by T. A. Pratt
“Sure, the instructions on a bag of knives maybe, but otherwise....”
“Knives don’t even come in—Elsie! Tell me about your stupid horsepersons so I can tell you it’s not my problem and you can leave.”
“Instead of War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death, I made my randomly selected humans into Peace, Plenty, Remedy, and Life.”
“Remedy? Really?”
“Did you see how I matched the number of syllables in their names with their opposites from the original quartet? That’s the kind of attention to detail you get from Elsie Jarrow. Anyway, my horsepersons rebelled and escaped and you have to help me get them back.”
“No.” Marla smiled. Saying it was just as nice as she’d imagined.
“I’m not the one asking.” Elsie reached into her cleavage—of course she did—drew out a folded piece of paper, and sent it spinning through the air toward Marla.
She caught it between her palms, then opened it up and read the text. She groaned. “God damn it.”
“Only if you really want me too,” Elsie said. “We should go. We’ve got a car to catch.”
The Wendigo
“The Wendigo found you?” Marla asked. She and Elsie were standing on the cracked blacktop of an abandoned gas station outside Spivey’s Corner, North Carolina.
“Apparently because I created the horsepersons, they’re my responsibility, or so the horrid thing insists. The Wendigo demanded I help it track down my horsepersons and neutralize them, and it’s very good at being demanding. I thought I was past ever having to do anything I didn’t want to do ever again, but even coercion is sort of interesting, in its way.”
“Great. So why is the Wendigo asking for me?”
“My fault again,” Elsie said. “Instead of locating my little helpers, I got distracted and took the Wendigo on an aimless but entertaining interdimensional road trip. When the Wendigo realized we weren’t actually making any progress, well, first it bit me, and then it decided we needed someone more mission-driven to come along and keep things on the straight path, since I prefer the crooked way. Since you still owe the Wendigo a favor from that time it helped you save the world, it thought of you. It wasn’t even my idea!”
“There was a time when people owed me favors instead of the other way around,” Marla grumbled. “That was a good time.”
An engine rumbled in the distance, and the Wendigo appeared, approaching slowly from behind the gas station. The Wendigo looked like a car—a huge four-door sedan the color of yellowed bone with a snarling grille and bulbous headlights—but Marla knew it wasn’t really a car. The strange thing was, it looked like a car anyway, even though illusions tended to disintegrate in her godly gaze. Some people thought the Wendigo was a god in its own right: the god of the Briarpatch, that tangle of bizarre half-formed universes, pocket worlds, and strange realities that sometimes collapsed under the weight of their own implausibility. Not even Marla knew what the Briarpatch really was—theories included the first draft for the multiverse, unstable creations abandoned by their gods, or the crawlspaces and steam tunnels of reality. Those with the right natural gifts or training could use the Briarpatch as a shortcut to go from one place to another on Earth, or even from one parallel universe to another... but the Briarpatch was treacherous and twisty, and if you ventured into its tangles, you risked getting badly lost.
Unless you had a native guide, like the Wendigo itself.
Elsie’s four horsepersons had fled into the Briarpatch, and they must be wrecking up the place pretty good if the Wendigo was looking for help.
The car stopped in front of them, and its front doors yawned open. Papers cascaded out and around Marla’s feet—take-out menus, flyers for guitar lessons, scholarly manuscripts written in German, letters from soldiers from various wars, civil and otherwise. The Wendigo produced a lot of paper, only some of which it used to communicate (like the letter Elsie had given her), but the scraps tended to disappear when you weren’t paying attention, like fairy money.
Marla brushed a manual for a Betamax player and a bunch of unsigned Valentine’s Day cards off the passenger seat and climbed in. Elsie got behind the wheel and attempted to beep the horn, which didn’t work, because the Wendigo didn’t feel like making noise right then, probably.
“Road trip!” Elsie shouted, and the Wendigo accelerated down the blacktop and took a sudden right turn down a side road that wasn’t apparent to mortal eyes.
Peace
They drove down a freeway lined by trees as tall as skyscrapers, then blurred to crossing a crumbling stone bridge across a black-water bay, then shifted realities to roar down a narrow track in a world that was nothing but rusted roller coasters as far as the eye could see, and then across a salty-dry ancient seabed where two suns shone their glare into Marla’s eyes.
She gritted her teeth, feeling profoundly disconnected. This wasn’t Earth anymore—it wasn’t even her universe. Some of the worlds in the Briarpatch were only a few miles across, and others were nearly as large as her own universe, but none of them were hers, and the deep connection she felt to every living thing in her world, and to the cycles of seasons, was cut off. This was almost as bad as being mortal, except for the immortality, and all the magical powers.
“We’re going to the realm of Peace first, even though I didn’t make her first, she was third.” Elsie said. “She was an ER doctor, you know, a trauma specialist, dealing all day with stabbings and shootings and idiot mishaps. I hid under her bed and gifted her with power, told her she could stop the violence before it started. You know what she did? She freaked out and yelled about me breaking into her house took a swing at me! I went to kick her in the knee, because it sets a bad precedent if you let mortals punch you. Before I even broke her kneecap, she eyeballed me and hit me with the old zonko. I fell asleep! For nearly eight minutes! I think if I were mortal, I would have gone full forever comatose.”
“Your definition of peace is putting people in comas?”
“You have to admit it’s effective,” Elsie said.
“I thought you liked chaos and activity though. People being asleep seems to work against your interests.”
Elsie shrugged. “I just do stuff, Marla. It’s not like I meticulously planned this thing out, and I wasn’t sure how her power would manifest. She could have ended up with the ability to charm people, or mind control them, or, who knows, slurp out their violent impulses like tapioca balls in boba tea. I don’t god the way you god. I just kind of feel my way, like jazz.”
“If you’re jazz, what does that make me?”
The Wendigo’s radio came on and played a few seconds of brutal death metal before lapsing back into silence.
“I’ll take it,” Marla said. “What’s your victim’s name? Don’t say ‘Dave.’”
“What are you, the census bureau? Doctor Dorondo. Has a nice round mouthfeel. First name Jim.”
“Not the most common name for a woman, Elsie.”
“I’m pretty sure I heard Jim. Maybe she’s a Jimilia or a Jimena. I am not the name police. Be glad. If I were, I’d forbid alliteration, Ms. Double-M.”
The Wendigo slowed to take a sharp curve, and suddenly the sky changed, the blinding clarity of the horizon over the ancient sea floor replaced with hanging fogs, and the emptiness with piles of bones as big as houses. The car slowed to a stop in the center of a stone plaza, before an immense temple that leaned hard on carved skulls as a decorating motif. It was an aesthetic Marla could appreciate—her own throne room tended to default to something similar—but it wasn’t exactly welcoming. “Peace came here?”
“She’s meant to seek out the most conflicted place in the world and pacify it,” Elsie said. “I thought that could be interesting, war zones turned to nap rooms, that kind of thing. I didn’t know her and her fellow horsepersons would flee into the Briarpatch to ply their trade. Probably I shouldn’t have given them those magical horses that could go anywhere.”
Marla groaned. “There are horses?”
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“Metaphorically, Marla, you know how it is. They have conveyances, anyway. Peace rides in a little cart pulled by a lion and a lamb—it’s a ram, actually, because that looked cooler—but their mounts had magic powers, apparently including the ability to access the crawlspace and junk rooms and flooded cellars of the multiverse.”
“So this is the most violent part of the Briarpatch?”
The Wendigo’s glove compartment popped open, and a much-folded expanse of paper fell into her lap. Marla opened it up, and realized it was a map, one with lots of arrows and notations and flaps that lifted up to reveal other flaps underneath. Probably necessary, if you were trying to map the Briarpatch. One part of the map was circled in red and marked with a skull and the scrawled notation: “Total Murder Town. Avoid.”
“The Wendigo used to travel with a cartographer,” Marla said. “Back when we first met. Darrin something. I bet he made this map.”
“Who needs a map when we have the territory?” Elsie climbed out of the car and shouted, “Can I have a little peace around here?”
A figure dressed in white appeared at the top of the temple steps and began to slowly descend. She was short, curvy, dark-haired and —complected, and there were butterflies flittering all around her in red and blue and gold. “It was quiet here,” she said. “I just wanted quiet.”
“I just wanted a group of friends to help me change the world, to give people some happy endings, and see how miserable that would make them!” Elsie called. “But you all disappointed me, and now you’ve enraged the Wendigo.”
The engine rumbled in a way that sounded more annoyed than enraged to Marla, but she wasn’t a car whisperer.
Elsie stared up the steps. “Time to come home, dear, and give me back my power, since you’re no fun.” Elsie blurred up the steps, moving faster than a mortal eye could have followed, but Peace wasn’t entirely mortal anymore, and she saw what Marla saw—the trickster god drawing something shiny from the pocket of her dress and raising it up. Before Marla could tell if the object was a knife or a gun or something stranger, Elsie wobbled and then fell down face first, just three steps below Peace’s perch.
All was silent. Then Elsie started to snore.
Marla thought for a moment. She walked toward the pyramid, her arms upraised. She climbed the steps slowly, and Peace stared at her, then glared, then squinted, then tried winking, but still, Marla climbed, detouring around Elsie’s sleeping form, until she reached Peace’s step, and sat down. She patted the stone beside her, and after a moment, Peace sat with her.
“I couldn’t knock you out,” Peace said. “Why not?”
“I meant you no harm. I thought maybe your power would only work on those who seek to do violence. I was already here in peace.”
Peace nodded. “That makes sense.”
“Do you like it in this place?” Marla said.
Peace shuddered. “No, it’s horrible. The people who live here all have four arms each and they carry weapons in all of them. After they passed out, I dragged them inside their temples, because seeing them sprawled everywhere on the ground.... It looked like the aftermath of a battle. Some kind of nerve gas attack, maybe, since it wasn’t all bloody. I hate it here.”
“Then I have a proposal. We can take your powers away, take you back home, and make Elsie leave you alone. We can also... well, there’s a river where I live, and if you drink the water from that river, you can forget things. You can forget a lot, or a little.”
Peace thought about that. “Right now, I feel like it’s important to remember the world is... different than I thought... but could I get some of that water, to have in case I need to forget, later? I know something about delayed onset of symptoms.”
“Yes.” Marla reached into her bag and removed a vial. “Drink this as needed.”
“If I took this to the lab and had it examined, what would it look like?” Peace said.
“Water, probably,” Marla said.
Peace sighed. “Magic. Is there magic than can heal people?”
“Sure, but there’s always a price, a trade-off—something taken for what’s given. Unless we’re talking about a malady that’s straight-up incurable, I’d trust science over magic most of the time.”
Peace looked down at Elsie. “She wanted us to, like, wear costumes, and descend from the sky in a coordinated show of power. She gave me this cart pulled by a lion and a sheep, and they could fly... it was kind of silly but also terrifying. I mean it was a real lion.”
“That’s Elsie. What happened to the animals?”
“I set them free. They seemed happy about it.” Peace glanced at Marla. “Will you find the others? Take their powers too?”
“That’s the idea. I assume they want to be rid of their abilities as well?”
“Life and Remedy probably do. Plenty likes his, but he shouldn’t be allowed to have it.”
“Oh? What’s he—”
Elsie leapt up and swung at Peace with the shining metal thing in her hand, and Peace gasped, fell back against the step, and then went still.
Marla got to her feet. “Elsie! I was talking her around!”
“Your distraction game is excellent.” Elsie turned over the object in her hand, dropping something small and spherical and glowing into her other palm, then popped the light into her mouth like a piece of candy. She swallowed, and grinned. “There. A little of my power back.”
Marla looked at the thing in Elsie’s hand. “Is that a melon baller?”
“An enchanted melon baller, but yes. It scoops out magic, divinity, things like that. I made it myself. It was supposed to be a big silver axe with a spike on the back, but my powers do what they do.”
Marla bent and picked up the unconscious Peace, carrying her down the pyramid over her shoulder. Having the magic sucked out of you was a blow, but she’d recover okay. “Do we drive her home, or what?”
The Wendigo’s trunk popped open.
“Seriously?” Marla said.
“I think it’s basically a portal,” Elsie said. “The Wendigo is like the conscious manifestation of the Briarpatch, or something. Taking people places is its whole deal.”
The interior of the Wendigo’s trunk was a blackness so deep not even Marla’s sight could penetrate it. She lowered Peace into the trunk gently, and the darkness briefly buoyed up her sleeping form, then drew her down, and she vanished. “I’m going to look in on Peace when I get home, and she’d better be okay, Herbie the Murder Bug.” Marla slapped the trunk lid closed. “Or I’m going to forge a very special socket wrench in the furnace of Hell and come disassemble you.”
Now the engine rumble sounded like a laugh.
Someone shouted, and then several other someones joined in, and when Marla looked that way she saw multi-armed warriors dressed in leather and metal waving bronze weapons come pouring out of the pyramids.
“So much for peace and quiet,” Elsie said. “Want to fight them?”
“Just get in the car,” Marla said wearily.
Life
“Those rocks are rolling around of their own volition,” Marla said.
“Well observed,” Elsie said.
“And those tumbleweeds... are they trying to have sex?”
“Looks like it. Life finds a way, huh?”
Marla got out of the Wendigo and looked around the barren landscape of rocks and desert, except it wasn’t barren: it was vibrant. The clouds in the sky moved with intention. Grains of sand hopped around like fleas. Everywhere Marla stepped, she trod on something alive, though none of it seemed much bothered by her presence. Not everything in the landscape was alive or moving, though: there was just a ribbon of unnatural animation about ten feet wide, leading off into the distance.
“So Life brings things to life?”
“Imbues them with mobility and sentience, maybe even sapience, though I’m not sure about that last one,” Elsie said. “I sorta thought he’d bring the dead back to life, but this is fun too.”
“Br
inging the dead back to life would have annoyed me, Elsie.”
She nodded and clapped her hands. “I know! It would have been great! We would have had a big fight about it! Oh well. See, my plan was, I’d send this guy, Gary his name was before I gave him a better one, to all the military bases, right, and then the drones and war planes and tanks and guns and all would come to life, and they could make their own decisions about whether to bomb the crap out of everybody. But all Life wanted to do was bring the little people in the model train village in his basement to life. So I stomped on the little guys, you know, to motivate him. Maybe that’s why he took off with the others. Bleah.”
“I do not understand you,” Marla said. “Why are you so awful?”
“I disrupt! Disrupting things is interesting. Look, I get bored super easily.”
They got back into the car and drove alongside the path of life, until at last they found a cave at the base of a heap of boulders. Marla said, “Give me the melon baller.” Elsie shrugged and handed it over. “Okay. Now stay in the car.”
“Why?” Elsie said.
“Because I want this interaction to go better than the last one.” She climbed out, and Elsie tried to follow, but the door wouldn’t open, and by the time she tried to get out Marla’s door, that was closed and locked too. “Thanks, Wendigo,” Marla said, and its engine purred.
Marla approached, and the cave mouth snarled at her, gnashing teeth of spiky stones. Marla stood outside and shouted, “Life! We should talk.”
A stoop-shouldered man with thinning gray hair and a Mr. Rogers sweater approached, but stayed within the cave’s toothy mouth. “Who are you?”
“I’m Death.”
He blinked. “Oh. Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you here to kill me?”
“Not unless you want me to. I was thinking I’d take away your power, and offer you some selective amnesia, and send you back home.”
“Can you really do that?”
She pointed. “I’ve apprehended the... creature... who did this to you. She’s locked in my car right now. See? She’s very unhappy in there.”
He peered past Marla, and she knew he could see Elsie in the car, yelling and pounding on the glass.