“Well, it’s better than nothing,” I said.
“Before they did … what they did, James asked me a lot of questions about my work at the Fed. I’m pretty sure it had something to do with what Slorzack was after.”
“What did Berman want to know about?” I asked.
“Printing and engraving,” Trace said. “The history of it, what happened to the old engraving die plates for money once they were retired.”
“What do they do with them?” I asked.
“They are in vaults at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington,” Trace said. “Those master dies are used to make the printing plates that are used on the presses to produce money.”
“Why the hell did he want to know about that?” I asked.
Trace shrugged. “He was interested in that shit from the time we met. He and Slorzack actually traveled to D.C. to do the tourist thing. Part of my job at the Fed is to coordinate the shipments of damaged and worn-out currency once it’s taken out of circulation. I know a lot of people at Engraving and Printing. I got them full access.”
There was a long pause, the train shuddered and rocked.
“How long after you met Berman did you two bump into Dusan Slorzack?”
“A few months,” Trace said. He looked up, turned, and stared at me. I shut up. My inner paranoid bastard had already run through the scenario in my mind. I hoped Trace’s hadn’t. The man he loved was dead, and I had just pissed all over his memory. Something crossed his face like a cloud drifting across the sun. Then it was gone.
“What happens to me now that you got my whole story?” Trace said. “You going to kill me, cut me loose?”
“No,” I said. “You held up your end, for all your screaming and freaking out. I’ll get you out of the city and find a safe place for you to hole up. We’re square.”
Trace nodded. “Thank you. Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” I said. “We need to banish the Inugami before they find us again. I can already sense them getting closer. We got a few more stops till Times Square.”
“Why Times Square?” Trace asked. I didn’t answer. I needed supplies.
I stood. Between the swaying of the train and the numbness and ache in my legs, it was hard not to just fall back into my seat. I had lost most of my goodies with the trench coat, and if I was going to locate what I needed to be able to end this, I would have to rely on the kindness of strangers. I walked up to a guy in a very nice Hugo Boss two-button, slim-fit suit. He was sitting, earbuds from his iPod jammed in his head, reading Forbes. He had a raincoat and a leather satchel next to him. He looked to be in his early thirties and seemed comfortable with a look of soft disdain on his narrow face. I stood in front of him, holding the overhead rail to steady myself.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I was wondering if I might have a pen and a piece of paper, please. It’s kind of urgent.”
He pretended to ignore me and kept listening to his music and reading his magazine. I pushed the magazine down with one hand while keeping the other clamped on the rail. He looked up, glaring at me. I saw the fear peeking out too, but he was trying to hide it well.
“Excuse me,” I repeated.
He popped an earbud out. “What?” he growled. Somehow I managed to not swoon in fear.
“A piece of paper and a pen. May I have those, please? It’s an emergency,” I said.
He scowled and opened his satchel and rooted around.
“It’s always an emergency,” he grumbled. “People like you make me sick.”
“People like me?” I said.
“I work my ass off to have the things I do,” he said. “People like you think everything just falls outta the freakin’ sky.”
“I see,” I said, nodding. “And what do you do, exactly?”
“I work on Wall Street,” he said. “In banking, if it’s any of your business.”
“Mmhhmm,” I said, taking the piece of notebook paper he ripped out of small Moleskine notebook. He handed it to me like I had a disease. “Teller?”
He stopped his search for a pen and looked up at me, his eyes narrowed, burned.
“Maybe collections?” I said. “You enjoy taking old women’s last dollars to cover the fees you shit on them? You like tricking and lying to people about how much you care about them, their family, and their future, and then rape them and take that future away.
“You bust your ass for your company, and you are caged up in a little box, like a dog waiting to be euthanized. You make them millions every day and you can’t afford a car, a parking spot downtown? You live in a shit hole apartment and feel the ulcer burn into your guts every night because you can’t pay your own damn credit card bills to keep up the kind of life you get told you should be living, but you hound people every day for not paying their bills, for doing the same damn thing. Went into debt for that suit, didn’t you? Are you a good dog? That how you make your living, Bubba?”
“Fuck you, you white trash bum,” he spat. I smiled.
“Pen,” I said. “Please. You can get another free one at the bank.”
He tossed it at me and I caught it. He flipped me off as I walked back to my seat and then put his earbud back in.
The truth is I am a bum and a criminal and a villain, and very proud to be white trash, but I’d rather eat out of a Dumpster and sleep on a subway vent than be a bottom-feeder like Mr. iPod. There is no intrinsic nobility in poverty, I assure you, but there damn sure isn’t any in wealth, either.
“You enjoy that?” Trace asked quietly.
“Yeah, I did,” I said, smoothing out the paper on the dry parts of the bench. “You?”
“My pops worked for a company for thirty years,” Trace said, looking down at the floor. “Long days, short nights. No vacations. More work, more responsibility, not much more pay. Too tired to read to me, to play with me. Always saying he had to be perfect, had to not give them any reason to call him a shiftless nigger, to whisper behind his back. Being a paragon is damn hard on a man, can kill you.
“I missed him so much, and then I kind of hated him for it, like it meant more to him than me. He was just trying to do right by me and Mom, trying to win a rigged game. He dropped dead at work, and the people he had given his life for didn’t give a damn. They replaced him, gave the job to someone right out of college for half the pay, like changing a spark plug. I think we got a fruit basket after the funeral.
“When Mom got sick, they did everything they could to drop her from the insurance Pops had paid into for most of his adult life. The creditors hounded her, made her sicker. She died a nervous wreck about the bills she still owed to millionaires. James was the only thing I had in my world beside my job at the Fed. I realized when they told me he was gone that I had nothing anymore. Just the job, just like Pops.”
“Not too late to change that,” I said. “It’s your life, free and clear.”
Trace smiled and looked at the pissed-off Mr. iPod. “Yeah,” he said. “I did enjoy that.”
The trick to dowsing is to free your mind to the compass of instinct. I knew the place I wanted to go, and I knew we were close. I didn’t have a witching rod—those Y-shaped sticks dowsers traditionally use, or a pendulum, or even a ring on a chain, so I had to make do with some automatic writing tricks I picked up. I put my waking mind away. The rocking rhythm of the train actually helped with that. It took a few moments. The last conscious thought was of the wave of hunger and confusion from the dog gods that hit me like a power washer full of acid. My hand jerked and shifted across the paper. Then, trance over. I blinked and looked at the paper. We had our map.
I tossed the pen back to Mr. iPod as Trace and I departed the train at the 42nd Street stop.
“Much obliged,” I said, and kept on walking.
* * *
After the train roared and squealed away into the tunnel, I examined the map I had drawn and pointed after the train into the darkness.
“There,” I said. I could feel a pressure in the b
ack of my skull, a flare of my Ajna chakra. The pack was coming, drawing closer.
“Into the tunnel?” Trace said. “If we don’t get electrocuted, or break our necks jumping down, the MTA cops will—”
“Have you noticed an overabundance of cops interested in us at all today?” I asked as I walked to the edge of the tunnel. “Do you have a key on you?”
“What, your cult cops?” Trace said, digging into the pockets of his still-damp raincoat. “They ordered to leave us alone?” He handed me a small key ring. I slid one key off the loop and handed it back to him.
“Maybe,” I said, “but we start mucking around down here, and they may get interested real quick. Be ready for that. You’re not going to ask me what the key is for?”
“Figure some messed-up shit you’re going to show me presently,” Trace said. “Why bother?”
“Good,” I said. “You’re learning.”
The gravel that surrounded the tracks at the edge of the tunnel crunched as we dropped down. I held the map and started walking. There was a narrow ledge with a rail on either side of the tunnel, and we shimmied up. It was cold and windy in the darkness. A row of feeble yellow lights in oval metal cages were strung along the wall. It was enough for me to read the directions and images my back brain had scrawled onto the paper.
“Maybe we can get directions, if we get lost,” I said as the warm circle of light from the tunnel entrance grew smaller and became a moon, then an eye that finally closed, and it was as if we were in deep space.
“That’s not funny,” Trace said, looking around nervously.
“Not intended to be,” I said. “There’re about six thousand mole people living down here, have whole societies and cultures.”
“You’re talking about some kind of mole creatures living down here, right?” Trace said. I stopped and looked at him.
“No, I’m talking about human beings,” I said. “They just call them mole people.”
“Under New York? That’s just weird, man,” Trace said. “Urban myth.”
“As real as it gets,” I said. “No telling how many died down here during Hurricane Sandy. No myth. Just people trying to live, to stay alive, the way people do.”
I went back to walking and following the magic map.
It took some time. We reached cross corridors and junctions, narrow metal stairs leading down. The only light was from the screen of Trace’s cell phone. I insisted he disable the GPS in it. No mole people showed up, but we did encounter plenty of rats. Eventually we found the door, just as the map said we would. It was a heavy steel security door with an outdated Con Ed logo stamped into it. It was secured by a heavy chain and padlock. I dug Trace’s key out of my jeans pocket, knelt before the padlock, and held the key in front of my eye.
“Obfirmo aperire,” I said. The lock resisted my spell and remained closed. I narrowed my eyes and rubbed my chin. There was a counterspell on the lock, designed to keep someone from doing what I had just tried to do.
“Why Latin?” Trace asked.
“Huh?” I said, looking up.
“You’re a country boy,” he said. “Why do you speak your spells like you’re late to Snape’s potion class?”
“It’s a focus, a trigger,” I said as I studied the complex knot of frozen will around the lock through the lenses of my Ajna and Sahasrara chakras overlapping. “Different workers do it in different ways. A lot of magic is based in belief and perception married to will. I’ve known some spell-lobbers who pray to a god or sing hymns, some chant mantras, or fall into glossolalia, others evoke Satan or Cthulhu. It’s all a matter of what makes the power work best for you, through you—it’s what you believe in. The guy who taught me a lot of the basics used Latin. He was kind of old school like that.”
“So what do you believe in?” Trace asked.
I held the key up again and spoke to the padlock. “Cincinno, vos nominantur a me, et ego EXTEXO incantatum est illud tenet vobis. i provocare voluntatem urget vobis. Ego sum superior! Yield! Et cum clavis nodum nostra. Aperi!”
The padlock snapped open, and the lock and chain clattered to the damp stone floor.
“Me,” I said with a tight smile and fire in my eyes. “I believe in how amazingly badass I am.”
Far off in the darkness, past the circle of Trace’s phone light, there was a chorus of howls.
“Shit,” Trace said, “they found us.”
“Come on,” I said, pushing open the door. “Let’s finish this.”
The chamber beyond was a network of aluminum tubing, meters, and junction boxes housing cables—the arteries and veins of the city, the thrumming heart of Times Square.
“The ritual requires that once you decapitate the dogs, you bury their heads under a busy street, so the spirits can know no peace,” I said.
“That’s why Times Square.” Trace nodded, then he gagged. “Oh, God, I’m going to be sick!”
The stench hit both of us. Rotting meat, putrid blood. The air was filled with flies. The light of Trace’s screen panned down to reveal four decaying dog heads, the shiny white bone of the skulls peeking out between bloody fur and the squirming attentions of maggots. The soft jelly of the eyes still held the dumb, confused look of the dead. The heads were arranged in a circle, each laid on top of Japanese kanji, painted in blood. Small scraps of paper containing spells and phrases of power were placed between the heads, completing the circle of the spell. The papers were also in each dog’s mouth. A traditional Shugenja ritual arrangement.
The howls again, growing closer. I closed my eyes and tried to remember my Japanese. It was always better to try to unweave a spell using its own traditions, if you knew what, or who, you were dealing with. The lock spell had been Western tradition, I’d bet good money on it. So a different caster had secured the room, or … I dismissed the thought. I didn’t have time for it right now, but it troubled me. I said. The spell papers all flared to life and began to blacken to ash.
There was a chorus, a quartet of mournful wailing in the darkness just outside the door, and then it was gone, only an echo that was smothered by the weight of the earth. Then silence.
“Thank God,” Trace said.
I looked up from the flickering flames of the broken spell and smiled at Trace. “Thank me. I told you I’d get you out of this,” I said. “Now let’s—”
Trace’s head exploded. Hot blood and brains splashed over my face and chest. As his body crumpled, I heard the thud of the silenced gun that had ended him. At the doorway stood a group of NYPD SWAT. I could see the bouncing flashlights of more beyond the door. They were in full combat gear: night-vision goggles, gas masks, helmets, and body armor—giant insects with Kevlar carapaces. One of them held up a small black box.
Two sharp stings in my chest and I was suddenly on fire, shaking, convulsing, as every nerve, every muscle in my body was sheathed in tingling, throbbing agony. My legs betrayed me and I fell, twitching.
“He’s down!” a voice said. All I could see were black combat boots and the bloody body of the man I swore to save illuminated in the flames of a burning dog skull. Voices, shouting.
Hands grabbed me, pulled me. A black bag was slipped harshly over my head and another charge of current applied to me. I fell into oblivion; my last thoughts were a realization that the darkness was just. It came to saints and villains equally, and a sad wish passed through me that the darkness would never end.
TEN
Granny passed away in 1974. She came back to visit in the summer of ’75. Probably getting a little ahead of myself.
I was ten years old in 1975 and unable to articulate, even to myself, the alien feelings I experienced near Kara May Odam—my first awkward brush with my slumbering sexuality and my first, and last, babysitter.
Kara May. Sweet Jesus in a Mustang. Jailbait-ponytail-wet-dream-prom-princess. All hay-colored hair, halter-top tits, and bare, tanned legs that were slender and firm and kept on going like a John Bonham drum solo, all the way up to her Daisy Duke perfec
t ass. She smelled of Bubble Yum bubble gum, strawberry lip gloss, pot smoke, and stale sex. Seventeen years old with vacant brown eyes that shifted between dull incomprehension and a fluid, sensual cunning. No disrespect intended there, Kara May. Most of the people I grew up around were pretty damn stupid, but many of them possessed acute and often uncanny instincts, and those instincts served them in good stead more often than any fact, figure, or tome. There is book learning, and there is knowing things. Thinking back on the whole incident with Kara May and Granny, I was the stupid one. Again, getting ahead of myself.
To my eyes, Kara May was the perfect woman, a goddess. If I had been a bit older, she would have been the stuff of epic jerk-off fantasy. I never did, though, because of how things turned out on Halloween.
I was a little shit at ten. Made it hard on my momma. Pa had been dead five years, Granny, not even a year. Ma lost everyone she counted on to keep her safe and sane, and was left with my vicious, useless, whiny little ass to take care of. Some of the men Pa used to work with who hadn’t died in the mine with him would come around. They’d knock on the door of the trailer, holding a six-pack of PBR. They’d smile and sit for a spell. Ma was thankful for the attention and the help they would offer—fix the old Nova, keep it going for another inspection, mow the lawn, and the occasional friendly date to avoid the madness that comes with death and loneliness.
So when Cecil Wheeler came up with two tickets to go see Conway Twitty Saturday night at Lakeside Amusement Park over in Roanoke, across the Virginia border, Momma jumped at the prospect. Her friend Gloria from work over at the Destiny Lounge had a niece, and she babysat. That was Kara May, and she had kept me a few times over the years when I was sick and Mom couldn’t get out of a shift at work, or simply couldn’t afford to miss work. It had been a few years since I had seen Kara May—Granny had kept me, but now Granny was gone.
After what happened with the squirrel, Granny had tried to work with me as much as she could, and as much as I’d let her. I actually got tired of Granny’s little tests and games and practice. It had started out as something secret and fun and had suddenly turned in to a chore. There were so many rules, so many things I was never supposed to do or even think. Eventually, by the time I was seven or eight, I told Granny I didn’t want to be a Wisdom.
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