Briarpatch by Tim Pratt

by Tim Pratt

  She nodded as if this all made sense, but then said, “That’s what it means to you, the purpose it serves for you. Okay. But what is it, really?”

  A fair question, and—forgive me—a thorny one. Harczos used to go on and on about the true nature of the briarpatch, and I tossed off one of his favourite quips: “It is the fleeting memory of a dream had by God.” The sort of answer that says nothing much and may or may not mean something, but that certainly sounds meaningful, in a kōan sort of way. But she looked at me with this terrible ferocity that I came to know so well—a look that said this was a serious talk we were having, that even though she was high enough to take the discovery of the briarpatch in stride, she wasn’t anywhere near high enough to take it lightly. I suspect you saw the same look on her face many times during your relationship. I certainly saw it many times while I knew her.

  “Tell me,” she said, and I sighed and replied, “It is a mystery. It is an impenetrable thicket of miracles. I have never been a philosopher, but for a while my friend Harczos believed the briarpatch was a dumping ground for worlds too implausible to exist. He said it was God’s storehouse, the place where the creator put away worlds half-made and then abandoned because they did not fit into the greater scheme of the universe, or because they were poorly made, or because they displeased Him. I have met scientist-shamans who talk on and on about quantum mechanics, convinced the briarpatch is a garden of forking paths, possible worlds that have not quite resolved into proper existence. I have met people who believe the briarpatch is Fairyland, and people who believe it is the access tunnels to the workings of the universe, where gods and their minions can make adjustments to reality, and people who believe it is the medicine lands, or the Dreamtime, or the outer boroughs of Hell. No one knows what it is. But it is full of wonders.”

  That seemed to satisfy her, and I thought more highly of her then, because she was happier with a messy, incomplete, truthful answer than with a neat complete one. “I’d like to go there,” she said. “Will you show me?”

  3

  “Enough.” Darrin stared down at his knees. He believed Ismael, all too easily. Bridget had always longed for something more, something important, and she’d dabbled in drugs, and religions both mainstream and alternative, and extreme activities of all kinds. How could she have passed up an opportunity like that, to see a world beyond the world she knew? How had he not realized? In the months before Bridget left him, Darrin had been busy, routinely working seventy-hour weeks. Bridget had professed not to mind, and she’d certainly always been an independent person with friends and a life of her own. They’d kept their Sundays together, their walks and brunches, their time spent sipping margaritas in the back yard, and those days had kept Darrin sane. But maybe they’d just been habit—or, worse, obligation—for Bridget. Now he had some idea of what she’d been doing the other six days of the week.

  “She did love you, you know,” Ismael said.

  “Then why didn’t she tell me about . . . all this?” He looked up into Ismael’s long, placid face.

  “She planned to, for a while,” Ismael said. “Until she decided to kill herself. She didn’t think you would go along with it.”

  Darrin stood up then, wobbling a bit, one of his legs having fallen asleep during Ismael’s story. “Yes. Right. That. Why did she kill herself? What did you have to do with that?”

  Ismael didn’t even bother to look at him when he answered. “Death is one path to the better world. You’ve heard of suicide cults. They believe that by casting aside their bodies, their souls could go to a better place. They are correct in theory, but woefully inadequate in practice. The soul and the body are tightly wound together, nearly inseparable, and it takes months of preparation to unbind them. While Bridget still lived with you, she took trips with me, here, into the briarpatch. She learned her way around, learned to see the same paths I could see, and, eventually, I took her to a place where she could see the light of the better world. Not reach its source, no—I’ve never found a direct path—but see it, as you can see the skyline of San Francisco from the shores of Oakland. After seeing the light, she decided to leave you, and dedicate herself to preparing for the journey there.”

  Darrin sat back down, his anger draining away. It was exhausting, being angry. “What kind of preparation did that involve? Brainwashing her? Sleeping with her?”

  “The pleasures of the flesh no longer interest me,” Ismael said. “I have had a surfeit of them, and they all grow tedious in time. No, Darrin. She meditated. She fasted. She studied. She drank preparations developed over the centuries by certain shamans, though I suspect they work more as placebo than true magic. She ritually destroyed most of her possessions, and gave the rest away. Leaving you was the most difficult step for her, because you were symbolic of everything she was leaving behind, of the total abandonment of her life. She needed to turn her back completely on this world, to carry nothing from her old life with her, until she felt she could leave this world without regret. And then, once she felt she was ready, I went with her to Golden Gate Bridge, and she jumped. As she fell, she saw a light appear beneath her, a pinprick at first, growing to a portal. When people give up everything of this world, even their bodies, a door to the better world opens before them. The body cannot pass through that door, but the spirit can, and with her study, and her willingness to give up everything, she was able to separate her spirit and her body. Her physical form died when it hit the water, but her spirit lived on, and passed through the portal, into the light of a better world.” He spread his hands. “She transitioned. She is a blessed one. She dwells forever in the light.”

  “You said you could take me to her. But if you can’t get to this place with the light unless you die, how are we supposed to do that?”

  “We are going to find a northwest passage. We will search for an overland route to the better world, a way to reach it physically, and once we get there, you will find Bridget. I believe that once you see the light, you will choose to stay there forever. As will I.”

  “If you’re so keen to find this place, why don’t you just kill yourself? Instead of trying to find some path that might not even exist?”

  “The path does exist. I know, because my old friend Harczos found it. He did not take me with him, because we had a . . . difference of opinion. But he went away, into the light, and came out again to tell me he’d found it. Because of our falling out, he would not take me there.” Ismael shook his head. “It is a cruelty on his part that I have never been able to forgive; we have not spoken for many decades.”

  “Decades?” Darrin said. “What are you talking about? You don’t look more than maybe thirty-five.”

  “I am at least 800 years old,” Ismael said. “I stopped aging before I was forty, as near as I can tell. If I could die, I would, but I will live forever, Darrin. The overland route is my only hope for transcending the essential misery of existence.”

  “You’re crazy,” Darrin said, though he knew saying something like that, in a place like this, was folly—how could he know what was possible and impossible anymore?

  “Not crazy, Darrin. Just born and raised in the briarpatch. I have no father, no mother. Neither did Harczos. We are implausible creatures, people who might have been, and we came into existence in the briarpatch independent of any creation, just like these hedges, just like that fence. There are a dozen of us, children of the briarpatch, possibly a score, though Harczos is the only one I’ve spent any amount of time with.” He paused. “Before you, that is. You are a child of the briarpatch too, Darrin.”

  “Bullshit,” Darrin said, but his heart was pounding.

  “You were found wandering the streets as a toddler. You came out of the briarpatch, and you suffered from years of blindness, until the devastation of your life opened your eyes to other passages in the world again. No one held your hand or showed you the way. You can see paths that I c
annot, just as Harczos could. I have explored as far as I can alone, but with your help, I can access whole other regions of the briarpatch, and together we may be able to find our northwest passage.”

  “What makes you think I can find it?”

  Ismael shrugged. “I know I cannot find it on my own. With your help, I can cover so much more ground. I know it exists, somewhere, in the tangles of the briarpatch. We may fail, I suppose, but I have all the time in the world, so why not try? Hope is very important, Darrin. It’s something I haven’t felt for a long time.”

  “You used Bridget to get to me,” Darrin said. “You took her away from me, so the grief would tear me up, and make me find the briarpatch. Didn’t you?” He shouted the last two words, and the sound was shocking in this quiet place.

  “No. I took on Bridget in good faith, and it was only as she told me about you that I began to suspect. When I encountered you in San Francisco, after your friend Nicholas attacked me, you chased me partway down a path into this world, and I knew then what you truly were.”

  That was it. Ismael was lying. Darrin knew for sure, now. Ismael was unaware Darrin had been inside his house, had seen proof of Ismael’s meddling in his life.

  Ismael was trying to use him. But Darrin knew he was being used, and that gave him some power. What else was Ismael lying about, though? About Darrin being a child of the briarpatch―what would that even mean? That he would live for centuries? The idea was ridiculous. About the light of a better world? About Bridget? Maybe she was simply dead, tricked into suicide in order to make Darrin fall apart. That seemed most likely. But lately, Darrin had been forced to accept lots of unlikely things. If there was any possibility Ismael was telling the truth, that Bridget still existed, in some form, and could be reached . . . how could Darrin give up the chance to find her? He had to go along with this, at least until he knew for sure, or found the leverage to make Ismael tell him the truth.

  “If we don’t find Bridget, I will kill you,” Darrin said. “I know you think you’re immortal, but I bet the truth is that nobody’s ever really tried hard enough.”

  “Understood,” Ismael said. “Shall we go? I have some ideas about where we can start our search.”

  “Lead the way.”

  4

  When they left the hedgerow, swinging open the black iron gate, they didn’t enter the English garden Darrin had expected, but a desert landscape of chalky white dunes, with the sun a bright flash in vaulted blue. The soil crunched underfoot, and Darrin knelt to sift a handful in his fingers. The powdery earth was mixed with fragile chunks, like beetle carapaces, all the same bone-white—almost the colour of the Wendigo, actually.

  “Be thankful there’s no wind, or the air would be thick with white dust, worse than any fog,” Ismael said. “I think this used to be a sea. We’re walking on the powdered bodies of ancient trilobites and the like.”

  Darrin rose, shaking the dust off his hand. Ismael led the way up, over a dune, sinking almost ankle-deep in the white in places. Despite the blanket of whiteness, it wasn’t much at all like walking through snow; more like walking through ashes. At the top of the dune, Ismael pointed. “There.”

  When Ismael had said they were going to a house, Darrin hadn’t envisioned this: something like an abandoned Depression-era farmhouse, boards weathered colourless by wind and grit, a sagging porch, and a screen door dangling from one hinge. Ismael approached the house, put his foot tentatively on the step, and pushed down with his heel. The board splintered under the impact, and Ismael sighed, lifting his foot from the hole. “It decays a little more each time. I don’t know what I’ll do if it ever falls down completely. There is another way to the place we’re going, but it is the long way, the scenic route, useful for impressing new visitors to the briarpatch, but not as efficient. Still, perhaps I will never have to pass this way again.” He climbed onto the porch carefully, without using the steps, and gestured for Darrin to follow.

  “Look, can’t we go around? This place looks like a death trap.” Darrin wondered if it was a trap, if Ismael had brought him into the briarpatch to kill him, and leave him where his body would never be discovered. He couldn’t think of any reason why Ismael might do that, but he knew the man had lied to him about many things.

  “There is no around,” Ismael said. “The only way out is through. Pathways in the briarpatch are conditional. You must approach them from the right direction. Think of it as a series of one-way streets, only it’s physically impossible to go the wrong way. Come, it’s not as bad inside.” He continued on, swinging aside the broken screen door and pushing open the inner door. Darrin followed his lead, and stepped into the house.

  Inside, it was a mansion—like a movie set of a mansion, really, so ostentatious as to seem unreal, with a marble floor, a diamond-bright chandelier, staircases swooping up on either side of the room, and a stone-and-gold fountain bubbling in the centre of the space. There wasn’t a speck of dust anywhere.

  Ismael went to a small door under one of the staircases. “Through here.” He ducked inside, and Darrin followed, into a long dim corridor that gradually widened out into a residential hotel sort of hallway, lit by low-watt bulbs and lined with identical red doors. Some of the doors were open, and when Darrin looked toward one Ismael said, “Eyes front. There’s nothing you need in these rooms.” Darrin bristled a bit against the command, but he was new to this place, and perhaps it was better to do as he was told. Lights flickered in some of the rooms, and he heard harpsichord and cello music from another, and from one door the smell of fresh buttered popcorn was strong and almost supernaturally inviting.

  “We’re almost through,” Ismael said, and Darrin saw the fire door at the end of the hall, with its utterly prosaic glowing red “Exit” sign above.

  “Darrin,” Bridget said, leaning casually in the doorway of the last room on the left. She wore an oversized t-shirt, and her hair was mussed, as if she’d just gotten out of bed. “Baby, I missed you. Come here.”

  He stared at her, eyes abruptly welling up with tears.

  “That’s not Bridget,” Ismael said sharply. “I see my wife, Mirari, who died two hundred years ago, and it isn’t her either.” The Bridget looked at Ismael, perplexed, and then turned her soft smile back to Darrin.

  “Shit.” Darrin wiped at his eyes and stumbled toward the exit door. “I know it’s not her, I’m not stupid, damn it.”

  “Ah,” Ismael said. “Of course. I’m . . . sorry. Your loss is still very fresh. But we will find Bridget, the real Bridget. You can join her in the light.”

  “Just open the fucking door, Ismael,” Darrin said, thinking your fault your fault your fault.

  Ismael pushed open the door, and they stepped out together. The door swung shut behind them, silently, and they were standing on a bridge.

  “This isn’t funny,” Darrin said. “You bring me to a bridge? Do you want me to jump now?”

  The bridge was nothing like the Golden Gate. It was made of blackened steel, a rust-belt monstrosity never meant for foot traffic, and it jutted out over a bubbling tar pit, the petroleum stink roiling in the air.

  “The briarpatch is full of bridges, Darrin. Bridges, and hallways, and rope ladders, and staircases.” Ismael walked to the railing and looked down into the steaming tar below. Darrin glanced back, and was not surprised to see there was no fire door, no wall at all, just a pitted blacktop road stretching back in a straight line through a desolate scrubland. One of Ismael’s one-way streets.

  Darrin thought about charging at Ismael while his back was turned, shoving him over the rail to sink in the tar like the mammoths at La Brea, but then he’d be lost here . . . and he would give up his chance of finding Bridget, the chance that was probably a lie but might not be.

  “I do not think they are really bridges,” Ismael went on, leaning forward to rest on the rail. “That is, I do not think an
yone actually mined this steel, or shaped these rivets, or designed this ugly bridge, or erected it on this spot.”

  “It looks like a pretty plausible bridge to me,” Darrin said, remembering Arturo’s word. He joined Ismael at the rail.

  Ismael smiled, slightly. “Indeed. We are passing through worlds of greater and lesser likelihood, yes, indeed, and some of those likelihoods involve bridges, certainly. But some bridges, some hallways, are more than what they seem—they are passages from one world to another. When you walk in the open in the briarpatch, through fields, through forests, you never pass into another world; it’s not like crossing a property line. There is always some liminal space, you see—often a bridge, though sometimes only a shadow. In the woods, the bridges are made of rough logs and lashed with vines. In ruins, the bridges might be made of tumbled rubble. Here, it is a thing of black steel. But I believe we are simply seeing a bridge because we are incapable of seeing the reality of our passage from one unlikely world to another. Back behind us, there is one world—a bleak place full of underground caves populated by plague rats, and the ruins of old military bases littered with the wreckage of crashed flying saucers. On the other side of this bridge, we’ll enter another world, one of great sadness and beauty. But while we are on the bridge, we are in neither world, though in the centre we can reach both.”

  “So . . . this isn’t really a bridge? And that hallway we walked through, it’s not a real hallway?”

  “I think the spaces between worlds are so strange and terrible and lonely that human eyes cannot look upon them. And so we perceive the spaces as methods of passage: bridges, ladders, hallways, doors, tunnels. It is something I think about when I cross such bridges. I wonder what I’m really walking through. Every bridge is a walkway to a new possibility.”