Nightwise (36 page)

“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?”

“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.