Winston made a casual gesture and a palanquin composed of smoke swirled into view behind her, along with a team of eight skeletal porters. One of the porters slid open a diaphanous door in the box’s misty side, revealing a solid and comfortable-looking interior. A space upholstered in silk and red velvet. A magnum of wine, an elegant hookah, and lush cushions all awaited her within.
It looked like heaven after her long hike down the side of the pyramid.
Winston offered a hand to help her up, and Ingrid took it. With a smile. “Thank you, Winston,” she said.
The well-dressed skeleton followed her to the insubstantial conveyance and helped her in. He slid the smokedoor shut behind her. “The pleasure is most assuredly mine, Miss Redstone,” he said.
Winston clicked his bony fingers and the porters bore Ingrid away. The ghostly palanquin faded rapidly into the thin but omnipresent fog. Winston turned into a wisp of smoke himself in order to follow on the breeze.
Ingrid had no trouble making herself comfortable inside the palanquin. She blew languid smoke rings while it rocked and bobbed with the rhythm of her porters’ gait. Time that wasn’t really time seemed to slowly pass.
Growing bored, Ingrid slid a window panel open for a peek outside.
Superimposed over the vast chaparral plain was a faint, barely-there street made of thin smoke and populated by clothed skeletons, all of them going about their everyday business-whatever they remembered that to be. Ingrid perceived gossamer suggestions of buildings and cars from different eras, from horses and carts to vehicles far ahead of any age she knew. An instant after they congealed they were gone again, absorbed back into the mists. The geography over here could be uncertain and unstable, changeable like the weather. Landmarks didn’t like to stay where they belonged, and the fashions she saw cut across the centuries.
She’d often wondered how that sort of thing worked, exactly. If the future dead were here in this timeless realm (as they plainly were, at least from her perspective), then might it not be possible to meet her future dead self?
Questions like that only irritated Mickey. His answers to them were vague, full of paradox and what he imagined to be poetry, leading Ingrid to suspect that even a god might not always understand as much as he pretended. The King of the Dead’s best explanation was that the phenomenal world, as he called it (which was not some fabulous location, as Ingrid first thought, but simply the regular human world where phenomena occur, otherwise known as the
As with most things Mickey told her, she wasn’t sure where the truth ended and the self-aggrandizement began. She knew he’d long since cornered the afterlife market, subsuming competing death-deities into himself, and that he’d also conquered any number of mythological territories beyond his native one, through sheer ambition. And yet he was hardly the almighty ruler of everything that he aspired to be. The realworld, for example, remained out of his reach, as did the more distant shores of the vast imaginal sea in which the realm of the dead was still just one of the islands (all right-one of the
She only stared out the window for a minute or two (or so it seemed-the action may have taken a century or a second in relative time, and there was no meaningful way to gauge it), but skeletons on the sidewalk started to notice their world’s living visitor just that quick.
They pointed bony fingers and followed along with the palanquin, in rapidly increasing numbers.
The skeletal citizens and their surroundings became more solid as the crowd grew, as though they were remembering form and vitality through Ingrid’s example. Even glimpsed through the slit of a window, her dark red hair and jewel-like eyes were the most vivid sights available. Arresting enough in the realworld, Ingrid’s beauty was almost shocking in this gray and faded place.
The locals were more than seduced.
Ingrid, feeling uncomfortable, slid the window shut. Alone again, she sucked on her hookah for reassurance.
As the tireless porters carried her down the chronologically-promiscuous, half-substantial street, it swirled away to nothingness behind them.
Finally-although any appearance of time here was really just for show-Ingrid’s porters set her palanquin down in front of a smokesketch of a cozy restaurant. Ingrid recognized it as a flawless simulacrum of Tom Bergin’s House of Irish Coffee, down below Wilshire on Fairfax, right here in Los Angeles. It was a favorite realworld pub of hers, a place she’d visited in seven different twentieth-century decades. Only the faces of the bartenders had ever seemed to change, and even those were apt to take their time about it.
In a world where so much was in flux, Ingrid took comfort in that type of continuity.
Winston reappeared to slide open the palanquin’s door and help her out, onto a misty sidewalk that felt more like cold, bare earth than concrete against her soles.
A ring of skeletons watched in awed silence, from a respectful distance. A number of ossified paparazzi snapped pictures, one with an old wooden box camera balanced on a tripod. His hand-held flash apparatus went up with a soft
Ingrid spared them one glance, then turned and walked into the restaurant.
Winston held the heavy front door open, and then closed it again behind her.
Like the palanquin, the inside of the public house appeared perfectly solid and real. Winston led Ingrid past the central bar and across a front room crowded with gregarious skeletons in vividly realized Prohibition-era attire.
By the time they reached the back of the bar, the skeletons had all become real-looking, fully-fleshed people from the Jazz Age.
Winston admitted Ingrid to a boisterous private party going on in the back room, ushering her past a pair of stone-faced bouncers.
Wild flappers in slinky dresses and bootleggers in suspenders, flatcaps, and rolled-up sleeves all laughed, danced or drank to the hot jazz provided by a combo in the corner. Several brands of fragrant smoke hung in layers in the air.
The crowd parted readily for Winston, revealing Mictlantecuhtli, in full cowl, sitting at a big table against the back wall.
Two sloe-eyed lovelies she’d heard him call Nyx and Lyssa on previous occasions sipped at opium pipes as they lounged on either side of him. He ran a flayed finger down Nyx’s throat and breastbone, playfully. She smiled.
Ingrid, who wasn’t into this at all, rolled her eyes, stepped past Winston before he could announce her, and walked right up to the King’s table.
“Mickey,” she said.
Mictlantecuhtli turned his head to look at her. All she could see beneath his heavy cowl was his jawbone and his bloody lower teeth. “My love,” he greeted her, in a voice that echoed like eternity.
“I did it,” Ingrid said. “I’ve done it. It’s done.”
Mictlantecuhtli tipped his head in the barest nod of acknowledgement.
“So. Are we square?”
Mictlantecuhtli didn’t answer. Instead he tipped his head forward and put his hands under his cowl to push it back. In doing so he revealed his ‘Miguel Caradura’ aspect: that of a powerful, dark-skinned man with small, intense eyes and a prominent nose, wearing a broad-shouldered Italian suit and a necklace of human eyes. If Rudolph Valentino had been an Aztec king…
“I can’t help but think you don’t care for my party,” he chided Ingrid, in a low whisky growl of a voice. “And I thought this was your favorite era?”
“It’s great, Mickey,” she said, not taking any special pains to conceal her impatience with his theatrics. “It’s fine.” If he’d bothered to look a little more deeply into anyone’s mind, he would’ve known this bar had never been a speakeasy. It hadn’t even opened till the 1930s. She cast a glance at Lyssa, who looked back with heavy-lidded, contemptuous eyes. “Really nice.”
Mickey snarled. He didn’t like being patronized. He never had. “I think perhaps you would prefer something
