by R. L. King
Sykes looked confused. “But—you said she was Forgotten.”
“She’s both,” Jason said.
“How...is that possible?” Prudence asked.
“We’re not sure yet,” Stone admitted. “We’re still working that bit out. But it’s true.”
“Why are you here?” Sykes asked. “This seems a pretty odd place to find folks like you. I’m guessing you must have a reason for being here.”
“We do,” Stone said. “And perhaps you might be able to help us.”
“Help you...how?” Prudence asked, looking a little afraid.
Once again, Stone chose his words with care. “We—have reason to believe that one of the...conduits through which the Evil are entering this world is somewhere in this area.”
The Harmony people stared at him. “Conduit?” Prudence asked. “What do you mean?”
“It’s a bit hard to explain. But we think we know how they’re getting in, and one of the entrances is somewhere near here. We’re trying to locate it.”
Prudence looked frightened. “Why—why would you want to find it?”
“Because we want to shut it down,” Jason said, surprised, in a why else? tone.
There was a long pause. “How many of these—conduits—are there?” Sykes asked at last.
“We think there are two,” Stone told him.
“Where’s the other one?”
“Nowhere near here,” he said. “Right now, we’re focused on the one we’re near. We’ll deal with the other one once we’ve successfully located and sorted out this one.”
Joshua nodded slowly, as if thinking hard. “It might be that we can help you, Mr. Stone. I don’t know. But it’s getting late, and there isn’t anything else we can do tonight. Would you stay with us? We have a guest house that you’ll find comfortable, I think.”
“Thank you. It seems we have little choice at this point, but in any case we’d be honored to accept your hospitality.”
Joshua and Prudence both stood. “Rainey,” Prudence said, “Can you show our guests to where they’ll be staying?” She smiled at the group. “We’re happy to have you all here. I hope you understand—this is all quite a shock for us. We’ve never had anyone like you come to us before. We have to discuss things with the others. I’m sort of—I guess you could call me an administrator, around here, but all our important decisions are made communally. It may take a few days. But believe me, if you’re serious—if you really are a mage, and there’s any chance at all that you might be able to do something about the Darkness, or even the bit of it that’s around here—you’ll have our help.”
“Thank you,” Stone said again.
“Let’s meet in the main hall in the morning,” Joshua said. “We generally rise at dawn and have a welcoming ceremony for the sun before we go off to do our various daily tasks and jobs, but of course we don’t expect you will join us for that—many visitors find getting up that early difficult. We prepare and eat breakfast as a group in the main hall afterward. You can meet us there if you like.” With a wave of farewell, he and Prudence left and closed the door behind them.
“Wow,” Sykes said, shaking his head as he began gathering the empty hot chocolate cups. “And here I was thinkin’ Lester’d just picked up some lost tourists who’d run into some trouble on a bad road. Who knew he’d find—you all.” He dumped the cups in the sink and pulled on his down jacket. “Come on—I’ll drive you to the guest cabin—it’s a little far to walk, especially after you’ve just warmed yourselves up. Let me know if you need anything. Depending on what it is, I might not be able to get it, but you never know if you don’t ask.”
They got in Sykes’s truck and he drove them past the cabins they’d seen when they came in, up a short, narrow road to another small cabin in a little clearing.
“Sorry it’s not fancy,” he said as they unloaded their bags. He pushed open the door and switched on a light. “Nobody’s used it in a while, so it might be a little musty. But there’s some bunks in there, and sleeping bags, and you’ve got running water and a bathroom. Wood’s next to the fireplace. It should be real quiet, but if you have any problems, just go down this road to the last house on the end. That’s Jimmy’s place, and he’ll help you out.” He looked them up and down one last time, as if convincing himself that they really did exist. “I’ll look forward to talking to you more in the morning, and I’m sure the others will too.” He waved and departed.
Stone stood in the doorway and watched his taillights recede down the hill, while Jason limped to the fireplace and began laying a fire. “Well, that was different,” Jason said.
“Indeed,” Stone agreed. “Not at all what I’d have expected. I’m beginning to wonder just how many Forgotten—whatever they happen to call themselves—are around. Possibly more than we suspected.”
Verity looked around the cabin. It was dusty, but otherwise clean. Two bunk beds were arranged at right angles to each other in the opposite corner of the room. She gathered sleeping bags from a pile in the far corner and began unrolling them.
“I didn’t know you could get to be Forgotten from doing too many drugs,” she said while she worked. “I wonder if there are other ways too. That Joshua guy—he’s weird, by the way—said something about spiritual enlightenment bringing you closer to the Gifts. I wonder if that means other people, like artists and really religious people and that kind of thing, could be Forgotten too.”
“No idea,” Jason said, sitting down heavily on one of the bottom bunks. “We should get to sleep, though. If this bunch gets up at dawn to greet the sun, that probably means they eat breakfast early, too.” He sniffed. “It’s gonna be hard enough getting to sleep in a bed that’s giving me a contact high.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
By the time they made it down the hill the following morning, most of the Harmony Farms residents were already in the large main hall building, eating breakfast. The three had taken longer than expected to get there because both Stone and Jason weren’t moving as fast as normal: Stone was mostly fine, just limping a bit, but Jason’s knee remained swollen, and he found it hard to put weight on it. Stone had tried his limited healing abilities on it and improved matters slightly, but Jason was reluctantly forced to make use of a sturdy branch walking stick Verity had found for him in the forest around their cabin. “Great,” he said in disgust. “All I do around here is fight and lift heavy things, and I can’t do either one because my knee’s fucked up.”
Everyone in the hall looked up when the three newcomers entered. Conversations stopped in mid-sentence as the residents craned to get a look at the visitors. Evidently news traveled fast around Harmony Farms.
Rainey Sykes, who had apparently appointed himself their ambassador, hurried over. “Morning,” he said with a broad smile. “Sleep well?”
“Not bad,” Jason said, looking around. All the people staring at him and his friends while trying to look like they weren’t was making him uncomfortable.
“Good, good. C’mon, there’s a table over here, and there’s plenty of food left.” He led them over to a small table off to the side. “Little more privacy over here.”
If Harmony Farms did indeed accommodate around fifty residents, it appeared that most if not all of them were present, seated around various mismatched tables of anywhere from four to ten people each. Jason spotted a tall, rangy guy with a goofy grin chatting with a scruffy-looking mid-30s man in a baseball cap; a twentyish couple with a little long-haired boy; and a slender young woman with hair as short as Verity’s seated with Prudence and a thin, gray-haired man who looked as close as any of this group did to being a little touched in the head. Joshua, the ‘spiritual leader,’ sat near the front of the room alone, his eyes closed as if in meditation.
Altogether Jason noted that most of the Harmony residents were older, with only a handful under thirty. He wondered how many of them had Forgotten powers, and how many of them knew the nature of the three strangers sitting in their midst.
Slowly, people began to get up and filter out. A few stopped at the visitors’ table to welcome them, but most contented themselves with smiles and curious glances from afar.
Sykes came back over carrying a cup of coffee. “Mind if I sit down?”
“Go for it,” Jason said.
He lowered himself with a contented sigh. “Hey, sorry about people lookin’ at you like you’re some kinda zoo animals. Not really much we can do about that—word’s already gotten around that one of you has the Gift, and they’re curious.”
Stone raised an eyebrow. “So, you haven’t told them we’re mages?”
“Not yet. Most of ’em, they don’t really understand that too much. Hell, I don’t really understand it too much. It would be too hard to explain it to the group. We do have some other folks who want to talk to you today, though. Rumors are getting around that you have some plan to stop the Darkness. Naturally that’s got everybody interested.”
“Well,” Stone said, “We don’t have anything else to do today, unless you’d like us to help out with anything to earn our keep.”
“Nah—you’re guests. And I don’t want to hear any more about that.”
“So—” Verity asked, watching more people leaving, “What do you do around here? Farming and raising animals, you said, but what else?”
Sykes shrugged. “All kinds of things. Like I said, we’re pretty much hippies philosophically, but we’re not freeloaders. For example—” he hooked a thumb over his shoulder at the tall goofy guy Jason had spotted earlier “—Spike over there, he runs the bike shop down in Highland. The guy sitting with him is Jimmy—he’s the one you’ll want to talk to about getting your car out of that ditch. And you see the fella over there?” He glanced over toward the guy Jason had identified as not being quite right in the head. “His name’s Wolf. Just Wolf. He’s never told us his real name.”
“And what about you, Mr. Sykes?” Stone asked. “What do you do?”
“Me? I’m a farmer. Corn, wheat, tobacco, a little pot here ‘n’ there—whatever I can grow. When the Gift hit me a few years back, I hooked up with a group that found its way here. The others moved on, but I liked the place, so I stuck around. Been here ever since.”
“What’s your Gift?” Verity asked. “If you don’t mind telling.”
“I find things,” he said. “Here and there, stuff I need. It just kind of turns up.”
Verity grinned. “We know somebody like that. Her name’s Marilee. She’s a bag lady, with a shopping cart full of old tote bags. Sometimes she can pull out useful things she needs from those, even though she doesn’t remember putting them in. She helped us out big-time doing that once.”
Sykes smiled. “Haven’t ever heard of anybody else with something similar,” he said. “What about you? What’s yours?”
She looked at Stone, who shrugged a little and nodded once. “I—uh—you know how the Evil—the Darkness—can possess people and take them over?”
Sykes nodded, his smile fading. “All too well, I’m afraid.”
“Well, I—uh—I can kick ’em out.”
He stared at her. “What do you mean, ‘kick ’em out’?”
“I mean, if they come near me or they’re threatening somebody I care about, I can sort of—push on them with my mind and make them leave the body they’re in.”
Sykes’s stare became a jaw-dropped gape. “You—you can make the Darkness leave a person? Without killing them?”
She nodded. “I take it you guys don’t have anybody who can?”
“We didn’t even know it was possible,” he said, struggling to keep his voice even. “Is it all right if I tell Prudence and Joshua about it?”
Verity shrugged. “Dr. Stone’s in charge. If he says it’s okay, it’s okay. Not that we could really stop you if you wanted to.”
Stone was thinking. “I was hoping that in our travels we might encounter other Forgotten with Verity’s ability, but I’m beginning to think it’s either extremely rare or possibly even unique.” He looked at Sykes. “Do you have any healers here at Harmony?”
“Yeah, one, but he’s not here right now. We have a few folks who get together and follow a couple of bands when they’re in the area—one of ’em’s touring up in the Northeast right now, so he’s out doing that. We don’t expect him back until sometime next month.” Not to be sidetracked, he turned back to Verity. “So—how does it work?” he asked, leaning forward. “How do you do it?”
“I—just do it,” she said. “I haven’t known about it for long—only a month or so, since Dr. Stone used magic to help me deal with my crazy. I can’t really make it happen at will. It has to be somebody coming after me, or threatening somebody else.”
“One at a time, though?”
She nodded. “Yeah. So it’s not much use if a whole crowd of them are after me. But it means I don’t usually have to worry about a single one.”
By now most of the group who’d been lingering over their coffee had left the hall, leaving only Joshua and Prudence, along with a chubby, bearded guy in his early fifties who, despite the weather, was dressed in an ancient Grateful Dead T-shirt that didn’t quite cover his belly and ragged, cutoff denim shorts. A large shaggy mutt lounged on the floor, draped over his sandaled feet. “C’mon,” Sykes said, indicating a larger table. “I think we need to do some more talking.”
Everyone settled around the table. Sykes indicated the chubby man. “This is Gary. He’s kind of our fix-it man around here. Used to do something in the aerospace industry or somethin’ like that years ago until he got sick of the rat race and joined us.”
“Pleasure,” Stone said, nodding. Gary nodded back, his shrewd, narrowed eyes taking the mage’s measure from behind his round glasses. The dog snuffled a couple of times and resumed its spot on Gary’s feet.
Joshua leaned forward, clasping his hands on the table. “We’ve never heard of anyone who would even consider wanting to try to stop the Darkness. We didn’t even have any idea they could be stopped, beyond killing the people they possess, which of course we can’t and won’t do. Please, tell us more about your plans.”
“They want to stop the Darkness?” Gary sighed. “Joshua, you can’t just believe—”
“They’re mages, Gary,” Prudence cut in gently. She nodded toward Stone. “He’s a mage, and the girl is his apprentice—and one of us.”
Still wide-eyed with wonder, Sykes nodded. “And she can kick the Darkness out of the possessed people,” he said, his voice shaking a little. “Without killing them.”
Suddenly Verity was the subject of three stares. “What?” Prudence demanded.
Once again, Verity explained her ability. All four of the Harmony group seemed amazed and disbelieving, Gary more of the latter than the former.
“Have you actually seen any of what these people say they can do in action?” he asked. “A lot of people out there aren’t what they seem to be.” He looked suspicious. “Are we even sure they’re not possessed by the Darkness themselves?”
“They aren’t possessed,” Joshua said, unruffled.
“How do you know?”
“I can feel it,” he said. “I don’t sense any taint of the Darkness on any of them. If you don’t trust me to know that after all this time, then I don’t know how I can convince you.”
Prudence considered. “But Gary is right about one thing, though,” she admitted. She looked at Stone. “You say you’re a mage, but you’ve done nothing to show us that you’re telling us the truth. You’re asking us to trust you—please don’t be offended, but we need to know you aren’t lying to us.”
In answer, Stone glanced over toward the table where the remains of breakfast had been cleared away. The large coffee urn still sat on the end of the table. He concentrated a moment and the urn rose up, flew across the room, and settled itself on the table between them.
Even Gary couldn’t argue with that. “Shit...” was all he said.
Prudence clapped her hands. “You are! I can�
�t believe it! We’ve never even met a real mage before, and now—” She looked at Verity as if expecting her to repeat the performance.
“Sorry,” Verity said. “I’m not really up to levitating things that heavy yet.”
Gary looked serious again. “That’s all good,” he said. “Maybe that means you’ve got a better chance than you would if you weren’t mages. But even so—there are only three of you. Even if we help you—and I’m not sure how we could—there are too many of them. You’d never be able to stop them.”
“Can you tell us more about this conduit you were talking about last night?” Joshua asked. “I still don’t understand.”
Stone took a deep breath. “It’s all speculation at this point,” he said, “but it’s speculation based on some fairly educated guesses. We have reason to believe that somewhere in this area is a—doorway—that the Evil are coming through.”
“Coming through from where?” Gary demanded. “Do you know what they are? Where they come from?”
“Sort of,” Stone said. He sighed, shaking his head. “You’ll have to forgive me—there are parts of this that I’m not at liberty to tell you, and there’s no way around that. To a certain extent you’ll have to just believe me, or not. But—” He looked down at his hands on the table, considering his words. “To simplify things, let’s look at the world like a house with two rooms. The first room is the one we all live in. The second one is where the Evil originates. There’s a door between the two rooms, and normally it’s closed and locked up tight. There’s—for all intents and purposes—no interaction between the Evil and us.
“Because of something that we believe happened a few years ago, though, that door has become—intermittently permeable. Our working theory is that it’s opening randomly, and every time it does, some of the Evil are able to come through into our room before it slams shut again.”
Joshua stared at him. “Are you talking about some kind of—alternate dimension?” he asked in a hushed tone.
“Way to metaphor, Al,” Jason said, patting Stone on the shoulder with a grin.
