The Madness Below: An Alastair Stone Urban Fantasy Novel (Alastair Stone Chronicles Book 20)

by R. L. King

“No idea. That’s what I’m hoping to find out.”

  Dez focused on driving as the road grew narrower, and a few minutes later the area on the left side opened onto a cleared area with three wooden cabins, a firepit, and a tiny, single-seat outhouse. Beyond, a dark lake stretched out as far as they could see through the leafless trees.

  “Here we are. This is where they stayed. There are more camping areas up the road further, but they said they took the first one because nobody else was here and it was closest to the road.”

  Stone got out, already shifting to magical sight again so he could look for any vestigial traces. He wasn’t surprised when he didn’t see any in the campsite proper. He pulled his collar up against the drizzly rain, which was coming down a little harder. It still wasn’t enough to worry about, but it had gone from “mild inconvenience” to “slight annoyance” since they’d left Treadley. “Do you know which cabin each group used?”

  Dez consulted her notes and pointed. “The boys were in that first one, the girls in the middle, and the farthest one must have been the one Neil and Muriel used on Saturday night.”

  Stone took them in order, starting with the boys’ cabin. He popped the padlock on the door and stepped inside, holding up a light spell to illuminate the dim space within.

  There wasn’t much there. The weathered wooden walls and floor were gray, and the pair of coverless windows were grimy and didn’t let in much light. A stone fireplace, obviously not used for a long time, dominated the far end. Five basic metal cots were pushed against the other walls, each with a thin, stained, institutional-style mattress.

  “I think they have better accommodations in prison,” Stone muttered.

  Dez laughed. “You’d be right about that.”

  “I have no idea what people see in this sort of thing.”

  “Oh, it can be fun if you’re with friends or family. But I wouldn’t go this time of year. Too cold, and what’s the point of camping at a lake if you can’t go swimming or boating? Do you see anything?”

  Stone shifted to magical sight and spun slowly in place, scanning the cabin’s interior. “Nothing. But that doesn’t surprise me. It’s been more than a week, and magical energy doesn’t hang about too long unless something violent or emotionally significant occurs in conjunction with it. Also, with all the people coming through here, they’ve certainly diluted any faint traces that might have remained.”

  A check of the girls’ cabin and the Cabin Three yielded the same results, as did a quick look around the campground itself. Stone let his breath out in a frustrated sigh. “Nothing. If anything significant occurred, it wasn’t here. That leaves either the hike route or somewhere near here, in some direction we’ve no idea of. We should probably check the hike route first. It’s possible one of the students who nipped off to use the loo while they were resting might have discovered something.”

  Dez looked up at the sky and frowned. In the twenty minutes or so it had taken Stone to examine the cabins and campsite, the sky had grown noticeably darker. “I think it’s gonna rain soon. I checked the forecast this morning before we left and it said it wasn’t due till later tonight, but I think it was wrong.”

  Stone concurred. The gray clouds crowded together overhead, blotting out what was left of the sun and creating an ominous backdrop to the skeletal trees. “Do you think we’ll have time to make it up and back before it hits?”

  “Maybe—but we’ll have to move fast, and we can’t stay long unless you want to get drenched. We’re not dressed for rain.”

  “Bugger,” Stone muttered under his breath. He’d hoped to have more time to examine the area. But they were here now, so they might as well do what they could. They could always come back—or he could come on his own, once he knew the way—some other day. “Let’s give it a try, if you’re willing.”

  “Sure, why not? A little water never hurt anybody, right? Come on—it’s this way.” She set off at a brisk pace, motioning for him to follow. “I hope you were serious about the running.”

  Stone had no trouble keeping up with Dez. He did run regularly back home to clear his head, and his new, Calanarian style of magic worked better when he kept himself in good shape. He followed her up the narrow trail, his long strides easily maintaining a fast, steady speed as the elevation increased. He thought this area must be beautiful in the spring and early fall, though now it looked forbidding with its gray sky, dark trees reaching their branches in every direction, and the thick carpet of damp leaves and pine needles muffling their steps. Aside from their own breathing, the only sounds he heard were the far-off scurrying of small animals and the rustles of startled birds. He’d thought Dez had been joking about getting lost, but he saw now that anyone leaving the trail would have a good chance of getting turned around and disoriented.

  The rain began to fall when they’d made it about halfway to their destination. As they kept up their brisk pace, the sky began to rumble, and a few moments later it opened up and let loose. Water pattered down on the fallen leaves, obscuring any remaining bird or animal noises.

  “Well, damn,” Dez said, brushing it out of her eyes. “This is gonna be fun. Do you want to keep going, or turn back?”

  Stone considered. On the one hand, they didn’t have rain gear. He’d slipped Walt Griffith’s down jacket on in place of his own wool overcoat, but he had no head covering and could already feel the raindrops trickling down the back of his neck. Dez was dressed marginally better (she’d retrieved her wide-brimmed police hat from the Jeep and wore a jacket that actually fit her), but if this kept up, they’d both be soaked. “What do you think?”

  “Eh, we’re here now. It’ll be a pain to come back again. I’ll tough it out if you’re willing.”

  He smiled. “Brilliant. Let’s get slogging, then. With any luck, I’ll find something quickly and we can get out of here before we float away.”

  “Slogging” was indeed a good word to describe the next fifteen minutes. Fortunately, the thick carpet of leaves and needles meant that the trail wasn’t muddy, but it was slippery. Twice, Stone nearly fell as he lost his footing on the uneven ground, and was forced to slow down. Dez, who must have grown up around here, negotiated the terrain like a mountain goat. To her credit, she didn’t laugh at the city boy.

  At last, just as the rain slowed a bit, the trail widened into a clearing strewn with rocks, fallen logs, and stumps. “This must be it,” Dez said.

  Stone used magic to levitate a mud-streaked Doritos bag stuck against one of the logs. “It certainly appears so.”

  “I’m gonna take a load off for a few minutes while you do your thing, if you don’t mind,” she said, puffing. “I’m not as young as I used to be.” She lowered herself to one of the fallen logs with a satisfied sigh and pulled a water bottle from her pocket. “Want some?”

  “No, thank you. I’ll try to make this fast.”

  Stone chose a point in the middle of the clearing. The rain was back to a trickle for the moment, but he was well aware that could change at any time. Forcing himself to calm down and take things slow, he drew a few centering breaths and then dropped into magical sight.

  To his disappointment, he saw nothing. Aside from the faint, pale-green auras of the trees, Dez’s blue, and his own (he’d been concealing it ever since he suspected other mages were in town, damping its blazing, tri-colored purple, gold, and silver down to a simple purple), no other traces of unusual magic hung around the clearing. He didn’t even see any traces of nearby ley lines.

  “See anything?” Dez called.

  “Not yet.” He shifted back to normal sight. “I want to walk around here a bit—how far do you think someone might go if they wanted to relieve themselves without anyone watching?”

  She shrugged. “Neil said Joe Buchanan had to take a crap—he’d probably go out further, since he’d be a lot more—uh—vulnerable than if he was just watering the far side of a tree. He wouldn’t want to get caught with his ass hanging out if somebody decided to play a trick
on him.”

  “Good point. But we have no idea which way he went. That wasn’t in the report, was it?”

  “No—Neil said he came back from a different direction than he’d left from, but he couldn’t remember exactly what they were.”

  Stone sighed. “Okay. I’m going to need to wander around a bit. You can come with me or stay here—it’s up to you.”

  “I’m serious: if you go out there on your own, you’ll get lost.”

  “I won’t. I can leave a sort of magical beacon here in the clearing, and use it to navigate back to this spot. If nothing else, I can levitate above the trees and find it that way.”

  She shook her head in wonder. “I never realized you guys could do that kind of stuff. I never knew any others besides Mom and Reverend Blodgett, and neither of them are what you’d call showy.”

  “Do you want to come along, or stay here?”

  “I’ll come along for a while, at least. Maybe, if you’re sure you can get back on your own, we should separate and cover more ground. I’ve got radios we can use to keep in contact.”

  Stone could tell immediately that she didn’t think that was a good idea, and neither did he. “No, best if we don’t. If there is something out here, I don’t want to take the chance of you being the one to find it.”

  “I’m glad you said that. Because I don’t either.”

  “Let’s go, then. You pick the direction—try to get in the mind of a teenage boy with an urgent need.”

  Dez took a moment to orient herself, then pointed. “That’s a little more downhill, so it would be an easier walk. Let’s try that.”

  Stone paused to set his magical beacon in the clearing and then they set off, moving much more slowly than before. Stone kept magical sight active, scanning the area ahead of them for any traces of arcane energy.

  After several minutes’ walk, Dez touched his arm and pointed at her watch. “Neil said the maximum amount of time Joe might have been gone was twenty minutes. We’ve been walking for ten. That means if he came out this far, he’d need the other ten to get back, not counting whatever time it took to do his business. So this is probably the edge of our search area. Have you spotted anything?”

  “Not yet.” He realized that the odds they’d picked exactly the correct direction were low, but he was still disappointed that nothing had turned up. If there was a rift out here, it was probably invisible to mundanes unless it chose to make itself known, which explained why the searchers and curious tourists managed to miss it. But damn it, there had to be something here!

  “Are you sure it’s out here?” Dez sounded dubious, pulling her zipper up. The rain was coming down steadily now, making visibility even more difficult. “Even if there is something, isn’t it possible they found it Saturday night?”

  “We don’t know they even did sneak out,” Stone pointed out. “Except for Jazmin, we’re only going on speculation. Warby said everyone was asleep when the two of them left, and they were asleep when they got back. It’s possible they weren’t faking.”

  “I guess. But how much longer are you planning to poke around out here? I don’t think this rain’s going to get any better. It looks like there’s a decent-sized storm coming in.”

  “Give me just a few more minutes. Tell you what—I don’t like to separate, but you said you’ve got those little radios with you, right?”

  “Yeah…”

  “And there likely aren’t any bears wandering about in this rain, yes?”

  “Yeah. They’re smarter than that…” she muttered. “Unlike us.”

  “Right, then. Why don’t we pick two opposite directions roughly circling the clearing, and walk for five minutes. If we don’t see anything, we’ll return to the clearing and head back down to the campsite. Does that sound reasonable? We can stay in communication.”

  “I guess, if it’ll get us home faster. I’m looking forward to a hot shower, a hot meal, and a night of TV wrapped in a blanket. I don’t even know what I’m looking for, though.”

  “I don’t either. Unfortunately, if it’s one of the things it might be, you won’t see it. But I’m not convinced that’s what it is. Just…look for anything out of the ordinary. Strange rock formations, odd symbols burned into tree trunks, unusual objects hanging from branches…”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “I think you’ve been watching too much Blair Witch Project.”

  He chuckled. “You’d be surprised at how much stuff from the popular media actually has a basis in magical fact. I wish I could describe whatever it is better, but given that I’ve got no idea what it is, that’s not possible.” He brushed rain out of his face and pulled the collar of his borrowed jacket up. Walt Griffith apparently had at least fifty pounds on him—and that was a conservative estimate—because the thing hung on him like he was a child wearing his father’s clothes. Still, it would be worth catching a cold if it meant he could find whatever these teenagers had blundered into out here. “Let’s get this over with, shall we?”

  Dez gave him a radio from her pocket, and each of them set off in opposite directions.

  “Don’t wander too far away,” she told him. “Remember, you’re circling the clearing.”

  “Got it.”

  Stone continued to keep magical sight up, pausing every few seconds to scan in all directions. After only a minute had passed, his radio crackled. “Find anything?” came Dez’s scratchy voice.

  “Not yet. Let me concentrate. Call if you see anything.”

  “Roger that.”

  As Stone continued walking, trying to spot any signs of magical energy through the rain, he let his mind wander into speculation about what else the students might have found, if not a dimensional rift. He’d been serious when he’d told Dez that New England was a hotbed of paranormal activity, probably one of the highest in the United States due to its population and history. Between the various Native American tribes and the early European settlers, many magical practitioners had gotten up to some fairly advanced techniques and rituals back in the day. The mundanes went on about things like the Salem Witch Trials (most of which had nothing to do with real witches, and everything to do with fear and paranoia), but they had no idea of what had truly been occurring under their noses. Real mages, witches, and other practitioners rarely got caught—the low-powered ones were usually too subtle to notice, and the powerful ones had an easy time hiding their activities from the uninitiated. That, and they usually had more important things to do than curdle cows’ milk or cause their neighbors bad luck.

  He stopped a moment, looking around. It seemed during his brief walk that the trees had grown darker, closer together. Above him, the sky had darkened as well. The rain still came down in sheets, but now the wind had picked up too. He turned around and didn’t see Dez anywhere behind him, but that wasn’t unexpected with the terrible visibility.

  This was ridiculous. There wasn’t anything out here. He was sloshing around in the rain, his whole body getting soaked, and for what? He didn’t even know what he was looking for, and had no idea whether it was even here. Was a hypothesis worth getting himself and possibly Dez sick with pneumonia?

  He pulled his radio from his pocket and keyed it. “Dez? Are you there?”

  The speaker crackled and popped, but no reply came.

  “Dez? Officer Griffith? Where are you?”

  The speaker crackled again and went silent. The little green light winked out.

  “Oh, bloody hell…” he muttered. What a time for the batteries to fail. “Dez?” He pitched his voice louder now. It had been less than five minutes—his voice should carry well even over the constant patter of the rain.

  Still no answer.

  Stone turned in place, scanning again as a faint tingle of dread crept up the back of his neck. It’s all right, he told himself. You know the way back to the clearing. This might be what you were looking for.

  Normally, odd feelings like this didn’t disturb him. He’d experienced so many of them in his caree
r that they were almost like old friends, alerting him to the presence of something beyond the mundane realm. Right now, though, standing here in this unfamiliar forest with these dark trees seeming to loom in on him from all directions, he suddenly wasn’t sure he wanted to find whatever was out here.

  The trees were whispering.

  He looked up, heedless of the rain hitting him in the face, and studied the interlocking branches above him. There seemed to be more of them now, an endless maze of them, making it impossible to tell where one tree’s branches ended and the next one’s began. As he continued to watch them, shifting back to magical sight, they appeared to writhe, grasping at each other, interweaving themselves until the canopy began to blot out the gray clouds above. The rain slowed to a trickle.

  “Dez?”

  Stone’s breath came fast and rattling in the back of his throat, and his heart thudded harder in his chest. The air around him grew colder and he began to shiver.

  Pull yourself together. This what you were looking for. It’s close now.

  The trees’ whisperings grew louder, their sibilant hisses coming at him from all sides, pushing at him, as if he were standing in a room full of people all murmuring around him in hushed tones. The voices never rose to the point of intelligibility, though, despite his efforts to pick something—anything—out. Whatever they were saying, it was important. He was sure of that. If he could only make sense of it, it would show him the way.

  He didn’t even realize he’d begun to walk. Nor did it occur to him to adjust his mental defenses, either lowering them to perhaps make the voices more understandable, or increasing them to block them out. His only thoughts were that he had at last located what he’d come up here to find,

  All he had to do was narrow down the direction and he’d have it.

  A fog rose at his feet, obscuring the blanket of fallen leaves, and above him the branches continued to writhe and weave, bending low to block the rain from hitting him.

  All he’d have to do was start walking, and…

  A sharp pain in his leg jolted him violently from his thoughts. He jerked backward—