Sean Traver - Graves' end

That Dexter Graves was up and ambulatory was proof that the first phase of her operation had succeeded. Lia had picked up that lighter, the link to Dexter, despite her protestations to the contrary. Her touch had sparked Ingrid’s long-dormant hex to life, and Dexter’s bones along with it. Lia’s abilities must have been the full equivalent of Ingrid’s own, or else the enchanted symbol would not have awakened for her. Had Ingrid ever returned for the lighter herself during the intervening sixty years, she would’ve been right back on Mickey’s hook.

She sighed, thinking about it.

She couldn’t help but identify with Lia, this young operator she’d uncovered, and she didn’t want to see her hurt, above all things. Lia’s basic affinities seemed to be vegetal rather than mineral, like Ingrid’s own, but they still had an amazing amount in common.

That knowledge made her wistful. Equals in her field had, in Ingrid’s experience, been few and far between. It took a fortitude few possessed to live full-time in the actual, when the real was the only world most people would let themselves believe in. The otherworld could be scary, since it was but partially mapped and minimally understood. Daunting as it was, though, most folks at least acknowledged its existence as a metaphor or a frivolous fantasyscape, if nothing more.

The actual, though… hidden in that subtle distinction was the witches’ world, the liminal tract of headspace wherein events deemed impossible or untenable by the standards of the realworld might nonetheless occasionally occur, to be remembered, contemplated, and learned from, by those who dared.

Ingrid had good reason to believe Lia knew that territory as well as she did. She’d sensed it from the moment they first corresponded, through the mediation of an entity called Craig who kept lists of the messages posted to the incredible public internetwork. Ingrid imagined he needed a staff of thousands. The planet’s new invisible information-sharing web seemed to her like nothing less than a man-made astral plane, one summoned up with secret words and viewed through flat black scrying-screens, very much in the classical tradition. The greatest of medieval sorcerers would’ve killed to possess even the cheapest example of the computation machines that made it all possible, and today they were used by everyone, including children.

Ingrid shook her head. So much had changed, and yet a lot remained the same.

Her old familiar loneliness felt like an ache in her chest today. She longed to be able to talk with Lia about any of these things. Ingrid’s modern-day counterpart was sure to be versed in concepts and cosmologies similar to the ones she employed.

What a relationship they could’ve-and should’ve -had.

She truly did hate manipulating the girl, but it had to be done, for now, in the name of manipulating Mickey.

If only she’d never found her way out to that goddamned Tree…

But no, Ingrid thought, she didn’t really feel that way, not even now. She didn’t regret her long-ago choice of the left-hand path. Only one particular betrayal by Mickey had ever brought her close to sentiments like that.

She couldn’t imagine renouncing the wonders she’d seen as a result of that choice, including this, the incredible opening of a brand new era, a full hundred years beyond her time. Ingrid was a true innovator in her ancient art, the first human being ever to time-hop like the imaginals did, and that privilege was a direct result of her relationship with Mictlantecuhtli.

Ingrid fingered the large garnet she wore on a silver chain around her neck. A dark red stone on a thin tether of shiny white moon-metal. It was the only thing that let her find her way back to herself from the unfamiliar ages she visited. Timehopping required that she use her true name, all the time, even in her own head and when it was inconvenient, or else risk losing her identity through the subtle split that existed between the other and the actual worlds. You had to know exactly who you were if you wanted to step across a seam like that. The gem that symbolized her to herself was it self an imaginal artifact, a thing from the otherworld, a gift from the figment of myth that now called itself Miguel Caradura, after her own suggestion.

His patronage had been her ticket to the initiatory level beyond the poetry and semiotic mindgames of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where Ingrid began her occult career. In London, this had been, around the turn of the previous century. Though she’d been born in San Francisco she’d spent her early twenties trying to make a name on the West End stage… or so she’d told herself, even at the time. What she’d really done was earn her keep as a box jumper, a stage magician’s lovely assistant (easy work for one sexy enough to get it), and then spent the bulk of her time attending the parties and pub-crawls of the theatrical set. That had led her to the alluring, exotic and slightly dangerous Golden Dawn (where she befriended a young painter from Jamaica named Pixie Smith, whose Tarot deck was still in print and popular today, and enjoyed several secret assignations with the poet William Butler Yeats, initiates of the mystic Order both).

It was through such acquaintances that she first heard the tales of a Hole in the Sky situated above a tree that grew back home, in distant California. She’d crossed an ocean to hear a local legend, ironically.

She followed one of the very earliest film production companies back to Los Angeles in 1908, blazing a trail that uncounted numbers of the world’s pretty people had apparently followed after her. A dear old friend from the Alcazar Theater Company in San Francisco (of which both her parents had been a part), directed the first movie ever to be filmed entirely in Los Angeles. He’d shot it in the drying yard of a downtown Chinese laundry, and in it Ingrid played an heiress who marries a gambler who does a good deed. She’d found similar trophy-women reiterated in the films of every decade since, and she had to smile every time she saw the well-earned love of a special girl held up as a symbol of healing and redemption. Even though the motif had been a staple of vaudeville too and probably went back to the goddamn Greeks, she still felt like she’d started something.

It amused her to recall how intimidated she’d been by the bulky, hand-cranked wooden camera with its single unblinking glass eye, so different from today’s ‘digital’ devices, which fit into the palm of a hand and yet shot both in color and with sound. The newfangled apparatus of 1908 had struck her as menacing and judgmental, whereas a live audience, at least during a good performance, always felt receptive and warm. People’s applause was like an embrace. The camera, however, claimed far more than an audience did, and it gave next to nothing back to the performer. Ingrid had known enough by then about the nature of images and signifiers that she hadn’t dared to let the contraption possess her true name, fearing the obsessive pull the thing exerted. Instead, she substituted the slightly awkward pseudonym ‘Silent Tower.’

The stage name was an in-joke between herself and the film’s director, Francis Boggs, who’d also been her first and only vocal coach a dozen years before. Ingrid had stood 5’10 by the time she was twelve years old, and was painfully, awkwardly shy-until she learned to sing on stage. The Silent Tower had been Uncle Frank’s nickname for her, an affectionate nudge to coax her out of her shell, and Ingrid knew he’d been touched when she chose to immortalize it in the credits of his movie.

Well, semi-immortalize, anyway, as only a handful of her friend’s two hundred or so single-reelers seemed to have survived the century, despite his pioneering efforts in the world of filmmaking (as Mictlantecuhtli had once warned her would be the case). To the best of Ingrid’s knowledge her piece, entitled The Heart of a Race Tout, was not among the survivals. Her source on that, however, was again the modern-day ‘internets,’ and it had to be said that the information they turned up often seemed somewhat fragmentary and vague. ‘Googling’ herself had proved neither as pleasurable nor as revelatory as she might’ve expected.