Graves' end Page 25

  What a relationship they could’ve-and should’ve-had.

  She truly did hate manipulating the girl, but it had to be done, for now, in the name of manipulating Mickey.

  If only she’d never found her way out to that goddamned Tree…

  But no, Ingrid thought, she didn’t really feel that way, not even now. She didn’t regret her long-ago choice of the left-hand path. Only one particular betrayal by Mickey had ever brought her close to sentiments like that.

  She couldn’t imagine renouncing the wonders she’d seen as a result of that choice, including this, the incredible opening of a brand new era, a full hundred years beyond her time. Ingrid was a true innovator in her ancient art, the first human being ever to time-hop like the imaginals did, and that privilege was a direct result of her relationship with Mictlantecuhtli.

  Ingrid fingered the large garnet she wore on a silver chain around her neck. A dark red stone on a thin tether of shiny white moon-metal. It was the only thing that let her find her way back to herself from the unfamiliar ages she visited. Timehopping required that she use her true name, all the time, even in her own head and when it was inconvenient, or else risk losing her identity through the subtle split that existed between the other and the actual worlds. You had to know exactly who you were if you wanted to step across a seam like that. The gem that symbolized her to herself was itself an imaginal artifact, a thing from the otherworld, a gift from the figment of myth that now called itself Miguel Caradura, after her own suggestion.

  His patronage had been her ticket to the initiatory level beyond the poetry and semiotic mindgames of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where Ingrid began her occult career. In London, this had been, around the turn of the previous century. Though she’d been born in San Francisco she’d spent her early twenties trying to make a name on the West End stage… or so she’d told herself, even at the time. What she’d really done was earn her keep as a box jumper, a stage magician’s lovely assistant (easy work for one sexy enough to get it), and then spent the bulk of her time attending the parties and pub-crawls of the theatrical set. That had led her to the alluring, exotic and slightly dangerous Golden Dawn (where she befriended a young painter from Jamaica named Pixie Smith, whose Tarot deck was still in print and popular today, and enjoyed several secret assignations with the poet William Butler Yeats, initiates of the mystic Order both).

  It was through such acquaintances that she first heard the tales of a Hole in the Sky situated above a tree that grew back home, in distant California. She’d crossed an ocean to hear a local legend, ironically.

  She followed one of the very earliest film production companies back to Los Angeles in 1908, blazing a trail that uncounted numbers of the world’s pretty people had apparently followed after her. A dear old friend from the Alcazar Theater Company in San Francisco (of which both her parents had been a part), directed the first movie ever to be filmed entirely in Los Angeles. He’d shot it in the drying yard of a downtown Chinese laundry, and in it Ingrid played an heiress who marries a gambler who does a good deed. She’d found similar trophy-women reiterated in the films of every decade since, and she had to smile every time she saw the well-earned love of a special girl held up as a symbol of healing and redemption. Even though the motif had been a staple of vaudeville too and probably went back to the goddamn Greeks, she still felt like she’d started something.

  It amused her to recall how intimidated she’d been by the bulky, hand-cranked wooden camera with its single unblinking glass eye, so different from today’s ‘digital’ devices, which fit into the palm of a hand and yet shot both in color and with sound. The newfangled apparatus of 1908 had struck her as menacing and judgmental, whereas a live audience, at least during a good performance, always felt receptive and warm. People’s applause was like an embrace. The camera, however, claimed far more than an audience did, and it gave next to nothing back to the performer. Ingrid had known enough by then about the nature of images and signifiers that she hadn’t dared to let the contraption possess her true name, fearing the obsessive pull the thing exerted. Instead, she substituted the slightly awkward pseudonym ‘Silent Tower.’

  The stage name was an in-joke between herself and the film’s director, Francis Boggs, who’d also been her first and only vocal coach a dozen years before. Ingrid had stood 5’10 by the time she was twelve years old, and was painfully, awkwardly shy-until she learned to sing on stage. The Silent Tower had been Uncle Frank’s nickname for her, an affectionate nudge to coax her out of her shell, and Ingrid knew he’d been touched when she chose to immortalize it in the credits of his movie.

  Well, semi-immortalize, anyway, as only a handful of her friend’s two hundred or so single-reelers seemed to have survived the century, despite his pioneering efforts in the world of filmmaking (as Mictlantecuhtli had once warned her would be the case). To the best of Ingrid’s knowledge her piece, entitled The Heart of a Race Tout, was not among the survivals. Her source on that, however, was again the modern-day ‘internets,’ and it had to be said that the information they turned up often seemed somewhat fragmentary and vague. ‘Googling’ herself had proved neither as pleasurable nor as revelatory as she might’ve expected.

  Appearing in that one early flicker show was the only acting she ever got to do in Los Angeles, but that didn’t matter to her, much. It was fun, but it wasn’t what she’d really come for. There was magic in the movies, certainly, but by then she’d needed more stimulation than shadow, light, and make-believe were able to provide.

  Instead of pursuing theatrical ambitions, she talked her way into the Golden Dawn’s sister organization here in Los Angeles: the Ordo Aurea Catena, or the Order of the Golden Chain. Their attitude had proved rapacious, however, their rituals staid and uncreative. Ingrid stayed with them only until she managed to goad one of their initiates into showing her a map drawn and sold to the association years before by a penniless independent named Ramon San Martin, a jealously-guarded map that showed the infamous SkyHole’s secret location…

  Her education had mostly been her own affair, after that.

  Hers, and Mickey’s.

  The King was an experience like no other at first. His attention was exhilarating, his company exciting, the physical presence he put on for her erotic and enticing, modeled as it was after her own personal aesthetic ideals.

  It was the subtle changes wrought in her by the practice of her art, she believed (the alignment with the earth’s secret graces that such work engenders, especially in a woman who starts young) that imbued her with the rare ability to cross back and forth between the King’s Chambers, and that made her tantalizing to Mickey, captivating and bewitching, at least as much as he was to her.

  She was a unique creature according to him, a nonpareil, completely free to walk the worlds, and she’d fast become the favorite amongst his handful of human servants. Really she’d been more like a protege. Together they’d made of her an unassailable independent operator in an age when magical practice was dominated by rigid and phallocentric orders with classical pretensions. It was a rather unusual accomplishment. Ingrid felt daring and dangerous simply for knowing King Death, while his lusts for her, his fascination with her living flesh, had known no satiety.

  She might’ve guessed at the ways in which their relationship would get out of hand, but at the time she’d been too willing a beneficiary of the King’s largess to bother with things like worrying about the future or planning ahead. Her magical ambitions had grown to quite an unsupportable size by then. She’d actually imagined she could rewrite the ancient inequities of the realworld from the absurd office building she talked Mickey into erecting around the Hole in the Sky, almost by accident.

  That place was her own Silent Tower, a crazy brick-and-mortar monument to her dreams. The King had altered the pasts of certain of his human servants in order to produce a man capable of putting up the structure and then charged him with the task, merely as a demonstration of his transworld influence a
nd generative prowess. The Tree was gone and the building was up, almost before she challenged Mictlantecuhtli to prove himself. Workmen arrived on-site at the literal instant in which Ingrid joked that a smart new skyscraper might be better suited to the sensibilities of her twentieth-century world than was some root-rotted old mistletoe factory.

  It was how she first learned about Mictlan’s special relationship with human time. The King might almost as easily have remodeled a much larger chunk of architectural and social history in order to make the building appear in a complete, fully-realized form as soon as she imagined it, but thankfully, he hadn’t yet learned to think that big.

  Not then, anyway.

  Mickey, who aped every trait of hers that fascinated him, especially her passions for creation, novelty, and change, soon enough seized upon the example of her aspirations to begin laying schemes of his own, on his side of the barrier. He conquered and claimed foreign mythological ground in the name of his kingdom, taking over moribund animist pantheons by the score and rearranging a large swath of the otherworld according to his own lights in the process. You couldn’t put an idea in his head that he wouldn’t extrapolate to the furthest degree. Before long, he even had designs on those unwieldy monotheisms that still dominate so much of humanity’s imaginal space.

  Otherworld victories weren’t what he really coveted anymore, of course, but for quite a while Ingrid’s native reality remained, for the King, just tantalizingly out of reach. The barrier between worlds held firm, even as she foolishly plotted to help the relentless monarchetype transcend his limitations, in the belief that her own power could only increase with his.

  That it’d all seemed romantic and magical rather than mad at the time was all she could say about it now.

  Then Mickey went and surprised her in a way that changed the terms of their relationship forever.

  Ingrid sighed again, reflecting on the unprecedented turns her life had taken.

  She’d tried her best to right her King’s wrongs, and she was trying still. If Dex and his dirtgirl would now get their asses back out here, before night fell, then maybe the three of them together would still have a chance to turn this thing around, before it ended badly for everyone but Mickey.

  Chapter Forty

  A hoodie-shrouded homeless man pushed a woman wearing a fedora down a Studio City side street in a rattling, clanking shopping cart. Other pedestrians ignored them with a zeal that rendered them effectively invisible. Lia herself might not have recognized them as Hannah Potter and Dexter Graves.

  “I seem to recall Miss Lia sayin’ something about us takin’ a cab…?” Graves said ruefully. He was in the process of discovering that his reanimated bones could still ache like a bastard when he’d been on his feet for a while. It was going to be a long walk back to North Hollywood.

  “Yeah, well, I didn’t bring my purse, or my phone, or anything,” Hannah said. “I didn’t expect to be leaving the way we did.”

  “And I didn’t guess we’d get dumped off at the top of Mulholland Drive.”

  They rumbled past a pair of very old men playing chess out in front of a rundown nursing home, a few blocks north of Ventura. One of the players was very big, as well as very old. Large enough that sheer size must have been his defining feature for his entire life.

  Graves stopped the cart and came back after a moment, to have another look at the big fella, but Big Fella wouldn’t look up from the chessboard.

  “Hey,” Graves said, after a moment of silence. “Your name’s Juan, ain’t it? Juan San Martin?”

  Big Juan kept his eyes on the chessgame. “Not if you’re a cop or a process server, it ain’t.”

  “Nah, nothin’ like that,” Graves said. “This is strictly personal.”

  Big Juan looked up, and Graves pushed back his filthy hood, revealing the bullet-cratered bone beneath. “If I recall,” he said, “you were the only schmuck that showed up at my funeral.”

  Big Juan leapt to his feet, upsetting the chessboard, and booked it (as fast as a fat nonagenarian dragging an oxygen tank could, anyway), shuffling off down a nearby alley.

  Hannah hopped out of the shopping cart and was after him in a wincing, relative flash, limping along in deference to her bullet-grooved side, but Graves and the second old guy who’d been playing chess had seen one another by then, and for them, time had all but stopped.

  The antique looked up like he was seeing a ghost. He wore a stiff Navy baseball cap with the insignia of the USS Jubal A. Early embroidered across the crown.

  “Dex?” he said, squinting like he expected his vision to resolve into something he could process. “Dexter Graves? Can that really be you?”

  “Holy shit,” Graves said. “It’s Charlie Lurp! Brother, you got ancient.”

  “Dex, am I dyin’?” Charlie looked like he really needed to know. “Is this what happens? Old friends come back to meetcha?”

  “I don’t think so, Charlie old pal. At least not today,” Graves said. “I got special dispensation, is all.”

  “Last time we talked was when I helped my buddy Dave track you down,” Charlie said. “You disappeared right after that.”

  “Yeah, well, I woulda phoned… but you know how it is.” Graves tapped his exit wound and Charlie nodded as if he did indeed know how it was to be shot in the brainpan and buried for sixty years.

  Graves threw off the hooded sweatshirt he’d scrounged from the same roadside gutter in which they found the shopping cart he’d been pushing Hannah along in since her feet had started to blister during their downhill trek. He shrugged back into his long coat and headed down the alley, feeling little need to hurry after Hannah’s low-speed pursuit of Big Juan. Graves kept pace with Charlie, who followed with the aid of a walker, bumping along step by step. The thing had slit-open tennis balls crammed onto its feet, for some reason.

  “Big Juannie wasn’t the one that done that to you, was he, Dex?” Charlie asked, pointing up at the exit hole in Graves’ forehead. “Wouldn’t put it past him-the asshole cheats at chess. Poker too.”

  “Nah,” Graves said. “But he used to work for the guy that had it done. And he did dump me in a hole, way out in the desert.”

  “That dirty son of a bitch,” Charlie said.

  They came upon Hannah, who was crouched over the prone and wheezing form of Big Juan, way down at the litter-strewn end of the alley. So that was that. Chase over. It hadn’t been much of a horserace.

  Hannah looked over her shoulder as first Graves and then Charlie stepped up behind her. Graves took his hat off her head and settled it back onto his own. Then he leaned over Big Juan, getting right down into the old henchman’s face.

  “I need some intel before you shuffle off there, big fella,” he said. “You worked for Hardface once. You know his ways. Spill what you know about his fetish for earthy girls, and maybe I won’t come after you on the other side.”

  Chapter Forty-One

  Lia’s handcuffs came off less than fifteen minutes later, and the young officer’s attitude had changed markedly by the time they did.

  “Guess the Captain thinks pretty highly of you, Miss Brujachica,” he said, using the Spanish description like a surname. “Says you’ve consulted on SWAT operations before?”

  “Remote viewing, yeah,” Lia said. “Looking into places people needed to go. I’ve also helped on a forensic case or two.”

  “Well,” the young cop said, “the Cap pulled me and three other units off our assignments and says we’re to help you. Blackdog guys all. So it looks like you’re getting a police escort. I’m Ben, by the way, Ben Leonard.”

  “Lia Flores.” She shook his proffered hand and considered him, feeling curious. “So, Ben Leonard, were you really there?” she asked. “The Night of the Blackdogs? I’ve heard the stories for years.”

  Ben Leonard nodded. “A thousand black ghost dogs,” he said, “all barking in unison, all at once, witnessed by dozens of cops from a dozen divisions, warning us off from a building that collap
sed not three hours after. It was like nothing I ever knew could be. Changed me, frankly. Changed every guy who saw it. Showed us all a wider world.”

  “Sure you didn’t eat some funny mushrooms earlier that evening?” Lia kidded.

  “No, I didn’t,” Ben said, “and why does everyone I ever tell ask me that? No, I was sober and lucid and in my right mind. We all were.” He looked Lia over in his turn, as curious about her as she was about him. “So,” he said. “You’re, like, an ‘independent operator’?”

  Lia nodded.

  “More of you on the street than there used to be,” Ben said thoughtfully, re-appraising her. “Guess I never met an actual witch before, though. A real one who can do things, I mean. Most of the ones I’ve run across were sort of pretending.”

  “No warts, no broom, no pointy hat,” Lia said. “Hope I don’t disappoint.”

  Ben smiled. “I wouldn’t say that, exactly.”

  Three LAPD cruisers pulled around the corner and into the Home Depot parking lot, and Ben raised a hand to their drivers in greeting. Then he turned back to Lia.

  “Your motorcade awaits,” he said. “Let’s leave that stolen thing for somebody else to deal with. You can ride in one of the cruisers… or I guess you can ride with me. If you like. I don’t think the Captain expects normal regulations to apply.”

  Lia thought about it, then broke into a grin.

  She was still grinning some minutes later, gleefully, under a helmet and perched on the back of Ben’s motorcycle while it and the three cruisers flew up Vineland at an insane rate of speed, flashing lights, blaring sirens, and parting traffic like a blade.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Graves got Big Juan sitting up and propped him against a discarded, cushionless sofa some slob had dumped in the alley. Within minutes, the fat man was breathing better.