The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl

by Tim Pratt

  “Well, you know. Raleigh’s not a big city by some standards, but it was the most urban place I’d ever been. I rode my skateboard, smoked weed, stuff like that. But one of my buddies was a drug dealer, and there were a few times when things got . . . unpleasantly heavy. Pissed-off customers once, and once another dealer. My mom talked about throwing me out of the house for a while, told me I was following in my father’s footsteps, which was funny, since I’d never met the guy.”

  “Wow,” Marzi said. “That’s rough. How’d you go from juvenile delinquent to art student?”

  He shrugged. “I realized I was being stupid, and decided to stop.”

  “That simple, huh? Just woke up one morning and decided to change your life?”

  He sighed. “Not exactly.” He lifted his T-shirt. “See that?” She did, right away: a white line of scar tissue, three or four inches long, running diagonally just to the left of his right nipple, standing out against his skin. She reached out, unthinking, and touched the leading edge of the scar, then drew her hand back. “It’s okay,” he said, and she pressed her fingertip there again for a moment, feeling the raised texture.

  “What happened?”

  He let his shirt drop. “My buddy Rob was making a drug deal in a park, and I was hanging out with him, when the customer pulled a knife and demanded Rob’s whole stash. Rob, who was never the brightest bulb in the box, tried to knock the guy’s knife away, and he stabbed Rob, right in the stomach. I’d never seen anything like it.” Jonathan was staring out at the ocean, but his eyes were focused beyond the horizon. “All the color ran out of Rob’s face, he went pale as milk, and without even thinking I rushed the guy, because he’d just stabbed my friend. But I was stoned, so I couldn’t exactly bring overwhelming force or good reflexes to bear. The guy came at me with the knife, and I went down with this horrible pain in my chest.”

  “Did . . . did your friend die?” Marzi reached out and took his hand again.

  “No. He was in the hospital for a while, but he lived. I got by with some stitches. The doctor told me how lucky I’d been. If the knife had come at a different angle, the blade might have punctured my heart, or a lung. As it was, it just hit my ribs and slid down, and left me this.”

  Marzi squeezed his hand, and he shook his head, losing the thousand-yard stare, and squeezed back. “So after that I made some changes in my life. My mom was married to this real asshole by then, and home was not a fun place to be, so I spent any time I wasn’t in school at the library, and then in the art galleries and museums as I got more interested in art. Mom assumed I was still raising hell at all hours, but my grades were suddenly good, so she left me alone.”

  “Looks like you turned out pretty good, coming from a background like that.”

  He shook his head. “Sorry, I’m not trying to throw a pity party. Lots of people have it harder than me. I got a scholarship, got to go to college, got into a decent grad school, and now I’m out here, following my dreams—or at least, studying Garamond Ray’s dreams, which is just as good for the moment. All that other stuff’s just the past.”

  “I don’t know. It’s hard to outlive your own history.” She considered telling him about her door-opening phobia, her stint in a mental hospital—wasn’t it fair to swap a confession for a confession? But she hesitated, unwilling to open those doors, and the moment passed.

  “Tell me about this place,” he said. “How’d you find it?”

  “Lindsay did, actually. She grew up in Santa Cruz, and she’s been coming here since she was a teenager.”

  “Ah, Lindsay. She’s something else.”

  Marzi laughed. “Yeah. We wound up as roommates when we were freshmen. I thought she was flaky and insincere—turns out I was right about the first one, but dead wrong on the second—and she thought I was a granola-eating self-righteous hippie because I spent a few years on a commune with my parents. Once I realized she really was interested in people, and not just faking it, and once she realized I wasn’t a proselytizing vegetarian and that I owned a good stereo, we bonded. She brought me out here one afternoon, and we spent all day throwing a Frisbee.” They’d done more than that, actually—they’d brought down a jug of vodka and orange juice, and gotten drunk, and Lindsay had kissed her. Marzi had gone along with the kiss—what else was college for, if not such experiments?—but hadn’t felt any particular thrill or sparkle, and had gently discouraged Lindsay’s other efforts to get intimate. Always one to pick up on hints, Lindsay had stopped, and their relationship hadn’t noticeably changed after that. For Lindsay, it was just something to try, and Marzi saying no hadn’t particularly bothered her. After a few weeks of feeling odd, Marzi got over it, and they’d been best friends ever since. At least, until Marzi dropped out of college. These days, it seemed they were best friends more in name than in fact. “That first time, Lindsay took me all the way down there.” She pointed to the tumble of rocks at the far end of the beach. “There used to be a natural bridge there, centuries ago, I guess, and it collapsed, so now there’s this weird plateau of rock you can climb up on. It’s a lot of trouble to get up there, slippery and slick with algae, and she wouldn’t tell me why she wanted to go. But once we made it, she took me out a ways, where the remains of the bridge stick out into the ocean pretty far, and she showed me the tide pools. Dozens of them, these tiny self-contained worlds, like miniature universes, you know? Just puddles in the rocks, but full of life. We spent hours there, looking at the sea anemones and starfish. There were fish and crabs, too, which I found so amazing, things that move, living in a cleft of rock, a sun-warmed pool, and maybe they had no idea about the whole ocean just beyond them. For all they knew, their tide pool was the whole world. Lindsay and I just stretched out on the rocks and looked into them, watching the fish swim, the crabs scuttle, the plants wave. The water was so clear . . . That was one of the best days of my life.”

  “It sounds beautiful,” Jonathan said.

  “We tried to go back a few times, but we could never make it. When the tide’s too high, the rocks are totally inaccessible, pounded on by waves, and you can’t climb up there. It seems like the tide’s always too high, whenever I come here. I can’t ever seem to get back to that place anymore.” She felt the start of tears, and blinked them back.

  “Maybe it’s not too high now,” Jonathan said. “Why don’t we go see?”

  Marzi nodded, slowly. “Sure. It’s worth a try.” She led the way to the end of the beach, and they climbed up the head-high wall of uneven rock, finding foot- and handholds. She pulled herself up over the edge, to the top, and offered her hand to Jonathan to help him up. “This way,” she said, and set off over the uneven rock toward the ocean. The waves were breaking hard on the rocks, white foam spraying, but the way was passable. “We probably have an hour or so before the tide’s too high,” Marzi said, pleasantly surprised. The window of opportunity to pass by was limited here, and she’d never managed to get the timing right since that first night with Lindsay. “We might get splashed, but we can make it.”

  “I won’t melt,” Jonathan said. “Let’s go.”

  They went carefully down the rocks, spray flecking them both as the waves broke, and then across a narrow ridge of rock to the largest part of the tumbled natural bridge. This place was tilted, pocked, and ridged, surrounded almost entirely by water, attached to the land only by the thin umbilicus of rock Marzi and Jonathan had crossed over. “I claim this land for us,” Marzi said. “Look, there—tide pools.” They went down on hands and knees to look into the clear water, at starfish and waving sea plants. They moved on, looking into others, exclaiming over mussels and crabs, and then Marzi saw a familiar pool. “Oh, this is the one,” she said. “I remember this.” This was the largest tide pool she’d found with Lindsay, a narrow cleft nearly ten feet long, an alleyway teeming with life. Marzi stretched out on her stomach, the better to see in, and Jonathan lay down beside her. They watched tiny silver fish dart through the water, past anemones like strange flowers. �
��There,” she said. “Under that little shelf of rock? I saw a crab.” A moment later the crab scuttled out sideways, claws upraised, followed by a pair of smaller crabs.

  “Oh, that’s awesome,” Jonathan said, and Marzi caught something in his voice, some reverent echo of her own thoughts. She looked over at him, at his dark eyes and fair skin, and felt for the first time in ages that she was truly with someone, sharing something beyond the civil or superficial.

  He turned his head and caught her looking at him, but she didn’t turn away. He leaned his head toward her, a little, and she moved her head toward him in return, and in a moment they were kissing, and unlike the last time Marzi had kissed someone here, there was a thrill and sparkle now, and she thought she could go on kissing him for some time. He must have thought the same, because they did keep kissing, until their position on the rocks became too uncomfortable for Marzi, and she broke contact to sit up.

  “That was nice,” Jonathan said, still stretched out, looking up at her with his eyes half closed against the sun. “I’m glad we ran into each other this morning.”

  “Me, too.” She’d let herself open up to someone, a little, and the sky hadn’t fallen. She didn’t feel endangered or scared. Trouble was easier to bear when there was a little joy in the midst of it. “We should get back, before the tide comes in.”

  “Right. I need to get some work done this afternoon, but maybe, if you’re not busy, if you wanted to do something later . . . I told you about my sordid past, but I want to hear about yours. This commune stuff intrigues me.”

  “I’d like that. But the commune stuff, really—not as interesting as it sounds, unless the theory and practice of milking goats excites you. I’ll drop you off by the café. I’ve got some errands to run downtown. Meet you at Genius Loci around six, we can get some dinner?”

  “Consider it a date.”

  Three-up Outfit

  * * *

  Marzi came up the steps to Genius Loci late in the day, after an afternoon spent reading Terri Windling’s The Wood Wife, sitting in a park, watching ducks in a pond, and thinking about Jonathan. She’d put caps in her toy pistol, too, and fired it a couple of times—it was satisfyingly loud, with none of the kick of a real gun.

  The lamps outside the café were already on, though dark was another hour away, and moths were clustered hungrily around the pale white globes, seeking some ethereal nourishment. Jonathan sat at the table just outside the double doors, at the top of the steps, the neon “Genius Loci” sign bathing him in red light. “Jonathan,” she said, and he looked up from the oversized art book he was leafing through.

  “Hey, Marzi. Lindsay was here earlier, looking for you.”

  “Everything okay with her?”

  “Yeah, she just wanted to see how you were doing after everything last night. We hung out for a little while here. She, ah, asked me about the afternoon, and I told her how it ended. I hope that’s okay.”

  Marzi laughed. “Lindsay’s like the Spanish Inquisition with glittery nail polish. What’d she say?”

  “Just that if I broke your heart, she’d break my fingers.”

  “Only your fingers? She’s going soft. Is she going to be around later?”

  “She said she was going out.”

  “Hot date?” Marzi asked.

  “So I assume. She’s meeting Alice—” He frowned. “Well, she said she was meeting Alice, but there she is now.”

  Marzi turned around in her chair to look. Lindsay came bouncing up the steps, smacking gum in her mouth. “Damn, girl,” Marzi said. “You’re looking good.”

  Lindsay flounced the skirt of her sundress and batted her lashes. “I know. I’m hot as hell tonight.” She dragged a chair across the deck with an awful scraping sound and flopped into it, then crossed one sandaled foot over the other. “But, alas, Alice stood me up.”

  “She wouldn’t have done that if she’d gotten a look at you,” Marzi said.

  “I daresay,” Lindsay agreed. “She left a message on my answering machine, said something came up, she was really sorry, yadda yadda. All very vague.” Lindsay put her elbows on the table, crowding an empty glass out of the way, and put her chin in her hands. She exhaled huffily, dramatically, but with an undercurrent of genuine sadness, Marzi thought; Lindsay was always one to cover actual distress with melodramatic lamentations. “Methinks she’s had her fill of me. That, or she doesn’t like the idea of being seen out on the town with me. She hangs out with a pretty hard-core crowd—those women don’t believe in bisexuals, and they sneer at anything in a skirt, though they’d also like to get up under those skirts, as often as not.”

  Marzi thought of her conversation with Alice. “I don’t think that’s it, Linds. I ran into Alice last night when I was out walking, and she seemed very much into you. She did seem like she had something on her mind, though, so maybe something really did come up.”

  “You’re too trusting,” Lindsay said, poking Marzi in the arm. “You’ve got to learn to expect the worst. That way, you can only be pleasantly surprised.” Lindsay took Marzi’s hand, then Jonathan’s. “Speaking of pleasant surprises . . . “

  “Are we having a séance, Lindsay?” Marzi asked.

  “Yes. We’re going to call up the spirit of my dearly departed fun night out. Do you know what I think we should do, Marzipan?”

  “I shudder to think.”

  “Young Jonathan has never been to the boardwalk. Young Jonathan has never eaten a deep-fried Twinkie a mere hundred yards from the ocean. Young Jonathan has never ridden the oldest wooden roller coaster in the tricounty area. Do you see where I’m going with this?”

  “I think so, yes.” She glanced at Jonathan.

  He shrugged. “I’m up for a night on the town.”

  “I bet you’re up for all sorts of things,” Lindsay said, “but we’ll have to settle for the boardwalk, for now. We’ll eat hot dogs and ice cream for dinner. When I was a kid, I thought I’d eat meals like that every night when I grew up. Let’s be true to our younger selves!”

  “My parents would be proud,” Jonathan said. “Is it far?”

  “No, it’s just down by the wharf,” Marzi said. “We can walk there in fifteen minutes or so.”

  After a brief detour for Jonathan to put his book away in the Pigeonhole, they set off toward the setting sun, passing neatly painted little houses on Washington Street. They chatted amiably for a while about inconsequential things, then Marzi said, “Oh, guys, you won’t believe this. When I got up today, there was a message on my answering machine from Beej, asking if I’d come bail him out of jail.”

  “Jeez,” Lindsay said, shaking her head. “I hope he gets some help. He’s always been weird, but I think he went over the rainbow recently.”

  “It’s strange,” Marzi said. “Beej talked about a god, the earthquake god, the other day, and he mentioned something about it at the café, too. And Jane, in between totally attacking us, talked about setting her goddess free. Remember, she asked me why I hadn’t embraced the goddess yesterday, when she jumped me on the deck?”

  “I can’t say I was paying that much attention to what she said,” Lindsay said. “I was shocked, mostly.”

  “I remember,” Jonathan said, looking off at the horizon, a worry line marking his forehead. “That is odd, that they’d both be talking about some god—”

  “And both assaulting the coffee shop,” Lindsay interjected.

  “Yeah. Converging delusions,” Marzi said, but not with any great conviction. There had been so many odd things in the past two days. The vision of death-from-a-Western in the Red Room, the recurrence of her problem with doors, that dream of Santa Cruz destroyed—all of it was taking a toll on her. There was something else, too, something she could almost remember, and for a moment she had a brief vision of a door opening in a yellow wall, and sunlight pouring in from the space beyond, light as harsh as ground glass, and then a man, or something at least mostly man-shaped, rising up before her—

  “This is
bumming me out,” Lindsay said, and that broke Marzi’s connection to whatever she was remembering—for that, Marzi was simultaneously annoyed and grateful. She’d had a good day, and possibly a good night ahead, and she didn’t want to spoil it with shit like this. But on the other hand, Jane, at least, was still out there, perhaps still mud-spattered, probably still crazed. “You guys are supposed to be soothing my injured ego since I got stood up,” Lindsay said. “So let’s refrain from dwelling on the habits of your garden-variety crazy guy.”

  “Agreed,” Jonathan said. “Is that the roller coaster?” He pointed to an arch of red-and-white showing just above the trees.

  “That’s the Big Dipper,” Lindsay said. “It was built in nineteen-early-something. It’s made of wood, and when you ride on it, it sounds like it’s going to fall into the ocean any minute. This whole boardwalk is famous, actually. It was in Lost Boys, you know.”

  “That vampire movie with Pee-wee Herman?” Jonathan said.

  “No, no, that was the original crappy version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Lost Boys is the one with Kiefer Sutherland, playing his career-defining role as a wicked vampire lieutenant,” Lindsay said.

  “I’d forgotten that,” Marzi said, distracted. Thinking about vampires and the boardwalk made her think of other monstrous things, like the rustling creature in her vision, the one denned inside Neptune’s Kingdom.

  “Ah, and here’s the skate park,” Lindsay said, nodding toward the fence-enclosed patch of asphalt, with ramp and rails chained down inside, and a few teenagers standing around holding their skateboards and smoking. A ten-year-old wearing a helmet and knee pads rolled slowly back and forth on his Rollerblades in the half-pipe. “Skater boys always did it for me when I was just a wee teenybopper,” Lindsay went on. “Something about the way they slouched.”

  “I used to skate,” Jonathan said. “I haven’t done it in years, though. Guess I’m getting old.”