The Stolen Karma Of Nathaniel Valentine (The Books Of Balance Book 1)

by Justin Bloch

  The karma policeman gazed back across the street, his fists clenched, lost in his thoughts. A minute passed and he came back to himself. “Nathaniel, this is Richard History. Richard, this is the Cipher Nathaniel Valentine.”

  The man offered his hand. “So you are the Cipher?” He cast an appraising eye on Nathaniel, then grinned, huge and friendly. He put a hand on Nathaniel’s shoulder and pulled him in closer, where the other spectators couldn’t hear. “Then to you, I am simply History. I added the first name to fit in a little better on this side.”

  “Are you an angel too?” Nathaniel asked.

  The big man laughed like a mountain. Sol half-smiled, explained, “Richard is the Source’s first creation after the angels, the first Inhabitant, although he spends his life here. He is literally history. He is all that ever has been, created to be the story of this world embodied in a single being.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Nathaniel said. What else could you say to the history of the world?

  “The honor is all mine,” he responded. He faced the bar across the street once more. “Have you seen her yet?”

  The karma policeman shook his head. “But Nathaniel needs to. He has doubts about killing the creature.”

  “Do you have any idea how she was killed?”

  Sol frowned. “Are you looking for an invitation, Richard?” he asked. “Do you want to see the body?”

  He grinned, revealing two rows of dazzling white teeth. “This death is historic, my friend. Of course I want to see the body.”

  The karma policeman nodded shortly, turned and marched down the steps, leading the way. The area inside the police tape had cleared as unneeded cops headed out to other calls. The bar was becoming the realm of the crime scene investigator, though from what Sol had said, Nathaniel suspected they’d find nothing. History held the door for them and they walked inside one after the other, squinting at the brilliant lights. Two cops, one in uniform, the other a detective, stood by the open door of the bathroom, both facing away and conversing in low tones.

  “Don’t you think you should interview the bartender again?” Sol whispered, but there was power in his voice, a deep thrum of power that seemed familiar to Nathaniel. The detective elbowed the uniform, pointed to the bartender, and they both made their way over to him.

  “How did you do that?” Nathaniel asked.

  “Being an angel comes with certain abilities, and pressing people is one of them. I tried to do the same to you when we met, when you wouldn’t come with me. You resisted.”

  Nathaniel said nothing. Trying to remember the first few minutes of his time with Sol was like trying to catch moths in a dark room. He watched anxiously as the karma policeman pushed the door to the bathroom open the rest of the way and peered inside.

  The girl was a mess. She had been propped up on the toilet, her head lolling back at an obscene, unnatural angle. Her eyes had rolled back in her head, exposing only a slim crescent of pale blue iris. Dried blood had knotted her hair in clumps, and an ugly gouge slashed across her forehead and obliterated one eyebrow. She was shirtless, her once white bra stained muddy red-brown, her skin unnaturally pale against dark smears of drying blood. Her neck was ripped open, covered in gore.

  There was blood everywhere. So much had splattered on the walls that they looked almost as if they had been painted crimson. Nathaniel’s stomach hitched and he turned away from the spectacle, covering his mouth with the back of his hand. He had never been good with blood.

  “Did you see the graffiti?” Sol asked. The cop’s voice had grown hard, sharp.

  History bent close. “It’s taunting you, same as the previous kills.”

  “It won’t for long,” the karma policeman snapped. “Nathaniel, have you seen what you needed to see?” the cop asked.

  “Um.”

  “Let’s go then,” he said, stalking past, his jacket fluttering out behind him.

  Nathaniel remained still for a moment, steeling himself, then took a deep breath, held it, and turned around. He forced himself to look at the body; he’d need to remember this. His gaze moved up the wall and he saw the graffiti that Sol and History had talked about, written in the girl’s blood and standing out among the other scrawled messages like neon lights on a dark night. In jagged letters, it said ‘The sun shall set and never again rise.’ Nathaniel released his breath and spun on his heel and walked slowly out of the bar. He closed his eyes and stood motionless for a moment on the sidewalk, taking deep breaths of the cool air. The dead girl’s ravaged face was painted on his eyelids.

  Sol and History stood near a thin tree, neither speaking. When Nathaniel joined them, they turned and strolled together up the street. The city was quiet. Nathaniel looked in dimly lit shop windows to distance himself from thoughts of the atrocity in the bar. He zipped his hoodie to his throat and buried his hands deep in his pockets. He didn’t know what he would do when it came time to deal with the Allamagoosalum. He didn’t know anything about fighting, had never even been in a fight at school. The sidewalk rolled by beneath his feet, uneven and cracked.

  “Ah, here we are,” announced History, yanking open the door to a restaurant. The smell of freshly baked pizza flooded the street and Nathaniel realized just how hungry for normal food he was, not just the manna he’d existed on since meeting the karma policeman. He stepped inside behind Sol and History and approached the counter. After the first two had placed their orders, he asked for a slice of pepperoni, a slice of sausage, and a large cherry Pepsi, paid and went to sit with the others in a back booth while they waited.

  “So what can you tell us about her, Richard?” Sol asked, his hands fidgeting restlessly.

  “The little facts that make a life and not much more, I’m afraid. Her name was Carli Barker; she was twenty-four years old; her favorite flower was the peony; she suffered from chronic headaches which, unbeknownst to her, were caused by a small, malignant brain tumor lodged in the frontal lobe of her brain. She thought it was possible to tell the future. The scariest book she had ever read was ‘’Salem’s Lot.’ She had two cats, she collected salt and pepper shakers. She could crochet.” Sol made a face, and History looked at him, held out conciliatory hands. “I am sorry, my friend, but I am her story as much as I am the world’s. She went into the bar because she’d had a hard week, and while there she decided that she didn’t want to go home alone. But she chose the Allamagoosalum, they went into the bathroom, and it killed her without anyone hearing a thing. Police,” he intoned, “are utterly baffled.”

  A tall, burly Italian with a scar running from the corner of his eye to his ear lobe brought the huge slices of pizza and drinks over to the table and deposited them in front of the trio without a word. Nathaniel dug in, the pepperoni greasy and hot, the Pepsi ice cold. After only having water for so long, the soda was an explosion of flavor, and he sucked it down greedily.

  “Oh my god, this is the best piece of pizza I’ve ever had,” Nathaniel said around a mouthful.

  “This restaurant serves the best pizza in history,” History remarked. “You have my word on it.” He raised his soda and looked over behind the counter. “My compliments to the chef,” he shouted. Behind the counter, a portly man with a dark brown aura nodded a heavy head.

  The karma policeman took a drink of his own soda, asked, “How do you think it’s choosing where to attack, Richard?”

  History pondered the question, chewing his food. “I don’t know. There’s not really any pattern so far as I can see. It may just be striking at random, which would make it that much harder to catch. You would almost have to find it by accident.”

  “There are some people I can talk to who might be able to help,” the karma police said.

  “Who, Son?” History snorted. “You would have more luck trying to get a straight answer from Buddha.”

  Sol grimaced. “He’s not in your charge, Richard, and you don’t know how to handle him. Besides, Buddha is purposefully vague. It’s his fault we have this whole complicat
ed karmic system in the first place.” To Nathaniel, he added, “Buddha has a very odd sense of humor. The more complex and incomprehensible something is, the funnier he finds it.”

  “Who’s Son?” asked Nathaniel.

  “Do you remember when we first met and I told you that sometimes Inhabitants can go mad? Most of the time it happens when they’ve spent too much of their lives on this world, where time moves faster. Members of the karma police are given watch over them. Every officer has at least one. Son is mine.”

  Nathaniel nodded, a bit surprised. He wasn’t used to getting such a succinct answer from the cop. He leaned against the wall, full and sleepy. His thoughts turned to his bed and the warm familiarity of his apartment. He missed Robber, curled up between his feet, purring rhythmically. He sighed, began watching the tall man who had served them their food. When he walked in front of the ovens, his aura shifted from bright yellow to pale pink, the color of carnations. Nathaniel wondered what had just changed it.

  “Would you like to hear a story, Cipher?” asked History, out of nowhere.

  Nathaniel blinked at the use of the title. His title, he supposed. “A story?”

  “Richard is a rather talented storyteller,” remarked Sol, sprinkling parmesan cheese on top of his remaining slice. “One of the finest.”

  “I am only what I was created to be,” History said modestly. “So, would you like to hear one?”

  “Sure,” he responded. “I love stories.”

  “All Residents do. It is precisely the reason I was created,” said History, nodding. “Did you know,” he began, “that there was once a man who could change the flow of karma?”

  Nathaniel shook his head.

  “Well, good then. I’d hate to tell you a story you’d already heard, though I do tell it better than most.” He put his arm on the back of the booth and relaxed, shutting his eyes as he gathered his thoughts. Sol looked suddenly irritated, but History either hadn’t noticed or was ignoring him, and the karma policeman stayed silent. “Now, the most important part of any story is the beginning, and on the subject of beginnings, I am something of an expert. This particular story begins in the way that almost all the best stories do, which is this way:

  “Once upon a time, many, many years ago, a child was born in Lyon, France, and the child’s name was Jacques Rogers. He was perfectly normal in every single way except that when he smiled his cheeks only dimpled on one side and the iris of his right eye was just a shade darker than the iris of his left. He wrote with his left hand, as the majority of left-handed people tend to do, and he had a tree house that he pretended was a castle in the sky. Jacques’s parents were named Michel and Marianne, and since he was their only child, they lavished their love on him and gave him all they could. They didn’t quite spoil him because he was always taught that what he was given could be taken away, but it was a near thing.

  “Jacques grew like every boy child, dealing with the things every child must: bullies and grades, puberty and girls. As I said, he was perfectly normal except for those two little abnormalities, which were not really such of a much. His father died of a heart attack a month after Jacques turned twenty, but his mother continued on strong and in the bitter, unfair end, outlived even her cherished son. So Jacques became a man like any other, going out into the world to create a life for himself.

  “But when his thirty-fifth birthday arrived, everything changed. It happened slowly, though, and for a long time what had happened to Jacques Rogers went unnoticed by those of the world above this one who watch for such things. Jacques began to see auras surrounding people and found that he could manipulate their color just by thinking about it. He didn’t know how he did it, just as he didn’t know how his heart went on beating or how his brain stored memories. He just did it. At first he assumed what any perfectly normal person would, which was that he’d lost his mind somewhere along the way. Medical science at that time still mostly consisted of bloodletting, and doctors could do nothing for Jacques condition. He was in perfect health otherwise, and did not trust them, anyway. The few friends he did confide in told him that the auras were all in his head, which was what he saw as the problem.

  “But he learned, just like any perfectly normal person would. Learned what the auras meant. Learned what happened when he made their colors change.

  “The things he did were small at first, a prominent apprenticeship for himself, a broken carriage wheel for a neighbor he wasn’t fond of, small things, trivial things. The karma police took only cursory interest in these sudden interruptions to karmic flow, chalking it up to the work of the Shine, a bunch of mischievous Inhabitants who delight in annoyance.

  “But Jacques’s power grew as he used it more, like a muscle that becomes stronger with exercise. Karma, however, was never meant to be left in the hands of a single person, and man’s fragile psyche was not designed to bear such a burden of power. Jacques was corrupted, driven to the madness he had originally feared. He lost control of himself and his ability. Everyone who came into contact with him was affected, their karma manipulated, their life altered. It was as if he was a meteor crashing down on an unsuspecting world. And the knights of the choirs finally took notice. Karma had fallen drastically out of balance and it could not be allowed to continue. No one knew how Jacques was able to do the things he did, but it violated the entire basis of karma and free will, and the Source would not stand for it.

  “The karma police began to track him, but with little success. Jacques had become increasingly paranoid. He was convinced that someone was after him, some shadowy force of evil that was following him using his own aura, which happened to be exactly what the karma police were doing. Jacques began to change his karma frequently, making it next to impossible to find him. When the karma police did manage to close in on him, he would escape through a series of wildly improbable circumstances, manipulating his own karma and the karma of those around him.

  “In the end, it was a mere coincidence that he was caught. He was standing outside of a patisserie when a karma policeman chasing a vissika through the streets crashed into him. Jacques went down. The vissika being what she was, a group of rather amorous Residents were also pursuing her, and as Jacques struggled to regain his feet, he was knocked to the pavement again by the mob of would-be suitors.

  “‘Watch where you’re going!’ he screamed. Waves of karmic interference rippled through the crowd. He turned to see who had knocked him down, but when he saw the karma policeman, his mouth dropped open like his jaw had just realized his teeth weighed a hundred pounds each. ‘You don’t have an aura,’ he hissed, and the karma policeman recognized exactly who it was he’d come face to face with.”

  History paused here, taking a slow, luxurious sip of his soda, the liquid darkening the straw as it surged up to his mouth. Sol seemed to barely be paying attention, looking away toward the massive ovens. Nathaniel waited, rapt, for the bearded man to continue.

  “Out came the straight razor, and in one quick slash it was all over: Jacques Rogers was no more of this world. His body slumped to the ground like a sack of raw chicken breasts. There was suddenly a crowd surrounding him, trying to see what happened, if there was any blood. But there was only a thin red line curving around his neck. There is never any blood when a member of the karma police kills, for it is a dread and fearful thing for an angel to be touched by the fluid which floods the human veins.

  “The police of this world searched for Jacques’s killer, newspapers implored the public to beware of an armed and dangerous psychopath on the loose. But the investigation never turned up anything, because none of the witnesses could properly remember what the killer had looked like, nor whether there had even been a killer in the first place, although most agreed that there probably had been one, seeing as how someone was dead.

  “On the world beside this one, the karma police set out to find how such a human as Jacques Rogers could be born, and the Divinors were questioned at great length. In the end, it remained as unsolved
as the investigation did in this world, and still remains a mystery to this day. Jacques, the first and only man who had ever been able to manipulate karma purely by force of will, went to Limbo and spent his allotted time there, and the rest is a story for another day. The End.”

  Nathaniel sat up in his seat, a quizzical look on his face. “What do you mean, ‘the rest?’ How can there be a rest? He died.”

  History waved one hand in the air, dismissing the protest.

  “Well, that’s not much of an ending then, if there’s more to the story.”

  He smiled sadly. “There is always more to the story. This whole existence is one great story made up of billions of smaller stories. Residents are always so concerned with endings, but if we are very lucky and the story stretches out long enough, then every story ends the same way and begins a hundred others.” He plucked his panama hat off the bench and perched it on his head, hiding dark, wet eyes. He left the restaurant without saying anything.

  Nathaniel watched him solemnly. When Sol rose to his feet, he did the same, dumped the plates and empty cups in the trash and followed him outside into the cool night air. The shout of city life had dimmed to a murmur as Philadelphia slept. Somewhere a few blocks to his left Nathaniel could hear someone playing a guitar. It was some song he recognized, but slowed down so much he couldn’t place it. A traffic light blinked through the motions despite the fact that no cars sat at the intersection. Its glow reflected on the flower shop window across from it, ruby, amber, emerald, ruby, amber, emerald. Late at night was swiftly becoming early in the morning, and Nathaniel yawned, stretching his arms out above him.

  “We only have a little more to do,” Sol said, noticing, “then you can rest. I’m sure Richard would be happy to arrange a room for us.” History nodded his assent. The karma policeman glanced at the street signs of the intersection then began to walk in the direction of City Hall. History fell into step beside him and they began talking in low tones. Nathaniel followed behind, hands stuffed deep into his pockets, lost in his own thoughts. He caught snatches of conversation from up ahead, but most of it concerned things he didn’t understand or know about, with names scattered throughout the dialogue like croutons in a salad. For a moment he tuned in as they exchanged news and caught up with each other, but he was so immediately confused that he went back to keeping himself company. There was too much of the world beside his own that he didn’t comprehend and what Sol and History said made little sense to him.