Graves' end Page 14

  Now that he’d traveled so far to the west that he was a mere ocean away from the mysterious East again (and, more importantly, now that the bill for the whole affair was about to come due), he couldn’t help but feel a touch of what the world’s professional pitchmen were said to have labeled ‘buyer’s remorse.’

  Caveat Emptor indeed, Tom thought.

  Watt, the skinny Englishman whose given name was Wendell or Wilson or Webster or something like that, if Tom remembered correctly, was already waiting for him across the street. Leaning against the Japan-black fender of a brand new Model T, right out in front of the Lankershim Post Office, where they couldn’t fail to miss each other.

  Watt raised a hand in greeting and Tom waved back, muttering “Hijo de puta…” through a phony rictus of a smile.

  He’d expected at least one night to himself. A chance to eat a last meal in a proper restaurant and sleep in a soft hotel bed. Not the King’s one-man welcome wagon over there. But he knew it was in his best interests to keep a pleasant face on things.

  And besides, he ought to be at least a little bit grateful. The Pacific Electric Railway had plans (again, according to the papers) to open a Big Red Streetcar line up from Hollywood to the recently-rechristened Lankershim sometime in the next year, but until then the only way over to the field containing the Tree That Grew Below the Hole in the Sky was via the rutted, winding dirt track that snaked through the mountain pass.

  The route was known by now simply as Pass Road, though Tomas could remember a day when it had been part of el Camino Real, the Royal Road connecting all the Spanish Missions up and down the coast. He also knew, beyond what he could personally recall, that it’d served the old people as something that might be better described as the Carretera del Rey, the King’s Highway (or simply the Road that Runs Past the Hole in the Sky), for some millennia before that.

  Riding in Woolgar or Wilshire or Wilbur Watt’s fancy new auto-mobile would certainly be easier on Tom’s old bones than the joint-jarring trudge in a hired horsecart that was his only other option.

  El Rey never skimped on hospitality. Not even when it overwhelmed his guests.

  Wallace or Walter or Watson crouched down to crank-start the Tin Lizzie while Tom hefted his bag over his shoulder and hobbled across the street on his walking stick. He’d heard those engines had a tendency to kick back if the spark wasn’t properly retarded, and he wondered if he wasn’t about to witness Willie or Wally or Whatever his name was breaking a thumb.

  But no, the engine sputtered safely to life, and Watt stood to shake Tom’s hand. “Welcome home, Tom,” the Englishman said, in his characteristically clipped and formal tones. He lowered his voice to add: “Mictlantecuhtli would see you.”

  Tom knew. That’s why he was here.

  He nodded, climbed up into the fancyass car, and held onto his hat as Winston (yes, that was it, Winston) Watt piloted the noisy contraption out into traffic and away down the street, frightening any number of horses.

  By the time they reached the far side of the pass Tom learned to be glad that the racket kicked up by Mr. Watt’s ‘auto-mobile’ more or less precluded casual conversation. He also learned, after they stopped for a gulp of water at the Eight Mile House (a small way station and hostel situated in the middle of the pass), that the infernal thing could hammer along at a pace of almost twenty-five miles per hour on a straightaway. Watt felt compelled to demonstrate that property, for some unfathomable reason, as they barreled down the southern side of the mountains.

  It felt suicidally fast to Tom. He remembered the headline furor surrounding the death-by-motorcart of a man named Henry Hale Bliss way back in 1899. The accident had still been the talk of the town when he first disembarked in New York City, after leaving Los Angeles. He further remembered naively regretting that the internal combustion fad hadn’t snuffed itself out before such a tragedy had to occur. Tom had been certain, back then, that the threat of violent, crushing death would finally be enough to dampen the public’s rabid enthusiasm for this absurd new sport of ‘motoring.’

  He, apparently, could not have been more wrong about that.

  Twice he and Watt met with vehicles like their own as they traversed the Carretera del Rey-noisy bouncing carriages piloted by grinning idiots swaddled in dusters and goggles, and each time such an encounter occurred one car or the other was forced to back some number of yards down the narrow dirt track until it widened out enough for someone to pull off into the weeds and let the other motorist pass by.

  Tom didn’t see how the Cahuenga Pass could possibly accommodate too many more of Mr. Ford’s Follies. Practical considerations like geography and the availability of fuels weren’t preventing people from buying the things, however.

  There were exponentially more autos on the Hollywood side of the pass, Tom noted, when they rolled down out of the hills. The cars puttered and honked their way past delivery wagons and well-dressed folks perched precariously atop fat-tired bicycles. Watt drove them down Highland and past the Hollywood Hotel: a vast, white, Moorish-style monstrosity hunkered at the northwestern corner of Highland’s intersection with Prospect Avenue.

  All of that acreage had been devoted to beans and strawberries the last time Tom had ridden by. There were even rumors in the papers now that old Prospect Avenue itself might soon be renamed ‘Hollywood Boulevard,’ in honor of the ever-expanding hostelry on the corner.

  The pace of development around here stunned him. There were still plenty of open fields stretching away to the horizons, but also so many large new homes and broad new streets, as well as all of the stores and schools and other businesses needed to sustain the ever-swelling numbers of brand new residents.

  The thought of so many new people living so near to the Hole in the Sky left Tom feeling a little sick.

  The old people-the Tongva and the Tataviam and the Chumash-had known how to respect a thing like a Hole in the Sky. Their fathers had known for countless generations, and the traditions they handed down amongst themselves had preserved the necessary balance between the elemental forces involved. Even the rancheros who displaced them had indulged a healthy superstition regarding old heathen magic, and they’d always shown enough good sense to leave the things they didn’t need to know about alone.

  These new people, though, Tom was not so sure about. They so often seemed to behave with the mindless rapacity of a swarm of locusts.

  What would happen when people like that discovered a thing like the Hole in the Sky? The old deflective hexes that protected it might not be able to keep the blissfully ignorant from stumbling across the secret by accident. Only the great Tree’s relative isolation and the difficulty of reaching the Hole above it had ever really prevented that.

  Worse still for Tom was the thought of what might happen if the King who occupied the twin chambers beyond the SkyHole were to become infatuated with the lives these new folks were building for themselves over here, on the far side of existence.

  What would become of the worlds if el Rey discovered Time, and the possibilities for growth, change, and increase that only it could offer?

  Tom Delgado literally shuddered to think of it, even in the warmth of the relentless California sun.

  Watt turned left at Sunset Boulevard, and when they motored through the intersection at Gower Street Tom saw it was true that the Blondeau Tavern had indeed closed down. The establishment had been doing land-office business back when Tom left town, serving Madame Blondeau’s famous pigeon- amp;-rum omelets to oceanbound daytrippers and local farmhands, and now it was gone. Marty Labaig’s older Six Mile House was still open across the street, still advertising light meals and cold drinks, although its sign now read ‘Casa Cahuenga.’

  Tomas nudged Watt in the ribs with his elbow to get the man’s attention and then motioned for him to stop in at the old roadhouse. He didn’t believe el Rey would begrudge him a quick glass of beer.

  Watt cut across the street and pulled up in front of the faux chateau, which still
had grapevines growing over its picket fence and up the sides of the house, exactly as Tom remembered. He felt relieved by the fact that something, at least, had managed to remain almost unchanged for over a decade. It was apparently quite a feat, here in the new Ciudad de los Angeles.

  “It true they mean to shoot motion pictures over there?” Tom asked, tipping his head toward Rene Blondeau’s boarded-up building across the street. “The Nestor Film Company?”

  “That’s what they say,” Watt said, and sniffed to indicate his contempt for the very idea. “Those Selig-Polyscope people are expanding their operation up in Edendale, too. Just what this city needs: a flood of producers and writers and actors.”

  “Oh my,” Tom said, cheered for the very first time that day by a vision of the future. He’d always enjoyed the company of actors. Well, of actresses, anyway. Still, the influx of theatrical types made sense. Tom knew from growing up around here that California’s weather would prove much better suited to the realities of film-making (a subject that had fascinated him for some time now) than anything he’d experienced on the eastern seaboard, or out in the middle west either. He wouldn’t be surprised to see the young city of Hollywood parlay the combination of Mr. Edison’s remarkable new technology and its own climatic assets into recognition as one of the world’s great centers of cultural dissemination, right after London and Paris and New York.

  He had to guess that Mr. Watt would respond with a hollow laugh if he tried to advance this theory to him. Tom figured they’d just have to wait and see.

  Then he remembered that he wouldn’t be here to see how the experiment panned out. He wouldn’t be here to see how tomorrow panned out, if things went as expected, and his momentarily-kindled spark of interest faded away.

  “Well, to hell with it all anyhow,” Tom said abruptly, then turned away from the movie-factory-to-be across the street and shuffled into the Six Mile House’s oasis of cool continuity on his cane. “I’ve been sober all morning, so maybe you wanna hurry up?” he said, back over his shoulder, to a bemused Winston Watt.

  Anyone watching would have assumed both Tom and Winston were well besotted by the time they wobbled out of the Six Mile House and made their way down to the grassy curb they’d parked at. Tom clambered back up into Mr. Watt’s gleaming new Tin Lizzie.

  He cast a surreptitious eye over at the bleary Englishman, who was pulling on his driving gloves with undue difficulty, as though he’d somehow found himself with more fingers than he remembered having.

  He was too skinny to be a good drinker, as Tom had guessed would be the case. Watt seemed aware enough of his limitations; he’d turned down Tom’s first offer to buy him a drink, attempting (Tom supposed) to keep things on a professional footing.

  But no one who worked for el Rey de los Muertos could stay away from the sauce for long, and Watt accepted Tom’s second offer. And then his third, and his fourth, and then some undetermined number beyond that. Tom did know that he was out almost five whole dollars, and he’d only bought three glasses of beer for himself. Watt had switched over from disgusting juniper-scented gin mixed with quinine water to bright green French absinthe at some point in the last two hours, and now he was crouching in the gutter to turn the Model T’s handcrank.

  A Prohibitionist’s worst nightmare, Tom thought. They could put this on a protest poster.

  This time the unpredictable engine did kick back, startling Watt, who leapt away from the thing with a shout, only to land on his ass in the street.

  Right in front of a horsedrawn farm wagon.

  The animals reared, almost upsetting the cart’s inventory of vegetables and clanking milk cans. The driver cursed at Watt and called him an idiot, then pulled his team around the obstruction and continued down Gower Street. Watt responded with an obscene gesture of his own, one he directed safely at the back of the receding cart, while Tom watched the whole exchange with one eyebrow arched dispassionately.

  “The roads around here are like this constantly these days,” Watt complained. “People have no manners at all anymore. I’m afraid it’s likely to get worse before it gets better, too.”

  Tom nodded, looking south over the fields and gardens, figuring Watt was probably right enough about that. There must have been literally a dozen houses in sight, almost all of them having cropped up like toadstools in the ten years that had passed since Tom last laid eyes upon this landscape.

  Forty years before that, the area for miles all around the Tree Below the Hole in the Sky had still been wild. The field it stood in was a natural prairie, situated across a low shelf of foothill bedrock. Isolation had long been its best, but not its only, defense.

  Back then, when Tom first came through here, he’d been on foot and in the company of his old friend Ramon San Martin. They’d been walking for some days-questing, really, one could say-eating nothing but the mix of dried cactus buttons and small brown mushrooms given to them by an old shaman in preparation for the trip. Teonanactl and Mescalito, the spirits of the plants they ate, walked with them. The spirits revealed the landscape as it was in their otherworldly eyes, and they guided the boys to what they sought, in their youthful foolishness: that which was rumored and whispered about by witches and sorcerers for leagues all around and had been for a thousand years or more.

  The Hole in the Sky, of course. And the two rooms that lay beyond it, the King’s Chambers, las Cameras del Rey. There was an antechamber, in which a man could stand and live; and then there was that inner room, the one with the blood-black altar. That was the Holy of Holies which, once penetrated, could never be returned from.

  At least not without the King’s permission, and even then it was only possible at a particular time of the year, the roughly forty-eight hour period acknowledged by the Catholic Church as the paired feasts of All Saints’ and All Souls’ days, when natural seasonal progressions brought the worlds into close alignment.

  Watt the Englishman squatted again before the auto’s handcrank, and this time he was able to wring the engine to life without incident.

  “We all set then, Tom?” he said, swaying a bit as he got to his feet.

  Tom nodded again, eyeing Watt for any signs of falsity in his behavior. He believed the man was legitimately soused, all right, but it wouldn’t do to be caught out unawares. Not now. Because, at some point in the afternoon, Tom had come to a decision. Quietly, without a lot of fuss or conscious consideration, he’d realized that he had no intention of climbing up that Tree, nor of crawling through that Hole. As he sipped his few beers (using a touch of sleight-of-mind to let Watt think he was matching him more or less drink-for-drink), his true objective had finally solidified.

  Now, he planned to let the King’s Englishman drive him out to the field with the Tree. But then, instead of ascending, he’d find a pretense to buy some time and wait till Watt inevitably passed out from acute inebriation.

  At which point Tom would tie him up, and then cut down that godforsaken oak.

  That’s right: he meant to chop down the Tree Below the Hole in the Sky. The ladder to the otherworld. The stairway to… well, not heaven.

  He could hardly believe it himself, but when he looked into his heart, he found that it was true.

  Tom looked over at Watt as the man hoisted himself up into the Model T’s driver’s seat. He hardly looked capable of operating the Ford’s elaborate controls. Tom wanted to offer to drive, but he’d never piloted an auto-mobile before in his life, and besides, he couldn’t now claim to be less intoxicated than Watt without tipping his hand, could he?

  If the Englishman killed them on the road, well… then Tom figured he’d just arrive in the King’s realm a little ahead of schedule.

  But if they happened to survive the drive, then he might yet have his chance to turn the tables.

  Part Three: All Souls’ Day, Morning

  Chapter Eighteen

  A century later…

  A tall, female figure in head-to-toe black leather stood at a scenic viewpoint off M
ulholland Drive and gazed out over the San Fernando Valley as it yawned and stretched away below her in the day’s clear new light. She had her helmet’s mirrored visor down, obscuring her face from view. The rising sun’s reflection burned across the silvered plastic in a hot white stripe.

  She raised a divining rod in her right hand and flicked it with her left index finger. The rod spun wildly, like a compass needle near a magnet, round and round.

  Then, with unnatural suddenness, it pulled to indicate north/northeast, and froze there.

  The concealed woman nodded, zipped the rod into a breast pocket, and swung a leg over a hulking black motorcycle that was parked at the side of the road. When she kickstarted her ride and roared off a total of six big black cars trailed after her, snaking down the winding road that ran through Laurel Canyon.

  Fifteen minutes later, the same woman and her six-car retinue growled to a stop for a red light at Laurel and Sherman Way, nearly halfway across the Valley’s flat floor.

  The foothills a few miles back had seemed a lot more affluent and pretty, in her opinion. Up here it was all blank-faced warehouses and construction-supply outlets with little knots of hopeful laborers milling around outside their parking lots. Cheery, accordion-based Mexican music blared from a nearby pickup truck that was also caught at the red.

  The leatherclad, helmeted biker took her divining rod from her breast pocket and flicked it again, repeating her wayfinding operation while the six black sedans that made up her ominous entourage settled in behind her. The rod spun, then froze, pointing in a more easterly direction.

  They were getting close now.

  The concealed woman nodded and zipped the rod back into her pocket. She glanced over at the pickup truck that was idling next to her, raised her visor for just a flash, and the men inside the cab promptly turned their music down.