Briarpatch by Tim Pratt (12 page)

Darrin went in, relieved to see a normal tavern of the local-dive variety, with a few stools by the bar, a dusty mirror on the wall behind, one pool table back in a corner, round tables and chairs scattered throughout the room, and a jukebox against the far wall. Curiously, there were no bottles of booze lined up behind the bar, just row upon row of pint glasses on the shelves.

Arturo led the way, and they sat on stools. The bartender eased himself away from the far end of the bar, an area darkened by a deep confluence of shadows, and approached them. He was dressed like a tavern keeper from a Western, with a white shirt and sleeve garters, and he had an impressive array of facial hair, muttonchops converging into a wild beard. His eyes were flat and incurious, and he looked past them rather than at them. “Your pleasure, gents?” His voice was soft and gentle enough for pillow talk. He nodded toward two tap handles, placing his right forefinger on a handle of flaked obsidian, and the other on a handle fashioned from a lump of amber with several bubbles trapped inside.

“Two pints of the amber,” Arturo said quickly, and glanced at Darrin. “The, ah, darker stuff isn’t really to our taste.”

The bartender smiled, then, a flash of teeth in the midst of his beard, and Darrin caught a glimpse of extraordinarily long and pointed canines. As the bartender drew the pints, Darrin leaned away from him, made uncomfortable by the man’s teeth. Were they filed down, or . . . ?

He noticed then that the bartender cast no reflection in the long mirror behind the bar, while Arturo and Darrin himself showed up clearly. “Arturo, the mirror—” he began, thinking it had to be some trick. The giant he’d seen in the woods, okay, maybe it had just been some huge wild homeless man, his size magnified in Darrin’s mind by panic, but someone with fangs, who didn’t appear in a mirror—

“S’okay,” Arturo said. “Don’t worry about it. There’s no danger. It’s just . . . one of those things.”

The bartender set their pints before them, glasses of golden-bright liquid, like fluid light. “I’ll run you a tab.” He eased back into the shadows at the end of the bar.

“It’s mostly plausible, anyway,” Arturo muttered and sipped his beer.

Darrin tried to lift his glass, but his hands were shaking, and he stopped, staring at his trembling fingers.
I think I’m going crazy
, he thought, and it seemed like one of the few sensible thoughts he’d had all day. Seeing Bridget jump like that must have done something to him, set up some nasty resonances in his mind. How else to explain the things he’d seen since? To explain this?

“I think I have to go,” Darrin said slowly. “I think I need to find a doctor.”

“You’re hurt?” Arturo said, worry creasing his forehead.

Darrin frowned. “I think I’m having some kind of an episode. I’ve been seeing things that aren’t real.” That was a relief, in a way. He could call his old therapist, and she would help him, refer him to the sort of doctor who could write him a prescription for some wonderful drugs. He and Bridget had been . . . estranged, yes . . . but he was still traumatized, still unravelling from grief at seeing her die. It was painful, but it was an explanation.

“Oh, hell,” Arturo said softly. “This is all new to you? I thought you were, you know, a seasoned traveler, that you just stumbled onto the wrong path. But, what, today, this is your first time in the briarpatch?”

“The briarpatch,” Darrin repeated. “You said that before.”

Arturo nodded. “It’s what some people call, ah, the place, or the whole combination of places, the paths and roads and bridges some people can reach from this world. I dunno what it really is. I’ve heard some people say it’s God’s maintenance tunnels, or worlds that got half-built and then abandoned, or worlds that might have happened, if things had been a little different.” He glanced at the bartender. “Or, you know, a
lot
different. Some places in the briarpatch don’t last long, and those are the weirdest places, the ones that aren’t very plausible at all, and I’ve seen some demented shit, lemme tell you, but lots of paths are stable. You can use them to get from one place to another in this world, there are some great shortcuts, but that’s not all. The briarpatch . . . there are secrets in there, if you can get in deep enough to find them. Wonderful stuff. Dangerous stuff. But, shit, it’s big, and hard to navigate.” Arturo went silent, tipping his half-empty pint glass from side to side, watching the beer move around inside. Long speeches didn’t seem to suit him.

“I’m leaving,” Darrin said abruptly, and stood up. “Thank you for . . . your help, whatever help you gave me, but I have to go.”

“Drink your beer,” Arturo said. “Please, for me? I gotta pay for it, the least you can do is take a sip. It’ll help.”

To be polite—it was easy to be polite in an unreal situation, Darrin realized, because courtesy provided structure—he took a sip.

The beer was cold, crisp, a little hoppy, better suited to summer than autumn. But there was something else, not exactly an aftertaste, almost like the mouth-filling vapours from a good sip of cognac, but these vapours filled his mouth and his throat and his chest and the rest of his body, a sort of soothing mist inside him, and he sat back down on the stool, closing his eyes to savour it. His hands stopped shaking. “I . . . that’s wonderful beer.” Everything seemed less dire now, somehow. He lowered himself back onto the stool.

“There’s some places in the briarpatch where you shouldn’t drink or eat anythin’.” Arturo took another gulp of his own drink, getting the ends of his long moustache damp in the process. “But other places, as long as you pay for what you drink, it’s okay, and it can make things seem a little easier.”

“Like in fairy tales.” Darrin took another sip. The beer just tasted like a beer, now, its extraordinary quality fading into memory, but he felt less disassociated, and the clarity that had followed the first sip remained. “If you eat or drink fairy food, it makes you part of their world, somehow. That kind of thing?” The idea didn’t distress him particularly, which, he supposed, was further proof of the drink’s effectiveness.

Arturo shrugged. “I picked up a hitchhiker in the briarpatch once—I don’t usually do that, but the Wendigo thought it was a good idea—and it was some guy who said he used to be a folklore professor, but he camped out in a fairy ring while he was doing research, and he woke up in the patch. He said all sorts of old legends and myths could be traced back to the briarpatch, and things that came out of it, or disappeared into it. The guy talked my ear off, and I offered to give him a ride back to Minnesota—that’s where he was from, just like me—but he said no way, he was still explorin’. He just wanted to borrow some paper because he’d filled up his notebook with notes. Fortunately, in the Wendigo, one thing I’ve always got plenty of is paper.”

Darrin nodded, only half-listening, still processing the things he’d seen. After all, the strange experiences hadn’t started today. There was the alley he’d seen Ismael vanish into, and the glimpse of a high, moon-coloured bridge. Hadn’t he always suspected there were worlds other than this, pathways and passages that went mostly unnoticed? That’s why he’d gotten involved in urban exploration in the first place, prowling through steam tunnels, abandoned factories, and condemned train stations—he was looking for places no one knew about, forgotten places,
magical
places. He’d given up that pursuit because one empty desolation looked much like another, and because he’d found a baseline of contentment in his relationship with Bridget. But the impulse had been there, in his constant shuffling from one temporary passion to another, always looking for the key that would unlock a universe of greater experience. He’d wanted to find a secret world behind the world.

Bridget had felt the same urge, though she’d leaned on drugs more than Darrin ever had. Maybe that’s why she’d left him. Darrin had found the end of his rainbow in their relationship, and become excited about the idea of having a family with her, a little house in the country, babies, the whole thing. That was enough of a new world for him. He’d believed it was enough for Bridget, too . . . but he’d obviously misjudged her. And now she was dead, and in that most proverbial undiscovered country.

“I’m still scared,” Darrin said. The fear was distant, not an immediate heart-pounding thing, but a kind of shadow of unease lying across his heart. “The beer helped, but it’s still there. I feel like I’m walking on a ledge.”

“That’s a natural response. But once you learn more, that kind of general fear, it’ll become a specific fear of specific things. Like, a useful fear.”

Darrin nodded. That made sense. And once this fear passed . . . what would he feel then? Having found entry into a world he’d maybe been half-consciously searching for most of his life?

“So tell me,” Arturo said. “How did you and Bridget meet?”

The change of conversational direction surprised Darrin, and he wondered if Arturo was genuinely curious or just trying to set Darrin at ease, take his mind off their present circumstance. “I don’t . . . it’s not much of a story.”

“So long as it’s a love story,” Arturo said. “There’s nothin’ in the whole wide world above or below or beyond I love more than a good love story.” He grinned his walrus moustache grin, and Darrin couldn’t help but smile too. He’d never had a drinking buddy, really. He thought Arturo might be a good one.

“Okay,” Darrin said. It was a good love story, at least, as long as he stopped telling it in the right place, which was the case for most love stories, he suspected. “It was like this.”

2

“Have you ever heard of geocaching?”

Arturo shook his head, and Darrin nodded, because Arturo didn’t seem like the most tech-savvy guy in the world. His universe didn’t involve things like geocaching and flash mobs, but Darrin had worked for a tech company—albeit one designed to bring people together in the flesh—and he’d always been an early adopter.

“Well, geocaching is sort of like a high-tech treasure hunt. Basically you get a GPS unit of some kind—a global positioning system, like a handheld navigational tool that talks to satellites and tells you your coordinates, you know what I mean?”

Arturo nodded. “I thought about gettin’ one of those for the Wendigo, but it wouldn’t work in the briarpatch anyway, so I figured screw it.”

“Right. Well, there are people who hide little boxes or canisters around, with treasures in them, and then post the GPS coordinates on the Internet. Other people find the coordinates, and go out to find the cache. Now, it’s not like the coordinates are accurate to within inches or anything, so you still have to hunt around for the cache. Once you find it, there’s usually a little log book inside, so you can record your name, and when you found it. It’s okay to take the little treasures, usually, as long as you leave something just as good or better in its place. Lots of people take digital photos and post them online.”

“What kinda treasures?” Arturo asked.

“Usually nothing big. Candy, little toys, stuff like that. I got a bunch of glow-in-the-dark plastic scorpions once, and left a carved wooden frog in its place. Stuff like that. The point isn’t the treasure, but the hunt, you know? Some people do this solo, and some do it in groups, and sometimes there are really complicated hunts, where the GPS coordinates just lead you to a hint or a puzzle, and that leads you to another hint, and so on. Sometimes the caches are easy to find, like just hidden next to a rock or something, but other times they’re underwater, or forty feet up a tree, or on a roof, stuff like that.”

“Sounds fun.” Arturo tapped the bar to get the bartender’s attention. He glided over and refilled Arturo’s glass, but didn’t leave this time—he polished glasses with a white rag, and seemed to be listening.

“It can be,” Darrin said. “I used to have this group of friends—people I worked with, mostly, I don’t see them much anymore—and we’d do geocaching sometimes. There was this really big cache hunt a few years ago, put together by a guy who got rich selling his start-up company, and this time there was a really valuable treasure hidden, to be kept by the first group who found the cache. Nobody knew what the treasure was, exactly, just that it was worth a lot. Four of us got together to look for it, first thing in the morning when the coordinates were posted. The hunt took us all over—it started in San Francisco, with the first clue hidden in the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, buried near the base of this giant stone Buddha they’ve got there. We knew we weren’t the first to find it, because it had been dug up already and re-buried, but the people before us played fair and didn’t destroy the clue, and neither did we. It was just a cipher, and we had a guy with us named Rick who did cryptography for fun, so he cracked it in no time. That set of coordinates led us to the old fort by the Golden Gate Bridge . . .” He trailed off. He’d just seen Bridget die this morning, so how could the fact that she was
gone
keep ambushing him like this, taking the wind out of him?

“Go on,” Arturo said, and the bartender nodded.

Darrin drained the rest of his beer, and the bartender refilled it for him while Darrin resumed. “Anyway, there was another clue, a jumbled-up word puzzle this time, and I’m good at that sort of thing, so I solved it, and we had to go across to Marin, which took forever in the traffic, and we wound up at this little vineyard, with a stone wall. I thought we’d never find that clue. When we finally did, it was a quote from the Bible, which we didn’t have any idea how to interpret. But somebody turned the note over, and someone who’d gotten to the clue before us had written ‘Too easy,’ and some numbers that looked like coordinates. Turned out later it was the chapter and verse numbers of the quote—I don’t even remember it now, something about planting a vineyard but never enjoying its fruit? Nothing any of
us
would have known, but whoever beat us to it had, and had even given us a little help. We didn’t feel right using those coordinates, and Joe, who was sort of our leader, thought it must be a trick, but we followed it anyway. That took us back across to the East Bay. By then it was afternoon, and we were getting hungry, and Joe and Rick both decided to quit and get some lunch, since they figured there was no way they’d get to the cache first.”