The Living End (Daniel Faust #3)(50)
“What other world?”
He didn’t answer at first. He got up, took a pair of mismatched mugs down from a cabinet, and poured two cups of coffee. He held one out to me. His hand trembled.
“The Garden of Eden.”
Twenty-Four
“We focused on theory at first,” Bob said. He cradled his mug with both hands as he sat back down at the desk. “Using what we could learn from the tunnels’ energy, we developed means of glimpsing into other worlds. Our efforts were slipshod and random, but what we saw…it was beyond imagining. Worlds of ice, and the things that wriggled and swam beneath that ice were the size of cities. Worlds of screaming glass. A world that was nothing but a windowless mansion of endless rooms, and in each dusty room lay an abandoned porcelain doll. Eventually, with a fusion of magic and technology, we built the means to see what waited on the other end of those tomb-tunnels.”
“What did you find?” I said.
His hands tightened around his mug.
“A sword. Twenty feet long and blackened by fire, lying forsaken in an overgrown field. Beyond it, a garden, wild and dense. Not just with plants, no, with…hybrids. An impossible mingling of plant life and human flesh and organs. The garden was abandoned, Mr. Faust. Left to its own devices, left to plummet into a Darwinian nightmare, and every creature springing from that poisoned soil either a predator or a parasite. We watched entire species rise and go extinct in the span of hours. We should have known. We should have known, right then and there, to dynamite the damn tunnels and leave it all alone. The garden wasn’t for us.”
“You’re right,” I said. “You should have.”
“Life, though. Aah, that’s the thing. We were in the business of saving lives, weren’t we? And here we had a source of abundant life and unstoppable fertility.”
I set down my mug.
“Viridithol,” I said, my blood running cold as I pieced the story together. “You reckless, dumb sons of bitches. You put samples of plant life from another f*cking dimension in a drug and fed it to pregnant women. And you were, what, surprised when the kids came out looking like that?”
“It was a tiny sample,” he said, shaking his head. “Just…just the tiniest fraction, given to a small portion of the test group. We thought we had it under control. We were trying to help people.”
“Well, I guess that makes up for everything then.”
Bob stared into his coffee. “We never should have called it Eden. That was hubris. It made us think we were dealing with something benign, something positive, when the truth was right in front of our faces. Whatever the Garden had once been, now it was seething with corruption. Abundant life. It makes me laugh, in retrospect. Mr. Faust, did you know that there’s a medical term for abundant life? For cellular life bursting out of control and running wild.”
The smoke-faced men had asked me the same question. What’s another word for life abundant?
I shook my head. “Don’t know it.”
“Of course you do,” he said, taking a sip of coffee. “It’s called cancer.”
He turned to the laptop and pulled up a file of scanned pages. Florid handwriting filled every inch of each parchment sheet, in French.
“Everything changed when we found the journals,” Bob said. “Have you ever heard of a man named Gilles de Rais?”
I just nodded. He didn’t need to know how or why.
“Mountaineering in the Alps, de Rais discovered the second tunnel,” Bob said. “He was already an accomplished sorcerer, insofar as we can gather, and he began having visions of the Garden. He felt it calling to him, promising him the power of a god.”
“Is that before or after he started killing kids?” I said.
“The visions triggered the killings. He was convinced that he could steal a human’s life force, drain their soul dry, and use that power to turn himself into the Garden’s conduit and master. It was very trial and error, though. Several hundred victims worth of trial and error.”
“Yeah, well,” I said, “that and he really liked murdering people. None of that good old scientific detachment.”
“Exactly,” Bob said. My sarcasm was lost on him. “As we traced his steps, the results from the Viridithol test trials came in. I had misgivings about, well, all of it. I wanted out. Nedry and Clark and the board of directors wanted full steam ahead. That’s when I created my little insurance policy.”
“The smoke-faced men.”
He nodded. “In our early work, we came across a world of absolute silence. An Earth stripped bare of resources, of life, of anything at all, crumbling under a cold and black sun. Lonely creatures walked the wastes, creatures born of entropy. The antithesis of life itself. I created an experimental bridge in my laboratory, coaxed two of them across, and showed them the samples from the Garden. They were on it like bloodhounds. I felt confident that they’d do their best to destroy any further attempts to breach the Garden’s walls. The antimatter to the Garden’s wild matter, you could say.”
“Problem there,” I said, “is you didn’t keep track of them. The name Lauren Carmichael mean anything to you?”
He shook his head, brow furrowed. “No. Should it?”
“There weren’t two tunnels. There were three. She found the third on a dig in Nepal. Your boys showed up to save the day. See, first they pushed Lauren into slaughtering all the witnesses, except for one.”