Ingrid reached the bottom of the pyramid’s staircase at long last. She knew how she must’ve looked by now, stripped bare of her flesh but still draped in her long satin gown: like a redheaded version of LaCalaveraCatrina, a famous old piece of Mexican folk art.
The King and his heir were exchanging futile blows down near the structure’s base, neither of them doing or incurring any damage that didn’t right itself within seconds.
“Dexter! Mickey!” Ingrid’s breathless skeleton scolded. “This is pointless, you can’t hurt each other over here, so stopit.”
“Sorry, mom,” Dexter said, infuriatingly. “But you don’t get to show up at this late date and start bossin’ me around.”
“You have to push him out that door between the rooms at the top of the pyramid without you,” Ingrid told him, her ribs heaving for air even though she had no lungs to fill anymore. “You can’t beat him over here.”
Mickey snarled at her, but he couldn’t silence her. Her voice was still her own, thanks to Lia. She would hold on to that much of her life’s free will until the lighter in her hand grew as cold as the corpse she’d left behind, back out in the realworld. Her King wouldn’t control her fully until then.
“I will throw you through that door and burn away the life of your pet witch, Dexter Graves,” Mickey spat. “Why do you fight this? She will still be yours, yours in every way!”
“Yeah, to dress up and pose and play with, like a frilly, pretty doll,” Graves sneered. “Right. Gifts like that don’t count unless they’re freely given. Like I once heard a wise woman say: people’s choices gotta be their own!”
Dexter punctuated his declaration by throwing his father-figment over one extended leg and slamming him to the ground. “Thanks for the heads up, Ing,” he said, and then looked back down at Mickey, who was laid out flat on his back, dazed and staring up at them. “C’mon, dad,” Dex teased, planting his hands on his knees and leaning over to look down into Mickey’s face. “Let’s play catch.”
He turned on his heel and raced back up the side of the pyramid, taking the narrow steps three at a time. Mickey leapt to his feet and powered right up after him. Neither of them experienced any physical limitation over here in Mictlan. They could behave like cartoon characters for an eternity if they felt like it, bashing away at each other relentlessly, without suffering any lasting consequence.
Ingrid Catrina sighed and began dragging her own weary bones (which were subject to a very different set of rules) back up the endless steps after them.
Graves led King Caradura in a chase back up to the top of the pyramid, running effortlessly, magically, as though they were in a dream. It was fun, if anything, but Graves was already coming to see that no escalation in the level of violence was ever going to put him on top of this situation. He and Hardface were too evenly matched for that. Ingrid hadn’t been lying. Not on that score, anyway.
A re-awakened Lia and two new skeletons he was pained to recognize as Miss Hannah and that Riley guy all stood aside when he blew past them upon reaching the summit, ducking under the temple door’s low stone lintel and darting back into the King’s inner sanctum. He didn’t know how Lia’s friends had come to lose their skins, but this hardly seemed like the time to ask.
Caradura burst into the dim, torchlit chamber after him. Graves positioned himself in front of the doorway on the far side of the altar stone, the one that led out into the empty antechamber and then the realworld after that, taunting the King.
“C’mon, pops, gimme a push,” he teased.
Caradura jumped up onto the altar and leapt at him from it, his small eyes glittering with rage. Graves dodged aside at the last second. Caradura nearly tumbled through the doorway barrier, but caught himself against the jambs before he fell. Graves tried to push him out of the chamber and across the dividing line before he could scramble back from the threshold, but the King grabbed hold of his arm and swung him hard against the mud brick wall. The impact was concussive enough to break Graves’ nose. It sent one of the torches that had flickered for ages tumbling from its sconce, and Graves’ injury evaporated before it went out in a burst of orange sparks against the cold flagstone floor.
Ingrid’s elegant skeleton led Lia and the remains of Hannah and Riley back inside the temple, away from the Mictlan-side door. Lia was the only one of the bunch who still looked alive. There was no sign anywhere of the Archon who’d taken her captive. Graves assumed the creature had been dealt with-at the cost of Riley and Hannah’s lives.
“Dexter,” Ingrid said, raising her voice to be heard over the ruckus he and the King were making. “If you go through that doorway first, what he is goes with you and it’ll take over your body. You’ll be him, not you. You’ve got to throw him through on his own, into the realworld, and someone on this side has to willingly assume his office, so he can’t come back.”
“Who’s that gonna be?” Graves gasped, craning his head to see her as he struggled with Caradura at the doorway.
“Me!” Ingrid’s skeleton said. “I’ll do it. I’m ready. And I bore his son, so I have a right to succeed him.”
“Your tortures for this treason will never end, Ingrid Redstone,” Caradura bellowed, while Graves tore at his hair. “You’ve refused to be my Queen before!”
“Oh, I’ll be Queen, Mickey,” Ingrid said. “I just won’t be yours.”
Enraged, Caradura seized Graves by the shoulders and launched him bodily at the doorway to the living world. Graves caught either side of it and felt himself stretched across the opening like a trampoline skin when Caradura slammed into his back with all his weight, fighting to ram him through. He peripherally saw the skeletons that had so recently been Hannah and Riley freeze into place before they could join the fray (according to their King’s will, he supposed), but Ingrid and Lia ran over to beat on Caradura’s back with their fists, trying to help.
Caradura turned away from Graves for an instant, knocking them both aside almost without effort.
Knocking Lia to the floor.
Graves saw her fall and his vision went red.
King Caradura hesitated just long enough to make sure his merchandise wasn’t damaged. Lia was the last living witch to’ve touched the lighter, so it was her life that would be forfeit if they made their trade now.
Graves knew it too, and he seized the momentary distraction to come around punching.
He caught Caradura straight across the jaw, first with his right fist, then with his left. He bashed Hardface across the room and out the far door, driving him back with blow after crunching blow to his face.
Nobody hurt his Lia, Dexter Graves thought grimly. Nobody. Not even the big bad king of the goddamn dead. Not without answering to him.
The King missed tripping over his own altar again by bare inches before he staggered out the far door, fighting to keep his balance under the onslaught. Graves discontinued his rain of knuckles when Hardface pinwheeled backwards on the very edge of the pyramid’s steps… then blew on him, sending him tumbling all the way down to the distant chaparral plain below.
He turned to catch Lia up in an embrace when she ran to him, out the door and into his arms. It was the first time she’d gotten a good look at Mictlan proper, and she couldn’t help but exclaim over the breathtaking view from the top of the pyramid. The land of the dead seemed to go on forever, its low hills stretching off toward every horizon.
Caradura was on his way back up to the top again literally as soon as he landed, his bare feet beating a fast tattoo on the rough stone steps. It wouldn’t take him long to regain the pyramid’s summit.
Ingrid’s bones turned to Graves. “Dexter,” she said, looking as though she’d had a sudden flash of inspiration. “It’s still November second out in the world. The dead can walk today if they have permission from the King. Maybe permission from the Prince will do. Call for help to drag him over the barrier!”
It sounded like a decent plan.
Graves looked out across Mictlan. He could see smokestreets and nebulous cities and possibly millions of tiny costumed skeletons in the far distance, if he tried. There were sure to be a lot of disgruntled dead out there. Plenty of possible allies.
King Caradura was about a third of the way back up the stairs.
“I think I can go you one better,” Graves said, looking away from Ingrid Catrina to wide-eyed Lia while he imagined them all, the forlorn dead of every era.
He knew in a flash what he wanted to do.
Graves leapt up, found a handhold between two mud bricks, and hauled himself onto the sanctum’s flat, square roof, onto the absolute top of Mictlantecuhtli’s pyramid. He bent down to help Lia up, too.
He didn’t have to wrack his brain to know how she’d choose to handle this situation.
So he put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. The shrill shriek cut across the plain like a sharp sonic knife. Skeletons going about their business on the vague smokestreets down below all turned toward the distant pyramid. Even King Caradura paused in his climb. He was more than halfway up the staircase.
“Listen up,” Graves called, projecting his voice easily, as though it were somehow amplified. “Son of Hardface says it’s play day on the earth plane, so all of you-get those bony asses on the streets!”
His penultimate order rolled across the realm of the dead like a peal of thunder, and the Prince’s directive was heard by one and all.
The entire skeletal population of Mictlan, down on the ground and numbering so many billions strong, all paused and looked to one another. They were uncertain for an instant, but not one of them needed to be asked twice. The dead dropped whatever they were doing and stampeded across the plain, converging on their King’s pyramid from every side.
All of them. Every one, without exception. After a moment an ocean of bones spilled over the hazy mountains that ringed the far horizon and flooded down their foothills-a multitude of tiny skeletons coming on the run, in numbers too great to comprehend.
No similar offer of freedom had ever been extended before, not to everybody all at once, not even in the dustiest and most disused corners of any of their memories, and it woke a hunger in the dead for the pleasures of the living world that the realm of Mictlan could no longer contain.
King Caradura, still stranded partway up his own pyramid, saw everyone who ever died pouring toward him across the vast, barren landscape at an unbelievable rate of speed, raising great billowing clouds of grayish dust that hung in the air behind them. The rumble of so many fleshless feet pounding the earth rose to a sustained roar.
The King screamed and sprinted upward as the first wave of skeletons swarmed the pyramid’s base and stairs. He made it back to the summit within a matter of seconds, but while el Rey may have been supernaturally fast, he was nowhere near fast enough to outpace the motivated mass of his subjects. The wave of eager dead caught him and bore him up the last few steps, through the exterior door, and back into his own temple.
Graves and Lia watched all of this in delighted astonishment, from the safety of the pyramid’s small, squared-off rooftop, both of them leaning over its edge to look down between their feet.
Inside the sacrificial chamber, the flood of jubilant skeletons herded their King across his own inner sanctum. He clung to the altar by his fingernails until they yanked him from it, muscling him toward the far door in spite of his violent, clawing struggles and the snarled invectives he hurled at them.
Ingrid Catrina watched it all as it happened, from a safe corner of the room.
King Caradura turned into fleshless Mictlantecuhtli when the dead shoved him across the barrier and out into the first chamber, ahead of them. He had no chance to slow down before the crush of animated bones pushed him through the modern office suite’s main door-the one marked with the name of his favorite avatar and the blood of his human family.
Then he was out in the corridor. Out in the realworld, beyond the Hole in the Sky, where he’d never been before.
Which could only mean that Dexter’s extravagant, extemporaneous experiment had miraculously paid off.
Ingrid Catrina stepped forward to help her fellow skeletons uproot Mictlantecuhtli’s round limestone altar and rumble it out the office door after him, like a massive grinding wheel. She stepped back and stood her ground on the spot where the altar had always been, in the center of the sacred chamber, at the very seat of Mictlan’s authority. The tidal flood of fleeing dead parted easily around her.
“Goodbye, Mickey,” she murmured, and could hardly hear herself over the roar of celebratory noise. “We loved each other as best we could.”
She watched the dead slam their King’s shrouded, skeletal form against the corridor’s far wall, then mash him there with his own rolling altar stone. He couldn’t come back to his realm while Ingrid was standing where the symbol of his purpose belonged. White plaster dust puffed out around his robed bones. Skeletons fought to roll the stone back as more and more of the unbreakable dead jostled out into the hall behind him, crowding the narrow space past its reasonable capacity within a matter of seconds. They hefted the altar up off the floor and used it like a battering ram, grinding Mictlantecuhtli deep into the drywall before the century-old masonry behind it simply shattered from the force and burst open in a shower of brick and plaster.
Ingrid Catrina shaded her bare eyesockets against a wash of brilliant, realworld daylight as the dead leapt through the breach after their former ruler, pouring out of what the old people had always known as the Hole in the Sky.
Mictlantecuhtli’s robe fluttered and snapped as he fell, screaming, and crunched against the cracked blacktop, thirteen stories below. His ancient altar landed on top of him and broke apart into several large pieces.
Skeletons in clothing from every era rained down upon Mictlantecuhtli’s remains, smashing them first to gravel against the pavement, then to powder, and then finally to the dust to which all things are said to return. The durable skeletons themselves landed unharmed and pranced away, out into the streets, elated over the prospect of being free.
Up on the roof of the Temple of Mictlantecuhtli, Graves and Lia continued staring down at the mass exodus taking place not three feet beneath the soles of their shoes.
Fresh droves of skeletons kept coming, pounding up the pyramid’s steps and even climbing its stacked sides, pouring in from every corner of Mictlan’s plain like a blanketing swarm of locusts.
There seemed to be no end to them, from one horizon to the next.
Dexter Graves and Lia Flores looked up and grinned at each other like a pair of delighted children.
The dead partied outside the Silent Tower and all over the rest of the city, badly disrupting the ‘real’ world of natural laws and social habits. They burrowed out of the ground and broke out of crypts, so hungry for the life they’d been denied that they were unable to wait in an orderly line at the door between worlds any longer.
In cemeteries across town, bones boiled out of manicured plots. Mausoleum slots blew open and whirlwinds of ash danced around the memory gardens with unrestrained glee. So many of the dead sought to act on the permission they’d been granted that the inviolable veil between life and death might as well have come unraveled. Los Angeles was the event’s epicenter, but its results were going global, spreading more swiftly than the planet could turn.
Los Muertos went nuts as soon as they were loose, too overwhelmed and overjoyed not to celebrate their liberation. The blue sky above was a miracle to them-even if the bright sun, which was currently facing a different hemisphere, was nowhere to be seen within it. They hardly noticed such a trifling detail as that after having endured the tedium of Mictlan’s never-ending gray for so long. Their raucous behavior freaked out the living (who were having a hard enough time dealing with the improbable daylight as it was). It looked as though a sepulchral spring break had been declared on the streets of LA. The dead were on holiday, and they meant to make the most of every second they had.
On paved avenues that had once been dirt roads, ranchero skeletons riding pale horses fired their guns into a blameless blue sky. Tribal bones wearing tall fans of feathers performed wildly whirling ghost dances in intersections they remembered only as crossroads, while dead musicians carrying instruments of every stripe gathered together to make as much lively noise as they possibly could. Skeletons in the costumes they remembered best from life danced and twirled and laughed and sang, all of them intoxicated by their unexpected taste of vitality.
Many of the living (who were still horribly confused, but starting to get over that first, debilitating shock that always accompanies an experience of the impossible) began recognizing ancestors. Joyous reunions broke out everywhere, in yards and in stores and on streetcorners, as the liberated dead sought out children, grandchildren, or descendents too far down the timeline for anyone to reckon. Even expired pets, cats and dogs by the skeletal score, hurried home to check up on the friends they’d loved so well in life but had to leave behind.
For one moment, unique in all of time (like every other moment, of course), the living and the dead celebrated together, and all of them believed wholeheartedly, if only for a little while, in the glorious future of their kind.