Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation

by A. W. Hill

  “Perfect freedom,” said Emmett. “Or p-perfect slavery.”

  Raszer moved closer, wanting to lend some of his own ebbing body heat, and this time Emmett didn’t recoil. His lips were a dull purple, and his teeth were chattering. Moreover, he’d made his inner coldness manifest in the room. Quite a trick.

  “And Katy . . . did she know these men?”

  “No,” Emmett replied. “Only from Johnny talking about how they were his t-ticket to paradise.Katy was like an angel. Katy was—“

  “--the last pure thing?”

  Emmett nodded. “Until Layla. Katy wanted to be like her…wanted Johnny to want her like that, and Johnny said she could. She would be, if she f-followed the plan.”

  The plan—right. So she didn’t struggle…didn’t scream when she saw him killed?”

  Raszer pressed his thumb lightly into the papery skin on Emmett’s wrist. The pulse was reasonably strong, but it was ticking at barely more than a beat per two seconds. Without taking his eyes off the boy, Raszer reached over with his free hand and pulled his jacket down from the bed, then draped it around Emmett’s frail shoulders.

  “She didn’t . . . I don’t think she saw what they did. Like I said, she was way fucked up. We all were. I wish I was more. It was dark, and there was the fog, and it all happened way too fast. Johnny and the rest, they were just . . . they just went down like birds. Like there was life and then there was . . . there was . . . nothing, except this . . . this thing that Henry made. This entity. This thing in the woods with yellow eyes, howling and screaming, pressing me down. Oh, God. Oh, God, the smell. I puked so bad . . . and then I just ran. I ran all the way back inside.”

  Raszer pushed up to a squat and slipped his hands beneath Emmett’s armpits, talking the whole time, keeping his eyes on the boy’s wildly dilated pupils. “I was up there yesterday, Emmett. In those woods. On that road . . . ”

  Using only the rock climber’s strength stored in his legs, for his arms had no leverage, Raszer began very gingerly to slide Emmett Parrish’s body up the wall, crushing him to his chest as they cleared the black stripe. “I think I had a run-in with your ‘entity,’” he said. “The smell is the giveaway. Got a good whack on the head from him, too. An old squatter. Believe me, he’s as flesh and blood as you are.”

  “Are you s-s-sure?”

  “I’m sure,” said Raszer. “He was probably just as freaked out as you, too.”

  “You mean . . . somebody else saw what happened?”

  “Uh-huh. Lost his tongue for it, evidently. There was a second witness, Emmett.”

  Emmett suddenly realized that he was standing, his head well clear of the protective barrier. His knees gave out in Raszer’s embrace.

  “Oh, shit. Oh, shit,” he whimpered. “I can’t—”

  “Yes, you can,” said Raszer. “It’s okay. It’s cool. Tell me something, Emmett: When you were little and there were monsters in the room, who cleared ’em out?”

  “M-my f-father,” the boy stammered.

  “Well, I’m a father, too. I’ve got a license to sweep out servitors.”

  For the first time, Emmett Parrish smiled, then giggled, and after that, he cried.

  “There’s something I don’t understand, though,” said Raszer. “If Johnny had this whole deal set up, and Katy was ready to go along . . . why did he and Henry switch the game plan at the last minute and try to double-cross these guys with a sex-magic spell?”

  “It was Henry’s idea. I think he thought he could defeat them ’cause he had something of theirs. Something he won in the game. The sigil.”

  “The sigil?”

  “The black rock.”

  “What about Johnny? Was he in on Henry’s plan?”

  “I dunno about Johnny. I don’t know anything. I just went along.”

  “Who does know?” Raszer pressed. “Who’s still alive, that is.”

  “Layla would know,” said Emmett darkly. “And maybe Ruthie.”

  “Katy’s sister,” Raszer affirmed. “How would Ruthie know? She was back in Taos, wasn’t she, when all this happened?”

  “Her and Henry had this connection. He called her his mystic sister. He must’ve emailed or texted her ten times a day.” Emmett’s body temperature had at last begun to rise, and his jaw relaxed a little, but Raszer did not let go. “Henry said you could use the web for magic, too. He said he could change the quantum flux. He swore that him and Ruthie even had sex on the Net, and that it was better than physical.”

  “Would Ruthie also know how Henry lost his testicles? Do you know?”

  Emmett flicked a strand of hair from his pocked face and turned aside, suddenly conscious of his near nakedness, and Raszer’s.

  “All I know’s he said they had more power off his body than on it.”

  Raszer processed this. “Emmett . . . were Henry’s testicles a sigil, too?”

  “I think so. That night, when he made me invisible, he gave me this blue velvet bag to keep. With his . . . his things in it.”

  “Did you hide that bag in one of Johnny’s Chinese lanterns, Emmett? Up there behind the trailer? Emmett? Emmett?”

  A thin column of light from the cracked bedroom door bisected Emmett’s face, and he squinted hard. Standing in the crack was his mother. Raszer turned his head and saw Grace Parrish’s face shift from surprise to relief, then alarm, and finally puzzlement, like cloud shadows scudding over an uncertain landscape, giving it form.

  “Excuse us for a minute, Mrs. Parrish,” said Raszer, “while we get our street clothes on.” He returned his eyes to the boy. “I believe we’ll be right out.” He nodded to Grace and noticed that the woman’s jaw had gone slightly slack at the sight of his paisley shorts, and at the intimacy with which he held her son. “Not to worry,” he said. “It’s an old sweat-lodge technique. Sometimes bare skin makes for a better connection.”

  “I’m not worried, Mister Raszer,” she said, stepping back. “I just can’t believe nobody’s tried it before.”

  She closed the door gently, and, without further words, the men went about the small ritual of getting dressed. All of Emmett’s T-shirts were clean. When they had finished, Emmett left his room for the first time in months, his fingers gripping Raszer’s wrist until he had been safely planted on the sofa.

  Layla stepped from the shower, tucked the towel around her torso, and listened. She did this habitually, because if anyone had entered the flat during her shower, she was certain his presence would reveal itself to her acutely sensitive ears. Today, the vigilance was unwarranted, because Harry had come with her staples: goat’s milk, candy, and a new pair of shoes, and was waiting for her in the bedroom. Harry adored her still. He would die before letting anyone enter her bath. She counted on that.

  She stood at the foggy mirror and began to comb out her thick, lustrousblack hair, making three parts in the form of a Y and applying a scented oil to her exposed scalp. She lifted the comb, then stopped and listened again.It wasn’t a sound, but the absence of sound that had caught her notice. When Harry was there, he laid on the bed, noisily turning the pages of her fashion magazines, or chatting on the cell phone, or both. He did it to reassure her. Human noises were comforting, he’d told her. Now there was no sound coming from the bedroom but for the faintest gurgling, like that of a coffee maker in its final cycle. She listened as a bird listens, intently focused but disengaged from self. All ears.

  “Harry?” she called through the door, and, immediately upon saying it, felt the muscles in her belly tighten. By the time she said it a second time, the tone was markedly different.

  “Harry!”

  There was no reply, but with her ear to the door, she could hear the gurgling, draining sound a little more clearly. Then she heard what sounded like breath, and the soft rattling and shifting of hangers in her closet. She squatted down and peered through the old keyhole. She could see nothing in the background but her walk-in closet, its doors closed, and nothing in the foreground but Harry’s right boot
, parked just where it ought to be at the foot of her bed, toe up. The boot trembled once, then again, and listed to the side, motionless.

  Layla put her lips to the keyhole. Her voice was low and strong now.“Harry?”

  Layla had a gun, but it was in her closet. She waited, counted, and breathed, and when the waiting was over, she flipped the deadbolt and very slowly opened the door. The scream that should have come from her throat stayed pinned down in her breast, where she’d put it long before. From years and miles away, she heard the bell and knew it was for her.

  She strode deliberately to the night table and scooped up Raszer’s business card from where he’d left it. The scream stayed inside even when she stepped barefoot into the warm pool of blood at the bedside. Then she turned to the bed, took the cell phone from Harry Wolfe’s right hand, and, wiping the bloody keypad on her towel, backed into the bathroom, leaving footprints. As she did, she counted the daggers embedded in Harry’s flesh. If the message was what she thought it was, there would be:

  One, two, three, four, five, six, seven . . .

  Once inside, she locked the door and sat down on the toilet, trembling in spite of herself. She couldn’t be absolutely certain there weren’t knives raised over her. When she had composed herself, she punched in the number on the business card.

  ELEVEN

  “This is Henry Lee’s little black book,” said Detective Aquino, unzipping the evidence bag and removing a well-worn paperback. “It’s all Greek to me.”

  “Well, Latin, anyway,” said Raszer, accepting the book. “But you probably know that. Liber Null—The Book of Nothing, or of no value, at least not to the uninitiated. I’ve got a copy in my library.”

  “I guess I’m not surprised,” said Aquino. “It’s a book of magic spells?”

  “More like magical practice,” Raszer answered, flipping to the title page, and an inscription: Henry—Good luck on the left-hand path. Do nothing is the law. Cheers, H.

  “Hmm,” Raszer mumbled, and turned to Aquino. “Any idea who H. is? Cheers would suggest a Brit.”

  “I thought the same thing,” Aquino repled. “Of course, we couldn’t ask Henry. When I pressed Emmett on it, he said it was probably a British soldier Henry met in Iraq. But I got the feeling he was making it up. So what’s the book for? Not pulling rabbits out of hats, I guess . . . ”

  ”No,” said Raszer. “Not unless a rabbit is what you’re after. It’s for achieving results. You might even call it pragmatic sorcery. The left-hand path is the path of power through intuitive self-knowledge. The magician uses his active imagination to harness the chaos at the heart of the universe. From that, he makes his own gods.”

  “You lost me there, amigo. Exactly how does he do that?”

  Raszer lit a cigarette and sat down on an oversize trunk. They were in a warehouse space in San Dimas shared by regional police departments, an elephant’s graveyard of evidence collected from ten thousand crime scenes: an archive of sin. On Raszer’s left were two nitrous oxide tanks, found at the trailer in Burro Canyon, and the fragments of a backyard methamphetamine lab. On his left was a box containing an assortment of Henry’s black rocks and fat little Mesopotamian goddess statuettes.

  “Back in the ’70s,” Raszer began, “a British magician by the name of Peter Carroll, who’d been—until then—an adept of Aleister Crowley, decided that ceremonial magic had gotten too highfalutin—too full of silk robes and mumbo-jumbo. He was a bright, serious guy, as far as it goes, and he’d noticed all the bizarre stuff happening in science: chaos theory, black holes, quantum entanglement, you know . . . ”

  “No, I don’t, actually . . . but go on.”

  “Well, to Carroll and his friends, all the old Egyptian magic, with its determinism, its invocation of dead gods, and its elitism, just didn’t jibe with a science that said the universe came down to quarks and uncertainty. Old-school magic was for horny old men in smoking jackets. Carroll wanted rituals that were effective, so he threw the religion out of magic and focused on screwing with the universe itself.”

  “Screwing with the universe,” said Aquino drily. “Okay. You still haven’t told me how me it works. How you make a god.”

  “Maybe you should read the book,” said Raszer. “I’m not saying I’m a believer, but, like all magical insight, it has an angle of truth. Put it this way: modern physics says, in a way, that everything is everything. The universe in a nutshell . . . ”

  “I did try to read that book.”

  “If the universe is enfolded in every stitch of space time, then God’s in the stitches, too. Which means God’s in you and me . . . in the fabric, not a separate thing. And if chaos is bubbling under it all, then some force has to evoke order—things, people, events—from the chaos. Carroll says basically that this force is imagination, the same kind a method actor uses to create a character. You go into your temple—if you’re Henry Lee, maybe that’s a trailer—you set your goal: You want Susie to love you, or you want a better job, or whatever. Then you work yourself into a state of gnosis—”

  “What’s that?”

  “Let’s just say it’s a kind of mainline to the divine, without any interference from the mind. It’s living inside the truth.”

  “How do you get there? Yoga? Meditation? Magic mushrooms?”

  “All or none of the above. For chaos magicians, it’s whatever works. Sex can do the trick, if it’s done right . . . even focused masturbation. Self-inflicted pain. Anything that takes you beyond ego. Then you say to yourself, I believe in Isis, or I believe in Cthulhu, or I believe in Mary Worth . . . ”

  “It doesn’t matter what you believe in?”

  “Doesn’t matter, as long as you believe for the duration of the ritual.”

  Raszer held the cigarette in his teeth and reached behind his left into the box containing Henry’s icons. He fished out the largest and most worn of the black rocks.

  “Then you summon your servitor—your god-form—into a sigil, like this rock or a statue, and you go to work. How you do the work is what the book’s about. How successful Henry was is hard to say, but he sure had an effect on Emmett Parrish.”

  “I’d like to hear about that,” said Aquino. “Did he stick to his story?”

  “I—”

  Raszer’s cell phone bleeped, sparing him any dissembling. “It’s Raszer,” he answered, bouncing Henry’s rock on his palm. It was surprisingly heavy for its size, polished from handling, and had a distinctive navel-like dimple. And there was some-thing else, something he couldn’t quantify—an emission, a kind of heat.

  The voice on the other end was all contained panic. Remarkably contained, considering its message. Raszer glanced at Aquino, shook his head, and rolled his eyes apologetically toward heaven. He put the phone to his chest.

  “It’s, uh, my girlfriend,” he said, and winced. “Will you give me a minute?”

  Aquino grunted knowingly, and gave a nod. Raszer stood, and with a thief’s sleight of hand dropped the rock into his jacket pocket. As he walked across the concrete warehouse floor, Aquino’s eyes tracked him. As practiced as Raszer’s own method acting was, it couldn’t disguise the draining of the blood from his face.

  “All right, Layla,” said Raszer softly, when he had gained fifty feet of distance. “Take a breath and start again. I’m here. I’m listening.”

  “Harry’s dead,” she said. “It’s them. He’s in my apartment.”

  The words were all in her throat, their pitch flattened by fear or numbness.

  “Harry’s in your apartment?”

  “Yes. On the bed. No, I mean the killer—”

  “Where are you now?”

  “In the bathroom.”

  “Is it locked?”

  “Yes, but that won’t—”

  “Okay. I want you to listen and do exactly as I say, all right?”

  “All right.”

  “Even hired assassins—especially hired assassins—try to avoid collateral damage. If you stay where you are, he
will probably leave. I’m going to call the police, and then I’m coming straight to you, okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now, when we’re done, I want you to put down the phone, walk over to the toilet, and take the lid off the tank in back. That’s probably the heaviest thing in the bathroom. It will knock even the biggest man cold. Stand behind the door, up against the wall, and raise the lid above your head. If he manages to get in, bring it down hard and take his weapon. I’m on my way. It’s going to be okay.”

  Raszer flipped the phone shut and stood for a moment with his back to Aquino. There were advantages, not to say honor, in telling the truth, but the truth would take time, and a small-town cop might create variables whose impact he couldn’t predict. He turned around and raised his hands in the air in a gesture of defeat.