Briarpatch by Tim Pratt

by Tim Pratt

  Echo growled. “Are we going idiot hunting?”

  “No. If Darrin is out of his house, we should join Nicholas and prepare. If we run into Orville again, however, you needn’t hesitate to kill him. You’re sure Darrin will be gone for some time?”

  “Sure as I can be.”

  “We’ll go through the briarpatch to meet Nicholas. It will be faster. Lock the front door. I’ll get the back.”

  They met in the living room. Ismael took Echo’s hand—she couldn’t even glimpse the briarpatch without his help, much less enter it. Fortunately, once inside, he didn’t have to keep holding her hand—touching Echo was like holding a sleeping rattlesnake. The sense of imminent danger was constant. She couldn’t find her way out of the briarpatch without help either, and if she ever became too problematic, he might strand her there, though that was dangerous, too. Long exposure to the briarpatch could change people, as anyone who encountered one of the bears knew. He didn’t like the idea of encountering a wandering, half-mad Echo in the briarpatch at some future date.

  They stepped through space, into a dank, dripping stone hallway, which would lead them by and by to Darrin’s neighbourhood, and from there to the next phase of Ismael’s search for a world of beautiful light.

  3

  “I’m sorry I ran away,” Orville said. He sat with his back against a smooth black boulder, the only feature on an otherwise perfectly level salt flat that stretched as far as he could see in all directions. The sky was a sort of perpetual dusk, but even without direct sunlight, the whiteness all around was almost too bright to look upon. When he’d fled headlong into the briarpatch, this was where he’d ended up, in the lee of a black rock. “That woman was going to shoot me.”

  “No, you did the right thing.” Bridget lay sprawled on her back, her coat appearing redder than ever against the white, like something freshly killed. “I don’t know who that woman is, but she didn’t look like the type to shy away from killing.”

  “Ismael was . . . different than I expected. He seemed almost sad for you, until he tried to have me killed.”

  “I think he was sad for me, but he didn’t want to help me. I’m the past to him. He considers me a failure, and now he’s moved on. But I can’t move on.”

  “What do you think he meant, about the land of the dead?”

  “Don’t know. Probably a landfill for ghosts, some little pocket hell for uneasy spirits. Doesn’t sound like a place I’d want to visit. I’ve stood in the reflected radiance of the light of a better world, and I’m not going anywhere but there.”

  “Okay. But . . . what do we do now?”

  “They’re planning to do something to Darrin. I don’t know what, or why, but I intend to find out. We should go over to his house, I think. So we can warn him. Or so you can, since I have no idea if he’ll be able to see me or not.”

  Orville nodded. “What Ismael said, about how you hadn’t let go of the real world sufficiently to enter the better world . . . do you think that’s true?”

  “I never know what to think about what Ismael says. He doesn’t always lie, but he doesn’t always tell the truth, either. I guess it’s possible, sure. I thought I’d let everything go, turned my back on my old life, but maybe I’m not as good at letting go as I thought. Anyway, I’ll find another way. We’ll find another way. We’ll make it to the light.”

  Orville wondered, if he killed himself, would he still see the light? Or had this past day and a half spent with Bridget changed him, made him more attached to this world? Certainly smell and taste and sex were still new pleasures that overwhelmed him with delight. And there was more, too. He wanted to help Bridget. He felt needed. That was new, and Ismael would probably consider it a terrible chain, binding him to the world. But Orville was happy for the connection.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said, sitting up. “Darrin needs our help.”

  Orville considered saying no. This wasn’t his fight, and he was already so fond of Bridget that he didn’t relish the thought of going to see her ex-boyfriend, especially with shotgun-wielding maniacs in the equation. But he wouldn’t even have this life without her, so he owed her—and she could probably make his life unpleasant if he didn’t do as she asked. Being followed at all times of the day and night by a furious woman no one else could see or hear would be miserable.

  And if he helped her, she might be grateful.

  4

  Darrin stood outside the house. It was one of the many rundown residences in the area, white paint peeling, roof shingles askew, grass half-dead, overgrown. Ismael Plenty didn’t strike Darrin as the type to care much about lawn maintenance, so maybe this was his place. There was no name on the mailbox, and when Darrin opened it, there were no envelopes inside, either, so he couldn’t be sure this was the right place. Nothing for it but to knock on the door, and if Ismael answered . . .he would improvise.

  Darrin banged on the door a few times, to no avail. Either nobody was home, or nobody was answering. He touched the doorknob, hesitant, then gave it a turn. To his surprise, the door opened. This wasn’t a neighbourhood where people generally left their doors unlocked. Darrin paused on the threshold, called “Hello?” a few times, then sighed and stepped inside. He’d come this far.

  The dim foyer smelled of dust and old sweat. Dozens of coats hung on the hooks inside the door, and dozens of shoes lay piled on the floor. He went through the living room, where cushions lay scattered all around a big hookah. Darrin went down a hallway strewn with old clothes. Pushing open a creaking door, he entered a room lined with dressers and sea-chests, all filled with more clothes, in a variety of sizes and styles from the past few decades—it was like a thrift-store graveyard. Eyes watering from the dust, he started snooping.

  Darrin tried to do a reasonably meticulous search to uncover some evidence of the nature of Ismael’s relationship with Bridget. Letters, pictures, a date planner, anything at all would have helped, but it was dispiriting work. Every drawer seemed stuffed with jangling tangles of junk, from paperclips to strings of fake pearls. He pulled down dusty shoeboxes from closet shelves only to find them full of ancient parking citations and the presumably losing tickets from long-ago horse races. The chests mostly held mothballs and clothing so old it was neither fashionable nor unfashionable, just dusty and threadbare. He spent fifteen minutes poking around, finding nothing of interest, before deciding he had to move on—he couldn’t spend forever searching.

  He moved on to the master bedroom. The bed was an impressive four-poster, but swaybacked, sagging in the middle. A desk, heaped with papers, stood against one wall, and Darrin picked through the contents. Old bills, letters in French, and faded postcards. He pulled out the drawers, rifling through the old paperclips and dried-up inkwells. He was about to give it up as another room full of useless detritus—but then he found a drawer full of photos. These weren’t yellowed photos from some long-forgotten family’s album—they weren’t even actually photographs at all—but printouts of digital pictures, printed in black-and-white on low-quality paper.

  They were photos of Darrin and Bridget, taken last year. Darrin even remembered the day, a picnic by the lake, but there had been no one there taking pictures—at least, no one they’d seen. Darrin’s face was circled in red, and written on the back, rather cryptically, the words “Another brother?” Darrin dug through the desk further, but didn’t find anything else about himself. Why did Ismael have photos of him? Could there be more to this than just seducing Bridget away and brainwashing her?

  The invasion of privacy implied by these photos—the stalkerness of it—was profoundly unsettling. Darrin had often felt, in recent months, as if events were conspiring against him, but maybe it was more than that. Maybe a person was conspiring against him. The numbness he’d felt after seeing Bridget die was increasingly replaced by confusion and anger, hot feelings superseding the cold, and he wonde
red, if he got angry enough, would he be able to avoid feeling grief entirely? He’d always coped with his problems by throwing himself into some project or hobby―from urban exploring to geocaching―maybe he could turn some of that capacity for obsession to a useful task: finding out what the hell was going on here. Who was Ismael Plenty? What did he have to do with Bridget’s death?

  And the question that photo brought up: what did he want with Darrin?

  He considered waiting around for Ismael to show up, but after a few minutes of pacing in the man’s filthy bedroom, he became uncomfortable. What if Ismael found him here? He’d be perfectly within his rights to call the police, or even to shoot Darrin. So what if the front door had been unlocked? It was still breaking and entering. Better to sit on Ismael’s front steps and wait there. He went back to the living room, and stepped on something half-hidden by the cushions. He slipped and almost fell, then caught sight of the gleaming shotgun on the floor. He bent down to look at it and reached out, almost touching it before coming to his senses—he didn’t want to leave his fingerprints on some stranger’s weapon. What kind of nutcase left a gun on the floor in a room where they also did drugs?

  A cross-breeze ruffled his hair, and Darrin looked up, heart thudding, sure the front door had opened—where else could the breeze have come from in this claustrophobic place?

  But the front door wasn’t open. Instead, he saw corridors all around him, five tunnels branching off from this room, passages that had been invisible—or, at least, unnoticed—a moment before. They must be paths into the place Arturo called the briarpatch, which meant—what? That Ismael had something to do with that place too?

  Darrin was out of his depth here. He was no detective. He didn’t even like mystery novels. He had a good mind for systems—chess, coding, music, cooking—but he faltered when it came to matters of art and intuition, which was why so many of his photographs were technically proficient but lacked that indefinable aspect that made light and shapes into art.

  So . . . was the briarpatch a system, or an art? Could it be deciphered, or must it be interpreted?

  He took a step toward the nearest corridor, and his perspective shifted—he was looking down, as if from a great height, onto a salt-white plain, marred by a speck of black and speck of red. There was no sense of scale, so he couldn’t tell if the black and red were bits of blood and pepper on a tablecloth, or mountains on a salt flat. The vertigo of standing upright and looking down was too much, so he retreated to the centre of the living room again. Those passageways had an allure, but he remembered the beast from the bone pit, and his curiosity was dampened.

  He’d come here to find evidence of Ismael’s complicity in Bridget’s death, and had instead found intimations of something more vast. Darrin had never been one to rush into things without sufficient information—he was a researcher, a devotee, a student by nature. He preferred to be prepared, and now he needed guidance. When he got home, he’d look for Arturo, and ask for his help. If he encountered Ismael now, what would he say, what would he do?

  Darrin eased past the twisting passageways, toward the front door, and out into the brightness of the ordinary world.

  Nicholas Gets Caught With His Pants Down

  1

  “Oh, fuck me sideways.” Ismael stopped dead on the sidewalk and leaned heavily against the stucco wall of an apartment building.

  “What are you on about?” Echo said, frowning. Ismael was usually placid, infuriatingly so, but now he was almost shivering. They were less than a block from Darrin’s house, and Nicholas was already there, waiting for them.

  Ismael extended his arm and pointed at a car parked by the curb. It was an off-white, battered four-door giant of a sedan with curiously bulging tail lights, and Echo had a vague recollection of seeing it around here before. Somebody had probably abandoned it.

  “What about it?” she asked, walking toward it. She reached out and touched the trunk, and Ismael sucked in a breath suddenly, as if he’d just watched her plunge her hand into fire. She looked at him curiously, wondering if his face was paler than usual or if it was just a trick of the light.

  “Wendigo.” She frowned at the name on the trunk. She’d been stealing cars since she got her learner’s permit, and she’d never heard of a Wendigo, but then, she never bothered to steal anything this old. She walked around the side and looked in the window, and saw the back seat was filled completely with papers. The passenger seat up front was filled with papers that spilled over into the driver’s side. She jiggled the door handle, but it was locked.

  “Don’t touch it,” Ismael said, hoarsely, as if just finding his voice. “I know you don’t have a death wish, Echo, so get away from that thing.”

  “Thing? It’s called a car, Ismael.” She rejoined him on the sidewalk. “They invented ’em about a hundred years ago. Detroit rolling iron, and it’d be a real bitch to parallel park, but I bet it’s a smooth ride, assuming the suspension isn’t shot.”

  “That is not a car,” Ismael said. “At least, that’s not all it is. It’s a fucking apport. The biggest one I’ve ever seen. So big it makes my head ache.” He levered himself off the wall and stood upright, but only to take a step away from the Wendigo. “That car is from some other Detroit, where ghouls work the night shift in the auto plants and there are alien graveyards on the moon.”

  “Oh yeah?” Echo said, somewhat interested. “So it’s briarpatch shit, is what you’re saying? A really unlikely car? If it bothers you so much, we can set it on fire. Smash a window, spray some accelerant on all those papers in the back, and light a match. Whoosh. No more scary car.”

  “Echo, I don’t even think it would burn.” Ismael backed up farther, then started across the street toward the opposite sidewalk.

  Echo sighed and followed. “It’s not going to bite you, Ismael.”

  He paused for a moment, clearly still uncomfortable, even with the width of the street between himself and the Wendigo. “You actually have no idea whether or not that is true,” he said, then continued up the street, hurrying as she’d never seen him hurry. Not quite running—he didn’t strike her as much of a runner—but coming awfully close. She glanced back at the Wendigo. From the front, it looked stranger, with pop-eyed headlights and a great chrome grille that seemed caught halfway between a smile and a snarl.

  Echo grinned back at it.

  “All right,” Ismael said a minute later. He glanced back down the block. “We’re out of that car . . . that Wendigo’s sightlines, assuming it can see. This will do.”

  “What will do?” Echo asked. They were almost directly across from Darrin’s house, near the walled courtyard of a small apartment complex.

  Ismael took her hand and pointed. With him touching her, she could see the briarpatch, and there was an entry point here, a set of steep, narrow stairs leading down to a bush-lined path. She grunted. “There’s blood on the steps.” A splash of red marked the concrete halfway down.

  “Does that bother you? I was under the impression you rather liked blood.”

  He let go of her hand, and the steps vanished from sight. That irked Echo, as always. Ismael said that most people, once shown the briarpatch, could see it by themselves forever after, or at the very least catch glimpses. It was an effort for them not to see the secret corridors into the liminal world, he said. But no matter how many times Ismael showed her that world, or how many times she ventured into it even, it was closed to her without help. Ismael said it was because she was too much a creature of the physical, the present, the here-and-now—too much a woman of flesh and appetites. Echo didn’t disagree with that assessment, but it pissed her off that things she considered her signal virtues kept her from exploring that other world on her own. When Echo was pissed off, she tried to hurt the things that pissed her off, but in this case, that meant somehow hurting the fundamental substructure of the world, and she wasn’t su
re yet how to go about that. She was confident that she’d figure it out eventually though. “So you’ll hide on the steps, then, and wait for Darrin?”

  “That is the plan. Just make sure he has good reason to flee.”

  “Oh, he’ll run off. Believe me. He loves Nicholas like a brother, and he’ll be more sad than pissed off, I bet. I doubt it’s going to turn into a crime of passion in there. But what if he, you know, sees you on the steps? He can see into the other world and all that shit, right?”

  “It’s possible,” Ismael admitted. “But the stairs are steep, and I’m good at being inconspicuous.”

  “Whatever,” Echo said. “I don’t see why all this emotional trauma is necessary, if he can already see the briarpatch.”

  “I need him to be broken,” Ismael said simply, “so that I can convince him only I can put him back together again. He must have nothing left holding him to this world, so that nothing will prevent him from entering another for as long as it takes.”

  “Ah,” Echo said. “Okay. I think you just like fucking with people’s heads. That’s all right. I can respect that. So after you talk to Darrin, assuming he doesn’t bash your brains out on the curb because of what happened with Bridget, we’ll meet you later on, back at your house?”

  “Yes. I’ll determine whether or not Darrin needs another . . . jolt to his system, to fully loosen his ties to this world.”

  “Cool,” Echo said. “Because, like I said, you owe me big time for this, and I mean to collect.”

  “I can’t wait. Now, go. Don’t keep Nicholas waiting.”

  Echo sniffed. Ismael vanished from sight, stepping down onto a stairway she couldn’t see. She really needed to do something about her inability to navigate the briarpatch, but if it meant cultivating a Zen-like detachment from, or even a burning hatred for, this world, it probably wasn’t worth it.