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  My new world consisted of a six-by-nine cell. Facing the corridor were steel bars with an electronic sliding door of bars built in. On the back wall was a cot bolted to the floor, a thin, slightly moldy old mattress, an army blanket, and a plastic hospital-style pillow. A sink with a square of polished steel for a mirror bolted to the wall, a stainless steel toilet with no seat. When I used it, I pissed bright red blood.

  I tried to focus my energies and see if I could perceive any enchantments on the bars or locks, or any kind of scrying, but I was too broken, too weak, and still too drugged to make anything happen. I tried to cry, but my eyes were too swollen and raw from bruises to summon tears. I groaned and rolled over on the cot, falling into a deep narcotic darkness—a land of no dreams. If there was mercy in this universe, I would die in my sleep, but my last waking thought was that I knew there was no mercy, and even if there were, I was the last soul on earth deserving of it.

  TWELVE

  Sleep was a knotted, broken thing. Nightmares of the beatings Fat had given me, Trace’s head exploding and showering his brain meat on me. Restraints, the smell of rubbing alcohol, and questions droned in my ear under surgical lights. ECT sessions at Weston, Boj’s sunken skull of a face. Slorzack staring at me from the video, killing the video with a stare. Static. Tangled, wet sheets, awake.

  I woke in my cell to guards over me, guns pointed at my face. Men in white coats were holding me down and injecting me with hypodermics. I tried to fight, but I was made of pain and stone.

  They departed, and I fell back to sleep. It was hard to keep my eyes focused; my brain was slippery. Whatever they were planning to do to me, it could wait till after a good nap.

  I awoke later; time had no meaning anymore. My face itched, and I scratched it. I had a beard now. I sat up in bed, and there was no pain, but there was a powerful, gnawing hunger in my gut. I was starving, and my mouth tasted like a diseased raccoon had taken up residence in it.

  I stood and walked to the mirror over the sink, again amazed that there was no pain, no stiffness. I twisted on the faucet and water sputtered out. I knelt and drank great greedy gulps of the cold, silver liquid. It was the best water I had ever tasted, and I drank until I couldn’t drink any more. I straightened and regarded myself in the mirror. I had a full beard now and my hair had grown at least a few inches. For a second, I thought they had kept me drugged and under for weeks, maybe a month, but then I touched the bloodstains on my pillow and mattress. Some of them were still damp.

  I went back to the bunk and sat down, waiting, craving food.

  “Hey, hey man,” a voice called to me from the darkness of the other side of the corridor of cells. “You okay, brother?”

  “Surprisingly, yes.”

  “Dude, you grew that beard crazy fast,” the voice said again. “They brought you in yesterday, and you were clean shaven, and beat to hell.”

  “Yesterday?” I said. “Thanks. My time sense is kinda fucked-up with no windows or clock and the drugs and all. So I’ve only been down here a day?”

  “Yeah,” he said. A horrible voice inside me whispered that this could all be an Illuminati psyop designed to feed me false information and screw even more with my brain. I wasn’t quite that paranoid yet; for example, I had drunk the water and shoved down the thought that it was most likely dosed with chemicals. If I lost myself to that level of crazy already, then I was as good as dead. “Yeah, man,” the voice continued. “We get three meals a day—that’s part of how I have been keeping track.”

  “Good, I’m starving,” I said. “When’s food?”

  The guy laughed. “You slept through breakfast, so lunch should be coming soon.”

  “Great,” I said. I felt so much better, I felt like pacing the cage, running laps. I didn’t understand what was happening inside me. To pass out in so much pain and so tired and sore and wake up feeling brand-new, it was exciting and frightening all at the same time. I knew they were doing something to me, inside me, but at the same time I felt like I was in my twenties again.

  “I’d tell you my name, but they are listening in,” I said to my friend in the shadows. “You can call me Crowley, if you like.”

  “Cool,” he said. “Like the Ozzie song. They already know who I am, so I don’t give a shit. My name is Darren, Darren Mack. Nice to meet you, man.”

  “Likewise,” I said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Darren, but … are you real?”

  He laughed. “Yeah, they do kinda play with your head, man. But no, I’m real, bro.”

  “Good,” I said. “How long you been in here?”

  “Well,” Darren said, “the protests were in October, and if we go by the clock of the belly and count each three meals as roughly a day, then … I’d say … about five years.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “Five years? Alone?”

  “Mmmmhhhmm,” Darren said. “I kind of thought I’d lost it when you showed up, maybe I was finally hallucinating, so I started some shit with a guard to see if this was real or if it was just me going batshit. He fucked me up pretty good, so I got my answer. Totally worth it, by the way.”

  I laughed, and so did Darren. I got off the bunk and knelt by the iron bars and the door, examining the lock. I closed my eyes and felt the power flow through my bone and nerve staircase. The defensive enchantments glowed and danced like live current. The place was warded against my kind of trouble. Given a lot of time and tools, I might be able to unravel the defenses, but then where exactly would I go? I was out of the world, in the bowels of one of the greatest prisons on earth. In a cell block that could be designated “the George Orwell Wing.”

  “Hey,” Darren called out, “what you doing, Crowley?”

  “Sussing out the locks,” I said. “They are pretty thorough.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I gave up on breaking out of here a long time ago.”

  “You said something about protests,” I said. “What happened?”

  “Times Square,” he said. “It was a huge protest in October—that would have been … 2011,” he said. There was a long pause, and I knew he was doing the calculus of imprisonment, reviewing all the birthdays he had missed, wondering if loved ones were alive or dead, searching for him, or if they had forgotten him. Missed chances, missed loves, life eaten up by the sharp maw of time, eaten and gone. I remained silent.

  “Yeah, so I was part of a group, we went after Citi’s mainframe.”

  “You a gray hat?” I asked.

  “Hells yeah,” he said. “Damn good one too. Just not good enough. They busted me after I put some stuff up on their Web site.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “They did not drop you in the sphincter of the universe over some spray paint manifesto on a corporation’s home page.”

  I heard Darren chuckle. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess it was a tiny-weeny bit more than that. I coordinated the cyber attacks against the IMF during those months. Sent all those documents to Wikileaks. They busted me. Had a whole G.I. Joe black helicopter assault team come get me in the dead of night. Been here ever since waiting for my due process.”

  He laughed again. I was amazed by how human a sound it was, laughter in the heart of the labyrinth. Pissing in the eye of the Minotaur.

  “You,” I said, “you are Fawkes? The Fawkes?”

  Laughter again. “Yeah,” he said. “Guilty. Did Wikileaks ever get that stuff out?”

  “Uh, yeah,” I said, “about Wikileaks…”

  I spent the time till our jailers brought us lunch catching Darren up on the news of the last few years. I have to admit, by the time the guards rolled up with the carts with the Styrofoam boxes containing our food, I was dizzy and groggy from low blood sugar. I could usually go days without eating and be cool. They had done something to me, were still doing it, but I didn’t care. I wanted food more than answers.

  A detail of SWAT myrmidons showed up at the same time, in full combat gear. One of the riot cops pointed at me.

  “No time for lunch, asshole, you got a d
ate at the precinct house.”

  And away did I go. As they marched me out, I saw Darren. The kid in the cell across the hall from me, the scourge of the Secret Masters, was maybe twenty-five, tops; he had a full brown beard, long hair, and a hell of a shiner. He was dressed in filthy street clothes. His shirt had a complex circuit board design on it. He gave me the peace sign as he grabbed a second Styrofoam lunch box.

  * * *

  Sometime later, I was sitting at the table again in the interrogation room. Always in the interrogation room. There was a cold soda and a pack of cigarettes in front of me. Skinny was still sitting with the same smile twitching at the edges of his face. He had his folder open in front of him. He recited a litany of names. One of them was my real name—the one that had power over me.

  “So,” he said as he finished the list of names, “which one is really you? We gave your profile to the Hidden Oracles at Quantico, along with all of the proper tributes and blood sacrifices, and got all of these possible results back. Your face is hidden in shadow from the Oracles’ sight. That is an impressive bit of working. So we do this old school. Save yourself the aggravation of another session with Lou, just tell me who you are.”

  “Why, so you can put a compulsion glamour on me to answer your questions?” I said, fumbling with the pack of smokes. I wished they were American Spirits, but these would do. It was hard to tell if the look on Skinny’s pinched face was amusement or controlled anger. I held out the cigarette, and Skinny lit it with a white lighter.

  “Those are bad luck, y’know,” I said. Skinny’s face split into a smile.

  “So, we have a player,” he said to Lou. After all Fat and I had been through together, I figured I should call him Lou. “They are bad luck, funny guy, they are real bad luck.”

  Lou worked me over real well. He went up to the edge he had taken me to the day before and gave me hope it was coming to an end, and then he went over that edge, hard. I was in agony, and then terror welled up in me as he kept going. He took my partly smoked cigarette and burned me on the face, in one of my eyes, with it.

  “Your name,” Skinny said, “and it stops.”

  I said nothing. I have no fucking clue why. I knew if they kept this up I would break and I would do anything they asked me to do, tell them anything. Give up Grinner, Christine, the baby, Magdalena, Geri, anyone, everyone, to just stop this pain and the disfigurement. But then I got pissed at myself for that and decided I rather fucking die than be that little snitch bitch. And there was still that nagging thing in my head if I could just think, just have the time to reason it out without a concussion, or pain, or hunger buzzing in my head.

  “Askh Lou’s mom,” I muttered, and spit blood in Lou’s wide face.

  More “quality time” with Lou followed. More questions, more witty replies that resulted in new and startling levels of pain, disfigurement, and permanent injury. There was no longer a line; Lou was destroying me in as painful a way as possible.

  “Your name?” Skinny said again and again. Sometimes it was, “Why did you murder him?” or “Who do you work for?”

  Each time my answer was a nonanswer, sometimes smart-ass and defiant, other times just sobbing sounds. I couldn’t cry. Lou had put out cigarettes on my tear ducts by that point.

  Lou took out a straight razor, and he cut one of my ears and most of my nose off. He whispered in my ear, “Your eyelids are next.” I felt his raging erection against me as he began to cut at the corner of my one remaining, squirming eyeball.

  “No,” Skinny said, and he stood. “Lou, that’s enough.”

  “The little fucker is about ready to crack,” Lou said defiantly, like a kid pleading with his mom to have five more minutes to play before he has to come in for the night.

  “No, save it for tomorrow,” Skinny said. “Bring him over here.”

  Grudgingly, Lou planted me back in the chair. I slumped over, my face hitting the table. Lou pulled me back and then smashed my face back on the table several more times. Blood flew everywhere.

  “Jesus, watch it!” Skinny shouted. “I don’t want to have to go home to Sally and the kids with this skell’s fucking blood all over me. Pull him up.”

  Lou did. It was hard to focus; I was more out of it than aware. Skinny leaned close as he dabbed the bloodstains off his tie.

  “Do you know why I let Lou go so far with you today?” Skinny asked. I couldn’t answer. A bubble of blood swelled between my shredded lips and shattered teeth and popped.

  “Because tonight you will be injected with the same potion they pumped into you last night—a combination of alchemy and biotechnology. Microscopic golems. Magical nanotech that accelerates your whole body’s metabolism and heals you completely. And tomorrow morning, you will be fine. You will have aged a few months, but you will be fine physically and ready for another day of this and another and another. Do you understand, funny guy? You get the punch line?”

  I stared stuporously at Skinny, but the awareness must have registered in my one functioning eye, because Skinny nodded and smiled broadly.

  “That’s right, no dying here, no matter what I let him do to you, no escape, no release. And the memory of each thing he does to you, the dreams of it, the dread of the next time you come to this room and what will await you—those are forever.”

  I made a little sound. It was very weak and feeble, but it made both men laugh. I didn’t have enough of me left to be angry or even fully afraid. I was like a suffering animal, and I just wanted it to stop.

  “Tomorrow, I will not ask you any questions,” Skinny said, “and I will make sure Lou here cuts your tongue out first thing. So have a good night’s sleep, funny guy.”

  And after a little more “me time” with Lou, they buried me back in the deepest, darkest part of the Tombs.

  Skinny was as good as his word the next day.

  Time became intervals of torture and healing.

  The only food I got was what Darren managed to steal for me. I was so broken by the time they returned me in the evening, I was unaware of dinner. And the healing coma that the tiny magical robots in my cells put me into ensured I missed breakfast. If I was lucky, I caught a few lunches a week before the detail came to get me for my time in the interrogation room.

  I felt my humanity slipping away, my mind turning to liquid that couldn’t hold a tight thought or defend a position, and reasoning was getting harder every day. Between the lack of food, the drugs, and the torture, they were breaking me, it was working. Darren became my anchor to objective reality. Part of me was waiting for him to be gone one night when they returned me, another prop, another way to give me a scrap of hope and then take it away, but so far he seemed to be real.

  I woke as usual, feeling fine physically, but now, daily, my mind was dull, and it was hard for me to do much but stare. Thought was like pushing against a wall of mud. I counted on Darren to tell me how long I had been here. It was about a month now, he said. Thirty days, thirty trips to the interrogation room. Thirty healing treatments. I had fantasies at one point of Geri, Grinner, and the gang crashing into Rikers in some daring Matrix-like raid and saving my ass. I didn’t dream that anymore; I didn’t dream at all except of the torture in the interrogation room. Sometimes I couldn’t tell the dreams from the reality.

  My beard stretched to my stomach now and my hair to my midback. Both were streaked with silver. I had no clue how much the healing elixir was aging me, but I knew that the rush of my accelerated metabolism was now being checked by my near constant starvation.

  A white Styrofoam box sailed across the corridor. It landed with a thump by my bars, and a second later another food box fell.

  “Two?” I asked Darren. My voice sounded strange to me now, alien. Words felt thick and odd in my mouth.

  “Yeah, man,” he said from the darkness of the other cell. “I think it’s your anniversary or something, and you deserve a little treat, Crowley.”

  I worked the boxes through the bars and opened the first one.
It was piled with food—bacon, sausage, hamburgers, fries, scrambled eggs, ham sandwiches, potato chips, and a baked potato. The second one contained pizza slices, tacos, mashed potatoes, even a hunk of steak.

  Sitting on top of the piles of food were two joints, one in each box.

  “Merry Christmas!” Darren said and laughed.

  “Where the hell did you get this?” I said, and I think I smiled for the first time in a thousand years.

  “Don’t got matches, though,” Darren said, and I saw him standing with a big grin of his own and a joint dangling between his teeth. “Don’t got a light, do you?”

  I slipped my hands out past the edges of the bars and pointed at his blunt with my index finger.

  “Accendere,” I whispered to the stale air. The tip of his joint became cherry red, and smoke coiled away from it.

  “Whoa,” he said, and then laughed.

  “Yeah.” I nodded and sat back down on the bunk. “I get that a lot.”

  “How, how’d you do that, Crowley, man?”

  “Sweet old lady taught me how to do it,” I said. “I learned the fancy words some other places, but she taught me to listen to the fire and the air and the water. I wish I’d listened better.”

  I got off the bunk and lifted one of the legs. The leg was hollow, and I pulled out a crumpled cigarette pack. Inside were four cigarettes and the white lighter I had palmed on the first day.

  “How did you get this smoke?” I asked.

  “Shit, man, it’s prison,” Darren said. “Even in this part, it’s still prison. I used to suck off this guard in exchange for part of the weed he confiscated in the cell searches in the general population. I stockpiled it. Like your food there.”

  “Darren, my man, I think I have a notion.” I began to eat, wolfing down the food eagerly. I set the two joints, my cigarettes, and the lighter to one side and kept stuffing food into my mouth. “Do you know who the Seraphim are?”

  “The what? Angels, right? Angels in Heaven,” Darren said.

  “Yes, but wrong Seraphim. They are the secret police of the Illuminati. They make the Secret Masters’ enemies disappear. They are smoke and shadow, everywhere and nowhere, and they have our asses in the belly of the beast.”