Nightwise (32 page)

The anger welled up in me. Anger at Harel for being too weak and too cowardly to keep the poison from eating his soul, anger at my part in all of it, and anger for the loss, the betrayal of someone who had been a treasure in this world and now was just debris.

I grabbed the little bastard by the lapels of his overcoat and forced him back until he crashed into the Ark. The old Hasid was up, bellowing at me in angry Hebrew. I spun and glared at him with crazy goyish eyes and jabbed a finger in his direction like a gun. The old man blanched and clutched his chest. The boy took the old man's hand and pulled him toward the front doors of the temple.

I turned my attentions back to Harel, still crushed against the cabinet that held the Torah scrolls.

“Now, that's more like the old Ballard I know.” Harel sneered.

“You listen to me, you little piece of garbage,” I snarled in his face. I could feel the flush of genuine anger on my skin. “I don't care how badass a kabbalist you are, were, 'cause I'm the mojo-murder-man, motherfucker. I can turn your skin inside out; I can burn your soul to ash before you were ever born. I can make it feel like you are jonesing for-fucking-ever, asshole. Do you get me, you little worm? I can and I will. You really want to test your powers against mine again? Do you?”

“No,” Harel said, full of sullen fear.

“Good answer,” I said, as I dragged him toward the lobby. “Now, I need that information in the next few days. Everything about this summoner hit man and what he was doing and who he was doing it with, plus anything about a Dusan Slorzack. You ever hear of him?

“No,” Harel said. “Who … who is he?”

“The man who fucking murdered Mita,” I said. “How about James Berman? You ever hear of him? I want whatever you can dig up on him too. They're all up to their fucking eyeballs in this shit.”

“James who?” Harel said. He was sweating hard and cold now.

“Berman, Wall Street suit. Got murdered a few months ago. He was Illuminati—the Inner Cabal of the Five Boroughs.”

Even in his present state, Harel snorted. “Fucking occult Kiwanis club. Posers.”

“Flyweight, I know,” I said, “but he was tied up in some much deeper shit, and I need to know what they were all up into and how it connects to this Memitim contract killer. I'm gonna pull it all out by the roots, and you are going to help me.” I gave him the number he could reach me at. “Forty-eight hours,” I said. “If I don't get it, then I swear to fucking God I will rain down on your ass. Now go cook up your shit, Harel; you're no fucking good to anyone straight anymore.”

I let him go, and he slid away from me. His eyes were red coals of hatred.

“Yeah, okay. I'll get you something in forty-eight,” Harel said. “No problem, pal. Just like the good old days, huh?”

He glared at me and staggered up the aisle toward the lobby doors and the bright outside.

“Whatever happened to you, Ballard?” he shouted as he pushed open the doors. “Lost your fucking sense of humor. It was your only redeeming quality. You used to be a riot at funerals.”

The doors let in a gust of cold wind, like the breath of God, and then slammed shut in Harel's wake.

“Too many caskets these days, asshole. Too many. And now I have one more.”

 

TWENTY-FOUR

I made my way to the hotel. I was staying at a dive off East Garfield in Washington Park. I bought another cloned cell phone off a guy on the street and used it to call Grinner's swept contact line.

“We're go as of thirteen hundred hours today,” I said. “Let me know what comes back.”

I waited. I drank. I smoked.

I kept remembering us the way we had been then and how the meat grinder had made us who we were now. Harel had been a bright-eyed young rabbinical student with a taste for the ugly side of the occult street, full of the fire and passion. He wanted so bad to have it all. He wanted to traffic in the forbidden but still help people. He was our light, but he yearned so for the darkness. Boj was the man, sharp as a razor, handsome, tactically brilliant, deadly, and so dead inside. He was beginning his slow courtship of oblivion through hypodermic communion. Not so lost in his pain yet that he had forgotten where the road was. His orbit had only started to decay. And me … I was a little stupider, a lot more arrogant. I was going to be the greatest wizard in the history of this world or any other—an occult rock star. I was willing to pay the price for knowledge, for power, and most of all for respect and awe—any price. I burned the taper of my soul at both ends and laughed while I did it. Okay, I guess I was a lot stupider.

When I called the hospice in New York, I was told Boj was going. He had slipped into and out of consciousness for the last several days.

“Can you give me any idea of how long he's got?” I asked the nurse. Her name was Rae, and she had talked to me a few times before when I had called.

“Three days, maybe a week. Anything you'd like me to pass along if he comes to again?” She paused and covered the receiver as she barked orders at a wandering patient to get back in his room.

“Yeah, you tell him the redneck said he's close and he needs to hang on, unless he doesn't have the guts to do that. Be sure you tell him just like that, okay, darlin'?”

Rae chuckled. “Yeah, I've gotten to know the tough little SOB. That should do the trick.”

“I hope so,” I said. “I'll be there by the end of the week. Thanks, Rae.”

We hung up.

I was running out of time. If this plan didn't work, I was done, and so was Boj. It all came down to Harel. Part of me hoped he didn't let me down again, but another part of me secretly hoped he would.

I missed the Harel I met before his soul had been scorched away, leaving something blackened and coarse in its place.

In '96, a thing was killing young men in Chicago's worst neighborhoods. Without a shy, brilliant young rabbinical student named Harel Ettinger, Boj and I would never have found it, never stopped it. All Harel had wanted was the chance to keep helping us, to help more people, fight more monsters, and maybe take a little walk on the wild side of the Life.

That good man never came back. “Those who battle monsters” and all that …

I should have been preparing a defense for what I suspected would come next. I should not have been getting shit-faced drunk and listening to the gunfire down the street, while the idiot TV looped static, and the tiny blown-out speaker on the clock radio played “This Night” by Black Lab and I knew every word.

I took another drag on the bottle of tequila, lit another cigarette, and waited. It felt like a wake. Eventually, it didn't feel like anything anymore.

*   *   *

The bloodred numerals of the clock burned 3:15
A.M
. into the stale, dark air of the hotel room when the cell phone rang. It had taken thirty hours, a carton of cigarettes, a bottle of tequila, and a bottle of Maker's Mark for the call to come.

I rolled over in the bed and answered the phone. “Yeah?”

There was a wet sound on the line, coughing, then Harel's rasping whisper.

“You bastard,” Harel gurgled. “You set me up. I should have known better than to trust you, you son of a bitch. Always looking out for yourself.”

“Where are you?” I said.

“Fuck you!” Harel screamed into the phone. There was a pause, more hacking, wet gurgling, and the sounds of great physical exertion by very damaged meat. The sound was sticky.

“I'm … ah … ah, old house in West Garfield Park. Oh, God, it hurts!” Harel said. “Turned on me, son of bitch turned on me. North … north of … Eisenhower Expressway.”

“Where, Harel?” I asked.

More uncontrollable phlegmy coughing from the phone. I was up, the lamp was on, and I was fumbling for my boots.

“Four thousand block West Washington,” he rasped. “Boarded-up house … look for the Mask of Melchom drawn on the door…”

“Okay, I'm on my way.”

There was a barely intelligible barrage of profanity, and then the line went dead.

*   *   *

It took twenty minutes to reach him by cab. I threw a wad of crumpled bills at the cabbie and sprinted down the dark corridor of rotting houses and decaying concrete as he shouted after me to wait. My breath was pale smoke in the cold, wet night. My heart was thudding dully in my chest. I was still drunk, and I felt thick and stuffed with dirty rags. The cabbie shouted, called me a stupid peckerwood, and peeled off. Only a fool attracted attention in this neighborhood in the dead of the night.

Across town there were monuments of shimmering steel, venerable marble, and mirrored glass. Lakeview, Edgewater, Hyde Park, lit up like Heaven, guarded by blue-vested garbed knights ready to turn back the unwelcome with traffic stops and steel batons. In the land of many mansions, the homes of those who do, who have, in the Chicago you saw in the movies, on TV, decent folk were asleep in their beds, behind solid walls and protected by electronic sentinels. Their bank accounts were positive and their kitchens were full of food. Their bills were paid up, barely, so they had lights and heat and water and all the things those in God's country should have. They were anointed by the gods of credit and commerce: car payments, cell phone payments, mortgage, tuition bills, taxes. They were hardwired into the fabric of society. All it cost them was a small sliver of their souls, their freedom, paid in easy monthly installments.

But here, in places like West Garfield, it was the longest hour of the night. Here it was shadowed lots choked with weeds and crack vials, oil stains on asphalt, and distant gunfire, distant sirens. Here you worked as much, as many places, as you could; here you fought a constant war between a thin check and a thick stack of bills. A struggle between hunger and self-respect, bus routes, sick children with no magic card to grant them access to the kingdom to be healed. Here it was a war to convince your kids it was better to work yourself into an early coffin that they ended up buying for your ass on credit, as opposed to the fool's gold of cash in one hand, a gun in the other. Do the math of how little you actually make after you factor in the jail time and short life expectancy.

Either way, whichever zip code you called home, the result was the same—you ended up dead, you ended up in debt to people who made more in a month than you made in a decade. You ended up wondering if all the struggle, all the roadblocks, the wasted time and broken dreams, the stress, the tension, the crying, and the anger, if all that had been worth the trinkets, sealed to you like barnacles, the shit they couldn't bury you with anyway. What was your life worth? Your happiness? Your soul? What was the going rate on you?

I found the house. On the plywood sheet that covered what remained of the frame of the front door, among spray-painted gang tags, was the carefully drawn and painted mask of office for one of the infernal parliament, the demon lord, Melchom—Treasurer of Hell.

I could sense the powers churning inside, like the archive in D.C. A wound had been gouged into our world from elsewhere, and there were forces moving in that old boarded-up, dark house.

I pushed the door open. The hasp was already loose, and there was no padlock with it. Inside the house, old smells of shit, piss, mold, and the chemical stench of burnt meth competed with the overpowering coppery smell of fresh blood.

I didn't have a flashlight, so I left the front door open. I moved as quietly as I could, sidestepping a half-rotted cat carcass near a yellowed pile of abandoned mail and newspapers. I stepped into what had once been the parlor of this home.

Harel was a broken pile of jagged fractures stabbing up through sliced and bloody skin. Each blood-soaked cough made his entire tortured frame shudder in pain. I stepped toward him, but I abruptly stopped when I saw the crippled angel hovering beside him.

It was beautiful and terrible—a butterfly of divine light held together by a will older than human sin. It was vaguely man shaped. It had multiple faces, some of men, others of beasts, all wreathed, blurred, in light that I knew burned mortal eyes if they stared too closely. It had two sets of wings and cloven hooves made of angelic brass. The way it moved and flowed, liquid around time and space, seeping, vibrating, static, infinite motion, slipping through the cracks of the dimensions … the things it did to my brain as I tried to look at it. It was … a Chagall painting come to life.

I was no kabbalist, but it looked like it belonged to the Hayyoth order—from the seventh sphere of Heaven; thirty-six of them in the “camp of Shekinah.” These were the beings that held aloft the pillars of Heaven, and it was hurt. Divine ichor, liquid fire, hissed as it spattered on the base matter of earth.

Only a master of the Merkabah, the ancient mystical system that predated kabbalah, could summon one of the Wheels of Heaven here. And Harel was a Merkabah master. It was impressive.

Across the room, partially embedded in the crumbling plaster, was a massive inhuman form, or what was left of it. Its gray, rubbery skin had partly been vaporized. Its face was toadlike and frozen in a grimace of pain and rage. Black blood spattered as it fell from the destroyed demon. The body was so mangled, I couldn't place the clan or the house of origin for the thing.

I approached slowly and bowed my head as the Hayyoth turned to regard me with a face that could lay waste to nations and turn men to salt. I heard Harel moan, and then a voice that I recognized as mine begin to chant. I was rusty in Dee's Enochian, and I felt the flesh in my throat begin to blacken and burn as I spoke.

“Ol sonf vorsg, gohu',”
I croaked in the tongue of Heaven.
“Iad balt
lansh calz.”

The angel looked down at its charge and then turned away from the pain of material being. It faded into memory.

I spit sizzling blood out of my throat and knelt by Harel, pushing the sweat-slicked hair out of his eyes.