Graves' end Page 3

  Oh, shitballs, she thought, watching herself assess the situation, live on digital video. What is this?

  Not what she and Tom had been led to believe, that much was certain. This place wasn’t dormant at all. It was fully awake. Awake, alive, and active. The abandoned-and-vandalized facade it presented to the world was nothing more than stage dressing.

  Black Tom faded into a corner of the first room while an appallingly large tarantula descended from the ceiling on a thread of viscous webbing, sinking down to the floor behind Lia. She almost turned, sensing its motion peripherally, but her attention was arrested by the luminous flatscreen on the desk in the darkened second chamber. She paused in the middle of the first room and strained her eyes from where she stood, wanting paradoxically to get a better look at the screen without moving any closer to the next room’s doorway.

  Tom hung back and watched as bees and beetles and fat red ants poured out from the baseboards and roiled together in silence, as roaches and wasps and tiny white scorpions teemed up into a swaying tower that stood almost six feet high. Right behind his girl. The looming mass of insects and arachnids seemed to be trying as one to copy a human form, clumping together into a vaguely feminine, hourglass configuration, perhaps using Lia herself as a handy example. They organized into a number of long tentacles that the lady-shaped swarm reached out with while her individual bugs began melting together, working furiously to congeal into a single, outsized specimen.

  Lia’s eyes darted away from the mound of shining hearts beside the bright computer screen when she realized that someone was watching her very closely, even still.

  A black-cowled figure seated at the desk-a figure obscured by the high back of his chair-now moved for the first time. She saw the reflection of the creature’s robe and his heavy, face-obscuring hood in the dark window beyond the desk when he picked up a half-eaten heart from a linen napkin and tore a squelching bite out of it with his long, gumless teeth. Lia knew immediately that this was not a man, although it still impressed her as being male. The thing’s skeletal hand, she noted with hallucinatory clarity, was stippled with clots of blood and fringed with fresh red shreds of flayed tissue. All she could see beneath the shadow of his cowl was a skeletal grin. Dark heartblood dripped down his bony wedge of a chin.

  Lia gasped and turned to flee, only to run face-first into the newly-minted bugwoman that was still churning behind her as it struggled to come into focus. She yelped, instinctually throwing up her hands to dampen the collision, and when a stray centipede scurried across the backs of her fingers, she screamed.

  The unstable bug-thing lurched after her as she staggered back, grasping with its multiple arms but not yet facile enough on its obscenely long, chitinous legs to catch her.

  Lia shouted again when she stumbled, tripping over her own feet and landing hard on her ass. She cringed, expecting the worst, but Black Tom whacked the bugwoman from behind with his walking stick before it could fall on her, and the swaying conglomeration of half-melded carapaces disintegrated into an avalanche of separate insects. Tom must’ve been biding his time until the demon was solid enough to be attacked. Lia scrambled away from the bugwave that resulted from his efforts, grimacing with revulsion when it washed across the floor and over her shoes.

  Tom extended a hand to help her up and together they ran like hell, pursued by the mad, cackling laughter of Miguel Caradura, currently known on the streets as Mickey Hardface, and previously known to the adherents of his ancient cult as Mictlantecuhtli, the Aztec King of the Dead.

  Chapter Two

  Lia and Black Tom burst out through the old building’s front door and back into the unlighted street, pursued by an angry cloud of buzzing, flying, biting creatures. Lia ducked and flailed, trying to keep the insects out of her hair and clothing. They swirled away into three separate funnels that swiftly congealed into lanky, Amazonian female forms. They were a lot faster about it now that they were warming up, she noticed with some concern.

  Black Tom turned and stood his ground against them, snarling.

  He swung the head of his walking stick up, catching the first of the re-spawned bugwomen under the chin and bursting her into a spectacular shower of insect bodies. He dealt with the other two incipient bug-beings just as deftly, bashing one through the midsection and sweeping the other to the ground, where he stabbed it between its multiple eyes with his cane tip.

  Their component colonies began to re-form almost as soon as they came apart.

  The bugwomen wouldn’t stay down for long.

  Lia, having caught her breath while watching the skirmish from what felt like a reasonably safe distance, now sprinted for the better-lighted street a block to the north. She glanced back to see Black Tom grinning and giving the finger to the camera-concealing gargoyle above the building’s front door, right before he punctured another nearly-whole buglady and batted her back into a shapeless cloud of gnats with his stick. He could reflect enough light to appear on video, briefly, when he made a special effort, so the King was sure to have seen his unambiguous gesture. Lia imagined the robed skeleton at the top of the tower winging his plate of shiny human hearts against his computer monitor in outraged response.

  She was almost surprised when she made it to the lighted and pedestrian-packed street up the block without being set upon from behind. This had to be the only Halloween she’d ever been grateful for the Hollywood crowds. The cordoned-off road was awash in masked revelers, mounted police, stiltwalking firebreathers and inebriated hipsters, and the collective mass of them made for at least some cover. The fact that she was still alive suggested the King at the top of the Tower wanted her captured rather than killed, and a crowd panicked by the sudden descent of a biblical plague was something she might well escape into. So the bugs were less apt to attack her directly, now.

  Thank the gods for public intoxication, she thought. Dionysus particularly. She’d have to make an appropriate offering later, like buying a shot but leaving it on the bar.

  Lia glanced back at the bug-beings gathering in the shadows behind her before she darted out into the costumed throng. The tiny insects they were made of seemed to be melting together, like lumps of sugar over heat, and Black Tom couldn’t continue fighting them all at the same time.

  The old people (she knew, from sources Tom had pointed out), had called them Tzitzimime. In the language of the Aztecs it meant ‘nightmares of the sky’ or ‘horrors descended from above.’ They were said to be demon courtiers in thrall to the King of Mictlan, the land of the dead, whom Lia still couldn’t believe she’d just seen with her own two eyes.

  Behind her, instead of a swarm, three fully-formed and solid bugwomen stepped out into the bright lights of Sunset Boulevard. There was an Ant, a Mantis, and a Wasp, each of them at least six feet tall. They looked stately and dangerous-all grasshopper legs, pinched waists, and curvaceous thoraxes. The Wasp’s long stinger dripped with viscous venom, and Mantis’s snapping mandibles looked as powerful as the jaws on a steel bear trap. Their dramatic appearance drew pleased applause from the crowds.

  Shitballs, Lia thought, looking back over her shoulder upon hearing a volley of cheers erupt behind her, rather than a chorus of screams. Those fucking bugs were smarter when they gelled together. At least by a little bit.

  They pushed after her, ignoring their admirers. Their fundamental inhumanity was neatly camouflaged by the occasion, and Lia hadn’t counted on a factor like that.

  She made it to the far side of the street, elbowing through a knot of glitter-covered, gossamer-winged fairies, and up onto the sidewalk. Only then did she pause to look back again.

  The bugwomen were coming, all right. They parted the partiers before them, shoving their way through the crowd and recklessly shunting human beings aside. Mantis and Ant were closest to her. The Wasp lagged behind a bit, using the opportunity to look around.

  Lia ducked into a dark and narrow alley, as yet unseen by any of the multilimbed predators. Or so she hoped. She immediate
ly spotted a furtive young tagger crouched beside a dumpster down at the far end of the passage, honing his craft on a patch of virgin wall.

  “Hey!” Lia called, startling him. “You, there with the paint, let me see that.”

  The bewildered vandal dropped his spray can and ran away, showing her nothing but the soles of his Nikes.

  “That works too,” Lia muttered, hurrying over and grabbing up the abandoned can. Glancing back, she spotted Ant and Mantis near the mouth of the alley, scanning and sniffing around for her. There was no sign of Wasp.

  Lia turned to the wall and sprayed, in big bold letters:

  MADAM, I’M ADAM

  — on the theory that palindromes make good imaginal traps.

  Semi-intelligent otherworlders, like her current pursuers, were said to get stuck in them, although she’d never had a need to test the idea out before. She didn’t know if this was going to work at all.

  Ant spotted her as she was finishing off the last letter of her slogan.

  Lia dropped the paint and slipped away while Mantis and Ant shattered into a rustling wave of bugs that poured down the alley after her, as fast as a thought. The pair drew themselves back together to concentrate with every modicum of mental acuity they possessed when they paused before Lia’s hurriedly-scrawled tag. She knew they had to make themselves as human as possible in order to focus and reason, in even the most perfunctory fashion.

  They cocked their sleek heads in eerie synchrony, reading and considering the spray-painted words for longer than they meant to, as Lia’d hoped they would. She paused behind another dumpster to watch them, even though her every nerve was vibrating with a suppressed need to flee. She could see the demons’ large, faceted eyes ticking back and forth over the letters that came to the same meaning when read from either the left or the right.

  The staring monsters’ smooth carapaces soon pebbled and roughened, then separated into tiny bugs that drifted lazily away.

  The entities were hypnotized by the words, their simplified minds bouncing back and forth between the strange phrase’s beginning and its end, completely foxed by the unexpected experience of finding the same message in either direction. It was like feedback in the symbolism, something entrancing and compelling. At least for them.

  Lia knew a child’s wordgame wouldn’t hold the Tzitzimime forever. It might not even hold them for long. But it was something, anyway.

  Within moments all that remained of the statuesque ladydemons were two vague swirls of wan, white light hovering before a nonsensical legend written on a concrete wall.

  Lia had to wrench herself away from the fascinating sight of them.

  She was shaking by the time she emerged from the alley’s far end and onto the next street over, not only from an adrenaline surge that was just now subsiding, but also from the manic, triumphant thrill that always hit her after seeing one of Black Tom’s old tricks come off without a hitch.

  This block was residential, tree-lined, stacked with apartment buildings and packed with parked cars, but far less crowded with pedestrians than the main drag had been.

  So it was no place to linger.

  Lia, looking ever over her shoulder, hurried down the sidewalk to her battered gray Mazda. It was identifiable at any distance by its proliferation of stickers proclaiming the names of her favorite bands or displaying slogans that amused her. A vivid purple example on the rear bumper exhorted its readers to ‘Visualize Whirled Peas.’

  She fumbled out her keys and got in. Tom was already waiting in the passenger seat. He tipped his hat with his customary wry smile before she started up the engine and pulled away from the curb, out onto the dark and traffic-free street, wasting no more time about it. She was opening her mouth to tell him about her success with the palindrome trap when something long and straight and deadly sharp plunged down through the car’s roof, barely missing her head. She lost control of the wheel as her eyes tried to focus on the fat black needle that had almost lobotomized her, crushing a trash bin with her front bumper before the car squealed to an involuntary halt against the curb. Its ill-maintained engine burbled, faltered, and stalled.

  While Lia twisted the key, fighting to restart the car, the unidentified spike withdrew with a loud metallic screech and slammed down again, punching a second hole in her roof.

  This time Black Tom grabbed the thing, whatever it was, and held on. He leaned out the passenger window and looked up.

  An enormous wasp/woman hybrid glared back down at him, enraged at having her stinger trapped.

  Black Tom pulled his head back into the car when the engine coughed and roared again. Gripping the thrashing stinger for dear life, he frantically indicated that they should go. The faster the better.

  Lia floored it and the little car lurched away from the curb, off down the street at full speed, with Wasp pinned to the roof by her considerable, yellow- amp;-brown-striped ass. Lia could hear her unfurled wings crackling in the wind as she piloted them straight up into the hills, climbing hard, with her Mazda’s puny engine howling in protest.

  She knew exactly where she was going.

  In minutes they were up above the houses, on a rough fire access road that ran all the way through Griffith Park, bisecting the vast swath of undeveloped territory that served as a divider between the city of Hollywood on this side and the San Fernando Valley (where they lived), on the other. Wasp slapped lashing foliage aside as Lia sped them through a tunnel of black nighttime trees.

  Stretched across the road ahead was a chain with an ineffectually small ‘NO TRESPASSING’ sign dangling from it. The chain was set high, for the sake of roving SUVs, and Lia’s car was small. Going slow, she might’ve slid right under it. But she wasn’t going slow. Not at all.

  The chain starred her windshield and snapped with an audible twang when the Mazda plowed through it at full speed. Lia’s hand shot up to shield her eyes.

  The broken chain whipped upwards, cutting Wasp in half at the middle while flicking her neatly off the roof. The two pieces of her segmented body fell away to burst against the pavement like a pair of rotten pumpkins, exploding into a dazed-looking swarm that rose and dissipated, reluctantly, after Lia’s taillights disappeared over the crest of the hill they’d been climbing.

  Black Tom craned around to look back and Lia angled her mirror every which way, but the Wasp seemed to be gone. It was either dead or distracted, at least for the time being. Lia drove on as fast as she dared, down a series of narrow back roads meant only for park service vehicles and the occasional fire truck.

  Tom realized he was still holding onto Wasp’s severed stinger. He looked down at it, nonplussed, then tossed it out the window. It clattered to the road surface behind them just before an unlighted, off-the-map tunnel swallowed up Lia’s car.

  Chapter Three

  Lia’s tires crunched and popped in the gravel when she pulled into the parking lot at the front of Potter’s Yard. Her headlights splashed across the Yard’s small office shack and penetrated the dense wall of greenery behind it, causing a brief wash of weird, bristling shadows to race away through the orderly ranks of sapling trees.

  “Home again, home again,” she muttered, then sighed. Peering through the new web of fissures in her windshield during the drive up through the Valley had given her the beginnings of a headache. She gauged how weary she must’ve looked by the concern she saw reflected in Black Tom’s eyes.

  She angled into her accustomed spot near the wooden fence and paused to finger the freshly-punched holes in the roof of her car before getting out. “Shitballs,” she muttered to herself, feeling fairly certain that demon attacks were not going to be covered by her insurance policy.

  Black Tom stepped out on the passenger side and inspected the holes in the roof for himself while Lia pulled the Yard’s rattling gate closed along its metal track, then locked it for the night.

  All around her, lush and leafy life thrived. There were shrubs, flowers, and mature trees in big wooden bins, as well as a lar
ge nursery under green nylon shades, a corrugated-plastic greenhouse, and the tiny cabin that looked to be about a hundred years old, which currently housed the establishment’s cash register. Its wood-plank walls were silvery-gray after years of exposure to the weather, and its glassless windows were shuttered closed for the night. Beyond that lay eight full acres of foliage, plants in hundreds of varieties and sizes.

  It all felt still, silent and safe-just the way Lia liked it.

  She paused to look back toward her car before she’d gotten more than a few feet down a narrow path that ran between two rows of bushy ficus trees.

  Black Tom was just then stooping down as if to pet a large black cat that was lying curled up near the gate, as still as a stone. He lifted the feline’s pointy chin with one gnarled hand and then dissolved into a substance that might have been either light or mist in order to funnel himself right down into the animal’s unblinking eyes, so fast that most people would have been able to tell themselves they hadn’t seen it happen.

  “C’mon, already,” Lia said, then vanished down the darkly verdant corridor. The spirit she called Black Tom trotted after her, re-ensconced within the catbody that kept him anchored to this world. The ink-colored kitten had been so young and so close to death when he claimed it years ago that it had no volition of its own today, and would sit motionless wherever he left it for as long as his conscious mind was absent.

  The reanimated animal was leading the way by the time they reached the center of the Yard: a clearing where pots, fountains, and a large collection of garden statuary were displayed. What Lia chose to see was a fairy ring made up of crouching gnomes, spitting mermaids, and concrete bodhisattvas, all of them frozen in their nighttime revels by her approach.