The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl (14 page)

But Jane didn’t fall down; at least, not right away. Jonathan’s foot, clad in a heavy hiking boot, passed
through
Jane’s body, mud spraying where blood might have been expected, and he spun almost completely around, stumbling before regaining his footing.

Jane howled, releasing her grip on Marzi’s throat. She stared around, eyes wide and white, and then her torso fell away from her waist, thumping on the sand, leaving her bodiless legs standing for a moment, separated. Jane had been kicked messily in half.

“Great holy fuck,” Jonathan said, and for the first time Marzi heard real fear in his voice. She recognized the tone—it was the sound of someone who has realized his part in an irrevocable action.

Jane’s legs fell over, next to the rest of her body.

Jonathan stared down at her, his mouth opening and closing, soundlessly. “I—I didn’t—” He didn’t complete the thought.

“That’s impossible,” Lindsay said, and she took hold of Marzi’s arm again, squeezing too tightly, her voice high, touching the lower registers of hysteria. “Marzi, that’s not—”

“She’s moving,” Marzi said, calmly, and she found that this development was not entirely unexpected, that somewhere inside she’d thought something like this might happen.

Jane rose up on her arms, looking at them all, still grinning. “You see?” she said. “The goddess has made me immortal. I am one with the earth. Will you try to lock up the earth itself, Marzi?”

Marzi took two steps toward Jane and kicked out, driving her foot straight into Jane’s face, mud spraying on impact. Lindsay and Jonathan gasped. The small white stones that made up Jane’s smile scattered. Her torso fell over—though not, Marzi knew, for the last time. She wouldn’t die that easily. Maybe if they threw her into the sea, she would dissolve . . . but even that might fail, and Jane might emerge later, dripping, composed of mud from the ocean floor.

Marzi knelt and picked up a pebble from the sand. One of Jane’s teeth. She clenched it in her fist.

“Let’s go to my house,” Marzi said. “I think I’ve had enough of the beach.”

Shadow Riders

Denis slept for most of the day, and when he got out of bed he decided to clean his boots at last. There was no point in pretending things were normal anymore. Better to acknowledge the mess his life had temporarily become, and turn his attention to moving on. He knelt and scrubbed his boots in the tub, which had quite a ring around it now, thanks to Jane. He wondered where Jane was, what havoc she was wreaking, whether he’d see her again, but as he washed the mud from his boots, he tried to rinse her from his mind, to cleanse himself of her stain. He wanted his mind to be smoothly oiled antique machinery again, all brass flywheels and golden screws, not clogged with the grit of her. He shook the water off his shoes and put them in the sink to dry.

It was time to get on with his life, and put this lunacy behind him. Jane had gone wherever spirits go; her body was buried where it wouldn’t be discovered for a long time, if he was lucky. People would realize she was missing, yes . . . but there were plenty of people who could confirm that she’d been acting strangely lately. Denis had already dealt with the police, and if necessary, he could do so again. As long as he kept his wits about him.

The phone rang. Denis gripped the basin of the sink with his hands, the mud remaining on his fingers marring the white porcelain. He listened to the phone ring. After nine rings, the answering machine picked up.

“Denis?” said a cheerful, faintly bewildered voice, instantly recognizable.

Denis sighed, relieved, then wondered what he was relieved about, what he’d been expecting—cops? Jane? But it was only Beej.

“You’re my other one phone call,” Beej said. “They’re not so strict around here, really, it’s not like it is on TV. Anyway, somebody could come bail me out, and I wondered if it could be you? I’d pay you back, you know, if you want money, I can find money, but I can put in a word for you with the earthquake god, maybe you can stand with me in the calm places, and not die, how’d that be? That’d be worth some bail money, I think.” Beej’s voice dipped, conspiratorial. “See, I have to get out, because I have to set the earthquake god free, because then everything can
begin
. My whole life’s been nothing but a waiting room, and I can’t believe there are these silly bars between me and my destiny, it seems like such a small thing, metal that could be torqued into spaghetti by the right ripple of the earth. . . .”

And on and on.
Why the hell did I get a digital answering machine?
Denis thought. If he had an old-fashioned answering machine, with a tape, Beej would’ve been cut off by now, but he could keep rambling for
hours
if he wanted, and the machine would turn it all into numbers, little bits of data that could be played back, binary lunacy.

Denis went into the living room and picked up the phone. “Don’t call here again,” he said.

“Hey, Denis! You’re there!”

“Not for long. I can’t help you, Beej. I’m sorry.”

“Oh,” Beej said. “You don’t have any money?”

Denis started to respond with something cutting, vicious—if anyone deserved to have some sense lashed into them, it was Beej—but he was too tired for that. There had been too much venom and tension in his life since Jane’s accident in the mud. “Yeah, Beej. I’m sorry, buddy, but I’m broke. Good luck, though.”

“It’s not so bad here,” Beej said. “Except for being imprisoned. The food’s okay.”

“Glad to hear it. I have to go.”

“Could you do me a favor? Could you go to Genius Loci and free the earthquake god? If something happens, and I can’t do it myself . . .”

Denis frowned. There was the shared delusion again, the gender-flip of what Jane had raved about. “What’s all this about an earthquake god?”

“It’s the spirit of desolation, what happens when the earth grinds its teeth, and it’s trapped. I don’t know where—in the building, under the building,
through
the building. But I’m pretty sure anyone can set it free, that all it will take is a crowbar, maybe not even that; maybe just a hand in the right place.”

“Right. If I see the door to the prison, I’ll open it, okay?”

“You’re the best, Denis!” Beej said. “Uh. Gotta go.” And then a click. Presumably Beej was being taken back to his cell.

“Crazy little fuck.” He’d found Beej interesting, for a while—for all his repulsive mannerisms and basic lack of sophistication, he had some fascinating ideas about art, and there was no doubt of his talent; his photo montages were eerily resonant and emotionally affecting, even for Denis, who prided himself on an intellectual approach to art. But lately Beej had grown steadily stranger, and his usual poor hygiene had become something nastier, bordering on the pathological.

Maybe the cops will give him a good delousing,
he thought, and then dismissed Beej from his mind.

It was time to get back to his own work, to his paper about the French surrealists. The same subject that had precipitated his falling out with Jane, which had led to their making up, and the aftermath . . . but that didn’t bear thinking about. If his mind was a mechanism, surely there was a way to route its operations
around
the areas pertaining to Jane, to slice every bit of her existence out of the operant loop?

Denis put on his jogging shoes and went out into the fading afternoon, walking to Genius Loci. He went to the café at the same time every day, if possible; his days were easier when they had a focal point to orbit around. The usual scattering of people sat on the deck, neo-hippies and goths and punks, bikers and clean-cut students and desperately uncool freshmen with dyed hair and fresh body piercings, reveling in their illusory freedom. Denis went up the steps, feeling subtly
wrong,
and in a moment he realized why: He was used to the solid reassuring thump of his boots on the nine wooden steps. The jogging shoes were too soft and silent, and it felt strangely like he was going into a different place, a changed place, though of course it was he who had changed. He would get strong coffee, sit at a table in the peaceful blue corner of the Ocean Room, and think about the surrealists. Their dreams were far more baroque than Denis’s own. He dreamed almost solely of the machine that grinds, all threshing arms and chrome, too neat by half for those artists with their bird-headed matrons, their talking cats, their fantastic landscapes superimposed over cheap furniture. Denis couldn’t imagine having dreams like that, like the aftermath of a mental tornado.

He’d only gotten three steps into Genius Loci when Hendrix began shouting at him, his pale face rising from behind the counter like the proverbial bad moon, his dreadlocks flying as he shook his head. “No, Denis, beat it, get out of here, you’re banned for life.”

Everyone in the café within earshot looked at him. A few people even stood up from tables in the other rooms to see what the fuss was about. Denis froze, feeling like a bug pinned under a magnifying glass. “What?”

“You. Are. Banned. For life.” Hendrix flapped his hand—like he was waving away a gnat—and said, “Beat it. Don’t ever come back. Go to Javha House or the Marigold or something.”

“But . . . you don’t understand . . . this is where I
go,
every day.” Denis was appalled to realize he was whining, when all he wanted to do was bring logic into this improbable argument. “I’m a
regular
.” In truth, the coffee shop was integral to his life. Denis took comfort in his habits and routines—routines that had been brutally upset in recent days. Losing Genius Loci on top of all that was just too much, and he felt the leading edge of hysteria rising, and forced it down. He wasn’t sure how much longer he’d be able to control his uglier emotions, though, if the stresses assaulting him didn’t ease up.

“Look, I don’t care where you go, but you can’t come here. We won’t serve you, understand? And you can’t hang out in here if you aren’t buying something.”

“That’s a catch-twenty-two,” Denis said.

“Good literary reference. Two points,” someone said, and laughter followed. Denis whipped his head around, but there were several people looking at him openly and chuckling, so he couldn’t single out any one for his glare.

What would you do, anyway?
a small voice in his mind wondered.
Stab him? Suffocate him?

“In about ten more seconds, I’ll decide you’re trespassing, Denis, and I’ll have to call the cops. Then you can join your buddy Beej in jail.”

Light dawned. This wasn’t as Kafkaesque a persecution as it had seemed at first; it was just a misunderstanding. “No, Hendrix, you don’t understand. I wasn’t trying to break in here last night. I just saw Beej and came to see what the fuss was about. I explained it to the cops, you can ask them—”

“You think I haven’t talked to the cops enough already? Since five in the morning I’ve been talking to cops! I don’t care what you told them; I know what Marzi told
me
. You and your crazy girlfriend are
both
banned for life.” He looked at his watch. “I believe your ten seconds are up. Banned for life. This is your final official notification. Piss off.”

Denis turned away. Marzi! He’d never thought about her much before. She was either a service drone—and thus a total nonentity—or she was that comic-book girl; she didn’t interest him greatly in either aspect. But now she’d arranged to have him kicked out of his favorite place, a place where he spent more of his waking hours than he did at home. And for what? He’d tried to
restrain
Jane, he’d held her back from smashing in the door and doing whatever it was she felt she had to do in Genius Loci! He’d done Marzi a favor, and this was his reward?

Only a few days before, Denis would have found the concept of “getting back at her,” of any sort of revenge, ridiculously simplistic, something from the movies, something far too messy to attempt in real life. But recently, he’d discovered a higher tolerance for messiness than he’d previously believed himself capable of. Perhaps revenge wasn’t outside the scope of possibility. Perhaps there were ways to sting her as he’d just been stung. Or worse.

He went down the steps in his soft shoes. It didn’t sound like he was leaving the same place. It didn’t sound like he was the same person leaving it.

Beej hummed in his cell, shifting his weight on the hard bunk. It was more comfy than the beach, where he’d been sleeping lately, or the temple of the earthquake god, where he’d tried to sleep one night, until the religious experience of his dreams had proved too powerful to allow him rest, but he still didn’t like it. The cell was too clean and antiseptic, all concrete and steel. One good quake would shear the bars, twist the walls out of true, render all right angles meaningless.

Beej listened for earthquakes, but didn’t hear any coming. He had the feeling that the earthquake god had expended a lot of energy reaching through the door of his prison to touch Beej. Surely
someone
would throw open the door to the god’s prison. Beej knew it would be easy; the prison was designed to keep the god
in,
not to keep anyone
out
. The god said there were guardians—one guardian outside the prison, and one on the
inside
—but that they could be easily sidestepped, that all it would take was a little plain human muscle to open the door. And then . . . Beej had dreamed of the aftermath, the world a jumbled mess, like a photo collage in three dimensions, like the world’s biggest found-object sculpture, strange juxtapositions of cars and steel girders, humped-up concrete, water running where it wasn’t meant to, fires illuminating everything.

When the earthquake god burst out, the whole
town
would become a work of wrecked art.

Beej went to the bars of his cell and held on. He closed his eyes and turned himself into a seismograph, the newly shaped plates in his head poised to vibrate in sympathy with any tremors in the crust of the earth, but nothing came.

“That’s okay,” Beej said quietly, cheerfully, to no one, opening his eyes. “I can wait.”

Dream Sack

The three of them walked back to Marzi’s place quietly, all wrapped in their own thoughts. Marzi let them into her apartment, and Lindsay went straight to the kitchen. “We’re drinking your wine, Marzipan,” she called.

Marzi flopped onto her couch and tried to relax, tried to pretend the world hadn’t gone insane by degrees over the past days. “Make mine a double, barkeep.”

Jonathan stood outside the doorway for a moment, brushing the last bits of sand from his body and taking off his shoes before coming inside. He stood in the middle of the room, scowling at the carpet, and finally said, too loudly, “Why is no one talking about the fact that I just
kicked
a woman in
half
?”

Lindsay came back with three wineglasses in her hands, held by the stems, and the way the glasses rattled delicately together revealed her trembling. She put them down, carefully arranging them on the table, and said, “I’m not sure that’s what I saw. It was dark. Really dark. Maybe you just grazed her, and she fell.”

Marzi didn’t speak. She
knew
what she’d seen, and she couldn’t unsee it now, but Lindsay and Jonathan hadn’t used up their reserves of rationalization and repression yet.

Jonathan shook his head. “This isn’t the first fight I’ve been in. I connected, but it was like kicking . . . I don’t know. I’ve never kicked anything my foot went right through before. I saw the dirt go flying—”

“She was covered in mud,” Lindsay said, annoyed, as if this discussion should already be behind them. “You kicked her, and some mud flew off her, so what? I’m not saying you didn’t do good, you
did,
but . . . there’s no way you kicked her in half.” Lindsay knelt by Marzi’s stereo, sorting through her CDs with occasional sniffs of disdain, tossing aside Uncle Tupelo, the Two Dollar Pistols, Whiskeytown, Wilco, all her cowpunk and insurgent country discs, until she finally found a Portishead disc and put it on.

Jonathan sat down on the couch, poured a glass of wine for himself, and then one for Marzi, and leaned back. “But at the end, when Marzi kicked her . . .” He looked at Marzi, pointedly.

Marzi shrugged, gazing into her wineglass. She decided to lie, to spare their minds. There was no need to put them through the torturous self-doubt she’d experienced herself so recently. “I just kicked a bunch of sand in her face, let her know we weren’t going to back down. After you knocked her down, I think the fight pretty much went out of her.”

“It sorta looked like you kicked her head right off,” Jonathan said.

“It’s hard to see anything in the dark,” Lindsay said, testily. “And as far as I know, Marzi isn’t some secret kung-fu master with the power to decapitate people with her feet. Look, can we talk about something else? I don’t want to waste any more mental processing cycles on psycho Jane.”

“Motion seconded,” Marzi said.

Jonathan sighed. “I could’ve sworn . . . but it was dark, and there was plenty of adrenaline to go around. I guess I don’t know what I saw.” He shook his head. “This summer isn’t turning out the way I expected so far.”

Lindsay leapt on the chance to change the subject. “So what do you plan to do this summer, exactly? You’re studying Garamond Ray, right?”

Jonathan shifted on the couch, but nodded, apparently willing to leave Jane behind. “I want to talk to some of the people who knew him—lots of the artists from back then are still living in the area. Ray taught a few classes at the university, so some of the faculty may have stories to tell. I’ve been corresponding with some of them. And of course I need to take pictures of the murals in Genius Loci. Which reminds me. I meant to ask you about it earlier, but isn’t there another room, one with a desert motif?”

“A desert?” Marzi said. At the mention of the Desert Room, her blood temperature seemed to instantly drop ten degrees—this was thin ice, tightrope territory, creeping past a cave with a monster inside.

“Sure,” Lindsay said. “You told me about it, ages ago. The old storage room, right? All rotten and crammed full of junk, and big water stains on the walls?”

“I think,” Marzi said, her voice hollow in her own head, distant, like the echo of gunshots or a cattle stampede in a far-off box canyon. “Sure, yeah, I remember.”

“Water stains?” Jonathan said. “That’s terrible. I’d love to get a look at the mural, though. Whatever’s left of it.”

“No,”
Marzi said. Her voice slashed down, hard, harsher than she’d intended. “It’s dangerous in there,” she said, trying to push back the hot ache that filled her skull, trying to speak normally. “The floorboards are all rotten; you have to know just where to step. Hendrix won’t let anybody in there—he’s scared of the liability, you know? Besides, you can’t see anything, there’s crap leaning against all the walls, you’d have to move everything out of the way, and Hendrix would never let you do that.” All those things were true, she
knew
they were true—but had Hendrix ever actually told her that? Or had
she
told
him
it was too dangerous, knowing his native paranoia would cause him to agree with her, and declare the room off-limits?

“Huh,” Jonathan said. “Too bad. Are you all right, Marzi?”

“Yeah, babe, you don’t sound so good.” Lindsay touched her leg. “But then, after the night we’ve had—”

“I have to go,” Marzi said, standing suddenly, feeling like she might vomit at any second. “Bathroom.” She stumbled across the room, toward the bathroom. The door was closed, and when she reached out to touch the knob, her vision filled with light, harsh and white, and she tumbled out of normal space and consciousness, into something else, a different time, another, half-familiar, space.

Someone pulled open a door once, but Marzi isn’t sure who—was it Rangergirl, curious as always, opening the nailed-shut door in her tiny apartment way back in issue number one? Or is it Marzi herself turning the brass knob on a painted-over door in the Desert Room, the crammed-full storage room in the back of Genius Loci, where Hendrix sent her on her second day at work to shift the junk around?

Either way, the door swings open as if pushed by fierce winds, and a bright high sun blinds the girl for an instant. When her eyes adjust (Rangergirl’s eyes? or Marzi’s?), she sees a long, dusty street lined with weathered storefronts and hitching posts. In the distance, jagged mountains make angular cutout shapes against the sky. She is more fascinated and awestruck than afraid, this girl, and she takes a hesitant step toward the doorway and the strange new world beyond, but she does not pass over the threshold. Somewhere an out-of-tune piano mangles a rollicking tune. The air over there smells of sage and sand, of heat and gunsmoke.

Then someone steps into the far end of the street, a black figure in a duster and a cowboy hat, at least nine feet tall and casting an impossible shadow that stretches nearly to the girl’s feet. The girl recognizes him, and is comforted: This is the Outlaw, and so the girl herself must be Rangergirl and not Marzi. That means this is a thing of the imagination, not something real, not something that ever truly happened.

Then the man moves and suddenly he is
there,
right up close, his face inches from the girl’s own, each one standing on their own side of the doorway, only the thickness of the doorframe dividing their worlds.

The man’s face is not human. His eyes are smoking gun barrels, his teeth ribbons of barbed wire, his face cut deeply by wrinkles that are really gullies and arroyos, desert formations. This face is not from the comic book—Marzi has never drawn anything so horrible, has never even imagined it. The Outlaw’s face is just shadow under the brim of his hat, and he is an evil, ancient man, but
this
—this thing embodies the wasteland, and promises to give the whole world over to dust.

The girl who opened the door knows she isn’t truly here, that this isn’t really happening now, but still she is terrified, in part because the scene seems familiar, and not because it’s something she drew in a comic book once.

The thing with the wasteland face says, in a voice of smoke and rattlesnake and mummification, “If you can get in, then I can get
out
.”

The girl (who is Marzi; she knows herself now; there can be no doubting, no hiding behind a character) steps back. She slams the door in the creature’s awful face.

That creature was never in Marzi’s comic. Rangergirl goes through the Western Door again and again, she has adventures, fights the Outlaw in all his guises, but Marzi would never be so brave, never risk her life, because her life is
real,
she is flesh and blood, not ink and paper, and she does not have the safety of turning to the last page and being done. Faced with a door to another place, Marzi would not become a brave adventurer—she would slam the door and never touch the brass knob again, never enter the room that
held
the door again. She would try to hide the door from others, try to forget about the thing with the wasteland face, try to
make it not be real
.

Marzi knows herself, and she also knows this dream, this vision, is not from her comic, not something she made up.

It is not fiction.

She knows, then, that it must be memory.

Marzi opened her eyes to find Lindsay and Jonathan kneeling over her, looking down in fear and concern. “Aw, hell,” Marzi said, doing her best to sound calm, wondering if they could hear the thud of her heartbeat, like horse hooves pounding on a coach road. “Shouldn’t have had that wine on an empty stomach.” In truth, she had never felt more sober. For the first time in two years, her memories were complete and unbroken—an absence she’d never consciously noticed had been filled. So what if the things she found in her newly restored memories were impossible? Hadn’t she seen other impossible things since then? “How long was I out?”

“Just a few seconds,” Jonathan said, touching her forehead as if checking for a fever. “You reached for the bathroom door and fell down, and we rushed over, and you opened your eyes.”

“Felt like I was down for a lot longer,” she said. “Just . . . stress, I guess. The adrenaline crash, after what happened with Jane.” She thought about telling them, describing her vision, but feared they wouldn’t believe her—they were well on their way to convincing themselves that Jane hadn’t been kicked in half, after all. Marzi knew the power of repression, understood the vast human capacity for forgetting the impossible, even if her own capacity for self-delusion had been burned out tonight, overwhelmed by one too many impossible things. Besides, if her vision was true, this was
her
problem to resolve. Jane had said as much: Her fight was with Marzi. There was no reason to drag her friends into it. Jonathan had saved her life tonight, kicking Jane that way, and she would do her best to protect his life, now.

“Do you want to go to bed?” Lindsay said. “We can take off.”

The thought of lying in her bed, looking at the ceiling, alone, was unbearable; she would only brood. She had things to think about—serious things, dangerous things, deeply confusing things—but she couldn’t face them now, in the dark, in the night. “I don’t think so. I want to drink lots of water and sit on the couch. And . . . could you stay?”

“I’m not planning to walk to my car,” Lindsay said. “Not after the night we had. I’ll stay overnight, if you want.”

“Yes,” Marzi said, making her way to the couch. “Please, both of you. I don’t feel safe by myself.” Though, in truth, she was more worried about them going out, alone. Jane might have put herself back together by now.

“I’ll get you some water,” Jonathan said.

Marzi nodded. The memory of the Desert Room had parched her to the bone, and her mouth felt as dry as sun-baked rocks. Jonathan brought her water, and she held a swallow in her mouth, her eyes closed, tasting the coolness, probing her memories. It was all there, unmistakable. She’d just started working at Genius Loci, and she went into the storage room—the Desert Room—to put away some old broken tables and

and

and she saw a door. A painted-over door with a tarnished brass knob. And she opened that door, because she was curious, as anyone would be.

Marzi swallowed, then looked at Jonathan and Lindsay, their faces hovering before her like anxious moons. She forced a smile. “Hey, guys, I’m okay. It’s been a long night, you know?”

“God, yes,” Lindsay said. “Do you think we should call the cops, about Jane? If she was really hurt . . .”

“I think she’s still in one piece,” Marzi said, phrasing it that way deliberately, looking for some reaction in their faces, but seeing none. So. They’d managed to forget the impossible parts of what had happened on the beach. She touched the white stone in her pocket, and knew that she would not be able to forget. Maybe she’d never be able to forget anything else ever again. “I doubt they’d be able to find her anyway.”

“I don’t want to talk to the cops, particularly,” Jonathan said.

Lindsay nodded, and flopped back down on the carpet. “This was supposed to be a
fun
night,” she said. “Like me and Marzi used to have. I wanted us to go out dancing after the boardwalk. I remember when you could drink frat boys under the table, Marzipan.”

“I got over
that
little affectation years ago,” Marzi said. It was true; she’d almost forgotten what the
old
Marzi was like, how she’d been when she first came to college. Free from her parental constraints, Marzi had overindulged in all the usual ways, going to raves, dropping ecstasy a couple of times, getting drunk, and neglecting her classes. At that point they didn’t have grades at Santa Cruz, so it wasn’t totally obvious she was fucking up; being out of high school meant having to be her own moral compass, and that was
hard
. She’d met Lindsay when they were both party girls, though Lindsay had always been serious about her art, too. Lindsay managed to keep everything under control by only sleeping four or five hours a night, apparently running on raw enthusiasm and talent the rest of the time.

Then, in her junior year, Marzi got her summer job at Genius Loci, and went into the Desert Room and—and all that shit went down, and she had to go to the hospital for a while. She’d never really been the same after that, she realized. Something had sobered her to the bone. She took a medical withdrawal, stopped going to parties, managed to get back her job at Genius Loci, and finally decided not to go back to college at all. She settled down to work on one of the half a dozen ideas she had for a comic book. One of her ideas was for a sort of cowpunk contemporary retelling of old Western yarns set in a city, maybe a vaguely dystopian frontier-town kind of vibe, and that had become
Rangergirl
. It wasn’t supposed to be overtly supernatural at first—all that shit about the door, and the Outlaw, and being a guardian, all that came later,
after
Marzi opened the door in the Desert Room, after she got out of the hospital.