The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl (18 page)

“Huh,” Jonathan said. “That’s bad. But better than if she’d stayed, and done it, right?”

“I told her, I said, get professional help. Right? That’s what you do, when you get crazy thoughts, you can’t keep them down. Right, Marzi? Right?”

“Yes,” Marzi said. “I guess so.” She hoped Lindsay wouldn’t bring up the fact that Marzi had been the recipient of professional help once; she didn’t want to deal with that, with Jonathan’s questions or even his speculative glance. She was busy thinking about Alice. Alice had told Marzi she was becoming more obsessed with fire, but she hadn’t said anything about arson fantasies centering around Genius Loci. “So Alice just wanted to burn stuff, anything, or was it this place in particular?”

“Oh, this place.” Lindsay held up her beer, sniffed at the glass, made a sour face, and put it back down again. “She dreamed about it. Daydreams, night dreams, that if she burned this place down, an angel or a phoenix or something would rise from the ashes. To cleanse the world. Which I thought was funny, on account of Beej and Jane and what they were talking about.”

“The earthquake god, and the goddess,” Jonathan said. “Mass delusions. Is three a mass?”

“Maybe it’s ley lines,” Lindsay said. She gestured again, making her hands vaguely perpendicular to one another. “Lines of converging force. Or because we’re close to a fault line.”

“Maybe it’s the paintings,” Jonathan said. He stretched out on his back, hands on his chest, and stared up at the ceiling.

Marzi swallowed and looked around, at the deep blacks of the Space Room, the dim blues in the darkened Ocean Room, the peacefully monstrous faces of the gods in the Teatime Room. The paintings. Was it the paintings? Did the thing behind the door have something to do with Garamond Ray? He had worked here, in this building, for a long time, and he had disappeared right after—maybe even during—the big quake in ’89. But how did he fit in? How did
anything
fit in? The thing behind the door had tried to recruit Alice to its cause, it seemed, and Marzi hadn’t even realized it.

Marzi was so far out of her depth, she couldn’t even see land.

“Hey. Whatsit,” Jonathan said.

“Hmm?” Marzi said.

Jonathan stretched out his arm and pointed at the ceiling. “That. Square bit in the ceiling. What’s it?”

“That’s the door to the attic,” Marzi said. “Your apartment, the Pigeonhole, used to be part of the attic.”

“Huh,” he said. “I never noticed it.”

“Well, there’s a
carpet
up there,” Lindsay said, rolling her eyes. “The trapdoor is under the carpet.”

“It’s nailed shut, anyway,” Marzi said. “Hasn’t been used for years and years.”

“Huh,” Jonathan said.

Marzi roused herself. “Okay, kids. This has been fun, but I want to clean up, close up, and go to bed.” She hesitated before the lie. “I’d invite you guys over, but I’ve got a headache, and I want to get some sleep.”

“You’ve been hospitable,” Lindsay said. “More than that. No problem. I want to sleep in my own lonely bed and mope anyway.”

“You okay, Linds?” Marzi said. “Want me to walk you home?”

“Nah,” she said. “I’m made of iron. I’m unstoppable.” She stood up, and Jonathan rose to his feet as well. They said their farewells and left, Lindsay walking steadily, carefully down the street, Jonathan tromping up the stairs outside to the Pigeonhole, head hung low. He looked flat-out exhausted.

Tomorrow Marzi would find some boards to nail over the door in the Desert Room. That was a priority. That would give her some peace of mind. Maybe she should just do it now . . . But it could wait. Going in there this afternoon had been traumatic enough—she didn’t think she could stand another foray into the Desert Room tonight. She’d get up early in the morning, come over before Hendrix opened up the café, and do it then.

Marzi went about her cleaning-up chores, wondering if the cowboy made of light would reappear, what she’d do if he did. He was simultaneously absurd and threatening, a manitou with a taste for singing cowboy movies. That taste had, apparently, affected her, made her write a Western comic, given her a small obsession . . . she paused in the act of cleaning the espresso machine. But she’d
always
liked Westerns. She’d read about Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok when she was a little girl, read Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey novels by the crateful, watched spaghetti Westerns and John Wayne movies. She’d eventually read a lot about the real history and found even the bloody, dusty truth fascinated her. What had interested her the most, though, was the divide between the
actual
“Wild West” and the public perception of that time, the mythologization of the West, which began way back in the mid-1800s, with dime novels and self-consciously quirky outlaws like “Black Bart” Boles, who left nasty little poems at the scenes of his crimes. Marzi loved the imagined West, found it fascinating, and always had. That fascination couldn’t be laid at the feet of the thing beyond the door. Why would her enemy choose to appear in such a guise, anyway? The dust-and-hardpan associations were obvious, but the West
wasn’t
about desolation, not really; quite the opposite. It was about dragging a living out of an unforgiving land. The resemblance between the landscape of the imagined Old West and the world the thing beyond the door wanted to create was only superficial, so why did it appear in such forms? It didn’t make sense. But she wasn’t capable of figuring it out, not tonight. She had to seal up the door, so she wouldn’t have to think about this anymore.

She finished her work and thought, briefly, of going to see if Jonathan was awake. Maybe now was the time for them to talk. But if they did, their conversation would surely turn to darker matters, and Marzi might not be able to resist telling him the truth about the Desert Room, and what lived beyond it. Their relationship was new, and she didn’t want to spoil that by making him think she was insane. She would deal with the door tomorrow, and
then
they could talk, when her mind and her conscience were clear.

Marzi walked home, thinking about nails and plywood, trying to believe her problems could be solved with something as simple as a hammer and a few hard swings.

Deadfall

Jonathan lay awake in the Pigeonhole, where the day’s old heat went to die, listening to the whispering in the corners of the room. Something about this room, the way it was shaped, made it an echo chamber or something—distant, scratchy, indistinct voices, rising and falling in volume, but constant. He might have thought he was going crazy, if not for the fact that he only heard the voices here, in this room.

He’d dozed in and out of consciousness for a few hours, but had woken before dawn from a suffocating, claustrophobic nightmare, and couldn’t get back to sleep. Reality wasn’t much better than the dream of suffocation; the dimensions of the Pigeonhole had never seemed so stifling. This attic room was tiny, tucked in under the sloping roof, the walls painted eggshell white. The single small window looked out over Ash Street, but there wasn’t even a sill, and no place to put a fan. The bed was pushed up under the lowest part of the ceiling, leaving a little space at the end to walk around. The bathroom was slightly more spacious than an airplane lavatory, and the shower was approximately the size of a telephone booth. No kitchen, no storage except the space under the bed—at least it was cheap, and the location couldn’t be beat.

Jonathan lay, naked, considering the dimensions of his new home, his exhaustion a constant thing now but bearable, the better part of his drunkenness seemingly gone—he’d forced himself to drink several glasses of water from the sink before falling into bed. He was afraid to look at the clock and see how many hours were left before first light.

Jonathan thought about getting up and doing some work. If he was going to be awake and sober, he might as well be productive. He hadn’t worked in the Pigeonhole yet—it was nicer to go downstairs to the café, though he could easily lose track of time staring at Garamond Ray’s paintings. The depth and texture of the murals were extraordinary, far superior to the rest of Ray’s work. All the articles about Ray talked about the house in Santa Cruz where he’d painted his last murals, where he’d disappeared during the Loma Prieta quake. His last works were his greatest, everyone agreed, and there had been a few small, bad photographs, enough to pique Jonathan’s interest. So he’d come to Santa Cruz, and looked for the cheapest apartment he could find—which was, miraculously, in the same house as Ray’s paintings. It was almost enough to make him believe in Fate.

But work seemed like too much trouble now. His thoughts drifted, and focus seemed impossible. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep again, but the darkness pressed in against him, oppressive, and the voices in the corners murmured. He gave up and looked at the digital alarm clock sitting on the chest of drawers: 4:17 a.m.

Groaning, he rolled over in bed, thinking about the past few days, trying—his eternal struggle—to focus on the positive, and not the frightening, the frustrating, or the irritating. He’d gotten into a lot of fights when he was younger, in high school, but he’d never come up against anything like Jane before, someone so off-the-charts crazy. Jonathan had straightened himself out and gone to college, and he didn’t like these recent, brief bouts of violence in his life; they brought back bad memories. But there were good things here, too: Lindsay had made him feel welcome, Marzi made him feel all
sorts
of things, he had a lot of new ideas about the thesis, and the murals were better than he’d imagined, from the bloodstained dignity of the gods in the Teatime Room to the leering Harlequin in the Circus Room to the saturated air of the Ocean Room.

Which made him wonder, as he’d been wondering all night, about the Desert Room. Marzi had described it, but only vaguely: a poison yellow sun, swarming scorpions, cartoon cacti. He couldn’t
imagine
it, not really, which was why he was an art theorist rather than an artist himself, he supposed. If Marzi had come back with photographs, that would have been good enough to appease his curiosity, but the camera had screwed up somehow, and he had nothing. If only he could
see
! So what if the floorboards were rotting in the Desert Room? He could be careful. It was maddening to have his life’s work thwarted by something so trivial.

He sat up, thinking he might go down the street to the open-all-night Saturn Café and have a steamed milk to make him drowsy, so he could sleep into the later morning, maybe.

“Trapdoor.” The word came from the ceiling somewhere, in a dry, spidery voice, more distinct than the usual acoustic ghost voices, and Jonathan jerked his head up in surprise, but there was only darkness there, of course, no one clinging to the place where the wall met the sloping ceiling. Jonathan stepped to the desk and turned on the lamp anyway, peering into the corners. Was it someone shouting down the street, their voice bouncing to him from an odd direction? He looked out the window, but there was no one in sight.

“Trapdoor,” Jonathan said, and then looked at the ragged green carpet under his feet. Jonathan didn’t have a great sense of spatial relationships, but he knew his room was directly above the main room—the Space Room—downstairs. And the old access to the attic was a trapdoor. He’d noticed that earlier tonight.

Jonathan knelt and peeled the carpet away from the wall. It wasn’t even tacked down—it was just a remnant cut to fit, more or less, the strange dimensions of the Pigeonhole. The carpet came up easily in his hands, and he tugged it back from the corner, revealing the scarred wood underneath.

There. A plywood panel set flush into the floor, with a couple of nails driven in, more to hold it in place than to truly secure it. Jonathan went to his bag and rummaged until he found his Swiss army knife. He opened the short blade, slid it under the edge of the plywood, and pushed. The edge of the board popped up, nails barely resisting. The plywood had been cut to size and nailed over the trapdoor, which was now revealed, just a thin board held up by a rusty old spring-and-hinge assembly. Jonathan set the plywood covering aside.

Still kneeling, he pressed experimentally against the trapdoor.

The hinge squealed horribly, making Jonathan wince, but the door moved. It swung down.

Jonathan chewed his lip. He could get down there, now, he knew, take his flashlight and slip into the Desert Room and finally get a look. No one would ever have to know. He could write about the room with authority, but claim his sources were all secondhand. It wasn’t so much for the paper, anyway; it was for
him,
for his need to know. The only problem was getting back up to the Pigeonhole afterward. He could wedge something in to keep the trapdoor open, but it was about ten feet from the floor, at least. He could lower himself and drop a few feet without ill effects, but how would he get back up again? There were alarms on the doors and windows, and Jonathan wasn’t James Bond enough to confidently disconnect them, so he couldn’t just walk outside and go back up the stairs to his room. Maybe he could make a rope of his clothes . . . He shook his head. Yeah. That would work, because this was a bad movie, right? Jesus. Better to just forget it.

“The side door,” the spider voice on the ceiling whispered, and this time Jonathan stood up and said, “What the
fuck
?” The voice was too distinct, too
close
. But he remembered, now: There was a door in the Teatime Room, blocked off by tables, and it opened onto the space underneath the stairs that led to the Pigeonhole. Maybe that door wasn’t connected to the alarm. He couldn’t remember if there were wires on it or not. Maybe not—it clearly wasn’t in regular use, there was a table in front of it, so maybe no one had thought to attach it to the alarms. It was probably locked, but it could be unlocked from the inside, and he could slip out that way, couldn’t he? And if that didn’t work, he could always just
leave,
alarm be damned. He wasn’t planning to steal anything, and he could be back in his room long before the cops arrived.

He got dressed slowly. He was really going to do this. Drop
Mission: Impossible
–style through the ceiling, take a look around, and get out. The flashlight would help at first, but he’d be able to turn on the light in the Desert Room, since there were no windows there to reveal his activities to potential witnesses outside. Jonathan slipped his little flashlight into his pocket, then sat on the floor, on the edge of the trapdoor. He pushed open the trap with his feet and began to lower himself down.

The spring-loaded trapdoor pushed against his back, trying to close. Jonathan felt as if he were in the jaws of a particu-larly weak mousetrap. He held on to the edge of the trapdoor and eased himself down, like lowering himself from a pull-up. The trapdoor, still trying to close, scraped up his shoulders, his neck, and along the back of his head, all rather painfully. Then Jonathan was past it, his head clear—and the trapdoor, no longer held open by his body, whipped closed, its edge slamming brutally against his knuckles. “Fuck!” he cried, and let go. He fell, his fingers dragging against the edge of the trapdoor with sharp wet stings of pain. Jonathan dropped a few feet to the floor, which hurt his ankles more than he’d expected, a pair of stabbing agonies shooting through his joints. He crouched and cradled his fingers against his chest, then put each knuckle to his lips, one by one, tasting blood on all of them, feeling the little curled bits of flesh where the skin had been scraped.

So much for
Mission: Impossible
. He stood, shaking his hands against the cool air. There was more light here than he’d expected. The streetlights out front shone through the bay window and glass front doors. He could see well, but people outside might be able to see him, too. Fortunately, there weren’t many people out at four-thirty in the morning . . . but early risers would be getting up soon. He should hurry.

Jonathan went into the dark kitchen and turned on the flashlight, a weak beam of light illuminating the mutant sunflowers on the walls. He washed his hands in the sink, hissing as the water hit his scraped knuckles.

Then he turned. There it was. The door to the Desert Room. All he had to do was open it, and step inside.

Jonathan touched the doorknob, almost reverently, and turned it. The door opened smoothly and silently. He didn’t shine the flashlight in, because he didn’t want to see the room piecemeal. He wanted to see the murals all at once, in full light. He aimed the flashlight at the floor and groped along the wall on either side of the door until he found the light switch. Then, with his hand resting there, he stepped inside and shut the door behind him. He switched off the flashlight and stood for a moment in the total dark, listening to the silence, smelling the mildew.

He flipped on the light, the bare bulb overhead briefly dazzling him, though it was dusty and low-watt. Blinking and squinting, he peered around as his eyes adjusted. The paintings were not the first thing he noticed. The room really
was
filthy and cluttered, and he took in the broken shelves, the monolithic old espresso machine, the jagged pieces of Styrofoam packing material, the sagging floor. He’d have to watch his step. He’d had enough falls for one evening.

Then he looked at the paintings. They were remarkable, despite the blooms of mold. But they weren’t at all like Marzi—or the art books, for that matter—had described them. The mural was always described as desert-themed, and while there was desert aplenty here, that wasn’t the prevailing motif. Jonathan would have called it the Old West Room, or the Cowboy Room, though there were neither cows nor their keepers in evidence, or any other living things. What of the cacti, the scorpions, the vultures he’d read about? There were none of those.

The murals depicted a ghost town. The storefronts were weathered, signs faded or hanging by one corner, bat-wing doors splashed with blood, windows dusty and broken. A pair of photorealistic snakeskin boots lay in the street near a pile of desiccated horseshit. There were hitching posts with ragged tethers tied to them, the animals they’d secured long since escaped or stolen. Jonathan turned around slowly, noticing more small details. A skull rested on a windowsill, and a wind chime made of fingerbones hung over the general store’s porch. The skeleton of a cat lay, paws outstretched, just inches from the skeleton of a rat; that should have been black humor, Tom and Jerry go to Boot Hill, but the bones were so finely detailed, down to the bits of gristle still clinging to the joints, that it was chilling instead. The ground was dust, glittering with flecks of mica. The windows of the sheriff’s office were shattered, and through them Jonathan glimpsed the shadowy hulks of medieval torturing equipment: a rack, a wheel, and the smooth curve of an iron maiden. The murals were astonishing, a monstrous reconsideration of the popular conception of the “Wild West,” and Jonathan was already composing paragraphs in his mind about Ray’s intentions. The room was a masterpiece.

Then he noticed the door on the far wall. Noticed the doorknob, actually, since the door itself looked like part of the painting, a door leading into an unmarked storefront. But the brass knob jutted out into the room, proving its reality. Was it a bit of three-dimensional sculpture, a knob Ray had nailed to the wall in order to make the door look more real? Or
was
it a real door?

“Open it,” the spider voice said, and this time Jonathan didn’t flinch. He simply stepped forward, enchanted by the notion of opening a door
into
the painting—because that was what seemed likely to happen, what
must
happen. Ray had done his work well, and created the illusion of entrance, suggested that it would be possible for Jonathan—for anyone—to go from observer to participant, to step into the painting itself. It was a masterly stroke, one which Jonathan could explore at length in his paper, and already he was thinking of comparing it to various famous trompe l’oeils—though really, this was the
opposite
of a trompe l’oeil; it wasn’t a painting designed to look real, but instead something real designed to look like part of a painting—of talking about Ray’s desire to truly engage viewers, to bring them into his work.

Jonathan reached for the polished knob. He expected the brass to be cool, but it was warm, almost pulsing in his hand. He turned the knob easily and tugged open the door, which, once started, seemed to open by itself, as if something on the other side were pushing. Light poured in from the doorway, blinding and searing compared to the dusty bulb overhead, and Jonathan couldn’t see anything, couldn’t understand what was happening. Then something grabbed him, seized him by one arm and the back of the neck, and dragged him through the door, into the light. Jonathan struggled against the thing that held him, the thing that stank of gunsmoke and dry snakeskin and whiskey and blood. The thing thrust its hand against Jonathan’s chest, somehow
into
his chest, dry fingers squeezing his heart, and then it threw him down into the dirt.