Ingrid Redstone stood in the door of the Yard’s ancient office shack, leafing through a dog-eared paperback copy of The Portable Dorothy Parker she always carried in her purse and waiting as the day grew long. Her gangsters hung around their cars out in the gravel parking lot, most of them smoking nasty, chemical-scented, factory-rolled cigarettes. A bit of a surprise, that was, really. At least to Ingrid. It’d seemed to her that people didn’t do that so much anymore, in this baffling new madhouse of an era.
The twenty-first century had been on for over a decade already, if you could believe it. The fateful events of 1950 seemed like they’d happened a few short months ago (which, for Ingrid, they sort of had).
The important thing was that Dexter was really back, in this time and place, after sixty years in the dirt.
Ingrid was quietly awed by the idea. He wouldn’t be quite alive again, yet, but he was above ground at least. Walking the earth. Hearing his voice over the wireless telephone had finally made it real for her.
She’d been sure (well, pretty sure) that he wouldn’t die all the way when she shot him in the head so far back along this new timeline. Dexter was different, due in part to the feelings she had for him and the protective net of hexwork she’d once wrapped him up in, quite without his knowledge. He was special. She’d gambled that Mictlan would have no authority to draw him in if and when he ‘died’ in the realworld. She’d bet that he, his soul or whatever, would stay with his bones for as long as they lasted. The only way Dexter Graves would ever cross the threshold between the rooms was by agreement, as an act of his own free will.
It was good to see her theory finally borne out. The stakes on that wager had been so very high, and they remained so now, really. Her whole plan could still go wrong in any number of ways.
Ingrid had many regrets when it came to Dexter, not the least of which was that she’d never been able to tell him the truth about herself. She’d never gotten to know him as well as she might’ve liked. It had simply been too dangerous. She hadn’t dared to let him meet the King-not when he might’ve taken Mickey up on the offer she knew he intended to make. Dexter had still been raw from the experience of war as of the winter’s day in 1950 on which he’d expired. Physically healed from his wounds, yes, but still ungrounded, adrift and in need of an emotional reconstruction he had no idea how to perform. The escape from remorse the King would’ve promised might have sounded all too enticing to a man in that precarious frame of mind. A man with little to nothing anchoring him to the ongoing life of his world.
Shooting him had been easier than facing the consequences, ultimately.
But Mickey found out about him anyway, of course. Mickey’s influence in this world was limited, to say the least, but even so, he had his spies everywhere.
If she’d just run away when she first realized that the cons outweighed the pros when it came to being Mickey’s Queen, if she’d just left the city and put as much distance between herself and the building Mickey’d erected for her as she possibly could… then none of this would’ve happened.
But she’d exited the otherworld into 1950 instead, and that hadn’t been enough distance in either time or space. Mickey’s Tzitzimime tracked her easily across the years and he sent a new man (a big fellow called Juan, the son of architect Oscar San Martin in fact) to fetch her back to him. She might’ve done better if she’d just stayed when she was and put more miles between them, like maybe the span of a continent or an ocean.
Now Dexter was yet another pawn in her long chess game with Death.
That Mickey’d been willing to make a deal at all, that he’d given her this chance to find an understudy for her role in this production, was an indication of how desperately he coveted what Dexter and Lia, together, might be able to do for him.
Her King was only diplomatic when he absolutely had to be.
Still, Ingrid’s upper hand could only be played for so much advantage here. Turning up another operator like herself-an initiate of the eternal cycles of generation and decay, one thoroughly schooled in the mysteries of the tripartite plane of being-had proved difficult enough that Mickey’d missed out on the entire twentieth century while Ingrid searched, and questioned people, and tracked down leads across any number of decades. All he had were the tales and memories that trickled into Mictlan along with the dead, and he was pissed about what he heard. He mourned Studio 54, and bemoaned his missed opportunity to attend a thing called ‘Woodstock.’ Burning Man was still on his agenda, even though he’d heard by ‘now’ that it was becoming too commercial.
Commitment to a timeline was a new and frustrating experience for the King.
Witches of Ingrid’s caliber were rare and independent creatures, though, clever and wary of those who sought them out. Not easy to track down, and less so to set up. Ingrid had taken a good long while to find Mickey his girl. She’d been sure to. She bought time by obfuscating the issue and doing what she could to cover her tracks, but her King’s patience was far from endless. She’d finally had to deliver her discovery, Lia Flores, little Camellia Flower herself, here in the second decade of the mindbendingly distant twenty-first century.
That Dexter Graves was up and ambulatory was proof that the first phase of her operation had succeeded. Lia had picked up that lighter, the link to Dexter, despite her protestations to the contrary. Her touch had sparked Ingrid’s long-dormant hex to life, and Dexter’s bones along with it. Lia’s abilities must have been the full equivalent of Ingrid’s own, or else the enchanted symbol would not have awakened for her. Had Ingrid ever returned for the lighter herself during the intervening sixty years, she would’ve been right back on Mickey’s hook.
She sighed, thinking about it.
She couldn’t help but identify with Lia, this young operator she’d uncovered, and she didn’t want to see her hurt, above all things. Lia’s basic affinities seemed to be vegetal rather than mineral, like Ingrid’s own, but they still had an amazing amount in common.
That knowledge made her wistful. Equals in her field had, in Ingrid’s experience, been few and far between. It took a fortitude few possessed to live full-time in the actual, when the real was the only world most people would let themselves believe in. The otherworld could be scary, since it was but partially mapped and minimally understood. Daunting as it was, though, most folks at least acknowledged its existence as a metaphor or a frivolous fantasyscape, if nothing more.
The actual, though… hidden in that subtle distinction was the witches’ world, the liminal tract of headspace wherein events deemed impossible or untenable by the standards of the realworld might nonetheless occasionally occur, to be remembered, contemplated, and learned from, by those who dared.
Ingrid had good reason to believe Lia knew that territory as well as she did. She’d sensed it from the moment they first corresponded, through the mediation of an entity called Craig who kept lists of the messages posted to the incredible public internetwork. Ingrid imagined he needed a staff of thousands. The planet’s new invisible information-sharing web seemed to her like nothing less than a man-made astral plane, one summoned up with secret words and viewed through flat black scrying-screens, very much in the classical tradition. The greatest of medieval sorcerers would’ve killed to possess even the cheapest example of the computation machines that made it all possible, and today they were used by everyone, including children.
Ingrid shook her head. So much had changed, and yet a lot remained the same.
Her old familiar loneliness felt like an ache in her chest today. She longed to be able to talk with Lia about any of these things. Ingrid’s modern-day counterpart was sure to be versed in concepts and cosmologies similar to the ones she employed.
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 and 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.