Graves' end

dry dust while he looked around for a suitable spot to dig.

Part Two: All Saints’ Day Chapter Four

Six decades later…

The Bindercotts’ aged Latina housekeeper was vacuuming, alone, mid-morning, in bitchy Bethany Bindercott’s outgrown frillygirl bedroom. She bumped the noisy vacuum against the leg of Bethie’s canary- yellow dresser, dislodging a baggie of mota that had until now been taped up underneath it.

Pilar, the housekeeper, shut off her roaring machine and picked up the baggie, considering it in the bright, suddenly silent bedroom.

Ten minutes later Pilar was parked out on the Bindercotts’ back deck, toking up in the clear autumn sunshine.

The hills just outside the irrigated housing development in Santa Clarita that her employers called home looked dusty brown and about as dry as kindling. As little as ten years ago, she remembered, this whole area had been a waterless wasteland, fit for little more than the surreptitious disposal of inconvenient corpses.

On the big green lawn in front of Pilar-right out in the center of Big Bill Bindercott’s personal practice putting green, in fact-something broke through the sod.

A gopher, maybe? If so, it was a damn big one. Whatever the thing was, it seemed to be forcing its way up from underneath the lush, professionally-tended lawn. Pilar squinted to see better, shading her eyes against the sun’s glare.

Out on the putting green, skeletal hands and arms emerged from what looked increasingly like a small sinkhole, clawing and scrabbling at the grass around it. A grimy skull popped up, one with a distinctive exit wound above the right eye socket.

Pilar’s own eyes widened. She looked down at the ineptly-rolled joint in her hand.

Dexter Graves (or what little remained of him after sixty years in the earth) hauled himself out of his grave and came staggering across the broad back lawn he found himself on, holding his cracked braincase like a drunk wallowing in the throes of crapulence. Up the steps and onto a redwood deck he went, where he stopped, looking down at an older woman in a light-blue uniform with bulky white sneakers on her feet who was parked in an Adirondack chair. A maid, Graves surmised, judging by her attire. The housekeeper was frozen, looking back up at him with a forgotten smoke dangling from her fingertips.

Must’ve scared the living shit out of her, Graves thought, wandering in from the backyard like this. Hell, he could’ve been anybody! A certain comfort level in the face of wild absurdity had often helped him keep hold of his wits, both during the war and several times thereafter in his current line as a PI, but he knew not everybody could roll with the punches in a similar fashion. He was still a little confused himself after waking up underground, not quite sure of where he was or exactly how he’d gotten here.

“Estoy muerta?” the maid whispered, looking up at the dirt-encrusted skeleton who wasn’t yet up to speed regarding his own situation. “Usted es la Santa Muerte? Esta esto la Apocalipsis?”

“Sorry, sister,” Graves’ reanimated bones replied, in a predictably gravelly voice. “Never did learn to habla the old es-pan-yol. Wouldn’t mind a puff on that smokestick, though. I have never had a hangover like this before.”

Graves plucked the hand-rolled cigarette in question from the lady’s fingers and put it between his teeth. He expanded his ribs as if to inhale, but with no lungs to pull air, nothing happened. Graves examined the joint critically while patting around the region where his pockets should’ve been. “Guess it went out,” he said absently. “Don’t know where my lighter got to, either. Hell, I’d hate to lose that thing now…”

Graves offered the joint back to its original roller. She stared at his skeletal hand. “De nada,” she managed to croak.

Graves thought she looked sort of shellshocked, for some reason. She had that sort of half-comprehending stare. He shrugged and went to stick the reefer behind an ear that’d turned to dust years ago. It bounced off his collarbone and tumbled to the deck.

“What the…?” he muttered, turning to look at his reflection in the house’s glass back door. His appearance came as a bit of a shock, to say the least.

“Holy hell, wouldja look at that?” he shouted, reeling back in bewilderment. He was nothing but a string of bones, literal bones, and the smooth, soil-blackened plate of his forehead was marred by what looked suspiciously like an exit crater. “Geez, no wonder my head feels like it’s got a goddamn hole in it. Now how in the-?”

He remembered.

“Oh, yeah. Ingrid.”

Leaning back in to examine the reflected bullethole in his fleshless brow, he murmured to himself: “How could you, Ing?” He hadn’t known the woman excessively well (certainly not in the biblical sense), but he’d imagined she thought more of him than that.

Behind him, that hapless housekeeper dumped what she must’ve assessed as a sack of psychotic locoweed out into the bushes. She skirted as wide a berth around Graves as she possibly could and slid a big glass panel in the house’s back wall aside so that she could scurry indoors, leaving the modernistic entryway open in her haste.

Graves followed after her.

Crossing a vast family room that had what looked like a mid-sized movie screen mounted up on its most prominent wall, he said: “Listen, lady, I gotta go find my lighter. It’s important to me. You think maybe I could-”

But the cleaning woman waved him off without so much as a look back. She was done. Just done. He knew that look, too. She gathered her purse and her jacket from the kitchen and exited right out the front door, closing it quietly behind herself this time around.

“Oh. Okay. All right,” Graves said after her, feeling affronted.

He went to the window and watched the house’s custodian drive away in a weird, rusty little car of some sort, one that seemed to have a great big hatch on its back end.

“Then I guess I can,” he opined, standing alone at the kitchen window.

Graves ransacked an upstairs closet, tossing clothing aside. Old stuff, winter coats and ugly sweaters, mostly. He came up with two reasonably familiar items: a ragged raincoat and a battered fedora. The hat said ‘Indiana Jones’ around the inside of the band. Graves didn’t know what sort of a name that was supposed to be, but Mr. Jones’ garage-sale candidates were close enough to the clothes he remembered wearing, and he nodded over them in satisfaction.

Standing in front of the master bedroom’s full-length mirror a little while later (after having hosed the worst of the yard dirt off his bones in the attached bathroom’s shower), Graves stepped into a pair of sweat pants and cinched them all the way down to the fattest part of his spine. He shrugged into his borrowed raincoat, donned his found fedora, and spent some time tilting the brim to his liking.

With big sunglasses taped to the sides of his skull and his coat collar flipped up, he was almost able to believe he wouldn’t draw much notice.

Next, he raided the kitchen drawers. He was flying more or less on autopilot now, distracting himself while he figured out how to proceed. He didn’t know why he was up, out of the dirt; he’d just felt a sudden need to be, and acted upon it. There’d been no real thinking involved. He didn’t care to lament his death or mourn his appearance-he just wanted to know why he was back, and how in hell it was possible. He felt almost more upset over the loss of his old Zippo than he did over the loss of his life, as strange as that sounded, even to