Graves' end Read online

  The red light changed to a green and the woman continued traveling north into the Valley, following the rod and leading her menacing procession of nondescript cars forward.

  Dexter Graves popped his skull up through Bag End’s already-open hatch. It was a lovely morning, bright and cool and full of birdsong. There were savory breakfast smells on the breeze.

  Graves climbed up out of the tube and into the sun, glad to be, well, if not exactly alive, then whatever the hell this was. His bonus round. It might not’ve been perfect (not by a damn sight), but it sure beat the long dirtnap.

  Of which he remembered surprisingly little, he found, when he stopped and gave it some thought. He had a hazy, disjointed memory of being burritoed up in a paint-spattered dropcloth then hauled out to a desert grave by Big Juan San Martin, Hardface’s enforcer, whom he now regretted not shooting back when he had the chance. After that, it was like his mind had shut down in the face of unending blackness, boredom and immobility, and it hadn’t stirred again until that driving compulsion to find his lighter roused him yesterday morning. Why that should have happened, he just couldn’t say. He didn’t know how these things worked. Going through them wasn’t enough to make you an expert.

  After a few agreeable minutes of wandering through the dew-bejeweled plant life and feeling the grasses underfoot tickle his toebones, Graves spotted Miss Hannah some way off through the greenery. She was standing in a little clearing filled with garden furniture, making bacon and eggs on a portable hotplate she’d dragged up from Lia’s bunker, as well as tea with an electric kettle.

  She didn’t seem to see him.

  Graves heard water start to run somewhere in the distance and he turned his skull in the direction of the sound, too curious about what Miss Lia might be getting up to not to check into it before he started a conversation with Hannah. She glanced up before she began setting out Lia’s mismatched plates, an instant after Graves stepped behind the cover of a potted tree. Maybe she saw him, and maybe she didn’t. Either way, she smiled a tiny smile and continued to busy herself with pleasant morning chores.

  Deciding she hadn’t seen him after all, Graves wandered off to look for Lia.

  She had an old waterheater jury-rigged into the Yard’s irrigation apparatus, and a soft cotton bathtowel thrown over a nearby garden bench.

  She stepped, naked, into the steamy cascade of water that gushed down from a showerhead on a hose that she’d slung over a wooden arbor, one nestled amidst a bower of fragrant citrus, peach and pear trees. She knew, from Black Tom, that these tall, rooted fruit trees were all holdovers from the Valley’s agricultural past.

  Her private outdoor shower was Lia’s very favorite amongst the many perks that came along (in her opinion) with life at Potter’s Yard.

  Behind her, Dexter the trenchcoat-wearing skeleton came sauntering out of the unruly foliage that proliferated back here in this far corner of the Yard. He spotted her straightaway, and she saw him duck back behind a juniper shrub, out of the corner of her eye. He peeked out from around his camouflage a couple of moments later, apparently thinking he was being subtle.

  Lia smiled. Some gumshoe, she thought.

  She was feeling a lot better this morning, after a good, recharging night’s sleep. Improved enough to be feeling a touch… well, playful. Something deep in her core quivered enticingly when she imagined Dexter’s eyes (or his ocular orbits, anyway) drinking in the naked sight of her.

  She didn’t think of herself as a necrophile. She’d never performed a peep show for a corpse before, and she’d certainly never expected to. But she was about to do it now, and she felt the strangest combination of surprise and excitement as she contemplated her own imminent behavior.

  Lia washed herself, languidly, leisurely, keeping her back to Dex, whom she knew wasn’t going away. She squeezed water from her hair (which looked like a spill of India ink when it was wet), and shook it out. She soaped up a second time just for show, just to let herself glisten amidst the torrent of white waterdiamonds that cascaded down all around her, basking as she did every morning in the warmth and billowing steam, fully aware that every inch of her bare, creamy skin was shining in the glory of the pure morning sun…

  While one leering cadaver looked on, with his jawbone hanging open to his sternum.

  Graves knew he shouldn’t have been there. He knew he should’ve beaten a retreat already and decided, reluctantly, that he would now actually do so. Before things got weird. He turned away from the scintillating sight before him (with more than a moderate degree of personal difficulty), and ran smack into Hannah, who’d snuck up behind him with a steaming cup of tea in her hand.

  Graves shouted and backpedaled, tripping over a stray flowerpot and taking a number of young Japanese maples down with him when he tumbled over backwards, landing hard enough to rattle his bones.

  He lay there for a moment, in the dirt, gazing up and feeling dazed. Hannah looked down from one side of his field of vision. Lia, her black hair dripping, did the same from the other. There was nothing but blue sky behind them, piled high with bulging towers of bright white cloud.

  “Tea, Dexter?” Hannah asked cheerfully. She and Lia (who’d swaddled herself in a towel) both laughed aloud.

  Graves sat up. “Yeah, that’s funny,” he said, exaggerating his perturbation as he retrieved his hat and crammed it back onto his bony head, then got to his feet. “Real funny. What’re you, the vice squad? This a sting operation? You know damn well I got no gut to dump that in,” he accused, pointing imperiously at Hannah’s teacup.

  Lia claimed it and sipped from it herself, grinning at him over the rim. He did like being grinned at by her, he had to admit. That chopped-off haircut made her a dead ringer for pretty picture star Louise Brooks, with whom he’d been infatuated since he was about fourteen years old. All the way back in 1929.

  He heard the sound of engines somewhere in the near distance, but traffic noises weren’t uncommon around here, and none of them took any particular notice.

  “Looks like you’re feeling better this morning, anyway,” Graves observed, automatically tilting a salacious socket down toward Lia’s thighs, which poked out fetchingly from underneath the hem of her abbreviated towel-skirt. He hardly even realized he was doing it.

  “I think I just needed to sleep,” she said, stepping close and gently tipping Graves’ chinbone back up so that he had to meet her eyes. “I get twitchy when I’m tired.”

  “Well, don’t we all, sister,” he said, feeling dizzily bemused and more than a little embarrassed to’ve been caught so nakedly eyegroping Miss Lia’s gams. You’d think not actually having the offending orbs anymore he’d be able to keep ’em in his goddamn head, but no. Not him. No chance.

  At least he couldn’t blush in his current condition.

  “Don’t we all…” he repeated, a solid beat too late, just for the sake of having something more to say, and he was gratified when Lia nudged his femur with her terrycloth hip and smiled up at him.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Black Tom watched over the Yard from the peak of the office shack’s corrugated roof, through his catbody’s sharp green eyes. He was in the habit of giving Lia a bit of space in the mornings, so that she could bathe and see to other personal business in relative privacy.

  From where Tom was crouched he could see all the way to each edge of the nursery’s property, and far beyond. To the north of them, the DWP generating station’s four red- amp;-white, candy-striped smokestacks poked up into the blue sky. Closer by, he could easily look out over the locked front gate and down into the empty street outside.

  While he was lounging in the early sun and lazily watching the Yard’s perimeter, a large black motorcycle piloted by a tall woman in head-to-toe black leather came rumbling down the road. She surprised Tom when she stopped her bike and let it idle right before the Yard’s front gate. Half a dozen long black cars also pulled up and parked at the curbs on either side of the street.

  They didn�
��t look like landscape designers, who rarely if ever traveled by motorcade. Tom sent a note of concern out toward Lia, just one soft alarm bell. For now. He could feel his girl tiptoeing back toward her bomb shelter with her rubber shower-sandals slapping at her heels, still unclothed except for a towel she’d cinched around herself like a fuzzy white mini-dress.

  The black-clad woman killed her engine and swung herself off her bike, then wandered up to the fence. Her henchmen, a full dozen of them, got out of their cars and stood around, waiting for orders.

  The leatherclad Amazon took in the eyeball-covered fence, with its multiple rings of Pi digits scorch-tattooed onto the silvery wood. She raised her helmet’s mirrored visor for a better look. None of the henchmen were in a position to see Lyssa’s mad static revealed instead of a face, but Tom was.

  Lyssa, Lady Madness, was the unknown biker. Crazy as she was, she’d somehow found her way back out here, and this time she had a different kind of reinforcement in tow: a dozen armed men with money as their motivator, in place of a handful of nightmares. Maybe things looked clearer to her by the light of day, which obviously didn’t force her to retreat from reality as it did in the case of her relation Nyx, or the Tzitzimime.

  Tom’s psychic warning bell began to clang in earnest, in time with his catbody’s skyrocketing heart rate.

  He felt Lia down in her bomb shelter, throwing on clothes she’d laid out before her shower and searching under the furniture for her shoes. She was coming, but she was still far away, down below ground in the most distant corner of the eight-acre Yard. Events were apt to unfold here at the gate before she could make the scene.

  Lyssa reached out and touched her gloved fingertips to the fence. “Oooooh, such an angryugly stare,” she murmured, her voice gone soft with wonderment. The painted eyes didn’t seem to trouble her much. “Oh, and a Pi slide; a long, long Pi slide, all the way down, down into the ground…”

  Tom watched the nearest pair of henchmen exchange a clear look of no confidence.

  Lyssa snapped her visor closed and turned back to them. “This is the Gravesite, yes,” she said decisively, in a somewhat muffled voice. “Surround it now, you vicious boys.”

  For a moment, nobody moved. Then the oldest of the assembled men stepped forward. He wore a scuffed leather jacket and his face was both shaped and textured rather like a brick. He looked to be in his early fifties. “Lady, look, I know Mickey Hardface wanted you to bring us out here,” he said carefully. “But ain’t somebody else gonna, like, tell us what to do?” After a beat he added, hopefully: “Anybody?”

  Lyssa cocked her helmeted head like she’d never seen such a thing as him before. “The Sun King reigns o’er hard, bright hours,” she said, “and I walk the day by his permissive grace, but my sister-mother never can hold dominion here. Duh. But Dexter Graves has left his grave and I can feel him there amidst the trees again. Our moment grows as ripe as the gibbous moon!”

  Brickface exchanged a second look with his buddy, the one he’d shared a car with on the drive out here. It was plain enough to Tom that the faceless wackadoo’s line of horseshit did not sound good to them, not good at all. It didn’t sound so great to him, either.

  “So… that’d be a no, then?” the pensive wiseguy pressed, still trying to get an answer on that chain of command issue.

  “That’d be a find him find him find him now, before I bite your squishy eyes to feel them pop between my teeth,” Lyssa elucidated. She then raised her voice to address the men en masse: “Go and stalk your prey, my wolves!”

  The assigned-by-Hardface henchmen reluctantly did as they were told, the full dozen fanning out, while Lyssa turned back to the closed front gate and raised her leather-sheathed arms to the sky.

  Mictlantecuhtli’s footsoldiers moved in quick. Tom had to wonder who’d hired these men on el Rey’s behalf. They seemed very well prepared for the task they’d been set to.

  One of the younger men removed the lock on the front gate with boltcutters. A second kid eased the gate open. Two older guys darted through, guns drawn, and feinted to either side. The man Tom thought of as Brickface and his partner entered next, their guns also drawn, and they crouched down as they jogged for cover deeper inside the Yard.

  Then Lyssa sauntered right the hell in, rendering all of that stealthy choreography pointless.

  The other half of the Henchforce hurried around the outside perimeter of the fence to cover any alternate exits. Tom could feel that Lia was now above ground and coming on the run, but he dreaded the thought of her encountering any of these people.

  In the moment of quiet that descended after the goon squad scrambled off to execute their orders, a half-visible thing that looked like a cross between a bulldog and a bullfrog peered around the gate, snuffling after the interlopers.

  It was a Croucher, as Tom well knew. The two men assigned to guard the front entrance couldn’t see it at all.

  It sniffed at a new offering of fresh fruit Hannah had put out first thing that morning, considered it… then hopped after the intruders instead, snorting up their scent and baring its double rows of sharp, shark-like teeth in a hungry, anticipatory grin.

  Tom watched from the office shack’s roof as half a dozen more ravenous Crouchers hopped through the gate, following in the path of the first one.

  Chapter Twenty

  Graves relaxed while Hannah finished up her cooking. The good, homey smells of frying breakfast filled the air, making him wish bitterly that he still had the plumbing you needed to digest a strip of bacon. He was starting to wonder how long he was apt to stay like this, dead in all but the most fundamental of ways, but such thoughts were not pleasant ones and he pushed them aside in favor of more enjoyable memories of meals he’d eaten two-thirds of a century in the past.

  Hannah started munching straightaway, as soon as the eggs were done. Lia’s plate waited for her on the table, steaming mellowly in the mottled light that filtered down through a forest of grown trees-oaks, olives, evergreens and palms-all of which stood rooted in half-ton wooden pots. Hannah told Graves, when he asked, that they rented the exotic specimens out to film productions. There were even several stands of tall bamboo that would rustle and rattle like lonely old bones in all but the gentlest of breezes.

  Graves tilted precariously back in his chair and rocked it a bit. He was savoring this quiet and companionable moment with one of his new friends when a leatherclad, helmeted woman came striding out of the foliage toward him.

  He was so startled that he tumbled backwards out of his chair.

  Hannah jumped up. The new woman knocked her out of the way as she made a beeline for Graves. He found his feet a second before the leather lady seized him by the throat and pinned him to a sapling tree’s wooden support post.

  Hannah scrambled up and ran for it, vanishing into the bush after taking one huge-eyed look back. Graves was peripherally relieved to see her escaping.

  “King Caradura throws the very best parties, Dexter Graves,” the disguised female said to him from behind her visor. “So what, prithee, be thy major malfunction?”

  Graves deftly broke the weird woman’s chokehold and headbutted the mirrored face of her helmet. The silver plastic shattered, revealing the crazy static behind it. “Awww, hell, not you again,” he said.

  “Me and all the names I call myself,” Lady Madness confirmed. “Come, Sinister Dexter, the King awaits.”

  The being Lia had called an Archon popped her fingers into Graves’ nosehole and eyesockets like his skull was nothing more than a bowling ball and then dragged him, effortlessly, even as he struggled and kicked, off toward the gate.

  She waved her other hand across her visor to heal it before she pulled a tiny walkie-talkie out of her pocket. The reflective glass melted back into place, obscuring her static. “Hunt the pretty, my wolves, but don’t break her,” she warned her confederates via the handheld radio. “The King has all the cold girls he can eat.”

  “Hey, Bad Signal,” Graves shouted
up at her (albeit in a stifled, nasal voice). “You so much as touch Miss Lia and I’ll cancel your broadcast for good. You hearin’ me under that shell, sister?”

  The woman-shaped distortion peeled a glove off her statichand and stuffed it into Graves’ mouth as she dragged him along, muffling his threats. “Not anymore, Dexter Graves,” she said, answering his rhetorical question.

  A moment later she raked him through the parking lot gravel and threw him into the back of the nearest of her six black cars while the pair of henchmen left to guard the front gate looked on with a high degree of astonished disbelief.

  A heavy steel dog screen blocked access to the vehicle’s front seats and there were no door handles here in the back, as Graves discovered in fairly short order. He still had the Archon’s leather glove stuffed between his teeth.

  He watched her stride back into the Yard through the open front gate, past a large black cat she didn’t even notice.

  “Now for LisaLiaChloeMia, and anybody else she thinks she is,” the unhinged otherworlder said, to nobody in particular.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Hannah sprinted through the trees, racing toward Lia and the safety of Bag End with all her might. Lia was already coming on the run when she spotted her friend and angled her trajectory so their paths through the plants would intersect. She was freshly dressed in jeans that clung to her still-damp skin and her hair was barely toweled dry. Tom’s frantic psychic alarms had roused her from her hobbit hole, but the images she was getting from him were jumbled and confused, with so much going on in them. The one thing she knew for certain was that she didn’t have time to sort them out. Dealing with this morning’s new threat, whatever it turned out to be, was going to require improvisation, since she’d had no chance at all to prepare for it.