Ingrid watched as Winston the bony butler finished knotting Miguel Caradura’s fine silk tie, then stepped back from the King. ‘Caradura’ turned to admire himself in a full-length mirror that appeared upon the gray plain in perfectly-timed anticipation of his desire for it.
The King had materialized another elegant, modern-day suit, Italian cut, which he now wore with his golden Aztec armbands over the sleeves and his owl-feather headdress perched upon his brow. The necklace of eyeballs was, as ever, his signature statement. If the vitreous humor that dribbled from the holes they were strung through stained his new clothes, well, then that was just as it had to be.
He turned away from the mirror. “Do you like my suit, my love?” he asked.
Ingrid looked him up and down, from where she sat reclining on her chaise. The step pyramid stood tall against the gray horizon far behind him, like a jagged Mount Fuji. “I do,” she answered, truthfully enough. “You always did know how to wear your clothes, Mickey.”
El Rey grinned. Ingrid figured it probably wasn’t the moment to point out that his taste in accessories did detract somewhat from his outfit’s overall effect.
Nyx, who was still kneeling on the bare ground, stirred and looked pained. She remained dressed in her simple linen and wore her hair in a fat, dark braid, as was her prerogative on this side of reality.
“Mic- Mictlantecuhtli?” she said.
“Yes, Nyx?”
“My sister-daughter… will not be returning, Mictlantecuhtli.”
Mickey blinked calmly, several times. “And why might that be, Nyx?”
“The witchgirl grew a tree down through her head and rooted her to the earth,” the anxious Archon explained. “She… she is quite uncomfortable, Mictlantecuhtli.”
“I always wonder what really happened when they come out with surrealist shit like that,” Ingrid said.
Mickey frowned, and Ingrid instantly regretted having spoken her mind. “Do you say their descriptions are not accurate?” the King queried. “They do not illustrate the events of the actualworld?”
“They tend to be… colorful, let’s say,” Ingrid said. “That’s all.”
“Foreigners,” the King spat, sneering down at his kneebound concubine. “I wasted my efforts when I conquered your sphere, Nyx. But you were weak and it was easy, so I figured ‘what the hell?’”
“I apologize, Mictlantecuhtli,” Nyx said, without raising her eyes. Ingrid actually felt a little bit bad for her. “I will free my sister-daughter at dusk, if it pleases you.”
“Yes, yes,” Mickey said dismissively. “Now leave me. It will please me more not to look upon you for a while.”
“Yes, Mictlantecuhtli,” Nyx said, and vanished.
The King turned to Ingrid. “Did I use that right?” he asked. “A ‘while?’ The vocabulary of time remains academic for me.”
“It was perfect, Mickey,” Ingrid said. “Spot on.”
“Like an incarnation would say it? An actualperson, not a nonbody pretending?”
“Exactly like.”
“It wasn’t ‘colorful?’”
“Mickey…” Ingrid had to make an effort not to get frustrated with him. “It was just right. Do I have to drop to my knees in admiration before you believe me?”
She illustrated by doing so, at a distance from his pelvis that was far more suggestive than it was respectful. She looked up the silk-suited front of him, batting her lashes and making her blue eyes as large and innocent as she possibly could. “Does this make you happy?”
“Stand up, Ingrid Redstone,” the King said, sounding stern and not at all amused. “Those games ended between us when you elected not to become my Queen.”
“Yes, Mictlantecuhtli,” Ingrid said, in perfect imitation of Nyx and Lyssa’s fawning subservience.
“Stop it.” Mickey shook his head, looking disgusted. “Foreign women,” he mused aloud. “I should never have strayed beyond the ministrations of my Tzitzimime.”
“Sure, if you like handjobs,” Ingrid said, getting to her feet and brushing off her knees. “Plenty of extra limbs. I’d steer clear of those mandibles though, if I were you.”
“Do not forget your place, Ingrid Redstone,” the King murmured. “Do not insult my sphere or those native to it. You are a foreigner in this land as well.”
“As if I could ever forget it,” Ingrid said.
That seemed to give Mickey an idea. He paced, thinking aloud. “And yet you are a native of the actual,” he said. “One not hampered by the necessary ignorance that blinds my living soldiers…”
“What’s your point?” Ingrid asked, leading him a little, but not too much. She had to play this very carefully now. He would never send her on this errand if he had any inkling that she wanted to go.
“You could get them,” the King said. “Find them, bring them. You could do this, my love.”
“Do I look like a bounty hunter to you?” Ingrid sat back against her cushions and spread her white arms out across the back of the red velvet sofa. “Don’t act desperate, Mickey. It’s unattractive.”
“You may command my mercenaries,” he told her. “I’ve got all the human beings you can use.”
“I don’t know, though…” Ingrid said, feigning a frown and hoping she wasn’t hamming it up too much. Not that a nuanced performance wouldn’t be lost on Mickey Hardface anyway. “It’s kind of a tall order. What can I do that all of your bugbabes and moonmaidens couldn’t?”
“Walk the actual with some understanding of its habits and its ways, apparently,” was Caradura’s considered thought on the matter. “You will do this, Ingrid Redstone,” he decreed. “You will do this, or you will become my Queen, regardless of your wishes in this matter, and we’ll try this all again!”
Before Ingrid could respond, Mickey snapped his fingers.
She woke up on the floor outside his office within the Silent Tower. In the very place where Dexter Graves had died, in fact. Died by her hand… sort of. She had managed to bind a tiny spark of him to the lighter he’d dropped, the last object he’d touched, right before he passed on into darkness.
She sat up, looked around, and smoothed her hair. The hall was a lightless ruin once again, with no red carpet rolled out for her now.
“My gods, that took long enough,” she muttered. She looked back at the closed door with Miguel Caradura’s name stenciled on it, and allowed herself a slight, sly smile.
Ahh, Mickey, she thought to herself. Still handsome, ruthless, and stupid. Just the way I like you.
She got up and hurried off, down the decaying hallway, headed toward the stairs.
When Ingrid stepped out onto the street, she found thirteen new gangsters already waiting for her, with six new black cars at their disposal. These guys were younger, rougher, more tattooed and less experienced than the last bunch had been. They mostly wore hooded sweatshirts and dark jeans-a distinct step down from the ugly suits the previous, more competent-looking minions had worn.
They all fell silent upon seeing Ingrid. ‘Rapt’ seemed like the appropriate word. She figured her gown was probably decades out of style (her clothes often were), but it was low-cut and form-fitting, and she didn’t think the men were staring because it looked anachronistic. Her curves and her vibrant red hair never failed to make an impression.
The gang’s defacto leader, a mean-looking, baldheaded bastard in sunglasses, stepped forward. “You ‘Lady Redstone,’ then, lady?” he asked.
“I am,” Ingrid said.
“Yeah, well,” the wiry man with the impenetrable black glasses continued, “I’m Xavier, okay? Miguelito Hardface says we gotta do whatever you say and guard your safety with our lives. That’s the way his boy Winston said it exactly. Guard your safety with our lives, and do anything you say.”
“And report to him my every move, I’m sure,” Ingrid added in a pretty singsong voice, keeping it light so her words wouldn’t sound like too direct a challenge.
Xavier said nothing. Ingrid nodded as if he’d answered, though.
“Very well,” she said, starting down the building’s front steps and heading toward the cars, parting the crowd effortlessly before her. “Allons-y, boys. Let’s go.”
Ingrid motioned for everyone to come along as she padded over to the back of the nearest vehicle on the balls of her still-bare feet. She hadn’t thought to ask Mickey to replace her shoes, but she was still taller than most of her men, even without high heels. She opened her own door and slid into the car’s back seat. Xavier closed the door for her, like a good underling should, and then went around the front to drive.
The engines started up. Ingrid’s car led the pack when they pulled away from the curb, one by one, turning left onto Fountain at the end of the second block.
She thought for a while as prison-tattooed Xavier drove west toward Santa Monica, his eyes hidden behind those imposing black sunglasses. He turned right at Highland, a street name that hadn’t changed in a very long time.
“Uh… Mrs. Redstone?” the unlikely chauffer said, after a few blocks worth of northbound travel, up past Labaig Avenue. “Lady? Where do you want us to, like, take you?”
Ingrid, in the back seat, continued to gaze out her window, in no apparent hurry to answer.
“We could go out to that plant place in the Valley,” Xavier offered. “Where that chick’s supposed to, like, work or something? Winston says he still got three guys out there, so we got a street address now, but I guess they say it don’t look like nobody’s comin’ back there anytime soon.”
“No, I don’t expect they would, would they?” Ingrid said, almost to herself. “But let’s head out there anyway. Maybe I can figure her out by seeing where she operates.”
Xavier nodded. “Whatever you say, lady. Redstone.”
Retrospective No.3 ~ 1910
A century ago…
Old Tomas Delgado nearly shit his britches when Winston Watt’s motor carriage rumbled around the last ridge to the southwest of a vast stretch of grazing land that had once been a part of Rancho los Feliz and into view of the field where the Tree that Grew Below the Hole in the Sky used to be.
That’s right, Tom had to tell himself: used to be. Past tense. Someone else had beaten him to the punch in cutting down the ancient Tree.
Somebody else had thought the unthinkable, and acted upon it. Then they’d done him one better, too. The natural prairie the live oak once dominated was now cleared and graded, and a concrete foundation had been laid down amidst a grid of newly demarcated city streets. A cage of new steel girders towered into the sky, stacked up from exactly the place where the old encino had stood for well more than a thousand years, according to the tales the old people had preserved and passed on.
“Watt, what the fuck is this?” Tom said, aghast, although it was plain enough to him what was happening. These distempered fools were putting up a goddamn skyscraper. Right under the Hole in the Sky, where los Muertos crossed over into the realm of Mictlan. And it already reached higher than the old Tree ever had, even in this early phase of its construction.
Anyone could find their way up there now. Anyone.
“Believe me, it’s not my idea,” Watt muttered, letting his engine stall as he coasted down to a stop in a wheelrutted lot that was stacked high with construction materials and situated across the road from the building-to-be. From the Tree-that-was, that was.
Tom could hardly believe it was gone. The landscape looked wrong without it.
He took a moment to look up at the man-made blight that had replaced the oak-that boxy metal skeleton silhouetted against a darkening sky. Watt, who was far too drunk to be in any sort of a hurry, nodded complacently over his car’s steering wheel while Tom examined the newly-assembled framework that stood before them.
There were no other buildings around here like this one, not for miles. It was going to be at least ten whole stories tall, too, at a minimum. You’d have to travel as far as downtown, to Los Angeles proper, with its theater and business and manufacturing districts, to find a comparably ambitious structure. At least that far, if not all the way to the island of Manhattan.
It looked ridiculous, an incipient skyscraper standing alone in the middle of what was still essentially farmland.
Tom had assumed that if he cut down the Tree, it would take another thousand years for a new one to grow back in its place. The worlds would’ve been safe for at least that long, and his selfish, squandered life might’ve come to have a little meaning yet.
He could never have conceived of a project like this one, though. This incongruous erection out here on the prairie. Not in his wildest dreams or his worst nightmares. He couldn’t imagine an undertaking more dangerous or more foolhardy than this, and he had to wonder just who it was that would set such a thing in motion.
“Tio Tomas!”
Tom swiveled his head toward a gang of workers who were just then coming across the road, laughing and joking with one another after a wearying day’s labor. They wore coveralls and caps and carried tin lunchpails, and one of them, the foreman (a handsome young man with thick black hair and a face Tom remembered all too well from his younger days), was grinning his ass off and waving to him.
It was Oscar San Martin. Ramon’s boy. He’d been a kid the last time Tom saw him. Now he was well over six feet tall and as broad as an ox through the shoulders. He looked so much like his father that it took Tom’s breath away. Seeing him now was like traveling back in time.
“Bienvenidos, Tio Tomas,” Ramon’s boy said, as Tom made his careful way down from Winston Watt’s Model T. “Welcome home.”
“Oscar,” Tom said, wanting to hug the kid (the ‘kid’ who stood more than a foot taller than him and had a rough shadow of late-day stubble growing along his jaw), but not doing it.
He and Oscar hadn’t been as close as Tom might’ve liked after Ramon… went over.
Xochitl, Ramon’s widow, hadn’t really blamed Tom for what happened. Not exactly, and yet it had been clear enough that he was welcome to keep his distance from her boy after it was done. She hadn’t wanted Oscar following in his father’s (or in his pseudo-uncle’s) footsteps.
Especially if those footsteps led him here, to this field. And, as much as it pained him, Tom had seen the wisdom in that position. It’d even been a factor in his decision to travel the world so late in life. There’d been other reasons for that too, of course, but as far as Oscar went, it’d simply been easier not to be around. Convenient.
And yet, despite the aloofness and the loneliness that resulted from it, here Oscar was. Working for el Rey. Like father, like son. The San Martin family had a legacy now.
Tom clasped the young man’s large, calloused hand in both of his and held it warmly, for a long moment, looking up at him. “Gracias, mijo,” Tom said. “It’s good to see you again.”
Oscar nodded, clearly pleased to see his father’s oldest friend, yet feeling as unsure about the content of their relationship as Tom was himself.
“Oz,” Tom said, as his eyes were drawn back up to the black steel bones superimposed over the purple evening sky, like some sort of artistic photographer’s effect. “What is it you think you’re doing out here?”
“The bidding of el Rey, Tio Tomas. What else?”
“But… this wasn’t your idea, was it?”
“Oh, hell no,” Oscar said, and laughed. He ran his hand back over his hair, a little nervously. “Don’t blame me, I just work here.”
“Then who?”
“La Bruja Roja,” Winston Watt piped up from the Model T’s front seat, jerking himself out of a drunken stupor in order to speak. He craned around to look at the other two men. “The Red Witch,” he said, as if it explained something. “The Scarlet Woman.”
“Who?”
“The King’s new girlfriend,” Oscar said quietly. Turning to Watt, he put a finger to his lips. “Shhh, now, about that.”
Construction laborers were crossing the lot as they knocked off for the day, men piling onto a horsecart that would take them ‘home’ to a nearby migrant camp. Some got into private carriages of their own, horseless and otherwise. (Otherwise if their work happened to be of the more skilled and better paid variety, Tom supposed.)
Watt looked the dispersing workers over and nodded sagely to Oscar, preserving the secret they both were in on. Very craftily, too, Tom thought, raising an eyebrow.
“Have you two been drinking?” Oscar asked quietly.
“Watt insisted we stop,” Tom said, under his breath. “El hombre es un borracho, you know.”
Oscar nodded, watching as Watt observed the last of his crew departing for the day. The final few stragglers were heading home on foot. Within minutes, Tomas, Oscar, and Watt-the preservers of the mysteries of Mictlantecuhtli-were all alone in the gloaming.
“A witch?” Tom said, turning to Oscar for clarification as soon as the last of the workers were out of earshot. “Like a person, a woman?”
Oscar nodded.
“Not a nymph or a succubus or some damn thing like that from over on el Rey’s side of the sky?”
“An actual person,” Oscar said. “Alive. Flesh and bone. And she comes and goes as she pleases, if you can believe that.”
“What, between the rooms?” Tom asked, his tone filled with disbelief. His old friend, Oscar’s father Ramon, had showed them both what was likely to happen when a human being stepped through the door between the worlds and into the King’s sacrificial chamber.
It was supposed to be a one-way trip.
And yet Oscar nodded, verifying that he had indeed observed this thing they’d all long assumed to be impossible. A living, human woman who could cross at will.
“I can’t believe it myself,” Oscar said. “But I’ve seen it happen, once or twice. She walks across like it’s the door between the kitchen and the dining room, and nothing more.”
“She visits so bloody often she needs a mechanical lift,” Watt said contemptuously, reeling a bit when he stepped down from his car’s running board. “She’s hardly the sort to keep climbing up and down a tree.”
“What’s her name?” Tom asked.
Oscar and Watt exchanged a look, and then a shrug. Neither of them wanted to admit to having that piece of information, although Tom suspected Winston Watt might’ve known more than he was owning up to. Oscar might as well, for that matter.
“She doesn’t bother conversing with the help,” Oz said. “Keeps her own counsel.”
“Mictlantecuhtli says she’s to be his Queen,” Watt informed them. “We’re to call her ‘La Reina de los Muertos,’ once she’s crossed over for good.”
This was sounding worse and worse by the minute to old Tom Delgado. He couldn’t help but feel a stab of jealousy when he contemplated this unnamed woman. Not only did the stranger share in his hard-won secrets, she’d also been allowed, somehow, to experience the otherworld without forfeiting her life and her freedom.
It didn’t seem fair. Not when Tom had sold his very soul for a journey far less exotic, for initiations far less significant and experiences that hadn’t done a fraction as much to satisfy his lifelong curiosity about the nature of the worlds as one single day spent freely exploring the possibilities of Mictlan would have.
Tom had to wonder what this new witch offered, that she enjoyed such favor with the King. It occurred to him that the ambitious crazywoman would soon be his mistress, too (and not in the way he liked to have a mistress), according to the letter of Mictlantecuhtli’s contract.
Well, he wasn’t having that. And that’s all there was to it.
“We can go right up to the top if you’re ready, Tom,” Watt said. “There’s a temporary elevator set up.”
Wonderful, Tom thought. They’d thought of everything. While none of the half-baked plans he’d been incubating had ever anticipated a scenario like this one. Tom was at a loss. What sort of excuse could he plausibly make?
It was Oscar who saved him, or at least bought him some time. Thank the Powers That Be for Oscar.
“Maybe you could hold your horses for just a minute there, Mr. Watt,” the young man said. “Mr. Delgado and I have a lot of catching up to do.”
“You can still talk to him once he’s gone over, and the King wants him as soon as possible.”
“Well, it’ll be possible in a few damn minutes, okay?”
Tom was getting the impression that Oscar cared as little for the King’s Englishman as he did himself.
“It’s not the same once people go over,” the young builder said. “Besides which, you might’ve taken a pass on those last few glasses of gin I can smell on your breath if punctuality was your big concern.”
Watt frowned and shot Tom an irritated look, but he was chastened enough not to argue or make accusations. “Fine,” he said. “I think I’ll go up to the Hole and wait for you there.”
“You do that,” Oscar said, looking at Watt in a way that was quietly confident yet not quite combative. “Tio Tomas and I will be up directly.”
The Englishman didn’t know what to do, other than slink away. Tom and Oscar watched him cross the absurdly wide street (you could walk three dozen sheep abreast down a trail like that one, and no other sort of traffic was likely to use it), and a few moments later they heard the gasoline motor that powered the rickety-looking supply elevator cough to life. As the lift platform ascended, up the girders that framed the structure’s southwestern corner, they saw Watt’s skinny silhouette looking back down toward them.
“How are you really, Oz?” Tom asked.
“Married, for one thing,” Oscar said, holding up his left hand so that Tom could see the gold band around his ring finger. “Last spring. Almost an architect too, one more semester till I have my degree, and I just found out I’m gonna be a father.”
“Congratulations,” Tom said, feeling his heart sink as he wondered whether a third generation of San Martins would now be pledged to the service of the King. Architecture also surprised him as a career choice. Tom didn’t recall him ever expressing an interest in any such thing, but then he supposed a lot really could change in the course of ten years. “Got names picked out?” he asked.
“Not yet.” Oscar grinned. “Maybe Juan, after Connie’s father, if it’s a boy. I think she’d like that.”
Tom nodded. “He’ll be a big one, if he takes after you. Hope your missus knows what she’s getting herself into.”
Oscar laughed and nodded, then turned quiet. “I know you’re shocked by all of this, Tio Tomas,” he said, nodding over at the partially-erected skyscraper. “But I don’t think it’s the first time there’s been a building here.”
“What are you talking about?”
“When we cleared the site,” Oscar said, “there were bits and chunks of old broken mud bricks, all over the place. For miles around, too. Like maybe something was built here a long time ago and then got torn down again, and the bricks got scattered everywhere. And then the old Tree grew up in its place.”
“Like somebody planted it to mark the spot,” Tom mused.
Oscar shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. “They smashed up what they built, but somebody didn’t want to forget what’s, you know… up there. That’s what it made me think of, anyway, finding all those little pieces of brick. Farmers around here tell me they’ve been plowin’em out of their fields since the beginning, just thinking they’re dirt clods that have edges and corners for some reason. They either crush ’em up or throw ’em away.”
“Huh,” Tom grunted, thinking of the tales los Muertos sometimes told about the Great Step Pyramid that stood on the other side, beyond and beneath the King’s unbreachable chamber. On this side, a Hole in the Sky, stationed a hundred feet above the earth. On that side, a monumental Pyramid with stairs down each of its four faces and doors that opened onto other worlds. Old Ramon’s bones had spoken of it to Tom more than once, while standing at the door between the Chambers. The conversation of the dead tended to be disjointed and rambling, however, and many of the things Ramon said after his death had made little sense to Tom.
Ramon had died crazy, guilty to the point of madness over some cataclysm he believed he’d set in motion. Over some secret he said he’d given away. That betrayal had been enough to send him over the threshold between the rooms, and Tom had never even figured out what it was he thought he’d done.
Tom now wondered if people older than the old people had long ago erected a real-world counterpart to the Temple of Mictlantecuhtli right here in this field. Perhaps the ancient forbearers of the Aztecs themselves had done it, before moving south from their mythic homeland of Aztlan. Maybe their temple had even been the original, and the one lingering on in the otherworld was a copy. Who but el Rey could know?
Tom also wondered who’d torn the structure down again, feeling a certain kinship with those wise folks, whoever they may have been.
“Makes me think of what the dead say, about what’s outside the second room,” Oscar said, echoing Tom’s thoughts uncannily. Of course the younger man would’ve heard the same stories. Even from some of the same ghosts. “You know, about the pyramid el Rey’s supposed to have over there, in the land of Mictlan.”
“Me too,” Tom murmured. “So what’s the plan here, anyway? How’re you supposed to keep all those men from finding out about the Hole?” He waved an indicative hand in the direction most of the departing workforce had taken.
“Well, I’m to finish off the top floor myself, for one thing. At least the rooms right around the Hole, me and maybe a few handpicked guys.”
“And you think you can expect them to keep the secret?”
Oscar shrugged. “Not really. I’ve been thinking it might go better if I give the work to some of the men I hate, like the ones who get drunk and punch their wives for fun on a Friday night, and then when they’re done just, you know… push ’em through.”
“That’s coldblooded, mijo,” Tom said. It was also smart, he reflected, and safer than letting rumors of the Hole spread amongst these new people. Still, he couldn’t quite bring himself to encourage it out loud.
“I know it, Tio,” Oscar said, lowering his voice. “But the King’s reach into this world is getting long enough already, I think.”
Tom looked up at him. “What do you mean?”
“He has money of his own now,” Oscar said. “Investments, bank accounts. He owns land. He’s got people on a payroll who think he’s completely human, just a weird recluse. Watt handles it all for him, for now, but he’s gonna snap under the pressure soon. He’s wound too tight for it.”
“Is it that bad already?”
“Things are moving fast, Tio. The King’s even picked himself out a name to use in the realworld: ‘Miguel Caradura.’”
“‘Michael Hardface?’” Tom said. “I guess that fits.”
“I think it was the witch’s idea of something clever,” Oscar said. “He’s working on a face and a body to go along with it. He stands there in the second room wearing a suit to practice looking like a real person. I think he means to hold business meetings and crap like that when the building’s done. He’s already had me drag office things up there so he can start learning to handle them.”
“Oscar,” Tom said, looking up at the younger man. “Do I have to tell you how bad an idea all this is?”
“Not really, Tio,” Ramon’s boy said, and Tom felt both relieved and proud of him upon hearing it.
The curtain came down on his moment of hope when Oscar took a small gun from inside his overalls and pointed it, reluctantly, right at him.
“But I still have to take you up to the Hole, and watch you go into the second room,” Oz said.
Tom looked at the gun. “You gonna shoot me? What would be the point of that?”
Oscar also looked down at the sorry little pistol in his hand, acknowledging the absurdity of it. He put it away, tucking it in at the small of his back. “Not much, I guess,” he said. “You need to give up your flesh of your own free will if you’re to be useful to the King. It’s the deal you made with him. I just need to make sure you honor it.”
“How come, mijo?” Tom said softly. “What arrangement has he made with you?”
Oscar’s face creased with shame and sadness. “My son,” he whispered. “The child Connie’s carrying right now, Tio. The King says he won’t call for him when he’s older, if you make good on your promise.”
Oh. Tom might’ve known. He nodded.
“Let’s go, then, if we’re going,” he said, and Oscar looked down at his boots, unable to meet Tom’s eyes.