Briarpatch by Tim Pratt (27 page)

“You used Bridget to get to me,” Darrin said. “You took her away from me, so the grief would tear me up, and make me find the briarpatch.
Didn’t you
?” He shouted the last two words, and the sound was shocking in this quiet place.

“No. I took on Bridget in good faith, and it was only as she told me about you that I began to suspect. When I encountered you in San Francisco, after your friend Nicholas attacked me, you chased me partway down a path into this world, and I knew then what you truly were.”

That was it. Ismael was lying. Darrin knew for sure, now. Ismael was unaware Darrin had been inside his house, had seen proof of Ismael’s meddling in his life.

Ismael was trying to use him. But Darrin knew he was being used, and that gave him some power. What else was Ismael lying about, though? About Darrin being a child of the briarpatch―what would that even mean? That
he
would live for centuries? The idea was ridiculous. About the light of a better world? About Bridget? Maybe she was simply dead, tricked into suicide in order to make Darrin fall apart. That seemed most likely. But lately, Darrin had been forced to accept lots of unlikely things. If there was any possibility Ismael was telling the truth, that Bridget still existed, in some form, and could be reached . . . how could Darrin give up the chance to find her? He had to go along with this, at least until he knew for sure, or found the leverage to make Ismael tell him the truth.

“If we don’t find Bridget, I will kill you,” Darrin said. “I know you think you’re immortal, but I bet the truth is that nobody’s ever really
tried
hard enough.”

“Understood,” Ismael said. “Shall we go? I have some ideas about where we can start our search.”

“Lead the way.”

4

When they left the hedgerow, swinging open the black iron gate, they didn’t enter the English garden Darrin had expected, but a desert landscape of chalky white dunes, with the sun a bright flash in vaulted blue. The soil crunched underfoot, and Darrin knelt to sift a handful in his fingers. The powdery earth was mixed with fragile chunks, like beetle carapaces, all the same bone-white—almost the colour of the Wendigo, actually.

“Be thankful there’s no wind, or the air would be thick with white dust, worse than any fog,” Ismael said. “I think this used to be a sea. We’re walking on the powdered bodies of ancient trilobites and the like.”

Darrin rose, shaking the dust off his hand. Ismael led the way up, over a dune, sinking almost ankle-deep in the white in places. Despite the blanket of whiteness, it wasn’t much at all like walking through snow; more like walking through ashes. At the top of the dune, Ismael pointed. “There.”

When Ismael had said they were going to a house, Darrin hadn’t envisioned this: something like an abandoned Depression-era farmhouse, boards weathered colourless by wind and grit, a sagging porch, and a screen door dangling from one hinge. Ismael approached the house, put his foot tentatively on the step, and pushed down with his heel. The board splintered under the impact, and Ismael sighed, lifting his foot from the hole. “It decays a little more each time. I don’t know what I’ll do if it ever falls down completely. There is another way to the place we’re going, but it is the long way, the scenic route, useful for impressing new visitors to the briarpatch, but not as efficient. Still, perhaps I will never have to pass this way again.” He climbed onto the porch carefully, without using the steps, and gestured for Darrin to follow.

“Look, can’t we go around? This place looks like a death trap.” Darrin wondered if it
was
a trap, if Ismael had brought him into the briarpatch to kill him, and leave him where his body would never be discovered. He couldn’t think of any reason why Ismael might do that, but he knew the man had lied to him about many things.

“There is no around,” Ismael said. “The only way out is through. Pathways in the briarpatch are conditional. You must approach them from the right direction. Think of it as a series of one-way streets, only it’s physically
impossible
to go the wrong way. Come, it’s not as bad inside.” He continued on, swinging aside the broken screen door and pushing open the inner door. Darrin followed his lead, and stepped into the house.

Inside, it was a mansion—like a movie set of a mansion, really, so ostentatious as to seem unreal, with a marble floor, a diamond-bright chandelier, staircases swooping up on either side of the room, and a stone-and-gold fountain bubbling in the centre of the space. There wasn’t a speck of dust anywhere.

Ismael went to a small door under one of the staircases. “Through here.” He ducked inside, and Darrin followed, into a long dim corridor that gradually widened out into a residential hotel sort of hallway, lit by low-watt bulbs and lined with identical red doors. Some of the doors were open, and when Darrin looked toward one Ismael said, “Eyes front. There’s nothing you need in these rooms.” Darrin bristled a bit against the command, but he was new to this place, and perhaps it was better to do as he was told. Lights flickered in some of the rooms, and he heard harpsichord and cello music from another, and from one door the smell of fresh buttered popcorn was strong and almost supernaturally inviting.

“We’re almost through,” Ismael said, and Darrin saw the fire door at the end of the hall, with its utterly prosaic glowing red “Exit” sign above.

“Darrin,” Bridget said, leaning casually in the doorway of the last room on the left. She wore an oversized t-shirt, and her hair was mussed, as if she’d just gotten out of bed. “Baby, I missed you. Come here.”

He stared at her, eyes abruptly welling up with tears.

“That’s not Bridget,” Ismael said sharply. “I see my wife, Mirari, who died two hundred years ago, and it isn’t
her
either.” The Bridget looked at Ismael, perplexed, and then turned her soft smile back to Darrin.

“Shit.” Darrin wiped at his eyes and stumbled toward the exit door. “I know it’s not her, I’m not stupid, damn it.”

“Ah,” Ismael said. “Of course. I’m . . . sorry. Your loss is still very fresh. But we will find Bridget, the real Bridget. You can join her in the light.”

“Just open the fucking door, Ismael,” Darrin said, thinking
your fault your fault your
fault.

Ismael pushed open the door, and they stepped out together. The door swung shut behind them, silently, and they were standing on a bridge.

“This isn’t funny,” Darrin said. “You bring me to a bridge? Do you want me to jump now?”

The bridge was nothing like the Golden Gate. It was made of blackened steel, a rust-belt monstrosity never meant for foot traffic, and it jutted out over a bubbling tar pit, the petroleum stink roiling in the air.

“The briarpatch is full of bridges, Darrin. Bridges, and hallways, and rope ladders, and staircases.” Ismael walked to the railing and looked down into the steaming tar below. Darrin glanced back, and was not surprised to see there was no fire door, no wall at all, just a pitted blacktop road stretching back in a straight line through a desolate scrubland. One of Ismael’s one-way streets.

Darrin thought about charging at Ismael while his back was turned, shoving him over the rail to sink in the tar like the mammoths at La Brea, but then he’d be lost here . . . and he would give up his chance of finding Bridget, the chance that was probably a lie but might not be.

“I do not think they are really bridges,” Ismael went on, leaning forward to rest on the rail. “That is, I do not think anyone actually mined this steel, or shaped these rivets, or designed this ugly bridge, or erected it on this spot.”

“It looks like a pretty plausible bridge to me,” Darrin said, remembering Arturo’s word. He joined Ismael at the rail.

Ismael smiled, slightly. “Indeed. We are passing through worlds of greater and lesser likelihood, yes, indeed, and some of those likelihoods involve bridges, certainly. But
some
bridges,
some
hallways, are more than what they seem—they are passages from one world to another. When you walk in the open in the briarpatch, through fields, through forests, you never pass into another world; it’s not like crossing a property line. There is always some liminal space, you see—often a bridge, though sometimes only a shadow. In the woods, the bridges are made of rough logs and lashed with vines. In ruins, the bridges might be made of tumbled rubble. Here, it is a thing of black steel. But I believe we are simply seeing a bridge because we are incapable of seeing the reality of our passage from one unlikely world to another. Back behind us, there is one world—a bleak place full of underground caves populated by plague rats, and the ruins of old military bases littered with the wreckage of crashed flying saucers. On the other side of this bridge, we’ll enter another world, one of great sadness and beauty. But while we are on the bridge, we are in neither world, though in the centre we can reach both.”

“So . . . this isn’t really a bridge? And that hallway we walked through, it’s not a real hallway?”

“I think the spaces between worlds are so strange and terrible and lonely that human eyes cannot look upon them. And so we perceive the spaces as methods of passage: bridges, ladders, hallways, doors, tunnels. It is something I think about when I cross such bridges. I wonder what I’m really walking through. Every bridge is a walkway to a new possibility.”

“Like the moon bridge,” Darrin said.

“The what?”

Darrin shrugged. “That first night, when you attacked Nicholas in San Francisco, I saw a bridge, high in the sky, beautiful silver, luminous like the moon. I saw it another time too, when I was riding in a car. It was one of the prettiest things I’ve ever seen. Where does it go?”

Ismael shook his head. “I do not know. But perhaps it leads to the light. If you see it again, you must take my hand, so that I might see it too.”

“The times I saw it, it looked impossibly far away,” Darrin warned. “I’d have about as much chance of reaching the
real
moon as getting to it.”

“You would be surprised at the avenues of approach the briarpatch affords. Would you stop at anything to reach that bridge, if there was a chance you might find Bridget waiting on the other side?”

“I’m here with you, aren’t I? That should give you some idea of the lengths I’m willing to go to.”

“Indeed. Come. We’re nearly there.”

“Nearly where? Another desert? Another petroleum swamp?”

“I do not think you understand the nature of the better world. How could you? My description . . . it is too abstract. So I’m going to take you to a place where you can see the light.” He reached out a hand as if to touch Darrin’s arm, then thought better of it. “If you see the light, you might understand why Bridget was willing to leave you for it. That might make you feel better.”

“You care about how I feel now?” Darrin crossed his arms over his chest. “I’m not convinced.”

“I am a compassionate man,” he said, and Darrin realized Ismael actually believed that. He’d loathed the man before, but now, for the first time, Darrin feared Ismael, because people who would do horrible things for the sake of compassion were dangerous, like the madmen who killed their own families to spare them the pain of a sinful world. Now Ismael did clap Darrin on the shoulder, a companionable gesture that Darrin resisted the urge to flinch away from. “Come,” Ismael said. “Soon you’ll see the light.”

Off in the distance, something broke the surface of the tar, a serpentine shape dripping blackness, coil after coil rising up and falling down again. Darrin shivered, and, at the same time, wished he had his camera so he could photograph the thing, though it would be tricky, getting the settings right, so it would appear as something other than blackness against blackness. He’d have to take the pictures in his mind now.

“I’ve often thought of bringing a torch here,” Ismael said, “and throwing it into the tar. If it didn’t snuff out immediately, it would burn ferociously, I think, and I wonder what would rise up to escape the flames? Think of the creatures that must live beneath this blackness, and their suffering, their miserable unlikely lives. It would be a mercy, I think, to burn them. But it might destroy this bridge, and so I have always refrained.” He set off across the bridge.

Darrin looked at his back for a moment before following.
A compassionate man
, he thought, and then hurried to catch up.

1

“You said before you didn’t have any idea where they were going,” Orville said between mouthfuls of hummus and pita. God,
hummus
. How could something that looked like mush be so delicious? He sat with Bridget in the far corner of a little Middle Eastern restaurant near Lake Merritt, far enough away from the customers that he could talk to her unheard, probably. “So where do we start?”

Bridget didn’t seem to hear him. She’d been staring off into the distance for a while now, though whether she was lost in deep thought or simply overwhelmed by recent revelations, Orville didn’t know. She’d wanted to go charging into the briarpatch the moment they left Darrin’s house, but Orville had needed food before setting off on a trek like that. This new body seemed to need more fuel than the old one ever had . . . or, maybe, he just felt like he needed to eat more often, since food was now more pleasure than chore. Bridget had slowed down a bit as they walked to the restaurant, melancholy creeping over her when she didn’t have immediate action to distract herself.

“Bridget?” he said, and she looked at him, cocked her head, and nodded.

“If Ismael is taking Darrin into the briarpatch in hopes of finding a direct route to the better world, I think I know the first place they’ll go. He’ll want to show Darrin what he’s looking for. There’s a kind of . . . scenic overlook, I guess . . . a place where you can glimpse the light of the better world. I think they’ll go there. I don’t know how long they’ll
stay
there, though, and if we miss them . . .”

“Well, let’s go.” Orville mopped up the last of his food and shoved a wad of pita into his mouth. He chewed and swallowed as he stood up, leaving some cash from his poker winnings on the table.