Briarpatch by Tim Pratt

by Tim Pratt

  Arturo didn’t scream. He threw the Wendigo into reverse, and they rocketed backward, out of the arc of the swinging tree. But the thing rushed toward them, seeming to approach without any need for a practical method of locomotion, just flying along like a special effect come to life, and Arturo braked abruptly. Darrin stared at him, and Arturo gave him an “A-OK” sign with his fingers. Then he slammed his hand down on the centre of the Wendigo’s huge steering wheel, and the car horn sounded.

  Detroit had never built a car with a horn like this. No car customizer had ever tricked out his ride to make such a sound. It was an animal’s roar, the voice of some alpha-beast that was to lions as lions were to mice, something that ate wolves and picked its teeth with the bones of Komodo dragons, a predator’s predator. The sound was so bestial and threatening that every hair on Darrin’s neck stood up, gooseflesh covered his arms, and his bowels nearly let go. He was paralyzed, and even though he knew it was the car horn, some trick or recording, his hindbrain was certain it was the cry of the pinnacle of apex predators, and that Darrin was about to be devoured.

  The thing—Darrin didn’t like to think the word “giant” again, didn’t like the word as anything other than maybe an adjective—dropped its weapon and loped away, disappearing into the trees.

  After another moment, Arturo took his hand off the horn, but Darrin went on hearing the sound for several seconds, and was sure he’d remember it in dreams forever.

  Finally Arturo turned to him and said, “I wasn’t sure the horn would work. Some of these things in here don’t have ears. I was afraid I’d have to turn the high beams on, and that would’ve led to a whole lot of other problems, most likely.” He put the Wendigo in gear and drove down the paving stones.

  All that remained of Darrin’s alcoholic buzz was a dry mouth and an aching head. “Arturo,” he said, measured, trying to keep his voice steady, but having no choice but to raise it in order to be heard over the Wendigo’s engine. “Where are we? Am I going crazy?” Maybe he’d gone mad with grief over seeing Bridget die. That sort of thing happened in books sometimes.

  “I saw you was out walkin’, thought I’d say hello.” Arturo guided the Wendigo around a fallen tree. Though the road looked rough, more cratered than potholed, the ride was smooth; the Wendigo had one hell of a set of shocks. “Then I saw you take a, ah, side path, you know what I’m sayin’, and I’d been that way—this way—here—before, and I thought maybe you’d need a ride out pretty soon. I didn’t follow you on foot, on account of I don’t get around so good in the briarpatch without the Wendigo.” He patted the dash affectionately. “I’m not a natural, like you are, so I came after you in the car. Good thing, too. You should know it’s dangerous around here. There’s worse things’n what you ran into in those woods. God forbid you should run into a bear. Sometimes not even the high beams work on them. One of ’em took a chunk out of the Wendigo’s fender one time, and that’s the only thing I’ve ever even seen scratch the paint on this baby.”

  Darrin tried to seize on something he could understand. Briarpatch? A natural? Bears? He finally said, “Thanks for helping me,” though that hardly seemed adequate.

  Arturo shrugged. “You and me got things in common. I lost somebody, too. I lost my Marjorie, and you lost your Bridget.”

  Darrin pressed himself against the car door, away from Arturo. “How do you know about Bridget? Do you work for Ismael?”

  “Don’t know any Ismael. Is he another briarpatch boy? The way I know about you is, I read about you. Here.” Arturo drove with one hand and rummaged in the trash pile with the other, pulling out a torn scrap of paper. He handed it to Darrin, who read, in his own handwriting, things he’d never written down, about Bridget leaving him. He turned it over, but the back side was blank. “What the fuck is this?”

  “Oh, you know the briarpatch,” Arturo said, cheerful and vague, and Darrin began to realize there was some vast misunderstanding here, some knowledge Arturo assumed they shared. “I think maybe it’s a page from a diary you might’ve written, but never got around to writin’? There used to be more, but I lost it, or the Wendigo ate it, either one. The Wendigo gives me what I need. When I saw them diary pages and then met you, and realized you was the Darrin who signed your name on those diary entries—not every page, but you wrote like letters you couldn’t send, to Bridget mostly, and you signed those, just like they was regular letters—I knew I was supposed to get to know you.”

  “Supposed to?” Darrin said, chasing a minor point, unwilling to face the larger mysteries, let alone acknowledge his own ignorance. “What, like God put you in my path? Fate?”

  “I don’t think there’s any such thing as Fate. Not for me, anyway. For me, there’s only the Wendigo. And I don’t know about God. What happened to my Marjorie, it’s hard to believe in God after that. I ain’t seen God, unless God’s a ray of light, or the briarpatch itself. Here’s our exit.” He spun the wheel, and the Wendigo dropped off the edge of the road, landing with a hard thump after seconds of free fall, and suddenly the trees were gone and they were on salt flats, endlessly blank in all directions, but only for an instant. Then the Wendigo was smoothly merging into traffic on Interstate 580, less than two miles from Darrin’s home. Darrin looked in the side mirror, but there was no sign of an on-ramp or feeder road they could have come from. They’d just . . . appeared on the highway. It’s like the alley Ismael escaped into, that night with Nicholas, Darrin thought, and there was a sort of click in his head. He’d once seen an alley that didn’t properly exist. Today he’d walked into some woods that were simultaneously near his house and nowhere near it at all.

  And now, as if it were a sort of rainbow only visible from certain angles, an impossibly high and distant moon-coloured bridge shimmered into visibility high above the freeway, like an overpass for angels. Darrin had seen the same bridge for an instant that night outside the strip club, with Nicholas. He raised his hand and pointed, too breathtaken to speak.

  “I know.” Arturo leaned forward over the steering wheel and looked up at the bridge. “I’ve been tryin’ to find an on-ramp to that thing for years.” The anguish and frustration in his voice were so clear and undisguised that Darrin reached over and patted his shoulder. “Home again,” Arturo said, forced joviality in his tone, and drove the Wendigo onto the exit for Park Boulevard. One left and one right turn later he stopped the car in front of Darrin’s place. “I’ll see you around, friend. And don’t be too sad—I know Bridget left you, but maybe she’ll come back, right, realize what a good thing she had, you know?”

  Darrin stared at him. Arturo clearly knew all sorts of things, but he didn’t know everything. “Bridget . . . she’s dead. She jumped off a bridge today.”

  Arturo’s face fell. “Oh, I’m awful sorry to hear that, awful sorry. You and me are more alike than I realized.”

  “Your Marjorie . . . she killed herself?”

  “She . . . it was a car thing,” Arturo said, looking down, as ambiguous an answer as Darrin could imagine. “Ah, hell, anyway. That explains why you went stumblin’ into that nasty part of the woods. The briarpatch is what it is, but it bends around us a little, too, like a plant grows up to the sun and roots grow down to the centre of the Earth. The briarpatch sort of turns us toward misery or wonder, whichever seems to suit us best.”

  “Right.” Darrin opened the car door.

  “Better wash your shoes off with bleach,” Arturo said. “You might’ve brought some seeds or spores with you from those woods, and you don’t want some of those plants takin’ root out here, you know?”

  “Thanks.” Darrin looked down at his own shoes in a sort of bemused horror. “I’ll do that.”

  “Hey, look,” Arturo said. “Before you go. Maybe, if you got a few minutes, I think we should talk. What do you say we go get a beer?”

  Darrin opened his mouth to make a polite, reflexive refusal, but the l
ook on Arturo’s face was so hopeful that he nodded. “Sure, we can do that.”

  “Let me park the Wendigo, and we can walk,” Arturo said. “I know a place.”

  Darrin and Arturo Swap Stories

  1

  “There’s a bar about five blocks down,” Darrin said when they reached the corner of his street and Park Boulevard.

  “I know a closer place,” Arturo said. “Just across here.” He strolled toward the crosswalk, and Darrin followed with trepidation—he’d lived in this neighbourhood for years, walked every street within a few miles, and there were no bars closer than the one he’d mentioned. Not in the normal world, at least.

  Arturo reached the far side of the street and continued up the hill, past an apartment complex, and turned down a narrow footpath between apartment buildings, turning sideways to pass through the bushes crowding the pavement. Darrin began to feel hope. Maybe there was some illegal bar run out of a basement apartment; maybe they weren’t going back into the strange world he’d stumbled into earlier.

  But no. After a few more turnings, down progressively-narrower passageways between high stucco walls, they reached a wider street with cobblestones, and the air there seemed ten degrees cooler than it was everywhere else. Brick buildings lined the cobblestone street, most with their windows barred and their doors secured with chains or closed behind steel gates. Only one door stood open, and Arturo gestured. “This is the place. You’ll like it. It’s very plausible. I don’t like to go too deep without the Wendigo, but places like this, right on the outskirts, I can manage.”

  Darrin went in, relieved to see a normal tavern of the local-dive variety, with a few stools by the bar, a dusty mirror on the wall behind, one pool table back in a corner, round tables and chairs scattered throughout the room, and a jukebox against the far wall. Curiously, there were no bottles of booze lined up behind the bar, just row upon row of pint glasses on the shelves.

  Arturo led the way, and they sat on stools. The bartender eased himself away from the far end of the bar, an area darkened by a deep confluence of shadows, and approached them. He was dressed like a tavern keeper from a Western, with a white shirt and sleeve garters, and he had an impressive array of facial hair, muttonchops converging into a wild beard. His eyes were flat and incurious, and he looked past them rather than at them. “Your pleasure, gents?” His voice was soft and gentle enough for pillow talk. He nodded toward two tap handles, placing his right forefinger on a handle of flaked obsidian, and the other on a handle fashioned from a lump of amber with several bubbles trapped inside.

  “Two pints of the amber,” Arturo said quickly, and glanced at Darrin. “The, ah, darker stuff isn’t really to our taste.”

  The bartender smiled, then, a flash of teeth in the midst of his beard, and Darrin caught a glimpse of extraordinarily long and pointed canines. As the bartender drew the pints, Darrin leaned away from him, made uncomfortable by the man’s teeth. Were they filed down, or . . . ?

  He noticed then that the bartender cast no reflection in the long mirror behind the bar, while Arturo and Darrin himself showed up clearly. “Arturo, the mirror—” he began, thinking it had to be some trick. The giant he’d seen in the woods, okay, maybe it had just been some huge wild homeless man, his size magnified in Darrin’s mind by panic, but someone with fangs, who didn’t appear in a mirror—

  “S’okay,” Arturo said. “Don’t worry about it. There’s no danger. It’s just . . . one of those things.”

  The bartender set their pints before them, glasses of golden-bright liquid, like fluid light. “I’ll run you a tab.” He eased back into the shadows at the end of the bar.

  “It’s mostly plausible, anyway,” Arturo muttered and sipped his beer.

  Darrin tried to lift his glass, but his hands were shaking, and he stopped, staring at his trembling fingers. I think I’m going crazy, he thought, and it seemed like one of the few sensible thoughts he’d had all day. Seeing Bridget jump like that must have done something to him, set up some nasty resonances in his mind. How else to explain the things he’d seen since? To explain this?

  “I think I have to go,” Darrin said slowly. “I think I need to find a doctor.”

  “You’re hurt?” Arturo said, worry creasing his forehead.

  Darrin frowned. “I think I’m having some kind of an episode. I’ve been seeing things that aren’t real.” That was a relief, in a way. He could call his old therapist, and she would help him, refer him to the sort of doctor who could write him a prescription for some wonderful drugs. He and Bridget had been . . . estranged, yes . . . but he was still traumatized, still unravelling from grief at seeing her die. It was painful, but it was an explanation.

  “Oh, hell,” Arturo said softly. “This is all new to you? I thought you were, you know, a seasoned traveler, that you just stumbled onto the wrong path. But, what, today, this is your first time in the briarpatch?”

  “The briarpatch,” Darrin repeated. “You said that before.”

  Arturo nodded. “It’s what some people call, ah, the place, or the whole combination of places, the paths and roads and bridges some people can reach from this world. I dunno what it really is. I’ve heard some people say it’s God’s maintenance tunnels, or worlds that got half-built and then abandoned, or worlds that might have happened, if things had been a little different.” He glanced at the bartender. “Or, you know, a lot different. Some places in the briarpatch don’t last long, and those are the weirdest places, the ones that aren’t very plausible at all, and I’ve seen some demented shit, lemme tell you, but lots of paths are stable. You can use them to get from one place to another in this world, there are some great shortcuts, but that’s not all. The briarpatch . . . there are secrets in there, if you can get in deep enough to find them. Wonderful stuff. Dangerous stuff. But, shit, it’s big, and hard to navigate.” Arturo went silent, tipping his half-empty pint glass from side to side, watching the beer move around inside. Long speeches didn’t seem to suit him.

  “I’m leaving,” Darrin said abruptly, and stood up. “Thank you for . . . your help, whatever help you gave me, but I have to go.”

  “Drink your beer,” Arturo said. “Please, for me? I gotta pay for it, the least you can do is take a sip. It’ll help.”

  To be polite—it was easy to be polite in an unreal situation, Darrin realized, because courtesy provided structure—he took a sip.

  The beer was cold, crisp, a little hoppy, better suited to summer than autumn. But there was something else, not exactly an aftertaste, almost like the mouth-filling vapours from a good sip of cognac, but these vapours filled his mouth and his throat and his chest and the rest of his body, a sort of soothing mist inside him, and he sat back down on the stool, closing his eyes to savour it. His hands stopped shaking. “I . . . that’s wonderful beer.” Everything seemed less dire now, somehow. He lowered himself back onto the stool.

  “There’s some places in the briarpatch where you shouldn’t drink or eat anythin’.” Arturo took another gulp of his own drink, getting the ends of his long moustache damp in the process. “But other places, as long as you pay for what you drink, it’s okay, and it can make things seem a little easier.”

  “Like in fairy tales.” Darrin took another sip. The beer just tasted like a beer, now, its extraordinary quality fading into memory, but he felt less disassociated, and the clarity that had followed the first sip remained. “If you eat or drink fairy food, it makes you part of their world, somehow. That kind of thing?” The idea didn’t distress him particularly, which, he supposed, was further proof of the drink’s effectiveness.

  Arturo shrugged. “I picked up a hitchhiker in the briarpatch once—I don’t usually do that, but the Wendigo thought it was a good idea—and it was some guy who said he used to be a folklore professor, but he camped out in a fairy ring while he was doing research, and he woke up in the patch. He said all
sorts of old legends and myths could be traced back to the briarpatch, and things that came out of it, or disappeared into it. The guy talked my ear off, and I offered to give him a ride back to Minnesota—that’s where he was from, just like me—but he said no way, he was still explorin’. He just wanted to borrow some paper because he’d filled up his notebook with notes. Fortunately, in the Wendigo, one thing I’ve always got plenty of is paper.”

  Darrin nodded, only half-listening, still processing the things he’d seen. After all, the strange experiences hadn’t started today. There was the alley he’d seen Ismael vanish into, and the glimpse of a high, moon-coloured bridge. Hadn’t he always suspected there were worlds other than this, pathways and passages that went mostly unnoticed? That’s why he’d gotten involved in urban exploration in the first place, prowling through steam tunnels, abandoned factories, and condemned train stations—he was looking for places no one knew about, forgotten places, magical places. He’d given up that pursuit because one empty desolation looked much like another, and because he’d found a baseline of contentment in his relationship with Bridget. But the impulse had been there, in his constant shuffling from one temporary passion to another, always looking for the key that would unlock a universe of greater experience. He’d wanted to find a secret world behind the world.

  Bridget had felt the same urge, though she’d leaned on drugs more than Darrin ever had. Maybe that’s why she’d left him. Darrin had found the end of his rainbow in their relationship, and become excited about the idea of having a family with her, a little house in the country, babies, the whole thing. That was enough of a new world for him. He’d believed it was enough for Bridget, too . . . but he’d obviously misjudged her. And now she was dead, and in that most proverbial undiscovered country.

  “I’m still scared,” Darrin said. The fear was distant, not an immediate heart-pounding thing, but a kind of shadow of unease lying across his heart. “The beer helped, but it’s still there. I feel like I’m walking on a ledge.”