Rex and I have been through some wild shit over the years. Truth be told I rather like him. However, meeting your dealer around midnight for some late night, secret knock loft party shenanigans is a situation fraught with danger. It was then a relief to find him staring defeated into an empty glass, so obviously wasted that it took him several minutes studying the subtle contours of my face before he recognized me.

Rex, for his own vices, has always been a pills and whiz type but looking at the state of him it was clear he had switched to junk and with horrible abandon. This was in a way good news. There would be, as is the way of the junky, the looming possibility of horrid shambling disasters and bodily fluids. However, if Rex was all smacked up, me having little interest in the shit and junkies not known for their generosity, I could keep my proverbial nose clean while working a job.

“Swingshift you sorry fucker, it’s been a dog’s age. Are you picking up from someone else these days? You cheap bastard.”

His usual affected diction sounded bizarre through the slur of intoxication. His well-tailored suit was crumpled, wrinkled and sweat stained. It hung like a ratty shawl around his razor blade shoulders.

“No sir, just on a stretch of clean living if you’ll believe that?”

“Nice man, nice, me too actually, within reason of course. It’s all on account of my new girl. You absolutely must meet her.”

Rex rolled his head about grotesquely in a scan of the bar that required his entire upper body to execute. After a few awkward minutes, I began to worry that the girl had fucked off on him hours before or worse was entirely imaginary. That was until a striking young girl turned from the jukebox at the far end of the bar and gave Rex and me a playful wave hello.

She was tall and slender with a Middle East by way of Paris complexion that I could not pin down. She was rather young even for Rex, who like me traded at a significantly younger age than his carbon dating. However, as she crossed the half full bar she carried herself with a confidence and poise of a more worldly woman. As she came closer, warning sirens erupted at the back of my brain but she had already fixed a set of fathoms deep, dark eyes on me.

“I am Qarin; Rex has told me all about you.”

“Well with a recommendation from Rex, I’m surprised you’re even talking to me.”

“This is one old school motherfucker Q.” Rex garbled the words beyond intelligibility and then lunged at a passing bartender who avoided his grasp with a quick flourish that had been perfected through excessive repetition.

“An old school shamus with a soft spot for witches is what I gathered.”

Qarin continued conversation undisturbed, turning her back to her boyfriend’s misbehavior. I gestured after the bartender in apology for Rex’s actions and tried to order a round.

“I’ll serve you and the lady if you promise to keep a short leash on him.”

The weary bartender gestured at Rex. After a quick conference, we took him up on the offer.

“A double Rye for me, an Absinthe sour for the lady and your freshest ice water for our companion.”

Rex turned on me with disdain in his glazed eyes. He was knitting together a conspiracy between the barman and me. It did not help that my face was colored by the guilt of having indecent thoughts about his girlfriend. For her part, Qarin left Rex alone and kept me locked down with a stern smile.

“You are too much,” She laid a disarming hand on my bicep. “Who drinks Rye in this century?”

“You want to talk anachronisms; Absinthe was outlawed nearly a century ago.”

As the kid returned with our drinks, Rex managed a savage leap across the bar at him. He had climbed up on the stool for height but managed to kick it over sending hum tumbling over onto the business side of the bar. By the time we turned around all I could make out were his cheap canvas shoes flailing upside down from behind the taps punctuated by a long string of curses from the barman.

Needless to say, we found ourselves out in the street dragging Rex out of the rain gutter in short order.

***

Fortunately, the drama managed to sober Rex up some. A Red-Bull Qarin fetched from the corner store did not hurt either. Soon we had him up and walking down Marcy toward Broadway. Keeping Rex upright and moving forward proved an immersive distraction for Qarin and me. This kept the dangerous flirtations to a minimum and me out of trouble for the moment. Once we emerged from under the Broadway train trestle, we began searching doors of battered buildings for ornate fixtures. Qarin was trying discreetly to use a coin on a necklace chain as a makeshift douser’s pendulum.

“Have you been to a door knock party Swingshift?” She inquired, “I feel like I would remember seeing you.”

Rex shot me a puckish grin that boasted of his girlfriend’s youth.

“Not in some time.” My non-descript response. “I’ve heard it’s a bit more of a spectacle these days.”

We came upon what looked like an abandoned bicycle shop and there perfectly hung on the shop’s battered crooked door, amongst layers of ancient grease and adhesive, was a massive brass doorknocker shaped as Anubis’ head. There was a ring in its mouth and red jewels set in its eyes that glowed gently in the night air.

Rex steadied himself with one hand on the doorjamb, traced an intricate sigil in the grime above the dog’s head and muttered a short incantation that sounded like a Welshman learning Yiddish. It took him a few attempts to get his numbed tongue around the unforgiving syllables but eventually the door did not so much open as simply dissipate into the air. As we crossed the threshold, a rush of crowd heat, incense smoke and loud music enveloped us.

As unassuming as the building’s facade was, inside it was an endless maze of high-ceiling corridors filled with stylish and costumed revelers. The walls appeared to lean in odd directions, the result of a perceptual trick of some kind. The effect was so strong that it made it difficult to remain steady on your feet through the crowded corridors. Rex was stopped every few steps by friends and clients alike. This further hindered any forward progress as each time it became more difficult to get him off the nod and moving again. Eventually I was forced to leave him in Qarin’s hands and make my escape, promising to return with fresh cocktails.

It took a fare amount of undignified stumbling but eventually I located a flight of stairs. I escaped the first floor’s ridiculous maze and entered the second floor’s large open performance space. There was a bar at the back of the room and a large stage at the opposite end. A band played a series of competing feedback loops from behind a mesh screen on which Kenneth Anger films and Tooter the Turtle cartoons were projected. I managed to procure a plastic cup full of brown liquor and zoned out in the back for a bit, letting the booze do its job. As I watched the hapless Tooter cry out for Mr. Wizard’s magical assistance, I slowly ran down what I knew about Jimmy.

James Murzim, Jimmy the Pop Magus to his detractors, had made his name as a member of the art collective cum indie rock band Canis Majoris. The group was known for reclaiming the earnest mysticism of the late 60s from soulless frat house jam bands and repackaging it for consumption by a young, jaded, post-irony generation. The band wallowed for a time in the bittersweet status of local heroes until they managed to stumble onto a big summer radio hit with a drone heavy cove of The Carpenter’s “We’ve Only Just Begun”. In a very short time, their fan base transformed from a handful of beardy faced indie heads into a nationwide army of obsessive young girls.

The clichéd infighting and “creative differences” followed and quickly unraveled the group, spinning the individual members in various solitary directions. Instead of an Eno produced solo project or ill conceived clothing line, Murzim chose to take his little piece of cash and fame and do a bit of esoteric backpacking. He spent the next few years traveling the globe in search of lost mystical arts and obscure hallucinogenic substances. He pestered every yogi, witch and shaman from the Amazon to the Ganges and across most of Europe and reported it all in hyperbolic dispatches on his blog.

When his curiosity waned and the cash ran out he returned to Brooklyn. Upon arrival, he discovered a small subculture of bright young things enthralled with the occult and captivated by his adventures. The siren song of fame called to him again. In a short time, Jimmy Murzim formed a commune in a donated old loft in Bushwick and began to gather his very own flock of well-heeled young sheep ripe for fleecing.

I knew an ego case like Jimmy would not be in the middle of a dark and crowded dance floor. After another stop at the bar, I found my way through yet another maze of hallways, and into an open courtyard. Either I was more turned around than I thought or the courtyard had little concern for the reality of being on the second floor of a three-story building. As I had hoped, Murzim was sitting in the corner of the courtyard. He was holding court for the amusement of a few followers who, for their part, hung on his every word.

I kept to the shadows, thinking invisible thoughts, listening to Jimmy work his audience. He was dressed in skinny white jeans and white blazer, bearded like all good gurus. He sat up on a ragged old picnic table, his legs crossed and a battered pair of white yacht shoes next to him. A dozen and half listeners sat on benches or the ground, instinctively placing themselves at a lower status then the man himself.

The members of the pop magus entourage were generally young, the fresh glow of youth just beginning to fray at the edges, slim, well dressed for the scene and attractive. As I scanned the group looking for Liahana, I noticed a recurring accessory among the tribe. Over half of them wore solitary rubber bracelets of the variety used for charity awareness campaigns. You know “Live Strong” and the lot. On closer inspection, these bracelets were actually constructed of three thin bands, two gray and one a deep red, which were twisted together. A flash of corpses in matching tracksuits and Nikes fluttered through my mind and I had to shake off a shudder. I did not make out Liahana in the group so I leaned back against a brick wall and took in a whiff of Jimmy’s routine.

It was a pretty lame performance all being told. He riffed on some standard late night spliff talk and delivered it with cheap Learning Annex NLP tricks. He wove his way through a myriad of paranoid classics about the military entertainment complex and one personal journey of liberation through DMT experiences. By the time he reached an apocalyptic frenzy I had decided to chime in.”

“The symbiotic relationship of destruction between the monotheists in The West and The Middle East is becoming unsustainable.” Jimmy lead in out of nowhere. “Can’t you see that the end of this death cycle is near just as the Maya had professed?” Can’t you see the signs pointing toward the end of time? As the Maya ended the long count at the thirteenth baktun so will the current world fall away and a brave new world be reborn.”

“Or they just decided to put off drafting that new calendar for a few hundred years.” I stepped out of the shadows into the courtyard’s solitary swathe of light and in the process made an entrance more dramatic than I had planned. “Historically the Maya were serious procrastinators and mysterious extinction would make it a hard project to finish up?”

“Ah, Dick Swingshift. The underground’s own Columbo. You here to enlighten us on the long count calendar system?”

“Well” I ran my best Peter Falk which to be honest was not very good. “All I know is when Ms. Swingshift finishes off a calendar after the holidays. We pick one up at the close out bin at Duane Reade and reality continues on unhindered.”

The shtick was good way to cover my surprise that he knew me by name.

“Over simplifying is clever but not effective here. I have been to the Mayan ruins and studied the Dresden Codex and the signs are too startling and numerous to be explained away as coincidence.”

“I respect your well traveled opinion Mr. Murzim. I’m just not sure I’m willing to set my apocalypse watch by an extinct civilization who wore their calendars as hats.”

Then, in the middle of what was to be honest an incredibly ridiculous sentence, Liahana wandered into the courtyard, emerging from some obscured entryway. As she crossed the empty space between Jimmy and me, she turned and the light caught her face. She was unmistakably the girl from the picture. She did not have the drawn and haggard coked-up look that I had expected. Instead, the years had been kind; she had grown into the looks. She walked up to Jimmy, pulling his ear and whispering in to it. I had the distinct fear that I had been made.

My fear eased back a touch when she continued on her way and Jimmy picked up where he had left off.

“The ancients are not extinct they live on in their monuments placed as instructions and warning for those who are open to them.”

I tried as quickly as I could to tidy up my end of the exchange and take off in the hope of catching Liahana before she disappeared downstairs.

“Well then where are they? It’s pretty obvious we could really use some of that mystic wisdom here at the end of time. Unless of course you believe they ascended into the next world ahead of us. Which if true is just a little to Catholic for my pagan sensibilities.”

I had blocked off his rhetorical line by offering it up as an option and then pissing on it. He just sat dramatically silent for a moment. A moment to long for my tastes as I was losing sight of why I was in the bullshit session in the first place.

“I’m sorry Murzim; I don’t mean to intrude on your conversation. I have had too much, or perhaps too little to drink this evening…” I brandished my empty cup and laid on the slur for effect. “…and I just like to argue. I’ll leave you to yours”

With that I stalked off in the direction I had come in, not wanting to be seen following after Liahana. I was forced to duck back and loop around. The weird perceptual effects made it difficult to navigate my way through the corridors but I managed it just. I caught sight of her about to descend a crowded staircase.

“Liahana.” I surprised myself by calling after her.

She paused on the first step and I wove through the crowd to close the gap before she turned around. She turned on me with a look that made it clear there was a clock ticking and I had better impress quickly.

“I don’t believe I know you?”

“I’m Swingshift, Dick Swingshift in fact.” I was sucking wind from the chase and approaching claustrophobia.

“I’ve heard your name around, aren’t you some old school head?”

“Something like that.”

“I liked the way you handled Jimmy back there. He needs a little push back every now and again. Man’s head gets any bigger he’ll have to sleep on the fucking roof.” I may have bought a small sliver of time but the clock behind her eyes was still ticking away. We moved away from the stairs.

“That does not however, explain how you know my name or why you’re stalking me through a crowd?”

It appeared time was already up. A dozen or more routines to run on her raced through my head but in the end I decided to roll the dice and lead with some flavor of the truth.

“I’m working for your old man. He’s hired me to track you down. He’s concerned.”

She responded with a riotous mocking laugh. As per usual, leading with the truth had paid high dividends in humiliation.

“Listen Dick, I know I look all perky and polite but I’ve not landed yesterday and I’ve known my dear Da twenty some years now, making me a bit of an expert. So do not lay some line of shit about fatherly concern on me. Alright?”

In short order, I had pissed away any upper hand I had in the situation. My options were seriously limited by my ignorance, so I just stared at her blankly and hoped she would toss me a lifeline.

“Oh shit ….He played you didn’t he? Or was it that pervert Henderson? No, even you couldn’t be a big enough rube to have Henderson work you over.” I could not believe that the only angle I had left was pity but you do not become a P.I. on account of an excess of pride.

“Well, Ms. MacEndroe, he did drop a sizable roll of bills on me to track you down. He must have some concerns.”

Playing dumb was easy. I was perfect for the part.

“Oh he has his concerns alright, but they are not for his little girl’s well being. You tell him if padlocking my trust fund didn’t getting me to crawl home, sending some P.I. isn’t going to break me.”

We were starting to get somewhere when suddenly a shout rang out from behind me.

“Swingshift there you are you sneaky bastard.” It was Qarin coming up the stairs. She sounded significantly more intoxicated then when I had left her. “Nice work abandoning me with the life of the party down there.” As she made her way toward us, a number of people were pushing their way up the stairs around her. There was obviously trouble downstairs but if that was why she had come over she had already forgotten. Instead, she slid her arm under mine and leaned in toward Liahana.

“Well if it isn’t the Pop Magus’ wicked little witch.”

The snarling possessive tone in her voice instantly reminded me that I was trying to avoid her. Liahana appeared unimpressed by the cheap dig so Qarin turned her focus on me.

“Rex is shooting his mouth off downstairs and I’m certain he’s going to be trampled to death. You must come help me.”

Liahana saw an exit and made her move. “Well, I think we are done here anyway Mr. Swingshift. I leave you to your friend.”

She tossed the icy last words at Qarin and went to leave.

I was fucked and I knew it. I moved in and slipped her my card, which consisted of a white card with “Swingshift” printed on the front and a handwritten number for the bar on the back. I held her hand and jockeyed for eye contact.

“We really should talk this out. Perhaps, we could come up with an arrangement beneficial for both of us.” She smiled gently, took the card and split back toward the courtyard. I prayed to a series long forgotten deities that the hail mary would work. Then I gave in and let Qarin drag me downstairs to get my head kicked in.

We found Rex at the foot of the stairs, sprawled out leisurely as if he were tucked into a lazy boy. He was shouting an un-pausing litany of insults at what may have been the largest, grimmest crew of black metal dudes ever.

“You glue-sniffing, ‘roid raging, bum-boys of Beelzebub, you wouldn’t know real evil if it popped ’round and gave you eyeliner tips.”

This was not good. I managed to leap awkwardly over the reclining Rex and placed myself between them. It had seemed like a good idea but I quickly regretted it as the leather clad grim artists began to size me up for a stomping.

“Ok, gentlemen. I have one for you. What do Erik the Red and Kermit the frog have in common? They share a middle name.”

It has been my experience that bad jokes are more effective than tazers in most violent situations. I swear to you the biggest, grimmest bastard of the lot, nearly cracked a smile. For a brief moment I thought we might be in the clear. Then Rex uttered a horrid sound that doomed us for good.

“Bork Bork Bork, Croonchy Stars! Bork Bork!”

Time slowed to a dull tick. I wondered if the Muppet Show had ever made it to Norway. The rising shades of anger in the giant metal dude’s face gave me my answer.

“Rex for fuck’s sake their Norwegian.” was all I managed to mutter before I was lifted clean off of my feet and casually tossed throw the air. I ended up in Rex’s lap on the stairs. At first I thought he was trying to help me to my feet, but it soon became clear Rex was using me as a shield against the rain of massive Viking boots descending on us.

***

After a while, the Vikings grew tired of kicking us. Qarin and I managed to get a mostly unconscious Rex out of the party and into a waiting car. I gave the driver, my man Jonesy, all the cash in my pockets and begged him to take both of them to Rex’s and if possible to lock Rex in his apartment as he was obviously a menace to himself and others.

I decided, even in my bruised and battered state to walk home. I needed to think through the MacEndroe fiasco. Suddenly things had taken a sharp left turn and I needed to come up with some damage control. I was lost in thought crossing Broadway when all of the hair on the back of my neck stood up and my feet fused themselves to the pavement. Though it was just before dawn, the air has still been thick and warm but suddenly an icy chill drifted across my knees. I squinted in to the darkness and found two luminous green eyes staring back at me. My breath went shallow and my ears filled with a deafening ring. Out of the shadow the form of massive black beast rose. If it was a dog, it was no breed I have ever seen. It was the size of a bear and formed of concentrated darkness. Only its eerie glowing eyes and eighteen-inch white fangs were discernible through the pitch.

It stood poised in front of me. I felt its heavy stare push against my chest. It sniffed the air, searching. Slowly an army of dogs emerged from the side streets and filed in behind the beast. There must have been a dozen or more. Tough feral strays by the sight of them. They sat at attention behind the massive black beast as if waiting for orders from a field general.

The massive creature took a few measured steps toward me. I knew if I tried to run the dogs would take me down like a fawn. The beast smelled of rotten flesh and stale wet ashes. It took one further sniff at the air. Then, not finding the scent it wanted, it turned and padded off into the early morning black. The dog pack sat at attention for another moment. Even with the beast departed, they were a formidable threat. A giant mastiff, thin and gaunt with only one eye, came forward and dropped something onto the pavement in front of me. The dog turned his head and gave me what I could only interpret as a gentle apologetic look. Then suddenly, as if a silent whistle had blown, the pack turned and was off. They ran fast and silent down Marcy after their leader.

I rubbed at my eyes and remembered to breathe. It took a moment for the adrenaline to ebb and the ringing in my ears to subside. I looked down to see what the mastiff had dropped. Lying at my feet was a human limb, torn from the elbow down in a brutal manner. Frozen, I could not turn away from the gruesome sight. Then I noticed, strapped tightly around the disembodied wrist, a rubberized bracelet, three bands, two gray and one a dark metallic red.