Then she was behind them, and gone from sight.
Chapter Six
Dexter Graves blew past a cop in his stolen car, doing ninety down the 170, racing in the direction indicated by the dashboard compass like his life-ironically-depended on it.
The instrument was on the fritz, Graves had already realized, spinning around with no regard for true north, and yet it somehow seemed to be leading him on. He couldn’t question it; he didn’t have the time. Interpreting the compass’s directives required all his concentration. When he saw police lights flashing in his rearview mirror he dutifully pulled over, more irritated by the interruption than anything else.
An imposing CHP officer got out of the cruiser behind him and sauntered up to Graves’ open window. “Please remove your hat and eyewear, sir,” the officer said in a bored, no-nonsense tone, as he flipped open his ticket pad and portentously clicked a ballpoint pen.
Graves’ distracted, six-decade-dead skeleton complied with the order.
The cop had no immediate response to the sight that confronted him when he looked up from his pad. He seemed about to say something, then thought better of it. Graves waited, cocking his skull at a quizzical angle. In his weirdly-consuming frenzy to find his lighter he’d almost forgotten what state he was in, physically speaking, and he couldn’t even imagine what this must look like to an officer of the law.
“You know what?” the cop said, after a long, long pause. “No. Nuh-uh, no way, just no. Not today. Fuck
He walked stiffly back to his car, got in, and drove away. Graves shrugged, put his hat back on, and zoomed back onto the highway himself.
He exited at Roscoe Boulevard and headed east into an area he remembered as North Hollywood, a small incorporated city within the Valley’s patchwork of communities that bore no legal or geographical affiliation whatsoever with its better-known namesake on the far side of the Hills. In Graves’ day the area had been a thriving business center and transportation hub, serviced by a Red Car line that ran down to that other Hollywood, as well as by regular rail to Union Station, downtown. The old groves to its north had even then been giving way to housing or industry, and now, today, they were pretty much gone. So was most of the area’s vivacity and that early sense of promise.
The dashboard compass guided him through run-down residential neighborhoods and stripmall-strewn commercial stretches that he barely glanced at, and before he knew it he was pulling his stolen car into the parking lot at a place that looked a little more like the Valley he remembered. It was called ‘POTTER’S YARD,’ according to its hand-painted sign.
Graves got out and sniffed at the chlorophyll-scented air, feeling dimly amazed for the first time since digging himself up that he
It was a nursery, obviously, and a damn big one. Like some kind of a woodland glade right smack in the middle of a dusty beige industrial zone. It seemed very quiet for such a large place. Because of its size Graves figured it might be a wholesale operation, and maybe the buyers came earlier in the day. The stillness didn’t feel suspicious to him.
A woman came out of the small office on the far edge of the parking lot and Graves sized her up at once with his investigator’s eye. She looked to be in her late forties or early fifties, with long streaks of gray snaking through honey-blonde curls and pretty crinkles around perceptive blue eyes. They made her look like she’d be quick-witted, kind, and prone to laughter. She wore faded dungarees with a flannel shirt and a necklace of tiny alphabet beads that spelled out the name ‘HANNAH.’ The necklace looked like something a girl might make to give as a gift. Maybe a niece or some other relation had strung it together, Graves guessed, because if Hannah’s own kid had done it, the thing would’ve read ‘MOM.’
“Hi there,” the lady said, crunching across the gravel lot to greet what she clearly believed was just another customer, out shopping for dirt or flowers or whatever the hell it was that people bought at a place like this. “Can I help you find any… oh.”
She stopped and trailed off when she got her first good look at the skeletal remains of Dexter Graves.
“I’m guessing you came to see Lia,” she said.
If he’d had any, Graves would’ve raised his eyebrows. This woman seemed like she practically expected him, even as shocked as she was by his appearance. “I lost something,” he explained, and cocked a bony thumb back at his stolen car. “Compass in the rocketpod led me here.”
“Definitely, you want Lia,” the woman called Hannah told him. “She left, a little while ago, but if you’d like to wait-”
“I’ll wait.”
“Thought you might,” Hannah said, nodding. “You’ve got a patient look.” She examined him critically, doing her best to take him in stride. “Well, I guess you might as well come inside, then,” she decided aloud, perhaps assuming it was best to be polite when confronted with something you couldn’t understand. “I’d offer you a cup of tea, but it looks like it’d go right through you.”
Graves followed Hannah back into the weathered little office shack. “Yeah, well,” he said, “I’d ask ya for a belt of scotch, except you’re right-I don’t have the stomach for it anymore!”
Hannah laughed, brightly if a little nervously, before the old screen door slapped shut behind them.
Chapter Seven
Lia mentally ran through her checklist for ‘going dark,’ as she conceived it, during the short and familiar drive home. She barely noticed the light traffic on the move all around her.
First and most vital to the things she meant to do was to understand exactly what they were up against. According to Black Tom and the notions he sent into her head, Tzitzimime and all things like them had once been summed up by the old people as ‘Those Who Are Not Our Brothers,’ because their experience of the worlds is that much different from our own. Symbols were their points of reference, rather than places or things. Meaning, to Lia, that the insectile entities might find her on a symbolic model like a map more easily than they could find her on the street. Their minds were simplified mechanisms, and she figured it shouldn’t be too hard to hide from things that couldn’t hope to find the same 7-11 twice without being given new directions.
Deflecting them was sure to be safer and more effective than making some sort of desperate stand. If she confused them badly enough, they might forget what they already knew about her. That was possible. If not, she knew of a trap more elaborate than a three-word palindrome that had the potential to pick off the bugs one by one. Such work left no margin for error, but precedent led her to believe that the Aztec entities should be vulnerable to it… assuming she got every detail of the experimental spell’s construction right.
The term ‘Tzitzimime’ itself was one Tom had guided her to on the internet several nights before, filling her mind with the knowledge that the beings so-named were something they might expect to see when they ventured up to the top of the Tower, in a worst-case scenario. Lia kept a whole raft of mythology websites bookmarked on her browser, and today she was glad she’d studied them, as every scrap of knowledge about the history or behavior of Mictlantecuhtli’s demon slaves improved her sense of how to deal with them. Tom assured her that all of this was so, and that her understanding was well in place.
Secondly, then, she needed a way to lose focus. Not a distraction or a diversion, but a systematic approach to fuzzing the mantle of symbols that make up an identity, such as our names. The ones we choose, the ones we’re given, and the ones that just evolve. Blurring such signifiers would make it hard for otherworlders to perceive the actuality behind them, the things most people would’ve said were ‘really’ there. (Although the ‘real,’ as Lia knew, was often less defined and more slippery than those same people would ever care to imagine.)
