The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl (28 page)

The crocodile opened its jaws and started forward again. Marzi wondered how many times people had told Jonathan they were trying to help him, right before they beat him up, or stole his money, or arrested him. She trained the gun on the crocodile, trying to justify it to herself—surely it was okay to kill this vicious, defensive part of Jonathan. It couldn’t be doing him any good, it was an artifact of his old hard life, right? But she knew it was
his,
and that by killing it, she would diminish him. But if that was the only way to
save
him . . .

“Damn it,” Lindsay shouted. “We’ve got your hero here, too, Garamond fucking Ray!”

“Hero?” Ray said, bewildered.

“He’s a big fan,” Marzi said.

The crocodile hesitated.

“Tell him you’re here!” Lindsay hissed.

“Um,” Ray said. “Yes, this is Garamond Ray. Care to, ah, let us pass?”

The crocodile tilted its head, sidled sideways, and began to climb up the wall, like a gecko. It reached the ceiling and hung above them, upside-down, watching them with onyx eyes.

“I guess we should go on,” Marzi said, and they walked warily under the crocodile, Marzi wondering what it would feel like to have several hundred pounds of animate, biting stone fall on her head. It was easy to imagine, and for the first time Marzi was grateful that she didn’t have much control over reality here.

“Now when you say ‘hero,’ ” Ray began.

“He’s writing a thesis about you,” Lindsay said.

“You only get critical attention after you’re dead. Or presumed dead,” Ray said, but he sounded pleased.

“I think this is the inner chamber,” Marzi said. There was a door at the end of the corridor—a very normal unfinished wooden door, like those inside any old house.

“That was easy,” Ray said.

“I think once we got past the crocodile, everything else decided to leave us alone.” Marzi turned and smiled at Lindsay. “That was brave, Linds.”

“Yeah, well. I just wish hearing it was
us
had been enough to get rid of the crocodile.”

“Don’t be too hard on Jonathan. He’s in a bad way.” Marzi turned the doorknob—it was cheap, plastic painted gold—and pushed open the door into a fairly small room, dominated by a golden sarcophagus resting on a platform. A crystal chandelier hung overhead, filled with lit candles, making their torch unnecessary. The other details were more ordinary: filing cabinets on the walls, bookshelves, a desk, a few chairs, a liquor cabinet. Lindsay went to the shelves, touching the books. “These are made of stone! They’re not real books!”

“They’re replicas, I guess,” Marzi said. “To serve him in the afterlife.” She shivered. “But I think they
should
be real books. The Outlaw filled Jonathan up with death. He’s petrifying at the core.”

“What’s in the filing cabinets?” Ray asked, touching the handle on one of the drawers.

“At a guess? Everything. Everything Jonathan knows, everything he’s done, everything he is.”

Ray took his hand away from the handle. “This is heavy shit you’ve gotten us into, Marzi. We are
not
meant to be here.”

“I know. But I bet the contents of those filing cabinets are turning to stone, too. We’ve got to wake Jonathan up.”

“And how do we do that?” Ray asked.

Marzi shrugged. “Trial and error. And hope we don’t err too much on the side of error.” She looked at the sarcophagus. It was intricately carved, but not with the image of Jonathan—the bas-relief on the lid was actually that of a mummy, wrapped in cerements, robbed of identity.

Lindsay was still investigating the room, and when she got to the liquor cabinet she said, “Ew. Guys, come see this.” Marzi went to her, and Lindsay pointed out the stone jars behind the row of liquor bottles. The lids of the jars were animal heads, familiar to Marzi from Ray’s painting of the Teatime Room—there was an eagle’s head, a jackal, an ibis. “I guess . . . his internal organs are in there?” Lindsay said.

“Ha,” Ray said. “That’d be a trick, since
we’re
inside Jonathan’s internal organs.”

“They’re his internal something,” Marzi said. “Things he doesn’t need anymore, I guess, but that he’s still holding on to.” She looked around the small room, knowing it was filled with symbolic keys to Jonathan’s mind, knowing she had an unprecedented opportunity to learn his deepest secrets, to uncover the answers to every mystery she might ever face in their relationship.

Also knowing that to take advantage of that opportunity would be nothing short of rape.

Marzi went to the sarcophagus and said, “Let’s get this thing open, shall we?”

She slipped the pry bar under the lid and heaved. The lid moved a fraction. “Little help?”

Ray came over and added his considerable weight to the bar, and the lid groaned and rose a few inches. Lindsay shoved the lid, and though she didn’t have much weight to put behind it, the push was enough. The lid slid off and hit the floor, ringing like a gong, a deafening sound in the small space.

The sarcophagus was filled to the brim with clean desert sand. Without hesitation—hesitation would have made her too afraid—Marzi began scooping out the sand with her bare hands. Ray swore, and joined in, and Lindsay started digging, too.

“I feel something!” Marzi cried, and started clearing sand away from the place where she expected Jonathan’s face to be.

Instead she found his bare feet—but they weren’t wrapped in sere cloth, and they weren’t withered and dry. She rushed around to the foot end of the sarcophagus and started digging sand away from that end.

Marzi uncovered Jonathan’s face. His eyes were closed, his face dirty, his lips slightly parted, sand between them. She wanted to cry, seeing him like this, buried—she hoped—alive.

“We’re doing this ass-backward,” Ray complained, and reached into the sarcophagus. He lifted Jonathan out, sand streaming away from his limp, nude body, and set him down on the floor.

“Now what?” Ray said, and then Jonathan started to cough, a horrible, sand-choked sound, like a dying engine. Marzi knelt and turned him over, and sand poured out of his mouth in a disconcertingly long, steady stream.

“We need water!” Lindsay said.

“We’d better get back to the fucking Oasis, then,” Ray snapped.

Jonathan was moving on his own now, and he crouched on hands and knees, coughing, spitting up sand, until he collapsed, facedown.

“Oh, Jonathan,” Marzi said, brushing the sand from his hair. “Please be okay.”

Then the pyramid collapsed. Not onto them, but outward, in a soundless slow-motion explosion. As the bricks fell, they faded, most disappearing before they hit the ground, and sunlight poured in on Marzi, Ray, Lindsay, and Jonathan. The crypts and pyramids around them faded, disappearing, replaced by trees and vines and bushes that sprang up everywhere around them. The stone under them became grassy earth, and the platform and sarcophagus faded away. The bookshelves and filing cabinets remained, but now all the objects were real again, not afterlife replicas carved in stone. Marzi noted that the new landscape wasn’t totally lush—there were a few dead trees, and one that looked lightning-struck, and a few burned stumps—but she suspected those were ordinary traumas, wounds that the garden of Jonathan’s heart had sustained in the course of his life. Still not good, but they weren’t the work of the Outlaw. Jonathan turned over on the grass and blinked up at them. “What—” he said, but Marzi interrupted him.

“Join hands!” she said, grabbing Ray and Lindsay’s hands. Lindsay reached for Jonathan, and Marzi said, “No, not him, just us!” She didn’t want to think of what would happen if they tried to take Jonathan out of his own heart. The three linked hands, and Ray and Lindsay closed their eyes without being told. Marzi closed hers, too, and concentrated on getting
out
.

It was like being fired from a cannon. Ray was right; they weren’t supposed to be there. Getting in had been difficult, but there was no resistance getting out.

They opened their eyes, back in The Oasis, and Jonathan sat up from the floor, holding his head in his hands. “What happened?” he said, looking at Marzi and Lindsay with bewilderment, and a little fear—but he was all there; that was Jonathan looking back at them, back with them, alive.

“We can do introductions,” Marzi said, “and catch Jonathan up on . . . well, everything. But then we should get back through the door. I don’t like to think of what the Outlaw is doing while the sheriff is away.”

Made Wolf Meat

The dump truck looked hugely out of place on Ash Street, sticking out into the roadway even when parked right against the curb. Denis was embarrassed to be there, having followed the others in his car. He’d idly considered driving out of town, of course, but only as a sort of mental formality. He knew there was no such simple escape. At least Jane was hidden in the back of the dump truck, with the door, out of sight. Fortunately, there weren’t many people around; it was, Denis realized dully, still quite early—not even ten a.m. yet. A lot of things had happened in a very small amount of time today. There should have been people at Genius Loci, but it was still closed, a hastily hand-lettered sign taped up in the window reading “Closed due to earthquake damage.”

Denis, Beej, and the godlet stood on the sidewalk, looking at the café. “Aw, that ain’t fair,” the godlet drawled, standing on the deck with his thumbs hooked into his belt. “I wanted to kill the morning rush. And I hardly busted up anything when I got loose this morning, just a few bottles. Marzi spoils all my fun.”

“So how do we get in?” Denis asked. “There are alarms, I think.”

“Not if I don’t want there to be alarms,” the godlet said. “I’ll just open the door. Not that I’d mind if the cops came—I do like killing lawmen—but at this point it would just be a distraction.” The godlet strode toward the doors, took the doorknob in his hand, and twisted. He grunted, twisted harder, shook the knob, then stepped back.

“Huh. It seems I no longer enjoy the freedom of movement I once possessed. Not here, at least. The door won’t open for me.” A low, harsh noise emerged from his throat, like gears grinding.

“What happened?” Beej asked.

Denis knew what had happened, and it was all he could do not to laugh. “Cowboys can’t magically open locked doors,” he said. “Marzi must be getting better at imagining you.”

“Yeah, well, her imagination’s gonna be the death of her,” the godlet said.

“If she did die, what would happen to you, I wonder?” Denis said.

“When she dies, I’ll be free,” the godlet said. “Once Marzi’s dead, I can quit the costume party, and change back to what I was in the old days. But in the meantime . . . Jane! Come here, darlin’!”

Jane climbed out of the back of the truck and jumped lightly to the sidewalk, then came up the steps, smiling, eager to be of assistance.

The godlet thumped the door. “Can you get us in here with no fuss, Janey?”

Jane nodded. “Everyone step back, please. I need room. I’ve been wanting to try this.”

They all dutifully retreated down the steps, Denis feeling freakshow-conspicuous. Maybe everyone saw the godlet differently, but it seemed unlikely that any of his forms were nondescript, and Beej was practically radiating madness. He hadn’t been so bad when the godlet was away, while they were working on the door, but in the presence of the god, Beej took on a glassy-eyed fervor. And Jane . . . there were seven-car accidents that were less conspicuous than Jane.

Denis counted through multiples of nine, and hoped the process would speed up, that they’d get inside, out of view. He hunched his shoulders and tried to think invisible thoughts.

Jane began to melt. Her shoulders and arms ran like ice cream in the sun, and her face lost all shape. Her body sank to the deck, becoming a puddle of mud on the boards. Denis stared—there had been hints of this mutability before, but it was still astonishing to see how fully Jane had thrown off the tyranny of shape.

Denis never would have left her to die if he’d known she would subsequently become something like this.

Jane flowed through the crack under the door, oozing slowly but inexorably, and Denis was surprised that she didn’t leave any mud on the deck when she departed, carrying every particle of her mud-body with her. He approved of her cleanliness.

Jane re-formed on the far side of the door. “It doesn’t look like the alarm’s on,” she said.

“That was sloppy of Marzi,” the godlet said.

“Maybe she just doesn’t care if you come back,” Denis said. “Maybe it’ll be easier for her to trap you again, if you’re so close to your old prison.”

“I can’t be caught that way again,” the godlet said. “You can’t keep an outlaw in a jail cell, not in the kinds of stories Marzi favors. The bad guys always escape, or get busted out. The only way you can stop a real outlaw is in a mess of blood and bullets, or else swingin’ at the end of a rope. Neither of those seems a likely end for me.”

Jane opened the doors wide, and propped them open with doorstops.

“Go and fetch the door,” the godlet said, and Jane trotted obediently away, to the rear of the dump truck. She clambered up the side with cockroachlike ease, disappeared from view, then climbed back out. She’d grown an extra pair of arms to carry the door over her head, making her look like a Hindu idol sculpted from mud. Denis wondered if the resemblance was deliberate on her part.

She brought the door up the steps, carried it into the café’s front room, and set it down by the counter. Denis realized that Jane hadn’t once commented on the door as an objet d’art. Normally, he and Jane would have enjoyed a spirited debate over its merits. She was, indeed, utterly changed, and not for the better. Jane closed the doors again, keeping her extra arms.

“What the fuck’s going on?” Hendrix came from the Ocean Room, carrying an empty plastic trash can, his face red, his dreadlocks swaying. “Beej, Denis, Crazy Girl, you’re banned for life! And who the hell’s—” Hendrix squinted and frowned. “Is that Ozzy Osbourne?” he said, bewildered. “Why’s he dressed like John Wayne?”

The godlet drew one of his guns and handed it to Beej, who took it automatically.

“No,” Denis said. “This isn’t necessary, it’s just
Hendrix,
he—”

“Prove yourself to me, son,” the godlet said, and put his hand on Beej’s shoulder.

Beej raised the pistol in both hands, visibly trembling. He licked his lips. “Sorry,” he whispered, and pulled the trigger.

Denis had never seen anyone shot before. It was louder than he would have expected. Hendrix flew backward, dropping his trash can, and fell. His arms and legs spasmed, and there was a great deal of blood—Beej had shot him in the chest—and then that was all. He stopped moving.

“Good boy,” the godlet said, and took his gun from Beej’s unresisting hand.

Jane put her arms around Denis from behind. “That’s it, then,” she said. “Now you’re the only one of us who hasn’t taken a life. I’m sure you’ll get your chance soon.”

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Denis said.

“Pussy,” the godlet said absentmindedly. “Come on, Beej. Now I have total faith in you. You deserve what you’re about to receive. You’ll be . . . exalted.”

Beej stared at Hendrix for a moment, then looked up, and Denis could see the switch flip in his old friend’s head. Beej just . . . shut Hendrix out. Made a little bypass in his mind that jumped over the experience of killing the man. It was a feat of repression that Denis almost admired. “I was thinking,” Beej said. “Maybe I could do something with the murals?” He gestured toward the Ocean Room.

“You do whatever you think’s best,” the godlet said. “So long as you kill Marzi.”

Beej nodded, but he looked unhappy. “I couldn’t just . . . keep her there? Make sure she doesn’t get out?”

“Hell, son, that’s what she tried to do with me, and you see how well
that
worked. No, killing’s the only way. Half measures won’t do. You have to go, soon. I’m fond of you, boy. I’ll miss you.”

Beej nodded. “Yes, god. I’ll miss you, too. I guess I should go in.”

“Let’s take the door to the Desert Room,” the godlet said. “You should get a look at it first, you know.”

“Of course,” Beej said.

They went, Beej first, then the godlet and Jane, who carried the door in her extra arms, Denis last.

They approached the Desert Room, passing through the kitchen. The godlet seemed to grow smaller as they walked, until he hardly had to stoop to pass through the doorway. The Desert Room was much
less
than Denis had expected—the paintings water-stained, the room itself filthy and junk-strewn. But who said portals to the medicine lands had to be impressive? Denis stood off to one side, wrinkling his nose to spare himself any odors, trying not to touch anything. Jane set the metal door down in the middle of the room.

Beej looked around for a while, his forehead wrinkled in concentration, then sighed and nodded. “I’m ready.” He stepped toward Denis and extended a sweaty hand.

Denis just stared at it. That hand had fired a pistol just moments ago. The godlet growled, faintly, and Denis decided he couldn’t afford the luxury of horrified indignation. He shook Beej’s hand. “Wish me luck,” Beej said.

“Luck,” Denis said.

Beej slid aside the bolt that held the metal door shut. The door opened with a squeal of hinges, and Beej looked inside. “It’s all . . . swirly,” he said, dreamy and content.

“In you go, then,” the godlet said.

Beej stepped through the doorway. He didn’t pass through and emerge from the other side. He disappeared.

“Oh, fuck me,” Denis said. He really hadn’t believed it would work, but it had. They’d made a door to another place, a little primal pocket of unshaped void, and now Beej was there, presumably giving shape to the nothingness.

Jane shut the door slowly and slid the bolt closed.

“There,” the godlet said. “Let’s get a move on. We’re burning daylight. Pick up the door, Janey. And you, Denis, open the other door. The one in the wall.”

Denis looked at him for a moment. He was terrified, though he’d believed his capacity for fear to be burned out. Beej was gone. Say what you would about him, he was
human,
not like these creatures, one who loved him, one who suffered him for his usefulness. But if he wanted to live through the day, he had to attend to the matter at hand, and do as the godlet said.

At first, Denis couldn’t even
see
the door, and then it popped into focus like an optical illusion resolving—just a door set into a painting of a building, so that the door looked like part of the painting. He touched the knob gingerly: It was strangely warm.

Denis hesitated, thinking. Could he shove this monster back through the door, into this prison? The godlet
was
smaller now, and seemed less powerful. That sense that the godlet’s presence extended through unseen dimensions was no longer so overpowering. Still, the godlet was made of chrome, it was strong, and it had guns.

Denis gave in. This was not the moment, not his opportunity. He opened the door, which didn’t even have the good grace to squeak ominously, and a hot wind blew into his face. There was a Western scene beyond the door, storefronts and hitching posts, and a sun like molten gold. It was stark, bleak, and strangely inviting. Beyond this door was a place that burned away complications, a place where Denis could hide, from himself as much as anyone else.

He could run there, and he knew the godlet wouldn’t follow.

“Do it, then,” the godlet said softly.

Denis stiffened, but didn’t turn around. “I thought you couldn’t read minds?”

The godlet snorted. “Don’t have to read minds to know you’re thinking of running away. So do it. Door’s right there.”

“I’d die, wouldn’t I? You’d like that.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Your sort is well equipped to survive over there. Artists.” He spat the word. “You’re experts at seeing the world as it’s not. Over there, the world becomes what you see, a little, anyway. Marzi’s got as much of that kind of power as I’ve ever seen, even more than Garamond Ray. She shines like the sun. Beej is good, too; he’s a bonfire, at least. And you . . . well, you’re less than them, but I reckon you can muster a few dozen units of candlepower when your juices are flowing.”

Denis turned slightly and looked at the godlet. “Talent isn’t everything. There are contextual issues, learned skills, awareness of—”

“Not over there. Over there, talent is everything. Well, talent, and practice, and self-control. You think you’re too good to bother with practice, and as for self-control . . . you’d probably prefer it if I didn’t go into that here.” He inclined his head a fraction toward Jane. “Still, you could get by there. So why don’t you go?”

Jane looked at him, her eyes pleading with him to stay.

Denis just looked at the godlet. This was his out, he realized. It was this, or stay with the monsters until the end. He looked through the door.

If the world over there responded to him, became the place he dreamed of . . . it would be all pure and unblemished, chrome and grinding wheels and whiteness. Denis would be the only imperfection there, and as such, he would have to be destroyed, stripped into clean, component molecules, ground away to nothing.

Denis shuddered. Better a dirty life than no life at all. Seeing Hendrix die had brought that point home. “No, I’ll stay,” he said. “I’m not ready to forsake this world yet.”

Jane whooped in delight and rushed past the godlet, embracing Denis with one set of arms, while the other set held the weight of the metal door above their heads. “Oh, Denis!” she cried. “You stayed, you’re staying with me!”

Denis began to regret his decision. Better a clean death, perhaps, than a messy life with Jane. But he’d made his choice.

“Yes, Jane. I’m staying.”

The godlet growled. “Enough, Jane. Put the door in place.”

Denis looked at the godlet and grinned. He
got
it—Why had it taken him so long? The godlet had wanted Denis to bugger off through the door, because he was afraid to kill Denis himself! Sure, Jane loved the god, but it was readily apparent that Jane loved
Denis,
too. The god needed Jane, and was afraid to excite her wrath by killing Denis! If the godlet told Jane now that Denis had murdered her, Jane might not even
believe
him. Denis was safe, as long as they didn’t go back up into the hills, as long as the god couldn’t show Jane her own corpse, the evidence of Denis’s crime. Maybe he’d make it through this after all.

Jane let go of him, shooed him away, and set the metal sculpture in front of the open door to the medicine lands. She pushed the sculpture toward the door, against it—the door frames were sized to match exactly—and then the metal frame went
into
the wall, melted into the painted plaster, became part of the painting. The buffalo skull lost its three-dimensionality and became a flat painting. Jane kept pushing and grunting until the door disappeared entirely into the wall. Now it looked like a comic book illustration of the sculpture he and Beej had made, a metal door frame set into a wooden wall.