The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl

by Tim Pratt

  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.

  It was like it hadn’t been her idea at all, but something planted in her mind. The conceit of the Western Door had almost certainly made Rangergirl a better comic, a better piece of art, than her original idea would have been. She’d undergone something deeply traumatic, which may have had repercussions of which she was still largely unaware, and that had affected her work positively. But how had it affected her otherwise? She suspected she was going to find out soon.

  Marzi looked at Lindsay with new appreciation. Lindsay was the only one of her friends who’d stayed by her, the only one who’d written to her while she was in the hospital, who’d brought her flowers afterward, who’d never pried into things Marzi didn’t want to reveal. She’d simply accepted her, been the same old wisecracking Lindsay, even though Marzi was scarcely recognizable as the person she’d been before.

  Marzi realized, with an almost physical rush, that Lindsay loved her—perhaps, even, was in love with her. She started crying, and her friends just held her hands. She’d seen horrible things these past few days, but there were good things, too, good people, to balance that. These were her guards, her protection, her deputies, her posse, her friends. They could face any showdown together. They could win any shootout. They could pick up the pieces after any disaster, and build something new. Marzi closed her eyes, and felt the emptiness inside her recede; felt the deserts in the greater chambers of her heart shift, and begin to blossom.

  Outside Man

  * * *

  Marzi woke, stretched, and heard Jonathan and Lindsay talking in the other room. Their presence, even at this remove, soothed her, and kept darker thoughts at bay. But eventually they would leave, and Marzi would be alone, and she would have no choice but to face the things she’d remembered, and the consequences she feared. Everything decayed. Everything turned to dust.

  Marzi sat up in bed, shaking her head sharply, as if to dispel cobwebs from her face. Why did she have this dark tide in her, this terrible undertow of loss and dismay?

  But she knew why. Because, two years ago, she’d glimpsed the face of total desolation. She didn’t know what it was, that thing with the wasteland face, not in any absolute, objective sense, but she knew it intended to grind the world down to nothing, to make the earth a molten waste, a heaving place in which no blade of grass could take root, on which no bird could land, in which no trust could be found. She’d opened a door, and almost let that force, that tornado with intentions, loose on the world. But she’d stood in its way. Somehow, her presence had been enough to keep it from passing through, and Marzi had shut the door in its face, and then locked the memory away in the deepest vaults of her mind. So why had she remembered now? Sometimes repression was a good thing, right? It let you get on with your life.

  Except it hadn’t, not really. Marzi had been in stasis, avoiding relationships, even keeping sweet Lindsay at arm’s length. The only thing that had involved her heart at all was her comic, and even that had been shot through with dark threads of alienation, influenced by her glimpse of the thing that lived behind the walls in the Desert Room. What was it? Where did it live, really, what meta-space did it inhabit? Marzi had heard of the medicine lands, the world-behind-the-world, that some Native Americans believed in, where the forces that secretly shaped the world lived. Had she glimpsed that place?

&nb
sp; Possibly. If so, she’d seen the thing that lived there, maybe the thing that was imprisoned there. Maybe—as much as she hated to think of it—the thing she was supposed to guard.

  Some guard I am, she thought. One look at the prisoner, and I have to check myself into a loony bin.

  She got out of bed, pulled on her thin summer robe, and went into the living room. “Morning, troops,” she said. Jonathan and Lindsay sat together on the couch, looking bleary and rumpled. “The shower’s free, if you want it.”

  “Mind if I go first?” Jonathan said. “I’ve still got sand in all sorts of unmentionable places.”

  “Don’t feel like you can’t mention them to me,” Lindsay said. “But, sure, go ahead.” She leaned her head back on the couch and closed her eyes, losing herself in her own thoughts, or else still in the waking-up process.

  “I’m going to make coffee,” Marzi said.

  “Coffee,” Lindsay said, without opening her eyes. “Coffee good.”

  Marzi went into the kitchen and started a pot of coffee, thinking. How much of what had happened in the past few days had to do with the thing she’d seen behind the door? The vision of the Outlaw in the Red Room, that bizarre dream of Santa Cruz in ruins, Jane and Beej both babbling about imprisoned gods, the tattooed Indian she’d seen disappear into the Teatime Room just before the earthquake . . . The god’s prison was weakening, and Marzi could no longer live in ignorance. She was needed to actively guard against the wasteland thing’s escape. The thing—Beej’s earthquake god, Jane’s goddess—was pressing against the door, whispering at the cracks, peering through the keyhole, influencing the world. It was trying to get someone to let it out, to fling the door wide. If it could do this much from behind the door—make Jane into mud-girl, hitch Beej’s inherent craziness to its own agenda—what could it do if set free?