Firewalk

by Chris Roberson

  “Martin Zotovic was with Undersight,” Izzie answered, her voice scarcely above a whisper. “The man who now owns Parasol was the last one that Fuller was looking for. The last one to go down into the darkness and bring the darkness back with him.”

  “How does that even work?” Daphne asked.

  “Wait,” Joyce put in, “so you think that Zotovic was one of the … what did you call them? The Ridden that Fuller was hunting?”

  Izzie nodded. “It would fit the facts. If Zotovic was the student that Fuller was looking for, and he had been down in the mine shaft with Undersight, he was most likely infected with whatever got to the others.” She started pacing across the metal floor, scratching the scar on the back of her hand. “But when Fuller died, there was nothing to stop Zotovic from doing … well, whatever it was that Fuller was trying to stop him from doing.”

  “Like dropping out of college and starting a software company?” Daphne’s tone was skeptical.

  “And introducing a new street drug, apparently,” Patrick added. “So it’s not just a coincidence that a bunch of Parasol employees were part of the Ink manufacturing ring. And it went a lot higher than just a crooked manager or two.”

  “No, no.” Izzie shook her head. “I mean, yes, all that sounds plausible, but we’re missing something important. This is about a lot more than just the drug. The Ridden are being possessed somehow, even after death. And the Ink in their systems is responsible for eating away at their brains, making that possible. It replaces their brain matter with itself, so that it can take control. But we also know that the Ink can grow inside of people’s brains—hosts—and be extracted to be put into others, right? And all of Fuller’s victims had the same kind of vacuoles in their brains, too.”

  She stopped pacing and faced the others.

  “What if the thing that infected the researchers in the mine shaft was Ink, only it’s not from here? Maybe it’s something that came through a gap of some kind from a higher dimension, from a higher universe. Maybe that’s why you never find traces of the stuff in the users’ bodies, because the stuff just goes back to wherever it came from, or it’s still there and has just, I don’t know, shifted into some dimension that we can’t perceive.”

  She thought back to “ana” and “kata,” and Aguilar’s mention of shifting to different worlds.

  “If Zotovic was part of the Undersight team and did become one of the Ridden, maybe that’s why he bought the land that the mine shaft is on, to keep anyone else from going down there.” She glanced out the window towards the mainland beyond. “And he’d certainly have the wherewithal to block our radios and phones to keep us from calling for help.”

  “But where did the Ink we’re seeing on the streets come from?” Patrick asked. “Is he just, like, mining it down there?”

  “I don’t think so.” Izzie shook her head.

  “I agree with Izzie,” Joyce said. “If that was the case, then why go to all the trouble of harvesting it from the brains of ‘hosts’?”

  “But the stuff would have been in Zotovic to begin with, right?” Daphne said. “So maybe that’s where Ink came from originally?”

  Izzie’s eyes widened. “He could have harvested it from himself and then put it in other people to cultivate more.”

  “But if it’s really something that entered our world from some other dimension or universe or whatever, and it’s controlling the people who use it, then what is it?” Patrick was scowling, frustrated. “And who or what is it that’s pulling the strings?”

  “The loa,” Izzie said.

  The others turned and looked to her.

  “That’s as good a name for it as any,” she went on. “In Haitian Vodou, the loa are intermediary spirits from outside our world, who can possess the bodies of the willing. While they’re in control, the person is said to be Ridden. When the Ridden move it’s because the loa wants them to, and when they speak it’s the loa who is speaking.”

  She looked out the window at the silhouetted figures on the boardwalk, and then back to Patrick and the others.

  “I think the Ink is all one thing. It’s all part of a single intelligence that exists somewhere out in the higher dimensions. That’s why all of those people down there move in sync, and how they all knew right away that we’d found the bodies down in that basement. They’re like fingers on the same hand or, I don’t know, tentacles on the same squid. Tendrils, I guess, emanating from whatever crack in reality is hidden down in that mine shaft, spreading out into our world.”

  Patrick and Joyce were thoughtful, but Daphne was plainly frustrated.

  “So you’re saying … what? That this is some kind of voodoo thing? Am I hearing you right? You expect me to believe that voodoo is real?”

  “Maybe,” Izzie answered. “Or maybe it describes something that is real in terms that people back then could understand. Like ancient astronomers and constellations and all that. Nicholas Fuller approached this originally from the science side, until he met an old man who followed an ancient Maya belief system, and then Fuller ended up combining the two approaches. And not just Maya, but stuff from all over the planet, where people have been exposed to this kind of thing before. The old man called them ‘true places,’ spots where the walls between the worlds are thin, and things can leak from one side to the other. And that’s exactly the kind of thing that Fuller’s scientific theory predicted.” She looked from Daphne to Patrick and Joyce and back again. “So maybe it is supernatural and scientific, depending on your frame of reference. But either way, we have to deal with it.”

  “Okay, okay.” Daphne nodded. “But deal with it how? If you took this to Agent Gutierrez, he’d think you were nuts.” She turned to Patrick. “And how are you planning to explain this to your superiors?”

  “I don’t know,” Patrick answered, his jaw tightened.

  “I saw it,” Joyce said, “and I’m still having trouble believing it.”

  “I think this has happened before,” Izzie said. “The Guildhall fire back in the forties? The murders at the Eschaton Center in the seventies? I think that was someone dealing with previous outbreaks of whatever this is.”

  “Someone like Fuller’s pal Roberto Aguilar?” Patrick suggested.

  “Possibly,” Izzie answered. “Or the old Mayan guy Don Mateo. He came to Recondito because it was a ‘true place,’ after all, to protect people against things coming through from the other side. And he wasn’t the only one, either.” She paused, and then added, “I think maybe that’s why your great-uncle came here, too.”

  “That tracks.” Patrick nodded slowly. “He always said that he came to Recondito to continue his ‘work.’ And he clearly knew more about all of this than any of us ever realized.”

  “So what are you suggesting, Izzie?” Daphne asked. “That we don’t report this?”

  “Not yet, anyway,” she answered. “Accusing the richest and most powerful man in the city of not only being behind a burgeoning drug epidemic, but also of being possessed by an intelligence from outside our universe? That’s not a claim that we can make without solid evidence.”

  “I agree,” Patrick said. “But what do we do, then?”

  Izzie turned and took a few steps away, mulling it over. She glanced at the window, saw the ghosts of mathematical formulae and occult symbols that lingered there, then hung her head. The scars on the back of her hand and on her leg itched, there was a sinking feeling at the pit of her stomach, and she felt suddenly more tired than she had in ages.

  “Girl, you best wake up,” she could hear her grandmother saying. “You got work to do.”

  Izzie turned back to face the others, her eyes narrowed and jaw set.

  “I think we have to pick up where Nicholas Fuller left off. We have to finish what the Recondito Reaper started.”

  EPILOGUE

  Daphne was snoring gently, her head resting on Izzie’s shoulder. She’d finally fallen asleep just a couple of hours before, but Izzie was still wide awake. They were sl
umped side by side on a tarp-covered couch in the living quarters beside the lighthouse, which they’d found after descending from the lantern room sometime after 3:00 a.m.

  Izzie and Daphne had spent hours talking in hushed tones on the couch so as not to disturb Patrick and Joyce, who’d gone off to sleep in an adjoining room. With all that had happened the previous day, something seemed to have shifted between them. It was as though a wall had begun to crumble, whether through exhaustion or anxiety or exhilaration or a mix of all three, and there in the darkness the final barrier between them had fallen.

  Daphne had agreed to help smooth things over with the Bureau, to keep Gutierrez or Izzie’s superiors back at Quantico from asking too many questions about just what was going on in Recondito. They wouldn’t be falsifying reports, as such, but covering their tracks for the time being, and justifying the need for Izzie to remain in the city for the time being. They decided that to deal with whatever it was Zotovic was up to, it wasn’t going to be quick.

  As the small hours of the night wore on, their hushed conversation drifted from pressing matters to more personal ones. They swapped stories of past heartbreaks, hopes and fears for the future, secrets and dreams that they’d never shared with anyone else. It might have been the camaraderie of the foxhole, filters lost and defenses lowered in extreme circumstances, or the smoldering attraction they clearly felt for one another. This was not some casual flirtation anymore. This was something else.

  Izzie had been whispering secrets about her childhood in the Ninth Ward when she realized that Daphne was no longer awake. So she sat in silence there in the dark, feeling the comforting weight and warmth of Daphne pressing against her side.

  She was exhausted, physically and mentally, and felt emotionally drained, but try as she might Izzie couldn’t sleep. She was too keyed up, her thoughts racing a million miles an hour, and no tricks or techniques that she knew were helping to slow them. A few stiff drinks might have done the trick, but she didn’t imagine that the previous occupant of the lighthouse had left a fully stocked bar behind.

  Finally, Izzie slid her phone out of her jacket pocket, and angled it so that light from the screen wouldn’t wake Daphne when she thumbed it on. It was even later than she thought, with only a short time remaining before dawn. There was hardly any point in trying to sleep at this point. They’d need to be up and moving in barely half an hour.

  Izzie decided to see what was happening on the shore. Were the ink-blotted shamblers still there waiting for them?

  With some difficulty, she managed to maneuver Daphne off her shoulder, gently lowering the sleeping woman’s head back onto the couch. Then she slid off the couch and stood up, tucking her phone back into her pocket.

  There was a sliver of dim light shining from the door that led to the lighthouse proper, but Izzie still had to feel her way through the darkened room to it. She banged her shin painfully against a stool, but the crack of the impact and the sharp intake of breath that followed apparently weren’t loud enough to wake Daphne, judging by the snoring that still sounded faintly from the couch. Izzie managed to reach the door without further mishap, and made her way down the corridor to the lighthouse.

  The lights were still shining in the lantern room above, spilling warmly from the open door at the top of the metal staircase. Izzie trudged up the steps, leaning heavily on the handrail. The climb seemed longer than it had the night before, and it felt as though her feet were encased in lead. But finally she reached the top of the stairs, and stepped out into the lantern room.

  Her eyes watered as she squinted at the bright light, which seemed to shine even brighter after her hours spent down in the darkness. But when her eyes adjusted, she saw that the lantern room was just as they’d left it a few hours before. Had she expected anything to have changed? She puzzled over the thought as she crossed the metal plates of the floor to the windows on the far side. It did seem that she had the unconscious expectation that something might have changed in their absence. Plunged into the depths of mystery as they were, with secrets lurking in every shadow, it was as if part of her anticipated that anything might shift or alter as soon as she stopped looking at it.

  What was more troubling was the sneaking suspicion that she might on some level be right.

  Izzie reached the window, and looked out. The waters had not yet fully receded at low tide, and the first light of dawn was peeking over the hills to the east of the city. On the Oceanview boardwalk across the way only a handful of the ink-blotted shamblers remained, but even as she watched she saw a couple of them turn and trudge away. By the time the morning sunlight reached the waterfront, the last of them would be gone.

  “How’s it looking?”

  Izzie spun around and dropped into a defensive posture, instantly alert.

  “Sorry,” Patrick said, standing by the open door to the staircase. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”

  Izzie forced herself to relax. She could hear her pulse throbbing in her ears.

  “Just a little keyed up.” She took a deep breath and forced a weak smile.

  Patrick came to stand beside her at the window.

  “The last of them are clearing out,” Izzie said, looking down at the boardwalk.

  Patrick nodded. “And not a moment too soon. Looks like the tide is just about all the way out.”

  Izzie crossed her arms and turned to lean her shoulder against the window, where faint ghosts of Nicholas Fuller’s formulae could still be seen. “So, are you ready for this?”

  Patrick arched an eyebrow.

  “For whatever we’ll have to do,” Izzie clarified. “It’s not going to be easy, and it’s not going to be nice.”

  “Yeah.” Patrick shoved his hands in his pockets and sighed. “But what choice do we have?”

  She chewed her lip, and shrugged. “Daphne’s going to help keep the Bureau off our backs while we figure it out.”

  “Good,” he answered with a nod. “Joyce is going to run interference on our side, too. We’ll have to report something about what happened last night, but she thinks that she can help me keep it vague enough that there won’t be any unwanted questions.” He shook his head, ruefully. “She’s going to have to come up with some kind of explanation for how a dead body went missing from the city morgue, but …” He raised his shoulders in a shrug of his own. “We’ll figure something out.”

  Izzie turned and looked back out over the rapidly receding waters, as the muddy land bridge rose once more into view.

  “This wasn’t what I was expecting, the last time I left Recondito,” she said. “Hell, this wasn’t what I was expecting when I flew into town the other day. But maybe I’m … I don’t know, maybe I’m supposed to be here?”

  “Sounds an awful lot like something that my great-uncle would have said,” Patrick answered with a sly smile. “Your grandmother, too, I’m guessing.”

  “Come on,” Izzie rolled her eyes, “I’m already calling into question everything that I thought was true. Don’t make me start wondering whether I’m turning into my grandmother, to boot.”

  “Okay, okay.” His smile widened fractionally as he turned to look out over the city. “But honestly, whether you were meant to be in Recondito or not, I’m just glad you’re here.” He turned, and met her gaze. “Because I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be facing this on my own.”

  She glanced back towards the door, indicating the living quarters next door. “Sounds like you aren’t on your own, though. Or didn’t you just spend the night with the queen of the underworld?”

  Izzie thought she detected a blush rising in his cheek. “Yeah, well, I seem to recall someone telling me that I had a blind spot where certain matters were concerned. So if you weren’t here, I definitely would be on my own. In more ways than one.”

  She punched him in the shoulder, grinning.

  “What was that for?” Patrick objected.

  “Couldn’t help myself,” she answered. “There’s just something about you that demands
to be punched.”

  He rolled his eyes, feigning outrage unconvincingly.

  “Come on.” Izzie turned and headed towards the stairs. “Let’s wake up the girls and get moving. We’ve got our work cut out for us.”

  To be continued in FIREWALKERS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks are due to Bill Willingham, Mark Finn, and Matt Sturges, who were generous with their advice when the earliest versions of this story were taking shape half a lifetime ago, and to my wife, partner, and best friend Allison Baker, for her support and encouragement in all the years since.