Closing Doors: The Last Marla Mason Novel

by T. A. Pratt

  Marla had an altimeter in her head now, pretty much, and they dove for a long time, descending several thousand feet. She could feel the pressure building up around her, and decided it was a good thing Zufi had insisted she come here in her real form after all. Any human body would have gotten squished into mush down here. Zufi could handle the oceanic pressures, but she was wrapped in a lifetime’s worth of highly specialized magics that allowed her to do so.

  The ocean floor came into sight at last, black and flat and boring. They were over ten thousand feet down now. Zufi slowed, rolled over in the water, and held up her hand to Marla: Stop. She pointed at the ocean floor some fifty feet below them and nodded her head emphatically.

  They should have come up with some method to communicate. They could’ve enchanted conch shells or something. Oh well. Marla looked down, but the ocean floor was nothing special—what was interesting about black sand?—so she shrugged and made her most baffled face. If there was a Cthulhuoid entity down there, it was lying low.

  Zufi scowled, then reached into a pouch at her belt, and drew out a handful of seashells. She held them up in front of Marla’s face so she could see them clearly, then hurled the shells downward. They drifted... and when they got within a dozen feet of the ocean floor, the ground leapt up, tendrils of black sand shooting forward and snatching the shells, pulling them down. Marla stared, then looked at Zufi, who nodded her head vigorously and pointed again.

  Marla started to float down a little closer, and Zufi grabbed at her arm. Marla shook her off. She was a god. She wasn’t afraid of... whatever this was. Some creature hiding under the sand, or controlling the sand? There were all sorts of weird things deep in the sea. She’d encountered an ancient tentacled monster-god-thing during her apprenticeship, in another ocean. Hmm. If there was some kind of bizarre entity down there, it wasn’t native to Earth, or she’d be able to sense its life. She couldn’t perceive anything living down there at all... and wasn’t that strange? Shouldn’t there be bottom feeders, at least, busily feeding on what came out of other fish’s bottoms? Or had whatever she was facing killed all the life? Zufi had said it was a threat to everything, and even if that was an exaggeration—

  When Marla got a bit closer, a telephone-pole-thick tendril composed of black sand lashed out at her. Marla gestured, and her terrible sword appeared in her hand. She sliced at the reaching limb—but instead of cutting through the monstrous appendage, black specks swarmed all over the sword, and began to dissolve it. Marla gasped and let go of the sword before the dots—were they insects? They just looked like sand—could climb up her arm, too. The sword should have been inviolate: it was an artifact, forged in hell by a death god, with a spark of divinity at its center! There was no force on Earth that could destroy it. But as her terrible sword fell, it diminished, transformed into a shapeless shower of dark sand.

  More tendrils reached for her, but Marla soared up out of range. Rage boiled up inside her. She stared down at the sand for moment, then glanced at the Bay Witch, opening a shadow beneath her and dropping her into the throne room in hell. Then she looked down at the ocean floor and she screamed.

  Unimaginable waves of heat poured off of Marla, and where that heat struck the ocean floor, it fused the black sand into glass. She began to move in a spiral, ever-widening, over the sea floor, realizing now how unnaturally level the bottom of the sea was: there should have been hills, valleys, chasms, but the black sand had smoothed everything out. She turned it all to glass, drawing heat from the Earth’s core, and from the power of her divinity, and her fury. She floated, and she melted, and she floated more. Finding the borders of the black sand was surprisingly simple, for her: she could sense life, and there was no life where the black sand teemed, so when she sensed living things again, that was the limit of its domain.

  When Marla was finished, she’d turned over three square miles of the sea floor to shiny black glass. The dead zone was raggedly circular. She’d projected heat deep into the ground, too, just to be safe, in case whatever laired under there could burrow away and escape. Unless Beach Blanket Cthulhu could swim through magma, it was burned.

  She closed her eyes and opened them in her throne room. Zufi was standing in a spreading puddle of salt water, head cocked, looking at Pelham, who’d conjured up a mop but wasn’t using it yet. “You do not look dead,” Zufi said to him.

  “Thank you?” Pelham said.

  The Bay Witch turned toward Marla. “Hello. I am sorry about your sword. I did not know the sand could destroy god-things. I have only seen it destroy fish and mud and water.”

  Marla blinked. “Water?”

  “Did you not see the shimmering agitation of the water above the sand?” Zufi held up her hand, palm flat, then made a wave motion. “The sand was converting the sea water into itself, though not as quickly as it converts other things. I do not know why it changes the water more slowly. Pressure? Because more water is always pressing down down down? Even so I think the sand transformed, hmm... eight hundred thousand gallons.”

  “Is... that a lot? It sounds like a lot.”

  “The north Atlantic holds one hundred and forty six million cubic kilometers of water. A cubic kilometer of water contains three hundred billion gallons. So, no, it is not so much of a lot, except that it is water being turned into black sand that turns other things into black sand also. So: any amount is too much.”

  Marla nodded. “It’s okay. I burned it up. Went full volcanic, slagged the sand and whatever was hiding underneath it. Do you have any idea what it was? Some kind of monster with the ability to alter substances on the atomic level, I guess, so that’s new—”

  Zufi frowned. “I do not think there is a monster, or not the kind of monster you are thinking I am thinking about. I have observed this sand very much and I have seen nothing hiding beneath it. The monster is the sand, and the sand is the monster. The thing is the thing itself. It began as just a small patch of dead ground, a little pile of black crystals, but something woke the sand up: it began to grow, and to spread, and whatever it touched, it changed, but it did not spread like moss. I saw the sand plan, Marla. I saw it encircle, and pincer, and flank. I saw it hide beneath a layer of regular mud, and burst out to snatch creatures that came too close. It likes to take living things best. When I cast a spell to make the animals avoid that spot, that is when it began converting more of the ground, and the water itself, instead. The sand can make anything into itself. It prefers to make living things into itself, though. It is a killing thing.”

  Marla didn’t shiver, but if she were mortal, she would have. “I don’t know what it was, Zufi. Some kind of horrible infestation, but it’s okay—it’s gone now. Inert.” And yet... Marla still felt the geas on her, like a bit of cool lace on the back of her neck, a silver spiderweb.

  That’s why she wasn’t surprised when Zufi frowned. “I sent out word to the other wave mages, and they tell me there is another bloom of this sand, a smaller one, in the Pacific. There is a third in the Mediterranean. I am waiting to hear from representatives in the other great seas.”

  Naturally. Nothing’s ever easy. “Gods. Okay. I’ll see what I can do. Give Pelly the details. We’ll send some demons to investigate—they’re not properly alive, just spun up out of primordial chaos, so if they get melted and converted, it’s no great loss. I’ll imbue them with very rudimentary minds, just enough to observe and report. I’ll find those other patches and get them sealed off, too.”

  Zufi said, “You are sure you cleared the other infestation? This sand... it is like cancer. If any is left, any speck, it can transform its surroundings, and grow again.”

  Marla shook her head. “I seared hard, and deep, even a bit beyond the margins of the infestation, to be safe, but... you might want to keep an eye on the area. I’ll get some research going, too, and see if we can figure out where this stuff is coming from. Maybe some sorcerer is doing a really stupid experiment, or it’s a mad-science type deal.” She put her hand on Zufi—touching
a human was safe here, since they were in the underworld, where her power was reality, and not an intrusion—Zufi was the outsider here, and was under Marla’s protection. “Thank you for telling me about this. You saved your favor for a good cause. We’ll get it cleaned up.”

  “I hope we will. I cannot swim in black sand. Will you send me home?”

  Marla conjured a shadow, and returned Zufi to the depths of the sea.

  Pelham was busying himself with the mop, though he could have banished the water with a thought, as steward of her palace. Ah, well. He liked doing things in the old way. “It’s been months since we were menaced by an alien threat,” Marla said. “I guess it’s good to keep busy.”

  Pelham swirled the mop around her feet. “Regarding your busyness, don’t forget you have another date, Majesty. Mr. Cole sent a message as well—Bradley would like to speak to you urgently. He had one of those dreams, and has some insight into who threatened his life, and Rondeau’s, he says.”

  She groaned. “Never mind. I hate being busy. I know where to find Bradley. Where’s this next date?”

  “A forest,” Pelham said.

  “Who has a first date in the forest? That’s some serial killer shit. That’s like, ‘Come have a blind date with me in the woods, you’ll love being chopped up and buried under a tree.’ Seriously?”

  “I understand this latest prospect is a nature magician, Majesty.”

  “You know my feelings about nature.”

  “That it is best observed from a safe distance on the far side of a thick window, yes. But you did want a consort who could tend to the cycles of the natural order, so....”

  “So someone else can tend to the fields and forests? That would be nice. You have a wardrobe in mind? At least I won’t be expected to wear heels in the woods.”

  Of Two Minds

  Gods are good at multitasking, so Marla decided to see if she could do two things at once. She had plenty of experience running a mortal shell on Earth while the deep divine parts of her handled the backend operations of reality in the underworld, but she’d never tried to simultaneously operate two bodies on Earth at the same time. The “black art of bodily bilocation,” as Rondeau invariably called it—quoting an episode of that old show The X-Files—was a power accessible even to powerful mortal sorcerers, but was famously difficult to manage. Running two bodies in parallel was the magical equivalent of rubbing your stomach and patting your head at the same time. (But really more like juggling chainsaws and masturbating at the same time.) Bilocators tended to trip over their own feet, or one body would throw up because the other body smelled something disgusting, or, most often, one body would just zone out when something really interesting happened and drew all the split attention in one direction. Marla had the expanded consciousness and accelerated processing power of a god, now, so she figured she could handle it.

  Besides, one of the things she needed to do was go on a blind date. How much attention would that take, really?

  Marla instantiated in the midst of an old growth forest full of spruce and pine at twilight, the sun just gone down. Funny: in San Francisco it was still morning. Could you get jetlag from being in two different time zones at once?

  She looked down at the clothing Pelham had prepared for her and snorted. She was wearing soft leather knee-high boots that laced up, green leggings, and a dark green shirt that could have been purchased at a Renaissance Faire. Her hair was in a braid hanging over her shoulder—which meant her hair was long enough for a braid, something it had seldom been when she had a mortal body, because long hair gave your enemies something to grab onto in a fight. “I look like a ranger in a D&D campaign,” she said aloud. “All I need is a bow.” Her breath made puffs of steam. That was Finland for you. She turned up her night vision, since she no longer had her incomparable god-eyes.

  Marla walked through the crunching pine needles, not bothering with stealth. She could sense bears in the distance, and wolves, and lots of birds, but there wasn’t anything out here that could threaten her, even in this relatively fragile body. Creatures touched by the supernatural could probably break through this body’s wards, but she didn’t sense anything eldritch in the vicinity. There were hardly any trolls left at all anymore, and those that survived were mostly hibernating in the patient wait for another ice age. She’d met a troll, once, and told it about anthropogenic climate change, and when their conversation was over, that had been one sad rock-monster.

  She sensed a human life up ahead, and pushed through a thick bunch of pine branches and into a small clearing, where a man sat cross-legged, eyes closed, dressed in layers of gray and mottled greens. He was levitating about two feet off the ground.

  “Show-off,” she said.

  He opened his eyes and smiled. He was dark-skinned, his head shaved, probably about forty years old, and handsome in a rugged way. “I’m Jarrell. You must be Marla.” He uncrossed his legs, and when his feet touched the ground, he stood up, subject to gravity again. He approached, hand outstretched, and Marla shook. He must have seen something in her expression, because he laughed. “You were expecting someone blond and blue-eyed?”

  She shrugged. “Place like Finland, seemed like a fair bet.”

  “My father came here from Nigeria in the ‘70s, and married a Finn. It’s not always the most welcoming place for immigrant families. I spent a lot of my life as an outsider. Maybe that’s why I like being alone in the woods so much.”

  “The alone part I can relate to. The woods, well. I’ve always preferred cities.”

  Jarrell chuckled. “It makes sense you’d need to outsource, then. Our mutual friend said you needed the help of a good nature magician.”

  The Finnish sorcerer wasn’t exactly into internet dating, so Cole had put together another pretext for them to meet, reaching out to some contacts in Europe to bring the two of them together. “It’s complicated,” she said. “You can do the job, I’m sure, my people vouched for you... but it’s a question of whether the two of us could work together, first, and whether you’d even want the job, second.” She thought fleetingly of Lauren, who knew nothing about magic. The “how would you like to rule the underworld with me?” conversation was likely to be a lot easier with Jarrell. Lauren probably wouldn’t literally go insane if Marla told her, or else Cole’s algorithm wouldn’t have chosen her, but Jarrell would grasp it far more readily. “Do you mind if I hang around with you a little, get a sense of what you’re like, before I get into all the details?”

  Jarrell shrugged affably. That was good. Marla was the opposite of easygoing, so someone more relaxed could be a congruent fit. “I’m just doing a little nature walk this evening, and despite what I said about being alone, I don’t mind your company. I’ve heard about you. The onetime witch queen turned freelance monster hunter.”

  “It’s a living.” News of Marla’s ascension to godhood hadn’t spread everywhere in the sorcerous community, it seemed. Even if it had, it was the kind of rumor people would be unlikely to believe, since magical adepts had a tendency toward embroidering the truth in the service of self-aggrandizement. They set off moving toward the north. “So you, like... look after the forest?”

  He chuckled. “That’s me. The black Finnish Lorax. I’ve been focusing on gray wolf populations, mostly. They’re endangered, so I’m doing what I can to help them make a comeback. I do my best to keep the whole ecosystem here protected and in balance. There aren’t a lot of these old forests left in the world.” Tree branches bent gracefully, almost unobtrusively, out of the way as Jarrell passed by, and stayed decorously out of the way until Marla followed. She didn’t know what spell he was using to do that. Maybe the woods simply showed deference to their protector.

  “You’re a lifelong do-gooder then, huh?”

  “Mmm, no. It’s purely selfish. I like spending time in the woods. Running with wolves and foxes, flying with bats. Shapeshifting is one of my great joys. If no one protects the forest, well. It’s much less fun to transform into
a wolf and run with a pack through a supermarket or a parking garage.”

  “I don’t know. That could be pretty entertaining. So what are you doing today? Breaking wolf traps? Guiding reindeer or whatever into a pack of wolves for dinner?”

  For the first time, his smile vanished. “No. It’s more serious today. I’ve sensed an... imbalance. It’s difficult to explain, but I have a kind of link with the forest, and when something is wrong, I feel it in my body.”

  Marla nodded. “I was chief sorcerer of a city for a while. I had a link, too, what we called the ‘city sense.’ If pollution levels got too high, or infrastructure crumbled, or the economy weakened, I got twinges and sensations I could interpret.”