Briarpatch by Tim Pratt (17 page)

“What can we do?” he asked. “We”—as simple as that. They were in this together, not by the necessary association of haunter and haunted, but by his choice. She’d shown him life was worth living. He couldn’t give Bridget her life back, but he could pledge himself to help, however possible.

“We have to find Ismael. I can’t go where
you
don’t, so I need you. Ismael met you, and his aura of fatalism or whatever caught hold in you, so it wouldn’t surprise him too much if you tracked him down, asked him for guidance, you know? I think he’d open the door and let you in. He might be able to see me—he’s spent so long in the briarpatch, he’s attuned to witnessing the weird. If not, you can be my translator, and tell him what I say. I’ll make him tell me what happens next, since he failed me. He’ll tell me where to go from here. And in the meantime, Orville . . . keep looking at me. Keep paying attention to me. I think that will help hold me together.”

The elevator opened on the ground floor, and Orville exited. “What if Ismael won’t help you?”

“Where can he run?” Bridget said, with a touch of her earlier zest. “You’ve seen the light, Orville. You’ve gone into the briarpatch and brought a new body—a new life—out of it. You can see the paths, if you look, and if he flees, we can follow. He’ll help me. He knows what a pain in the ass I can be if I don’t get my way.”

Orville was glad to hear her sounding resolute—being sad and vague couldn’t be good for her cohesion, either. “When do we go?”

“Tomorrow. You need to sleep, after the day you’ve had.”

They left the building and went down the sidewalk to a bus stop bench. Orville sat down. The night was crisp and clear, and he was profoundly satisfied and tired. “Thank you for tonight, Bridget.”

She paused in her pacing to flash him a grin, and her smile was somehow wired directly into his heart; he’d never felt as important as he did when she looked at him. “Any time, Mr. Troll.” After a moment she stopped in her pacing. “Say, what time is it?”

Orville looked instinctively at his wrist, but he had no watch, having lost it in the jump from the bridge or the aftermath at the hospital. “Um, I saw the clock at Geneva’s, it was about nine thirty when we left, so maybe almost ten o’clock now?”

Bridget frowned, a vertical worry line appearing between her eyebrows. “You’re shitting me. It’s got to be later than that.”

Orville shrugged. “We jumped in the morning. I’m not sure what time I woke up, but it couldn’t have been too much later. We went through . . . that other place, the briarpatch . . . and back home, and then played poker. It was just getting dark when we left the card club. It’s been a long day, and I don’t mind going home.”

Bridget chewed her lip. Not that she actually
had
a lip, really, but old habits were probably hard to shake. “Would you mind maybe making one more little stop? Something’s been bothering me.”

Orville nodded, not even needing to hear what she wanted, happy to do anything for her. He wasn’t as tired as he should have been. Swapping bodies halfway through the day probably had a rejuvenating effect. “Where to? As long as we can get there by bus. It can be hard to get a cab over here.”

“Over near Lake Merritt. Close to the high school.”

Orville knew the neighbourhood. “I go to the movies over there sometimes, in that nice old theatre. Probably faster to take the train, though. There’s a BART station a couple of blocks back.”

Bridget hesitated. “About the trains . . .”

“What?”

“Nothing. I guess it’ll be okay, as long as we’re careful about which train we get on.”

Orville stood and started down the sidewalk, past the closed shops and the teenage punk panhandlers. He didn’t much care if people here saw him talking to himself. Around here, you had to start screaming and bothering passers-by to make much of an impression, and even then, people would just walk in a wider arc around you. “I haven’t owned a car since I was 17 and rear-ended somebody. Couldn’t afford the repairs or the insurance, really. I do mass-transit a lot. Don’t worry, I know which train to take.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Bridget said. “You’ll see. Once you’ve been to the briarpatch, once you’ve had your eyes opened, you see things differently. Down underground, where the trains run . . . it can get a little freaky. Ismael doesn’t even know where all the special trains run down there.”

Orville wanted to ask what she meant by “special trains,” but then she gasped and grabbed his arm (still so strange, her habit of acting as if she had a body, and the lack of pressure from her touch). “Look,” she said, lifting her chin, and Orville turned his eyes skyward.

A bridge filled the far quadrant of the sky, a graceful arcing structure with no visible supports, the colour of the moon, more shining with its own light than reflecting. It was beautiful, and Orville suspected it was extremely large and very far away. He couldn’t see where it began, or where it ended, just a segment of its length rising from behind the buildings on the left and disappearing beyond the buildings on the right.

“It appears, sometimes,” Bridget said. “Ismael thinks it might be important, but he’s never been able to reach it, or even come close, though he’s chased it dozens of times, he says. It comes and goes like a rainbow.”

“Where do you think it leads?” Orville asked, his own voice hushed, more out of respect for Bridget’s reverence than because of his own awe.

“I’m not sure it leads anywhere. I think it might be a destination all on its own.”

For some reason Orville doubted that, and he wondered if Bridget truly believed it. Bridges only existed to take you from one place to another, right?

“Funny how everything in the whole world, as far as I know, is under that bridge,” she said. “You know what kinds of things traditionally live under bridges. Monsters.”

“And homeless people and runaways. They’re not monsters, usually.”

Bridget nodded, still gazing up at the moon-coloured bridge. “But don’t you wonder where
our
true home is? What we’ve run away from? Ismael thinks that bridge leads to the better world, where the light never fades or comes in slantwise.”

Orville actually thought light was prettiest when it came in at a slant, passing through clouds, the rays clear in the hazy air, or limning trees in gold with late-afternoon sun. But he knew Bridget had a religion of sorts that sought a purer light. “You don’t think so?”

“I don’t know. I don’t
want
to think so, because then it’s just cruel, seeing the bridge, but being unable to reach it, to go to that place. The briarpatch is hard, and strange, but I don’t think it’s cruel, I don’t think there’s any intention behind it at all.”

“Ah,” Orville said. He didn’t know much about these matters. His one visit to the briarpatch had been miraculous and terrifying by turns.

The bridge shimmered and faded from view, and Bridget let out a long sigh. “Guess we’d better go. We’ve got our own world to navigate.”

They went down the long escalator into the train station, and Orville used a little of his cash to buy a ticket. They passed through the gates—Bridget jumped it, easy and graceful, and he wondered again if she
would
be able to pass through solid objects if she gave up on the idea of having a body. How much of her current form was just
habit
? Down another escalator, to the platform . . . and now Orville understood what Bridget meant about train stations being strange, now that he had eyes to see.

This station normally had a single platform in the centre, with some benches and a perpetually-broken elevator to the upper level, and train tracks on both sides, one with trains bound for San Francisco, one with trains bound for other points in the East Bay. Orville stood on that platform now . . . but there were other platforms, beyond the tracks, on both sides. The walls were missing—at least to Orville’s eyes—and this subterranean space was vast and shadowy now. On both sides, platforms stretched as far as he could see, not connected visibly, tracks between them, so it seemed that in order to reach any one you would have to clamber down onto the tracks and climb up onto a platform on the other side.

“You see?” Bridget said, and Orville nodded, unwilling to speak with so many other people around. A man talking to himself on a train platform wasn’t much stranger than a man talking to himself on the street, but it was more noticeable for being in a confined space. “Different trains come to those platforms. Sometimes they come to this platform too, only most people can’t see them. Some of them are obvious—there’s one that’s made of bone, looks like it was carved from the femur of a giant or something, and Ismael says he never quite had the guts to board that one. But there are other trains that pull in here that don’t look much different from regular trains. That’s what I was worried about, really, seeing a train that looks
almost
right but isn’t. Ismael says some of them aren’t trains at all, just things that
mimic
trains, and he doesn’t know what happens if you board them. Something bad. Ismael once spent six months down here, riding every train he could, hoping to find one that ran to the better world, avoiding the ones that only
looked
like trains.”

“How did he avoid them?” Orville spoke out of the side of his mouth, softly, like a convict in an old movie.

“Well, maybe he didn’t really avoid them . . . Ismael has this funny power. Only ‘power’ isn’t right, it’s not something he can control, so call it a ‘quality.’ He doesn’t die. Whenever death is imminent, whenever something is about to kill him, he just sort of . . . jumps to some other point in the briarpatch, someplace safer.”

“Like teleportation?” Like Nightcrawler from the X-Men, he wanted to say, but didn’t want to look like any more of a geek in front of Bridget.

Bridget waggled her hand in a “sort of” motion. “Ismael says he thinks it’s more complicated than that, that distance and location in the briarpatch don’t work the way they do in the mundane world, that it’s more like topological crumpling or something, he wasn’t very interested in explaining it, so he didn’t explain it well. But however it works, when he tried to get on one of those fake trains, he jumped away before he could even step through the doors, which makes him think he would’ve died as soon as he got inside. But you and me, we don’t have that kind of defence mechanism, so we have to be careful. Ismael brought me down here not long after I first met him, to prove to me that the briarpatch really existed. He showed me how to identify the sham-trains, called it ‘briarpatch trainspotting.’ He has a way of helping you see, by holding your hand, pointing things out, and it’s like seeing a hidden picture at first, one of those optical illusions, but pretty soon you can’t
stop
seeing it.”

A train pulled into the station, with all the customary noise and wind, and it looked normal enough, and like the train Orville wanted. There were people visible through the windows, sleeping or reading newspapers or talking. The doors hissed open. “This one looks okay,” Orville said.

“
No
.” Bridget tried to grab his arm again, though it felt more like a hard wind blowing against him than a human touch. “You have to look. No one else is getting on the train, that’s the first thing. The wind that came, pushed before the train? It blew your hair, but it didn’t move anybody else’s. I’m dead, so that explains why the wind didn’t touch me, but if this were a regular train, it would have affected other people too. You’re susceptible to drafts from another world now, Orville.”

“But the people inside the train—” he began.

“There are deep sea predators that have little stalks on their heads with glowing bulbs at the end. Other fish come to the bulb, thinking it must be something good to eat, and then the predator slides out of the shadows and eats them. Those people you’re seeing, they aren’t real, they’re just bait. Look at the sides of the train.”

Orville took a step back, as if afraid the train might lunge at him—and maybe it would, for all he knew. The sides were slick with water, he assumed it was condensation, and—

“Shit!” he said, drawing glares and glances from the other people waiting on the platform. Some kid muttered that he was a crazy motherfucker.

But Orville had seen the sides of the train move, expand and then contract, like the train was—

“It’s breathing,” Bridget said. “Or something like that.”

After a moment the doors closed and the train pulled away down the tunnel. For the first few cars it looked the same, like a normal train, but then the far end appeared from where it had been hidden deeper in the tunnel, the train cars darkening, windows disappearing, tapering until the thing no longer resembled a train at all; the end was dark and mottled and looked like nothing so much as the tail of a giant snake, shimmying a little from side to side as it disappeared into the darkness.

Orville sat down hard on an empty bench. He’d almost walked into that
thing
. How could he ever take a train again? How could he come down here without Bridget, if she managed to move on to the better world and leave him unhaunted, unaccompanied? Would this be his life now, filled with terrible miracles? Would he have to tap passers-by and say “Hey, do you see that train?” Were there buses like this too, or cars, or stores, things that tried to eat clueless wanderers? “This is very scary,” Orville said.

“It’s different. But I don’t think it’s any scarier than the regular world you know. You just have to learn new rules. There are neighbourhoods you don’t walk in after dark, right? And in the briarpatch, or on the edge of the briarpatch, like here, there are certain trains you don’t ride. You don’t stray from the path in the cavern of trees, and you don’t feed the bears, and you don’t answer the things that speak from the drains, and a few other rules, and you get by okay.”

A moment later another train arrived, and people got on this one. With a glance at Bridget, who nodded, Orville boarded.

Now Orville wanted to ask where they were going. He hadn’t before, assuming she would offer an explanation, and then he’d been distracted by the oddness of the train station. Now he couldn’t speak to her without looking crazy and making the other riders uncomfortable. Bridget was standing in the middle of the mostly-empty car, anyway, hanging onto a handrail overhead, and didn’t look like she wanted to talk. There was something on her mind.