The Forgotten

by R. L. King

  “Yeah,” Verity added, nodding. “I see what you mean. We haven’t seen anybody like that kid at the haunted house, just standing around watching and getting his jollies—and even if people were watching, nobody’s really getting hurt. Not permanently, anyway. Do the Evil still get off on pain if the person enjoys it?”

  “Could we be in the wrong place?” Jason looked concerned now. “What about Marilee and her cart? I mean, I guess everybody misses sometimes, but—”

  Stone wasn’t listening. He appeared to be deep in thought, staring at but obviously not seeing a lurid poster for a band called Dark Desires on the wall in front of him. Finally he shook his head, as if trying to rid it of cobwebs. “I don’t understand this,” he said. “There are definitely Evil here—I’m getting readings, and I’ve no reason to doubt them. But the concentration—it’s not as high as we were led to expect.”

  Verity started to say something, then held up as two women, their arms draped around each other’s shoulders and passing a joint back and forth, moved past them. When they were gone, she said slowly, “Well…the Evil do get off on any kind of emotions, right? Not just the bad ones. They just like the bad ones better. But it’s kind of hard to make a place where there are bad emotions all the time. We tried to think of one before, and the best we could come up with was a haunted house.”

  “Or some sort of asylum or prison,” Stone agreed. “But what are you getting at?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know exactly. I was just thinking—maybe this place is kind of like—broccoli or something.”

  Stone and Jason both stared at her like she’d sprouted antennae. “What?” they asked in near-unison.

  She grinned sheepishly. “Sorry, sorry. Sometimes my shorthand only makes sense to me. What I mean is that if they need strong emotions to live and it’s sometimes hard to get the bad ones they really like—then maybe the kind they get here are something they need, even though they don’t like it as much. You know, like eating your broccoli when you don’t have any candy bars.”

  “Verity, you’re weird,” Jason told her.

  “Indeed,” Stone agreed. “But she has a point. Perhaps what they’ve got set up here is a place where they can get a fairly constant influx of emotional sustenance—not what they prefer, certainly, but enough to keep them going until they can get what they prefer.”

  “So does that leave us back at square one?” Jason asked, hoping very much that it didn’t. He wasn’t sure how much more of this kind of detective work he could stand.

  “Not necessarily,” Stone said, pulling out the detector. “We just need to figure out where the Evil activity is coming from, if not here.”

  “Some sort of secret part of this building?” Verity asked.

  “Possibly,” Stone said. “Let’s spend a bit more time investigating this area down here. Look for any unmarked doors, areas that don’t seem to get a lot of traffic—anything that looks out of the ordinary.” At Jason’s eye-roll, he grinned. “All right, more out of the ordinary than just about everything else ’round here. Better?”

  Jason didn’t answer that.

  “I’m going to try something,” Stone told them. “I didn’t want to do it before because it has its own problems associated with it, and I didn’t think we needed it before, but I think we do now.”

  “What’s that?” Verity looked interested.

  “Come on,” he said, gesturing toward an empty cubicle. They moved behind the black curtain and he closed it behind them. “I have a spell—it’s a concealment spell, but not invisibility per se.”

  “You can make people invisible?” Jason asked.

  “I can, but it requires a lot of energy and it’s almost never practical for anything more than a few seconds. No, this is more like a misdirection than true invisibility. Somewhat akin to what the Forgotten can do to make people not notice buildings. It’s essentially a stronger version of the concealment spell I’ve been doing on the car for a while now. Surprisingly, it’s a lot harder to do it on people than it is on cars. People rarely notice cars anyway, unless they’re looking for a specific one.”

  Verity cocked her head. “You mean you can make it so people don’t see us, even though we’re not invisible?”

  “Essentially. It’s risky, especially in crowds, because it doesn’t make us incorporeal. If someone runs into us, or we speak right next to them, they’ll still notice us. But it will help us fade into the background a bit and perhaps make it so we can see things that we might not see if people were aware of us.”

  Jason gave him a look. “Al…I can think of at least a dozen times in the past few days where that would have come in really handy. Why didn’t you tell me you could do this before?”

  “Because a few days ago I didn’t have the items I’ve been building, and it’s damned tiring to keep even a simple spell like that going if I have to power it myself—especially if it’s covering more than one person.” He raised an eyebrow. “Jason, before I met you and got caught up in your little web of insanity, I was making a good go at just being a university professor. My magic’s been more of the experimental variety the last few years. Last time I tried being an action hero, people died. So I don’t exactly get much call for using that kind of spell these days.”

  “Let’s try it now,” Verity said. “What do we have to do?”

  “Stay close to me, and whatever you do, stay out of people’s way. Stay close to the walls, and if a large group is coming, duck into one of the cubicles until they pass by.” Gesturing, he chivvied the two of them into standing next to each other, then moved in front of them. He held up his hand and moved it slowly over all three of them. Jason noticed that the blocky purple ring he wore glowed slightly. In a few seconds, he lowered his hand. “There, that’s done.”

  “I don’t feel any different,” Verity said, holding up her hand as if expecting not to be able to see it.

  “Well, you wouldn’t, would you?” Stone said. “Trust me, though, it’s working. Remember, stay close. You don’t have to be touching, but don’t move more than a couple of feet away. Let’s go.”

  They walked out of the cubicle into the still-unoccupied hallway and set off. “Let’s investigate as much of the area we haven’t already seen as we can,” Stone muttered. “I’m convinced there’s something down here we’re not seeing.”

  “Wait a sec…” Jason said, stopping. Stone, in front, had to stop fast to avoid moving the spell effect away from him.

  “Don’t do that,” he said irritably. “Didn’t you hear what I just said?”

  “No, this is important,” Jason insisted. “You said ‘something down here we’re not seeing.’”

  “Yes, and—?”

  “Well, what if you’re not the only mage here? We know they’ve got at least one good one, or they did anyway, before Verity evicted him. Who’s to say he hasn’t been re-occupied?”

  Stone stared at him. “You know, I didn’t even—”

  “—think of that,” Jason finished. “Yeah. I didn’t either, ’til you said that. But remember that door in that restaurant? The one with the gateway? Or you and your crypt? What if there’s a hidden door around here somewhere?”

  “Unlikely,” Stone said slowly. “But possible.”

  “Why unlikely?”

  “Because that sort of thing is white magic, not black. Remember I told you permanent magic isn’t something black mages do? It’s one of their biggest weaknesses. That kind of concealment magic is permanent, or at least long-term.”

  “So, you’re saying they can’t do it, or just that it would be hard?”

  Stone thought about that for several long seconds. “It wouldn’t be completely impossible,” he said at last. “But it would require an immense amount of effort. The way their magic works, they probably would have had to kill at least one person to get the power to even begin it, plus put their mage�
��or mages—at some personal risk. So, they would likely save it for something they wanted to conceal very much.”

  “Can you find it?” Jason asked. “If it’s here, can you find where it is?”

  “Not directly. Not without a lot more equipment and time than we have.”

  Jason sighed, disappointed. Then he perked up. “But if they’ve got some kind of hidden entrance to something, maybe if we poke around enough we’ll spot someone using it.”

  “Yes, that’s much more likely. Come on. Let’s go. It doesn’t take a lot of energy to keep this spell going, but I can’t do it indefinitely.”

  They headed out again, staying close to walls and keeping their eyes open for anything that looked more out of the ordinary. They were lucky in that most of the patrons of the dungeon seemed now to have moved off into their various cubicles or larger areas, so there weren’t many people wandering the halls. They did have one close call when the middle-aged man from whom Verity had first gotten the directions to the dungeon’s entrance came weaving around a corner with another woman and nearly blundered into them, but they ducked into a nearby cubicle and managed to avoid him. Jason got one look at the couple inside and averted his eyes. He was an open-minded kind of guy and believed that anything consenting adults wanted to do together was absolutely A-OK, but that didn’t mean he wanted to watch. In any case, he doubted they would have noticed the arrival of a platoon of Marines, given how caught up in each other they were.

  It took another twenty minutes or so to explore the rest of the dungeon area. It wasn’t as large as they’d initially thought—the maze of black dividers distorted its dimensions and made it seem much bigger than it really was. They glanced inside the large scene areas, peeked discreetly into the cubicles, and investigated both the men’s and women’s bathrooms. For this latter activity they had to drop the spell and hope for the best—Jason was reluctant to let Verity out of his sight long enough for her to check out the ladies’ room, but in the end he had to relent. He and Stone hovered outside the door, earning a couple sour looks from female patrons who had to walk past them to get inside, and were just about to go in after her when she emerged. “Nothing to report,” she said. “Three or four women putting on makeup, a couple more using the stalls, no extra doors or windows or anything. Just looks like a bathroom that really needs cleaning.”

  Jason nodded. They’d encountered similar in the men’s room, except that two of the stalls were obviously in use for romantic encounters (“Why would they want to use the bathroom stalls when they’ve got a whole club to use?” Verity asked). Again, no extra doors or suspicious looking blank walls.

  Stone sighed. “I’m running out of ideas,” he said. “We’ve checked out the whole area. Either we’re missing something, there’s nothing here to find, or it’s upstairs in the nightclub. We—” He stopped, because Verity had just poked him hard in the arm. “What?”

  “Shh,” she whispered urgently, pointing. She’d turned to look behind them while Stone and Jason had been looking ahead. The two turned, and Jason had to stifle an exclamation of surprise.

  Sauntering down the hall like they owned the place were two young men. Their body language didn’t suggest that they were a couple, but rather a clear contempt for their surroundings. As they moved closer, it was obvious they were both dressed in identical black leather jackets with the red-and-black circle logo of Dead Men Walking. The three watchers flattened themselves against the wall, holding their breath as the gangers moved past. If the either one noticed them, they gave no sign.

  When they drew past, Stone pointed at them and nodded. Taking the cue, the three detached themselves from the wall and followed, leaving about ten feet between themselves and the gangers. The music was so loud that they weren’t concerned about being heard, but they still made every effort to move as quietly as they could.

  Perhaps surprisingly given their usual propensity for causing trouble, the gangers didn’t do anything overtly threatening. They didn’t poke into the cubicles or otherwise disturb any of the dungeon’s patrons. They simply walked down the hallway, then took a left at an intersection. Stone and the others picked up their pace a bit to follow; their previous investigations had shown them that this particular hallway was flanked by the long wall of a large, closed scene area on the left side (a quick peek inside had shown it to be an elaborately staged church/funeral setup, complete with open casket at the front, with its entrance on the hallway from which they had just turned) and three smaller cubicles on the right. The wall at the end of the hallway was blank, and if Jason’s sense of direction was any good—which it usually was—it was the outer wall of the club.

  Stone and the others hung back to watch what the gangers did. The pair moved past the first two cubicle entrances without a glance at them; their destination seemed to be the third cubicle. One pulled a folded cardboard sign from his pocket and affixed it to the curtain with two safety pins; it read Closed for Cleaning. Then both went inside. As soon as they disappeared through the curtain, Stone motioned Jason and Verity forward. They closed the distance and moved in close so they could see through the gap in the cubicle curtain. They glanced at each other, wide-eyed, when they saw what was happening.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  The far wall of the cubicle wasn’t a divider, but rather a continuation of the solid wall that represented the outer boundary of the building. Stone and the others had checked this cubicle before and the wall had been resolutely blank, but now one of the two gangers was on his knees fiddling with something under the bed, while the other waited with clear expectation near a spot in the middle of the wall. After a moment, just like in A Passage to India, a section of the wall shimmered, and a door came into existence where none had been before. It was a plain, metal door with the word Maintenance on the outside.

  As soon as it appeared, the standing ganger fumbled in his pocket, pulled out a key, and opened it. He held it open to wait for his companion to get up, then the two of them went through it. From the other side of the curtain, Stone made a quick gesture at the door, and it stopped an inch before clicking closed again. The three waited anxiously to see whether the gangers noticed that it hadn’t closed.

  “Holy shit,” Jason whispered after several seconds. “It’s just like the door at the restaurant. They’re even using the same ‘Maintenance’ trick.”

  Stone shrugged as he headed inside. “Who looks in a maintenance closet?” He glanced around. “Get me something to block this door open.”

  Jason pulled the threadbare pillow from the bed and tossed it to Stone, who used it to prop the door and let his spell holding it open drop.

  “Where are they going?” Verity asked. “Secret room?”

  “Let’s find out, shall we?” Stone said. “Let me go first—if it is a secret room and they’re in there, I can likely take them out faster than either of you two can. Be ready, though.”

  Silently, he pushed the door open. Jason kept a close eye on him, while Verity watched the cubicle curtain to make sure nobody else was coming in. After a couple of tense moments, the mage’s call came back through the open door: “Come on in, and close the door behind you.”

  Quickly, Jason and Verity followed him through the door. Jason picked up the pillow and tossed it back on the bed, then let the door click shut.

  They stood at the top of a long, metal stairway. Their steps echoed eerily as they made their way slowly down about a floor’s height, until they stood in a short concrete tunnel. The tunnel was featureless except for some pipes running along one wall and a bare, incandescent bulb hanging overhead. Ahead about fifteen feet, they could see a T-intersection; the bulb’s light didn’t reach far enough to fully illuminate what was beyond, but it looked rougher, and didn’t appear to be made of the same concrete as their current tunnel. The air down here was chilly, and there was a faint hint of a breeze. The music from the floor above was muted.

  �
��What…is this place?” Verity whispered, wrinkling her nose. “Smells like—garbage. And seaweed.”

  Stone walked forward, keeping close to the wall of the concrete tunnel until he reached the intersection. Cautiously he peered around in both directions, then pulled his head back. “It’s brick,” he said, his expression troubled. “This is very strange. If I didn’t know better—and I’m not sure I do—I’d say it was a storm sewer tunnel, and a very old one. I’ll bet if we follow it toward the ocean, we’ll find that it lets out there.”

  “Why would they have a storm sewer attached to a nightclub?” Jason asked, confused.

  “I don’t think it’s in use anymore—and it appears this concrete section isn’t part of the original design. I can’t see the other end of the brick tunnel—I think it might be blocked. Come on. Let’s check it out.” But instead of moving forward again, he suddenly put his hand to his chest. Before Jason could ask if something was wrong, he pulled out the small cage/detector. The crystals were glowing more brightly now. “Whatever it is,” the mage said softly, “I think we’re heading in the right direction. Look sharp and stay close. Remember, they have mages too.”

  Staying close together, they first made a right turn. The tunnel, which was round and lined with brick and not tall enough for Stone or Jason to stand fully, extended for about twenty or thirty feet, then stopped abruptly. It was obvious that it had been blocked off on purpose; the opening was filled with concrete that looked much newer than the bricks.

  “This place looks really old,” Verity said, nervous. “Are you sure it’s safe? If we had an earthquake right now—”

  Stone glanced up. “They’ve reinforced it. Look.”

  The other two looked up as well, and sure enough someone had added metal bracing to the top of the tunnel. Like the concrete, it looked much newer than the brickwork. “Curiouser and curiouser,” Stone muttered. “Come on.” He changed direction, moving down the tunnel in the direction of the ocean. “I think we’ll find a—” he started, but then stopped moving.