Briarpatch by Tim Pratt

by Tim Pratt

  “Yep. Heard the back door close as I opened the front. It squeaks.” She was sprawled on the big wine-red couch across from the television. The couch had been nice once, but the cushions were starting to wear, and Darrin was a long way from being able to afford a new one. Echo didn’t mind. She’d sat on worse things.

  “He just saw his girlfriend die like a few hours ago,” Nicholas said. “Where the hell did he go?”

  Echo yawned. “Probably for a walk. He’s all the time walking, he says it helps him think, though I don’t know what he thinks about, besides how shitty his life is. Maybe me. I’m fun to think about, I bet.” She stretched languidly on the couch. “Want to get to know each other, since we probably have to fuck in a day or two?”

  Nicholas finally turned to look at her, his expression one of undisguised disgust. “How is it that Darrin can’t see right through you? He’s a smart guy, I don’t get it. I understand being blinded by pussy, but shit.”

  “I can be very convincing when I need to be, Nicky.” She propped her feet on Darrin’s scarred coffee table. “Besides, I’m an honest liar. I’ve never given a damn about Darrin. What’s your excuse? Or have you been planning to screw him over since freshman year?”

  “You shut up,” Nicholas said, but there was no heat in it. He went back to his vigil.

  “No, I’m serious. I know why I’m doing this, but how did Ismael get to you? What did he promise you?”

  “He said he’d kill me if I didn’t help him,” Nicholas said.

  Echo burst out laughing, and laughed harder when Nicholas hunched his shoulders and twisted, as if to turn even farther away from her. “What-ever,” she said. “Ismael doesn’t kill people. He just outlives them. Seriously, what’s on the table for you? Darrin tells me stories about you two, you know, about how you saved his ass by paying his rent for two months when his financial aid got delayed, about how he helped you pass your math classes, about all those drunk and stormy nights you spent together in college. You guys’ve got history, and you’re just pissing on that. I mean, getting the guy fired is one thing, at least you could do that in secret, but you didn’t say boo when Ismael told you the next step in his little plan, and that’s going to be it for you and Darrin—”

  “Shut the fuck up, Echo.” Nicholas got up off the couch, looming over her, fists clenched at his sides. “You don’t get to judge me.”

  “Ooh, big strong man.” She looked up at him, noting the sweat on his forehead, the frown lines that were someday going to be etched permanently on his face. Echo almost never frowned. Her face was one of her weapons, and wrinkles would weaken that. “Going to hit me if I keep mouthing off? You’ll be pissing through a tube if you try it, and we’ll just have to fake part two of Ismael’s plan.”

  The front door rattled. Echo blew Nicholas a kiss, then fixed her face into a well-practiced look of concern. She listened to the thump as Darrin trudged up the stairs, and when he stepped into the doorway—looking like he’d been rolling in dirt and leaves, but hey, we all grieve in our own way—he stared at her blankly for a moment, then at Nicholas, then back at her again. His expression was abstracted, the deeply interior look he got when he was mulling over some project or processing new information.

  “Honey,” Echo said.

  “Bro,” Nicholas said.

  “Bridget is dead.” Darrin turned, abruptly, and walked toward his office.

  Echo lifted her eyebrow, and Nicholas made a “go ahead” gesture. She rose, smoothed her skirt (pleated, flannel, the schoolgirl thing, because it pushed Nicholas’s buttons, and Echo loved sending mixed signals), and went after Darrin. He sat at his desk, chin in his hands, staring at something on his screen.

  “What happened?” She stepped behind him, massaging his shoulders. He was beyond tense—his knots had knots. He smelled a little like beer—that was understandable—and like dirt and leaves, which was weirder, but whatever. The image on the screen was Bridget, standing on the Golden Gate Bridge, leaning over the railing. Echo had never met her, though she’d seen her leaving Ismael’s house a few times, while Echo spied on them from across the street. That was back when she just knew Ismael was a weirdo, before she figured out he was even weirder than she could have imagined.

  Darrin gradually relaxed, letting himself lean back in the chair. “I don’t know. I went out to the bridge, to take some photos, and there she was. Bridget. Before I could say anything to her, she just . . .”

  “Fell?” Echo said. Enjoying it, careful not to show it.

  “Jumped. She jumped.”

  “That photo is from today?”

  He nodded. “Just . . . god, just hours ago.”

  She stroked his hair. “Oh, Darrin, that’s terrible. I had no idea she was so . . . troubled. But you can’t blame yourself. It’s not your fault—”

  “I don’t blame myself,” he said, more fiercely than she’d heard him say anything, ever, in the three months they’d been together. “I blame him.” He clicked his mouse, and the image on the screen zoomed larger, centred on a figure in the background, behind Bridget. A pale man, with lank dark hair.

  “Who’s that?” Like she didn’t know. This was interesting.

  “His name is Ismael Plenty. Bridget was . . . seeing him. After she left me. Before she left me too, I think.”

  She was seeing him, Echo thought, but she wasn’t fucking him. At least, not regularly. Ismael didn’t fuck many people these days, and when he did, it was only when they’d decided to die soon anyway. Ismael was immortal—to the limits of current experimental data, anyway—but that didn’t mean he was clean. He probably had weird STDs that had died out during the Middle Ages, still lively in his blood and brain, not doing any permanent damage to him, swimming around confused in his not-quite-normal innards. It was only luck that he didn’t have the plague, or smallpox, or some other population-decimating illness. Luck, or the good offices of the briarpatch. He never seemed to contract anything deadly. The briarpatch probably flung him across the world if he tried to stick his cock in someone with anything too dangerous. Maybe that’s why he’d never fucked Echo. She didn’t have any deadly STDs, but she was dangerous in other ways.

  “This guy,” Darrin said. “He watched her jump. He came like, like a spectator. Or a cheerleader. She never talked about killing herself when she was with me. I think he did something to her. Like, got her into a cult, or something, made her go all Jonestown, all Heaven’s Gate, I don’t know what.”

  Getting warmer, Echo thought. Ismael had talked to her about the idea of starting a cult (except he called it a “group of like-minded seekers”), trying to show the light to a bunch of people all at once instead of one at a time, but he was more focused on Darrin as a way to achieve his own goals right now.

  “I’m going to get answers, though,” Darrin said grimly.

  “Oh? How will you do that?”

  “I’ll look for Ismael. Someone must know him. Bridget couldn’t have cut ties with all her friends. I’ll start by asking them, and if that doesn’t work . . . hell, I’ll enhance this photo, I’ll put it online, I’ll put it on flyers and hang them all over the city, with a headline that says ‘Do you know this man?’ I’ll offer a reward. I’ll find him.”

  Echo leaned down, putting her ear close to his, and whispered: “And what will you do, once you find him?” Darrin talking this way was actually making her kind of hot.

  “I’ll make him answer me,” Darrin said, and there was something dark and sure in his voice, a tempered steel certainty.

  Oh, Ismael had fucked up. Echo couldn’t wait to see him try to tap dance and chatterbox his way out of this mistake. He’d been working all this time to break Darrin, to push him into the depths of despair and grief and send him stumbling into the briarpatch, where Ismael could follow him . . . and find access to new paths, ones that would open for Darrin. Paths th
at Ismael hoped might lead to his stupid better world. Instead, he’d let Darrin discover his existence, and given Darrin a mission. Bridget’s introduction to the briarpatch had only ever been a tool, a way for Ismael to take her away from Darrin and open his eyes to the broader world beyond, to pathways Ismael couldn’t find on his own. But it was a tool that had turned in Ismael’s hand. Now Darrin was hunting him. It was almost funny. No, it was funny. Echo remembered her role just in time to stop herself from laughing.

  “I’ll help you find him,” Echo said.

  “We both will,” Nicholas said from the doorway. “I still owe that Eurotrash fucker a beating from that night at the strip club. We’ll find out what he did to Bridget.”

  “Thank you.” Darrin took Echo’s hand in his own. “I don’t know what I’d do without the two of you.”

  Poor stupid Darrin, Echo thought. Nicholas has been screwing you over for months and months. At least when I screw you, you get an orgasm out of the deal. “But we’ll start tomorrow,” Echo said. “You should take a shower, Darrin. I’ll join you, and try to take your mind off this. And Nicholas will run out and get us some drinks, won’t you Nicky?”

  He frowned, but nodded. “Sure. I’ll get that chocolate stout you like, Darrin. We’ll have like . . . a little wake for Bridget, you know? How’s that sound?”

  “Sounds good,” Darrin said. He stood up and embraced Nicholas, briefly, in an awkward one-armed man-hug. “Thanks. Bro.”

  “No problem.” Nicholas hurried away. Echo wondered if he was embarrassed, ashamed, or pleased with his own acting job.

  No matter. She had a job of her own, now. She kissed Darrin’s cheek, and began to undress him. “Wow, babe. You’re filthy.”

  “I went for a walk. Got a little lost in a patch of trees. Too many drinks I guess.” There was something strange in his tone, and he seemed beyond distracted, his mind a thousand miles away, but with everything he’d been through, it was no wonder he was acting weird.

  And he had no idea that things were probably only going to get worse.

  2

  Echo made Ismael kneel and kiss her patent-leather shoes before she’d tell him anything. He performed the act with his usual infinite weariness and dignity, licking from toes to buckle and back again. One of these days she’d make him really abase himself, but she didn’t think it would matter. As he liked to tell her, he’d been through several forms of hell—he’d pretended to be a corpse under a pile of dead soldiers, face down in a mud composed of blood and shit; he’d been attacked by dogs at the behest of German soldiers who thought he was a Jew; he’d been chained and staked out in the sun on a salt flat by an ex-lover who’d wrongly believed he was a vampire, and he’d roasted there until he came close enough to death for the briarpatch to save him. Compared to those and a million other miseries, kissing boots or drinking piss or verbally abusing himself was nothing. His patience in the face of her humiliations was annoying, but at least it was a challenge. Life presented few enough of those to her.

  When he was done, she flopped down in a beanbag chair and reached for the bong. “So ask,” she said.

  “Why didn’t you stay with Darrin? I didn’t expect you until later.”

  She shrugged. “I blew him in the shower, and hung out for a while. When I left, him and Nicholas were looking at old photo albums and shooting the shit. I told Darrin I had an early shift tomorrow and kissed him goodbye. You know, he never cares if I sleep over? And he fucking tosses and turns when I do stay over. Did he do that with Bridget?”

  “She never mentioned,” Ismael said. “What did you and Nicholas determine about his emotional state?”

  “Well, I think maybe he was in the briarpatch, before he came up the stairs. He had dirt and leaves all over him, and one of the knees was torn out of his pants. So either he went into the briarpatch, or he fell down in a park somewhere. Who can say?”

  “I see. That’s promising. Anything else?”

  Echo grinned. “Oh, yeah. You’re fucked. You’re Darrin’s public enemy number only. He got a photo of Bridget right before she jumped, with you in the background, and he’s convinced you’re some cult recruiter who convinced Bridget to kill herself. It’s a crazy idea, but, I mean, he’s basically right.”

  “Cults believe they have knowledge of a true revelation, but they do not.” Ismael rose from his knees and seating himself on the couch. “But the path I showed Bridget is a true one. It’s an important difference. Bridget was not a cultist. She was my student.”

  “Yeah. You’re sure you’re right. Unlike every other cult in the history of the world.”

  Ismael ignored the jibe. “What does Darrin intend to do with this knowledge?”

  “Hunt you down. He’ll do it, too. He’s got your photo, and it’s not like you’re all that inconspicuous. Hell, it’ll probably only take him a couple of weeks. The question is, what will you do?”

  “I always intended to reveal myself to Darrin. In the depths of the briarpatch, I thought—I could step in and save him from some trivial danger, or guide him toward a place of sweet water and fruit, be a mentor to him. That plan was . . . made difficult . . . when he met me outside the strip club.”

  “Why the fuck did Nicholas point you out to him anyway?” She took a hit off the bong, and the smoke made everything feel lighter.

  “He was trying to show initiative.” Ismael twisted his mouth. “He didn’t believe that Darrin was suffering enough from the loss of Bridget, and he feared that even losing his job wouldn’t make Darrin too sad, since he didn’t much care for the work. He thought Darrin’s suffering would be increased if he believed Bridget had left him for another man. I was the logical choice to blame. Nicholas didn’t share this plan with me, of course, and I never told him I intended to introduce myself to Darrin someday. A measure of the blame is mine, I suppose.”

  “Nicholas is a moron.”

  “True,” Ismael said. “But he is a key to Darrin—someone close to his heart, but corruptible. If I could have made Bridget betray Darrin, I would have, but she would never have agreed. So I seduced her away, and showed her the light instead. She was actually a good candidate for transition. I was sad when her death was only a death, and not a passage to peace forever.”

  “Yeah, it’s a tragedy.” Echo stared up at the ceiling, daydreaming. Maybe she could make Ismael lick her asshole. She liked that, and nobody had done it for her in weeks. Ah, the pot was making it hard to focus. She tried. “But what do you do now? What’s plan B? Or C?

  “If Darrin merely believes I was sleeping with Bridget, that is inconvenient, but not insurmountable. If he believes I convinced Bridget to kill herself . . . it will be difficult to gain his trust.” Ismael steepled his fingers and stared off into the middle distance. “Difficult. But I see a possibility. I think we will proceed as planned. I need Darrin to be wholly unsupported, to have the only sure pillars in his life—Nicholas, and, to a certain extent, you—torn away from him. Then he will be able to see the briarpatch more clearly, and new passages will open for him, to lead him out of his torment.”

  “And maybe he’ll find this northwest passage you’re always going on about?”

  “The overland route. Yes. It is possible.” Ismael had that faraway look in his eyes that Echo hated. She wanted people in her presence paying attention to her.

  “So when do we do the deed?”

  “Tomorrow, I think. We must find some pretext to get Darrin out of the house, to allow you and Nicholas time to . . . prepare. Can you arrange that?”

  “Easy,” Echo said. She already had a good idea how. Ismael wouldn’t like it, but she wasn’t planning on telling him the details.

  Orville Takes a Bite

  1

  “Nice place,” Bridget said. “Sort of lacks character though.”

  Orville sat in a swaybacked armchair beside a
dusty bookshelf. “Like me, you mean?” he asked, dull and exhausted. This had been the longest day of his life. Bridget had found a path that took them near his apartment, but he’d still had to walk two blocks barefoot in a hospital gown—he was lucky no one had seen him and called the police. He was in his own clothes now, which helped, but only a little.

  “Oh, you’re a character all right.” Bridget wandered through his sparsely-furnished in-law unit of an apartment, peering at the one thumbtacked poster on the wall—a flyer for a play he’d had a bit part in during his one semester at college, before a lack of funds and talent made him give up his dreams of acting. Orville had never really loved drama anyway. What he’d loved was the idea of being someone else.

  “I’m starving.” Orville stood and walked past Bridget—wondering if he could walk right through her—into his tiny kitchen.

  Bridget moaned. “Food. Food. Don’t even talk to me about food, Troll. I’m never going to taste anything ever again. If I’d passed through into that other world it wouldn’t matter, I’d be a god eating light and shitting stars, but here and now all I can think about is a big dish of vanilla ice cream with hot fudge and crushed walnuts. God, it’s killing me just thinking about it.”

  Cry me a river, Orville thought. He hadn’t tasted anything since he was six months old and his stepfather threw him headfirst against the fireplace. But he didn’t expect to get sympathy from Bridget, so she didn’t tell her about his ageusia. She’d just remind him that he was alive, and she wasn’t, so what did he possibly have to complain about? “In some of the stories about . . . um . . . what you are, I mean, ghosts, I guess . . . you can burn food, and the ghosts can eat it, somehow . . .”

  “Good luck burning ice cream,” Bridget said, sitting (or appearing to sit) in Orville’s chair.

  He opened the fridge and peered inside. He hadn’t done his shopping this week, since he’d expected to be dead. He sniffled and wiped his runny nose with the back of his hand.