Jose led the others along the dirt path. It snaked between the orange rocks, descending slowly under stone arches and around giant boulders, winding down without really seeming to go anywhere. They were all tired. The pelts and fabrics they had wrapped around themselves were dirty and torn, and their feet hurt. They were hungry, dehydrated, bruised, and bleeding. Kathy thought the only thing keeping them going was the vague promise that they might rediscover the gate Jose had happened upon once before.
The sun hung high in the sky the whole time, despite the hours on the path. The faces moved from stone to stone, watching, but this time, they kept silent. It occurred to Kathy that maybe contact with the gods and the Wraiths carried its own kind of infection, one even the faces wanted no part of. It was an unsettling thought, but one she didn’t have the strength to deal with just then. If Xíonathymia had anything else to throw at them, they weren’t in much of a condition to fight it off.
Just as the sun finally resumed its progress across the sky, clouds moved across it, casting shadows on the path. If not for that, they might not have seen the object, ebbing and flowing within its rectangular confines fifty feet ahead of them.
“Holy shit,” Jose said. “The other gate! I think we found it. Look!”
The object was the size and measurements of a normal door. It hung a few feet in the air, its swirling substance neither thick nor thin, liquid nor vapor. It looked a lot like the gateway in the lab, the only fundamental difference being the color of the gate itself, a rippling pearlescent white.
They ran to the gate, their energy renewed by the hope of return. Jose dragged a nearby rock over to step up on, but Claire grabbed his arm.
“Wait,” she said. “What if…what if that’s a gateway to someplace else, and not home?”
From the expressions on the faces of the others, that hadn’t occurred to any of them. After a moment, Kathy spoke.
“Claire has a point, but I don’t see how we have a choice. For whatever reason, your people at Paragon closed the gate from their side. If we leave this one, we might lose it. There might not be any other gates.”
As if to underscore Kathy’s point, the whiteness in the gate rippled, and the whole thing contracted. The shrinkage only amounted to an inch or so from all five sides, but it was enough to decide the others.
“Let’s take the chance,” Hornsby said.
“Yeah, I agree.”
Claire considered it a moment, then acquiesced. “Yeah, me too. Let’s go.”
Jose, from atop the rock, looked over the heads of the others to Kathy. “Ready?”
“Go ahead and leap, crazy man,” she said with a small smile. “We’re right behind you.”
Jose grinned, and then stepped up and through the gateway.
Claire followed right behind him, and then Hornsby climbed up. The gate contracted again. With a glance at Kathy, who gave him a nod of encouragement, Hornsby climbed through as well.
Kathy jogged over to the rock Jose had placed as a step and climbed up. The gate was shuddering now, its rectangular edges growing irregular. Kathy took one last look at the world of Xíonathymia, then hoisted herself up and through the gate.
* * * *
The wet-not-wetness engulfed her and everything went white. Kathy’s senses were saturated with the gate, and she couldn’t feel anything except the sensation of falling, falling…she thought of the platform over the edge of an alien universe and closed her eyes. A moment later, she landed hard on asphalt.
“Where are we?” she heard Claire’s voice ask, and looked up to see the other woman, Jose, and Hornsby, shaken but unharmed.
“I think we’re home,” Jose said.
Kathy looked around. They were in a small suburban neighborhood. Everything—the air, the structures, the feel and smell of the air, all of it—felt normal and familiar. There was no whispering, no faces in the inanimate matter. There were conventional cars in the street, houses on grass lawns, wooden fences, children’s bikes. It sure looked like home to Kathy.
Claire began to cry and laugh at the same time. She managed through both to choke out, “I never—I thought I’d never see—any of this again!”
Jose put his arm around her shoulder, and she kissed him on the mouth. His eyes looked surprised and then pleased, and he leaned in to return the kiss. Hornsby looked on, grinning.
Kathy glanced back at where the gate had been. It was gone. It, too, had closed. She wondered if that was the work of Paragon’s Blue Team, or if such gateways could only remain stable for a limited period of time. Ultimately, it didn’t matter. The gates were closed. But Kathy couldn’t rest until she knew Paragon would not be able to reopen them.
“I have unfinished business,” Kathy said. Jose and Claire parted lips and turned to her. Hornsby was already nodding.
“Greenwood,” he said. “We need to make sure that lab doesn’t let anything more from that place get out into the world.”
“You all aren’t obligated to see it through with me,” Kathy said. “It’s my job to make sure Paragon’s gate is closed for good and that the face creatures…and Greenwood…are dealt with.”
“Where you leap,” Jose said softly, “we follow. Lead the way.”
* * * *
The few hours leading up to Kathy’s confrontation with Paragon were a bit of a blur. It turned out, after walking for a bit, that they were on the outskirts of Haversham, a mile or two away from the lab. They had no clothes, no money, no wallets or purses or backpacks. Those things were rotting unevenly away on a stone-paved city center at the edge of a universe in another dimension. They walked to Darryl Lefine’s house. Markham’s men had moved Hornsby’s car, but Lefine’s was still there, and Hornsby knew where his partner kept the keys.
They drove to Hornsby’s house and gathered clothes and shoes, Kathy and Claire borrowing from his wife Alison’s closet. Then they ate and drank. Kathy called Reece, who tried to pretend he hadn’t been worried. His voice, though, was flooded with relief, and despite the guilt she felt, Kathy was glad to hear it. She felt relief herself, not just for being lucky enough to have made it back to hear his voice again, but also because he didn’t tell her that her job was more than he could take, that he couldn’t live like that, that he was leaving her. He simply told her he loved her, and wanted her to come home soon. She promised him she would. She told herself she’d have to take some time off, do something fun and relaxing with Reece. Hornsby called his wife at work, and Kathy could tell he felt the same flood of relief in talking to Alison.
They slept for two more hours. When they awoke, it was about six thirty in the afternoon.
It was time.
The four loaded into Darryl Lefine’s car and drove to Facility 18. They said very little in all that time, but they had come to understand each other’s facial expressions and body language. She supposed they were probably in shock, traumatized by the experience, but they were an impressive group of people. They were holding it together better than most would have. It could have been anger or that same desire for revenge and for closure that Kathy felt; whatever it was, they needed it and it was keeping them going, and she was glad for it.
* * * *
They arrived at the gate at about seven in the evening. The guard, recognizing both Jose and Claire and offering the latter a warm welcome back, buzzed them in. He didn’t know where Claire had been and didn’t ask, and they didn’t volunteer any information. The four of them didn’t want to draw any more attention to their arrival than was necessary.
Since Jose’s and Claire’s employee IDs had been lost, the four of them waited by the front door for employees on their way home. Jose kept Doug Kehoe from subfloor 29 distracted enough with jokes to let them in without questioning where their IDs had gone.
Once inside, they collectively tensed, unsure what to expect.
“We’re in,” Jose said, “but we’re going to need someone’s ID to get anywhere.”
Kathy pulled out Doug’s ID from the pocket of her jeans and dangled it in front of the astonished eyes of the others. “Not everything I learned from my brother was bad,” she said.
Jose laughed. “All right then, let’s go.”
They made their way along the same route Markham had taken Kathy and Jose and found the elevator. Another employee, Amelia Elwood, was getting off as they were getting on. She waved good night to them and told them she’d see them the next morning, and they nodded and smiled, then piled into the elevator. Doug’s ID gave them access to the subfloors, and Jose pushed the button for 31.
When the doors opened, at first Kathy thought they were on the wrong floor. The sight stretching out before them was one of deconstruction. They wandered out of the elevator, looking around at the pale gray walls of the long hallway. The lighting had been removed and exposed wires hung from the ceiling. The drop ceiling was missing tiles, parts of the floor carpeting had been ripped up, and the door and wall signs had been scrubbed clean of names and numbers.
Jose found Suite 40, the research lab, by rote, and eased open the door.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. Kathy and the others came into the lab and joined him, taking in the scene before them.
There were wires sparking from the ceiling. Puddles of blood coagulated or elongated in long smears across the formerly tidy floor. The Plexiglas enclosure around the observation control room had been partially shattered, its remnant slivers on the floor below it. The jagged hole was rimmed with blood, and next to it was a streaking crimson handprint. Stunned, Jose and Claire led the others into the room. The computers and monitors had been smashed; plastic and electronic fragments were strewn about the counter like confetti. Bodies in blood-splattered lab coats lay face down on the floor, many in pools of their own fluids. Kathy thought she recognized Abigail’s ponytail. George’s ID tag lay next to a body whose upturned head no longer had a face.
“What happened here?” Claire asked.
“The gate, maybe,” Kathy said. “It looks like it wasn’t Paragon after all that closed it.”
“What do you mean?” Hornsby checked the neck pulse of a man with bluish lips, shook his head, and stood up.
“Those gods probably discovered the gate in the woods and tried to use it to escape. The spells binding them…they might have set off a reaction that blasted through the lab. I saw something like that happen once before, although this…this is far more devastation.”
Sadly, they filed out of the observation control room and toward where the gate had been.
The quarantine chamber that had surrounded the gateway looked as if it had been blown outward from some explosion, possibly from the final closing of the gate. There were more bodies lying there, although most of these were only in pieces. A torso with half a head lay propped against the base of the chamber. A woman missing the bottom half of her jaw and most of the left side of her body had been swept against a side wall. Kathy saw a nose pointing upward, a charred hand, an orthopedic shoe with part of a foot in it. She also saw some fingers, and thought of her brother.
The gateway was gone. There was nothing left of it. For that, and that alone, Kathy was glad.
The group made their way around the carnage and back to the elevator. Jose pushed the button for Subfloor 24.
“There’s a quarantine chamber there for neutralizing the parasites from that place,” he told Claire. She looked confused, but nodded anyway.
The elevator doors opened and they made their way to the chamber and got inside. There was an electric hum which lasted for a good five minutes or so, and then the door opened on its own.
“Let’s hope that does the trick,” Hornsby said. He didn’t look entirely convinced. In truth, Kathy wasn’t, either, but she thought of the faces in the rocks of the mountain, and how they had seemed finished with the broken humans, the ones who had pissed off ancient gods. If Kathy and the others had been carriers of any of those parasites, she was pretty sure the faces had jumped off before she and her companions had gone through the gate. Further, whatever had torn through the lab and killed the researchers had likely killed any lingering face-creatures as well. The floor had felt empty, as this floor did. They were alone.
As they exited the quarantine chamber, they heard the gunshot.
They ducked, alarmed, until they heard a thump.
“What fresh hell is this now?” Jose said, exasperated.
“This way,” Hornsby called, jogging in the direction of the sound.
They found Greenwood slumped against a blood-spattered wall outside an empty office. Amazingly, he was still alive, but there was a blooming red stain on his shirt and lab coat. The gun lay a few feet away, just out of his reach.
He looked up at them, pale and sweating. He might have looked worried to see them if he’d had the energy, but he didn’t.
“What happened in the lab, Greenwood?” Kathy asked, crouching beside him.
“I noticed you didn’t offer to call an ambulance,” he replied.
“Because I intend to let you die,” she said. “What happened in the lab?”
“I thought…ahh, I thought maybe…you could tell me,” he said. “All our work, all our research…it’s all gone.”
“Your humanitarian soul is refreshing,” Kathy said sarcastically.
“It worked,” he said to them.
“What worked?”
“The quarantine over there. It worked, if you want to know. You’re free of the parasites, all of you. The little ones and the big ones. I told you it would…but you killed all the samples before we could extract them. Now we really have nothing left.”
“Good,” Kathy said. “Then my work here is done.”
“You think…we’re the only ones…who will open a gate?” Greenwood’s free hand clutched the wound in his gut. “There will be others…and we have nothing…nothing to show. Nothing to protect us.”
“Let it go, Greenwood,” Kathy said. “You’re dying. Think happy thoughts.” She turned away, disgusted. On the faces of her companions, she saw a range of emotions—pity, indignation, weariness. None of them moved to help Greenwood, though.
“Give me the gun, before you go?”
Kathy turned back to him, watching his shaking hand reach unsuccessfully for the gun.
“Please…I tried…to shoot myself in the head. I don’t know how…I missed so wildly. This is agony. Let me die quickly.”
Kathy regarded him with a cold look, then moved toward the gun. With the toe of her borrowed shoe, she sent the gun skittering off into darkness. Then she turned and walked back to the elevator. When she looked back, she saw Jose, Hornsby, and finally Claire turn as well, leaving the gun where it was despite the man’s pleas.
The four got onto the elevator and the doors shut as the pleas became curses.
No one spoke on the elevator ride up to the main floor, or through the building to the front lobby. Kathy dropped Doug’s ID on the front counter on their way out the door.
“What do we do now?” Claire said.
“Go home. Take a shower. Get some sleep.”
“But what about all that?” Claire gestured back at the facility.
“Paragon will have it cleaned up by morning, I’m sure,” Kathy said. “There’s nothing more we can do.”
“I—I can’t go home. I can’t be alone,” Claire said.
“Then don’t,” Jose said. He regarded Claire nervously. “Come back to my place. You can have the bed, I’ll sleep on the couch…and then neither of us has to be alone.”
She smiled at him. “I’d like that.”
“I’ll drop you off,” Hornsby said. “I’m looking forward to getting home myself. Alison’s shift is over in a few hours. I want to be there when she gets home.”
The three of them started for Lefine’s car, but paused when they noticed Kathy hanging back.
“What is it? You okay?” Jose asked.
Kathy had been thinking of Greenwood dying alone on an unfinished floor of a corporate facility. There had been so many times—too many times—that Kathy had imagined her own life ending in a similar way. She figured eventually her work would catch up to her, and if some slimy, tentacled thing that was all eyes and mouths and fury didn’t kill her, then her own guilt and exhaustion would. The people before her had seen more than any human ever should, and while maybe they were still in shock, their only thoughts were of the people they had to go home to. And all she could wrap her brain around just then was how close she’d been all of her life to dying alone.
She forced a smile for the sake of the others. She wasn’t alone; she had Reece, and God help him, no matter how crazy her job made their lives, he was still there for her. She wasn’t going to be alone; there were people she could trust, people she could safely love. This job wasn’t going to get the better of her.
Kathy told herself those things even as she glanced back at the facility and the carnage she was leaving behind. The carnage she always left behind.
She pushed those thoughts away, and as she jogged to catch up to the others, she thought of Reece once more. She was going home.
If you enjoyed Beyond The Gate, be sure not to miss all the books in the Kathy Ryan series by Mary SanGiovanni, including
Kathy has been hired to assess the threat of patient Henry Banks, an inmate at the
Connecticut-Newlyn Hospital for the Criminally Insane, the same hospital where her brother is housed. Her employers believe that Henry has the ability to open doors to other dimensions with his mind—making him one of the most dangerous men in modern history. Because unbeknownst to Kathy, her clients are affiliated with certain government organizations that investigate people like Henry—and the potential to weaponize such abilities.
What Kathy comes to understand in interviewing Henry, and in her unavoidable run-ins with her brother, is that Henry can indeed use his mind to create “Tulpas”—worlds, people, and creatures so vivid they come to actual life. But now they want life outside of Henry. And they’ll stop at nothing to complete their emanicipation. It’s up to Kathy—with her brother’s help—to stop them, and if possible, to save Henry before the Tulpas take him over—and everything else around him.
A Lyrical Underground e-book on sale now.
Read on for a special excerpt!