Nightwise

by R. S. Belcher

  “Fuck you!” Harmon said, and fell partly off the couch.

  “I want in,” I said, setting my glass on the bar. “The Greenway. I want in.”

  Harmon laughed. “Of course you do, you’re that kind of reckless idiot. A scavenger wanting a bite of the corpse now that the lions are finished.”

  I walked over, still smiling, and punched him in his broken nose. He screamed and cursed as he nursed it.

  While he groaned and damned me, I took the time to move aside the curtains, open the sliding glass porch door to his study, step into the graying dawn, and suck in some cold air and try to get my head on straight.

  This was way, way past me now. No one had been able to find Slorzack; the fucking Devil couldn’t find him because he was no longer on the earth. And I was about to go after him. Go off the earth … I wanted it. I wanted to go where only a handful of humans had ever been. I wanted those bragging rights, I wanted that rush. That was fucking stupid. This wasn’t about a dumbass promise I made to a friend of mine who was probably dead by now and wouldn’t mind anyway. To go any farther would be fucking crazy.

  I looked at my reflection in the glass door, really looked. In my mind I did the gut check and I asked the questions: You up to facing the fallout of this? You ready, come what may? Can you hack it if it goes south? Well, rock star?

  I went back inside. Harmon was sitting on the couch again holding his bloody nose with his bloody hand.

  “Do you know who I am?” I asked.

  “A dead man!” he sobbed as he gingerly patted his swollen, purple nose. I grabbed him by the perfect hair, and he whimpered like a puppy.

  “I’m Laytham Ballard, the greatest fucking magus to ever walk this earth, motherfucker. I slay monsters and bed damsels. I traffic with demons and angels and everything in between. I walk wherever I fucking well please in this world or any other. Now take me to the fucking Greenway.”

  It was the same juvenile ego-stroking shit I had been saying to myself since I was a kid, since Granny was gone. For the first time in my sad traffic accident of a life, I really, really believed it, though. I could stride worlds and piss lightning. I could avenge a wrong, a genuine act of evil, for once in a lifetime of selfish intentions, weak will, and petty inhumanities. But the sad truth was, I knew why I was going, and it wasn’t to avenge Boj.

  I picked up a hunk of the broken glass, dragging Giles along the carpet as I collected it. “Now you say it,” I hissed at him, and tugged harder on his mane. “Or I will open up your fucking throat right now and watch the comical expression on your face as you bleed out. Now, who … am … I?”

  And he told me, repeated it verbatim as he soiled his pants.

  “How do I get in?” I said.

  “The way in is easy.” Harmon wiped the tears from his eyes and whispered between sobs. “You, you just put yourself into a relaxed trance state. Very first-year meditation, apprentice kind of stuff. Then you focus on the doorway.”

  “And what is the doorway, Giles?” I said, my breath hot on his face. He pulled the crumpled hundred out of his robe pocket again.

  “The doorway,” he said. His eyes were glazed over like an animal’s driven mad by fear. “No one sees it. Everyone covets it, wants it, but no one sees it. The new ordered world—‘Novus Ordo Seclorum.’”

  “You focus on the bill? Any bill?”

  He nodded. “Coins too. The seal on the dollar is the template for the conduit for the power, but it works with all of them.”

  “The inactive gate is embedded in them when they’re made,” I said. “Brilliant. Doesn’t even register as magic until it’s active. How long has Slorzack been in there?”

  “Almost eleven years,” Harmon said.

  “Eleven years? Doesn’t he ever come back over? Is there food, water?”

  “Once a year I find some eager young occultist to undertake a ‘rescue mission’ for me,” Harmon said. “Dusan deals with them once they arrive. I purchase pallets full of MREs and bottled water, camping gear, books … other things … all with Slorzack’s money. My lamb to the slaughter carries them across. Most machines don’t work there. There’s no electricity, either. Batteries seem to work okay.”

  “So you handle his money?” I said. He nodded with a grunt. I let go of his hair.

  “Show me.”

  He booted up the computer. The monitor was built into the glass top of his desk, and in a few moments we had navigated the maze of dummy corporations and overseas banking institutions that laundered and hid Dusan Slorzack’s treasure in Giles Harmon’s name.

  “Wow,” I said, “I didn’t realize committing crimes against humanity was so fucking profitable.”

  “Slorzack was one of Radovan Karadžič’s inner circle. He was one of the men in charge of čelebići—it was a prison camp at—”

  “I know what it was,” I said. “How could he make all this money off of that?”

  “You really are a bottom-feeder aren’t you?” He cringed when I looked like I was going to strike him again. He went on. “Power. Power over lives, destinies. If you have power, then money comes easy.”

  “Well, right now I have the power, and the money is about to go. Here is what I want you to do.”

  He paled a bit when I told him, but he did it.

  “I want all but two million to be transferred, as cleanly as possible, to the account of the Fund for Human Rights. I’m sure you can find it.”

  He did, and in twenty minutes it was done. I broke out the cocaine I found in Harmon’s desk while he did it, and availed myself of it. “Now put the other two mil in this account,” I said. His eyebrows went up.

  “An alias of yours, Mr. Ballard?”

  “Look,” I said, “I’ve got expenses too; ’sides, how much you been skimming off old Dusan there, Giles?”

  After the money was moved, I leaned over his shoulder and whispered in his ear. “Now, Giles, old boy, you are going to use all that awesome Illuminati muscle to spring a guy rotting in Rikers Island. His name is Darren Mack, and you are going to wipe his record and drop about a million of your own money into his brand-spanking-new account, with his brand-spanking-new identity. I want him breathing free air with a new life by sunup.”

  Harmon did it. I felt a small weight come off me.

  “Trying to give yourself a moral foothold to cushion the jolt of what is to come?” Harmon said softly. “Honor among thieves and all that, Laytham?”

  It was getting close to dawn. I had drunk all of Harmon’s good booze and went through about four lines of rich-people-grade coke. My courage was as bolstered as it would ever be.

  “Turn around,” I said to Harmon. He faced the window behind his massive desk.

  “So it’s time,” he said.

  “Yes. When did you know?”

  “I’m not an idiot. I knew it would end like this. Now I have my surprise for you. I promised, remember? I hope you prepared an investment like what you did for me for Dusan, because if you didn’t, you will die. He’s far more powerful than I, and he has passed so far beyond any shore of human thought or morality, he makes me look like Mother Teresa. I saw the look in your eyes, though, when you made me recite your ridiculous little credo. You haven’t prepared for him because you are going in there to prove you’re the better gunfighter, the greatest magus in the world. Pathetic. Slorzack doesn’t trifle with guns anymore, he trucks in exterminating populations and seizing divinity. He will burn you, Laytham. I know. I know you; I’ve known your kind my whole life. You’re a sad little white-trash shit kicker who finally got to get one over on someone who actually did something with his life.”

  I pulled the curtain. The sky in the east was the color of drunken sleep, bruised like the face of a staggering boxer. The sun’s light was pushing its way through the night’s last stand.

  “I have children,” he said, fear and tears finally creeping into his voice, choking him.

  “Fuck you,” I said. “You know the difference between you and me, Giles? I r
emember every single death. It marks me, burns me, eats me up some nights. Makes me sob and puke sometimes. Makes me hate me. I remember the faces, even if I don’t know all the names, and that makes me one tiny drop less evil than you. I’ll take that.”

  I killed him quickly, while I still had the amnesty of the night. It was quick, but not painless. He didn’t deserve painless and neither would I when the time came. If you want to know how I killed him, the hell with you.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  I sat on Harmon’s couch in the early-morning light. His body cooled on the thick carpet. His trophy wife knocked on the door, tiptoed in, and gasped when she saw him on the floor. She ignored me. She had no choice; I wasn’t there. Once she was sure he was dead, her expression changed to one of calm relief. She kicked his body and exited the room to call the police and her accountant, most likely not in that order.

  I took a crumpled, old, ten-dollar bill from my wallet, smoothed it out, and took a deep breath. I regarded the U.S. Treasury building, massive stairs leading up to an entrance shadowed by eight Doric columns, on the back of the bill. I focused on the images—the tiny bronchial branches of the trees that framed the oval containing the image, the stippled green and white sky, with gentle banks of clouds.

  My breathing slowed. I willed my cocaine-hammering heart to quiet itself.

  The clouds moved. The branches whispered, and the flag atop the Treasury fluttered with a brisk snap.

  A horrible suffocating feeling engulfed me. I couldn’t breathe; my chest was tight. There was a dizzy, giddy terror. A sense memory—drowning as a child. I fought through the rising panic of suffocating, of being helpless. I retained my focus.

  My body was there, but I felt thick and unconnected to it. The wind was in my face, but it was dry, with no sense of comfort or renewal. I felt sudden acceleration in my stomach, but my head said I was standing still. I wanted to shut my eyes, but when I did, I still saw the world in shades of green and white.

  I tried to open my eyes, but I couldn’t. I was falling with my feet on the ground. It felt heady, drunk, out of control. Another memory struck me. I was high on meth, clutching a paper bag of greasy fifties in one hand and a 9mm in the other. The alley was clear, and the alarm was a banshee at my back. I was the richest man in the world. I pulled the reins of my focus tight and held on, not allowing myself to charge off into euphoria. Then the acceleration stopped, abruptly.

  I opened my eyes, effortlessly. I was no longer on earth.

  The stairs were a few feet in front of me. I was standing before a statue, vaguely Greek in styling, dressed in robes and carrying a shield. The face was featureless—an empty mass of green shadows. I looked up at the stippled sky. There was no sun, no moon. The illumination was a sickly wash of vellum-colored light that seemed to stretch on into bland infinity. The clouds were gauze, the color of malachite, drifting into and out of white oblivion. It took only a few minutes to realize that the pattern of the clouds—their shape and how they moved across the sky—was fixed, like a looping gif.

  I ascended the stairs. The scuff of my feet on them was the only sound in the universe. There were no birds, no murmur of human traffic, even the wind was silent and dry as a reptile’s breath.

  The handle of the door felt like frozen wood. I soon learned that everything here felt blunted and distant. The senses of touch and smell were almost nonexistent in this place.

  Inside the Treasury were seemingly endless dark halls. The muted echo of thick marble walls and floors. The darkness reminded me of being in a cave, deep underground. I wished I had brought a flashlight with me. I used my lighter instead. The shadows it cast were olive.

  After a few dozen levels of hollow, empty, tomblike rooms and stairs, I began to get confused. In fear of spending the rest of my life wandering lost, I hurried outside. It didn’t help much to calm my nerves.

  I started to walk down the street in front of the Treasury, past one of the large trees only partly seen on the back of the ten-dollar note. It was only then that I realized that the bill was still in my hand—a featureless piece of white cloth that was warm to the touch. It was my ticket home. I stuffed it into my pocket and kept walking.

  About eight blocks later, I reached the edge of the world.

  The sidewalk simply stopped, falling away into absolute white. It was as if the artist had grown tired of drawing the landscape, the buildings, everything. I stood at the edge of existence, feeling the gravity of oblivion tugging at the pit of my stomach and at my balls, like looking over the edge of a skyscraper, knowing with a horrible clarity that comes from the marriage of reason and instinct that if you take that next step, you will cease to exist. After a time, I turned around and started walking back toward the Treasury.

  Wandering across the Mall, the massive field that divides the Capitol from the Lincoln Memorial, I discovered the ancient blackened remains of a wicker man made of human leg bones, a marrow man, I suppose. The grass around the half-collapsed thing was dead and “blackened,” a dark shade of celadon. Hundreds of cold, discarded torches lay on the ground in a circle around the bone thing. There was a skeleton inside the rib “cage” of the marrow man. I could not determine if the mummified thing inside was the remains of a human or not. It appeared to have tattered wings under its arms.

  The mirrored walls of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial leaked blood the color of spring leaves.

  A fleet of black ships huddled in the docks just below the Kennedy Center—narrow, insectile vessels with barbed masts, lines that looked more like cords of knotted muscle than rope, and hulls of black, glistening chitin with a sheen of beryl.

  I touched the oddly silent, gently, lapping waves of forest green that cradled the alien ships. My hand felt coldness and the pressure of surface tension, but when I removed my hand from the water, it was as dry as my mouth and throat.

  I passed featureless cubes twelve stories high throughout the city. Some were completely covered in chalk symbols that were foreign to me, others were chiseled and carved in bas relief depicting gods and demons who I suspected had never been known upon earth. One cube simply had the word “mercy” written over and over and over in a childlike scrawl covering every inch of its massive surface.

  A narrow, needlelike tower with terraces overlooking the half-finished skyline rose up out of Georgetown. It had no entrance, no ladders, no stairs.

  A massive pyramid squatted near 19th Street. It was made of hundreds of thousands of tiny skulls mortared together.

  Eventually, I found myself in front of the White House. I climbed the gate and dropped down onto the lawn. I seemed to fall slower than normal, but it was impossible to determine if that was my perception or the nature of gravity here.

  I slipped in silently through the main doors. Scattered about the foyer were hills of decaying garbage. Mostly empty plastic water bottles, military MRE packages, and leaking, corroded batteries, but there were also mummified piles of human feces and shredded magazines and books scattered everywhere. I was thankful for the absence of my sense of smell in this place as I stepped over a copy of Also sprach Zarathustra that someone had wiped his ass on.

  It was dark in here too. I found a Maglite flashlight on the floor in one of the rooms and I turned it on. A feeble circle of pea-colored light appeared, illuminating vast, intricate stretches of alchemical formulas scrawled on the walls with a Sharpie—green, of course. In one room, I found stacks of black-and-white photos of prison camp victims, mostly women and children. Some of them, the worst of them, were taped to the wall in the corner of the room next to a filthy towel. I tried to not think about the origins of the dried stains on the towel.

  The door to the Oval Office opened smoothly. The room was well lit from the large windows that opened out into a courtyard that on earth was the Rose Garden. There was a dirty cot, a few tattered blankets, and towers of books and magazines. The walls were covered in magical formulas written in ink, shit, and blood. None of them seemed to be complete. On the floor was a T
riangle of the Art, a symbol for summoning an entity, and a partially completed Sign of Ameth, a kabbalistic symbol that was supposed to contain all the names of God.

  “They don’t work here,” a thickly accented voice croaked in English. It sounded like it had not been used in a very long time. I snapped my head in its direction and came face-to-face with Dusan Slorzack. “No demon of Hell, no angel of God, nothing,” Slorzack mumbled. “We are alone here, my friend … alone. No one is watching.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  Dusan Slorzack was cadaverous. He was nude, covered in bedsores, scabs, scars, and occult tattoos, many of which were twins of ones I had on my own body. His massive, unkempt gray beard hung almost to his knees and covered his loins. His eyes were the color of blood on fresh asphalt.

  “Bones effrego quod splinter,” I shouted, as I gestured at Slorzack with my fist.

  “Boli okrenuti obrnuto,” he spat back with a raised palm, turning my spell back on me.

  “Subsisto alica!” I shouted, feeling the force of my own magic pressing down on me. It sent me flying back into a pile of books. I fell to the floor even as the spell’s full power was dismissed by my counterspell. I rolled to my knee and glared at the old bastard.

  “You … you are not the grocery boy, are you?” Slorzack said.

  “Nope,” I said, standing and brushing myself off. “I’m the bill collector.”

  “Your accent,” he said. “Cowboy. American. You have come to kill me, yes, cowboy?”

  “Yep,” I said. Slorzack waited for more, and then he smiled. His teeth were black and jagged with decay.

  “I like that you do not say why you have come to kill me,” he said. “You recognize that I most likely will not remember anyway. You came through much to find me here, to reach me, yes?”

  “Yes,” I said, and for a second, the weight of the trip settled on me. I shook it off. I couldn’t afford a distraction.

  “Good,” he said. “That way it will be more satisfying to me when I kill you.”