The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl (20 page)

“I
love
opening doors,” it said, and walked into the slowly rising dawn.

Marzi looked at the clock over the kitchen sink. It was almost five-thirty. Genius Loci opened at seven, and Hendrix would be there at six-thirty or so, probably. She didn’t have much time.

She had to find Jonathan. There was no question about that. What had happened to him was her fault, for not being honest with him, for not telling him and Lindsay about the dangers they faced. Besides, she
owed
him; he’d kicked Jane in half, probably saving Marzi’s life. Marzi had been running from her responsibilities for too long. She wouldn’t run from this one.

But she couldn’t go after Jonathan alone. What if the thing
was
lying? She’d need someone on this side, who could open the door for her if she got stuck. There was only one person in the world she could call: the
other
person she should have been honest with, the other one she should have warned. Marzi picked up the phone and dialed Lindsay’s number.

The earthquake woke Beej about an hour before it happened. He felt the vibrations thrumming through the bones in his skull, an exquisitely blinding sensation somewhere between pain and orgasm. He lay awake on his hard bunk, looking into the dark above him, whispering softly to himself, begging forgiveness for his trespasses, pledging fealty, occasionally giggling. The world would break like an egg, and Beej would be there at the place where the crack began, standing at the epicenter, at the right hand of a god.

When the quake came, Beej bounced out of his bunk and landed hard on the concrete floor, but he didn’t care—it didn’t even hurt. He sat cross-legged on the floor of his cell while the cops cursed and poked their heads in to make sure everyone was okay. Beej waved at them jauntily, and they scowled, like always. Beej hummed a little and watched the windows as light crept into the sky, everything in his head going
la la la
in anticipation. Because something had
happened
. That hadn’t been a natural earthquake, and the epicenter was close-close-close; just down the street, in the prison where the god lived, or used to live. Beej had half-expected the walls of the jail to crack open when the tremors began, but they hadn’t. The building was probably on a floating foundation, or at least earthquake-safety retrofitted. After Loma Prieta rearranged the face of the town, the people of Santa Cruz had become a bit more careful about such things. Not that their care would protect them. Oh, no. Everything would be shaken down to bits around them, and they would be broken up, too. That was too bad. Beej didn’t have anything against people, not really. He would have just as happily pledged himself to a god of love and light, but those gods had not revealed themselves to him. Beej’s only revelation had come from the god of the earthquake, and so that was the god that earned his loyalty.

When he heard bootheels clicking on the floor, Beej rose to his feet. None of the cops sounded like that when they walked, every click of heel on floor clear and distinct, each a miniature crack of doom.

The earthquake god walked into the holding area, and Beej stood still on the other side of the bars, unable to believe his good luck, to be looking on the god-in-the-flesh, not a smoke ghost or a brief apparition, but the real thing walking around. It was man-shaped, the color of sandstone, naked from the waist up, clothed below in a leather cloth. It wore deerskin moccasins, but each step sounded like bootheels, a small and strange thing that struck Beej as very godlike—a walking sense of dislocation, a living, sentient example of cognitive dissonance. The god stood just on the other side of the bars; its face was impassive, its eyes polished black stones, its teeth the color of flint. “Beej,” it said, voice toneless and uninflected. Its breath smelled like rocks baking in the sun.

“My god,” he breathed.

“I need you to do something for me.”

“Anything.” Beej imagined himself driving a bulldozer, or manning a wrecking ball, or just walking through town, opening fissures in the ground with every step.

“Much as it pains me to say this . . . I need you to build me something.”

Beej frowned. He hadn’t expected that. Unless he was supposed to build something that would later wreak greater destruction. . . . “Of course. Whatever you want.”

The thing reached through the bars and touched Beej’s cheek, which made Beej shudder with pleasure, though the god’s flesh was hard and rough. “You are my pet artist, you know. I chose you because you are mad, and you can make things. You’re a shaper. Under other circumstances, you might have been the one holding me prisoner.”

Beej winced. “Never, I would never—”

“Oh, I don’t know. All you want is duty, a set of devotions, a
reason
. Keeping me prisoner might have given you that. But you’ve got too many snake pits in your head to make you a good candidate for that sort of responsibility, I suppose. Marzi was a better choice.”

Beej smiled a little, hearing her name.

“You like her, don’t you?” the god said.

Blushing, Beej looked at the floor. “It’s not important,” he mumbled. “Flesh is grass.”

“And we know what happens to grass, don’t we? It gets dry, and it burns, and it floats away. Your flesh too, eventually. But even full of snake pits, you have power, enough to shape things, enough to make you valuable to me. You can build what I need.”

“What should I make?”

“Sort of a sculpture, Beej, and sort of a tide pool. Something like a door, and something like a shadow box.”

“A sculpture?” Beej said uncertainly. “I’ll try, but . . . I’m not so good with making things in three dimensions. I can paint, I can do photo collage, I can draw, but when it comes to building things, my eyes don’t meet my hands.”

The god did not look pleased. It blinked, once, like a lizard. “Ah. I see. You’re not that kind of artist.”

“Now, if you want a good
sculptor,
” Beej said, “that’d be my friend Denis. He used to make the most amazing things. He worked with metal, mostly, because he liked the clean lines, but he did other stuff, too, with wire and found objects . . .” Beej trailed off, belatedly realizing that pointing out his uselessness to the god’s plans might be a bad idea. But he couldn’t very well lie to his deity, could he? Better the god know now than find out later.

“Denis.” The god sounded unhappy, the first inflection that had touched its voice. “I see. And do you think you could work with Denis? The door will need to be embellished. Imbued. And you’re the one with the power to do that, Beej, to make it more than just a sculpture. I shudder to think where a door Denis made by himself might lead to, but I can guide
you
. Could you . . . collaborate with him, do you think?”

“Oh, sure,” Beej said. “That’d be great. I’ve always wanted to work with Denis, but he never wanted to.”

“I suspect we can convince him,” the god said.

Beej looked around, then said, confidentially, “Of course, the problem is, I’m in
jail
.” He shook the bars by way of demonstration.

“Oh, not to worry,” the god said. He slipped his pinky finger into the lock and wiggled it a bit, meditatively. The lock clicked. “I’m good at opening doors. I like it. It’s my new thing.” The god stepped back, and the door swung open.

Beej stepped into the corridor. “But there’s getting
out
of here, and that’s tricky, too, there are police . . .”

The god shook his head. “Don’t worry. They’re all . . . asleep.” The god smiled, and Beej suspected that the police weren’t asleep at all, that something worse had happened to them. He felt bad, thinking about that, because those cops had been nice to him, mostly, and even the ones who hadn’t been nice didn’t deserve . . . Well. It wasn’t about what people
deserved
. It was about the god’s will. Beej served the god’s will. Anything else was a distraction.

“Let’s find your clothes, shall we?” the god said. “We can’t have you running around in that ugly jumpsuit.”

Throw In

Marzi couldn’t bring herself to go into the café yet. She sat on the steps, wishing for a cigarette, looking dully at the trash in the street beside the sidewalk: a condom wrapper, a ragged bit of newspaper with the word “Run” in screaming thirty-six-point type. There was no heat in the air, and she wore a sweater, but she was still cold. She had her toy gun, loaded with caps, and she turned it over in her hands, taking comfort from it like it was a lucky charm, which maybe it was. She’d gone up to Jonathan’s room, hammered on his door, but he wasn’t home.

The door under the stairs to the Pigeonhole was standing open. It was the only door into the building that wasn’t alarmed; Hendrix had probably forgotten about it when he had the system put in. It was locked anyway, and the key was long lost, but the Outlaw had gotten through it with no difficulty. At least it hadn’t just walked through the wall; that was reassuring, to know it had to use doors, even if it could open them without difficulty. Apparently prowling around bars and appearing as a spectral cowboy were the supernatural equivalent of remote telepresence. Now it was out for real, walking around in the world in something like a body, and it had to use doors. So maybe, if it was physical enough to need doors, it was physical enough to kill. But why was it physical at
all
? Why did a sentient earthquake need a body? In a sense, it wasn’t even a
thing
—it was a potentiality, an event, a process, a conscious disaster.

And why did it keep appearing to her in the form of things she’d written about in her comic books? Sure, there was a degree of accuracy in the comparison, a certain satisfying symmetry, but its fundamental form couldn’t possibly be that of a villain from a Western. So what the hell
was
it?

Lindsay arrived, parked at the curb in front of Marzi, and popped out of her car. She didn’t look at all puffy or half-asleep. She’d been awake when Marzi called—“The quake bounced me out of dreamland,” she’d said—and agreed to meet right away, almost no questions asked. Just one: “Is it bad?” And Marzi said, “Well, yeah,” and Lindsay said, “Give me ten.”

Lindsay sat down beside Marzi on the curb. “Hey, babe,” she said.

“Hey.” Marzi leaned her head on Lindsay’s shoulder, then abruptly, and to her own great surprise, began to cry.

Lindsay put an arm around her and made soothing noises.

“Ah, Lindsay, I fucked up,” Marzi said. “I didn’t want the job, but I got it, and I screwed it up bad.”

“Nothing we can’t fix,” Lindsay said. “No such thing as a problem we can’t handle.”

Marzi shivered. What could she and Lindsay do to stop the thing with the wasteland face? It seemed afraid of Marzi, which suggested there was
something
they could do, but if Marzi could hurt it, she didn’t know how. How did you fight a willful mudslide, a living wildfire? You
couldn’t
—you could only pick up the pieces afterward. But if the Outlaw had its way, there would
be
no afterward. Just desolation spreading in all directions.

“I should have told you about this before, but I didn’t entirely believe it myself. Even now, even though I
am
sure, I’m also sure you’re going to think I’m crazy,” Marzi said.

“Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“I’m serious.” Marzi looked at the asphalt, the trash in the gutter. Not at her best friend.

“Tell me,” Lindsay said.

Marzi almost smiled. Lindsay was good people. “Well, in a nutshell . . . Two years ago, when I first started working here, I was storing some stuff in the junk room . . . the
Desert Room
.” She had to force herself to call it that, but she didn’t stutter, this time. “And I found a door in the back wall. A door to nowhere.”

“Okay.”

“Well, I opened the door, because, shit, that’s what you
do,
if you’re stupid, if you’re me.”
Or if you’re Jonathan,
she thought, but she’d save that revelation for later. “And I saw this . . . thing. It had . . . it sounds too stupid, if I describe it, but it was alive; it had a face.”

“I don’t guess you mean you found a rat in the crawl space.” Lindsay sounded serious, at least, but not in a humor-the-lunatic way.

“No. I didn’t even find a crawl space, unless it’s the crawl space for the whole world. The door opened on a place, Lindsay. A whole other place.”

A moment of silence, then, “Sounds like your comic.”

“Yeah. Art imitating life. Anyway, I slammed the door, and then I slammed a bunch of doors in my own head, repressed the shit out of the whole experience, buried it all so deep I’ve only just started remembering it this week. But it was coming out in bits and pieces all along—I had a breakdown, I had anxiety attacks when I tried to open doors. You remember. That was right after I saw the thing beyond the door.”

“So what made you start remembering?”

Marzi wanted to ask Lindsay if she believed her, but that was too dangerous, and not really necessary. Because Marzi intended to show her the door, and Lindsay would either see what was behind it—the lands beyond the lands, as the Outlaw called it—or not. If the former, she’d believe, and if the latter, well, no problem. Marzi would call her old therapist, tell her she’d had a . . . what would she call it? A relapse with escalations.

“I started seeing shit. Hallucinations, I figured, stuff from my comic, pretty much, but walking around in full color, big as life. And I had this dream, or vision, where I saw Santa Cruz destroyed, and I heard this raspy old-lady voice saying a bunch of crap I didn’t really understand. Remember Beej talking about the god of the earthquake? And Jane going on about the goddess? And . . .” She trailed off.

“Alice,” Lindsay said. “She talked about a phoenix, a god of fire, rising from the ashes of Genius Loci. Shit, Marzi. This thing you’re talking about, it’s what made Alice go?”

Marzi nodded. “I think so. Yeah. So if I’m crazy, I guess it’s contagious.”

“I guess,” Lindsay said, clearly troubled. “I’m not one to laugh at stuff I don’t understand—I was the only one who believed Seth when he said he’d been abducted by aliens, remember, back when we were freshmen? But this . . . I hate to say that line about how I believe
you
believe, but that’s the best I can do for now. Beej, and Jane, and Alice . . . It doesn’t seem like it could just be coincidence, but this is way beyond tarot or prophetic dreams, you know? This is the far side of far out.”

Marzi had scarcely dared to hope for even that much belief. “It’s worse now, because the thing behind the door got
out,
earlier this morning. I fucked up, and I didn’t watch the door, and now it’s loose. That’s what caused the earthquake, when it escaped.”

“Heavy,” Lindsay said, and shifted a little on the sidewalk. “I mean. Shit.”

“The thing came to my house. Stood in my living room. I saw it. It was a monster, like a cowboy made of wrecked earth. . . . I’m not making any sense. It was horrible, and it pretty much talked trash to me, tried to scare me into leaving town.” Marzi glanced at Lindsay, who was looking meditatively off into the middle distance. “I guess this qualifies as full-blown psychosis, huh?”

“Mmm,” Lindsay said. “The thing to do is to get independent verification, right? I don’t guess it told you anything we can check out?”

“It told me Jonathan was the one who set it free.”

Now Lindsay looked at her. “Say what? Your Jonathan?”

“Yeah. He wanted to see the Desert Room, so he pulled up his carpet and came through the trapdoor. He went into the Desert Room, he opened the door, and he let it out. But not before it locked Jonathan in, left him on the other side.”

“Um. So, have you tried knocking on Jonathan’s door? If he’s home, then everything’s okay. Apart from your possible mental health issues, that is.”

“Yeah, I knocked. Nobody’s home. So I figure the thing was telling the truth.” Marzi sighed. “Or else, you know, I went into a fugue and chopped Jonathan up, and I just don’t remember it.”

“You’d be all bloody if you’d done that,” Lindsay said.

“So maybe I smothered him.”

“Hardly seems like your style.”

“So,” Marzi said. “Hendrix will be here in half an hour. Before that happens, I want to go through the door, find Jonathan, and bring him back. But I need your help.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to be my doorman. You make sure I don’t get trapped on the other side, like Jonathan was. I’d just leave the door standing open, but I think there’s other not-so-nice stuff living there, things we don’t want wandering around town. The thing told me I could open the door from the inside, because I’m the prison guard, so it’s my door. But I don’t quite trust that, you know? So I’d like you to watch my back. Will you come?”

“Of course I’ll come. But just for the sake of argument, let’s say the door opens up on bricks or something. What then?”

“Then I call Dr. Mitchell, and you give me a ride to wherever she tells me to go.”

Lindsay nodded. “So long as we’ve got a contingency plan. And that’s better than chopping me up to hide your shame.”

“I’ll always share my shame with you. You’re taking this awfully well, you know.”

Lindsay shrugged. “I feel like I’ve been called up from reserve best-friend status to active duty. Helping you dye your hair or something is easy.
This
is what friends are for.”

Marzi stood up. “Thanks, Lindsay. I mean it.” She shook her head. “Most people . . .”

“Most people suck. Come on.” She stood, too, and they went up the steps. “I can’t decide if I want you to be crazy or not. I don’t know which would be better.”

“That’s easy. If I’m crazy, it’s just me who’s in trouble. If I’m not . . . we’re all seriously fucked.”

“Yes, but if you’re not crazy, that means it’s
real,
that there’s magic in the world. It would be worth a lot to know that for sure, even if no one else believed it, even if bad things came along with the magic. It can’t
all
be bad magic, can it?”

“I don’t know,” Marzi said. “The good stuff isn’t making itself obvious.”

Marzi unlocked the door, stepping inside to quickly punch in the alarm code. Once Lindsay was safely inside with her, she shut and locked the door, and carefully rearmed the alarm.

“Looks like this place got quaked,” Lindsay said.

Marzi turned and surveyed the damage. All the bottles of Torani syrup had tumbled from the shelf to the floor, a bunch of chairs had fallen over, and there was a crack in the glass on the dessert case.

“It could be worse, I guess,” Marzi said. “This being the epicenter and all.”

“Hmm,” Lindsay said.

Marzi went around the counter, stepping carefully over the drying puddles of hazelnut, raspberry, and Irish Cream syrup. “Hendrix can clean it up. I’m not even supposed to be out of bed yet.”

Lindsay followed her into the kitchen. The door to the Desert Room was standing ajar, but not enough to allow a view into the room.

Marzi took a deep breath and pushed the door open. It swung inward, silently as ever, letting a little ambient light spill onto the trash and dust on the floor. “Moment of truth.”

“I’ll go first,” Lindsay said, and bustled past her, into the room, glancing around and flicking on the light switch. She whistled, low and appreciative.

Marzi stepped into the room, and gasped.

The mural had changed drastically. It was no longer a desert scene, but something from a ghost town, with faded storefronts, tumbleweeds, hitching posts, rain barrels, and water troughs.

“Did you paint this, Marzi?” Lindsay asked. “Paint over whatever used to be here before, or . . .”

“No,” Marzi said. “I . . . it’s not even my style. I don’t paint like this. It’s like something by Garamond Ray.”

“Somebody could copy that style.” She glanced at Marzi, then quickly looked away. “Somebody must have. This isn’t what you described, what Jonathan said the books described. No scorpions or cacti or rocks or anything.”

“It’s weird, but honestly, Lindsay, it doesn’t register all that strongly on my weird-shit scale. I’ve seen stranger today. See the door? With the brass knob?”

“What door?”

Marzi pointed. Lindsay stepped forward, put her hand on the wall, on the door, and whistled again. “It looks like part of the painting. I didn’t even know it was real.”

“I’ve had that feeling a lot, lately.”

Lindsay took a deep breath. “So what’s behind Door Number Only?”

“Either a place that doesn’t quite touch the world, or nothing at all, or . . .” She shrugged.

Lindsay touched the knob. “Shall I?”

“I don’t—Maybe I should—Shit. Sure. Open it.”

Lindsay turned the knob and pulled the door open. Marzi stood behind her, and when the harsh light from the lands beyond the lands poured in, it turned Lindsay into a shadow, just a black silhouette standing in a door frame. This
was
the door from her comic, then, essentially, opening onto the West beyond the West. Lindsay looked exactly like page three of the first issue of
The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl,
and Marzi realized with a pang of wonder that she’d put a lot of Lindsay into that character, that in a way the character was a love story about her best friend. Perhaps not the kind of love Lindsay would want from Marzi, if the world were a place of perfect congruency, but something deep and true all the same.

Lindsay stepped back, and stumbled into Marzi, but didn’t fall. Marzi blinked against the light until her eyes adjusted, and she could see what lay beyond.

Lindsay reached behind her, fumbled for Marzi’s hand, and gripped it hard. “I see . . . a dusty street, and wooden buildings.” Her voice was tight and too high. “Is that what you see?”

“Yes,” Marzi said, and it was like an ice floe had broken loose from her heart and drifted away. She wasn’t crazy. Lindsay could see it, too. “The first time I saw this, Lindsay, my mind just shut down. I dreamed about it, I
drew
about it, but I didn’t remember it. And I didn’t even see this, not really. The buildings . . . they’re bigger now, more substantial. It was mostly just a desert before. Then the thing came at me, and its face filled my vision.”