by T. A. Pratt
BRIDE OF DEATH
A MARLA MASON NOVEL
by T.A. Pratt
DEAR ME
Dear me,
Marla Mason here, fresh from the grave. It’s late in Vegas and I can’t sleep, maybe because as far as I can tell I’ve been unconscious for the past month, even though I know part of me was awake and doing the business of the universe. I might as well have been in a fugue state, sleepwalking, in a walking blackout, for all the impression thirty days in the underworld made on me. I don’t like losing time. It feels too much like losing part of myself. Maybe because it is.
I’ve never kept a diary before, not even as a teenage girl, but I’ve got my reasons for starting now. The thing is, I can’t entirely trust my memory. In a handful of weeks I’ll return to the other half of my life, and when I come back to this mortal coil next time, what if I’m all blank-slated again? This notebook could be the only reliable record I have. Which means I should try to keep it reliable. I’ll do my best, but you’re me, Future Marla, so I shouldn’t have to tell you: trust no one. Maybe not even yourself.
Don’t expect a bunch of mushy dithering introspective stuff here – spending too much time wringing my hands with indecision gets in the way of wringing necks. I’ll have to write down some conversations (unless I can avoid having any), and I’ll try to keep those pretty much accurate, except I doubt I’ll have the patience to write down the bullshit and pleasantries. I’ve got a pretty good memory for what people say, when I feel like listening. It’s handy for throwing words back in people’s faces.
What I’m trying to say, dear possibly-brain-addled me from the future, is, I’ll try to keep things as true as I can, without writing it all down so tediously that you get impatient and start to flip through the pages looking for sex and violence. (The violence will probably be along shortly, but as for the sex, don’t expect too much. I’m a married woman now, ha ha, oh, gods.)
Here goes. I woke up yesterday, buried alive.
It wasn’t much of a burial, very much a shallow-grave affair, and after a moment of thrashing panic I clawed my way out of a pit of dry sand and sat up. It was like being buried by kids at the beach, only with no ocean, no kids, no cooler full of sodas and sandwiches close at hand. I was in a dim room – except it was actually a cave – lit by a flickering fire. The air smelled like burned cinnamon and cloves. My friend Pelham sat cross-legged a few feet away from my grave, and when I sat up gasping and spitting and covered in dust he rose and brought me a porcelain pitcher of water and a cup and a rag. I washed out my mouth, spat, and wiped dirt off my face.
“What,” I said, “in the everlasting fuck is going on?”
Pelham tried to smile, but he could never hide his feelings from me, and I could tell he was anxious and unhappy. He’d started out as my employee – sort of an all-purpose personal assistant, valet, and occasional bodyguard – but we’d become closer since my fall from grace (and further fall into another sort of grace). He said, “Ah, perhaps it’s best if I let you explain that?”
He fumbled in his waistcoat – he was dressed like an English gentleman from the 1920s despite the heat, too hot even in what should have been the coolness of a cave – and brought out a ragged sheet of paper, much-folded and stained with troubling blots of brown stuff. One of his hands was bandaged, and blood had seeped through the gauze. “What happened to your hand? Did you have a tea-sandwich-cutting accident?”
“You don’t remem – no, of course you don’t. The ritual required a bit of blood, that’s all, nothing I couldn’t spare. Here’s the message you sent.”
I frowned, took the paper, and unfolded it in my lap.
Dear me, it began.
If you’re reading this, you’re alive again. Enjoy it while it lasts. You’re probably wondering why you can’t remember anything that happened in the past month. I’m sending Pelly this message to set your mind at ease about that, even though I know it probably won’t do any good. The Mister and I both agree, it’s best if you just don’t worry about it. You were in hell, and you were doing hell’s business, and that’s nothing that belongs inside a mortal mind. Letting you remember what happened this past month, when you were a goddess, would probably pop vessels in your mere-mortal brain anyway – the experiences just wouldn’t fit in your head, any more than the ocean would fit in an eyedropper. Trust me on this. What happens in the underworld... well, you know how it goes.
yours,
Mrs. Death (But mostly I call him “Mr. Mason”)
Dear me indeed.
•
I was starving – being in the underworld for a month will do that to a person, apparently, and don’t ask me where my mortal body was while I was in goddess-form, because I have no idea how any of that stuff works. Maybe they propped my corpus up in a corner of Hell’s throne room, or kept it in a coffin, or maybe it was the core of my goddess-self, like the stone in a peach.
Luckily, it turned out I was wrong about the lack of a cooler and soda and sandwiches. Trust Pelham to provide the necessities. I sucked down sugary carbonation and gobbled up turkey and ham and cheese. Between mouthfuls I said, “Where are we?”
Pelham cleared his throat. “Death Valley, California.”
I snorted despite myself. “Death Valley. That’s cute. You have to admit, Mr. Mason can be cute. And making me crawl out of my grave, that’s also funny.” I paused. “Except I bet that was my idea. To make myself really appreciate the fact that I was coming back to life. That seems like the kind of crap I’d put someone through. What a bitch.” I sighed. “I don’t like thinking of myself as two different people, Pelham. Mortal-Marla and Goddess-Marla. It’s messed up.”
“There is certainly some mythic precedent for such duality, Mrs. Mason.”
“Oh, I believe it. There’s nothing so fucked up that some god or another won’t try it. What’s the shortest distance between me and a shower? Because I have dirt in places I shouldn’t mention in polite company.”
“I have an RV parked not far from the cave, but there’s the small matter of... the cultists.”
I swallowed my mouthful and gave him the side eye. “What cultists?”
“Your cultists.”
“Since when do I have cultists?” I said it the way I’d say “Since when do I have lice?” or “Since when do I have bedbugs?” or “Since when do I have liver flukes?”
“They began to gather when you first departed this mortal plane, and they have awaited your return.” The way Pelham twisted his hands around told me this was the source of his anxiety. “As for how they know about your ascension to goddess-hood –”
“Part-time,” I said automatically.
“– or how they knew where to find me... I have no idea. The cultists are tuned in to some particular psychic wavelength that lets them apprehend that portion of the supernatural spectrum that you occupy. They report visions, dreams, whispers in the night, all leading them to me, to this place. Some of them seem... damaged. Others seem perfectly ordinary. There is an affable dentist named Ambrose Mason – no relation, but they make much of the coincidence – who has taken on a sort of leadership role, and a personal chef, and a used car salesman who is keen to proselytize on your behalf, though I have restrained him. Such things are to be expected, I suppose, given the circumstances.”
“I don’t want cultists, Pelly.”
“And yet. Goddesses of death tend to attract them.”
Hell. Maybe I should back up.
THE CONTEXT PROBLEM
Yes. I’m a goddess of death. Except right now, I’m not. Technically. Or I am, but my goddess-hood is in remission.
One thing that’s harder than I’d expected, now that I’m writing things down, is trying to f
igure out how much context to provide. Obviously I know what I was doing in the underworld, I know how I became the – yech – Bride of Death, as those sexist idiots in the black robes and silver masks call me, so it’s not like I need to rehash all that stuff here, for Future Me.
Except what if next time I come out of the underworld I don’t remember the basics? What if my slate gets wiped cleaner and cleaner every time? The note I sent Pelly – assuming I really sent it – makes it sound like losing my memory of the afterlife is just a sort of cosmic non-disclosure-agreement, a “there are some things woman was not meant to know” type deal. But I know better than to trust anything anybody says – especially myself.
The last thing I remember, before waking up in the dirt: I was in a hotel room in Maui, and a door appeared on the wall. Death – my husband – opened it from the inside, and beckoned to me. I stepped into blackness... and that’s it.
What if the physical transition to the underworld and back again is causing me trauma? Brain lesions? Mini-strokes? Great spreading white patches in my gray matter? Most people don’t go to hell in the flesh, and it’s not like there’s a lot of precedent for commuters to the underworld, or part-time goddesses. (There’s Persephone, of course. I wish she was still around, assuming she was ever real. I’d love to pick her brain.) Who knows what this whole part-time godhood thing is doing to me?
So, just in case this memory loss becomes a bigger problem, have some context, future me.
There’s magic in the world (obviously, right). Most people are totally oblivious to that fact, but there are some people who can use that magic, occasionally for good, mostly for personal profit. Those people call themselves different things – adepts, witches, magi, whatever – but where I’m from we’re called sorcerers. (It’s a regional thing, like whether you call carbonated soft drinks “soda” or “pop.”) For a while I was the chief sorcerer – sort of a cross between a crime boss and a secret mayor and a superhero – of a city that shall remain nameless. No false modesty here: I was pretty hot shit. I made some major moves in my day. Saved my city from magical destruction a few times, and probably saved the world at least twice. One of those times the world was only in danger because of something I fucked up, but I still count it as a win. Everybody makes mistakes; I fix mine. Unfortunately, that didn’t stop the other sorcerers in my city from exiling me. They have a zero-tolerance policy for world-threatening screw-ups. I was pissed at the time, when they fired me and kicked me out of the city I love, but in retrospect, I see their point.
One of the biggest bits of magic I ever did involved a symbolic ritual marriage to the god of Death. It was necessary, to save my city, and for a while that “marriage” gave me certain powers beyond those of any mortal – even great sorcerers. The thing was... the marriage was a little less symbolic than I’d realized. And eventually my husband, who is literally the god of Death, started showing up, pestering me to join him in the underworld. Because it turns out being the Bride of Death isn’t like being the First Lady; it’s more like being the co-president. Mr. Death couldn’t do his job right, because he was only half a deity, and I’m his other (better, obviously) half. I don’t know why Death needs a formerly-human consort – it’s probably something to do with the cycle of life-death-rebirth, and fertility, and the land, and seasons, and crap like that. (I’m a city girl. Don’t talk to me about crop cycles.) There have been other death gods and other brides before us, because there are seasons even in the underworld, but apparently their terms of office are on the order of centuries and millennia, so I don’t expect to retire for a while. Don’t ask me what exactly a dualistic death god/dess does, either, because I’ve got no idea: see the previously-mentioned cosmic NDA. Apparently it’s important, though. I assume I don’t dress up in a latex Grim Reaper outfit and chase people with a spectral scythe, but who the fuck knows for sure?
For a while, I did a pretty good job keeping Death off my back, telling him I’d join him in the underworld eventually, we’d be together for centuries after all, so he could give me a few decades to live my life. Unfortunately, a time came when I got into the nastiest fight of my life, with a crazy chaos witch who was – I hate saying this – better than me, and I couldn’t see a way to stop her without killing myself in the process. So I did what was necessary, and I stopped her from wrecking the world, and I died.
Now that I think about it, that was probably the third time I saved the world. I’m not especially noble, but weighing my life against the continuing coherence of reality wasn’t such a tough choice, and I made the ultimate sacrifice, yadda yadda.
I would’ve asked my husband for help – being married to a fundamental force of the universe should have some perks – except for two things: I have issues when it comes to asking for help at the best of times, and I knew he’d refuse to intervene to save my life, since me being alive was a huge inconvenience for him.
After I died, my husband was there beyond the veil to greet me. He was so happy I was dead, which is not a great quality in a spouse.
I told him I wasn’t done with life. If the universe needed me, the universe could damn well wait. My lifespan is a drop in the bucket of eternity, so what’s the hurry? He didn’t see it the same way, but he knew spending a large chunk of forever with me when I was furious and scorned would make his underworld into entirely the wrong kind of hell.
In the end we negotiated, because marriage is all about compromise. We settled on the Persephone clause: I would spend six months of the year alive on Earth, and six months in the underworld, ruling by his side. But I’m a better negotiator than Persephone was, because my six months don’t have to be consecutive. We settled on doing a one-month-on, one-month-off rotation for the first year, with an option to alter the structure in the future. (I got some other useful benefits, too. He wouldn’t agree to let me have the powers of a death goddess in my mortal form – apparently human brains can’t be trusted with that kind of power – but I scratched a couple of smaller concessions out of him.)
So there. That’s why the cultists call me the Bride of Death. Even though I’m more like the co-regent. I’d beat that fact into their heads, but that would require acknowledging their existence. The problem is, when I’m cold and aloof and even mean to them, they like it. Death cultists are such masochists. I guess I should get back to talking about them.
THE CULT OF THE BRIDE OF DEATH
“Get rid of them,” I said.
Pelly shook his head. “I have tried. But they are religious fanatics, and you are the object of their fanaticism.”
I paced around the cave, glaring at the fire raging between us and the outside world. “What’s with the blazing flames? It’s not hot enough here for you?”
“The ritual required to wake you involves burning certain spices and herbs.”
“That explains why it smells like a bakery hit by an arsonist in here.” I sighed. “How many cultists are we talking about?”
“Around two dozen. So far.”
“Is there, like, a high priest, or –”
Pelham cleared his throat. “That would be me. They desired someone with a personal connection to you. The choices were me, or Rondeau, and –”
“Rondeau as a cult leader is a bad idea,” I agreed.
“We discussed it, and determined that he would find it difficult to resist sleeping with certain members of the congregation,” Pelham said. “He did not seem to view that as a drawback, but I did.”
Rondeau is a good friend from the old days, my longtime right-hand man, from back when I ran a city. He’s not a sorcerer, exactly, but he’s a psychic, and an oracle generator, and a lecherous hedonist with no impulse control, and pretty rich ever since he sold off some prime real estate he inherited. Wealthy and morally-flexible and telepathic... that’s a dangerous combination, but fortunately, he’s too lazy to use his powers for much in the way of evil. “Is he around?” I asked.
“At a hotel in Las Vegas. He’s watching the head.”
I looked at him blankly. “The what?”
Pelham frowned. “You really don’t remember anything? You didn’t send us a letter when you gave us instructions about the head – you sent an emissary to speak to Rondeau, an oracle in the form of a ghostly talking dog’s skull. No? Ah. I’d better let Rondeau explain it. We’ll head for Vegas after you’re cleaned up. But I’m afraid it might be best for you to address the cultists first – “
“There’s not a back way out of here?”
Pelham shrugged. “There are rumors of extensive caves beneath Death Valley, but I do not know details, and am not equipped for spelunking at the moment.”
I groaned. “I do not require cultists. I don’t even like having friends. What do they want from me?”
“To touch the hem of your garment. To ‘bask in your black aura,’ as they say. To receive your ‘dark blessing.”’
“Ew. That sounds like a euphemism for vampire handjobs or something.”
“Indeed. They are a group of devoted lunatics who will obey you unquestioningly... probably. The ‘lunatic’ part may at times overrule the ‘devoted’ part. I can’t say for sure. They spend most of their time chanting and burning things and giggling and cutting themselves.”
Wonderful. “What should I do with them?”
“Whatever you will, oh dark lady.” His lips quirked in a smile. I had to smile back. I remember back when I wasn’t even sure Pelham had a sense of humor. He’d come a long way. “Perhaps you can send them on a mission to plant trees or feed the hungry – though I shudder to think of what they’d feed them.”
“Fine, fine. I’ll come up with something. After running the city for all those years, it’ll be a nice change to have some obedient followers.” Something nagged at the back of my head. “I’m in a cave in Death Valley. Why do I remember something weird about caves in Death Valley?”
“Are you thinking of the giants?”
I snapped my fingers. “Yeah! Some doctor back in the nineteen-whatevers claimed he found some crazy burial chamber full of giant skeletons and weird artifacts, right? And then scientists supposedly covered up all the evidence, because that’s scientists for you, always covering up evidence.”
