Graves' end Read online

  The bills for the project kept coming, though, and apparently they’d never gotten paid.

  The acreage was abandoned to this day, its future tied up in legal limbo while the original paranoiac’s distant heirs squabbled over their inheritance, none of them even aware, at this point, of the big bomb shelter that had bankrupted the family business so many years ago.

  Forty years worth of Valley cats would’ve brought their every half-eaten trophy to these people’s doors in gratitude, if any but Tom had been able to find them by reading a street address. Rumors that the property was soon to be sold off and either developed or reopened as a nursery continued to circulate, but so far they’d come to nothing.

  Tom felt certain he could find a way to lead his new protege out there, even without a voice to guide her. He’d been robbed of his capacity for words along with his living body almost a century ago… although that, too, was another story. One he supposed he’d need to reveal to his new friend, in time, after she’d gotten used to the psychically-projected pictures, sensations, and dreams that were the only vocabulary he had to work with anymore. Their connection would have to be empathic, emotional and visual, as the unfortunate events of Tom’s past had eliminated all verbal options.

  But that was all right. The bus line that ran past the market would get them close to the place he meant to take her, and he could fox a goddamn mechanical fare counter. That was easy. Once he got his girl out to the hunting-place, he was pretty sure he’d be able to get them into that subterranean sanctuary, too. He was good at getting into things. They might find food down there, cans, military-style rations maybe, or other packages that required opposable digits to open. It seemed likely enough. The place had been built with the end of the world in mind, and you’d have to expect that survivors would want to eat.

  He was surprised by how much better he felt once his small belly was filled with the preservative-laden bovine mash they sold as ‘cat food’ these days. The girl seemed pleased and gratified simply to watch him eat it.

  When he was finished Tom looked up at her, his ward, his new best friend, and thought that she had no idea what she’d just bought herself, for the price of a can of processed cowlips.

  Part One: Halloween Night

  Chapter One

  A decade later…

  Lia Flores made a futile swipe with her coat sleeve against one of the narrow glass panes set into the old building’s heavy front door, attempting to clear away what might have been years of accumulated grime. The windows were backed with brittle brown paper, but it had peeled away from their corners, to greater and lesser degrees. Lia couldn’t make out anything in the blackness beyond them, however, no matter how hard she squinted. There was nothing to see but her own pale reflection in the smudged window glass-a transparent ghost with black, bobbed hair and large, dark eyes.

  She tried the bell, waited for a moment, then tried it again. When nobody answered after a minute or so, she repeated the procedure. There was still no response, but then Lia wasn’t really expecting one, either. It was after ten p.m. on Halloween Night, for one thing, and the building itself-a century-old, red-brick office box languishing on an underpopulated Hollywood side street-was the kind that would’ve looked just as moribund and disused at ten a.m. on any given morning.

  Assuring herself that no one could possibly be watching, Lia dropped to her knees before the doorknob and withdrew a miniature set of locksmith’s tools from an inner pocket of her dark, bulky peacoat. She took a breath and held it as she went to work on the corroded old lock with a slim rake that looked appropriate to the job.

  Behind her stood a short, hunched old man. He was propped up on a walking stick and still wearing sunglasses, despite the lateness of the hour. He wore a white linen guayabera shirt with two rows of extra pockets down the front and a misshapen hat over his gray-streaked hair. Lia knew him as Black Tom, and even though they’d been inseparable companions for better than ten years now, they’d never once had a proper conversation.

  Tom raised a hand to bless her lockpicking efforts and the lock gave way. The door before them yawned open onto a shadowy corridor.

  Lia looked back over her shoulder at the bright street several blocks behind her. It was packed tight with costumed celebrants, not a one of them aware of her or of what she might be doing back here in the darkness. They could’ve been in a different world. One they all agreed upon and labeled ‘real.’

  She was uncomfortable with what she was doing here, to say the least. Breaking and entering was not the arena in which she normally applied her skills. This felt more like a job for a detective.

  Still, she crept on down the corridor anyway, with exaggerated caution. Skeins of cobweb depended from the ceiling and a total lack of lighting made the obscenities scrawled upon the walls difficult to read. Black Tom trailed after her, a portrait of cool behind his sunglasses. He leaned on his walking stick but didn’t bother to creep as he ambled right down the middle of the hall.

  Lia knew this place had once had a name, though Tom wasn’t able to tell it to her. They were here because she’d been asked to check the location out by a stranger, one whose brother had vanished almost a year ago, after coming here to perform what their so-called client had referred to only as ‘some weird ritual.’ Lia and her wordless familiar had a bit of experience with missing persons, and a lot more than that when it came to arcane rites. The real reason she’d agreed to this, though, was that Tom had known the place in question immediately. This place, this building, and the story of the missing brother had struck an obvious alarm bell for him.

  He’d covered it up with his habitual wry composure right away, but Lia wasn’t sure if she’d ever seen him frightened before. Ghosts had little to fear, generally speaking, and yet even now Tom radiated a desire to believe that the story they’d been told was somehow inaccurate, that the location was dormant or otherwise closed down, and the neglected condition in which they’d found the building would seem to argue in favor of that possibility.

  If something was lingering on here, however, Tom expected it to reach the height of its power during the next two days, a period of time roughly corresponding with the holiday the locals called el Dia de los Muertos. That made tonight, Halloween night, the best possible time to observe without putting themselves in unreasonable danger.

  It sounded logical enough to Lia, in its way, but she was still unsettled by the fact that her friend had never tried to tell her before about the early twentieth-century skyscraper that now stood on a site once considered sacred to the Aztecs’ God of the Dead.

  She glanced up, noting a camera mounted in a corner near the hallway’s ceiling. Its lens appeared to be occluded by a thick cataract of dust.

  She looked over at Black Tom, who shrugged, although he could’ve sent her reassurance if he’d wanted to. Could’ve reached out with his mind and touched her nervous system, psychically blunting the sharpest edge of her fear and letting her know without words that everything would be all right. He’d done such things before, when she’d needed them in the past. That he wasn’t doing them now told her everything she needed to know about this situation. Tom thought it was more important, at the moment, that she be focused and on her guard than comfortably unafraid.

  She did wish he could just talk to her about it, though. The wish was a well-worn one, reiterated nearly every day, but she felt her friend’s silence especially keenly right now, when even a single word of reassurance would’ve done something to ease her tension. But Tom was as silent as he’d ever been.

  As silent as this empty tower.

  Lia decided to push on, assuming the cobwebbed camera overhead had to be a dud. Nothing was working in here, she felt sure of it. Or at least she wanted to feel sure of it. All of the evidence before her confirmed the assumption that nobody else had set foot in here for a very long time. Even the graffiti looked pretty old.

  Still, she had to force herself deeper into the building, and it did seem like that elde
rly camera was following her every move. She couldn’t tell if she felt watched because she was being watched, or merely because she was trespassing in a place she didn’t belong. In any case, she was nearly dizzy with it, that feeling was so powerful.

  Encountering the otherworld always involved a series of moves and counter-moves, of selective advantages leveraged against specific weaknesses. Head-on confrontations with its denizens were generally ill-advised. But, much as a man in a flame-proof suit might stand beside a conflagration and not get burned, Lia was often able to edge in close to dangerous entities and learn their secrets-so long as she remained aware of their blind spots. This sort of divination was a spy-game akin to chess, and Tom had taught her to play it like a grandmaster (although he’d also trained her to know when it was time to knock over the board and make a run for it, too).

  Intuition could be difficult to separate from paranoia, and Lia couldn’t tell which one of them was coloring her impressions now.

  She clicked on her flashlight as she eased open the solid double doors at the end of the hall, and its beam sliced at the shadows that closed in around her like a silent pack of eager black beasts. The flashlight flickered and wavered as though it were frightened, but Lia shook it and it came back on strong. For the moment. She’d purchased new batteries before driving down here, so maybe it was a loose connection. Maybe. She hated to think the building might be draining her energizers at an accelerated rate.

  The wide foyer she and Black Tom found themselves in was dark, abandoned, and liberally vandalized. Lia played her flashlight over the gaping elevator shafts, and then across the door marked ‘STAIRS.’ Its identifying sign hung askew.

  Still, she opted for the stairs. Those elevators hadn’t been operated in a very long time.

  Her flashlight flickered and stuttered out more warnings of its own imminent demise as she ascended flight after flight of echoing steps, headed up toward the tower’s very top floor. Black Tom tagged along after her, ascending easily despite his age. Lia’s calves had turned to wood by the time they reached the seventh landing, but she took a deep breath and continued climbing. Her heart thudded against her ribs, and not just from exertion. This place had an aura about it that unnerved her, despite Tom’s clear wish to find it empty.

  The last stairwell door protested when she pushed it open, its disused hinges groaning over the indignity of being disturbed after so many years of rusty silence. Lia’s dimming flashlight beam preceded her as she emerged into a top-floor corridor, followed as always by her Tom.

  She skipped her coin of fading, copper-colored light down the corridor’s frayed runner of once-red carpet, scanning along the baseboards for anything out of the ordinary. She paused and held the flashlight beam in place when it glinted off some tarnished bit of metal that might’ve been an old-fashioned cigarette lighter lying on the floor at the far end of the passage.

  She and Black Tom went over to crouch down on either side of what did indeed turn out to be a Zippo-style lighter, one that sported a US Navy insignia on its side. An anchor inside a loop of rope. Tom and Lia examined it silently for a moment. Then they looked up at one another, as if on cue, and nodded in agreement. This felt significant to both of them. It was just the sort of sign they’d come looking for, although the lighter itself appeared far older than anything they’d expected to find.

  Lia’s sepia-toned beam flickered fatally when she bent to pick up the Zippo. She shook the flashlight again, but it was a goner and she knew it. What she didn’t know was whether or not Black Tom could lead her out of here in total darkness. She guessed that he could-she was quite sure of it, really-but she still preferred not to put it to the test.

  Lia rolled the Zippo’s wheel in desperation and, as old as it was, the flint inside of it still sparked. Her electric light would be dead within seconds, so she clicked the Zippo again, several more times, as her depleted batteries failed her once and for all.

  In the moment of pure blackness that followed the flashlight’s demise, Tom seemed to notice something. Lia felt him frowning in the gloom.

  Then the lighter’s wick ignited, and she was bathed in its faint, warm fire-glow.

  Lia stood up on legs that felt liquid with relief, holding the lighter aloft. Black Tom hopped to his feet and tugged on the back of her coat.

  She turned. “What?”

  Tom pointed to a closed door at the end of the hall.

  Now it was Lia’s turn to frown. She hadn’t even seen a door there, herself, shrouded as it was in cobweb and shadow. She supposed a part of her hadn’t wanted to see it.

  But she closed the lighter, as Tom indicated she should, and after giving her night-vision a long moment to adjust, she too was able to see the thin seam of light that lined the bottom of the door.

  It was only the faintest glow, seeping out from the next room, but it was there, definitely there, beyond any shadow of a doubt. The flashlight and the old Zippo had each provided enough illumination to obscure it.

  In the darkness that seemed to iris down around them, Black Tom pointed toward the stairs, punctuating the gesture with a questioning raise of his eyebrows. (He could bypass Lia’s retinas when he wanted to, appearing directly on the movie screen of her mind, so her ability to see him wasn’t compromised by the dearth of ambient light. It was still disconcerting not to see much of anything besides him, however, hovering there in the entoptic murk while he waited for her to make a choice.)

  She re-lit the tarnished Zippo and squinted against its bright yellow tongue of flame as she considered her options. There seemed to be a name stenciled on the door in front of her, barely legible beneath what looked like ancient rust stains, even with her nose an inch from it. She held the lighter’s flame up before the letters one by one and found they spelled out ‘Miguel Caradura,’ a name Lia translated as ‘Michael Hardface.’ It might’ve struck her as funny at a different point in time, but not so much, right now.

  Tom won’t fault you if you turn back, she told herself. He’s letting you off the hook. And it’s not like he can tell anybody if you chicken out, anyway.

  But Lia shook her head. They’d come up here because Tom needed to know if the rooms at the top of this tower were occupied and open for business once again, yes, but also because they’d been asked. Asked by someone who needed their brand of help and had nowhere else to turn, which was more than Lia could refuse. She knew all too well what it felt like to need an ally.

  So they weren’t leaving, she decided, not quite yet. Not until she’d seen all there was to see, and not before she’d done what needed doing.

  She closed the lighter, put it in her pocket, and reached for the doorknob.

  Black Tom looked on, radiating his regret as Lia pushed open the door to the rooms he’d once called las Cameras del Rey-the King’s Chambers-and her startled, wondering face was bathed in dazzling light.

  Miguel Caradura’s office suite was brightly lit and fully functional, in surreal contrast to the rest of the shabby and apparently abandoned modern-day building.

  Lia stepped tentatively into the outer office, shielding her eyes and feeling blown away by the sheer weirdness of it all. Instead of the decrepit, run-down room she’d been expecting, she found herself inside an office decorated to rival any top CEO’s establishment. The leather furniture smelled new, and the walls shone with a fresh coat of paint in a designer shade of cool mint green. The waiting room might’ve been refurbished that very afternoon.

  The door to the next chamber stood open, beckoning like an invitation.

  The overhead lights in there were switched off, but Lia couldn’t miss the huge flatscreen monitor glowing on an executive desktop, so she crept a few steps nearer to that shadowy inner office. The monitor was displaying security-cam angles of locations within the building that were already familiar after her laborious climb up the stairs.

  Each window on the display seemed to be showing a short video clip on a loop, in fact, and every clip she saw was of her. Lia’s
stomach tightened at the realization. Black Tom wasn’t visible, not anywhere on the screen, but then his presence never had been perceptible by a thing like a camera’s lens. Not unless he wanted it to be.

  The clips traced Lia’s progress upwards through the building. Starting in the upper left corner of the screen, she saw herself down at the front entrance, looking up into a fish-eye lens and seeming to scrutinize it with one huge eye. (There had been a stone gargoyle mounted over the door; Lia remembered looking up into its snarling face when trying the bell. The camera must have been hidden inside its mouth.) In the next video window she was pixilated in poor lighting, standing in a downstairs corridor and plainly wondering whether the dusty relic of a camera she was staring up into could possibly still be viable and functioning.

  Got my answer on that one now, don’t I?

  Yet another window showed infrared footage of her brightly-colored silhouette standing outside the office door, minutes ago, flicking the wheel of a cold blue antique lighter and making psychedelic sparks. The tongue of flame they finally kindled made for a dramatic, multi-hued fireball on the feed from the thermal spy cam.

  The very last window, in the lower righthand corner of the screen, showed her right here and right now, real time, standing in the well-lit outer office. As her eyes continued to drift south she realized there was a silver tray sitting next to the monitor, one piled high with what looked to be wet, red, and weakly-pulsing human hearts. Her own heart seemed to stop in her chest at the sight of them. A rose in a cut-glass vase stood beside the tray, completing an elegant presentation. Lia hadn’t registered the grisly offering immediately because of the bright glow from the computer screen, which made everything else in the dim second chamber difficult to see.