Nightwise

by R. S. Belcher

  We clinked out glasses and drank.

  “So,” I said, “Slorzack. Where?”

  He reached into his robe pocket, and I came at him fast.

  “Stop!” he shrieked, and immediately hated me for making him do that. “I am merely pulling out my wallet. I have no desire to receive further pummeling. We have established that I cannot defeat you.”

  He pulled a thin leather wallet from his pocket and liberated a hundred-dollar bill. He held it up for me to see.

  “When you killed,” he said, “were there times you were hungry? Did someone you love need money, like this, and not have it?”

  “Fuck you,” I said, and yanked him off the couch by the lapels on his blood-crusted robe. He was still smiling. “Last time before I do some serious damage to you, Giles, where is Slorzack?”

  He jammed the bill in my face. “Here, he’s in here.”

  I struck him hard and let him fall to the floor. The Benjamin fluttered to the ground a bit slower than its owner had.

  “What?” I said.

  Harmon sat up. He laughed, the kind of laugh that begins when fear is cooking itself into madness.

  “The Greenway,” he said. “He’s hiding inside the Greenway.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “What the hell is a Greenway?” I said.

  “The Greenway,” Harmon corrected. “There is only one. It’s … magnificent, a marvel for the ages. It’s the philosopher’s stone, the Holy Grail, a magic artifact in an age of dull skepticism and anorexic wit.”

  Harmon snorted in disgust as he climbed off the floor and then winced in pain from the exertion. He dropped back onto the couch and took another long pull on his drink.

  “Mr. Hillbilly,” he said, “do you have any concept of what drives the higher orders of magic?”

  I shrugged. “I’ve heard lots of different answers to that question from a lot of different masters,” I said. “None of them satisfied me. I say it’s basic, unbendable will. You dominate the universe into doing what you want it to do. Mind over matter, in the simplest terms.”

  “Quite the simplest terms,” Harmon said. “Magical theory from a street-brawling banjo player. Quaint. Your grasp of magic is as homespun as your accent.”

  “Okay,” I said. “What’s your take?”

  “My take, as you so quaintly put it, is the true path to power in this world and others,” Harmon said.

  “The power of love,” I said. “Huey Lewis and the News were right?”

  Harmon ignored me.

  “Faith,” he said. “At its core, magic is about faith. The more you can engender, the more you can accomplish. With enough faith, the magus is no different than God. Magic requires unswerving belief, does it not, Mr. Hillbilly? You are able to do what you do because you don’t just think you can, like the little engine, you know you can. Doubt cannot be in the lexicon of the wizard.

  “The earliest miracle workers, the earliest of our kind, shared that characteristic with the most fervent priests and worshipers. They knew the gods were real, they knew they were watching, acting upon the universe in tangible ways, and that belief, that faith, gave the gods as much power as us. Faith can and did move mountains, did it not?

  “The difference between the gods on high and us was, and still is, that our power comes from within us, while the gods have to go, hat in hand, trolling for believers. We believe in ourselves, or abilities, supremely. We have no other option. The best of us are egomaniacal, because we must be.

  “There are a handful of us in this world—wizards, mystics, magi, call us what you will. We are woefully outnumbered by the huddled masses. They will never have the hardware to do what we do, but they possess the raw fuel of belief, and that was the genius of the Founders, the architects of America, and of the Greenway.”

  Harmon leaned forward with a groan and retrieved the hundred-dollar bill from the floor. He held it up for me.

  “Faith,” he said. “‘Backed by the full faith and good credit of the United States government.’ That’s what they say, isn’t it? Not gold or silver locked up in some vault, not anything real anymore, just blind belief that the giant will keep lumbering right along. The gods are shades, Mr. Hillbilly, starved long ago from nothing on their altars but dead flowers and ashes, but the green, ah, the green.”

  “Money,” I said, “is some kind of magic?”

  “The most powerful in the world,” he said, climbing to his feet. “It creates matter out of nothing more than paper or base metals. It controls minds and behavior, can kill or save a life. It is the charm, the focus, of countless millions of human lives. It is considered as essential as air, water, or food, and it isn’t real. Behold the greatest source of sympathetic ritual magic in the history of mankind—the currency system of the United States.”

  “How?” I said. “I saw the magical operating system on the printing dies and plates. That system was unlike any magic construction I had ever seen before. It was … poetry.”

  “It’s uncertain with whom the idea originated,” Harmon said. “What is known is that the rituals, the formulas, and the thought-form architecture were postulated, argued over, and eventually finalized and created by Jefferson, Franklin, and Hamilton.”

  “The system I saw changed and evolved,” I said. “Long past the life spans of any of them, unless you’re telling me they are still creeping around somewhere.”

  “No,” Harmon said. “The architects are gone, but like their social and political experiments, they made the framework for the magical system tied to the currency of their new nation adaptable, flexible, and sturdy. It has been modified and amended and improved upon over the decades, over the centuries, by the seven occult scholars allowed to tinker with it officially—the seven engravers at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. They are high priests of a sort, of a long-lost conspiracy that only a dozen individuals worldwide even know exists anymore. Seven engravers, seven—a powerful numerological, spiritual, and occult symbol, is it not? The Greenway was not originally created as an Illuminati venture, but as our influence grew in the nation, we eventually discovered the experiment and made it our own, for a time.

  “The symbols you saw on the dies and plates serve the same purpose as those of any enchantment on an object or the formula surrounding a summoning or protection circle. It gives the power a foothold, an anchor to cling to and perform its function.”

  “And its function is what, exactly?” I asked.

  “It takes the belief in and worship of a sympathetic object—in this case, U.S. currency—and transforms that faith into usable, workable magical power. Workable power that was then directed into a singular miraculous purpose, the creation and sustaining of the Greenway.”

  I stood and took Harmon’s glass. I filled it and then mine. I had to open a fresh bottle of scotch to do that. Harmon drained half his drink quickly.

  “That,” I said, “is slick magic. So, in effect, you had a huge amount of the American population at first and then, pretty much the global population, participating in ritual magic for you guys twenty-four/seven. That’s … wow.”

  Harmon was well past drunk now and feeling much less pain. He laughed again, that something-broken-inside laugh, and sloshed his glass around as he gestured.

  “It took time. Faith can’t be rushed, Mr. Hillbilly, it must be nurtured and given signs and portents. At first the currency, the notes, were an easier way to deal with large transactions, and it was backed by the blustering young nation’s vast material wealth, but over time, as America’s power grew, faith and belief in the money grew. Eventually it was coveted for its own sake across the world. Nothing more than an idea, bound to simple paper, enslaves the human race and controls all of us. It was genius.”

  “That it is,” I said. “I have to admit.”

  “It wasn’t just the money, either,” Harmon went on. He was slurring a bit now. “A magical undertaking of this magnitude required additional underpinnings to ensure it would sustain itself. Occult a
rchitecture was employed. Pierre Charles L’Enfant and Andrew Ellicott were commissioned to help design Washington, D.C., with Jefferson’s assistance, to produce an evolving, fluctuating mystic circuit of unimaginable size. Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Vermont Avenues and part of K Street form a massive pentagram, a summoning symbol and the focus of the sympathetic ritual. The White Lodge, or White House, the obelisk, or Washington’s monument. Lincoln’s memorial is a Greek temple to the gods. All envisioned for the Greenway before they were ever physical buildings on this earth.

  “They bound the Greenway to the other symbol of traditional power—the All-Seeing Eye, the pyramid. The thunderbird, or phoenix, became the eagle, clutching Apollo’s spears in one foot and Athena’s laurel in the other. Symbols have power, my hayseed friend. Making a symbol into a reality—that is the power of true magic. Control, harnessing the minds of the powerless to serve the powerful and keeping them ignorant that they are slaves, giving them a prize to strive for, a dream that might come true but never does. Person by person, child by child, generation by generation until they are willing cogs in an arcane process they will live and die never knowing about.”

  I had drunk too much. It was a bad idea. Giles Harmon, even in his present state, was one of the most dangerous men on earth. I had started drinking because I knew what was coming and I didn’t think I could handle it sober. However, my booze-soaked brain was beginning to turn over some of the implications of what Harmon was saying, and the scope of it sobered me, somewhat.

  “The whole damn city was a sympathetic model,” I said. “The size of the focus would be … with that much power from all those people…”

  Harmon leaned back on the couch and let his head loll. He laughed and held his empty glass in a toast to me. “The lights come on in Possum Holler! Bravo, Mr. Hillbilly. Bravo! Yes, they don’t make them like that anymore, do they?”

  “Trying to be like gods,” I said. “The Greenway is a world—a magically manufactured world.”

  “They took the belief, the faith, the desire, and the love of greed, tied it to the currency, and created a world beyond this one,” Harmon said. “A magician’s paradise built in the dark corner of Jung’s crowded closet. A world where all of that worship, all of that faith—from the peon shoveling shit for minimum wage to the priests of Wall Street, working in the holy temples—their belief holds the walls of the Greenway together. Made it real and kept it safe.”

  “So this place is some kind of Illuminati retreat, a place of power for working powerful, dangerous magic,” I said. “A bolt-hole, a laboratory, a sanctuary.”

  “It once was,” Harmon said. “The Greenway was designed to be very conducive to magic workings. It’s built of belief, for Christ’s sake. A wizard in the Greenway has access to far more power than he can summon on earth, and a master magus … they are gods in the Greenway.”

  “So why aren’t you Illuminati assholes selling time-shares there?” I asked.

  “The Greenway is a closed, isolated universe,” Harmon said. “The workings you do in there can’t affect anything anywhere else in all creation. It’s also part of the reason why the Greenway can’t be detected. And as far as time-shares, there have been numerous wizards who have inhabited the Greenway over the centuries and often fought wars to hold it or claim it.”

  “It’s a pure research environment,” I said. “You can do amazing magic there, I’d bet, but it has no impact on anything anywhere else. It’s the ultimate in mystical masturbation.”

  “You,” Harmon said, “are a tactless shit kicker. To think I was laid low by the likes of you. But I have a little surprise for you, Mr. Hillbilly. A very big surprise. I’m saving it for last.”

  He paused and rubbed his face. He was seriously drunk, and it was creeping toward dawn.

  “Many of the inner circles found the Greenway too unstable,” Harmon said, “too dangerous to risk their precious hides. After the stock market crash in 1929, the inner circle lost too many members when all of that faith suddenly blinked for a moment. Many of those who supposedly took their own lives, falling out of office windows, actually fell much farther—fell out of the Greenway when it faltered and were never heard from again. In that crash, most of the individuals in the world who knew of the Greenway’s existence were wiped away, and it became lost lore, a magician’s myth. Economic uncertainty, runs on the banks, currency and bond crises, market corrections, government bailouts—these are the weather of the Greenway. If that faith is diminished too much, the world flickers and goes away and anyone there falls between the cracks. The ultimate margin call, if you will. It became a forgotten relic, a vacant lot, known only to a few of the oldest members of the Inner Circle and the occasional free-range occultist.”

  “Like Slorzack,” I said.

  “Ah, Dusan. You remind me of him quite a bit, Mr. Hillbilly, ambitious, overreaching, arrogant. Dusan actually knew only vague rumors of such a place,” Harmon said. “He had been playing at becoming a god, a true god, since the ’80s. He had been working to supplant some moldy old Eastern European god of evil.”

  “Chernobog,” I said. “He was really trying to become Chernobog.”

  “Yes,” Harmon said. “Gods are like kings; If they grow too quiet, some hothead will come along and try to usurp them or rebrand them and make them sexy again. Happens all the time—ask the pagans about Christianity.

  “Dusan made considerable progress, including becoming the earthly avatar of Chernobog, and had summoned and tamed some of the old boy’s servants. I think Ettinger threw one of them at you in D.C.”

  “Neva,” I said. “We met.”

  “However, Dusan racked up considerable karmic debts in the process,” Harmon said. “Including a sizable bill with a very active and pissed-off Prince of Darkness. Your mutual business partner gave Dusan his start on the road to godhood, and the bill was coming due, with interest. Not to mention the more tangible disadvantages to being an international war criminal, hunted, hated, hounded everywhere.”

  “And you taught Slorzack about the Greenway?” I said. “Sent him in there?”

  “I had been searching for the Greenway all my life,” Harmon said. “I was born into Illuminati royalty. I heard a few hints and some old fairy tales. The Greenway is like Atlantis and Shangri La, a fable, a myth. It took me until the late ’90s to discover the truth about it.”

  “How did you?” I asked.

  Harmon smiled and shrugged. “You’d be surprised the things a two-hundred-twenty-year-old senile magus will tell you over a bottle of good scotch and an infant sacrifice.”

  “Where did Berman come into the picture?” I asked. “You didn’t have to kill his lover, you know, Trace. He was no danger to you.”

  “Mr. Berman, a very minor associate of a fringe society,” Harmon said, “happened to be something of an occult scholar himself. He was an ambitious little prick, I’ll give him that. He had acquired some journals belonging to Alexander Hamilton and he leveraged those and their knowledge of the Greenway into an apprenticeship, a partnership with me. Supply and demand. He was capable but a little too eager to advance beyond his station. It’s a very unattractive trait in the working classes, wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Hillbilly? And I didn’t kill Mr. Trace. You did, by involving him in this business. We’ll add him to your tally of the dead on your quest to find me and Dusan.”

  I didn’t take the bait. I was starting to get my courage up. Harmon was helping me.

  “Dusan sought Berman out when he arrived in New York,” Harmon said. “He knew Berman was the gate to me, and he knew he needed me to escape the forces closing in on him. I’ve often wondered if perhaps Slorzack and Berman met before he approached me with the journals, if Slorzack used him as a conduit, a filter. It doesn’t matter in the end, does it? The point is Berman was used by everyone. He was the classic middleman.

  “Among the three of us, we rediscovered the Greenway,” he said. “We learned about the magical architecture that created it
and its reinforcement in the dies and plates. The rituals and computations of the original architects proved too complex for us to fully comprehend, but we managed to puzzle out enough. We rededicated the gateway through the sacrifices of the nine/eleven working. The destruction of the twin towers—the twin pillars of global finance—a massive reordering of society and a breaking of the established order, the reworking of the Masonic Tracing Board, as a means to disrupt the stasis of the Greenway’s matrix. The damaging of the Pentagon—another bound pentagram, a massive symbol of warding and protection, to allow us to bypass any wards, protections, or traps placed on the Greenway by former residents or visitors, to unlock the gate anew.”

  “You destabilized the global economy and started decades of wars, death, suffering, and hatred, just so you three could jailbreak the Greenway, like a cell phone,” I said.

  “In essence, yes,” Harmon said. “And we did it.”

  Something had been clawing at me since I escaped from Rikers back in New York. A disconnect, but it suddenly made sense. I laughed and pointed at Harmon. “The Illuminati has no clue what the three of you have been up to,” I said. “That’s the real reason you were so keen to cover it all up, why you didn’t use your Illuminati connections to take me and the others out, and that is the real reason you tolerated Berman. He threatened to expose you if you didn’t teach him. The little hustler had you, the great man, over the fucking barrel, didn’t he, Giles?

  “The All-Seeing Eye would have your ass for staging something like nine/eleven without Inner Circle approval, and you didn’t get it. They’d feed your guts to hungry demons while you were alive to enjoy it, if they knew. That and you didn’t want to share the Greenway with them, did you? It was yours, your secret, and your power.”

  Harmon snarled, threw his glass at me, and missed by a mile. It exploded against the wall. “Smug little bastard!”

  “Greed,” I said. “Greed and fear of being caught. You’re right, Giles—we are all the same, aren’t we? Pretty simple to figure, aren’t you?”