by T. A. Pratt
“Where is Marla?” she said. “Wanting to meet at midnight, on a fake volcano? I can appreciate the showmanship, but I don’t like to be kept waiting.”
“About that,” Rondeau said, and then grabbed Pelham and jumped off the volcano, down to the pool of frozen water surrounding its base. They landed hard and rolled, flopping onto their backs and looking up at the volcano looming above them.
“What was that in aid of?” Regina peered over the edge at them. “If you’re wasting my time – “
The demon loomed up behind her, wrapped her in its arms, and then pulled her backward. The volcano flickered. For a moment, it wasn’t a hokey collection of fake stones and pipes and gas and hidden speakers with an ornamental lava flow down the side. It became the cone of an active volcano, dribbling molten rock, rumbling, spitting cinders and acidic smoke, its heat so tremendous that Rondeau was afraid his coat would burst into flame.
Then, in an instant, the volcano was just fake rocks again, and the demon and Regina were gone.
“Is it getting warmer?” Rondeau asked.
“I think these things take time,” Pelham said.
They high-fived, weakly, though it didn’t make a sound because of their gloves.
•
The air was definitely warmer by the time they got back to the hotel – still a cold desert night, but no longer killing cold. They went upstairs, both too exhausted to celebrate, and collapsed into their respective beds.
Some time later, the demon appeared by Rondeau’s bed, emerging from a wall turned into a curtain of flame. “I want that favor now.”
Rondeau groaned. “Can you turn down your fiery glow? I’m trying to get some sleep here.”
“It’s time to get up. And get out. I want your share of the hotel and casino. And I want all your money. And all your stuff. Well, no. You can keep, say, ten grand, I’m not a monster. Seed money for your new life someplace else.”
Rondeau sat up slowly. Maybe this was a nightmare. “I don’t think giving you all my worldly possessions counts as a favor, exactly.”
The demon growled. “It’s not mercy-killing anyone. Or violating your moral code. A young thought-construct like me has to look out for himself. There’s a power vacuum in this city. I’ve got the right look to be the new Pit Boss of Las Vegas – I just need the resources to grease a few wheels. That’s where you come in.”
“Look, I’m kind of like your... creator, or father, or something, right, so maybe we can work something out.”
“You are like my father. I want my inheritance early. And I want you to move far away. Who wants to live in the same town as his dad? I talked to Pelham, he’s already getting packed. He says you can live with him in his RV. Nice, huh? You’ve got a good friend there.”
“I did not think this through.” Rondeau put his face in his hands. What was he losing here? The twenty-four-hour-concierge service. The hot and cold running cute boys. The good booze. The not ever having to actually do any work. Oh, gods. He’d have to do work again. “There’s a reason I don’t get put in charge of killing ice witches. I fuck it up.”
“Who said Regina’s dead? She’s in a fiery little pocket dimension I made. She’s not happy in there, either. Fulfill your end of the bargain...” The demon leaned forward and exhaled sulfurous breath on Rondeau’s face. “Or I’ll let her out.”
“Is a cashier’s check okay?” Rondeau said.
Marzi in Genius Loci
A dead movie star came into the café and ordered a mocha chai. Marzi stared at him: his tropical blue eyes, his affably scruffy two-days-past-shaving face, his easy smile, his curly black hair. As she went through the motions of making the drink, she kept casting glances at him, and said, “You know, you look a lot like – “
He nodded. “Yeah, I know. I get it all the time. But, hey, you can do worse than looking like one of People’s Sexiest Men of the Year... even if it was quite a few years ago.”
Marzi didn’t think he was flirting – for some reason he struck her as gay, though now that she thought about it, maybe it was the dead movie star who’d been gay. What was that guy’s name? Bradley something. He’d been a big deal for a little while, starring in quirky independent movies and then a couple of big-budget ones that hadn’t even sucked. Marzi didn’t particularly follow the tabloids or the celebrities-behaving-badly TV shows, but as she recalled he’d had some kind of breakdown on a movie set, gotten into drugs, dropped out of the public eye, and pulled a serious vanishing act, of the without-a-trace variety. Maybe he wasn’t even definitely dead – his boyfriend had died, though, in an overdose, maybe? Had they both died? Could be the real actor was just living like a recluse in Mexico or something. She’d have to check Wikipedia later.
Marzi passed him a pint glass full of mocha chai and reached out to take his proffered ten dollar bill. Their fingers brushed, and he sucked in a surprised breath and then grabbed her hand tightly. Before she could yell at him or pull away, he released her, running a hand through his hair. He had the kind of hair that made him look even cuter when it was mussed. “I... sorry about that.”
“Right. Here’s your change.” She put it down on the counter, not giving him a chance to touch her again. She hadn’t had to throw anybody out of the café in ages, and if he behaved from here on, he wouldn’t necessarily make her break that streak.
“Hey, look, do you have a break coming up? I think... maybe I need to talk to you.”
She shook her head. “I own the place. No breaks for me. Heavy lies the head that wears the crown.”
“Don’t I know it,” he murmured, then squared his shoulders and looked her in the eye. He said, “We should talk about gods and doors, okay?”
Marzi let out a little involuntary groan. Tessa came around the corner lugging a full bus tray, and Marzi said, “Take over the counter for me.”
Tessa grunted. She was tiny physically, though she seemed bigger because of the many piercings and the bad attitude. She was a pretty good employee, attitude aside. Had Marzi ever grunted her way through a workday back when she was just an employee here, working for the old manager Hendrix? Poor Hendrix, who’d been killed by the acolyte of something like a god, that came into this world through something like a door. Speaking of.
“Come on.” Marzi led the guy into the Teatime Room, one of six rooms in the café – formerly a rambling old Victorian house – painted with murals by local artist and noted malcontent Garamond Ray. This room featured life-sized paintings of animal-headed Egyptian gods seated at little round tables, like a Parisian street café. The room wasn’t usually crowded, having fewer power outlets than the other rooms, and on this particular weekday afternoon it was entirely deserted.
“Wow.” The man leaned over a table to peer at a painting of a lion-headed woman pushing down the plunger on a French press, crushing the human heart inside. “This is wild. What great paintings.”
“Yeah, we’re famous. There was a spread in Art Review a few years back, you can buy a copy online. Sit.”
He complied, dropping into one of the mismatched wooden chairs across the wobbly rectangular table from her. “Did you paint it? I get, ah, kind of an artistic vibe off you.”
What did that mean? Her hair wasn’t even pink anymore. She’d dyed it brown before she went to the bank to get a business loan to take over Genius Loci, and had let it stay that way. By Santa Cruz standards, she looked appallingly conservative. “Nope, these aren’t mine. They’ve been here since the late ‘80s.”
“Oh. I could have sworn you were an artist – “
“I do a webcomic. Look. Gods and doors. You got my attention. Who are you? What do you want?”
“I’m... my friends call me B.”
“Fascinating,” she said. “What should I call you?”
“Bradley, then. And you are?”
“Marzi.” She frowned. “The dead movie star you look like was named Bradley.”
“True enough. Bradley Bowman. And who says he’s dead?”
“Boy, you drop out of sight for a few years, and people consign you to the dustbin of cinematic history. No, I’m alive. Just... keeping out of the public eye.”
“Shiiiit.” Marzi drew out the syllable appreciatively. “I knew a girl in college who had a poster of you on her wall. You were pretty good in that one movie, about the musician who got hooked on crack.”
“The Glass Harp. Thanks. I never had much trouble playing addicts. Method acting and all that.”
Marzi snorted. “You look pretty straight to me now, apart from talking about gods and doors.”
“I never said I didn’t almost die, and you can overdose and live to regret it. I hit rock bottom, dug my way down a little deeper with pickaxe and shovel, then finally started dragging myself out of the hole. Kinda like crawling out of your own grave, zombie-style, but here I am, up in the sunshine again.” He leaned forward. “Now I’m in a different line of work. The pay isn’t as good as being a movie star, but at least it’s dangerous and the hours are lousy. See, sometimes... I have these dreams.” He searched her face, and though she tried to betray nothing, he nodded like she’d given everything away. “Yeah. You know about those dreams, don’t you? You’re sensitive, like me. In kind, if not degree. My dreams got so bad I did a lot of drugs to keep them quiet, but I’ve learned to live with the visions. They don’t just come when I’m sleeping, either. When I touched your hand, I saw doors, and mud, and cracks in the earth, and scorpions, and ... a cowboy? Some kind of Old West outlaw?”
Not some kind of outlaw – the Outlaw, a godlike spirit of destruction that Marzi had perceived as a villainous gunslinger. “That was a long time ago,” she said. Granted, some days, it felt longer ago than others. “Nowadays I draw comics and make drinks, and those are the only jobs I’m interested in. I’m out of the saving-the-world business.”
Bradley nodded. “I’ve had the urge to quit myself, but sometimes the job’s gotta be done, and there’s no one else around to do it.” He sighed. “Or the person who should be doing it is taking a long-ass nap. But anyway. I saw something else when I touched your hand, something that felt fresher – something like a shadow, but also like a snake?”
Okay. Marzi had tried the denial thing the last time weird stuff had infringed on her life, liberty, and happiness, and it hadn’t done a bit of good. In fact, putting her head in the sand (the dry desert sand) had probably made things a lot worse back then. But still. “I’m not joining your posse or whatever, all right? I’m an upstanding businesswoman these days. My days as a metaphysical gunfighter are way behind me, and I want to leave them there. But, okay. I’ll tell you what I saw, a few days ago. If you want to do something about it, that’s on you.” She gave him the story, about waking from a bad dream and seeing the shadow in the street, watching those kids disappear, looking over the things they’d left behind.
“The police didn’t find any trace of them?” Bradley said.
Marzi shook her head. “Not as far as I know. They asked us a bunch of questions, but they believed our story, as far as I can tell – at least, they don’t seem to think we chopped up the kids and hid them in the crawlspace, which I’d sort of worried about. I’m not quite old enough yet to think of cops as a force for good, you know? In my mind they’re just the people who hassle you for loud music or public intoxication. There was an article in the paper a couple of days ago, about the disappearance of three local students and their visiting friend, but I haven’t seen a follow-up about their miraculous return.”
“It ate them,” Bradley said. “The Outsider.”
Marzi suppressed a shudder. The Outsider. That was a little too close to “the Outlaw” for her taste. “The thing I fought, years ago... it didn’t look anything like a shadow. It was more... shaped by people’s expectations. My expectations, anyway. If that makes sense. The Outlaw looked like different things at different times, but it always appeared in more-or-less human form. Not like a twist of shadow.” She paused. “The Outlaw didn’t eat people, either. It shot them, sometimes. Tried to turn them into forces for chaos. It seemed more interested in wrecking the world, bringing earthquakes and mudslides and wildfires, than in preying on individuals.”
Bradley whistled. “You faced something like that? A spirit of destruction, and you beat it without any training – without any help? Somebody should give you a medal. I wonder if the powers-that-be up in San Francisco even know about the disaster you stopped?”
“Which powers? Never mind. I don’t want to be involved with that kind of spooky shit anymore. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.” She sighed. “And here I am again.”
Bradley made a sympathetic noise. “I’ve been calling this thing the Outsider because it comes from... well. Some other universe entirely. I’ve been tracking it for a couple of weeks. It’s been moving across California, eating people. Their clothes, too – it seems to consume anything organic. It eats skin and bone and hair and muscle, leather and linen and cotton, but it leaves plastic and metal and glass. Maybe it can’t tell one kind of organic matter from another yet. I think it’s trying to learn about the kind of life we have in this universe. What you described, a living shadow, that sounds a lot more substantial than it used to be. Survivors – and you are a survivor, if you got close enough to see it and live, you definitely count – described it as a disturbance in the air at first, like a heat shimmer. Then it became a shimmer with dark specks in it. Later people compared it to a swarm of flies, only instead of flies, they were just little bits of darkness, all moving around wildly. Now you say it’s a translucent serpent of shadow. It’s... gaining ontological mass, or accreting layers of reality, or something. I don’t know.”
“It’s eating,” Marzi said. “So it’s growing. That’s what you’re telling me.”
“Yeah. And I think it’s still in town. I follow... I don’t know... intuitions. Vibrations. The advice of creatures wiser than myself, sometimes, though they haven’t been a lot of help when it comes to finding this thing. I went to a beach outside of town this morning and found what I’m pretty sure was a pacemaker lying in the sand near the water. The thing was dry, so it hadn’t been there long – the tide was out – which means the Outsider took a victim earlier today. You saw the shadow days ago, too, and that’s different. The Outsider has never stayed in one place for so long. That worries me. I thought it was just wandering aimlessly... but maybe it had a destination. If it’s lingering here, maybe there’s something it wants.”
“You say it’s from... another universe?”
“It’s complicated, but that’s about right, yeah.”
Marzi had some experience with things that came from other worlds. She chose her words carefully. “In your experience, are there places where reality is... a little squishy?”
He raised an eyebrow, a mannerism that was somehow familiar – maybe she’d seen him do it in one of his movies. “There are. I take some professional interest in places like that.”
“I told you about the Outlaw – the god of earthquakes. He came to Santa Cruz through a door. A door that shouldn’t have existed, a door that didn’t exist, at least not before something wanted to walk through it. The room where that door opened, I think it’s over one of those squishy places. Reality melts and runs and re-forms in there. It seems to me, if this shadow is a creature from outside, it might be interested in places like that.” She rose. “Do you want to see it? The room where the door used to be?”
“Not especially.” He grimaced. “But I think I probably should.”
Bradley in the Wilderness
Bradley followed Marzi – and her name was so close to Marla’s; was that just coincidence, or something else? She led him out of the Teatime Room and around the café’s front counter, on through the little kitchen, where the walls were decorated with mutant sunflowers, their stems segmented like
the tails of scorpions. She paused in front of a wooden door, put her hand on the knob, and then stood there, head lowered, as if preparing herself for an ordeal. What was waiting behind that door? What would this “squishy” place look like?
Bradley thought he was doing a good job of not letting his panic and bewilderment show. He’d come in here to get a drink and think, and hadn’t expected to stumble into another psychic. Marzi didn’t have the raw power he did, but she’d apparently stumbled into some heavy shit a few years back and come through intact, which made her just as battle-hardened as Bradley himself, and a whole lot luckier.
“The last time I went in here,” Marzi said, head still bowed, “it was just a storage room, with a mural of a desert on the walls, all sand dunes and a big yellow sun and cartoony cactuses.”
“Okay,” Bradley said. “Doesn’t sound too terrifying.”
She lifted her head. “Once upon a time, there used to be a door in the far wall. A door with a brass knob. That door should have just opened to nowhere, to the inside of a wall or the alley out back, at best, but instead it opened to... somewhere else. Something terrible came through that door. After I killed it, the door disappeared.”
“Ah. And now you’re wondering, what if the door came back?”
“You’re the one who saw visions of doors, dude.” She sighed. “Might as well find out, huh?” She pulled open the door and stepped inside, and after a moment, Bradley followed.
The room filled with blinding yellow light, followed by a black interval that obliterated Bradley’s senses. In the darkness, light bloomed: a cartoon-yellow sun rising over a desert that combined the endless rolling dunes of the Sahara with towering saguaro cactuses from the Southwest. Rough stone towers like the spires in Arizona loomed in the distance, and were those pyramids? The ground shimmered and became flat, faintly glittering sand, scattered with scrub brush; then shifted again to dirty white salt flats; then again to a valley, lined with cliffs. As if all the deserts of the world had been jumbled together. As if somehow, in this place, all deserts were the same desert.