Briarpatch by Tim Pratt

by Tim Pratt

  “You see?” Bridget said, and Orville nodded, unwilling to speak with so many other people around. A man talking to himself on a train platform wasn’t much stranger than a man talking to himself on the street, but it was more noticeable for being in a confined space. “Different trains come to those platforms. Sometimes they come to this platform too, only most people can’t see them. Some of them are obvious—there’s one that’s made of bone, looks like it was carved from the femur of a giant or something, and Ismael says he never quite had the guts to board that one. But there are other trains that pull in here that don’t look much different from regular trains. That’s what I was worried about, really, seeing a train that looks almost right but isn’t. Ismael says some of them aren’t trains at all, just things that mimic trains, and he doesn’t know what happens if you board them. Something bad. Ismael once spent six months down here, riding every train he could, hoping to find one that ran to the better world, avoiding the ones that only looked like trains.”

  “How did he avoid them?” Orville spoke out of the side of his mouth, softly, like a convict in an old movie.

  “Well, maybe he didn’t really avoid them . . . Ismael has this funny power. Only ‘power’ isn’t right, it’s not something he can control, so call it a ‘quality.’ He doesn’t die. Whenever death is imminent, whenever something is about to kill him, he just sort of . . . jumps to some other point in the briarpatch, someplace safer.”

  “Like teleportation?” Like Nightcrawler from the X-Men, he wanted to say, but didn’t want to look like any more of a geek in front of Bridget.

  Bridget waggled her hand in a “sort of” motion. “Ismael says he thinks it’s more complicated than that, that distance and location in the briarpatch don’t work the way they do in the mundane world, that it’s more like topological crumpling or something, he wasn’t very interested in explaining it, so he didn’t explain it well. But however it works, when he tried to get on one of those fake trains, he jumped away before he could even step through the doors, which makes him think he would’ve died as soon as he got inside. But you and me, we don’t have that kind of defence mechanism, so we have to be careful. Ismael brought me down here not long after I first met him, to prove to me that the briarpatch really existed. He showed me how to identify the sham-trains, called it ‘briarpatch trainspotting.’ He has a way of helping you see, by holding your hand, pointing things out, and it’s like seeing a hidden picture at first, one of those optical illusions, but pretty soon you can’t stop seeing it.”

  A train pulled into the station, with all the customary noise and wind, and it looked normal enough, and like the train Orville wanted. There were people visible through the windows, sleeping or reading newspapers or talking. The doors hissed open. “This one looks okay,” Orville said.

  “No.” Bridget tried to grab his arm again, though it felt more like a hard wind blowing against him than a human touch. “You have to look. No one else is getting on the train, that’s the first thing. The wind that came, pushed before the train? It blew your hair, but it didn’t move anybody else’s. I’m dead, so that explains why the wind didn’t touch me, but if this were a regular train, it would have affected other people too. You’re susceptible to drafts from another world now, Orville.”

  “But the people inside the train—” he began.

  “There are deep sea predators that have little stalks on their heads with glowing bulbs at the end. Other fish come to the bulb, thinking it must be something good to eat, and then the predator slides out of the shadows and eats them. Those people you’re seeing, they aren’t real, they’re just bait. Look at the sides of the train.”

  Orville took a step back, as if afraid the train might lunge at him—and maybe it would, for all he knew. The sides were slick with water, he assumed it was condensation, and—

  “Shit!” he said, drawing glares and glances from the other people waiting on the platform. Some kid muttered that he was a crazy motherfucker.

  But Orville had seen the sides of the train move, expand and then contract, like the train was—

  “It’s breathing,” Bridget said. “Or something like that.”

  After a moment the doors closed and the train pulled away down the tunnel. For the first few cars it looked the same, like a normal train, but then the far end appeared from where it had been hidden deeper in the tunnel, the train cars darkening, windows disappearing, tapering until the thing no longer resembled a train at all; the end was dark and mottled and looked like nothing so much as the tail of a giant snake, shimmying a little from side to side as it disappeared into the darkness.

  Orville sat down hard on an empty bench. He’d almost walked into that thing. How could he ever take a train again? How could he come down here without Bridget, if she managed to move on to the better world and leave him unhaunted, unaccompanied? Would this be his life now, filled with terrible miracles? Would he have to tap passers-by and say “Hey, do you see that train?” Were there buses like this too, or cars, or stores, things that tried to eat clueless wanderers? “This is very scary,” Orville said.

  “It’s different. But I don’t think it’s any scarier than the regular world you know. You just have to learn new rules. There are neighbourhoods you don’t walk in after dark, right? And in the briarpatch, or on the edge of the briarpatch, like here, there are certain trains you don’t ride. You don’t stray from the path in the cavern of trees, and you don’t feed the bears, and you don’t answer the things that speak from the drains, and a few other rules, and you get by okay.”

  A moment later another train arrived, and people got on this one. With a glance at Bridget, who nodded, Orville boarded.

  Now Orville wanted to ask where they were going. He hadn’t before, assuming she would offer an explanation, and then he’d been distracted by the oddness of the train station. Now he couldn’t speak to her without looking crazy and making the other riders uncomfortable. Bridget was standing in the middle of the mostly-empty car, anyway, hanging onto a handrail overhead, and didn’t look like she wanted to talk. There was something on her mind.

  Orville leaned his forehead against the window and looked out. The train passed side-tunnels that didn’t conventionally exist, as far as Orville knew, and there were lights in some of them, and through one, he thought he glimpsed an open beach and an ocean under a sapphire-coloured sun, but it passed in a flash. There were wonders in the briarpatch, it seemed, or accessible through it. Unless that ocean was filled with tentacled monsters, or the whole scene was unreal, an illusory projection designed to lure him into something with a mouth the size of a room. . . .

  They only had to go a few stops, and soon they exited the train—into the Lake Merritt BART station, which looked utterly normal, to Orville’s surprise, no extra platforms. The briarpatch was weird. Bridget walked briskly to the stairs, and Orville followed, figuring she knew the way. “We can wait for a bus,” she said. “Or we can walk. It’s about two miles, and parts of it are kind of pedestrian-unfriendly, but it’s doable. I don’t get tired, but . . .”

  “I’m okay,” Orville said. “Lead on.” She set the pace—which was a bit unfair, perhaps, since she didn’t have the capacity to get fatigued anymore, but she also knew where they were going, so Orville followed along. They walked along dark sidewalks, down past the courthouse, taking the first few blocks in silence. Finally Orville said “Where are we going, anyway?”

  “I . . . have a friend. More than a friend, once. A lover.”

  Orville frowned. “I thought Ismael was your . . . ?”

  She snorted. “God, I never fucked Ismael, or loved him, either. He impressed the hell out of me, and showed me miracles, and I guess I cared for him a lot, but it wasn’t love. We just made common cause, both of us sick of the world not living up to our dreams, and looking for some unattainable heaven. No, I want to go see Darrin, the man I was with . . . before
Ismael.”

  “You think he’ll be able to see you?” Orville wondered why he was jealous of a dead woman’s ex-boyfriend, especially when the same dead woman had helped set him up to have sex with a friend of hers. But emotions weren’t rational, and he was jealous.

  “No. I guess not. There’s no reason to think he could—he can’t see into the briarpatch, no one’s ever taught him, so I don’t have any reason to believe he’s got better perception than anyone else. I just . . . want to see him. It was the strangest thing, this morning on the bridge, just as I jumped, I thought I heard his voice, calling my name. I can’t believe he was really there, but I’m afraid . . . I don’t suppose you noticed anyone, before you jumped?”

  “There were lots of people shouting, leaning over the rail, looking at you fall. Maybe if I saw him I would recognize him. . . .” He shrugged. “So what are we supposed to do when we get to his house? If he can’t see you?”

  Bridget shook her head. “I hadn’t really thought it through. I just wanted to make sure he was okay. Maybe you could knock on the door, ask him if I’m home, say you’re a friend of Geneva’s, and she was worried about me, or . . . shit, that doesn’t make any sense, I don’t know. Maybe you can pretend to be a travelling encyclopaedia salesman or something.”

  “I’ll just pretend I have the wrong apartment,” Orville said. “How’d that be? Is that enough?” He wanted to help—he owed her—but didn’t really care to meet the man who’d lived with her, loved her, made love to her, but had been unable to make her love the world enough to keep her from killing herself. If Orville had been given the chance to make Bridget happy in life . . . well, honestly, he probably would have fucked it up, like he fucked up most things, but he liked to imagine she would have inspired him to better things. He dreaded the prospect of knocking on this stranger’s door, with Bridget lingering behind him. He’d never even liked selling candy door-to-door for fundraisers in high school. Orville tended to stammer when forced into awkward conversations with strangers. Still, for Bridget, he’d do it

  They hurried through the trickiest part of the walk, following the road beneath an overpass where there were no sidewalks. A little shanty-camp had sprung up beneath the overpass, tarps and pallets and scavenged wood making a shelter for a few homeless people, but none of them bothered him, probably because he was talking to himself and nodding as he went. Sometimes it was good to look crazy; it helped you either blend in or stand out as someone not to be messed with. From there it was a jog across several lanes of thankfully traffic-free asphalt, then a hop over a low barrier into the protected bike lane, and from there onto the sidewalk that curved around the lake. Orville had never spent much time on this side of the lake—the Grand Lake Theater was across, on the other side—but it suddenly became very peaceful as he curved away from the larger street, along the paved multiuse trail, beneath the twinkling fairy lights strung between lampposts. Even this late people were jogging, and a couple sat on a bench looking at the water, talking and holding hands. Orville could smell the water, and the bird shit, and he enjoyed it all.

  “I love this lake,” Bridget said. “The last couple of springs, Darrin and I came here to see the baby geese. There are Canadian geese here, you know, it’s a bird sanctuary, and they’re so adorable when they’re born, these little fuzzy things, nothing at all like the mean birds they become when they grow up, the ones that try to steal your sandwiches if you have a picnic in the park.” She pointed to a crosswalk that led to a small park. “The geese usually trundle across the street here several times a day, leading their flock of babies, and they mostly use the crosswalk, even, though they still cross against the light.” She grinned. “Darrin and I would buy some cheap bread from the Merritt Bakery over there, and come sit in this park to feed the goslings. That was . . . really nice. If every day was like that one half-hour, feeding baby birds in the park, I might never have hooked up with Ismael, might never have tried to pass through death into a perfect beautiful place . . . but who am I kidding? I get bored so easily, Orville. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Maybe I did too many drugs in high school, and I’m still looking for the next high. Part of what I liked about the idea of reaching a better world was being able to stop looking, stop working, to just be, and be happy.”

  Orville didn’t answer. He felt like he’d just seen something true and sad about her, a depth of insight he hadn’t expected. They’d been through a lot today. Shared trauma could bring people together, even if one of them was already dead, and thus as thoroughly traumatized as it was possible to get. “That sounds nice, about the baby geese,” he said at last.

  “We should cross here,” she said, about a block later, and they cut across the street and went up a steep hill into a residential area. The neighbourhood got nicer as they got farther from the lake, apartment houses replaced by single-family dwellings, mostly. Orville was puffing a little from the hills, which were not insignificant, but he wasn’t breathing as heavily as he should have been—the Orville who got his body tattooed also got more exercise, it seemed. He’d have to keep that up, not spoil the gift by sinking back into sedentary habits. He hoped again that he hadn’t actually swapped bodies with some other iteration of himself, living some other life, a body snatched from some other possible timeline. There were deep philosophical waters here. With a different body, was he really himself at all? Was the structure of his brain different, or the chemical balance in his body; did those changes affect his mind, make him less depressive, less prone to giving up? Was he even really Orville Troll at all—was the only thing that mattered the continuity of memory? Could he even trust his memory? He shied away from the implications. He could consider them later, when things were less in motion.

  But he knew one thing: If this body was taken from some other world, then he owed it to that truncated timeline to make his own life a good one, with Bridget’s help. For as long as she lasted, anyway.

  They passed a church, and Bridget said “Nearly there.” They walked toward a big redwood right in the middle of a roundabout in the centre of the street.

  “Pretty neighbourhood,” Orville said. The air smelled of some sweet night-blooming flower he couldn’t possibly identify.

  Bridget paused by a stucco wall surrounding the courtyard of a nice-looking group of apartments. “That’s the house.” She pointed across the street toward a big rambling structure.

  Orville whistled. “Darrin must do all right for himself.”

  “Nah, he doesn’t have the whole place. It’s busted up into apartments, he’s there in the top left. It’s nice enough, but not very big, almost too cozy for the two of us. We had to share the spare bedroom as an office and a place to put my craft stuff. We—”

  “Evening, mister, do you have the time?” A tall, lanky man spoke, emerging from the driver side of a parked sedan a few feet ahead of them.

  “Uh, no, sorry,” Orville said. “Before eleven o’clock, I think.”

  “The night is young,” the man said agreeably. “I’m going to need you to give me all your money now.”

  His voice was so calm and friendly that Orville had trouble comprehending for a moment, but Bridget just said “Shit,” in a disgusted voice. “We’re getting mugged.”

  Another man, shorter and less talkative, emerged from the passenger side of the car and took a step toward them. The first man circled around the hood, stepping into a streetlight long enough to illuminate his face—handsome if not for a long-ago-broken nose and pockmarks. “I hate asking for things twice,” he said. “Money, now.”

  Orville didn’t back away. He’d never been mugged before, despite living in far worse neighbourhoods than this. Maybe that was the point. There was no reason to mug people in a lousy neighbourhood, because no one there had anything. “Okay,” Orville said.

  “Oh, to hell with this, I worked hard to get you that money,” Bridget said. “Back away from them,
just a few steps.”

  “But—” Orville protested. He knew you were supposed to comply with muggers. Neither man had pulled a gun, yet, but they were drawing closer. They could hurt him if they wanted—the shorter man looked made of muscle. The men drifted apart, probably so they could flank Orville and cut off any line of retreat.

  “Do it!” Bridget said, and Orville complied without thinking, holding up his hands in a placating way, taking small steps backward, trapped between the stucco wall and the parked cars on the street, nowhere to run.

  “I’m sorry, look, I don’t have any money,” Orville said, though of course he did, wads of cash in his pants pockets.

  “You got shoes,” the tall man said meditatively. “We’ll take those. And you can get beat for wasting our time if you don’t stop walking away from me.”

  “You can stop now.” Bridget circled around behind the tall man. Orville noticed a break in the wall, which was odd, because he hadn’t seen it before, but there was an opening in the stucco, leading to a very steep and narrow set of stairs, going down, down, down. Which didn’t make much sense, topographically speaking, since the ground was pretty level here, and where were those stairs going down to?

  Then he figured it out. Those stairs were only conditionally real. They led to the briarpatch.

  “Hand him a little of your money, Orville, hold it out to him, and be sure his skin touches yours. Keep contact for as long as you can, don’t let go until the last moment. If you touch someone, they can see what you see, the entrances to the briarpatch, they can go in. That’s how Ismael first took me. I have an idea.”