The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl

by Tim Pratt

  “Ah,” Denis said, thinking furiously, and getting no-where. If this thing really was responsible for making Jane a mud-revenant—and look at it, who knew what a being like this was capable of?—it had all the power here. Desperately, Denis said, “How do I know you aren’t just some . . . some robot, some art project Beej made, with a speaker in your face?”

  The thing stared at him, necessarily expressionless. “Oh. Right. You see me as metal, mostly, right? Within certain . . . annoyingly immutable limits, most people see me as they like, as they interpret me. Beej thinks of me as the earthquake god, and he sees me with skin made of cracking sandstone. But you . . . oh, I know your dreams, Denis. The machine that grinds, wearing down all the ugly imperfections, that killing engine of chrome and spikes. My goals and your dreams aren’t so different—I want to dip the world in a killing jar, too. I want to scour the earth. I am the machine that grinds, Denis.”

  Denis swallowed. “You know my dreams.”

  “Ayup. When people dream about me, I know.”

  “Then . . . I guess you are what you say.”

  “Good boy. I take it you’ll be joining my band of merry outlaws, then? I didn’t want you, particularly—you’re too fucking contrary by half, like a mean horse that’ll throw you for no good reason—but my wildfire girl ran off down the owl-hoot trail, so I’ve got an opening at the disciple level. You do what I say, and I won’t tell Jane what you did to her.”

  “Fine,” Denis said, because what else could you say to a chrome-faced god? “But can’t you kill me yourself? Why be so roundabout, why threaten me with Jane?”

  “Because you’re more scared of Jane than you’ll ever be of me, Denis. Because Jane is something you did, and there’s nothing you’re so scared of as your own well-earned consequences.” There was silence for a moment, broken only by the steady whir of the threshing machines in the god’s head. “Damn. I never used to be insightful. The things that girl’s done to me.”

  Denis ignored that—he had a well-honed ability to discard trivial or confusing information—and nodded. This thing had him over a barrel. “So what do you want? To scour the earth, big killing jar, blah blah blah, I know—but what do you want to do? Practically speaking?”

  “You and Beej are going to do a little art project for me. I’ll tell you all about it. But first, we’re going to go pick up Jane. Won’t that be fun?” It couldn’t grin, but there was definitely mirth in its voice.

  “Delightful,” Denis said, thinking that he was going to get his just-cleaned boots all muddy. Again.

  Sage Rat

  * * *

  When Marzi and Lindsay stepped through the door, hand in hand, their clothes changed.

  “What the hell!” Lindsay said. Marzi gaped at her. Lindsay had been transformed into the image of a saloon girl, in a red corseted dress, her hair ringleted and red-ribboned. She lifted her skirts and looked at her feet. She was wearing red heels. “This is not funny. Why do you get to be Billy the Kid, and I’m a hospitality girl?”

  Marzi looked down at her own clothes. She wore unassuming gunslinger garb: jeans, boots, and an undyed cotton shirt. The most interesting thing was the gun belt, soft old leather with a plain metal buckle. A heavy Colt .45 hung backward on her left hip, so she could reach across and draw right-handed. Marzi drew the pistol, careful not to point it anywhere near Lindsay. “I think this used to be my cap gun,” she said. “I tucked it in my pocket before we came through, and now it’s gone . . . but I’ve got this.”

  “Is it loaded?” Lindsay asked, holding up her skirts like a woman frozen in mid-curtsy.

  Marzi opened the gun, and found a bullet in every chamber. She snapped it shut. “Looks that way.”

  “Do you know how to use it?”

  Marzi shrugged. “My grandfather used to collect guns. Mom and Dad never approved of him showing me the collection—they’re hippies to the bone—but he taught me how to shoot a little when I was a teenager. I’m not good, but I could hit a barn at twenty paces, I guess. It’s been a long time since I’ve tried.” Marzi wasn’t quite being truthful; she had a natural gift for shooting, that rare synthesis of hand and eye that made sharpshooters. The skill was useful in table tennis, too, and that was mostly where she employed it. Her grandfather had been stunned when, after a few lessons, Marzi could shoot almost as accurately as he could. He’d offered to buy her a piece of her own when she graduated from high school, but Marzi had declined. She was comfortable enough with guns, but she didn’t feel any particular passion or affection for them, and she’d read too many stories about people being killed accidentally or deliberately by their own handguns.

  She hadn’t held a firearm in years, but this was a good one, well balanced, and it seemed authentically period, from the late 1800s. The Colt Peacemaker was a good weapon, for its time, less prone to exploding in the shooter’s hand than some of its contemporaries.

  “As long as you can kill otherworldly monsters, I’m happy,” Lindsay said. “And scare off any horny cowboys who come after me.” She flounced her skirts in irritation. “Really, this sucks.” She glared around at the worn-down buildings.

  “As long as I don’t have to shoot more than six horny cowboys,” Marzi said. “I don’t have any more ammo.”

  Lindsay ran her hands down the front of her dress. “I think this thing has whalebone in it. We’ve got to find something else for me to wear, Marzi, if we’re going to be here for long. Whose bright idea was it to dress me like this, anyway?”

  Marzi walked to a building and put her palm against the rough wood. “I don’t think any of this is exactly real. It is, but I think the way we’re perceiving it is sort of . . . optional. Arbitrary. The clothes are like that, too. You’re just dressed to fit the theme.”

  “That’s lame,” Lindsay said.

  “When in Tombstone,” Marzi said, shrugging. “We should find Jonathan and get out of here.”

  “This place doesn’t look that big. There’s only one street. Where do we start? Should we yell for him?”

  “I don’t know. The thing . . . the Outlaw . . . said there are other creatures living here. Maybe we shouldn’t call too much attention to ourselves.”

  “Too late for that,” drawled a man’s voice, from the porch of a building on the right.

  Marzi spun, drawing and cocking her gun with an unthinking ease that went beyond her meager training, into something like instinct.

  A man sat in a rocking chair beneath a wooden awning. He was sun-darkened and barrel-chested, wearing a striped Mexican serape spattered with unidentifiable stains. His face was round—though not precisely fat—and his gray-and-black beard needed a trim. His faded blue eyes watched Marzi’s face, not her gun.

  He took a long drink from an unlabeled glass bottle, then set it down on the boards beside him with a clink. He raised his arms slowly to show his empty hands. After matching Marzi’s stare for a moment, he said, “Well, I guess you’re the new sheriff in town. I’d be happy to hand over my badge, if I had one.”

  “Is he one of those other creatures,” Lindsay said, “just disguised to look like the town drunk or something?”

  The man frowned for a moment, then smiled mirthlessly, showing all his teeth, which were surprisingly white. “No, my posy, I’m not a creature. I’m Garamond Ray.”

  Marzi lowered her gun. “The painter? You?”

  He beamed, lowering his hands. “My fame precedes me! I knew I’d become famous after I died. Not that I actually died—just the next best thing. Tell me, am I part of the canon, now? How long have I been gone?”

  “Marzi,” Lindsay said, “if we’re going to chat, can we get in under the shade? Whalebone is hot, and I don’t mean sexy.”

  Marzi nodded, still looking at the man on the porch. Sunburned. Middle-aged. Half drunk. This was Ray? How could that be? He should be in his sixties at least by now . . . unless he hadn’t aged since his disappearance in 1989.

  The building behind him was a saloon with bat-wing d
oors. The faded sign hanging above the doors depicted a pool of blue water and a couple of palm trees in flaking primary-color paint, and a name, “The Oasis,” in sinuous faux-Arabic script.

  “Sure, come in out of the sun,” Ray said. “I never could do a damn thing about the heat. It’s built-in.” He pushed himself up, the arms of the rocker creaking under his weight.

  Marzi and Lindsay walked into the shade, instantly cooler by several degrees. “Oh, that’s way better,” Lindsay said.

  Ray looked her up and down with obvious appreciation, and Marzi thought about how long he must have been here, if he’d been trapped since the day of the Loma Prieta quake in 1989, when he’d disappeared. So many years, with no other people—or were there other people?—living in a ghost town. Marzi suspected that, under those circumstances, her own sex drive would have simply withered and dried and disappeared, but from the way Ray looked at Lindsay, his was definitely still functional.

  Or maybe this place was full of nymphs or succubi or something, and Ray had sex daily with jackal-headed women. What did she know? She didn’t even understand precisely where they were: the backstage area for the material world? Under the floorboards of rational space? In Faerie, or the medicine lands, or the Dreamtime? Or was that all the same place?

  “I admit,” Ray said, voice broad and ironic, “that I haven’t experienced a social occasion in a long time, but isn’t it customary for strangers thrown together by circumstance to introduce themselves?”

  “Sorry,” Lindsay said. “I think we’re still shaken up, just being here.”

  “Oh, that’s understandable.” Ray held out his hand. Lindsay shook politely. “I am, as I said, Garamond Ray, once a painter, lately a stationary nomad.”

  “I’m Lindsay,” she said. “And you should know, I am so totally gay. Sorry.”

  Ray stared at her, blinked, then laughed, a sound too big for this dry place. “My apologies. Once upon a time I had a bit more tact, but I haven’t been in the company of others for a long time. Your sexual unavailability is duly and regretfully noted.”

  Lindsay dropped an ironic little curtsy.

  “And you must be my esteemed replacement,” Ray said. “The Wild West theme is certainly a switch. There’s whiskey, now, which is nice. I’d ask how the apocalyptic doorman job is treating you, but since your prisoner escaped a little while ago, I think I can hazard a guess.”

  “I’m Marzi,” she said, not offering to shake hands. “You seem to know a lot more about this than I do.”

  He shrugged. “It’s all on-the-job training, but you get the hang of it after a while. I’ve been doing it longer than you have. I am a bit confused as to why you’re here, though—shouldn’t you be out capturing the man in the black hat, or whatever you’ve imagined our adversary into? Or else buggering off to some tropical paradise with a low incidence of geological upheaval?”

  “We’re looking for our friend,” Lindsay said, crossing her arms, clearly annoyed.

  “Ah,” Ray said, and stared up at the awning above them meditatively. “Then I suppose you’d better come inside.”

  He pushed through the bat-wing doors, Marzi and Lindsay following. The interior of The Oasis was familiar from countless Westerns: sawdust on the floor, scarred wooden tables scattered with dog-eared playing cards, a long rough bar, a honky-tonk piano with yellowing ivory keys, stairs to a second floor with a few closed doors. It might have been the same bar Marzi saw in her vision of Daniel’s death, but made even more unnerving by its emptiness.

  Jonathan was stretched out on the long, wide bar, like a corpse laid out at an old-fashioned wake.

  Marzi pulled her gun and trained it on Ray, who sighed and raised his arms again. Lindsay ran to Jonathan, touched his cheek, then leaned over to press her ear to his chest. She listened for a moment, then raised her head. “His heart’s beating, but it sounds all rattly, like if you shake a half-full salt shaker. Like he’s full of sand.”

  “What did you do to him?” Marzi demanded, stepping closer to Ray.

  “Apart from picking him up out of the dirt and bringing him out of the sun and making him as comfortable as possible?” Ray said. “Not a thing. Now put that gun down, before I take it away from you.”

  Marzi stiffened. “I’d like to see you try.”

  Ray snorted. “You couldn’t even keep our adversary locked away, when I did all the hard work of getting him here in the first place, and you think you could stop me?”

  “Can you guys compare dicks later on?” Lindsay said. “I’m worried about Jonathan.”

  Marzi lowered the hammer on her gun and went to Jonathan. His every breath rattled. Marzi took note of his clothing: He was dressed in dandified Western clothes, a black shirt with silver embroidery around the cuffs and collar, little pearl buttons, and a string tie with a silver clasp in the shape of a bull’s head; the eyes were turquoise. Jonathan’s boots were hand-tooled, shiny leather, worked with complex lasso designs. He looked like what the old-timers called a “mail-order cowboy,” someone from back East with a head full of dime novels and no real sense. Someone who didn’t belong in a place like this. “The Outlaw told me he’d touched Jonathan’s heart,” Marzi said.

  “The Outlaw? That’s what you call it?” Ray grunted. “I always called it ‘the djinn.’ And while I realize these things are largely subconscious and beyond our control, I have to say, things were better when it was a djinn. It’s easy to trap a djinn—you lure it into a bottle, then seal the bottle. It was just my bad luck to get sealed inside with it. But now that it’s a cowboy . . . well. There are all sorts of new complications.”

  “Marzi, do you have any idea what this guy’s talking about?”

  Marzi shook her head. “Not really. I’m out of my depth.”

  Ray sighed. “Let’s sit, then, and have a little powwow.” He gestured to a table, like all the others except it held a shot glass and a bottle of whiskey. Marzi hesitated, looking at Jonathan. “Don’t mind him,” Ray said. “I think he’ll keep. The desert is a wonderful preservative. I haven’t aged a day in all the time I’ve been here, and my beard hasn’t grown. I haven’t even taken a shit. I don’t even know how long I’ve been in here, either. The sun never sets, you know, so it’s hard to keep track. I tried piling up stones for a while, but I ran out of stones, and marks in the sand don’t last.”

  “You’ve been here for more than fifteen years,” Lindsay said. “Your beard is no longer in style.”

  “Shit,” Ray said. “I thought, maybe five years, but . . . shit.”

  Lindsay and Marzi sat down with him, Lindsay angling her chair so she could keep an eye on Jonathan. Ray sat back in his chair, hands crossed over his belly. “You’ve been the guardian for a while now, Marzi. I don’t know how long exactly, but I’d guess it’s been a couple of years since we developed a Western motif around here, since the seals started cracking and the door began to give. For a while, I hoped I’d be rescued.” He shook his head. “I gave up on that, though. Tell me what happened.”

  Marzi shrugged. “Two years ago, I found the door. I saw the thing, the Outlaw. I slammed the door. That was it.”

  “Oh, I remember. There were sandstorms around here for weeks after that, and then the buildings started to appear, the spring dried up, and I got a well and whiskey instead . . . but go on.”

  “I had sort of a breakdown. I repressed everything. I only realized there was a real monster, behind a real door, a couple of days ago.”

  Ray whistled. “I’d assumed you were making plans, taking precautions, all this time. No wonder the djinn—sorry, the Outlaw—managed to make a crack in the door.” He ran a hand through his short, going-to-gray hair, and for a moment he looked lost and vulnerable. “We’re in the shit here, now. Sorry I was nasty to you before, but I thought you’d just screwed up out of incompetence. Ignorance is a bit more excusable.”

  “You’re so gracious,” Lindsay said, but she didn’t take her eyes off Jonathan.

  Ray ignored he
r. “I’d begin at the beginning, but what’s that? I don’t know if the djinn—no, the Outlaw, I have to get used to that—I don’t know if it’s been around forever, or just since people were around to recognize it, to believe in it. You know the idea of the genius loci?”

  “It’s the name of the coffeehouse where I work,” Marzi said. “The house where the door is.”

  Ray stared at her, then laughed. “Ah, Christ, it leaks. It gets to people, influences things, no matter what. Whoever named the place must have felt its presence, way down deep in the cellars of their brain. I did my best work in that place—it’s a coffee shop now? Damn. It was a shared house, a studio. A bunch of us lived there in the eighties and painted and got high. Santa Cruz was a haven for old hippies and aging punks back then.”

  “Still is,” Lindsay said.

  “That’s good to hear,” Ray said. “I had some of the best times of my life in that house, and did my best work there. Did my murals survive?”

  “Yeah,” Marzi said.

  “It’s wonderful work,” Lindsay said, still not looking at Ray, but in a softer tone.

  “Yes, it is,” Ray said. “It wasn’t until I finished all the murals that I realized I had painted gods.”

  Marzi blinked. Lindsay said, “Come again? Sure, in the Teatime Room, there’s Thoth and Ra and all, but there aren’t any other gods . . .”

  “It makes more sense when you’re on ’shrooms,” Ray said. “Anyway, when you’ve been saturated by the place, and the images are pushing against your eyeballs from the inside . . .”

  “I think I get it,” Marzi said. “He’s right. There are big and little gods. The serpent, in the Ocean Room—”

  “I love the names,” Ray murmured appreciatively, not really interrupting.

  “It’s what, the Midgard serpent?” Marzi asked.

  “Maybe. Or more like Leviathan. ‘That which gathers itself together in folds,’ that’s what ‘Leviathan’ means, literally. I think I was painting a metaphor for this place.” His gesture encompassed the whole of the lands beyond the lands. “A place where space and time are folded in on themselves. Möbius territory.”