Closing Doors: The Last Marla Mason Novel

by T. A. Pratt

  She shook her head vigorously. “It’s not like that, though. I almost never harvest a soul personally. Just on special occasions. There are psychopomps to do that sort of thing—they ferry the souls here.” She pointed toward what passed for a sky down here. “Those shooting stars up there? They’re souls, being brought from Earth. Being Death is about a lot more than killing, anyway, Jarrell. You’d be surprised. We’re responsible for all the lives on Earth, too, including the non-human ones. That’s why you being a nature magician is such a good fit. Traditionally, the mortal consort is in charge of the renewal parts of the job—ensuring a fertile springtime and a bountiful harvest, sending salmon to spawn, all that stuff. I’m happy to handle the... less pleasant bits. Your beat would be the life half of the equation.”

  “I understand. That... is more interesting.” Jarrell stood up, gazed around the garden, then slowly nodded. “This is a lot to take in, Marla. Do you need an answer right away?”

  “No. I’m meeting with a couple of other prospects, though it’s a shorter list than you might think. Settling on a consort is important, and it needs to happen soon, before the natural cycles of the Earth get too out of whack, but I’m doing my due diligence. Whoever I end up with, we’ll be spending centuries together, possibly millennia, so I’m not about to rush into anything.”

  Jarrell nodded. “So you’ll think about me, and I’ll think about... all this? All right. I can do that.” He paused. “Can you send me back home? I want to see how the forest is doing.”

  “Absolutely.” She summoned a shadow, and gave a little wave as it engulfed him and returned him to the woods.

  Her date with Lauren had ended on a rather more pleasant note, but that had been more of a date, and less an experience of mortal peril followed by traumatic displacement followed by a job interview. She liked Lauren more, in a like-like kind of way, but Jarrell probably had a better understanding of what the work would entail, and she suspected he’d excel at it. There could be other candidates to consider, too, though.

  But choosing a consort was only one of her ongoing emergencies. She let her full attention return to the body she’d built in San Francisco.

  Marla looked around. She was walking beside Bradley down a steep hill lined by Victorian-era row houses, split into innumerable apartments to feed the endless hunger for rental units in San Francisco. “Where are we going?”

  He glanced at her. “We’re oracle hunting. You’re back, I guess? That was pretty weird, Marla. You were on robot autopilot or something, all monosyllables, but I asked if you were ready to go, and you said yeah, so... here we are.”

  “Ha, yeah, sorry to leave you with mannequin Marla. Most of my attention was focused on dealing with an infestation of black sand in Finland.”

  “Whoa. How did that go?”

  She told him about using primordial chaos to transform the sand into soil, and he grinned. “That’s a promising approach. Primordial goo versus gray goo.”

  “We’ve got a decent weapon. Now we just need targets. You’ve got a line on an oracle?”

  “You know how it is. I opened my mind, I felt the pull, and we’re following the thread to see where it leads. Looks like we’re heading to the Mission.”

  “If I have to be in San Francisco at all, I like the Mission. It still feels like a real city, you know? Burrito shops, bookstores, dive bars, SRO hotels—”

  “It’s been a few years since you’ve spent time here, huh? Those things aren’t entirely gone, but they’re going. The Mission is more like organic ice cream shops and fancy cafes and wine bars now, and the old tenants are being forced out to make room for new, richer ones. The tech industry is doing well again, and that’s brought in a ton of people with lots of money, so. You know.”

  “Gentrification, huh?”

  “It’s hit the Mission hard. The housing situation is bananas. There are people paying two grand a month to sleep in a closet. I mean a literal closet. And they’re happy because at least they have a door that closes and they don’t have to share the space.”

  “All the artists have fled to Oakland?” That’s what had happened during the last tech boom.

  “Ha. Sure, but Oakland’s full, too, and rents there aren’t much better. The artists have fled to, like, Richmond and Hercules and Redwood City. Or else all the way off to Portland or whatever.”

  “So all the people who made the city vibrant and cool and exciting get pushed out by people who moved here because they were tempted by how vibrant and cool and exciting the city is.”

  “Circle of life. Same as it ever was. The ebb and flow. We’re booming, and someday we’ll bust again, though Cole is doing what he can to soften the inevitable collapse.” He glanced at her. “Does your, uh, sphere of influence extend to cities? They are born, and live, and die, after all.”

  “Cities aren’t organisms, but they’re at least ecosystems, and those fall within my sphere of interest and influence, yeah. Don’t worry about it. I don’t think San Francisco is likely to die anytime soon. So, what’s in the Mission? Any idea what kind of oracle we’re going to meet?” Sometimes Bradley summoned ghosts, or monsters, or even minor gods, and they all brought their own unique challenges.

  “I dunno. I sense something moderately big.... Here.” They stopped in front of a bar near the towering immensity of the Armory building. “See this bar? It used to be a beloved neighborhood joint, Ace Café. You could shoot pool, drink beers, hang out. Then this guy founded an internet porn empire in the neighborhood, got rich, bought this building, and jacked up the café’s rent to something like twenty grand a month. The owners had no choice but to shut the place down, which was the point of raising their rent in the first place. See, the rich guy wanted a bar of his own to hang out in near his porn empire headquarters—” Bradley pointed at the Armory. “—so he got rid of the old and brought in the new. Don’t get me wrong, the new bar is nice, all leather and fancy cocktails and erotic bondage artwork and this kind of Victorian men’s club vibe, but... it’s not what it was. A lot of people see this bar as a symbol of how things are changing, how the old parts of the city are being destroyed, and... huh. I think this bar has its own genius loci.”

  “What... like... the spirit of gentrification?”

  “I... think that’s pretty close to exactly right. I’m not sure why this is the spirit I was drawn to with a question about the black sand, though.”

  Marla shrugged. “The black sand is an invasive force that moves into an existing system, transforms the place utterly, and renders it hostile to the original inhabitants. So...”

  Bradley chuckled. “When you put it that way.” He lowered his head, swayed a bit, and leaned against the wall for support. “Better put a look-away spell on us,” he muttered. “It’s fixing to get weird up in here.”

  Marla cast a spell, making the two of them profoundly uninteresting to any passers-by. Bradley took a few deep breaths, then said, “I have a question.”

  A door appeared in the wall of the bar, where no door had been before. Marla felt a twinge. Conjuring up doors was her late husband’s favorite way to travel, and she’d been thinking about him a lot today already.

  A humanoid figure walked out of the door, and behind him, Marla glimpsed a spare studio apartment with hardwood floors and wall-sized windows looking out over a city that appeared to be consumed by fire. Then the door closed. The oracle looked basically like a man, dressed in cargo shorts and a blue T-shirt that read “Bitches, am I right?” in cursive script. He wore a bizarre sort of helmet—no, it was more of a faceplate or visor covering his eyes: a black oblong of shiny plastic attached with myriad black straps that wrapped all around his buzz-cut head. He looked like his face was being fed on by an immense spider. Despite the black visor that entirely obscured his vision, he was staring fixedly down at a smartphone in his hand. Marla looked closer and realized the smartphone was his hand, growing seamlessly from his wrist.

  “What the hell is that on its head?” she said. />
  “I think it’s a virtual reality headset.” Bradley’s voice was breathy and strained. Calling up oracles cost him a lot of strength and effort, especially if it was a powerful oracle, and a spirit of gentrification in the Mission probably was.

  “How is it looking at a smart phone if it’s also looking at virtual reality?”

  “It’s all burnwired and razorsynced,” the oracle said, in a voice of infinite boredom. “My watch talks to my phone talks to my headset talks to my reality. Infinite disruptive intermediation.”

  “Can you even see us?” Marla demanded.

  “I’ve got your mo-cap telemetry hotlined into my avatar generator, yeah. I’m looking at more fuckable versions of you, pretty much. You’re welcome.”

  “That place you come from... it looked like the city was burning. There was fire everywhere.”

  The oracle chuckled. “Objectivist Libertarianism teaches us that fire is a social construct invented by the Chinese to sell us nanny state smoke detectors.”

  “Marla, I can’t hold onto this thing forever.” Sweat beaded on his forehead. “I don’t think there’s much point arguing with it anyway. It’s like a living comments section. Oracle, can you answer my questions?”

  “For a price, for sure.” The oracle jabbed at its phone hand.

  “What’s the price?”

  “Get all the homeless people out of San Francisco.”

  “I—that’s not possible.”

  The oracle shrugged.

  Marla grabbed it by the throat and slammed it against the wall, the back of its visored head bouncing off the bricks. The oracle gurgled. “Hi there, little god,” she said. “I’m a big god. I can make it so this city crumbles to dust. I can fill the streets with plague rats. I can call up screaming ghosts and make everyone desperate to move away from the howling, and leave you the god of rubble. I can call up volcanoes and earthquakes anytime I like. How about you answer my friend’s questions as a favor to me, no price necessary?”

  The oracle squeaked, “This is about ethics in rape culture, you social justice warlords are the real bigots—”

  Marla pumped a little divinity into her body, and Bradley whimpered and shrank away from her. She felt the glow spill out of her eyes, but the oracle wasn’t seeing her, so she grabbed the visor and ripped it from the spirit’s face, throwing the visor onto the ground, where it shattered into shards of glass and plastic. The oracle had a single immense eye filling its forehead, bloodshot and oozing tears and pus, and its pupil dilated to a pinprick in the face of her light. “Now you see me?” she said. “Do you know my truth?”

  “There has to be a bargain,” it whimpered. “That’s the old covenant. You give and you get, and you just—you just know what the price is, it just feels right, okay?”

  “You and me, though, one god to another, we can negotiate, right? We can find a compromise that fits the spirit of your request. How about... you answer Bradley’s questions. In exchange, he’ll buy an overpriced espresso drink and a five-dollar cupcake, and he’ll take one bite out of the cupcake and throw it in the trash, right in front of a homeless person, and he’ll pour the coffee into the gutter.”

  “I... maybe that would... it depends... what’s the question?” The oracle turned its face away from her, but didn’t close its single eye. Maybe it couldn’t; maybe it didn’t have an eyelid.

  Bradley said, “There’s black sand scattered all over the world, transforming everything around it into more of itself. Where did the sand come from?”

  “I... I can’t answer that, not for that price, but—but I can tell you who to ask! Pelham! Ask him about his trip to the desert with Rondeau, and what they found there! That’s all I can say!”

  “We also need to know the location of all the black sand on Earth,” Bradley said. He slid down the wall, and now sat on the pavement, his head turned away from Marla and the oracle both.

  The spirit of gentrification waved its smartphone hand. “There! I’ve marked the current locations on the map in your phone!”

  Marla released the oracle and damped down her divinity. She noted the presence of several cancers in her body. Letting a fraction of her godly power into this meat suit for a minute had given it half a dozen tumors. Ugh.

  The oracle fell to its knees, sobbing, and picked up the fragments of its shattered headset—then faded slowly out of sight as Bradley released his hold.

  “It never occurred to me to beat up an oracle that gave me unfavorable terms,” Bradley said, getting shakily to his feet.

  “I wouldn’t recommend it for you, but I’m a god. I’ve got leverage. We... speak on the same level. Even so, we didn’t get direct answers.”

  Bradley looked at his phone and grunted, scrolling around. “We got something, though. The oracle marked the location of a handful of human agents. One in London, one in Australia, one in Greece, and two in the US. In terms of the big piles of deathsand, we’ve got six active infestation sites. One in the south Pacific a long way from anywhere inhabited, and one in the Mediterranean way too close to Crete. There’s one on land up in the arctic, another in the Antarctic, another in Siberia, and a fourth in the Atacama desert in South America. Huh. This thing picked some pretty random places for its attack. Maybe there’s some deep strategy to mostly choosing such remote places. Gives it time to build up its power before it’s noticed? But it’s gotta be tough to get human agents out in the middle of those various nowheres.”

  “If the sand infects one person, that person can infect others, though,” Marla said. “But you’re right, the locations aren’t much good for an invasion. That’s because the sand didn’t choose those beachheads, though. Someone else did.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Marla wasn’t omniscient, but she could accurately access any of her past experiences... if she knew what she was looking for. When the oracle told them to ask Pelham about the sand, she remembered a letter she’d received from Pelham during her days as a monster hunter, and she realized immediately what the oracle meant. She understood, at least roughly, what the black sand was, if not exactly what it wanted. “It was Rondeau,” she said. “He chose the sand’s various home bases. He just didn’t know he was doing it.” She sighed. “I should talk to him, and deal with the infestation sites, too. You and Cole see what you can do about finding the infected? Maybe the old guy got his black sand detectors working.”

  “Okay. But... Rondeau? How is he responsible for this?”

  “It’s not his fault. It’s mine. He was doing a favor for me.”

  No Good Deed

  “Rondeau has been here twice already today.” Pelham sat at a small secretary in her office, not far from the immense desk of dark wood she literally never used for anything. She sat in her chair behind it, swiveling back and forth.

  “What? Since when can Rondeau just pop down to hell?”

  “Since you gave him backup bodies, remember? He’s taking advantage of his new form of immortality. I gather he’s attempting to quell the magical war of succession in Las Vegas, and some of the factions have found his presence inconvenient. In both cases, I sent him immediately back to the place where he’d been killed, at his request. Is that all right?”

  Marla chuckled. “Honestly, this shows initiative, which I didn’t expect from him. Maybe dying really does have a way of clarifying the mind. I should talk to Rondeau, but it can wait. He can supply me with some more details, maybe, but I already get the gist. I figured out where the black sand came from.”

  “Oh?”

  “Do you remember, back when I was tracking down the Eater, and I hit a dead end, couldn’t find any leads to follow? I asked Rondeau to summon up an oracle to find some clues for me, and he took you with him on the trip?”

  “Oh, no,” Pelham said. “Yes, of course. We went into the desert, and found a strange black stone there, embedded in the ground. When Rondeau touched the stone, we were transported to another place... the inside of some dread sphere, it seemed, under a curve
d sky dotted with red or green stars that resembled festering sores. The ground on which we stood... it was the same glittering black of the stone in the desert.” He shuddered at the memory. “The sphere, if that’s what it was, spoke to us through Rondeau’s own mouth, in a voice of infinite malice and amusement.”

  “The oracle answered your questions,” Marla said. “It told you a tiny fragment of itself had fallen through a tear in space and lodged here on Earth, which gave it the power to observe the Earth. That rock you found was a chunk of its body. The oracle’s information put me on the right track, and I found the Eater... but the price the black star demanded for that information....”

  Pelham nodded. “Yes. It wanted us to break up the stone we found in the desert.”

  “I remember your letter, word-for-word—this god brain is good for something. The oracle said, ‘The piece of me that is lodged in your world: break it up, smash it to sand, and send some of that sand to distant places: sift some into the seas, drop some at the poles, some in the mountains, some in the caves.”

  “The oracle wouldn’t tell us why it desired such a thing.” Pelham lined up pens and nibs and inkwells on his desk as he spoke: knolling was one of the ways he coped with anxiety. “It said its reasons were not ours to know. After, we broke up the stone with pickaxes until we had a few pounds of black sand, and Rondeau mailed the sand to people he knew or hired, to fulfill the bargain. We caused this infestation?”

  Marla shook her head. “If anything, I caused it, by asking Rondeau to help. Maybe Bradley would have been more cautious about accepting such a requirement, but Rondeau wasn’t as experienced with oracles, so he wasn’t as wary. Anyway, I got your letter, I knew the price you’d paid, and I didn’t think anything of it. I just thought it was oddball oracle shit.”

  “I was only in the presence of that black star for a short time, but it did not wish us well,” Pelham said. “It called the Earth a ball of mud and rot.”

  “I think the black star is xenoforming,” she said.