Graves' end

couldn’t really be transmitted, but only received. The skills he had to pass on would change her, divert the course of her destiny off from where it might otherwise have led, but then again, she’d never have her native kindness shamed out of her by a wicked world this way, either. The power that comes with knowledge would make her strong enough to keep it, and that seemed to Tom like an excellent thing.

For the first time in the gods only knew how long, the old ghost in a cat actually felt excited about something.

He refused to let himself be troubled by the thought that one day, for her own safety, his girl might need to know the secret of the King’s Chambers and the building-the Silent Tower-that now concealed them. Tom knew the consequences of that revelation could be as dire for this new child as they’d once been for his lost love Dulce… if he wasn’t just as careful about it as he could possibly be.

But that theoretical occasion was many, many years off; a decade or more before she’d be ready, and for now there were far more immediate plans to be made.

Tom knew the Valley incredibly well after a fifty-year career as a backyard mouser. He knew the secrets cats knew, the hidden paths and the rarely-traveled roads, the forgotten tunnels and the rooftop hideaways.

There was a certain place he knew of, not too many miles distant. A place many cats knew, that literally thousands of them had visited or lived at over the past forty years or so. It used to be a farm-supply depot, a rather remote one, in the dimmest days of Tom’s human memory. During his bobcat years it’d been a small farm itself, or maybe a large garden would’ve been a better description, growing corn and strawberries and selling them all summer long from the property’s original wooden shack. It saw a couple of seasons as a Halloween pumpkin patch in the late 1950s. Then, in the years after that Cuban Missile thing Tom absorbed some news about in passing, the patriarch of the family that owned the place had sunk a bunch of money, literally, into an underground nukeproof bunker in which to wait out an anticipated Apocalypse that never quite came.

The bills for the project kept coming, though, and apparently they’d never gotten paid.

The acreage was abandoned to this day, its future tied up in legal limbo while the original paranoiac’s distant heirs squabbled over their inheritance, none of them even aware, at this point, of the big bomb shelter that had bankrupted the family business so many years ago.

Forty years worth of Valley cats would’ve brought their every half-eaten trophy to these people’s doors in gratitude, if any but Tom had been able to find them by reading a street address. Rumors that the property was soon to be sold off and either developed or reopened as a nursery continued to circulate, but so far they’d come to nothing.

Tom felt certain he could find a way to lead his new protege out there, even without a voice to guide her. He’d been robbed of his capacity for words along with his living body almost a century ago… although that, too, was another story. One he supposed he’d need to reveal to his new friend, in time, after she’d gotten used to the psychically-projected pictures, sensations, and dreams that were the only vocabulary he had to work with anymore. Their connection would have to be empathic, emotional and visual, as the unfortunate events of Tom’s past had eliminated all verbal options.

But that was all right. The bus line that ran past the market would get them close to the place he meant to take her, and he could fox a goddamn mechanical fare counter. That was easy. Once he got his girl out to the hunting-place, he was pretty sure he’d be able to get them into that subterranean sanctuary, too. He was good at getting into things. They might find food down there, cans, military-style rations maybe, or other packages that required opposable digits to open. It seemed likely enough. The place had been built with the end of the world in mind, and you’d have to expect that survivors would want to eat.

He was surprised by how much better he felt once his small belly was filled with the preservative-laden bovine mash they sold as ‘cat food’ these days. The girl seemed pleased and gratified simply to watch him eat it.

When he was finished Tom looked up at her, his ward, his new best friend, and thought that she had no idea what she’d just bought herself, for the price of a can of processed cowlips.

Part One: Halloween Night Chapter One

A decade later…

Lia Flores made a futile swipe with her coat sleeve against one of the narrow glass panes set into the old building’s heavy front door, attempting to clear away what might have been years of accumulated grime. The windows were backed with brittle brown paper, but it had peeled away from their corners, to greater and lesser degrees. Lia couldn’t make out anything in the blackness beyond them, however, no matter how hard she squinted. There was nothing to see but her own pale reflection in the smudged window glass-a transparent ghost with black, bobbed hair and large, dark eyes.

She tried the bell, waited for a moment, then tried it again. When nobody answered after a minute or so, she repeated the procedure. There was still no response, but then Lia wasn’t really expecting one, either. It was after ten p.m. on Halloween Night, for one thing, and the building itself-a century-old, red-brick office box languishing on an underpopulated Hollywood side street-was the kind that would’ve looked just as moribund and disused at ten a.m. on any given morning.

Assuring herself that no one could possibly be watching, Lia dropped to her knees before the doorknob and withdrew a miniature set of locksmith’s tools from an inner pocket of her dark, bulky peacoat. She took a breath and held it as she went to work on the corroded old lock with a slim rake that looked appropriate to the job.

Behind her stood a short, hunched old man. He was propped up on a walking stick and still wearing sunglasses, despite the lateness of the hour. He wore a white linen guayabera shirt with two rows of extra pockets down the front and a misshapen hat over his gray-streaked hair. Lia knew him as Black Tom, and even though they’d been inseparable companions for better than ten years now, they’d never once had a proper conversation.

Tom raised a hand to bless her lockpicking efforts and the lock gave way. The door before them yawned open onto a shadowy corridor.

Lia looked back over her shoulder at the bright street several blocks behind her. It was packed tight with costumed celebrants, not a one of them aware of her or of what she might be doing back here in the darkness. They could’ve been in a different world. One they all agreed upon and labeled ‘real.’

She was uncomfortable with what she was doing here, to say the least. Breaking and entering was not the arena in which she normally applied her skills. This felt more like a job for a detective.

Still, she crept on down the corridor anyway, with exaggerated caution. Skeins of cobweb depended from the ceiling and a total lack of lighting made the obscenities scrawled upon the walls difficult to read. Black Tom trailed after her, a portrait of cool behind his sunglasses. He leaned on his walking stick but didn’t bother to creep as he ambled right down the middle of the hall.

Lia knew this place had once had a name, though Tom wasn’t able to tell it to her. They were here because she’d been asked to check the location out by a stranger, one whose brother had vanished almost a year ago, after coming here to perform what their so-called client had referred to only as ‘some weird ritual.’ Lia and her wordless familiar had a bit of experience with missing persons, and a lot more than that when it came to arcane rites. The real reason she’d agreed to this, though, was that Tom had known the place in question immediately. This place, this building, and the story of the missing brother had struck an obvious alarm bell for him.

He’d covered it up with his habitual wry composure right away, but Lia wasn’t sure if she’d ever seen him frightened before. Ghosts had little to fear, generally speaking, and yet even now Tom radiated a desire to believe that the story they’d been told was somehow inaccurate, that the location was dormant or otherwise closed down, and the neglected condition in which they’d found the building would seem to argue in favor of that possibility.

If something was lingering on here, however, Tom expected it to reach the height of its power during the next two days, a period of time roughly corresponding with the holiday the locals called el Dia de los