Briarpatch by Tim Pratt

by Tim Pratt

  “That’s bullshit,” Nicholas said. “Ismael owes me. He’s supposed to show me how to live forever.”

  “Somebody better tell me what the dead girl said,” Echo demanded.

  Orville hurriedly translated Bridget’s words, and Echo curled her hands into fists. “That fucker. He owes me too. He can’t do this to us.”

  “Ismael doesn’t bother to pay his debts,” Bridget said. “He just outlives them. I feel bad about letting Ismael trick me, but at least he tricked you two idiots as well. Yeah, go to his house, hang out and wait for him. You’ll be waiting until you die of old age.” She shook her head while Orville relayed her words to Echo.

  “She’s right,” Nicholas said, looking gobsmacked. “Why would he come back? I just assumed, he comes and goes all the time, but . . . he’s over there now. He’s searching. He doesn’t need anything else.”

  Bridget rose. “Come on, Orville. We’re going into the briarpatch to find them. Once Darrin finds out how Ismael fucked with his life, that he had a part in my death, he won’t help him anymore. Revenge isn’t much, but it’s all I’ve got right now.”

  “Darrin already knows Ismael is involved,” Nicholas said. “He saw Ismael on the bridge when you jumped, and they’d met once before, so he knew you guys were spending time together. It’s not going to be a big crushing revelation.”

  Bridget blinked. “But . . . why would Darrin help him, if he knew Ismael had a hand in my death?”

  That’s got to hurt, Orville thought.

  Nicholas shrugged. “I think he was going to tell Darrin he could find you, like your spirit, in the briarpatch. Or tell him you’d gone to the better world, and that if Darrin helped him find the pathway there, you’d be waiting for him. Darrin loves you a lot more than he hates Ismael.”

  “Then I’m definitely going to find him,” Bridget said. “Darrin’s been lied to long enough.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Nicholas said, standing up.

  “Who’s going where?” Echo demanded.

  “No,” Bridget said. “Fuck you, Nicholas. I don’t need you or want you with us.”

  “Please, Bridget, he’s my friend, I didn’t mean for it to go down this way—”

  “No,” she said. “Orville, let’s go.”

  Orville nodded. This was all very confusing, but it was a lot more interesting than working the phones at his old job, so he couldn’t complain. Bridget went down the stairs, and Orville followed. The last sound he heard before closing the front door behind him was Echo and Nicholas arguing.

  4

  “Sure, I can see the briarpatch,” Nicholas said. “Not well, I haven’t been there often, but yeah, Ismael took me enough times that I got a sense of it. But what do I want to go in there by myself for? Or with you? I’d get eaten by fucking bears or fall down a bottomless pit or something. With a guide, sure, somebody like Bridget who’s been there a lot, I’d have a shot, but by myself?” He punched his own thigh, hard. “Fuck. I can’t believe Ismael did this to me. But no, I won’t take you in there.”

  “I can’t go by myself, Nicky,” Echo said, trying to keep her cool. “I need you.”

  “Go to hell, psycho. We’re done.”

  “I will kill you if you don’t help me,” Echo said. She’d never actually killed anyone, but Nicholas probably believed she had. She was certainly capable of killing someone, but so far the risks had always seemed to outweigh the rewards.

  Nicholas just stared at her. “You can try it, but you don’t have the element of surprise with me, Echo. I know what you are. And I won’t hesitate to put you down myself if I get the chance.”

  They stared at each other for a moment, until finally Echo spat on the floor. “Shit. You’d be worthless in there anyway.” She’d suddenly had a better idea. Nicholas might be able to get into the briarpatch, but he’d stumble around blindly for a while and then get lost. She needed a guide with more experience, someone who knew the secret byways of that strange world. And, because luck was always on Echo’s side, she had an idea where to find just such a guide. “Take care, Nicky. See you around.”

  “Not if I see you first,” he muttered.

  Echo went into the kitchen, took Darrin’s biggest, sharpest butcher knife, slipped it into her purse so only the handle was showing, and went down the back stairs.

  5

  Arturo strolled back up Park Boulevard, hoping the Wendigo would see fit to cough up a little cash again tonight. Since getting thrown out of the bar with the mutton-chopped bartender, he’d been reduced to spending most of his waking hours at a bar a few blocks down, by the Parkway theatre, and they demanded real money in exchange for booze, as opposed to a pinprick of blood like the other place had taken.

  When Arturo reached the corner, he saw right away the Wendigo had turned itself around—the headlights were pointed toward him. Arturo swore. The Wendigo was known to drive itself, so maybe it had just executed a neat three-point-turn in the wide residential street and re-parked itself, but Arturo didn’t think so. He wasn’t particularly prone to the metaphysical, and had always been reckoned a practical, hard-headed man by his friends and family, but he understood the Wendigo was more than just a car—being a car was a convenience for it. Arturo didn’t think it bothered with the brute business of moving around on the street. He thought it just reversed direction, quick as a blink, modifying reality to suit its needs.

  Anyway, how was less important than why. The Wendigo was finally pointed away from Darrin’s house, and at the street—pointed out, which meant maybe they were ready to go. Arturo didn’t know what had changed, but he put his trust in the Wendigo. It had never steered him wrong.

  He reached the car and put his hand on the door. Suddenly something cold pressed against his throat, just below his chin, and he went still. Unless Arturo was very much mistaken, someone had a knife to his throat.

  “I’m Echo,” said a pleasant female voice right in his ear. “What’s your name?”

  “Arturo,” he said, trying not to open his mouth too wide when he spoke, afraid of getting cut. Then, because politeness was a reflex, he mumbled “Pleasedtomeetcha.”

  “Likewise.”

  Arturo wondered if she was going to cut him. Slashing a throat was harder than most people realized—there were a lot of tough muscles in the neck—but death was still pretty likely if she left him bleeding.

  “You’re going to take me for a ride,” Echo said, and Arturo almost laughed, he was so relieved. “Go around and open the passenger door.” The knife left his throat, only to prod him between the shoulder blades. “I won’t hurt you if you behave, but I’m still close enough to bury this in your kidneys.”

  Maybe one kidney, Arturo thought. Anatomy probably wasn’t her strong point. He walked around the back of the car, his unseen carjacker staying close behind. He didn’t even think about running, or fighting back. If she wanted to get into the Wendigo, he wouldn’t stop her. The Wendigo had its own ways of dealing with unwelcome passengers. “Open the door,” she said, and Arturo did. “Empty the crap out.” He pulled on the tottering pile of paper that filled the passenger seat, sending reams of brightly coloured paper spilling out onto the street. He felt a twinge of guilt, but knew the Wendigo’s papers would disappear before they could get stuck in gutters or tangled among tree branches.

  Eventually the seat was clear—mostly—and Echo told him to get in and scoot across the seat to the driver’s side. He did, and got his first glimpse of her, though she kept the knife angled so she could slice out his eye with a single thrust. “You’re Darrin’s girl,” he said. “Well, hell, I didn’t realize he was datin’ the criminal element.”

  “Quiet, walrus.” She slid into the seat beside him, keeping her knife handy.

  Arturo frowned. Was that a crack about his moustache, or his weight?

  Echo glanced a
round, then reached for the door handle.

  That’s it, Arturo thought. Shut the door. Once she was closed in, the Wendigo would do . . . whatever it did to unwelcome passengers. He turned his face away, closed his eyes, and listened to the door click shut.

  Silence. Then “I said be quiet, not avert your eyes.” She sounded more amused than angry.

  Arturo looked at her. She still had the knife held at the ready. The Wendigo wasn’t eating her, which meant the Wendigo wanted her to be here. Which meant Arturo did too, whether he liked it or not.

  “You don’t need the knife. You’re welcome here.”

  “Oh, really? Look, walrus, I’d just leave you in a ditch somewhere, but I’m guessing it takes more than a key and a full tank of gas to get the most out of this car.”

  “True enough. And my name is Arturo, not walrus. Where do you want to go?” He turned the key and the Wendigo growled to itself as the engine turned over.

  “Into the briarpatch.” She said it with great relish, as if delivering the scene-ending line in a movie.

  “Well, yeah,” Arturo said. “But where in the briarpatch?”

  For a moment, the pretty woman beside him lost her sly, self-satisfied expression, and revealed a face of total bafflement. “I need to find Ismael.”

  “Don’t know him.”

  “He’s . . . did you say you know Darrin? Ismael is with Darrin.”

  The Wendigo’s engine revved, though Arturo hadn’t pressed the accelerator. “All right, then.” He shifted the car from park to drive. “Let’s see what we can do.” He reached out for the radio.

  “Did I tell you to touch that?”

  Arturo looked at her. “Miss, if I’m drivin’, I’m listenin’ to the radio. If you object, you can stick that knife in my belly and drive yourself into the briarpatch. If you think the Wendigo will let you.”

  For just a moment, he thought he’d miscalculated, and that she was going to stab him. He wondered what the Wendigo would do to stop her, if anything. Maybe he was meant to die at her hands, and take the direct route of death to find Marjorie.

  But instead she just said, “Whatever. Get moving.”

  He turned on the radio, and it was Willie, singing “On the Road Again.” The Wendigo always got the best stations on the radio, except when it didn’t get any radio stations at all. Arturo pulled away from the curb, easing down this rational road, looking for an on-ramp into the briarpatch. It felt so good to be driving again, even at knifepoint, that he started singing along with the radio.

  After a moment, Echo started singing too, her voice off-key but enthusiastic.

  Could be this won’t be so bad, Arturo thought. Road trips were always more fun with company.

  Darrin and Ismael Take a Walk

  1

  From the stairway, Ismael led Darrin down a gravel path between high hedges, and whenever Darrin demanded to know where they were going, Ismael would only say, “Into the briarpatch, to find Bridget.”

  Finally, after what seemed an hour spent trudging through an English hedge-maze, Ismael stopped. “There’s a house up ahead, through there.” He pointed to an iron gate at the end of the hedgerow. “Follow my lead. Once we get inside, don’t go into any of the doorways we pass, no matter what you see there, even if you think you see Bridget. It’s a house of mirrors, in a way, and you see what you want to see—it’s nothing real. But we need to pass through it. We should rest first.”

  He unslung his shoulder bag and reached inside, withdrawing a bottle of water. He offered it to Darrin, who scowled, thinking, Poison.

  Ismael sighed, uncapped the bottle, took a swig, and said “See? No cyanide. I’m not your enemy, Darrin.” He sat cross-legged on the gravel and began rolling his head around, as if working out kinks in his neck.

  Darrin sank to the ground across from him, their knees almost touching in the narrowness of the hedgerow, and took the water bottle. He wasn’t tired from their long walk—he’d been well-conditioned over the past few months, having spent most of his days walking—but it was important to stay hydrated. He hadn’t come prepared for a long trip, though at least he was wearing decent hiking boots. His greatest regret was that he hadn’t brought his camera. The long walk, looking at the back of Ismael’s head, had helped drain away some of his rage toward Nicholas and Echo, though the opportunity for contemplation had brought a lot of questions too. He was no longer overwhelmed by the very idea of the briarpatch, though he was still a little unclear on what it was, exactly, and why he was able to enter it when other people couldn’t. But he had other questions.

  “I’m not going any farther with you until I get some answers,” Darrin said.

  Ismael sighed. “I can help you find Bridget. It is a long and arduous trek, but it can be done.”

  “Listen. The first time I saw you, you cracked Nicholas in the knee with a club. The second time I saw you, you were standing in the crowd when Bridget jumped to her death. The third time I saw you, you promised to lead me to Bridget. I think you need to fill in some fucking gaps.”

  Ismael looked upward, meditatively. “Agreed,” he said at last. “We are not precisely on a schedule, and I can see how this might set your mind at ease. Let me tell you how I met Bridget.” He gestured for Darrin to give him back the water bottle, took a sip, and then began to speak.

  2

  The day I met Bridget, I was travelling from my home in Oakland to a place in San Francisco, near the park, where I had a meeting with an associate. The briarpatch is many things, but one of its baser attributes is a series of shortcuts. If one is experienced in walking its pathways, one can use it to travel quickly from one point to another in the narrower world, with the added advantage of avoiding the press of humanity on trains and buses. It is a trivial journey, as I can enter the shed in my back yard, pass into the briarpatch, take a relatively safe ten minute walk along a lonely dirt track in a place where the air is sweet and fields of red blossoms sway in the breeze, and emerge behind one of the many statues hidden in Golden Gate Park. The man who designed the park despised statues, and whenever the city forced one upon him, he planted densely around it, often hiding the monument completely from view, which made my spot a convenient exit point. Because of the vagaries of time, which does not flow evenly everywhere in the briarpatch, I sometimes arrive in the park shortly before even leaving my home. Efficient, hmm?

  But one day last year, I emerged from the briarpatch to find a woman sitting cross-legged—much as we are sitting now—at the base of the statue, smoking a joint. She stared up at me, and did not seem particularly startled by my emergence from empty air. “Want a drag?” she asked.

  I nearly said no and hurried away. But I am always looking for . . . prospects, people who can be guided and saved . . . and I have come to develop a sense for these things. Some people are willing to consider the mysteries that lie at the heart of the world, and I thought this woman might be one. Either that or she was sufficiently stoned that seeing a man appear from nowhere didn’t merit comment. So I sat with her, and we passed the joint back and forth in companionable silence, looking at the legs of the forgotten statue. Finally she said, “How did you do that? Just . . . appear like that?”

  I answered her honestly, which is generally my policy, because most people don’t believe me, and those who do can sometimes be useful to me. I said, “There is a world—there are worlds—behind and beyond this world, and some people can travel those worlds at will. I am one of those people.”

  She pinched closed the end of the joint and put it away in her pocket, then said, “Prove it.”

  “I’m not a magician. I don’t do shows.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she said.

  “I don’t care.”

  Then she said, more softly: “I want to believe you.”

  I have a hard heart. I have endured mu
ch in the way of suffering, and little in the way of joy, and I discovered long ago that compassion is just a winding path to greater misery, because when you allow yourself to care for someone, they can hurt you far more than any stranger ever could. But I felt compassion for this woman, and the longing in her voice.

  “Take my hand,” I said, and she did. “Now look.” I nodded to the left of the statue, and she gasped, because she could see it then, as clearly as I could, a wooden archway hung with boughs of white flowers, and beyond the arch, a path that led off into a place that was not the park.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said, seeing the red flowers in the distance, and I agreed that some parts of it were beautiful, but other parts were ugly, or dangerous, or simply incredibly strange. I let go of her hand, and she made a noise of disappointment, because she could not see it anymore. “If you spent enough time in the briarpatch, you wouldn’t need my help to see it anymore.”

  “Why do you call it the briarpatch?”

  “It’s just what a friend of mine used to call it,” I told her. “His name was Harczos, and he used to say he was born and raised in the briarpatch, and there was nowhere he would rather be. Though since then I have heard others call it the same thing. Harczos was a talkative man. I suppose his term for the place spread. Before I met Harczos, I called it the dark wood, or sometimes the wild garden, but the briarpatch seemed more fitting.”

  She surprised me with her next question. She said “What is it for?”

  Most people, made aware of the briarpatch’s existence, don’t think to question its utility. I had to think for a moment before I answered her. “There is a better world, a place where there is no pain or suffering, where everything is made luminous. But it is difficult to reach. It is almost impossible to even glimpse from this world, though sometimes—through sex, through music, meditation, drugs—it is possible. From the briarpatch, you can more directly sense the existence of that better world. It is . . . a step closer to the sublime. There are places where you can glimpse the light, indirectly, without its true potency, but enough to get a sense of its power. There may even be an overland route, a way to walk to that better world from the briarpatch, but I have not found it yet. The briarpatch provides encouragement, reassurance that there are other worlds than this, and other options besides drudgery and empty death.”