Halloween had reached its zenith. The witching hour passed, and it begun its lengthy wane. Costumed revelers ventured into the night in packs. Most of them were drunk or recovering from drink and they yelled to each other and laughed loudly. But the financial district brooded in silence like a Transylvania castle. It was nearly deserted. Only the odd window or two was lit in the skyscrapers overhead.
It was chilly, and the streets were wet from an earlier rain. The foyer of my destination was all marble, swirling in off-white and green, like the color of dollars. For some reason, cathedrals, mausoleums, and old banks all looked the same. Couldn’t be a coincidence. There was a row of four elevators at the back, just to the left of a little guard desk. Two rent-a-cops sat behind it. One of them stood when he saw me.
“Good evening, Detective.”
I’d burned all of my clothes from the adventure at the John D and changed into cargo pants and a heavy sweater. Under it, I had a gun taped to my back. I had another around my ankle. Sweat leaking from my skin threatened to loose both.
“They’re expecting you.” He motioned to the elevators, one of which opened as if on cue.
I looked at it. I looked at him. They weren’t even going to frisk me. I stepped in cautiously. The button for the top floor had already been pressed. I looked up at the camera in the ceiling. Someone was watching.
The doors closed and I rode to the top in silence. There wasn’t any music. There was only a soft ding at the top as the doors opened. The corridor was dimly lit and plushly carpeted. I was met by a blind woman in business attire. Her pert hair screamed “church lady.” She actually bowed before leading me past the empty offices and dark conference rooms to a heavy door at the back of a storage closet. She punched a code into the keypad and the door opened to an older, wood-paneled office with an open floor plan. Rows of L-shaped wooden desks ran three across all the way to the back. Several of them had printers with clear plastic ink cartridges filled with blood. Stacks of blank parchment rested underneath. They were quiet then, but during working hours, I gathered, they were busy forging contracts whose interest and terms I couldn’t contemplate. I saw another man, also in drab attire, collating files. He turned in our general direction as we passed and waited. His eyes were insect mouths. Tiny proboscises rolled over each other like greedy hands.
My guide took me to a wide carpeted staircase that rose to a landing. There, it turned back to the floor over my head. The wood-paneled walls of the staircase held framed paintings, portraits of men (and one woman) in dark robes. They seemed almost inhuman. At the top of the stairs was a high-ceilinged foyer. To my left, discordant chamber music emanated from the other side of a set of heavy drapes. About a dozen guys waited in the round space, most by the coat check. They were all in fancy suits with dark red vests. They were all armed. I could tell by the bulge of their expensive jackets.
A dozen.
Not even on my best day.
But they didn’t move. Except for one. He walked to the drapes and parted them. The music got louder and I saw one sliver of a beautiful view of the city. The ballroom windows faced north, back up the full length of Manhattan. Best skyline in the world.
“Good evening, Detective,” the man said. “Please go right in.”
I looked at the guards sitting in waiting chairs and leaning against the wall. They looked back. I stepped forward through the drapes, which hung not from the door frame but all the way from the high ceiling. They covered the entire back wall. There was a giant crystal chandelier overhead, only dimly lit. Revelers stood in scattered groups throughout the long interior. Many were costumed in elaborate multi-layered dresses, men and women both. The dresses were opulent and ornate, with folds and ruffles and sequins and dangling pearls. Each layer supported itself by wire over the rest. Each was also cut away in the front, like a slice from a cake, revealing the layers below. The bodies underneath it all were clad in expensive lingerie, even the men. I saw more than one pair of bare breasts. Some of the revelers wore leather straps with beaked masks like the doctors had during the black plague. Their eyes were black disks, windows to nowhere. There was lots of chatter. They were celebrating something. High-backed chairs were placed tastefully about in a staggered pattern such that one wouldn’t have to directly face another. Next to each was an elevated chafing dish that released wisps of smoke. An assistant chief of police sat in the chair nearest me. He was not ornately dressed, merely suited. His pants were on the carpet around his ankles and he was having his dick sucked by a naked woman young enough to be his granddaughter.
“Detective,” he said, eyes rolling back in pleasure. “I’m glad . . . Oh—to see you’ve redeemed yourself. Although . . . I admit I was looking forward. Ah—to bringing formal charges against you. Ahh—on Monday.” His eyes focused behind me. He wore a wicked smile.
“Charges?”
He tossed a hand into the air. “Oh, something or other. It would’ve hardly mattered.”
I felt a little woozy then. The smoke from the chafing dishes had some kind of drug in it. I could smell it—that and the sweet odor of burnt flesh. I saw a black finger amid the charcoal and covered my mouth. I shook my head to clear it.
“Yessss . . .” he said. “Wonderful, isn’t it? You can see all those who’ve joined us today.”
It did seem as if the crowd had gotten larger suddenly. Many of them were blurred. I turned away from him, forearm over my mouth, to the freestanding wall of beating hearts. Pairs of bubbling tubes fed and drained each organ. There were so many. You could feel them, shaking your chest with their beats. Each was individually illuminated inside an oblong crystal container: delicate decanter glass, rounded and irregularly shaped, like the globules in a lava lamp. Each was unique, both the shape of the thin glass and the heart inside. I never knew there was so much variation. I always thought human hearts were more or less the same. But they’re not. Some are larger. Some darker. Some stronger. Some weaker.
In the middle of the wide room, directly under the chandelier, an im-age of a stone table had been knit into the heavy carpet. It was surrounded by a pentagram on which a pair of waiflike bare feet tread, toes curled. A circle of high-backed chairs surrounded a young girl. She stood half-naked in the center, as if on display. Her dark hair hung in front of her face, which was turned in shame. She shivered from cold and fear. She wore a sports bra with a little pink flower in the center and matching panties, both sul-lied. Her arms were pressed to her side and she leaned slightly as if trying to slide away. There were stacks of money on small side tables next the chairs, yuan and euros and dollars. I thought they were auctioning her at first. But it was worse than that. So much worse.
Next to her in the ring was a well-suited man holding a hand cannon, a shiny fifty-caliber revolver. Monster of a handgun. It was their version of roulette, I realized. They were gambling on which spin of the cylinder would blow her head clean off. Win or lose, one fat ante bought you a ringside seat to the action, close enough to feel the splatter. Like at Sea World.
The man with the gun was immobile. He’d turned his mascaraed eyes to me—as had the revelers in all the corners—but he didn’t move, and there was nothing to reveal his thoughts except the bulge in his lace underpants. Motherfucker had an erection. He wasn’t alone. I recognized some of them, men and women both. They were important. Mayors and talk radio hosts and social media tycoons. But I didn’t recognize anyone in those chairs. They looked young. All of them stared at me without shame or fear. And why not? I could’ve stormed in with an entire film crew in tow. What difference would it have made? They controlled everything. They had everything.
And they wanted more.
A light clicked on at the far end of the room, and I saw a chair. No, a throne. It was raised on a multi-leveled dais. It was bigger than the one in the sanctum. Much bigger. The back fanned outward like a peacock’s tail. It was made of shining white bones. Human bones. Martyrs. So many of them. Hands, clawing to be free. Spines, twisted and broken. Long bones, studded with nail heads. And the base: skulls. Jawless. Empty. Hollow. Yet still silently screaming. They were turned every which way as if pressed together by the sheer weight of he who sits.
Only no one sat.
The throne was empty.
“We thought it might be you.”
An older man in a buttoned frock stepped from the mostly silent crowd. The music had stopped. Everyone was watching me.
“Of the six drawn, you were the most adamantine.”
He noted the confusion on my face.
“Did you think you were the only one?”
I didn’t recognize him. He was older, 70s maybe, and well groomed. A rich man, it seemed, although I’m not sure I could’ve picked him out of a lineup. On some level, they all look the same.
A woman got up from the roulette game. She was at most 30. She wore a four-layer dress with a pronounced Elizabethan collar. I noticed some of the dresses there had more than four layers, some less. Probably a status thing. As with all the others, her dress had been cut away at the front, revealing all the layers underneath, each of which was a different shade of white. A Lycra one-piece swimsuit the color of bone covered her midsection. Her nipples were erect. She walked on a matching pair of high-heeled, knee-high leather boots. She had fresh contact smears—smudges of blood—on her abdomen.
“Six righteous weapons were forged,” she explained in heavily accented English. I thought she might be Eastern European. “Each different. We knew all of them couldn’t last. But you were the most tenacious. The most fearless. The most reckless. The most unwilling to yield. You should be congratulated.” She didn’t say that last part to me. She said it to the old man in the frock.
Five others in the same kind of frock stepped forward and bowed to him. Several shook his hand. Six total.
“You were my draw,” he said to me. “My perfect weapon.”
I looked to the empty throne rising over the hall.
“Where’s your boss?” I asked.
Everyone laughed. It rose and then fell softly like the chatter of birds.
A man in a three-layered harlequin dress rose from a chair. He removed a white cushioned mask that looked like it had been stitched together from the padded cell of a sanitarium. The mouth of the mask was pulled taut to one side, as if it had been hooked and dragged. It was awful. I recognized him. It was the man from Sully’s bar, the one with the pomaded hair.
“It was important that each of you act of your own free will,” he said. “If we had cursed or enchanted you directly, the wizard’s lapdog would have smelled it.”
The older man, my patron, spoke again. “But fear not. Today is a day of celebration. For our enemy has been struck down. Thanks to you.”
He turned and raised his hand and the curtain on the wall parted and revealed a large screen. The already dim lights all but faded. Images appeared. Local news. Live coverage.
Bistro Indigenes was on fire. The whole building was engulfed in flames, consumed by bright orange pillars spiraling a hundred feet into the sky. Firemen were battling the inferno on three sides, but they were only trying to contain it, to keep it from spreading. Everything inside was destroyed, or would be very soon. The art. The artifacts.
The chair.
I stared in silence as a perky bilingual commentator did her best to sound grave. Sports scores scrolled across the bottom.
“He was too well protected,” the woman in white explained. “The marks on his palms. His guard dog. A man without a heart is a man who cannot be corrupted. And the woman he keeps with him. Two and a half centuries old. Cursed with immortality. Not an easy person to get around.”
“But then,” the man with pomaded hair explained. “We never had to destroy him. That arrogant fool had more enemies than we do.” He laughed. “As with a dike, we needed only to poke a hole. The entire world would rush in to finish the job.”
I lowered my head.
“Yeeeessss . . .” The old man said. “Now you see.”
I pulled the gun from my back and pointed it at him. They all laughed again, longer this time. The chatter filled the room up to its height.
“How do you think magic works?” he asked. “You think you pull that trigger and the bullet passes through me?” He shook his head. “Tsk, tsk. You think like a child, Detective. Only technology is so crude. One day, one of your sycophantic acolytes of the machine will invent a way to do that, I’m sure—become intangible to bullets—and you’ll all think you’re soooo clever.
“But tell me, which is more powerful: the abortive ability to let bullets pass”—buttons fell as he pulled open his frock—“or the aura that ensures none are fired at all?”
The skin of his white-haired chest was burned. Swollen and scarred with fresh runes. Different than the chef’s. Harder. Angled. Hidden under clothing and forged in pain. I had learned enough to know that was significant.
I kept the gun level and released the safety.
“Do it,” he said, stepping closer.
When I didn’t respond immediately, he grabbed the barrel of the gun and thrust it at his heart.
“Here!” he said. “Right here. Shoot me in the heart. Blow it out my chest. Then I will be sure to die, and my lords will greet me and I will be rich as never before.”
I gripped the trigger once. Then twice. My finger curled.
He smiled. “But first, perhaps you should take another look in the ring.”
On second glance, I recognized her immediately. The girl in the sullied underpants. Whether it was the same girl or magic had changed her, I couldn’t say. She still had her arms curled around her half-naked body, but I could see her face then. She was older, and heavier, but it was definitely Alexa. She was terrified. She didn’t recognize me, of course. How could she? We’d never actually met.
I stepped toward her, but as soon as I crossed the circle in the carpet, I felt sick, and I stumbled. The gun dropped. My audience moved, and fearing I was about to be overtaken, I planted my feet and tried to take control of my body. I wanted so badly to vomit. It was rising violently inside me, like lave in a bubbling crater. Standing there inside the giant pentagram-circle, looking at my gun, which seemed to be floating across the carpet, I noticed something I hadn’t before. Out the windows. In the distance, past the lights and skyscrapers, there was a ring around the city—a green aurora that shifted and shimmered. It was enormous, miles and miles across. I looked down. I didn’t see dark carpet. I saw a tunnel to an under-place. It was as wide as the aurora and so very, very deep. I had a sense of distance like I’d never known before.
The human brain, you know, it does okay with numbers up to a point—a hundred or even a thousand. We can hold the total of that in our minds at one time. But once you get up to a million or a billion or a quadrillion, the numbers become abstract. We don’t have a sense of how far away the sun sits, 93 million miles from us, the same way we have a sense of the space between where we are and the nearest grocery store. It’s just too huge. I had a sense then of distance beyond the human scale. And of beasts at the far end of it who were closing that distance. At the lead was a tentacled giant, one of the same I had seen in my dreams as a child. A winged army followed.
In my distraction, the silent crowd closed, and I sprang to Alexa and took her arm. I fumbled for the weapon taped to my back but had trouble reaching behind me.
“Stay back!”
But no one had moved. It was in my head. The room twisted as if I was drunk. I wasn’t a threat to them. I was a show. I’d been summoned by the man in the harlequin costume to be the capstone of the evening’s entertainment. He was the jester, the master of ceremonies. I looked down and saw something pouring into the deep hole, like mist over a mountain peak. Only it wasn’t pale like mist. It was black. A darkness deeper even than the hole into which it ran.
The old man saw me looking. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
I was hunched and clutching the girl with one hand. I wouldn’t let go. My head drooped and I was breathing through my mouth. I slurped drool. I missed some, and it fell in a string to the carpet.
“Do you know what it is?” he asked gleefully.
I shook my head, hoping it would buy me a few moments to clear my mind. I needed to get out of the circle, but I couldn’t move. I was bound. I’d taken the bait like an idiot and stepped inside the circle and now I couldn’t move.
“It is an offering,” he explained. “From all the people of the earth. It has been wrongfully withheld from Our Lords for centuries, but now the flow has been restored. It summons them to us. They come to give us our reward, as was promised. They come to make us princes of the earth—and many more worlds besides.”
I watched the dark mist fall over the edge into the hole. It came endlessly from all sides.
“Tell me, Detective, why do you suppose our planet floats in a sea of darkness?”
I couldn’t answer.
“Because they made it. To feed on. You see, an evil being, one capable of only evil, is just a machine. A golem, or a computer. Anything it makes is not the work of itself but of its creator, for it has no choice. The production of evil, like the production of good, requires the generative capacity: the power to choose. A soul. To produce a great quantity of evil, then—as our lords require to fight the cosmic war—one needs a great many souls. A cosmic supply. Our universe is a dark battery full of beings whose only real purpose is to be petty: to be capable of good but perpetually unwilling to try.
“All the first myths reflected this. In the Babylonian, men are born from the blood of the dragon of chaos. In the Chinese tradition, we are the parasites on the body of the cosmic man. Despicable. Even in the ludicrous Christian fantasy, we are made from dirt and full of sin. And can you deny it? Just look at them.” He motioned out the windows. “Trifling things. Wound them and it pours out, naturally, like sap from a tree. Venom. They excrete it. Our predecessors built altars to collect it. But now . . .” He raised his hand to one of the technology tycoons, a young man with a pale face and blank eyes. “Every day, they go online to be milked. We didn’t even ask. They simply lined up on their own, like cattle, and handed it over, just as they do with their labor. We collect their venomous excretions as offerings to our gods. The rest we turn to money. And they give us everything. Day after day. And all they ask in return is for a little pat on the head.” He rubbed mine like I was a dog. “And perhaps some slight reassurance that they’re one of the special people, not like those other wicked fools who’ve made the same bargain on the other side of a wall—a wall we built to keep both in shadow.
“Each and every one of them is convinced they’re smart—or decent, or worthy—just as long as they’re not the worst, just as long as there’s someone lower. So that’s what we give them. Someone lower. They don’t want to believe that anyone is truly better than them, not in any way that matters. It sounds so fair, doesn’t it? Endless servings of equal pie. A universe of the equitably ignoble. Convinced that their own innate worth is no less than anyone’s, they lay brick after brick after brick on the road of good intentions without once considering where it leads.”
He saw my face. “Don’t believe me? I’ll prove it to you. Next time you’re on the street, ask a stranger what honest good they’ve done in the last week, or the last month, or at all the past year. Watch them struggle to give some meager answer. Then ask them how often they’re petty, and they’ll laugh.” He stopped himself. “But dear me, I’m going on, aren’t I?” He wiped the corner of his mouth with a handkerchief. “We’d like to show you something, Detective, something you’ve never seen. Not really. It’s why you’re here. Think of it as your reward. Each of you had something you wanted—something you wanted so badly it blinded you to everything else. In your case, power. I think you meant to do good with it, to smite the wicked, but that’s because, like most people, you’ve never seen power, not in its pure, distilled form. So I will show it to you.”
He had my gun. He’d lifted it off the carpet. I saw it in his hands. He opened the cylinder to inspect the bullets. Satisfied, he closed the cylinder and cocked the gun.
“It was I who cast the spell. Purchased on credit. Financed, you might say. The bill is due . . .”
He lifted the barrel to his temple and pulled the trigger.
I flinched as bits of him flew sideways across the room. His body fell to the carpet with a thud. The gun bounced free.
Silence.
The assistant chief of police had moved closer to the circle. He was a big man. He was fixing his belt. And smiling.
“Well, Detective. It looks like a prominent member of our city’s financial community was just murdered in cold blood. With your gun.”
Laughter rose and there were cheers and applause like you hear when someone dedicates a bridge or a company goes public, like this was the conclusion of a great enterprise, months or years in duration. The woman in white raised her hand and the room fell again to silence.
I looked at the body. Blood pooled dark on the carpet. It didn’t seem like an illusion. It seemed like he had really shot himself. And that meant he wasn’t a player. He was a piece, like me. They all were, I realized. Everyone in the room. They were not the sitters at the stone table. They were sitters at the feast of shadows, gorging themselves on nothing. Money. Sex. Fame. Glory. Each as substantial as shade.
I turned to the empty throne.
They had created the Lord of Shadows, a man who existed but who didn’t exist. Not a false idol. A false devil. Not something for us to worship in vain; something for us to revile in place of his creators. Someone for the chef to battle. A manifestation of the myth we all want to believe: that evil is always the other, never ourselves, and that at the top of things, there’s one bad man responsible for all of it, and if we just arrest him, silence him, or strike him down, the world would finally know peace.
The story we tell children.
He was the perfect foe, for an enemy that doesn’t exist is an enemy that can never be defeated.
“Take the child,” the woman in white said, waking me from my torment. “If that is what you wish. Consider her payment for services rendered. Take her and leave with our benediction. But leave you will. Your usefulness has ended.”