Nightwise

by R. S. Belcher

  “I … I can’t go back, honey,” she said. It sounded like she wanted to cry but wasn’t capable of that anymore. “It’s a one-way trip, darlin’. You pulled me out. I … I’m not allowed to go back no more.”

  “But … but I thought you were missing me too, Granny,” I said. “I thought you were sad.”

  “Now, Laytham Ballard, don’t you be fibbin’ to your old Granny,” she said. “You weren’t thinking about me. You were thinking about yourself, now weren’t you?”

  The thumping became louder, and Kara May was humming a tune in time to it.

  “I missed you, Granny,” I said softly.

  “Honey, you have to learn to let it go. You are not the Almighty, and you can’t use the power to do whatever you please. There are rules, and when you break them, there are consequences.”

  Hot tears finally came, and I sobbed. The terrible awareness of what I had done settled over me like a moonless night. “I’m so sorry, Granny. Were you happy where you were, Granny?”

  There was a long pause, I saw the shadow of the thing that had been my grandmother shift.

  “Aww, it weren’t all that great, I suppose,” she finally said, but there was anguish in her voice.

  I cried.

  “Now Laytham, you have to promise me you won’t do this again, son—promise me! The price is too high, for everyone.”

  “I swear, Granny,” I said. “I’m so sorry, Granny. What will you do?”

  Another long pause. Kara May’s pounding and humming continued unabated.

  Finally, Granny spoke. “Well, I can go to the place that welcomes all comers. At least misery will have company. Or I can stay in my skin until it turns to dust and then just wear away with it.”

  I screamed in sorrow, in pain unlike any I could fathom—I still remember that feeling, that pain, to this day. It’s the feeling that makes us eventually long to pass from this world. Kara May joined me in the wailing.

  “Oh, God, Granny, I am so sorry!” I screamed. Can’t they take me? Please take me instead and let you go back to Heaven! Please, God!”

  “It can’t work that way, Laytham,” Granny said. “We are each responsible for what we do, the damage and the healing. It ain’t God’s fault—that’s like blaming the landlord when you burn the house down. Folks like us got a lot more ability to harm or heal than most, but in the end we still stand for what we’ve done with our life. We all do, no hiding from that.

  “For what it’s worth, I forgive you, honey. And I love you, Laytham. I always will.”

  I heard the wet, heavy footsteps recede back down the hallway. Then there was only the thudding sound of the door again and the rhythmic pounding and Kara May’s animal-like mewling.

  I crawled out of the closet, over the damaged door, over Chip’s cooling body. And I pulled myself up by the edge of Momma’s bed. Kara, naked and covered in her lover’s blood, was in the corner of the room by the night table, beating her head against the wall. With each impact, a new dark stain. Clods of wet, slimy mud led out into the hallway.

  Kara May stared at me with the look of a broken toy. She no longer existed in the same world she had, and I felt myself strangely envious of her. Everything was spinning, dizzy. I was at the threshold of her new kingdom, and I yearned for it.

  “Price, price, price, price…” She giggled in between impacts. Then she stopped and turned to look at me, her face harlequined in blood. She pointed to me and made a noise at the top of her lungs. It was laughter and rage and absolute fear. It was the sound madness makes when it scratches upon the wall of our world.

  “Priiiiiiccccceeeeee!!!!!!” she screamed and pointed at me. I picked up the bloody scissors at my feet and, without any hesitation, I tore them across one wrist, then the other as deeply and as hard as I could. I lay on the floor and waited for, welcomed death.

  Looking back, I was incredibly lucky; I shouted out into the dark well beyond this world and begged for someone to come to me. No protection, no wards or charms, no training. It’s a miracle I wasn’t possessed by the Waiting, what Granny would call a haint, or a ghost, or something far, far worse—the Hungry, the Unnamed. I like to think it was Granny’s doing, her looking out for her stupid, crazy grandson, one last time.

  It’s part of my legend now, the myth of the rock star. “He raised the dead at the age of ten.” The part of me that had all the feeling burned out is kind of proud when I hear that, and that is very sad. Only I ever view the event in its proper context, as, “He took a human life and damned a good soul at the age of ten.”

  To this day, I wish something had clawed up out of the Void, vomited into the lands of light and matter, and claimed my body and soul. I wish I had been eaten, instead of what I did to the only person who loved me all the way through in this shit house world. I wish they hadn’t breathed life back into me, wish they had let me bleed out on the floor of Momma’s bedroom. I wish I had listened, wish I had learned. Wishes are the currency of the foolish, the helpless, and the damned, lotto tickets that never pay out.

  I saw Kara May a lot after that. Every day when it was meds time in the common room at Weston State Hospital. The asylum is closed down now, in part due to the hauntings, but that’s a story for another day. I spent a year and a half in Weston, after Granny came to visit. Kara May Odam never left the hospital alive, another bloody bill on my account.

  They never found Granny’s body.

  ELEVEN

  The Seraphim were waiting for me on the other side of oblivion in the interrogation room. Always in the interrogation room—in my dreams, after the beatings, the torture, the drugs, I was always in the interrogation room. A loop of horror, like a serpent choking on its own tail. Always in the interrogation room.

  I came to, leaning against someone in ballistic armor with a black bag on my head and my chest burning, throbbing from the Taser. The bag was ripped away. I blinked under the harsh light of the room, which looked the same in a hundred different police stations, right down to the stains and scratched declarations on the table.

  The armored SWAT cop nodded to the two plainclothes detectives, gave them an odd salute and a bow, almost ritual in nature, and exited the room with my black bag. I tried to stand still and look cool, but I was teetering. My hands were cuffed, and my mind was flat and dull.

  “Sit,” the skinny one said, gesturing to the chair across from his own at the table. Soft, strong voice, Bronx accent. Skinny was balding, he had strands of salt-and-pepper hair combed over his pate. He had a thick, bushy, gray cop mustache standing sentry under his nose, and his complexion was pale with splotches of florid pink. His eyes may have been kind a few eons ago; now they were just tired. He wore the detective uniform—a short-sleeved, white-collared shirt, a cheap-looking tie (this one was brown-and-beige striped), and a sport coat that was at least ten years old. He didn’t look well enough dressed to be a dirty cop. He had a little police union pin tacked to his lapel. I’d wager the keys to these cuffs that he had a Saint Christopher medallion around his neck.

  I sat. His friend, the fat one, lurked menacingly in the corner off to my left. He was a good foot taller than me and Skinny and outweighed us both by at least 150 pounds. He dressed about the same as Skinny, except he shopped the big and tall bargain bin. Anger came off of him in waves, like heat off asphalt on a summer day. I could see the scars on his knuckles without needing to see his hands, and at home there were holes in the sheetrock walls and a discarded wedding band on the dresser in the bedroom next to a dusty wedding album and a letter of reprimand. He had a mop of black hair and a face that was too old, too busted up, too wrinkled, and too damn mean to have such a crown. At first glance, you’d think he was sporting a toupee, but on second viewing, you’d realize that he was just an old guy who got lucky enough to keep his hair, kind of like me. I wasn’t feeling an overabundance of lucky right now, I have to admit.

  Fat was waiting; I could see it in his dog-shit brown eyes, glazed with hatred, in his posture. Waiting for me to giv
e him a reason, any reason, to let it loose, to use the plant gun, to break me down so he could live a little longer outside of himself. To teach me a lesson. I knew exactly what not to do here, to avoid the ogre, to avoid the rage. I knew, but we all have our weaknesses, don’t we?

  I smiled at Fat as I sat down. “Hi,” I said, and waved as best I could with handcuffs on.

  Fat walked over and kicked the chair out from under me. I hit the dirty tile floor hard. His steel-toed shoe was in my side, kicking me, hard, over and over and over, like Gene Kelly doing a buck-and-wing. I felt red blossoms of pain as several of my ribs snapped under his attentions. I tried to roll into a ball. He pulled me up by my hair with one hand and punched me a few times in the face with the other. A strobe of white light flashed behind my eyes and my face became numb. I was pretty sure my nose had just been broken, again. What was this now? Six, seven times?

  My exercise partner held me up while he picked up the chair off the floor and slid it back to the table. He deposited my sorry ass in it and let me go. He stalked back to his corner.

  “Who are you?” Skinny asked. “We tried to print you, of course, while you were out. The ink wouldn’t stay on, it ran off your fingers every time we tried, and the partials we managed to get weren’t actual prints. They were like tiny paintings, seemed to be small parts of some painter’s work … who was it?” he asked Fat, who was wiping blood off his hands with an old handkerchief. Fat shrugged.

  “Some fuckin’ faggot,” he opined. Accent straight out of Brooklyn.

  Skinny snapped his fingers. “Bosch,” he said. “Hieronymus Bosch. Nice trick there.

  “No wallet. We tried blood tests, DNA unraveled and the results were inconclusive. One genetic test told us you were Alex Trebek. We drugged you, of course, tried to get intel out of you that way. You were very resistant, obviously not your first time being interrogated. We tried digital scans of prints and facial recognition. Your images crashed the computer, crashed the network, or sent us to Russian porn sites, every time. So, we figure you for being in the Life. Figured we’d just ask you. Who are you, cowboy?”

  I sucked back in through crushed sinuses, winced at the exquisite pain, and hocked a glob of black blood onto the folder in front of Skinny.

  “Phuck youh,” I said through loose, bloody teeth. “There’s anuder sanple ford youh. I wan’ a lawyer.”

  Skinny smiled, sighed, and shook his head, the way you might at an errant dog that pissed on the new carpet again.

  “No, pal, fuck you. Hard. You understand that there will be no lawyers coming for you, don’t you?” Skinny said. “You are alone here with us, and when we are finished with you, you go to the Tombs—you know, Lower Manhattan. We have a special section there just for guys like you.”

  “Gee, I didn’t knowd there wa’ anybody like me,” I said.

  Skinny smiled big, and ice filled my bowels. “Guys like you—people who fuck with the Secret Masters, asshole.”

  “Isn’t dath a golfth tournament?” I said.

  He nodded to Fat. I didn’t need to see the bigger cop to feel his smile.

  Everything jerked back into the frame-jump world of violence and pain. There was blood, mine, everywhere. There was no clock in the room, so I measured time in the intervals between new expressions of hurting and the pauses between pain.

  I remember crawling across the floor, trying to hide in a corner, but Officer Friendly would have none of it. His kick caught me in the diaphragm, and I felt all awareness abandon me with the air in my lungs. The panicked feeling of not being able to breathe, not pull a breath out of the air. The thrill of thinking you are going to die and realizing how unimportant you are, how meaningless your life is to the continuity of the great show. Trauma strips away all our pretenses; it leaves us naked and small.

  Eventually, I was dropped back into the chair. I couldn’t see very well. One eye was swollen, and the other didn’t seem to be working the way it was supposed to. I couldn’t feel my left leg at all, and there was a sharp knife in my lungs with each breath.

  Skinny had a can of soda now. I guess he had stepped out during Fat’s quality time with me. Surprisingly, I hadn’t noticed. I had taken enough beatings in my day to know Fat knew exactly what he was doing. He freestyled a bit, but he was an artist of suffering. I was right at the edge of life-threatening, permanent damage.

  “Why did you kill him?” Skinny asked. “Tell us your name and confess your crime. Why did you kill him?”

  “Killh who?” I asked.

  “The banker,” Skinny said. “You were in his office on Wall Street about five days ago. Remember him now?”

  “Node,” I muttered as I put my head down on the table.

  “You a freelancer, a Sellspell? A Hexhitter? Maybe you’re an Athame, a ritual assassin with another lodge, and Berman got in your way? Tell me I’m wrong.”

  “Who’s Berdman?” I said, looking up and rubbing my swelling face.

  “You led us a merry chase, I’ll give you that,” Skinny said. “We had been looking for you for days. It was fortunate we picked you and Berman’s boyfriend up on the city cameras we have hardwired into the Sphinxes.”

  “Finxes?” I asked. Skinny handed me a paper towel to stanch some of the blood dripping from the train wreck that was my face.

  “We take political prisoners, like you. Some homeless, if they haven’t wrecked their nervous systems with too much Sterno, orphans of the state that have fallen through the cracks, and we do a series of surgeries on them. Remove all their external sensory organs: eyes, ears, nose, tongue. We destroy parts of their brains and enhance other parts, and then we wire them up to the over 2,397 traffic and surveillance cameras in the city. They become eternal watchmen, scanning, seeing, unblinking, unsleeping. They live in coffins—devices that feed their shriveled bodies. They sift data for us, churn it, and, lucky you, they spotted you and your dead friend, Trace.

  “Were you fuckin’ him too?” Fat rumbled, and smacked the back of my head. “That why you snuffed Berman, lovers’ spat, homo?”

  It was hard to think, but a few wheels were turning in me. A hypothesis was formulating, but I didn’t have the brain power to reason it out right now. They were either playing games with me, mind-fucking me, or I was missing some things. I decided to keep doing what I was doing, clam up and keep fishing.

  “Whyd you killh him?” I asked Skinny, looking him dead in the eyes. “Trace. He wad a civilian, a nobody.”

  “You liked him,” Skinny said.

  I nodded. “Yeah, he was okay. Why killh him and keep me? Why?”

  Skinny looked genuinely pained for a second and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “It was not supposed to go down that way,” he said. “Someone on the extraction team screwed the pooch, got a little overenthusiastic and dropped Trace. We’d already interrogated him about Berman and had pretty much written him off. It was sloppy and bad form. You’re right.”

  Fat seemed not to be too happy with Skinny’s line of discussion with me. He resumed brooding and pacing in the corner. But I saw what angle Skinny was working here, and it was brilliant. Establish trust, demonstrate honesty, and share information, just enough to keep me going but not enough to give me the full picture.

  These two cops were not just pulled out of a hat; they were both experts in their arenas. Fat in breaking my body and Skinny in hacking my mind.

  “Why did you have him with you at the ritual site?” Skinny asked. “What did he know?”

  “I thin’ the real question is whyd yourth man killed him,” I said. “I’d look to yourth own house, firs’, pal. That wasn’t an accident, id was an off-the-books hit.”

  The muscle in the left side of Skinny’s jaw twitched.

  “Your ass is about to be disappeared,” Skinny said. “Now, why did you kill Berman?”

  “I’m ready to disappear now,” I said.

  “Ballsy little prick,” Fat muttered to Skinny. “Want me to bounce him around a little bit more? See if he gets more
helpful?”

  I looked up at Fat. He was panting, but he actually looked healthier after our session. There were all kinds of things I could say. They would all get me killed or in a wheelchair, turned into a vegetable, breathing through a machine. Sometimes you have to listen to your survival instincts and not be a fool.

  I smiled through bloody teeth and shredded lips. “Thad wha’ youh and yourh boyfrien’ call fordplay, Salad Barh?” I said to Fat. I heard Skinny laugh.

  I don’t remember anything after that, until the Tombs.

  * * *

  The second worst thing about being beaten to within an inch of your life by professionals is that after it’s all over, you have the time to stiffen up. Time for your back to become a fused steel rod, for your head to feel like it’s full of gravel, for your skin to feel tight and numb over the brutal topography of bruises and split skin. The worst thing, of course, is getting the shit kicked out of you in the first place.

  They call the Manhattan Detention Center “the Tombs” for good reason. In the caves of crumbling concrete, between curtains of steel, it’s easy to feel lost to time, to life, to daylight—a thing of dust, frozen pain, aborted from the memory of the world. Prison is Hell’s waiting room.

  On the way to my new home, they paraded me through the general population. Imagine walls six stories high, made of screaming, hungry faces and steel. It rained down on me; I was baptized in shit, blood, puke, moonshine, and cum from my new neighbors. The guards just smiled. They knew I was headed for the special cells.

  I sat in my dark cell in the deepest bowels of the prison and felt the beating I got at the precinct house stiffen me up real good. Welcome to the rest of your life.

  I was unsure how long I had been out. I had been drugged, I felt that much and, like any effective drug designed to incapacitate you, it played hell with my sense of time. My head buzzed, and I was dizzy, and my mouth was dry. The puncture wounds and burn marks from the Taser’s barbs in my chest were scabbed over and healing. The looked like they had been treated. That gave me a rough idea: I had been in here for at least a few days.