The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl

by Tim Pratt

  “I don’t have a—oh.” A pause. “Here you go.” Lindsay passed over a short pry bar, and Marzi worked it into the crack beside the door. “Ray, you should get a torch,” she said.

  “Why not a flashlight?” Lindsay asked.

  “Torches are better to burn up the evil nasty pyramid gases, right?” Ray said.

  “Right,” Marzi said. “The torch is on the wall right behind you, Ray.”

  “You could be a boon to interior decorators everywhere,” Lindsay said.

  “Got it,” Ray said.

  “Matches in your front pocket,” Marzi said.

  Ray sniffed. “I can take care of that much myself,” he said. “I’ve got some control over this environment, too, you know. It may be your sandbox now, but I still have a shovel and a pail.”

  “Sorry,” Marzi said absently. The torch flared to life behind her. “Everybody hold your breath,” Marzi said, and leaned on the pry bar.

  The stone squealed, and then the door popped open. A cloud of thick air swirled out, and the torch flamed bright blue for a moment in the new atmosphere. Ray waved the torch around, burning up whatever gas had come from the tomb, and when the air was clear again, they all exhaled and took tentative breaths. The air stank a little of rotting meat, but it was breathable. “Ray, do you want to lead the way?” Marzi said. “Or else hand me the torch.”

  “I’ll go,” he said, and stepped through the door. Marzi and Lindsay followed, into a narrow corridor with a distinct downward slope. The roof almost brushed Marzi’s head.

  “Like an iceberg. Nine tenths of the place is below the surface.”

  “That sounds like a fair description of Jonathan,” Lindsay said. “Do you ever get the sense that he used to, like, steal cars or something? He’s cleaned up his act, but he’s still got this desperado vibe about him.”

  “I think it’d be safe to say he had a misspent youth, yes,” Marzi said.

  “Sorry to interrupt the fan club,” Ray said. “But what should I be looking out for? Trip wires, flaming boulders, giant knives, pits full of spikes?”

  “Yeah,” Marzi said. “That kind of thing.”

  “Ah. Good. Inclusive.” He coughed. “How about living crocodile statues?”

  “Seems unlikely,” Marzi said.

  “Well, there’s one fast approaching,” Ray said.

  Marzi looked past him, and there was something slinking up the corridor toward them. It was a walking statue, rough-hewn from red rock, and its proportions weren’t quite right, but it was clearly a crocodile, struggling gamely along on slightly misaligned legs. Its jaws, however, seemed in good working order, with teeth shining like crystal. “Fuck,” Marzi said. She concentrated, trying to create a pit in the floor before the crocodile, something for it to fall into harmlessly—and nothing happened. This was too deep, too securely inside Jonathan’s heart, for her to make casual changes like that. “Um, guys, I think a retreat is in order—”

  “No way,” Lindsay said. She strode past Marzi, headed straight for the crocodile. Marzi reached for her, but Lindsay batted her hand away and kept going. Marzi drew her gun. She didn’t want to kill this thing—whatever part of Jonathan it represented—but she wouldn’t let Lindsay die.

  The crocodile seemed baffled by this direct approach, however, and stopped walking as Lindsay approached. “Hey, you stupid boy!” she shouted, and the crocodile actually flinched. “It’s us. I know you’re in a coma or whatever, but it’s Lindsay and Marzi. We’re here to help you.”

  The crocodile opened its jaws and started forward again. Marzi wondered how many times people had told Jonathan they were trying to help him, right before they beat him up, or stole his money, or arrested him. She trained the gun on the crocodile, trying to justify it to herself—surely it was okay to kill this vicious, defensive part of Jonathan. It couldn’t be doing him any good, it was an artifact of his old hard life, right? But she knew it was his, and that by killing it, she would diminish him. But if that was the only way to save him . . .

  “Damn it,” Lindsay shouted. “We’ve got your hero here, too, Garamond fucking Ray!”

  “Hero?” Ray said, bewildered.

  “He’s a big fan,” Marzi said.

  The crocodile hesitated.

  “Tell him you’re here!” Lindsay hissed.

  “Um,” Ray said. “Yes, this is Garamond Ray. Care to, ah, let us pass?”

  The crocodile tilted its head, sidled sideways, and began to climb up the wall, like a gecko. It reached the ceiling and hung above them, upside-down, watching them with onyx eyes.

  “I guess we should go on,” Marzi said, and they walked warily under the crocodile, Marzi wondering what it would feel like to have several hundred pounds of animate, biting stone fall on her head. It was easy to imagine, and for the first time Marzi was grateful that she didn’t have much control over reality here.

  “Now when you say ‘hero,’ ” Ray began.

  “He’s writing a thesis about you,” Lindsay said.

  “You only get critical attention after you’re dead. Or presumed dead,” Ray said, but he sounded pleased.

  “I think this is the inner chamber,” Marzi said. There was a door at the end of the corridor—a very normal unfinished wooden door, like those inside any old house.

  “That was easy,” Ray said.

  “I think once we got past the crocodile, everything else decided to leave us alone.” Marzi turned and smiled at Lindsay. “That was brave, Linds.”

  “Yeah, well. I just wish hearing it was us had been enough to get rid of the crocodile.”

  “Don’t be too hard on Jonathan. He’s in a bad way.” Marzi turned the doorknob—it was cheap, plastic painted gold—and pushed open the door into a fairly small room, dominated by a golden sarcophagus resting on a platform. A crystal chandelier hung overhead, filled with lit candles, making their torch unnecessary. The other details were more ordinary: filing cabinets on the walls, bookshelves, a desk, a few chairs, a liquor cabinet. Lindsay went to the shelves, touching the books. “These are made of stone! They’re not real books!”

  “They’re replicas, I guess,” Marzi said. “To serve him in the afterlife.” She shivered. “But I think they should be real books. The Outlaw filled Jonathan up with death. He’s petrifying at the core.”

  “What’s in the filing cabinets?” Ray asked, touching the handle on one of the drawers.

  “At a guess? Everything. Everything Jonathan knows, everything he’s done, everything he is.”

  Ray took his hand away from the handle. “This is heavy shit you’ve gotten us into, Marzi. We are not meant to be here.”

  “I know. But I bet the contents of those filing cabinets are turning to stone, too. We’ve got to wake Jonathan up.”

  “And how do we do that?” Ray asked.

  Marzi shrugged. “Trial and error. And hope we don’t err too much on the side of error.” She looked at the sarcophagus. It was intricately carved, but not with the image of Jonathan—the bas-relief on the lid was actually that of a mummy, wrapped in cerements, robbed of identity.

  Lindsay was still investigating the room, and when she got to the liquor cabinet she said, “Ew. Guys, come see this.” Marzi went to her, and Lindsay pointed out the stone jars behind the row of liquor bottles. The lids of the jars were animal heads, familiar to Marzi from Ray’s painting of the Teatime Room—there was an eagle’s head, a jackal, an ibis. “I guess . . . his internal organs are in there?” Lindsay said.

  “Ha,” Ray said. “That’d be a trick, since we’re inside Jonathan’s internal organs.”

  “They’re his internal something,” Marzi said. “Things he doesn’t need anymore, I guess, but that he’s still holding on to.” She looked around the small room, knowing it was filled with symbolic keys to Jonathan’s mind, knowing she had an unprecedented opportunity to learn his deepest secrets, to uncover the answers to every mystery she might ever face in their relationship.

  Also knowing that to take adva
ntage of that opportunity would be nothing short of rape.

  Marzi went to the sarcophagus and said, “Let’s get this thing open, shall we?”

  She slipped the pry bar under the lid and heaved. The lid moved a fraction. “Little help?”

  Ray came over and added his considerable weight to the bar, and the lid groaned and rose a few inches. Lindsay shoved the lid, and though she didn’t have much weight to put behind it, the push was enough. The lid slid off and hit the floor, ringing like a gong, a deafening sound in the small space.

  The sarcophagus was filled to the brim with clean desert sand. Without hesitation—hesitation would have made her too afraid—Marzi began scooping out the sand with her bare hands. Ray swore, and joined in, and Lindsay started digging, too.

  “I feel something!” Marzi cried, and started clearing sand away from the place where she expected Jonathan’s face to be.

  Instead she found his bare feet—but they weren’t wrapped in sere cloth, and they weren’t withered and dry. She rushed around to the foot end of the sarcophagus and started digging sand away from that end.

  Marzi uncovered Jonathan’s face. His eyes were closed, his face dirty, his lips slightly parted, sand between them. She wanted to cry, seeing him like this, buried—she hoped—alive.

  “We’re doing this ass-backward,” Ray complained, and reached into the sarcophagus. He lifted Jonathan out, sand streaming away from his limp, nude body, and set him down on the floor.

  “Now what?” Ray said, and then Jonathan started to cough, a horrible, sand-choked sound, like a dying engine. Marzi knelt and turned him over, and sand poured out of his mouth in a disconcertingly long, steady stream.

  “We need water!” Lindsay said.

  “We’d better get back to the fucking Oasis, then,” Ray snapped.

  Jonathan was moving on his own now, and he crouched on hands and knees, coughing, spitting up sand, until he collapsed, facedown.

  “Oh, Jonathan,” Marzi said, brushing the sand from his hair. “Please be okay.”

  Then the pyramid collapsed. Not onto them, but outward, in a soundless slow-motion explosion. As the bricks fell, they faded, most disappearing before they hit the ground, and sunlight poured in on Marzi, Ray, Lindsay, and Jonathan. The crypts and pyramids around them faded, disappearing, replaced by trees and vines and bushes that sprang up everywhere around them. The stone under them became grassy earth, and the platform and sarcophagus faded away. The bookshelves and filing cabinets remained, but now all the objects were real again, not afterlife replicas carved in stone. Marzi noted that the new landscape wasn’t totally lush—there were a few dead trees, and one that looked lightning-struck, and a few burned stumps—but she suspected those were ordinary traumas, wounds that the garden of Jonathan’s heart had sustained in the course of his life. Still not good, but they weren’t the work of the Outlaw. Jonathan turned over on the grass and blinked up at them. “What—” he said, but Marzi interrupted him.

  “Join hands!” she said, grabbing Ray and Lindsay’s hands. Lindsay reached for Jonathan, and Marzi said, “No, not him, just us!” She didn’t want to think of what would happen if they tried to take Jonathan out of his own heart. The three linked hands, and Ray and Lindsay closed their eyes without being told. Marzi closed hers, too, and concentrated on getting out.

  It was like being fired from a cannon. Ray was right; they weren’t supposed to be there. Getting in had been difficult, but there was no resistance getting out.

  They opened their eyes, back in The Oasis, and Jonathan sat up from the floor, holding his head in his hands. “What happened?” he said, looking at Marzi and Lindsay with bewilderment, and a little fear—but he was all there; that was Jonathan looking back at them, back with them, alive.

  “We can do introductions,” Marzi said, “and catch Jonathan up on . . . well, everything. But then we should get back through the door. I don’t like to think of what the Outlaw is doing while the sheriff is away.”

  Made Wolf Meat

  * * *

  The dump truck looked hugely out of place on Ash Street, sticking out into the roadway even when parked right against the curb. Denis was embarrassed to be there, having followed the others in his car. He’d idly considered driving out of town, of course, but only as a sort of mental formality. He knew there was no such simple escape. At least Jane was hidden in the back of the dump truck, with the door, out of sight. Fortunately, there weren’t many people around; it was, Denis realized dully, still quite early—not even ten a.m. yet. A lot of things had happened in a very small amount of time today. There should have been people at Genius Loci, but it was still closed, a hastily hand-lettered sign taped up in the window reading “Closed due to earthquake damage.”

  Denis, Beej, and the godlet stood on the sidewalk, looking at the café. “Aw, that ain’t fair,” the godlet drawled, standing on the deck with his thumbs hooked into his belt. “I wanted to kill the morning rush. And I hardly busted up anything when I got loose this morning, just a few bottles. Marzi spoils all my fun.”

  “So how do we get in?” Denis asked. “There are alarms, I think.”

  “Not if I don’t want there to be alarms,” the godlet said. “I’ll just open the door. Not that I’d mind if the cops came—I do like killing lawmen—but at this point it would just be a distraction.” The godlet strode toward the doors, took the doorknob in his hand, and twisted. He grunted, twisted harder, shook the knob, then stepped back.

  “Huh. It seems I no longer enjoy the freedom of movement I once possessed. Not here, at least. The door won’t open for me.” A low, harsh noise emerged from his throat, like gears grinding.

  “What happened?” Beej asked.

  Denis knew what had happened, and it was all he could do not to laugh. “Cowboys can’t magically open locked doors,” he said. “Marzi must be getting better at imagining you.”

  “Yeah, well, her imagination’s gonna be the death of her,” the godlet said.

  “If she did die, what would happen to you, I wonder?” Denis said.

  “When she dies, I’ll be free,” the godlet said. “Once Marzi’s dead, I can quit the costume party, and change back to what I was in the old days. But in the meantime . . . Jane! Come here, darlin’!”

  Jane climbed out of the back of the truck and jumped lightly to the sidewalk, then came up the steps, smiling, eager to be of assistance.

  The godlet thumped the door. “Can you get us in here with no fuss, Janey?”

  Jane nodded. “Everyone step back, please. I need room. I’ve been wanting to try this.”

  They all dutifully retreated down the steps, Denis feeling freakshow-conspicuous. Maybe everyone saw the godlet differently, but it seemed unlikely that any of his forms were nondescript, and Beej was practically radiating madness. He hadn’t been so bad when the godlet was away, while they were working on the door, but in the presence of the god, Beej took on a glassy-eyed fervor. And Jane . . . there were seven-car accidents that were less conspicuous than Jane.

  Denis counted through multiples of nine, and hoped the process would speed up, that they’d get inside, out of view. He hunched his shoulders and tried to think invisible thoughts.

  Jane began to melt. Her shoulders and arms ran like ice cream in the sun, and her face lost all shape. Her body sank to the deck, becoming a puddle of mud on the boards. Denis stared—there had been hints of this mutability before, but it was still astonishing to see how fully Jane had thrown off the tyranny of shape.

  Denis never would have left her to die if he’d known she would subsequently become something like this.

  Jane flowed through the crack under the door, oozing slowly but inexorably, and Denis was surprised that she didn’t leave any mud on the deck when she departed, carrying every particle of her mud-body with her. He approved of her cleanliness.

  Jane re-formed on the far side of the door. “It doesn’t look like the alarm’s on,” she said.

  “That was sloppy of Marzi,” t
he godlet said.

  “Maybe she just doesn’t care if you come back,” Denis said. “Maybe it’ll be easier for her to trap you again, if you’re so close to your old prison.”

  “I can’t be caught that way again,” the godlet said. “You can’t keep an outlaw in a jail cell, not in the kinds of stories Marzi favors. The bad guys always escape, or get busted out. The only way you can stop a real outlaw is in a mess of blood and bullets, or else swingin’ at the end of a rope. Neither of those seems a likely end for me.”

  Jane opened the doors wide, and propped them open with doorstops.

  “Go and fetch the door,” the godlet said, and Jane trotted obediently away, to the rear of the dump truck. She clambered up the side with cockroachlike ease, disappeared from view, then climbed back out. She’d grown an extra pair of arms to carry the door over her head, making her look like a Hindu idol sculpted from mud. Denis wondered if the resemblance was deliberate on her part.

  She brought the door up the steps, carried it into the café’s front room, and set it down by the counter. Denis realized that Jane hadn’t once commented on the door as an objet d’art. Normally, he and Jane would have enjoyed a spirited debate over its merits. She was, indeed, utterly changed, and not for the better. Jane closed the doors again, keeping her extra arms.

  “What the fuck’s going on?” Hendrix came from the Ocean Room, carrying an empty plastic trash can, his face red, his dreadlocks swaying. “Beej, Denis, Crazy Girl, you’re banned for life! And who the hell’s—” Hendrix squinted and frowned. “Is that Ozzy Osbourne?” he said, bewildered. “Why’s he dressed like John Wayne?”

  The godlet drew one of his guns and handed it to Beej, who took it automatically.

  “No,” Denis said. “This isn’t necessary, it’s just Hendrix, he—”