Briarpatch by Tim Pratt

by Tim Pratt

  Orville looked around. The hospital corridor just outside his room had been brightly lit, but the woman had guided him down other hallways, and once into what looked like a broom closet, except they’d slid through the chemical-smelling darkness and out the other side into another corridor. Now the chair rolled down a dim hallway, fluorescent lights overhead sputtering, more than half of them burned out. The floors were filthy and slick, and occasionally the wheels made a squelching noise, as if rolling through organic debris. They passed doorways framing darkness, and sounds emerged from some of them—bells, whispers, weeping. “This isn’t the hospital,” Orville said, and his mind felt clearer than before, and the pain below his waist was more insistent.

  “Well. I could argue semantics with you. This is the hospital, or maybe a part of the hospital that was never built, except in a place where there was a nuclear war or some Omega Man scenario with flesh-eating vampires living in the wreckage. It’s sort of like the mad whimsy wing of the hospital.”

  “You’re kidnapping me,” Orville said, feeling dumb for not realizing it before, drugs or not. “Take me back! I’m hurt!”

  “Yes, you’re hurt. But I’m not kidnapping you, I’m helping you.” Orville tried to twist around to look at her, but moving his head too quickly made everything spin. A sudden stabbing pain in his chest made him gasp—hadn’t the woman said something about broken ribs? God, it was like having shards of broken metal inside him. What had he done to himself? What would become of him? He thought of grabbing the wheels, turning the chair around and trying to get back to his room, but there was a sound like distant howling, and the corridor was very dark, and he was lost, and afraid.

  Suddenly there were lights again, and the hallway was clean and wide and brightly lit. Everything was chrome and translucent white plastic, and the tiles on the floor cycled in colours, from orange to yellow to green. It was like some spaceship sickbay from an unusually stylish vintage science fiction film.

  “This is better,” she said. “I was worried there for a minute, when it was so dark. Ismael showed me this place once, when I got hurt on one of our exploring trips, but I wasn’t sure I remembered the way.”

  “Where am I? Who are you? What is this?” Orville was rapidly becoming sober. He felt balanced on a sharp edge, a brief window when he was lucid but not yet overwhelmed by pain. The pain was building, though, like a storm in his body, and he was afraid to let his hands leave the armrests of the wheelchair, afraid of dropping them to his lap and brushing the wreckage that had once been his own ordinary, healthy legs, two things he’d never appreciated before.

  “You’re in the hospital,” she said. “A hospital, anyway. Briarpatch Memorial.” The chair rolled around a sharp curve into another corridor. There were signs on the walls, but Orville couldn’t read them. The letters were sinuous, not quite Arabic, but closer to that than anything else Orville could think of. “And I’m Bridget. As for what this is . . . I’ll explain more once we get your legs taken care off. In the meantime, just relax. You’d planned to be dead this afternoon, so anything else has to be an improvement, right?”

  She pulled open a bright blue door with a square window set at eye level, tugging like it weighed a ton, until some mechanism clicked and it locked open. Then she wheeled Orville into the room, which was small, barely big enough for the chair. The walls were studded with coloured crystals, some small, some as big as fists. “Don’t worry,” she said. “This should only take a minute.” A moment later, the door shut behind him with a click.

  “Bridget?” he said, but she didn’t answer. She was gone, and the tiny room made him feel closed-in and short of breath, claustrophobia starting to wrap its tendrils around him. What was this? A gas chamber? Was she trying to finish the job he’d started on himself?

  The crystals on the walls began to pulse and glow, yellows and purples and reds, and then Orville’s eyes blurred, or else the room blurred, and his body became a distant and tenuous thing. Phantom sounds rose around him—bird calls, string music—and Orville wondered if he was having a seizure, if the jump had opened lesions on his brain. He’d read about such things, about patients undergoing brain surgery who experienced vivid memories, so real they thought they were reliving past moments , and that was happening now, only these weren’t his memories. He was making love to a woman, with dusky skin and black hair, and he’d never done that, too ashamed to hire a prostitute and too shy to pursue other channels. Now he was playing basketball with his friends, and he knew their names, knew they played every weekend, knew he wasn’t any good at the game but he loved it anyway. Now he was on a ferry, leaning over the bow, looking out at the water, leaving some kind of life behind, heading toward something new. A cascade of experiences he’d never actually experienced washed through him, little snippets of existence, conflicting and mutually exclusive memories fluttering by.

  And then it stopped. He was back in the crystal-studded room, in his wheelchair, completely lucid, with no pain in his legs or chest. But, oh, the pain in his heart; the pain of seeing what might-have-been, or could-have-been, or what was only dreamed-of, or desperately-wanted.

  The door opened behind him. “C’mon out, Mr. Troll,” Bridget said. “You’re all fixed up.”

  Orville rose from the chair, his legs whole again, and he turned to look at Bridget. She was a beautiful woman, but angry, and tired, and, yes, dead. There was no mistaking her for a living person. It was hard to say why. She wasn’t waxy, she wasn’t translucent; she didn’t look dead. He thought it might be because she wasn’t breathing consistently, wasn’t blinking enough, wasn’t producing body heat. He could see her, and hear her, but she seemed shifted halfway out of reality. She was a walking, talking evidence of absence.

  “That room . . . what is that room?”

  “I don’t know how it works. Ismael brought me here when I got hurt, I told you that, and he said it’s a place that sort of . . . fishes the probabilities. It doesn’t heal you, exactly, it just finds a version of you that never got hurt in the first place, and makes that body the reality—lets the likelihood of health achieve immanence.”

  Orville pushed the chair out of the little room. “I saw things, but the memories are fading, it’s like they were a dream . . . I played basketball, I made love to someone, things I never . . . but I am better now.” He was in a hospital gown that hung open at the back, and was embarrassed now that the drugs were out of his system. He kept the chair between himself and Bridget. He suddenly sneezed, then sniffed. He could only breathe out of one nostril, and not very well. “Except now I’ve got a cold. I didn’t have that before.”

  Bridget laughed. “I think it’s a decent trade, don’t you? New legs in exchange for the sniffles?” She stepped past him and looked into the small room. “I wanted to bring you here to heal you, but I also wanted to try something. If it could make your legs work again, maybe . . .”

  “Maybe it can make you alive again?” Orville said. “Bring you a body that never jumped off a bridge?”

  “Yeah.”

  Orville stepped aside and gestured. “Go on in.”

  Bridget stepped around the chair and into the crystal-lined room, and Orville shut the door gently after her.

  He peered in through the high window set in the door, but nothing happened—the lights didn’t dim, the crystals didn’t glow. After a few moments, Bridget lowered her head, said “Open the door,” and emerged from the room. “No good. It doesn’t even recognize me as a potential patient.”

  “I’m sorry,” Orville said, awkward as if at a stranger’s funeral. “I guess this isn’t what you expected death to be like.”

  “I expected to be basking in the light of the next best thing to heaven by now, not—forgive me—stuck haunting a failed suicide.” She balled her hands into fists, and seemed very small and lost in her enormous puffy red coat.

  “You talked about the lig
ht,” Orville said. “I don’t really remember, I was on a lot of drugs, but didn’t you say something about the light I saw in the water when I jumped? It was—”

  Something clattered far off down the curving corridor, a noise like ball bearings falling into a steel pan. Bridget stared at Orville, her eyes wide. “Fuck,” she said. “What was that?”

  “I’ve never been here before.” Orville took a step back, away from the sound.

  “Ismael said this place was uninhabited, like it was a place too implausible to actually support life, but—”

  The clattering came again, and this time the noise continued, a sound like marbles rolling down a steel chute, and getting closer.

  “Let’s get out of here.” She set off down the corridor. “I might be dead, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t still dangers.” Orville went after her, his legs operating as well and painlessly as ever—maybe better. He was acutely aware of his bare ass hanging out as he ran, and of the noise, which had now grown to roaring waterfall proportions. Now that he was sober, Orville could see the stranger properties of these hallways, including the ghostly corridors that shimmered in the corners of his vision, disappearing if he looked at them directly. Some of the passageways seemed more tangible than others, and occasionally as he passed these insubstantial side-corridors the air changed, growing hotter or colder or wetter or more dry.

  “This way,” Bridget said, shouting to be heard over the roar, and she darted hard sideways, disappearing from view, passing through a wall. Orville hoped it wasn’t some ghost-trick, hoped he’d be able to follow, and he hurled himself after her. As he turned, he caught a glimpse of the hallway behind him fraying away into threads of silver and darkness, like a rapidly unravelling piece of cloth, and he realized the noise was the sound of the hallway disappearing. Then he was through the wall, back in the half-dark asylum hallways they’d passed through in the wheelchair. He leaned against a wall, and Bridget flung herself at him, hugging him tightly—at least, it seemed she was hugging him tightly, but it was more like standing in a stiff breeze than holding a human being, and it was profoundly dissonant, seeing her clinging to him, but being unable to feel her warmth or weight at all.

  He tried to pat her back, but it felt like wind on his palm, and she pulled away.

  “I thought you were lost,” she said, standing before him. “I thought you were going to die!”

  Orville felt absurdly touched. When had anyone ever cared about the possibility that he might be lost before? “No, I’m okay, it’s okay.”

  “What was that?”

  Orville thought about trying to explain what he’d seen. He’d never been very good with words, descriptions, making himself understood, so he just shook his head and said, “Something terrible. I only got a glimpse , silver and dark, but it was destroying everything .” That was wrong, he knew—it implied there had been a thing doing the destroying, when the process of destruction was the thing, but before he could try to clarify, Bridget was talking again, almost shouting.

  “You have to run faster when shit like that happens, Orville, you can’t hang around and look behind you and get a peek, you could die. The briarpatch is a dangerous place, you don’t even know. If you’d died, I might be stuck haunting this fucking hallway forever. Who knows where your spirit or soul or animus or whatever would go, maybe you already got your ticket to a new golden world and you’ll go there when you die, but I’d be stuck with your rotting corpse I bet, here in the ass end of the middle of nowhere, deep in the ugliest brambles of the briarpatch.”

  Orville didn’t even feel disappointment, exactly, though he was a little hurt. Why would a pretty girl, even a dead one, care about him for anything other than pragmatic purposes? “I’m sorry you’re stuck haunting me. I’m sorry I didn’t die when I jumped.”

  “Yeah.” Bridget turned her back. “Maybe it would’ve been better for both of us if you had. I’m sure you had good reasons to try to kill yourself. I mean . . . you must have let everything go, divorced yourself from all worldly things, if you saw the light.”

  “You make it sound Zen. It wasn’t Zen. It was . . . just being tired. Realizing I didn’t have anything to live for, and deciding I was tired of the hassle. But you were a suicide, too. I guess you understand.”

  Bridget laughed harshly. “I didn’t hate my life. I just wanted my life to be better, to be extraordinary, wonderful beyond wonderful. And Ismael told me I could have that—if I left all this behind, gave up everything in my life, and finally gave up my body, I could go to a better place.”

  “Sounds like a cult. Like those Heaven’s Gate people who committed suicide, and thought they’d fly away on a spaceship in a comet.”

  Bridget sniffed. “Maybe the comet did take them away, the parts of them that transcended their bodies, anyway, but probably not. Most cults are just hobbies for the power-hungry and deluded. Shit, suicide isn’t like a magical doorway to the land of milk and honey; you have to work for it. Suicide is the last step, it shows willingness to leave the most elemental part of yourself behind, it’s like turning a knob and opening a door—but first you have to open up the ten fucking thousand locks on the door, the bolts and chains and padlocks and crossbars. People who think just offing themselves will let them go to planet Xanadu or some other paradise are just lazy, it’s cargo cultism, it’s mistaking a part for the whole.”

  “So your cult leader knows better, huh?” Orville said, surprised at the contempt in his voice. Bridget had hurt his feelings, which made it easier to be mean to her, even if she had taken him to get his legs fixed. Besides, focusing on his annoyance with her kept him from thinking about the impossible situation he was in, the dark and viscera-stained hallway where they stood. “He’s really got the keys to enlightenment.”

  “I’m not sure it counts as a cult when I was the only member. Though I think he might have had cults before, or at least groups of like-minded people—he talked, sometimes, about trying to mass-produce transcendence, giving up the one-on-one mentor thing in favour of teaching groups, trying to save more people all at once. Ismael convinced you, too, Orville, and a lot faster than he did me. Anyway, you saw the light. That’s the place I was trying to reach. But I must have done it wrong, or Ismael didn’t tell me everything I needed to know. I didn’t open all the locks on the door, I guess. But you, without even trying, you saw the light. You’re like some kind of idiot savant of transcendence.”

  “Take me out of here,” Orville said coldly. “If you have to haunt me, at least haunt me back in my own world.”

  Bridget shrugged. “You’re a briarpatch boy now, Orville. The borders of your world just got a lot more permeable. Once you’ve seen the light, it’s hard to go back to blindness. Ismael taught me to see, a little, but it’s so much clearer since I left my body behind. I can see all the bridges and corridors and stairways. I saw you looking around back there, in Briarpatch Memorial, you can see the passages now, too, at least a little. It’s going to get harder and harder for you to tell where your world ends and the briarpatch begins. You’ve only been here once, and you can already see the pathways that lead from one broken fragment of a world to another. Ismael said sometimes trauma can do that—knock the doors of perception right off their hinges. Maybe that’s why you can see me. That’s lucky. It would be even worse haunting someone who couldn’t even hear me talk—not that you’d be my first choice for an eternal companion. But, sure, I’ll guide you back. Want to go to the hospital? I mean the normal one?”

  Orville shuddered. How would he explain, how would he talk to the doctors? But they hadn’t found identification on him, and if he didn’t go back to the hospital, maybe they’d never discover his identity. Even if they did find him, his body was the perfect alibi—how could he be the broken man who’d escaped from the hospital, when his legs worked fine? “No,” he said. “I want to go home.”

  “Where’s home?�
��

  “North Oakland. Near the MacArthur BART station.”

  “Nice,” Bridget said. “Crackhead adjacent.”

  “Just how long do you intend to haunt me?” Orville said.

  Bridget frowned. “Well, that’s the question. Like I said, I didn’t get an instruction sheet. Maybe we’re stuck together until you die, or maybe I’ll have to hang around forever.” She shuddered. “I don’t want to think about it. I’m a big believer in action over contemplation—of course, that’s kind of what got me into this mess—but I’m hoping I’m like a standard ghost, the kinds you hear stories about, either a revenant or a returner. Either I’m here to take revenge for wrongs done to me, or I’m here to take care of some unfinished business. Whichever, I know where I need to go.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “To see Ismael Plenty, my ‘cult leader.’ He’s going to love you, Orville. You saw the light, but you didn’t die. That makes you some kind of rarity, and Ismael loves rarities. He’s been alive so long he almost never encounters anything rare anymore.” She started down the hallway, stepping around dark puddles, beckoning Orville to follow. “And after he’s done marvelling at you, he’s going to fix me. If we could fish a whole body out of the timestream for you, there must be a way to get me back to life.”

  Orville wasn’t so sure. The existence of one impossible thing hardly proved the existence of every other impossible thing. If you saw a unicorn, it wouldn’t mean there were also giants, hydra, pegasi, and leprechauns. And dead wasn’t the same as hurt. But if trying to save herself kept her from going crazy, he supposed it was all to the good. Having something to work toward probably made her life a lot easier. Orville had never had any purpose at all, and look where that had gotten him.