It was supposed to be a one-way trip.
And yet Oscar nodded, verifying that he had indeed observed this thing they’d all long assumed to be impossible. A living, human woman who could cross at will.
“I can’t believe it myself,” Oscar said. “But I’ve seen it happen, once or twice. She walks across like it’s the door between the kitchen and the dining room, and nothing more.”
“She visits so bloody often she needs a mechanical lift,” Watt said contemptuously, reeling a bit when he stepped down from his car’s running board. “She’s hardly the sort to keep climbing up and down a tree.”
“What’s her name?” Tom asked.
Oscar and Watt exchanged a look, and then a shrug. Neither of them wanted to admit to having that piece of information, although Tom suspected Winston Watt might’ve known more than he was owning up to. Oscar might as well, for that matter.
“She doesn’t bother conversing with the help,” Oz said. “Keeps her own counsel.”
“Mictlantecuhtli says she’s to be his Queen,” Watt informed them. “We’re to call her ‘La Reina de los Muertos,’ once she’s crossed over for good.”
This was sounding worse and worse by the minute to old Tom Delgado. He couldn’t help but feel a stab of jealousy when he contemplated this unnamed woman. Not only did the stranger share in his hard-won secrets, she’d also been allowed, somehow, to experience the otherworld without forfeiting her life and her freedom.
It didn’t seem fair. Not when Tom had sold his very soul for a journey far less exotic, for initiations far less significant and experiences that hadn’t done a fraction as much to satisfy his lifelong curiosity about the nature of the worlds as one single day spent freely exploring the possibilities of Mictlan would have.
Tom had to wonder what this new witch offered, that she enjoyed such favor with the King. It occurred to him that the ambitious crazywoman would soon be his mistress, too (and not in the way he liked to have a mistress), according to the letter of Mictlantecuhtli’s contract.
Well, he wasn’t having that. And that’s all there was to it.
“We can go right up to the top if you’re ready, Tom,” Watt said. “There’s a temporary elevator set up.”
Wonderful, Tom thought. They’d thought of everything. While none of the half-baked plans he’d been incubating had ever anticipated a scenario like this one. Tom was at a loss. What sort of excuse could he plausibly make?
It was Oscar who saved him, or at least bought him some time. Thank the Powers That Be for Oscar.
“Maybe you could hold your horses for just a minute there, Mr. Watt,” the young man said. “Mr. Delgado and I have a lot of catching up to do.”
“You can still talk to him once he’s gone over, and the King wants him as soon as possible.”
“Well, it’ll be possible in a few damn minutes, okay?”
Tom was getting the impression that Oscar cared as little for the King’s Englishman as he did himself.
“It’s not the same once people go over,” the young builder said. “Besides which, you might’ve taken a pass on those last few glasses of gin I can smell on your breath if punctuality was your big concern.”
Watt frowned and shot Tom an irritated look, but he was chastened enough not to argue or make accusations. “Fine,” he said. “I think I’ll go up to the Hole and wait for you there.”
“You do that,” Oscar said, looking at Watt in a way that was quietly confident yet not quite combative. “Tio Tomas and I will be up directly.”
The Englishman didn’t know what to do, other than slink away. Tom and Oscar watched him cross the absurdly wide street (you could walk three dozen sheep abreast down a trail like that one, and no other sort of traffic was likely to use it), and a few moments later they heard the gasoline motor that powered the rickety-looking supply elevator cough to life. As the lift platform ascended, up the girders that framed the structure’s southwestern corner, they saw Watt’s skinny silhouette looking back down toward them.
“How are you really, Oz?” Tom asked.
“Married, for one thing,” Oscar said, holding up his left hand so that Tom could see the gold band around his ring finger. “Last spring. Almost an architect too, one more semester till I have my degree, and I just found out I’m gonna be a father.”
“Congratulations,” Tom said, feeling his heart sink as he wondered whether a third generation of San Martins would now be pledged to the service of the King. Architecture also surprised him as a career choice. Tom didn’t recall him ever expressing an interest in any such thing, but then he supposed a lot really could change in the course of ten years. “Got names picked out?” he asked.
“Not yet.” Oscar grinned. “Maybe Juan, after Connie’s father, if it’s a boy. I think she’d like that.”
Tom nodded. “He’ll be a big one, if he takes after you. Hope your missus knows what she’s getting herself into.”
Oscar laughed and nodded, then turned quiet. “I know you’re shocked by all of this, Tio Tomas,” he said, nodding over at the partially-erected skyscraper. “But I don’t think it’s the first time there’s been a building here.”
“What are you talking about?”
“When we cleared the site,” Oscar said, “there were bits and chunks of old broken mud bricks, all over the place. For miles around, too. Like maybe something was built here a long time ago and then got torn down again, and the bricks got scattered everywhere. And then the old Tree grew up in its place.”
“Like somebody planted it to mark the spot,” Tom mused.
Oscar shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. “They smashed up what they built, but somebody didn’t want to forget what’s, you know… up there. That’s what it made me think of, anyway, finding all those little pieces of brick. Farmers around here tell me they’ve been plowin’em out of their fields since the beginning, just thinking they’re dirt clods that have edges and corners for some reason. They either crush ’em up or throw ’em away.”
“Huh,” Tom grunted, thinking of the tales los Muertos sometimes told about the Great Step Pyramid that stood on the other side, beyond and beneath the King’s unbreachable chamber. On this side, a Hole in the Sky, stationed a hundred feet above the earth. On that side, a monumental Pyramid with stairs down each of its four faces and doors that opened onto other worlds. Old Ramon’s bones had spoken of it to Tom more than once, while standing at the door between the Chambers. The conversation of the dead tended to be disjointed and rambling, however, and many of the things Ramon said after his death had made little sense to Tom.
Ramon had died crazy, guilty to the point of madness over some cataclysm he believed he’d set in motion. Over some secret he said he’d given away. That betrayal had been enough to send him over the threshold between the rooms, and Tom had never even figured out what it was he thought he’d done.
Tom now wondered if people older than the old people had long ago erected a real-world counterpart to the Temple of Mictlantecuhtli right here in this field. Perhaps the ancient forbearers of the Aztecs themselves had done it, before moving south from their mythic homeland of Aztlan. Maybe their temple had even been the original, and the one lingering on in the otherworld was a copy. Who but el Rey could know?
Tom also wondered who’d torn the structure down again, feeling a certain kinship with those wise folks, whoever they may have been.
“Makes me think of what the dead say, about what’s outside the second room,” Oscar said, echoing Tom’s thoughts uncannily. Of course the younger man would’ve heard the same stories. Even from some of the same ghosts. “You know, about the pyramid el Rey’s supposed to have over there, in the land of Mictlan.”
“Me too,” Tom murmured. “So what’s the plan here, anyway? How’re you supposed to keep all those men from finding out about the Hole?” He waved an indicative hand in the direction most of the departing workforce had taken.