The reanimated animal was leading the way by the time they reached the center of the Yard: a clearing where pots, fountains, and a large collection of garden statuary were displayed. What Lia chose to see was a fairy ring made up of crouching gnomes, spitting mermaids, and concrete bodhisattvas, all of them frozen in their nighttime revels by her approach.
Potter’s Yard was a place she dearly loved, especially at night, when it was hushed and lit only by the stars. It felt like a shadowy oasis out here in the middle of the industrial suburbs, one that was always awash in some sort of fecund, flowering life, all year round. She breathed in the familiar olfactory chorus of damp, green, earthy smells, and as always, she felt immediately soothed. She even shivered pleasantly in the chilly air.
Lia knew she couldn’t relax yet, however. She might, in fact, never be able to properly relax again, if she wasn’t careful. Those insect women were out there somewhere still, regrouping, and they might even know her name. If they did, it meant they’d never quit. She didn’t need her Tom to tell her that.
Her eye landed on a number of pale green mantises sitting primly on a palm leaf nearby. They seemed to be watching her. That in itself wasn’t so troubling, but when Lia looked down, she realized that an entire line of tiny red ants trailing across her path had also paused, and every one of them seemed to be staring up at her, too.
Only then did she become aware that the night had gone unnaturally silent around her. There wasn’t a single cricket to be heard.
The ants resumed their usual brisk pace as soon as they knew she’d noticed them.
Lia took a deep breath and let it out slowly, forcing down the panic that was rising in her chest. She knew what this was, all right: a witch test. An assessment of her comfort level in the face of wild improbability. Her Tom had warned her about such things, but she’d never been the subject of an otherworldly assessment like this one before. The surreal occurrence had happened so quickly that an ordinary person would’ve shaken her head, blinked her eyes, and walked away. Someone who knew the Tzitzimime for what they were, however, was apt to react to unusual bug behavior with stark raving terror, thereby marking her sorry self out as a holder of occult knowledge.
Black Tom quietly confirmed her suspicions about this, mind-to-mind.
The King’s consorts weren’t too bright in their insect forms, so Lia figured it was unlikely that this little lapse on her part would catch their attention. Only a big reaction would alert them. Maybe the distinctive stinger-holes in her car’s roof had helped them to spot this place from above, but human faces all looked more or less alike to them, and it seemed they didn’t know her well enough yet to recognize her by sight alone-which was a good thing. They’d want to be sure to get the right girl, and they wouldn’t pounce until they were certain they had her.
If she made a wrong move, though, every bug hidden away within the greenery of Potter’s Yard would be on her in the space of a heartbeat.
She forced herself to giggle aloud, as if chiding herself for imagining she’d seen a thing that simply couldn’t be, before stepping casually over the ant superhighway and moving on, ignoring the attentive cluster of mantises who rubbed their tiny, greedy hands together. Tom hugged close to her ankles until they reached the very back of the Yard.
Lia knew the only thing she could do now was seal herself in and hang on till daylight. Tzitzimime were insidious things by nature, and they’d get in through vents or under doors-at any place a tiny bug or a point of light could. Hiding out from them was a tall order. Fortunately, she happened to be prepared for just this sort of thing.
The nursery’s rear storage corner was packed with pots, planks, bags of soil, and a small forklift. There was also a big, upended concrete cylinder that could’ve been some sort of a well, all of it situated behind a low chainlink fence with a gate marked ‘EMPLOYEES ONLY.’
Lia was relieved to hear the crickets start up again behind her after three points of light that might almost have been mistaken for shooting stars departed from the Yard, rising up into the night sky like meteors in reverse. It meant the Tzitzimime had moved on in confusion, and that she had a moment or two before they’d come around to thinking she might have been their prey after all. But a moment was all she needed in order to drop out of sight.
Lia scooped her tomcat up and tucked him inside her coat. She hurried over to the wide concrete tube that seemed to be planted in the earth, swung her legs over the lip, and climbed down a steel ladder bolted to the inside of it.
Some feet below ground level was a hatch. Lia turned a big spoked wheel to unseal it, then pulled it open and climbed on down, letting the hatch door slam shut after her with an ear-hammering metallic clang. She spun a second wheel, a less-corroded twin to the exterior one, in the opposite direction now that she was inside and underground. There was a bolt that locked the hatch in place and Lia threw it, battening herself in for the remainder of the night.
Lights buzzed and flickered to life when she hit a wall switch before climbing down the ladder’s last few rungs and into her home of the last ten years. She thought of it as Bag End, her hobbit hole, buried deep in the sheltering earth. Old signage on the unpainted walls indicated that the big concrete bunker had originally been intended for use as a bomb shelter.
Lia opened her peacoat, letting her tomcat out. She dumped the coat over the back of a chair and kicked off her Chuck Taylors as she picked her way over to the dark corner of the room that housed her bed.
The furnishings she twisted past were all cleverly repurposed objects. There was a dented surgical crash cart for a dresser, while a pharmacist’s cabinet with cracked, chickenwire-embedded glass doors served as an overcrowded bookcase. Her table was a carved mahogany door she’d topped with a salvaged slab of green-edged glass. There were pictures, toys, and bits of statuary all over the place. Many things that looked alive, as Lia was an animist by inclination and therefore always felt a need to make objects with personality feel welcome when they showed up, wanting to spend a part of their long, strange lives with her. As a result her place felt funky, weird and witchy, although it was undeniably cozy, too.
Lia stopped by her bed and took the tarnished, Navy-crested Zippo from her pocket. She considered it for a long moment before setting it on a wooden shelf stuffed with secondhand books, wondering who might’ve owned it before her and how they’d come to leave it outside an office belonging to the Aztec God of the Dead.
She didn’t imagine the antique’s previous steward was apt to come looking for it, in any case.
Lia flopped down onto her futon, fully clothed, on top of the covers. Tom curled up next to her and purred loudly. Within minutes they were both asleep.
Ignored and unnoticed, the dead man’s lighter warmed up by gradual degrees, until its case smoldered in an ominous shade of orange. Slight curls of smoke rose from the shelf it sat on.
Now that its dormant magic had been kindled by a witch’s touch, the heated anchor on its side pulsed like the slow and steady beat of a living heart-bumpbump, bumpbump-as it silently called out to its former owner.
Retrospective No.1 ~ 1950
Six decades ago…
Dexter Graves lit a cigarette, snapped his lighter shut, then tipped the brim of his fedora back so he could look all the way up the tall front of an old, brick office building located on the southern edge of Hollywood. A few of the local oldtimers still called it the Silent Tower, though Graves had never learned why. The sky was clear and blue above it, and the structure itself was as silent as a tomb, lacking identifying signage of any kind. It was in obvious use and good repair, however, despite its half-century of wear and weathering. Most of its neighbors were newer by decades, and in truth next to nobody remembered its name anymore. Graves had done a fair bit of digging before turning it up himself. At thirteen stories high, the Tower must’ve been one of the first tall buildings erected in this area, back in its day, but the public records regarding it were as sketchy on that score as they were on any number of others.