Closing Doors: The Last Marla Mason Novel

by T. A. Pratt

  “What is the defining quality of a queen?”

  Marla bit back on the glib responses that leapt to mind—”bedazzled hats, committing adultery with knights, getting beheaded by husbands who want a younger wife”—and instead said, “Queens have subjects.”

  “Yes.” Zufi nodded serenely. “The dead owe their afterlives to you, and they are yours to command.”

  “I... huh. Zufi, have I ever told you you’re a genius?”

  “I cannot remember. It seems likely, because you are very observant.” She coughed again. “Usually.”

  “I need to see how Hamil is doing on making my detectors. Can you and Cosmocrator handle chasing down any black sand around here without me? I’ve spread myself pretty thin as it is.”

  “The demon can continue this work. I would like to go with you. You have a plan. I set you on the path to fight this sand, and I wish to see the path to its end.”

  “Let’s go then.” Marla took Zufi’s cold, wet hand, and shadow-stepped them to Hamil’s office.

  They both dripped water all over the carpet, and Hamil looked up from his desk and sighed at them. “Marla. Zufi. Always a pleasure. I’ve only had time to make one of your charms, Marla.” He held up a chain with a gold heart-shaped locket dangling from the end. “There is a single piece of black sand suspended in this—I apologize for the heart, it was the first thing that came to hand. That piece of sand is excited by sympathetic magic to resonate whenever it comes within a few hundred yards of another grain of sand. It will begin to buzz, and will emit a chime, which will grow in intensity as you approach the target. It will take some time for me to produce more charms—”

  “It’s okay.” Marla took the necklace. “I can make copies.” She glanced at Zufi. “You want to go to the underworld with me?”

  “I am always interested in new experiences.”

  They stepped through the shadows, and Marla took on her full godhood again. “Pelham!” she called, and he appeared from a doorway, bowing when he saw Zufi. “How’s Lauren?”

  “She is... no longer screaming or weeping, but she is not doing very well. I have tried to reassure her, but she is unhappy.”

  “I wish I had time to talk to her....” Marla sighed. “But I have to do a thing.”

  “I see an ocean.” Zufi stood at a window, gazing across the plain toward the primordial sea.

  “It’s the idea of an ocean, anyway. Pelham, give Zufi the tour? I’ve got to go to the wellspring of chaos.”

  “Of course—” he began, but Marla was already gone.

  After a brief descent, Marla stood at the edge of the same pool of shimmering chaos where she’d made her copies of Rondeau’s body. The idea of replicating the black sand here was horrifying, but she’d examined the binding magics on the locket, and they were formidable: Hamil knew his business. This was the only way, anyway, or at least the fastest, and right now, those were pretty much the same thing.

  She instructed the chaos to make fifty billion copies of the magical locket, and then willed her image to appear in every afterlife under her control, simultaneously.

  “I am your queen.” Marla spoke to the dead—all the billions upon billions of dead people who’d ever lived and now spent eternity in her realm. She unleashed the fullness of her divinity, so they would know the truth of her words. By her rough estimate, over one hundred billion beings recognizable as human had died in the course of time, and though many of them had no concept of the afterlife, or were atheists, or for whatever other reason didn’t reside in the underworld, there were still more than enough, even when she weeded out the shades of children and the insane and the irredeemably evil. She addressed the multitude who could be useful to her. “There is a grave threat to reality, a monster with a billion bodies, known as the Inimical. Our enemy hides in caves, it hides in lakes, it hides in cities, it hides inside people. I call upon you to defeat this threat.”

  The dead were rapt. They had no other option.

  “You will be given a locket, you will return to the world as a shade. You will be given an assignment, and together, you will walk over every inch of this planet. If the locket chimes, you will know the Inimical is near, and you will say these words.” She created an incantation on the fly, boiled it down to a brief trigger word, and made sure the dead could repeat it, even the ones who’d barely possessed language when they were alive. “That word will summon a demon, and that demon will destroy our enemy. When this work is done, you will be returned to your eternal dreams. Do you understand?”

  The dead understood. She didn’t give them any other choice.

  Marla sat in her throne room, but not on her throne, just on the dais. Zufi sat beside her. “I do not understand how this works,” the Bay Witch said.

  “Ha. But it was your idea. You know how in small towns, if a little kid gets lost in the woods, they bring everyone in the whole county out to look for them? They form a line, sometimes they even join hands, and the people just walk across the fields and forests, so someone looks at every single inch of ground. We’re doing the same thing. Fifty billion dead souls, holding hands, walking not just across the Earth but through it, since they’re conditionally immaterial. My wonderful souls, passing through every inch of the sea, every cavern underground, every block of every city, every branch of every tree. It’s going to take some time, but the dead travel fast. Earlier I had the idea to do that with demons, but that wouldn’t work. I can’t conjure enough demons to look everywhere simultaneously. This way, though... it’s wave after wave, chain after chain. There are only seven billion people on Earth the Inimical could be hiding in, and my dead searchers outnumber the living more than five to one. When they do find the sand, they summon Muscles or Cosmocrator or some other demon, who unleashes primordial chaos to convert the sand into something harmless.”

  “The dead are just... overrunning the world then? Will that not frighten everyone?”

  “They’re going to be invisible, mostly, until they find a cache of sand or an infected victim. Oh, some psychics will flip out, but most people don’t tend to notice ghosts anyway.”

  “It is... oddly anticlimactic, to sit in your palace while the war rages above.”

  “Mmm, I’m up there, though, in parts, running various bodies, and looking through the eyes of demons. We’ve already purged half a dozen infected and cleared out ten caches of hidden sand. Still, I get your point. I’m used to breaking noses and kicking out knees, being right there in the scrum. But like you said: think like a queen. I am directing my troops and guiding their movements.” She leaned back on her elbows, enjoying the easy companionship of Zufi’s company. “This kind of reminds me of the time I sat on a blanket in Golden Gate Park eating an apple while two giant gods had a brawl I’d engineered. I’m not going to miss all the fun, though. There’s going to be another showdown, after the black sand is scoured from the Earth.” She glanced at Zufi. “Want me to send you home?”

  “I enjoy your company,” Zufi said. “Also I am tired. I would like to stay here and rest.”

  “Sure. I like having you here while we wait for word anyway. It’s weird, Hell being almost empty.” Except for those dead who were unsuitable for the work, and Pelham, and, of course, Lauren. Marla would have to talk to her fiancée—let’s be real, ex-fiancée—but she wasn’t ready yet, and from what Pelly said, Lauren wasn’t eager to see Marla, either.

  “I am hungry,” Zufi said. “I would like to eat a pomegranate, because that is traditional.”

  Marla laughed. “I can arrange that.”

  Marla had the dead go everywhere, and then she had them go over everywhere again, just to be sure. For some of the souls, it was a holiday from torments; for others, an interruption of paradise; for most, it was merely a baffling and dreamlike experience that would be forgotten once they were back in their comfortable bubbles. Marla considered dragging the last infected person down to her throne room, to get in some last words and let the Inimical know she’d beaten it personally, b
ut she didn’t want to risk exposing herself to the sand, and anyway, she had those other plans she’d mentioned to Zufi. The final toll of infected humans was only seventy-eight. Seventy-eight souls destroyed, seventy-eight people who wouldn’t get to enjoy the fruits of eternity in their afterlife. That was seventy-eight too many. There would be consequences for that.

  When the last of the sand had been destroyed, including in the lockets, and the last of the dead returned to their worlds, Marla went to her study, where Lauren sat waiting. The room had been expanded, with comfortable seating added, but Lauren sat on the floor against the wall, staring at nothing. Marla cleared her throat. “Hey. The danger is over. The thing that killed your father, it’s gone. Cleansed from the Earth. I’m really sorry you—”

  Lauren rose. “I’m sorry. I can’t do this anymore. Send me home.”

  “I—”

  “Don’t try to talk me out of it.” She turned on Marla, her hands balled into fists. “My father is dead because of you.”

  “I know. I wasn’t going to try to convince you to stay. I’d hate me, too, if I were you. I do hate me for that. I was just going to offer.... Remember I showed you the river Lethe? Those who drink of its waters can forget. I can make it so you don’t remember ever meeting me, or ever coming here. You’ll think your father just died of a heart attack, something sudden and unforeseen. I can make sure your mother gets the same gift.”

  Lauren frowned, then nodded, her hands unclenching. “I think that would be best,” she said stiffly.

  Marla set a vial of Lethe water on the counter. She’d come prepared. “Just drink that, and when you wake up, you’ll be in bed at home.” She turned to go.

  “Marla, wait. I... understand you aren’t a monster. If we’d met under other circumstances, if you weren’t what you are, if you hadn’t brought—hadn’t—” She started to sob.

  “Drink up,” Marla said softly. “I’ll miss you, Lauren. But you won’t miss me.” She left the study, shut the door, and closed her eyes, but she didn’t cry, because there was still work to be done.

  Through the Briarpatch

  “I wasn’t really asking permission,” Marla said. “More giving you a heads-up.”

  Big B covered his face and groaned. His face was immense, gazing at her from a wall-sized mirror in a golden frame, hanging in her palace. Zufi sat on the floor behind Marla, eating another handful of pomegranate seeds, juice dripping down her chin, apparently ignoring the conversation.

  “Marla. You messed with alternate worlds once before, and the results were disastrous—”

  “This is different. I’m older and wiser. No sundering of the veil here. You told me about the briarpatch, so I’m going to go that way: crawling around underneath the structure of the universe, not knocking holes in the walls. Besides, you said the briarpatch isn’t your jurisdiction anyway, so you don’t get a say in this. I was just hoping you’d, you know, point me toward the nearest on-ramp.”

  “Hold on, I’m running some simulations... huh. I’m actually not getting any results where you fuck up reality. I am getting a lot of results where you never come back, though, or where you come back injured—how gods even get injured, don’t ask me—or where you fail in your dumb mission. Let me see what’s different about the simulations where you succeed....” He whistled.

  “What?”

  “Since we talked I’ve been back-channeling a little bit with the... I don’t want to say ‘god’ of the briarpatch, because it’s way weirder than any deity I’ve met. I think it’s just a conscious emergent property of the briarpatch, though now that I think of it maybe that’s all any gods are really—”

  “Was there a point? Can I help you find it again?”

  “Right. There’s an... entity... that most people call the Wendigo, at least lately.”

  “Like the flesh-eating monster from Native American folklore?”

  “People call it that, and I gather it does occasionally eat flesh when provoked, but no, it’s just a name, probably meant to scare people... one it was given because people were scared. I’ve been communicating with it, whatever it is. Not talking. It doesn’t talk. But we’ve exchanged information in various ways. In the simulations where you succeed, it’s because I reach out and set you up with the Wendigo as a guide.”

  “Then do that.”

  “Ugh. Fine. You’re the worst, and also, you owe me.”

  “I’m all about obligations, Big B.”

  “All right, I’ve got a designated entry point. I’ll send you—”

  “I would like to come with you,” Zufi said. “If there is a big showdown to be shown, I wish to see the show.”

  “I... it could be pretty dangerous. I’m told there’s a high probability of success, but there are also scenarios where I get hurt or killed, and no offense, but you’re more fragile than me. Plus, I have to go in my godly form, which is potentially unhealthy for you, though I’m not sure how my divinity will react with my surroundings in the briarpatch or—”

  “You are talk talk talking. Since when does Marla Mason talk more about doing things than just doing things? I do not fear death.”

  She could just send Zufi back to the world anyway, but the Bay Witch knew her own mind, even if no one else ever did. Marla still owed Zufi, if not in a formal way: if not for the Bay Witch, she might not have found out about the black sand until it was too late to stop it. “All right then. Let’s go.”

  There were entry points to the briarpatch all over, apparently, and they picked one in an abandoned copper mine, because it was well away from human habitation. Marla went in the god-flesh, after wrapping Zufi in protective magics to reduce the chance of negatively impacting her, and to increase her chances of surviving this journey. As they descended through the tunnel, the walls of the mine trembled, and some of the copper turned to gold, and some turned to cat shit. There were all kinds of perturbations—was that a word?—in the world anyway because Marla had been neglecting her god-of-cycles-and-change duties, and because the system was so unstable, her presence aboveground was even more disruptive than usual. Pelham was an able factotum, but he was trying to keep a million plates spinning in the underworld while Marla was otherwise occupied, and he couldn’t even reach most of the plates. In some ways this trip was an indulgence... but Marla felt it had to be done. She needed to be sure.

  The cave went down, and then, weirdly, it started going back up, and when they emerged, they weren’t in Nevada anymore, but in a lush place with trees that looked like something from a Doctor Seuss book, all bright orange and blue foliage. There was no visible sun in the sky, but the place was bright all the same. The air was scented with coriander. Nothing exploded or transmuted or transmogrified in her presence, which suggested to her they weren’t on Earth anymore. She was just one more strange thing in a place that was already strange.

  “I smell water,” Zufi said. “But it smells wrong.”

  “This place is weird,” Marla said. “I don’t sense any life but yours. The trees look alive, so... maybe it’s because they’re not Earth trees? I can only sense Earth life I guess? I don’t—wait, there’s a human coming.”

  A car rolled slowly toward them through a gap in the trees: a battered, hulking sedan the color of yellowed old bones, with a chrome grille like grinning teeth and half-dome headlights like bulging eyes. The car pulled to a stop in front of them, and a nondescript man in his thirties got out of the driver’s seat. He squinted at a piece of paper. “Are you Maria and... Zuffy?”

  “We’re Marla and Zufi, so close enough.” How had he known to expect Zufi? Probably god-stuff. “Are you the Wendigo?”

  The guy laughed and patted the top of the car. “This is the Wendigo. I’m just its passenger. My name’s Darrin. I’m a sort of... cartographer of the in-between places. I’m supposed to give you a ride somewhere? Or so this note I found on the steering wheel says. Climb on in.”

  Marla opened the passenger door, and piles of paper cascaded out—receipts, graph
paper, newspapers, take-out menus, flyers, political mailers, drawings, charts, and all kinds of refuse. “What are you, a hoarder?”

  “Just sweep it out. The papers will dissolve after a while, so you’re not really littering. The Wendigo produces the stuff by the buttload. Don’t ask me why.”

  The backseat was similarly full, and Zufi pushed papers out of the way until she could climb in. “I do not like riding in cars.”

  Darrin shut his own door and the Wendigo roared to life. “Then you’re in luck. It’s not really a car. It just looks like one right now. I’m not sure you’d be any more comfortable riding around inside a giant lion’s mouth or whatever, so this is practical.” He put the car in gear and drove forward, and the scenery around them blurred and smeared like a watercolor stuck under a running faucet.

  “How the hell did you end up driving this thing?” Marla could sense the strangeness of the Wendigo: it was a thing out of place, or else, a thing that didn’t have a proper place, and so lived in between them.

  “The Wendigo saved my life, or at least, gave me a reason to live. We’re almost there. It picks the shortest path, unless there’s some reason to wander. You know, I’ve never been to this part of the briarpatch, and there are tons of side branches, way more than usual. Being with you is revealing all kinds of new pathways.”

  “She is a god,” Zufi said.

  “Oh.” Darrin glanced at her sidelong. “That would explain it.”

  They drove for another twenty minutes, through harrowing moonscapes and empty parking lots and vast cathedrals and glass tunnels surrounded by sea monsters (Zufi liked that one), through assorted implausible realities. Finally they reached a place of darkness and gloom, and Darrin stopped the car at the edge of a crumbling basalt cliff overlooking an abyss.

  “So, uh, where you’re going, it’s down there. Supposedly there’s a way back? I’m supposed to wait for an hour and then give up on you.”