by R. L. King
“Who knows? People tell all kinds of weird stories, don’t they?”
“Can you tell me what they did say? I saw an article online, but it didn’t have a lot of detail.”
The place was slow this time of the afternoon, so she seemed happy to have someone to chat with while she wiped the counters. “Eh, they say a lot of things. Personally, I’d have thought a bunch of kids just went out there and got high as kites, except for the accidents.”
“Accidents?”
“Yeah, some cars ran into each other. It was a mess. I mean, we sometimes get fender-benders out on the highway, but never multi-car pileups. That was the weirdest part. I’m just amazed nobody got killed. Thank God for that.”
“Can you tell me what people claimed to see?”
“Oh, yeah, they come in here talkin’ about it yesterday. Like I said, drug-trip stuff. Trees reachin’ out their branches and tryin’ to grab cars. Giant things with wings—what do you call those dinosaur bird things again?”
“Pterodactyls?”
“Yeah, those, kinda. Leathery things with big wings, landin’ on the cars. One guy said the hoses under his hood all came loose and tried to reach in through his window. Another guy said the sky turned blood red and the road started floppin’ around like he was on the ocean. Stuff like that.”
“That sounds a bit terrifying.”
“Doesn’t it? By the time they got back here, I think they had themselves half-convinced it was all some kinda mass hallucination or somethin’. The cops went out to check on it, but by the time they got out there, they didn’t find nothin’ but a bunch of banged-up cars.”
“So whatever it was, it didn’t last long?”
She shrugged. “I think it was a while before anybody called the cops. They were too busy trippin’ balls, or whatever.” She gave the counter a final swipe, tossed the rag aside, and topped up Stone’s coffee. “I’m just tellin’ you, don’t be disappointed if you don’t find anything good out there.”
“Oh, I won’t. I’m used to that. Can you tell me exactly where it was supposed to have happened?”
She grabbed a napkin and a pen and sketched a crude map. “Just head out this road for about five miles and look for the sign for the winery turnoff. It’s the intersection of the highway and Miller Road. Can’t miss it.”
“Thank you.” He paid her, took the map, and left the shop, already thinking about what could have happened out there. It did sound like rift behavior, but once he’d discovered the purpose of Desmond’s globe, he’d never found a rift that didn’t show up on it.
Could it have appeared and disappeared that quickly? It was possible, he supposed. But if there had been one and it had vanished a day or two ago, he suspected there might still be detectable energy traces.
The waitress was right—he didn’t have any trouble finding the place, but not for the reason she said. As he approached it, he noticed a few cars pulled off to both sides of the road. One had its door open, blasting heavy-metal music out into the otherwise quiet day. Several figures milled around the area.
Stone pulled in behind them. Closer now, he noticed they were young—middle teens to early twenties. Most were male, and all of them wore mellow, expectant expressions. The skunky reek of cheap marijuana hung in the air.
“Hey, man,” one young man in a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt called. A couple others waved vaguely. “You here for the Big High?”
“The—er—what, now?”
“Didn’t you hear?” another one asked. “Somethin’s goin’ on out here. Happened a couple days ago, and we’re waitin’ for it to happen again.” He held out a badly-rolled joint. “Want a hit?”
“No. Thank you.” Stone looked around. There were a few skid marks in the road, along with various bits of glass and broken taillights. “Were any of you here when it happened before?”
“Naw. Sucks, too. From what they were sayin’, it sounds like it was a real trip. Too bad it mostly got wasted on a bunch of olds.”
“Have you got any reason to believe it’s coming back? Has it been here before?”
“Not that I ever heard,” the second guy said. “Wish we could figure out how to bring it back.”
“Can’t help you there,” Stone said. “Excuse me, please.”
“Yeah, sure.” The guy hopped onto the hood of one of the cars, leaned back, and took a big hit.
Stone stood off to the side of the road away from the cars and shifted to magical sight, scanning the area for any unusual traces. It would be hard to spot anything during the day, especially with this many auras around. He turned in place, trying to find a spot without people.
“What’cha lookin’ at?”
He switched back. A stringy-haired young woman in a cropped T-shirt and leggings was watching him with interest. “Er—nothing, really. Just looking around.”
“I don’t think the High’s comin’ back,” she said, disappointed. Her gaze wandered, and she didn’t meet his eyes. “If you’re lookin’ for it, I mean.” She smiled. “Hey, you’re new here. And you’re kinda hot. I love your accent. Wanna come sit with me in the back of my truck while we wait? I got a six-pack and some sweet edibles…”
“Thank you for the offer, but…no. Thank you.”
“Okay, whatever…” She shrugged and wandered off.
Stone spent a few more minutes walking around, taking readings in various areas around the intersection. To his disappointment, though, nothing turned up. He even walked a short distance off the highway in all four directions, peering around in the trees, but if there had been a rift here, it hadn’t left any signs behind. He took one last scan of the group’s auras, looking for any strangeness, but the only thing he noticed was they all flickered with anticipation. That made sense if they expected the “Big High” to show up again.
He made a few notes and headed back toward his car.
“Not gonna wait?” the Lynyrd Skynyrd guy called. “Prob’ly gonna be after dark. Was last time.”
“That’s—all right. You enjoy it without me.” He got back in his car and drove off, back toward Fern Ridge. On his way, he passed a police car driving the other way, and wondered how many of the easygoing crowd were about to have a much less pleasant night than they’d expected.
He returned home to Encantada, disappointed. He hadn’t wanted there to be another misbehaving rift that close to a road, but at least it would have given him something to concentrate on to take his mind off Daphne.
He spent the rest of the afternoon running a few errands he’d been putting off, then picked up some takeaway from a new Vietnamese place that had opened near the University.
His phone rang when he was halfway through his Bánh xèo. He picked it up, expecting it to be somebody from work, but the number was blocked. “Yes, hello?”
“Alastair?”
He nearly dropped his chopsticks. “Daphne. I was just thinking about you. Hoping you’d call me back. Are you all right?”
“We’re fine. Sorry I took so long to get back to you. I didn’t mean to hang up so abruptly. Still a little skittish, I guess.”
“It’s all right. Did Laura give you my number?”
“Yep. I called your office today, but you weren’t there so she gave me this number.” She chuckled. “She’s very nosy, do you know that?”
“You don’t know the half of it. I hope you didn’t tell her much.”
“I didn’t tell her anything, even though she tried hard.”
“Where are you now? Or do you still not want to tell me?”
“I’d…rather not. I’m sorry, Alastair, but I think it’s best if you don’t know.”
He gathered the rest of his meal, carried it to the kitchen, and put it in the refrigerator with a foil cover for later. “So…if you won’t tell me where to find you, what can I do for you?”
“I wanted to hear about what happened after the portal failed. You told me something happened. I’m almost afraid to ask because it sounded bad, but I need to know. I tried
researching it at a library in one of the towns where we stopped, but nothing came up.”
“Yes, well, it wouldn’t, if you didn’t know what to search for.” He returned to the living room and sat on the couch, where Raider immediately jumped up next to him. “Are you sure you want to hear it? It’s all been sorted now, and it’s not a happy story.”
There was a long pause, and when she spoke again tone was sober. “I think I need to.”
“Have you got some time?”
“We’re in a motel room, so no more pay phones for now.”
Stone considered how much he wanted to tell her. On the one hand, there was nothing she could do to fix what had occurred with the Evil pouring into the world through the malfunctioning portals. On the other, he respected her as a fellow scientist and she had a right to the data. He sighed, stroking Raider. “Well…remember those black things you were telling me about? The ones that…”
“Attacked Artie and Rochelle?”
“Yes.”
“What about them?”
“They were…extradimensional beings. We still don’t know exactly where they come from—” He shuddered as he remembered his brief time in the Evil’s hellish home dimension, and Raider looked up at him in confusion, “—but they used to hang about in the Overworld. You might remember them. There weren’t a lot of them, but they were there if you looked.”
The line was silent. “Those things were the same as what killed Artie and Rochelle?”
“Yes.”
“But then…why didn’t they kill anybody in the Overworld?”
“They did, occasionally…but it was so rare most people never even heard about it.”
“Okay…so…how was that related to our portals?”
“I’m still not one hundred percent sure. But I’ve studied your notes—thank you for leaving them for me, by the way—and I do know that when your portals failed, they…opened a conduit to the Evil’s dimension.”
“Wait—the Evil?”
“Long story. One of the other things that happened when these conduits were opened was that certain sensitive people started developing mental issues, and along with those came certain…abilities.”
“Abilities? Like what?”
“Pseudo-magical abilities. Things like tracking, healing…a lot of these people ended up homeless because they couldn’t cope with what was happening to them.”
Another pause. “Alastair, this is…I don’t even know what to say. But you didn’t tell me why they were called the ‘Evil.’”
“That’s what these homeless people—they called themselves ‘the Forgotten’—called them around here. Some others I know named them ‘the Darkness.’ I suppose it varied by area.”
“But—”
“They called them the Evil because what they did was evil, at least by normal human standards.”
“Did they kill people? Like they did in the portals?”
“No, not exactly. That was only what they did in the Overworld. Here, they took people over, forming a symbiotic relationship with them. And since they gained their sustenance through negative emotions—fear, hate, despair, and so forth—they did their best to create as much of that as possible.”
This time, the line stayed silent even longer.
“Daphne?”
“Oh, God…” she murmured. “These things were…out in the world…and we were responsible for them?”
“I wouldn’t say you were responsible, exactly.”
“I would.” Her voice was full of despair. “We screwed up. We tried to do something big, and not only did we end up killing two of our group, but now you’re telling me we let these…horrible things into the world to hurt and kill a bunch of other people, too. How is that not responsible?”
Stone didn’t have an answer, because she was right. Sure, she and her team hadn’t meant to do what they did, and they’d certainly paid for it, but if they hadn’t tried creating the portals, none of it would have happened. “There’s no point in getting upset about it now. It happened, it’s been sorted—mostly—and it’s over.”
“What do you mean, sorted? What happened?”
“We…closed the portals. Both of them. That closed the conduit and prevented more of them from coming through. It turned out the portals were winking in and out on an unpredictable schedule, letting some through and then going dormant for anything from a few weeks to several months, gathering energy before they could open again.”
“You…closed them? You said ‘we’. Who else?”
“My apprentice and her brother, mostly. With a bit of help from some other people, including some of the Forgotten in the West Virginia area, and another mage in Las Vegas. The calculations in your notebooks were a big help, by the way—so in a way you were also responsible for ending the problem, if that brings you any comfort.”
“So…that did end it? You closed the portals and these things stopped hurting people?” She sounded like she’d been beaned in the forehead with a fastball, and was still trying to gather her scattered thoughts.
“Well…mostly.”
“Mostly?”
“We stopped any new ones from coming through, but that didn’t do anything about the ones already here. It turned out that they had different power levels. Most of them were weak, but some were very strong. Those got together and tried opening another portal so they could get their pipeline going again.”
Daphne didn’t reply.
“Are you sure you want to hear this?”
“I’m…sure.” She didn’t sound sure, though. “Tell me the rest.”
“Have you ever heard of Burning Man?” Stone couldn’t remember how long it had been around.
“Uh—that thing where all the naked hippies get together out in the desert somewhere and do lots of drugs?”
He smiled. “There’s a bit more to it than that these days, but essentially yes. That’s where they did it. You—er—probably don’t want to look that one up.”
“More people died.”
“Yes. Quite a lot of them.”
“But they didn’t finish the portal, I’m assuming, or you’d have said something about it.”
“No. They didn’t. We stopped them again.”
“My God, Alastair…”
“I know. It sounds like I’ve got quite the big head about it, but I assure you, that’s not the case. It was all rather horrible, and I still have nightmares about it occasionally. But it’s over. The powerful Evil were destroyed, and the few small ones still left have settled in and haven’t been causing trouble for a long time.”
He heard a loud exhalation on the other end. “I…don’t even know what to say. So many people…”
“Look—you’ve got enough to worry about right now without adding that. You asked me to tell you, so I did. You’ll probably have to deal with it at some point, but if you’re running from motel to motel, this probably isn’t that time. You’ve got Jeremy to look out for now.”
“I know.”
He caught an odd note in her voice. “Daphne?”
“Nothing.”
“What is it? Even after all this time, I know you well enough to know when you’re lying.”
“No, it really isn’t much. Jeremy’s not feeling well. He hasn’t been for a couple of days. That’s why I stopped here. We’re staying until he’s feeling better.”
Stone frowned. “Anything serious?”
“No, I don’t think so. I’m keeping an eye on him. I think he’s just having a little trouble adjusting to the food here, since it’s not what he’s used to. There wasn’t any processed stuff where we were. He’ll be fine.”
“You know—you can trust me. I promise I won’t cause you any trouble. If you’ll tell me where you are, I can bring you some things, help you get set up somewhere. Hell, you can stay here if you like. I’ve got a big house near the University now. Plenty of room, and it would be easy to keep you hidden until you figure out what you want to do.”
“That’
s…a wonderful offer, but I can’t. I’ve got a lot on my mind, and I can’t risk anybody finding us. You know what will happen if they do.”
He sighed. “I know. But listen—I’ve got friends who are very good at creating false identities. They’ve already made a couple for me, so I can travel around through the portals without anyone getting suspicious when my real ID or credit cards start popping up in unexpected places. I could have them do that for you, too. You and Jeremy could start a whole new life somewhere.”
“That—you know, I might take you up on that sometime. But it’s not as easy as you make it sound.”
“Why not?”
“I guess it depends on how good your people are, but creating fake IDs for us won’t be enough. For me it probably would be, but Jeremy has no history. How am I going to explain where he’s been all these years? Where he went to school, why he doesn’t talk, why he can’t read English? They’re going to want to put him in a program somewhere, and I can’t let that happen.”
She had a point. “Let me see what I can do. Will you call me again in a couple of days, at least?”
“I’ll try. I—hold on.” Suddenly, she sounded more urgent.
“Daphne? Is everything all right?”
“Jeremy’s upset about something. I’ve got to go. Talk later!”
“Daphne—”
But she’d already hung up.
Stone sighed, staring at the phone. “This is a mess, mate,” he told Raider, gently nudging the cat off his lap. “I feel so helpless, since I can’t do a bloody thing about it.”
14
Stone had a hard time focusing on work over the next few days. Daphne didn’t call back; he hoped that meant she and Jeremy were doing all right and didn’t need any help, but the thought of them out there with no resources bothered him. Daphne’s knowledge was eleven years out of date, which was bad enough, but he could only imagine what Jeremy must be going through. Adjusting to a new dimension was hard enough for an adult, fully-trained mage. What must it be like for a child who couldn’t even talk to express his confusion? He wondered if Daphne was regretting her decision to return to Earth. To hear her tell it, the other dimension might have been primitive, but she’d made a life for herself and her son there.