The Living End (Daniel Faust #3)(49)
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It was a quarter past midnight by the time I reached the marina, but I wasn’t tired. Silent boats bobbed on the tranquil waters of the bay, their sails furled, skeletal masts pointing like fingers toward the starry night sky.
Yellow lamps lit the way along the weathered concrete walk. The stone was stained from decades of sea spray, and I tasted salt and mildew with every breath. Toward the end of the line, as I closed in on the slip, another kind of light caught my eye: thread-thin lines of raw magic twisted into a warding spell, pulsing emerald green in my second sight. They coated the dock like a spider’s web. Or a net woven from razor wire.
The boat tied to the pier was more of a barge, a boxy thing with shuttered windows and more spells laid on the deck. Calligraphy decals on the back gave the boat’s name: Second Chance.
I stood at the edge of the dock, alone in the dark, and held up one finger.
With a focused thought and a puff of breath, a luminous spark of power jumped from my fingertip and drifted away. It floated like a puffball on a summer breeze and brushed against the farthest edge of the warding spell. The threads of magic rippled, shivering like the taut strings of a violin all the way back to the boat. I stood and waited.
The man who emerged from the boat’s cabin might have grown a snowy-white beard and changed his name, but the passage of time couldn’t hide the sliver-thin scars that covered his haggard face and shaking hands. He wore a tattered bathrobe and slippers.
“Dr. Payton,” I said, not moving. I kept my hands empty, palms slightly turned his way. “My name is Daniel Faust. I’ve come a long way to see you.”
He looked like he was about to protest, insist he was Erik Krause, but then his shoulders sagged. He knew it was over.
“Are you here to kill me?” he asked.
“Probably not,” I said.
“Come aboard, then.” With a wave of his hand the warding threads slid back, making a clear path for me between their webs.
I climbed aboard the Second Chance and followed him into the cabin.
“Wasn’t hard for me to find you,” I said. “Other people could find you too.”
“They’ve had twenty years to try. Either they believe I’m dead, or they know I’m just a broken old man. Why bother?”
The cabin was cramped but homey, with a little kitchenette and an old vinyl couch. A stuffed lizard stood watch over his laptop desk next to a small shelf of books. Occult grimoires stood shoulder to shoulder with texts on quantum engineering and advanced calculus, thrown together with no apparent rhyme or reason.
“So,” he said, hobbling over to the kitchen nook, “if Ausar didn’t send you, who did?”
Even though a tuft of tangled white hair dangled over his eyes, I could still see how his gaze narrowed as he turned to face me. His left hand dipped under the counter, reaching into a drawer. He kept his eyes fixed on me.
If you’re reaching for something innocuous, like a new coffee filter or a spoon, you tend to look directly at it. If you’ve got a stranger in your home and you’re reaching for a silenced pistol on the other hand, it’s probably someplace you’ve taught yourself to reach by feel alone.
“Your creations sent me,” I said. “The smoke-faced men.”
His hand froze. It came back out of the drawer, empty.
“Coffee?” he asked.
“If it’s not a bother.”
“Not at all,” he said and put on a fresh pot while we talked.
“I need to know what you were trying to do, you and Nedry and Clark. What you were really trying to do. They’ve got new patrons, and they’re picking up where you left off twenty years ago.”
Bob sighed and leaned against the counter. He rubbed his leathery forehead.
“The first thing you have to understand,” he said, “is that ninety-nine percent of Ausar Biomedical was a perfectly legitimate company. Then there was us. The terrible trio, we called ourselves. We were recruited by a rogue faction on the board of directors and compartmentalized from the rest of the company, set to a special and very specific task.”
He sat down at the little desk and powered on his computer, waving for me to pull over a vinyl-padded chair from the kitchenette. I sat at his shoulder as he typed. He showed me pictures, scanned in from old Polaroids, dusty and faded. An aerial photograph of a dig site. A cordon of security tape and men in dark glasses. A stairway carved into rocky ground, leading down into the dark.
“They found it in Mexico,” he said. “A tomb where there shouldn’t have been one, carved with glyphs matching nothing in Mexican history. No, not a tomb. A tunnel. Eventually we found a second, identical one in the French Alps.”
The vision of Lauren descending into the darkness, in Nepal, flashed behind my eyes.
“They were filled with plant life,” Bob said as his eyes went distant. “Impossible life, nothing anyone had ever seen before. We could only explore so far. Anyone who went past a certain point in the tunnel…was lost to us. The board of directors was aware of certain secrets. They needed specialists, and they found us. Nedry was an expert on quantum sorcery. Clark’s expertise was occult biochemistry. As for me? Warding and containment.
“You must understand, Mr. Faust, that this is not the only world that exists. Like the petals of a snowflake, other dimensions weave and lace around our own, sometimes touching our planet, sometimes violently drilling through it. The tunnels were ancient relics, the doomed efforts of some long-dead sorcerer to create a permanent bridge between our world and another.”