The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl

by Tim Pratt

  “Mmm,” Lindsay said. “The thing to do is to get independent verification, right? I don’t guess it told you anything we can check out?”

  “It told me Jonathan was the one who set it free.”

  Now Lindsay looked at her. “Say what? Your Jonathan?”

  “Yeah. He wanted to see the Desert Room, so he pulled up his carpet and came through the trapdoor. He went into the Desert Room, he opened the door, and he let it out. But not before it locked Jonathan in, left him on the other side.”

  “Um. So, have you tried knocking on Jonathan’s door? If he’s home, then everything’s okay. Apart from your possible mental health issues, that is.”

  “Yeah, I knocked. Nobody’s home. So I figure the thing was telling the truth.” Marzi sighed. “Or else, you know, I went into a fugue and chopped Jonathan up, and I just don’t remember it.”

  “You’d be all bloody if you’d done that,” Lindsay said.

  “So maybe I smothered him.”

  “Hardly seems like your style.”

  “So,” Marzi said. “Hendrix will be here in half an hour. Before that happens, I want to go through the door, find Jonathan, and bring him back. But I need your help.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to be my doorman. You make sure I don’t get trapped on the other side, like Jonathan was. I’d just leave the door standing open, but I think there’s other not-so-nice stuff living there, things we don’t want wandering around town. The thing told me I could open the door from the inside, because I’m the prison guard, so it’s my door. But I don’t quite trust that, you know? So I’d like you to watch my back. Will you come?”

  “Of course I’ll come. But just for the sake of argument, let’s say the door opens up on bricks or something. What then?”

  “Then I call Dr. Mitchell, and you give me a ride to wherever she tells me to go.”

  Lindsay nodded. “So long as we’ve got a contingency plan. And that’s better than chopping me up to hide your shame.”

  “I’ll always share my shame with you. You’re taking this awfully well, you know.”

  Lindsay shrugged. “I feel like I’ve been called up from reserve best-friend status to active duty. Helping you dye your hair or something is easy. This is what friends are for.”

  Marzi stood up. “Thanks, Lindsay. I mean it.” She shook her head. “Most people . . .”

  “Most people suck. Come on.” She stood, too, and they went up the steps. “I can’t decide if I want you to be crazy or not. I don’t know which would be better.”

  “That’s easy. If I’m crazy, it’s just me who’s in trouble. If I’m not . . . we’re all seriously fucked.”

  “Yes, but if you’re not crazy, that means it’s real, that there’s magic in the world. It would be worth a lot to know that for sure, even if no one else believed it, even if bad things came along with the magic. It can’t all be bad magic, can it?”

  “I don’t know,” Marzi said. “The good stuff isn’t making itself obvious.”

  Marzi unlocked the door, stepping inside to quickly punch in the alarm code. Once Lindsay was safely inside with her, she shut and locked the door, and carefully rearmed the alarm.

  “Looks like this place got quaked,” Lindsay said.

  Marzi turned and surveyed the damage. All the bottles of Torani syrup had tumbled from the shelf to the floor, a bunch of chairs had fallen over, and there was a crack in the glass on the dessert case.

  “It could be worse, I guess,” Marzi said. “This being the epicenter and all.”

  “Hmm,” Lindsay said.

  Marzi went around the counter, stepping carefully over the drying puddles of hazelnut, raspberry, and Irish Cream syrup. “Hendrix can clean it up. I’m not even supposed to be out of bed yet.”

  Lindsay followed her into the kitchen. The door to the Desert Room was standing ajar, but not enough to allow a view into the room.

  Marzi took a deep breath and pushed the door open. It swung inward, silently as ever, letting a little ambient light spill onto the trash and dust on the floor. “Moment of truth.”

  “I’ll go first,” Lindsay said, and bustled past her, into the room, glancing around and flicking on the light switch. She whistled, low and appreciative.

  Marzi stepped into the room, and gasped.

  The mural had changed drastically. It was no longer a desert scene, but something from a ghost town, with faded storefronts, tumbleweeds, hitching posts, rain barrels, and water troughs.

  “Did you paint this, Marzi?” Lindsay asked. “Paint over whatever used to be here before, or . . .”

  “No,” Marzi said. “I . . . it’s not even my style. I don’t paint like this. It’s like something by Garamond Ray.”

  “Somebody could copy that style.” She glanced at Marzi, then quickly looked away. “Somebody must have. This isn’t what you described, what Jonathan said the books described. No scorpions or cacti or rocks or anything.”

  “It’s weird, but honestly, Lindsay, it doesn’t register all that strongly on my weird-shit scale. I’ve seen stranger today. See the door? With the brass knob?”

  “What door?”

  Marzi pointed. Lindsay stepped forward, put her hand on the wall, on the door, and whistled again. “It looks like part of the painting. I didn’t even know it was real.”

  “I’ve had that feeling a lot, lately.”

  Lindsay took a deep breath. “So what’s behind Door Number Only?”

  “Either a place that doesn’t quite touch the world, or nothing at all, or . . .” She shrugged.

  Lindsay touched the knob. “Shall I?”

  “I don’t—Maybe I should—Shit. Sure. Open it.”

  Lindsay turned the knob and pulled the door open. Marzi stood behind her, and when the harsh light from the lands beyond the lands poured in, it turned Lindsay into a shadow, just a black silhouette standing in a door frame. This was the door from her comic, then, essentially, opening onto the West beyond the West. Lindsay looked exactly like page three of the first issue of The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, and Marzi realized with a pang of wonder that she’d put a lot of Lindsay into that character, that in a way the character was a love story about her best friend. Perhaps not the kind of love Lindsay would want from Marzi, if the world were a place of perfect congruency, but something deep and true all the same.

  Lindsay stepped back, and stumbled into Marzi, but didn’t fall. Marzi blinked against the light until her eyes adjusted, and she could see what lay beyond.

  Lindsay reached behind her, fumbled for Marzi’s hand, and gripped it hard. “I see . . . a dusty street, and wooden buildings.” Her voice was tight and too high. “Is that what you see?”

  “Yes,” Marzi said, and it was like an ice floe had broken loose from her heart and drifted away. She wasn’t crazy. Lindsay could see it, too. “The first time I saw this, Lindsay, my mind just shut down. I dreamed about it, I drew about it, but I didn’t remember it. And I didn’t even see this, not really. The buildings . . . they’re bigger now, more substantial. It was mostly just a desert before. Then the thing came at me, and its face filled my vision.”

  “Why haven’t I fainted?” Lindsay said, still squeezing. “In the movies, people are always fainting. It seems like a great way to get out of a difficult situation, you know? To skip the awkward intermediate moments. But it never happens to me.”

  “It’s because you’re so stout of heart.”

  Lindsay turned around and looked Marzi in the face. “Are we going in there?”

  “I have to go in. Jonathan’s in there, I think. But I need you here, to make sure I can get out again.”

  “Look,” Lindsay said. “You go through, and I’ll shut the door, and you see if you can open it again from the inside, okay?”

  Marzi searched her face for some sign of incipient hysteria, any indication that Lindsay was near her breaking point, but she looked fine, just a little pale.

  “Okay,” Marzi
said. “I guess that’s the first thing to do.” She stepped toward the door. She couldn’t see much of the lands beyond the lands—mostly weathered two-story buildings and a dusty street, blocking the view to the horizon. It smelled like sand and sage and heat there, but not horseshit, or piss, or gunsmoke, or whiskey. It didn’t smell like anything alive or human lived there, despite the buildings. She glanced at Lindsay, who stood with her hands clasped before her, as if about to recite a poem for a class. “If I’m not out in ten seconds, open the door, okay?”

  “I’ll open it in five.”

  Marzi nodded, looked back at the lands beyond the lands, and stepped through.

  There was no frisson, no sense of dislocation, just a dramatic increase in the heat; this was a dry, baking place, quite unlike Santa Cruz. The sky overhead was a faded barely-blue, as if the sun had bleached the color from the atmosphere. She pulled the door shut behind her, before she could think too much about what she was doing.

  The door was set in a free-standing fragment of wooden wall, as if it were the only remaining part of a house that had otherwise been demolished. She didn’t move from the shadow of the standing wall, didn’t make a sound, just counted slowly to three and then turned the knob. It opened easily, out into the Desert Room, and Marzi stepped through again, back to the world she knew, and shut the door behind her.

  “Looks like I can come and go as I please,” she said, shaking a little.

  “Good,” Lindsay said. “Then you don’t need me to play doorman, and I can go with you.”

  Marzi stared at her for a moment, then shook her head. “No. No way.”

  Lindsay touched her arm. “Marzipan. I’m going with you. You think I’d let you go over there by yourself? No way. I’ll be honest, I thought you were losing it when you told me about this outside. I thought you needed help. But I was wrong, except it turns out you do need help, and the help you need is me.”

  “This isn’t a comic book,” Marzi said. “This is its own thing, and it’s not a good thing. What if something happened to you?”

  “What if something happens to you, huh? And I’m out here, all by myself, no you, no Jonathan, Alice is gone, who do I have? Where would I be then? You say this bad thing is loose in the world, you want to leave me alone to deal with that? I have to go with you. I have to make sure you come back. I need to do this. I don’t want to be a sidekick or a lovely assistant, Marzi. I want to be there beside you. You think I’d let you go by yourself, let you get eaten by basilisks or giant rattlesnakes or some shit?”

  “Okay,” Marzi said, relieved, pleased, and apprehensive all at once. It would be better, with Lindsay there. But if anything happened to her, Marzi would never forgive herself. Or the Outlaw. “Okay, we’ll go together.”

  Lindsay looked at the closed door and sighed. “I wish it wasn’t a Western, though. You know I never really liked Westerns.”

  “Aw, c’mon. We’re a team. Frank and Jesse. Hart and Boot.”

  “Rangergirl and her fearless native guide.” Lindsay frowned. “But this . . . the way it is . . . it must have something to do with you. It used to be a desert before, but now it’s like something out of your comic, a door that leads to a weird Old West, that’s so you. I don’t understand it, but this isn’t some . . . some static situation. It’s dynamic. You’re affecting the world over there. Somehow.”

  “Yeah. Somehow. But I don’t know how, and there’s no time to figure it out.” She took Lindsay’s hand. “Come on. Time to follow the no-brick road. Time to find Jonathan.” With her other hand, she reached for the brass knob, and opened the door.

  The earthquake woke Denis, too, but once the tremors subsided he got back into bed, pulled the blanket over himself, and went back to sleep. Unpleasant dreams had broken his rest all night—not his usual dream, but new ones, messier ones. Dreams of mud-women pursuing him through ditches and gullies, all eager to wrench his arms and legs from his body, to stuff his mouth and rectum with slick mud. He hoped for a few more restful hours in bed before trying to work on his paper. He had an office on campus he could use, but he seldom went there, because he also had an officemate, a greasy cupcake-devouring manatee named, appropriately enough, Whalen. Whalen worked at his desk often, and after a few attempts to share space with the man, who farted without shame and had a distressing tendency to sing top-40 pop songs to himself, Denis had requested another office. He’d been laughed at. Space was at a premium, and none of the other grad students wanted to trade places with Denis. Whalen’s odor and idiosyncrasies were well known in the department. So Denis had started doing his work at Genius Loci, and that had worked fine until . . . the recent unpleasantness. Now he would have to try working in his office again, and hope Whalen was away for the summer, which seemed unlikely.

  After the earthquake, Denis dreamed of being repeatedly swallowed and disgorged by an enormous whale with phosphorescent, leprous patches on its skin.

  He woke again to the sound of something falling over in the next room, and a muttered curse. Denis lay still in bed, listening, and heard footsteps and the creaking of his couch cushions. Someone was in the living room.

  It had to be Jane. Who else but his dead ghost lover would enter this way? Had she come back to make up, to kill him, to fuck in sullen silence? Denis got out of bed, already dressed enough, since he slept in shorts and a T-shirt. He opened his door and went into the living room.

  It wasn’t Jane. It was Beej, sitting in the middle of the couch, hands on his knees, smiling tentatively. “Hey, Denis. Sorry to barge in, but—”

  “Barge in?” Denis’s weariness was replaced by outrage. “I think you mean break in, Beej. Get out of my house, before I call the police. Speaking of which, why aren’t you still in jail? Who would bail you out?”

  Beej looked uncomfortable, insofar as Denis could see his features in the half-light from the curtained windows. “Sorry to come in unannounced, but see, something’s happened—”

  “How fascinating. Leave now.”

  “Denis, I can’t go yet. I brought someone to meet you.” He leaned forward, and pitched his voice low. “I brought the earthquake god. He escaped from his prison this morning, and then set me free.”

  Denis sighed. “As much as I’d enjoy meeting your imaginary deities, Beej—”

  “I believe I can make my own introductions.” The voice came from the kitchen, dry and full of malicious good humor. Denis looked, and saw a tall man—absurdly tall; his head seemed almost to brush the ten-foot ceiling, but that couldn’t be—standing by the stove, mostly in shadows.

  “Okay, Beej, you coming here is one thing, but you bring your weirdo friends—”

  “Could you give us a few moments, Beej?” the man in the kitchen said, and Beej sprang to his feet.

  “Sure thing,” he said, and hurried to the front door without a backward glance, letting himself out, shutting the door behind him.

  Denis knew he should be shouting, demanding that this man leave, threatening to call the police, but all that seemed so banal, predictable, exhausting; after all he’d been through these past few days, he couldn’t work up the energy. “What is it? What do you want?”

  “First, let’s establish my credentials. I am a god. Beej may be misguided about a lot of things, but he’s got that much right.” The man didn’t move from the shadows in the kitchen, and Denis didn’t approach him; he could still dodge back into his bedroom and lock the door, if necessary.

  “Okay,” Denis said. “Nice to meet you. I’m an atheist.”

  “I don’t know how you can doubt what I say. After all, I raised a woman from the dead. I gave her a new body made of mud. Aren’t those the sort of things a god is expected to do?”

  Denis swallowed, suddenly thirsty. “Ah. I don’t think . . .”

  “Yes, Denis,” the man said, patiently, pedantically. “I’m talking about Jane, whom you killed—”

  “No,” Denis said, holding up his finger, trying to stay in control, counting rapidly in his head
, up to nine and back down again, up and down. “I never killed anyone.”

  “Oh, really?” the man said, and stepped forward, his shoes—they seemed to be pointed cowboy boots—clicking on the floor. “I suppose you’d say that at worst you’re guilty of negligence, that the only crime you committed was the crime of inaction. You didn’t kill Jane, a mudslide did.” Another step, and now enough light touched him to reveal a brown duster, jeans, and a ragged cowboy hat, which threw shadows on the man’s face. “Which means I killed her, because I am the god of the mudslide, god of the swift and slow endings of life. Maybe so.” The man came into the light completely, and when Denis saw his face, he screamed, something he never would have imagined himself doing—screaming in shock was so pulp-fiction, so hackneyed and inauthentic.

  But he screamed, because this man had no face. This man wasn’t a he at all, but an it. It had a chrome skull, with barbed wire for teeth, and threshing hooks turning slowly around and around deep in its eye sockets. The thing took no notice of Denis’s brief shriek. “But do you think Jane would buy that excuse, son? That she’d say, ‘Oh, well, you didn’t kill me, you just caused me to be killed by your own inaction, well, that’s a different story, no harm done.’ Or do you think she’d be, maybe, a little angrier than that? See, I’m going up into the hills to pick her up. She had a little run-in with the good guys, got kicked in half, and she made her way back to the place where she was born, to bury herself in mud and recuperate. When I dig her out, I can tell her what you did. That you left her to die. I can show her the corpse you left behind—”

  “Ha!” Denis said, and shook his finger at the chrome cowboy. “She can’t even see her body! It’s invisible to her!”

  “You dumb shitheel,” it said. “Why do you reckon it’s invisible? Because I made it invisible. Jane’s close to my heart, she’s important to me, and I wanted to spare her that pain. She thinks she’s merely been transformed—it might upset her to find out she died in the process. But if you don’t go along with what I want, boy, I can cure her blindness. I can let her see what you did, see the body you left. I believe she’ll be cross with you, if I do that. Who knows what she might do to you then?”