The Night Dahlia

by R. S. Belcher

  A hand grabbed my shoulder. It was one of Sam’s men. He smiled at me and winked. “Going up,” he said in Khmer. I saw Burris trying to reach me, but a few of the gangsters he had played bowling pin with were back in the fight and made a violent curtain between him and me. He took out two of them before he had to turn to deal with the ones at his six.

  Samnang sent in his last five men to reinforce the five still standing. He shouted out in Khmer, “Let’s show this Fae bastard what he’s stirred up!” Sam and the others all began to change, to melt and shift from their human guises to their true forms, their true natures.

  The name of the gang, Freakz and Yeakz, is actually a warning to anyone up on their Cambodian mythology. The Yeakz are Cambodian boogeymen, monsters like ogres or trolls. They show up in all kinds of tall tales and stories as shapeshifters with monstrous tusks, bulging, burning eyes, and superhuman strength. They always reminded me a little of the troll under the bridge in the old story of the Three Billy Goats Gruff that my granny used to tell me.

  To join Samnang’s merry band, a Cambodian had to demonstrate that they were either pureblood yeak from the old country or still had enough nonhuman blood in their veins to shift. Vigil now found himself surrounded by eight-foot-tall, drooling, shaggy monsters. Vigil had the strangest look cross his face as he saw the gang transform. He looked … happy. It came to me then that this was a good fight for him now, a challenge. I could get that.

  The guy grabbing me was getting his yeak on too. The giant monster tensed his leg muscles and launched skyward, holding me. Oh, yeah, they can fly too. I think I forgot to mention that. We landed on a building about half a block away from the fight. The yeak let me go and looked back at the rear of All-Star Lanes. His monstrous face, a cross between an Oni demon from Japanese myth and the faces of the dragons that were in Chinatown parades, looked shocked. His big-old bugging eyes obviously worked better than mine. “Oh shit,” he rumbled, “I gotta get back and help them!”

  “Tell Samnang thanks,” I said to the yeak’s tattoo-covered back. He threw me a gang sign and launched off into the flushed, hazy L.A. demi-night. In a second, I lost sight of him.

  I listened to the jangled murmur of traffic on the freeway—all day, all night—it was the constant rhythm of this city. Sirens punctuated by horns, the bone-vibrating thud of bass from car radios below me. L.A. was a champagne call girl with a razor blade hidden between her knuckles. I hated this fucking city, and I had missed her like a junkie misses what his veins scream for. I lit a cigarette, tipped it to the glittering sprawl, and got to work finding Caern Ankou.

  EIGHT

  Wilcox Avenue’s in Hollywood, right off the boulevard, where reality and dream began to get fuzzy. It’s the part of L.A. most people think of when they think of the city. It’s a little like what you see on TV, but they hose the less colorful and more fragrant street people off the sidewalks before the cameras roll.

  I walked past the Sayers Club, where celebs, studio execs, reality TV stars whose names have Ks in them, music moguls, and their collective drug dealers chilled out like regular folk. I passed the lines of the faithful in their skintight, glittering vestments, their silicone stigmata, hoping to be allowed past heaven’s bouncers to get inside and become real by hanging with people who are mostly illusion.

  “Hey, hey!” a voice, salami thick with a Jersey accent, called out. “Ballard! Laytham Ballard! Holy shit!” I paused and turned. A guy with greased-back hair, his chest fur spilling out of the V of his black silk shirt, sprinted up to me from the paparazzi lines behind the velvet ropes. He was clutching a camera. His sudden rush to me had gotten the attention of some of his peers.

  “Do I know you?” I asked, flicking away my cigarette.

  “Sonny,” he said and laughed; it sounded like an asthmatic weasel having a stroke. “Sonny Brozo? I did the paperback about the Westerland murders, Gotta Kill ’Em All? Remember your old buddy Sonny, now?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I sure do.”

  There’s this game app where you run around in real time, in real space, hunting cute little animated Japanese monsters. You might have heard of it since it’s been downloaded more times than porn. A Japanese wizard, a rather nasty one, a Jaakuna hakkāu~izādo, created a computer-virus-spell that ended up on the cell phone of a twelve-year-old kid from Lansing, Michigan, named David Westerland.

  David ended up possessed by the app. He used it to track down and kill twenty-seven people, sacrificing each victim to the avatar of the respective Oni, Japanese demons, that were hiding behind the adorable little animated critters on his phone. I stopped David and the other kids who had been possessed by the virus. All of them died in the process—big surprise there. A guy I know who works his magic through cell phones, a twittermancer, helped me. He tracked the app back to the psychopath who had created it before it could go out of “beta testing” and be transmitted across the world. Scumbag died too; that didn’t make any of it better.

  In the aftermath of this shitstorm, it was all chalked up to the usual culprits, by the usual assholes: gaming, poor parenting, fluoride in the water, and, of course, a lack of family values. The press had a circle jerk with this sweet kid, a Boy Scout for chrissakes, murdering strangers and dismembering their bodies in an occult ritual.

  My old buddy Sonny, here, had been working for some tabloid TV show at the time. He got pictures of me at the Westerlands’ home trying to say … something, anything that might comfort David’s mom and dad, that they hadn’t raised a monster, they had raised a sweet kid who got fucked over by fate, by God, whatever you wanted to call the rigged, cosmic lottery. Sonny made me the hero of his literary work, calling me an “occult hustler” in the book and tossing around some of the more well-known and nasty public stories about me. He dredged up every speck of dirt he could find to kick on the Westerlands and their boy too. David’s parents are dead souls now walking around in slowly rotting skin, waiting for time to put them out of their misery.

  Now, in the hot L.A. night, I thought of Joey, the shooter from the school, of the parents of all his victims. I wondered how many Sonnys were camped outside their doors, waiting to lap up their tears. Let’s get this straight, right now—I am a very evil man. I have done wrong to so many people, damaged so many lives for my own selfish purposes. It may be hypocrisy of the highest order to judge a man like Sonny Brozo, but hey, like I said, I’m a bad guy.

  “Small fucking world, huh?” Sonny said. “I’m with TMZ now! What you doing, man, you checking out the club? Meeting someone? Got another caper going? You still dating that fetish model? Stepping out on her? What?”

  “Aren’t there leash laws in this town?” I said, smiling and patting Sonny on the shoulder, palming a few greasy hairs in the process, and kept walking. I lit a fresh cigarette and muttered under my breath, “Si me imago, novissima erit umquam,” burning the hairs in the fire of my Zippo as I wove the working, a good, old-fashioned curse; it didn’t need much juice other than my animus.

  Sonny’s pack had caught up to him. I heard the chirp of digital cameras, the panting of excited scavengers at my back.

  “What’s up! What’s up! What you got Sonny-boy!”

  “This guy get some hits? Who’s he sleeping with? Gay? Straight?”

  “I think he was in some band, wasn’t he? He looks like he was in a band somebody OD’ed in!”

  “Name’s Laytham Ballard,” Sonny said, “some kind of occult asshole. He’s good copy; shit follows him everywhere!” I slowed and began to turn.

  “I’m ready for my close-up,” I said. Cameras beeped, clicked, and whirred; my face, in their viewfinder, on their camera screen, was the last thing any of them would ever see. The screams began. Sonny pulled his face away from the camera. Thick, ugly calluses of skin had grown over both of his eyes. The calluses leaked blood from painful, inflamed cracks in the thick skin. The other paparazzi who had taken pictures of me had the same deformity.

  “Shit!” Sonny screamed, one voice in a c
horus of terrified shouts from his companions. He clutched at his face, dropping his very expensive camera on the sidewalk. “I’m blind—my eyes, my fucking eyes! Somebody help me!” Other paparazzi who hadn’t shot me or had stayed back by the club entrance now descended on the chaos and began to shoot pictures of Sonny and the others, surrounding them. I kept walking, pleased with myself for blinding these men for life. The sounds of the feeding frenzy diminished behind me.

  A few blocks down from the Sayers was another Hollywood institution, but it was a much more exclusive club than the Sayers. The building looked like a generic warehouse; an office section jutted out of the front with two black-tinted glass doors and a large two-story featureless structure beyond. A shiny, stainless-steel plaque was affixed next to the doors with two words stamped into it: HARD LIMIT. There was a driveway beside the building with a ramp descending into the underground parking deck. I pushed open the black glass doors and stepped in. “Acquainted” by the Weeknd was pulsing through the speakers hanging high on the walls. I could hear the music echoing through the building. The “office” was an entry foyer. The furniture was all black leather and chromed steel. The walls were dull steel scratched and scoured by steel wool. A lovely young lady, looking like an executive office manager, approached me as soon as the doors shut. She had blond hair swept back and flesh-colored lipstick.

  “Good evening, sir,” she began. “Welcome. Is this your first time with us?” She glanced over to a large, muscle-bound Asian gentleman in a Valentino suit who stood with his massive arms behind his back, his hands clasped. I hadn’t noticed him there, mistaking him for one of the walls. He scanned me and did a threat assessment. I looked more like a street person than their usual clientele, but they had to be sure before they threw my ass out that I wasn’t some shabbily dressed billionaire.

  “Actually, no,” I said, “I was kind of a charter member. I’m here to see Lady Anna, or maybe Dragon, if she’s still here.” The attendant looked surprised, and maybe a tiny bit offended, like holy words were coming out of the mouth of an infidel.

  “Sir, Mistress Anna does not accept clients, and I would have no idea who ‘Dragon’ is. Good evening. Malcolm can see you out.”

  Before the wall could put a hurting on me, I lifted my shirt and pointed to a mark on my left flank. It was a brand, a ragged circle of raised flesh, once seared with three scars like claw tracks intersecting it. “You recognize this?” I said. The girl gasped, and I lowered my shirt and lit a cigarette. “I’m here to see Anna and Dragon. Now where the fuck are they?”

  “What?” Malcolm asked the attendant, stepping toward me, unlimbering his arms.

  “He has an owner’s mark,” the girl said, “like the ones they have.”

  “Where are they?” I asked again.

  “Mistress Anna is in the Akari room,” the attendant said, then added an uncertain “… sir.” I nodded to the girl and walked past her, pushing aside gray drapes covering the doorway.

  “I’ll find my way,” I said.

  I walked down a claustrophobic hallway of cracked mirrors of every imaginable style, age, and shape. “Acquainted” shifted, mixed, and became “Way Down We Go” by Kaleo. The hallway opened into a great cavernous room, dark, with walls of stone like some ancient castle. The illumination came from blue low-watt bulbs, covered by industrial cage fixtures. There were more leather couches, mostly occupied by beautiful, wealthy people; some wore masks, others didn’t. There was a bar of surgical steel, edged in fluorescent tubing. Behind it, bartenders in leather pants and harnesses served more masked patrons.

  The main attraction in the room was a large, vertical, radiating spiderweb of chains mounted on a steel ring bolted to the floor. A young man with dyed blue hair and an older woman with a bright green Mohawk were restrained, splayed on either side of the web, the man’s head was near the floor and the woman’s legs, spread-eagle, were pointed toward the floor. They were both nude save for their tattoos and masks.

  A house dom in black boots, black T-shirt, and black military-style pants was kneeling on one knee, tracing the edge of a very sharp, very large hunting knife over the man’s skin. He was currently teasing his nipples with the tip of the knife. Fine, red lines crisscrossed the man’s chest, back, and legs. With each new slice, the man convulsed. His erection was fierce.

  A house domme, dressed like her male counterpart, was working the other side of the web on the woman, striking her breasts and stomach with a flogger made of thin leather strips. The woman’s skin was bright red and her nipples hard. Tears found their way out from under the leather mask, but she was smiling, laughing after the wince of each new blow. The domme leaned toward her captive. She brutally pinched one of her nipples as they kissed, as if the domme were tasting the scream of pain and pleasure that escaped the restrained woman’s lips as she shuddered in release.

  I moved on, heading up a marble staircase to the second floor. A velvet rope blocked the top of the stairs, and a well-dressed Latino clone of Malcolm was the rope’s guardian. He was talking to someone on his cell as he looked me over and obviously didn’t see me as much of a threat by the dismissive look he gave me. He nodded, muttered a good-bye, and ended the call, tucking the phone away in his jacket. He reached for the rope and unhooked it, stepping aside.

  “Mistress Anna is in the third room on the left,” he said with a heavy Spanish accent. “She is expecting you, sir.”

  I walked down the corridor; this level was all exposed wooden beams among the stonework, giving it the feeling of a great Viking hall. I wondered for a second if Grendel was lurking behind one of the heavy wooden doors, covered in leather, ready to devour me like Hrothgar’s kin. Then I remembered I had already dealt with the scaly bastard and his harpy of a mom in Sweden, sixteen years ago with Boj and Harrel by my side. Still, it did remind me that it took a dragon to bring Beowulf down, and at least one of them was still lurking around here somewhere.

  I opened the third door on the left without knocking. The room smelled of Nag Champa incense and a faint musk of sweat. The light was low, coming from a small circular brazier full of hot coals. A good-looking athletic man in his forties was strapped to an X-shaped St. Anthony’s cross. He was nude and panting like an animal, his eyes were rolled up in his head, and his body was covered in a sheen of sweat. Anna was standing before him.

  Anna. There are a rare few who move through this shadow box with so much genuine life and love in them, or so much pain and anger, or so much control and care that they echo, that they impress a mark of their passing through this time and place, indelible, on every life they intersect with. Anna was one of them.

  She looked as young and beautiful as she had almost thirty years ago. I see the world through many lenses, many windows of perception, but nostalgia isn’t one of them. If she had noticeably aged, I couldn’t tell. Maybe a little thinner, her beautiful features a little more angular. Her hair was still russet silk; it fell below her shoulders when she wore it down, but tonight was business, so it was coiled in a long, tight french twist braid and pulled back severely from her face. Her eyes were sapphire stars, quizzical, intelligent, with equal parts innocence and trespass warring in them. Right now, the trespass had ascendancy as she regarded her charge.

  She wore a leather catsuit the color of dried blood and stiletto-heeled boots that ended at her thighs. Her lipstick was the only makeup she wore, and it matched the color of the catsuit. Anna seldom wore makeup; she didn’t need it. The lipstick was a prop for her sub. The suit’s zipper was fastened all the way up. The large metal ring hanging from the zipper rested at her throat and reminded me of days when she wore a collar with two such rings. The only skin exposed was her slender, delicate hands. They were strong hands too, marked with the passage of hard work, a life of struggle. Her whole demeanor spoke of wiry strength. Her build was slight, but she possessed enticing curves and I burned inside remembering the way her body moved. The suit hid ivory skin and a lithe body. I remembered how her skin felt; it
was intoxicating. Touching her could get you high. She had been mine once, and I considered myself very fortunate to have had that time. In a lifetime of damnation, pettiness, anger, fear, and a hundred other hollow heartbeats, my time with Anna had felt like a brush with a kind of divinity.

  Anna saw me, and her eyes widened a little and became a lighter shade of blue, then she was back in character. She raised a finger with a nail that matched her lipstick and suit in color. She traced it along her sub’s chest, pausing to toy with his nipple. The sub came out of his stupor and was looking at me too. Anna slapped his cheek, hard. The stinging crack of the blow made him jump, and his cheek was red and flushed from the force of it.

  “Eyes forward,” Anna said. Her voice was not harsh; it was precise. No emotion leaked into it. It did not rise or betray an iota of stress. It was the voice of someone in complete control of her environment and everything in it. It occurred to me that it might be how God’s voice might sound. The sub’s eyes glazed over with pleasure. His sex stirred.

  “Yes, mistress,” he muttered. Anna cupped his face now, caressing the skin she had just struck.

  “I am your focus,” she said, “I am your universe. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, mistress,” he said. His voice was getting hoarse, and his erection was brushing Anna’s thigh now. She ran her hand from his cheek down his toned chest to rest for just a moment on his hardness. Her touch was light and fluttering, and he moaned a little, and then her touch was gone. She turned her back on her sub, facing me. I leaned against a wide wooden beam and enjoyed the show.

  “Confess to me,” she said. “Tell me what you’ve done since we were last together. Tell me your sins.”