October 30

October 31

I left the freeway at Cesar Chavez Avenue and headed east. My destination was only a mile from the freeway.

When Conor had mentioned a “special tree,” my thoughts had immediately gone to a photo I’d taken sometime in the early 1980s. Back then, I’d briefly considered going into professional photography for my day job, and I’d worked to assemble a portfolio. One day, completely by accident, I’d stumbled across an amazing cemetery just east of downtown L.A. At the time I didn’t know that Evergreen Cemetery was the oldest extant cemetery in Los Angeles, but its melancholy beauty, age, and hodgepodge of monuments and headstones had yielded some of my best photos.

My real prize, however, was a picture of a gigantic spreading oak that overlooked a significant chunk of the graveyard. In the final black-and-white print, the tree looked impossibly huge, and somehow wise.

I knew exactly where to find my wand.

At this time of the afternoon, on a weekday, the cemetery was mostly deserted. I was also saddened to see that it had fallen into some disrepair in the years since I’d last visited, but I spotted the oak easily enough, and parked as near to it as I could.

Evergreen dated back to 1877 and supposedly held some 300,000 interments. There were no superstars resting here, no shining beacons of Hollywood history, but Evergreen was home to many of L.A.’s more interesting historical figures. A tall, white monument marked the plot of the Lankershim family; Isaac Lankershim had once had a town named after him, until that town was renamed North Hollywood in 1927.

I strode across the lawn, and was saddened to see patches of dying grass and headstones that had literally fallen in disrepair. A few graves were clean and well kept, testament to longstanding families that still honored their dead.

I passed the quaint, cobblestone cottage that would be opened for funerals, and elaborate granite memorials that were taller than I was. In some places, the headstones were so crowded together that it was hard to see ground beneath them. I passed a stone angel I’d shot thirty years ago, and saw it was now missing most of one upraised arm.

The oak had been significantly trimmed back, but it was still there, providing a surprisingly lush green canopy for those resting beneath. The sun was slanting in from the west now, but there were still areas beneath the oak hidden from light, perhaps permanently. The ground was spongy here, and I sidestepped around a large gray mushroom cropping up from the cracks in a plaque that marked an 1892 burial.

I didn’t know what I was looking for, really, so I searched for a place to sit. There were no benches in this area, and I finally opted for a small patch of dry grass without a marker. Was it nonetheless a grave, one for which the marker had crumbled or been removed? I offered a silent apology to the resident beneath me, if that was the case.

I’d picked a spot in the sun, but the day’s autumn warmth faded quickly, even as the sun’s light did not. I shivered once, wondering why the temperature was dropping when sunset was still hours away.

The first tiny nudge—it wasn’t truly a physical sensation, but I can only compare it to that—came then. I turned, expecting a visitor or a guard, but there was no one to be seen nearby, just a few distant joggers on the path that encircled the cemetery. A leaf, perhaps, that had fallen from the tree…

It happened again, this time feeling more like a small puff near my ear, like a sentient breeze trying to whisper its secrets. Then I remembered something from Mongfind’s book about contacting the dead:

“The new Druid will experience the initial attempts by the dead to reach us as the smallest of touches or sounds, or perhaps a movement half-glimpsed when nothing’s there…those with experience, though, will understand that the dead are anxious to communicate, and that we need only open ourselves to them.”

Open ourselves to them...I wasn’t sure what that meant, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out. Weren’t close encounters with death at the heart of most great horror fiction? I’d certainly written about it myself dozens of times, everything from a story about a haunted bookstore^[20] to flesh-eating zombies^[21]. Again, I had to ask myself how much deeper I wanted to explore the real version of my fiction.

Yet I felt no fear about this potential meeting. Perhaps it was the gentleness of the approaches to me; there was something timid about it. Maybe the ghosts were more afraid of me.

And I hadn’t come here to parlay with spirits; I was in search of a tool. But I had no idea how to go about finding what I needed; perhaps one already dead would know how to help me deal with a Lord of Death.

It was, paradoxically, too bright to see them, so I closed my eyes.

Whether what took place was dream or reality or trance or some other state, I can’t say.

It was:

Gray, as if all light and color had been leeched from the world. And in this gray realm were gray people…hundreds, thousands, of them. They were dim—not translucent, not see-through shades with faint blue glows, not cheap movie effects, but rather like someone you’d glimpse from a distance standing in an unlit corner of an attic. I could see just enough of them to make out a few details: An out-of-fashion cut of hair, a nineteenth-century uniform, a woman’s dress from the 1940s. Some of them moved slightly, wavering as if they were underwater. It was hard to tell how much awareness they possessed, but a few seemed to be murmuring. I could hear their voices, but too faintly to make out any words.

I watched them for a while before I rose to move among them. They didn’t react…nor did I. There was nothing frightening about them; if anything, they seemed…sad. Stuck. How many of us feel like this in our lives: Drained, trapped, unaware? Death should be different, but perhaps it was just an extension of life.

As I walked through them, I saw a change happening, slowly: As the sky darkened, they brightened. Colors faded in on their clothing and skin; some took tentative steps.

And they began to notice me.

I wasn’t sure when the first pair of faint eyes locked with mine, but I knew that they followed me as I walked by. More began to track me. A small, wizened woman in a shawl stretched out a veined arm as I passed.

I realized it was night now, and that was why they had changed, become slightly more substantial. I still felt no menace from them, but I did wonder how it was possible that night had settled in at the cemetery and I hadn’t been asked to leave. Didn’t they lock up graveyards at night? Wouldn’t they have at least noticed my car, even if they’d somehow missed me?

I considered trying to find my car, seeing if I could leave, but I still didn’t have what I’d come for. I’d walked out now from beneath the oak tree, and thought perhaps I should return to it.

Somehow I’d lost my bearings, and everything looked different in the gloom of night. Was that my tree ahead…or was it that silhouette against the sky behind me? The figures around me now were almost all Asian, some dressed in obsolete robes, and some in the loose-fitting clothing of nineteenth-century railroad workers. I also saw westerners here and there, but they didn’t look like those I’d passed in other areas of Evergreen; these people were noticeably poor, with gaunt frames and threadbare garments of another age.

Potter’s Field.

I remembered something I’d read about Evergreen: That it had once housed L.A. county’s Potter’s Field, where those too impoverished or just too forgotten to be buried elsewhere had been interred. But it wasn’t just the transients and addicts and outlaws who rested there. Back in the nineteenth century, L.A.’s ruling whites had refused to integrate Chinese into their graveyards, and had charged the immigrants to be buried with the indigents. Now their spirits stood side by side, taking no notice of each other, proving that intolerance died with living skin.

A colder breeze caused me to tremble, but it wasn’t just the temperature—that wind was tinged with something else, the mental equivalent of the smell of rotting meat. Then I saw the spirits being pushed aside by some greater mass. Something was flowing up out of the ground of the Potter’s Field, something that was far blacker than the night sky. Even the dead were distressed now: I saw mouths open in soundless horror, hands upraised to ward off whatever it was that came.

What the fuck was I seeing? I ran down possibilities: An unidentified murderer or rapist who’d been interred in the Potter’s Field, an accumulation of the misery the poor had suffered while alive, before the answer came: Surely this could only be Bal-sab. The black cloud was exactly what Mongfind had described, and a sense of immense hunger radiated from the heart of the thing. I turned to run, with no clear direction except away from it. My legs moved as if in a dream, they pumped furiously, my heart hammered, but my forward momentum was slow. Perhaps running through ghosts dragged on me, or Bal-sab had the power to pull me towards him.

I knew he would be on me in seconds; reason was replaced by the flight impulse. There was something mixed with Bal-sab’s palpable hunger: he emanated glee at my panic, and I knew that if he caught me, he would toy with me, torture me, linger over every shriek and shiver, and it wouldn’t end with my physical death. My suffering would make the pathetic souls of the Potter’s Field seem blessed by comparison.

This was why the Druids had protected themselves before calling on him.

I could feel him closer behind me. My feet caught on headstones and tiny hills in the grass; I stumbled, but didn’t go down. If I fell, it would be my final act.

Then, among the shades before me, I saw a woman who possessed more color than the rest. She faced me, fearless; she wore a sort of frock dress, and held something in one hand. I instinctively ran towards her, and she didn’t falter as she turned her attention to my pursuer. She raised her hand, which I saw held a narrow rod, and she pointed it at the Death that came for me.

There was no sound or explosion of light, but the sensation of nightmarish pursuit vanished immediately. I knew without question that she’d somehow driven Bal-sab back, with only a gesture. I envied that confidence and power, regardless of the fact that she’d been dead for at least a century.

I walked towards her, full of questions, but when I opened my mouth I couldn’t seem to speak. Who are you? How did you do that? Can you teach me? Are you a Druid?

She smiled as I approached, and held out her hand…no, not her hand, but the length of wood in it.

The wand.

At first I thought she meant to cast some sort of enchantment on me – a protection, perhaps – but then I realized her true intent: She wanted me to take the wand. I held up my own hand, looked at her tentatively, and she nodded. I reached out, wrapped my fingers around the slender length of wood—And woke up.