Graves' end

His hip seemed to ache even when the weather was warm, these days.

At sixty-five, Tom felt far older in his bones than he did in his mind. On some days that discrepancy didn’t bother him a bit, but on others, it did.

He paused on the platform while his fellow travelers milled around him, greeting families or fussing with trunks, tickets and porters, then shielded his eyes to look south.

The Santa Monica Mountains jutted up from the earth a few miles away, divided by the natural cleft once known to the old people as Kawengna. It was the ‘Cahuenga’ Pass these days, the old native name approximated by a new Spanish spelling.

Not far beyond the pass, Tom knew, was a lonely field in which stood an ancient and gnarled encino, or oak tree, whose limbs had always pointed up at a Hole in the Sky. A Hole where someone was currently waiting for him to climb up and crawl through, as he’d long ago promised he would… one day.

And now that day had come.

Tom sighed. He could hardly complain. He’d had a decade to roam the earth and money enough to do it in style. He’d bedded the most beautiful of women during that time; dined at the finest of tables; drunk himself stupid on the rarest liqueurs. He’d seen the cities and palaces of Europe, traveled the colorful trade routes of Egypt and India, sipped at tea or opium while conversing with silken courtesans in the lacquered pavilions of the Orient. Through the grace of his patron Mictlantecuhtli, the ancient Aztec ReydeLosMuertos, the old sorcerer had done and seen and had just about everything he could remotely imagine doing or seeing or having, but now…

Now that he’d traveled so far to the west that he was a mere ocean away from the mysterious East again (and, more importantly, now that the bill for the whole affair was about to come due), he couldn’t help but feel a touch of what the world’s professional pitchmen were said to have labeled ‘buyer’s remorse.’

Caveat Emptor indeed, Tom thought.

Watt, the skinny Englishman whose given name was Wendell or Wilson or Webster or something like that, if Tom remembered correctly, was already waiting for him across the street. Leaning against the Japan-black fender of a brand new Model T, right out in front of the Lankershim Post Office, where they couldn’t fail to miss each other.

Watt raised a hand in greeting and Tom waved back, muttering “Hijo de puta…” through a phony rictus of a smile.

He’d expected at least one night to himself. A chance to eat a last meal in a proper restaurant and sleep in a soft hotel bed. Not the King’s one-man welcome wagon over there. But he knew it was in his best interests to keep a pleasant face on things.

And besides, he ought to be at least a little bit grateful. The Pacific Electric Railway had plans (again, according to the papers) to open a Big Red Streetcar line up from Hollywood to the recently-rechristened Lankershim sometime in the next year, but until then the only way over to the field containing the Tree That Grew Below the Hole in the Sky was via the rutted, winding dirt track that snaked through the mountain pass.

The route was known by now simply as Pass Road, though Tomas could remember a day when it had been part of el Camino Real, the Royal Road connecting all the Spanish Missions up and down the coast. He also knew, beyond what he could personally recall, that it’d served the old people as something that might be better described as the Carretera del Rey, the King’s Highway (or simply the Road that Runs Past the Hole in the Sky), for some millennia before that.

Riding in Woolgar or Wilshire or Wilbur Watt’s fancy new auto-mobile would certainly be easier on Tom’s old bones than the joint-jarring trudge in a hired horsecart that was his only other option.

El Rey never skimped on hospitality. Not even when it overwhelmed his guests.

Wallace or Walter or Watson crouched down to crank-start the Tin Lizzie while Tom hefted his bag over his shoulder and hobbled across the street on his walking stick. He’d heard those engines had a tendency to kick back if the spark wasn’t properly retarded, and he wondered if he wasn’t about to witness Willie or Wally or Whatever his name was breaking a thumb.

But no, the engine sputtered safely to life, and Watt stood to shake Tom’s hand. “Welcome home, Tom,” the Englishman said, in his characteristically clipped and formal tones. He lowered his voice to add: “Mictlantecuhtli would see you.”

Tom knew. That’s why he was here.

He nodded, climbed up into the fancyass car, and held onto his hat as Winston (yes, that was it, Winston) Watt piloted the noisy contraption out into traffic and away down the street, frightening any number of horses.

By the time they reached the far side of the pass Tom learned to be glad that the racket kicked up by Mr. Watt’s ‘auto-mobile’ more or less precluded casual conversation. He also learned, after they stopped for a gulp of water at the Eight Mile House (a small way station and hostel situated in the middle of the pass), that the infernal thing could hammer along at a pace of almost twenty-five miles per hour on a straightaway. Watt felt compelled to demonstrate that property, for some unfathomable reason, as they barreled down the southern side of the mountains.

It felt suicidally fast to Tom. He remembered the headline furor surrounding the death-by-motorcart of a man named Henry Hale Bliss way back in 1899. The accident had still been the talk of the town when he first disembarked in New York City, after leaving Los Angeles. He further remembered naively regretting that the internal combustion fad hadn’t snuffed itself out before such a tragedy had to occur. Tom had been certain, back then, that the threat of violent, crushing death would finally be enough to dampen the public’s rabid enthusiasm for this absurd new sport of ‘motoring.’

He, apparently, could not have been more wrong about that.

Twice he and Watt met with vehicles like their own as they traversed the Carretera del Rey-noisy bouncing carriages piloted by grinning idiots swaddled in dusters and goggles, and each time such an encounter occurred one car or the other was forced to back some number of yards down the narrow dirt track until it widened out enough for someone to pull off into the weeds and let the other motorist pass by.

Tom didn’t see how the Cahuenga Pass could possibly accommodate too many more of Mr. Ford’s Follies. Practical considerations like geography and the availability of fuels weren’t preventing people from buying the things, however.

There were exponentially more autos on the Hollywood side of the pass, Tom noted, when they rolled down out of the hills. The cars puttered and honked their way past delivery wagons and well-dressed folks perched precariously atop fat-tired bicycles. Watt drove them down Highland and past the Hollywood Hotel: a vast, white, Moorish-style monstrosity hunkered at the northwestern corner of Highland’s intersection with Prospect Avenue.

All of that acreage had been devoted to beans and strawberries the last time Tom had ridden by. There were even rumors in the papers now that old Prospect Avenue itself might soon be renamed ‘Hollywood Boulevard,’ in honor of the ever-expanding hostelry on the corner.

The pace of development around here stunned him. There were still plenty of open fields stretching away to the horizons, but also so many large new homes and broad new streets, as well as all of the stores and schools and other businesses needed to sustain the ever-swelling numbers of brand new residents.

The thought of so many new people living so near to the Hole in the Sky left Tom feeling a little sick.

The old people-the Tongva and the Tataviam and the Chumash-had known how to respect a thing like a Hole in the Sky. Their fathers had known for countless generations, and the traditions they handed down amongst themselves had preserved the necessary balance between the elemental forces involved. Even the rancheros who displaced them had indulged a healthy superstition regarding old heathen magic, and they’d always shown enough good sense to leave the things they didn’t need to know about alone.

These new people, though, Tom was not so sure about. They so often seemed to behave with the mindless rapacity of a swarm of locusts.

What would happen when people like that discovered a thing like the Hole in the Sky? The old deflective hexes that protected it might not be able to keep the blissfully ignorant from stumbling across the secret by