“Jesus. All it needs now is a moat full of alligators. How did he do all that?”
“He didn’t. A lot of people owed him favors. Big favors. The only thing he had to figure out was how to get over to the other side, and that was just a spell. He liked to go there and get away from things.”
“And you don’t know what makes the spirit bottle such a big deal?”
“Just that it scared him enough that he felt the need to hide it in the most secure place he could think of.”
This feels dangerous. Like I should walk away and not look back. But there’s something at the back of my mind that tells me not to ignore it.
“Thank you,” I say. “For the key and for telling me about my family. If it’s all right, I’d like to talk to you about it more sometime.”
“I thought you might. Some of it’s not easy to talk about. I loved him, but he had his flaws, and trouble always seemed to travel in his wake. We both lost a lot of good friends because of things he did.”
Sounds familiar.
“Thanks. Should I call you at the number I got hold of you tonight?”
“I’m having it turned off,” she says. “It was only around for one reason.” She pulls out a cell phone, stores my contact information. I get the same from her.
“You need a lift anywhere?” I say. She’s gotta be in her nineties by now and I’m not leaving her alone in an empty train station after midnight.
“No, but thank you,” she says. “I’ll be just fine.”
“Look, I’m not gonna just leave—”
Her eyes flash a dim, glowing red and her smile is full of teeth. “Looks are deceiving, Eric. I’m not as old as I look. I’m much older.”
Some things fall into place. “This is why my dad didn’t like you, isn’t it?” I say. Now that I’m looking for it, I see the signs. “Lamia, right? I dated one a few years back in New York. It didn’t work out.”
“It very often doesn’t,” she says. “But it worked with your grandfather and I. Your father didn’t trust me. But Robert did, and that’s all that mattered to me. Goodnight, Eric. Be safe.”
She stands up smooth and graceful as a dancer and for a brief moment I can see her true self just under her skin. It’s a good glamour, but then, Lamias are excellent predators.
“You too, Miriam. I’ll see you around.”
* * *
—
I get to the Ambassador grounds about half an hour later. The hotel closed in ’89, but they kept it around a while for film shoots. That’s the fate of everything in this town. It thrives, declines, gets turned into a movie location, then they tear it down.
They left it standing a good long time, too. Finally came down a few years before I got back to L.A., and they built a school complex on the grounds, the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools. Needed to call it something, I guess. Kinda morbid, though, you ask me.
I slap a HELLO, MY NAME IS sticker with the words I’M NOT HERE written in Sharpie onto my chest and pump a little magic through it. I stand outside the gates of the school and peer inside. I can barely make out the outline of the old hotel in the distance. It looks a little more solid from this side of the veil than I’d expect. I can’t usually see a vanished building on the other side unless it’s got a lot of significance. I guess the Ambassador rates.
It’s not a long walk, but I’m not sure which route would be easier. Navigate through the school until I get to the site of the actual hotel, or pop over to the dead side now and walk in a straight line.
There are a lot of Haunts and Wanderers around, though they seem to be keeping their distance. That’s definitely not normal. The Wanderers at the very least should be swarming me, hoping for a free lunch whether I’m on their side or not. I walk toward a cluster of Wanderers on the street corner and they all back away from me, generally keeping about ten feet of distance.
No shit. Looks like that anti-ghost talisman works. It must only work near the hotel grounds, because I saw plenty when I was leaving Union Station and they didn’t have this reaction.
That decides it, then. I slip to the other side. The color leaches out of everything, leaving it dim and blue, the jet engine noise blasts through my head, and I’m over. I head toward the hotel, the ghosts keeping their distance, though some of them are straining like mad dogs at the end of short leashes. I quicken my step. I have no idea how effective this talisman really is. It’s doing its job, but it feels like the power could snap at any moment. If that happens I might not be able to get back fast enough. And with the new construction, who knows where I’ll actually end up. I won’t materialize into solid matter or anything like that, but I could find myself in an inconvenient spot.
The entrance of the hotel is just as grand on this side of the veil as it was when it stood on the other. It stands out from everything else on this side. Brighter, more color, not the drained look of the dead. Guests and hotel staff bustle around, most not noticing me. They look off. Too solid, too busy, too . . . alive. Are these just Echoes from the hotel’s past? Not quite ghosts?
“Take your bags, sir?” a bright-eyed bellboy says, stepping into my path. Vibrant red uniform, pillbox hat. If the staff is talking to me, there’s more going on here than I thought, but for the life of me I can’t figure out what.
“No luggage,” I say, holding up the key. His eyes flash on it and his smile grows impossibly large.
“Ah, of course! Mister Carter. We haven’t seen you in quite some time. But as per our agreement we’ve kept the door to your suite in tip top shape. The maid hasn’t been inside to clean it, obviously, but we’ve noticed no degradation in the spells you cast to keep things clean and in good working order.”
“Uh . . . thanks.”
“All part of the service, sir. Your contribution to this hotel has allowed us to keep things going for quite some time. You’re paid up well into the next century.”
He frowns momentarily, then the smile is back. “I’m so sorry, sir, I hadn’t realized you weren’t the original Mister Carter, though the family resemblance is uncanny. As part of the contract, anyone who holds the key and is a member of Robert Carter’s family is allowed entrance to the suite. Do you need me to show you to your room?”
“I think I could use a guide,” I say.
“Well then, follow me, sir.” He snaps around like a soldier on parade and steps into one of the elevators. I follow closely, not quite sure what to make of all this.
“Can you refresh my memory?” I say. “You said something about a ‘contribution to the hotel.’ What was that, exactly?”
“Blood, sir,” the bellboy says, his smile freakishly wide. “Gallons and gallons of it. That was the deal. And with that much blood, you’ve kept the Ambassador going for decades no matter what happens to the world outside.”
The bellhop is clearly no Echo, and he’s sure as hell not acting like any ghost I’ve seen on this side.
“Do you speak for the hotel?” I say.
He looks over his shoulder at me, and I figure it out just before he tells me, “Sir, I am the hotel.”
Holy shit. None of these people are ghosts. Not individually. They’re all part of a larger, much more powerful one: the ghost of the Ambassador Hotel itself. The Ambassador wasn’t just a building, wasn’t just masonry, glass, and wood. It was the people who slept there, worked there. It was Bobby Kennedy’s assassination and the Rat Pack’s performances.
This Ambassador isn’t just an imprint on the psychic landscape. It’s the soul of the hotel itself.
The elevators ride smoothly and in moments we’re up on the fourth floor. He points to the far end of the hallway. “There you go, sir. I’m sure you’ll find everything to your satisfaction.”
“I’m sure I will,” I say and hand him a five spot as a tip. He graciously tips his hat and disappears like the Cheshire Cat, only it’s his hat th
at lingers instead of his grin.
The hallway is empty and I half expect to see two little axe-murdered girls asking me to play with them forever and ever. Which actually happens more often than you might think.
The door at the end of the hall is different from the others. I can tell those are ghost manifestations. They look very real, but there’s an odd sort of plasticity to them. Like they were cast in one piece, doorknobs, wood grain, the works.
But the far door, my door, looks battered and worn. Runes and sigils carved into the unpainted wood that I wouldn’t want to try my luck disarming. Most I don’t recognize, the rest I don’t trust. Good thing I have this key then, huh? I slide the key into the doorknob and turn. There’s a click and the door swings open easily. I cross the threshold and I’m in another world. Probably literally.
It’s a hotel suite, all right. A living room, two bedrooms, bathroom, kitchen, and dining area. Guess gramps didn’t want to depend on room service. It’s done in a forties Art Deco style, all elaborate curves and straight lines. Furniture in walnut, comfortable club chairs, plenty of light from lamps scattered around the room. I tug aside a curtain covering one of the windows, and it’s not what I was expecting.
Not really sure what I was expecting, actually, but it sure as fuck wasn’t this. This doesn’t look onto the ghost hotel’s lands, or onto the new school that’s taken its place.
Outside is a thick pink fog, but even with that there’s enough visibility to see the giant gas planet in the sky, and a landscape teeming with lumbering creatures that look like masses of tentacles and not much else.
I close the curtains quickly. Jesus, Gramps, you couldn’t have built this place in, fuck, I dunno, Detroit? Pensacola? I guess if you really want to hide something well, you put it in the middle of a Lovecraftian wet dream.
I can’t even begin to guess at all the spells that went into making this place. When I cross over to the dead side I can’t access any magic but my own. I’m cut off from the pool. But in this room I can feel plenty. I don’t know what casting any spells in here would do, but if I had to I’d have a lot of energy to work with.
Does it draw from the horror show outside? Does it bypass the ghost lands and hook directly into the living side? And what about the electricity? The hot and cold running water? The gas stove?
There’s a large console tube radio in the living room. When I power it on I can pick up some AM stations playing 1940s hits, but most of the dial is this weird piping music like vuvuzelas played by monkeys on acid. Must be a local station.
On the one table in the living room is the thing I’ve been ignoring since I stepped in here, a large wooden box with hinges at the top and sides allowing each side to unfold. Each unhinged side has a small latch. Best to get my bearings before I fuck around with any magical artifacts I’m not on a first name basis with. There are no markings, no sigils. It was designed to be as ignorable as possible. So I continue to ignore it.
After checking the bedrooms, bathroom, kitchen, all fully functional, the beds even made up all professional-like, there’s only one thing left.
I undo the top and front latches of the box, slowly opening each panel to lie flat on the table. I look at the contents from different angles, close-up, from across the room. As near as I can tell it’s a bottle.
I mean, it’s a pretty bottle. It’s fairly short, about the height of a fifth of Jack, but it’s fat and curved. It hurts a little to look at, actually. It’s not square, it’s not round, and yet it is. One moment it looks about twice the width of a baseball, then no larger than a flask. But at the same time it doesn’t seem to change at all.
Instead of being made from one continuous piece of glass, it’s a collection of multicolored glass panels bound together by thin bands of brass. Each pane has sigils engraved in its surface. Different languages, some I recognize—Hebrew, Arabic, Phoenician—others that look like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Even the thick metal-and-glass stopper is covered in runes.
The ones I can read, and I’m assuming the ones I can’t, all amount to the same thing. They’re binding spells. This thing is designed to keep inside whatever goes inside. It is not fucking around.
Unlike the nuclear one back in the storage unit, this one isn’t labeled. No THIS END TOWARD ENEMY simplicity to it. Sure, these things look simple, open the bottle and pull in whatever you’re pointing it at, but spirit bottles are rarely that easy. If I’m lucky there’s a manual around here somewhere.
After a minute of looking I find an unlabeled envelope slid beneath the wooden case. Newspaper clippings spill out when I open it. L.A. Times, Herald Examiner, Evening Herald. Nothing big, certainly not front-page news, but in a couple of them there’s a photo of a man who, just like Miriam said, looks a whole hell of a lot like me. He’s standing at the edge of a scaffolding over a pit, holding something wrapped in cloth in his arms. He doesn’t look happy that someone’s taking his picture.
The headlines are the kind of sensational bullshit you get from the era. INDIAN GRAVES YIELD SURPRISING FIND; ANCIENT SECRETS SHED LIGHT ON EARLY CALIFORNIA; CATALINA ISLAND EXCAVATION FINDS SPANISH TREASURE. No help there. And then I realize what I’ve just read and my brain seizes.
Spanish treasure, Catalina Island, an ornate spirit bottle.
Fuck me. People have been looking for this bottle for hundreds of years. This is the bottle that if opened would let loose an entity that wiped out almost all of the Aztec gods with Quetzalcoatl’s help, and under Cortés’s command. A bottle that only ended up here because it hitched a ride with Cabrillo in his travels along the coast, stopping at places like Catalina Island.
This is Darius’s bottle. And now everything starts to make sense.
Chapter 26
Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo. Cortés orders him to hit Mictlan with a bunch of soldiers, priests, Quetzalcoatl, and the Djinn, Darius, right? You know this bit. Everything goes to shit, Cabrillo escapes with Darius’s bottle, nobody’s happy.
Twenty-some odd years later, our boy Cabrillo has made his fortune in the slave trade, brutally oppressing the indigenous people, yada yada yada. You get the idea. Real charmer, this guy.
Anyway, around 1540 he goes on an expedition up and down the California coast, somehow missing San Francisco Bay, which people give him shit for to this day. He makes a pit stop at Santa Catalina Island, where he trips over a rock while stepping out of a boat. Shatters his shin. Can you say Vitamin C deficiency, kids? Wound goes septic, gangrene sets in, and about a week later he’s dead. Huzzah.
Now a question for the class, and think carefully. Where is Darius’s bottle?
Folks who know about it through legends, and then later after meeting the Djinn, dig all around the California coast looking for it. Eventually everybody settles on “somewhere in Los Angeles.” Even going so far as to use an excuse of hidden tunnels beneath Los Angeles filled with lizard people and gold to dig a pit near Downtown.
Stupid, I know. The lizard people are way further down.
Then in 1947, some archaeologists on Catalina dig up a bottle along with some Spanish crap and lots of busted up Chumash and Tongva artifacts. For god knows what reason, Robert Carter, Granddad, happens to be there and gets his hands on the bottle because it just about screams magic.
He locks it up. Then he figures out what it is and realizes that if anybody gets their hands on this thing, it’s game over. Because whoever has the bottle has control of Darius. And the last time that happened, an entire civilization crumbled.
I sit in one of the leather chairs staring at the bottle on the table. I found a completely stocked bar and I’m on my second whiskey. Maybe if I drink enough this will all turn out to be a really bad dream.
I get why Gramps stuck the bottle here. Best place for it. I just wish he’d never found it in the first place. Then I wouldn’t be in this mess.
I think I’ve mostly got it figured out. I th
ink some people knew my family had it and were hoping I’d go looking for it without figuring out what it was. Make Quetzalcoatl enough of a threat and I’d go looking for a spirit bottle to take him down with, and grab the most powerful one I could find.
Hell of a gamble to get the bottle. But what do they lose? Not much. If I grab the wrong one, as long as it’s not strong enough to trap Quetzalcoatl, they can do it again. “Well, that one didn’t work. Do you have another?”
But if I show up with the right bottle, all they have to do is take me down to get it. The hard part’s done. It’s out in the open. Easy after that, provided they know how to undo the spell that locked it up tight back in Mictlan.
Obviously Quetzalcoatl’s in on it. He knows what the bottle is, what it looks like, and how powerful he could be with Darius under his control. And Sastre, though I doubt Q would have told her everything. She’s hired help, or a true believer, but either way Q’s not stupid enough to let an unstable lunatic in on a secret that’s been buried five hundred years.
But why have her around at all? To do something he couldn’t. Sow enough chaos with the blame pointed at me that I lose my balance and can be steered in the right direction. She could have killed me pretty much any time she wanted to, or at least tried. But kill some mages, start some rumors, and now I’ve got everybody crawling up my ass. The obvious solution is to take her off the board. But she’s got Q’s protection, so he’s gotta go first.
But there’s somebody else. Has to be. How would Q have known my grandfather found it? I can’t see him or his pet assassin rooting through the stacks at the L.A. library looking through old newspaper articles.
But who? I’m pretty sure I’ve got it narrowed down to a couple. Now I just need to figure out what to do about it.
Fire Season Page 18