The Third Gate

  “And people are starting to get spooked,” Logan said.

  “I wouldn’t say spooked. Restless, yes. Demoralized, maybe. See, it’s bad enough being out here in the middle of nowhere, floating in the world’s nastiest swamp. But with these strange happenings … well, you know how talk gets started. Anyway, maybe with you poking around, people will calm down.”

  Poking around. As she was speaking, Romero’s initial skepticism, if not outright hostility, had slowly returned.

  “So I’m to be a rainmaker,” he said. “I may not do any good, but it’s comforting to see me on the job.” He glanced at her. “Now I know where I stand. Thanks for your candor.”

  She smiled, but it wasn’t a particularly friendly smile. “You got a problem with candor?”

  “Not at all. It clears the air. And it can be very bracing—even enlightening.”

  “For example?”

  “For example, you.”

  “What about me?” she asked sharply. “You don’t know the first thing about me.”

  “I know quite a bit, actually. Although some of it is, admittedly, conjecture.” He held her gaze steadily. “You were the youngest child in your family. I’d imagine your older siblings were boys. I’d further imagine that your father devoted most of his attention to them: Boy Scouts, Little League. He wouldn’t have had much time for you—and if your brothers noticed you at all, it would be to belittle you. That would account for your instinctive hostility, your academic overcompensation.”

  Romero opened her mouth to speak, then shut it again.

  “There was a famous, or at least distinguished, woman a few generations back in your family: an archaeologist, perhaps, or maybe a mountain climber. The way you hang your diplomas carelessly on the wall, slightly askew, suggests an informal approach to academics—we’re all one big happy family, whether we have impressive doctorates or not. And yet the very fact you brought your diplomas at all suggests a deep insecurity about your standing on this expedition. A young woman, one of few among men, on a physically demanding mission in a harsh and unforgiving environment—you worry about being taken seriously. Oh, and your middle name starts with A.”

  She looked at him, eyes blazing. “And just how the hell do you know that?”

  He gestured over his shoulder with one thumb. “It’s on your nameplate on the door.”

  She stood up. “Get out.”

  “Thanks for the chat, Dr. Romero.” And Logan turned and left the office.

  13

  Logan’s schedule was free until the following morning, so he spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the Station getting his sea legs: trying to get a feel for the place and its occupants. Since he’d already seen the offices, residency, and dive staging areas, he decided to visit the science labs in the Red wing. Though the labs themselves were small, he was astonished by their diversity: not only archaeology but geology, organic chemistry, paleobotany, paleozoology, and several others. The laboratories were modular: each was a stainless-steel box approximately eighteen feet square. While some were occupied, others were mothballed: apparently, Porter Stone cherry-picked the labs he thought might be useful for a particular expedition and then activated them on an as-needed basis.

  Next he visited White, which he learned was command and control. Although there were the obligatory secure areas and locked doors, the site seemed refreshingly informal: there were very few guards, and the ones he met were friendly and candid. He did not speak of the curse or his reason for being on the project; judging from the curious looks he occasionally received, however, it was clear that at least a few had been briefed.

  The nerve center of White was a large space, staffed by a lone technician sitting at a terminal in a far corner. His back was to Logan, and he was so surrounded by monitors that he was reminiscent of a pilot in a cramped cockpit.

  “Catch any shoplifters?” Logan said, stepping into the room.

  The tech whirled around, neighing in surprise. A book that had been sitting on his lap flew to the floor, spinning around and coming to rest in a corner.

  “Judas H. Priest!” the man said, one hand plucking at the collar of his lab coat. “You trying to give a guy a heart attack or something?”

  “No. I imagine that would ruin Dr. Rush’s day.” He stepped forward and extended his hand with a smile. “Jeremy Logan.”

  “Cory Landau.” From the mangy thatch of black hair, and the way he’d lounged in his chair, Logan had guessed even from the doorway that the tech was young. But seeing him face-to-face was a surprise. Landau couldn’t have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three. He had brilliant blue eyes, the fresh, peach-colored complexion of a cherub, and—a bizarrely incongruous addition—a narrow Zapata-style mustache. A can of grape-flavor Jolt and a thick pack of chewing gum sat on the desktop before him.

  “So,” Logan said. “What do you do around here?”

  “What do you think?” the youth replied, leaning back in his chair, surprise giving way to an affected breeziness. “I run the joint.” He took a sip of Jolt. “What did you mean by that crack about catching shoplifters?”

  Logan nodded at the array of screens that surrounded Landau. “You’ve got enough LCDs here for the security pit at the Bellagio.”

  “Security pit, my aunt Fanny. It all begins and ends right here.” Suddenly Landau’s brow creased with suspicion. “Who are you, anyhow?”

  “Don’t worry. I’m one of the good guys.” And Logan flashed his ID.

  “In that case, check this out.” Landau waved at the forest of glass panels and the half-dozen keyboards arrayed beneath them. “Here’s where all the data gets entered, all the numbers get crunched by autonomous programs.”

  “I thought that was taken care of at the Maw.”

  Landau waved a dismissive hand. “You kidding? They’re just the piano builders. I’m the artist who plays the instrument. Watch.”

  With a quick flurry of keystrokes, Landau brought up an image on one of the monitors. “See, we receive sensor, sonar, and visual information from the ongoing diving missions. It all comes into a program, here, that maps out the underwater terrain. It’s a beast of a program, too. And this is the result.”

  Logan followed the outstretched hand toward the image on the screen. It was indeed remarkable: a fantastically complex wireframe CAD image of an undulating, almost lunar, landscape, thickly honeycombed with tunnels and boreholes.

  “That’s what it looks like, forty feet below us,” Landau explained. “With each new dive, our representation of the swamp bed—and the caverns below it—expands.” He demonstrated how the image could be manipulated, zoomed and panned, rotated on the X, Y, and Z axes. “You mentioned the Maw. You seen it yet?”

  Logan nodded.

  “While you were there, did you get a chance to check out the Grid?”

  “You mean, that thing that looks like a bingo card on steroids?”

  “That’s it. Well, what I’ve got here is the other half of the equation. The Grid is a two-D representation of what’s been explored so far. And this shows its exact topology.” Landau patted the display with almost fatherly pride. “When we find the—the target, we’ll use this to ensure it is fully mapped and explored.”

  Logan murmured his appreciation. “Is this your first assignment for Porter Stone?”

  The youth shook his head. “Second.”

  Logan waved a hand around. “Is this unusual? All this equipment, tools, expensive setups—just for a single expedition?”

  “It’s not for a single expedition. Stone’s got a warehouse somewhere in the south of England. Maybe more than one. That’s where he stores all the stuff.”

  “You mean, the vehicles and electronics? Portable labs?”

  “So they say. Everything he might possibly need for a particular site.”

  Logan nodded. It made sense: like the inactive labs, such an arrangement would allow Stone to get up and running quickly, with as little time wastage as possible, in almost any
conceivable climate or terrain.

  It was refreshing to chat with someone who hadn’t heard of him before, who didn’t pester him with a hundred questions. Logan gave a smile of thanks. “Nice talking to you.”

  “Sure. Mind tossing me that book on your way out?”

  Logan walked over to the book that had fallen from the tech’s lap. Picking it up, he saw it was William Hope Hodgson’s exceptionally weird novel The House on the Borderland.

  He handed it to Landau. “Sure this is the kind of book you want to be reading out here?”

  “What do you mean?” Laudau took the book and cradled it protectively.

  “The Sudd’s bizarre enough. Reading stuff like that besides may rot your mind.”

  “Huh. Maybe that explains it.” And Landau turned around and resumed his typing.

  From White, Logan crossed another floating tube into Maroon, which housed—according to a small sign at the far end of the access vent—the historical archives and exotic sciences. Although Logan had no idea what “exotic sciences” were, he began to get an idea as soon as he peeked into some of the additional modular labs that had been installed in this wing. One darkened lab was stocked with ancient books and manuscripts about alchemy and transmutation; the walls of another were plastered with maps of Egypt and Sudan, as well as photographs of pyramids and other structures, each image overspread with a tangle of lines and circles, intersecting at odd geometric angles. Clearly, Stone would explore any avenue of knowledge, no matter how abstruse, to help make his finds. Logan wondered if he should feel insulted that his own office was located here.

  As he made his way down the corridor, he stopped before a room whose door was ajar. Although Maroon seemed to hold very few people at present, this particular room was occupied. It was dimly lit. Logan could make out a hospital bed, from which dozens of leads snaked down to various monitoring devices at its foot. It reminded him of the setups in the vacant rooms he’d seen back at the Center for Transmortality Studies.

  The bed in this room, however, was not empty. Logan could see that a woman was lying on it: perhaps the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Something about her—some quality he could not quite analyze—made him stop, rooted in his tracks. Her hair was a very unusual color, a rich, dark cinnamon. Her eyes were closed. Probes were set at her temples, and others were fixed to her wrists and ankles. On the wall beside her was a very large mirror, brilliantly polished. The faint lights of the medical devices were reflected in it in myriad points of tiny color.

  Logan stood there, mesmerized by this unusual sight: the woman, almost ethereal looking in the faint light of the vast arsenal of instrumentation. She lay absolutely motionless; there was not even any indication of breathing. She almost seemed to have passed from life into death. He had the distinct feeling he’d met her sometime in the past. This feeling was not in itself unusual; with his unusually sharp perception, Logan found déjà vu to be a frequent companion. This time, however, the sensation was unusually strong.

  There was motion by the monitors at the foot of the bed. Logan glanced toward it and was surprised to see Dr. Rush. He adjusted a dial, peered at a gauge. And then—as if with some sixth sense—he turned toward the doorway and saw Logan.

  Logan began to raise his arm in greeting. But he could tell from the look on Rush’s face, from the man’s body language, that this was not the time to linger and that his presence was not welcome. So instead Logan turned away and continued down the hallway, in search of his own office.

  14

  Logan found his office in a far corner of the Exotic Sciences wing. It was modular, like the others, and contained a desk, two chairs, a laptop computer, and a single empty bookcase. He noted—with faint amusement—that there was no other equipment.

  Placing his large duffel bag on the guest chair and opening it, he put a dozen or so books in the bookcase. Then he removed several pieces of equipment and placed them on the desk. Next, he removed two quotations in small frames and hung them on the wall with pushpins. Then he closed the duffel and turned to the laptop.

  He logged in with the password and ID he’d been given during that morning’s processing. The site’s network was relatively easy to navigate, and he immediately saw there were three e-mails awaiting him. The first was a generic welcome, explaining the layout of the Station and the whereabouts of important locations (Medical, cafeteria). The second e-mail was from the HR woman who had processed him, laying out a few ground rules (no straying from the site, no unauthorized sat-phone communications). And the third e-mail was from a person who identified himself as Stephen Weir, assistant to Porter Stone. It was essentially an aggregation of all the strange, unanticipated, or unfortunate events that had occurred since the site went live two weeks before—in other words, the reason he was here.

  Logan read over the list twice. Many of the items could be immediately discounted—lights flickering, systemic effects like nausea or dizziness—but several others remained. Firing up the laptop’s word processor, he began to make a list.

  Day 2: On a routine reconnaissance, the engine of one of the Jet Skis abruptly went wild and refused to cut off. The occupant was forced to leap off to save himself, breaking a leg in the process. When the boat was finally recovered, the engine would not work at all. The following day, however, it operated normally.

  Day 4: Three people, using the library late in the evening, reported hearing a strange, dry voice whispering to them in an unknown language.

  Day 6: A cook reported two sides of beef missing from the meat locker—almost two hundred pounds. A careful search yielded nothing.

  Day 9: Cory Landau was found wandering the marsh outside the perimeter after nightfall. When questioned, he said he’d seen a strange form in the distance, beckoning to him.

  “Huh,” Cory had said to him not half an hour before. “Maybe that explains it.”

  Day 10: Every electrical object, computer, and other equipment in Green shut down spontaneously at 3:15 p.m. Attempts to restart them were unsuccessful. At 3:34 p.m., they resumed functioning normally. No explanation was found.

  Day 11: Tina Romero reported that the outfit of an Egyptian high priestess was missing from a closet in her office.

  Day 12: Several eyewitnesses in Oasis, the drinks lounge, reported seeing strangely colored lights flickering near the horizon, accompanied by an ominous chanting, barely audible.

  Day 13: A worker in the communications room reported strange noises and a machine that suddenly sprang to life when it should have been dormant.

  Day 14: A machinist reported seeing a strange woman in Egyptian garb at a distance, walking across the Sudd at nightfall.

  Day 15: An as-yet-undiagnosed equipment problem forced a diver to panic and surface, causing him severe injury.

  Logan looked up from the screen. He already knew about the last one, of course. He’d witnessed it himself.

  His thoughts drifted to King Narmer’s curse. Any man who dares enter my tomb will meet an end certain and swift.… His blood and his limbs will turn to ash and his tongue cleave to his throat.… I, Narmer the Everliving, will torment him and his, by day and by night, waking and sleeping, until madness and death become his eternal temple. There was something the recitation of incidents had in common. Except for the diver and the Jet Ski rider, nobody had been hurt. That did not jibe with the details of the curse.

  Of course, Logan thought to himself, nobody had yet found—or entered—Narmer’s tomb.…

  For perhaps the dozenth time, he wondered what Narmer’s tomb might contain. Why had the pharaoh expended such effort, made such lavish sacrifices of gold and men’s lives, bestowed such a curse, to make sure his remains were never violated, his most important possessions undisturbed? What was Porter Stone keeping from him? What would a god take with him to the next world?

  There was a quiet sound behind him. Logan turned from the laptop screen to see Ethan Rush standing in the doorway.

  “Mind if I come in?” the doctor ask
ed with a smile.

  Logan took his duffel bag from the guest chair and placed it on the floor. “Help yourself.”

  Rush stepped in, glanced around. “Rather spartan accommodations.”

  “I guess the interior decorators were uncertain just how to stock the lair of an enigmalogist.”

  “Funny thing about that.” Rush took the empty seat, glanced toward the bookshelf. “Interesting selection of books: Aleister Crowley, Jessie Weston, Stowcroft’s Organic Chemistry, The Book of Shadows.”

  “I have eclectic interests.”

  Rush peered at a particularly old and moth-eaten book, bound in leather. “What’s this?” He reached out, glanced at the title. “The Necro—”

  “Don’t touch that one,” Logan said in a quiet voice.

  Rush pulled back his hand. “Sorry.” He turned his attention to the two framed quotations. “ ‘The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious,’ ” he read from one of them. “ ‘It is the source of all true art and science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead. Einstein.’ ” He glanced at Logan. “Message?”

  “Only that it sums up my vocation rather well. You could say I’ve got one foot in the world of science—Einstein’s world—and the other in the world of the spirit.”

  Rush nodded. Then he turned to the other frame. “ ‘Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.’ ”

  “It’s Virgil. From the Aeneid.”

  “I don’t read Latin.”

  When Logan didn’t offer to translate, Rush turned to the objects on the desk. “What exactly are those?”

  “You use scalpels, forceps, and blood-oxygen meters, Ethan: I use tri-field EM detectors, camcorders, infrared thermometers, and—yes—holy water. Which reminds me: Do you think you can scare up a key for this desk drawer?”