Nightwise

by R. S. Belcher

  I looked toward the other room, I saw the people in there in my mind. I saw my old friends, my old crew, and how they were now. Nothing changes. People can’t change, even if the world would let them. I wanted a cigarette really bad.

  More laughter from the other room. It felt better, easier, to be alone, to keep your distance and your guard up. How many people in that room would end up dead if they stuck with me? How many dead inside? How many would betray me? Wound me? How many of them would I let down, or throw under the bus in the name of my own pride, my own ego, my own lousy hide? No answers. Just do the job, make things square for Boj. One foot in front of the other.

  I stood and made my way to the living room. I opened the door to the sounds of life and light, and stepped through.

  “Okay,” I said, “I’m on the team that doesn’t suck.”

  EIGHTEEN

  The beds were huge, soft, and clean. It was almost noon when I got up. There was a little folded note on my bed stand, next to the magic Kodak camera and the empty scotch glass. The paper smelled like purple lollipops. The note said simply:

  You are amazingly hard to wake up when you are drunk and tired. Gods know I tried.

  Mag

  P.S. Who is Torri Lyn? You talk in your sleep.

  I sat on the side of the bed and smelled the paper again. I remembered the scent. I refolded it and left it on the night table.

  Showered, shaved, and wearing clean clothes, I headed downstairs. It was quiet, and early afternoon sun was filtering through the numerous windows. The only sound was the old grandfather clock’s steady, oiled-metal ticking.

  “Hello?” I called.

  “They’re gone,” a voice said just out of sight to the right of the stairs. “Took the Jeep and went into town. Ichi-san is walking in the woods, and Pam is at her clinic in the main barn. She’s a rather busy veterinarian in these parts.”

  I came off the stairs, turned toward the dining room. A heavyset man in his late sixties with thinning black hair, sideburns, and thick glasses—what they called in the military BCGs, or “birth control glasses”—stood from the dining room table to greet me. He was dressed in what they used to call “the uniform” at IBM—a white collared shirt with short sleeves, a pen protector with actual pens in the shirt pocket, dark slacks, and sensible shoes. He had a slide rule case on his belt. He crossed to meet me and thrust out a hand.

  “Howdy,” he said, shaking my hand. It was a firm, vigorous shake. “I’m Bruce Haberscomb.”

  “Laytham Ballard,” I said. “Pleasure to meet the legend.”

  “Likewise,” Haberscomb said. “I know I’m not exactly what you were expecting…”

  “No, no, it’s just…” I said.

  “Old habits die hard,” he said with a chuckle. “Back in the day, this outfit was pimp. Pam has been trying to get me to at least wear an occasional sweater vest, but I just can’t do that. Freebirds got to fly, I say.”

  “Please,” I said, “never wear sweater vests. Ever. Please. They suck.”

  “Yes,” Bruce said with a great deal of solemnity. “Yes, they are just about the worst thing in this universe, ever. They do suck. Yes. Please have a seat. We can talk about why you are here.”

  We sat at the dining room table. He poured me coffee from a stainless steel pot and then refreshed his own cup.

  “Did Grinner tell you much?” I asked.

  “That you are looking for someone, someone who has erased every trace of himself from human society.”

  “Yes,” I said. “He told me you can hack the Akashic Record and locate him.”

  Bruce nodded and took a sip of coffee. “‘Hack’ is a crude term, but it’s essentially correct,” he said. “Do you understand the Akashic Record—what it represents?”

  “I have some experience with it,” I said. “I studied in the East for quite a few years, but I’m afraid my understanding is far from complete, Bruce.”

  “The Record presents itself in many different ways to each pilgrim,” he said. “Edgar Cayce described it as the Hall of Records. Others view it as a photographic or holographic experience. Some claim it is the reflection of curved space-time off the twenty-sixth dimensional wireframe.

  “To me, it has always been presented as computer code, a logic puzzle to be studied, line by line, and sometimes carefully modified.”

  “So you can actually see … what?” I said, leaning forward. “Everything?”

  “I can access all the desires and experiences of our world, the life experiences of every human from now until the last human, the empathic experience of the entire nonhuman bio-aura of earth, and the aggregation of the tuplaic architecture formed by the interaction of the dynamic of karma with thought-form structures based upon the desires, the dreams of every human that has been or will be. Didgeri Doo would call that aspect the Dreaming.”

  “That has got to be a bitch to process,” I said, shaking my head, “to not get lost in that. I felt a little taste of that when I first discovered the Art, that feeling of interconnectivity, and it must be much, much harder.”

  Bruce nodded. “Yes, precisely. Only someone with the proper training and the right hardware in their skulls can distinguish between actual 4-D experience and experiences created by imagination and keen desire.”

  “LSD, acid,” I said. “Grinner said you were an Acidmancer, and now I understand why—it helps you navigate the Akashic Record.”

  “Yes,” Bruce said. “As you well know, each of us comes to the Life a different way, and we find our own paths to access the power. I am led to understand from Grinner that you found what works best for you is chakraic visualization and somatic reinforcement. For me, it was programing. Building objects in code was like solid curtains of music, sculptures of thought. It still gives me goose bumps. Turns out, as I kid I was coding when I didn’t even realize I was doing it.

  “I had a real knack for it too. I was recruited out of UC–Berkeley by IBM and, in a few weeks, I was promoted over to their covert Defense Department programs. You know, the Blue Magic Initiative: Bell Atlantic, Book and Candle, Deep Ouija, all that stuff, mixing magic and computer technology. I worked side by side with Marcel Vogel—he’s actually who recruited me. That man was a visionary and a genius, a true pioneer in merging hard science with occult and paranormal theory. He did things with luminosity, magnetics, liquid crystal systems…” Haberscomb smiled. He was looking back at Camelot. The memories were green and golden. “The man was a living, breathing wizard—the real deal, a Pythagoras, a Tesla, a Feynman. He was my hero, my inspiration. Those were exciting days, Latham. You wouldn’t have even been born yet.”

  “Reckon not,” I said with a wide grin. “So, how do you get from IBM black ops to Acidmancy?”

  “Well, I discovered a little problem with coding and magic for me,” he said. “The code became too rigid in my mind. I sometimes overlooked elegant intuitive solutions to simple formulaic models because I was too tied into the dogma of the code. I wasn’t creating items out of thought and math, I was merely utilizing the artifacts others had created. I fell into the abyss of assembly. My workings suffered for it. I wasn’t the only one, either; it was one of the reasons Blue Magic eventually folded, the basic dilemma of coding versus programmer, samurai versus rōnin. I was stuck in between two worlds. I had been trained to illuminate manuscripts, if you will, but I ached to write my own stories, and I lost the power somewhere in between. I wandered in some pretty dark places trying to get the magic back. I know you understand paying a price for power, Laytham. Grinner told you I was with the Company for a while?

  “Yeah, Project Stargate, Project Midnight Climax. Midnight Climax was where the CIA was covertly dosing U.S. citizens with acid to see how it would work as an interrogation and mind control drug. Pretty deep black, Bruce.”

  “Yep,” he said. “Not my finest hour. Thank goodness for Timothy. He helped me solve the problem, brought me back to myself.”

  “Timothy Leary?” I said. “Right? You w
ere one of the original Acidmancers?”

  He nodded, sipped his coffee. “There was more than just the war in Vietnam going on back then, Laytham,” he said. “There was a cultural war, a spiritual war, waging across the world. So many young, brilliant minds, so much will and desire to change the world, to create a golden age out of dross. So much hatred and madness and recklessness. So many casualties, in all the wars. Those boys coming home in aluminum boxes, kids getting shot down and beaten in the streets, bastards like Manson turning kids who wanted peace and love into murdering robots…”

  He removed his glasses and wiped his eyes. “I won’t venerate Leary. He had great ideas and short-sighted ones. Many young men and women fell on the battlefield of the mind, causalities of their own burning desire to experience, to evolve past that point of human social evolution. For every Acidmancer, every psychonaut, there were a legion of burnouts—lost lives, chemically burned souls. Was it worth it? I can’t say. I can tell you this, though, we made a difference, and we stood against evil. The Agency’s evil, Manson’s evil, Nixon’s evil. We stood … and we fell.

  “I’m the last one of the originals. I retired here in the eighties, when it was clear that all the things we were fighting for, we had lost. I have visitors—folks like you and Grinner, some who come to apprentice. I try to do what I can to help people. That’s what it’s all about, right? We couldn’t change the world, not in any real, lasting way. So we change our little part of it, right? That’s what we wizards do, isn’t it? Change the world at the fringes, defend it in the night.”

  He was quiet. The clock ticked, and I sipped my coffee. Finally, he looked over to me and smiled.

  “Sorry. An old man rambling. Okeydoke. You want me to go into the Record and see if I can find your man, Mr.…”

  “Slorzack,” I said. “Dusan Slorzack.”

  “I will. I understand from Grinner he is one bad guy, so I will go find him for you. Did Grinner do a full search for you using all the conventional methods?”

  “Yes.”

  “Normally to hide your tracks from someone like Grinner, you need pretty powerful friends—is he Illuminati? Neomasons? Purrah? The Mazekeepers of Pamukkale? Id of Warhol? Assassins of the Magic Bullet? One of the other superior secret societies?”

  “I thought he might be Illuminati,” I said. “But it appears he’s freelancing. He’s mixed up with some low-level Illuminati types in some kind of caper, but the home office seems clueless.”

  I stood and held up a hand. “One second. I want to show you something I recovered yesterday. If you have some blank paper—photographic or computer paper—that would be great.”

  I ran upstairs, grabbed the old Kodak, and came back down. Bruce had a small ream of paper waiting.

  “That’s a beaut of an old camera there,” he said. “That a Brownie?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Special one too. Watch.”

  I placed the camera on the stack of papers and laid my hand lightly on it.

  “Veritatem revelare estis testificata,” I said. Images from the archives at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing slowly developed on the paper underneath the camera, like an old Polaroid Instamatic, only faster.

  “Very nice,” Bruce said. “An artifact of power. Someone loved this camera very much, and you took that love and power and turned it to a like-minded purpose. So you are an artificer too, Laytham. Impressive. It takes a bit of social engineering to make an item of power.”

  I removed the camera and checked the paper; each sheet held one of the images I had taken of the mysterious occult symbols on the engraving dies for the U.S. currency.

  “Not as impressive as you think,” I said. “I dabble. If I can’t make the artifact I need, or find it, I steal it. It’s got me in trouble quite a bit over the years. I almost grabbed a very badass straight razor a while back that would have cost me worlds of hurt.”

  I handed the photographs to Bruce one at a time.

  “What do you think? You ever see anything like this before?”

  “No,” Bruce said. He opened a drawer in the buffet behind him and retrieved a magnifying glass. “I haven’t.” He studied each picture carefully.

  “It’s an evolving system,” Bruce said. “Looks like they hit their stride in the 1930s. It looks pretty realized by then. I can see where it’s derivative of a few Western traditional sources, but such bold, almost reckless innovation. This work is genius.”

  “Any clue what it is, what it’s doing?” I asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “You ever hear of anything called ‘the Greenway’?” I asked.

  “I’m afraid it doesn’t ring any bells,” he said. “However, I might be able to put some of this into a historical context for you. Ever hear of Henry A. Wallace?”

  “’Fraid not,” I said.

  “He was Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture and second vice president,” Bruce said. “Not surprising you haven’t heard of him. He’s part of the history of the Life—one of those dark alleyways in history most folks don’t wander down. He might have a connection to your mysterious new magic here, as well.

  “Wallace was a damn good man, saved thousands of family farms during the Great Depression as agriculture secretary. He was also a seeker of truth and an avid occultist and mystic. He was into all kinds of stuff: astrology, Native American shamanism, Theosophy, Tibetan Buddhism. I don’t know if he worked the power, but he sure as hell studied it and knew more about it than most.

  “He was FDR’s right-hand man and a heartbeat away from the presidency in the middle of the crucible of World War Two. I often wonder what path our world would have taken if he had become president at such a critical juncture.

  “The reason I mention him at all is that he made many comments publicly that implied there were powers at work behind the economy of the United States. This was in 1935, the same year the dollar acquired the All-Seeing Eye, the same year this printing plate of yours, here”—he pointed to the photograph in front of him, the one with the unknown mystic symbols covering the edges of the die plate—“with a fully actualized and completely unknown magic system embedded into it, came into reality.”

  “You think he was trying to warn people about whatever this is?” I asked. My coffee was cold. I didn’t care. My instincts were screaming to me that I was on the right track here, and that this was much, much bigger than I had imagined.

  “Or maybe he had been part of it and then saw where it was going and wanted out. You know how that works, Laytham. Sometimes there is no turning back. You’re in too deep.”

  “What happened to him?” I asked.

  “Like I said, he was a good man, “Bruce said. “We both know what happens to good men in politics.”

  “So maybe you can see if Wallace knew anything about this”—I held up a picture of one of the plates—“when you go into the Record.”

  “I will try,” Bruce said. “Running the Akashic Record is like kayaking on a river full of rocks and falls. The more I go in trying to find, the rougher the ride, but yes, my interest is piqued.” He grinned. “I want to know too.”

  NINETEEN

  “May I study these photos? I have certain techniques to commit them fully to memory, but it takes a bit,” Bruce asked as he stood from the dining room table.

  “Sure,” I said. “Any way I can assist? I’d like to see an Acidmancer in action, if I could?”

  Bruce laughed. It was a soft, comfortable laugh, like mellow pipe smoke, or worn leather. It made you feel safe. “Come on, I’ll show you the office,” he said.

  He grabbed an old, worn dark green barn jacket off the hook by the living room doors, and I grabbed my leather jacket. He folded the pictures and stuffed them into a pocket of his coat. He led me out of the house and toward the big two-story metal prefab work building. The sun was bright again, but the wind had picked up. It was cold and our breath trailed out of our mouths.

  We walked across the asphalt basketball court with its ra
in- and snow-faded chalk drawings and its lone post and goal, a rusting sentinel with a rotting net, a flag to an age of bright summer evenings, fireflies, and laughter.

  “Pam mentioned our boy to you?” he said.

  “Yes, I’m so sorry. A parent should never outlive a child.”

  “Kids shouldn’t outlive their parents, either,” Bruce said. “It’s a mess, either way, this whole death business—poorly thought out, you ask me. And if you look back in the Record to the beginning or forward to the end, it doesn’t change and it never makes sense in this world, ever. If I ever find God, I need to have sit-down with him about that.”

  Bruce paused at the door and rummaged in his pockets until he found a key ring. He selected a key and unlocked the door. I felt a surge as powerful mystic alarms, wards, and defenses lifted like a stage curtain. He opened the door and gestured for me to enter.

  Inside, the first level of the building was mostly taken up with what looked like a medical clinic. There were exam rooms, a well-stocked lab, and a waiting room and reception counter. Pam, in a Mumford & Sons T-shirt, red-and-black flannel shirt, and worn jeans, was doing paperwork in a small office just behind the waiting room and reception area. Her wall was decorated with pictures obviously drawn by children thanking her for healing their pets. She looked up and smiled at Bruce. He came around the desk and hugged and kissed her.

  “I see you two found each other,” she said. “How are you feeling?”

  “Better,” he said. “I’m taking Laytham down to the office to show him around, and then I’m going in to find his mystery man.”

  Pam tried to hide the disapproval on her face but failed pretty badly.

  “Your loss,” she said. “I was making those scalloped potatoes you like so much for dinner.”

  “Save me a plate,” he said. “I’ll be home for dinner, just late. I want you to come fetch Laytham in about an hour or so, if you don’t mind. I will be out in the Record by then, and I don’t want him crashing any of our wards or our defenses crashing him while he’s trying to get out on his own.”