In fact, someone with that much strength could probably link to a titan without too much concern, at least if they had some basic dampening gear.
So is it her then? he wondered. Is she the one who’s meant to become a Darklord?
If so, it was clear that she had no idea it was going on, which fit with the god’s claim that she was a victim in this situation—a target. It also made it easy to see why he might want to consider keeping her identity a secret from The Order of Merlin.
She would undoubtedly be classified as a serious threat by The Order. A team would be dispatched to take her into custody. They would study her, test her, question her.
They might keep her prisoner for a very long time. Maybe even forever.
And maybe for good reason…
Darklords were supposedly capable of terrible things. The scariest legend of all was that some Darklords could bring the titan they were linked to out of The Gap and into this world temporarily. Some theorists believed it had happened plenty back in medieval times, that dragons and other horrors really did roam the earth in those days, at least for short periods of time.
But even discounting some of the more outlandish claims, there was plenty of agreement about certain traits of Darklords.
Most who survived the link to a titan were supposedly very different afterward—not really people anymore, unpredictable, driven by beast-like urges, and physically altered to the point where dampening gear couldn’t change them all the way back. Generally, the human personality would linger under the surface, but the titan would be running the show, and titans of all kinds were cruel and bestial. They loved violence and were often bent on dominating the weak.
Of course, this woman, if she could actually teleport, was an uncommonly powerful individual, basically one in a million, and she might be an exception. She might have enough juice to actually resist the influence of a titan and maintain a good portion of her actual personality.
It seemed to Thackery that she probably deserved at least a chance to try, but if he told his bosses about her, they would take her future out of her hands altogether, and that didn’t sit well with him, for a lot of reasons.
Already, in one part of his mind, he had begun to formulate the lies he would tell Enid when he called her. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d painted outside the lines in his years with The Order, and probably wouldn’t be the last.
That was, of course, assuming the theory was correct. It was also possible that the god—or whatever it was—that spoke to him through the pad had been lying. And it was also possible that the woman didn’t even exist. She could have been an illusory manifestation, meant to confuse him, to get him off the trail of the real problem, whatever it might be.
He glanced back at Joe’s house and wondered what to do next.
He thought about calling Enid to start spinning the lies he’d been thinking up, but quickly decided he wasn’t quite ready to do that yet. Once he crossed that line, it would be very hard to go back and ask for help later if he needed it. Cutting himself off from his support structure in a situation like this, purely on the basis of cryptic advice from a being that wouldn’t even name itself, seemed like an impulsive and reckless thing to do.
Then he remembered the spirit’s other supposed reason for contacting him—an ominous warning, something about deadly danger nearby, underground…
…Carry your gun when you descend…
Descend where?
He had seen no sign of a basement entrance in the house.
But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t one.
Maybe he’d missed it. Maybe it was hidden somehow, like a secret chamber.
Malcolm started toward the house to have a quick second look.
If he found a basement, it would mean the god had been right about two things, not just one, which would help legitimize its other statements.
And conversely, if he couldn’t find anything, it would give him more reason to be skeptical.
- - -
The search didn’t go well, and after an hour, he was about ready to throw in the towel.
He had tossed rugs aside, turned furniture over, crawled under the bed, checked every closet, felt along the walls looking for hollow spots or fine cracks that might be secret doors. He measured off rooms with his feet looking for walls that might be thick enough to hide a stairway. He even tried the infrared setting on his See-All to check for warm spots on the floor that might be coming from an underground heat source.
It was all a waste of time.
Eventually, in desperation, he tried the Ouija-Pad again, thinking maybe his mysterious benefactor would return and give him another hint, but all he got was more silence.
He had begun to think that the entity must have either been full of shit, or possibly just toying with him for its own amusement, when he realized he’d forgotten to check something totally obvious.
He walked outside, took out his See-All, and put it into the psi residue mode, then dialed into the frequency range where energy from The Gap would show up.
Immediately, he saw it: a line of red clouds on the ground, leading around the corner of the house and then off to the left.
Like a trail of breadcrumbs…
He started walking that way, cursing his stupidity with every step for taking so long to figure it out.
- - -
The trail ended about 30 feet from the house in a shady spot under a pine tree. At first glance the area looked rather ordinary, but a closer examination revealed an irregularity in the pine needles: it seemed to Malcolm that they looked too neat.
He went over to the spot, dug around with his foot, and wasn’t surprised at all when he uncovered a gleaming sheet of metal about four inches down. A few more minutes of digging uncovered the entirety of the trap-door. It was flat, about six feet across, and made of bright stainless steel. There was a handle recessed into it, much like you would see on a car door, with a little keyhole next to it.
A fallout shelter or something I suppose… Are you down there Joe?
Thackery thought he probably was.
The god had warned that there was danger down there, something he would need to shoot at, presumably a person. And Enid had dreamed of Joe wandering around in some dark place.
Maybe Joe had realized he was about to get busted and decided to hole up down there till things cooled off. Maybe he locked himself in, and got an accomplice to shovel leaves over the entrance and drive his car away to make it look like he took off.
Not a bad plan really, and it might’ve worked. If Joe had somehow managed to stay hidden for a few more weeks the residue trail would’ve faded to nothing.
It seemed like the kind of thing Joe might do. It wasn’t a perfect plan, but Joe wasn’t really all that cunning. He was smart in a bookworm kind of way, and aspired to craftiness, but lacked an ability to think in abstract terms, which often caused him to miss obvious things.
Malcolm bent down, gave the handle a light tug just to test it, and wasn’t surprised to find it locked.
There were tools in the van that would probably get him inside, but it would be a slow, noisy process, and would definitely alert Joe.
There was, of course, another way. It was unpleasant, and seemed a bit like overkill for something as small as busting open a lock, but it would be quieter, and save him a trip hauling tools back from the van.
Bloody hell… Might as well, I guess.
He stood, took a deep breath to steel himself, then quickly slipped the small, silvery ring off the third finger of his left hand, and placed it in a lead-lined box he kept in the right chest pocket of his coat.
Right away, he felt the demon spores that lurked dormant in his body began to stir. It made him tingle and shiver and sweat. There was pain, too: all over his skin, and in his bones, and in his organs.
After about 30 seconds of exquisite suffering, he felt a certain tightness in the skin of his face, and knew the change was on him fully.
Anyone s
eeing him at that moment would have noticed a subtle difference in his appearance. He was slightly more hawk-faced, his eyes tilted upward at the corners, his skin somewhat pallid.
He sniffed the air, and he could smell life itself: the vital energy left behind by all creatures as they moved through the world.
The smell made him hungry.
He reached into a hidden coat pocket under his right arm, and took out a whitish wad of goo. It looked like dough, only it shimmered slightly, and if you gazed close enough at it, for long enough, you would begin to see into it, to the core of it, and soon you would realize there was something alive in there, something awake, something moving.
The stuff was the very essence of life, left behind everywhere as a waste product of spent emotions, distilled down to a solid resin that you could carry around with you.
The traditional term for it was mana, sometimes spelled manna, depending on which mythology you were consulting. Malcolm had gathered this batch at a wedding party a few months ago and had only used a little of it so far.
You could do a lot of things with mana. You could eat it, for example. It was perfectly nutritious, better for you than most things, and Malcolm went ahead and ate some now, tearing off a little hunk, and putting it in his mouth to calm the sudden hunger that had come over him when the spores first activated.
He felt tingles of pleasure run through him as soon as the taste hit his tongue. It was a soothing sort of taste, savory and warm, and he let the stuff dissolve there for a while. Almost immediately the emotions locked inside the mana began to seep into his consciousness: euphoria, love, nostalgia, a touch of sadness, hints of jealousy.
He tore off another piece, like breaking off a hunk from a raw biscuit, and held it up in front of his face on an open palm. He stared down at the stuff, seeing into it, letting himself fall inside, deeper and deeper.
And then he spoke to it, not with words, but with directed thoughts that were so sharp they functioned like a special, secret language, conveying his instructions in the clearest, most concrete way possible.
He felt the manna grow warm in his palm, then it began to lose its substance, shrinking away to nothing in a matter of seconds.
At about the same time, something appeared in the air, barely visible, like a tiny thread made of light, coiling towards the lock on the the trap-door.
A moment later, he heard a click.
Good, he thought, only had to use a little bit.
Malcolm started to put the remaining wad of mana away, then he thought of something else he ought to do first, so he ripped off another, slightly larger, piece, and looked deep into it until he felt it touch his mind.
When he finished, it evaporated in his hand quickly and became a thread of light that immediately started swirling around him, so tiny and fast that it was barely visible to the naked eye.
This thread was tasked with the job of trying to protect him. It certainly wouldn’t be able to stop a bullet—that would’ve taken the whole wad at least, maybe more—but it might flash in an enemies eyes and make him miss, or nudge a gun aside, or make a bad guy trip at a key moment. There was no telling, really—mana always had a mind of its own. This batch was mostly composed of positive emotions, so it probably wouldn’t do anything overtly violent. Mana that came from negative feelings like anger and hate and fear was often more direct and ruthless in the way it dealt with things, but you couldn’t trust it not to turn on you unless you formulated your intentions with great care. He had some dark mana in another pocket, gathered from the energy left at a murder scene, and it was incredibly potent stuff, but he preferred not to use it in situations like the current one for fear that it might intentionally sabotage him, or worse, do exactly what he wanted in some sort of needlessly violent way.
And regardless, this should probably be sufficient if Joe was the one waiting for him down there. Malcolm found it very difficult to summon much fear of the man, despite the god’s warning. Joe was a crook, but he was no fighter.
In fact, if it came to violence Malcolm thought he would try to avoid mortally wounding Joe if he could; he had a whole bunch of questions on his mind at the moment and Joe, if he didn’t end up dead, might be able to answer most of them.
Thackery looked down at his remaining manna. He’d used about a quarter of it altogether, which wasn’t bad. He hated to waste the stuff—gathering it was a fairly taxing process, and not one he looked forward to.
He put the clump back in his pocket, then retrieved his dampening ring from the shielding box, and returned it to his finger.
This triggered another round of shivering and pain as the spores inside him went back to sleep. This time the discomfort was slightly worse than when he’d taken the ring off, and he had to lean against the tree to keep from stumbling.
After about a minute, he felt the skin on his face loosen up, and knew the worst of it was over. Now all he had to do was take a few moments to regain his composure. He felt dizzy. Sweat covered his body, and his limbs were trembling from weakness.
The process of initializing and dampening demon spores was an uncomfortable experience for anyone, but it was especially bad for Malcolm because the spores he carried were almost too strong for him.
They served as a link to a powerful demon called Heedootan who had been associated with his family for hundreds of years, apparently due to some exchange of favors or a blood oath or something like that.
Malcolm had only been 13 when he was first given Heedootan’s spores, and the process nearly killed him. His father and uncle had tested his blood to make sure he could survive it beforehand, and they’d known it would be a narrow thing, but decided to do it anyway because family tradition demanded it. He recalled the experience of infusion the way you would recall an especially vivid nightmare. There had been days and days of writhing in his bed, enduring unspeakable agony, his mind swarming with strange impulses as his body struggled to find equilibrium.
Then one day he woke up and found that it was suddenly all over. The process only took about a week, but it had felt more like a month.
Now, every time he put his dampening ring back on, he went through that same experience again on a smaller scale, and the more time he spent with the ring off before replacing it, the worse it was. If he left it off for more than a few hours, he often needed bed rest to fully recover.
Today he’d only used the spores for about three minutes altogether, so it only took another minute or so before the trembling and weakness in his limbs faded, and he felt as good as new.
After that, he figured he might as well go ahead and take care of Joe—he’d found that hesitation was only good for tying yourself up in knots in a dangerous situation.
He drew his gun, approached the entrance, and knelt, positioning himself sidelong to make a smaller target, holding the weapon at the ready in his right hand, prepared to blast away if he had to, hoping he wouldn’t.
He slipped the fingers of his free hand under the lip of the handle and gave a quick tug.
The door came up very easily; so easy, in fact, that it surprised him at first, and then he realized there were two air pistons built into the mechanism, assisting with the lift and holding the hatch open as he raised it, just like you’d see on a modern car’s trunk.
He’d been halfway expecting to find Joe waiting there for him with a shotgun or something, but instead he found a set of concrete stairs leading down into darkness with walls made of unpainted block on either side. The air coming out of the opening wasn’t cool like you would expect from a basement; it actually felt a little warmer than the outside air, and there was a terrible odor wafting up—like lemons mixed with human waste.
The lemon part was particularly unsettling. The smell was wrong somehow.
It occurred to him then that he would be an easy target for someone standing down there in the dark looking up, and he quickly backed away from the edge for a moment to consider his options. He had noticed a light switch built into the left wall, pla
ced within easy reach so that someone could flick it on before descending, but he wasn’t sure whether or not he wanted to use it. He didn’t like the way he felt looking down into that blackness, and it would obviously be foolish to stumble around in the dark, but turning on the light would make him an especially easy target for anybody that might be waiting down there.
Luckily, there was another viable option. His See-All had a very effective night-vision mode, and while it was a little inconvenient to use alongside a gun, the ability to see in the dark might give him a potentially decisive tactical advantage if there was an adversary waiting for him down there.
He took his See-All out to let it warm up, a process that took about 15 or 20 seconds. Once it was ready, he turned the dial, setting it to the dark-sight mode, then crept back up to the edge to take a quick peek.
The entrance viewed through the lens looked sort of like someone had turned on a fluorescent light somewhere—there was no green tinting or any other visual distortion that you would get with conventional night vision equipment. The stairs descended about 30 feet, and there was a plain concrete floor at the bottom. There was no sign of a person down there, but he couldn’t see very far into the chamber either. Someone could easily be waiting just out of sight with a weapon, or there could be some kind of booby trap, or god knew what else.
He raised the See-All and positioned it right up in front of his eyes so it could function almost like a set of goggles, then held his gun outstretched in the other hand to stare down the sights through the lens. It was a fairly awkward position, but also the only practical way to use the See-All and a gun at the same time.
He noticed then that his gun hand was trembling slightly, which surprised him—he was usually a pretty cool customer in dangerous situations.
It’s that goddamn smell… It’s not lemons. It's something else, and there’s something off about it.
The DARK Trilogy: Titan's Song Chronicles Volume 1 (Books 1 - 3) Page 8
