The Third Gate (12 page)

Logan took a deep breath and stifled this sudden reaction; he had long ago learned that his sensitive gift had the capacity to produce either scorn or fear in others. He concentrated on listening to the conversations around him.

“Christ!” Valentino was saying. “The auxiliary tank!” The chief turned and shouted at one of the men on Jet Skis. “Rogers, quick—go uncouple and float that aux tank free before the heat ignites it!”

The man nodded, put down his hose, and moved his Jet Ski into position on the far side of the generator. But just as he was reaching toward the tank with a boat hook, a massive explosion sent a cloud of thick smoke roiling toward them. The walkway trembled violently, and Logan was knocked to his knees. As he rose to his feet again, he could hear a desperate, ragged screaming. The smoke began to clear and he made out the figure of Rogers. The man was coated in burning diesel, his clothes and hair afire. As a half-dozen workers jumped into the swamp and began swimming toward him, he writhed—screaming—off his Jet Ski and began to sink, still afire, beneath the brown and murky surface of the Sudd.

16

Oasis was the name of the Station’s lone watering hole. Half canteen, half cocktail lounge, it was located in a far corner of Blue, overlooking the vast, bleak expanse of the Sudd. And yet, Logan noticed as he entered the bar, the windows facing the swamp were covered with bamboo blinds, as if to obscure, rather than emphasize, the fact they were smack in the middle of nowhere.

The lounge was dark, lit indirectly in blue-and-violet neon, and almost empty. Logan wasn’t surprised. In the wake of the generator fire, the mood of the Station had grown subdued. There were no bridge games that evening, no merry chatter in the mess. Most people had retreated to their quarters, as if to deal with what had happened in solitude.

Logan felt just the opposite. The overwhelming sense of pervasive evil he had felt as the generator collapsed in flames had alarmed
and unnerved him. His empty lab, his quiet room—these were the last places he wanted to be at the moment.

He walked up to the bar and took a seat. Charlie Parker was playing from invisible speakers. The bartender—a young man with short dark hair and a
Sgt. Pepper
mustache—came over.

“What can I get you?” he asked, placing a crisp cocktail napkin on the bar.

“Got any Lagavulin?”

With a smile, the man gestured toward an impressive array of single-malt scotches on the mirrored wall behind him.

“Great, thanks. I’ll take it neat.”

The bartender poured a generous dram into a glass and placed it on the napkin. Logan took a sip, admiring the heft of the heavy-bottomed glass, enjoying the peaty taste of the scotch. He took a second sip, waiting for the sharp memory of the fire, the smell of burnt flesh, to ease just a little. Rogers had suffered third-degree burns over 25 percent of his body: he’d been evacuated, of course, but the nearest burn center was hundreds of miles away and his prognosis was guarded.

“Buy a girl a drink?”

He looked over and saw that Christina Romero had entered the bar and taken a seat beside him.

“That’s a good question. Can I?”

“This isn’t the woman who reamed you out earlier. This is an upgrade. Christina Romero, release two point zero.”

Logan chuckled. “All right. In that case, I’d be happy to. What’ll you have?”

She turned to the bartender. “Daiquiri, please.”

“Frozen?” the bartender asked.

Romero shuddered. “No. Shaken, straight up.”

“You got it.”

“Shall we move to a table?” Logan asked. When Romero nodded, he led the way to a table near the wall of windows.

“There’s something I want to say up front,” she told him as they sat down. “I’m sorry about being such a bitch, back in my office.
People always tell me I’m arrogant, but I usually don’t parade it around like that. I guess, your being pretty famous and all, I wanted to appear like I wasn’t in awe. I overdid it. Big-time.”

Logan waved a hand. “Let’s forget it.”

“I’m not trying to make excuses. It’s just—you know—the stress. I mean, nobody talks about it, but we haven’t found a damn thing yet in two weeks of digging. I’ve got a couple of major league a-holes to deal with here. And then, these—these strange goings-on. People seeing things, equipment malfunctioning. And now this fire, what happened to Rogers.” She shook her head. “It gets on your nerves after a while. I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.”

“That’s okay. You can pay the bar tab.”

“It’s free,” she said with a laugh.

They sipped their drinks.

“Did you always want to be an Egyptologist?” Logan asked. “I wanted to be one myself, as a kid, after seeing
The Mummy
. But then—when I learned how hard it was to read hieroglyphics—I lost interest.”

“My grandmother was an archaeologist—but then, you already knew that somehow. She worked on all sorts of digs, everywhere from New Hampshire to Nineveh. I always idolized her. I guess that’s part of it. But what really gave me the bug was King Tut.”

Logan looked at her. “King Tut?”

“Yup. I grew up in South Bend. When the King Tut expedition came to the Field Museum, my whole family drove to Chicago to see it. Oh, my God. My parents had to tear me away. I mean, the death mask, the golden scarabs, the treasure hall. I was only in fourth grade, and it haunted me for, like, months. Afterward I read every book about Egypt and archaeology I could get my hands on.
Gods, Graves, and Scholars
; Carter and Carnarvon’s
Five Years’ Explorations at Thebes
—you name it. I never looked back.”

She grew more animated as she spoke, until her green eyes practically flashed with excitement. She wasn’t pretty, exactly, but she had a kind of inner electricity, and a refreshing candor, that Logan found intriguing.

She finished her cocktail with a mighty slug. “Your turn.”

“Me? Oh, I became interested in history my freshman year at Dartmouth.”

“Don’t be evasive. You know what I’m talking about.”

Logan laughed. It wasn’t something he usually talked about. But, after all, she had sought him out, apologized. “I guess it started when I spent the night in a haunted house.”

Romero signaled the bartender for another drink. “This isn’t going to be bullshit, is it?”

“Nope. I was twelve. My parents were away for the weekend, and my older brother was supposed to look after me.” Logan shook his head. “He looked after me, all right. He dared me to spend the night in the old Hackety place.”

“The old, haunted Hackety place.”

“Right. It had been empty for years, but all the local kids said a witch lived there. People talked about strange lights at midnight, about how dogs avoided the place like the plague. My brother knew how stubborn I was, how I could never resist a dare. So I took a sleeping bag and a flashlight, and some paperbacks my brother gave me, and I went down the street to the deserted house and sneaked in a first-floor window.”

He paused, remembering. “At first it seemed like a breeze. I laid out the sleeping bag in what had been the living room. But then it got dark. And I started to hear things: creaks, groans. I tried to distract myself by looking into the books my brother gave me, but they were all ghost stories—it figures—and I put them aside. That was when I heard it.”

“What?”

“Steps. Coming up from the basement.”

The cocktail arrived, and Romero cradled it in her hands. “Go on.”

“I tried to run, but I was petrified. I couldn’t even stand up. It was all I could do to switch on the flashlight. I heard the footsteps move slowly through the kitchen. Then a figure appeared in the doorway.”

He took a sip of scotch. “I’ll never forget what I saw in the gleam of that flashlight. A crone, white hair wild and flying in all directions,
her eyes just hollows in the glare. My heart felt like it was going to explode. She started walking toward me. And then I started to cry. It was all I could do not to wet my pants. She stretched out a withered hand. That’s when I knew I was going to die. She’d hex me, and I’d just shrivel up and die.”

He paused.

“Well?” Romero urged.

“I didn’t die. She took my hand, held it in hers. And suddenly I—I
understood
. It’s … it’s hard to explain. But I realized she wasn’t a witch. She was just an old woman, lonely and scared, hiding in the basement, living on tap water and canned food. It was as if I could … I could
feel
her fear of the outside world, feel her miserable existence in the cold and dark, feel her pain at having lost everyone she cared about.”

He finished his drink. “That was it. She retreated into the dark. I rolled up my sleeping bag and went home. When my parents got back, I told them what happened. My brother got grounded for a month, and the cops checked out the Hackety place. She turned out to be Vera Hackety, a mentally handicapped woman whose family had been taking care of her. Her last surviving relative had died eighteen months before. She’d been living in the basement ever since.”

He looked at Romero. “But a funny thing happened. Something about that encounter changed me. I became fascinated by tales of real-life ghosts, of haunted mansions and treasures with curses, and Bigfoot, and everything else you can imagine. And one of those books—the ghost stories my brother had so thoughtfully given me to scare me even worse—turned out to be a book by E. and H. Heron called
Flaxman Low, Occult Psychologist
. It was a book of stories about a supernatural sleuth.”

“A supernatural sleuth,” Romero repeated.

“That’s right. A kind of Sherlock Holmes of the spirit realm. As soon as I finished that book, I knew what I wanted to do with my life. Of course, it usually isn’t a full-time job—hence the professorship.”

“But how did you develop your—your skills?” Romero asked. “I mean, there aren’t exactly any graduate courses in enigmalogy.”

“No. But there are lots of treatises on the subject. That’s where being a medieval historian comes in handy.”

“You mean, like the
Malleus Maleficarum
?”

“Exactly. And many others, even older and more authoritative.” He shrugged. “As with anything else, you learn by doing.”

The skeptical look began to creep back into Romero’s face. “Treatises. Don’t tell me you believe all that stuff about familiars and astrology and the philosopher’s stone.”

“Those are just Western European examples you mention. Every culture has its own supernatural apparatus. I’ve studied just about all that have been documented—and some that haven’t. And I’ve analyzed the elements they have in common.” He paused. “What I believe is that beyond the natural, visible world there are elemental forces—some good, others evil—that always have and always will exist in counterpart to ourselves.”

“Like a curse on a mummy’s tomb,” Romero said. She pointed at Logan’s glass. “How many of those did you have before I got here?”

“Think of atoms or dark matter: we can’t see them, but we know they exist. Why not elemental beings—or creatures we simply haven’t yet encountered? Or, for that matter, forces we simply haven’t learned how to harness?”

Romero’s skeptical look deepened.

Logan hesitated for a second. Then he reached over, plucked the plastic straw from Romero’s drink, and placed it on the white linen tablecloth between them. He placed his hands on both sides of it, palms downward, fingers spread slightly. He breathed in, slowly exhaled.

At first, nothing happened. Then the straw shuddered slightly. And then—after another, more violent shudder—it rose slowly off the table; hovered—trembling—half an inch above it for a few seconds; then dropped back onto the cloth, rolling once before falling still again.

“Jesus!”
Romero said. She peered at the straw, then gingerly picked it up, as if it might burn her fingers. “How did you do that? That’s one hell of a magic trick.”

“With the proper training, you could probably do it, too,” Logan replied. “But not as long as you think of it as a trick.”

She looked dubiously at the straw, then put it back down on the table, took a thoughtful sip of her drink. “Just one other question,” she said. “Back at my office—everything you said about me was true. Down to the fact that I was the youngest child. How did you know so much about me?”

“I’m an empath,” Logan replied.

“An empath? What’s that?”

“Somebody with the ability to absorb the feelings and emotions of others. When I shook your hand, I received a series—a flood, really—of very strong memories, notions, thoughts, concerns, desires. They’re nonselective—I have no control over what impressions I receive. I only know that, when I come into physical contact with another person, I will receive impressions, in greater or lesser measure.”

“Empathy,” Romero said. “Sounds like something right up there with aromatherapy and crystals.”

Logan shrugged. “Then you tell me: How
did
I know all that?”

“I can’t explain it.” She looked at him. “How do you become an empath?”

“It’s inherited. It has a biological aspect and a spiritual one, as well. Sometimes it remains dormant in people their entire lives; frequently it is awakened by a traumatic experience. In my case, I believe it was the touch of Vera Hackety.” He fiddled with his empty glass. “All I can tell you for sure is that it’s proven critical to my work.”

She smiled. “Levitation, reading thoughts … can you predict the future, too?”

Logan nodded. “How’s this: I predict that, if we don’t get to the mess in ten minutes, they’re going to stop serving dinner.”

Romero glanced at her watch. Then she laughed. “That’s the kind of prediction I can understand. Let’s go, Svengali.”

And as they stood up from the table, she picked up the cocktail straw and slipped it into the pocket of her jeans.

17

The following morning at nine o’clock, a conference was called to perform a postmortem on the prior day’s accident. Logan wasn’t invited, but—learning about it from Rush at breakfast—he managed to slip into Conference Room A in White on the doctor’s coattails.