by T. A. Pratt
But Marla didn’t need to climb any higher. The person she was looking for was right here, set up in the middle of the basketball court, his or her precise form obscured by a visible haze of magics. There was a half-assed keep-away spell on the space, enough to drive mortals away but weak enough for her to overcome, though pushing through the zone of discomfort made her sinuses ache and her eyes water. She gritted her teeth and took step after step until she broke through to the center.
Her enemy was a fifty-something man with a few wisps of gray hair clinging to his mostly-bald head, dressed in a ratty old bathrobe, sitting cross-legged in a sacred circle of his own devising. The perimeter of his circle was lined with objects: a case holding a wristwatch, with the words “Ingersoll Mickey Mouse Watch” written on the lid; stuffed toys of Disney characters, tattered and threadbare; a Mickey Mouse cap with one ear torn off; a wooden Pinocchio doll with its paint all scraped and scratched; a chipped cookie jar in the shape of Winnie the Pooh; and other old toys that might have been worth something if they’d been in better shape.
“Hey,” Marla said. “Obsessive much?”
The man lifted his head and blinked at her like an owl on opium. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“I get that a lot.” She paced the perimeter. “So what’s the deal here? You’re sapping the will to live out of all the kids in the park, and you’ve clearly got a weird collector vibe going on, but what’s the point?”
The guy slumped. He seemed to barely have the energy to talk to her. “I’m just... trying to be happy again... to get back to that perfect day...”
Marla crouched down so she could meet his eyes, or try to. “Huh. So you’re siphoning off all the wonder and imagination of the kids down there, to, what, make yourself feel better? Pretty shitty thing to do, Mr....”
He didn’t provide his name. “I’m going to make a bubble. A loop. A snow globe, but with sunshine instead of snow, and I get to live inside it. That day when I was eight years old, when I came here with my mother and brother, and everything was perfect, everything was wonder, it was the happiest I’d ever been, the happiest I would ever be, before everything fell apart, before I was eaten up by mysteries and secrets...”
Right. He was trying to create some kind of pocket-reality, a bubble of time so he could relive some nostalgia-soaked memory, probably one that left out all kinds of inconvenient realities of discomfort and boredom and hunger and frustration. The kind of memory polished up to a high shine by the passage of years, every nick and scratch buffed out. If he really went back in time, he’d doubtless find the experience disappointing... but if he used magic to recreate that day, and fueled it with the stolen wonder of hundreds or thousands of excited children, sure, it would probably be pretty great.
“What happens to the people in the park now, though?” Marla said. “They lose their capacity for wonder... forever?”
The man stirred a little, and scowled. “They’ll lose that wonder anyway eventually. Everyone does.”
“Everyone dies eventually, too,” Marla said, consciously echoing her husband. “That doesn’t mean anyone’s in a hurry to get started .” She rose and kicked one of the stuffed toys, punting it right at the man’s face, and he gasped and fell back to avoid being struck. The magic snapped, the ritual shattered, but there was still plenty of stolen power, and it settled onto the man at the center of the broken circle like snow upon the peak of a mountain. He stood up, eyes shining—literally pouring light—and raised hands that crackled with the energy of stolen wonder.
Crap. Now she was going to have to stab the guy or something. (She’d gotten her dagger through security just fine. Magic had its advantages.)
Unless...
“Look,” she said, holding up her hands. “What if I told you there was a way to get what you wanted, and you don’t have to suck the joy out of hundreds of children to do it?”
He didn’t believe her, so she reached into her pocket for the little bell she used to summon her husband when they were going about their usually-separate lives. She rang the bell, and a door that hadn’t existed a moment before opened by the ping-pong table, and Death sauntered in.
The wizard of nostalgia looked him up and down. “He does not look like a god.”
Death glanced at Marla. “Oh, am I meant to provide my bona fides?” He shivered, casting off his mortal form, giving them both a glimpse of the reality underneath: a thing of starlight and dark wings, caverns and sunless lakes, ashes and ice, and oh so many eyes.
The wizard crouched, weeping, hands over his face, the light of his power leaking out between his fingers.
Marla had seen her husband naked before, and was thus less impressed, but it was still a relief when he cloaked himself in a mortal semblance again.
“So here’s the deal,” Marla said, standing by the weeping wizard. “We can fight, my knife and magic against your stolen mojo. You’d probably win, honestly, but Death here is a close personal friend of mine, and he wouldn’t take kindly to you hurting me. Or you can release all that joy back to the people you stole it from, and give them back their best day ever. Either way, your plan isn’t going to work. Now, you can keep being an asshole, but if you are, when you die, as we all eventually die...”
“I can make a terrible hell for you,” Death said. “Tailored to your individual terrors. I don’t usually meddle with the nature anyone’s personal afterlife, but as a favor to my... friend here... I will in your case.”
“Or alternately,” Marla said, “If you stop being an asshole, and try to live a good life, and do non-asshole things, then when you die... You can have your best day ever forever in the underworld. It won’t be some temporary pocket-reality built on stolen happiness. It’ll be perfect and eternal. How’s that sound?” She paused. “No jumping to your death from a roof tonight or anything. You’ve gotta be good, for the rest of your natural span, to reap the rewards.”
“It’s true?” the man said, lowering his hands and gazing up at Death.
“It is.” Death spoke in a tone available only to creatures of his kind: its total truthfulness was unquestionable.
The man stood up, spread out his arms, looked to the heavens—or anyway to the basketball hoop above his head—and fluoresced, becoming a shining sun for a moment, all the stolen joy and wonder pouring out of him and dissipating into the atmosphere, returning to those he’d stolen it from.
“Okay then,” Marla said. “We’ll be watching you. Death, make us a door.”
They sat on a bench on Main Street, watching a horse-drawn carriage go by. “Defeating our enemies by giving them what they want,” Marla said. “Not my favorite approach.”
“Your solution was most compassionate,” Death said.
“Yuck, don’t say that. Can we get out of here now?”
“Alas, no. I’ve used my considerable power and influence to book us an overnight stay in Cinderella’s room at the castle.” He put his arm around her. “Haven’t you always wanted to be a princess?”
“If you weren’t the incarnation of Death,” Marla said, “I would kill you right now.”
Cages
This is a rare first-preson Marla Mason story, set during her time as a freelance monster hunter.
I stood in the broken remnants of a town somewhere in West Texas at twilight, holding the handle of a rolling suitcase in one hand and a covered wire birdcage in the other. The birdcage rocked and swayed in my hand. ‘‘Be still in there,’’ I said, bumping the birdcage with my hip. A muffled snarl emerged from under the heavy cloth, but I ignored it.
The town wasn’t much to look at, and if it had a name I never noticed. There was a stoplight, but it didn’t look like it got much use, even though we were just off the highway. The few shops, huddled together as if for warmth, looked ignored if not abandoned. A gas station with ancient red-faded-to-pink pumps that had never even heard of credit cards. Everything on this side of the highway looked desiccated, like flies in a web.
The gleaming oas
is of a modern truck stop shone a little ways off on the other side of the highway, and I figured it had stolen most of the life out of this place like a well-lit, colorfully-packaged vampire. There was a motel over here, though, with a couple of big rigs in the parking lot, for drivers who wanted more than a shower at the truck stop and a nap in their own cab.
And somewhere, in or under or above or running through this town, there was something that might as well be called evil.
‘‘Evil’’ isn’t a word I’m too comfortable with. I’ve been called it myself, by people with good enough reasons. But for me, the definition is pretty simple: evil is treating people like objects, and working against life. Both things I’d done a fair bit myself, though I always thought I had good reasons.
My friend Pelham says this walking tour I’m on is an effort at redemption, a way of making up for some of the bad things I’ve done, but I don’t know about that. I think I just like killing things, and if I kill things that are evil, I don’t have to lose so much sleep over my actions.
I checked into the motel, paying with nearly the last of my cash. That was fine. I could always get more. People with my skills don’t have much trouble finding money.
The room was surprisingly clean, though old and worn. I set the birdcage on the table, then opened my suitcase on the bed and fished out a napkin wrapped around a chicken bone I’d saved from dinner a few nights back. I muttered an incantation, snapped the bone in half, and send a low-level pulse of death through the room. My old city, Felport, had suffered a nasty bedbug infestation once, and I couldn’t bear the thought of the little vampires snacking on me. Better safe.
The birdcage rocked on the table, and I sighed and pulled off the dirty brown cover. ‘‘So,’’ I said. ‘‘This is the place?’’
There was a human head in the birdcage, resting on a ragged stump of neck. The head was female, with scraggly white-blonde hair—her hair kept growing—and glaring eyes. She bared her teeth at me. ‘‘Hungry.’’
I sat down in the chair and glared right back at her. ‘‘There’ll be plenty of time to eat after I deal with—’’
‘‘Not if you get killed. And I’m hungry now.’’
‘‘You don’t get to make ultimatums, Nicolette. You’re a head in a cage. You don’t even have the dignity of being a head in a jar.’’
‘‘What are you going to do, Marla—kill me?’’ Nicolette cackled, and I regretted—not for the first time—casting the spell that allowed her to speak despite her total lack of lungs. But an oracle that can’t talk isn’t much use. Maybe my mistake had been rescuing her deathless severed head from the bottom of that pond in the first place, but I’ve always been hesitant to ignore things that might prove useful to me. Nicolette and I had hated each when she was still officially alive, and her murder (not at my hand, surprisingly) hadn’t improved our relationship. At least now that she’d been reduced to just a head she couldn’t swing an axe at me.
‘‘If I feed you, you’ll tell me where this supposed evil is?’’
‘‘HUNGRY!’’ Nicolette shouted.
I went to my suitcase and pulled out a messily taped-up, bubble-wrapped package. Unwrapping the plastic, I removed several antique blue glass bottles, ranging in size from beer bottle to test tube, and then dug out a small ball-peen hammer. I lined up the bottles in front of Nicolette’s cage and smashed them, one by one, with the hammer. Nicolette’s eyes rolled back in her head, and she gasped and shuddered, less like someone eating a meal than like someone having an orgasm.
‘‘Mmm, delicious entropy,’’ she said, once I’d swept all the broken fragments into a trash can. ‘‘Nothing tastes as good as destroying something beautiful.’’
Pure Nicolette. Once a vicious chaos witch, always a vicious chaos witch.
‘‘Now,’’ I said. ‘‘Speak. Where’s this evil?’’
‘‘Oh, didn’t I tell you? It’s in the room right next door.’’
I have been criticized for being too direct in my approach to problem solving, but many of the subtle, tricky, deceitful people who made those criticisms are dead, and I’m still alive, so I see no reason to change my ways. I slid off my red cowboy boots—handmade for me by a cobbler in Austin, they fit so well that even after hours of walking it was like my feet were wrapped in clouds—and traded them for my scuffed old workboots, the ones with the inertial charms in the heels and the steel toes.
I turned on the TV, both so the noise would make the room seem occupied and to keep Nicolette more-or-less entertained. She was a lot less dangerous than she used to be, now that she was just a head, but she was still capable of making trouble. When I’d left her covered in a room a few weeks earlier while I went out for dinner she’d punished me by screaming that she was being murdered until the motel manager opened the room and found her. I had to use the last of my lethe water to erase the guy’s memory of finding a cackling head in a cage.
I opened my bathroom window and climbed out, dropping down to the weedy ground in back of the motel. Then I crept over to the next room, listening at the monster’s bathroom window—frosted glass, so I couldn’t spy more directly. I couldn’t hear anything, except the low murmur of the TV, so I tested the window. Locked.
I took a tarnished old key out of my pocket and gently drew the outline of a rune on the window. The key dissolved into powder in my hand—four hours spent enchanting it, and only seconds to use up the magic. Isn’t that always the way? This time when I pressed my palms against the window and pushed upward, it moved.
I stared through the open window at the astonished face of a man sitting on the toilet, pants around his ankles. He had thinning wisps of brown hair, big brown eyes, and a generally fishlike aspect. ‘‘Wha—’’ he began
In one smooth motion I drew my most mundane weapons—just a little .22 target pistol, but a gun is a gun—and aimed it through the window. ‘‘Don’t speak, and don’t move.’’ I never used to carry firearms, since knives and magic seemed sufficient, but I’d had a run-in with an anti-mancer capable of nullifying magic not long ago, and I’d decided I needed something with a little more range and intimidation factor for certain eventualities.
Have you ever tried to climb through a chest-high window without taking your eyes or your gun off a prisoner? It’s not easy, but I managed, and once I was upright in the bathroom I slid the window shut behind me with one hand. I was no more than three feet away from the man on the toilet, my gun pointed straight at the center of his chest.
‘‘Hi,’’ I said. ‘‘My name’s Marla Mason. I hear you do bad things.’’
Unfortunately I couldn’t be a lot more specific than that. When Nicolette had her head cut off by a mad magician named Elsie Jarrow, the process had done something strange to her, in addition to giving her an unpleasant sort of immortality. Nicolette had always had a good sense for impending disaster and uncertainty, being a chaos witch, but now she was like a bloodhound for violations of natural law, an oracle capable of locating monsters and aberrations eating away at the structure of reality, dignity, and decency. Every morning we got up and she picked a local strand of chaos at random, and we followed it until we reached the end. Nicolette wasn’t too forthcoming when it came to details, so I couldn’t be sure just what this monster was—
Apart from scared. His face was slicked with sweat, his adam’s apple bobbing, his eyes fixed and wide. ‘‘Listen,’’ he said, ‘‘I don’t have much, but you’re welcome to it, my wallet’s in the other room, just—’’
‘‘Let’s not do this. It’s so tedious, the part where you pretend you don’t know why I’m here. You’re a monster. I’m a monster-hunter.’’ But I didn’t shoot, or kick, or draw my blade... because this just looked like a guy. Sure, lots of monsters were indistinguishable from humans—lots of monsters were humans, though I was focusing on the inhuman sort these days—but confirmation was nice. If I’d found him eating a baby or wearing a hat made out of human eyeballs, that would have helped, but he just looked like
an idiot taking a crap. Nicolette had successfully led me to several undeniable abominations (a thing that thought it was an angel, a forgotten graveyard haunted by an ectoplasmophage, a grove of carnivorous trees, and more), but I wouldn’t put it past her to screw things—
‘‘Shit,’’ the man said. ‘‘Did you say Marla Mason? Did Nicolette send you?’’
I didn’t quite lower my gun, but I confess my hand wavered. ‘‘What do you know about Nicolette?’’
He ran a hand through what was left of his hair. ‘‘Ah, hell, we used to date in high school, before she got into all the witchy shit. Things between us never worked out, in fact we had a nasty breakup, but a few years back I was passing through Felport and she somehow knew—magic, I guess—and she invited me out for dinner. I thought, you know, she wanted to rekindle an old flame, but it was all a trick. She poisoned my food—just a little, enough to make me puke and shit myself all night long. The whole time I was sick she stayed in my hotel room, laughing at me, and she never stopped talking, and mostly she bitched about you, Marla Mason, how much she hated you and wanted to get rid of you. I passed out eventually and woke up in a cornfield wearing nothing but a pair of pink lace panties, and one of my kidneys was missing. Crap. And now she’s told you some bullshit about how I’m a monster?’’
I gritted my teeth. This was all extremely plausible. Nicolette was nothing if not whimsically vindictive. I lowered the gun, but I didn’t put it away, because, well. Like I said. Better safe.
The guy was a little less terrified-looking, now, and he went on with renewed energy. ‘‘I don’t know what Nicolette told you, Marla, but I’m just a guy, I drive a truck for a living, you know? She’s just fucking with both of us. I think ever since she got her head cut off she’s gone even crazier—’’
And the gun went back up. The man—if he was a man—winced. ‘‘Damn it,’’ he said. ‘‘I shouldn’t have known she got her head cut off, huh? Must have happened too recently. But it was such a strong image in your mind... I’m a decent telepath, but I can only skim the surface. Oh, well. I guess we do this the other way. At least I can read enough of your mind to know you don’t have any idea what the fuck you’re dealing with here.’’
