October 31

 

Morning

 

 

 

The sun was in my eyes, I was stiff and cold, and damp from morning dew.

I was still in the cemetery, where I’d apparently spent the night. That shouldn’t have been possible…yet, as I sat up and looked around me at the headstones, the morning joggers, my great tree…it had happened.

The fingers of my right hand were tight. I flexed them, and something dropped from my grasp. I retrieved it.

It was the wand: A foot-long section of oak, twisted in a perfect spiral shape, with a neat nob at one end and a tapering point at the other. It was possible that it had fallen from the tree above me naturally-the wood felt slightly rough, and there was a slight center bend to it–but I recognized it without question:

It was the tool that my savior used during the night to drive Bal-sab back.

I didn’t even ask myself if it had really happened or if I’d merely dreamed it. At this point, the answer didn’t really matter.

I was relieved to find my car where I’d left it, and the gates to the cemetery were open. I drove out without seeing a caretaker or guard.

It was 7:33 as I left Evergreen, the morning of Halloween. The day was clear and already warm, with just a trace of L.A.’s perpetual smog blanket. I was surprised to find that I wasn’t tired or aching from my night on the ground. In fact, I felt…well, I can only call it hyper-aware. I saw every detail as I drove towards the 5 freeway: Every yard of cracked asphalt, every scrap of trash, every used hypodermic needle or empty bottle, every man who staggered along the sidewalk too young to have dead eyes, every woman who carried a jar of Vaseline in a cheap purse and looked for her next trick, every kid whose heart hardened a little as he saw the bullies coming and wanted to join them.

At first I was glad to leave the city streets behind and ascend to the freeway that ran above the urban hell, but the morning rush-hour traffic was in full force and presented its own grim scenes: A woman on the shoulder, staring with grim desperation at her broken-down car; a man in a Lexus with a perfect haircut shrieking into a Bluetooth so loudly that I could hear him across two lanes of idling cars; honking horns, blaring ranchera music fighting discordant rock, a helicopter beating the air overhead.

This world was mad.

Two thousand years had led to this. It seemed ridiculous to think any of it could be reversed. The everyday difficulties of life, small and large, are too interconnected; severing one link can’t destroy the chain. But if part of the chain can be weakened, then maybe we can begin the act of freeing ourselves. Isn’t that why we vote, why we volunteer, why we donate?

What part of the chain would break if an ancient death god were appeased?

An hour later, I finally reached home. Roxie meowed unhappily at me, understandably upset over missing dinner last night, but even her irritated, shrill little cries lightened my mood. The world couldn’t be so bad when different species could live together, with joys, upsets, and experiences shared, and those rare times when simply nothing happened except each other.

I fed Roxie, then she settled in at my feet, purring and grooming herself, as I checked e-mail. There was the message from Conor, with directions; he’d provided a map of the location where we were to meet. It was forty minutes or so to the west, but I’d be joining the going-home traffic and so doubled the time. I’d need to leave here at around 3:30, then.

I had six hours to prepare.

And no idea what “preparation” should be.