Do Better: Marla Mason Stories

by T. A. Pratt

  “Artifact, huh?” Marla said, plucking at her cloak, which was also an artifact—an object of unknowable age and great magic. An object with motivations, however inscrutable they might be to their wielders. For some reason, wearing the cloak was making her skin crawl even more than usual today. Its malign intelligence, always a presence deep in the back of her mind, seemed more active and agitated, now, like a cat who’d spent hours watching squirrels frolic safely behind a pane of glass. “Think we can sell it?”

  “I believe I will hold onto this key,” Dr. Husch said. “For the very reasons you so neatly articulated while you were unconscious.”

  Marla waved her hand. “I don’t need to know what I say in my sleep. I’m sure it’s embarrassing. But... why isn’t Barrow waking up? Wasn’t busting up his delusion supposed to cure him?”

  “I don’t know,” Husch said. “I’d hoped, of course, that he would become lucid when you proved his delusions of grandeur were false—I didn’t expect him to be cured, but if he could hear me, then therapy might be possible. He’s not speaking, though, so I don’t know what he’s experiencing now...”

  Barrow did not die in the pit. He lay among the filth for a while, then began to search the corpses. As the witch said, there were magic weapons there, countless ones, and he chose some of the most deadly for himself. He climbed out of the pit, hauling himself and his implements of war to the Citadel’s floor. Lector, the Living Book, rested on the stone, left behind when the witch departed.

  “Lector,” Barrow croaked. “Old friend. Tell me. Do you know spells to raise the dead, and send this pit of fallen corpses into battle?”

  “I do,” Lector said.

  “This Citadel,” Barrow said, licking his lips. “Has it ever been held by a mortal before?”

  “It has not,” Lector said. “Only by gods.”

  “Ah,” Barrow said, flexing his fingers. “I will have to become a god, then.”

  Lector seldom spoke unprompted, generally limiting himself to answering questions. But he spoke now. “Barrow of Ulthar... what are your plans?”

  “If I am not a hero,” Barrow said, “Then I must be... something else. If I do not have a destiny, then I must make a destiny of my own. If I cannot unlock all the doors in all the worlds... Then I must tear holes in the walls. If I cannot save the world—”

  “Then I must conquer it,” the old writer shouted beyond the glass, and Marla winced. “I will have my revenge!”

  “He’s gone all Dark Lord on us, hasn’t he?” Marla said.

  Dr. Husch sighed. “It seems so. His story is taking a darker turn. He’s making himself into an anti-hero.”

  “I can’t imagine there’s much of a market for stories about those,” Marla said. “So... did we make things worse? Is he going to start trying to reach this world now? Are there going to be, I don’t know, hordes of orcs and black dragons who breathe napalm and dust storms of living anthrax popping randomly into existence? Aren’t you afraid he’s going to find another way in, and that he might bring an army next time?”

  “Possibly,” Dr. Husch said. “Loath as I am to admit defeat, I think it’s time to take extreme measures. When therapy fails, sometimes the only solution... is isolation. Fortunately, you brought me a key, and keys aren’t just used for opening doors—they’re also used for locking them.” She cocked her head, considered the door before her, and slipped the crystal key into the lock. Which was quite a trick, since the key was way too big. Nevertheless, it fit, and Dr. Husch twisted it, resulting in a click as loud as a thundercrack. The door began to change, transforming from beaten-up metal into black volcanic glass. The change crawled up the wall and across the window until the entire room was an unbroken sheet of stone. “There,” Husch said. “Locked away.” She tucked the key into the pocket of her suit.

  Marla whistled. “When you do solitary confinement, you don’t fuck around.”

  “Your payment is due,” Dr. Husch said. “A trick and a secret, you said?”

  Marla, who’d been staring at her reflection in the black glass, blinked. “Uh, yeah, right. The trick—I wanted to know how you managed to bind up some of the most powerful people you’ve got here. Agnes Nilsson, Elsie Jarrow, that caliber. From my researches, they should be impossible to hold. Then again, that was before I saw you do this.”

  “It’s a rare patient who provides the key to his own security,” Husch said. “Barrow is a special case. The bindings on Jarrow and Nilsson are a bit involved, and I’ve had a trying day, but come back next week, and I’ll take you through the sigils and incantations.”

  “Fair enough. As for the secret—I hear you’ve been running this place for decades, and you don’t look a day over twenty-five, no matter how you try to old yourself up with the dowdy hair and clothes and bondage hair. Even if you have one of those spells where you don’t age when you’re sleeping, that wouldn’t account for this kind of youth. So what’s the deal?”

  Dr. Husch patted Marla on the shoulder. “Oh, Marla. Your mistake is in assuming I’m human.”

  Marla frowned. “Don’t tell me you’re... an artifact in human form?”

  “Of course not,” Dr. Husch said. “I’m a homunculus, just like the orderlies. Except my creator—he’s gone now—made me much smarter than they are, and my tastes go beyond meals of lavender seeds and earthworms. If I were human, I would have been able to go into Barrow’s dreams myself, and seen to his therapy directly. Of course I’m not human. Why else would I have hired you, dear?”

  Marla frowned. She had a memory of Husch, telling her this already—”I am not of woman born”—but, no, that wasn’t really her, it was Barrow’s version of her. The old writer was psychic, so maybe he’d seen into Husch’s mind and found her secret, incorporating her true nature as a magical inhuman thing into his fantasy world. If he could see into Husch’s mind, then...

  “Next time, hire someone else,” Marla said. “Barrow’s bad for my mental health.”

  That night, Marla stopped by a used book store and pawed through a crate of yellowing old magazines. After half an hour of searching she finally found one with a story by Roderick Barrow, called “Shadow of the Conqueror!”—complete with exclamation point. She paid for the magazine with pocket change.

  She read it in her tiny studio apartment south of the river. Barrow wrote a lot like he talked. The last two pages were torn out, but it was pretty clear what was going to happen: the hero would thwart the villain, free the slaves, and get the girl, who was dressed in golden chains and not much else. Nothing in the story really rang any bells, and her memories of the experience in Barrow’s mind didn’t come any clearer, the details turning to mist whenever she tried to focus on them. Ah, well, screw it. She tossed the magazine into a corner. Who needed fantasy stories, when she had asses to kick and secrets to learn?

  That night, Marla dreamed of a house of endless black hallways. Every corridor was lined by dozens of doors, some marked with numbers, some with letters, some with runes or mystic sigils. She tried all the doorknobs, but none of them opened—none of them so much as turned—and though she pressed her ears to the door, she couldn’t hear anything. She just kept walking, until she reached a door made of black volcanic glass, with no knob at all, but something on the other side was pounding, and pounding, and pounding, as if trying to break through—

  Marla woke, sweating, and scrambled to the enchanted wardrobe where she kept her white-and-purple cloak. She pulled the garment down and wrapped it around herself, crawling back into bed. Marla didn’t like wearing the cloak when she slept—she felt like it tried to communicate with her in her dreams—but even the dark whispers of her artifact would be better than the risk of falling prey to Barrow’s psychic grasping. She could all too easily imagine her body left breathing in her bed, but her mind torn out of her body, wriggling on the end of a spear, trapped in a Dark Lord’s realm...

  Her dreams that night were horrible, but they were her own.

  Pale Dog

 
This was the third or fourth story I actually wrote about Marla, but it’s the first one where she actually seems like herself—the prior three were much darker, more grim, and humorless. This is the one where she clicked, and I knew I really had something. It’s the first story in this collection featuring her friend Rondeau, and Marla is so much more fun when she has someone at her side to talk to and get annoyed by. By this point, she’s chief sorcerer of Felport, protector of the city, and nominally the leader of a bunch of squabbling backstabbing sorcerers who all run their own neighborhoods as personal fiefdoms. It’s a job she’s very good at, despite her near total lack of diplomatic skills.

  Marla carried a drawstring bag containing a dozen kidney stones recently passed by an elderly clairvoyant named Bainbridge. She swung the bag and hummed, almost dancing down the alley. She’d taken Rondeau along with her to see Bainbridge, and Rondeau had been the one to actually fish the kidney stones out of the toilet. Marla wasn’t averse to doing her own dirty work, but given the choice, she’d let Rondeau do it for her every time.

  Now Rondeau had his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his jacket. He wore a vintage purple zoot suit with a gold shirt—a suit which he claimed was haunted by its former owner. Marla had yet to see any evidence of a ghostly presence, though Rondeau had been wearing the suit for a week straight, ever since he bought it.

  Rondeau looked up at the looming brick walls on either side of them and sighed. “It seems like we’re always skulking down alleyways. Why can’t we take a nice stroll down a broad avenue, all with...” He waved his hands in a vague gesture. “With trees and shit. Happy little lampposts.”

  “Alleys are shortcuts,” Marla said. “Shortcuts are our business.”

  “So me having my hands in a filthy toilet, that was in the service of the Great God Shortcut?”

  “It beats cutting Bainbridge open and taking the stones out that way, doesn’t it?”

  “At least you would have done the cutting yourself,” he muttered.

  A fluffy white dog trotted into the alley. Marla didn’t know much about dogs, but if pressed she would have said it was partly terrier but mostly mutt. The dog was neither big nor small, but medium-sized—just exactly the right size for a dog, Marla thought.

  “Lovely pup, Rondeau said, squatting to pet the animal on the head. The dog panted and wagged its tail. Marla crouched and ruffled the fur behind the dog’s ear. “Good boy!” It looked at her with peculiar, honey-colored eyes, and licked her hand. “It looks well fed, but it might be a stray. Do you need a home to go to, little pup? Do you? Do you need a Mama? I can—” Marla stopped the rush of baby talk she felt welling up within her. Slowly, she lifted her hand from the dog’s neck. The dog didn’t seem to mind the end of attention, just kept looking at her, panting and wagging.

  Marla eased away from the dog. “Rondeau,” she hissed.

  Rondeau looked up. “What?”

  “Why are you petting that dog?”

  “What do you mean? It’s a nice dog. Aren’t you a nice doggie? Aren’t you just?”

  “Rondeau,” Marla said, in her most sandpaper-on-nerve-endings voice. When she had Rondeau’s attention, she said “Can you think of any two people less likely than us to stop what we’re doing so we can pet a stray dog?”

  Rondeau stopped patting, his hand hovering a few inches over the dog’s head. He looked at the dog, at Marla, and back at the dog. “Ah,” he said. “Right.” He eased away to stand beside Marla. The dog didn’t move, or seem troubled by their behavior. It just kept wagging its tail, looking at them expectantly.

  “I still want to pet it,” Rondeau said. “And I hate dogs. A dog stole my dinner once when I was a kid, living under the Brandon Street underpass.”

  “I don’t hate dogs,” Marla said, keeping her eyes fixed on the animal. “I don’t even think about dogs. They’re pointless. I have no opinion about them. But I want to take this one home, and give it a nest of blankets at the foot of my bed, and... and feed it steak.”

  “Do you think it’s some kind of a... dog god?”

  “I hope we haven’t sunk that low, Rondeau, to get pushed around by a dog god.”

  “Well, what, then? Somebody’s familiar?”

  “Maybe, but it would have to belong to someone pretty damned powerful. Who runs a dog show? Some out-of-towner? It’s nobody local; I would have heard.” Marla was the head sorcerer in the city, chief of chiefs, first among equals. Not much slipped through her information network.

  “And I would’ve heard if anyone of consequence came to town.” Rondeau ran Juliana’s Bar, and all gossip of relevance to the city’s sorcerous population passed through there eventually.

  “So.”

  “So.”

  “Shapeshifter?”

  Marla snorted. She could tell a shapeshifter from a real animal. Only ordinaries and amateurs were fooled by shapeshifters.

  “Maybe it’s just a sport, a fluke.” Rondeau looked down at the dog, whose tail had not slowed in its wagging. “An otherwise normal dog that was born with some psychic twist. It happens to people sometimes, so why not dogs? It makes us want to love it and take care of it... that seems like a reasonable, beneficial adaptation.”

  “Maybe,” Marla said. “But then why is it out on the street with no collar, no tags? If this were my psychic dog, I’d take better care of it.”

  Rondeau shrugged. “Maybe the collar broke. Maybe—”

  The dog moved, and Marla and Rondeau both stepped back warily.

  The dog turned and trotted out of the alley.

  “See?” Rondeau said. “Off to seek other suckers.”

  “I don’t know...”

  Rondeau shook his head. “You just don’t like my theory because, if I’m right, the dog is harmless, and you don’t know how to deal with anything harmless.”

  “Maybe that’s it,” Marla said. And maybe it was. But as they walked back to Marla’s apartment, she kept her eye out for the white dog. She didn’t see it, but she wondered if it could see her.

  Marla set the last jar on the counter, the one holding Bainbridge’s kidney stones. Another jar held the toenail clippings of a man with amazing regenerative properties. A third (and this jar was made of cobalt glass, to mute the brightness) held a dram of the shining lymph of Mother Abbot. The remaining jar contained a goiter cut from the throat of a sacred cow.

  “That stuff’s nasty,” Rondeau said, wrinkling his nose at the jars. He twiddled with the radio on the counter until he found some big band music. Marla didn’t like that kind of music, but it was an improvement over the hard-driving dance-music Rondeau usually preferred. He hummed along with the radio for a moment, then took a sip of his gin and tonic and grimaced. “This drink is nasty, too. How can you stand this stuff? Tastes like pine needles.”

  “I like the taste of pine needles.” Marla checked the seals on the jars. “That’s it, we’re set. Now we go to see Langford.”

  “Why can’t you do a divination on your own? Why go to all this trouble?”

  “The only divination I’m any good at is reading entrails, and I don’t have the stomach for that anymore.”

  Rondeau swirled the ice in his glass. “You don’t have the stomach. For reading entrails. Marla, have you just made your first joke?”

  “It’s my second joke at least. Don’t you remember that knock-knock joke?”

  “Ah, yes. I must have repressed the memory. But really, why are we going to see Langford? There are other methods.”

  She waved at the jars. “This is specialized stuff, to answer a specialized question, and for that, we need a specialist. Hence, Langford. Most of the Seers in this city are cryptic and obscure. They can’t help it—that’s just the way the information comes to them, the way it gets filtered through their minds. I don’t have time to puzzle out secret meanings, though, and Langford can give me clear, unambiguous answers.”

  “He’s creepy,” Rondeau complained.

  “This from the man with the haunted zoot
suit?”

  Rondeau looked at his sleeves worriedly. “Shh. You’ll wake him up.”

  “I thought the dead didn’t sleep?” She put the jars into a satchel. “Or else they don’t do anything but sleep.”

  “Yeah, well, he’s quiet sometimes, at least.” Rondeau smoothed his lapels.

  “Let’s go. We have to catch the 7:35 train.”

  “Why do we ride the subway, when we could take the Bentley? We never take the car.” His eyes became dreamy, faraway. “I like cars. I want a big one, like you see in old movies, all chrome and curves, like a torpedo, a rolling bomb...”

  Marla frowned at him. He’d never rhapsodized about cars before. “Cars are for ordinaries, Rondeau. We’re underground people.”

  “Goddamn shortcuts.”

  Langford owned big property, and kept his headquarters beneath one of the city’s largest medical testing facilities. The place was like a hospital, without the inconvenience of actual patients. Marla and Rondeau walked down white hallways, past gray doors. People in lab coats passed by and gave them quizzical looks—Marla in her milk-white cloak with the silver clasp in the shape of a stag beetle, Rondeau in his gold-and-purple zoot suit. The two of them looked disreputable, fundamentally out-of-place, but people who worked for Langford doubtless became accustomed to the occasional odd coming-and-going.

  Marla led Rondeau down a dim stairway to a steel door with no discernible seams or apertures. A red button set into the wall glowed faintly. Marla pushed it.

  “Yes?” Langford’s voice came crisp and digitally clear from a concealed speaker

  “It’s Marla and Rondeau.”

  The door buzzed and swung inward. Marla and Rondeau stepped inside. Marla had been to Langford’s lab before, so she knew to breathe through her mouth. Rondeau, however, was a newcomer, and he gagged. “It smells like a barnyard in here!”

  “I always thought it smelled like a yeast infection,” Marla said, her voice nasal. “But I’ve never smelled a barnyard.” They stood in a small, featureless room, with another door at the other end. “This is the anteroom, too. It really stinks in the main area. Langford says you get used to it. I never have.”