Marah Chase and the Fountain of Youth

by Jay Stringer

  “I agree.”

  “And the original recipe for Dosa Cola had cocaine in it. We all know that story. They spin their history as selling a cheap drink to poor communities as a health remedy, but you don’t need to squint all that much to see it as a bunch of racists selling cheap drugs to workers and immigrants to keep them addicted and controllable.”

  Chase’s head went boom at that one. How had she never made the connection? It was true, a good PR person can change history.

  “Wow,” Hass said, giving voice to what Chase was feeling.

  Eades nodded. “I’d been sniffing around Dosa, but like I said, I didn’t want to just come out and ask Lauren, because then she’d know I was on to her. So I was trying to go the long way round, talked to my ex some more, did a bunch of interviews, tried asking questions that got what I wanted without being obvious. That’s when things started to get crazy.”

  Hass laughed. “Because a hundred-year-old secret Nazi cult disguised as a soda company wasn’t already crazy enough.”

  “Yeah. True. I’ve been deep in this for so long, it just all seems normal now. But it does get crazier. See, I heard that the Stanford family had always been obsessed with the Fountain of Youth. And that chimed—I was sure Lauren had mentioned it a few times at uni. So I figured, pretend not to be working on the Nazi stuff, start working on the Fountain, and maybe that’s a way to get to Lauren.”

  “Smart.”

  Eades winced. “Ninety percent stupid. That’s when I remembered my new grandpa, James Gilmore. Because he kept talking about being a soldier from the 1800s and saying he’d been drinking water that kept him young. I always just nodded and smiled because why would I think anything of it? He was just a senile old guy. But I started going back to see him again, and kept bringing the conversation around to his past. The more I stepped into his world with him, the more he opened up and talked about it.”

  Eades paused as lights flashed in the window. They heard a car outside. Hass jumped to his feet and moved to the edge of the window, watching what was happening.

  “Someone turning,” he said. “We’re okay.”

  He stayed where he was, though, keeping watch.

  It took a few seconds for Eades to get back on the subject after the interruption, her still waiting for someone to come. At last, she started again. “But James never once talked about the Fountain of Youth. He kept talking about a valley, and a mountain, and a river, and water that kept him young. And it was confusing; sometimes he’d say it was paradise, and he wanted to go back, and other times he’d be talking as if it was this horrible place he’d escaped from. Then, the last time I visited him, he finally said the name.”

  “Eden,” Chase supplied.

  “Eden. He said he’d been in the Garden of Eden.”

  They sat in silence for a full minute after that, Eades lost in memories and Chase swamped in new thoughts. Hass kept one eye outside.

  Finally, Hass said, “He mentioned a mountain?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He say anything about it?”

  “He called it Moon Mountain.”

  Hass turned to face them, giving Chase a look that was clearly supposed to carry a message, but she wasn’t sure yet what it was.

  “The Mountains of the Moon,” he said, “were an old myth. They were said to be the source of the Nile, and a lot of explorers went looking for them, including Henry Morton Stanley.”

  Now Chase understood what the look had meant. The connections were all coming together.

  “Stanley picked up where Dr. Livingstone failed and confirmed the White Nile started at Lake Victoria and the Rwenzori Mountains,” Hass continued. “The idea of the Mountains of the Moon faded after that. The Rwenzoris didn’t fit the other aspects of the legend, but Westerners started to figure it was just a legend.” Hass nodded at Eades. “If your new grandpa was the same man as the old photo, he was a deserter—part of a regiment that went looking for the Mountains of the Moon. His whole regiment abandoned their posts to go searching for treasure there. Stanley mentioned mountains in the west of Punt, described them the same way the deserters were talking about the Mountains of the Moon.”

  Chase leaned forward. “Have you ever heard about these Punt mountains?”

  Hass came back to sit with them, shaking his head. “No. Not until I read Stanley’s book. One other thing, and I can’t believe I’m even thinking this, but Eden is mentioned in the book, too. General Gordon thought he’d found Eden in the Seychelles. Not anywhere near Punt, no mention of the Mountains of the Moon. But it got a mention. The whole thing seems…” Hass trailed off.

  Chase nodded. “Yeah.”

  “He didn’t say mountains,” Eades said. “Plural. He only ever said it in singular. He was talking about one mountain and one valley.”

  Chase put her hand up, emphasizing the point she was about to make. “Hypothetically. Let’s say there is a place, this valley, this mountain. Let’s say it’s real. And let’s say the water is real, too. A spring, or a well, or a river.” She paused again, letting the ideas line up in her mind. “The Garden of Eden is biblical, but it comes from older myths—the Sumerians, I think. Maybe older, a relic of something passed down. But it doesn’t seem to have come via Egypt, because they had separate creation myths. And they, at least for a time, believed their people were descended from Punt.”

  She looked to Hass, who nodded.

  “But water was important to them,” she said. “We’ve always assumed it was because of the Nile, a culture that grew up along the river, seeing it as the source of life.” She paused, looked to Hass again, part of her still not believing she was about to say this out loud. “So what if this all comes from the same place? One place that passed into cultural memory and became Punt to the Egyptians and Eden to the Sumerians, and many other things to other people, including the Fountain of Youth?”

  Hass smiled, nodding. “Punt and Eden. The Garden and the Fountain are the same place.”

  Eades wanted to take back control of the conversation. “I let it be known to a few people that I was working on a story about the Fountain of Youth, that I maybe had something solid. Word got to Lauren Stanford, I guess. We met, and I told her about James, and she seemed hooked. We arranged to meet up again to talk more about it. I thought I could get her to work with me on searching for the Fountain, or fund me on a trip, and then I could use that time to dig into her Nazi connection. Next thing, there’s a woman talking to me on the street in London saying that Lothar Caliburn is going to kill me, and then I got home, and…”

  Her words died off in a choking sound. Chase leaned forward and touched her knee. She didn’t need the rest. Eades had gotten home and found Bobby dead and, in her shock, had made the gut decision to trust Mason. That had been the night Ashley Eades died.

  “My turn,” Chase said. “You guessed I was working. I was hired by Stanford.”

  Eades’s face twisted in shock, anger.

  “You know me, I’m on your side,” Chase hurried to add. “We”—she gestured at Hass—“are on your side. Stanford gave me the whole speech about healthcare and how finding the Fountain would be the cure to all our problems. But I wasn’t buying it. I had no interest. She hooked me with you. Told me about Bobby. Told me you’d gone missing. She knew that would get me. I came here to make sure you were safe.”

  “Well, hey.” Eades’s voice shook, clearly rattled. “As you can see, I’m totally safe.”

  “And we still have a load of questions. Why would she risk bringing me in? Why do they really want to find”—Chase paused; saying it was still a big hurdle to jump—“Eden? And what will she do now that I’ve found you? Wait…”

  Chase looked down at her messenger bag. She opened it up and pulled out the tablet Ted had given her, full of Stanford’s research on the Fountain. She remembered how she’d been given it. Right after the attack, seconds after a stranger had planted the seed in her mind, questioned her about the Fountain. Then Ted shows up to save he
r and, oh, by the way, here’s an electronic device. She had so casually accepted that Conte would plant tracking software on the files he sent her, but she had been too distracted to even think of Stanford.

  Eades met her eyes. “She gave you that, didn’t she?”

  Chase nodded. “We need to destroy this. And get moving.”

  Eades stood and left the room. Chase and Hass sat in silence, waiting. Had Eades gone to cry? To get drinks? To creep out the back door, leaving these weirdos to their private little war?

  She came back in carrying a bulging messenger bag of her own.

  Chase nodded at it. “Go-bag?”

  “Yeah.” She dropped down into the seat. “It’s funny. I’ve run all these scenarios hundreds of times. Like, someone coming for me when I’m in bed, and I hear a noise, need to run. I’d figured out a way down the outside of the building that might work. Or I’d be on the street outside, spot someone looking at me a little too long, and just keep on walking.”

  “What was your plan for where to go after that?”

  Eades shrugged. “Didn’t have one. Starting a whole new life feels impossible until you’ve already done it. I love it here, but if I need to, I can just move on, be someone else. I already have a different name; I can just get another.”

  “I’m sorry for all the crap you’ve been through.” Chase surprised herself at how genuine she sounded. It was real. Eades’s life had been ruined, and sitting here now, Chase really got a sense of how much trouble she’d caused.

  Eades leaned back into the ripped leather armchair and let out a long breath. “Honestly, it’s not your fault. It’s mine. You were just a cool new thing for me to glom on to. I used you.” She paused, stared at the wall for a moment. “I used a lot of people. Got burned.” She paused again. “I was using Bobby.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I mean, I loved him, but I was using him, too.”

  Chase touched Eades’s knee again. They still needed information, but she hoped she pitched her tone right. “Did you find out who Caliburn is?”

  Eades swallowed a couple of times. Nodded. “I got a look at the man who killed Bobby. I didn’t tell anyone. Didn’t tell your friend.” She met Chase’s eyes for a second, then looked down at her feet. “I saw him coming out of the building, and I don’t know how I knew, but I just did. Even going in, it felt wrong, seeing this stranger. I was scared for Bobby. Then when I… when he was… I just knew I’d seen the man who did it.”

  “Was he somebody you knew?”

  “Never seen him before, or since. But I’ll never forget him.”

  Hass was still focused on the bigger issue. “Did Gilmore give you anything else about the location?”

  “He drew a map.”

  Chase leaned forward, all thoughts of tact and moderation gone. “Do you have it? Can we see it?”

  Eades looked down at her feet. “It wouldn’t make any sense. It was just something out of Tolkien—none of the names related to anything real. And he didn’t put anything to show what country it was in. He said nobody should go there.”

  “Why?” Hass said. “If it’s Eden, why not go back? Why leave in the first place?”

  “This might be hard to believe, but an old man with dementia didn’t always make sense,” Eades replied. “He said Eden didn’t want him anymore, that the ground spit him out. Another time he said Eden wasn’t for us. He said it was protected.”

  “Stanley’s version of the Mountains of the Moon,” Hass said, “included evil spirits who guarded the mountain.”

  Chase thought back to the island in Lake Tana and the blind swordsmen with weapons fashioned to sound like wind, and the ancient security traps she’d encountered in Alexander’s tomb. “Legends like that can mean anything.”

  “Agreed, but they also usually mean something.”

  Chase turned back to Eades. “Why not go looking for Eden yourself with all this information?”

  Eades shook her head, smiled like Chase had said the dumbest thing. “Why would I? It was all just some story from an old man who made no sense. I was only using it to get to Lauren. And even if I believed it, how would I do it? I’m not you or Lauren. I can’t just wake up one day and decide to go on a mad quest to a faraway place, for a thing that might not exist. I wake up each morning and worry about breakfast, then getting to work, and then if today is the day someone tries to kill me.”

  Eades had dodged a question, and Hass had apparently noticed that, too. “You didn’t answer,” he said. “Can we see it?”

  Chase watched Eades’s reaction. It was like she’d just been caught in a lie. “You still have it, don’t you?”

  Eades leaned back in the seat and rubbed her forehead. She sighed and said something to herself, muffled, that sounded like “okay.” She got up a second time and left the room again, coming in a moment later with a piece of paper. She closed each laptop on the desk to make a flat surface and unfolded the document to its full A4 size.

  “It’s all I had to remember him by when I ran.”

  Chase and Hass both leaned in to look. Chase understood Eades’s Tolkien reference right away. She remembered an old green hardcover copy of The Hobbit her mother had stolen from the school library when she was young, with a map on the inside of the front cover. This was drawn much the same, but with less precision and detail. There were no edges to the map, nothing that could be used to give a wider context of geographical borders. Mostly it was drawn in faded pencil, but Gilmore had colored in a few sections with crayon, giving it the look of a child’s school drawing. There was a large circle in the upper left, filled in blue, labeled The Queen’s Garden. The writing was also childlike, a scrawl that spoke to Gilmore’s mental state when he drew the map. Parallel to the garden, off to the far right of the drawing, were two notches, something like a doorway or two pillars, with the words Gateway to Hell written between them. The largest feature of the map, drawn slightly off-center near the bottom, was another large circle. This one was lightly shaded brown. There were lines running off it, spreading outward. This large feature was labeled The Impossible Mountain.

  “That’s Moon Mountain,” Eades said. “He was very clear about that when he drew it. In conversation, he always used the Moon Mountain name, but then on the map he called it Impossible Mountain. I asked him why, but he just shrugged.”

  There were two lines close together coming off the north of the mountain, winding like a river, but he’d shaded in the space between them red. The lines converged at the end, and there was a crude image of some green trees and a white four-legged creature, like a lion or a wolf.

  “What’s this?”

  “That’s the valley.” Eades shrugged. “That’s where he said he’d lived. So, Eden, I guess.”

  “And this?” Chase pointed to the lion.

  “He didn’t tell me, but he’d already said the area was guarded, so…”

  Chase tried to think of anywhere she knew in Ethiopia or Somalia that had any known species of animal that fit the bill, or a mythic creature that might have been inspired by the image.

  Chase opened her mouth to speak but paused. She looked at Hass. Yes, he’d heard it, too. A noise outside. Near the window.

  “That’s him,” Eades shouted.

  A second later someone tried the front door. The handle didn’t turn because of the lock, but they all heard the attempt. There was a bang, followed by a cracking sound as someone shot the window. It was followed by the sound of a second solid connection and smashing as the glass gave out.

  A grenade landed on the floor.

  TWENTY-NINE

  The small black flash grenade skidded across the floor. The impact on the glass had taken the force out of the throw. Hass and Chase both moved fast. Hass lifted the table by the nearest leg, sending the laptops crashing across the room, and tipped it on its side, positioning it as a barrier between them and the device. Chase grabbed Eades and pulled her to the floor, having just enough time to shout, “Close eyes.” />
  WHUMP.

  Even with her eyelids screwed shut, Chase could see the bright flash of light fill the room. Blotches and patterns danced across her eyes in the darkness. Her hearing went out completely. She didn’t so much hear the explosion as feel the absence of it. One second, she could hear everything that was happening, and the next, there was silence. Slowly, a distant ringing was the only thing to penetrate the fog. She felt movement beside her and opened her eyes. The patterns were still there, obscuring her vision, but they faded as she blinked.

  Hass was already up and moving.

  A shape filled the window. Someone climbing in. Through spotty vision Chase watched as a small wiry guy with cropped hair got half in before Hass grabbed him. They fell to the floor together in a twisting, fighting tangle of limbs. The small guy had a gun, but Hass grabbed for it, stopping him from taking aim.

  Hass called something out. Chase almost heard it. The sound formed in her head, but had it come in through her ears? Had it made it all the way through this wave of nausea she was feeling? As she looked, he shouted again, his mouth forming the word she thought she’d heard.

  “Go.”

  “Back door.”

  Chase looked down. Eades was on the floor beneath her, clearly struggling with the same inability to hear, but she’d been the one to speak. Probably? Maybe? Everything was still off-kilter.

  “Back door,” Eades said. Chase wondered if this was the second time, or if there was a time delay on the first. Had she heard it before Eades said it? That wasn’t possible. Why was she—?

  Hass’s and Eades’s words finally combined in her mind into an urgent thought.

  Go. Back door.

  She climbed to her feet, not feeling steady, and pulled Eades up after her. Eades led the way though a small kitchen and washroom to the back door. They were both out into the early-morning air before Chase’s brain was working enough to realize they’d fallen for the oldest tactic in the book. The frontal assault was a diversion. Chase took a punch to the face, falling back against the house and hitting her head. Her mind went cloudy again.