Dark Hallows II: Tales from the Witching Hour

by Mark Parker

  The dark-haired woman in the absurd cycling suit dropped a kickstand on her contraption and dismounted on unsteady legs. She didn’t even see Tom, not at first. Not until he stood up, intending to greet her properly, and the fifty or so cats partaking of the relative cool beneath his trees all stood up with him.

  The visitor stepped back… but didn’t turn and flee.

  “Hola,” she said uncertainly. Her skirt, Tom noticed, was actually split, more like a pair of wide-legged trousers. The whole ensemble looked cumbersome, far too heavy for the season (though the hems of her skirt-like pant legs did swish prettily around her high-booted ankles). “Hello. I- I’m looking for a Mr. Tomás Delgado. Have I come to the right place?”

  Tom tipped his head in a gesture that was not quite a nod. He wore his hat so that the brim concealed his eyes.

  “¿Prefiere hablar español?”

  “Whatever you like,” Tom said. “We’re all Americans now.”

  “Um. Well, yes, I suppose that’s so. My name is Dulcé Calavera.”

  Tom waited.

  “I understand you’re a man of particular knowledge, Señor Delgado,” Dulcé Calavera said, eyeing the cats that watched her from the low branches of the nearest trees. Others stared from the roof or out from under the porch.

  “Who told you that?”

  “People who call you ‘Black Tom’.”

  Tom tapped his cane on the porch steps and the cats departed, draining away like water. “I think you have been misinformed about me, Mrs. Calavera.”

  “Miss. Or doctor. Or Dulcé. And I’m quite sure I haven’t.” The small, determined woman’s accent was hard to pin down, like she’d lived in different places during formative years. He might’ve guessed her for a fellow Californio, albeit a well-traveled one. It was part of the reason he was talking to her. “The black magician of Los Ángeles,” she continued, “whispered of by witches for miles around. They say you walk with a limp because you once fell from a hole in the sky.”

  Dulcé looked pointedly at Tom’s oak-wood walking stick, the one that made him seem older than his years, at first glance.

  “A myth,” he said.

  Dulcé shrugged. “Of course.”

  “Why did you come here?”

  “To see what you can show me, and to know what you can teach me.”

  “Yes, but why?”

  Heartbreak and money were the usual reasons. Things left too long unspoken, or valuable secrets taken to the grave.

  “I’m writing a book,” was what Dulcé Calavera told him.

  ***

  Tom refilled her water skin so she wouldn’t die of heatstroke on the road and sent her away that afternoon without confirming her deductions. He had some regrets on that score, but people’s usual reasons were trouble enough, and Dr. Calavera’s proposal sounded insane by comparison. Insane and insulting. Tom bristled at the idea of the secrets he’d inherited being recorded as mere ‘folklore,’ primitivism, though worse still was the idea of the new people, these Americans, actually believing in the stories he might tell. Cooperating in such an endeavor would be a dangerous betrayal of his vows. There’d been trouble enough with interlopers already, in the years since California stopped being Mexico and turned into one of these United States. He didn’t want to encourage more.

  The enduring mysteries of Mictlantecuhtli, el Rey de los Muertos, the funerary god of his ancient Aztec ancestors, were not a fit subject for modern scholarship.

  But his idly-conceived comparison to a stern Zen teacher proved more fitting than he could’ve guessed when the lady anthropologist turned up again a week later, this time carrying a picnic lunch of chopped-chicken sandwiches in a wicker bicycle basket. Tom still didn’t tell or promise her anything, but he enjoyed seeing her again. She looked to be in her early forties—ten or twelve years younger than he was—with a few first streaks of silver threaded through her black hair and endearing crinkles around the corners of her very dark eyes, but she had a girlish enthusiasm for the subjects that caught her fancy. She seemed delighted that he shelved The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Time Machine, and other silly novels right alongside Darwin and Frazer in his not-so-small library, which had piled up all around the house over a number of years. He may have been a hermit, but he wasn’t a hayseed. After lunch he played his guitar for her a bit, like a fool, and sent her on her way again well before dark, but later that night found himself wondering what she thought of him. He’d certainly never known anyone like her.

  The next week she brought a bottle of wine along with the sandwiches.

  The week after that, she brought two. She didn’t go home before dark on that occasion, or before the next night, either.

  Dr. Calavera’s research focused on magical practices in the modern world, and her methodology consisted of deep immersion in the sub-cultures she studied. She told him about dancing naked with traditional witches in the English countryside, and of seeing a real zombi pulled wide-eyed and gibbering from the Louisiana crypt his body had been bricked into a day and a night before. For an academic (hell, for anyone) she led an astonishing life. But she was a local girl, too, as Tom had surmised—born near Pasadena to a once-wealthy Mexican-American family that came through the ‘conquest of California’ with enough resources intact to let her study abroad.

  Her eyes seemed to shine when she described the capitals she’d visited, and Tom found himself envying her wistfully while he listened to her tales. Little of the traveling he’d done in his time had been physical in nature.

  Dulcé’s increasingly frequent overnight absences from her rooming house in the city began to draw notice, and then commentary. She was given some benefit of the doubt, as she was a respectable scholar working with a grant from the University of Southern California and not some wild young thing, but it was still quite improper for an unmarried woman to sleep where and with whom she pleased—a corrupting influence on the morals of the other boarders, to be certain—and before a month was out her landlady quietly asked her to leave.

  That was how Dulcé came to spend the rest of the summer at the Cat Ranch.

  Tom hardly felt put out. He didn’t worry any more about his hoarded secrets, either. He’d already decided he would tell this woman anything she wanted to know.

  ***

  Not that he didn’t have an ulterior motive.

  Tom owed his patron another acolyte, a replacement for himself. All of los Hombres del Rey did, by tradition. It was the only way to be released from their vows of service after death. No woman had ever joined their ranks, as far as he knew—they didn’t call themselves the King’s Men for nothing—but perhaps one could, provided she was willing to commit herself.

  Dulcé Calavera was the most committed person Tom had ever met. The initiation process wasn’t easy, but less qualified applicants had made the grade. That goddam Englishman for one, the newest of the King’s Men. The Interloper, as Tom thought of him, though his real name was Winston. Winston Something-or-other. He could never remember and didn’t care to. They were never going to be friends.

  Replacing himself in the employment of the King wasn’t a pressing concern, as he didn’t expect to die tomorrow, but the requirement had begun to weigh on him as more gray crept into his beard. Dulcé would inherit the same obligation (if el Rey accepted her), but that only meant she’d have to find a pledge of her own, in due course.

  Tom thought she would find the terms of that deal amenable. And he was right.

  ***

  “It’s a real thing? The hole in the sky?”

  Tom nodded. They were lying in bed as a hot afternoon cooled into evening, passing a cigarette he’d rolled back and forth.

  “Not a metaphor or a legend or some sort of navel-of-the-world myth? An actual, literal hole in the sky?”

  “I don’t know another way to say it.”

  “And it leads to the land of the dead? The literal land of the dead? The afterlife?”

  “Mictlan. The King of that place is Mictla
ntecuhtli. He says the first of his priests made the hole with sacrifices. So many sacrifices that the veil between worlds grew thin, and wore through.”

  “Aztec priests? We’re far north from Tenochtitlán.”

  Tom shrugged. “People migrate. And what we’re talking about would have been ancient history already by the time Cortés arrived.”

  “Why is it in the sky?”

  “I asked that once. El Rey told me there was a pyramid. A temple, a ‘false mountain,’ and those priests made their offerings at the top. But if there ever was, it was very long ago. A tree grows there now, right below the hole. An oak that’s grown taller than any oak should. You can see it’s been there for many hundreds of years.”

  “And you’ve gone there? To Mictlan?”

  “No. Never. Just to the edge. To Death’s waiting room. Once you go over, there’s no coming back. But you can talk to the dead at the door. El Rey will bring whoever you want to see. Plato. Cervantes. Shakespeare. Your grandmother who died when you were small. Anybody.”

  “When can we go?”

  “Soon. There are preparations that have to be made. You have to be made ready.”

  “Tell me what I have to do.”

  ***

  They began their work that night.

  Tom took Dulcé’s hand in his (the one not holding his walking stick), and they set off across the misty fields as the moon came up. Their summer had vanished out from under them. Even though the days were still warm this far into October, the nights cooled off precipitously. El Dia de los Muertos was right around the corner, preceded this evening by the Americans’ new holiday, which they called ‘Halloween.’

  By any name, this was a favorable time of year for their operation, when the boundaries between the worlds were at their most ephemeral.

  Tom stooped to gather mushrooms as they came across them—the variety known to the old people as ‘the flesh of the gods,’ Teonanactl. (These grew best in grazing pastures, and had been easier to find back in the days when local rancheros used cowhides as currency.) He ate a couple straight out of the ground, and handed more to Dulcé so that she might reluctantly do the same.

  This was the first invocation.

  The Tree Below the Hole in the Sky couldn’t be approached directly, Tom explained. There were wards around it, concealments put in place by the first of the King’s Men, to guard their secret access to the afterlife and ensure the privilege that it conferred. The age-old hexwork scrambled an unprepared seeker’s sense of direction. It deceived eyes that hadn’t been adjusted to see the worlds beneath the world. The ritual procedure for locating the Tree despite these effects had been handed down for a millennium amongst el Rey’s Men.

  Tom could have shown her the route to the Tree (he’d traversed it often enough in the last forty years), but he couldn’t show her the way. The manner in which they searched counted almost as much as where, in this case. Tom had his cats, but Dulcé needed a guide of her own to help them navigate the wards.

  Her task, then, was to meet her beast. Her nagual—the animal that ruled her nature and chaperoned her dreams.

  Tom sat down on a handy rock when they reached the bank of the Arroyo Seco. Dulcé stood staring up at the river of stars splashed across the sky. She cocked her head, listening to the wind rustling through the black nighttime trees as though it were music.

  “How do we start?” she asked. Her dark eyes were black in the moonlight, like she had no irises at all.

  “We already have.” Tom tipped his chin, and Dulcé whipped around in time to see a large, tawny mountain lion slink out from the brush behind her. She froze as the cat padded toward her on paws as large as a man’s hands, then sat down some feet in front of her, like a trained creature looking for a treat.

  “Um, Tom?” Dulcé said, not quite daring to take her eyes off the wildcat.

  Don’t be afraid, he thought at her, watching her through the cat’s flashing eyes. The animal had mentally stepped aside at his unspoken request, allowing him to leave his body and settle into its head. He was the big cat now, possessed of new, sharp senses and flexible feline strength. The omnipresent ache in his hip stayed with his human body, distant as a memory, and that was a sensation he always relished. He lay down on the dry river bank and rolled over onto his back, like a tame house pet, to show Dulcé there was nothing to fear.

  Now you, Tom thought, and could see from her expression that she was receiving the words, though not exactly hearing them. She took the experience in stride. Call. Imagine running free across the wild hills. Remember feeling unfettered in your dreams.

  Dulcé nodded, and closed her eyes. She frowned at first, then broke into a smile.

  The shadows beneath the willow trees some yards away seemed to congeal into a tall black horse that clopped out from under the low-hanging branches. He shook out his mane and neighed softly. Steaming breath curled from his nostrils. He displayed no agitation whatsoever over the presence of Tom’s wildcat.

  Look, Tom thought, and Dulcé did. Her eyes welled and she went to tentatively stroke the horse’s black velvet muzzle. “Oh, Tom…” she murmured. “Can this be real?”

  Do you know him?

  Dulcé nodded emphatically. “El Caballo de la Bruja,” she said. “The Witch’s Horse. My aunts told me stories of him when I was little, and I used to ride him in my dreams.”

  Tom considered. He supposed he’d heard of the Witch’s Horse, another local legend, like the Hole in the Sky itself. Why shouldn’t more than one of them be true? It was said that the black stallion had haunted the hills and canyons around the Cahuenga Valley for centuries, since before the Spanish even brought horses to this continent, awaiting the return of the powerful sorcerer who’d conjured him from shadows.

  “My aunts said he would sometimes come to answer a witch’s cry, el grito de una bruja, if she needed help. I always thought of him as Sombra, Shadow. I used to go out to the fields and call and watch for him when I was sad or upset, like a little ritual. But he only came to me when I fell asleep.” Dulcé swiped at her eyes with the backs of her gloved fingers. “I think it was those stories that started my interest in all stories. I wouldn’t be me today if I hadn’t believed them for a while.”

  Tom paced around the horse on silent paws, examining it from every angle. There might’ve been something to those tales, because the animal didn’t seem entirely real, up close. It smelled like nothing more than dust and rain. He’s saddled, Tom thought in Dulcé’s direction, and she saw that it was so. He wore a bridle as well, and black leather saddlebags, one of which she opened. Inside she found a roll of dark gray fabric that unfurled into a long cloak, very much like the garment Tom had seen Mictlantecuhtli draped in on any number of occasions.

  He found this disquieting, but chose to take it as a sign that they were expected.

  Ready?

  Dulcé looked at the powerful horse. “Really?” Her face was aglow with childlike joy.

  Tom tipped his cat’s head to the south. Dulcé shook out the cloak and threw it around her shoulders, becoming just another of the night’s shadows, and swung herself expertly into the saddle. (Luckily she’d worn her split-skirt cycling suit, which was easier to hike in than most of her other clothing.) She exchanged one more glance with the mountain lion before Tom bounded off in the Tree’s direction. Dulcé nudged her mount’s sides with her heels and shrieked with delight when the shadow-horse lunged forward, chasing after the fleet-footed cat.

  ***

  The stallion outpaced the lion before they covered the first mile, and gained a substantial lead after that. Tom could still hear peals of laughter echoing back to him even when horse and rider were well out of sight.

  His catamount was panting by the time he reached the Tree, but Dulcé had been there for some minutes already. Tom found her standing beside her horse (which didn’t look so much as winded), staring up into the monstrous oak’s maze of branches. Its overwhelming height left no doubt that they’d come to the
right place. Her hair had come loose along the way, and the wind had reddened her cheeks. She grinned at the tired wildcat that came sloping toward her through the yellowed grasses.

  “Do we climb up?” she asked when he flopped down beside her. “Do I?”

  Tom hesitated. He hadn’t expected to climb, not this soon. He hadn’t even brought his body, and he could hardly present her to Mictlantecuhtli without it. Who could’ve expected her to mount up and ride her goddam spirit animal? Tonight’s exercise had been meant as a test, but Dulcé was ahead of the learning curve. As she probably had been for most of her life, Tom reflected. And that cloak, so like el Rey’s, had been waiting for her. So maybe this decision wasn’t his to make.

  I’ll leave it up to you, he told her. If you feel ready, climb.

  Dulcé looked up again into the black nighttime foliage as a bank of clouds slid across the moon, casting her face into darkness.

  “I’m not sure I am,” she said after a moment. “Ready, I mean.”

  The relief Tom felt surprised him. Now that he’d brought her right to the edge of what he’d promised, he didn’t know whether to encourage or dissuade her.

  “It changed the course of your life, didn’t it? Climbing up there.”

  This was nothing he could deny. Mictlantecuhtli’s patronage had impacted everything about him, down to the way he walked. A crunching fall from the Tree had long ago left him with a permanent limp. The stick he leaned on to this day was one he’d carved down from the treacherous limb that gave way beneath him. It had become a symbol of his contract with el Rey, who’d come to him while he lay unconscious after falling and offered him a second chance to serve. Because he’d thought of fleeing even then and forgetting what he’d seen, after his very first climb. He chose to return to life at that time, and had been the King’s Man ever since. El Rey’s eyes, his ears, and the instrument of his will, here in the world of the living.