The Night Dahlia

by R. S. Belcher

  “There’s no need for that, Mr. Ballard,” Cheekbones said. It’s been my experience that when someone says that, there’s absolutely a fucking need for whatever “that” is. In this case, I threw a shaky upper cut at Square-face. He blocked it and planted a solid one in my gut. I dropped to my hands and knees and vomited on his Testoni shoes.

  “Shit, mate!” Square-face snapped a kick at my face, which my booze-drowned brain registered as a Hapkido kick, in the instant prior to me blacking out.

  “You sure this is the guy?” a voice asked. There was a reply and more talking, but I slid back into anesthetized slumber, bordering on poisoned coma.

  Time passed. My face ached. My jaw ached. My ribs ached. My brain spun in the darkness of my skull. I smelled my own stale vomit and piss. I was placed in a comfortable seat and belted in. Cool air blew on my face. I slept. I awoke and asked for water through swollen lips to match my swollen eyes.

  “Fuck you,” a familiar British voice said. “Legend, my ass. This tosser’s a fucking bum.”

  “You’re just mad about your shoes,” another voice without the English accent said, and I laughed.

  Then, at some future point on the other side of dizzy, nauseous blackness, a cool glass was placed to my lips.

  “Drink slowly,” a voice that wasn’t Square-face said. The tiny sliver of my brain that had avoided the deep fryer figured it for Cheekbones. I drank the cold water, swallowed, and then slept again. Time passed. I dreamed. I was talking to the little dead girl. She had lost her doll in a blood-painted maze. I wandered with her and tried to help her find it. The maze never gave up the doll or offered a way out.

  I awoke to being carried by my two well-dressed keepers off some kind of airplane and deposited in the back of a limo.

  “Where we going, fellas?” I muttered. Neither of them answered me. I sunk into the leather seats and sighed. “This thing have a bar?” I asked Cheekbones. If he answered me, I didn’t hear it before I slept again.

  THREE

  Afternoon sunlight filtered through the antique lace curtains. I was in a bed with an excellent mattress and feather pillows. The thread count on the sheets was a number approximating the national debt. There was a pitcher of ice water on the bed next to me along with a small bell and several bottles of salt tablets, analgesics, and stomach medicine. There was also my crushed but serviceable brown package of American Spirits and my tarnished old Zippo. I sat up and winced a little from the soreness in my side and stomach. Had I gotten kicked? When I blinked, it hurt. I touched my face. My lips and eyes were sore and puffy, but the swelling was already receding. I had been in a scrap, but I’d had much, much worse. I did my requisite ten minutes of hacking and coughing, paying my tribute to the god of nicotine with an offering of lung tissue.

  I slipped out of the clean, comfy sheets and discovered I was naked. I checked myself for any injuries other than the ugly green-and-blue bruise on my side. The old bod was still getting by, covered in tattoos and scars, my meat biography. For a fella of my advancing decrepitude, I was holding up okay. I was still cut like Iggy Pop, hold the heroin; still had all my hair, it was falling down to my shoulder blades, and the majority of it was still black. Still had most of my teeth, but not for lack of trying.

  I looked out the window and saw endless, perfect green. A verdant lawn worthy of the Elysian Fields. I was either dead and in the wrong place, or the guest of someone who could afford to have his vast grounds manicured on a daily basis. I drank the better part of the pitcher of water, sat on the edge of the bed, and lit up a cigarette.

  Whoever had me didn’t want me dead or at a disadvantage. They had gone to some time and trouble to patch me up. That sounded to me like a job, so I stood up and checked the closet. My clothes were all there, cleaned, pressed, and perfect. I pulled up my jeans, put on socks and boots, and slipped on the shirt. My wallet was on the shelf above the clothes. Everything was still in it, about two thousand in cash; it should have been considerably more, but I chalked that up to my binge, not theft. There was also a bunch of credit cards, and an ID, all in names that weren’t mine.

  I gathered up my smokes and lighter, tried the door and found it unlocked, and walked out of the bedroom, buttoning my shirt as I did. The house was old; it smelled of well-oiled wood and was a little stuffy with heat. I walked down the hall past numerous doors and came to a foyer at the top of a grand staircase. I had an excellent view of a series of stained-glass mosaics that were capturing the afternoon sun. It was some of the finest glass work I had ever seen. The colors and the designs shifted and flowed, and I suspected there might have been a bit of subtle enchantment at work in the overall effect, but if it was, it was some of the most subtle working I had ever seen. The scene depicted was a beautiful autumn forest, alive with leaves of garnet, fire, umber, and salamander. A sun and moon presided overhead, circling each other in phase-dances of life, death, and rebirth. Tall, slender beings, cloaked in colors that put the leaves to drab shame, stood at the center of it all, their skin lustrous like diamonds, their eyes, trackless night. Above the mosaic was a family crest I recognized. I realized who had me, and something long-buried writhed in me, thrashing like a hungry eel in my guts.

  “Ah, Mr. Ballard, you’re awake. Excellent.” The voice was Irish, gentile, and belonged to a man at my six. He was in his late sixties, maybe early seventies. He had a full head of white hair, thinning a bit on top, and a wrinkled, ruddy complexion with prominent laugh lines. I liked him almost instinctively; I think that was the point. He wore a suit and tie with a simple apron over them. “I’m Carmichael, sir, Mr. Ankou’s butler. I trust you are feeling better than when you joined us, sir?”

  I laughed. “Yeah, I’m good. Thanks. Sorry for the mess. I reckon you had to clean that all up, huh?” Carmichael kept smiling.

  “Think nothing of it, sir. It reminded me a bit of earlier days here, when the house was a bit more lively and boisterous.”

  “Well, I don’t care to have anybody clean up my messes for me,” I said. Someone cleared their throat. It was Cheekbones, in another tailored suit, this one charcoal gray. He looked good, GQ good.

  “Your history would suggest otherwise,” Cheekbones said. “You seem to leave messes wherever you go and seem to have little care for the consequences to others.”

  “Mr. Burris,” Carmichael said, “I was about to notify you that Mr. Ballard is up and about.”

  “Thank you, Carmichael,” Burris said. “I’ll take him down to Mr. Ankou.” I nodded, waved bye to the butler, and followed Burris down the staircase.

  “Where am I?” I asked, as I lit a cigarette. Burris kept walking.

  “An estate outside London,” he said. “You are a guest of the Ankou family.”

  “‘Honor above,’” I said in a trilling language that didn’t have its origin upon this earth. Burris looked over his shoulder but kept walking. “That’s the house motto, isn’t it?” I said in English, exhaling a cloud of smoke.

  “It’s more than a motto,” Burris replied in the same language. It sounded like water babbling over stone. “Someone like you wouldn’t understand.”

  Burris took me through the manor. I walked past a parlor with ancient Middle Eastern tapestries adorning the walls. In the room, an old, blind Egyptian with ram horns growing out of his temples was reclining on a mass of cushions, taking sips off a water pipe full of very pungent marijuana as he instructed a half-dozen serious-looking young men who rested on their knees with blades and guns arrayed ritually before them. Burris paused for an instant to look into the room, and a flicker of a recognizable emotion crossed his face, gone too quickly for me to get a bead on it.

  We passed another room with very expensive antique furniture; a circle of ladies practiced needlepoint and spoke quietly among themselves. Their garb ran from Victorian-era gowns to modern-casual. The matriarch of the circle was an old woman, easily in her nineties with giant moth wings of dusty gray twitching at her back as she jabbed a bony finger at a young
girl who was looking down, admonished and blushing.

  Burris opened a glass door that led to a narrow corridor, also of glass. The corridor, like an airlock, opened into a large conservatory through a door at the other end. The glass walls and ceiling were buttressed with ornate beams of what appeared to be silver. The sunlight flashed off a few of the lower beams. There were plants everywhere, mostly orchids, and the floor was dark, rich soil. I saw a few plants, I was fairly certain, that were not native to Earth. The air was hot and moist to accommodate the flora, and sweet smelling, almost to the point of being cloying.

  Burris led me along well-worn dirt paths through the foliage until we reached a clearing that contained a small rattan table and four high-backed rattan chairs. A man sat in one of the chairs, sipping a cold, sweating glass of white wine. He was an average-enough-looking fellow, with slightly prominent front teeth, big ears, and a mop of curly brown hair. His clothes cost more than most cars back in the States ran you. He regarded me and Burris with a look of practiced disdain, reserved for “the help,” I’m sure. The man standing at the opposite edge of the circle was tall; he wore a white linen suit. I didn’t recognize the tailor from the cut, but it made the other guy’s clothes look like he shopped at Goodwill. He had a powder-blue dress shirt and no tie. He had his back to me and, for a moment, when I first looked at him, he seemed … larger, too large to fit in this space, too large for my mind to fully comprehend. Imagine getting a glimpse of the ocean, the whole ocean, all at once. He seemed to squeeze the enormity of his being back into a human-sized space my monkey brain could wrap itself around. He turned to look at me with dark eyes flecked with silver and a warm smile. His hair was brown, straight, and fine, and fell to his collar. He had a widow’s peak. He had the kind of real tan only the rich can afford to cultivate.

  “Laytham Ballard,” the cosmic force pretending to be the tan man said. “Please have a seat. You stay as well, Burris.”

  “Yes, sir,” Burris said and sat in one of the rattan chairs. I joined him in another. The tan man sat down as well and crossed his legs. As if on cue, Carmichael appeared with a tray of drinks, refreshing the wine of the guy who had been sitting when we arrived. There was a chalice of something for the tanned man. The cup was covered in what I was pretty sure were real jewels. For Burris, it looked like ice water, and for me a double bourbon on the rocks. When I sipped it, I was surprised to discover it was more of the Van Winkle Reserve.

  “How do you say it?” the tan man asked. “The hair … of the dog? Yes?”

  I tipped the glass at him and nodded. “That is exactly how we say it, Mr. Ankou.”

  The tan man smiled and nodded as he sipped from his million-dollar pimp cup. “I am Theodore Ankou, Lord of the Isles of Albion, Baron of the Black-Light Realms, High-Minister to the Court of the Uncountable Stairs, and Patriarch of the Ankou clan. I trust you understand all that?”

  “I do,” I said. “You left out a few, I assume for brevity’s sake. I am honored to be a guest in your realm, Lord Ankou.” That last part I said in the slippery-sounding liquid language of the Fae that Burris and I had spoken on the stairs. My Fae was rusty, and it probably sounded weird as hell with a Southern accent. Ankou smiled and raised his cup in salute.

  “So it’s true; you know our ways and customs.”

  “You knew I did,” I said. “You knew all about me before you ever sent your men to fetch me. The Ankous are well known for their … thoroughness.”

  Theo laughed. “Thank you for the compliment, Mr. Ballard. We found out as much as we could,” he said. “Most of it is urban legend and well-promoted myth. There is very little hard data in this world about you, Mr. Ballard, a remarkable feat in this age of digital scrying. Humans seem only too eager to lay every detail of their lives out for the world to see. But men like you, Mr. Ballard, you understand the power and currency of secrets.”

  Ankou withdrew a Diamond Rose iPhone from his jacket pocket and pulled something up on the phone’s screen. “‘Laytham Ballard,’” he began. “‘Born in Welch, West Virginia, United States. The exact date and time of birth has been obscured through both technology and ritual.’”

  “I had this Coptic horoscope assassin on me for a bit,” I said, “trigger man for the Followers of Montanus. If he knew your date and time of birth, you were dead. ’Sides, birthday parties get kinda lame. After your twelfth, it’s all downhill.”

  Ankou continued reading.

  “As for your childhood, both parents are reported deceased. Names and locations unknown. A persistent rumor is that you raised the dead at the age of ten. You were also supposedly an inmate at the Weston State Mental Hospital between the ages of eleven and twelve. Again, all the records regarding that story can’t be found.” I said nothing. “Ah,” Ankou said with a seam of a smile. “Perhaps that one’s a bit too close to home, yes?”

  I drained half my drink.

  “You were supposedly inducted into the Nightwise, a most prestigious honor for a wizard,” Theo said, not even looking up from his phone. “You are the only member of that august circle to ever be dishonored and cast out.”

  “I wasn’t fired; I quit,” I said. “More pricks in that ‘august circle’ than on a cactus.” Mr. White Wine chuckled at that. He covered his mouth as he did. Classy.

  “It is claimed that you are the man who stole the philosopher’s stone from the mobster and master alchemist, Joey Dross, in 1999, then lost it in a high stakes poker game, or over a woman, accounts vary. A few years ago, you and some accomplices broke into the U.S. Treasury Department in Washington, D.C.,” Ankou said, putting his phone away, “and supposedly made off with rune-etched currency printing plates worth millions, infuriating the All-Seeing Eye in the process. Few men cross the Illuminati, the Secret Masters, and live.

  “In 1996 you were the leader and sole survivor of a group of individuals that rescued dozens of Kolkata street children from a Brahmarakshasa lair. You are said to be the only mortal wizard to have ever harnessed the power of the Tianzi Tablets and not gone incurably mad. You are the subject of numerous documentaries, books, magazine articles, and social media ‘fan pages,’ and, if the myth has any truth to it, a cameo in at least one pornographic movie.”

  “Hairy Boff-her and the Wand of Wonder,” I offered happily. Ankou crossed his legs, angling his body toward me.

  “You have decades of similar anecdotes surrounding you, Mr. Ballard. Depending on whom you ask, you’ve either stolen from, conned, betrayed, saved, or avenged pretty much everyone associated with the occult underworld: ‘the Life,’ I believe you people call it. You’re a legend.”

  “Okay,” I said, taking another sip of my drink, “my turn, and I don’t even need to check an eight-million-dollar cell phone for this one. The Ankous are one of the last of the original Fae clans to still reside on Earth. You were building exquisite architecture, creating literature, music, and art, and, oh, being worshiped like gods, demons, and ancient astronauts when humanity was scratching the fleas off our asses in caves and trying to figure out the whole agriculture gig.”

  Ankou nodded and sipped from his goblet. He seemed very pleased with himself. “These days,” I continued, “your family is pretty diversified. You own media corporations and banks, you pull diamonds, gold, silver, plutonium, all kinds of goodies out of the Earth, and then you take profits from those and a bunch of other commodities all along the way, from inception to market. You are major players in the Court of the Uncountable Stairs and have treaties and trade deals with everyone from the Grays’ massive collective colony to Rangi, the Polynesian sky god—y’know, the one you see on late-night TV, hocking his self-help books? You own factories, retail chains, and companies that make computers, cell phones, military drones, water purifying straws for the third world, and wind turbines. Oh, and heroin. Lots and lots of heroin. A major part of your bottom line, I’d guess. The Fae families, as a group, including the Ankous, are about the third-largest producers and distributors in the world of ‘smack,�
� I believe you people call it.”

  The smug smirk slid from Ankou’s face. “So,” I said, finishing off my drink, “how can I be of service to the Sugar Plum Mafia?”

  “You live up to your reputation, Mr. Ballard; that much is evident,” Ankou said. “I want you to find my daughter, Caern. She’s missing.”

  “You have more money than God’s loan shark,” I said. “You have your own army of house knights”—I nodded toward Burris—“you own security companies; you can buy whole detective agencies and put them to work on finding your girl. You can employ more hackers and data miners than the Chinese government and the Russian Mob combined, not to mention you have enough juice on the street to put a bounty out and have every lowlife, junkie, dirty cop, and street hustler looking for her. Why bring me in?”

  “I have done all of that,” Ankou said, “and more. My daughter’s trail is completely cold. I understand you have acquired a reputation for finding things and people that seem to have vanished without a trace. I think Caern has been swallowed up by some part of the Life so deep and so foul that all my resources can’t reach her.”

  “But you think I can?” I asked.

  “You’re Laytham Ballard,” he said. “Just your name has cachet in some very, very dark places, places my people cannot go.”

  “I have unlocked the ‘Master at Slumming’ achievement,” I said, “true.” Ankou’s companion with the wine looked confused by that. “How cold a trail are we talking about here?”

  “Caern has been missing since 2009,” Ankou said. “Nine years after my wife, her mother, the Lady Osperia, died in a car accident in Spain.”

  “How old was she when she disappeared?” I asked.

  “Thirteen,” Ankou said.