“Take it with you,” she said. “Twenty-four hours. Be out of my city, Laytham. You should never have come back here.” I stood and took the bottle.
“I know why he’s doing it,” I said. “It’s a drug, a rush. He cultivates these girls, carefully, slowly degrades them, makes them fall a few inches at a time. It probably takes years—that’s why the time between the kills—and then he…”
Gida stood, her face still a placid frozen lake, but there was a sharp edge in her voice, no mercy, no compromise. She was done listening. It was the Maven of the Nightwise speaking now. “Twenty-four hours, and then I order all of my people, including your ex-partner, to hunt you down and drag you out of L.A., dead or alive, Laytham. It’s over.”
“… and then he fucking harvests them like goddamned crops!” I said and drove my fist down on her desk. Luke and Bridgette came through the door, eldritch power dancing at their fingertips. Both looked a little worse for wear from our time in the elevator, and both looked more than ready to open up on me. Gida raised a hand for them to hold. “He fucking smokes their soul like really good weed, and he gets off on it. It makes him feel like a god. Maybe he even keeps a little of their energy to supplement his own! He’s in the fucking Life, Gida, goddamn it, are you fucking blind? I know him! I understand him!”
“Yes,” she said. “You do. And that, Laytham, that is your problem. Good-bye.” She looked to her two loyal agents. “Mr. Ballard is leaving. Make sure he finds his way out unmolested.”
“Yes, Maven,” they intoned. I pushed past them, the bottle in my hand.
“I know my way out,” I said. “Fuck you, Gida.”
* * *
I wandered through the streets of Chinatown, multicolored lanterns and lurking dragons my companions. It was late, but clusters of drunk tourists still weaved along the streets of light, avoiding the shadows I had walked out of. The whiskey bottle was my companion too, and I remembered its sweet, smoky voice offering forgiveness, understanding, comfort. I chuckled to myself, Southern comfort.
I smashed the bottle in the gutter, scaring a flock of tourists and making them hustle to the other side of the street. I watched thousands of dollars’ worth of golden absolution drain into the gutter. I hailed a cab and headed back to Elextra’s house.
* * *
The way a Nightwise investigation worked was like this: my elevator-buddies, Bridgette and Luke, had contacts with LAPD, detectives who either were in the order or knew the score. This would be investigated as a homicide by the daylight cops, and the Nightwise who caught the case, in this instance, most likely Bridgette and Luke, would run a parallel shadow investigation into any and all connections to the Life and its denizens. A lot of so-called occult crime had nothing to do with the Life or anything even remotely occult. It was often the mentally ill or posers who had read the paperback of the Necronomicon and thought they were John Constantine now. That wasn’t the case with what had killed poor Elextra, and not-so-poor George. I had a hunch what it was, but it seemed that my hunch was impossible. I wanted to go over the crime scene, and I was pretty sure that the LAPD wouldn’t “discover” the scene for at least another day or so. I also knew that Luke and Bridgette were patching themselves up and cursing my name right now, so I didn’t have a lot of time to dick around.
The mystic seals they had placed on the house were tougher to crack than the ones on Caern’s apartment back in Greece, but I was up to it. I had been taught how to bypass protective enchantments by one of the best thieves in the Life. I hadn’t seen her since she had been part of my caper to rip off Joey Dross in 1999, relieving him of the philosopher’s stone. She was a hell of thief, and I had paid attention. The wards folded like a bad poker hand and I was in.
The place reeked even worse of marinated blood and feces. The lights were on, just as they had been when we had arrived, and I took a moment before I reentered the slaughterhouse of the den. I wished for the tenth time I hadn’t chucked the bottle. It was now almost two in the morning. This scene had been gone over by Dragon and Vigil, but I needed to feel like I was doing something and I had ways to suss things out of a scene that neither of them could. I started out standing at the doorway to the den, trying to make order out of the blood-spattered chaos. I noticed that the cardboard file boxes that had contained Caern’s possessions were gone. I assumed that Dragon and Vigil had spirited them away, even though they had been shredded by the thing that killed Elextra and George.
The killer spent virtually no time on George. Plucking out his eyes was an afterthought, a sick joke for whoever found this scene. The killer had gone out of its way to annihilate Elextra and even more out of its way to shred the boxes of Crystal Myth’s life. It was sent with specific mission parameters, like a good little kill-bot. So this was a hit to keep Elextra from talking any more about Crystal and from helping us find her. I had found a pigeon feather resting on a bench in a bus stop shelter. I held it up now and directed my will and power through it. “Surge Sursus,” I said. Everything in the room drifted upward, ignoring gravity’s demand. Each drop of blood, each chunk of Elextra’s body, the furniture, it all rose. A tiny scrap of white drifted downward as the leather recliner in the room drifted up. It had been stuck under the chair, and I walked over and plucked it from the air where it now hovered under its hiding place. It was part of a doctor’s prescription pad. The full name of the doctor and the practice’s phone number were not on this scrap, but it was enough to start looking. I pocketed it next to the crumpled photo of Crystal I had recovered from the room earlier. I had almost slammed it down on Gida’s desk in my anger, but I was glad I hadn’t. It gave me an edge, knowledge she didn’t have, and I’d have to worry about her and the Nightwise soon enough if I wasn’t smart enough to heed her deadline. I let everything drift back to its place on the ground.
After another of hour of poking about, both physically and metaphysically, I had zip. If Dragon or Vigil had turned something up in the room, they took it with them. I walked to the hallway beside the den and felt the shiver of the still-bruised space that had been torn for the killer to escape. The house was stunted in its silence. I once again reached out my perceptions and sought to feel my way along the slowly healing wound in the world. My awareness didn’t get as far this time as it had when the thing was running away, but I reached the same conclusion. The killer had not fled into the outer worlds; it had fled inside this world, inside someone’s mind.
I rubbed my face and wished I weren’t out of cigarettes. I considered making myself a drink at the bar in the corner of the den, but I saw Elextra’s face in my head, and I suddenly wasn’t thirsty anymore. I took out the scrambled satellite cell phone Vigil had given me. I dialed a number I had committed to memory. I pulled the crumpled photo of Crystal Myth out of my pocket and unfolded it as I held the phone in the crook of my neck, waiting for the connection. I knew that the phone call was bouncing across the world and perhaps through several others, in an act of electronic and mystic legerdemain that would make Grinner’s head spin. There was an electronic beep, a pause, then a second beep, and then a click as the call was answered at a quiet little farm tucked away in Harrisonburg, Virginia. A woman’s voice answered. “Hello?” she said, sounding a little wary.
“Pam, it’s Laytham Ballard,” I said. “How are you? Sorry if I woke y’all.”
“No,” Pam English said. “You didn’t wake me. We’re on farm time, remember? I’m on watch with a foal that’s got a bad case of colic. I imagine you want to talk to Wayne?”
“Yes, please,” I said.
“Now him, you’re waking up,” she said. Pam was the gatekeeper for her husband, Wayne. The couple had already lost a son to Wayne’s decades-old connection to the Life, and Pam had no intention of losing her husband as well. She was very protective of Wayne, which was understandable. Wayne English was one of a kind, the last of the Acidmancers, a prodigy, a Man in the Gray Flannel Suit for IBM, back at the dawn of the information technology age. Wayne had found the w
orld-changing power inherent in the computer revolution to liberate and ennoble the human soul being turned into another gimmick, another marketing tool, another way to chain and control, tabulate and sort mankind. In his search for truth and freedom, he began to wander down some very unconventional rabbit holes. He worked with the military and intelligence boys on projects like Grill Flame and Stargate. Eventually, the twisting pathways led him to the White Rabbit himself, Timothy Leary. Wayne became one of Leary’s Acidmancers, psychedelic knights of the Summer of Love, the first psychonauts. Using LSD and computers, Wayne achieved a heightened state of awareness and could actually “hack” the Akashic record, the collective unconsciousness of the human race.
I had met Wayne a few years back when I was tracking a Serbian war criminal who had struck out at the demigod game. Wayne and Pam had opened their home to me and my squad and given me a rare taste of hearth and family. I liked them, and I hated having to push my corrosive presence back into their world, but I had no other option if I was correct. All Wayne’s brothers-in-arms, and even his Merlin—Leary, himself—were gone now. I needed Wayne’s unique expertise to help me learn the truth about the creature that slaughtered Elextra.
I heard Pam pass the phone, her hand over the receiver muffling whatever she was saying. A groggy voice, an older man, picked up the phone on his end. “Laytham? Wayne, here. How can I help you, son?”
“I’m sorry as hell to trouble you, sir, but I need your help to track down and bag a critter that killed two civilians during an investigation I’m into out here in L.A. Your line’s secure, right?” I heard an odd digital tone, like a MIDI with hiccups, and then Wayne’s voice again.
“It is, and so is yours, just to make sure,” Wayne said. “Tell me everything.”
So I did. In a strange way, it felt like a confession to a priest. If I managed to stay alive long enough, maybe one day, I’d grow up to be Wayne English. It was doubtful I’d live that long, and I’d given up on the notion of someone beside me to love, a child, a home like Wayne or Grinner had. I’d pissed away every opportunity the universe had tried to give me to be happy. I’d die alone, no love, no nothing, like a meteor that flares to ash in the sky, a bright second of beautiful destruction, then gone, forgotten. It was a fair fate. I had my chances, but my ego, and my ambition, and my fear always made sure I passed them by. Life is choices and trades, you gain and you lose. It was too late in the game to whine about it now, especially when you had cheated as much as I had.
Wayne was one of the few people on earth with the power and the experiences to get me sometimes, and I was thankful for him being in this world. I was thankful enough to try to stay far away from him and Pam but like I said, he was the only one who could tell me if I was right or not about what I was dealing with. I described in very esoteric terms the resonance of the creature’s departure and how it had retreated not to an outside realm, but to the interior of the mindscape, the Akashic, Wayne’s turf.
“Oh,” Wayne said. “That’s not good.”
“Yeah,” I said, and I described the type of shredding that had been done to Elextra, to the room as I slipped the picture of Crystal back in my pocket.
“Damn,” Wayne said. “That sounds exactly like Crash Cart or Rib Spreader; did you get a look at it, did it look metallic? Surgical? Did it have wheels instead of legs?”
“I’m not sure, Wayne,” I said. “Its shadow didn’t look human at all. You sound pretty certain it’s one of them. It is, isn’t it? I thought you and the other Acidmancers destroyed all of them in the Helter Skelter War?”
“I thought we did,” Wayne said. I felt ice, and perhaps fear, settle in his voice. “I truly thought we did. I lost so many dear friends fighting them, purging them from the zeitgeist, from the Akashic record. I’m sorry, son, I agree with you. I wish I didn’t. It sounds like one of the Nightmare tulpa.”
I felt fear shrink my balls too. These things were legendary, powerful, evil given form. “There’s only supposed to be one man who could call them up, build them in his bug-house-crazy skull,” I said.
“Yes,” Wayne said grimly, “Manson.”
EIGHTEEN
I’ve spent enough time in prisons, on both sides of the cage, to understand that when you walk through those seemingly normal doors, past offices and break rooms, checkpoints and metal detectors, you are stepping into a parallel universe. You pass beyond the veneer of the civilized, normal, safe world into a realm beyond sunlight and mercy, into the forge. The greatest thing to fear on the inside, guard or con, is yourself, what you will do, what you’re capable of just to breathe another day, to survive until you make it back to that other soft world or die trying.
Most of the people in prison are there because they fucked up, not out of some great inherent moral failing, more like a sick comedy of errors. They were just tired, drunk, angry, bitter, or broke at the wrong place at the wrong time. They fucked up, usually in a split second. They made a choice, and it was usually the wrong one. Then there are the folks who are inside due to no fault of their own, but because the gatekeepers fucked up. Innocent people fall through the cracks in a clattering, overloaded system that struggles to maintain a facade of safety and order, a system made up of fallible mortals who are overworked, underpaid, stressed, jaded, distrusting, and, sometimes, racist.
Then you have the smallest percentage of the population inside, the ones that you hope never get out, never breathe free air, the monsters. I was meeting an old monster today.
Wayne English had been unable to make it out to L.A. in the rapidly dwindling time I now had to wrap up this caper before my former associates in the “august body” of the Nightwise came for me and kicked my ass out of town. He had tag-teamed with Grinner to produce an airtight cover for me as some kind of shadowy federal agent from some nebulous organization. I think Grinner insisted the acronym for the make-believe agency be “A.S.S.” So, now, here I was, in the bowels of Corcoran State Prison, clean shaven, hair slicked back and in a tight ponytail, wearing a charcoal-gray Fioravanti suit with a pale purple Turnbull & Asser tie. I looked good, James Bond good. That’s me, Laytham Ballard, international cracker of mystery, the Man from A.S.S.
English had also done me one final solid. I tucked it away in case I needed it later.
I had all the proper credentials, all the necessary emails and verification. For the next twelve hours, this identity was golden. The two best hackers in the universe had even managed to get me a private interview, a whole thirty minutes. It wouldn’t take that long to find out everything I needed to know from the old monster, if he was chatty today.
The interview room I was led into by the old monster’s keepers—a cadre of guards, the warden, and a prison psychologist—looked like any other corporate conference room, except for the heavy steel door with the narrow sliver of a window made of steel mesh–reinforced glass.
“Mr. Blanke,” the psychologist said, frowning as she read my fake last name off my clip-on visitor badge. “Are you sure you want to be in here without at least some prison staff present? I’d be willing to stay if you would feel more comfortable. He can be a bit of an overpowering personality, even given his failing physical health.”
“I’ll be fine, Doctor,” I said. “I’m kinda used to big personalities, and please call me Melvin.”
She smiled, arched her eyebrow, and nodded. “Very well, good luck. He’ll be brought in shortly.” Everyone left. I saw a few guards waiting outside the door.
The room was quiet, except for the hum of the AC. A few minutes passed, and I spent the time breathing, slowing my pulse. While the old monster was no threat physically, he was still formidable in the realm of power. I had felt his madness, like a hot, angry wind as soon as I had entered the prison. I should have my defenses up and ready for him. The part of me that whispered I’d be more loose and ready for him if I had had that drink this morning told me I needed to know, to see how I fared bare-knuckle against him. Sober me told me I listened to that asshole way to
o much.
There was an electronic click and buzz, and the steel door swung open. Charles Manson entered the room. He had steel-gray hair, shaved up on the sides in a brush cut, and a gray goatee. He was hunched over, his hands close in cuffs, connected to a body chain and then leg restraints, a shuffling old hippie. He looked at me. A little smile played at his lips, and I felt his presence scrape and claw at the edges of my power, looking for cracks to seep in through. The swastika scar was there, above eyes as black and devoid of life as the death between stars.
I had heard he had been very sick, and I saw in him that he wasn’t much longer for this world. A horrible thought occurred to me then: would death be enough? Would death erase his stain from the world? Manson nodded and grunted at me as the guards sat him down and locked him to a chair opposite me at the conference table. “Who the hell are you?” he said. I had been interrogated enough times to know that I’d make him wait. Charlie decided not to play my game. “You’re witchy. I can feel it coming off of you like stink off a whore. Ain’t no agent man, though, no Eff-Bee-Eye, are you, witchy-man?”
“Cut the shit, Charlie,” one of the guards said under his breath. “Behave. Answer the nice man’s questions and don’t make us come back in here until he’s done. Got it?” Manson bobbed his head rapidly a few times, looked up with hooded eyes, and smiled at me. It was the famous Manson smile, the Manson eyes, and I have to admit, it had power to it. My stomach curled, and I felt his energy prying at the tiny crack in my armor his demeanor had created. The guard who had admonished Manson explained to me that they would be right outside if I needed anything. They departed without another word. There was a loud clank as the heavy door closed and locked, and I was alone with the self-proclaimed Devil. Having met them both, I have to say, Charlie was scarier.
The Night Dahlia Page 24
