Lincoln Child - The Third Gate

“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.”