Trinity? The fuck is Trinity? Somebody’s name? The nuclear bomb tests? Some Catholic shit? I take a deep breath, calm down, start thinking.
Whatever it means has to be from somewhere between 1947, when the bottle was found, and 1994, when Kelbo’s closed. Something about the writing bugs me and after a few minutes of staring, it clicks.
The first two letters, TR, are capitals, then five numbers. It’s a phone number from the old telephone exchange system, when there weren’t as many people with their own numbers and you had actual operators to talk to.
The first two letters of the word matched numbers on the phone. But different cities might share the same numbers. So out of something like 32 you might get EAstgate, FAculty, and DAvis.
Or in this case, 87, TRinity. The phone number on the back of the napkin is 873-4778. My momentary excitement at figuring it out dies fast. They had area codes back then, but they’ve split them up over and over as more phone numbers were needed. Who knows how many people have that same number in different area codes now? There’s 818, 323, 213, 310, and those are just the ones I can remember.
I check the time on my pocket watch. It’s almost eleven. I write the exchange and number in pen on my hand and lock the napkin in the safe, shoving the crates back in place. It was there for a reason, and something tells me I shouldn’t let anybody else get hold of it.
Exhaustion hits me like a brick. The Adderall and Vicodin have worn off and I’m tired and everything hurts. I need sleep. I’ll hit the motel for a few hours’ shut-eye and figure this out in the morning.
I go through the same process getting out of the storage facility as in, and once the door opens and I step outside into the dry, too-warm air, I can feel the city’s magic again. That place is shut up so tight I can’t get anything from the outside. Not the magic, not the temperature, not even a single bar on my phone.
My phone. My phone can get me on the internet. The internet has information. Information like old telephone exchanges. I used to have no need for computers and cell phones. If somebody wanted to get hold of me, I had an answering service. But now I don’t see how I lived without them.
My exhaustion is gone, but adrenaline’s only going to last me so long. I pop another Adderall to pick me up, and a Vicodin to smooth things out. That should keep me going a few more hours.
I get in the car and start typing on a tiny keyboard. Now that I know what I’m looking for, it goes pretty quickly. Fifteen minutes of tracking down exchanges, area codes, and phone numbers, and I piece it together. That old exchange was in Downtown L.A. Once I have that it’s easy to narrow down.
It’s too much to hope that whoever had that number fifty years ago has the same number now. But it’s the only lead I have. I dial the number. It rings a few times then picks up with the long beep of an answering machine.
“Hi,” I say. “I found this number in a safe in Sherman Oaks. I don’t know if you know anything about it. But I need to get what was supposed to be in there. It’s a thing called a spirit bottle. And if you’re the right person then you know what I’m talking about. Call me at this number if you are. It’s really important.” I should be doing this on one of my burner phones, but I don’t have one with me.
I sit there staring at my phone, willing it to ring, but then I remember that it’s after eleven. Sane people aren’t crazy about getting late night phone calls from strangers.
And then the phone rings. At first I’m not sure I want to answer. All I wanted was a goddamn bottle to stick a god into, not this weird cloak-and-dagger shit.
But I’ve gone this far, I might as well see it through. As a great man once said, “Buy the ticket, take the ride.”
“Hello?”
Silence, then, “Robert? No, you can’t be Robert.” A woman’s voice, gravelly from age, maybe too many cigarettes. There’s surprise in there, maybe even shock.
“Eric,” I say. “Eric Carter. I found—”
“Oh, dear god,” she says. “Eric. You sound just like him. He was right. He said you’d come one of these days and know what to do.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t know who—”
“Oh, of course,” she says. “I’m Miriam. You would have been too young to remember me. He said if family came looking then it would be important. And that they need to understand. We need to meet.”
“Okay, where do—”
“Can you get to Union Station?” she says. “The waiting area. It’ll be empty. I don’t think you’ll want anyone else around. And it was a special place for him. For us. That’s where we met. He told me to give you, well, give whoever came looking the key.” My head is spinning. I didn’t know what I was expecting but it sure as hell wasn’t this.
“Okay, I need you to slow this down a little,” I say. “Who are you talking about?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you knew,” she says. “Your grandfather.”
Chapter 24
Back when it opened in 1939, Union Station was the jewel of Los Angeles. People came from all over the country. Make it big in Hollywood, try their luck in the Sunshine State, hide from a past best left buried in the east.
It sits on what used to be Old Chinatown. The land got bought up and Chinatown moved to the west a bit. The problem I’ve always had with it isn’t the place itself. Union Station’s beautiful. Gorgeous chandeliers, amazing tilework. Even if you don’t know you’ve seen it, you’ve seen it. Like everywhere else in L.A., it’s been in the movies.
No, it’s not Union Station I have a problem with. It’s all the land around, and a piece of little-known L.A. history that took place there in 1871. Something like five hundred white men descended on Chinatown, ransacked buildings, tortured and murdered the residents. By the time it was all over, eighteen Chinese men hung from lampposts. Fun fact, biggest mass lynching in U.S. history. Bring that one out at your next cocktail party.
All the white folks cheered, all the Chinese wept, and all the dead left ghosts.
Whenever I come down here I try to pass by where the massacre happened. It’s a little outside Olvera Street, a historic district that’s turned into a kitschy tourist trap of Mexican restaurants and south-of-the-border tchotchkes. Strong Haunts, those dead Chinese. A hundred fifty years gone and they’re solid as the day they died. They’re even strong enough to incorporate the lampposts into their manifestations.
Faces purple from bruising and strangulation, heads hanging from necks at impossible angles. They’re close enough together that walking through is like stepping through a grove of corpses. Like the Billie Holiday song, strange fruit indeed.
I’ve tried talking to them. I picked up a little bit of Cantonese in the nineties. Barely enough to hold a conversation, but enough to ask a few questions. They look right at me, open their mouths, and scream. I’m just another fucking gwáilóu as far as they’re concerned. Five hundred white guys loot your neighborhood and hang you from a lamppost, I wouldn’t trust me, either.
I’m not sure why I pass through here to Union Station. I certainly don’t enjoy it. It just feels important to remember that no matter what monsters are out there, there’s nothing more dangerous than just plain people.
Union Station’s always open. Most of the passenger trains are done for the night, but some of the non-stops run through, and there’s always cargo. Stepping through the doors is like stepping into the 1930s. There’s a pristine ticketing area to one side that they don’t use anymore except as a movie set, but the waiting area, the main concourse, is huge and well used.
A peaked ceiling with hand-painted tiles, forty-foot windows on either side, rows of wide, Art Deco mahogany chairs with leather cushions. Not a lot of people come to Union Station this late at night. Before I left L.A. you’d find at least some of the seats occupied by homeless people trying to take a nap somewhere they wouldn’t get shanked. But now the station’s cleared them out.
&
nbsp; But even with the hour, I would expect to see more than one old woman sitting in one of the chairs near the end of the hall. She sits ramrod straight, a cane held in front of her. Skin marked with the deep crevasses of age, hair white and falling down her shoulders, eyes that are bright and alert. As I get close enough she looks me up and down and her eyes go a little distant.
I sit down in the chair opposite her, lean forward to get a better look. The wide aisles between rows were designed with people carrying 1930s luggage in mind, not for convenient conversation.
“You’re Miriam, I take it.”
“Miriam Dawson,” she says. “I knew your grandfather, Robert. And your parents.”
“Funny, they never mentioned you,” I say.
“I doubt they mentioned that your grandfather was still alive until you were fifteen, either. The Carters and their secrets.” Hearing that is like a punch in the chest.
“My grandfather died after getting back from World War II with my grandmother in a car accident. My dad was an orphan.”
“Your grandmother, yes, but not your grandfather. That happened back in New York. 1945. They had your father before Robert went off to fight in 1943. He’d only been home a month when the accident happened. He came out here to start a new life, get his bearings and a place to live before he brought your father out here.” She tilts her head behind her. “That’s where I met him. On the train. He helped me when some of your people tried to rob and kill me. He was a good man.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I never met him.” A wave of sudden anger washes over me. Why did they tell me he was dead? Why keep that a secret? He was alive for the first fifteen years of my life and I never met him? He was the only surviving ancestor I had. My mom’s parents had passed away a year after I was born.
“Oh, I know that look,” Miriam says. “God, you look just like him. You’re angry. Because they didn’t tell you? Or because you’re having to find out from a stranger?”
“I’m really not sure,” I say. “More the first, I think. And wondering why.”
“Your grandfather went to fight voluntarily. Very few of your people did. They didn’t see the point. They knew they’d be safe no matter what. But your grandfather wasn’t built that way. He knew he would be perfectly safe on a battlefield, and if he hid things well enough, he might make a hell of a difference.
“He wasn’t counting on other mages fighting in the war. Did you know Eisenhower was a talent? Not a terribly gifted one, but he knew magic when he saw it, and it didn’t take long for your grandfather to get his attention.”
“This doesn’t really answer my question.”
“Young people,” she says, rolling her eyes. “So impatient. And yes it does, if you’ll mind your elders for five minutes.”
“Are you gonna call me a whippersnapper?”
She laughs. “I just might. Now shut your hole and listen. Robert was sent behind enemy lines to verify rumors that the Nazis were using magic directly in the war effort. They were. Necromantic rituals, magical experiments on people from the camps. Robert stopped them. But it scarred him.”
Necromantic rituals. I can see where this is going.
“PTSD?” I say.
“He used to wake up screaming in the middle of the night. Almost killed me a time or two waking from nightmares about ghosts and armies of walking corpses.”
“So he did know me,” I say. “But he couldn’t be around me.”
“Not after you manifested your talents, no. And you were six months old when it was clear what they were. Oh, he loved you, and he hated himself for not being there. He heard stories from your parents, heard things off the streets. The fights you were getting into. The anger. He so wanted to help you. Because that’s how he’d been at that age.”
“But every time he came near me he’d have a panic attack,” I say.
“That’s putting it mildly. We’d taken you off your parents’ hands for a day when your talents manifested at six months old. You made a roadkill rabbit get up and dance. You were delighted. Laughing and clapping.”
“And, what, he rolled up into a ball and shook?”
“No,” she says. “He tried to kill you. I had to hit him over the head with a rock several times before he stopped strangling you and cleared his head enough to realize what he was doing.”
Jesus. What the hell had he seen? A lot of necromancy is really fucked up, I won’t pretend it isn’t, but to do that to him? I can’t even imagine what he saw. And if he tried to kill me . . .
“Did he know an old Nazi in town named—”
“Neumann,” she says. “Yes, they knew each other from the war. Your grandfather tried to kill him so many times. And the other way around. But they never could. Finally, your grandfather stopped trying, and instead made a point of stopping anything he tried to do.”
“I heard somebody finally got him.”
“Yes. A zombie, if you can believe it. Well, not a zombie exactly. I’m not clear on the details.”
“Sounds like poetic justice.”
“Yes, it does, doesn’t it? Robert knew that he couldn’t be trusted to be entirely rational with you. He tried. Therapy, drugs, hypnosis, magic. But he couldn’t get past his nightmares. When he looked at you he saw a monster, not family.”
“Yeah, I tend to bring that out in people. They thought it would be better if I just didn’t know?”
“Yes. It wasn’t my decision. Your father never liked me much, so when Robert finally died I was largely shunned. Told not to seek you out. Robert and I never married, so I wasn’t technically family. There were wards on some places and things that would only open up to family. I thought about getting hold of you anyway, but then I thought it would be better not to. I did leave you a couple of things your grandfather wanted you to have, though. I pulled them out of storage before he died and I was locked out of those warehouses your family kept all that stuff in.”
“A pistol and a pocket watch?” I say.
“Oh, good, you did find them. The gun he got off a Nazi necromancer and said only another necromancer could make the magic work. The pocket watch . . . well, it wasn’t always a pocket watch. When I met your grandfather it was an elaborate nineteenth-century clock weighing almost twenty pounds. Had to carry it in a suitcase. Over time it changes, or decides to change. Who knows, maybe in another twenty years it’ll look like a cell phone.”
“This is fascinating, and kind of disturbing, history, but—”
“The safe,” she says.
“Yeah. Kind of on a timetable. Why was your phone number in there?”
“I don’t know what the thing is, but it frightened him. He called it a spirit bottle, and got it when he was doing security for some local archaeologists. I’m afraid I don’t have the details. He paid for the phone line and when he died I kept it up. I don’t really know why. He told me to only talk about it if someone from his family called the number. I think he was hoping no one ever would and then it would simply be lost. But, in a weird way, I think he had you in mind.”
“Presumably you know where it is,” I say.
“Oh yes,” she says. “I’m the only one.” She hands me a key with a plastic, teal-colored tag that says AMBASSADOR HOTEL on it. There’s a number on the key, 427. “Now it’s your problem. You’ll find it in that room in the Ambassador Hotel.”
The Ambassador Hotel. Of course. Why not? It’s not like anything else about this is easy. “You do know that the Ambassador was torn down a few years ago, right? It’s not there anymore.” She looks at me like I’m the stupidest kid in school and she’s trying to teach me that two and two is four.
“Of course it isn’t there,” she says. “Not on the living side.”
Chapter 25
It takes me a second to parse what she’s just said.
Items leave a psychic imprint on the landscape. Have
something around long enough and it will have an equivalent on the side the ghosts inhabit. It doesn’t even have to be particularly old, it just needs to be imbued with enough people’s attention for enough time.
Things that don’t stay fixed in one location don’t stick around. Cars, for example, or any other vehicles, unless they’re directly related to a haunting, like a ghost train.
But buildings, particularly old buildings where some shit’s gone down, they’re solid as rock. Walls are walls, floors are floors. You want to open a door, you better have the key. There are ways around it, but they’re usually more dangerous than they’re worth.
And just because a place has been torn down doesn’t mean it’s gone. The imprint’s still there. People remember, wonder, write papers and books about it.
A hotel that used to host the cream of L.A. society, diplomats, kings, and even a presidential candidate who was assassinated isn’t going to let something like being demolished keep it down.
Hiding something in it is kind of genius, but I see a few flaws in this plan. “Physical key, psychic lock,” I say. “How’s that supposed to work? And how did he get it in there? I don’t know what his knack was, but it was clearly not necromancy. I don’t see him wading through a sea of ghosts to get to the—” I glance at the room number on the key. “—fourth floor.”
“You know, your grandfather was a pain in the ass, too.”
“Must be a family trait.”
“It’s a physical key because it’s a physical lock. The room is a pocket dimension. It’s anchored to the location where that room in the Ambassador used to be, and used it as a template. The key tag is a talisman to ward against the ghosts as long as it’s on your person. He usually went into the hotel, stood outside the room and then crossed over so he didn’t have to deal with the ghosts. It’s about the safest safehouse you can have. It even has electricity and running water. Well, it did the last time I was there. Nobody’s been in since before your grandfather died.”
Fire Season Page 17