The Long Way Down (29 page)

“She’s not here. We are. We can protect you.”

He laughed again, giving me an incredulous lopsided smile. “You can’t protect me, son. No one can. She’s
inside
of me. She buried a monster in my guts, and it listens to every word I say. I have to keep her secrets for her.”

“Please, try,” I said. “I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”

Eugene sighed. He smoothed down the front of his hospital gown, pulling it tight across his emaciated stomach.

“We went to Nepal in nineteen—” he started to say, then let out a pained groan. His stomach bulged. Under the gown, flesh stretched and rippled as something fat and wormlike writhed in his abdomen. He fell silent and it slithered back into the depths of his body, its warning delivered.

My breath caught in my throat. I remembered the feeling of Lauren’s snake-curse all too well.

“You can see it. Good. These fellows,” he said, giving a nod of his head to the orderly at the door, “they can’t see a thing. They just say I’m hallucinating. I’m sorry. I’d help you if I could, I really would. I just can’t. This…this is what Lauren Carmichael did to me. She showed me horrors and then she took away my voice. I’ve been waiting twenty years just to scream.”

Caitlin drummed her fingernails on the table, her brow furrowed.

“If there’s one thing I know,” she said, “it’s that every contract has a loophole. You can’t speak of what happened in Nepal. Fine. I think we can accommodate that.”

He shook his head. “I can’t write it down either, or draw pictures. I tried once. Oh, that went badly.”

“No, I’m envisioning something a bit more elegant than that,” she said, then looked to me. “Dreamwalk. He can just remember it for us.”

I guess I didn’t have to wonder anymore whether Caitlin’s appearance in my dreams was real or a flight of fantasy. “Is it safe?”

“Not remotely. And it doesn’t work on the unwilling. He has to open himself to me, give permission.”

“Wait, I didn’t give permission and you did it to me,” I said.

She chuckled, brushing the back of my hand with her fingernails. “Not in words, but you sent an invitation and left your front door wide open. Don’t you dare deny it.”

“So there’s a way?” Eugene said, sudden urgency rasping in his acid-scarred throat. “There’s really a way?”

“You could die,” Caitlin said, matter-of-factly. “You aren’t trained in the occult arts, and you don’t know how to manage the energies involved. If anything goes wrong, the process could induce a brain embolism or leave you a vegetable.”

He shook his head firmly. “I don’t care. I don’t care what happens to me. I want to tell my story. I want my voice back.”

Thirty-Five

W
e needed to stay close for the dreamwalk to work, and a sleepover at the mental hospital wasn’t in the cards. We drove until we found a Motel 6 a couple of miles down the road and rented the room at the end. Caitlin went out again to do some shopping, leaving me with orders to lie in bed, watch the grainy television, and try to relax. We all needed to be asleep for this to work, but nothing’s harder than getting sleepy on command. The more I tried to rest the less tired I felt, and the sunlight streaming in around the thick curtains didn’t help.

Caitlin came back an hour later with a plastic bag from a local grocery store and a sack of cheeseburgers from Wendy’s. “Let’s get some red meat in your stomach,” she said cheerfully. “That’ll help.”

I got up and ambled to the table by the window. “Don’t suppose you got me a Coke with that?”

“Yes,” she said, rolling her eyes, “you should absolutely have caffeine right now.”

“Oh. Right.”

“You can, however, wash it down with a few shots of this,” she said, digging in the grocery bag and setting a bottle of Nyquil on the table.

I groaned, shaking my head. “Seriously?”

“Short of knocking over a pharmacy to get the really good stuff, I know of no better aid in the pursuit of short-term unconsciousness.”

I sat next to her, my fingertips brushing her thigh. “I’m sure I could think of an idea or two.”

“That,” she said with a smile, “is exactly what you said when I came back to the motel. You’re a bit disoriented.”

“Huh? You just came back now.”

Caitlin whistled tunelessly and spun her finger, gesturing for me to turn around. I looked over my shoulder. Our bodies, naked and entwined on sweat-soaked sheets, slept peacefully in the double bed.

“We’re already asleep,” I said flatly.

“Mm-hmm. Your short-term memories are muddled. It happens.”

I pointed at the bed. “But I missed the good part!”

“I think,” she said, touching my shoulder as she rose from her chair, “an encore can be arranged. Come now. Let’s find the good Dr. Planck. It shouldn’t be hard. I can feel him yearning for us. He wants to be heard.”

I looked around the motel room, concentrating. I couldn’t hear the echoes of Planck’s soul, not like Caitlin, but I knew a message needed a medium.

“Let’s try this.” I turned on the television set.

Sunlight filtered through the canopy of a lush tropical jungle, woodshrikes chittering in the branches. I didn’t recognize Eugene at first. The man on the television screen, frowning as he studied a crumbling stone slab under a magnifying glass, was young and vibrant. So was the girl beside him, dressed in an explorer’s khakis, her eyes wide and bright.

“Lauren,” Caitlin hissed.

The stone might have been a doorway, submerged into the loam by tremors and time, choked by centuries of vines and weeds. Something about it, the shape of it, the curious lean of the arch and the glistening sheen of the rock, set my teeth on edge.

“This is all wrong,” Planck said on the screen, echoing my thoughts exactly. “These symbols aren’t Hindu, and this style is far too old to date from the Maurya Empire. I can’t even read this part; it’s not Sanskrit or any of the Prakrit languages. This temple shouldn’t
be
here.”

Lauren traced a twisting symbol with her finger, following the ragged cut. “We should go in! Come on, where’s your sense of adventure? There could be anything inside!”

Planck shook his head, taking a step back.

“Not without the entire team, and not without the right tools to clear the passage without risking any damage to the walls. Not a scratch. You know my motto.”

Lauren sighed, but she favored him with the smile of an indulgent lover. “‘Proper archeology takes its proper time,’” she recited.

“She didn’t listen,” Planck said from behind us. He stood in the corner of the room, young again, watching the screen with a look of abject misery. “She went back under the cover of the stars with a machete and sheer stubbornness. The next morning, she had a new ring on her finger, an old pewter thing that looked like something her grandmother might wear. That’s when things started to change.”

A young Indian trembled on a cot in an army-surplus tent, his terrified eyes bulging and his lips flecked with white foam. We stood next to Planck, the motel room suddenly gone. Oppressive summer heat baked into my bones and sucked the breath from my lungs.

“Snakebite,” a stout man with an Australian accent told Eugene, “third bloody case this week. Been seeing ’em all over the camp, bold brown bastards with a nasty bite. The porters are finding ’em in their bedsheets. They’re about to take a hike, and I don’t blame ’em a damn bit.”

“Where are they all coming from? The site was clear when we struck camp.”

“Your guess is as good as mine, mate. They’re saying this place is cursed.”

The outside light slipped away as we plunged into nightfall. Insects droned in the jasmine-scented dark. Eugene opened the tent flap and stepped outside.

Lauren stood with her back to him, facing the jungle, the temple ruin. Whispering.

“Who are you talking to?” he asked cautiously.

“My new friends,” she said, turning to face him with a jubilant smile.

“Lauren,” Eugene said, hesitant, “nobody’s out here but us.”

“They’re on their way. You’ll see them. Not everyone will. Certain sacrifices have to be made for progress. But you? You’re special.”

She leaned in to kiss his cheek and froze. The trees stopped their swaying, the insects silenced, the world gone rigid and still. Eugene shook his head at us.

“I didn’t understand what she meant. More porters died. Snakebite. One of our other interns went missing. We found her body the next morning in the brush, savaged by a pack of feral beasts. Then I sent my assistant on a run to the nearest village to buy food and medical supplies.”

The world shifted around us again, canvas flaps dropping over the sky and a card table laden with maps boiling up from the dirt. The Australian paced the tent, wild-eyed, barely able to control himself.

“Just take it slow,” Eugene told him. “One thing at a time.”

“We can’t leave,” the Australian said, squeezing his hands at his sides. “I’m telling you, I took the road out of camp and drove for fifteen minutes through the jungle. Ended up coming back into camp. I didn’t turn, not once. Did it again. Ended up back in camp. I spent eight hours driving the
same five miles of road
. I’m telling you, Doctor, something is keeping us penned in here. It’s killing us off one by one, and it won’t let us go!”

“It’s impossible. The jungle must have confused you. It’s easy to get turned around—”

The Australian slammed his fist against the table. “We’re going to die here. You
know
why. That bird of yours. You’ve heard the whispers. You know what people’ve seen, what that girl’s been doing at night. You just don’t want to believe it. We’re all going to die here, and it’ll be your damn fault.”

Eugene’s shoulders shook. I stepped closer and saw the tears on his cheeks.

“He’s right,” he told us. “It was my fault.”

“No,” Caitlin said. “It was hers.”

Night again, and we followed Eugene out of the tent. Half the camp lay barren now, the wind blowing ragged tent flaps wide. Fat brown snakes coiled on empty cots. They hissed lazily as we walked by. In the distance, a man’s shrill scream pierced the night and, just as suddenly, fell silent.

At the edge of the clearing stood a small pavilion built from the scavenged bits and pieces of half a dozen tents. The pavilion was sprawling and shapeless, and a faint droning sound echoed from inside like a tuneless chant in a long-dead tongue. An oriental rug lined the floor at the entrance, caked with sand and dirt. As we followed Eugene inside, we heard the clinking of glasses and faint, conversational laughter.

A human torso, crudely butchered, lay across a glass table with its innards still wet and glistening. Lauren sat beside it, dressed in her Sunday best and sipping tea from a delicate porcelain cup. A man in a dapper black suit sat across from her. His face was a featureless black void, a smudge of frozen smoke.

“Eugene!” Lauren said. “You’re just in time for high tea.”

“Abelard,” Eugene gasped, obviously in shock, “says he can’t leave the camp. He says the road—”

“Right, we can’t let anyone leave. Obviously. Mr. Gray, would you please do something about that pesky man?”

The black void buzzed, and the suited man hoisted his teacup emphatically. He spoke in the droning voice of a thousand flies’ wings.

“Fanciful! I will snatch his nails!”

The man’s words sounded like a parody of English, strings of text run through a computer translator and back again. Still, nonsensical as it was, there was no mistaking his gleefully malicious tone.

“Can’t you remember his face?” Caitlin asked. Halfway submerged in the memory, Planck looked at us and shook his head.

“I do remember,” he said. “That
was
his face.”

Another faceless man, garbed in the sash and gown of an old-time British boarding-school teacher, stood beside a chalkboard. He rapped his pointer against a sketch, drawing attention to a chalk drawing of what could only be the Etruscan Box. Runes surrounded the Box, a swirling chaos of incomprehensible letters that tugged at my eyes.

“To open the Box without the requisite sacrifice,” buzzed the faceless teacher, “invites the wrath of its guardians.”

The seated man waved his teacup, splashing amber droplets on the rug. “They are lean and athirst! They chew on gumption!”

“The number of souls is five, no more and no less. This is the key and the cost to open Belephaia’s prison. The ring will render her docile and pliant.”

Caitlin’s jaw dropped. She grabbed Planck’s shoulder.

“Repeat that! What did he say? Are you sure you remember it correctly?”

The room flickered and skipped as time ran in reverse. My stomach lurched.

“—is the key and the cost to open Belephaia’s prison,” the teacher said again, and Caitlin spat an oath in her native tongue. I touched the small of her back, frowning.

“What is it?”

She shook her head. “Hold on. This is bad. I need to think.”

The teacher rapped his pointer against the chalkboard for emphasis. “It will not be long before her brother, the demon prince Sitri, comes to her rescue. You must bind them both, quickly. Only then shall your desires be made flesh.”