The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl

by Tim Pratt

  “And I guess Harlequin is a kind of god,” Lindsay said.

  Ray nodded. “Chaos personified.” He frowned and seesawed his hand in a gesture of equivocation. “Well, that’s oversimplifying, but you get the idea. Harlequin was my first attempt to paint our adversary, and I didn’t even realize it. But Harlequin is a joker, and the Outlaw doesn’t have a sense of humor. Not inherently, anyway,” he said, glancing at Marzi. “And neither djinns nor gunmen are known for their sense of whimsy. I’m glad I didn’t go on thinking of our adversary as Harlequin.” He shuddered. “God, can you imagine? Harlequin, striding around on stilts made of bone, burning down the world, dragging around entrails like strings of sausage—”

  Marzi gasped as the room around them changed, the walls turning from wood to brightly colored, tattered canvas, Ray briefly made up in the dead-white greasepaint of Pierrot, Lindsay in a red dress with lipstick to match, transformed into Columbine. Then Ray slapped Marzi across the face, hard, and everything snapped back to normal. Marzi stared at him, her mouth open. Lindsay whimpered.

  “Sorry,” Ray said. “I shouldn’t have been so . . . vivid . . . in my description. I have a lot of practice at keeping my imagination under control—that’s important, in this place—but you’re in charge of things now, you’re the one who defines the point of view, and really, as bad as it may be to think of our enemy as a gunslinger, it would be infinitely worse if he were Harlequin. You can’t start thinking of him that way. Harlequins are . . . unpredictable.” He shook his head. “Keep your imagination under control.”

  “I understand,” Marzi said, almost whispering. “It was me. I made him into the Outlaw. He didn’t influence me; I influenced him.”

  “You define his shape,” Ray said. “And this place is fluid—it’s the medicine lands, it’s all potential, it’s all clay. You can shape things here so easily. You saw the face of total desolation, of a local spirit that was probably born when Santa Cruz was just water and rock and nothing, and it wants the world to be that way again. But you couldn’t understand that, not really—I’m not sure anyone can look into the face of a wasteland and see its true features. You know that quote, about how if you stare too long into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you? I think what stares back is your reflection. Faced with all that emptiness, you try to fill it up with yourself. So when you saw that thing, you did what people always do: You made up a story, you personified. People see faces in the patterns of linoleum, they see rocking chairs and hunters in the patterns of the stars, they see the Virgin Mary in a knot on a tree trunk. People make patterns. They see gods in natural processes. I don’t know if seeing makes it so, or if the potentialities would express themselves somehow anyway. . . .” He shrugged.

  “Wow,” Lindsay said after a moment.

  “You painted,” Marzi said. “You . . . sensed the presence of our enemy. Was it here all along?”

  “Someone else trapped it, a long time ago,” Ray said. “Maybe they imagined it as a creature of the night, and daylight banished it. Maybe they imagined it as a mountain lion, and painted its picture on a rock, and buried the rock. I don’t know, but someone trapped it here. Then I came along, and accidentally stirred it up. I sensed it. I painted. The Teatime Room, the Ocean Room, the Space Room, I painted those things because I understood there were depths beneath the world, utter freezing vacuums, but inhabited. I painted the room with the castles in the clouds because I had a sense of shifting, inconstant places—maybe of this place—of strange territories inhabited by giants. Then . . . I found the door. I think I thought there had to be a door. Too much Narnia, maybe. The door appeared in the last room, the one I was painting to look like a desert. One day I opened the door. Shit, wouldn’t you?”

  “I did,” Marzi said.

  Ray nodded. “Yeah.” He poured himself a drink, looked at it for a moment, but didn’t drink it. “So I opened the door, and the thing came out. A beast of smoke and fire. A devil in the desert. A djinn. Because that’s how I really imagined it, deep down, like a monster from the Arabian nights.”

  “It got loose . . . and it caused Loma Prieta,” Marzi said.

  Ray looked blank.

  “The big quake,” she said.

  Ray nodded. “Yeah, it did that, after a couple of weeks and a lot of mischief. Everybody else moved out of the house, weeks before I opened the door—they just weren’t comfortable there, said they heard a horrible buzzing all the time. So nobody knew about it but me. The djinn had to work up to causing that earthquake. Being locked up had weakened it. Life’s too easy here, strangely enough—it can cause storms and quakes here with a thought. The real world is a lot more solid. It resists. But, yeah, it worked out, it got strong, and it made a big quake.”

  “But the epicenter wasn’t even in Santa Cruz! It was, like, ninety miles away!” Lindsay protested.

  Ray shrugged. “So it expanded its borders. This is just the place where it was trapped, a long time ago. I expect it could tear down the whole coast, given time.”

  “But you trapped it,” Marzi said. “So there’s hope. We can capture it again.”

  Ray shook his head. “It used to be a djinn, Marzi. It’s not all that hard to trap djinn. Solomon did it; he sealed them in clay pots. There are countless stories of genies in bottles. Once I understood what it was—or what I believed it to be—I was able to trap it. I read about djinn. I researched. I imagined. I finished painting the Desert Room. I painted a pot over the door, a picture of a huge clay pot, inscribed with seals of tempting and trapping, and I lured the djinn inside. It wanted to get rid of me, to be free of my perceptions, of the form I imposed on it, and once it got strong, it came to kill me. I lured it into the room, and opened the door, and it was sucked into the pot. The pot I’d imagined, you see? But before it was sucked in . . . it grabbed me, and dragged me with it. So here I am.”

  “I didn’t see a pot in the painting,” Marzi said.

  “I expect not. Things started changing as soon as you became the guardian. And no, I don’t know why you, or why me, except I’m an artist, and I assume you are, too. We’re imaginers. We can do it, and someone has to, so we get the job. You didn’t think of it as a djinn, didn’t perceive it that way. You saw it as an outlaw, a gunslinger, poisoning wells, kicking up dust.”

  “Aw, fuck,” Lindsay said. “I get it. You can trap a djinn in a bottle, but you can’t do that to an outlaw.”

  Marzi nodded, staring at the tabletop. “Jails don’t hold outlaws. Not in Westerns. The bad guys always escape, or get busted out by their henchmen. There always has to be a showdown. So we can’t trap it the way you did again.”

  “You begin to see the nature of the problem,” Ray said, and took the shot of whiskey, grimacing as it went down.

  Range Boss

  * * *

  “You know,” Denis said, “it hardly seems appropriate for you to be riding in a car. Where’s your . . . your godlike conveyance?”

  “He can ride in a car if he wants to,” Beej said from the passenger seat, glancing behind him into the backseat, which was improbably shadowy. “That’s what being a god is all about, really. Being able to make choices.”

  “You think I should be riding, what, a stagecoach with wheel spokes made of thighbones?” the godlet said from the backseat, voice a distinctly John Wayne–style drawl. “Or maybe a pale horse?” He laughed. “No, you want me riding in something all shiny metal and curving blades, right? Shit. I’d be happy to travel in greater style. But I can’t just snap my fingers and make that stuff appear. Maybe that’ll be your second project, making me a proper mount. But I doubt it. There won’t be anything recognizable as a street around here, soon. Once I get Janey woke up.”

  “I thought being able to create things was part of the basic god skill set,” Denis said, turning onto Bay Street and beginning the long, gradual ascent out of town and into the hills. He had the sense that he could push the godlet fairly far before being struck down. The monster needed him. And, more to
the point, Denis amused him. He could tell, and it pissed him off, and made him even more likely to snipe.

  Besides, they were going to get Jane, and that was scarier than the godlet’s ominous presence.

  “Nah,” the godlet said. “That’s a common misconception. Some gods are creators. Some are preservers. Some are destroyers. Me, I’m the last kind.” The god spat, which made Denis’s shoulder muscles bunch up—spitting! In his car! And what was he spitting? What did a thing of iron and homespun cloth spit with? “Which you’d best remember, next time you want to mouth off.”

  Denis sniffed. “I’m a creator, and you’re not. You need me.”

  “I hate creators,” the godlet said, and shifted in the strangely shadowed recesses of the backseat. “You’d better do everything you can to stay on my good side. Maybe then I’ll let you take off among the willows before I finish scouring this place down to bare rock.”

  Denis fell silent, and Beej breathed a sigh of relief. Denis glanced at him. Beej had definitely gone all the way strange. They’d been . . . friends, sort of, insofar as Denis could be friends with someone who had only a passing familiarity with personal grooming. At least Beej knew his art, and Denis had to respect that. But he’d turned into the doomsday equivalent of a Jehovah’s Witness, all smiles and crude attempts at conversion. He couldn’t imagine why anyone would choose not to worship the god of earthquakes, mudslides, and wildfires! It was all part of his native inferiority complex, Denis thought. Beej couldn’t find any real value within himself—there wasn’t much to find, after all—so he had to look to outside sources for validation. The godlet certainly had a presence, and his very existence unpleasantly jostled many of Denis’s most fundamental beliefs, but when you came right down to it, he was a thuggish prick with a cowboy fetish. What sort of god wore spurs? It simply wasn’t right.

  “Stop slowing down,” the godlet growled. “I realize this car’s a piece of shit, but you can go faster than this, even uphill.”

  “Sorry,” Denis muttered, pressing the accelerator. He’d dropped to about ten miles per hour without even realizing it. “My mind was wandering.”

  “Thinking about your sins, huh?” the godlet said.

  “I don’t believe in sin,” Denis snapped. “We don’t live in a moral universe. There’s no such thing as an objective ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ There’s no final judgment.”

  “I find that temporary judgment is pretty effective, though,” the godlet said. “Especially since ‘temporary’ can still last a damn long time.”

  “I hate it when you two fight,” Beej said miserably.

  Denis saw the turnoff coming up, but he didn’t slow down. He would drive right past. He would claim he didn’t remember where he’d left Jane. He would—

  A freezing hand touched his shoulder—it was like metal kept in a freezer, burning cold right through his shirt. “Turn left, hoss,” the godlet said, right in his ear.

  Denis spun the wheel, and bounced over the edge of the pavement. He slowed the car and stopped in sight of the half-collapsed mound of mud and Jane’s abandoned car.

  “Yee-haw,” the godlet said, without apparent irony, and the back door clicked open. The shadows in the backseat departed suddenly, and the interior of the car brightened enough to make Denis squint.

  “This is amazing,” Beej said. He looked at Denis and smiled, tentatively—Beej always looked like a dog that was hoping for a pat on the head but expecting a kick. “To be in the company of something so powerful, to be of service . . . we’re extraordinarily lucky.”

  Denis just stared at him, not blinking, not letting any expression at all touch his face, and Beej blushed, looked at his lap, mumbled something wholly unintelligible, and got out of the car.

  Denis stayed in his seat, his hands clutched on the wheel. It dawned on him, suddenly, that he could get away. The godlet couldn’t fly, couldn’t reach him; clearly he required mundane transportation. Denis could just put the car in reverse, back out onto the road, and drive away. He could escape. Hadn’t the godlet said something about another member of his posse, one who’d gotten away—gone down the owl-hoot trail? Escape was possible.

  But he would have to go far away, he knew. He’d have to give up everything: his studies, his life. He was not yet convinced that those things were irretrievably lost. Denis had great faith in the power of the status quo. The godlet could talk about scouring life from the West Coast, but Denis thought life, normality, was more resilient than that. The world was inertial; it resisted change. Look at all the stupid hippies who still lived in the hills around Santa Cruz, waiting for a revolution that had never come, that would never come. Things would probably work out in the end, wouldn’t they?

  Then there was the matter of Jane. She didn’t need to sleep, or eat, or piss, or anything. If Denis took off, the godlet would surely make good on his threat, and tell Jane what Denis had done. She would pursue him, and she would, inevitably, find him.

  Even if she didn’t pursue him, he would always wonder. He’d be looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life. Could he live with that much tension?

  No. He would snap.

  He didn’t drive away.

  When the godlet had its back turned, it was somehow easier to look upon. It didn’t overwhelm the senses quite so much. Wasn’t there something, in the Bible or somewhere, about how God had shown His backside to one of His prophets, because the sight of His full-frontal divinity would have proven too overwhelming? At any rate, now the godlet looked almost human, though extraordinarily tall, wearing jeans and a leather vest and a large, rather misshapen cowboy hat. The bit of uncovered—well, not flesh—substance between the hat and the collar shone dully, like tarnished chrome. The godlet might’ve been a special effect from a peculiarly genre-bending B-movie, a sci-fi Western, except for his incontrovertible reality. The godlet was as solid as the earth, more there than almost anything else Denis could see. He was as real as rocks and the sea, as inevitable as entropy and tooth decay. Denis shivered. Odd, that he should get a sense of the thing’s power now, while watching him from a distance. Perhaps, closer up, Denis was too overwhelmed, too engaged in the complex business of maintaining his sanity, to appreciate it.

  The godlet was walking around, looking at the mud from different angles, while Beej fluttered around. It was like that old cartoon, with the tiny yipping dog that bounced around the stately bulldog, trying for bigness by association. The godlet stopped walking, turned its head to look at Denis, the reflected flash of sunlight off its metal face briefly dazzling him, and then raised its arms like a conductor signaling a crescendo.

  The mud rose up. That, too, could have been a good effect in a bad movie—damp soil shifting, rising, taking on vaguely human proportions, first a sort of lumplike golem shape, gradually acquiring definition; fingers, eyes, something like dreadlocked hair. And then it was Jane, absolutely and recognizably Jane, a figure sculpted in mud. She looked around suspiciously, squinting, and then her eyes fell on the godlet.

  She collapsed to her knees and shouted “Goddess!” while raising her arms in what Denis considered a rather melodramatic gesture. He frowned. Goddess? Well, hadn’t the godlet said different people saw him differently?

  “But why are you dressed like a cowgirl?” Jane said cautiously.

  Within certain annoyingly immutable limits, Denis thought, and smiled, because really, it was funny, wasn’t it—a god of destruction, a Kali for the Western world, dressed up like a cowboy?

  For just a moment, the godlet flickered in Denis’s sight; he suddenly had shiny black skin, and four arms, each tipped with hands dripping blood, and he—she—it wore a necklace of skulls. Just like an Indian goddess of destruction.

  Except he still had on that misshapen hat, and though there were heads hanging from his belt, it was a gunbelt, complete with holsters. And Kali had never, in any depiction Denis had ever seen, worn leather boots and spurs.

  Then the godlet was just himself again, metal and co
wboy clothes. That had been . . . strange. Denis hoped such a perceptive shift didn’t happen again. He liked his supernatural intrusions into reality to be as consistent as possible.

  The godlet gestured for Jane to rise, and she did, and then they all came back to the car, and there it was, that fundamental absurdity again: the mud-revenant and the god of earthquakes riding around in a decade-old Honda Civic. Beej took the passenger seat again, and Jane and the godlet took the back. Jane was lost in the godlet’s shadows, but she reached out and caressed Denis’s cheek, leaving a faint streak of mud there. “Hey, baby,” she said. “I’m sorry I ran out on you, but I was so tired, and confused . . . I had to take a walk, to touch soil with my hands, and then I got hurt, and had to rest. But I’m not tired anymore. I feel strong.”

  “Good,” Denis said, and concentrated on driving back down the hill.

  “We’re going to change the world,” Jane said.

  “Yep,” Beej said, sounding happier than the proverbial pig in shit.

  The godlet giggled, and for a moment Denis heard a burst of jaunty calliope music and smelled, of all things, sausages cooking, but then it was gone, and there was just the sound of tires on pavement, and the smell of Jane’s mud and the godlet’s sage-and-gunsmoke.

  “Did anybody else hear—” Beej said.

  “Sorry,” the godlet said. “I just went all Harlequin there for a second. Nothing to worry about.”

  And though Denis had no idea what that meant, he didn’t ask.

  Snake Blood

  * * *

  “We’ve got to get back to Santa Cruz,” Marzi said. “We need . . .” She trailed off, looking at Jonathan’s prone body. “We need to get him to a hospital.”