Graves' end

Muertos. That made tonight, Halloween night, the best possible time to observe without putting themselves in unreasonable danger.

It sounded logical enough to Lia, in its way, but she was still unsettled by the fact that her friend had never tried to tell her before about the early twentieth-century skyscraper that now stood on a site once considered sacred to the Aztecs’ God of the Dead.

She glanced up, noting a camera mounted in a corner near the hallway’s ceiling. Its lens appeared to be occluded by a thick cataract of dust.

She looked over at Black Tom, who shrugged, although he could’ve sent her reassurance if he’d wanted to. Could’ve reached out with his mind and touched her nervous system, psychically blunting the sharpest edge of her fear and letting her know without words that everything would be all right. He’d done such things before, when she’d needed them in the past. That he wasn’t doing them now told her everything she needed to know about this situation. Tom thought it was more important, at the moment, that she be focused and on her guard than comfortably unafraid.

She did wish he could just talk to her about it, though. The wish was a well-worn one, reiterated nearly every day, but she felt her friend’s silence especially keenly right now, when even a single word of reassurance would’ve done something to ease her tension. But Tom was as silent as he’d ever been.

As silent as this empty tower.

Lia decided to push on, assuming the cobwebbed camera overhead had to be a dud. Nothing was working in here, she felt sure of it. Or at least she wanted to feel sure of it. All of the evidence before her confirmed the assumption that nobody else had set foot in here for a very long time. Even the graffiti looked pretty old.

Still, she had to force herself deeper into the building, and it did seem like that elderly camera was following her every move. She couldn’t tell if she felt watched because she was being watched, or merely because she was trespassing in a place she didn’t belong. In any case, she was nearly dizzy with it, that feeling was so powerful.

Encountering the otherworld always involved a series of moves and counter-moves, of selective advantages leveraged against specific weaknesses. Head-on confrontations with its denizens were generally ill-advised. But, much as a man in a flame-proof suit might stand beside a conflagration and not get burned, Lia was often able to edge in close to dangerous entities and learn their secrets-so long as she remained aware of their blind spots. This sort of divination was a spy-game akin to chess, and Tom had taught her to play it like a grandmaster (although he’d also trained her to know when it was time to knock over the board and make a run for it, too).

Intuition could be difficult to separate from paranoia, and Lia couldn’t tell which one of them was coloring her impressions now.

She clicked on her flashlight as she eased open the solid double doors at the end of the hall, and its beam sliced at the shadows that closed in around her like a silent pack of eager black beasts. The flashlight flickered and wavered as though it were frightened, but Lia shook it and it came back on strong. For the moment. She’d purchased new batteries before driving down here, so maybe it was a loose connection. Maybe. She hated to think the building might be draining her energizers at an accelerated rate.

The wide foyer she and Black Tom found themselves in was dark, abandoned, and liberally vandalized. Lia played her flashlight over the gaping elevator shafts, and then across the door marked ‘STAIRS.’ Its identifying sign hung askew.

Still, she opted for the stairs. Those elevators hadn’t been operated in a very long time.

Her flashlight flickered and stuttered out more warnings of its own imminent demise as she ascended flight after flight of echoing steps, headed up toward the tower’s very top floor. Black Tom tagged along after her, ascending easily despite his age. Lia’s calves had turned to wood by the time they reached the seventh landing, but she took a deep breath and continued climbing. Her heart thudded against her ribs, and not just from exertion. This place had an aura about it that unnerved her, despite Tom’s clear wish to find it empty.

The last stairwell door protested when she pushed it open, its disused hinges groaning over the indignity of being disturbed after so many years of rusty silence. Lia’s dimming flashlight beam preceded her as she emerged into a top-floor corridor, followed as always by her Tom.

She skipped her coin of fading, copper-colored light down the corridor’s frayed runner of once-red carpet, scanning along the baseboards for anything out of the ordinary. She paused and held the flashlight beam in place when it glinted off some tarnished bit of metal that might’ve been an old-fashioned cigarette lighter lying on the floor at the far end of the passage.

She and Black Tom went over to crouch down on either side of what did indeed turn out to be a Zippo-style lighter, one that sported a US Navy insignia on its side. An anchor inside a loop of rope. Tom and Lia examined it silently for a moment. Then they looked up at one another, as if on cue, and nodded in agreement. This felt significant to both of them. It was just the sort of sign they’d come looking for, although the lighter itself appeared far older than anything they’d expected to find.

Lia’s sepia-toned beam flickered fatally when she bent to pick up the Zippo. She shook the flashlight again, but it was a goner and she knew it. What she didn’t know was whether or not Black Tom could lead her out of here in total darkness. She guessed that he could-she was quite sure of it, really-but she still preferred not to put it to the test.

Lia rolled the Zippo’s wheel in desperation and, as old as it was, the flint inside of it still sparked. Her electric light would be dead within seconds, so she clicked the Zippo again, several more times, as her depleted batteries failed her once and for all.

In the moment of pure blackness that followed the flashlight’s demise, Tom seemed to notice something. Lia felt him frowning in the gloom.

Then the lighter’s wick ignited, and she was bathed in its faint, warm fire-glow.

Lia stood up on legs that felt liquid with relief, holding the lighter aloft. Black Tom hopped to his feet and tugged on the back of her coat.

She turned. “What?”

Tom pointed to a closed door at the end of the hall.

Now it was Lia’s turn to frown. She hadn’t even seen a door there, herself, shrouded as it was in cobweb and shadow. She supposed a part of her hadn’t wanted to see it.

But she closed the lighter, as Tom indicated she should, and after giving her night-vision a long moment to adjust, she too was able to see the thin seam of light that lined the bottom of the door.

It was only the faintest glow, seeping out from the next room, but it was there, definitely there, beyond any shadow of a doubt. The flashlight and the old Zippo had each provided enough illumination to obscure it.

In the darkness that seemed to iris down around them, Black Tom pointed toward the stairs, punctuating the gesture with a questioning raise of his eyebrows. (He could bypass Lia’s retinas when he wanted to, appearing directly on the movie screen of her mind, so her ability to see him wasn’t compromised by the dearth of ambient light. It was still disconcerting not to see much of anything besides him, however, hovering there in the entoptic murk while he waited for her to make a choice.)

She re-lit the tarnished Zippo and squinted against its bright yellow tongue of flame as she considered her options. There seemed to be a name stenciled on the door in front of her, barely legible beneath what looked like ancient rust stains, even with her nose an inch from it. She held the lighter’s flame up before the letters one by one and found they spelled out ‘Miguel Caradura,’ a name Lia translated as ‘Michael Hardface.’ It might’ve struck her as funny at a different point in time, but not so much, right now.

Tom won’t fault you if you turn back, she told herself. He’s letting you off the hook. And it’s not like he can tell anybody if you chicken out, anyway.

But Lia shook her head. They’d come up here because Tom needed to know if the rooms at the top of this tower were occupied and open for business once again, yes, but also because they’d been asked. Asked by someone who needed their brand of help and had nowhere else to turn, which was more than Lia could refuse. She knew all too well what it felt like to need an ally.

So they weren’t leaving, she decided, not quite yet. Not until she’d seen all there was to see, and not before she’d done what needed doing.

She closed the lighter, put it in her pocket, and reached for the doorknob.

Black Tom looked on, radiating his regret as Lia pushed open the door to the rooms he’d once called