When the bell above the sliding door rang, Graves and Hannah stepped out of the elevator. The Silent Tower’s top floor hallway was pristine and ready for them. To Graves, it seemed not to have changed one iota since the last day of his natural life, all the way back in 1950.
They walked up to the office door. The coat of Graves’ blood that obscured Miguel Caradura’s name looked as red and fresh as if it had just been sprayed there in the wake of a high-velocity projectile. Graves paused to contemplate it.
“Here’s as far as I got on my last visit,” he said. “Never did make it through that door.”
“Are you ready, Dexter?” Hannah asked, looking over at him.
“As I’ll ever be, I guess.”
Together, Graves and Hannah pushed open the office door, which had once been a mere Hole in the Sky, although neither of them knew it.
The King’s office was immaculate, elegant, and timelessly appointed. There were traces of Art Deco in the space’s design, as well as evidence of the post-war trends toward bolder colors and straighter lines that had been starting to assert themselves when Graves died. There was a lot of polished wood, not to mention a few very modern touches, such as a flat-screened television setup mounted on the wall like a framed painting. Graves got a sense that this room was supposed to feel like it could’ve been anywhen in the twentieth century, stylistically speaking.
In the suite’s second chamber, the freshly-flayed figure of Mictlantecuhtli sat behind his desk, in his robes, watching another, smaller flatscreen while snacking on human hearts. A pile of them glistened on a silver tray beside him. He washed them down with what smelled like blood (hot blood, from a steaming skullmug), like it was morning coffee.
He rose and turned to greet his guests when they stepped into the first room.
Graves moved forward to meet him at the threshold. Except for their different costumes (Graves’ coat and fedora versus Mictlantecuhtli’s reaper robes), the two skeletons might’ve been mirror images facing each other through the doorless doorway between the chambers.
“Dexter Graves,” Mictlantecuhtli said. His voice was deep and sonorous. “Our moment arrives.”
“Yep,” Graves confirmed. “Greetings and salutations.”
“Come,” Mictlantecuhtli said, “and walk beside me as my guest, and see what I have summoned you to offer. Bring your soul, but leave your body at the door. I shall then have no power to prevent your resuming it as you desire, upon my unbreakable word.”
Mictlantecuhtli made a gesture, and Graves stepped forward. His bones and clothes fell into a heap at the threshold when his ghost stepped through the doorway, which neatly separated it from his mortal remains. Lia’d done the same thing to him yesterday afternoon, so the sensation was not unfamiliar. This time his unrestricted spirit was free to move around, and he had to admit he preferred it that way.
Having crossed into the inner sanctum, Graves’ unencumbered ghost-form raised its eyebrows at the instantaneous changes he noticed all around him. It was like a painted veil had been yanked away. The modern-day office trappings he’d seen through the door had all disappeared. In their place were dim torchlight that flickered off of mud-brick walls, and a bloodcaked stone altar where the desk had previously been.
Mictlantecuhtli had also changed, into what Graves guessed was supposed to be ‘Miguel Caradura,’ also known as Mickey Hardface. The tall skeleton in a cowl had become a living man, a muscular and dark-complected one, with black hair and small, knowing eyes. After that, the anthropomorphic illusion fell apart a little bit. The Aztec King’s attire consisted of a modern-day suit that might’ve looked pretty sharp if he hadn’t gone and further adorned it with a headdress made from a skull and a fan of long feathers, hammered golden cuffs that he wore over his coat sleeves, and a necklace of what appeared to be semi-fresh human eyeballs looped twice across his broad, pin-striped chest.
Graves looked back at Hannah, who was still standing behind him in the outer office, which hadn’t changed at all, it seemed.
“Your guest may wait,” Caradura said. “I have provided magazines.”
“That sit all right with you, Miss Hannah?” Graves wondered if the inner sanctum was still an inner office from Hannah’s point of view, and if Caradura still looked like fleshless Mictlantecuhtli. He guessed that he’d still be the same gray ghost of himself, in either case. His bones, coat and hat were out there on the carpeted floor, but he felt like he’d be able to get back into them when he wanted to. Felt it instinctually, and he’d learned long ago to trust his gut.
“Oh, I’ll be all right,” Hannah said, in answer to his question. “Besides, I have a weird sense I wouldn’t be able to walk through that doorway and survive. Feels like looking over the edge of a tall building.”
“You are likely correct, Lady,” Mictlantecuhtli told her. “Only an initiated practitioner of ancient earth magicks could hope to cross that threshold and retain her living flesh.”
“So there, you see?” Hannah said. “Thanks for the warning. I’ll just park it here and catch up on which celebrities are screwing.”
“Very good, Lady,” Mictlantecuhtli said, but he was Caradura again when he turned around to address Graves’ ghost.
“Come,” he said, in his grandly booming voice. “Let us walk, and talk, and hold palaver, Dexter Graves.”
Miguel Caradura guided the ghost past the altar and toward the rough door in the second chamber’s far wall, the one that opened onto the undiscovered realm beyond the rooms. Graves glanced back one last time to see Hannah finding a seat, then making a sour face when she picked up one of those magazines Caradura had mentioned. It, like all of the others fanned out on the low table in front of her, was brittle and faded, dating from the 1940s.
Graves turned away from Hannah to follow the King and found himself stepping outside onto the top of an enormous Aztec pyramid, one every inch as tall as the skyscraper that stood in its place on the other side of reality. He paused to admire the view.
There was a leaden sky above, and an endless chaparral plain below. The landscape was dotted with twisted, leafless, and black-trunked oaks. Slow mists rolled between the trees, billowing in ways that suggested the shapes of people or buildings or vehicles for an instant or two, before the breeze pulled them apart again.
“So this is Hell,” Graves declared thoughtfully. He’d seen some things in his day, but this took the goddamn cake. “I was told I should expect something warmer.”
“It need not be hell,” Caradura said, sounding almost defensive about it. “It is Mictlan-a paradise for some and a torment for others, and even these fates are their own creations, deriving from their feelings about the lives they chose to lead.”
“All of the dead come through here?”
“Yes.”
“Regardless of whatever they believed?”
“Yes, Dexter Graves. Death wears many faces. My cult of worshippers persists in this City of Angels, however. It was their actions, not mine, that first opened the Hole in the Sky, more than a millennia before your birth. Their attentions have helped me to retain this form over generations, while others less remembered by the living world have faded to obscurity, if not oblivion. Mictlan is as vast as memory, and all of this, my kingdom, can be yours… if you desire it.”
Graves’ ghost chuckled at the assertion. “You don’t say,” he said. “For how many easy payments?”