Nightwise (24 page)

I suddenly felt a spasm in my Swadhisthana, my sacral chakra, as if I had been stabbed with a blade of fire. Something was ripping its way into the world.

“Didgeri, please tell me that is you,”
I thought, but her mind and presence were still far way and dancing in place settled somewhere just past my Vishuddha chakra. No, whatever the hell it was, it was from a far more terrible place, a place of baser matter.

“Soldiers are here.”
Ichi's mind was cool stone. “
No more Mr. Nice Guy.”
I switched to his point of view. He stood before the cargo elevator as the massive gate slid upward. He bowed, arms crossed, gun in each hand. These were Special Forces troops, black operators, paladins of plausible deniability. Twenty of them, looking like jagged, bulletproof shadows with gas mask eyes. They moved like oiled smoke, missionaries of death. They fanned out, tossing smoke and CS gas before them, like a dragon's breath. Seeing them through Ichi's eyes frightened me, they were antibodies of order and control. Then I caught a slight razor-edged thought as it slipped from Ichi's disciplined mind, and the fear changed in me.

“Finally,”
he thought. “
I was getting bored.”

Ichi raced toward them even as the clatter of their machine guns began, spraying death. Ichi spun, swirled into the clouds of darkness and pain, moving along their left flank. Blasts from his guns now—two of the twenty fell, and now the old man was wearing one of their gas masks. He felt the bullets whine past his ears. He jammed a barrel under a chin and pulled the trigger, snagged the pins on a pair of grenades with the hammer of the other gun, twisted them loose with a violent jerk of his arm, and fired, putting a bullet through the eyepiece of another's mask. Two more down. Two seconds. The whole archive shook as the flash bangs Ichi had detonated went off in the middle of the black ops teams. Ichi was deaf now, and blind. I pushed out of the contact, trying to avoid the nausea, but as I did I saw in his mind serenity, as he moved on, killing, dodging, using senses that still functioned past sight and sound. And I pitied these warriors, for they played at death, and today they had met it.

“What the hell was that?” Liz shouted.

I was back, ripping open cabinets. I found the 1935 dies with the All-Seeing Eye of the Illuminati on them. The symbols now were small and intricate with elements of sacred geometry, Sanskrit, hieroglyphics, but mixed in a bold, almost reckless way that made me admire the artist. This was a wizard who was unafraid of breaking structures and rules, creating something new from the shattered pieces of the past. I was in awe of it. I had found my Rosetta stone. The magical script covered the edges of the 1935 die completely. I began to see the hazy mechanics of the working, but I needed more information to even begin to backward-engineer it, to understand it. This was lost art. I snapped pictures quickly, as I felt the horrible thing bore closer and closer to the really-real world. I had minutes if I was lucky. The gunfire intensified on the other side of the archive.

“Liz, are there papers, letters, anything from the early days of the Treasury? Please, I'm close.” She opened her mouth to protest, but the pleading in my voice must have convinced her. She started opening drawers of the other cabinet.

“There are some packets of letters here from the late 1700s and the 1800s; I assume you are looking for documents from the 1930s as well, the way you orgasmed over the 1935 die. Right?”

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you, Liz. Thank you from the bottom of my crazy-ass heart.”

I opened my mind to Magdalena. She was on the beach, calm, controlling her panic and her disbelief. She was focusing on something far away that I could only vaguely perceive.

“Okay,”
I said.
“I need you to call the number on the throwaway cell phone now. Dial it, wait for the connection to happen, then hang up and toss it in the ocean. Got me?”

“Yes,”
she said. I felt the distaste in her thoughts.
“What is that? It feels like someone just vomited in your skull. I can feel it, smell it. Ugh. It's making it hard to receive you.”

“Psychic chaff,”
I said.
“Something bad is coming through, summoned up once the trip wires were hit. This place had someone on speed dial to conjure up something major so quickly.”

Tumblers were tripping in my head, but there were too many channels flipping in there currently for me to pay it much mind right now. I filed it away, to review if we lived past the next five minutes.

Liz handed me the letters and packets of documents in plastic bags. The lights died and the archive fell into darkness. The emergency lights clicked on with a
thunk,
and everything was painted in harsh halogen and deep shadow. The gunfire was getting more sporadic.

“Now what?” Liz said as I opened the packets.

“One of our people on the outside just activated a virus that was in that tablet we left up at the guard station in the lobby,” I said, unfolding the first letter and squinting at it in the dim light. The paper burst into flame.

“No, No!” I shouted. The other papers in my hand erupted into flame as well. I dropped them to the floor, where they quickly turned to curling black ash. “Damn it, damn it, no!”

I held on to the one I had been trying to read; it was from the late 1800s. I saw the words “endeavor,” “esoteric,” and “sacrifice required,” before the flames performed their rendition on the secret knowledge and gave me the cosmic finger.

“Fuck!” I said, trying to squeeze one more word out of the blackened paper as it began to drift away like leaves in an autumn wind.

“Larry,” Liz said. “Larry! Whatever your name is! Your hands, you're burning yourself.”

My arms dropped and the black paper slipped from my fingers. It was ash before it hit the cement. Gone. The secret, the knowledge, the magic trick. Hidden by jealous, greedy little minds. Gone. Fuck.

“Wouldn't be the first time, Liz.”

I groaned as the abomination shit itself into our world and my Swadhisthana chakra clenched at the affront to space-time and my personal aura. Liz clutched her stomach and gagged at the close proximity to the manifestation.

“God,” she said.

“Doubtful,” I said, rubbing my red, swollen hand. I tucked the camera into the briefcase and grabbed it.

“Liz, I know you think I am insane, and I want you to keep thinking that. You run up to the stairwell and keep running. It was nice to meet you. Thank you for everything. Run. Don't look back.”

She started to say something, then thought better of it, and ran. She didn't look back. I stepped out of the cage and walked toward the well of darkness between the terminator of two emergency lights. The thing was there. It had been sent for me. I cleared my mind and summoned my power. I could feel Didgeri swimming between the worlds, coming closer. I reached into my pocket and took out a small bullet of chalk.

“Ichi,”
I thought,
“time to go. Head for your pickup like we planned. Geri is almost here.”
I drew a simple hexagram on the floor. The thing in the dark made a wet moaning sound from multiple mouths, as it solidified, like Jell-O, in the skin lands.

“You are in danger,”
Ichi thought.
“This creature is not part of the plan. I will—”

“You will stick to the plan and your part,”
I thought back. “
I got this. Your guns can't help with this. I got it.”

Ichi was silent; he headed to the location we had already selected for Didgeri to pick him up. Something was moving in the darkness, part of the shadow dislodging itself. I knelt and touched the chalk markings.

“Geri, if you can hear me,”
I thought.
“I'm going dark. I'm going to be in a seal, cut off from you, and when you see that seal open you have to grab me quick, darlin', or something else is going to.”

The thing in the darkness lumbered into sight. I filled the Seal of Solomon with my power and my anger, and stood. The seal flared and the thing snarled. All the voices were gone in my head. I was alone. I suddenly remembered the lyrics to the Pixies song “Hey”—don't ask me why.

It was nine feet tall, four feet wide, a column of black, leathery skin leaking medical waste from fist-sized, fanged sphincters all across its body. Glowing red eyes, mouths, barbed breasts, hooked penises, and human arms were scattered across the surface of its trunk with no semblance of design or reason. A ring of arms at the base of it, bent at the elbows like tree roots, held it up and allowed it to lurch forward, toward me. A circle of arms flailing toward accursed Heaven was at the top of the pillar of filth and atrocity, a beautiful, perfect blue eye in the center of the palm of each hand in the crown. It moved toward me, hissing, leaking, and stinking.

“Hold,” I said. “By the power of the Silver Seals and the Compact of Shiva, by the Sacrifice of the Bodhisattva, by the secret saint Alice Weinstein of Fort Worth Texas—destroyer of monsters and guardian of life, by the Court of the Uncountable Stairs, you are bound to stand down or name yourself.”

The thing lurched to a stop. It made a sound kind of like an eighteen-wheeler having congestive lung failure. It started to speak from all its mouths at once in a language I didn't recognize.

“No,” I said. “Nice try. You know the rules, lurker at the threshold. Your name or you must depart the angle worlds.”

“And you, you who stink of fear and petty evil,” the thing rumbled in a phlegmy, amplified voice, “you claim to be of the Nightwise, a protector, a guardian of these lands?”

“Yeah, well, my membership card may be a little out of date, but yeah, I am. Now stand and name yourself, or depart.”

“I am Neva,” it said, shuddering. “The twelfth maiden of Chernobog. Bringer of All Ills.”

“Chernobog,” I said. “Eastern European. The Black God. Older than Lucifer. You're one of the twelve Likhoradkas, evil demigod things. What are you doing here?”

“Killing you,” it said, and shuffled forward. “Do you think your little ward and your tiny powers can match the might of the Goddess of Plagues? One touch and you will die the most horrible death a human can imagine, every illness, every disease cast upon you. Such is the fate of those who interfere with the works of Chernobog.”

Neva was right in front of me, now, a wall of oozing hatred and death. I slid my toe to the edge of the chalk.

“And now, little guardian, little Nightwise, tell me your name, before I devour you,” it rumbled.

“Dusan,” I said. “Dusan Slorzack.” Neva shuddered as it laughed. The sound of the demon goddess's laughter slid into my brain's greasy folds. No human was ever made to hear that sound.

“Very funny, Nightwise,” Neva said. “But you are not the Avatar of Chernobog, and such a pathetic lie will not save you.”

I slid my toe over the chalk, blurring it. “Then come and get me, you poxy old bitch,” I said. “
Now, Geri, now!”
I thought.

Neva was on me, the useless chalk island was nothing. Wet, oozing hands reached for me. A black weeping wall was my universe. Something grabbed me by the ankles and pulled. I closed my eyes and tried not to piss myself. I was too scared for a last thought.

Water. I was under cold, salty water, something had hold of me, and I flailed and twisted, fought and tried to run. I was up, out, in bright daylight—blue sky, fresh, cold air. I snorted seawater and the stench of the twelfth maiden out of my nose.

Didgeri had my shoulders, helping me up. She was soaked. Ichi was standing next to me in his suit, also completely wet. Magdalena had waded in and was laughing and shouting. The water was freezing. A crowd of tourists on the sand, near
The Awakening
statue, were looking at us. I couldn't care less. I looked at Didgeri and hugged her as tight as I could. She hugged me back.

“Great job,” I mumbled. I coughed up some water and coughed and laughed again. “Great job, guys.”

We all couldn't stop laughing, except for Ichi, of course. The gulls laughed with us as we slogged our way back to the shore.

 

SEVENTEEN

Didgeri and Magdalena had acquired a Jeep. We climbed in. Ichi refused to sit anywhere near Geri, so he and Magdalena sat in the back. We were all so fucking happy to be alive, no one minded Ichi being an old stone ass. We drove to a mall parking lot, found a public restroom, and everyone got on clean, dry clothes. I now sported jeans, boots, a Bella Morte T-shirt, a leather jacket, and a shit-eating grin at being alive. I treated my rowdy pirate band to a luscious lunch of fast food from the mall food court. Ichi, the party animal, got some steamed rice and water. Magdalena, for such a tiny girl, put away more sushi than I thought a human being of any size could consume. Giri had a decadent choco-foamy-coffee drink thing of about eight thousand calories and a chocolate scone, and I, their fearless leader, had tacos—the perfect travel food. Tacos—exotic. That's me, International Man of Mystery. I asked the girl at the counter of the taco joint if they served Cheerwine. She asked if they sold that in 40s.

“Let's get the fuck to Virginia,” I said.

The sun was bright and the air was cool bordering on cold for early February. We glided onto 495, headed toward I-66 and then I-81, to Harrisonburg.

I missed WHFS, the old alt-radio station I used to listen to whenever I was in D.C. or Maryland. It was long gone, so I surfed the channels and eventually was delighted to find that HFS had moved to a new frequency and was alive and well. “Seven Nation Army” by the White Stripes greeted my ears. It seemed fitting, so I put on my sunglasses, rolled down the window, ate my taco, and smiled.

“You are insufferably pleased with yourself,” Didgeri said.