Closing Doors: The Last Marla Mason Novel

by T. A. Pratt

  “Rondeau.”

  “I get it, I guess you did score pretty high on the assertiveness end of the personality spectrum, so how about... this one is a graduate student in economic policy for the developing world, that’s pretty, I don’t know, it’s community minded or whatever, could be good... ah, huh, he wants to know if you’d be into him doing just a shit ton of cocaine and then going down on you for six or eight hours straight. That’s pretty much his whole deal.”

  Marla stared at Rondeau for a moment, then turned back to Cole. “As you can see, you’re my only hope.”

  “I will do my best to find... suitable candidates, with auspicious auguries.” Cole rose, shook Rondeau’s hand, and gave Marla a small bow. “Your Majesty.”

  Marla snorted. “Cut it out with that stuff. You were court magician to a magical emperor.”

  “Yes, I was. That taught me a healthy respect for such offices, and occasionally—as now—for the people who hold them.”

  One of the book-lined walls swung open, and Marla and Rondeau stepped out into the bookshop, which was arranged neatly, if eccentrically, through a series of labyrinthine rooms, made more maze-like by freestanding shelves. The bookshelf door closed behind them, fusing with the wall, and external reality, seamlessly. Rondeau ran his finger along a shelf. “Lapland Noir,” he said, reading the hand-lettered shelf label. “Who knew there were so many ways to kill somebody and make it look like a reindeer did it?”

  Marla reached out for a book on another shelf, the title and the author name both catching her eye: A Brief History of Death by someone named “Spellman,” which was so on-the-nose it couldn’t possibly be an alias for a sorcerer. When her fingers touched the blue spine, though, the book’s cover turned black, and transformed from paper to something like greasy leather. That blot of dark transformation rippled and flowed across the other books around it, darkness radiating outward like a time-lapse video of a mold bloom spreading, until all the books in the Death & Dying section were transformed into grimoires.

  She moaned softly, pulled the first book down, and opened it up. The pages were soft vellum, and she flipped past a meticulous diagram of a toad pinned alive on a crucifix to a list of the names of dukes of hell from some earlier, more baroque regime in her realm. She tried to push against the books with her will, to turn them all back into whatever they’d been, but instead of reverting, they crumbled to grey ash and sifted down on the carpet, making dust clouds in the air.

  Rondeau stared at the ashes, and at her. “Uh. Are you okay?”

  She shook her head and hurried toward the door, with Rondeau close at her heels. “Pay Cole for that stuff, would you? And give him my apologies?”

  “The shelf, though,” he said.

  She glanced back. The old oak, mellow and smooth with age, had turned into some knot-infested greasy black wood. “Damn. Better burn it, or it might infect other books.” She gestured, and hellfire, at least, still obeyed her will: there was a blinding flash of white light, and then nothing, not even ash or smoke where the altered shelf had been.

  The clerk, a pretty young bibliomancer and apprentice to Cole named Noe, with pale dreadlocks and dark-rimmed glasses, stared at them, open-mouthed. Rondeau paused to talk to her, but Marla pushed on out the door, onto the sidewalk. There were the usual San Francisco crowds, a mass of slow-moving tourist pedestrians, but they parted around her without even seeming to notice they were doing so, giving her all the personal space she needed and then some. None of the mortals noticed her, because she didn’t want to be noticed right now.

  She ducked into the doorway of the defunct stationery shop next door and took deep breaths, even though breaths were strictly optional now that she was a divinity. The old all-purpose exclamation rose in her throat—”oh, gods”—but she didn’t let it out. She was one of the gods now. Arguably the most powerful of the gods to be found on Earth, even. She’d never been much for praying, and now she was the sort of creature people prayed to. Which meant she didn’t have much in the way of higher authority to appeal to for comfort or help.

  What the hell had happened with those books? She’d locked her magic down! She was in full incarnation mode, and a good eighty percent of her consciousness wasn’t even in her body in San Francisco, but back in the underworld—less than one whole god doing the work of two. She checked her magical seals, and they seemed intact. The light of her godhood was hidden under a suitable bushel. So what—

  Rondeau stepped out, looked around, saw her, and came over. “I paid for their lost stock. Fortunately it wasn’t in the rare book room or something, so it’s all pretty replaceable, but what was up with that? Spontaneous necrotizing book-i-otis?” He shook his head. “Poor Noe was pretty flipped out.”

  “I’m not sure,” Marla said. She’d had this silly idea that once she gave up her mortality and became fully divine she’d understand everything. It turned out, nope: when you became a god, you just traded up to a better class of incomprehension.

  A woman—not a tourist, but a local, and one on the far side of a long life of trauma, trouble, and self-medication—shuffled along, stopped, and swung her head around. Marla had always had an affinity for the damaged—for people who’d lost everything but managed to survive anyway, who suffered but carried on, transformed but alive. Marla had been a teenage runaway, and she’d always known she was just one bad break or fluke of brain chemistry away from being just like this woman: wearing everything she owned on her back, her mind cluttered with a mess of spiders and mirrors and monsters.

  The woman lifted one hand and pointed a long finger at Marla’s face. “Death,” she whispered. “Death,” she said. “Death!” she shouted. “Death!” she screamed.

  “Whoa.” Rondeau started to take a step forward, to put himself between the woman and Marla, then paused, raising his hands. “You okay there, hon? Here, I’ve got some cash, let’s get you a room.”

  The woman paid no mind, just kept yelling “Deathdeathdeathdeathdeath!”

  Now people started veering around the screaming woman, but as if her perception were contagious, other people began looking toward Marla, too. Most of them seemed to see nothing out of the ordinary, but a few went slack in the jaws and glassy in the eyes. One teenage boy covered his face and began weeping. A petite woman wearing an oversized UC Santa Cruz sweatshirt dropped to her hands and knees and started crawling toward Marla, muttering something that sounded like “I belong to you, I am meat for you.”

  “Uh, Marla, there’s some kind of supernatural paparazzi swarm thing going on here.” Rondeau looked at Marla, concerned, and she saw a strange nimbus of light around his body.

  Oh, shit. Rondeau was a powerful psychic, and though he was too lazy to develop his powers much, he was just naturally a magical catalyst. In his presence, magic worked better, ghosts could materialize... and divinities became more potent, apparently.

  More people pressed in, their minds overridden by a compulsion to approach the divine, or to fall down in awe—awe in the old sense, of being overwhelmed in the presence of something mighty and terrible. All the while, the first woman continued to shout “Death!” Spittle flecked the corners of her mouth, and Marla saw with horror that one of her pupils was vastly larger than the other. A blown pupil could have various causes, but Marla didn’t have much doubt that she was the cause this time. The woman was psychic, to some degree, and being in the presence of a god was giving her brain trauma.

  Then the screaming woman began to claw at her own face.

  Rondeau shouted and rushed to her, hoping to help, with no idea he was the thing making things worse.

  Marla flinched away, into a shadow deeper than shadow, and out of the mortal world entirely.

  The Limits of Divinity

  A few days later, as mortals reckon time, Marla sat on her throne and brooded. Her throne looked like an immense cancer-ridden lung today, all pink and red and black. She’d gained the power to shape the appearance of the underworld with her thoughts when she mar
ried the old god of Death, but now that she was the only deity in charge, the place seemed to burrow into her thoughts and mood, and to act as an extension of them. She was thinking about cancer, so: disgusting tumor chair. She was also thinking about the chaos witch Elsie Jarrow, now a bona fide trickster god, who’d once been described as “cancer with a mind,” because at the zenith of her powers (and the nadir of her control over those powers) she’d been such a potent force for disorder that people around her developed spontaneous tumors. Sometimes she’d spontaneously cured people’s cancers, too, to be fair.

  “Are you all right, Majesty?” Pelham sat at a little writing desk a few yards away, impeccably dressed as always, attentive to her needs and moods as no one else ever had been.

  Marla shook her head. “I made a mistake, going up there to see Cole personally. I’m not meant to walk among people anymore. There was this woman... she looked at me, she really saw me, as I truly am, and she dropped to her knees, clawing at her eyes....” Marla shuddered. “The human world is a rubber sheet, and I’m a steel ball resting on it, distorting the shape of everything I contact. I have magical gravity. I’m fire and the world is dry wood. I’m too much for everything. I bend reality, and chance, and minds. I don’t mean to, but magic just pours out of me, like exhaust from a tailpipe.” She sighed. “And hanging out with my oldest living friend only makes things worse.”

  Pelham put down his pen and gave her his full attention. “Rondeau, you mean?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t think about it, but he’s just like Bradley, who I also probably shouldn’t hang out with anymore in the world in person. They’re both magical catalysts. It’s how they summon oracles and conjure impossible things into being, but it turns out they have the same effect on the divine: I get amped up. I was using my best god-level spells of obfuscation to make myself blend in with the normals, and then Rondeau got close to me, and whoosh: I turned a bunch of books into grisly grimy grimoires, and then there was the whole madness of crowds thing. We were okay during the meeting with Cole, but his office is a bit of pinched-off space, with its own laws and wards and boundaries, and the combination of his wards and mine kept the whole—not to be all Dungeons-and-Dragons about this—wild magic problem under control.” She looked at her hands, flexing her fingers. “I just... what if I gave those people looking at me cancer? Or set off some other ticking time bombs in their biology?”

  “I can see you’re troubled. Perhaps we can create some wards to dampen Rondeau’s power?”

  Marla shrugged. “Maybe. And if I avoid his company, and Bradley’s, it won’t be as bad, but there could still be magical leakage and unintended effects—just more subtle ones. I’m a god now, and not one of the cuddly ones. I’m not meant to go among mortals anymore. Even with my best wards, people with extra perception would still sense my divinity, and some of them would pledge themselves to be my cultists, or totally break with reality in some less organized way. Besides, weird stuff happens around gods. Coincidences get more coincidental, and luck increases, both good and bad. That whole distortion of reality thing I mentioned. Rondeau’s company made it worse, but strange stuff would have happened anyway.” She sighed. “I’m glad you’re down here, Pelham, because I think I need to retire from walking around in the human world after I find a consort, and you’re good company.”

  Pelham frowned. “Other gods live among humans, don’t they? Reva, the god of the outcasts, wanders the Earth, and of course your, ah, acquaintance Elsie Jarrow, now that she’s a trickster god.”

  Marla nodded. “Reva wanders the world looking for trouble, sure, but he spends almost all his time inhabiting human bodies, in forms spontaneously generated to fit local norms. He’s only in his divine form when he travels, and he stays up in the sky and out of the way, mainly. As for Elsie... well, she’s a shit-stirrer, that’s her purpose, to afflict the comfortable and overturn the expected. For her, messing with the nature of reality in her local vicinity is a feature, not a bug. Besides, I’m a much bigger god than either of them. I’m the god of Death—and of rebirth, so sort of the god of life—for the entire planet. I’m not even just literal Death—I’m the god of huge changes, titanic shifts, metaphorical deaths and rebirths.” She scowled. “I blame the tarot for that part. I bet it wasn’t originally part of death’s job description. I’ve got so much more power and responsibility than I realized before I gave up my mortality and became fully divine. The point is, spending time on the surface of the world is dangerous for everyone I encounter. I’m a catalyst for change and transformation wherever I go—Rondeau and Bradley walking beside me just supercharges my natural tendencies.”

  Pelham tapped his pen—a gold fountain pen, naturally—against his chin. “But what of your late husband? He was sometimes known as the Walking Death, because he enjoyed trips to the world above. Why, you even took your honeymoon in the human world.”

  “Yeah. The difference was, he had a mortal consort. Me. My mortality, paired with his divinity, sort of... balanced the equation. My mortal core shielded the world from the effects of his divinity. But I’m a god alone in the world—an unbalanced equation. I’m like a lump of radioactive gold with no lead shielding. I need to find a mortal consort, and I thought going up to the world was the best way to do that, but now I don’t know. Maybe I should just send agents up there and bring prospective suitors here.”

  “I’m sure such things can be arranged. You can make this place quite beautiful if you’re in, ah, the right mood.” He didn’t look at the diseased-lung throne. Pointedly.

  Marla concentrated for a moment and the chair became a thing of ice and antlers and branches, a little too fantasy-novel-cover-art for her taste, but it was what always materialized when she thought “What’s a good chair for the queen of the dead?”

  “Or perhaps you could take a page from Reva and—” A chime rang, and Pelham grunted. He opened a drawer in the desk and drew out a long, dark green envelope. “How strange! Were you expecting a message, Majesty?”

  Marla frowned. The underworld was notoriously hard to reach, especially since she’d stopped extending any courtesies to necromancers, mostly because she found them unsavory and overly inclined to murder. “It’s a letter? What, from another god?” That seemed more plausible than some mortal sorcerer sending her a letter.

  “It is addressed to ‘Marla.’” He sniffed at the envelope. “I think this is made of seaweed, and the message is written in, hmm, is that squid ink?”

  “You can identify squid ink by smell?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not one hundred percent certain, but I think it’s from a cephalopod of some kind. Perhaps it’s a letter from a sea god?”

  “Let me see it.” Pelham rose and placed the envelope in her hands. The letter had a distinct odor of brine and kelp, and the purplish ink was hard to read against the green, partly because it was blotched and spotted with water. She opened it up, scanned the few lines, and then lifted her head, staring into the empty distance.

  “Well, fuck.” She tossed the envelope on the ground and rubbed at her temples.

  The letter read:

  Dear Marla how are you I hope you are good I am having some troubles and now is the time for calling in the favor you owe me so please get in touch at your soonest earliest because I will maybe be dead I think if you are not quick and I want to talk to you before I die not after

  It was signed “Zufi.”

  Pelham picked up the letter from the floor, glanced at Marla for a nod of permission, and read it. He murmured, “Oh, my.”

  Marla drummed her fingers on the icy arm of the throne, her fingernails growing to talon-length and making a satisfying clatter. “I’m too busy to do a favor for her right now, trying to find a consort and running the whole afterlife on my own.... But I owe her. We made a deal, a long time ago. She helped me in exchange for a favor to be named later. I honestly thought she’d never call it in—I thought she just liked having it to hold over me, as an option. Who knows what kind of weird thin
g she’ll ask me to do? When the Walking Death owed her a favor, she made him kill all the zebra mussels in Felport’s bay. Maybe she just wants me to zap some invasive species out of the way like that, but who knows? Her mind is a maze full of sinkholes. Rondeau always claimed there was some rhyme and reason to the ebb and flow of her lucidity and lunacy, like it was a tidal thing, but I was never able to discern a pattern: some days she’s clear as glass, some days she’s as clear as mud. Ugh. I just decide to leave the world alone, and now someone is dragging me back up there.” She pointed a long-clawed finger at her assistant. “Never let anybody ever do anything for you, Pelham. Obligation is a bitch.”

  “Duly noted, ma’am. Zufi is still based in Felport, yes?”

  Marla nodded. “Or the waters outside it, anyway.”

  “Then you could, perhaps, also deal with the other outstanding issue you’ve been postponing? It’s noted here on your calendar. As it has been every day. For months.”

  Marla groaned. “You want me to make an unpleasant errand worse by adding a second unpleasant errand to it?”

  “Then, at least, the unpleasantness would be taken care of in one fell swoop, and would no longer weigh upon you.”

  “It’s like that old saying—eat a live frog when you wake up in the morning and nothing worse will happen to either one of you all day.” She rose. “Home again, home again. I hope I don’t give everyone in Felport brain tumors. Ugh.”

  “Wait, Majesty. There may be another way.”

  The Fell Port

  Marla stepped from a shadow onto the roof of the apartment building where she’d once lived, beneath a forge-hot noonday sun and looked upon her old domain, which was now just one small corner of her new domain.

  Felport! That skyline like a mouthful of jagged teeth. The bay glittering in the distance, actually as clean and shining as it looked because the Bay Witch kept it from getting polluted. The river cutting through the city like a sinuous scar, dividing the haves on the north side from the hapless on the south. The hills with their mansions and gates, the slums with their SRO hotels and underfunded free clinics, the revitalized downtown, the unreconstructed waterfront, the clot of tents and booths that made up the Market Street Market, the financial district that was more and more the biotech district, the Whitcroft-Ivory building rising higher than the towers around it like an upraised middle finger to the sky.