Do Better: Marla Mason Stories

by T. A. Pratt

  The tree was odd, too: the only lights on it were red, and the ornaments... they were all human figures in terrible torment: a man surrounded by horses, one attached to each outstretched limb, frozen in the act of tearing him apart; a blank-faced woman lashed to a great wooden wheel; a pair of legs and sandaled feet sticking out of a lion’s mouth; a robed man tied to an anchor; another man pierced with a dozen tiny arrows. “What the hell?” he said.

  “They’re saints,” a woman said. He spun, and recognized the redhead from the street, but more smartly attired, in a green dress, with sprigs of mistletoe in her hair. “Depicted at the moment of martyrdom. Neat, huh?” She held a glass of what looked like eggnog in her hand. “Do I know you?”

  “I’m—the Christmas miracle. Where’s Ivy?”

  “How should I know? I haven’t thought about you guys in years. After a promising middle, you got so dull and domestic. I was going to peek in again when she was about seventy to see if you were still giving it to her on the regular, but.” She shrugged.

  “Why am I here? Why did I wake up under this tree instead of with Ivy?”

  She sat in an armchair near the fire. “Hold on, I’m all-seeing, but I do need to look first....” She stuck her finger in the eggnog and swirled it around, peering into the glass. She grunted. “Looks like Ivy took a tumble about a month ago. She went back east for Thanksgiving, slipped on some ice, cracked her head. Brain swelled up, and she died in the hospital, never regained consciousness, surrounded by family, all that. Not a bad way to go. Pop, out like a light. Well, you know, you had the same thing—”

  He knocked the glass out of her hand and grabbed her by the front of her dress. She looked more amused than intimidated, but his anger and rage were towers rising from a sea of black despair, so he didn’t care. “Bring her back. Bring Ivy back to life. You did it to me, I know it’s possible—”

  “You are a gift, you don’t receive a gift. That would be like giving a toy fire truck a little boy for Christmas. Don’t be stupid. Let go of me before you lose a hand.”

  He backed off. “I... this isn’t... there must be something I can do. Take away my miracle, let me stay dead, and just transfer my life to her, all right?”

  “What, so Ivy can wake up under my tree, all boo-hoo-hoo, and then beg me to take her life so you can have it instead? Each of you getting the other a gift they don’t have any use for, like some Gift of the Magi shit? No thank you.”

  He fell to his knees and implored her. “Then just let me die. Please. Maybe she’s somewhere, there must be souls, since you brought me back, so if there’s an afterlife, and I can be with her....”

  The woman sighed. “Like I said, if I let you go, we’ve got a loose miracle. Right now the magic is channeled and controlled. Cut that connection, and all kinds of weird random disasters would happen. I’m not opposed to that, to be clear. Is it what you want?”

  “I can’t live like this. An endless Christmas, without her. But I don’t want to hurt anyone... isn’t there some other way?”

  “Well, since you asked.... Magic can be altered. It can change form without going wild, as long as the equation still balances. Hmm. I’m not usually so nice, but it’s Christmas, and this eggnog is pretty good, so. Take down Saint Catherine from the tree there.”

  He looked at her blankly. “What?”

  “The ornament, the woman on the wheel. I’m guessing you didn’t go to Catholic school?”

  He found the ornament, the stoic woman bound to a wheel, and handed it over.

  “Heads, you get the fairy godmother. Tails, the bad fairy.” She flipped the ornament, which spun awkwardly a few times before landing on the carpet.... saint-side up.

  “You and Ivy are lucky, Dave. I’m almost never sugar and spice and everything nice twice in a row.” She picked up a fireplace poker and gave him a smile. “I think you’ll enjoy next year.”

  “What—” he said, and then she smashed him over the head with the length of iron.

  He woke, naked and disoriented, underneath a tree in the same dark living room. It looked like the same tree, even, a year older and thoroughly dead, its needles gone, branches bare, ornaments missing... but a fire still burned in the hearth.

  “Gabe?” Ivy said, and he rolled over to find her on the other side of the tree, also naked. “What happened?”

  “You—baby, you died, you hit your head, and I... I think I made a wish?”

  She sat up, and there was an envelope tucked under her body. She picked it up, turned it over, and showed him the front: To Ivy and Dave.

  “It’s Gabe,” he muttered, but tore it open. The card inside wasn’t for Christmas—it was a detail from a Goya painting of a nightmare menacing a sleeping woman—but a message was written inside:

  Old miracle: one rebirth for 24 hours. New miracle: two rebirths for 12 hours. Law of conservation of blah blah blah. Feel free to use my house but don’t make a mess.

  Love and kisses, Aunt Elsie

  He handed the card to Ivy, and she read it. “So... we only have twelve hours together, but... it’s twelve hours every year? Together?”

  “And there’s no sense of time passing in between Christmases, not really—it’s just like going to sleep for the night.” He touched her face. “So I’ll wake up beside you, every day, for... as long as there’s a spirit of Christmas.”

  “Now is now,” she said.

  “Now is forever,” he said, and kissed her there under the tree.

  Part Three: Odds and Beginnings

  Encounter on a Back Street

  This flash piece was the very first thing I ever wrote about a character named Marla who did weird magic. Amazingly it was even published in a little horror ’zine. From such humble beginnings, etc.

  Marla kept the straight razor, but dropped the jar of eyes in a garbage can. Let some alley sorcerer have them. Eyes were easy. She could always get eyes.

  This razor, though—owned by Gilles de Rais, used by Anne Dancer to slice off her son’s fingertips, sharpened on a strop made from Tecumseh’s flesh... she’d never held anything so potent.

  She wondered what the man had planned, with the razor and the eyes. Probably some petty curse, but perhaps he’d realized the value of the razor, and intended something more grandiose—Maybe the Rite of the Malachim. If so, she’d saved the world a lot of trouble by killing him.

  The weapon would fetch quite a price, from Cooper or Gregor or even Sauvage. They could perform magics she’d never heard of, use the razor to its full potential and pay her for the pleasure.

  A man in a pale robe stepped from an alley. White paint disguised his face, and a pair of makeshift wings sprouted from his back, constructed of coathanger wire, sharp bits of broken spring, and mirror shards dangling from strings. His wings jingled like windchimes when he approached.

  Marla flipped the razor open and the silver case warmed in her hand. She had other weapons, but nothing so potent as the razor. It hadn’t helped her victim, true, but he hadn’t seen her coming.

  “My blade, please,” the man said.

  Marla shivered. His mouth hadn’t moved. He might be a ventriloquist... but she doubted it. He wasn’t a demon, or a sorcerer, or even a Throne, she couldn’t smell any of those powers on him. But he was something.

  Marla didn’t hesitate. Artie Mann had taught her that much—kill first, and interrogate the skull at your leisure. She lunged, slashing with the razor.

  The man didn’t move. The blade passed easily through his white gown, slashing across his belly. She brought the blade back across his throat, then stepped away to avoid the jet of blood.

  Which didn’t come. Light shone through the slashes she’d made.

  “My blade,” he said again, extending his hand.

  Marla stepped away. The man scowled. Something appeared in his outstretched hand—a broken sword, dripping yellow fluid. The sword flickered, became a wooden-handled scythe, its blade similarly broken. The man’s clothing changed, too, his white robe fir
st becoming purple, covered with golden eyes, then shifting to dead black sackcloth with a hood. His face stayed white—skull white.

  Then he reverted, open hand outstretched.

  The light coming from his wounds seemed dimmer, and Marla wondered if she _could_ kill him, slash him enough to let all the light out... and if, in doing so, she could take his place.

  The idea chilled her. She handed the razor over.

  The man nodded, closing his hand. “See you,” he said, and melted back into the shadows.

  Marla, shivering, sat on the curb with her feet in the gutter. She stared at the broken asphalt, thinking of death, and eyes, and mercy.

  Haruspex

  I started writing this piece, the first real Marla Mason story, while working at an antique store in college. It is heavily influenced by the works of Scott Baker (especially “Varicose Worms”) and the Sonja Blue novels of Nancy Collins. It’s dark fantasy and kind of nasty, and lacks the humor that enlivened the best Marla stories, but I kept some bits of it as backstory for the series as a whole.

  The child’s jawbone, a smooth fragment tinted green by long years of immersion, bobbed in the glass jar. Marla watched intently, her question still hanging in the air like a cold exhalation. She sat at her rickety kitchen table, oblivious to the stink of old food in the garbage and the buzz of flies around the overhead light. She pressed her fingertips into the jar’s sides so hard her knuckles ached, waiting for an answer.

  “Haruspex.” The word whispered and bubbled, and the floating jaw sank to the jar’s bottom, the baby teeth clinking gently on impact.

  “Yes,” Marla said, and closed her eyes, remembering black-flecked entrails piled messily in a succession of front yards, alleyways, and darkened houses.

  Marla opened her carved wooden wardrobe, decorated with vines and snakes. The doors creaked as they opened, revealing a single garment hung on a wooden hook. Harsh geometric patterns hacked into the wardrobe’s inner walls glowed blue, then faded. She took down the velvet cloak, emperor-purple lining inside, virgin-snow white outside. She fastened it around her throat with a silver stag-beetle pin, mandibles pointed down. She closed the cloak, became a white ghost. Opened it, purple as a bruise.

  She went.

  They called him the Belly Killer. He cut people open and let their intestines fall out, spilling onto a variety of surfaces: tiled floors, cobblestones, weedy lots, raked gravel. The police believed he chose his victims randomly. Marla had seen all his victims, seven in two months, sometimes observing their messy corpses by clinging invisibly to the ceiling, sometimes looking through a pet policeman’s eyes. She knew the victims, every one. She knew the killer did not choose them randomly.

  Two things she didn’t know: The killer’s identity, and what he’d divined about the future by reading portents in the steaming guts of murdered sorcerers.

  Marla stood at the bar in Juliana’s, sipping a special drink, a mixture made of one-quarter child’s tears to three-quarters spring water. Juliana swabbed the bar in repetitive circular patterns, rubbing a charm against lost tempers and sudden violence into the pitted wood. Noise and smoke filled the bar in equal, excessive measure. Juliana’s, an underground complex of seven rooms and innumerable stone pillars, attracted the usual club-hopping nightcrawlers and a small, more specialized clientele.

  “I need Rondeau,” Marla said. “Is he here?”

  Juliana shook her head, her eyes watchful hollows under her thatch of orange hair.

  Marla laced her fingers together and let her hands rest on the bar. “I’ve always appreciated your hospitality, Juliana, and the free drinks—” Marla tapped her glass with one long, unpainted fingernail, making it ring. “—but I won’t tolerate being lied to.”

  Juliana, stalk-thin and sickly, looked away. She had strange appetites, and gratifying them had weakened her. She didn’t do heroin, nothing as mundane as that, but she resembled the waif-thin longtime addicts that frequented her establishment. As keeper of the eighth room she had power and prestige, but Juliana had frittered most of that away. She maintained a tenuous position in the sorcerous hierarchy. If the eighth room hadn’t been as much burden as benefit, someone would have taken the custodianship away from her long ago. She couldn’t match Marla.

  “He’s in back,” Juliana muttered. She jerked her head toward an arched doorway, covered with a heavy red curtain, beside the bar. She looked up, defiance smoldering in her eyes. “You scare him. He hides.”

  Marla nodded, vaguely pleased. Demons seldom feared humans. Rondeau had gained great power over the years, but he still thought of her with the awe and fear of his youth. Like the way you can tie a baby elephant to a stake to keep it from getting away, she thought, and when it grows up, the same stake will hold it. Even though the full-grown elephant could tear the post out of the ground, it remembers the early failure, and remains tethered.

  Marla finished her drink and went to the archway leading to Juliana’s infamous eighth room. The uninitiated whispered speculations about the obscenities that must take place there, and all of them knew someone who knew someone who’d been inside.

  In truth, the eighth room simply provided a meeting place for special figures, a protected place unobserved by the roaming, many-eyed Thrones who spied on the city’s sorcerers, gathering evidence for some future reckoning. The Thrones could be glimpsed in the most unlikely places, recognizable to the trained eye by the crackle of static electricity jumping in their hair and the light that showed from the edges of their eyes, like the sun’s corona leaking around the moon during an eclipse, but the eighth room’s properties blinded them entirely.

  Nothing overtly horrific took place in that room, though the quiet discussions that went on could chill blood. When demonstrably monstrous entities, human and otherwise, plotted things so terrible they could only be discussed in secret, they met in the eighth room.

  And sometimes people who didn’t want to be found paid a price to hide there. If Rondeau had paid, Juliana would have protected his privacy to the death. Rondeau hadn’t paid, though; he’d only asked a favor.

  Marla pushed aside the heavy red curtain and stepped into the eighth room. A small, concrete-floored space, it barely held eight office chairs and a long conference table. Gas lamps burned on the water-spotted walls. Electricity (among other things) didn’t work properly in the eighth room.

  Rondeau, seated, stared at her, clutching the chair’s arm. As always, Marla felt faintly disappointed at his appearance. His actuality never lived up to her memory. When she thought back on her past dealings with Rondeau, she remembered a man with demonic handsomeness, a debonair charm, and a cunning that surrounded him like a radioactive aura. Just one of his small magics, she knew, to make himself more impressive when people told stories about him. In the flesh he cut a nondescript figure, a dark-haired bony twenty-something, unremarkable except for his replacement jaw, stolen from a larger man and a poor match for his head, and his flamboyant blue-and-red silk suit. In films, demons are wise-cracking and suave, or sinister and taciturn, but in Marla’s experience real supernatural creatures spent most of their time simply trying to pass for human.

  “Your jaw spoke to me today,” she said, not sitting down, touching the stag beetle pin at her throat. “It told me you knew the haruspex.”

  “Haruspex?” His bewilderment, even veiled by fear, seemed genuine. He held his chin protectively, talking from behind his hand.

  Marla considered. She’d taken Rondeau’s jaw, quite against his will, shortly after he came to earth, only a few days after he possessed a young boy’s body. If questioned properly, the jaw spoke to her. It knew whatever Rondeau did. Like subatomic particles that once collide and remain connected forever, regardless of distance, Rondeau and his jaw shared information instantaneously. Marla kept the jaw locked in a lead box so Rondeau wouldn’t be privy to details about her home life. Sometimes, the jaw knew things before Rondeau did, an oddity and occasional paradox that Marla accepted but did not understa
nd.

  “A haruspex is a sorcerer who divines the future by studying the arrangement of things,” she said. “Tea leaves, or scattered stones, sometimes—but usually entrails.” He looked blank. “Intestines. Guts, Rondeau.”

  His eyes widened. “Him? The belly man? That’s why he’s doing it?” He swore, an inhuman obscenity that made Marla wince. If he’d uttered it outside the eighth room’s protective walls, paint would have blistered and flies dropped dead, and Marla would have endured ringing in her ears for hours afterward. “That makes a little more sense. Not much, but a little.”

  “Tell me,” Marla said. She had a stake in this, a duty, an obligation to dead Artemis Mann, the Belly Killer’s latest victim—but all that aside, curiosity compelled her. To know the future. Even Rondeau’s jawbone couldn’t tell her that.

  “You don’t want to know. I told Carlton Spandau, and you heard about him.”

  “Victim number six. Is the killer someone I know? Someone Carlton knew?”

  “He’s nobody,” Rondeau said, seemingly affronted by the killer’s lack of stature. “Never been an apprentice, never witnessed anything...” He shook his head. “Carlton hired me to track him down, and after the sixth killing, I found him. Until three months ago, the killer was just an ordinary guy with a lousy job. Then... something happened. Something that made him strong enough to kill Carlton, Mangrove, Sorenson... I don’t know what, but when I tracked him leaving the murder scene, I smelled electricity.”