Nightwise (26 page)

I couldn't hold her gaze. I looked out the bay windows into the utter darkness of a country night.

“Because I was too damn busy,” I said, “too much up my own ass, into my own little drama, my ‘legend' to care. Because he had pissed me off, and part of me wanted him to get exactly what he has now, because he hurt me, and he betrayed me, and I am a vindictive son of a bitch, Pam.”

“You think finding this man for him and, I assume, killing him, will change anything for either one of you? Honestly?”

“No,” I said. “Men like us, we're thrice damned already. The things we've done … There's no redemption, no magic satori at the end of the road. His life is still shit and my life is still shit, and we're both evil bastards. Almost as evil as the bastard I'm hunting. Nothing changes that.

“I just saw him all frail and decaying from the inside. And he asked me to help him one last time. And I do owe him; I owe him my life a dozen times over. And he asked me … he asked me.

“When your whole life is ugly and dirty and broken, when you have fucked up so many times, in so many ways, Pam, a tiny spot of clean looks mighty good to you.”

She was silent. I was too. There was laughter from the other room. I heard Grinner's booming voice.

“You saw him and you saw yourself,” Pam finally said.

I nodded. “Yeah, and all us evil bastards, all of us, hate thinking about dying alone. 'Bout the worst fate for any of us. We know we deserve it. We know it's the most likely outcome of where we've driven our lives to, but …

“Pam, today I faced off against a thing from another place—a thing that was pretty much a god—and while I was scared shitless when I thought it was going to kill me, part of me thought, ‘This would be a good way to go out. They'd be talking about this for years.'

“Hell is having the time to reflect back on the train wreck of a life you've made. Having time to recall the faces of everyone you fucked over, wish you hadn't said all the things you said, agonize over the ‘if-only-I-hads.' Regret is the deadliest poison of all, and it works slow. So, if I can give Boj one tiny drop of something other than regret, it's worth it. And he won't be alive long enough to realize how pointless and meaningless it really is.”

Pam looked at me, and then leaned over and hugged me. It was the most alien feeling I could recall from the day, more than the evil goddess, more than running between worlds, more than magic.

“Bruce and I, we had a son,” Pam said. “He died. Bruce blames himself, and truth be told, a part of me blames him too. If we hadn't had each other, I … I don't know if I would have survived it. I fell, I wanted to fall. I could have been your friend Boj. But I had Bruce. And Boj, Boj has you. That's why he reached out. Everyone tries to find someone, something to hang on to in the darkness, in the fall. Even evil bastards don't have to be alone. A truly evil bastard wouldn't care.”

She released me and walked toward the kitchen door. “Coming?” she said. “I think they are playing some stupid board game.”

“I'll be along presently,” I said. “Thank you, Pam.”

She walked out. I sat for a moment and recalled days gone by. Boj at his prime, a dark underworld prince full of violence and twisted honor. Harel, innocent and so wanting not to be—full of life and compassion and eager to live a life of adventure, to help people, to master magic. And me, the fucking rock star, so eager to make a legend, to make my name, I was willing to do anything, use anyone. To use them.

I looked toward the other room, I saw the people in there in my mind. I saw my old friends, my old crew, and how they were now. Nothing changes. People can't change, even if the world would let them. I wanted a cigarette really bad.

More laughter from the other room. It felt better, easier, to be alone, to keep your distance and your guard up. How many people in that room would end up dead if they stuck with me? How many dead inside? How many would betray me? Wound me? How many of them would I let down, or throw under the bus in the name of my own pride, my own ego, my own lousy hide? No answers. Just do the job, make things square for Boj. One foot in front of the other.

I stood and made my way to the living room. I opened the door to the sounds of life and light, and stepped through.

“Okay,” I said, “I'm on the team that doesn't suck.”

 

EIGHTEEN

The beds were huge, soft, and clean. It was almost noon when I got up. There was a little folded note on my bed stand, next to the magic Kodak camera and the empty scotch glass. The paper smelled like purple lollipops. The note said simply:

You are amazingly hard to wake up when you are drunk and tired. Gods know I tried.

Mag

P.S. Who is Torri Lyn? You talk in your sleep.

I sat on the side of the bed and smelled the paper again. I remembered the scent. I refolded it and left it on the night table.

Showered, shaved, and wearing clean clothes, I headed downstairs. It was quiet, and early afternoon sun was filtering through the numerous windows. The only sound was the old grandfather clock's steady, oiled-metal ticking.

“Hello?” I called.

“They're gone,” a voice said just out of sight to the right of the stairs. “Took the Jeep and went into town. Ichi-san is walking in the woods, and Pam is at her clinic in the main barn. She's a rather busy veterinarian in these parts.”

I came off the stairs, turned toward the dining room. A heavyset man in his late sixties with thinning black hair, sideburns, and thick glasses—what they called in the military BCGs, or “birth control glasses”—stood from the dining room table to greet me. He was dressed in what they used to call “the uniform” at IBM—a white collared shirt with short sleeves, a pen protector with actual pens in the shirt pocket, dark slacks, and sensible shoes. He had a slide rule case on his belt. He crossed to meet me and thrust out a hand.

“Howdy,” he said, shaking my hand. It was a firm, vigorous shake. “I'm Bruce Haberscomb.”

“Laytham Ballard,” I said. “Pleasure to meet the legend.”

“Likewise,” Haberscomb said. “I know I'm not exactly what you were expecting…”

“No, no, it's just…” I said.

“Old habits die hard,” he said with a chuckle. “Back in the day, this outfit was pimp. Pam has been trying to get me to at least wear an occasional sweater vest, but I just can't do that. Freebirds got to fly, I say.”

“Please,” I said, “never wear sweater vests. Ever. Please. They suck.”

“Yes,” Bruce said with a great deal of solemnity. “Yes, they are just about the worst thing in this universe, ever. They do suck. Yes. Please have a seat. We can talk about why you are here.”

We sat at the dining room table. He poured me coffee from a stainless steel pot and then refreshed his own cup.

“Did Grinner tell you much?” I asked.

“That you are looking for someone, someone who has erased every trace of himself from human society.”

“Yes,” I said. “He told me you can hack the Akashic Record and locate him.”

Bruce nodded and took a sip of coffee. “‘Hack' is a crude term, but it's essentially correct,” he said. “Do you understand the Akashic Record—what it represents?”

“I have some experience with it,” I said. “I studied in the East for quite a few years, but I'm afraid my understanding is far from complete, Bruce.”

“The Record presents itself in many different ways to each pilgrim,” he said. “Edgar Cayce described it as the Hall of Records. Others view it as a photographic or holographic experience. Some claim it is the reflection of curved space-time off the twenty-sixth dimensional wireframe.

“To me, it has always been presented as computer code, a logic puzzle to be studied, line by line, and sometimes carefully modified.”

“So you can actually see … what?” I said, leaning forward. “Everything?”

“I can access all the desires and experiences of our world, the life experiences of every human from now until the last human, the empathic experience of the entire nonhuman bio-aura of earth, and the aggregation of the tuplaic architecture formed by the interaction of the dynamic of karma with thought-form structures based upon the desires, the dreams of every human that has been or will be. Didgeri Doo would call that aspect the Dreaming.”

“That has got to be a bitch to process,” I said, shaking my head, “to not get lost in that. I felt a little taste of that when I first discovered the Art, that feeling of interconnectivity, and it must be much, much harder.”

Bruce nodded. “Yes, precisely. Only someone with the proper training and the right hardware in their skulls can distinguish between actual 4-D experience and experiences created by imagination and keen desire.”

“LSD, acid,” I said. “Grinner said you were an Acidmancer, and now I understand why—it helps you navigate the Akashic Record.”

“Yes,” Bruce said. “As you well know, each of us comes to the Life a different way, and we find our own paths to access the power. I am led to understand from Grinner that you found what works best for you is chakraic visualization and somatic reinforcement. For me, it was programing. Building objects in code was like solid curtains of music, sculptures of thought. It still gives me goose bumps. Turns out, as I kid I was coding when I didn't even realize I was doing it.

“I had a real knack for it too. I was recruited out of UC–Berkeley by IBM and, in a few weeks, I was promoted over to their covert Defense Department programs. You know, the Blue Magic Initiative: Bell Atlantic, Book and Candle, Deep Ouija, all that stuff, mixing magic and computer technology. I worked side by side with Marcel Vogel—he's actually who recruited me. That man was a visionary and a genius, a true pioneer in merging hard science with occult and paranormal theory. He did things with luminosity, magnetics, liquid crystal systems…” Haberscomb smiled. He was looking back at Camelot. The memories were green and golden. “The man was a living, breathing wizard—the real deal, a Pythagoras, a Tesla, a Feynman. He was my hero, my inspiration. Those were exciting days, Latham. You wouldn't have even been born yet.”

“Reckon not,” I said with a wide grin. “So, how do you get from IBM black ops to Acidmancy?”

“Well, I discovered a little problem with coding and magic for me,” he said. “The code became too rigid in my mind. I sometimes overlooked elegant intuitive solutions to simple formulaic models because I was too tied into the dogma of the code. I wasn't creating items out of thought and math, I was merely utilizing the artifacts others had created. I fell into the abyss of assembly. My workings suffered for it. I wasn't the only one, either; it was one of the reasons Blue Magic eventually folded, the basic dilemma of coding versus programmer, samurai versus rōnin. I was stuck in between two worlds. I had been trained to illuminate manuscripts, if you will, but I ached to write my own stories, and I lost the power somewhere in between. I wandered in some pretty dark places trying to get the magic back. I know you understand paying a price for power, Laytham. Grinner told you I was with the Company for a while?

“Yeah, Project Stargate, Project Midnight Climax. Midnight Climax was where the CIA was covertly dosing U.S. citizens with acid to see how it would work as an interrogation and mind control drug. Pretty deep black, Bruce.”

“Yep,” he said. “Not my finest hour. Thank goodness for Timothy. He helped me solve the problem, brought me back to myself.”

“Timothy Leary?” I said. “Right? You were one of the original Acidmancers?”

He nodded, sipped his coffee. “There was more than just the war in Vietnam going on back then, Laytham,” he said. “There was a cultural war, a spiritual war, waging across the world. So many young, brilliant minds, so much will and desire to change the world, to create a golden age out of dross. So much hatred and madness and recklessness. So many casualties, in all the wars. Those boys coming home in aluminum boxes, kids getting shot down and beaten in the streets, bastards like Manson turning kids who wanted peace and love into murdering robots…”

He removed his glasses and wiped his eyes. “I won't venerate Leary. He had great ideas and short-sighted ones. Many young men and women fell on the battlefield of the mind, causalities of their own burning desire to experience, to evolve past that point of human social evolution. For every Acidmancer, every psychonaut, there were a legion of burnouts—lost lives, chemically burned souls. Was it worth it? I can't say. I can tell you this, though, we made a difference, and we stood against evil. The Agency's evil, Manson's evil, Nixon's evil. We stood … and we fell.

“I'm the last one of the originals. I retired here in the eighties, when it was clear that all the things we were fighting for, we had lost. I have visitors—folks like you and Grinner, some who come to apprentice. I try to do what I can to help people. That's what it's all about, right? We couldn't change the world, not in any real, lasting way. So we change our little part of it, right? That's what we wizards do, isn't it? Change the world at the fringes, defend it in the night.”

He was quiet. The clock ticked, and I sipped my coffee. Finally, he looked over to me and smiled.

“Sorry. An old man rambling. Okeydoke. You want me to go into the Record and see if I can find your man, Mr.…”

“Slorzack,” I said. “Dusan Slorzack.”

“I will. I understand from Grinner he is one bad guy, so I will go find him for you. Did Grinner do a full search for you using all the conventional methods?”

“Yes.”

“Normally to hide your tracks from someone like Grinner, you need pretty powerful friends—is he Illuminati? Neomasons? Purrah? The Mazekeepers of Pamukkale? Id of Warhol? Assassins of the Magic Bullet? One of the other superior secret societies?”

“I thought he might be Illuminati,” I said. “But it appears he's freelancing. He's mixed up with some low-level Illuminati types in some kind of caper, but the home office seems clueless.”