Do Better: Marla Mason Stories

by T. A. Pratt

  “Marla, I am not yours to—to reassign,” Chum said.

  Marla smiled up at the glowing skull. “What do you think happens to you when you go back down to the underworld, your purpose fulfilled?”

  “Back to chaos,” Demi murmured. “Where demons go when they are of no further use. Returned to the raw stuff of creation.”

  “Ah.” Chum couldn’t blink, being a skull wreathed in fire, but he bobbed in a very blinky way. “I... I can see the advantage in remaining useful. And I do know ever so much that can be helpful—”

  “You two can sing to each other.” Marla stood up. “Okay. I’m done here. Where’s the off-ramp back to Hell, Chum?”

  “I am, ah, supposed to, ah, immolate you....”

  “Maybe let’s do that outside,” Marla said. “So we don’t ruin the couch.”

  After being set aflame by Chum’s sacred fire, Marla opened her eyes in the bedroom of her apartment building in Felport. Wait, no—the windows in her apartment building didn’t look out on walls of flame as high as skyscrapers, so this was probably the underworld. She looked around, and caught a glimpse of a face in the cracked mirror over her dresser. She walked over and leaned on the top, gazing at herself... but not quite herself. This face was paler, as white as bone; the eyes were black; the smiling teeth were pointed; the tongue, revealed when the face spoke, was black. “Hello, Marla.”

  “Hello, your majesty.”

  “You didn’t kill the demon.”

  “I did not kill the demon.”

  “Instead you showed caution, and you showed mercy.”

  “Once upon a time I would have called those things ‘cowardice’ and ‘weakness.’ But people change.”

  “People deviate, occasionally, from their norms,” the Bride of Death said. “It remains to be seen whether they can truly change. But no one expects miracles. That’s why the marks on your body didn’t read ‘Be Flawless.’”

  “You know, when I agreed to be the queen of hell, I didn’t expect to be so... compartmentalized.”

  “This is a special situation. It’s really just an advanced form of talking to yourself. I am you, Marla. I am the highest attainment of all your best qualities: your strength, your loyalty, or sense of right and wrong, your sense of justice, your essential desire to help those who are lost and in pain, as you once were yourself. I am you, but with a heart of iron and a mind the size of a galaxy... and a basic ability to make long-term plans.”

  “Ha.”

  “But you only have my senses and my understanding half the time. The rest of the time, you are human, albeit no longer in danger of permanent bodily harm—our husband took our agreement seriously, and will protect your mortal form for as long as you wish to retain it. It occurred to me that being invincible and short-tempered and arrogant might be a bad combination, so I hoped to impart to you a little... caution and humility.”

  “You are insufferably patronizing.” Marla sighed. “I guess you really are me.”

  “Come rejoin me,” the face in the mirror said. “We still have a little time left to reign in Hell before you return to Earth for your month of mortal folly. What do you think you’ll do when you get there?”

  “What am I going to do?” Marla smiled warmly. “Why, I’m going to do... whatever the fuck I feel like, you self-righteous ass.”

  The Queen of Hell sighed, and the bedroom door swung open onto light.

  Three Petitions to the Queen of Hell

  After Marla’s husband Death dies in Lady of Misrule, eaten by a monster from another universe, Marla chooses to give up her mortality, become fully divine, and stay forever in the underworld. The plus side is that her personality integrates a lot better when she’s not dividing her loyalties between Earth and the underworld, and her ‘at-war-with-myself’ period ends. The minus side is that she’s lost the love of her life, and has to choose a mortal consort to rule with her. In the novel Closing Doors she ends up marrying Zufi, the Bay Witch, and they rule together for a really long time. This is a glimpse of some of those years.

  1

  Marla and Zufi, the reigning queens of Hell, were eight years into a meaningless spat, living more as roommates than lovers, and as a consequence, Marla was irritable, and Zufi was bored.

  The demons and psychopomps who served them stepped lightly (or floated above the ground entirely, if they could), and the dead were uneasy even in their personal paradises. In the mortal world above, crab apples and briars thrived, geese attacked cats without provocation, and dark clouds gathered ominously, only to spit a few halfhearted drops of rain before dispersing.

  Each queen was sure the other should apologize first, but queens are stubborn by necessity, and neither was ready yet to swallow pride in exchange for peace. Still, Zufi was bored enough to look across their breakfast table (which resembled the ugly stump of a huge petrified tree, because it was Marla’s turn to choose the décor), and said, “I’m going to open the pathways and passages and secret trains.” She broke the yolk of her egg and watched it run across the plate toward the rosemary potatoes and waited for her wife’s long silence to break.

  Marla was sipping bitter coffee and she made a face to match. “We’ll be overrun by idiot mortals on idiot quests.”

  “I am supposed to remind you what it means to be mortal, but it has been so long since I was born and thought about dying that I’ve forgotten how to remember to do the reminding.” Zufi’s blonde hair was swept up into a crown of braids, her lips were a shade of purple borrowed from a sea anemone, and she wore a dress of delicate seafoam lace. “And gods are gods. We should be open to prayers and petitions.”

  Marla’s hair was chopped short and ragged and she wore a ratty old dark purple bathrobe with white lining inside. She’d sealed up the passages from the world of the living because she valued her privacy, and she’d stopped acknowledging the rituals of necromancers because she found them distasteful, but she shrugged. “As long as you take the meetings.”

  “I will take some of the meetings, and you will take the ones I do not take.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Tyrants do what they will. Queens recognize their duty.”

  Marla thumped down her cup. “It’s not duty. It’s tradition. Deals with the devil, petitions, contests, feats of daring and demonstrations of talent, ugh, why. We give the dead a place to spend eternity. We make sure the seasons keep seasoning. Don’t we do enough?”

  “Not quite. Don’t be sad. You could make some monsters, to guard the passageways. I think getting to the underworld should be a possible maybe but not an easy for sure.”

  Marla brightened, a little, at that.

  Marla’s monsters were fearsome, but after four months, someone finally made it through: a mortal woman managed to swim across the Styx by singing a haunting a capella rendition of “Straight Outta Compton” that made the ravening eelwolves sway enchanted in the water with their multitudinous eyes closed. The mortal woman limped on toward their palace (which resembled an immense rusting iron diving helmet, because it was Zufi’s turn to decorate, so everything looked stupid), and presented herself in the throne room, dripping green water all over the black and red marble.

  “Are you the ruler of the underworld?” the woman asked, before dropping down on one knee. She had a lovely voice. She was in her mid-twenties, perhaps, with blue hair and delicate whorls of tattoos crawling down her arms, wearing a torn black tank top and a chunky silver necklace and filthy corduroys and heavy black boots.

  “No, I’m just a random passerby who likes to sit on a throne carved out of a single immense diamond.” Marla looked around. “Zufi! You have a guest!”

  A bandy-legged demon with the head of a goat and a monkey’s body covered in short red fur drifted in from a side door. “Zufi went for a swim.”

  “So go get her.”

  “She’s not in the pool,” the demon said. “She’s in the sea primordial.”

  Marla groaned. Zufi sometimes vanished into the sea o
f chaos for days at a time, swimming among the ruins of Lemuria and Atlantis and R’lyeh and other imaginary places, racing demonic megalodons and chatting with the spirits of abyssal squid and the other sentient sea creatures who had afterlives. Zufi had been a nature witch in her mortal life, and retained her affinity for all things oceanic.

  “Ugh.” Marla looked at the mortal. She’d come a long way, and bested terrible trials, to get here, which probably ought to count for something. “What do you want?”

  She kept kneeling, which annoyed Marla, quite unreasonably. “My girlfriend died. We were hiking and she was stung by a scorpion, which usually isn’t fatal, but—”

  “Stand up. You want me to bring her back to life, right? What’s your girlfriend’s name?”

  “Élodie Marie Petit.”

  Marla rose, rolled her shoulders, lifted her hands as if about to conduct an orchestra, and the whole room went black. Marla’s crown of ice glowed, casting cold white light on the petitioner, who was looking around with more interest than fear. After getting past Marla’s guardians, a little darkness wasn’t likely to scare her. A shimmering bubble about six feet across drifted toward them, the color of desert sand. “Here she is. Dead two weeks. Let’s see how her afterlife looks.” Marla reached down and took the petitioner’s hand, and then walked with her through the wall of the bubble.

  They stood high on the edge of a canyon, under a deep red sky. A young woman with dark skin and loc’d hair stumbled through the shadowy depths far below, the rocks and floor around her swarming with scorpions. “Hannah!” she shouted. “Hannah, help me, I’m lost!”

  “You’re Hannah?” Marla said.

  The petitioner ignored her and started to scramble down the rocks. Marla sighed, grabbed her by the arm, and pulled her back out of the bubble. Hannah tried to yank her arm free, which was funny, and Marla dispersed the darkness and the bubble with a wave. “That didn’t work. I was hoping to show you miss EMP was having the time of her afterlife down here and didn’t need rescuing, but she must have some heavily unresolved issues if that’s the afterlife she came up with.”

  Hannah stared at the empty space where the bubble had been. “She died right there in front of me. The coroner said she must have been allergic—”

  “Brutal. Okay. You know her body is no good now, right? The stuff they do in mortuaries, oof.”

  “She was cremated.”

  “Even worse.”

  “Can’t you... restore her?”

  “I could, but I’d have to go up there and mess with her ashes, and that’s not happening, because I do bad things to everyday reality, being a god. People go mad, there are disasters, monsters spontaneously generate, it’s a mess. I’m radioactive, magically speaking. But what I could do is shape a bit of primordial chaos into a duplicate of your girlfriend’s body, maybe without the whole allergy problem, and stick her soul in the new body, and send you both back up to live out your lives.”

  “You’ll do that?”

  “Nah. I said I could, not that I would. What’s in it for me?”

  “I can sing. I charmed the beasts and guardians—”

  “They have to be vulnerable to something, to give you folks a sporting chance, but, eh. No thanks. We’ve got, like, Pavarotti down here. Amy Winehouse. We’re good singing-wise.”

  Hannah took a deep breath, like it might be her last. “Do you want... my life? For hers?”

  Marla wrinkled her forehead. “You misunderstand. I don’t need more dead people. We’ve got plenty. There’s not any kind of balance I need to maintain, either. Putting her soul in a new body, it’s fine, it’s really just a loan anyway—she’ll be back. I can’t do that kind of thing for everyone, obviously. It would get even more crowded up there, and I’d never get a moment’s rest, which would irritate me, and the seasons would go to hell. Honestly, most people like it fine down here. Their afterlives are nicer than the original lives. Élodie, though.... I can do this, but there has to be a cost. I’m a bargaining sort of god. You have to do something for me. Something valuable.”

  “Like what?”

  “Have you ever been to Portland?” Marla said.

  “I... in Maine or Oregon?”

  “Oregon.”

  Hannah nodded.

  “There’s a place there, with great ice cream—”

  “Salt and Straw?”

  Marla frowned. “You don’t interrupt me. I interrupt you. No, Salt and Straw is good, but I’m thinking Cloud City. I’d love to get a pint of something from there.”

  “You want me... to get you ice cream?”

  “I can’t go get it myself. If I showed up in Portland it would stop raining rain for a minute and start raining blood or frogs or whatever.”

  Hannah stared. “I can’t believe this. Okay. What flavor?”

  “No, that’s the thing, you have to surprise me. I can conjure up ice cream down here, any kind I want, but that means I’m never surprised. And if I ask my wife Zufi to conjure it for me, it’s always something weird and gross. One time she made seaweed ice cream. Vile. No, bring me something tasty. Something I don’t expect. Pack it in dry ice so it won’t melt. Then come back. Oh, and bring a piece of your girlfriend, hair from a brush or toenail clippings, even a shirt she sweated in real hard if that’s the best you can do—just something of her body.”

  “Then you’ll restore Élodie to life?”

  “A bargain’s a bargain. Gods have to stick to them. Now shoo.”

  Once Marla was sure Hannah was out of the underworld, she made new monsters, and this time, she made them all hate music.

  Zufi was right. This was kind of amusing.

  A week later, Hannah was back, kneeling in the throne room. There was a big chunk of her hair missing, and blood all down her face. “The monsters don’t like singing anymore,” she said.

  Marla frowned. “No, and they were supposed to pick you up in their jaws and fling you back upstairs. How did you get past them?”

  “I used the sword.”

  “What sword?”

  Zufi appeared in a shimmer of sparkles, like sunlight on the water, and sat down on a throne made of coral. “I thought your monsters were too monstery and not sporting so I hid a sword. Also an axe and a whip.”

  “Huh,” Marla said. “Well, all right, you worked for it, Hannah. Did you bring the thing?”

  Hannah got to her feet and carried over a cooler, full of dry ice. A paper pint of ice cream nestled inside. Marla opened it up. Yellow ice cream, with purplish swirls and black specks. “What’s this?”

  “Lemon with black pepper marionberry jam.”

  “That sounds horrible.” Marla conjured a spoon (the handle was shaped like a seahorse, because Zufi was still doing the décor, ugh), took a bite, made a face, swallowed, and put the ice cream on the arm of the throne. “Bleah.”

  “A bargain is a bargain.” Zufi picked up the ice cream and began to eat, with apparent relish.

  “Yes, I know. All right, come on.” Marla rose and beckoned to Hannah. They went through a door, and immediately down a spiraling staircase. They descended in silence, Hannah moving slowly, clearly in some pain from her ordeal.

  They reached the bottom after a long time. The stairs led to a round stone room lit by torches. A pool of silver liquid shimmered in the floor. “Toss the toenail clippings or whatever in there.”

  Hannah reached into her pocket and came out with a snipped-off lock of hair, and dropped it into the pool.

  Marla focused a bit of her intention, and the silvery chaos churned. A moment later a woman’s body floated to the surface: Élodie, identical to her mortal form on the last day of her life in every apparent detail, naked and whole. “Pull her out.”

  Hannah struggled to drag the body out of the pool. While she was doing so, Marla reached into the pool, just enough to wet her fingers, then brushed them across Hannah’s scalp and arm. The woman gasped as the chaos spread and healed her injuries, even restoring her torn-out chunks of hair. She looked
up at Marla. “Thank you.”

  “I usually handle the destroyer-goddess side of things, but I didn’t want you bleeding all over my sacred wellspring of chaos. How are you going to handle the whole returned-to-the-dead thing? People will have questions.”

  Hannah shrugged. “We’ll think of something. We’ll say she was in a coma and there was a clerical error, they cremated the wrong person... I don’t know. She’ll be alive, indisputably. We’ll come up with something.” She touched Élodie’s face. “Why isn’t she awake?”

  “That’s just a shell. Let me pour in the filling.”

  Marla summoned the sand-colored bubble, this time much smaller, no bigger than a fist, and sent it drifting down to touch the new body’s forehead. The bubble popped, and Élodie opened her eyes and gasped and took her first breath.

  Hannah started kissing her all over the face and Marla waved her hand and they vanished, returned to Earth.

  She climbed all the way back up the stairs, instead of just reappearing in the throne room, because she wanted to think. When she reached the dais, where Zufi sat on her throne of coral, Marla said, “Hey. I’m sorry about, you know. That whole thing.”

  Zufi inclined her head regally. “I am sorry as well.”

  Marla gestured toward the cooler. “Want to go throw some dry ice in the River Styx?”

  “Oooh.”

  2

  About a dozen years later, Zufi interrupted Marla’s reading of a posthumous novel by Balzac (who wrote as obsessively in the afterlife as he had when alive) to say, “You have a petitioner.”

  Marla closed the book, which vanished (but saved her place), and sat up in the hammock of silken thread. “That’s the third mortal to make it down here in the past decade. We’re not making it hard enough. Can’t you deal with them?”

  “I took care of the last two. They were boring secret-wanters and justice-seekers, nothing fun.” Zufi smiled and her eyes twinkled, in the literal sense. Marla felt a surge of affection and lust. Things were good. In the world above, summer was lush in one hemisphere and winter was mild in the other and the air was sweeter than usual everywhere. “This one is yours all yours because it was yours before in a reversal.”