by Mark Teppo
For a long time, I had lamented the loss of my innocence. Like the children in Blake's poetry, I wanted to be purified and left clean. But that could never happen. Not after what happened in the woods. Even if I stopped using magick, even if I sealed myself off and denied the mystical world, there was still a hole. Things could get out; things could get in.
In the end, I had adapted. It was as simple as that. I embraced the darkness as my path toward the light. It was the only way I knew.
One direction, one life. One purpose.
I needed to bury the past. In time, all things must be returned to the earth, planted deep so they can be forgotten. The natural cycle will transform them into something new. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust: the cycle repeats over and again. I was cut off from myself, having been transformed that night into something different than I had ever expected to be. A part of me was taken, and wasn't it right that I got that piece back?
Kat was the link. She was the cosmological demiurge who had created me. She had ripped open the world, and shown me the darkness that lay behind the stars. I was going to be caught in this unfinished loop until I found her, haunted by what could have been until I closed the cycle and moved on. Take it back. End the exile. Complete your self.
The Chorus, always happy to remind me in the simplest language possible.
We all deserve the chance for something new, don't we? An opportunity to save ourselves. Sometimes we have to bury the past-bury our old selves-in order to be reborn.
Le roi est mort. Vive le roi. Such is the cyclical nature of all things. Such is the way the wheel turns. Kat had killed me, and I had to return the favor.
Two becoming one. I would remake my own world, once I was whole again.
IX
Back-tracking to Kat died as an option when the barn blew up, obliterating any viable trail. The only remaining option was to find Doug again. While dodging Pender and his surrogate eyes.
Doug would have run back to his real body. Without me on his trail, there was no reason not to return to the flesh he knew. If I was right, then Doug wanted access to his group's inner circle, and completing his rite of separation was the sort of act that came with a promotion. He had to make it back in order to show he was ready for advancement.
The magus at the farmhouse-the white-haired man-was one of Doug's masters, one of the elevated adepts of that group. He had possessed the gunman in the barn just as easily as I could put my hand in a sock. He knew the secrets that Doug so desperately sought.
Your attention is unwelcome. He had known who I was-maybe not my name, but he knew of me-and that meant someone had told him. Best guess was Doug. Just as soon as he had been grounded in his meat again. Who else knew? Had Doug told everyone in the group? Had he told Kat?
Would she know it was me? Doug might have plucked some of my identity from when I was binding him. He certainly could offer a physical description. But was it enough to warn her?
I had to find her before she made a decision about that knowledge, before she decided to run.
After getting off the ferry, Nicols made one call while we were waiting in the traffic. By the time we crawled one block along the waterfront-a deluge of vehicles from Pioneer Square was snarling all lanes along the water-he had Doug's essentials.
Traffic thinned out at Pier 70, and Nicols pointed at one of the tall buildings visible on the slope above the bay. "Washburne Tower," he said. "Upscale Belltown condominiums. Doug lives in number 1712. One bedroom condo."
"Drive past" I said. "Let's see who is watching."
"Pender, probably. Or someone who will report to him if we show."
"That won't be a problem."
"No violence."
I smiled at Nicols, a feral grin tainted by the black root of the Chorus. "Of course not."
Nicols merged into traffic flowing up the hill, and turned left onto Second Avenue at the top of the rise. The Washburne Tower was part of the urban modernization of Seattle's Belltown district-towering residential condominiums replacing the squat brownstones from a half-century ago. The building was a mass of dark angles and a thousand glass eyes staring sightlessly into the night. Sporadic squares of light suggested residents were either still awake or slept with their lights on, afraid of being suspended in darkness.
Nicols drove by the building. The ground floor was retail: a coffee shop, a wine bar, a dry cleaner, and a small deli barely big enough for its three coolers of wine and beer. The shops were all closed, lit by neon and recessed security lighting. A quartet of silver-edged doors sat beyond a tiny courtyard of heavily manicured shrubbery. A wide staircase led down to the street. The residential entrance.
Nicols angled his chin toward a cream-colored sedan parked across the street from the courtyard. Pender's eyes. A pale man with a thin face had his head back against the seat rest. The only thing he was keeping an eye on was the inside of his eyelids.
We circled the block, and Nicols parked on the opposite side of the building. A service alley cut into the geometric symmetry of the building, a narrow slit leading back to a loading area. We crossed the street like phantoms, and melted into the wan shadows of the alley. Sodium lights lit up a short loading dock and wire gate that led into the building's underground parking. Overhead, a pair of security cameras. A trio of green dumpsters and two recycling bins huddled tightly together like they were homeless seeking warmth in numbers, their rubber tops still wet from the recent rain. A card reader rose out of the ground next to the security gate, and a single unmarked door stood between the gate and the short tongue of the loading dock.
Nicols nodded toward the door, drawing my attention to the single keyed lock. "Can you magick it?" he asked.
I nodded, and the Chorus flowed into my palm. Hand against the lock, I felt them glide into the tight fit of the keyhole. I worked the muscles at the base of my fingers, undulating my palm and the Chorus went rigid, filling the empty space around the tumblers. A twist of my wrist to the right and the lock clicked open. We walked in like we owned the place, and Nicols shut the door gently behind us.
Nobody seemed to care. The dimly lit hallway was quiet; the only sound, other than our breathing, was the hum of distant HVAC. Nicols brushed past me, heading for the lobby. We found another unmarked door that put us at the back of the grand foyer, behind the bank of elevators. An open car gaped invitingly, and we slipped onboard like a pair of soft-shoed dancers.
The ride to the seventeenth floor was smooth, and both of us watched the news scrawl on the tiny TV monitor mounted on the inner wall of the elevator cage. Flooding in New Orleans, Hollywood starlet in rehab, Congressional back-biting: plus ca change.
I did the lock trick on the 1712's pair, and we slipped inside Doug's condo to check out his view and the 800 square feet that came with it. Seventeen-twelve was on the northern side of the building, affording us a view of Queen Anne and the Seattle Center. Not much in the way of water or mountain, which meant this condo had been slightly cheaper than the western- or eastern-facing units. Maybe. These days, it was hard to say if that sort of aesthetic detail depressed real estate pricing anymore.
The architecture adhered to the modern minimalist trend still hot in the celebrity gossip magazines-off-white walls with white cabinetry and steel appliances. Personality-bare living waiting for its owner to imprint it. Doug, however, appeared to have very little aptitude for interior design. His only contribution to the decor was a pair of generic Indonesian landscape prints on the living room walls, a flat screen TV hung on the wall between the prints, a couple of glazed vases in the insert over the gas fireplace, and a wildflower calendar in the kitchen. The furniture was Swedish Geometric, straight from the nearest IKEA warehouse, and the contents of the kitchen drawers and cupboards had been bought on the same shopping trip.
Nicols looked in the refrigerator, counted the bottles of spring water and glanced in the crisper to see if anything was still fresh. Two bottles of champagne lay on the top rack. A lonely box of baking soda sat i
n the back.
Half of the top rack of the dishwasher was filled with teacups, and the bottom rack had two small plates and a handful of silverware. The sink was empty, and the garbage can underneath contained a profusion of Styrofoam and paper to-go cartons. Nicols poked at a few of the containers. "Thai," he said. "A lot of Thai."
"So our boy isn't big on hanging out at home," I said. An old rotary phone-molded plastic that qualified more as a piece of shit from Goodwill than a retro artifact from The Sharper Image catalog-was plugged into the phone jack beneath the wall calendar. He didn't seem to have an answering machine. "It's hooked up to the internal switchboard," Nicols explained, seeing my confusion. "Like every other kid these days, he's completely dependent on his cell phone. This is for the intercom in the lobby." He played with the twisted cord. "The fifty-cent solution."
The vases were molded assembly-line artifacts meant to look hand-made but the "Made in Taiwan" sticker on the bottom ruined that mood. Against the wall opposite the TV, there was a table between two tall bookcases. I did a quick scan of the books in both cases as Nicols went through the two-drawer file cabinet shoved under the desk. Crowley, Mathers, Plotinus' Enneads, an abridged version of Frazer's Golden Bough, a recent translation of TheCorpus Hermeticum, Eliade's Shamanism, and TheNag Hammadi caught my eye. The rest of the "esoteric" titles were the sort of pabulum sold by the case to the local New Age shops. The other case was filled with thrillers, New York Times bestsellers, and Oprah's Book Club selections that made one look well-read, and a scattered handful on fly fishing.
"Investment banker," Nicols announced as he found a stash of financial statements. "Looks like he works for a brokerage downtown." He flipped through the pages in a file folder. "Five years now." He glanced at the bookcases. "Anything?"
I shook my head. "Nothing you couldn't buy at Borders. It's mostly stuff the big publishers flooded the market with a few years ago when everyone was talking about New Age Magick, trying to address Pre- and Post-Millennial fears. That sort of bullshit." I swept my hands to include both cases. "Little of it is really useful. It's the sort of collection you'd find in the room of a fourteen-year-old girl who thinks being a wiccan pagan and a lesbian are the same thing. Doug's well beyond the 'let's make a love potion!' crap most of these books offer."
"What about the useful stuff?"
"It's the wrong sort of details. Eliade's Shamanism is a good magico-religious overview of the old techniques, but the rituals Doug and the others are doing aren't part of the archaic practices. The couple of Crowley books are better, but they're still filled with distractions and practices which have no bearing on what we saw in the barn.
"Admittedly, these skills aren't going to be publicly available-most of the practical manuscripts were hand-copied, passed from magus to magus. They aren't the sort of thing that you're going to leave haphazardly on a shelf. The last time I had the opportunity to examine a real alchemical text was a year ago in Singapore. A fourteenth-century copy of Speculum Alchemiae. The buyer paid more than five hundred thousand dollars for it."
"So if he's really experimenting in radical stuff, why is there so much junk on his shelf?" Nicols asked.
"Exactly. He seems to lead a pretty Spartan existence. Why waste the space on populist crap written for dilettantes?"
Nicols put the folder back in the file cabinet. "He's never here," he sighed. "The DMV records put him at twenty-eight years old. According to his pay stubs, he's making six figures a year. But there's no sign that he's even paying attention to anything. There's not a shred of personality in this place. Might as well hang a 'Vacancy' sign over the door."
"I figured you'd appreciate the decor."
"Why is that?"
"It's not much different than your place."
Nicols sucked at a tooth as he looked around again as if to see the room from a different perspective. "No," he said with some care. "He's never lost anything. This is just a shell that hasn't been filled."
An involuntary shiver ran up my spine. A shell. A husk emptied of light and life, one that didn't recognize its lack of humanity. It just kept breathing and functioning, waiting for something to make it feel less empty. Something to fill it.
"You okay?" Nicols asked, watching me.
"Fine," I replied. "Goose on my grave. That's all."
"Is that something we should worry about?"
"No. Just an old memory."
"Sneaking up on you?"
"Something like that," I muttered, walking toward the bedroom.
A flicker of energy caught my attention, and I stopped in the hallway. A sparkle-glitter on glass-coming from the bathroom. I set the Chorus in a defensive array, and pushed open the half-closed door with one finger. Light flickered from the bathroom mirror, a dancing knot of magick like a captive butterfly under glass.
I felt Nicols at my back. "What is it?"
"Not sure."
The magickal form in the glass didn't have an edge to it, nor was there any sort of signature attached to the flickering charge. It was just a small bundle of energy transfixed beneath the glass, free to twist and shine in its reflective prison. It was a static spell, an incantation caught inside the mirror. Without a regular infusion of energy, it would fade in a few days.
I walked toward the mirror, hand outstretched. Nicols sucked in his breath noisily behind me. The light spun faster as my finger, kissed with the focused fire of the Chorus, approached the glass. When I touched the glass, the mirror cracked. Nicols made even more noise, and I heard the safety-snap on his holster pop open.
"It's all right." I stepped back to the hallway. On the end of my finger, stuck as if it were glued, was an oversized playing card. The back of the deck was stamped with a multicolored Rose Cross, a rainbow pattern of petals arranged at the center. I plucked the card free, and turned it over so Nicols could see its face. Through a veil of geometric patterns, a soldier in green armor struggled with his golden chariot. Tiny cherubs, lashed to the ornate frame with wire and ribbon, were too slight, too ineffectual, to pull the heavy wagon.
"What is it?"
"It's a tarot card. From a deck designed by Aleister Crowley," I said. "It's the Prince of Swords."
He glanced at the broken mirror, trying to process what he had seen: a spark of light drawn through a piece of glass, transformed into a playing card by my touch. How were such things possible?
"It's a message," I said, ignoring the question on his face. "Left for me."
"From Doug?"
"No. From Pender."
He scratched the side of his nose. "Okay, I'm not up on the secret codes. Nor-" His eyes strayed to the broken mirror again. "-the ways you guys leave notes for each other."
"It means Pender knows who I am."
As if the words were a trigger, darkness striped across the face of the card. The corners curled inward, and I let go of the card. It didn't fall; it just vanished into a cloud of dirty vapor. Poof. Leaving nothing but a tiny rain of ash.
X
We would have been happy to find any hint of Doug's extracurricular hobbies: printed emails left carelessly in the trash, a desk calendar with circled dates and cryptic references, notes scribbled in the margins of his esoterica, secret society-style robes and objects of office hidden in a valise shoved in the back of the closet. What we found instead was the not-so-subtle suspicion that the place had been cleaned. The condo had been sanitized by Pender so as to remove any occult impropriety. Now, it was just the empty apartment of an energetic investment banker who spent most of his time chasing clients, spending money, and reading pop magic books. Nothing more.
After the dismal return on breaking the law at Doug's, Nicols insisted on getting something to eat. We repaired to the nearest 24-hour restaurant-Minnie's on the corner of First and Denny. Caffeine and starch. Post-midnight brain food.
I was having trouble sitting still as Nicols looked over the menu. My lower intestine was busy knotting itself over the fact that the hunt for Kat was going to have
to be abandoned. My small window of opportunity had closed. The back trail was gone, and not only was Pender waiting for me, he was already removing what scant clues I had to go on. Doug's group had gone to ground. I didn't have the time to look under every rock.
No way to them. No way to her.
Seattle wasn't safe anymore. The psychic card in Doug's condo meant Pender had made contact with Paris. The Prince of Swords was the sign that he knew my history, knew what had happened between Antoine and me. He is coming. That was the message of the card.
My stomach took on some of the tension in my lower intestine, the Chorus clawing its way up through my torso. So close. She's so close.
"All right," Nicols said, jarring my internal confusion. "Let's hear it."
"Which?" Why was the Chorus nipping at me like this? They could be persistent, but never as overt as this. It had first started at the barn, and I tried to recall the sensation I had felt there. Hidden layers. The false reality of the surface, like the glassy mirror of a still lake. The sense of awareness underneath.
Could they hide something from me?
"Why you're running from Pender. What that card means. The whole story."
"Why?" Why were they pushing me?
"Because you're getting ready to bail on me. I step away to use the restroom, and you'll be gone when I get back. Just like that card. You keep looking out the window like you're expecting someone, like you're waiting for a signal to run."
"What if I am?"
"Where does that leave me?"
I exhaled, trying to remember the pranayama technique from yesterday morning. "Did I ever give you the impression that I needed a side-kick?"
"No, goddamnit," Nicols growled, "that's not what I'm talking about. Pender. What am I going to do about him?"
"Ignore him," I sighed painfully. "He's only interested in me."
His response was aborted by the arrival of the waitress with a pot of coffee. She managed to pour coffee and take our order with one eye closed as if she had woken up moments ago.