The dashboard compass guided him through run-down residential neighborhoods and stripmall-strewn commercial stretches that he barely glanced at, and before he knew it he was pulling his stolen car into the parking lot at a place that looked a little more like the Valley he remembered. It was called ‘POTTER’S YARD,’ according to its hand-painted sign.
Graves got out and sniffed at the chlorophyll-scented air, feeling dimly amazed for the first time since digging himself up that he could still smell things. Or speak, or think at all, for that matter. This was the spot all right, though. He’d never been here before in his life, as far as he recalled, but somehow he knew that this was it. He supposed he felt it in his bones.
It was a nursery, obviously, and a damn big one. Like some kind of a woodland glade right smack in the middle of a dusty beige industrial zone. It seemed very quiet for such a large place. Because of its size Graves figured it might be a wholesale operation, and maybe the buyers came earlier in the day. The stillness didn’t feel suspicious to him.
A woman came out of the small office on the far edge of the parking lot and Graves sized her up at once with his investigator’s eye. She looked to be in her late forties or early fifties, with long streaks of gray snaking through honey-blonde curls and pretty crinkles around perceptive blue eyes. They made her look like she’d be quick-witted, kind, and prone to laughter. She wore faded dungarees with a flannel shirt and a necklace of tiny alphabet beads that spelled out the name ‘HANNAH.’ The necklace looked like something a girl might make to give as a gift. Maybe a niece or some other relation had strung it together, Graves guessed, because if Hannah’s own kid had done it, the thing would’ve read ‘MOM.’
“Hi there,” the lady said, crunching across the gravel lot to greet what she clearly believed was just another customer, out shopping for dirt or flowers or whatever the hell it was that people bought at a place like this. “Can I help you find any… oh.”
She stopped and trailed off when she got her first good look at the skeletal remains of Dexter Graves.
“I’m guessing you came to see Lia,” she said.
If he’d had any, Graves would’ve raised his eyebrows. This woman seemed like she practically expected him, even as shocked as she was by his appearance. “I lost something,” he explained, and cocked a bony thumb back at his stolen car. “Compass in the rocketpod led me here.”
“Definitely, you want Lia,” the woman called Hannah told him. “She left, a little while ago, but if you’d like to wait-”
“I’ll wait.”
“Thought you might,” Hannah said, nodding. “You’ve got a patient look.” She examined him critically, doing her best to take him in stride. “Well, I guess you might as well come inside, then,” she decided aloud, perhaps assuming it was best to be polite when confronted with something you couldn’t understand. “I’d offer you a cup of tea, but it looks like it’d go right through you.”
Graves followed Hannah back into the weathered little office shack. “Yeah, well,” he said, “I’d ask ya for a belt of scotch, except you’re right-I don’t have the stomach for it anymore!”
Hannah laughed, brightly if a little nervously, before the old screen door slapped shut behind them.
Chapter Seven
Lia mentally ran through her checklist for ‘going dark,’ as she conceived it, during the short and familiar drive home. She barely noticed the light traffic on the move all around her.
First and most vital to the things she meant to do was to understand exactly what they were up against. According to Black Tom and the notions he sent into her head, Tzitzimime and all things like them had once been summed up by the old people as ‘Those Who Are Not Our Brothers,’ because their experience of the worlds is that much different from our own. Symbols were their points of reference, rather than places or things. Meaning, to Lia, that the insectile entities might find her on a symbolic model like a map more easily than they could find her on the street. Their minds were simplified mechanisms, and she figured it shouldn’t be too hard to hide from things that couldn’t hope to find the same 7-11 twice without being given new directions.
Deflecting them was sure to be safer and more effective than making some sort of desperate stand. If she confused them badly enough, they might forget what they already knew about her. That was possible. If not, she knew of a trap more elaborate than a three-word palindrome that had the potential to pick off the bugs one by one. Such work left no margin for error, but precedent led her to believe that the Aztec entities should be vulnerable to it… assuming she got every detail of the experimental spell’s construction right.
The term ‘Tzitzimime’ itself was one Tom had guided her to on the internet several nights before, filling her mind with the knowledge that the beings so-named were something they might expect to see when they ventured up to the top of the Tower, in a worst-case scenario. Lia kept a whole raft of mythology websites bookmarked on her browser, and today she was glad she’d studied them, as every scrap of knowledge about the history or behavior of Mictlantecuhtli’s demon slaves improved her sense of how to deal with them. Tom assured her that all of this was so, and that her understanding was well in place.
Secondly, then, she needed a way to lose focus. Not a distraction or a diversion, but a systematic approach to fuzzing the mantle of symbols that make up an identity, such as our names. The ones we choose, the ones we’re given, and the ones that just evolve. Blurring such signifiers would make it hard for otherworlders to perceive the actuality behind them, the things most people would’ve said were ‘really’ there. (Although the ‘real,’ as Lia knew, was often less defined and more slippery than those same people would ever care to imagine.)
At any rate, collecting extra names was a good place to start.
Lia checked the list of voicemail messages waiting on her phone as she drove. There were quite a number of missed calls, as she tended to leave the ringer off. Many of them were from a number identified as belonging to ATLAS RECOVERY ASSOCIATES.
Lia hit the reply button. Moments later a voice chirped in her ear: “Atlas Debt Recovery, is this Ms. Camellia Flores speaking?”
“Yeah, you guys called me, I think?”
“Yes, Ms. Flores, we’ve left a number of messages,” the bill collector said, managing to sound both solicitous and judgmental at the very same time. “I’m Marco, by the way. Is it all right if I call you Cammie?”
“It sure is, Marco,” Lia said.
“Good, Cammie. Thank you. Well, then, were you aware that you still owe-”
“Y’know,” Lia said, losing interest in his spiel now that her goal in calling back had been achieved. “This isn’t really the best time after all. Call ya back.”
“Cammie, wait!” Marco cried, with real desperation straining his voice. “Camellia, Ms. Flores, please, it’s extremely important that we-”
Lia folded up her phone as she came to a red light at Magnolia. More of that later, she promised herself. She had a long list of people she could count on to call her by something other than her personal name, and every time one of them did so it made her a tiny bit harder for imaginal eyes to see.