Nightwise

by R. S. Belcher

  “Okay,” she said, smiling. “I love you, old man. No wandering. I want you home by midnight.”

  Bruce laughed, kissed her again, and then led me out of her cramped office. She waved to me and I waved back. I paused just long enough to see the worry slide back onto her face before she tried to outrun it in the paperwork.

  The “office” of Bruce Haberscomb, the last Acidmancer, was a reinforced concrete-and-steel bunker hidden under the work building and accessible only by a hidden staircase. The secret door, the stairs, and the door to the office were all booby-trapped and dripping with magical and mundane alarms, detectors, and weapons.

  “I need all of the security so that this doesn’t end up with the wrong people,” he said, gesturing at the glittering womb of computer technology that laterally made up the walls of the large, cold spherical room. “It’s the world’s first fully functioning quantum computer. About twenty years ahead of its time. I had a friend at Los Alamos Lab. I hooked her up with an alchemist buddy of mine—funny story—they ended up getting married. They helped me get it up and running to deal with a little problem I had with a higher-order entity that was messing about with the world through satellites.”

  “A higher-order entity?” I asked.

  Bruce pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. “A dragon, actually … Tiamat, actually, the um … the Mother of Chaos. She’s not bothering anyone anymore, no siree.”

  Bruce walked down a set of steel grid stairs to a large ring-shaped platform that surrounded the center of the room. The ring was edged with large flat-screen monitors, worktables covered with various electronic, computer, and alchemical gadgets, tools, bits and pieces, and lots and lots of computer servers and workstations. Another set of stairs descended from the ring platform to the floor of the chamber and granted access to another series of computer consoles, some lockers, a bunk, and additional workstations. Suspended from the center of the ring by massive steel and data cables was a dull steel capsule that reminded me ominously of a coffin with rounded edges. Bruce shrugged off his jacket and hung it on the back of a chair at one of the workstations.

  “It comes in handy,” he said. “I need to keep the things I work on quantum-encrypted. I can’t let the information I receive from the Akashic Record fall into the wrong hands.”

  “So,” I said, “to sum up, you fought an ancient dragon-goddess with your magic quantum computer. Do you have a fan club? ’Cause if you don’t, I’d like to start one.”

  Bruce chuckled. He began to punch codes and commands into computers. The coffin-looking pod came to life. It lowered a few feet, and then a powerful gyrostabilized arm turned it until it was lying horizontally.

  “We’ll, I’ve heard a few of the tall tales about you too, Laytham,” Bruce said. “Needless to say, a whole heck of a lot more people know about Laytham Ballard than ever heard of me.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Only because you were busy saving the world, and I was busy trying to get all that attention.”

  The pod opened with a hiss, and the top half of the capsule swung aside on hydraulic hinges. Inside was a grayish foam material with a vaguely human-shaped cavity cut out, allowing Bruce to lie down? Numerous hoses, cables, and sensory terminals lay coiled like snakes inside the cavity.

  “Is it full sensory deprivation?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “I like to narrow my perceptions to specific stimuli. I have contacts that function kind of like Google Glass, only more so. I have fast-twitch nerve-mouses built into those finger terminals there. All my vitals and brain patterns are registered at that terminal over there, and it regulates fluids and waste as well as the drip rate for the LSD. I have trained myself now so that, under normal circumstances, I can do with very minuscule doses of acid to achieve the state I need to metaprogram and navigate the Akashic Record.”

  “Bruce, thank you for doing this,” I said. “I really have run out of places to look. Thank you.”

  “Sure thing,” he said, smiling. “People like you and I have a gift. We get to see things, do things that normal folks would never, ever believe, never get. And the flip side of that is we have a duty to help when we can and to fight the bad guys where we find them. It’s a privilege and an obligation.” Granny’s words coming out of Bruce’s mouth. “I’m glad to help you fight the good fight, Laytham.”

  He set a few more parameters on the consoles before him, and then he took the photographs out of his jacket pocket and excused himself to the lower gallery. I sat, and I waited. After about twenty minutes, Bruce came back up in a white bathrobe. He was wearing swim trunks under it and had taken his glasses off. His eyes had a strange bright blue-white sheen, which made me think he was wearing smart contacts.

  “Ready?” I asked. He nodded and checked a few readings on the screen. Bruce walked to the sensory deprivation pod and began to hook small sensor terminals to his chest and side.

  “I’ve meditated and committed the symbols on the money dies to memory. Once I’m in, the pod will deliver the proper dosage of LSD to me through my skin, and I’ll begin. You can sit quietly until Pam comes for you, Laytham. I’ll see you by midnight, and I should have your answers.”

  “Bruce,” I said, “I’m no hero. I’m nothing like you. I never wanted to be. I’ve always been the bad guy, or, at best, the selfish guy.”

  “I know,” he said. “You don’t think I’d jump into this without looking into you. I know what you are, I know what you’ve done, and I also know what a lot of people think of you. And I know what you think of yourself.”

  “Then why the fuck are you doing this?” I asked. “You know what a bastard I am.”

  Haberscomb tossed me his robe and chuckled. He climbed into the pod and got comfortable. He connected the terminals to his fingers and plugged several of the small cables into devices embedded in the sides of the pod.

  “A person is his actions, not his intentions, and all I can say is that I looked you up and down in the Akashic Record, and I saw enough to convince me to help you. I haven’t given up on you, Laytham Ballard, even if you have.”

  With a gesture of his fingers, the pod began to close. Bruce gave me a peace sign and a wink before he was swallowed whole by the machine. Banks of computers began to hum and whirr. The air-conditioning in the office kicked into overdrive, and it became even cooler. The walls of the room throbbed with power as the quantum computer began to spin itself up to full power. The lights all dimmed. Music filled the chamber, and I realized I had seen Bruce pop small earbuds in. The music was slow at first, a piano, the whisper of strings. It enveloped the room, and it made me think of snow falling silently, gently in a deep woods. I looked on one of the monitors and it said “Metamorphosis One” by Philip Glass and Bruce Brubaker. I sat back and watched as the pod bearing Bruce Haberscomb rose on its metal arm of hydraulic tubes and cables, higher and higher, and then swiveled and turned over, around, rolling, moving Bruce through space as his mind now moved past the walls of flesh and bone into a realm of omens and portents, principalities and power, galaxies drifting like snow.

  “Safe journey,” I whispered.

  The music faded, only to be replaced by another Glass composition, “The Hours.” I sat and tried to not think. It didn’t work too well. And I began to listen more and more to my inner bastard, and I began to plan my endgame as best I could with the limited information I had.

  Pam was suddenly at my side. She looked tired.

  “Time to go,” she said. “Field trip is over.” I let her lead me out, and I tried to ignore the worry and the sadness on her face whenever she looked up at her husband twisting and writhing in a synthetic heaven of his own design.

  TWENTY

  Ichi, home by four from his nature hike, was his usual chatty self and proceeded to trounce me soundly in chess a few times. Eventually I got up the nerve to ask.

  “Ichi-sama,” I said as I reset the chessboard, “I mean no offense, but why are you still here?” The old Gun Saint did not look at m
e as he reset his pieces.

  “Why have I not returned home or moved on now that our mission is complete?” he said. “When you reach a certain age, you find yourself locked in a press of days, more binding than any chain, any dungeon cell. You can feel yourself getting cold and brittle inside, and you … miss anything, anyone who distracts you from the grindstone your life has become. You and your associates are … distracting, and you remind me of myself and my old friends, all of whom I have outlived. I am in no hurry to go home.”

  He finished setting up his pieces and looked across the board to me. “I know why you are asking, Laytham-kun. And I do understand what you must do now, even if the others do not. If I may add, as a lonely old man to a lonely young man, I urge you to not drive them too far away, regardless of the reason. You will regret it in the end.”

  “Your move,” I said. “And thank you.”

  Everyone was back to Foxglove by six that night. They came in from town laughing and happy.

  “There’s nothing on any of the news channels, the radio, or the papers about what happened in D.C.,” Magdalena said as she set a few grocery bags on the dining room table. “I mean nothing, like it didn’t happen.”

  “Same on the intrawebs and the TV,” I said. Grinner plopped down on the sofa next to Christine and Geri. Ichi stood, arms behind his back, palms clasped.

  “So that’s good, right?” Magdalena asked. “We’re clear?”

  “Not necessarily,” Grinner said. “It could just mean they plan to hunt us down quiet.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “It’s basically a cost-benefit analysis for them: Is it worth more to hunt us, find us, interrogate us, and kill us, or is it less hassle to just let us scuttle off like cockroaches?”

  “A poet,” Didgeri said blandly. “You are a poet.”

  “It isn’t pretty, but he’s essentially right,” Grinner said. “The next forty-eight hours will determine how in the clear we are.”

  “Who is ‘they,’ exactly?” Magdalena asked. “Is this the Illuminati we’re talking about?”

  “That is a very complicated question, dear,” Didgeri replied. “Most powerful and far-reaching secret societies are more incestuous than Ballard’s family tree.”

  “Nice,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “It is often difficult to determine where one ends and another begins,” Didgeri continued. “I’d say that, given the close ties to banking and the federal government, Illuminati involvement would be primary.”

  “But from what Ballard said,” Grinner interjected, “this is an off-the-books job Slorzack and Berman were doing, which means the powers that be may be as clueless as we are about it.”

  “The covers Grinner gave us are sealed tight—doubtful they will blow back on us—and the mystic cleansing Ichi and I underwent should wipe a lot of the psychic fingerprints off us,” I said. “Our exit, however, is another matter. I am thinking that Neva wasn’t a guardian of the archive; I think she was summoned by some third party to stop whoever was messing with those plates. An entity like her sets off all kinds of bells and whistles the all-seeing eyeholes will want to investigate. We also jumped space on our way out, and that leaves some really big mystic skid marks…”

  “You need to not talk anymore,” Didgeri said, wincing.

  “So, what’s our next move?” Magdalena asked, sitting down in the chair next to the couch. I stood and turned off the TV news.

  “There is no ‘our next move,’” I said. “First rule of a caper is knowing when to cut bait and run. And that time is now, gang. All of you need to get the fuck gone, now.”

  I tried hard to ignore the look of hurt and confusion on Magdalena’s face. Geri just shook her head to make sure I understood just how stupid I was being right now.

  “Laytham,” Christine said sweetly, “you’re being an asshole again. Stop it. We all came to help you.”

  “And you did, Christine,” I said, standing and looking at everyone. “You guys saved my ass and kept me going, but if, in the next ten minutes, black helicopter thugs like the ones Ichi played with in Washington crash in that door, your life is over, your baby’s life is over, your husband’s life is over, the Haberscombs’ lives are over. We all go into a black bag and we never come out.”

  “You did,” Magdalena said, with bitterness in her eyes and voice. “You came back out of the black bag.”

  “He is right, Megan,” Ichi said. “Together, in one location, we are too visible a target, too vulnerable. We need to scatter. And we do endanger our hosts. We should all depart soon.”

  Christine snuggled in deeper to Grinner’s shoulder. He looked pissed at me too. Good. The more the merrier.

  “I’m done talking,” I said. “The caper’s over. I have to wait to hear what Br … Haberscomb has found for me to get me back on Slorzack’s trail, then I’m fucking gone. As for the rest of you, good job. If there was a take from this, I’d be giving you each your shares. Much obliged. Now get the fuck out. Tonight.”

  The room was silent as I grabbed my jacket off the peg next to the door and walked outside.

  It was damn cold and the stars boiled and burned, distant and wordless in their sharp, painful beauty. So many. I wondered for the thousandth time today where exactly Bruce Haberscomb was and what he was communing with.

  I fumbled in my jacket and cussed. I was going almost two days with no cigarettes. I heard the door open, then close, and Magdalena, her hands thrust deep into her black leather-and-cloth hoodie, looking like a cross between a nun and a ninja, stepped down into the gravel parking circle with me.

  “Nice show in there,” she said. “You really are a natural at working that. You’re like an antimotivational speaker. Tony Robbins with a goatee.”

  “I’m not trying to motivate anyone,” I said. “Just giving them the facts, and you should listen too. This is the Life, darlin’: running, hiding, surviving. Waiting for faceless killers to come for you. Glamorous as hell, ain’t it.”

  “You didn’t seem to mind a few days ago when you were planning this little field trip and you need them, needed me.”

  “Yeah, well, like I said, caper’s over. I don’t need them anymore. Time for everyone to pack up their shit and go home before we all get busted.”

  Magdalena stepped closer to me. Her eyes were huge and dark, liquid and perfect in the light from the full moon. Her breath was the wings of gray moths fluttering past her cheeks, silvered. She reached for me, to touch my face. I felt her fingers brush my cheek. It was the gentlest touch I could recall in a long time, since Torri Lyn. I looked up at the moon and tried to fight down the storm in me.

  “You don’t have to do this alone,” she said. “These people aren’t here for money or power. They are all here because they believe in you, respect you, love you.”

  I took her wrist and moved her hand away from my face. I was stone.

  “You think because we spent one night together, that I am the dark prince of your little Gothic fairy tale?” I said.

  “Don’t do this,” Magdalena said. “Don’t.”

  “I don’t do that,” I said. “I’m not for anyone. I’m not your romantic lead, and I find your schoolgirl crush sad and misguided. In case you didn’t notice, in case Grinner didn’t tell you, I left you in the morning and had no intention of ever coming back, ever teaching you, ever seeing you again, and I was cool with that.”

  Hot tears welled in her eyes. She fought them, valiantly. Her wet eyes never left mine.

  “I was like you a long time ago,” I said. “Then I wised up. I met enough people like me, watched enough dumb, sentimental lemmings die because they didn’t know that things like loyalty and friendship and love are parlor tricks we play on ourselves to keep from losing our minds in this asylum. Consider this your first real lesson in magic. Know when to walk away, and don’t drag dead weight.”

  I let go of her wrist, and she stepped away, back toward the house. “If that’s true, then why are you going after Slorzack? Why are you hel
ping your friend?”

  “Because I want to see if I can take this prick,” I said. “Nothing noble, just ego and balls and bragging rights. Boj just gives me cover. And now, because I want to know what this Greenway is, I want the secret, I want the power. It’s really simple when you look at it without all those tears in your eyes, darlin’.”

  “Trust me,” she said, flint in her voice, wiping her tears away on her sleeve, “these will be the last ones you see for a long, long time, Professor. I’m a fast learner.”

  She walked back in the house without another word. I felt my balls in my stomach and copper in my mouth. First times and beginnings are rare and fragile, like spring flowers in the late winter frost. I had just destroyed another one. I was the prince of frost.

  I walked toward the work building, under the bright regard of the swollen moon. I didn’t want to go back inside. Light and warmth and everything from the night before, it was a dream, it was for others, never for me. I looked down and noticed as I walked I had no shadow—an old debt to a harsh loan shark, the harshest in the Life. It was a jarring reminder of how far I had fallen and how right my choice was to send them, to send her, away.

  I heard the groan of the metal door to the building and saw Bruce emerge, clothed again and in his barn jacket and a stocking cap pulled down to his brow. He seemed to teeter a bit as he tried to close the doors. I sprinted over to help him. Motion lights caught me and painted me and the Acidmancer in a circle of harsh halogen light.

  I helped him with his keys to lock the door. “You okay?” I asked. He seemed a little out of it, his pupils slightly dilated, but he righted himself quickly.

  “Yes, yes,” he said. “I am fine. The words feel funny in my mouth—jagged, like they don’t quite fit, but I am already readjusting to this dimensional harmonic, and I’ll be … I’ll be okay. I want cheesy potatoes.”

  “I’m pretty sure Pam has those waiting for you,” I said. “She smacked Ichi’s hand when he made a move for thirds, that’s no mean feat—old guy’s spry for his age. C’mon, let’s get you inside.”