for the two old Forgotten to follow him. “He’s gonna be okay, right? I don’t need to take him to a hospital or anything?”
Lamar shook his head. “He should be fine. He’s just tired from the magical exertion and the blood loss.”
“What about my sister? She was saying that somebody here was keeping her from—having her crazy thing. If she leaves here, she’ll go back to the way she was, won’t she?”
“Probably, yes,” the old man told him. “As I told Dr. Stone, we have no idea what causes these symptoms. There just seem to be some people who are susceptible to them, and your sister seems to be one of them. Unless we can somehow cut off the source of the symptoms rather than simply blocking it, then moving away from the one who can do the block
ing will have predictable results.”
Jason looked him up and down. “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“Don’t take this wrong—you know I’m grateful for what you did for Al, and I’m sure he is too. But—you don’t seem like the rest of the people here.”
“What do you mean?”
“You look like them,” he said, taking in Lamar’s thin, stooped frame, ragged clothes, and unshaven face. “But you don’t act like them. What were you before you were—here?”
Lamar smiled gently. “I was a doctor, a long time ago.”
“Seriously?”
He nodded. “A good one, too. But I had some issues in my life that I wasn’t very wise at coping with.” He patted Jason on the arm. “I like it here, Mr. Thayer. I can take care of people, but the pressure that drove me away from my ‘good life’ doesn’t exist here.”
“Just having to wonder where your next meal is coming from, and being stalked by some weird disembodied alien bodysnatcher who wants to kill you because you know too much.”
Lamar chuckled. “True, there’s that. But we have each other, and we’ve adapted. The Forgotten are very resilient. We have to be—we’re all each other have. The rest of the world pretty much ignores us—hence the name we’ve chosen for ourselves.”
Jason nodded, realizing uncomfortably how much truth there was to the old man’s words. How many times had he himself walked right by homeless people without even noticing them? It was just too much trouble to stop and talk to them, to give them some change—to even recognize their humanity. “Why—do you stay out here? There are places you can go—shelters—”
“No, that’s not possible.” Lamar gave him the kind of look you give a beloved small child who had just made an amusing grammatical error. “Don’t forget—the Evil are hunting us. They want as many of us dead as they can manage. Wouldn’t you think homeless shelters would be the best place for them to hunt?”
“I—guess I didn’t think of that,” Jason mumbled.
Lamar smiled. “We do what we can to survive. It’s best to just avoid them, since none of us enjoy the alternative. Maybe if we can find more of us who have your sister’s gift, we’ll never have to kill anyone again.”