Graves' end

accident. Only the great Tree’s relative isolation and the difficulty of reaching the Hole above it had ever really prevented that.

Worse still for Tom was the thought of what might happen if the King who occupied the twin chambers beyond the SkyHole were to become infatuated with the lives these new folks were building for themselves over here, on the far side of existence.

What would become of the worlds if el Rey discovered Time, and the possibilities for growth, change, and increase that only it could offer?

Tom Delgado literally shuddered to think of it, even in the warmth of the relentless California sun.

Watt turned left at Sunset Boulevard, and when they motored through the intersection at Gower Street Tom saw it was true that the Blondeau Tavern had indeed closed down. The establishment had been doing land-office business back when Tom left town, serving Madame Blondeau’s famous pigeon- amp;-rum omelets to oceanbound daytrippers and local farmhands, and now it was gone. Marty Labaig’s older Six Mile House was still open across the street, still advertising light meals and cold drinks, although its sign now read ‘Casa Cahuenga.’

Tomas nudged Watt in the ribs with his elbow to get the man’s attention and then motioned for him to stop in at the old roadhouse. He didn’t believe el Rey would begrudge him a quick glass of beer.

Watt cut across the street and pulled up in front of the faux chateau, which still had grapevines growing over its picket fence and up the sides of the house, exactly as Tom remembered. He felt relieved by the fact that something, at least, had managed to remain almost unchanged for over a decade. It was apparently quite a feat, here in the new Ciudad de los Angeles.

“It true they mean to shoot motion pictures over there?” Tom asked, tipping his head toward Rene Blondeau’s boarded-up building across the street. “The Nestor Film Company?”

“That’s what they say,” Watt said, and sniffed to indicate his contempt for the very idea. “Those Selig- Polyscope people are expanding their operation up in Edendale, too. Just what this city needs: a flood of producers and writers and actors.”

“Oh my,” Tom said, cheered for the very first time that day by a vision of the future. He’d always enjoyed the company of actors. Well, of actresses, anyway. Still, the influx of theatrical types made sense. Tom knew from growing up around here that California’s weather would prove much better suited to the realities of film-making (a subject that had fascinated him for some time now) than anything he’d experienced on the eastern seaboard, or out in the middle west either. He wouldn’t be surprised to see the young city of Hollywood parlay the combination of Mr. Edison’s remarkable new technology and its own climatic assets into recognition as one of the world’s great centers of cultural dissemination, right after London and Paris and New York.

He had to guess that Mr. Watt would respond with a hollow laugh if he tried to advance this theory to him. Tom figured they’d just have to wait and see.

Then he remembered that he wouldn’t be here to see how the experiment panned out. He wouldn’t be here to see how tomorrow panned out, if things went as expected, and his momentarily- kindled spark of interest faded away.

“Well, to hell with it all anyhow,” Tom said abruptly, then turned away from the movie-factory-to-be across the street and shuffled into the Six Mile House’s oasis of cool continuity on his cane. “I’ve been sober all morning, so maybe you wanna hurry up?” he said, back over his shoulder, to a bemused Winston Watt.

Anyone watching would have assumed both Tom and Winston were well besotted by the time they wobbled out of the Six Mile House and made their way down to the grassy curb they’d parked at. Tom clambered back up into Mr. Watt’s gleaming new Tin Lizzie.

He cast a surreptitious eye over at the bleary Englishman, who was pulling on his driving gloves with undue difficulty, as though he’d somehow found himself with more fingers than he remembered having.

He was too skinny to be a good drinker, as Tom had guessed would be the case. Watt seemed aware enough of his limitations; he’d turned down Tom’s first offer to buy him a drink, attempting (Tom supposed) to keep things on a professional footing.

But no one who worked for el Rey de los Muertos could stay away from the sauce for long, and Watt accepted Tom’s second offer. And then his third, and his fourth, and then some undetermined number beyond that. Tom did know that he was out almost five whole dollars, and he’d only bought three glasses of beer for himself. Watt had switched over from disgusting juniper-scented gin mixed with quinine water to bright green French absinthe at some point in the last two hours, and now he was crouching in the gutter to turn the Model T’s handcrank.

A Prohibitionist’s worst nightmare, Tom thought. They could put this on a protest poster.

This time the unpredictable engine did kick back, startling Watt, who leapt away from the thing with a shout, only to land on his ass in the street.

Right in front of a horsedrawn farm wagon.

The animals reared, almost upsetting the cart’s inventory of vegetables and clanking milk cans. The driver cursed at Watt and called him an idiot, then pulled his team around the obstruction and continued down Gower Street. Watt responded with an obscene gesture of his own, one he directed safely at the back of the receding cart, while Tom watched the whole exchange with one eyebrow arched dispassionately.

“The roads around here are like this constantly these days,” Watt complained. “People have no manners at all anymore. I’m afraid it’s likely to get worse before it gets better, too.”

Tom nodded, looking south over the fields and gardens, figuring Watt was probably right enough about that. There must have been literally a dozen houses in sight, almost all of them having cropped up like toadstools in the ten years that had passed since Tom last laid eyes upon this landscape.

Forty years before that, the area for miles all around the Tree Below the Hole in the Sky had still been wild. The field it stood in was a natural prairie, situated across a low shelf of foothill bedrock. Isolation had long been its best, but not its only, defense.

Back then, when Tom first came through here, he’d been on foot and in the company of his old friend Ramon San Martin. They’d been walking for some days-questing, really, one could say-eating nothing but the mix of dried cactus buttons and small brown mushrooms given to them by an old shaman in preparation for the trip. Teonanactl and Mescalito, the spirits of the plants they ate, walked with them. The spirits revealed the landscape as it was in their otherworldly eyes, and they guided the boys to what they sought, in their youthful foolishness: that which was rumored and whispered about by witches and sorcerers for leagues all around and had been for a thousand years or more.

The Hole in the Sky, of course. And the two rooms that lay beyond it, the King’s Chambers, las Cameras del Rey. There was an antechamber, in which a man could stand and live; and then there was that inner room, the one with the blood-black altar. That was the Holy of Holies which, once penetrated, could never be returned from.

At least not without the King’s permission, and even then it was only possible at a particular time of the year, the roughly forty-eight hour period acknowledged by the Catholic Church as the paired feasts of All Saints’ and All Souls’ days, when natural seasonal progressions brought the worlds into close alignment.

Watt the Englishman squatted again before the auto’s handcrank, and this time he was able to wring the engine to life without incident.

“We all set then, Tom?” he said, swaying a bit as he got to his feet.

Tom nodded again, eyeing Watt for any signs of falsity in his behavior. He believed the man was legitimately soused, all right, but it wouldn’t do to be caught out unawares. Not now. Because, at some point in the afternoon, Tom had come to a decision. Quietly, without a lot of fuss or conscious consideration, he’d realized that he had no intention of climbing up that Tree, nor of crawling through that Hole. As he sipped his few beers (using a touch of sleight-of-mind to let Watt think he was matching him more or less drink-for-drink), his true objective had finally solidified.

Now, he planned to let the King’s Englishman drive him out to the field with the Tree. But then, instead of ascending, he’d find a pretense to buy some time and wait till Watt inevitably passed out from acute inebriation.

At which point Tom would tie him up, and then cut down that godforsaken oak.

That’s right: he meant to chop down the Tree Below the Hole in the Sky. The ladder to the otherworld. The stairway to… well, not heaven.