The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl

by Tim Pratt

  Shit, that’s easy, she thought. It can turn this whole coast into a desert.

  Marzi had to consider the other possibility, of course, the alternative explanation to the things she’d seen, and the things she’d remembered: She might be crazy. It had all been very believable last night, with the memory of Jane breaking apart still fresh in her mind, but now the doubts were creeping in. She still remembered it all, but she doubted the truth of those memories. They were unbelievable, after all, though she found herself believing them anyway, and wasn’t that a sign of madness? She had to find a way to prove this to herself one way or another. The first step, she decided, would be to go back into the storage room—the Desert Room—and look at the door to the wasteland. Not open it, she wasn’t ready to risk that, but just look at it, touch it, confirm its empirical existence. But more than that, she needed to face her fear. She’d subconsciously avoided the room totally for two years, and she’d suffered a recurring phobia of opening any doors at all, because of what she’d glimpsed there. Fuck that. Marzi didn’t want to be a victim of her own inability to cope. She’d go in there, and have a look around. That’s what Rangergirl would do. And Marzi might not be Rangergirl, but she’d invented her, and that meant her better qualities had to exist in Marzi somewhere, if she dug deep enough, right?

  Marzi poured herself a cup of coffee, and another for Lindsay. This was going to be a long day.

  “Bagels are, like, God,” Lindsay said. They sat in the courtyard behind the Bagelry, where the fruit trees were blossoming, white flowers scenting the air and falling down like perfumed snow.

  “Interesting theological position,” Jonathan said, sipping what must have been his fourth or fifth cup of coffee for the day. He wasn’t even slightly jittery, and he wasn’t asking for decaf. Marzi was in awe. He propped his feet up on an empty chair, wiggling his toes.

  Lindsay held up the uneaten half of her bagel, smeared with raspberry cream cheese. “The major religions agree: God is round. Raspberry is divine. Ergo.”

  Marzi laughed. “So what’ve you kids got planned for the day?”

  “Work!” they chorused, then looked at each other and laughed. “I haven’t been to the studio in a couple of days,” Lindsay said. “My work in progress is probably, like, dormant. I need to talk to my adviser, too. I’m supposed to TA for this summer class.” She shrugged. “It’s beer money.”

  “I’ve really got to knuckle down on my thesis,” Jonathan said. “I’m only here for the summer, and while that seems like a long time now, it’s going to go fast.” He glanced at them—Lindsay in particular was suddenly looking blue—and said, “Hey, I’ll have time to hang out, don’t worry, it’s not like I have to work twenty-four-seven. I just want to get into the habit of working every day.”

  “What I love about him is his professionalism,” Lindsay said.

  “And here I thought you liked his ass,” Marzi said.

  “It’s a very professional ass, isn’t it?” Lindsay said, leaning back in her chair and eyeing Jonathan’s bottom.

  Jonathan waited patiently for them to finish, then said, “Could I ask you a favor, Marzi?”

  A cold coil of fear grew in Marzi’s stomach. She knew what he wanted, if not in particular, then in general. “Shoot.”

  “I understand I can’t go into the Desert Room, but I was wondering, could you take a few snapshots of the walls for me? If the floor’s unsafe, you could just stand in the doorway. I know I won’t see much, but anything would help, really. It’ll probably just be a footnote in the thesis, about how even the few remaining major works by Garamond Ray are being lost, but I’d like to have as much documentation as possible—otherwise, it’s just apocrypha.”

  Marzi was pleasantly surprised that she didn’t vomit, black out, or have an apocalyptic vision when he said the words “Desert Room,” but otherwise, there was nothing to be happy about. How could she refuse without calling attention to herself, without making Jonathan and Lindsay suspicious? It wasn’t like Jonathan was asking for much; it was a reasonable request.

  Why shouldn’t I do it? she thought. She’d planned to go to the Desert Room again anyway, to see how reality matched her memories. Granted, she’d planned to do it at some as yet unspecified future date, while doing it as a favor for Jonathan would likely be more immediate . . . but that was a good thing. Otherwise, she might put it off indefinitely. This way, she had some outside motivation. It was good to do the hard stuff right away, wasn’t it? Do the hardest thing first, and then everything else was easier.

  That was good advice . . . unless going into the Desert Room wasn’t the hardest thing she’d have to do, just the first thing.

  She smiled, wishing she were a better actor, hoping they would ascribe any strangeness in her expression to residual hangover. “Sure, I’ll do it. I don’t know how well the pictures will come out. The room’s moldy and full of junk, but I’ll do what I can.”

  Lindsay finished her bagel in a few quick bites. “What’re you doing today, Marzi?”

  “I want to finish a couple of strips for the paper,” she said.

  “You do a strip for a newspaper?” Jonathan asked.

  “Yeah. It’s called ‘Glass Eyes’—your basic alternative-newspaper-broody-shadows-no-punch-line type of thing.”

  “Only it’s good,” Lindsay said.

  “Dunno about that. But it keeps me in beer money. At the rate of about one beer per week, anyway. I’m working at the coffeehouse from five ’til close. I’ll see you guys around?”

  “I’ll come down and give you my camera around five,” Jonathan said. “Is that all right?”

  “Actually, I’ll get there a little early, around four, and take a few pictures then. Might as well get it over with, right?” She was in no great hurry to go into the Desert Room, but she wanted to do so during daylight, with lots of people in the café; otherwise, she might not have time to do it until after closing, when she was alone in the building, and there was no way she was going to do that.

  “Sure. I might even be able to get the photos developed tonight.”

  “I’ll try to stop by later, if I can,” Lindsay said. “No promises, though. I’ll get in touch tomorrow, if nothing else.”

  “All right. Back to the ink mines,” Marzi said.

  “To the pigment mines!” Lindsay said.

  “To the, ah, theory mines?” Jonathan said.

  “Academics,” Lindsay said, and rolled her eyes.

  Painted for War

  * * *

  Marzi lost herself in her work that morning, happily forgetting every danger real and imagined, emotional and visceral, in favor of scratching out sketches with her pen. “Glass Eyes” was in many ways her breadand-butter work, at least in terms of visibility—it appeared weekly in several free California papers, the indie press, and was archived on-line. Most people who knew her name knew her more for the quirky comic strip with its ever-shifting ensemble cast than for Rangergirl. It wasn’t a punch-line kind of comic; Marzi put the characters in odd situations, quite a few of them drawn from Lindsay’s picaresque and picturesque life, following one viewpoint character for a while, then switching to someone the character had interacted with, a process she called relay racing. The title came from the first strip, when a blind man with two glass eyes was accused of ogling a woman in a short skirt. The blind man appeared occasionally, usually lurking in the background, making cryptic pronouncements, or more often behaving in a completely prosaic fashion. After almost eighteen months of writing the strip, Marzi was gearing up for a series about the blind man, most of which would actually center on his pet peacock, Argus.

  It was totally, utterly unlike Rangergirl, which was admittedly her consuming passion, and working on “Glass Eyes” was a nice respite from the emotional effort writing her comic book entailed.

  Now, though, she found herself doing a series of strips about a Stranger coming to town, a sort of Waiting for Godot meets The Iliad, her usual cast of artists, busboys, bus
drivers, beachcombers, and surfers milling around in a city park at some vast picnic, making cryptic comments about “that guy” and “that bastard,” complaining about all the things that happened the last time the mysterious Stranger showed up. All the while, the clouds overhead gradually darkened, going from happy cottony fluffballs to menacing sacks of rain and lightning. By the time Marzi looked up from her sketch paper, her fingers twisted in a cramp, she’d filled half a dozen pages with rough sketches, every comic filled with uncomfortably hobnobbing characters relating dark anecdotes about the Stranger—the time he got a dance club shut down, how they changed the rules at the skating rink because of him, how he’d ruined a chartered fishing boat company in some complicated scheme involving nude scuba diving.

  Marzi blinked and groped for her glass of water. The comics were good, though a bit more brooding than her “Glass Eyes” work usually was. The strip tended to focus on misunderstandings, comedies of errors, mistakes in perception, so this was a different tone from the usual. They weren’t bad, and most of these sketches could be transformed into finished strips, but what was her subconscious getting at? Who was this stranger? Jonathan? No, that didn’t make sense, he wasn’t ominous. . . .

  She sighed. It was the Outlaw. The thing with the wasteland face, the lurker beyond the threshold, her nightmare come true. Now even “Glass Eyes” was infected by it. Oh, well. It wasn’t like she could keep something so monumental from appearing in her work. But what could she do about it? This thing was trapped, and it was somehow reaching through the door, affecting people, trying to make someone set it free. Marzi had, however inelegantly and accidentally, prevented that for now: Beej was in jail, and Denis and Jane were banned from the café. Had the thing reached out to anyone else? How could she be on the lookout all the time?

  Maybe she was ignoring the obvious. Why not just nail a few boards across the door, or take off the doorknob, or put a bunch of big padlocks on the thing? Hendrix would think she’d gone crazy if he caught her, but she could probably get away with it. He never went into the Desert Room, which was probably a good idea, as his weight might strain the creaky floorboards to the breaking point. The idea was something to consider. Even if she was crazy, and there was nothing behind the door but the back of some aluminum siding, locking the door would give her some peace of mind. Theoretically.

  It was 3:40 now, so she had to hurry to meet Jonathan. She went out, locked her apartment, and looked around for wild mud-people, faceless giants in gray dusters, or other assorted monsters. Seeing none, she set out for Genius Loci. The day was cooling off already. The café looked lovely, its sprawling decks inviting, its big windows lending it a feel of airy openness. How could this be the prison for an ancient evil? The café didn’t feel dangerous to her. It felt like home.

  Maybe that was part of its . . . what? Magic? That wasn’t a word Marzi was prepared to say out loud any time soon, not in connection with her own life, and it felt funny to even be thinking it. So say “power.” Maybe the café attracted Marzi because she was a guardian, for whatever random or preordained reason, and it made sense to make a guard want to spend time in the place that needed to be guarded.

  Or maybe she just liked big funky coffeehouses with murals and scrounged secondhand furniture. She liked to think it was an inner rather than an imposed affection for the place. That was the problem with accepting the supernatural: It brought up all kinds of unpleasant questions about fate and destiny and free will, things she’d rather not question too closely. Maybe she had to think about them, though. The monsters were coming up out of the basement. The doors were coming off their hinges. She had to deal.

  Jonathan sat on the deck, a half-full pint of beer in front of him, another pint sitting untouched across the table. “Bought you a beer. Payment in advance. Got time to sit down?”

  “Thanks, yeah.”

  “No problem. Drinking alone depresses me.”

  “Did you get much work done today?”

  “Eh. Some. I went back to the beach today, just to make sure . . . I don’t know. That Jane wasn’t still there, unconscious or something. We knocked her down pretty hard. Self-defense, I know, but it worried me. There was nothing there. Even the pile of sand had mostly blown away.”

  Marzi nodded. “I thought she would be up and around again soon. I just hope she’ll leave us alone, now.” She knew Jane wouldn’t, but she didn’t want to get into that at the moment. Or, preferably, ever.

  “That would be nice.”

  She glanced at her watch. “Do you have a camera for me?”

  “I do.” He reached into his bag and drew out a bulky silver-and-black contraption.

  “I figured you for the slim digital type.”

  “Wish I could afford one. This was a hand-me-down from my grandmother. She was kind of an amateur photographer.” He handed the camera over to her.

  Marzi took it, surprised at the weight—this was no little plastic-and-cardboard disposable number, which was more or less the only kind of camera Marzi had ever used. There were knobs, dials with numbers written around them, switches, silver doodads . . . “I think this is beyond me, Jonathan.”

  “I’ll set it up for you. Don’t worry; all you have to do is point, focus, shoot, advance the film . . .” He trailed off, smiling.

  “Consider me reassured.” She handed it back to him. “Show me how it works, and I’ll go take your snapshots.”

  “You’re sure I can’t come in with you . . . ?”

  “Hendrix would have kittens. I’m going to have to sneak past him as it is.”

  He sighed. “I had to ask. But I appreciate your help. I just wish I could see the room for myself.”

  Jonathan showed her how to work the camera, and though she had the feeling it could be a lot more complicated, she thought she’d be able to get the job done. She’d take a few pictures of moldy, cluttered walls, and that would be it . . . except it wouldn’t. She wasn’t going into the Desert Room to take pictures, not really—that was just the pretext, and the goad. This was . . . what? A scouting expedition. A bit of reconnaissance. She was getting the lay of the wasteland, or at least its anteroom.

  Or, maybe, she was going to prove herself seriously delusional. Which would, in many ways, be better than the alternative.

  “Okay,” she said, and finished her beer. “I’m going in. If I don’t come out by nightfall, send in a search party.”

  Jonathan nodded, unaware of how black that bit of lame humor really was.

  “I’m going to try to move some of the crap around and get clear photographs of the walls,” Marzi said. “So it might take me a while.” She wanted to see the murals in their entirety, if she could. It didn’t seem like simple coincidence that the doorway was in the Desert Room, after all, and there might be something for her to learn from the paintings. She remembered them pretty well—now that her memory had opened up again—but she hadn’t seen the parts of the walls obscured by stacked boxes and other junk.

  “You’re going above and beyond the call of friendship,” Jonathan said. “I owe you.”

  “Hey, you bought me a beer. That’s at least partial payment, and up front, too.” She stood up. “I start work at five o’clock. Give me a few minutes after that to get settled, then you can come bug me for your photos, okay?”

  “Sounds good. There’s a one-hour photo place over on Mission. I can probably get the pictures developed tonight.”

  “Great.” She waved and went inside.

  Hendrix was busing tables in the Teatime Room, his broad back turned to her, so Marzi just scooted around the counter, nodded to Tina, who sported a fresh piercing in her eyebrow, and went through the kitchen.

  Marzi took a deep breath and looked at the door to the Desert Room, painted an innocuous blue, the same as the kitchen walls. Garamond Ray had painted sunflowers in the kitchen, big jaunty blooms with strangely segmented stems, like crab legs, but there were no flowers painted on the door. Maybe he’d tried to paint flowers, and th
ey’d withered, wilted, and died from the heat baking through the door from the other side, all the searing nastiness radiating out from the Desert Room . . .

  Marzi shook her head. Damn. She was getting schizo-melodramatic, here. This was no big deal. This was just opening a door, and stepping inside. Anyone could do it. People did it every day.

  She knew that was a lie, that this was more than the ordinary crossing of a threshold, but she took comfort from the thought, from the everyday nature of the act. See, you turn the knob, there, it twists cool and easy in your hand. You push the door, and it swings open without even a squeak, though it hasn’t been opened in months at least, though no one’s ever oiled it, and this isn’t even the important door, this is just the door to the room that holds the door. Marzi thought of airlocks: This room was a buffer zone, the place where the wasteland and the world were kept apart, the demilitarized zone. No-man’s-land. The metaphors were obvious, and they were more than metaphors, actually—they were analogues. She groped for the light switch, there on the right side of the door, just where she remembered, her fingers touching the cool plastic before she could begin to really worry about strange hands closing over hers, or about scorpions and black widow spiders scuttling over her fingers. She flicked the switch, and it clicked on with a dry snap like a bone breaking cleanly. Dirty flyspecked light filled the room from a single unshaded bulb, but Marzi cast her eyes down instinctively, not ready yet to look at the walls, or at the door which she knew was straight ahead on the far wall. Instead she looked at the dusty floorboards, stepped inside, and closed the door behind her.

  When she looked up, the first thing she noticed was how small the room was. In her memory it was vast, but in reality it was just a small back room, nothing special. It smelled of mildew and dust, not of alkali or desert wind. The room was filled with junk: the remains of a tarnished brass espresso machine atop a battered gray metal cart, scrap boards leaning against the walls and littering the floor, like the remains of a barn scattered after a tornado. The walls on either side were mostly uncluttered, but she didn’t dare look at the murals yet.