Briarpatch by Tim Pratt (21 page)

“You’re saying this is my fault?” Bridget clenched her non-existent fists.

Ismael shook his head. “Quite the opposite. I should have been a better teacher.”

Bridget seemed at a loss, as if she’d expected resistance, or defiance, or some other strong response. He’d thought she knew him better than that.

“If you’re so sorry, you can fix this,” Bridget said.

“Of course,” Ismael said. “I can take you where you need to go right away.” He didn’t have much time before he needed to deal with Darrin, but the place Bridget should go was on the way. Harczos had shown him the path long ago, and though it was worthless to Ismael, he still remembered how to get there.

Bridget frowned, that pretty line appearing in her forehead. “What’s the deal, Ismael? You can show me the way to the light now that I’ve permanently departed my body?”

Ismael understood. “Oh, Bridget, no. You cannot reach the light. I can only show you the passage to the land of the dead, the place where only ghosts can go. I have never seen the other side, but I trust there is some peace or oblivion there, if not the utter pleasure of living forever in the light.”

“Fuck that,” Bridget said. “I’m not giving up that easily. I want to get to the better world you promised me, Ismael. There has to be a way.”

“It is impossible,” Ismael said. “I can show you the passage to the land of the dead, but that is all. If you refuse, I must ask you to leave.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Hmm,” Ismael said, glancing at Orville. “You, Troll—she haunts you? Her spirit is somehow tangled with yours?”

“Ah, I guess so,” Orville said, and Bridget shushed him.

“I see,” Ismael said. “I give you one last chance, Bridget—you can go to your resting place, or you can leave me forever, but those are the only options.”

She stepped closer to him. “Tell me what’s going on with you and Nicholas. Tell me what Darrin has to do with all this. You’re going to give me answers, Ismael.”

That cold fear returned. What did she know? Not much, apparently, or she wouldn’t be asking. But how did she know
anything
?

Of course. She was a spirit. Tethered to this Troll, but still able to move invisibly and listen. She might have been watching Darrin or Nicholas or Echo all day yesterday, since her unfortunate death.

Troubling, but no cause for fear. He still had the power here. “Echo!”

“Yeah, babe?” she shouted.

“Would you still like to kill Mr. Troll?”

“No!” Bridget shouted.

Orville stood and said “We’d better go, Bridget.”

“You can’t do this, Ismael,” Bridget said. “You failed me, and now you threaten my friend?”

“I offered you all the help I could,” Ismael said, not without sadness. “But I don’t have time for your drama or complications. You’re a ghost, and I think you’re haunting this man, which means his immediate death might jostle you loose from this world, or at least restrict your mobility.” He stepped closer to her, and said, “Also, you’re bothering me.”

“Sorry.” Echo came into the living room, cradling the chrome-plated shotgun in her arms. “Would’ve come sooner, but I was on the phone. Nicky called from his hiding place in the bushes, and the birdy has flown the coop, the fish has taken the bait, whatever you want to call it, the house is empty, so we can get over there and set things up.” She glanced at Orville. “You want me to shoot him in here, or should we take him to the laundry room or something where the spatter won’t get on the pillows?”

“Back off, bitch,” Bridget spat, getting up in Echo’s face, but Echo failed to notice she couldn’t see Bridget. Echo was not as sensitive as Ismael was, could not even enter the briarpatch without his help, despite several excursions which should have opened her eyes. Echo was firmly and happily part of this world, and her preference for living in a perpetual now of entertainment and sensation made her unsuitable for solo otherworldly excursions.

“She can’t see you, Bridget,” Ismael said.

Echo perked up. “Bridget? The dead girl Darrin used to fuck? She’s here?” She looked around. “What, like her ghost or something?”

“Essentially,” Ismael said. “Anyway, you can shoot Orville here, we’ve got plenty of extra pillows.”

Orville dove sideways, probably just leaping instinctively away, but he managed to pass into one of the cross-corridors of the briarpatch that converged in the room. Bridget gave a whimper, as if suddenly in pain, and then leapt after him.

“No fair!” Echo shouted.

Ismael nodded. He could pursue them, try to put Orville down, but he couldn’t quite muster the enthusiasm. Wandering in the briarpatch with only Bridget as his guide would very likely prove to be fatal for Orville anyway. “I guess Mr. Troll wasn’t so eager to die after all,” Ismael said. “Perhaps Bridget has given him something to live for.”

Echo growled. “Are we going idiot hunting?”

“No. If Darrin is out of his house, we should join Nicholas and prepare. If we run into Orville again, however, you needn’t hesitate to kill him. You’re sure Darrin will be gone for some time?”

“Sure as I can be.”

“We’ll go through the briarpatch to meet Nicholas. It will be faster. Lock the front door. I’ll get the back.”

They met in the living room. Ismael took Echo’s hand—she couldn’t even glimpse the briarpatch without his help, much less enter it. Fortunately, once inside, he didn’t have to keep holding her hand—touching Echo was like holding a sleeping rattlesnake. The sense of imminent danger was constant. She couldn’t find her way
out
of the briarpatch without help either, and if she ever became too problematic, he might strand her there, though that was dangerous, too. Long exposure to the briarpatch could change people, as anyone who encountered one of the bears knew. He didn’t like the idea of encountering a wandering, half-mad Echo in the briarpatch at some future date.

They stepped through space, into a dank, dripping stone hallway, which would lead them by and by to Darrin’s neighbourhood, and from there to the next phase of Ismael’s search for a world of beautiful light.

3

“I’m sorry I ran away,” Orville said. He sat with his back against a smooth black boulder, the only feature on an otherwise perfectly level salt flat that stretched as far as he could see in all directions. The sky was a sort of perpetual dusk, but even without direct sunlight, the whiteness all around was almost too bright to look upon. When he’d fled headlong into the briarpatch, this was where he’d ended up, in the lee of a black rock. “That woman was going to shoot me.”

“No, you did the right thing.” Bridget lay sprawled on her back, her coat appearing redder than ever against the white, like something freshly killed. “I don’t know who that woman is, but she didn’t look like the type to shy away from killing.”

“Ismael was . . . different than I expected. He seemed almost sad for you, until he tried to have me killed.”

“I think he
was
sad for me, but he didn’t want to help me. I’m the past to him. He considers me a failure, and now he’s moved on. But I can’t move on.”

“What do you think he meant, about the land of the dead?”

“Don’t know. Probably a landfill for ghosts, some little pocket hell for uneasy spirits. Doesn’t sound like a place I’d want to visit. I’ve stood in the reflected radiance of the light of a better world, and I’m not going anywhere but there.”

“Okay. But . . . what do we do now?”

“They’re planning to do something to Darrin. I don’t know what, or why, but I intend to find out. We should go over to his house, I think. So we can warn him. Or so you can, since I have no idea if he’ll be able to see me or not.”

Orville nodded. “What Ismael said, about how you hadn’t let go of the real world sufficiently to enter the better world . . . do you think that’s true?”

“I never know what to think about what Ismael says. He doesn’t always lie, but he doesn’t always tell the truth, either. I guess it’s possible, sure. I thought I’d let everything go, turned my back on my old life, but maybe I’m not as good at letting go as I thought. Anyway, I’ll find another way. We’ll find another way. We’ll make it to the light.”

Orville wondered, if he killed himself, would he still see the light? Or had this past day and a half spent with Bridget changed him, made him more attached to this world? Certainly smell and taste and sex were still new pleasures that overwhelmed him with delight. And there was more, too. He wanted to help Bridget. He felt needed. That was new, and Ismael would probably consider it a terrible chain, binding him to the world. But Orville was happy for the connection.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said, sitting up. “Darrin needs our help.”

Orville considered saying no. This wasn’t his fight, and he was already so fond of Bridget that he didn’t relish the thought of going to see her ex-boyfriend, especially with shotgun-wielding maniacs in the equation. But he wouldn’t even
have
this life without her, so he owed her—and she could probably make his life unpleasant if he didn’t do as she asked. Being followed at all times of the day and night by a furious woman no one else could see or hear would be miserable.

And if he helped her, she might be grateful.

4

Darrin stood outside the house. It was one of the many rundown residences in the area, white paint peeling, roof shingles askew, grass half-dead, overgrown. Ismael Plenty didn’t strike Darrin as the type to care much about lawn maintenance, so maybe this was his place. There was no name on the mailbox, and when Darrin opened it, there were no envelopes inside, either, so he couldn’t be sure this was the right place. Nothing for it but to knock on the door, and if Ismael answered . . .he would improvise.

Darrin banged on the door a few times, to no avail. Either nobody was home, or nobody was answering. He touched the doorknob, hesitant, then gave it a turn. To his surprise, the door opened. This wasn’t a neighbourhood where people generally left their doors unlocked. Darrin paused on the threshold, called “Hello?” a few times, then sighed and stepped inside. He’d come this far.

The dim foyer smelled of dust and old sweat. Dozens of coats hung on the hooks inside the door, and dozens of shoes lay piled on the floor. He went through the living room, where cushions lay scattered all around a big hookah. Darrin went down a hallway strewn with old clothes. Pushing open a creaking door, he entered a room lined with dressers and sea-chests, all filled with more clothes, in a variety of sizes and styles from the past few decades—it was like a thrift-store graveyard. Eyes watering from the dust, he started snooping.

Darrin tried to do a reasonably meticulous search to uncover some evidence of the nature of Ismael’s relationship with Bridget. Letters, pictures, a date planner, anything at all would have helped, but it was dispiriting work. Every drawer seemed stuffed with jangling tangles of junk, from paperclips to strings of fake pearls. He pulled down dusty shoeboxes from closet shelves only to find them full of ancient parking citations and the presumably losing tickets from long-ago horse races. The chests mostly held mothballs and clothing so old it was neither fashionable nor unfashionable, just dusty and threadbare. He spent fifteen minutes poking around, finding nothing of interest, before deciding he had to move on—he couldn’t spend forever searching.

He moved on to the master bedroom. The bed was an impressive four-poster, but swaybacked, sagging in the middle. A desk, heaped with papers, stood against one wall, and Darrin picked through the contents. Old bills, letters in French, and faded postcards. He pulled out the drawers, rifling through the old paperclips and dried-up inkwells. He was about to give it up as another room full of useless detritus—but then he found a drawer full of photos. These weren’t yellowed photos from some long-forgotten family’s album—they weren’t even actually photographs at all—but printouts of digital pictures, printed in black-and-white on low-quality paper.

They were photos of Darrin and Bridget, taken last year. Darrin even remembered the day, a picnic by the lake, but there had been no one there taking pictures—at least, no one they’d seen. Darrin’s face was circled in red, and written on the back, rather cryptically, the words “Another brother?” Darrin dug through the desk further, but didn’t find anything else about himself. Why did Ismael have photos of him? Could there be more to this than just seducing Bridget away and brainwashing her?

The invasion of privacy implied by these photos—the
stalkerness
of it—was profoundly unsettling. Darrin had often felt, in recent months, as if events were conspiring against him, but maybe it was more than that. Maybe a
person
was conspiring against him. The numbness he’d felt after seeing Bridget die was increasingly replaced by confusion and anger, hot feelings superseding the cold, and he wondered, if he got angry enough, would he be able to avoid feeling grief entirely? He’d always coped with his problems by throwing himself into some project or hobby―from urban exploring to geocaching―maybe he could turn some of that capacity for obsession to a useful task: finding out what the hell was going on here. Who was Ismael Plenty? What did he have to do with Bridget’s death?

And the question that photo brought up: what did he want with Darrin?

He considered waiting around for Ismael to show up, but after a few minutes of pacing in the man’s filthy bedroom, he became uncomfortable. What if Ismael found him here? He’d be perfectly within his rights to call the police, or even to
shoot
Darrin. So what if the front door had been unlocked? It was still breaking and entering. Better to sit on Ismael’s front steps and wait there. He went back to the living room, and stepped on something half-hidden by the cushions. He slipped and almost fell, then caught sight of the gleaming shotgun on the floor. He bent down to look at it and reached out, almost touching it before coming to his senses—he didn’t want to leave his fingerprints on some stranger’s weapon. What kind of nutcase left a gun on the floor in a room where they also did drugs?

A cross-breeze ruffled his hair, and Darrin looked up, heart thudding, sure the front door had opened—where else could the breeze have come from in this claustrophobic place?