by Brian Hodge
He was standing on the edge of a vacant lot bordered by dead, antique skyscrapers — empty tenements with blackened windows — and the air was singing with tension. To his left a broken sulfa-lamp threw a pool of jaundiced light across the rubble. To his right, the bald, petrified ground stretched into blackness. His feeble heart started thumping harder. Had he taken a wrong turn? Something was very wrong. He squeezed the AmuLEDs, and he glanced down at his feet.
Panic stabbed his sunken chest.
The barriers were gone. Gone! He had made a fatal mistake. He had inadvertently wandered into an uncharmed zone, and now he was exposed, naked, a sitting duck. Spinning around in a quick three-sixty, nearly losing his balance, he fumbled with his visor, slipping it back on, lifting his charmsuit collar. He could hear a faint buzzing noise, and he saw the speckled pin-points of fireflies out of the corner of his eyes, closing in on him from all directions.
He turned and ran.
Unfortunately he wasn’t as strong as he used to be — at sixty-three, with seventy-five percent artificial joints, he wasn’t exactly a world class sprinter — and now his side was stitching unmercifully with sharp pain as he careened across the hard-pack. The fear was dragging at him, and his skinny legs were already trashed from the six kilo trek across the city. And besides, it was futile. Where was he going to hide? Charging toward the nearest edifice, gasping for breath, clutching the stringer of charms, he could hear the buzz of black magic tightening around him.
He reached the threshold of a gaping doorway when the first shockwave reached him.
It was like being struck in the back of the neck by a snow ball, the impact cracking his teeth as he tripped on the threshold. He went down hard, biting his tongue and tasting grime and copper. His muscles seized up suddenly. His visor was cracked down the center by the fall, the infra sparking and fizzing as he tried to twist around and face the onslaught. The fireflies were above him, hovering in the doorway, coalescing into a swirling constellation.
The Disciple had no opportunity to flip on his neuralizer, or reach for his charms, or even pray. He only had time to let out a primal cry as the constellation above him metamorphosed into a horse— an enormous, graceful, excruciatingly beautiful, translucent horse— rearing up in the air above him. And on this starry horse’s back rode a faceless medieval knight with his broadsword poised for attack. And the Disciple’s primal scream proved to be his final mistake because it necessitated the yawning of his mouth.
The glittering broadsword plunged down into his throat and transformed one last time.
The scientists have a name for it: Spontaneous hypertrophic neurological combustion (SHNC). On the street they call it “shanking” or “flaming out” or “popping twenty,” and very few have witnessed it. The Disciple was oblivious to the final stages of the phenomenon due to the abrupt cataclysm of pain erupting inside him. Most of his bodily functions had already failed, and most of his consciousness had already winked out by the time the final phase began. He never felt the rending, or the flames blossoming from every orifice, or the internal heat bursting the seams of his abdomen like a pressure cooker exploding.
He collapsed then.
And his corpse raged with magenta flames for nearly an hour before subsiding into a smoldering pyre.
And no one tracked it. No one reported it. No one even saw it. Around these parts, people keep to themselves. They have better things to do than monitor uncharmed zones for incidents such as these.
In fact, no one even made note of the charred body until dawn the next morning, when a small dispatch of city cops appeared in the grey haze along the horizon.
They came in three vehicles: A cruiser, a meat wagon, and an unmarked sedan — all masked with opaque lead shields — hugging the charm lines. They drew to a stop at the corner of a Hundred and Eleventh and Avenue X, and they sat there for a moment, taking samples of the air. When they were satisfied the ion count was back to normal, they emerged from their vehicles and trudged across the uncharmed lot.
There were five cops, four of them dressed in dark grey, city-issue charmsuits, their methodical boot-steps crunching in the cinders. Two of them were young men with civil tattoos on their shaved heads, carrying ambu-gear and a folding gurney. Another two were older, more seasoned men wearing police flak vests over their charmsuits. The fifth was a middle aged woman with an antique fedora on her head and a pair of tiny round opaque-visors over her eyes. She wore a slightly different style of charmsuit — an alloy duster — and the outline of her elemental bulged off her hip.
“Looks like a shanker,” Cop Number One commented as the group approached the corpse.
“Let’s go easy on the physical,” Ambu-Driver Number One pleaded, unfolding the gurney.
“Yeah,” Ambu-Driver Number Two agreed. “Last time you cowboys got your hands on one of these, you turned it to dust before we got a chance to sweep.”
“Shut up,” the woman in the hat said softly, kneeling down by the Disciple’s body, her long-coat blooming around her. Her hands were rock-steady.
“Is this gonna take long?” Cop Number Two asked, glancing over his shoulder at the dull shimmer of the charm-lines a quarter klick away.
“Please,” the woman muttered, making careful observations of the position of the body.
Was it ritual? Was it BlackStuff? Was it something the woman hadn’t seen before? She pulled a cruci-probe from her vest-pocket— an antique crucifix, blessed and retrofitted with a jeweler’s pick— and carefully prodded the scorched flesh that had pulled back from the Disciple’s yellow, uneven teeth. Who was this guy? Was he civvie? Was he cult?
The woman let out a sigh and glanced around the threshold for evidence. Behind her opaques, in the crook of shadows slanting off her fedora, she was striking. Piercing green eyes, and a lioness’s mane of iron grey framing an angular face that had only gotten more sculpted and creased with age. It was a face with years of loneliness etched upon it.
Her real name was Eva Strange, although most people knew her by her obligatory city registration number: 0004511477. ‘Sevens’ to her friends. Of which she had very few. Eva Strange was a special detective for a newly formed adjunct to the police force — the White Patrol — and she had little time for friendship. Especially with her expanded duties.
“Goddamn clear-pits smell like monkey cages,” Cop Number Two was mumbling.
“Would you gentlemen mind giving me a little room here?” Eva murmured, glancing across the corpse. Something had caught her eye in the ashes under the body. It was glimmering dully, a tiny coin or medallion lodged in the debris. She carefully extended the cruciprobe and picked at it, rooting it out of the ash. It fell apart as she lifted it.
The stringer of AmuLEDs was partially melted, fused together, but a few of the medallions were still intact. Eva dangled the charms in the dim sulfa-light and took a closer look at one of the medals. Around its tarnished edge were the words PROTECT US, still barely visible. On its back face plate were the letters VIN D P UL.
Eva put the stringer in a numbered, blessedpouch and slipped it into her vest.
Something else caught her attention. It lay in the ash a few feet beyond the Disciple’s left hand, a small piece of bone or milk glass. She prodded it with the cruci-probe. It was a figurine, a tiny miniature effigy often used in black ceremonies, most likely carved out of gallows bark and baby tallow, still oily with blood. Probably menstrual blood. It looked female. In the old days the uninitiated might have called it a voodoo doll. Eva carefully picked it up with the probe, letting it dangle from a hank of its hair.
A faint breath of chills breathed up Eva’s back. Carved out of hangman’s wood, the doll was a middle-aged woman, her features meticulously rendered with jewelers tools and scientific instruments. The doll had human hair, just the perfect shade of desert sunrise red, and a tiny alloy duster fashioned out of quilted wasp wings: A spectacular rendering of Eva Strange herself.
“Of course,” she uttered under her breath.
“What was that?” asked Cop Number Two.
“Nothing,” Eva said, shoving the fear back down her throat, standing up. She put the doll in her blessed pouch and slipped it back in her coat, then she nodded at the corpse. “Go ahead and process him, and send me all the digitals.”
Then she walked away, the cold, carved lump of hangman’s gallows like a tumor in her pocket.
2.
The Color Behind the Dark
To kill or harm an enemy: Bury bottles or vials of chloral hydrate, phosphorous, and snakeroot along a path where the victim will walk. Say a black mass for the dead in his or her name in a churchyard facing magnetic north the night before he or she walks the intended path.
The Spiritual Registry Division is in the basement of the east wing of the Central Municipal Building, at the end of a narrow corridor where the liquid-tungsten lights blanch the color out of everything.
By 10:00 AM Eva Strange was striding down this hallway with a purpose, her jaw set, the overheads flickering arrhythmically in her eyes. She was a bird-dog on the scent now, a whole set of contradictions orbiting the discovery of the body in the uncharmed zone earlier that day.
The digitals had confirmed the stiff was Cult, probably terrorist, most likely Saman. From his internals, Eva determined his rank and number in the BlackWorld, and a lot of things didn’t add up. He was a high-ranking disciple, and he was slotted for promotion to High Council. So what made him bail? Who were his enemies? And what was his connection to Eva? Had he fashioned the doll? Or had someone else? And why Eva? What was the connection?
At the end of the corridor was an opaque-glass portal engraved with the SRD insignia.
Eva touched the biometric pad, and the door whispered open.
“He’s not ready for you yet,” the AA muttered across the reception area. A wan-faced Asian woman with bronze corn rows and artificial retinas, she sat behind a com-console with her face buried in a palm book, and she didn’t even look up as she spoke. “Said he’d call you when he found something.”
“Tell him his time’s up,” Eva said as she strode across the lobby.
“Seventy-seven — wait!” the receptionist called out, springing to her feet.
Eva was already pressing her thumbprint on the inner door pad.
The door whisked open, revealing a windowless, cluttered private office crowded with digital storage racks and various counter-measures. Walls stuccoe’d with stalks of St. John the Conqueror Root, ceiling joists festooned with talismanic herbs, a floor shimmering with a parquet of belladonna and fetal tissue. Ionization monitors winking at each corner, and a gun rack filled with elementals near the door.
SRD guys take no chances; they’re common targets of BlackStuff.
“Sevens! — I was just going to zap you,” the division chief said from behind a massive desk laden with piles of flat digitals. He was a shriveled little troll with one bad eye dressed in Hemlock cloth and government-issue specs. His mannerisms were that of an ancient lizard.
“Sure you were,” Eva said.
“Always with the suspicious tone,” the chief lamented, giving her an unhappy glance.
“What’s the deal on this char-dog, One-Four?” Eva said, using the chief’s reg-number, following the absurd cloak-and-dagger protocol. Surnames, first names — even nicknames — were verboten. Too risky. Too much exposure. Too easy for some disgruntled BlackStuffer to a pull a name out of the city guide and lock onto it. Nowadays, names were more closely guarded than credit numbers.
“Always right to the point,” the chief said gloomily. Looking down at his plate of read-outs, he cocked his head at the diodes, aiming his good eye and reading. “Let’s see. Yeah. Your John Doe’s a known Disciple with the Shambler sect.”
A splinter of panic shot through Eva’s breast. “I thought they were gone with the wind.”
“Evidently not.”
“What else?”
The one-eyed man shrugged. “The flame-out was SHNC, aggressive, no source. No next-of-kin.”
“Any priors?”
The chief glanced at his read-outs. “Just the usual stuff. A couple of ritual felonies, some Black misdemeanors, a few unlawful ceremonies.”
“That’s it?”
The chief trained his good eye on her. “This guy was strictly a think-tanker, a book worm. These types never do the dirty stuff.”
“So why bother shanking him?”
“What do I know?” the chief said. “I just work here. Besides, isn’t that you’re job? Figuring all that Black-shit out? What’s the problem? Why all the Sturm and Drang?”
Silence. Eva hadn’t told him about the doll, and she had no plans to do so.
The chief regarded her balefully. “Don’t tell me you’re dipping into that family tree for inspiration again, working some big apocalypse theory.”
Eva felt a pang of anger. The cops were always goading her about her heritage, and it was getting more and more difficult for her to ignore it.
Eva Strange came from sturdy New England stock, the generations reaching all the way back to the Salem Witch trials in the seventeenth century. A distant relative of Eva’s, Nettie Harrow, was tried for witchcraft in the Essex County Witch House in 1692. Her great-great-great-great grandmother, Mary Holden-Curry, was tried in Providence for crimes against the church. Her great-great-grandmother, Helen Strange, was a white witch and a suffragette who was lynched in Maryland for aiding a burgeoning civil rights movement. And most of the subsequent generations of women — most of whom kept Helen’s maiden name — were either involved in witchcraft or victimized by repressed men: from Eva’s grandmother, Miersol, down to her biological mother, Sarah. It became a big joke in the department. Who better to helm the new “White Patrol” than Good Witch Eva? But what the cops didn’t realize was that Eva Strange was terrified of her own destiny.
Brewed in the cauldrons of ten generations, engraved into wood-cuts, recorded in yellowed diaries and passed down in oral histories whispered from mother to daughter to granddaughter, Eva’s bloodline was the last defense against the infamous Rip. Originally revealed in the gnostic gospels of the Sumerians — thousands of years before Christ — and reappearing in art and religious artifacts down through the centuries, the Rip was exactly that: A tear in the seam of reality, a crack through which an unimaginable force would ultimately pass and consume this world. Way back in 1692, only minutes before she was burned at the steak, Nettie Harrow warned her fellow villagers about it. Helen Strange wrote in her secret journal’s about it. Some thought it was merely a reference to the antichrist, the Devil — the fabled Prince of Darkness — returning to claim the earth. But Eva knew better. Eva knew the Rip was worse than Satan, worse than anything dreamt or inspired in religious writings. The Rip was the darkness behind the dark, the unraveling of reason, the end of all physical laws. The Rip was the turning inside-out of the universe. And today, in a world over-stimulated by rampant BlackStuff, Eva Strange was afraid that she would be the last of her lineage, the last line of defense against the inevitable breech, the last —
“You okay?” the chief’s voice broke through Eva’s rumination, a splash of cold water on her face.
Eva rubbed her eyes. “I’m fine.”
“You don’t look so hot.” The chief’s jaundiced eye was on her again. “You oughtta take a vacation.”
“What about the church?” Eva asked.
“What church?”
“The AmuLED, the medallion. Belonged to the stiff. It had an insignia on it— Saint Vincent de Paul.”
The chief let out a grunt and looked through his read-outs again. “We chased them out of Spittlefield a year and half ago, shut them down.”
“What were the charges?”
“Dealing onyx, doing magic, recruiting kids. Bunch of Destroyer cultists.”
“Destroyer?” Eva’s stomach clenched. Again, the investigation was getting too close to home. A few years back her ex-boyfriend had ended up an onyx addict, recruited by
a splinter group of the Destroyer cult. It had devastated Eva, and she had sworn off men for the rest of her life. Her boyfriend’s name had been Anger, Kenneth Anger, his last two reg-digits eleven, and he had looked a little like Edgar Allen Poe with a Bo-Ho haircut. Eva remembered the way he made love, like a mad monk having a religious experience.
“What’s the matter?” the chief asked.
Something clicked in Eva’s midbrain, a memory, a fragment of a broken mirror. All at once she realized where she had to go, whom she had to see: An old associate of her boyfriend, an onyx addict and part time snitch named Lydon.
Eva was certain that Lydon would have the four-one-one on the latest Destroyer politics.
“Gotta run,” she said, turning toward the door.
“Wait a second —!”
“Thanks a lot for the information,” she said, palming the door open and slipping out. She could hear the chief’s exasperated sigh as she started down the corridor.
The liquid tungsten made her eyes ache as she hurried toward the stairs.
It took her forever to get through security and get her elemental back, but she was used to being delayed. She was also used to the hostile stares of other cops. To most of the other uniforms — as well as most other detectives — Eva was a creampuff, a spoiled brat, a teacher’s pet with a cushy job. Most regular cops viewed this new “White Patrol” as a joke. A waste of tax payer’s’ credits. Crime was crime, and justice was justice, and Blackstuff was no different than any other vice.
But few cops knew the trials to which Eva had been subjected by the mysterious old men.
3.
The Committee
To control a person’s destiny: Thread a needle with their hair, then run it through the fleshiest part of an afterbirth, then wind the loose end around a magnetized stone of nickel, quartz or silver.
There were six of them. Hairless old geezers with palsied hands and long faces — bureaucrats, law makers, captains of New Industries. They were there – supposedly — just a few years ago, when the scientists discovered the new frontier of super biology, the connection between neurochemical impulses, subatomic chemical reactions, and remote energy activation. They were there when the newspapers screamed in garish, bold, Day-Glo headlines: “Magic Is Real!” They were there, these six old men, studying the phenomena, setting forth new standards and guidelines. They were there when the crime started, the rash of ritual murders, the waves of black magic vandalism. They were there when the government got involved, outlawing spell casting, outlawing fortune telling and psychic entertainment, even outlawing gambling and sporting events— any activity that relied on chance, faith, or prayer. The elderly men were there. They were there when they tore down the Sistine Chapel, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, even St. Peters Basilica. And they were there — these six ancient codgers — when they decided to create a specialized inner-city anti-magic task force otherwise known as the White Patrol.