The Long Way Down (Daniel Faust #1)(69)

I rested my palms on the table, casting a quick look at the orderly loitering by the door and keeping my voice low.

“I’ll lay it on the line for you, Doctor. We need to know everything you can tell us about Lauren Carmichael and the expedition to Nepal.”

A pained look crossed his face and he shook his head. “Oh, no, it was so long ago. So very long ago. I’m sure I can’t remember.”

He was a lousy liar, but I didn’t blame him. The haunted look in his eyes told me to go easy.

“Please,” I said. “I know you’ve seen some bad stuff. I know it left scars. You don’t want to go back there, and I don’t want to make you. Thing is, she’s hurting people, innocent people. She’s gotta be stopped.”

He laughed, a wheezing choke that turned into a wet, hacking cough. He put his hand to his mouth, catching his breath.

“You’ll just end up like me,” he said.

“You tried to stop her?”

“Didn’t try hard enough,” Eugene said, his gaze going distant. “If I’d known, if I’d known what she was capable of…no. I still would have been too late. I was delusional and in love.”

“She was your student,” Caitlin said, and he nodded.

“It happens on every campus, I suppose. Usually lecherous old professors and nubile coeds looking for an easy A. Lauren and I, though, that was different. She was brilliant, the brightest student I’d ever had, and the most ambitious. I tutored her late into the night, and soon she was sharing my bed.”

“So she was using you,” Caitlin said.

“No, no,” he said. “Well, not entirely. She did have feelings for me. I have proof of that.”

“How do you know?” she asked.

“Because she let me live.”

“Doctor,” I said, “what happened in Nepal?”

He sighed. “You don’t understand. I can’t talk about it. She won’t let me.”

“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



We 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.