Briarpatch by Tim Pratt (11 page)

Almost without thinking, Darrin raised the camera, gazed at the digital reproduction of the grisly scene before him, and zoomed in on the broken skull and its bed of leaves. He pressed the button, which gave an artificial but satisfying “click,” a little sop to those who’d grown up using non-digital cameras. He was thinking of evidence for the police as he snapped his pictures, but he was also thinking of beauty, and composition, and light levels, and because it was dim under the trees he turned on the flash.

The leaves stirred as he took pictures. Wind? A strange wind, to stir only in a hole. Then the bones clattered and rattled together, and Darrin kept taking pictures, oddly mesmerized, until a great pile of bones and leaves heaved up, like a blanket with a body moving beneath it. Darrin stumbled back, camera thumping against his chest.

A voice rose from the pit, no more human than a lion’s roar or an avalanche, but making words: “Fee, fie, foe, fum, I smell blood and shit and come. Make you spatter, make you spurt, make you scream and flinch and hurt.” Something rose from the pit, bones and leaves cascading away as it emerged. “Bind your bones into my bed, make a soup bowl from your head, eat your heart and eat your lungs, make a morsel of your tongue.”

Giant
, Darrin thought, and for just an instant he lifted his camera, wanting to take a picture of whatever monstrous head and shoulders might rise from the pit, but he wasn’t
that
drunk, or such a voyeur that he’d watch his own oncoming death. He let the camera fall again, strap pulling at his neck, and raced away from the pit, away from the path. Terror gave him the luxury of not thinking about the words he’d just heard, about the impossibility of giants, let alone a giant in an empty lot a block from his house. So he ran, leaping over those footstool-sized mushrooms, crashing along through low-hanging branches. Noises came from behind him, great stony grindings and cataclysmic thumps as the half-buried thing in the hole dug itself out. The sound was more like that of earth-moving equipment than of anything alive. And still that droning, inhuman voice, chanting words Darrin couldn’t make out now. Something whizzed through the air over his head, a spinning blur of white that struck a tree and exploded into fragments. As Darrin pushed himself faster, his side beginning to ache from the exertion, camera bouncing painfully against his breastbone, he realized the thrown weapon had been a long bone of some kind, a recognizable knobby joint lying in his path where it had bounced after impact. The thing behind Darrin was hurling body parts at him.

The ground sloped, up and possibly out, the trees thinning, and Darrin expected to see a familiar street, houses he knew, maybe even his own home; this was the right general direction.

But when he crested the ridge and emerged from the trees, there were no houses, only a road paved with great flat stones, and more trees across the way. There was, however, one familiar thing, which made Darrin pause in his flight, confusion compounded into paralysis.

The Wendigo was parked in front of him, passenger side facing Darrin, and the door was open. A great mound of paper, envelopes, notes, and sheets of musical notation was scattered all around the car, and the bucket seat inside was clear of litter, mostly. Arturo popped out from the driver’s side, looking at Darrin across the Wendigo’s roof. His balding head glistened with sweat, and his moustache twitched. “Get in,” he shouted, slamming the flat of his palm on the Wendigo’s roof.

Trees snapped behind him as Darrin sprinted the last few yards to the car, and from Arturo’s wide eyes and gaping mouth, Darrin knew the thing from the pit, the creature that slept under a blanket of bones, had cleared the trees too.

Darrin flung himself into the Wendigo, whipped the door shut after him, triggering an avalanche of mounded litter from the back seat, paper cascading down his shoulders, paper cuts nicking his neck, and he had the absurd thought that the Wendigo was a vampire, sampling his blood through tiny slices.

Arturo jumped back into the car as well, revving the engine, but before they could escape, something stepped into the road. But something that size shouldn’t have been able to
step
, shouldn’t have been able to move at all. It had the proportions of a house rather than an animal, and its body was a mess of dirt, draped with clacking chains of bone, ivory, and fungus, as if the forest back there had decided to rise up and go walking. If it had a head, Darrin couldn’t see it, but its chanting drone went on, blood and death and pain, the specifics drowned out by the Wendigo’s growling engine. The creature held a tree, a mess of roots and hardened soil at one end. It cocked back the club, clearly intending to smash the Wendigo.

A horrible noise started, and Darrin realized it was his own screaming, mingling with the rising shriek of the Wendigo’s engine—the sounds harmonizing.

Arturo didn’t scream. He threw the Wendigo into reverse, and they rocketed backward, out of the arc of the swinging tree. But the thing rushed toward them, seeming to approach without any need for a practical method of locomotion, just flying along like a special effect come to life, and Arturo braked abruptly. Darrin stared at him, and Arturo gave him an “A-OK” sign with his fingers. Then he slammed his hand down on the centre of the Wendigo’s huge steering wheel, and the car horn sounded.

Detroit had never built a car with a horn like this. No car customizer had ever tricked out his ride to make such a sound. It was an animal’s roar, the voice of some alpha-beast that was to lions as lions were to mice, something that ate wolves and picked its teeth with the bones of Komodo dragons, a predator’s predator. The sound was so bestial and threatening that every hair on Darrin’s neck stood up, gooseflesh covered his arms, and his bowels nearly let go. He was paralyzed, and even though he knew it was the car horn, some trick or recording, his hindbrain was certain it was the cry of the pinnacle of apex predators, and that Darrin was about to be devoured.

The thing—Darrin didn’t like to think the word “giant” again, didn’t like the word as anything other than maybe an adjective—dropped its weapon and loped away, disappearing into the trees.

After another moment, Arturo took his hand off the horn, but Darrin went on hearing the sound for several seconds, and was sure he’d remember it in dreams forever.

Finally Arturo turned to him and said, “I wasn’t sure the horn would work. Some of these things in here don’t have ears. I was afraid I’d have to turn the high beams on, and that would’ve led to a whole lot of other problems, most likely.” He put the Wendigo in gear and drove down the paving stones.

All that remained of Darrin’s alcoholic buzz was a dry mouth and an aching head. “Arturo,” he said, measured, trying to keep his voice steady, but having no choice but to raise it in order to be heard over the Wendigo’s engine. “Where are we? Am I going crazy?” Maybe he’d gone mad with grief over seeing Bridget die. That sort of thing happened in books sometimes.

“I saw you was out walkin’, thought I’d say hello.” Arturo guided the Wendigo around a fallen tree. Though the road looked rough, more cratered than potholed, the ride was smooth; the Wendigo had one hell of a set of shocks. “Then I saw you take a, ah, side path, you know what I’m sayin’, and I’d been that way—this way—
here
—before, and I thought maybe you’d need a ride out pretty soon. I didn’t follow you on foot, on account of I don’t get around so good in the briarpatch without the Wendigo.” He patted the dash affectionately. “I’m not a natural, like you are, so I came after you in the car. Good thing, too. You should know it’s dangerous around here. There’s worse things’n what you ran into in those woods. God forbid you should run into a bear. Sometimes not even the high beams work on them. One of ’em took a chunk out of the Wendigo’s fender one time, and that’s the only thing I’ve ever even seen scratch the paint on this baby.”

Darrin tried to seize on something he could understand. Briarpatch? A natural? Bears? He finally said, “Thanks for helping me,” though that hardly seemed adequate.

Arturo shrugged. “You and me got things in common. I lost somebody, too. I lost my Marjorie, and you lost your Bridget.”

Darrin pressed himself against the car door, away from Arturo. “How do you know about Bridget? Do you work for Ismael?”

“Don’t know any Ismael. Is he another briarpatch boy? The way I know about you is, I read about you. Here.” Arturo drove with one hand and rummaged in the trash pile with the other, pulling out a torn scrap of paper. He handed it to Darrin, who read, in his own handwriting, things he’d never written down, about Bridget leaving him. He turned it over, but the back side was blank. “What the fuck is this?”

“Oh, you know the briarpatch,” Arturo said, cheerful and vague, and Darrin began to realize there was some vast misunderstanding here, some knowledge Arturo assumed they shared. “I think maybe it’s a page from a diary you might’ve written, but never got around to writin’? There used to be more, but I lost it, or the Wendigo ate it, either one. The Wendigo gives me what I need. When I saw them diary pages and then met you, and realized you was the Darrin who signed your name on those diary entries—not every page, but you wrote like letters you couldn’t send, to Bridget mostly, and you signed
those
, just like they was regular letters—I knew I was supposed to get to know you.”

“Supposed to?” Darrin said, chasing a minor point, unwilling to face the larger mysteries, let alone acknowledge his own ignorance. “What, like God put you in my path? Fate?”

“I don’t think there’s any such thing as Fate. Not for me, anyway. For me, there’s only the Wendigo. And I don’t know about God. What happened to my Marjorie, it’s hard to believe in God after that. I ain’t seen God, unless God’s a ray of light, or the briarpatch itself. Here’s our exit.” He spun the wheel, and the Wendigo dropped off the edge of the road, landing with a hard thump after seconds of free fall, and suddenly the trees were gone and they were on salt flats, endlessly blank in all directions, but only for an instant. Then the Wendigo was smoothly merging into traffic on Interstate 580, less than two miles from Darrin’s home. Darrin looked in the side mirror, but there was no sign of an on-ramp or feeder road they could have come from. They’d just . . . appeared on the highway.
It’s like the alley Ismael escaped into, that night with Nicholas
, Darrin thought, and there was a sort of
click
in his head. He’d once seen an alley that didn’t properly exist. Today he’d walked into some woods that were simultaneously near his house and nowhere near it at all.

And now, as if it were a sort of rainbow only visible from certain angles, an impossibly high and distant moon-coloured bridge shimmered into visibility high above the freeway, like an overpass for angels. Darrin had seen the same bridge for an instant that night outside the strip club, with Nicholas. He raised his hand and pointed, too breathtaken to speak.

“I know.” Arturo leaned forward over the steering wheel and looked up at the bridge. “I’ve been tryin’ to find an on-ramp to that thing for years.” The anguish and frustration in his voice were so clear and undisguised that Darrin reached over and patted his shoulder. “Home again,” Arturo said, forced joviality in his tone, and drove the Wendigo onto the exit for Park Boulevard. One left and one right turn later he stopped the car in front of Darrin’s place. “I’ll see you around, friend. And don’t be too sad—I know Bridget left you, but maybe she’ll come back, right, realize what a good thing she had, you know?”

Darrin stared at him. Arturo clearly knew all sorts of things, but he didn’t know everything. “Bridget . . . she’s dead. She jumped off a bridge today.”

Arturo’s face fell. “Oh, I’m awful sorry to hear that, awful sorry. You and me are more alike than I realized.”

“Your Marjorie . . . she killed herself?”

“She . . . it was a car thing,” Arturo said, looking down, as ambiguous an answer as Darrin could imagine. “Ah, hell, anyway. That explains why you went stumblin’ into that nasty part of the woods. The briarpatch is what it is, but it bends around us a little, too, like a plant grows up to the sun and roots grow down to the centre of the Earth. The briarpatch sort of turns us toward misery or wonder, whichever seems to suit us best.”

“Right.” Darrin opened the car door.

“Better wash your shoes off with bleach,” Arturo said. “You might’ve brought some seeds or spores with you from those woods, and you don’t want some of those plants takin’ root out here, you know?”

“Thanks.” Darrin looked down at his own shoes in a sort of bemused horror. “I’ll do that.”

“Hey, look,” Arturo said. “Before you go. Maybe, if you got a few minutes, I think we should talk. What do you say we go get a beer?”

Darrin opened his mouth to make a polite, reflexive refusal, but the look on Arturo’s face was so hopeful that he nodded. “Sure, we can do that.”

“Let me park the Wendigo, and we can walk,” Arturo said. “I know a place.”

1

“There’s a bar about five blocks down,” Darrin said when they reached the corner of his street and Park Boulevard.

“I know a closer place,” Arturo said. “Just across here.” He strolled toward the crosswalk, and Darrin followed with trepidation—he’d lived in this neighbourhood for years, walked every street within a few miles, and there were no bars closer than the one he’d mentioned. Not in the normal world, at least.

Arturo reached the far side of the street and continued up the hill, past an apartment complex, and turned down a narrow footpath between apartment buildings, turning sideways to pass through the bushes crowding the pavement. Darrin began to feel hope. Maybe there was some illegal bar run out of a basement apartment; maybe they weren’t going back into the strange world he’d stumbled into earlier.

But no. After a few more turnings, down progressively-narrower passageways between high stucco walls, they reached a wider street with cobblestones, and the air there seemed ten degrees cooler than it was everywhere else. Brick buildings lined the cobblestone street, most with their windows barred and their doors secured with chains or closed behind steel gates. Only one door stood open, and Arturo gestured. “This is the place. You’ll like it. It’s very plausible. I don’t like to go too deep without the Wendigo, but places like this, right on the outskirts, I can manage.”