Graves' end Read online

  Ingrid crossed to the bank of three elevators waiting on the far side of the room and stepped into the center car. The doors closed behind her, and as soon as they did so, the vitality drained out of the foyer. It decayed back into the dusty, ravaged ruin that lay underneath the King’s illusions, now that she wasn’t there to see them anymore.

  Starting off as a similar sort of moldy wreck, the upstairs corridor brightened and restored itself in perfect anticipation of the elevator’s bell.

  Ingrid stepped out of the car and into the hall, onto carpeting that matched her shoes. She hadn’t seen the transformation occur, but she sensed that it had. The magic left a charged, electric feeling hanging in the air. She went straight to Miguel Caradura’s office door.

  The name painted there at eye level was still marred by Graves’ bloodstain, even after the passage of more than sixty years. That much had not been cleaned up in honor of her visit. Ingrid contemplated the rusty smear for a moment before opening the door. She knew better than to think that leaving it there had been an oversight.

  The outer office she walked into looked mostly appropriate to the modern world, although its far wall was constructed of rough mud bricks that didn’t match the rest of the decor one bit. Ingrid could see Mictlantecuhtli’s bloodcaked altar through the doorway in the adobe wall: a round slab of limestone carved with hearts, skulls, and others of the King’s symbols. Beyond that was yet another doorway-a doorless portal to the outside world, ancient and simple in its style-one that admitted a sort of weak, gray daylight into the sacrificial room.

  “Hello?” Ingrid said.

  There was no answer. The place was empty.

  Ingrid frowned as she stepped through the doorway between the Chambers and into the inner sanctum. She gave the altar a wide berth on her way to the far door.

  Then she stepped outside and found herself on the top level of a monumental Aztec pyramid. It was the only structure of any kind anywhere in sight.

  Silver stars and a line of moons in progressing phases hung motionless across a matte gray sky, above her. Pale, fog-shrouded suns hovered at either horizon, and the untrammeled landscape looked like the Los Angeles area would have back in the days when the world was still flat.

  This was Mictlan, the Realm of the Shades, where Time did not apply. Which meant that events here felt like they were either taking forever or happening instantaneously, and sometimes both at once.

  Ingrid sighed, looking down the excessively long and steep set of rough stone steps that lay at her feet. There was no other way down the side of the pyramid.

  “Dammit, Mickey…” she muttered, taking off her impractical heels. She carried them by their thin straps as she began picking her way down the precarious stairs in nothing but her stocking feet.

  Some indeterminate and utterly meaningless span of the pseudotime Mickey insisted on playing around with later, Ingrid reached ground level.

  Her hair was mussed, she was out of breath, and her feet were screaming. Her silk stockings were a total write-off. She sat down on the last step and considered putting her pumps back on, then just threw them aside instead.

  “Lady Redstone.”

  Ingrid looked up. Standing a few yards away from her was a tall and dignified-looking skeleton in dapper black tie and tails. This was Winston, Mickey’s majordomo and the overseer of his affairs out in the realworld. Ingrid knew him all too well. “Winston,” she said.

  “Mictlantecuhtli would see you,” the dead manservant told her.

  “Good for him,” was her terse reply. She was still irritated over having been made to climb down the pyramid’s side when Mickey normally met her at the door between life and death, the one between his Chambers. These games of his were so uncalled for. Being pawned off on a servant was nothing she appreciated, either.

  Winston made a casual gesture and a palanquin composed of smoke swirled into view behind her, along with a team of eight skeletal porters. One of the porters slid open a diaphanous door in the box’s misty side, revealing a solid and comfortable-looking interior. A space upholstered in silk and red velvet. A magnum of wine, an elegant hookah, and lush cushions all awaited her within.

  It looked like heaven after her long hike down the side of the pyramid.

  Winston offered a hand to help her up, and Ingrid took it. With a smile. “Thank you, Winston,” she said.

  The well-dressed skeleton followed her to the insubstantial conveyance and helped her in. He slid the smokedoor shut behind her. “The pleasure is most assuredly mine, Miss Redstone,” he said.

  Winston clicked his bony fingers and the porters bore Ingrid away. The ghostly palanquin faded rapidly into the thin but omnipresent fog. Winston turned into a wisp of smoke himself in order to follow on the breeze.

  Ingrid had no trouble making herself comfortable inside the palanquin. She blew languid smoke rings while it rocked and bobbed with the rhythm of her porters’ gait. Time that wasn’t really time seemed to slowly pass.

  Growing bored, Ingrid slid a window panel open for a peek outside.

  Superimposed over the vast chaparral plain was a faint, barely-there street made of thin smoke and populated by clothed skeletons, all of them going about their everyday business-whatever they remembered that to be. Ingrid perceived gossamer suggestions of buildings and cars from different eras, from horses and carts to vehicles far ahead of any age she knew. An instant after they congealed they were gone again, absorbed back into the mists. The geography over here could be uncertain and unstable, changeable like the weather. Landmarks didn’t like to stay where they belonged, and the fashions she saw cut across the centuries.

  She’d often wondered how that sort of thing worked, exactly. If the future dead were here in this timeless realm (as they plainly were, at least from her perspective), then might it not be possible to meet her future dead self?

  Questions like that only irritated Mickey. His answers to them were vague, full of paradox and what he imagined to be poetry, leading Ingrid to suspect that even a god might not always understand as much as he pretended. The King of the Dead’s best explanation was that the phenomenal world, as he called it (which was not some fabulous location, as Ingrid first thought, but simply the regular human world where phenomena occur, otherwise known as the real world), is something that exists only as a single anomalous bubble of change and alteration amidst the vast timelessness of Mictlantecuhtli’s territory, where all possibilities exist at once. Chronology itself was the illusion.

  As with most things Mickey told her, she wasn’t sure where the truth ended and the self-aggrandizement began. She knew he’d long since cornered the afterlife market, subsuming competing death-deities into himself, and that he’d also conquered any number of mythological territories beyond his native one, through sheer ambition. And yet he was hardly the almighty ruler of everything that he aspired to be. The realworld, for example, remained out of his reach, as did the more distant shores of the vast imaginal sea in which the realm of the dead was still just one of the islands (all right-one of the continents, Ingrid conceded), no matter what el Rey de Los Muertos had to say about it.

  She only stared out the window for a minute or two (or so it seemed-the action may have taken a century or a second in relative time, and there was no meaningful way to gauge it), but skeletons on the sidewalk started to notice their world’s living visitor just that quick.

  They pointed bony fingers and followed along with the palanquin, in rapidly increasing numbers.

  The skeletal citizens and their surroundings became more solid as the crowd grew, as though they were remembering form and vitality through Ingrid’s example. Even glimpsed through the slit of a window, her dark red hair and jewel-like eyes were the most vivid sights available. Arresting enough in the realworld, Ingrid’s beauty was almost shocking in this gray and faded place.

  The locals were more than seduced.

  Ingrid, feeling uncomfortable, slid the window shut. Alone again, she sucked on her hookah f
or reassurance.

  As the tireless porters carried her down the chronologically-promiscuous, half-substantial street, it swirled away to nothingness behind them.

  Finally-although any appearance of time here was really just for show-Ingrid’s porters set her palanquin down in front of a smokesketch of a cozy restaurant. Ingrid recognized it as a flawless simulacrum of Tom Bergin’s House of Irish Coffee, down below Wilshire on Fairfax, right here in Los Angeles. It was a favorite realworld pub of hers, a place she’d visited in seven different twentieth-century decades. Only the faces of the bartenders had ever seemed to change, and even those were apt to take their time about it.

  In a world where so much was in flux, Ingrid took comfort in that type of continuity.

  Winston reappeared to slide open the palanquin’s door and help her out, onto a misty sidewalk that felt more like cold, bare earth than concrete against her soles.

  A ring of skeletons watched in awed silence, from a respectful distance. A number of ossified paparazzi snapped pictures, one with an old wooden box camera balanced on a tripod. His hand-held flash apparatus went up with a soft flump, in a puff of desultory smoke.

  Ingrid spared them one glance, then turned and walked into the restaurant.

  Winston held the heavy front door open, and then closed it again behind her.

  Like the palanquin, the inside of the public house appeared perfectly solid and real. Winston led Ingrid past the central bar and across a front room crowded with gregarious skeletons in vividly realized Prohibition-era attire.

  By the time they reached the back of the bar, the skeletons had all become real-looking, fully-fleshed people from the Jazz Age.

  Winston admitted Ingrid to a boisterous private party going on in the back room, ushering her past a pair of stone-faced bouncers.

  Wild flappers in slinky dresses and bootleggers in suspenders, flatcaps, and rolled-up sleeves all laughed, danced or drank to the hot jazz provided by a combo in the corner. Several brands of fragrant smoke hung in layers in the air.

  The crowd parted readily for Winston, revealing Mictlantecuhtli, in full cowl, sitting at a big table against the back wall.

  Two sloe-eyed lovelies she’d heard him call Nyx and Lyssa on previous occasions sipped at opium pipes as they lounged on either side of him. He ran a flayed finger down Nyx’s throat and breastbone, playfully. She smiled.

  Ingrid, who wasn’t into this at all, rolled her eyes, stepped past Winston before he could announce her, and walked right up to the King’s table.

  “Mickey,” she said.

  Mictlantecuhtli turned his head to look at her. All she could see beneath his heavy cowl was his jawbone and his bloody lower teeth. “My love,” he greeted her, in a voice that echoed like eternity.

  “I did it,” Ingrid said. “I’ve done it. It’s done.”

  Mictlantecuhtli tipped his head in the barest nod of acknowledgement.

  “So. Are we square?”

  Mictlantecuhtli didn’t answer. Instead he tipped his head forward and put his hands under his cowl to push it back. In doing so he revealed his ‘Miguel Caradura’ aspect: that of a powerful, dark-skinned man with small, intense eyes and a prominent nose, wearing a broad-shouldered Italian suit and a necklace of human eyes. If Rudolph Valentino had been an Aztec king…

  “I can’t help but think you don’t care for my party,” he chided Ingrid, in a low whisky growl of a voice. “And I thought this was your favorite era?”

  “It’s great, Mickey,” she said, not taking any special pains to conceal her impatience with his theatrics. “It’s fine.” If he’d bothered to look a little more deeply into anyone’s mind, he would’ve known this bar had never been a speakeasy. It hadn’t even opened till the 1930s. She cast a glance at Lyssa, who looked back with heavy-lidded, contemptuous eyes. “Really nice.”

  Mickey snarled. He didn’t like being patronized. He never had. “I think perhaps you would prefer something different,” he murmured acidly.

  ‘Miguel Caradura’ stood, and his coat and shirt rotted away to reveal a muscular torso. He donned a ludicrous, floppy top hat and pumped his fist to a house beat that seamlessly supplanted the 20s-era jazz. Even the crowd changed around them, into rave kids with light sticks and water bottles clutched in their hands. Blacklight-reactive bodypaint designs appeared all over Nyx and Lyssa’s glistening flesh, like luminescent tattoos.

  Mickey grinned. “Yes?” he asked. “No. A bit past your time, isn’t this, my love? How about this, then? Any better?”

  Even as he spoke the music changed to disco and Mickey’s clothes grew back into an outfit Tony Montana might’ve worn to a cockfight: an awful leisure suit in a shiny white synthetic fabric. Only his garland of eyeballs remained unchanged, while styles all around them morphed over into Afros, miniskirts, and paisley polyester.

  “Mickey, stop,” Ingrid said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “But I will have failed as a host if I cannot please you.”

  Ingrid sighed. There was no talking to him about things like this. “Ago, then,” she suggested. “Can we try that?”

  Mickey looked displeased, but he waved a hand and the restaurant, the crowd, and the band all vanished around them on the wind. Everything and everyone except for Lyssa and Nyx, who retained their stupid 70s outfits even out here on the chaparral plain, under the flat gray sky.

  Mickey himself was now the Aztec king in every detail, down to an owl-feather headdress, golden ornaments on his arms, and an abbreviated loincloth that tied in the front, one woven from coarse but colorful threads.

  “Happy now?” he asked.

  “You know I didn’t come to play,” Ingrid said.

  “Time was you wouldn’t come for any other reason.”

  “Times change, Mickey.”

  “So I hear,” the King said wistfully, looking off toward the horizon. “So I hear…”

  Lyssa twirled away from them, dancing to a tune only she could hear. Nyx lay on the ground, rolling around and stretching her limbs out sensually.

  Ingrid eyed them, nonplussed. Turning to Mickey, she said: “Your new witch took the bait. I’m certain she did. So can you please just tell me now, are we square?”

  Mickey shrugged. “When they come back, we will be.”

  “But that isn’t fair,” Ingrid protested. “I’ve done my part.”

  The King, however, could not have cared less. He smiled, watching his concubines cavort in the near distance. Ingrid had to struggle not to get shrill. He was trying to goad her into losing her composure, and she knew it. These were the games he played.

  “He’ll go to the girl first,” she said. “You know that’s how this has to work. She could be anywhere in the city, and it’s not my fault if your… your bugbitches can’t track her, Mickey.”

  “Not your fault, no,” Mickey said calmly. “But still your problem.”

  Ingrid was angry enough to cry, as he knew she would be. She clenched her jaw and stayed silent.

  Mickey, pleased with her show of resolve, turned and put his hands on her shoulders. “Be soothed, my love,” he said. “My living soldiers search for them even now, and my Tzitzimime will soon rejoin the hunt.”

  Ingrid looked away. “Wonderful. The ignorant backed by the incompetent. My fate’s never felt more secure.”

  The King let her go and stepped back, looking irritated. “You make a point,” he said. He considered for another moment, then turned and clapped his hands for his concubines. “Lyssa!” he called. “Nyx!”

  They vanished from where they were and reappeared right before him, submissive and attentive, with their 1970s attire now abandoned in favor of simple linen shifts and pulled-back hair.

  “You are to go and lead my Tzitzimime in their task,” he told them. “Yes?”

  They answered in unison: “As you would have it, Mictlantecuhtli.”

  They vanished again, and this time they didn’t reappear.

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
Ingrid asked, folding her arms once they were gone.

  “It should, I think, yes,” Mickey said. He grinned in a way that chilled Ingrid’s blood. “Madness and Darkness, Lyssa and Nyx,” he continued, looking off to the horizon again, as he was wont to do. “If he’s above ground, those two will have him.”

  Chapter Nine

  Lia picked up the lighter she’d found the night before from its new resting place on her bookshelf. She noted the burnt spot beneath it with a frown. But no matter. She turned, holding up the Zippo as a skeleton who dressed like a detective from a black- amp;-white movie came climbing down the tube ladder and into her underground home. Graves’ bony, segmented fingers clicked and rang against the ladder’s metal rungs. Hannah descended after him. Black Tom was down here already, projected from his catbody and appearing human again to Lia (although he remained invisible to everybody else). He kept one censorious eyebrow arched in the undead thing’s direction, but Mr. Graves’ courteous attitude was so different from that of the Tzitzimime that it was hard for Lia to believe he might be in league with them, despite the probable origin that his raw-boned appearance hinted at.

  Whatever he was and wherever he’d come from, all he really seemed interested in was finding his cigarette lighter.

  “Is this it?” Lia asked.

  The skeleton raced over and snatched the Zippo from her hand, Smeagol-like, as soon as his shoeless, skinless feet hit the concrete floor. “Yes!” he shouted. “Oh, man, it is good to have this back.” Graves flipped the lid a couple of times, clicked the wheel to light the device and snuffed it out again, nodding happily. “Ohhhh yeah, that’s the stuff,” he crooned. “That’s just, I dunno… satisfying, somehow.”

  He became aware of the strange looks the women were giving him and straightened up to recover his dignity. “Uh… yeah,” he said. “Sorry. I’m not, y’know, section eight or nothin.’”

  “I’d never think it,” Lia said.

  “It’s just got personal meaning for me, this thing,” Graves explained, contemplating the tarnished old lighter.