Briarpatch by Tim Pratt (36 page)

1

“So that’s it,” Darrin said, sitting on the grass with his dead lover, the man she was haunting, and Arturo. “I think Ismael has to be stopped. Who knows how many more people he’ll hurt?”

Bridget nodded. “But how?”

Darrin shrugged and took a sip of his soda. “We’ll give him what he wants. We’ll take him to the better world.”

“You
found
it?” Orville said.

“Sure,” Darrin said. “And it’s not that great.” He told them what Harczos had told him, about dissolving into the light, becoming one with it, and losing yourself.

“A year ago, that would have sounded great to me,” Orville said. “But I’m a little more attached to myself now. I never thought the search for transcendence was a moving target.”

“I didn’t know it was like that,” Bridget said, worry line visible on her forehead. “I’m . . . not sure it’s what I want either.”

“I’ll take you there if you like,” Darrin said. He had trouble looking at her. Even beyond the fact of her death, they’d both changed so much in the past several months, he wasn’t sure who he was looking at—or who was doing the looking. “But I don’t think it would appeal to you.”

“Let me think about it,” Bridget said. Orville looked at her with hopeless longing, and Darrin felt a pang on his behalf, though he didn’t know the man at all. Orville had feelings for Bridget, clearly, but Bridget was just with the guy because she was
haunting
him, right? Darrin found that his own feelings for Bridget existed mostly in the past tense—the passionate feelings, at least. At some point during his travels with Harczos, he’d come to terms with Bridget’s death, and more importantly, he’d accepted that she was lost to him. She still cared about him—she’d said so a dozen times already, and he believed her, and told her so. He still cared about her, in that he wanted to see her safe, and happy, whatever those words meant for a bodiless spirit. But he was no longer the Darrin who had loved her, and she was no longer the person he’d loved—assuming she ever really
had
been that person. He’d never understood her true nature until she was no longer in his life. That was sad, but such sadness was part of life, and he accepted it. They’d . . . grown apart. It happened.

“So you’ll help me?” he said. “And I’ll help you, if I can?”

“Sure,” Arturo said. “Where do we start?”

“With Echo otherwise occupied, there’s only one person I can think of,” Darrin said. “Let’s go see my old friend Nicholas.”

2

Nicholas came into his apartment, hung his jacket on a coat hook, and walked, humming, into the dim living room. As he reached out to turn on the lamp, Darrin said, “Working late tonight, Nicholas?”

“Oh, hell,” Nicholas said, and switched on the lamp. He turned to face Darrin, who sat in the far corner of the room on a barstool, his back against the wall. “I thought you were lost forever, bro. Ismael said you were probably so deep inside the briarpatch you’d never find your way out again.”

“Ismael’s full of shit about a lot of things,” Darrin said. He looked at his old friend, his betrayer, and still didn’t know how to feel about him—it was nothing so simple as hatred, because he could still remember the good times he and Nicholas had shared. But hatred was a large part of it.

“That beard looks stupid on you,” Nicholas said. “No offense, but with the raggedy hair, you’ve got a real crazy woodsman thing going on.” He went to the liquor cabinet and poured himself a drink, scotch neat, and took a sip. “Want something to drink?”

“I need to know where to find Ismael, Nicholas.”

Nicholas set his glass down. “Sorry, bro. You remember non-disclosure agreements. It’s pretty much like that.”

“But you are still working for him? Still hoping he’ll make you immortal?”

Nicholas waved a hand and grinned. “Hell, that ship has sailed. I am immortal. Ismael took me to the fountain of youth months ago, and dipped me in the waters.”

Darrin had no doubt that Ismael had taken him
somewhere
and dipped him in
something
, but he doubted it was the water of eternal life. “How do you know he wasn’t lying to you?”

“Aw, I feel better than I ever have, like I can wrestle mountain lions and fuck ten chicks a night. It’s gotta be immortality.”

Or a placebo effect,
Darrin thought. The problem with immortality was that there was no way to test it without risking the death of the subject. Nicholas would only realize he’d been tricked when he died, and by then, it would be too late by definition.

“So you don’t work for Ismael anymore? That’s smart, at least.”

“Nah, we still have a business relationship.” Nicholas dropped into an overstuffed armchair and kicked one leg over the side, like a boy king lounging on a throne. “I do all kinds of things for Ismael, shit he doesn’t have time for, real estate deals, helping out with legal arrangements, stuff like that. I’m no lawyer, but I know the guys to hire. He can’t be bothered to do all that stuff himself. He’s got all his spiritual shit to deal with, so I help with the practicalities.”

Darrin shook his head. “Why are you working for him? Jesus, Nicholas, you fucked me over because you thought you’d get to live forever, and while I can’t forgive you, I can understand it. But what’s in it for you now? What can he possibly be offering you?”

“You would not
believe
the heaps of cash Ismael has.” Nicholas shook his head. “I guess when you live forever and you hardly buy anything and most of your friends wind up killing themselves and leaving you their whole estates, the cash starts to pile up. Anyway, he pays me well for my services.”

“I thought you were making good money?”

“You can never be too rich. Especially if I’m going to live forever, I don’t want to spend any of that time poor. It takes a lot of money to keep up quality of life over the long haul. Anyway, the stuff he’s asking me to do now, it’s not all psychologically complicated like that thing with you. That tore me up, Darrin. You gotta know that. And really, it was for your own good, right? You were in a rut, just spinning your wheels, and Bridget was going to leave you sooner or later, no doubt. And now, look at you. You’ve practically got fucking
superpowers
. You can walk around in a whole secret magical world. Pretty sweet deal. It’s gotta beat the hell out of checking out old subway tunnels and abandoned train stations, or doing those little treasure hunt things you used to like. So, I know it seems like I shafted you, but I really think I helped you out. I understand if we can’t be tight anymore, and I’m bummed about that, but everything worked out okay.”

“Except Bridget is dead,” Darrin said.

Nicholas didn’t answer, just swirled the liquor in his glass. After a while, he sighed. “Yeah, but she made her choice. Ismael doesn’t force people to do anything. He just helps them out.”

That wasn’t quite true, Darrin knew—Harczos had told him about Ismael’s ability to project his emotions, and about his occasional acts of outright murder. “What is Ismael doing now?” Darrin said. “I know he’s got some kind of plan, a plan B, since things with me fell through.”

“Sorry. I told you, that’s NDA territory. I didn’t sign anything, but let’s just say, me and him have an understanding.”

“Okay,” he said. “Now, Arturo.”

Arturo and Orville stepped in from the hallway, where they’d been lurking and listening, and crept up behind Nicholas’s chair. Arturo threw a rope around Nicholas and leaned back, pulling it tight, pinning Nicholas into the seat. Darrin walked over, avoiding Nicholas’s kicking feet, and he and Orville grabbed the arms of the chair and dragged it into the kitchen, where there was an entryway to the briarpatch Darrin had found after days of searching.

They dragged the chair through a shadow beside the refrigerator and on into the briarpatch. This place was close to the edge of a rocky promontory, beneath a black starless sky lit only by an aurora the colour of rainbows in an oil slick, and by the ruby glow of fires pulsing far below. The air reeked of something that wasn’t quite sulphur. Arturo tied the rope, throwing a few more loops around Nicholas to secure him in place. At first, Nicholas cursed at them, then went silent as Arturo, Darrin, and Orville all formed a semicircle before him. Bridget loomed up from the darkness, scowling at him. She’d never liked Nicholas, and he hadn’t given her a reason to change her mind.

“What, is this some Mafia-style bullshit?” Nicholas said, his face mostly shadowed. “I told you, I’m immortal now. You don’t scare me.”

“Let’s say you are immortal,” Darrin said. “Do you think it would hurt if we kicked your chair off this rock, to bounce down into that chasm, into the fire?”

“You wouldn’t do it in a million years,” Nicholas said, but his voice was fake-confident, a flavour of bravado Darrin had heard often over the years of their friendship.

“You conspired against me with Ismael. You fucked Echo in front of me. You knew she was a lying psychopath, and you didn’t tell me. The fact that you got me fired from my job is actually at the bottom of the list of bad shit you did to me. If I ever owed you anything, Nicholas, from friendship to brotherhood to goodwill, you burned through it. These are my friends now, Arturo and Orville and Bridget, and you’re my enemy. I will push you over if you don’t tell me everything you know about Ismael, about what he’s doing, and about where I can find him. Do you understand?”

Nicholas didn’t answer. Darrin went to the chair and put his foot against the base, shoving the chair a few inches closer to the precipice. Orville gasped, and Arturo shushed him. “I asked if you understood, Nicholas,” Darrin said. “Answer me,
bro
.”

“Yeah, shit, yeah, quit it!” Nicholas said. “Hell, I don’t owe Ismael anything now, I’ll help you out. Me and you go back, Darrin, there’s no need for this kind of crap.”

“Right,” Darrin said. “Now talk.”

Nicholas swallowed, then began. “These past months, while you’ve been gone, Ismael’s been making new friends. Taking on new students. Like, a few dozen of them. I mean . . . I guess you’d call it a cult. Ismael gave them all the same spiel he did Bridget—come to the briarpatch, get a glimpse of heaven, and all you have to do to live there forever is
die
. They’re all hard-core, true believers. They’re going to march out to the Golden Gate Bridge one morning and then jump, all at once, like massive tandem base-jumping, but with no parachutes.”

“Why?” Darrin said. “Is he just trying to, what, mass-produce transcendence?”

“Ismael has this idea. A theory. He thinks that so many souls tearing free of their bodies all at once might make, like, pinpricks in reality. See, imagine if a portal to the better world opens up underneath all of them at the same time. That’s a lot of passages all at once, like punching holes in a piece of construction paper with the tip of a pen. If you punch enough holes, you don’t have a piece of paper anymore, so much as a bunch of empty space with scraps of paper
around
it. Ismael thinks if he opens enough holes to the better world all at once, it’ll loosen reality so he’ll be able to pass through bodily. So he’ll jump from the bridge a moment after his followers do, and, he hopes, fall into the light after them.”

“And if it doesn’t work, he’ll just bounce away to safety in the briarpatch,” Darrin said.

“Pretty much,” Nicholas agreed.

Darrin pushed for more details, and Nicholas seemed genuinely eager to provide what he could. “Okay,” Darrin said at last. “One more thing. I need you to give a message to Ismael.”

3

“Ismael won’t believe us,” Bridget said. They were all lying belly-down on the ridge of a hill overlooking the compound below, trying to stay out of sight. Even Bridget had to keep a low profile; if Ismael had taught any of his new pupils to travel to and from the briarpatch, to perceive the hidden pathways of the world, then they might be able to see her, and a horde of angry cultists running up the hill toward them would really spoil their reconnaissance mission.

“Probably not.” Darrin peered through binoculars at the property below—Ismael’s “place in the country.” Darrin had sent Nicholas with a message: if Ismael would meet him peacefully, Darrin would take him to the better world. But Ismael would probably think it was a trick, even though Darrin meant it sincerely. Darrin hadn’t told Harczos his plan, for fear Harczos would try to stop him. That might still be a problem, but Darrin would deal with it when the time came.

Ismael had been a busy man during the months Darrin and the others had wandered the briarpatch. Having failed to get Darrin’s help achieving his goal, he was well on his way to enacting his backup plan. Darrin passed the binoculars to Arturo.

“I see maybe twenty-five, thirty people down there. Probably more in the buildings.” The old farm below was only a few miles from the Golden Gate Bridge, on the Marin side, where—if you had enough money—you could experience rural peacefulness within sight of the lights of San Francisco.

“That could have been me,” Orville said, lying on his back and staring up at the sky. “If Ismael had been that organized when I first talked to him, I’d be down there getting excited about jumping off a bridge.”

“You gotta admit he has a good schtick,” Arturo said. “Most cult leaders have to get by on charisma and psychological tricks. Ismael can take his people by the hand and lead them to a no-shit, magical, other world. It must be pretty easy for him to convince them. And now he’s got them all down there, with their heads shaved, dressed in white. . . .”

“Taking away their individuality.” Bridget ran the zipper of her red coat up and down, up and down. “Making sure they’ve given up on their old lives. Brainwashing them. He doesn’t want a repeat of what happened with me.”

“You’d think the cops would do somethin’ about it,” Arturo said.

Bridget shook her head. “They might start paying attention if he had hundreds of followers instead of fifty, or if they were selling drugs of stockpiling weapons. But California’s full of little communes and cults and compounds. Lots of new age types and hippies, and plenty of fringe religious groups too. It’s not illegal to be a weirdo, and cops around here tend to be careful about not trampling on religious rights. I doubt Ismael is talking about mass suicide in public, anyway. As far as anybody knows, they’re just looking for meaning in their lives. Like I was.”