by Tim Pratt
Echo rolled down the window and let some of the fortunes go fluttering out into the wind. Arturo winced. Litter offended him—he saw too much of it on the roadsides he drove past. And while, in the real world, the Wendigo’s freight of paper tended to vanish after a little while, like fairy money, he wasn’t sure the same would be true here, in the briarpatch, where reality was more bendable.
“What’s that in the road up there?” Echo said.
Arturo looked where she pointed. There was something on the ground, something other than rocks, but he couldn’t tell what. Trash, it looked like.
“Stop the car there,” Echo said.
“Okay.” Opportunities for escape were fine by him. After another minute he reached the pile, and stopped the Wendigo.
“Turn off the car, and then get out,” Echo said.
So much for driving off when she got out. Arturo did as she said. She scooted across the seat and got out on his side, keeping her knife in plain sight. He could’ve taken off across the plain, but he was no good at getting around in the briarpatch without the Wendigo. Besides, Echo would probably have chased him. So he stood by, hands clasped before him, as Echo slammed the door.
“Okay, let’s check it out.” They walked around to the front of the Wendigo, and Echo gasped. “My shotgun!” She rushed to the weapon, an ostentatious chrome-plated job, and scooped it up in her arms. “How the hell did it get out here?”
“Mind if I pick up some of that water and beef jerky?” Arturo said. “I got some coupons for El Pollo Loco in the car, but I don’t think we’re gonna find a drive-through out here.”
“Sure, fine.” Echo pulled the backpack toward her and began rifling through it. “Damn it. No shells.”
“It makes a pretty club, though.” Arturo filled his pockets with jerky and picked up a couple of water bottles.
Echo opened the gun and laughed. “Oh, it’s loaded. Two shells, just like I left it. So don’t go thinking I’m defenceless.”
“That’s damn near the last thing you are.”
“I do wonder how it got here, though. Maybe Ismael took it, and dropped it here? So it’s a clue, right? But why drop it here? What—”
“Um,” Arturo said. “There’s bears out here.” A trio of grizzlies was approaching, still some distance away, but he knew bears could move fast if they wanted to. One of the bears had dozens of little blue ribbons woven into its fur, which undid any hope Arturo had that these were ordinary bears. These were the other kind of bear. He began backing toward the Wendigo.
“I didn’t tell you to move,” Echo snapped. “You listened to me when all I had was a knife, you’d damn sure better listen when I’ve got a gun.”
“Can you threaten me later? Bears! Get in the car!”
Echo finally looked around and saw the approaching animals. “Fuck. How can anything live in this desert?” She hurried to the passenger side.
Arturo got into the car and shut his door, and as soon as Echo was inside, he pressed the button that locked all the doors. The bears couldn’t work a door handle in this shape . . . but bears in the briarpatch had a distressing tendency to shapeshift. Arturo started up the Wendigo, put it in reverse, and glanced up to the rearview mirror.
There were five bears behind them, two big grizzlies, two smaller black bears, and one by-god polar bear, a variety Arturo had never encountered in the briarpatch before. “Oh, shit,” he said. “There’s a whole goddamn herd of bears back there, too.”
“A group of bears is called a sloth,” Echo said, twisting in her seat to look behind. “I heard that on a nature show. So what do we do?”
The bears ahead of them stopped at the pile of food and began nosing the contents around. Arturo wished he hadn’t picked up that jerky. “We try to get away,” Arturo said. More bears were ambling in from both directions, and there were over a dozen now, a bigger congregation of the creatures than he’d ever seen in one place before. The Wendigo was fairly well boxed-in, and while it was possible the grizzlies would scatter if he drove toward them, it was also possible they’d decide to attack. They wouldn’t be able to break into the Wendigo, but being stuck in a car with Echo, surrounded by ravening monsters pounding on the glass, wouldn’t be fun. And if they managed to flip the car over, Arturo and Echo might really be stuck here.
One of the grizzlies behind them rose up and put its forepaws on the trunk of the Wendigo, making the whole car rock back.
“Fuck!” Echo said, sounding genuinely alarmed for the first time.
“Cover your ears,” Arturo said. Echo just looked at him, frowning. “Suit yourself,” Arturo said, and slammed his hand down on the Wendigo’s horn.
The roar was loud, vast, bowel-churning, and Arturo squeezed his eyes to slits and gritted his teeth. Echo had her palms pressed flat to her ears.
The effect on the bears was instantaneous. Most bolted away from the Wendigo, and the grizzly leaning on the trunk staggered back. Arturo would have gunned the engine . . . but the polar bear wasn’t acting scared. The polar bear was acting pissed, and it charged toward the Wendigo, mouth open in a roar Arturo couldn’t hear over the Wendigo’s horn.
Before the bear quite reached the Wendigo, it changed into an enormously fat, naked albino man. All the bears around them began changing too, transformations so abrupt it was a bit like watching balloons pop, larger volumes suddenly reduced to human proportions.
“This is fucked up!” Echo shouted, hands still held to her ears. The albino man ran and flung himself onto the hood of the Wendigo, face twisted in a snarl, and began pounding on the windshield.
Arturo stopped pressing the horn. It was good for scaring away animals and the occasional not-quite-animal, but it wasn’t much good on bears in human form—they might be crazy, but they were smart enough to know the noise was coming from a car, and not some gargantuan apex predator. Arturo hit the gas, and the Wendigo shot backward, sending the polar man sliding off the hood, but Arturo couldn’t continue his high-speed reverse, because a boulder loomed up in the rearview mirror. He hit the brakes, and the Wendigo lurched to a stop. The now-human bears approached the Wendigo from the front, and some of them stopped to pick up chunks of rock from the ground.
“I doubt I can shoot them all,” Echo said. “Even if they were grouped up nicely, I’ve only got two shells in this gun.”
Arturo sighed. “I’d rather keep the murderin’ to a minimum if that’s okay with you. I’ve got one more thing I can try. Get the sunglasses out of the glove compartment.”
“What are you talking about? The glove compartment is full of fortune cookie—”
“Just look, would you?” The bears were getting closer, and while the Wendigo was tough, enough guys bashing the glass with rocks would get in eventually. And then Arturo and Echo would die. Or, worse, they wouldn’t die, and would, instead, be changed.
Echo dug into the fortunes in the glove compartment and came out with two pairs of oversized aviator sunglasses.
“Give me a pair, and put yours on,” Arturo said, and added “Trust me,” when she hesitated. She handed him the sunglasses, and donned her own.
Once he put them on, the sunglasses blocked Arturo’s vision almost completely—they were much darker than ordinary sunglasses. The Wendigo owner’s manual was only intermittently available, but it was very clear about the necessity of protective eyewear before turning on the high beams. Arturo had only used the bright headlights a couple of times in all the years he’d been driving the Wendigo, but if this wasn’t an emergency, he didn’t know what was.
“Let there be headlights.” He pulled the lever by the steering wheel.
Even through the heavily smoked glasses, the light was bright, twin expanding cones of intense brightness that threw the bear-people before them into stark relief. They didn’t try to shield their eyes, though—they just stopped moving,
and stared.
“So pretty,” Echo murmured, and started to reach up to take off her sunglasses.
Without thinking, Arturo grabbed her wrist. “No,” he said. “That light is like heroin or something, okay? Once you start looking, it’s hard to stop.”
“It’s the light of a better world, isn’t it,” Echo said, but when he let go of her hand, she didn’t try to take her glasses off. “What Ismael’s been looking for.”
Arturo sighed. “No, it’s like an imitation of that light, okay? The same way the horn sounds like the roar of a big scary animal, but isn’t. This light, it’s just a trick.” Arturo wasn’t certain of that, actually, but even if the light pouring forth from his high beams was somehow imported from the supposed heaven so many briarpatch pilgrims were searching for, it wouldn’t do them any good. The high beams couldn’t stay on forever, and if they could, the pilgrims would just starve to death while basking in the light.
“Those bears might not stay subdued for long. The light has funny effects on them, maybe because they’re crazy, I don’t know, but it’s like red kryptonite to Superman, you never know how they’ll react. Sometimes they just sit and enjoy it, and other times they try to kill each other, like the light is a limited resource and they’re afraid the other bears will eat it all up.” He nosed the Wendigo forward a bit, to put some space between them and the boulder behind. The bears were swaying and weeping and laughing not far from the Wendigo’s front end, but if he could rock the car back and forth in a seven- or nine-point turn, he should be able to get a gap big enough to drive through.
“Pretty pretty pretty,” Echo murmured. Arturo backed, filled, backed, filled; and then the headlights flickered briefly. Echo let out a low moan at the instant of darkness before the lights returned.
Arturo glanced at the dash, and the glowing red “low battery” light was on. Shit shit shit. He’d never left the brights on for this long, and if the battery died, they were well and truly screwed, because they couldn’t get a jump out here, and Triple A didn’t service the briarpatch.
He finally got the Wendigo turned so there was no one directly in front, though the bears outside the cone of the lights began shaking and thrashing and keening horribly in withdrawal. The brights flickered again, and Arturo shut them off and put the Wendigo in drive, pulling his sunglasses low on his nose so he could see.
The fat albino man lurched to the front of the car and screamed “Bring back the light! Bring it back!” He pounded on the hood with his fists.
Arturo froze. If he turned the brights back on, the man would just stand there, and Arturo would have to spend more time—time the battery probably didn’t have—to back up and get around him.
Then Echo stomped on his foot with her own, driving his foot down on the accelerator, and the Wendigo’s engine roared. The car shot forward, the fat albino rolling up onto the hood and then bouncing off, hard, when Arturo jerked the wheel around. Echo kept pressing on his foot with hers and the Wendigo’s speedometer ratcheted up and up, putting distance between them and the bears. A glance at the rearview mirror showed them pursuing, changing into bears again, but they couldn’t catch the Wendigo.
Finally Echo took her foot away, and Arturo was able to ease up on the speed a little. “I did not like the way that light made me feel.”
“You seemed to like it a lot.” Arturo felt almost friendly toward her, flush with the giddiness of survival, riding high on the Wendigo’s power.
“I liked it the way I like high doses of painkillers, and I disliked it for the same reason. I don’t like losing control.”
“I guess you won’t be joinin’ Ismael in his search for the better world, then,” Arturo said.
“Hell, no. Though I can see why he wants it. He just wants to hide from the mean old world that hurt him so bad, boo-fucking-hoo. Whereas me, I want to hurt the world back.”
Arturo was reminded, then, that Echo was crazy. But, still. “That was some good drivin’ back there.”
Echo took off her sunglasses, tossed them onto the floor, and looked at him. She grinned. “You too, old man.”
The landscape flickered, the vastness suddenly replaced by grassy hills strewn with bits of classical-looking ruins, tilted pillars and broken arches. The clouds were dark against the blue sky, their edges limned with brightness from the concealed sun. The Wendigo climbed up to the top of a high hill, and Arturo stopped it. From this vantage, they could see, off in the distance, a sort of crack in the sky, with honey-coloured light filtering down, illuminating a valley as if with a spotlight.
“That looks like the light that came from the headlights,” Echo said. “But weaker, like it’s shining through dirty glass.”
“Yeah, I been here before. It’s a place where you can sorta glimpse that better world Ismael told you about, stand in the reflection of a reflection of its light, filtered and indirect. Lotta skeletons down there of people who starved to death starin’ up at the light. Supposedly if you can make it to the land of light, you don’t starve to death, or else you don’t need your body, or somethin’. I’ve heard different stories.”
“Fuck it,” Echo said. “Let’s keep moving.”
But the Wendigo’s engine suddenly shut off, and Arturo couldn’t get her started again. He was afraid the battery was dead, but, no, the radio and dash lights and dome light all still came on. The Wendigo had just decided to stop here.
“What’s this?” Echo reached into the glove compartment and drew out what looked like a hand-drawn treasure map. She showed it to Arturo, and there was a little kid’s drawing of a car, with a dotted line leading in a winding path through little cartoon pillars and hills toward an X—marking who knew what kind of spot.
“I guess we’re walkin’ from here,” Arturo said.
“This will lead us to Ismael?”
Arturo shrugged. “This will lead us wherever the Wendigo wants us to go.”
“You better not be fucking with me, car,” she said. “I’ll slash your tires and rip out your spark plugs. I know a lot about cars, and I can make it so nobody could even rebuild your engine, got it?”
Arturo managed not to laugh, which was probably for the best, since Echo seemed totally sincere in threatening the Wendigo. “Let’s go.” She unlocked her door and climbed out, shotgun in hand.
Not quite daring to hope, Arturo tried to start the Wendigo, because escaping from Echo before she found Ismael would be nice. But the car didn’t respond. It wanted him to accompany Echo a little farther, it seemed. Ah, well. Arturo had trusted the Wendigo this far. He got out of the car and joined Echo at the summit of the hill, and together they looked at the distant pool of honeyed light.
Darrin Gets Jumped
1
Darrin followed Ismael into a horrible dark nothing place that stank of hot asphalt. The only feature in the black sky was distant threads of a different and glistening quality of darkness.
“This way!” Ismael shouted, and grabbed Darrin by the wrist, dragging him through the empty place. The stench was so overwhelming Darrin stopped breathing in self-defence. Each step was heavy, as if the air itself were thickening. The dark threads grew larger and wider, and after a moment of confused staring Darrin realized they were coming toward him, somehow, that what he’d taken as some nightmarish dark-energy aurora was actually something else, a phenomenon with physical substance. There was a sound like a clatter of ball bearings falling into a metal bucket.
They blundered through a side-passage and into cooler air, and though this new place was in twilight, it seemed positively incandescent compared to the place they’d just been. Darrin looked around at the field where they’d landed, covered by shifting mists, more like something from a horror movie than any real fog he’d ever encountered. He sank down onto the tough, wiry grass, sucking gulps of damp air. Ismael sat beside him, hugging his arms around himself. �
�What was that?” Darrin said.
“We were in no danger,” Ismael said. “Not . . . immediate danger. If we’d lingered, perhaps . . . well.”
Darrin waited a moment and then sighed. “When human beings have conversations, Ismael, often one human asks a question, and the other one answers.”
“I am not certain I am human,” Ismael said. “Nor you. But, yes. That was supposed to be our last stop before the scenic overlook I want to show you. It used to be a sandy beach, with a profusion of tiny cobalt blue crabs, and the flash of mermaid tails off in the blue-green water. It was a pleasant place, but . . . not very plausible. I fear it has dissolved. It happens, sometimes, in the briarpatch. Worlds rise and fall. Most of the places I visit are stable, but others have only a tentative existence, and it can be difficult to tell ahead of time if a particular area is in danger of fading away. Unravelling.”
“Those things in the sky, the dark threads, that noise . . .”
“The sound of a world being unmade,” Ismael said. “A probability wave collapsing. The act of God forgetting. A few moments later, and we would not have been able to enter that place at all. As it is, we did not pass through to the place I expected.” Ismael rose and brushed grass off his pants. “But I do know this place. Come. The overlook is not far from here either.”
Darrin stood up. He still had a lot to learn about life in the briarpatch. But it was extraordinary, wasn’t it? He’d never hungered for frontiers quite as desperately as Bridget, but he’d always enjoyed discovery, and seeing places no one else had ever seen, or at least, hadn’t seen for a very long time. Ismael wasn’t an ideal travelling companion, but in a place like this, confronted with these shifting wonders, there was no chance of sleepwalking through his life, and that was a welcome change from the slough of despond he’d been slogging through these past months.
“This way.” Ismael set off through the horror-movie mist. They crested a hill, and the mists swirled away as they reached higher ground. Darrin gasped at the spectacle before them. A dark chasm stretched below, so wide he couldn’t see the far side, spanned by a massive suspension bridge with black metal support towers the size of skyscrapers. Twinkling green lights dotted the structure, revealing the graceful arcs of its shape. But there was something wrong. . . .