Graves' end Read online

  Hannah tried to catch her when she dropped and both women tumbled to the floor, hard. They stayed there for a breathless minute or two. Then Lia sat up. So did Hannah. They exchanged a look.

  “I guess we can sleep down here tonight,” Lia said.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Ingrid wasn’t all that surprised when Lyssa and Nyx showed up again empty-handed. She’d been lounging languidly on a soft chaise for quite some ‘time,’ next to a dark teakwood throne the King had conjured for himself upon Mictlan’s endless plain, and she barely acknowledged the Archons’ reluctant reappearance.

  Skeletal Winston quietly continued mixing martinis behind a nearby bar. Besides the bar, her sofa, and the King’s fancy chair, there were no other signs of civilization anywhere beneath the slate-gray sky.

  Nyx and Lyssa dropped to their knees before their King. They wore simple linen wraps, as before, and their hair hung down their backs in neat braids. They looked like more or less ordinary women over here (if strikingly lovely ones, in the classical sense). Ingrid couldn’t even guess at what they must’ve looked like out there in the realworld, as strange and vast as they were.

  “Well?” Mickey said.

  Together, Nyx and Lyssa answered: “He has returned to the cold womb of the earth, Mictlantecuhtli.”

  Ingrid suppressed a satisfied smile.

  “He’s what?” Mickey said.

  “Returned to the cold womb of the earth, Mictlantecuhtli.” Again in unison, with submissively downcast eyes.

  “I heard you the first time!” Mickey shouted.

  Lyssa and Nyx wisely stayed quiet. The King jumped up, knocking over his throne, and commenced to pace. Ingrid watched him wearily.

  “What are you telling me?” he demanded of his playmates. “That he dumped himself back in a hole and pulled the dirt in on top?”

  Nyx and Lyssa exchanged a look and a shrug. “Yes, Mictlantecuhtli,” they said together. “We no longer feel his presence.”

  The King righted his throne and parked his ass, pouting. He sighed. “I did not expect that,” he said.

  “Nor did we, Mictlantecuhtli,” the Archons echoed.

  “I might’ve guessed,” Ingrid said. Everyone looked over at her, draped elegantly across her chaise. She shrugged. “If history’s any precedent,” she explained.

  The illusion of a man that called itself ‘Miguel Caradura’ sneered. He stood again, knocking over his throne for a second time. “Go ahead and laugh, witch!” he barked down at Ingrid. “You’ve got plenty of time for jokes.”

  Ingrid swung up into a sitting position, taking a moment to arrange her skirt. “Relax a little, why don’t you?” she suggested, glancing up at Mickey. “So they’re smarter than you thought they’d be. I’m sure your ‘companions’ will find them for you soon enough.”

  “Yes, you should keep on hoping that,” the King said.

  “Oh, come on, Mickey!” Ingrid cried, finally raising her voice in frustration. She was more than a bit amazed that he hadn’t blown this deal already by trying to get a glimpse of the witch called Lia Flores, perhaps to see if the newer model had a body he might enjoy possessing. “This has nothing to do with me anymore,” Ingrid insisted. “And we had a deal.”

  “I am altering the terms of that deal.”

  Ingrid rolled her eyes. “Then I’ll just pray you don’t alter them further, Lord Vader,” she said, trying to chide him with a joke, but Mickey turned on her with nuclear rage burning in his eyes.

  “Who is this Vader?'” he demanded. “You call me by the name of another man? Who is this person? I will eat his skin while savoring the music of his screams!”

  “Mickey, my god, have a drink,” Ingrid said, raising an eyebrow. “Winston?”

  Winston brought over a martini on a tray. A spiral curl of citrus peel clung to the rim of the frosty glass. Mickey refused to take it. He continued to glare at Ingrid, actually expecting an answer, it seemed.

  “It was a line from a movie, okay?” Ingrid told him, forcing herself not to sigh. “Remember I told you about movies? The dreams the realworlders share in common? What you said sounded like a line from one, is all.” When the King didn’t respond, she flashed her bright blue eyes at him and said, emphatically: “There is no ‘Vader,’ Mickey.”

  Mollified, King Caradura finally took Winston’s proffered martini. He looked to Lyssa and Nyx, who had cringed during his outburst, but hadn’t moved from where they knelt upon the ground.

  “Can you find again the place where he is buried?” he said to them, after sipping his drink and nodding his approval of it to Winston. “Are you that much smarter than my idiot Tzitzimime?”

  “We… we believe so, Mictlantecuhtli,” the sinister sisters replied.

  Mickey looked to Ingrid. “Well, that’s something then, isn’t it?” he said.

  Chapter Seventeen

  About a third of the impossible thing that called itself Dexter Graves sat in the middle of Bag End’s cold concrete floor, intently organizing the rest of his bones. His torn trenchcoat was still in place around his ribs and shoulders. The ragged garment had held those bones together when he fell down the tube, leaving his arms attached at the torso and in proper working order. He sang softly to himself while he sorted:

  “Soooo… the knee bone’s connected to the / leg bone, and the leg bone’s connected to the / hip bone, and the hip bone’s connected to this / other bone / but I still can’t tell / what this one iiiiis…”

  Lia stepped out from behind a folding shoji screen in comfy flannel pajama pants and a faded, laundry-thinned t-shirt, and paused to watch the decayed detective for a moment. Hannah was lying on her side on Lia’s bed, assembling a skeletal foot while munching cereal straight from the box. She glanced up at Lia, clearly suppressing her own laughter.

  “Mr. Graves?” Lia asked politely. “Is that really helping?”

  “Yeah, sure it is,” Graves said. “What am I, a goddamn osteopath over here? I gotta figure this out somehow. There’s about a thousand bones in the human body, y’know.”

  “There are two hundred and six,” Lia informed him, “and not all of yours even came apart.”

  “Then you figure out where they all go, you know so goddamn much,” Graves grumbled, crossing his arms in a show of weary petulance.

  “All right, all right, relax already,” Lia said, pulling her bobbed hair back into a blunt little ponytail that bristled like a makeup brush at the nape of her neck. “I’ll help.” She stepped in front of him, looking down at him squarely. “Just don’t go freaking out on me again, or I’ll have to put you back under glass. Understood?”

  “Ha!” Graves exclaimed. “Fat chance, sister. You’re not getting anywhere near my lighter again.” He frantically pawed at the front of his coat, searching for the item in question.

  Lia raised her eyebrows. She walked over to the shelf the lighter had been sitting on, underneath a waterglass, when last she’d seen it. “No? You sure about that?”

  “Of course I’m sure about that,” Graves shot back. “I rose from the dead to get that lighter. You can’t seriously think I’m gonna… gonna forget… oh.”

  He trailed off when Lia retrieved the Zippo from the scrim of broken glass it was still lying under up on the bookshelf, then held it aloft and waggled it.

  “Damn it all to hell,” Graves muttered, sounding defeated.

  Hannah did her best to muffle a snicker.

  “Well, what do you expect?” Graves said irritably. “My brains turned to mush a long time ago.”

  Hannah laughed aloud at that. Graves sulked. Lia smiled and tossed him his lighter. He caught it on the fly and looked up at her, more than a bit surprised.

  “You know this means I’m trusting you, Mr. Graves,” Lia said. “I expect your best behavior.”

  Graves stared at the lighter for a long moment before he put it away inside his coat, on the lefthand side, over the place where his heart used to be. It glowed warmly through the fabric for a pulse
or two before fading away, Lia noticed.

  “My word is my bond, dollface,” Graves swore, looking up at her earnestly. He seemed unable to keep a faint note of emotion out of his voice, and that made her smile. She knew how good it could feel to be trusted. “Dontcha ever let anybody tell ya different,” the skeleton continued. “And… you did promise to call me Dexter, if I recall.”

  “All right, then, Dexter.” Lia’s smile twisted into a mischievous grin as she nodded toward the little, leftover bone in his hand that he hadn’t been able to identify. “And that one’s your coccyx, by the way,” she said.

  “My what?” Graves yelped.

  “Your tailbone.”

  “Oh. Right.” Graves-Dexter-examined the little calcified nub. “Didn’t think what I thought had an actual bone in it.”

  Hannah outright snorted with laughter at that one, and Dexter looked over at her. “Okay, now I’m gettin’ the level of the room,” he said. “I pick up on subtleties, y’know. I was a private dick before I died.”

  “Private dick?” Lia said. She hadn’t heard that term before. Maybe it was from before her time, like ‘groovy’ or ‘zounds.’ It sounded nasty though, so she was intrigued. “What’s that,” she asked, “like a male prostitute or something?”

  “A male…?” Dexter was openly astounded. “No. God, no. What gutter is your mind in, girly? Geez! No, a dick’s a detective. A gumshoe, a seamus. You heard those vocabulary words before?”

  “Sure,” Lia said, grinning at his outrage. “But these days, just so you know, a dick’s a penis. Unless it’s a person, then it’s an asshole. Just FYI.”

  “I got a lot to bone up on, don’t I?”

  “No pun intended, I’m sure,” Lia said.

  Mystified, Dexter looked over to Hannah for clarification. “I made a pun?”

  Hannah smiled and shook her head. Lia yawned hugely.

  “We borin’ you over there, dollface?” Dex asked, swiveling his skull back in her direction. He seemed like he was starting to enjoy the banter.

  Lia handed him a rebuilt leg and he popped it into place. The bones stayed put when they were fitted together, like they had magnets embedded in their ends, and she thought the effect was pretty nifty. “It’s been a really long day for me, Dexter. That’s all.”

  She sneezed unexpectedly.

  “Plus I think I might be getting sick.”

  “Well, we can put out the lights and chase down some Zs, if you’re feelin’ the need,” Dexter said, and Lia noticed his voice had become overwhelmingly protective, underneath his hardboiled drawl. Again, she felt warmly glad to have rescued him. “This’s been a sorta trying sunup-to-sundown for me too, you wanna know the truth,” he said.

  Lia nodded. Hannah was looking at her with some concern. “Do you want a sleeping bag, Dexter?” Lia asked. “Do you get cold?”

  “Y’know, I haven’t really thought about it,” Dex said. After a moment’s consideration: “I guess I’m okay.”

  Lia nodded and unrolled her own bag onto the hard floor. She hadn’t realized how tired she really felt until just a few minutes ago.

  “Llll…isa?” Hannah said, catching herself on the verge of using Lia’s true name. “Honey? Do you want to sleep in your own bed? I can-”

  “Sleeping on this floor’ll kill your back, Han,” Lia said. “Really, I’ll be all right.”

  Hannah nodded uncertainly. Lia wriggled into her bag, and Dexter propped himself up against the wall. Tom curled up at Lia’s hip and she reached out a hand to touch his fur. Her eyes were already closing. “Can you get the light?” she said to Hannah.

  “Sure.”

  Hannah sat up to click off the lamp, and the small bed creaked when she settled back into it.

  In the ensuing silence, Lia let her eyes drift back open. Dexter Graves, lit only by the faint digital glow from her few electronic appliances, angled his skull in her direction. Something seemed almost to pass between them, some exchange or communication, although neither of them said a word.

  After a moment or two Lia watched the sentient skeleton lean back and settle his misshapen old fedora down over his eyeholes to sleep.

  Black Tom felt Lia’s fingers twitch against his fur when she began to dream. He could’ve joined her, tired as he was, and he would have, had he not also been able to tell that her dreaming was of a calm and restful variety. She was all right. So, instead of drifting off after her, he stood up from his motionless catbody and shuffled his ghost over to stand in front of Dexter Graves, leaning on his insubstantial cane out of old, unbreakable habit.

  In sleep, the bundle of bones wrapped in a raincoat looked about as divorced from life as a fossil should. If Tom had wandered in for the very first time he might’ve been tempted to believe that Graves had died trapped down here when the bomb shelter was new, and had been a decomposing part of the decor for the subsequent half-century. The clothed bones looked like nothing so much as the Calavera cartoons he remembered seeing in Mexican newspapers back when he’d been alive: engraved illustrations of skeletons getting drunk or riding bicycles or what have you. People still trotted out those old images of domesticated death every October, for use as Halloween decorations.

  Try as he might, though, Tom couldn’t sense any ill intent on this skeleton’s behalf. Which, in truth, worried him far more than the direct menace posed by the Archons and the Tzitzimime. Dexter Graves didn’t even seem to know who or what Mictlantecuhtli was, and yet Tom would’ve been an idiot not to assume some connection there. The mere fact of the dead man’s presence meant they weren’t shut of el Rey or his creatures yet, despite all of Lia’s clever if desperate attempts at deflection.

  He paused, listening again to his girl’s (and to Hannah’s) almost inaudible respiration in the darkness. Graves didn’t seem to breathe, and there were no other sounds to be heard this deep underground. Tom knew they couldn’t stay down here forever, though.

  He was filled with a dreadful certainty that el Rey’s ambitions hadn’t changed at all since the night he’d broken his covenant with the King and fled from his patronage, so many years ago.

  He wondered what sort of trap he’d led his girl into, and he could only hope they’d find their way out of it again.

  Retrospective No.2 ~ 1910

  A century ago…

  Southern Pacific’s Toluca Flyer pulled into the Valley Line terminus (at the busy heart of Lankershim Township, about as far to the west as one could travel by rail) right on schedule. The time was just after one o’clock in the afternoon on a temperate autumn day, late in the year 1910.

  ‘Lankershim,’ Delgado noted, with a wry arch to his brow, as the engine chugged the last few hundred yards down the gleaming tracks and into the station, finally rolling right across ‘Lankershim Boulevard’ itself. The broad dirt street was crowded with pedestrians, horsedrawn carts, and a surprisingly large number of those newfangled motorcars that were already becoming such a menace on the roads back east. The omnipresent name it bore was also a recent addition, both to the street itself and to the greater township at large. It had been contributed by the family of a sheep-magnate-turned-local-investor from someplace up north: one Mr. Isaac Lankershim. Obviously a humble and unassuming sort of man. Or at least that was the picture Los Angeles’ native necromancer had constructed from newspaper stories during this last leg of his long peregrination across the North American continent, as he made his way back home.

  Dulce had been dead for a decade, almost to the day. Delgado had planned his return to Los Angeles to coincide with that anniversary, according to the terms of the deal he’d been forced to make in order to avenge her murder… although he didn’t want to contemplate that just now. The pain of her loss had been dulled by time, but he could still feel it as keenly as a new wound whenever he made the mistake of letting memory catch up with him.

  The town at the end of the tracks had still been called ‘Toluca’ when he departed from this same station a full ten years before. He was a native Ca
lifornio, Tomas Delgado was, born on a nearby rancho in the year 1845, and he remembered back to a time when this particular place had enjoyed no proper name at all.

  But then the times were changing, weren’t they? Everything was changing, change was absolutely derigueur these days. In the fullness of time, Delgado reflected, this little boondock situated to the north of Hollywood would probably come to be called something else again.

  He eased himself down from the private car el Rey’s man had chartered for him and stepped onto the wooden platform, leaning heavily on his cane.

  His hip seemed to ache even when the weather was warm, these days.

  At sixty-five, Tom felt far older in his bones than he did in his mind. On some days that discrepancy didn’t bother him a bit, but on others, it did.

  He paused on the platform while his fellow travelers milled around him, greeting families or fussing with trunks, tickets and porters, then shielded his eyes to look south.

  The Santa Monica Mountains jutted up from the earth a few miles away, divided by the natural cleft once known to the old people as Kawengna. It was the ‘Cahuenga’ Pass these days, the old native name approximated by a new Spanish spelling.

  Not far beyond the pass, Tom knew, was a lonely field in which stood an ancient and gnarled encino, or oak tree, whose limbs had always pointed up at a Hole in the Sky. A Hole where someone was currently waiting for him to climb up and crawl through, as he’d long ago promised he would… one day.

  And now that day had come.

  Tom sighed. He could hardly complain. He’d had a decade to roam the earth and money enough to do it in style. He’d bedded the most beautiful of women during that time; dined at the finest of tables; drunk himself stupid on the rarest liqueurs. He’d seen the cities and palaces of Europe, traveled the colorful trade routes of Egypt and India, sipped at tea or opium while conversing with silken courtesans in the lacquered pavilions of the Orient. Through the grace of his patron Mictlantecuhtli, the ancient Aztec ReydeLosMuertos, the old sorcerer had done and seen and had just about everything he could remotely imagine doing or seeing or having, but now…