The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl

by Tim Pratt

  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.

  A door slammed, and then there was silence, and light, and dry heat.

  Jonathan lay still, unable to summon the will to move, or even to close his eyes against the sun. A numbness spread from the places the thing had touched him, radiating out from his heart, robbing him of hope, of strength, of intention; mummifying his will to live. He knew he would never stand up again. He would become a skeleton in the street, part of the painting, rotting in color on the wall. He knew, and he couldn’t care.

  Then someone picked him up, a man who smelled of tobacco and licorice and whiskey. The man carried Jonathan toward the saloon, with its bloodstained bat-wing doors, and Jonathan didn’t even wonder what was happening. The light was already starting to fade.

  Grave Patch

  * * *

  The earthquake woke Marzi from a restless sleep. Her dreams were a sinister nonsense montage: cowboys made of fire, drawing plastic cap guns that melted in their hands; wagon trains in which the wagons were somehow alive, but dying, struggling along like starving oxen, ragged bloody holes opening in the canvas; flash floods tearing through the streets of Santa Cruz, clocks and park benches and potted plants bobbling and tumbling in the white rush of water; Marzi painting on the ribs of the sky with a bloodied brush, her one-pigment palette a sucking wound in her own chest. The last dream, the one she woke from, was of a machine like a chrome bulldozer, chewing up the terrain before it, leaving nothing but antiseptic whiteness in its wake.

  Marzi leapt out of bed, not even half awake, as the quake hit. The pictures on her walls swayed, creaking. Her lamp fell over, the bulb breaking with a tinkle. The wind chimes in her bedroom window jingled wildly, and her bookshelf gave a little bounce, disgorging its contents onto the floor. Marzi stumbled through the shaking room to the doorway, standing in the threshold, holding on to th
e doorjamb, blinking her eyes and coming into consciousness. By the time she’d awakened enough to realize what was happening, the quake was over. It wasn’t even a very bad one; she’d felt bigger in her time, though any quake you noticed was disconcerting, bringing a brief but profound sense of dislocation.

  After setting her upset possessions right again, Marzi sat on her bed and looked at the clock. Almost five a.m. She could sleep, but not for long, not if she wanted to get to the café before Hendrix did, and nail shut the door. Better to get up now; she could sleep more later in the day. She was sort of hungry anyway. Wrapping a robe around herself against the morning chill, she headed for the kitchen.

  Her back door was open, showing a slice of sky and the path to the sidewalk. Dawn was creeping into the sky, lending everything an in-between, twilight feel. Marzi stood still, her heart thumping suddenly hard, and listened. Had someone come into her house, or had the door been jounced open by the quake? Normally she locked the door, but she’d been so distracted last night it was possible she’d forgotten. It was also possible someone was in her house, or had been, a burglar she hadn’t even noticed.

  Marzi didn’t hear anything. Her place wasn’t that big: her bedroom, the kitchen, the living room, bathroom. There weren’t many places for a person to hide. The couch was against the wall, the armchair too spindly to make a good hiding place, and if someone had been crouched under her drawing table, she’d have been able to see them from here. Marzi swiftly pulled open a drawer, grabbing her butcher knife, and turned with her back to the cabinets. “All right, bastard, come on out,” she said. No one answered. Her stomach grumbled loudly.

  She sighed. The door must have popped open during the quake, that was all. She closed the door and twisted the deadbolt, then turned back toward the fridge.

  Someone was standing in her living room.

  Marzi gasped, and then, ridiculously, her stomach growled again. She still had the knife, and she raised it before her, wondering if she could dash for the door, turn the bolt, and get out before this whoever-it-was could reach her. It didn’t seem likely.

  “Guess who busted out of jail?” the stranger said, voice gravelly. “None of my own boys could break me out, but it turns out they didn’t need to. It was an inside job.” The stranger stood in shadow, beyond the range of the kitchen light, but its body seemed to shift and ripple, unable to settle on a given shape.

  “No,” Marzi said, not understanding the particulars, but grasping the essential: The thing behind the door was no longer behind the door. “This is a trick, like in the café.”

  “Nope. No fool’s gold here, sweetness. I’m the real thing, cut loose and walking up and down in the world. Somebody popped my hinges for me.” It stepped a little closer to the light. “I’m just here to talk, for now. I don’t mind telling you, I’m not strong enough to do much else. Yet.”

  Marzi held up the knife. “I can take you, then.” The words seemed false and hollow, but she had to say something.

  The thing laughed, softly. “Oh, darlin’. You’re too green to hurt me. I’m a grizzled old hand, and you’re so wet behind the ears your shoulders are damp from the dripping. No, if I thought you could hurt me, I wouldn’t be here. I’d be holed up in the hills somewhere. I’ve been watching you, though, peering out of the keyhole, through the walls. You thought you were so tough. Like it’s hard to keep a door closed and locked. You’re not the one who caught me, and you never will catch me, now that I’m loose again.”

  “If I’m so green, why are you wasting time with me at all?”

  The thing shrugged. The light was touching it a little, now, enough to show cracked leather boots, dark jeans, a leather vest, but its features were still in shadow. “Because you’re the law around here. I don’t much like the law, not the kind people make. The laws of nature are good enough for me. Things fall apart. Water seeks the lowest level. Everything becomes dust. Those are all the laws the world needs, the only ones I want to obey, but you’re here, mucking things up with the way you look at the world, the way you look at me. This can go one of three ways. I can kill you, or I can run you out of town on a rail, or you can leave on your own.”

  Marzi thought about leaving. It was a tantalizing idea, to just throw some things into a bag and buy a bus ticket, get away from doors that opened onto impossible places, away from spectral cowboys and mud-women, away from the madness that had so swiftly overtaken her life. If there were nothing at stake but her own happiness, she wouldn’t have hesitated, but yielded, and given this creature his free rein. She’d never asked for such responsibility, after all. But there was more at stake than that. Lindsay lived here—how could Marzi leave her behind, to be terrorized? And if she took Lindsay with her, did she also have to take Alice Belle? And what about Jonathan? And even Hendrix, Denis, and Beej—did they deserve to be swallowed by sands, pecked to pieces by vultures? And, moreover—this was her town. Santa Cruz had survived disaster in the past, but if she left this time, pretty soon there’d be nothing left to come back to.

  Staying was bad, but leaving would be worse.

  “You caused that earthquake,” she said.

  “Just a little whoop of exultation,” it said. “I was happy when I got out, and I told the world I was back, and rattled a few windows. It wore me out, too. I’m not strong yet. Been locked away too long, in the lands beyond the lands, where the living is easy and everything flows like water. This world is harder to change, but when you do things here, they’re more permanent.” It cocked its head. “Don’t you want to know how I got out?”

  The thought had crossed her mind. What did he mean, an inside job? Had Hendrix opened the door? But it had been closed tonight when she left, she knew it, so—

  Shit.

  “Jonathan,” she said.

  “That’s the one,” the thing said. “He just had to get an eyeful of the Desert Room, the one Ray painted to lure me in. Oh, how we wrestled there! We shook the whole damn coast that day.”

  Marzi wanted to ask about that. What did this thing have to do with Garamond Ray? But she was more concerned about Jonathan. “He broke in?”

  “Dropped through the ceiling like an angel from heaven. Though I had to whisper him down. He sauntered in, had a look around the Desert Room—which looks a mite different now, since you were there earlier, sweating out changes, exhaling transformations—and when I whispered ‘Open the door,’ he did it, the idjit. And I flew free. Your own boyfriend set me loose.” The thing cocked its head—which seemed to be topped by a vaguely misshapen cowboy hat again—and said, “I never used to gloat. That’s just one of the changes you rang in me. I like gloating, but I can see how it might get in the way of more important things.”

  Marzi was scarcely listening to him. Had Jonathan been hurt? She was more worried about him than pissed off, but if he was okay, she’d get pissed off very quickly. Then again, she didn’t know how persuasive the whispering of the thing behind the door—now the thing in her living room—could be. It had, presumably, driven away all her customers last night, perhaps driven Beej mad, or at least helped speed along the process, pushed Jane into a mud-smeared frenzy, maybe even gotten into Alice’s head and sent her running for the hills. And Jonathan lived right above the door; he was subject to the thing’s whispering constantly. He’d even said something last night about hearing voices, and she hadn’t realized what that meant! She was the worst guardian ever.

  “But back to my point,” the thing said. “I’m not really strong enough to kill you yet, and my gang’s in bad shape, mostly thanks to you, so the first option’s out. Running you out of town on a rail is difficult for the same reasons. So I’m asking you to leave, before I get strong enough to stomp you, which won’t take long. I said last night that I’d give you until dawn to get out of town, and that still holds—though dawn’s coming up fast, so you’d best saddle up, don’t you think?”

  “Go fuck a rattlesnake,” Marzi said.

  “I figured that’s what you’d sa
y. Well, the gist of it, anyway. So.” It stepped out of the shadow, into the light. Its face was much as Marzi remembered, though mercifully farther away, not exhaling on her. Its skin was ravaged and lined, more like landforms seen from above than flesh, nose a black mineshaft hole, eyes black circles, smoking slightly. It smiled, and its teeth were wound with barbed wire, its lips shredded and bloody. Marzi steeled herself and showed no reaction. She’d seen worse in horror movies, seen worse in photos of wartime. It was just special effects, meant to scare her, and she wouldn’t give it the satisfaction. The thing didn’t seem to care, just smiled its bloody-lipped grin. “Turns out there’s a fourth option. It’s a doozy, too. Your boy, Jonathan—I left him on the other side of the door.”

  Marzi blinked. “What?”

  “It ain’t complicated. He opened the door. I drug him in and threw him on the ground. I walked out, and slammed the door behind me. I wasn’t the only thing living back there, you know. The lands beyond the lands are teeming, and I didn’t want nothin’ following me out. Besides, I figgered it might come to this, you being pigheaded, me being too tuckered out to take the direct approach, and I thought having your boy on the other side of the door could be useful. There’s stuff there that can hurt him, darlin’. Stuff that can eat him alive. You can leave him there, I reckon, while you try to deal with me. Or you can go in and get him. I imagine he could use a cavalry right about now. I touched his heart, and I doubt he’s coping at his best.”

  “What do you mean, you touched his heart?”

  “A fella’s gotta have his secrets, now. You’ll find out, unless you leave him to die. And he will die. Or worse, he might not. Not for a good long time. Think on that.”

  Marzi sneered, trying to feel brave. “Sure, I go in after him, and the door shuts again, and we’re both trapped. You’d like that.”