The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl (6 page)

Misty Beyond

Denis reached the site of Jane’s inhumation shortly after nightfall. He pulled his car off the road and drove into the trees, parking well away from the hillside. He searched halfheartedly for a flashlight in the glove compartment, but he hadn’t brought one. That was stupid, but he was under a lot of stress. Denis considered moving his car closer to the mound and letting his headlights illuminate the area, but that would bring him entirely too close to possible entombment. The way Jane had died . . . that wasn’t for him.

Denis got out of his car, wrapping his overcoat around him against the evening chill. It was noticeably cooler here in the hills than it was downtown. Denis squinted in the darkness as he approached the mound. The moon was silvery bright, but its light was pale and filtered through the redwoods overhead. Denis stumbled and cursed as he walked, but when he saw the tire tracks running through the mud, he stopped. He hadn’t thought about it before, but Jane had left a trail, driving here through the soft earth. Would someone notice the tracks, and follow them to the mound of mud? Jane had pulled off the road, but she hadn’t gone
that
far from the beaten path, just a few dozen yards.

Someone would find her eventually, Denis supposed. There’d be no evidence of his involvement, though. Not once he picked up the knife, and the other remains of the picnic. There were his footprints in the mud, but his boots were not an unusual brand, and by the time the car was discovered, his prints would likely be washed away. Maybe he would scuff away the bootprints when he left. No one had seen him with Jane that night, Denis reminded himself. As far as anyone knew, they had broken up and were no longer speaking. He was safe. There was nothing to fear from Jane now but bad memories and bad dreams—but even dreams of Jane would be a relief from his usual nightmares about the machine that grinds.

Denis followed the tire tracks . . . and then found another, much fresher, pair of tracks crossing the original set. Denis crouched and touched the new tracks, bewildered. The old tracks were dried on the edges, while the new ones were still damp. Someone had driven out of here recently, today, by the look of it.

With a sinking feeling, a sort of disbelieving dread, Denis followed the new tracks toward their inevitable starting place.

The mound of mud was still there, but it looked more like a broken volcano now, hollowed out and caved in. A hole gaped in the side of the mound, and the sides and top had fallen into the hollow center. Somehow, impossibly, Jane had driven out of the mudslide. But how could that be? Surely the weight of the mud would prevent any escape, the slickness beneath the wheels would make traction impossible—but he was faced with the refutation of those assumptions. This mound of mud, and no car, and tire tracks leading out and away.

“Oh,
fuck me
.” Jane was alive. And she knew that he’d left her here to die. What would she do to him? Tell the police? Or come after him herself, attack him, talk to him, try to blackmail him? He tried to figure out which approach her personality would dictate. Could he . . . take care of her himself? Actually kill her, to keep her quiet, to keep his secret? He didn’t think so. The past two days had been hellish, edged with hysteria and denial, and then he’d been guilty only of negligent homicide, at worst. Denis was a creature of habit, and premeditated murder would catastrophically break his routine. To actually murder Jane would probably unhinge him. But there had to be some way to contain this situation.

His mind refused to function properly. Every time he attempted to think in a rigorous line, he imagined Jane’s car driving out of the mudslide and bearing down on him, running him over, crushing his body into the mud.

When headlights appeared behind him, throwing the mound of mud into sharp relief, Denis screamed.

He sucked in a breath and squeezed his hands into fists. Screaming wouldn’t help. Perhaps this was just a random passerby, someone looking for a make-out spot, or even a police officer who’d seen Denis’s car parked off the road. There was no cause for panic yet.

The car rolled toward him slowly, headlights blinding Denis to any details of the vehicle’s make, model, or provenance.

The engine sputtered like an arrhythmic heart. Denis thought about walking up to the car, to see what they wanted, but why should he? He’d been here first. The fact that the driver could see him while Denis himself couldn’t see anything but the glare of headlights annoyed him, however, so he shaded his eyes and walked toward the driver’s side.

The driver’s door opened, and someone stepped out, just a person-shaped blob in Denis’s still-dazzled vision. He blinked, waiting for his pupils to dilate so he could see in the dimness.

“Denis?” the person said. Denis recognized the voice. It was Jane. Absolutely, no doubt about it, Jane. He took a step back, and she rushed at him.

Denis threw up his hands defensively, and it took a moment for him to realize that he was being embraced, not attacked. Jane wrapped her arms around him and hugged him tightly. She sobbed into his shoulder.

What
was
this? Didn’t she understand what he’d done, what had happened?

“Shh, baby, it’s okay,” Denis said, patting her shoulder. Cool mud smeared under his hands, and he realized she was wholly covered in filth. She’d gotten somewhat muddy during her wish-fulfillment fantasy with him, but her clothes shouldn’t have been so streaked, and the layer of mud on her body shouldn’t feel so
thick
. Why was she dirty, if she’d
driven
out? It wasn’t as if she’d crawled bodily through the mud. The car should be filthy, yes—and he saw now that it was, that her white hatchback had been turned brown by mud, the filth covering everything but a wiper-scraped semicircle on the windshield. Jane must have gotten down and rolled in the mud for some reason. That was the only explanation that made sense.

Not that any of this really made sense.

“I woke up in the dark, Denis,” she said into his shoulder. “I was so afraid. I don’t understand what happened. After I woke up I got into the car and drove out of this muddy mess, looking for you, but I couldn’t get to your apartment. Every time I started driving I wound up on Ash Street, by that coffee shop you like so much. I felt like there was something inside the place,
pulling
me. Do you remember when I told you about the goddess?”

“Yes,” Denis said, trying to hug her as lightly as possible. She clung to him like a barnacle on a hull, smearing dirt into his clothes, his coat. He took deep breaths to calm himself, to overcome his total revulsion, but even breathing deeply didn’t help—Jane smelled of earth and wet and mold, and revolted him.

“I think the goddess is trapped in the coffee shop,” Jane said. “I have to help her escape.”

She’s gone insane,
Denis thought. Being trapped in her car had driven her crazy—or else she’d run short of oxygen and sustained brain damage. Believing in some primal Earth Mother was one thing, but thinking the goddess dwelt in an espresso machine was something else altogether.

“Let’s get you home,” Denis said. “Get you cleaned up.” Then he thought of Jane’s housemate. Denis didn’t want anyone to see Jane in this state—it could only reflect badly on him, lead to questions. “Better yet, come to my place.”

“You’ll stay with me? You’ll help?” Her voice was husky and frightened. Denis had never heard her speak this way before, so vulnerably.

“You can stay with me.”

She looked into his eyes. Her face was ghost-pale in the moonlight. “Will you help me set the goddess free?”

Denis hesitated, then said, “We’ll talk about it. Come on. Follow me down.” He needed to find out what, exactly, she remembered. If her memory loss was sufficiently complete, there might be no need for extreme resolutions.

She gripped his jacket with both hands. “Please, Denis, ride with me. Don’t make me go by myself.”

“Shh, it’s okay, all right.” He could pick up his car later. Right now, the important thing was to get Jane into the shower and scoured clean. He couldn’t think with her looking like this, like an avatar for some mud-goddess.

He went to the passenger side of her car and opened the door, the mud from the handle smearing his fingers. He got inside and wiped the mud from his hands onto the upholstery. The smell struck him right away, though it wasn’t strong—just a whiff of ripeness, a hint of urine and feces. “There’s a nasty smell in here,” he said.

Jane got into the car. The internal light came on when she opened the door, and Denis got his first clear look at her. No part of her body was uncovered; even her hair was caked, dreadlocked with mud. “I only smell the earth,” she said. “It smells good.”

Denis grunted. He rolled the window partway down to let fresh air in.

Jane drove, her hands leaving muddy prints on the steering wheel and gearshift. She didn’t talk much, though she answered readily enough when Denis asked questions. “It’s all scrambled,” Jane said. “I wanted to pick you up, and make amends. We drove into the hills, made love . . .” She shook her head. “What happened then?”

Denis improvised wildly. “You took me home, then realized you’d left some things there, your blanket, I’m not sure what else. You said you were going back to get them. I didn’t hear from you after that, and when I called your house Nancy said she hadn’t seen you, so I drove up here tonight to make sure nothing had happened to you.” He hadn’t picked up the knife or their trash, he realized, but he supposed it didn’t matter now, since Jane was alive and reasonably well—it wasn’t a crime scene anymore.

“I must have been caught in a mudslide, and thrown from my car . . .” She shook her head, and a little rain of dirt pattered down onto the seat. “It doesn’t make any sense. There are all these gaps in my memory . . . I could have been killed, you know?”

“I know.”

“But the goddess saved me.” Jane’s voice, content and sure, chilled Denis. “She spared my life, and consecrated me into her service. Baptized me in mud.”

“Baptize” was an inherently Christian term, unsuited to such a pagan sentiment, but Denis refrained from pointing that out, though it did indicate the extent to which Jane’s ordeal had affected her, replacing her typical precision with muddy inaccuracy.

“I’m still so confused, but some things are clear,” she said.

“You’ll feel better once you have a shower.”

“
You’ll
feel better once I have a shower,” she said, with a touch of her old venom. “I like being muddy. It makes me feel
strong
. There was this bitch at the coffee shop—”

“You went to the coffee shop?” Denis said. “Looking like
this
?”

“This is the way I look. That’s the way it is.”

Marvelous. So now other people knew Jane was crazy. Maybe no one had recognized her; she wasn’t exactly a regular at Genius Loci. Though, oddly, she seemed to be driving toward the coffee shop again, not slowing down for the turn to his house. Denis touched the steering wheel lightly. “Turn right here, Jane,” he said.

She looked at him, blinking, then nodded and made the turn.

Jane pulled into a parking space in front of his apartment. “We’ll get your car washed tomorrow, too,” Denis said, getting out.

“I don’t know. I like having a mud chariot. A vehicle created by the patriarchy, but consecrated to the goddess.”

“Okay, Jane.”

She got out of the car and went to his door. Denis followed. He couldn’t decide if he wanted to jump into the shower first and clean off the traces of her touch, or let her clean up right away. They could always shower together, though that would mean watching the filth stream off her, turning the floor of the shower brown. . . . No, thank you. He could wait.

In the light of the living room, Jane looked terrible, hardly human at all. Her face, which he’d thought merely pale, was actually covered in white clay, as if she were made up for some primitive death-festival.

Jane went into the bathroom, then came out again. “I don’t want to use your towels,” she said, half smiling. “I know how you are about stains. And I’ll need clean clothes. I washed some things at the Laundromat, before I picked you up and we went into the hills. I remember that. The laundry bags are still in the car. I’ll get them.”

“No, I’ll go,” Denis said. He suppressed a shudder at the thought of Jane touching clean laundry with her filthy hands.

“We’ll both go.”

Denis sighed. She never let him do anything for her, as if the very offer of assistance were an act of male oppression. “Fine.”

They went out to the car. Jane swung the hatchback open and reached inside for a bag of laundry.

Denis just stood, staring.

There was a body in the back of Jane’s car. A woman’s body, naked, mud-streaked, and curled up, long hair hiding her face. Jane seemed completely unaware of the corpse’s presence as she grunted and tugged on the laundry bag. She couldn’t get the bag loose because the dead body was lying on top of it. With a final yank, Jane pulled the bag free, and the body rolled over.

The corpse’s hair fell away, revealing the face.

It was Jane, her features slack, her eyes blank and glazed.

Denis drew breath to scream, but before he could, the
other
Jane, Mud-Jane, said, “Well, are you going to help or not? Grab the other bag. I don’t know which one has the towels.”

Denis exhaled, counting to nine in his mind, calming down. This was Jane, too. He was sure of it—only Jane talked to him that way, looked at him that way. Her expression of half-amused annoyance was instantly recognizable, even through a mask of mud.

Maybe Jane hadn’t gone crazy. Maybe Denis had. His guilt over leaving her trapped had conjured this corpse in the car to haunt him. It was just a hallucination, and would fade away. That was the only reasonable explanation.

“Sometime this year, lover,” Mud-Jane said, shouldering the bag and walking to the apartment.

Denis hauled out the other bag of laundry, then stood looking at the body and the inside of the car. There were muddy handprints on the windows. While Jane was trapped, she must have crawled from the passenger seat into the back, beaten on the glass. But why? Because there was more room to move back there? Because it was more comfortable to lie curled on a bag of laundry? Because there was nothing else
to
do, there in the suffocating dark?