Graves' end Read online

  “Then I’m glad I can give it back to you.”

  She meant it, too. The raggedly dressed skeleton looked up at her and seemed in a way to see her for the very first time. It was hard to tell without facial expressions, but she thought he looked surprised, and maybe even humbled.

  Then his swagger reasserted itself. Grinning (again, insofar as that could be done without facial muscles or lips-it was mostly a matter of skull positioning), he sauntered over to take Lia’s hand, clearly and perversely attempting to charm her pants off. That he now conspicuously lacked the endowments needed to follow through on his compulsion didn’t seem to faze him at all.

  “Well, listen, dollface,” he drawled. “I am in your debt here, so if there’s anything, and I do mean anything that I can do-”

  Lia recoiled when Graves took her hand and attempted to kiss it, jerking it away and shying back with a startled hiss.

  It made for an awkward moment between them, to say the least.

  Lia regretted her reaction as soon as she sensed Hannah’s mounting alarm over it. If Lia turned frightened of this thing that called itself Dexter Graves, then Mrs. Potter might well freak out. And who’d be able to blame her?

  Graves looked down at his own fleshless phalanges. “I keep forgettin’ I’m not as pretty as I used to be,” he said quietly, by way of apology.

  Lia felt guilty enough about her discourtesy to a guest that she began to protest automatically, in spite of her genuine consternation. “No, no, it isn’t that,” she said, groping for words even though she wasn’t sure what she meant to say. The man was a walking cadaver, after all, and Miss Manners was sure to be silent on subjects like these. No index entry for ‘undeadiquette,’ Lia would’ve wagered. She didn’t like to hurt feelings, though, if she could help it, no matter who or what those feelings might belong to. “It’s just-”

  “Guess I could be crawling with disease, too, couldn’t I?” Graves mused, talking over her and rubbing it in a bit, she thought, now that he could see she felt bad. “After being planted for… well, hell, how long has it been, anyway?”

  Lia didn’t know. How on earth could she? She shrugged and shook her head, still feeling quite bewildered by him. By the incredible fact of his existence, as well as the sheer undeniability of his presence. Desiccated Dexter Graves represented a new phase in her experience, all right. A mindblowing one, even for a woman with interests and predilections like hers. He looked like a Day of the Dead decoration come to life. “When did you, umm…?”

  “Buy the farm?” Graves teased, trying and failing to cajole her out of her obvious discomfort. “Cash my check? Shuffle off my-”

  “Yeah. That.”

  “1950 or so, I s’pose,” Graves said, thinking about it. He scratched at his fractured skull, tipping back his hat and revealing a ragged crater in his forehead, like an off-center third-eye socket. “Memory’s a little cracked, y’know. So, when is it now?”

  Lia hesitated. She didn’t want to deliver this sort of news.

  Hannah stepped in, seeking to take the pressure off her rattled friend, and Lia was more than willing to let her. Han took Graves’ reclaimed lighter from his hand and set it aside, then urged Graves to sit.

  He did so compliantly, settling his assbones onto one of Lia’s scavenged chairs with a trenchcoat-muffled thump. Hannah crouched down in front of him, took both of his hands, and looked him square in the eyeholes.

  “Dexter…” Han said. “Brace yourself, okay?”

  “I’m braced,” he said, and Hannah told him what she knew.

  Graves looked overcome.

  “No fooling?” he said wonderingly, after a moment or two. “Sixty years?” He thought about it for another beat, and some of the straightness went out of his spine. “Everyone I ever knew is dead,” he murmured.

  “Probably,” Lia agreed, perhaps tactlessly, but it was out there before she could think better of it.

  Graves shook his skull as the full weight of his existential conundrum crashed over him. It was as though a spell that’d been keeping him from thinking too deeply about his circumstances had evaporated, probably at the instant she gave him back that lighter. His cervical vertebrae crackled.

  “Holy hell,” he said. “I never thought… I mean, how could I have, it’s not, it, it-oh God what’s happening? What the hell is going on?”

  He jumped up, beseeching, and this time both women recoiled in fear. Lia pushed Hannah aside to grab up Graves’ Zippo from the pile of books Han had absently set it on top of. Graves lurched away after Hannah, who shrieked at full volume, her voice echoing painfully off the close concrete walls.

  “Lady, come on, you gotta tell me, how is this happening?” the skeleton pleaded, backing Hannah into a corner. “Why did I come here? Who the hell are you people? Come on,I need to know!”

  All right now, Lia thought. Enough’s enough.

  She deftly wrapped Graves’ lighter in twine that she snatched up from a handy box of craft supplies, then nipped it off with her teeth and knotted it. She dumped the stagnant remainder of a beverage from a nearby drinking glass and clapped it down over the lighter. She put her hands over the glass, closed her eyes and concentrated hard to charge her intention. She gasped sharply and straightened up like she’d been jabbed in some invisible way when she felt the psychic circuit close. It would’ve been difficult for an observer to guess whether this was painful or pleasurable for her. She wasn’t always so sure herself.

  At the instant her eyes flew open, Dexter Graves tumbled into a heap of bones and clothes on the floor behind her. His ongoing rant was silenced mid-shout. Lia heard the bones clatter, and the coat whispered as it deflated.

  Hannah, cowering against the wall, likewise sagged with relief. “Is he gone?” she asked in a shaky voice.

  Lia turned around, feeling woozy, and smoke rose up from Graves’ disarticulated bones. It coalesced into a vivid ghost right in front of her, one that looked the way Graves must have before he died: smug and cool in his coat and hat. “Not gone by a long shot, sister,” he said to Hannah, who yelped and clutched at her breastbone when he spoke to her. “Not forgotten either.”

  “Oh, my God, it’s a ghost,” Han said.

  “It was a talking skeleton when you were having a drink with it,” Lia observed.

  “Yeah, but… I’ve never seen a ghost,” Hannah said, prompting Lia to roll her eyes and abandon the conversation.

  “Listen,” Graves said. “I don’t know what you dolls are tryin’ to pull here, but-”

  He took a step toward Lia and bumped against an invisible barrier, like a mime in a box. Or under a big drinking glass.

  “Heyyy,” he said, scowling and testing the unexpectedly resistant air before him. “What gives?”

  Lia pointed to her arrangement of glass and lighter and string, nestled up on her overstuffed bookshelf. “I’ve bound you, Mr. Graves,” she explained. “I’m sorry, you seem like a very nice man, but… you’re scary.”

  Graves shrugged. He couldn’t argue that one.

  “What I mean is, we don’t know what you are or why you’re here, any more than you seem to. And until we figure that out, I think it’s best you stay right where you are.”

  “You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Graves said. “What, you’re just gonna leave me here? For how long?”

  “I don’t think time is exactly of the essence with you, Mr. Graves,” Lia said.

  The ghost put his hands on his hips and looked for a retort, but he couldn’t seem to find one. “Yeah, well, maybe not,” he said, and sighed, looking defeated. “Will you at least call me Dexter, then? I like to be on a first-name basis with all my captors.”

  “I will do that,” Lia agreed with a nod. “And… you are right about one thing, Dexter.”

  She looked Graves’-Dexter’s-ghost up and down, with an approving lift of her eyebrows (a mannerism she’d half-consciously adopted from Tom). In life Dex had been tall and solid, with dark hair, nice eyes, and an affably bemuse
d expression. He looked damn good in the suit he’d manifested, too.

  “You were prettier before you rotted,” she told him.

  Then she sashayed over to the tube and climbed up without another look back. Hannah waved an awkward goodbye before she followed.

  Graves heard the hatch clank shut and the wheel squeal, above. He reflected that this, then, was the second time he’d ever been dumped in a hole for safekeeping. At least he had dim electric light and a little bit of elbow room this time around. His invisible cell allowed him almost five whole feet of leeway. Enough space to dance a goddamn jig, should the spirit move him.

  He wanted to be angrier about all of this than he was really able to manage. That Lia was smart to be cautious, as well as far too cute for him to stay mad at. Her oversized eyes glittered like balls of dark glass, and her pert little figure looked generous in all the right places.

  While he’d looked like something a dog might dig up and barf onto a kitchen floor, when making his first impression.

  Frustrated, Graves sat down crosslegged amidst his own dusty bones, with his ghostcoat pooling out around his insubstantial shoes. This whole deal felt backwards to him. Clients were supposed to walk into his office, looking for help from a man who knew the score. Not the other way around. Miss Lia seemed at least to know the name of the game they were playing, which was far more than Graves could currently say for himself. She’d also dealt with his little outburst pretty efficiently, as soon as she felt the need. He couldn’t help but be impressed with that, despite the resulting inconvenience. She was like nothing he’d ever seen before.

  Letting his thoughts drift back toward the girl wasn’t as distracting as the weird compulsion that had left him like a dream as soon as he touched his lighter, but it was a perfectly kosher way of occupying his mind while he waited for a plan to occur to him. Habit made him pat his breast pocket and he was pleasantly surprised to find a pack of ectoplasmic cigarettes in there.

  Talk about coffin nails, he thought dryly.

  He patted again, his hopes rising, but he no longer seemed to have his lighter. He remembered why and looked over at it, tied shut and imprisoned under glass up on Lia’s crowded bookshelf. He sneered bitterly.

  “Story of my goddamn life,” he muttered.

  Chapter Ten

  Potter’s Yard was fast becoming a seductive oasis of deepening shadow and saturated color by the time the women emerged from the doortube, swinging first one leg and then the other out over its concrete lip, but Lia could only look pensively up at the still-bright sky. Her tom twined about her ankles, anxiously.

  Hannah, as shaken as a martini by the experience of meeting Dexter Graves, didn’t quite know what to say.

  “We don’t have much time,” Lia murmured, talking mostly to herself. There were only a few hours left before dark. It wasn’t yet two in the afternoon, but night fell early at this time of year.

  Hannah looked back at Bag End’s doortube: that innocuous concrete cylinder poking up out of the earth. “Are you really gonna leave him down there?” she asked, in reference to the magically-incarcerated Mr. Graves.

  “I guess,” Lia said absently. “It’ll keep him out of the way. Right now I’ve got other things to worry about.”

  Hannah followed when Lia strode off through the plants, headed toward the parking lot and the distant office shack.

  “Lia?” she said tentatively, brushing aside the foliage that swatted at her as she hurried to keep up. “How’d you know you could, you know, do what you did? To him, back there? Trapping him like that, I mean. Dexter.”

  “I could do as much to you if I wanted.”

  Hannah stopped in the middle of the path.

  Lia realized what she’d said and stopped, too. She turned and saw that her friend was genuinely frightened-this time of her. It was not a nice feeling. “I don’t, though,” she said quickly. “Want to. I won’t. I mean, I wouldn’t. You know that, right?”

  “I don’t know what I know right now,” Hannah said.

  Lia winced. She wondered, not for the first time, if telling Hannah the truth about what she was had ever been a good idea. They’d discussed it before, a time or two, but the poor thing had never fully accepted that being a ‘witch’ entailed more than wearing too much black and enjoying books about mythology.

  “Hannah, look, I’m sorry,” she said, striving for patience despite her own growing anxiety. “But there’re more things like your pal Dexter on the way and I have to be ready for them. Before dark.”

  Hannah looked unwell. “More?” she gulped.

  “Yes, and we can talk about it all later, but right now I have a lot to do and it might be safer if you’re not here.”

  “But… I can help,” Hannah said. “I can stay. I should stay.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I want to, though. I do.” She added: “I can’t just leave you.”

  Lia had to smile. Hannah was more fascinated than afraid. Lia was both touched by her concern and proud of her excitement in the face of events that went far beyond the scope of her previous experience. “Okay. Good,” she said. “I don’t really think I have time to finish everything by myself anyway. I can use a hand.”

  Hannah nodded, looking both pleased and apprehensive, like a soldier hand-picked for dangerous duty.

  “You go home, though, if you get scared, okay? I won’t hold it against you.”

  Hannah nodded again. “Just tell me what we need to do,” she said.

  Lia tied a hasty dreamcatcher from red thread and gave it to Hannah, who hung it, alongside many others, high up in the trees. They looked like scarlet webs spun by nightmare spiders.

  It was arts and crafts time for Lia, with an emphasis on the Craft.

  Tom hung about, watching the women work as the day’s late light grew warmer and the shadows grew longer, pointing like heavy, black fingers toward the east. There wasn’t a lot he could do to assist; it was now up to Lia to apply the knowledge he’d given her over all the years of their acquaintance.

  The first task she assigned herself was to spraypaint creepy, staring blue eyes, dozens of them in many sizes, all down the outside of the nursery’s wooden fence. Hannah consented to the vandalism without so much as a word about property values.

  Tom’s (and now Lia’s) theory was that to ‘Those Who Are Not Our Brothers,’ even rudimentary symbols are alive and imbued with power. It meant that the unblinking stares of her warding eyes would be agony for Mictlantecuhtli’s demon women to endure, and best of all, with a little deflective hex added in they wouldn’t even understand why.

  Lia next decided a little math magic might be in order. The number Pi, she’d been told, represents a crack in reality’s mathematical rationality, one that unwary otherworlders might easily stumble into. She therefore instructed Hannah to paint a string of red numbers all around the eyeball-bedecked fence. 3.1415etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, and so on. Han checked the digits against a computer printout as she went, starting at the top of the front gate and spiraling them around the Yard’s perimeter in descending rings, all the way down to the ground.

  Encountering such a sequence, the cut-down consciousness of a typical imaginal feels compelled to follow it all the way out to its logical end. Pi, as far as Lia knew, had been calculated well past its billionth decimal, although the actual end was nowhere in sight.

  Have a nice trip, was her thought on that matter.

  Next, she stuck a USB drive into the aging computer attached to the office cash register. A Solitaire window popped up on the screen and laid out a game, seven cards, face up. Lia saw a story in the sequence. A beginning, a middle, and an end. Then the program glitched, blanked, and restarted in a new window, laying out a new game. Another window popped up, and then another, each dealing out a hand of cards and disappearing, but not before two new games opened in its place. They rapidly filled up the screen.

  The program on the portable drive was something she’d gotten from her old f
riend Riley, who was, by his own description, an accomplished mathmagician. (Or technomancer-he’d vacillated between the terms for years, like he meant to put the to-be-determined favorite on a business card someday.) It was essentially a magic trick, an illusion, one designed to make the area around its point of deployment look like Union Station at rush hour, to a certain sort of eyes. It made the cash register’s old computer system into a large-bore conduit for a constant stream of fresh identities-symbolized lives dealt out by the score and swept away again just that quick. Playing cards were originally derived from the symbols of the Tarot deck, and so otherworlders feel inclined to link them with personality traits and potential destinies. The point of the buggy software was to weave an opaque curtain from false threads of fate.

  Lia watched hand after hand, life after life, cluttering up the computer screen. She nodded in satisfaction and quit the office, leaving the program to run unsupervised. Finding her through such an elaborate screen of semiotic disinformation should’ve been impossible, now.

  But then, these Tzitzimime were surprising things. Witless and not that hard to manipulate, but surprising, too. It was hard to know if what she knew was going to be enough to deal with them.

  She sat down in a little clearing she’d arranged at the quiet center of the Yard, on the bare ground and amidst a profusion of foliage that blazed in tones of green, gold and delicate orange as the smoldering, late-day light poured through it. She closed her eyes to compose herself. Her tom sat down beside her and dropped into a similar state of psychic quiescence (which comes naturally enough to a cat), and together they activated Lia’s symbolized intentions.

  It was a sacred, silent moment for the both of them. Lia fancied she could feel the pull of the imminent moon in her blood, as well as the terrifying velocity of her vast world as it ground its relentless way around the tiny spark of light and warmth that kept it alive in the never-ending blackness of space. Her mind kept on expanding, out beyond the galaxies and down through the microcosm, too.