Sean Traver - Graves' end

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.

He could hardly believe it himself, but when he looked into his heart, he found that it was true.

Tom looked over at Watt as the man hoisted himself up into the Model T’s driver’s seat. He hardly looked capable of operating the Ford’s elaborate controls. Tom wanted to offer to drive, but he’d never piloted an auto-mobile before in his life, and besides, he couldn’t now claim to be less intoxicated than Watt without tipping his hand, could he?

If the Englishman killed them on the road, well… then Tom figured he’d just arrive in the King’s realm a little ahead of schedule.

But if they happened to survive the drive, then he might yet have his chance to turn the tables.

A century later…

A tall, female figure in head-to-toe black leather stood at a scenic viewpoint off Mulholland Drive and gazed out over the San Fernando Valley as it yawned and stretched away below her in the day’s clear new light. She had her helmet’s mirrored visor down, obscuring her face from view. The rising sun’s reflection burned across the silvered plastic in a hot white stripe.

She raised a divining rod in her right hand and flicked it with her left index finger. The rod spun wildly, like a compass needle near a magnet, round and round.

Then, with unnatural suddenness, it pulled to indicate north/northeast, and froze there.

The concealed woman nodded, zipped the rod into a breast pocket, and swung a leg over a hulking black motorcycle that was parked at the side of the road. When she kickstarted her ride and roared off a total of six big black cars trailed after her, snaking down the winding road that ran through Laurel Canyon.

Fifteen minutes later, the same woman and her six-car retinue growled to a stop for a red light at Laurel and Sherman Way, nearly halfway across the Valley’s flat floor.

The foothills a few miles back had seemed a lot more affluent and pretty, in her opinion. Up here it was all blank-faced warehouses and construction-supply outlets with little knots of hopeful laborers milling around outside their parking lots. Cheery, accordion-based Mexican music blared from a nearby pickup truck that was also caught at the red.

The leatherclad, helmeted biker took her divining rod from her breast pocket and flicked it again, repeating her wayfinding operation while the six black sedans that made up her ominous entourage settled in behind her. The rod spun, then froze, pointing in a more easterly direction.

They were getting close now.

The concealed woman nodded and zipped the rod back into her pocket. She glanced over at the pickup truck that was idling next to her, raised her visor for just a flash, and the men inside the cab promptly turned their music down.

The red light changed to a green and the woman continued traveling north into the Valley, following the rod and leading her menacing procession of nondescript cars forward.

Dexter Graves popped his skull up through Bag End’s already-open hatch. It was a lovely morning, bright and cool and full of birdsong. There were savory breakfast smells on the breeze.

Graves climbed up out of the tube and into the sun, glad to be, well, if not exactly alive , then whatever the hell this was. His bonus round. It might not’ve been perfect (not by a damn sight), but it sure beat the long dirtnap.

Of which he remembered surprisingly little, he found, when he stopped and gave it some thought. He had a hazy, disjointed memory of being burritoed up in a paint-spattered dropcloth then hauled out to a desert grave by Big Juan San Martin, Hardface’s enforcer, whom he now regretted not shooting back when he had the chance. After that, it was like his mind had shut down in the face of unending blackness, boredom and immobility, and it hadn’t stirred again until that driving compulsion to find his lighter roused him yesterday morning. Why that should have happened, he just couldn’t say. He didn’t know how these things worked. Going through them wasn’t enough to make you an expert.