The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl

by Tim Pratt

  Someone approached from the front door, though Marzi hadn’t seen it open, and strolled across the floor unhurriedly. Where his boots touched, the carpet seemed to disappear, replaced by the rough planks of the ghost saloon. The figure was coming right toward them.

  It was the Outlaw.

  The principal villain of Marzi’s comic was an ancient sorcerer of indefinite origin, known by many names, most recently called the Outlaw. He embodied the spirit of savagery and bloodshed in the West, and he masterminded most of the nefarious activities that took place on the far side of the Western Door. His appearance was as mutable as his motives were cruel, and he appeared in a variety of guises. When Rangergirl first saw the Outlaw, the day she opened the strange door in the western wall of her tiny apartment, the villain appeared as a tall cowboy in a duster and a beaten hat, his face a mass of impenetrable shadow, his gnarled hands resting on the worn wooden gun butts at his hips. The Outlaw cast a long shadow even at high noon, even in darkened rooms, and the sound of his boot heels reverberated like a hammer on steel with each step he took, whether he walked on sand, stone, or wood. In later issues of the comic the Outlaw appeared as women, children, city slickers, and monsters, but always that long shadow, the sound of his heels, and the smell of gunsmoke gave his true identity away.

  Now the Outlaw was here, in a faded sepia form that flickered and disappeared if she looked straight at it, but still, here. Marzi wanted to move, to run, but she was paralyzed, overwhelmed by the impossibility of the creature before her. She looked away from him, to a far corner of the room, and stared until every trace of the ghost piano and its music disappeared.

  When she looked back around, the Outlaw was gone, nowhere to be seen, and all traces of the sepia saloon had vanished, too. The moment had passed, and Marzi exhaled heavily. Just her imagination taking on a life of its own. But why was she having hallucinations now? There had been pressure the last time she cracked up—the stress of school, her mother’s breast cancer. But Marzi’s life was good now. A little lonely, but good. Did there even have to be a cause? Maybe her mind was just rotten all the way through, collapsing under its own weight.

  “Marzi?” Jonathan said.

  She blinked at him. She wasn’t okay, but she could fake it. “Yeah. I just thought I saw someone I knew, across the bar—”

  The Outlaw reappeared, right behind Daniel’s chair, though the ghost saloon didn’t. The villain was more substantial than ever now, face a clot of shadows, body almost real enough to smell of gunsmoke and ancient sweat. Marzi felt the temperature drop when his shadow fell upon her.

  The Outlaw reached out and touched Daniel on the shoulder. Daniel turned his head to look behind him . . . at no one. He frowned, clearly confused, a little annoyed. Marzi started to rise from her seat, but the Outlaw’s shadow made her cold and lethargic and slow.

  The Outlaw put one of his long-barreled guns—Colt .45 Warmakers, Marzi called them in the comic—against Daniel’s right eye. Without hesitation, without delivering a one-liner, without any ceremony at all, the Outlaw pulled the trigger. The gun went off without a sound, like something from a silent-era Western film, and Daniel’s head snapped back. Marzi couldn’t shout, couldn’t even scream, as the shadow across her—or the shock within her—rendered her numb. The Outlaw started to turn, and disappeared before he even began walking away.

  Daniel fell across the table, knocking glasses and bottles aside. Lindsay shouted, and a few people in the Red Room turned their heads, curious. Marzi leaned forward and touched Daniel’s shoulder, then, when he didn’t respond, she shook him. That was enough to send him tumbling off the chair to the floor. Lindsay, Marzi, and Jonathan knelt around him, saying his name, Marzi feeling at his throat for a pulse, finding nothing, no thump of life.

  Daniel’s eyes were open. His left eye was normal, but the pupil of his right eye was obscenely dilated, the white streaked with blood.

  Cactus Country

  * * *

  Denis closed his eyes and waited for Jane to stop screaming. He counted to nine three times, but the screaming went on, so Denis acknowledged the inevitable. He would have to go in there, into the presence of whatever-she-was, and see what was wrong.

  He knocked, and the screaming choked back to a sob. “Jane? Are you all right?”

  Her voice was like rocks falling down a well. “No. I’m not all right.”

  Denis hesitated. “Should I come in?” Maybe she’d say no.

  “Please.” Her voice was low, troubled, like a storm front far off, but fast approaching.

  Denis turned the knob and pushed.

  Jane stood in the middle of the floor, in a puddle of brown ooze, her mud splashed all over the toilet, the floor tiles, and the sink. The floor of the tub was streaked with mud, and dirt swirled around and around the drain as water sprayed down from the showerhead.

  Jane stared at the tub. “I keep scrubbing, and the mud keeps washing away, but . . .” She trailed off. Still looking at the tub, she put her hand against the wall and wiped, as if wiping at a fogged window. Mud smeared across the wall. “I can’t get clean. I can’t even find my skin, Denis. I’m afraid. Look.” She extended her right forefinger and pressed it against the palm of her left hand. She pressed, applying a steady pressure, and her fingertip dimpled her palm, then sunk in, then pressed through, her finger poking out the other side, right through the back of her hand. “What’s happening to me?” she whispered.

  Something deep inside Denis, some secret mechanism, switched on. Denis often imagined his internal organs as clockwork devices. The messy chemical factory of meat and acid and bacteria disgusted him, and so he thought instead of flywheels, levers, and gears, imagining himself as one of those terrifically complex clockwork mechanisms from the eighteenth century. He knew it wasn’t true, but the idea comforted him, distracted him from the shitting shedding bleeding truth of his own human nature. Somewhere in the red-glass mechanism of his heart, a switch flipped, and the fear and disgust and horror he felt . . . went away.

  She’s a golem, he thought. Something made of mud, to look like a woman. But golems were mute, they were blobby, they had the word for “Life” written in Hebrew on their foreheads.

  More importantly, golems weren’t real. But reality suddenly seemed like a particularly negotiable currency.

  He thought of the body in the back of Jane’s car, Jane’s body. He wanted to believe it had been a hallucination, but now he thought otherwise. Jane was dead, and this thing before him . . . this wasn’t Jane. Not exactly. It was a revenant, a returning spirit. A ghost in a body made of mud. Something unnatural, something to be destroyed. He imagined plunging the knife into her, again and again, three by three times, and in that imagining he could see the blade come out stained with mud, not blood, and Jane only looking at him quizzically, her wounds closing, filth welling forth to seal the openings his knife made.

  He couldn’t tell her she was a ghost, couldn’t tell her that he’d killed her, because then she could take her revenge, and how could he stop her? He had to tell her . . . something else. She was vulnerable now, afraid, weeping muddy tears. She would believe him, if he came up with the right sort of story.

  “The goddess,” he said suddenly. What had she been babbling about before, the power of the goddess, imprisoned somewhere?

  “What?” she asked, bewildered, but no longer mewling and moaning, at least.

  “The goddess. You said you had to rescue her, you said that she’s the spirit of the earth . . .” He pointed to her, to the mud dripping from her extremities. “Now you’re the spirit of the earth. You’ve been . . . empowered.”

  Jane looked at her hands. “Empowered,” she said, as if tasting the word. It must taste like minerals and worms, Denis thought. But it must also taste good. Jane smiled; her teeth, he noticed, were small white stones. “When we made love in the mud, it made a real connection, didn’t it? It woke the goddess, showed her my devotion.”

  “That must be it,” Denis sai
d.

  Jane squeezed her hands into fists. “I’m a mud-girl now, a daughter of the earth.”

  “Looks that way.”

  Jane threw her arms wide and embraced Denis. He gasped, his throat filling with the harsh mineral fragrance of her, the mud smearing against his clothes, his skin. Denis tried to flip the switch inside himself again, tried to detach and make this experience less than unbearably horrible. The best he could do was stifle the scream that wanted to emerge from his throat, turn his revulsion to stillness. He could not bring himself to hug her back, not knowing what she was, but she didn’t seem to notice.

  “And I couldn’t have done it without you,” she said, her earthy voice in his ear. “Our sex woke the goddess. You’re in this with me, Denis. We made this together.”

  “Yes.” Denis’s voice was a croak. It was true. She couldn’t have done this without him. If he hadn’t let Jane die, she couldn’t have come back as . . . whatever she was. And now she thought she was on a mission from a goddess, when the whole idea of gods—

  —was just as absurd as the whole idea of ghosts.

  There was madness now, either in Denis, or in the world.

  “I’m unstoppable,” she said.

  Denis greatly feared that she was right.

  “Let’s get in the shower,” she said. “I want to anoint your body with running mud. And then . . . we’ll set the goddess free. I’ll bring my new body, and you can bring a crowbar.” She let go of him and stepped toward the shower, then looked over her shoulder at him, coquettishly.

  Denis’s stomach churned. That was a come-hither look. Jane had given it to him dozens of times before. She twitched her ass as she got into the shower. He was trapped. He mustn’t reveal his revulsion.

  “Come on,” she said. “The water’s fine. The mud is even better.”

  Wild Mare’s Milk

  * * *

  “I’m not really supposed to let people in after hours,” Marzi said. “But I think tonight calls for an exception.” She put the ornate old key into the brass plate and unlocked Genius Loci’s front door. Once it was open, she went to the security system keypad and deactivated the alarm. Lindsay and Jonathan followed, still shaken by their experience at the Red Room. They’d talked to the police there, but only briefly. The paramedics said Daniel had died of an embolism, just a faulty blood vessel popping in his brain. Marzi had seen . . . something else, but she kept that to herself.

  Marzi felt strangely resigned, as if pivotal events had transpired, unavoidable happenings set in motion. The consequences couldn’t be stopped, only endured and—maybe—deflected. Marzi felt close to understanding, that she only needed a few crucial pieces of information to bring this confusion into some kind of clarity, a sort of grand unification theory of the madness in her life. A way to make sense of the sandstone-colored savage from her dream, the Outlaw in the Red Room, even her old phobia about closed doors.

  Or maybe that sense of just-out-of-reach enlightenment was merely symptomatic of her growing insanity.

  I need coffee before I think about things like this.

  “It’s nice of you to let us come here,” Lindsay said. “Industrial quantities of beer and coffee are in order.” Lindsay’s voice was a ghost of its usual self, but Marzi was cheered to see her attempt lightness.

  Jonathan sat down on the couch under the bay window, arms crossed over his chest, frowning. The walls in this room were painted flat black, with stars done in phosphorescent paint. Cracked and pitted planetoids adorned the walls, and Garamond Ray had also painted a strangely insectile satellite or space probe, with a cluster of solar cells that looked like faceted eyes, sensory arrays like dragonfly wings, and extended pincers. The satellite held a shred of thick white fabric in its pincers, blood staining the cloth, and the letters NA could just be made out on the shred of uniform, in the familiar style of the NASA logo. He looked at the walls for a long time, then said, “This painting is all about distance and alienation, isn’t it? Or am I just projecting?”

  “I always figured Garamond Ray just watched 2001 too many times,” Marzi said, switching on a lamp and walking behind the counter.

  “He might have been a friend,” Lindsay said abruptly, dropping into an armchair beside the never-lit fireplace. “Daniel, I mean. He was an artist. I don’t know if he was any good, but . . . well . . . now we’ll never know what he might have made. It’s funny. He died right in front of us, and I feel like I should feel something for him, but there’s nothing. Which is almost worse.” She put her elbows on her knees and her chin in her cupped hands, looking at the floor glumly. Her glittering outfit, which had seemed so festive earlier in the evening, now struck Marzi as terribly sad, misplaced and tattered finery, a ball gown worn to a funeral.

  Marzi drew a Guinness for Lindsay without even thinking, then set the glass aside. Lindsay didn’t need more alcohol tonight. An Italian soda would be better. Marzi took a pitcher of iced coffee concentrate—“liquid crack”—from the fridge and poured herself a tall one, two parts water to one part coffee. Her synapses felt sluggish, her whole brain felt like a turtle left out in the snow, cold-blooded and bewildered. As if the Outlaw’s shadow falling across her had lodged a little bit of desert night in her soul.

  “I had an uncle who died of an embolism,” Lindsay said, still staring at her boots. “He popped a blood vessel sitting on the toilet. The doctor said it happens like that sometimes, you’re straining to take a shit, you push too hard, and ‘pop.’ My uncle died on his toilet with a porno magazine in his hands.” She shook her head. “Daniel didn’t go that badly, I guess. Though he didn’t live as long, either.”

  Marzi, thinking of the Outlaw’s long gun, wondered how easily Daniel had gone. At the last moment, had he seen what Marzi saw? Death in a long coat, Death like a Western cliché? Or had he seen something else, something appropriate to his own personal mythology, through his blood-soaked eye?

  “Which porno magazine was it?” Jonathan asked.

  Marzi and Lindsay both looked at him, and Lindsay laughed, a beautifully unfettered sound. “You know, I never thought to ask. My aunt was mortified enough as it was. She wouldn’t have even mentioned the magazine, but my mom heard about it from a cop she knew. . . .” Lindsay shook her head. “And how could I not know that detail? It makes or breaks the story.”

  “It’s a whole different kind of pathos if he was reading Butt Pirates than if he was reading Big Bare Beavers,” Marzi said, which made Jonathan chuckle and sent Lindsay into paroxysms of laughter. She’s probably just hysterical, Marzi thought. But a hysterical Lindsay was something she could deal with, something she could understand—not like a sad, existential Lindsay, which was too alien to bear.

  Marzi brought Lindsay a cherry Italian soda, and then handed an ice-filled glass to Jonathan.

  “What’s this?” he asked, sniffing it.

  “It’s a vanilla train wreck. Go ahead, try it.”

  Jonathan sipped. “Mmm. It’s good. And the name’s appropriate. I feel like I’ve been in a train wreck tonight.”

  “Well, sure,” Lindsay said. “Sure, the train wreck part. But please, dear Jonathan, don’t tell me the vanilla part is appropriate, too. The last thing I need to hear tonight is that you’re vanilla. And I had such high hopes.” She grinned, superficially quite recovered from the trauma of seeing Daniel die in front of her. Marzi was sure Lindsay was overcompensating, trying to distract herself with laughter and innuendoes.

  So what if she is? Marzi thought. Whatever gets you through the night.

  “I only just met you,” Jonathan said. “So I’ll keep the secrets of my personal proclivities to myself, for now.”

  Lindsay looked at Marzi. “He must be shy.” She turned back to Jonathan. “I’m not shy.”

  “She’s really not,” Marzi said. “I know, you thought she was shy, but it’s actually a clever subterfuge.”

  “I was completely fooled,” Jonathan said.

  “Oh, shut up and drink your train w
reck,” Lindsay said, but fondly.

  They were quiet for a time, sipping their drinks, looking at the ceiling. Not exactly avoiding one another’s eyes, but not making an effort to connect, either. Marzi looked into her cup for a long time. Lindsay was her best friend, and Jonathan . . . well, he was still essentially a stranger, but he’d tried to pull Jane off of her, and she liked the way his eyes brightened when he talked about the murals, and sometimes you had to take a chance, didn’t you? Marzi had talked to a lot of doctors during her three weeks in the mental hospital, and they’d spouted a lot of jabber and nonsense, but one thing rang true, and stuck with her: that Marzi held things in, that she didn’t ask for help, ever. Hell, she’d only agreed to take a medical withdrawal when she could no longer physically make herself open doors and walk into classrooms, because the fear of what might be waiting beyond the doors became too great. She’d had a dozen anxiety attacks before she mentioned her troubles to anyone. And what had that gotten her? Only more fear and loneliness. One of the doctors had summed it up perfectly, saying, “Marzi, you don’t need to be the Lone Ranger. And even he had Tonto.”

  Marzi smiled a little. Wouldn’t Lindsay just love to be compared to Tonto?

  She looked up and caught Lindsay’s eye. Jonathan had wandered off to stand near the far wall, peering intently at a ringed planet painted in fuzzy hues of blue and green. Marzi went to sit on the couch near Lindsay’s armchair, close enough for their knees to touch. “Can we talk for a sec, Lindsay?” she said softly. She didn’t exactly mind if Jonathan overheard, but she wasn’t going to pull him into it. Lindsay already knew all the backstory, so she’d understand if Marzi was feeling a little . . . fragile . . . about her sanity, and she wouldn’t freak out about it. “Things’ve been sort of weird for me lately.”

  “The bad dreams you mentioned?” Lindsay said. “About the savage Indian guy?”