Closing Doors: The Last Marla Mason Novel

by T. A. Pratt

  They stepped through a shadow, and emerged in a dry lake bed. “I feel a pull... to the east,” Bradley said. Another step, and they reappeared in the mountains. “Nope, still farther east.” Another step, this time to the middle of a corn field, fronds waving in the sun. “Same deal....” Another, and they stood on the banks of a wide, slow moving river. “Hmm. Getting warmer. Northeast now.”

  Rondeau looked at his phone. “We’re in Missouri now, so I guess we jumped through Utah, Colorado....”

  Another tug and step, and they stood in the center of an empty baseball stadium. “Whoa. I think this is Wrigley Field,” Rondeau said. “Crazy about the Cubs, huh?”

  “Cole told me they were only under a fifty-year curse, really—the years after that were just bad luck. Come on, we’re close. Or, if not close, getting closer. There’s something dark and potent lurking in the heartland.”

  “I kind of always suspected that.”

  Bradley pulled Rondeau through another shadow, and this time they emerged in a forested area. They stood beneath a tree with the broken remnants of an old deer stand or tree house stuck up in the dead branches. Rusty nails and splintered boards littered the ground around them. “Oof,” Bradley said. “There is something big in this place, or connected to this place, or, I don’t know, bleeding through here.”

  Rondeau nudged a big, jagged rock with his foot, then looked at his phone. “We’re in Indiana. What kind of monsters live in Indiana?”

  “Who knows?” Bradley said. “I guess we’ll find out. I recently summoned up the spirit of gentrification, and I didn’t even know that was an actual thing. There’s no telling what we’ll get here.”

  Rondeau and Bradley cleared away a patch of ground at the base of the tree so he wouldn’t fall down on a rusty nail and get tetanus. Bradley sat down and settled his back against the tree, getting as comfortable as possible. “Okay. I’m going to reach out and make contact. Don’t freak out too much if I have a seizure or spasm or something, but I’d appreciate it if you kept me from biting off my own tongue or clawing out my eyes or anything like that.”

  His friend was wide-eyed and worried-looking. “You think it’s going to be that bad?”

  “This one is big, Rondeau. I can already tell it’s going to be the psychic equivalent of trying to pass a kidney stone the size of an apple.”

  “That’s a hell of an image to put in a man’s head under conditions like these, B.”

  “Here we go.” Bradley closed his eyes and reached out with his mind. Come on, he thought. Come on you big bastard. I need you.

  The hook of his attention snagged in something vast, something beneath the skin of the world, and he pulled. The oracle resisted, as they sometimes did, but while it was usually like fighting a marlin at the end of a fishing line, this was more like trying to reel in a leviathan with a bit of dental floss. Once the connection was made, though, it couldn’t be broken unless Bradley willed it, or a deal was struck. His vision blurred, and his teeth snapped together, and his head exploded in pain like someone had put cherry bombs behind his eyes, but he didn’t let go. Come on. Come to me. To me. Obey.

  “It’s almost here,” he mumbled. His skull felt like an egg about to crack and give birth to something monstrous, his bones were fragile as glass, his bladder control was iffy, and he smelled burning metal. “I’m... I’m losing cohesion here. You are my agent, Rondeau. Bind and command it.”

  Darkness swallowed him up.

  One moment Marla was swimming with Cosmocrator and the Bay Witch, destroying pockets of black sand, while she was simultaneously arguing with sorcerers in Florida, yelling at sorcerers in Savannah, bossing around sorcerers in Boston, and tending on some deeper level to the bare baseline necessities of keeping the seasons and the cycles and the rhythms of life on Earth moving properly, just on the off chance that all life didn’t get annihilated. She was doing a shitty job of that last part, but there weren’t any cracks yet that she wouldn’t be able to mend when she could give things her full attention, with a consort at her side. Though the odds of that maybe weren’t so great, giving her last interaction with Lauren.

  But the next moment, something snapped like an overstretched rubber band, and her divided consciousness was suddenly unified again, her meat puppets abandoned—or, more accurately, ripped from her. The god of Death floated in the void-and-star space of the underworld where she usually monitored the glowing lights of every living thing under her care, countless flames dimming and going dark as creatures died and countless more lighting up as new creatures were born. What the hell? She hadn’t willed herself here. She had work to do on Earth. Was there some kind of emergency protocol that could pull her back in the event of catastrophic inattention? If so, where was the emergency? What could be a bigger deal than the black sand trying to kill everything?

  She gasped as a searing pain tore at her back—wait, why did she even have a back? There were no bodies in this place! There was something attached to her, something like a harpoon plunged into her—into her divinity itself, snagged in her essential nature. Marla snarled and clawed at the invasive object, a wave of unreasoning panic blotting out her thoughts. She was a rat in a cage, she was a rabbit in a snare, she was a fox ready to gnaw off its own foot to escape a trap—

  The astral line attached to the harpoon tangled around her hands, her throat, her feet, and why did she have any of those things, she should be bodiless here, she was thought and will, she was Death, and she would not be bound!

  The astral line dragged her inexorably upward, out of the void, out of the underworld, and into the world itself. She passed through magma, through rock, through void, through lightless seas, through dirt, and still she snarled and struggled and pulled at the hook and the tether, but she couldn’t free herself. She was compelled to go where the thread pulled her. She was a falling rock fighting against gravity. Hopeless. But she fought on anyway, because that was her nature.

  Finally she burst into the open air, emerging beneath a tree in a forest, and the lines loosened, though they didn’t vanish entirely: something was holding her here. Who dared? Who dared?

  “WHO DARES?” she screamed, and did not bother to dim her majesty, or her rage.

  The ground exploded in a shower of dirt like a landmine had gone off, and Rondeau scuttled backwards and then fell on his ass as clods of dirt rained down all around him. He’d seen oracles arrive in various ways, but he’d never witnessed an entrance as grandiose and destructive as this. The intellectual knowledge that he could get a new body if something destroyed this one didn’t do much to quell the unreasoning biological terror he felt, and he whimpered in a distinctly unconfident way.

  Something roughly human in shape, but gigantic in its proportions and glowing white and hot, rose up from the broken hole in the Earth and floated a few feet above the ground. The tree branches above the figure’s head caught fire, the dry wood igniting all at once and blazing wildly, and the oracle screamed “WHO DARES?” Its eyes and mouth were holes that emitted orange-red light, and the grass crackled and singed wherever its gaze fell.

  Some kind of fire-monster. Okay. The black sand could be melted—they knew that much—so maybe this made sense. It was probably the spirit of the Earth’s molten core or some shit, capable of looking through every nook and cranny of the planet.

  Rondeau darted forward, grabbed Bradley by the ankles, and pulled him away from the tree before he could catch fire, too. The oracle’s heat couldn’t hurt Bradley, he was protected from direct harm by the same magic that let him compel beings like this, but once the flames made the jump from supernatural entity to ordinary wood, that could be different. Rondeau wasn’t sure. This wasn’t his area of expertise anymore. To be honest it hadn’t been even when he’d been capable of summoning oracles.

  “We dare!” Rondeau called. “Really sorry to bother you, but, uh—we bind you and compel you, that’s what we do. We want you to destroy every single grain of the alien invader that calls itself the Inim
ical. Name your price.”

  The glowing figure stepped down to the ground, and shrank in size as it approached, until it was truly human in its proportions. The white-hot glow faded, too, and beneath the fire, the features of a woman emerged. Her skin was pale, her eyes and lips black, her teeth needle-sharp—but she was familiar. He recognized her.

  “Rondeau?” Marla said.

  “Marla?”

  “Oh, damn.” Bradley moaned and rubbed his forehead. He opened one eye and peered at Marla. “I summoned you?”

  Marla glanced at the burning trees, and the flames all doused themselves. She sat cross-legged on the grass and looked at Bradley. “That—this doesn’t make any sense. You dragged me here. I didn’t know you could do that. It’s really fucking unpleasant, by the way. I’m amazed the oracles don’t try to kill you when they appear.”

  “They want to,” he croaked. “They just can’t. Neither can you. You couldn’t hurt me if you wanted to, not right now.” He looked around. “Why is this the place of your power? Wait, this is Indiana—that’s where you’re from, right? Were you born on this spot or something?”

  “Sort of.” She picked up a fragment of a broken board, looked at it for a long moment, then tossed it away. “This is the first place I ever killed someone.”

  “Damn,” Rondeau said. “That’s heavy.”

  Bradley started to get up, then winced. “Gods, Marla, you’re powerful. I never called up anything as big as you before. I can still feel the bindings, the connections. I... I’m sorry. I’ll let you go.”

  “Hold up!” Rondeau said. “You summoned her to do a job, right? That means she can do the job.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” Marla said.

  “No, he’s right.” Bradley held up a finger as if to say just a minute, then turned his head, vomited briefly, and returned his attention to them, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “That’s how this power works. You always summon something capable of answering your question or fulfilling your task, as long as you’re willing to pay the price. That’s the whole nature of the relationship here.”

  “Bradley, if I knew how to stop the black sand, I would. The whole point is, I don’t. That’s why you were going to recruit outside help in the first place.”

  “But this proves there’s a way, Marla. You’re capable of it. We summoned something to stop the sand, and you appeared, so you can stop the sand. It’s within your power, somehow.”

  “Yeah,” Rondeau said. “And if we bind and compel you to do it, you have to do it. It becomes, like, an ironclad contract.”

  “More like a law of nature,” Bradley said.

  “A geas,” Marla murmured. “A compulsion that can’t be avoided. Like I don’t have enough of those. But the fact remains, I have no idea how to do it.”

  “We bound and compelled you,” Rondeau said. “You have to name your price now. What does it cost Bradley, for you to do this?”

  “What? That’s stupid, I can’t charge for something I don’t even know how to.... Oh.” She blinked. “Oh.”

  “What is it? Did you figure out how to stop the sand?”

  “Fuck, no, but when I thought, ‘Price, what price?’ the answer just... popped into my head. Like the spirit of gentrification said.”

  “That’s it.” Rondeau clapped his hands excitedly. “Tell us. If Bradley pays your price, then you have to stop the sand, it’s written in the stars or whatever, it’s a whole thing, it has to be done, and we’ll be okay.”

  “This is stupid,” Marla said again. “It’s—Bradley, the price is... you have to give up your death.”

  “Uh. What?”

  “If you bind me this way, you and I sever the soul-to-deity relationship. I will never take you to the afterlife. You will never die.”

  “So the price I have to pay is... immortality? Is this some kind of eternal life without eternal youth deal? Am I going to get older and older until I shrink into something the size of a cricket?”

  “No. Your aging process will cease. You will be as you are now, forever. Every injury will heal. You will become inviolate.” Marla shuddered. “Don’t do it, Bradley. Please.”

  “I am not seeing the downside,” Rondeau said.

  “He will,” Marla said. “Give it a few billion years. It’s the same curse you have, Rondeau. To live forever. To see everything you know dead and destroyed. Bradley, you’ll go on even if the Earth is destroyed, as it will be, inevitably. When the last star goes out, you’ll be there floating in the void, alone, and you’ll keep floating. Endless. You will outlive death itself. You’ll never be able to rejoin your collective. You will be... a thing apart. That’s the price. Don’t do it to yourself. Please. Don’t make me do it to you.”

  “My life, my choice,” Bradley said. “So I live forever, and everyone else gets to live as much as they’re supposed to? Yes. I accept. I will give up my death, and you will kill the black sand.”

  He gasped, blinking, then barfed again, for longer this time. Rondeau moved a few inches farther away.

  Marla shivered, then hugged herself. “Gods, the chains and hooks are gone.”

  “So,” Rondeau said. “Any flash of inspiration? Like, the way the price just popped into your head, did the way to stop the black sand pop in, too?”

  Marla seemed to consider that for a moment. “Fuck, no,” she said.

  “Oh.” Rondeau shrugged. “That sucks. I really thought that would work.”

  “But I do feel the compulsion to solve the problem, and it’s worth something to know there is a way, even if I’m not sure what it is. If you want something done, you really do have to do it yourself.” She stood up. “Damn it, B. I figured you and me would get to hang out in the underworld in another fifty or sixty years. You couldn’t even enter the underworld now as my guest, you’re so deathproof.”

  “Maybe I’ll figure out a way to undo the arrangement,” Bradley said. “I’ll have an immortal lifetime to study on it.”

  “To hell with that,” Rondeau said. “There’s a chance I’m going to live forever, too. You and me, eternal buddy road trip comedy, yeah?” He held out his hand for a fistbump, and Bradley laughed and weakly returned it.

  “My best friends are idiots,” Marla said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a geas to fulfill.” She turned around and vanished into a shadow.

  “So. You feel up to Shadow Walking us back to Vegas?” Rondeau said. “I bet you could use a bite to eat, and I just happen to own a hotel with a kickass buffet.”

  “I... don’t think I have that power anymore. I’m pretty sure I’ve got the only gift from Death I’ll ever have again now.”

  “So... we’re in the middle of someplace in rural Indiana with, let me just check, yep, no phone service, and you’re too weak to stand up right now. Is that about right?”

  “That is about right.”

  “It’s a good thing I’m resourceful and indomitable,” Rondeau said. “Also that we’re both immortal.”

  The Nature of Royalty

  Marla divided her attention again, returning to her assorted bodies, and started trying to get a handle on the various situations she’d left hanging. The only scene that wasn’t some variety of chaos was the one off the coast of Felport. Zufi was just calmly treading water in the Atlantic, with Cosmocrator circling like a shark underneath her.

  “You went away,” the Bay Witch said. “Where did you go?”

  Marla adjusted the buoyancy of her body so she could float easily. “You know how Bradley Bowman can summon oracles? He tried to summon one so he could ask it to destroy the Inimical. Guess who came when he called?”

  “He compelled you?” She smiled weakly. She looked more tired than Marla had ever seen her before. “Bradley is very powerful.”

  “I had no idea I could be bound that way. Ugh.”

  “Were you bound? Did he strike a bargain?”

  “Yeah. We made a deal. I’m going to destroy the Inimical. I just have no idea how.”
/>
  Zufi sniffed. “His power would not have summoned you if you could not fulfill the agreement. He knows something you do not, on a level that he is incapable of accessing consciously.”

  “It would be nice if someone could access it consciously. A magical compulsion starts out like an itch, but the longer you go without fulfilling it, the more uncomfortable it gets. I’m bound twice over now, first by my promise to you, and now by my bargain with Bradley. I’m basically just a machine whose sole function is destroying the Inimical.”

  Zufi shook her head. “No. You are not one person bound twice. You are two people, each bound once.”

  “I’m not following you there, Zufi.”

  The Bay Witch touched her chest. “I asked Marla Mason to repay a favor, and Marla Mason is the one who helped me. She helped me in... Marla Mason ways, yes? She did research. She mustered her allies and associates, burned things with fire, developed a plan and executed it.” Now she pointed at Marla. “Bradley Bowman did not make a bargain with the same person I did. Bradley made a bargain with a god. He did not summon Marla Mason. He summoned the god of Death. The queen of the dead. She is the one who can solve this problem, by doing... god things. Queen of the dead things. Not Marla things.”

  Marla let that sink in. Maybe Zufi had a point. She was known for her accurate, if weirdly expressed, insights. Marla had used some of her god-powers against the Inimical, sure, but had she been thinking like a deity, or like a sorcerer? “What can I do, though? I’m not omniscient or omnicognizant. I mean, with deadsight I can see through every dead thing on Earth, and visit every life, but I have to actually look, and it would take a long time to even assess the situation, let alone do anything about it. I can split my attention a lot, but not that much.” She considered. What were her uniquely godly powers? “I can create maybe a thousand demons at once.... More than that, and I risk losing control, and when you get rogue demons, you find yourself living through the darker bits of mythology and the final chapters of certain holy books. I can’t call up enough demons to cover the entire world, which is what I’d need to do to track down every speck of this sand.”