The Living End (Daniel Faust #3)(75)

“For somebody who’s tripping balls right now,” I said, “you are remarkably lucid.”

“I went to college in Berkeley in the sixties. Trust me, I can swallow down a fistful of Quaaludes and lead a discussion on the themes of Sartre. Angle that standing light my way, would you please?”

I tilted the lamp toward his bench. Bob had a vanity mirror propped up against the wall and a fountain pen in his hand. He leaned his head back, dipped the brassy nub of the pen in a vial of black ink, and carefully traced more glyphs along the skin of his throat. I couldn’t place the symbols. They looked a little like Sanskrit, but that was out of my wheelhouse.

“Seals of protection,” he explained. “Like I said, warding and containment is my specialty. I know how to keep my skin intact when dealing with creatures not of our world.”

“I thought the smoke-faced men were buddies of yours. They called you their father.”

In the mirror, he gave a pained smile. “That was before.”

I gazed across the room. In the center of a block of bare concrete, white chalk marked the curves of a binding seal, a pentacle inside two concentric circles lined with writings in ancient Hebrew. Five white candles, halfway burned down, stood at the points of the star. There wasn’t anything inside the circle, at least nothing I could see.

The side effects of the tea crept up behind me, in the shape of a slowly growing headache and a sudden wave of nausea that made my guts clench.

“You’re feeling it,” Bob said, looking back at me through the mirror as he dipped his pen in the inkwell. “Sorry. This isn’t exactly a recreational drug. Shamanic experiences are rarely joyrides.”

“What I’m feeling,” I said, “is hungover and pissed off. This isn’t even worki—”

I watched as the tip of Bob’s pen touched his throat and left a squiggling black worm in its wake. The glyphs on his skin were alive, subtle but squirming, wanting to break free of the flesh and fly. I watched him in rapt silence, my eyes tracing the faint trails of light that ebbed from the motions of his fingertips.

“Still with me?” he said.

Strange question, my brain said. How could anyone be with anyone? We’re born alone. We die alone. It’s better that way. You disappoint fewer people.

Still, the air between us rippled, and I thought I could pick out the currents of our breaths flowing between our bodies. How many other people’s breaths did I have in my lungs? How many of their molecules were in my body? Weren’t we all together, basically?

I lolled my head to the left. My blood ran cold, and my college-freshman philosophy ran dry. The binding circle wasn’t empty anymore. The creature trapped inside had given up all pretense of playing at a human form. It was a tornado of black smoke, churning and furious, lashing out like a bullwhip at the invisible barriers that caged it. I could feel its emotions, vibrating like discordant music on a half-tuned radio station. Hunger and hate. The urge to consume and consume, until nothing remained but ashes.

“You can see him now,” Bob said. “Good. Let me show you something.”

He held up a test tube, corked on the end, filled with a luminous green goo.

“Concentrated Viridithol,” he said.

He walked over to the binding circle. I was sitting down on the floor. I couldn’t remember sitting down, but it made sense. My legs were woozy, and my head wouldn’t stop pounding.

“Have to be careful with my aim,” Bob said, gesturing at the candles. “This stuff is flammable as hell. Wouldn’t do to break the wards right now. That’d be bad for both of us.”

He threw the flask down. It hit the heart of the circle and cracked, splattering tiny glass shards and rivulets of goo across the concrete. The tornado of smoke hit it like a freight train, blasting down and gusting out over the spill. When the smoke lifted, nothing was left but broken glass. There was no trace that the toxic drug had ever been there, not even a single spilled droplet.

Something was different about the smoke, too. It was a tiny bit lighter, a tiny bit slower. It’s sick, I thought.

“I could kill it right now,” Bob said, walking back to his ink and mirror. “Just drag over the drum and splash in the toxins, a cupful at a time. I was tempted. So tempted. Problem is, to my shame, I could only catch one of the creatures. The other one’s running. He knows that ‘father’ has turned on his loving sons.”

He turned and gave me a sad-eyed smile.

“To my shame,” he said. “I’ve been saying that a lot lately.”

The outline of Bob’s body vibrated like a delicate crystal bell. He moved his hands when he spoke, and they left streamers of light in their wake.

I decided I wanted to get up. My legs wouldn’t listen. They went all noodly on me. Treacherous legs.

“I’m afraid I told you a little white lie, Mr. Faust. There was perhaps a bit more in that tea than I let on. Enough to keep you incapacitated for the next four or five hours. Long enough to finish my work.”

He walked to the back of the derelict lab. Rusty wheels squealed as he came back with a rolling cart. I watched helplessly as he checked the tools he’d prepared ahead of time.

A hacksaw. A blowtorch.

“You’re right, you know,” he said. “It’s my fault. So much of it. The Viridithol trials? I knew what we were doing was wrong. All these years, I told myself it was an accident. That we didn’t know anyone would get hurt. That’s no absolution. Those mutated children, those dead mothers…we did that. I did that.”