The Living End (Daniel Faust #3)(44)

“Oh, I never push. I’m all about freedom of choice. So what brings you around?”

I took a deep breath.

“I need to get high,” I told her. “I mean, really high.”

She blinked. “This early in the morning? Like you don’t have work to do? I can’t be the responsible one in this friendship, Danny. I just won’t do it.”

“No, it’s not like that. Listen, you remember when I told you about the smoke-faced men? Well, I was checking out a lead, trying to track down Lauren. I got dosed with some nasty shit that put me out of my head for a while, and they showed up. I’m getting the idea that you can only see them if you don’t have both feet firmly on the floor of reality. I need something that’ll really mess me up, but only for a little while.”

She thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “Come with me. I’ve got just the thing.”

We left the party behind, walking down to a seemingly random door on the second floor. “This one’s the real McCoy,” she said, jiggling her key in the lock. The room beyond was a cramped but clean apartment, furnished with Amish wood and gingham print, most of it furniture from her old place. A window unit rattled on full blast, filling the room with cool air, and the ceiling subdued the music from upstairs into a faint, almost hypnotic thumping.

She took me into her bedroom and clicked on a table lamp. “Take your shoes off and lay down,” she said as she rummaged through a lacquered wooden jewelry box on her dresser. She held up a small baggie filled with tiny dried lumps and weighed it in her hand, glancing back at me and frowning.

“About two grams, I’m thinking.”

“What are those?” I said. “Mushrooms?”

“Good ol’ psilocybin, nature’s gift to the shaman. Here, take these and don’t just gulp them down. Chew ’em. They don’t taste great, but they’ll work faster that way.”

I took the dried pieces dubiously and popped them into my mouth. They had an earthy, pungent flavor, like a mouthful of sour dirt. I started to have second thoughts about this plan the moment I swallowed. Just in time for the train to leave the station.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll be your sitter. Gonna be right here the whole time.”

I lay there for what felt like twenty minutes, just staring at the flowered wallpaper, before I shook my head.

“Are you sure you got the real stuff? I don’t feel different at all.”

That was when the room started to vibrate.

It was subtle at first. A tremor under the bed like a low-wattage earthquake, spurring images of great gears churning a hundred miles below Jennifer’s bed. The room turned slowly, and the corners where the walls met the ceiling left neon trails in their wake.

Jennifer wouldn’t stay still. She was sitting on the edge of the bed. Then she was by the door. Then she was over by the dresser—and suddenly I realized that I was only looking at life-sized photographs that someone had cut out of a fashion magazine.

“That’s right,” I mumbled. “Jennifer is modeling in Spain and sent her pictures back to watch me. It all makes sense now.”

“The rain in Spain falls mainly in your brain,” buzzed the smoke-faced man in the mortarboard and smock, perching on Jennifer’s dresser.

“We’ve replaced this sorcerer’s illusion with conditions of stark and terrible reality!” said his suited companion, now standing at my bedside. “Let’s see if he notices.”

“This isn’t reality,” I said.

Then we were in Nepal.

“We were not in the tomb,” the professor said softly, almost fearfully, as we walked through the steaming jungle under the light of a hot-pink sun. “We did not give her the ring.”

“You told me that back at the shelter,” I said. “So who did?”

“The Garden,” the professor whispered.

The pink sun tumbled from the sky like a shooting star, turning day to night in the space of a trembling breath. What rose in its place was a moon made of rotting meat, its vast surface pitted with crawling black mold, glowing in a starless sky.

Young Lauren Carmichael crept from the underbrush with a hooded lantern in her hand, moving swift and sure-footed. Night birds warbled in the dark. We floated behind Lauren as she approached the overgrown and vine-tangled entrance to the unearthed tomb.

“This is the part Eugene Planck didn’t see,” I said. “His memories showed them discovering the door, and how she had Solomon’s ring the next day, but he wasn’t here for this.”

I expected to see Lauren take a machete to the tangled roots. Instead, they moved aside on their own. Vines untwisted and brambles pulled away, parting like the Red Sea for her slow and curious descent. We followed her down, drawn by the firefly glow of her lantern.

Green lichens clung to the ancient stone walls, and soon grass began to spring between the cracks in the floor. Somehow, deep beneath the soil and away from the sun’s light, life thrived in the musty tunnel air. A strange flower rose up from a bed of grass, and I crouched to take a closer look.

It was made of skin.

The flower bent and wilted, its bloody petals glistening, and a nodule of flesh at its tip began to throb and stretch from within. It burst with a wet splurt, spitting yellow pus across the grass. I watched in horror as the blades of grass started to thicken, twist, and sprout tiny pustules of their own.