by Tim Pratt
“You dumb green sage hen,” the thing said mildly. “You can’t be locked in there. Just about anybody else can, but not you. You’re the guardian. You own the door. Oh, if I was still on the other side, and you came in, you’d never get out again, I’d see to that—I’d beat your ass every time you went near the door, just like I did to Garamond Ray. I probably couldn’t kill you, not over there, but I could keep you from getting away. Hell, if you had any sense, you wouldn’t even try to get out, because then there’d be a chance I’d escape with you, and you’d have to find a way to put a whirlwind in a box again, to bottle a mudslide, and that’s a tough job. But without me standing in the way, you can come and go through the door as you please.”
“You’re lying,” she said.
It shrugged. “Maybe. But your boy is over there fixin’ to die, and that’s the truth. Hell, everything I said’s the truth. I’m not a liar by nature, and you haven’t made me be one, especially.”
“You lied to Beej, to Jane, told them you were a god, imprisoned—”
The thing took a long step forward and it was in her face, teeth bared, eyes penetrating twin abysses.
Marzi shrieked and slashed upward with her knife. She felt resistance, but not much, and heard a sound like paper tearing, and a buzzing, like she’d disturbed a wasp’s nest. The thing’s expression didn’t change. Marzi might not have moved at all.
“I never lied, not to any of them,” it said, voice soft and reasonable, and this time its breath didn’t smell of gunsmoke. It smelled of salt flats and alkali. “I am a god. I lived here in the West before there was anything touched by man or beast, before life knew what it was to be alive. And I was imprisoned. Maybe I let my followers use their imaginations as far as what that means, what I might do for them if they let me out . . . but Beej, at least, he knows what I am, and he pledged allegiance anyway. And Jane . . . let’s just say that Jane knew working for me was better than the alternative. But I did not lie.” It stepped back, sliding off the knife, frowning, shaking its head. There was a tear in its chest from the knife, but it wasn’t bleeding. The thing laughed, abruptly, a sound like rocks rubbing together. “I never used to get offended, either. Just another one of your gifts. Not as much fun as gloating, I must say.”
Marzi didn’t know what the thing was talking about—though she suspected it was important—but the foremost thing in her mind was a concern for Jonathan. What if the thing was telling the truth? Then Jonathan was in trouble, and only Marzi could help him.
“I’ll be back for you,” Marzi said.
The thing nodded. “Sure. I’m not trying to get out of the showdown. I’m looking forward to it. I just want to get up to my fighting weight first, and keep you busy in the meantime.”
“Get out of my house.”
The thing looked around, as if seeing its surroundings for the first time. “I will. And then I’ll flatten your house. All the houses. Return everything to dirt and dust and nothing.” It strode past her to the back door, turned the bolt, and threw the door wide.
“I love opening doors,” it said, and walked into the slowly rising dawn.
Marzi looked at the clock over the kitchen sink. It was almost five-thirty. Genius Loci opened at seven, and Hendrix would be there at six-thirty or so, probably. She didn’t have much time.
She had to find Jonathan. There was no question about that. What had happened to him was her fault, for not being honest with him, for not telling him and Lindsay about the dangers they faced. Besides, she owed him; he’d kicked Jane in half, probably saving Marzi’s life. Marzi had been running from her responsibilities for too long. She wouldn’t run from this one.
But she couldn’t go after Jonathan alone. What if the thing was lying? She’d need someone on this side, who could open the door for her if she got stuck. There was only one person in the world she could call: the other person she should have been honest with, the other one she should have warned. Marzi picked up the phone and dialed Lindsay’s number.
The earthquake woke Beej about an hour before it happened. He felt the vibrations thrumming through the bones in his skull, an exquisitely blinding sensation somewhere between pain and orgasm. He lay awake on his hard bunk, looking into the dark above him, whispering softly to himself, begging forgiveness for his trespasses, pledging fealty, occasionally giggling. The world would break like an egg, and Beej would be there at the place where the crack began, standing at the epicenter, at the right hand of a god.
When the quake came, Beej bounced out of his bunk and landed hard on the concrete floor, but he didn’t care—it didn’t even hurt. He sat cross-legged on the floor of his cell while the cops cursed and poked their heads in to make sure everyone was okay. Beej waved at them jauntily, and they scowled, like always. Beej hummed a little and watched the windows as light crept into the sky, everything in his head going la la la in anticipation. Because something had happened. That hadn’t been a natural earthquake, and the epicenter was close-close-close; just down the street, in the prison where the god lived, or used to live. Beej had half-expected the walls of the jail to crack open when the tremors began, but they hadn’t. The building was probably on a floating foundation, or at least earthquake-safety retrofitted. After Loma Prieta rearranged the face of the town, the people of Santa Cruz had become a bit more careful about such things. Not that their care would protect them. Oh, no. Everything would be shaken down to bits around them, and they would be broken up, too. That was too bad. Beej didn’t have anything against people, not really. He would have just as happily pledged himself to a god of love and light, but those gods had not revealed themselves to him. Beej’s only revelation had come from the god of the earthquake, and so that was the god that earned his loyalty.
When he heard bootheels clicking on the floor, Beej rose to his feet. None of the cops sounded like that when they walked, every click of heel on floor clear and distinct, each a miniature crack of doom.
The earthquake god walked into the holding area, and Beej stood still on the other side of the bars, unable to believe his good luck, to be looking on the god-in-the-flesh, not a smoke ghost or a brief apparition, but the real thing walking around. It was man-shaped, the color of sandstone, naked from the waist up, clothed below in a leather cloth. It wore deerskin moccasins, but each step sounded like bootheels, a small and strange thing that struck Beej as very godlike—a walking sense of dislocation, a living, sentient example of cognitive dissonance. The god stood just on the other side of the bars; its face was impassive, its eyes polished black stones, its teeth the color of flint. “Beej,” it said, voice toneless and uninflected. Its breath smelled like rocks baking in the sun.
“My god,” he breathed.
“I need you to do something for me.”
“Anything.” Beej imagined himself driving a bulldozer, or manning a wrecking ball, or just walking through town, opening fissures in the ground with every step.
“Much as it pains me to say this . . . I need you to build me something.”
Beej frowned. He hadn’t expected that. Unless he was supposed to build something that would later wreak greater destruction. . . . “Of course. Whatever you want.”
The thing reached through the bars and touched Beej’s cheek, which made Beej shudder with pleasure, though the god’s flesh was hard and rough. “You are my pet artist, you know. I chose you because you are mad, and you can make things. You’re a shaper. Under other circumstances, you might have been the one holding me prisoner.”
Beej winced. “Never, I would never—”
“Oh, I don’t know. All you want is duty, a set of devotions, a reason. Keeping me prisoner might have given you that. But you’ve got too many snake pits in your head to make you a good candidate for that sort of responsibility, I suppose. Marzi was a better choice.”
Beej smiled a little, hearing her name.
“You like her, don’t you?” the god said.
Blushing, Beej looked at the floor. “It’s not important,�
�� he mumbled. “Flesh is grass.”
“And we know what happens to grass, don’t we? It gets dry, and it burns, and it floats away. Your flesh too, eventually. But even full of snake pits, you have power, enough to shape things, enough to make you valuable to me. You can build what I need.”
“What should I make?”
“Sort of a sculpture, Beej, and sort of a tide pool. Something like a door, and something like a shadow box.”
“A sculpture?” Beej said uncertainly. “I’ll try, but . . . I’m not so good with making things in three dimensions. I can paint, I can do photo collage, I can draw, but when it comes to building things, my eyes don’t meet my hands.”
The god did not look pleased. It blinked, once, like a lizard. “Ah. I see. You’re not that kind of artist.”
“Now, if you want a good sculptor,” Beej said, “that’d be my friend Denis. He used to make the most amazing things. He worked with metal, mostly, because he liked the clean lines, but he did other stuff, too, with wire and found objects . . .” Beej trailed off, belatedly realizing that pointing out his uselessness to the god’s plans might be a bad idea. But he couldn’t very well lie to his deity, could he? Better the god know now than find out later.
“Denis.” The god sounded unhappy, the first inflection that had touched its voice. “I see. And do you think you could work with Denis? The door will need to be embellished. Imbued. And you’re the one with the power to do that, Beej, to make it more than just a sculpture. I shudder to think where a door Denis made by himself might lead to, but I can guide you. Could you . . . collaborate with him, do you think?”
“Oh, sure,” Beej said. “That’d be great. I’ve always wanted to work with Denis, but he never wanted to.”
“I suspect we can convince him,” the god said.
Beej looked around, then said, confidentially, “Of course, the problem is, I’m in jail.” He shook the bars by way of demonstration.
“Oh, not to worry,” the god said. He slipped his pinky finger into the lock and wiggled it a bit, meditatively. The lock clicked. “I’m good at opening doors. I like it. It’s my new thing.” The god stepped back, and the door swung open.
Beej stepped into the corridor. “But there’s getting out of here, and that’s tricky, too, there are police . . .”
The god shook his head. “Don’t worry. They’re all . . . asleep.” The god smiled, and Beej suspected that the police weren’t asleep at all, that something worse had happened to them. He felt bad, thinking about that, because those cops had been nice to him, mostly, and even the ones who hadn’t been nice didn’t deserve . . . Well. It wasn’t about what people deserved. It was about the god’s will. Beej served the god’s will. Anything else was a distraction.
“Let’s find your clothes, shall we?” the god said. “We can’t have you running around in that ugly jumpsuit.”
Throw In
* * *
Marzi couldn’t bring herself to go into the café yet. She sat on the steps, wishing for a cigarette, looking dully at the trash in the street beside the sidewalk: a condom wrapper, a ragged bit of newspaper with the word “Run” in screaming thirty-six-point type. There was no heat in the air, and she wore a sweater, but she was still cold. She had her toy gun, loaded with caps, and she turned it over in her hands, taking comfort from it like it was a lucky charm, which maybe it was. She’d gone up to Jonathan’s room, hammered on his door, but he wasn’t home.
The door under the stairs to the Pigeonhole was standing open. It was the only door into the building that wasn’t alarmed; Hendrix had probably forgotten about it when he had the system put in. It was locked anyway, and the key was long lost, but the Outlaw had gotten through it with no difficulty. At least it hadn’t just walked through the wall; that was reassuring, to know it had to use doors, even if it could open them without difficulty. Apparently prowling around bars and appearing as a spectral cowboy were the supernatural equivalent of remote telepresence. Now it was out for real, walking around in the world in something like a body, and it had to use doors. So maybe, if it was physical enough to need doors, it was physical enough to kill. But why was it physical at all? Why did a sentient earthquake need a body? In a sense, it wasn’t even a thing—it was a potentiality, an event, a process, a conscious disaster.
And why did it keep appearing to her in the form of things she’d written about in her comic books? Sure, there was a degree of accuracy in the comparison, a certain satisfying symmetry, but its fundamental form couldn’t possibly be that of a villain from a Western. So what the hell was it?
Lindsay arrived, parked at the curb in front of Marzi, and popped out of her car. She didn’t look at all puffy or half-asleep. She’d been awake when Marzi called—“The quake bounced me out of dreamland,” she’d said—and agreed to meet right away, almost no questions asked. Just one: “Is it bad?” And Marzi said, “Well, yeah,” and Lindsay said, “Give me ten.”
Lindsay sat down beside Marzi on the curb. “Hey, babe,” she said.
“Hey.” Marzi leaned her head on Lindsay’s shoulder, then abruptly, and to her own great surprise, began to cry.
Lindsay put an arm around her and made soothing noises.
“Ah, Lindsay, I fucked up,” Marzi said. “I didn’t want the job, but I got it, and I screwed it up bad.”
“Nothing we can’t fix,” Lindsay said. “No such thing as a problem we can’t handle.”
Marzi shivered. What could she and Lindsay do to stop the thing with the wasteland face? It seemed afraid of Marzi, which suggested there was something they could do, but if Marzi could hurt it, she didn’t know how. How did you fight a willful mudslide, a living wildfire? You couldn’t—you could only pick up the pieces afterward. But if the Outlaw had its way, there would be no afterward. Just desolation spreading in all directions.
“I should have told you about this before, but I didn’t entirely believe it myself. Even now, even though I am sure, I’m also sure you’re going to think I’m crazy,” Marzi said.
“Wouldn’t be the first time.”
“I’m serious.” Marzi looked at the asphalt, the trash in the gutter. Not at her best friend.
“Tell me,” Lindsay said.
Marzi almost smiled. Lindsay was good people. “Well, in a nutshell . . . Two years ago, when I first started working here, I was storing some stuff in the junk room . . . the Desert Room.” She had to force herself to call it that, but she didn’t stutter, this time. “And I found a door in the back wall. A door to nowhere.”
“Okay.”
“Well, I opened the door, because, shit, that’s what you do, if you’re stupid, if you’re me.” Or if you’re Jonathan, she thought, but she’d save that revelation for later. “And I saw this . . . thing. It had . . . it sounds too stupid, if I describe it, but it was alive; it had a face.”
“I don’t guess you mean you found a rat in the crawl space.” Lindsay sounded serious, at least, but not in a humor-the-lunatic way.
“No. I didn’t even find a crawl space, unless it’s the crawl space for the whole world. The door opened on a place, Lindsay. A whole other place.”
A moment of silence, then, “Sounds like your comic.”
“Yeah. Art imitating life. Anyway, I slammed the door, and then I slammed a bunch of doors in my own head, repressed the shit out of the whole experience, buried it all so deep I’ve only just started remembering it this week. But it was coming out in bits and pieces all along—I had a breakdown, I had anxiety attacks when I tried to open doors. You remember. That was right after I saw the thing beyond the door.”
“So what made you start remembering?”
Marzi wanted to ask Lindsay if she believed her, but that was too dangerous, and not really necessary. Because Marzi intended to show her the door, and Lindsay would either see what was behind it—the lands beyond the lands, as the Outlaw called it—or not. If the former, she’d believe, and if the latter, well, no problem. Marzi would call her old therapist, t
ell her she’d had a . . . what would she call it? A relapse with escalations.
“I started seeing shit. Hallucinations, I figured, stuff from my comic, pretty much, but walking around in full color, big as life. And I had this dream, or vision, where I saw Santa Cruz destroyed, and I heard this raspy old-lady voice saying a bunch of crap I didn’t really understand. Remember Beej talking about the god of the earthquake? And Jane going on about the goddess? And . . .” She trailed off.
“Alice,” Lindsay said. “She talked about a phoenix, a god of fire, rising from the ashes of Genius Loci. Shit, Marzi. This thing you’re talking about, it’s what made Alice go?”
Marzi nodded. “I think so. Yeah. So if I’m crazy, I guess it’s contagious.”
“I guess,” Lindsay said, clearly troubled. “I’m not one to laugh at stuff I don’t understand—I was the only one who believed Seth when he said he’d been abducted by aliens, remember, back when we were freshmen? But this . . . I hate to say that line about how I believe you believe, but that’s the best I can do for now. Beej, and Jane, and Alice . . . It doesn’t seem like it could just be coincidence, but this is way beyond tarot or prophetic dreams, you know? This is the far side of far out.”
Marzi had scarcely dared to hope for even that much belief. “It’s worse now, because the thing behind the door got out, earlier this morning. I fucked up, and I didn’t watch the door, and now it’s loose. That’s what caused the earthquake, when it escaped.”
“Heavy,” Lindsay said, and shifted a little on the sidewalk. “I mean. Shit.”
“The thing came to my house. Stood in my living room. I saw it. It was a monster, like a cowboy made of wrecked earth. . . . I’m not making any sense. It was horrible, and it pretty much talked trash to me, tried to scare me into leaving town.” Marzi glanced at Lindsay, who was looking meditatively off into the middle distance. “I guess this qualifies as full-blown psychosis, huh?”