Stone and a Hard Place

by R. L. King

“And Tommy.”

  Yarborough sighed. “Alastair, come back home with me. Back to England for a while. Get away from all of this. Bring Miss Whitney if you want to. Sitting here in your study drinking yourself to death isn’t going to bring Ethan back. Or Tommy. And deciding you don’t deserve to be alive because they aren’t is just lazy thinking. It’s not worthy of you.”

  Stone’s gaze came up. “Is that what you believe I think?”

  “It’s pretty obvious. You’ve got a bad case of survivor’s guilt, my friend.”

  Stone stared at the other mage for a long moment, then sighed, pondering. “P’raps…p’raps you’re right. Maybe I do need a change of scenery. I haven’t been home in a while.”

  Yarborough smiled just a bit. “That’s more like the Alastair Stone I know.” He rose, his expression growing serious again. “For what it’s worth, I don’t believe you got Ethan killed. I’m not stupid. I knew he’d be a handful when I put him in touch with you. Let me guess: he got himself involved in some things we’d both have disapproved of.”

  “It doesn’t matter what he did. He saved my life, I know that. As far as I’m concerned, that’s all I need to know. If I’d paid more attention to what was going on in his life, I might have been able to prevent some of what happened.”

  “Or you might not have,” Yarborough said gently. “That’s the trouble with apprentices—they have the unfortunate habit of being human. And you know as well as I do that any time you add humans to a situation, there’s no way to know where or how it will end up. We’re an unpredictable lot.”

  He paused, then came around behind Stone and put a gentle hand on his shoulder. “Remember, Alastair: when a master agrees to take on an apprentice, it’s not only the apprentice who learns valuable lessons.”

  Stone looked up at him. His eyes were still haunted with guilt and pain, but something subtle in them had changed. “That’s very profound, Walter,” he murmured. “Did you get that in a fortune cookie?”

  “Magic for Dummies,” he said mildly. “Now come on—when was the last time you had anything to eat, not counting alcohol?”

  Stone thought. “Sometime—yesterday, I think. Megan tried this morning, but I haven’t been much to live with lately.”

  “Come on, then—get yourself presentable, and let’s go out for a nice steak, if you’re feeling up to it. Just the three of us. Then we can talk about getting you back home where you belong for a while so you can recharge. And after that—I think you should look for another apprentice. I believe the expression is ‘get back on the horse.’”

  Stone shook his head, getting unsteadily to his feet. “I’ll go out tonight, but I make no promises about the rest. And I’m done with apprentices.”

  “You say that now. We’ll see. In any case, I think you owe Miss Whitney an apology for the way you’ve been treating her lately, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I think I do. It’s a wonder she puts up with me, honestly.”

  Yarborough chuckled and headed upstairs. Stone paused for a long moment, gazing into the dying candle. Then he leaned down, blew it out, and followed his old friend up out of the lab.

  READ ON FOR A PREVIEW OF

  THE FORGOTTEN

  BOOK 2 OF THE ALASTAIR STONE CHRONICLES

  Coming soon!

  PROLOGUE

  In the darkness, Verity’s eyes flew open.

  Disoriented, she lay still for a moment, holding her breath. Around her there was no sound. The room was quiet and dark, the curtains still against the closed window, the soft glow of her alarm-clock face illuminating a few inches of her battered nightstand.

  3:27 a.m.

  She waited for several seconds, reaching out with all her senses. Something had awakened her. She didn’t just wake up for no reason in the middle of the night. Was it the sound of one of the staff walking past the door? The closing door of one of the residents returning to his or her room after a trip to the bathroom? The blare of a too-loud radio or television in the far-off common room downstairs? She didn’t think it was any of those. They were all normal sounds around here, part of the fabric of her existence. There was no reason why any of them would start affecting her differently now.

  So what was it, then? A bad dream? God knew she had enough of those, but it still didn’t seem right. Those kinds of dreams tended to jolt her awake in a cold sweat, the vestiges of whatever horror had sought to disturb her calm still alarmingly fresh in her mind.

  She took a deep breath, rolling over and pulling the covers up so she could snuggle under them, cocoon-like. When she was a little girl back before things had all gone to hell, she used to think that nothing could hurt her as long as she was bundled up in her safe warm bed, the covers wrapped around her as tight as mummy wrappings. A lot had changed since those days, but the feeling still brought her comfort. Okay, she told herself. Just go back to sleep. It’ll be morning soon and you’ll forget all about this. To quiet her mind, she began to play an old game her brother had taught her many years ago: think of a category, then pick a random letter of the alphabet and try to think of something that fit the category. She usually fell back asleep before she hit ten letters.

  Okay, she thought again. Wild animals, and P. Possum. Q. Ugh, I hate Q. Oh, wait—quail! R: Raccoon. S, then—

  Scream.

  She gasped, jerking fully awake. No mistake that time—she had heard it. It wasn’t close, but it was there. The desperate, inarticulate scream of someone in terrible pain, or fear, or both. Somewhere inside the house. Downstairs, maybe?

  For a moment she just lay there, trying to quiet her breathing, listening to see if the scream was repeated. It wasn’t. She’d heard plenty of screams during her time here—everybody had. Kids were always coming down off something, having nightmares, detoxing. Hell, she’d produced a few of those screams herself, on some of her bad nights. That had been a while, though, thank goodness. Most of the residents here had been here for a while, and most of them had worked through most of their demons to the point where nights were usually pretty quiet. The worst she’d heard in the last month had been an argument between Ryan and Charles after Ryan had decided to blow off some assigned chores.

  She took a deep breath. The easiest thing to do would be to just roll over, pull the covers over her head, and go back to sleep. Now that she knew what had awakened her, she could easily rationalize it as somebody having a bad night. It wasn’t her concern. You learned early not to get too involved around here. Just focus on your own thing, and leave the rest of it to the staff. That’s why they were here. Getting involved could get you in trouble, or worse. You just pretended you didn’t see things, and pretty soon they went away. If you were lucky, anyway.

  But yet something about that scream—it had sounded very young. Too young to be here. She knew everybody in this place, and the youngest resident was fourteen, three years younger than she was. That scream had not come from a fourteen-year-old. She would have bet a lot of money on that, if she had any. What a child was doing here, she had no idea.

  Still trying to stay as silent as possible, she swung her legs free of the covers and sat on the edge of the bed. The wooden floor was cold under her bare feet—it would be winter soon and the air was full of a constant low-grade chill. They couldn’t afford to run the heater all the time so they did what they could.

  She didn’t need to turn on a light—she knew every inch of this place like it was the home where she’d grown up. Quietly she padded across the room, pushed open her door—no locks here—and stepped out into the hallway. On either side of her were a row of closed doors; to her left a stairway led down to the kitchen, rec room, and other common areas. The hallway was deserted.

  Still moving slowly and silently she crept toward the stairs, then stopped to listen. Nothing. The house was as still as she’d have expected it to be at nearly 3:30 in the morning.

  It’s not too late, she told herself. You can just turn around and go back to bed. Nobody’s seen you. You won’t be in trouble
.

  But the child—such pain for one so young. And the scream—why hadn’t everyone heard it? Why weren’t all the doors being flung open, people running out to see what was going on? She couldn’t have been the only one who heard it.

  They told her that she heard things—saw things—sometimes things that nobody else could hear or see. They tried to tell her that they weren’t there, but she knew better. They were there, all right. They were everywhere, all around. She even suspected that they were here, but she couldn’t be sure. They hid their traces well. She had found evidence, almost like a leftover trail of body odor or perfume that remained in a room long after the person had left, but nothing definitive.

  Nobody believed her, of course. She learned that a long time ago, and stopped saying anything about it. She’d been in places like this long enough to know how they worked. You kept your head down and your mouth shut, you did what you were told, and you tried to find ways to get by without attracting attention. She’d gotten good at that.

  And now, if she kept up her current course, she could end up losing all the credit she’d built with the staff, all the trust she’d earned. It would be so easy to just turn around and go back to her room.

  She thought of her brother then. She’d been close to him years ago, when she was a little girl and he was a teenager. She’d idolized him, loving the way he’d take on neighborhood bullies or barking dogs to protect her. He protected everybody. That was just the way he was. And she wanted to be just like him—a protector of the weak, not a coward who’d slink back to her safe warm bed at the slightest sign of danger. She’d never be able to live with herself if that child was injured.

  She was at the bottom of the stairs before she realized that she’d been moving. Again she stopped; again she listened.

  More silence. Had she just been hearing things? Had it just been the tail end of a particularly vivid dream, perhaps brought on by the cry of a bird outside her window? That was—

  Wait.

  What was that?

  She froze, standing just inside the open entranceway that led to the kitchen and the dining room.

  Had that been a whimper? The sound of someone desperately trying not to cry?

  There it was again! It went on for a couple of seconds, then cut off abruptly as if purposely muffled. Then she heard the low rumble of a male voice.

  It was coming from somewhere in the direction of the kitchen. She was sure of it. She was also sure that there was no way she could give up now. She had to know who this mysterious child was, and what this man was doing to him. The male voice hadn’t been loud or distinct enough for her to recognize it, if she’d ever even heard it before.

  Nearly tiptoeing now, knowing that if she made even the smallest of sounds she’d be discovered, she moved across the kitchen like a ghost in flannel skully pajamas. There wasn’t much past this point: just the pantry closet and the door to the basement, which was always locked. She’d never been down there—when she’d asked, she was told they kept things like yard care items, cleaning chemicals, and other supplies there, and it was off limits to residents. She hadn’t much cared; she had a normal amount of curiosity but wasn’t in a big hurry to poke around a smelly, spidery basement.

  Now, though, she noticed to her surprise that the basement door was open, just a bit. The tiniest crack of light poked out into the kitchen, softly illuminating a few of the blue and white floor tiles. And as she stopped near it to listen, she heard the whimper again.

  It was definitely coming from down there.

  She stopped, her breath coming a little faster. What was a distressed child doing in the basement with the weed whackers and the toilet cleaner? And what was a man doing down there with him? She couldn’t think of any possible way that this could come out sounding good.

  What to do, though? Should she call someone? Somewhere around the house at least one of the staff should be doing rounds soon; she could find them and bring them here. But what if they didn’t believe her?

  Or worse—what if they were somehow connected with whatever was going on?

  She closed her eyes for a few seconds, willing her brain to calm down and let her think. Call the police? They’d never get here in time. Even that time when Johnny had ODed on some bad stuff he’d somehow gotten hold of and freaked out in the dining room, the cops had taken nearly twenty minutes to arrive. By that time Johnny had injured two residents and a staff member. So no, cops were out of the question.

  Did she dare check it out on her own? Maybe if she sneaked down there—

  Looking around the darkened kitchen she tried to find a weapon. The only light came from the tiny shaft from the basement door, the scant moonlight coming in from the window, and a small Mickey Mouse night-light plugged in near the toaster, but it was enough to show her that no weapons were forthcoming. Naturally they kept all the knives and other dangerous implements locked up. Even things like rolling pins were locked away out of reach.

  She could sneak back to her bedroom and look for something there, or—

  The child screamed again, loud and piercing. This time the scream started out with words: “Nooo! Please...don’t—”

  That was it. Tossing all caution away, she flung the door open and pounded down the wooden stairway, looking wildly around for the source of the scream—

  —and stopped dead.

  There were no yard-care implements here. No chemicals. No spiders.

  There was only a featureless gray room with padded walls and a hard, concrete floor, illuminated by a bank of harsh fluorescent lights overhead.

  In the middle of the room stood a man, his back to the stairway, holding on to a young boy perhaps nine years old. The man hadn’t noticed her, the sound of her descent muffled by the child’s screams. As she watched, shocked into immobility, the man laughed and touched the boy’s forehead.

  The boy screamed even louder this time, a sound of transcendent agony that rose to a shrieking crescendo and then abruptly stopped. For the space of barely a second the boy’s eyes met hers over the man’s shoulder—pleading with her to do something, anything—and then—

  —he was gone.

  Just like that, the space where he had stood was empty. There was nothing left but a faint smell of ozone in the air, a heap of disarrayed clothing, and a tiny charred pile of what looked like ashes at the man’s feet.

  “NOOOOOOO!” Her own scream, of defiance and shock and disbelief at what she’d just seen, was almost as loud as the boy’s. She rushed forward, having no idea what she intended to do but not caring. She had to do something.

  The man wheeled around, and she nearly stopped in her tracks again. His face was wild, almost inhuman in its ferocity. His eyes blazed with some weird inner light, and his mouth was stretched wide in a grin straight from the pits of Hell. He reached out toward her, his fingers seeking her.

  “Go—AWAY!” she yelled. It was as if something alien had taken over her mind—she felt like whatever was happening, she was just along for the ride now. Instead of shrinking back from the madman lunging toward her, she held her ground. Clasping her hands together and pointing them at his head as if she were shooting an invisible pistol, she forced out with her mind. She felt something, some kind of power, emanate from her and contact the man. For a moment a nimbus of strange foggy light formed around him. He screamed, clutching his head and dropping to his knees.

  She did step back now, staring at him as he writhed there, obviously engaged in some massive interior struggle. Then all the life went out of him and he dropped bonelessly to the floor. As she continued to watch, some sort of nebulous purplish...thing...wafted up out of his body and hovered for a moment in the air above him. It oriented itself, then shot toward her.

  “NO!” she yelled again, and forced out with her mind as she had done before. She had no idea how she was doing this—it was instinctive, like breathing or crying. But it had its effect—the floating thing changed direction, darting around the room for several seconds an
d then heading straight up through the ceiling.

  She didn’t move for nearly a full minute. She stood there, rooted to the spot, her numb gaze taking in the room, the pile of ashes and clothes, the unconscious (dead?) man. The weird insane expression had left him; he looked now like nothing more than a nondescript middle-aged man in a suit.

  When the compulsion to remain standing in one place left her, she did the only logical thing she could think of: she ran. Her only thought as she pelted up the stairs was to get away from the man, to find someone on the staff, to bring them down here and show them the man and explain to them about the ashes and the boy and—

  —She flung herself out the door into the kitchen. She didn’t see the shadowy figure standing there until she collided with it.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  When not chronicling the adventures of Dr. Stone, R. L. “Rat” King works as a technical writer for a large Silicon Valley corporation, and has been a freelance writer for the pen-and-paper roleplaying game Shadowrun since 2001. Her first novel in the Shadowrun universe, Borrowed Time, will be published in April 2015. She spends the rest of her copious free time hanging out with her understanding spouse and herd of cats, watching Doctor Who, and playing MMORPGs (including World of Warcraft, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and The Secret World) far less than she used to.

  You can find her at rlkingwriting.com, or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/AlastairStoneChronicles.