Closing Doors: The Last Marla Mason Novel

by T. A. Pratt

  “What, like a computer chip?” Marzi said. “A Manchurian Candidate kinda thing?”

  “You two do love referencing films I haven’t seen,” Cole said. “You realize that when I went into hibernation it was still the silent era? I haven’t had much time to visit the cinema since then.”

  “We’ll organize a film festival after we figure out why fish-monster assassins are trying to kill us,” Bradley said.

  Cole chuckled. “To answer your question, Ms. McCarty, I doubt the brain manipulation is technological in nature—or even magically enhanced technology. This transformation... it strikes me as fundamentally alien. Or at least wholly sui generis: this is magic done by someone with great power and ingenuity but absolutely no grounding in known techniques. Someone inventing spells themselves, or working from a set of foundational principles I cannot even comprehend.”

  “Like a sorcerous outsider artist?” Marzi said.

  “Indeed. Well. Let’s look at the poor devil’s brain and see what we can find out.”

  Cole fired up the bone saw and neatly and quickly cut around the top of the fish-man’s skull. He grasped the top of the skull, pulled a disk of bone and scalp away—

  And leapt backward, dropping the skull fragment, as a large quantity of black sand poured out of the cranial cavity, pattering onto the exam table and spilling onto the floor.

  “Holy shit.” Bradley started to step forward, then hesitated. “What the hell?” He bent over, peering into the man’s head, and saw there was no brain inside, just more of the black sand.

  Cole found a plastic specimen container and used it to carefully scoop up some of the sand, screwing the lid on tightly. “How very odd.” He stared at the sand on the table and floor: shiny black grains, like ground-up obsidian. “It seems inert, but be careful. Don’t touch it.”

  “Dude.” Marzi pointed at the floor, and it took a moment for Bradley to realize what she was trying to show them. The tile floor beneath the sand was darkening and changing, transforming from smooth whiteness to bumpy blackness, as if taking on the properties of the sand.

  “Uh, Cole—”

  “I see it.” The old sorcerer’s tone was grim. He tossed the specimen jar toward the table, the plastic container already dissolving into black granules as the sand inside somehow converted its container to more of itself.

  Cole moved his hands in a deft conjuration, and a dome of hard light appeared, covering the body on the table and the part of the floor where the sand had fallen. The forcefield distorted their view of the table and corpse slightly, like they were looking through a heat shimmer, but they could see the black sand slowly replicating itself until the whole floor was black. Then the sand began to climb up the legs of the table.

  “Whoa. Gray goo.” When Cole and Bradley both looked at Marzi in confusion—it was black sand, not gray goo—she said, “You know, nanotech gone crazy? You guys don’t read sci-fi?”

  “Assume my reading of fiction stopped with Dickens,” Cole said.

  Marzi nodded. “There’s this idea that you could make nano-machines, okay? Tiny robots, the size of microbes or even smaller. In theory you could use the nanobots to manipulate matter in all kinds of ways, changing things down to the molecular level—or even the atomic level. You could inject the nanobots into sick people and they could destroy tumors or viruses. You could send them to strip poisons out of the soil or spilled oil out of the ocean, turning poisonous materials into harmless ones—or just converting them into more of the nanobots, since the machines would be capable of self-replication using any matter they encountered. You could have ‘utility fog’ even, a cloud of programmable matter that follows you around and creates whatever you tell it to, a sort of infinitely shapeshifting robot. In some science fiction stories, the stuff is basically magic—you can use it to turn lead into gold, whatever.”

  “Okay. But what’s that have to do with this black sand?” Bradley said.

  “Imagine if nanotech goes wrong. Say you release a bunch of nanobots into the Gulf of Mexico to clean up an oil spill, but you mess up the programming, and instead of just converting that particular kind of hydrocarbon into copies of itself, the nanobots start to convert all forms of carbon. Every copy made would go on to make more copies, and pretty soon you’re looking at an exponential curve of growth. In no time at all, they’ve converted the whole world to nanobots. One book I read called it ‘ecophagy.’ Eating the world, and turning it all into... gray goo.” She shrugged. “Or in this case, black goo. That looks like what the sand is doing. Maybe it’s nanobots?”

  “Then why didn’t they transform this poor man’s body into more of themselves?” Cole said.

  But as they watched, the sand did just that. The table collapsed, its legs turned to black sand, and then the man began to disappear under an encroaching swarm of granules, beginning with his extremities, until after a few minutes there was nothing under the dome except an inert heap of glittering blackness.

  “I trust that’s a bubble and not a dome, right?” Bradley nodded toward the forcefield. “That stuff’s not free to burrow down to the floor below us?”

  Cole nodded. “Correct.” He gazed into the dome. “These are not machines. They are also not alive, in any way that I understand. My specialties are divination, diagnostic magic, history, and lore, you understand? My expertise is knowing things... and this is something I do not know. This is alien.”

  “How does something that’s not alive, or a machine, make copies of itself?” Bradley said.

  “Viruses do it,” Marzi said. “And prions, which are even less like a life form than viruses are. A prion is just a protein with a set of bad instructions that other proteins are tricked into following, but that’s enough to put holes in the brains of people and cows.”

  “This sand could be something like that,” Cole allowed, “though it seems to be inorganic. I will need to do further study, but I am loathe to open this forcefield enough to remove a small sample.” He sighed. “I’d better see if the sand can be destroyed.”

  “What are you going to do with it?” Bradley said.

  “I control the conditions within the forcefield, so let us experiment.” He stared hard at the sand, and nothing at all seemed to happen. “Extreme cold does... nothing. Extreme heat... Hmm. Also nothing. It must have a melting point, everything does, but it must be a temperature beyond what I can generate. Perhaps a dedicated pyromancer could do better.” He stared, and the forcefield began to shrink, getting smaller and smaller, until it was a sphere the size of a beach ball, hovering in mid-air, packed solid with black sand. “It can’t be compressed any further than that. I’m putting so much pressure on the sand that it should be turning into diamonds, but it’s resistant. It can’t be crushed any more than this. Well. That’s disheartening.”

  “What will you do with it?” Bradley said.

  “Lock it away in the most potent set of magical wards I can create. This sand is worse than a biohazard. It’s a threat to all matter, not merely the living.”

  “What was a bunch of self-replicating death sand doing in the head of a shark-man assassin?” Marzi said.

  “An excellent question,” Cole said. “A better question might be, who else is walking around with skulls full of black sand?” The old sorcerer looked at Bradley. “Son, I hate to ask, but...”

  “Yeah. Existential threat stuff, huh? I’ll inquire. It’s always the goddamn end of the world around here.” He started toward the door. “Marzi, stay and help Cole, okay?”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To talk to myself.”

  The Doctor and the God

  Marla sighed. “You could have asked me before you actually made the date, Pelham. I do have an underworld to run.”

  Pelham lowered his eyes, but she could tell he was entirely unrepentant. “Fortunately, you have me to help run the day-to-day aspects of your domain while you deal with more pressing concerns. You told, me, and I quote, ‘There is nothing more important t
han choosing a new consort—’”

  “Yes, okay, fine. Why do you have to be such a good listener? A date. I haven’t done this in forever. At least it doesn’t take me long to get ready, what with my mastery over my entire physical form. So, what’s the deal here? Does my date know they’re being auditioned for co-regent of hell?”

  “This particular individual is not a magical initiate, but a resident of the ordinary world, so it might be best to... ease her into those realities, if she strikes you as a suitable candidate. Cole and I took advantage of the fact that Rondeau signed you up for all those dating sites, and used one of those as a pretext to arrange a rendezvous. We, ah, enlisted Rondeau’s assistance to send her messages, since he is more conversant in the conversational norms of such communiqués.”

  She groaned. “There’s a whole correspondence? How long have you known about this woman?”

  “She was actually the first individual Cole’s algorithm identified, as soon as he got the spell running, and may therefore be the most suitable. We didn’t want to mention her to you until we’d investigated her a bit, and secured a meeting.”

  “But you let Rondeau write her? I think that’s technically catfishing.” Then again, that was better than Cole, who wrote like a 19th-century novelist, or Pelham, who was even fussier and more precise in writing than he was in speech. “All right, it’s fine, give me a quick sketch of what I’m getting into. Who is she?”

  “Her name is Lauren, thirty-four years of age, a physician with a specialty in infectious diseases, employed by various aid organizations, most recently Doctors Without Borders in the Central African Republic. She’s Dutch, and is currently on vacation, visiting family in Amsterdam.”

  “Dutch? I’ve never met a Dutchwoman, that I remember. So what do we talk about? Legal weed, tulips, windmills, wooden shoes, gouda?”

  “I am sure that constitutes a comprehensive list of her interests, just as your American roots dispose you toward NASCAR racing, assault rifles, Coca-Cola, and cheeseburgers.”

  “I do like cheeseburgers. Fine, point taken. If Rondeau were here, he would’ve made a joke about dikes, you just know it.”

  “His presence is indeed sorely missed.”

  “Do I even speak Dutch? I’ve never tried.”

  “You can speak and comprehend all languages spoken by any creature that has ever died, human and otherwise.”

  “That explains why the birds always sound like they’re yelling about fucking and eating and traveling. Okay. Who does this Lauren think I am?”

  “She thinks you are Marla Mason, a bisexual woman of thirty-five, trained as a forensic pathologist, based in Felport, but often jetting around the globe to consult on criminal murder cases.”

  “Rondeau made a dating profile that said I’m a doctor? A cop doctor?”

  Pelham cleared his throat, though his “body” was a form of convenience, and Marla suspected he was just covering a laugh. “Rondeau indicated that he ascribed various occupations to you on various sites. Vocations he mentioned included funeral director, coroner, crime scene cleaner, obituary writer....”

  She snorted. “Yeah, I get the general idea. It’s fine. I’m a god. I can fake being a doctor. But when he wrote to her, what was it like? Funny, flirty, serious, what? Did he do a good job pretending to be me?”

  “I am not sure whom Rondeau was pretending to be, since the individual implied by the correspondence does not greatly resemble you, but he was reasonably attentive to matters of grammar and spelling, at least for the purposes of informal communication, and I suppose we should be grateful. Your exchanges with Lauren have mostly involved sharing stories of memorable experiences in distant locales, with a certain amount of flirtation entering into the more recent messages when you mentioned you broached the possibility of a meeting during your current trip to Amsterdam. Nothing too explicit in those flirtations, fortunately. You like wine, or so Rondeau indicated, and so Lauren suggested a meeting at a wine bar.” He glanced at his watch. “Twenty minutes from now. Instantiate a smart phone when you arrive, and you’ll be able to glance over your messages with her to get a sense of the proper tone.”

  I’m impersonating Rondeau impersonating me. What could go wrong? “Did Cole say why he thinks she’s such a good fit?”

  “I gather his divination algorithm is something of a black box, but he says she is unflinching in the face of adversity, with a combination of great compassion and competence in the face of crisis that should prove useful. He said there’s some evidence she has encountered the supernatural in the course of her work, though she likely classes the experience as something inexplicable or baffling—that prior exposure may make it easier to reveal your true nature to her, however. What will you wear?”

  Marla stared at him, caught flat-footed by the abrupt shift in topic, then shrugged. “I haven’t ever really dated, Pelham. I’ve had my share of one-night stands and little flings with men and women and once an incubus and another time a lovetalker, but not many things you’d call a relationship, apart from my teenage sweetheart Daniel and my dead husband. I met Daniel when we were apprentices, and I met the Walking Death when he tried to conquer my city. I don’t, like, go out. I have no idea how to dress for a first date. I mean... slutty? But not too slutty? Help me out here.”

  Pelham clucked his tongue. “We will say alluring rather than slutty, if you don’t mind. Fear not. This is why you have me.”

  “No offense, Pelly, but you were trained to be a valet for magical aristocrats with fashion sense that got stuck in the Victorian era. I’m not wearing a bustle or stays on this date.”

  He sniffed. “Please, Majesty. I wouldn’t let my personal tastes influence the appropriateness of my choices.”

  Marla instantiated in Amsterdam. She paused in front of a window around the corner from the wine bar, glanced around to make sure no one was looking, and turned up the window’s albedo until it was as reflective as a mirror.

  She had to admit, Pelham had done a good job: she was dressed in black pants that fit her perfectly, low but stylish heels, a tailored white blouse with a neckline that offered just a hint of cleavage, and simple silver earrings and a matching necklace. Marla, who usually never bothered with vanity, had nevertheless recreated her original body with a couple of tweaks this time: fewer scars, glossier hair, better skin. Make-up she limited to just the barest touch of lipstick, in a shade her late husband had admired. She wasn’t going to change who she was.

  Now that she had a body, she had body chemistry, and as a result, she felt nervous. Bodies were stupid.

  She leaned against a wall and scrolled through her phone, looking at Lauren’s pictures and reading through the messages she and Rondeau had exchanged. There was nothing too alarming there, and Rondeau had even made some decent jokes. She tucked the phone away and walked along the night-time street, nodding to a few couples and singletons who went strolling by. None of them were wearing wooden shoes or clutching bouquets of tulips.

  She’d never been to Amsterdam when she was a mortal. Become a god, see the world. The brick street ran along beside a canal, with an arched stone bridge nearby, where a couple leaned into each other and looked at the water and doubtless thought sappy thoughts. It was probably hard to find a spot in this city that wasn’t a little romantic. The buildings she passed were tall brick, a mix of apartments and shops, and soon she reached the wine bar, a narrow place tucked in between residential buildings. There were worse places to live.

  Marla looked through the window and saw no one who resembled the woman she’d seen photos of on her phone, so either Lauren hadn’t arrived yet, or there was a radical disconnect between her digital presentation and her physical reality. Marla went inside, appreciating the wall of wine bottles (half glass-fronted and refrigerated for the chilled wines, the other half tall wooden racks), the scores of glasses hanging from the ceiling above the long bar like an elaborate chandelier, the dark wood tables and stools and booths. The place was cozy, half-filled with
chatting couples and the occasional person sitting alone, all sipping generous pours.

  The hostess, a classically apple-cheeked and blonde-haired woman in a simple black dress, greeted her and asked if she had a reservation. Marla said, “I think my friend Lauren made one,” surprised to hear herself speaking Dutch. The hostess said the rest of her party hadn’t arrived yet and guided her to a seat near the back.

  Marla chose a chair that put her back to the wall and provided a good view of the entrance, because some habits never died, even after you became pretty much invincible. She read over the menu—a billion wines and a few fancy food choices, including one that involved seared scallops, contemplation of which made her stomach rumble. She was in a body, which meant she could get hungry now, as well as nervous.

  About five minutes later the door opened, and Marla looked up and recognized Lauren right away. Her photos on the dating site had included a couple of her dressed-up at fundraisers or fancy parties and a couple of her looking (admittedly rather adorably) disheveled out in the field, smiling among trees. The current version of her was somewhere in between: she was wearing a cute skirt and a dark green sweater that flattered her, but her long curly brown hair was distinctly flyaway, and overall she had the distracted air of someone who knew she’d forgotten something but couldn’t remember what.

  The hostess pointed out Marla, and Lauren bustled toward her, apologizing when she was still ten feet from the table. Marla rose and tried to give her a reassuring smile. At least she wasn’t the only one who was nervous.

  She spoke in lightly accented English. “Sorry sorry sorry, my mother was interrogating me about my plans, and then she was criticizing my outfit, and—” Lauren stopped and looked Marla up and down, then snapped her gaze up to Marla’s eyes and held out her hand. “Hi. I’m Lauren.”